New Seedlings!

The germination station is officially active and working overtime! On Sunday 2/27 we started the leeks and ground cherries in seedling trays with a special seed starting mix. We knew we wanted at least 117 leeks based on our garden plan. Although our garden plan calls for 117 leeks, I think we will probably need fewer because we got Bulgarian Giant Leeks which could be way too big for square foot gardening general spacing (9 leeks per square). Our plan calls for two ground cherries, but I am willing to scatter a few more around the house, so I started nine. We also started the Early Jalapenos, Jimmy Nardellos, Snow White Tomatoes, and Amish Paste Tomatoes on March 1. We started a few extra of each plant, but our base numbers for what we need are 12 Amish Paste, 3 Snow White, 8 Jimmy Nardello, and 12 Early Jalapeno.

The leeks have sprouted and we are holding our breath to see the germination rates of the others.

Updated Seed List

Now I've managed to finalize a list and would love peoples' opinions if they have experiences with these varieties:

• Early Russian Cucumber
• Snow White Cherry Tomato
• Amish Paste Tomato
• Early Jalapeno
• Jimmy Nardello Pepper
• Jackson Wonder Lima Bean
• Green Arrow Garden Pea
• Blue Podded Blauwschokkers Garden Pea
• Sugar Sprint Snap Pea
• Red Malabar Spinach
• Giant Noble Spinach
• Bulgarian Giant Leek
• Caribe Potato
• Carrots (again, still have to locate the seeds)
• Goldie Ground Cherry

Planning for Spring

Whew, long time no blogging. I fear we have gotten side tracked significantly from eating local due to financial issues, but we are trying to buckle down a bit. We probably aren't going to be as extreme as before, but we definitely have decided that it makes us happier and healthier to cook from scratch and eat local! Now, I find myself perusing the seed catalogs and trying to find out what we will be growing this year. Right now, here is the line-up (if anyone has any experience with these varieties, I would love to hear how they did):

• Jimmy Nardello (Sweet Pepper)
• Early Russian Cucumber
• Early Jalapeno
• Sugar Sprint Snap Pea
• Carentan Leek
• Caribe Potatoes
• Ground Cherries
• Amish Paste Tomatoes
• We want a yellow/white cherry tomato that is quite small and I am looking at Bianca, Blondkopchen, Hartman's Yellow Gooseberry, Ildi, and Snow White.
• Red Malabar Spinach (I'm really curious about this one) and maybe some Giant Noble as well
• I'm debating on the lima beans. The Hendersons did well last year, but I am looking for something else since they got picked over a bit by bugs. Currently, I'm looking at Dixie Speckled Butterpea and Jackson Wonder.
• For garden peas, I'm still trying to decide between Green Arrow and Pioneer.

All of these varieties are heirlooms from Seeds of Change, Bakers Creek, Tomato Bob, and maybe Johnny's. We will also be growing some carrots that we bought seeds for last year. I have to dig those up (no pun intended) to figure out what variety that is. We will NOT be putting carrots or potatoes in our square foot beds - instead we will get something bigger and deeper to give them more space. We will be getting strawberries, asparagus, and onions coming up this year that we put in last year, so we will get to enjoy those finally!

If you are looking for seeds to order, be sure to talk to your friends and neighbors and read reviews. I didn't do this as much as I should have last year and made some mistakes that negatively affected my yields. I could have easily avoided a lot of stress and frustration if I had done this!

Stored Foods

I finally was able to take the time to evaluate what all has been preserved in our freezer and what we have canned.

In our freezer:
Strawberry Freezer Jam - 11 half pints
Apples - 11.5 lbs.

Berry Freezer Jam - 17 half pints
Potato Leek Soup - 5 quarts (I improvise a bit with this by making half of the water be chicken broth and we always add some cheese and diced ham)
Diced Tomatoes - 15 quarts

Applesauce - 7 quarts
Corn - 15 pints
Blueberries - 12 cups
Rhubarb - 9 cups

Zucchini - 9.5 cups

Bell Peppers - 5 quarts
Tomato Sauce - 5 quarts
Borlotti Beans - 2.5 quarts
Lima Beans - 2.5 quarts
Sugar Snap Peas - 5.25 quarts

Peas - 6 cups
Poblano Peppers - 1 quart
Jalapeno Peppers - 1 pint

Banana Peppers - 1 cup
Medium Peppers - 1 pint
Cayenne Peppers - 1 cup

Red Hot Peppers - 1/2 cup
Black Hungarian Hot Peppers - 1/2 cup
In our pantry:
Peaches - 11 quarts
Green Beans - 31 pints (plus 2 we have already eaten)
Salsa - 8 half pints (this turned out to be a sweet and spicy recipe, so next year, we need to cut back a bit on the sugar)
Hot Salsa - 2 pints
Peach Melba Jam - 7 half pints
Apple Butter - 2 1/2 pints (We tried a crockpot apple butter recipe that really did not go well!)

New Residents and Fall

We were sad to say goodbye to the hopping Worthington farmers' market a few weeks ago and now we are getting down to freezing temperatures. A few days ago, we pulled the last of the unripe tomatoes and the peppers to save them. We will be wrapping the tomatoes in newspaper to help them ripen, which will give us fresh tomatoes for some time to come. In addition, we had to drain the rain barrel, which was a complex issue with our little comet goldfishes inside. We drained it to about the halfway point and then tipped the barrel over and caught the fish as they shot out. If you recall, we started the season with 8 fish (7 Erics and a Bob) and we knew we had one fatality early on. Other than that, we were unsure of what was inside the barrel. We ended up with (drumroll please.....) three fish! It is not shocking because of the fluctuating environment of the barrel, but it was funny that there were no bodies. Out of all of them, we had a white one, a white and orange one, and an orange one. As you can see, they have now taken up residence in the house. I am notorious for killing fish (not on purpose of course), and it looks like these three hardy ones will still struggle inside. The cats have taken a keen interest in the fish bowls despite our best attempts to protect them. We also have already had to learn the important lesson that one bowl does not offer enough space and oxygen for three fish, so we had to divide them into two bowls. We thought about getting a big tank with fancy filters, but in the end, budgets are tight and there is only so much money we are willing to put into 3 fish that cost 30 cents a piece. So for now, they will have to be split up... They have also earned individual names since they survived this long. Orange is Bill, orange and white is Eric, and white is Sookie (can you tell we are True Blood fans?).

Plant Summaries

I wanted to write up summaries that showed the performance of the crops we grew this summer.  Below highlights what we noticed…

Black Diamond Yellow Flesh Watermelon – BIG healthy plants that produced multiple melons. The melons themselves were juicy and beautiful but not very sweet. Part of the problem probably came from us not watering frequently enough. We harvested one full size melon and will be getting about 3 additional small melons by the end of the season.

Crenshaw Melons – The plants began very big and healthy but were killed by the Cucumber Beetle and bacterial wilt, so we never got any melons.

Amish Paste Tomato – Very large, beautiful plants with lots of tomatoes that look like big Roma tomatoes. The fruits were easy to peel and meaty. We love these for sauces and salsas!!!

Ernie’s Plump Tomatoes – These plants were not as lush with leaves and produced significantly less tomatoes. These tomatoes tended to be much harder to peel (even when blanched) and we ended up with a lot more of these rotting because they seemed to be more susceptible to bugs.

Chadwick Cherry Tomatoes – We did one of these just for the heck of it in a pot and it developed into a big plant with lots of large cherry tomatoes. These are bigger than the average cherry tomato, but they were very tasty.

Hungarian Yellow Wax Hot Peppers – These were our most productive hot peppers. The plants were kind of small but there were always one or two peppers developing whenever we checked the plants.

Jalapeno Peppers – These plants struggled and we really didn’t get anything off of them. Many of them died so we supplemented our hot peppers with other varieties which seemed to struggle as well.

California Wonder Pepper – We had one plant pull through the season and now that we are about to get our first frost, we are about to get our first pepper. Funny and sad, but next year we will definitely go for a different variety because based on feedback from other gardeners, this variety is notoriously unproductive.

Black Seeded Simpson – These were fairly dedicated germinators but they went to seed before we were able to harvest much of anything off of them.

Snowball Cauliflower – The plants germinated well and grew into huge, healthy plants but they never developed any crowns!

Iceburg Lettuce – We had to buy seedlings of these because our home-germinated plants all died. The plants began to grow nicely but they bolted before developing heads.

Caribe Potatoes – These all germinated fairly well, grew into beautiful plants and gave us as many potatoes as they could. Unfortunately, we needed to give them more room, because six-inch deep soil just doesn’t give much room for potatoes to grow.

Appaloosa Beans – These plants all struggled. We got a few successful grown up plants, but out of all of them, we ended up getting ¼ cup of dry beans in the end. We tried to supplement with another variety of white dry bean, but that was not productive either.

Henderson Bush Lima Bean – These plants germinated very well and grew into healthy plants, but we had some sort of pest that liked chewing up the leaves. We missed out on the first round of harvest for these beans and we only got a handful of beans in the end.

Kentucky Wonder Bush Bean – These plants germinate fairly well but again they suffered from a bug that liked to munch the leaves. The plants ended up providing us with tasty beans for a few meals but nothing really significant.

Danvers Half Long Carrots – These seeds germinated very well and grew into the biggest carrots they could be. Unfortunately, that meant they only got to be about 4-6 inches long because of the limited bed space.

Homemade Pickles – These plants germinated very well and grew into big healthy plants that produced more cucumbers than we knew what to do with for a while. Sadly, after about a month of producing we got Cucumber Beetles and bacterial wilt that killed all of them very quickly.

Thomas Laxton Garden Peas – These peas germinated the best of the 3 varieties and grew into the biggest plants with lots of pods, but the pods were all fairly small. We probably got a cup of shelled peas out of these plants.

Oregon Giant Snow Peas – These were the second best germinators and were by far the most productive. We always had some snow pods to munch on while the plants were growing and they were very tasty.

Sugar Snap Peas – These did not germinate well at all and did not produce very much. We got a few handfuls of pea pods off of all the plants we grew which was very disappointing.

Bloomsdale Long Standing Spinach – These germinated very well and were tasty based on the few leaves we got to eat. Unfortunately, they bolted very quickly, so we hardly had any harvest time.

Zucchini – We grew 3 gorgeous plants from seed, which germinated very well. We got one big zucchini off of one plant and that was it for the harvest. The plants ended up being the last to succumb to the Cucumber Beetles and bacterial wilt.

Onions – We planted onion sets and the limited space of the beds resulted in the onions we harvested being little bigger than ping pong balls (those were the big ones), so that didn’t work out so well.

Strawberry Freezer Jam and Green Beans

Another weekend of canning and definitely many more to come.  A week or so ago, we canned 7 pints of green beans and this last weekend, we purchased around 4 pounds more and got 12 pints out of that.  We followed the guidelines from PickYourOwn.com for canning green beans and got all 19 jars to seal successfully.  We put salt in our beans since the last time we canned these we quickly realized that we love salty canned green beans!  This many cans means we can have a pint every 2 weeks, hopefully that will be enough (we both are quite fond of canned green beans).  Our green bean liquid did seem to decrease quite significantly in the canning process, which concerns me a little, but since they all sealed, fingers crossed the beans will be okay. 

We lucked out and got 4 quarts of strawberries at market.  One quart I froze whole after cutting off the tops so we can make at least one batch of strawberry breakfast bread.  The rest went into the strawberry freezer jam.  We tried the recipe from CDKitchen, which like the raspberry freezer jam doesn’t call for pectin.  After eating this jam, I would definitely try adding the pectin because it behaves more like a sauce than a jam and I would probably cut back on the sugar a little because it is VERY sweet.  With our 3 quarts, we ended up getting 14 half pints of jam, so we are doing quite well on our jam stock.