Definitely the End of Summer

For the next several days, the weather forecast is for lows in the 30s. Any warm-season crops left in the garden are going to be looking pretty miserable by the end of the week, unless they've been protected. In my garden, there are a few more tomato plants and peppers still in place, but those will be heading toward the compost heap sometime tomorrow.

I hope, especially, that everyone's sweet potatoes are inside. This year, I was lucky enough to be able to harvest sweet potatoes in three different gardens: my own, the Plant-a-row-for-the-hungry garden, and at Mr. Kastner's garden. Out at Mr. Kastner's place, there was a lot of help, which was a good thing because he had a whole lot of potatoes to dig up. The big harvest day was a couple of weeks ago, so these pictures are a little late going up. In this first picture, Mr. Kastner is the guy in the pink shirt, and his partner-in-gardening, Mr. Hankerson, is on the right in blue:



The potatoes were not all that easy to get out of the ground, and there was some discussion about the best way to pry them out without damaging them. The good news is that these were all grown on long, wide hills, so the digging wasn't so much "down" as it was "from the side."



These big clusters of sweets were pretty typical of what came out of the ground at each place where a slip had been planted back in early summer:



In all, there were three double-wide rows, each about 150 feet feet long, that had been planted. In each row, the slips had been planted about 9 or 10 inches apart. Mr. Kastner figured that he had planted close to 900 slips. Removing the vines and then digging up the sweet potatoes from that many plants was a big job!



Mr. Hankerson and Mr. Kastner had built some storage bins out of old wood pallets for storing the sweet potatoes while they cured in a metal "shed" (it looks like an old version of what 18-wheelers pull around out on the highways). When the bins were all placed inside the shed, a little heater and a fan went in there, too, along with a temperature & humidity gauge to help make sure the sweet potatoes stayed appropriately warm and the air moist.



They are going to be able to feed a lot of people with this many sweet potatoes.

A Lot Like Fall

We've had low temperatures in the upper 30s, and days in which the highs are in the 60s. Indoors, we've had a fire in the woodstove a couple of nights. It is definitely feeling a lot like fall.

Outside, even though the remaining summer crops are looking pretty ragged, the cool-weather crops are starting to shine. The broccoli is beginning to head up:



This bed of greens (and weeds) has already given us a couple of salads, some greens for cooking, and radishes. When the rest of the radishes come out, it will be easier to see the greens - the little bulbs are planted between the rows of greens, and their leaves are sticking up all over.



Right near where I stood to take that picture is a little patch of cilantro that didn't make it into the field-of-view. At the far end of the bed is a short row of bok choy. This does really well for us every year:



Isn't that beautiful? I think a stir-fry-supper is in my near-future.

Wrong season, but a cool trick

My Louisiana sister sent another useful video. This is at least as cool as peeling a whole head of garlic in less than ten seconds (in a previous post), and it doesn't require matching large bowls.



Let's hope I remember this when the fresh corn comes back around in June!

Field Trip to Farmer D Organics!

Even though I live within an hour of Farmer D Organics, I had never been there until this week. I had an extra-long day at work on Monday (15 hours!), so on Tuesday I left work early. I was a little cranky from sleep-deprivation, but I figured that the thing that would improve my mood the most was a garden-oriented field-trip. Of course, a nap would probably have been a more logical choice.

My excuse for the field-trip was that I wanted to check out the garlic, since it is just about time to put that in the ground. It didn't hurt that the Farmer D store is only about 20-25 minutes from the office.

The good news is that there was plenty of garlic to choose from, and the cloves were HUGE. I bought two heads of California Early softneck and three cloves (loose) of Elephant garlic to try.

I have bought different varieties of garlic through the mail before, and they've done well, but the heads were not even close to the size of the garlic at Farmer D's, and this is one of those situations in which size matters. Big cloves usually end up making big heads of garlic in the garden.

The garlic that I've had the best luck with so far, in terms of consistently producing big heads of garlic in the garden, is the Rabun County garlic that my friend Cheryl brought back from one of her visits there a few years ago. We are still working on growing out enough of it to be able to actually eat very much of it, but it does make nice, big heads of garlic, and it has good flavor, too.

Photo below is of the two California early heads (left), the three cloves of Elephant garlic (center), and one of my Rabun County. Notice how the Rabun County is dwarfed by the garlic from Farmer D's:



I usually grow some grocery-store garlic along with the specialty garlics, but unless I see some heads with whopper-sized cloves, I'm going to stick with what I have now - the new garlic from Farmer D and the Rabun County that I've saved to replant. If all goes well, I'll have the garlic planted by Halloween.

Farmer D Organics had fruit trees and bushes for fall planting, and the strawberry plants are in. Onion sets will be in stock closer to Thanksgiving. The store seems to specialize in the small-scale food-growing that works so well in urban areas, and the people there were friendly. By the time I left, I was definitely in a good mood. It was a great field trip.

My Louisiana sister and I have been talking some about our fall gardens and planting the garlic and onions. Her planting date is later than mine, since she is more zone 9/10 than 7/8, but planning ahead is almost always good. To go with the garlic theme of our last couple of conversations, she sent a link to the amazing video below about using garlic in the kitchen.

How to Peel a Head of Garlic in Less Than 10 Seconds from SAVEUR.com on Vimeo.

Are you as astonished as I was? My sister and I are now both hunting for pairs of same-sized, large metal bowls.

Tenacity of the Summer Garden

The tomatoes just won't quit:



I pulled out the last two of the April-planted tomatoes, though, because when the first frost comes, I want to be more ready than I am. That first frost could come pretty much anytime now, though I don't actually expect it until about Halloween.

I ended up with another big pile of green tomatoes. A lot of these are far enough along that they will ripen within the next week or two, but some are too immature to ripen well, and I plan to use them in a green tomato salsa recipe that I found online.



I've already made one batch of this, and there was enough to use on one supper's enchiladas and then to mostly fill an ice-cube tray. The frozen cubes may seem weird to some people, but we don't always need the same amount each time we want to use some "salsa verde." Having the salsa frozen in cubes - then stashed in a freezer bag - means I can pull out just the right amount for the purpose at hand.

Eggplants and peppers are still coming into the kitchen, too. Some years the garden does better than in other years, and it is usually a mystery to me what makes the yearly differences so large. Of course, sometimes a less-productive year is totally my fault - the result of not paying attention to water or soil/nutrient needs, for example. This year, the weather has been so weird that a low-harvest year would not have been a big surprise, but the garden has, instead, blown me away with its productivity.

A delivery-guy I was talking with last week suggested that the shade in my yard (that I usually complain about) might have saved my garden from roasting in this overly-hot summer. Maybe he's right.

Regardless of the reason, the sweet potatoes seem to have done pretty well. I ended up with about 35 pounds from the 3x5-foot space they were planted in.



I always manage to resist brushing off the dirt and giving the sweets a good scrub, since those activities can damage the thin skins and result in sweets that rot rather than stay good into the winter, but the box of sleek, brownish, tapered shapes with "tails" makes me think I'm looking into a box of dead rats. The good news is that, when I get these into a basket on the kitchen floor after they've had a chance to cure, some of that dirt will have fallen off on its own and the resemblance will be less striking (I hope).

Later this week, I will get some mulch onto the bed that I dug those sweets from, and onto some other spaces, too. One whole bed, the one the melons were in, has been planted with a cover crop, hairy vetch. I've planted vetch for the winter before, and it is a pain to dig it back into the soil in spring, but I still had some seeds that I didn't want to waste.

That melon bed had been created as a "lasagna" bed, with compost from my yard and manure and bedding from a stable. When I checked that part of the garden after pulling out the melons, the top few inches were great, but below that was still solid clay. I'm hoping the roots of the vetch will help make little tunnels into that lower clay, giving the earthworms a little help in mixing the layers.

Gardens are always ending - and always beginning

Last Wednesday, the Plant-a-Row-for-the-Hungry garden group met for the last time at the Smith Gilbert Garden in Kennesaw, where it's been for the past six years. We harvested the last of the summer crops that were still in place - peppers and sweet potatoes - and we hauled the debris to the compost heap.

The final total of donated veggies for our 2011 garden year was 2710 pounds. Some of us still have at home some of the Seminole pumpkin squash that were too green to give away when we pulled up those vines, but those will all have finished ripening soon, and they will go to the Center for Family Resources - the pantry where we take our harvest - in another week or so. (Their weight hasn't been added to our total, yet.)

We had a great turnout for our last day at Smith Gilbert! This particular group of gardeners is just wonderful to work with. I feel very fortunate to know such great people every time I'm with them.



I'm in the plaid shirt, in front. Notice how I'm so short that I don't have to crouch down for the people behind me to be seen.

Some members of the group (but mostly just Fred) who have had a little free time have been looking into places to move the garden to, and we will have a few spots from which to choose. I am very happy that the group is ready to begin again! We will be meeting in about a week and a half to make a final choice, and to celebrate what we've accomplished this year.

When we have made that decision, it will be time to start getting the soil ready for next year. The fun will start all over again!

At home, the summer garden is thinking about ending, especially since we are getting some nighttime lows in the 40s. In spite of the onset of actual fall weather, we still have plenty of tomatoes. This is why I make that second planting in late June.



My fall veggies are mostly planted, but it isn't too late for one last crop of one of the faster-maturing radishes, and in a couple of weeks it will be time to plant garlic and multiplier onions that will mature in June, as part of next summer's garden.

This overlap of beginning and ending is one of the best parts of gardening. There's always something to look forward to. Even though it will be a little sad to bring in the last of the tomatoes in a few weeks, it also will be great to harvest the first bok choy, lettuce, spinach, beets, and other fall veggies. Some of these cooler weather crops will start to come to the kitchen before those last tomatoes are brought in.

When one season is coming to a close, another is opening up. When the soil temperatures drop and plant-growth slows to the point that it seems there's no growth at all, there is less work to do in the yard and more time to plan next year's garden -- what to plant and where, and how to improve the soil. And some of that work on improving the soil can begin in the less-rushed season of planning.

It's also a time to think about how the work of "putting food by" has panned out in terms of meals. That's part of gardening, too. If my little family's plan of making most our pasta sauce (and other foods that usually include a can of diced tomatoes) from our dehydrated tomatoes is successful, we will be very pleased.

Now and Later

The greens are planted in an area that gets less sun than they were planted in last year, so they are not quite as far along as I would hope, but the little plants are definitely recognizable.

This is one of the Capitan lettuce:



These are two of the bok choy:



And this is one of the Red Russian kale:



If the weather continues to be beautifully sunny with some interspersed days of good, soaking rains, the little plants will be nicely grown by the first frost.

I see that there are a few little weeds in the pictures, too, but I'll remove those in a couple of days, when I get another chance to work in the yard.

For the last several days, my yard work has focused on moving wood chips, left by a tree-removal company, from the middle of my front yard. The good news for me is that Joe takes care of most of the hardest work, but I still managed to make a whole bunch of my own muscles sore.

We had asked for one load of chips a couple of weeks ago, because they are great to use on the paths that run through the wooded back yard. When the tree-guys stopped by a week later with another load, asking whether we could use more mulch, I (crazily) said, "yes!"

The tree-guys were very happy that they weren't going to have to drive that truck-full of chips 40-or-so miles to where-ever they usually dump loads of chipped wood, so I was feeling pretty good about the whole thing until they actually dumped the chips. The pile was twice as big as the first pile, and it took some serious work to get it all moved.

Some of those chips are spread as mulch in places where the first load had to be laid a little thin, but a lot of it is now in three big piles that are not in the middle of the yard.

By the time next spring's garden is far enough along to need some mulch, those chips should have aged enough to be just about right for the purpose. If I am very lucky, some might be decomposed enough to dig in as soil amendment.

The Only Constant is Change

At the Plant-a-Row-for-the-Hungry garden, where I am both volunteer and co-chair, we are in for some big change. The place where we have been growing veggies is going to be remade into a children's interactive garden. For the past few weeks, we have been looking at other properties that would work for our project.

It won't be the first move for this garden project; before moving to the Smith Gilbert Garden in Kennesaw, the project was on County Farm Road, on Cobb County property, in Marietta.

The space where we've been for the past six years is about 4,500 square feet. In our best years, we've donated about 2,500 pounds of food to the Center for Family Resources in Marietta. This year, our final total is going to be higher. We're already above 2,300 pounds, and the sweet potatoes are still in the ground!

These days, it seems especially important to keep the project going. More and more people are food-insecure (don't know for sure whether they will have food for every meal, every day), and most of those people are kids or older individuals who can't, really, provide for themselves. The Center for Family Resources does great work in helping to feed those people, and in helping the working-age and working-able people around them to get and keep jobs and housing.

With luck, we'll have identified a new space and started working on preparing the soil within the next couple of months.

Fall Garden's All In

Shifting from the summer garden to the fall garden involves a lot more work than I usually remember when I set out to make the change. Pulling out the old crops, amending the soil, tending the trays of transplants, getting everything into the ground in a timely manner - that all takes some pretty serious effort. The good news is that the work is usually spread out over several weeks, so no single week is too painful.

It's kept me busy, but the fall crops (except for another round or two of quick-growing radishes) are in the garden now. I started planting them in a particular sequence: slow-growing root crops like carrots, winter radishes, and beets that are all planted as seed went in first, then broccoli and cauliflower transplants, then the leafy crops as both transplants and seeds.

The beets and winter radishes are growing very well; the carrots are still tiny, but that is no surprise; and the broccoli and cauliflower are looking good.



It doesn't hurt that we finally had both some rain and some wonderfully cool weather. We still have plenty of summer veggies coming in, though. I pulled out some of the older tomato plants to make room for transplants of leafy greens, and I was left with a lot of tomatoes. The smaller green ones are going to be made into some green-tomato salsa, for use on winter enchiladas.



Two of the older tomato plants were left in the ground - the Wuhib paste tomatoes - because they are still producing incredibly well. There was just no way I could pull out plants with so many tomatoes on them when there is still so much time before the first frost.



The last summer veggie, the sweet potato crop, is at the "volcano" stage. That's when the magma-colored tuberous roots erupt from the soil.



Digging sweet potatoes too soon, or eating them before they have a chance to cure after digging, causes them to be a lot less sweet than they could be, so I haven't been in a big hurry to get those out of the ground. These should be just about ready, though.

The Latest "Goings On"

Between finishing up some of the summer garden tasks and getting started on the fall ones, things here have been pretty busy.

Over the past few weeks, The Great Melon Experiment has progressed quite a bit. My melons, grown from seeds collected from hybrid plants, have been ripening, and I've been making decisions about what seeds to save for next year for my de-hybridizing project.

There has been some argument with the local chipmunks over whose melons these are, but we've worked out an arrangement. They get most of them; I ended up with enough to work with (the five pictured here, plus a couple more), but even a couple of those were pretty hotly contested -- note the scarring and other damage from little chipmunk teeth.



At first, I (naively) thought I'd probably save seeds from the earliest and biggest, but tasting the melons changed my mind about that pretty quickly. The earliest and biggest melon was plenty sweet, but other than the high sugar content it didn't have much in the way of flavor, and the texture was a little gritty -- not like sand, but not smooth, either.

After tasting the first few, I was wondering why I thought this multi-year breeding project was such a great idea, but then I tasted the little three-pounder. Oh my. It was sweet but also flavorful, almost buttery, and the texture was creamy-smooth. Deciding which seeds to plant next year suddenly became a "no brainer," and my original enthusiasm for the project returned in full force. The packets of seeds saved from each melon are marked with date of harvest, size at harvest, and flavor notes, and they are dried and tucked away for next year's garden.

Also completed is this year's popcorn harvest. Corn is probably not the smartest choice for a gardener working with a small space, but this really is a beautiful harvest:



Not only have I already cleared the old stalks away (chopped up and layered into the compost pile), but I've also been able to get the kernels off the cobs. These are pint-and-a-half jars, which means my little harvest has provided a quart and a half of popcorn.



The tomatoes and okra are still coming in at a fairly steady pace, along with an occasional eggplant, and the peppers are still rollicking along as though they were in their prime. I suppose they could actually be!



For fall crops, I have quite a lot of greens in flats, and root crops have been seeded directly into the ground -- if you don't count that the carrot seeds were first "sown" onto some paper towels to make wide-row seed tapes. Beets and winter radishes seem to be doing pretty well, in spite of the heat.

I've also planted broccoli and cauliflower transplants that I bought at a local store. It's been hot for their first week in the ground, but rain and cooler weather will be here, beginning at about 2 o'clock this afternoon, when the first rain-bearing bands of tropical storm Lee are expected to arrive. Already it is cloudy, and we are looking forward to the break in the drought and the heat. We are hoping, though, to avoid flooding!

Pickled Green Tomato Relish

Even though the first frost is a couple of months away, near the end of October, and summer gardens are still producing pretty well, plenty of gardeners are looking ahead, toward the end of the summer growing season.

One of my gardening friends has begun to pass around his favorite recipe for Pickled Green Tomato Relish. It's a recipe that makes full use of all the small green tomatoes that make gardeners hesitate to pull out those old tomato plants. We all hate to waste any of our good, fresh food!

This is his favorite relish recipe, and he says it's good "on everything!" The instructions assume that the gardener is already pretty familiar with canning.

Ingredients:
10 pounds small, hard, green tomatoes
4 red peppers
4 green peppers (can use all green, if red aren't available)
2 pounds onions
1/2 cup canning salt
1 qt. water
4 cups sugar
1 qt. vinegar (5%)
1/3 cup prepared mustard
2 Tablespoons cornstarch

Directions:
Sterilize canning jars. Wash and coarsely grate or finely chop the tomatoes, peppers, and onions. Dissolve salt in water and pour over the veggies in a large saucepot.

Heat to boiling and simmer 5 minutes. Drain veggies and return to saucepot. Add sugar, vinegar, mustard, and cornstarch. Stir to mix. Heat to boiling and simmer 5 minutes.

Fill hot pint jars with hot relish, leaving 1/2-inch headspace. Remove air bubbles. Wipe jar rims and adjust lids. Process 5 minutes in a boiling water bath.

The book this recipe came from was probably printed before the newer canning books came out (I only saw a copy of the page, not the actual book); I don't think I've ever processed any canned foods for as few as 5 minutes! For safety, I expect to process the jars for at least 10 minutes. Other gardeners, those more prudent than myself, may want to put the jars into a pressure-canner rather than just the boiling water bath.

Like the Energizer Bunny

The summer garden keeps going ...



In general, the harvests have become more manageable (the tomato avalanche has subsided), but we have been processing peppers pretty steadily. Right now, there is an assortment of red peppers, both sweet and hot, in the dehydrator that I plan to grind up for "paprika," and I am contemplating another round of pickled pepper rings from the Golden Greek peppers (that are not at all golden) below:



These Feherezon peppers have been producing well all summer:



This year, I remembered to fertilize the peppers again after the first flush of fruits had reached full size, and that may have helped the pepper harvest. If they are treated well and manage to avoid diseases, peppers will produce until frost.

Another summer veggie that will come to the kitchen soon is the Pigott Family Heirloom Cowpeas. This little crop had been planted in the spot from which we harvested potatoes earlier in the summer, and it seems to like that spot just fine. One of the great things about all the summer peas is that they are so easy to harvest - it's almost as though the plants are holding the peas out for you to pick!



The variety of foods coming into the kitchen isn't tremendous, but the flavor is, and we have earlier crops in the freezer (zucchini, collard greens, green beans) if we get tired of tomatoes, peppers, okra, and eggplants.

There is still chard in the garden, but it is struggling a bit in the heat, and I am thinking about cutting the tops off for compost and letting the tops regrow in what will hopefully be cooler weather in the coming weeks. There is also Malabar spinach, which I like well enough to snack on when I'm out in the yard (like purslane) but not well enough for a big serving as part of a meal.

The first melons are in the fridge (photo to come in a day or two), and the Heritage red raspberries have been ripening their late-summer crop that appears on the first-year canes.

Overall, I've had a surprisingly successful summer garden this year.