Mama Bean is KinderGARDENing - it's Harvest Time!

The other night we harvested our potatoes. We grew three types sold by a local greenhouse as a "gourmet mix" - Norland (red skin, white flesh) purple viking (deep purple skin, white flesh) and Alta blush (an Albertan creation, white to pink skin, and white to yellow flesh). I wouldn't say our harvest was great, only 3 or 4 potatoes per plant, and only the purple ones got large. Papa Bean dug up the plants, and laid the potatoes onto the dirt, where the kids could grab them and put them in the box.

Our harvest would have been better if we'd hilled the plants more diligently. I'd like to build some potato boxes (with layers of planks you add as the plant grows) or else just garbage bins, in the future. It's not really economical to grow them - potatoes at the store are cheap enough. They are ego boosting, though, it's hard to kill a potato plant, and beetles notwithstanding, they just make a gardener's soul happy :) I like growing the "gourmet" types, I really want to try fingerlings next year.

In the box picture, Bean's blurry arm has a blurry worm on it. We found lots of juicy-looking earthworms while digging, and the kids were well distracted by them, having little worm races on the walkway. The worms, alas, did not survive. But their sacrifice helped our sanity survive, and for that, we honour them lol.

This little Sproutlet doesn't meet much that doesn't go into her mouth - green tomatoes, ripe tomatoes, dirt, rocks, acorns, and more tomatoes... She keeps smiling, so I can't see anything wrong with it...

The Prairie Valley City in general, and our family in specific, have been blessed by an amazing apple harvest this year. We've received 50 or 60 pounds of apples from three different sources (!!!) We're going to take about 100 lbs to a local farm that presses them into fresh unpasteurized cider - we'll get about 8 or 10 gallons. Only $5.50/gallon, and they sell their own stuff for $15/gallon. The rest we'll sauce or make pie filling or something. Here's Bean learning to use our peeler. After borrowing a fancy peeler (for over a year, yikes!) I found this cheaper plastic one at Value Village for only $4, and it is awesome!

This is the tomato station in my garage, where I'm trying to sort the types. The giant ones on the left are Hawaiian pineapples, in the middle are a mix of green zebra/Bulgarians, and nyagous (black) tomatoes. Then there's the cherry bounty. At the farmer's market, those suckers sell for $3-4/pint, and I've probably eaten about 10 pints already. I love my garden :)

I have a half dozen montages like this, just enjoying the colours of the harvest. It's been a really bright, vibrant kind of year, and I like that. On the other hand, those Hungarian wax peppers (the long orange one) were waaaay too hot, luckily I thought to put them in salsa, otherwise I doubt we'd have used them. The mini brown peppers were cute, but not terribly tasty. Overall, I'm not sure we'll keep growing peppers - it's one of those rare things that don't taste as good as the store (in our experience, maybe I'm doing it wrong) and often our growing season isn't long enough for them to ripen (colour) fully anyway, plus we only get 3 or 4 per plant, which isn't necessarily economical. But maybe I'm saying that because peppers were cheap this year at the store *shrug*

This is a Hawaiian pineapple tomato sliced up. They have the most beautiful colouring, this lovely peachy orange into bright red, and the streaks go throughout. The flavour was amazing - not really like a tomato at all, just vaguely fruity and very (very) sweet. Mild, not a lot of zing or acidity. It was a pleasure to eat, and it was huge, so I basically had this for lunch haha.

Last but not least, yesterday's caprese salad, with black cherries, sweet 100s, and sun golds/sun sugars, fresh basil from my aunt's garden, and bocconcini. I cannot describe how much I enjoyed this. I used the rest of the basil to make walnut pesto (not quite as good as with pine nuts, but at $6.48/100g, I wasn't buying pine nuts) and used some of the pesto to make a balsamic vinaigrette. I also used 23 green zebra/Bulgarians to learn how to blanch and peel tomatoes (it's so easy!) and make salsa (onion, garlic, lime juice, salt/pepper/cumin, cilantro, corn, red pepper, Hungarian wax pepper, and tomatoes). And then today, I had another caprese-ish salad, with green tomatoes to add some zing (they are such bright happy tomatoes, with a lovely sweetness) and the vinaigrette. Smiling smiling smiling...

[Internal monologue: I talked a lot about money in this post, that's weird. I didn't think gardening was about money for me, but then again, we do this because we're Green Misers, environmentally minded when it costs less lol. Also, it's weird to put something some bright and cheery after serious posts about Depression, but, well, that's life!]

Mama Bean is KinderGARDENing, winding down through August

 

We were away for a week, and I feel like I came home to early Fall, which is my favourite season - the nights are getting crisp, mornings are refreshing, and the garden is definitely heading into harvest time. Our master plan for these cucumbers to climb up the repurposed futon frame trellis, covered in delicious cukes didn't exactly... welp, it failed. But I pulled the ten or so cucumbers we did get onto the outside of the box just to take this nifty picture haha.

 

The tomatoes have continued going crazy, bending their cages down, lots of heavy fruit starting to turn colour. These are green zebras, and they are ripening to a slightly orange colour, but I'll only pick them when they start to feel less hard (but not necessarily soft). I did pick two green hungarians (which also ripened a bit orange) and they were pretty tasty, but a bit too sharp/bright. I like my tomatoes with a lot of sweetness, so I'm not sure if I'll grow them again. I am thinking some green salsa and green tomato sauce will look (and hopefully taste) good, so that's the plan.

 

The tomatoes on the left are Japanese black trifeles, so they've got a lot of ripening to do. The green hungarians are on the left. Our potatoes do not seem to have done well this year, despite having nice big plants; they have drooped and dried out already, maybe we didn't hill them enough? But those three taters in the bucket you see were all I got from one whole plant, and one of those may even have sneaked in from a neighbouring plant /sigh.

 

These are black cherry tomatoes. They look ready to eat, but they won't pull off the stem/vine easily yet, so I don't think they're fully ripe. I am being as patient as I can to taste them :S

 

I have two or three of these super-tomatoes on my Hawaiian pineapple tomato plant - I think they are made from several blossoms being fertilized and growing all together at once (maybe the vine was too cramped?) They are just starting to get orange now, I suspect I'll have to pick them green and let them finish ripening inside. But there's still plenty of August and (hopefully sunny warm) September left - fingers crossed against frost, right?

 

I thinned the beets just to see how they were coming along; they are small and that sucks. I've been picking many delicious handfuls of those orange sun sugars and sungolds and some red sweet 100s. Those orange suckers are so sweet and awesome, they're all eaten within hours of entering the house. That cucumber was very thick-skinned and a bit acerbic near the skin - I think this is either because it's not a thin-skinned variety and/or because it's been such a hot and dry summer.

 

These are mini brown peppers, they have since ripened to an even deeper red-brown colour. I can't decide when to pick them, but I'm thinking tomorrow.

 

These are yellow Hungarian wax peppers, which have for some reason turned orange. I don't know if they are spicy or not, but I think they're getting picked tomorrow, too.

 

The pumpkin plants have taken over the front flower bed, growing from the right corner across the middle and back (covering my lilies a bit, that's not so good) up into the bush at the left. There have been many male flowers, but not a single female flower, so no pumpkins for us :( I found two small female buds when I got home from vacation, but neither will bloom in time for fruit. That's my update! How's your garden doing?

Mama Bean is KinderGARDENing (without the Inadvertent Farmer this year)

The Inadvertent Farmer has gone MIA, so she's not hosting the KinderGARDEN blog carnival as in years past, but I still have a garden and I still have kids, so I'm carrying on the spirit of it, and praying everything is alright in her neck of the woods.

This collage shows (clockwise from top left): yellow zucchini, onion flower, teeny tiny beginning cucumbers, thinned carrots, Papa Bean watering the jungles, mini brown pepper, Hungarian yellow wax pepper, green zucchini. PB is watering the potato bed there, which also has the cucumber plants that are unfortunately shaded by the potato plants. They are very short, but with lots of flowers, so hopefully they still fruit. The middle bed has a tomato jungle that I cut back (drastically) tonight, tying up escaped branches and centering tilting cages - I will never underestimate indeterminate tomatoes again, we are concocting some sort of crazy heavy duty cages next year. There are also green beans in the middle bed, which we ate stir fried with shrimp for dinner tonight.

 

This is the third bed. The peas along the trellis are pretty much done, they were sweet and lovely, little Sprout loves to pick them one by one out of the shell. She also loves when mommy takes a pile out of the shell and she can stuff them all in her mouth at once. Bean kept asking for peas, but not really eating them. There are four out-of-control tomato plants at the end, and then rows of carrots, lettuce, parsnips, and beets. I have taken out the two rows of spinach because they bolted before I could eat it. If I ever try to grow spinach again, I'm planting it somewhere really shaded, summers are too hot here otherwise.

 

Here's a parade of my tomatoes, of which I am ridiculously proud :) First are the Green Zebras.

 

These are called Hawaiian Pineapple. They are oddly pale, and multi-lobulated (?)

 

This is the Nyagous plant, which has the most tomatoes by far of all the plants. It has crazy escapee branches going all over the place, trailing on the ground. I'm worried the tomatoes higher up will weigh the branches down too much, I'll be watching this plant very closely.

 

Black Cherry. I am fascinated at how, even as unripe green tomatoes, they all look so different.

 

This is called Japanese Black Trifele. I love the unique pear shape.

 

These are Green Bulgarians, they look a lot like the Green Zebras.

 

Tomatoes not pictured: Persimmon, which has no flowers or fruit on it yet :( Carbon black, sungold, sun sugar, and sweet 100s. If anyone from KinderGARDENs still reads here, please leave and comment with your own gardening post, I'd love to catch up with your gardens and kiddos this year!

Mama Bean is KinderGARDENing (the end)

I have had such a good time participating in KinderGARDENs this year. It has provided good focus for my gardening and photographing efforts. In many ways, with a new little Sprout on the scene, gardening would have taken a complete back seat, if I hadn't committed to myself that I wanted to do KinderGARDENs from start to finish (minus a few missed weeks, oops!) I can't wait until next year, for a variety of reasons, including seeing everyone else's KinderGARDENs again, and simply the sheer untapped potential (for better weather, for more diligent weeding, for tastier harvests) that next year holds. But first - a rundown of how this year finished...

Here is Bean walking through the weeds at our big community garden. To be honest, we just gave up on this garden, there was no time to redeem the lack of watering during this hot dry summer, and I just figured what could grow would grow, and everything else... would not. In front of Bean you can see the radishes that bolted like crazy. Radishes are awesome, I recommend growing them to boost the confidence of any gardener. Behind Bean you can see our kohlrabi and chard, which remain to be harvested, probably this weekend.

Here is a sample plant of the first member of the brassica family I've ever grown successfully. We picked three about this size and I chopped and stirfried them and thought they were delicious! Just like broccoli stem, which I happen to like a lot. I'm the only person in my family who will like these, so we probably won't grow it again. But I'm gonna go harvest the rest of it and eat it all by myself! Ha!

Here's Sprout keeping warm while we picked carrots. Luckily, PB's parents, who are visiting from Cowtown, met us at the garden with a truck and extra manpower, to help pull in the carrots. I wasn't sure how big or tasty they'd be, and I'm pleased to report carrots are pretty darn hardy :) We had a great harvest of at least this one vegetable from our whole plot lol. I also pulled up a few onions, and there are potatoes to be discovered at the back of the plot. We've got this weekend to accomplish the task, before the garden is shut down for the season (they plough it under each fall.) And then we're done with it. I am sad to leave the community, but we never really plugged in with other gardeners there anyway. I think if we hadn't been so busy growing a family, we'd have had a better experience growing a garden.

But, here is our alternative - two new raised beds! Altogether, this puts us at a little under 150 square feet of growing space at home, with beautiful sunlight, close to our rain barrels and water taps, and all round more convenient. Next summer, these boxes will be bursting with produce, I am SO EXCITED I'M WRITING IN ALL CAPS!!! (!!!) We'll be layering garden clippings, compost, and new topsoil in the beds over winter. We're also putting some fall onions and garlic in for tasty tasty harvests next fall :)

This is the beautiful delicate flower of the stinky coleus plant. I consider this plant a success story, and I'll be buying two (or four) next year to keep the rabbits out of the beds. We were able to grow lettuce and cabbage at home without the rabbit eating them, even though he still lived across the yard under our mugo shrubs. It sustained some freezing at the beginning of spring/summer to grow into a lush healthy plant. The smell is strong but surprisingly not that unpleasant, or maybe I just got used to it. Anyway, I'm happy to include it in my garden.

This summer was terribly dry, after such an insanely wet/flooded spring. These carrots show the effects of the dryness, I think, in their banding. See how they are all constricted at about the same level? I think the roots experienced good moisture levels above and below the bands, but at the constrictions, they grew thinner and more slowly. They are tasty, but maybe just a little harder to clean and peel.

Here's more or less what we harvested this week. Some potatoes, some carrots, some onions, some kohlrabi, some squash. Kim can add about 6 pounds of chard to the KinderGARDENs donation tally, and there will be several more pounds of chard donated in the next week, I'm sure. Along with some of this other stuff. The acorn squash are from our volunteer plant. My tomato plants are near done, still with tonnes of small green tomatoes to pick off and let ripen in our warm kitchen. All in all, for a kind of busy summer with really weird weather, I'm happy with the harvest. For sure, once again, we learned a lot of lessons, and I leave the year encouraged about next year. Make sure to swing by Kim's and check out everyone else's final summaries. Thanks for an excellent year of KinderGARDENing!

Mama Bean is KinderGARDENing (19)

It's been a few weeks since I did a KinderGARDEN check in - I missed week 17 and week 18. So far, Kim hasn't posted a week 19 sign up. In fact, she hasn't posted anything in over a week, and I hope it's not because something is wrong. Thinking of you, Kim, and praying everything is okay with your family! [Update: Kim came back! Her son needs back surgery, so she's been battling HMOs to get his precious spine the very best care she can, because that's what all spines deserve! Please head to her blog to check out everyone else's KinderGARDEN updates.]

 

I missed the week when the assignment was to take pictures in the glorious golden light of a rising sun, but I still did the 'homework.' I went out early on my way to work one Friday morning, but actually missed the golden morning sun by about 10 minutes. Instead, I have the cool cool tones of pre-sun. It was still peaceful to be out when no one else was around and putter about taking pictures of my (sad) garden.

 

Here are the tassles on the corn-that-wasn't. Next to that corn are the potatoes-that-didn't, followed by the beans-the-weeds-ate, and then the squash-the-drought-killed. Let's not forget the onions-the-grass-drowned, the carrots-bravely-growing-despite-the-weeds, and the cucumbers-of-mass-patheticness. I also have kohlrabi and chard, so much I don't know what to do with it. I have a few twigs of cinnamon basil which will be cooked into a small batch of tomato jam. And the peas were done long ago. I know my big garden suffered from a) having two babies to care for (/sigh KinderGARDENing will one day be easier, yes? promise?) b) too little rain and c) laziness, because we know we're giving it up next year. This land, which will grow pretty much anything with a bare minimum of attention, deserves the respect of people who will care for it. We are not (currently) those people.

 

Our garden at home has confirmed for me that raised beds are the absolute bestest thing EvarintheUniverseWow. The tomatoes are rampant, the vines have cascaded over the cages and are spreading across my lawn. I roasted some for a pasta salad. I turned five pounds of just the yellow ones into a lovely glaze/jam concoction that tastes delightful on grilled chicken. I would have had beautiful cabbages if I'd combated the slugs with any sort of consistency. I have EGGPLANTS! And I really do think the stinky coleus plant did it's job, because we had lettuce, and the rabbits didn't eat it. Most importantly, raised beds grow an amount of food we'll actually use, instead of rows and rows of stuff four folks couldn't possible consume. So, I'll happily post pics of our two new beds when they are completed (in a few weeks!)

 

I may have mentioned a few times we had a remarkably hot and dry summer. It has virtually disappeared overnight (though the forecast promises a return to warmer temperatures for the weekend, when we are having an early birthday bbq for Bean *fingers crossed*) The past two days have been gray, rainy and super windy. Tonight we'll drop near freezing and will probably frost later this week. On the one hand, I'm glad it will kill the wasps. On the other hand (wringing hands) my tomatoes! I sort of covered them with sheets, but the tomato jungle is really rather uncontainable. I picked the eggplant, even though I don't know if they could have used a few more days on the plant. I hope they are tasty anyway - I'm just excited to have them! They grew much bigger than I expected. And the flowers were so pretty, I'd grow it just for them :)

 

We planted these raspberries our first full summer here, and I must say we've been a little disappointed in their yield. I think we need to feed their soil with some compost and mulch, and probably watering them would help. Anyway, we've grown enough that little Bean hands know what to do with them - the trick is stopping him from picking them all!

 

His face is tear-streaked because we had a Bonk right before this. He wasn't hurt, only scared, but he knows he gets hugs and cuddles for Bonks and he maybe milks that a little right now. (Parenting aside: previously, we've tried to teach him to just "brush off" the Bonks and get on about his life. However, he is lately going through some separation/anxiety/stuff, not really sure what it is, probably typical 2-year-old neurology, and I feel like he needs the extra cuddles and reassurances. We are building a relationship, you know, and a big part of that is really laying the foundation that we are Here For Him No Matter What. Plus, he's never really been a cuddly kid, and to hear him ask for hugs is so heart-warming and adorable I can't help myself. So maybe I will regret in a few months that he's running to me for pats on the back every time he Bonks, but for now... I'm just gonna keep doing it!) I used the raspberry picking as a distraction, and it was successful. A little too successful. As in, Papa-Bean-didn't-get-any-berries-too-successful. Sorry PB! You've got dibs on the next ones, if Bean doesn't sneak them, ok?

Mama Bean is KinderGARDENing (16)

These are the happy ending to my gardening adventures - Tiny Tims, sweet golds, and Juliets. I didn't think the Tiny Tim plant was producing, because its squat determinate plant got buried under the monster indeterminate vines of everything else (especially the sweet golds.) But I poked under there, and it had a bunch of teeny tiny Tims! They are such a weird cherry tomato - they taste just like a big, meaty beefsteak (not sweet at all) but are sooooo small. It's actually been very interesting to taste these cherry varieties next to each other, makes me feel like a tomato connoisseur. The sweet golds are definitely the sweetest this year, the Juliets taste and feel very much like a roma, and the sweet 100s are just your average tomato (this year.) I have three larger tomatoes ripening, can't wait to put them on a sandwich!

This is a before picture of my weed harvest. I don't recommend letting your garden grow to look like this - it takes hours to change it's appearance. And when you put in those hours, the plants you wanted will be stunted, sad, and less than productive :(

As I weeded, I disturbed at least 10 nests of these little red and black beetles. They didn't seem to be hurting anything, but it was creepy to lift a plant out, and see them swarm out of the cracks in the ground.

Here's the "after" picture of the back half of my plot. Dying corn because we didn't water, dead potato plants we should dig up soon, anemic bean plants with overly mature beans that were not picked, and a few cucurbits also suffering from lack of water, with a few flowers, but no fruit.

I don't have any pics of my kinders helping me garden this week, but Bean has been eating peas from the garden (he likes the edible pods more than the peas inside, which actually I do, too.) He also helped me kill some of the slugs that I find feasting on my cabbages every morning - what can I do about slugs? The BTK isn't meant for them, only the looper caterpillars. As the nights get longer and cooler, I feel summer slipping away, and after the weeding fiasco, I've given up on any upkeep, only harvest!

Please check out everyone else's updates at Kim's blog! Hopefully this next week I'll sneak away one morning (when I'm not exhausted by waking up with a newborn) to do her early morning photo assignment :)

Mama Bean is KinderGARDENing (15)

I will try to be less depressed than last week. Who can be depressed when beautiful cucumber tendrils are snaking across sunlit leaves, promising... promising things?

On the other hand, who wouldn't be depressed with this weed-ridden garden plot? If you have a particularly keen eye, you can sort of see rows of bean plants in there - lots of flowers, but because we've had no rain, and because I am too busy and too lazy to haul buckets for an hour every day to water my plot, nothing is turning into beans. But I am undaunted. I think I'm learning that every year of gardening is going to be unique in it's own way until I'm many more decades into it, and one more rainy year or one more hot year won't feel like The Worst Year Ever anymore. Ha!

Bean likes to help! Here he is helping Papa Bean wrap up our row-marker tool. I'd left it marking the final row of carrots I planted and just never cared enough to wind it up. And then when we visited this last week, the line was getting overwhelmed by weeds and some carrots, too! Tell me something - do carrots from a dry year taste different? Like cucumbers without enough water are bitter, and radishes with too much water are spicy, so what about carrots?

Papa Bean accosted my new camera and took pictures of me picking peas. They're pretty tasty, just not many of them. We'll have to get in another picking tomorrow, maybe. You can see Bean on the side there, helping by pushing Sprout in the stroller. It's one of his favourite things to do. He only gets completely a little bit in the way while he's doing it.

These are the flowers on the volunteer cucumber plant by our BBQ. Fingers crossed they'll fruit in time to mature before cold weather hits. The other volunteers seem to be acorn squash, but weirdly hybridized and spotty/stripey. I've had a slew of male flowers with no females to put their pollen onto, now I see a bunch of female flowers coming up, but I'm not sure if any males will be around for them (gah!) I love to eat cucurbits, and I love the way they grow, but they do seem so prone to whims of... plants. The whims of plants are not that whimsical, turns out.

This is another volunteer I just noticed today by our compost bins in their new location. Yes, I only noticed it when it got this big. Let's say I'm good at filtering out the plants I don't want to see - my eyes see, but my mind ignores. Anyway, there's no way this will flower and fruit in time, but I would've liked to see what kind of tomato it was that held on so tenaciously in our compost.

I finally have an eggplant growing! At least, I think this is a viable, growing eggie. So far all the pretty purple flowers have just bloomed and shriveled. I don't know how to nurse an eggplant, but I'll do whatever I can for this little guy. At least for my plot at home, watering is easy and close and, most importantly, happens.

Don't these leaves look like a cartoon? Our front shrubs flowered crazily this year, and now they're shooting off all these new branches with these crazy cartoon coloured leaves. I've got to trim them soon, the branches are blocking our front door, and Bean gets scared, in that little two-year-old way, of long grasses and branches touching him. He'll go fearlessly wandering around some plants or something, then realize those very same plants are now blocking his way back to mama, and gets all antsy and agitated. It's pretty cute, but don't tell him that ;)

After taking the pictures of our shrubs, I noticed our neighbour's shrub, which is a totally different type of plant, also has crazy cartoon colouring this year. Weird, right? Like, these bushes have different branching, different flowers, different leaf shapes, different... weird. I have to say I've really appreciated how KinderGARDENs gives me a focus for my picture taking. Like, when you're just running around with a camera, kids and life give you any number of things to photograph, in a really undirected way. But having a project (creating a post each week) gives me reasons to push the shutter, it directs me eye, y'know? I really like it :) And I'll miss it when it's over for this year.

Sprout likes to play with her toes. That's all. I mean, she likes lots of things. I just meant that's all I have to say about this. Without gushing about how cute she is and how much I love her nose and and well, you know.

I pick tomatoes every day, three types so far, Juliet, Sweet Gold and Sweet 100s. They are all rather thick-skinned this year, maybe from the heat (?) The sweet 100s are not as sweet at the first year, the Juliets are like small romas (so maybe I can sauce them?) and the sweet golds are truly little jewels, if I leave them to ripen to a deep, rich, goldenrod. I am trying to teach Bean to only pick the colourful ones, but a few green ones come off the vine regardless. He loves to pick them, and bites into each one, even though he doesn't like them. My son, the optimist, "Maybe this one will taste good. Maybe this one!" I also planted a Tiny Tim plant, but it's getting shaded out by the bigger vines, so the teeny tiny tomatoes under there may not ripen. I've also seen, deep in the tomato jungle, some of the Ultra Sweets, they look the perfect size, I'm so excited. Sadly, our pepper plants are also being shaded by the tomato monsters, so no peppers this year.

This is his face after biting into yet another one. He is also perturbed by the seed fluff on top of that green tomato. It's another of these new little toddler freak out things - they pick the strangest things to be scared of.

Kim's on vacation, but everyone else is still posting their garden updates - check it out!