Category: Kitchen Garden

Gardening, Farming, Cooking, Recipes, Local Food, Everything that goes into meal production.

Categories
Kitchen Garden

Peak Gardening Season

Not enough sugar for cider to make vinegar, so apple sauce.

I’m left alone to attend to the house while my spouse is helping her sister. She’s been gone three weeks, and a return date is uncertain. I made a care package of garden produce, a couple boxes of rags, and my labor for some heavy lifting last Wednesday. We had a good conversation about life after the work was done.

The main August activity centers on the garden. There is a lot of food to bring in and preserve for the future. It never seems a straight line on getting things done.

Apples are dropping at the rate of one every minute from the Earliblaze trees. I picked a bucket full, yet there is not enough sugar in them to make cider for vinegar. I guess I’ll sauce them. If it is a bit tart, we can add a sweetener when we open the jars and serve. This was not a good variety of tree to plant back in the 1990s and I have two of them. The Zestar! apples, from a tree planted a couple of years ago, made a great-tasting sauce. That jar is in the refrigerator for immediate eating.

The first round of hot peppers is in and needs processing. The goal is to make at least one quart jar of Guajillo chilies with garlic, maybe two. There are also Serrano peppers for eating fresh and another kind of refrigerated chili sauce. Jalapenos will be eaten fresh. Anticipating a fresh salsa, I bought a bag of organic corn chips at the wholesale club. Once we get past the hot times, there will be a surge of hot peppers.

There is a small patch of celery to bring in. These get sliced thinly and frozen in one cup batches for soup. The leaves are abundant. I put them in the food processor to chop them and then freeze with water in small batches in a muffin pan for soup flavoring. Nothing is so good as home grown celery.

Tomato canning is on deck for the weekend. There are a dozen quarts left from last year and it looks like I’ll need them to get through the year. I’ll have a separate post later about the tomato crop. The ones that are coming in from the vines have had excellent flavor.

It is more difficult to cook for one. I made a big cut vegetable salad and it lasted for days. A person can only eat so many vegetables. I’ve been donating to the food pantry, so that helps alleviate the backlog. Still, there is a lot to process this weekend before the vegetables deteriorate. Better get after it soon.

Categories
Kitchen Garden

Sweet Corn

First sweet corn of the summer.

Sweet corn became available Saturday afternoon and we tried a dozen ears. About half of the ears were under-developed but the rest of it was as good as sweet corn gets. Since our standby outlet closed a couple years ago, only marginal corn has been available. It is unclear whether there will be enough good sweet corn available to put some up.

Our area, like most of the upper Midwest, is under drought conditions. This complicates farming with a residual effect on folks like us who rely on farmers for sweet corn. We aren’t going to go hungry.

I caught a deer in my tomato patch yesterday. When it saw me coming, it attempted to jump over the eight foot fence. It got caught and ended up bending the fence over to make its escape. The fencing system implemented this year is not working, although I am getting more exposure to deer behavior. Next year it will be better.

I delivered my spouse of 40+ years to her sister’s home on Sunday. They are preparing for a move after closing on a home at the end of the month. She will be gone for about two weeks, although these things are never certain. I reverted into some form of myself I don’t quite recognize. The main characteristics of this are changes in eating habits (spicier), and a weird feeling of loneliness when I realize no one else is home.

I’ve been preparing an editorial calendar for the 23 posts I will make on Blog for Iowa in August. I have outlines for half a dozen so far and feel there will be no shortage of topics. The trick is to make them relevant to August 2023. I’m not sure what exactly that means during the resurgence of Republican state governance. Well, I do, but I can’t post every day about what the Biden administration is doing.

It is hard to miss that Elon Musk directed Twitter to become X. It’s probably for the best as it drove me to become more of a lurker than a poster in social media. What am I worried about? Here’s a definition of media addiction:

Social media behavioral addiction is defined by being overly concerned about social media, driven by an uncontrollable urge to log on to or use social media, and devoting so much time and effort to social media that it impairs other important life areas.

The Addiction Center website.

Musk X’d that out.

Soon I’ll harvest the rest of the red cabbage, celery and potatoes. Arrival of sweet corn is a sign we’ve turned to corner of the gardening season. As long as deer don’t eat the entire tomato crop there will be plenty to do in our kitchen garden. I’m ready for it.

Categories
Kitchen Garden

Month Into Summer

Summer salad made mostly with ingredients from the garden.

Battle with squash bugs began this week. Egg laying is concentrated on the patty pan squash plants but they are throughout the squash plots. I am catching some of the egg clusters just as they are hatching. This year I am determined to get rid of them before I have to get rid of all the plants. Daily diligence in removing eggs and any squash bugs is the only way to do it without chemicals. Even that may not be successful. There were fewer eggs today than I found yesterday. I’m hopeful I can be master of my garden.

The main objective is to save the pumpkins and winter squash. A person can eat only so much zucchini and patty pan, so no loss there.

The onions are cured and ready for storage. I emptied the greenhouse Friday afternoon. Soon I will pack it away for the season. The main crops of peppers, eggplant and tomatoes are about to begin. There are many cabbage heads coming, kale, chard, and collards for leafy green vegetables. Potatoes will soon be ready to dig. There will be no shortage of fresh vegetables in our kitchen garden for a while.

There is more to life than gardening and eating the results. Not much more, though.

Categories
Kitchen Garden

First Crop of Zestar!

Zestar! apples.

The decent rain this morning will help the apples. I’m particularly looking forward to having a Zestar! apple from the tree I planted a couple of years ago. Zestar! is early and a bit tart. I tried one already and there is still too much starchiness. This rain should help them get bigger and sweeten them.

It is different for a retiree when it rains. Outdoors activity slows or stops. We take up indoors tasks that may have been long neglected. Or maybe, I put up the garage door and just watch the rain fall.

There is a lot going on in Iowa right now. Before I deal with that, I just need to breathe a while.

Categories
Kitchen Garden

Donating the Garden

Eight crates of vegetables for the food bank.

I just returned from my Monday morning trip to donate to the food pantry at the Methodist Church in town. They are open Monday afternoons for clients and accept deliveries beginning at 9 a.m. I donated cucumbers, zucchini and patty pan squash today.

Donating food accomplishes a couple of things. Clients really need the food they get at the food bank. By donating there, I contribute directly to someone’s good. When I want to preserve something — kale, cucumbers, vegetable broth, cabbage — I don’t know the yield, or how much I will need. The food bank enables me to grow plenty of what I need of a specific crop and find a home for the rest. By growing different things — patty pan squash, for example — I provide produce that is a bit different from what other gardeners may be donating. That give clients more diversity in their diet. More than anything, My donations make me useful in society.

I grow a garden for the fresh food. Being able to donate excess makes it feel like nothing is going to waste. That’s a good feeling.

Categories
Kitchen Garden

Garlic Harvest 2023

2023 Garlic Harvest. 70 head plus seven green garlic.

It took about two and a half hours to harvest, sort and rack the garlic. 70 good sized head plus seven green garlic where I filled in spots where the clove planted in October didn’t survive winter. There is plenty for cooking in the coming year and 100 cloves to plant in the fall. This is what a home gardener hopes for in a garlic crop.

Lining up the garlic heads on a two-by-four for drying.

The main learning lessons are these:

  • Use wheat straw to mulch over winter. Grass clippings created a too-dense matte that hindered spring growth.
  • If there are empty spots in the spring, do plant new cloves in them. They don’t grow to maturity with the rest of the garlic, yet if you harvest the entire plot at once, they make green garlic to use in the kitchen while waiting for the main crop to cure.
  • Inspect each head to make sure it is disease-free. As long as the heads are disease-free, they can be used to start the following year’s crop.
  • Set aside the largest heads to use as seeds. Don’t equivocate on this step.
Racked garlic crop of 2023.

Garlic is such a basic ingredient that if one gardens at all, some part of the garden must be devoted to it. In the years I have been growing my own, I never found garlic at the grocer that is anywhere near as good in quality as my own. Producing a good garlic crop is one of the reasons we garden.

Categories
Kitchen Garden

After a Day of Rain

Wild Bergamot on the state park trail on July 2, 2023.

Rain was forecast all day Saturday and it did sprinkle some in each hour. In between sprinkling I made my way to the garden and found the first head of cauliflower was ready to pick. I grabbed it and headed back indoors.

It was a punk day while rotating between my writing desk, the living room, the kitchen, and taking naps. We both continue to suffer from contact dermatitis, my spouse worse than me. There was tending to treatments to alleviate pain and itchiness. At the end of the day I was tired, yet I can’t put a finger on exactly what exhausted me.

First cauliflower on July 1, 2023.

I’m in a pickle over the vegetable harvest. The refrigerator and freezer are close to capacity and I’m only just beginning. Pickling cucumbers and other veggies is not a path to exit, since I have too many pickles canned in jars from previous years. I messaged a friend who works at the local food bank and if they are working the day before Independence Day, I will transfer much of what I have to them for distribution. I like the excess produce as we can take the best and give the rest away to people who need or want it.

It is a lazy, early summer day. It’s not hot like it can get in August, yet spring is over. It’s an in between time of organizing for the next big project, yet not starting it. It’s time for taking naps in the middle of the day. How long it took us to get to this place in our lives.

Categories
Kitchen Garden

Deer Jumped the Fences

First summer harvest of vegetables.

For the first time since I began gardening in Big Grove, deer jumped the fences and began nibbling on my plants. Thus far, they got into two plots, eating peas, green beans and cucumber plants. I put up supplemental fencing where I thought they jumped over, yet I’m not sure that will do any good. I don’t have enough fencing to elevate the height to eight feet all around every plot.

What is going on? I haven’t changed anything. My instinct is the exceedingly dry weather hindered growth of their natural food supply and my tasty plants were better than starving. The damage of one eating session is substantial, and will impact yield. I need to do something.

I mastered the art of keeping rabbits out of the garden. By securing the bottom of the fence to the ground, and letting the clover grow in the yard, they have plenty of food without intruding on my vegetable patch. It is a success story. I’ve long realized deer can easily jump my four and five foot fencing, yet because of the how I planted, they haven’t… until now.

I’ll rig up some additional fencing after the sun rises and I view last night’s damage. What I believe would resolve the problem is getting a good, long rainfall.

U.S. Drought Monitor
Categories
Kitchen Garden

A Day in a Garden

Vegetable broth simmering. Made with many kinds of garden greens.

A hummingbird dipped water from the leaves of cabbage plants throughout the garden. It has been a dry season, yet the bird found enough to drink condensed from the night and pooled in drops on the leaves. The garden is full of such life. By taking time to stand, listen, and look, we share in the experience. We become part of the garden, which is not nature, yet as close as we can get.

A deer was eating pea blossoms over the fence. I let it go on for two nights then installed additional fencing to make it eight feet tall and restrict access on that corner of the garden plot. It worked, but the deer jumped the fence on the other side and tried to access the peas from inside the fence. It ate one or two, leaving hoof marks in the fresh-dug soil where I planted spinach seeds. I wonder what happened that it only took one bite.

Predictably, I found the first little green worm on a kohlrabi plant yesterday. The egg-laying white butterflies have been thick in recent days. It was only a matter of time. The challenge now is to seek them out and pick them off in the mornings. Hopefully the organic insecticide I applied will suppress them. They arrive just as the heads of broccoli are beginning to form. Half the battle is knowing their behavior. It is a battle that can be won by diligent humans.

My daily morning walk through the garden is rewarding. Everything is growing and besides early greens, I harvested the first zucchini and patty pan squash. This is my first year growing patty pan or scallop squash. This first one will go into stir fry later this week.

Tomatoes and tomatillos are beginning to blossom. Onions are forming bulbs. Green cabbages are about three inches in diameter. Soon I will turn over the first tub of potatoes for small ones. Apples and pears are growing. There is a lot going on.

We are lucky to be able to age in place. I don’t think of the outside world when I’m in the garden. I listen, observe and experience the ecosystem I made while wondering how I fit in. It’s the wondering that’s the best part.

Categories
Kitchen Garden

Spring Kale is the Best

Cart of five varieties of kale picked June 17, 2023.

The best kale is harvested before the characteristic little green worms have a chance to establish themselves. I deter them from getting too far by a couple of applications of Dipel, an insecticide containing toxins from Bacillus thuringiensis kurstaki (Btk), a naturally-occurring bacterium found in soil and plants. Btk is not harmful to humans, to birds, or to most beneficial insects and pollinators. It is widely used by farmers who use organic practices. The truth is one has to do something about the little green worms to have a good crop. This year, because of these applications, the cruciferous vegetable patch of kale, collards, broccoli, cabbage, chard, and cauliflower looks quite good.

The spring greens harvest has two major purposes outside eating fresh kale and collards. I stem the leaves and put as many packages as will fit in the freezer. Less attractive leaves, as well as the stems go into canned vegetable broth. I have been following this practice since we got a small freezer during a power outage. Since then, we upgraded to an upright freezer. This enables us to eat greens all year, until next year’s crop. It is something that goes well in our garden. Something upon which we rely in our everyday cooking.

Based on the number of white butterflies spotted in the cruciferous vegetables yesterday, it will be hard to keep up with them soon.

We like kale, especially in stir fry, soups, and tacos. Many people do not care for it. I learned to grow it from my friend Susan back in 2013. I would stop eating it if I didn’t grow it myself and control all the inputs. Part of aging successfully will be figuring out how to continue the annual kale crop.