Grow it! Eat it!

Frugal Gardener: Seed catalog(s) revelation!

2012-01-27T16:42:00.002-05:00

Does the Frugal Gardener in you get irritated when you see five packets of seeds you want to buy in one catalog but the sixth packet you want is in another catalog—and you aren’t about to pay a second shipping and handling fee to get that one extra packet?

Over the last couple of weeks I’ve discovered that several seed catalogs come from the same source and that you can place one order from several catalogs and pay just one shipping and handling fee, provided, of course, that you wish to purchase from the cooperating catalogs.

When I was reviewing catalogs earlier this month, I noticed in passing that the mailing addresses of two catalogs, Totally Tomatoes and Shumway’s, were in the same city. Then, when I compiled my “must order” seed list recently, I jotted down catalog abbreviations, page numbers, SKU numbers (product identifiers), and prices and realized the SKU numbers were the same in the two catalogs. For example, the SKU for Amish Paste tomato seeds in both catalogs is #00029.

When I finished my list, I went to the Totally Tomatoes website and entered my selections. Before final check out, however, I had an idea. Why not add a SKU number for the last packet on my list—rutabaga seed, which is listed in Shumway’s but not Totally Tomatoes, and see what happens? I did and bong! —the site wouldn’t accept it.

Still later, after I had checked out of the Totally Tomatoes site, I had another idea. I sent an email to Customer Service at Totally Tomato and said I’d noticed that the addresses are the same and would they please add a packet of Shumway rutabaga seed to my order.

After we had exchanged several emails, Customer Service said for business and accounting reasons they could not mix orders from the two companies but that there is a website, egardenersplace, where you can order from “all our catalogs.”

I hastened to the website and found eight catalogs listed. Four contain vegetable seeds: Totally Tomatoes, Shumway’s, Jung, and Vermont Bean. Four sell flower seeds, roots, and/or plants: McClure & Zimmerman, Roots & Rhizomes, Edmund’s Roses, and Seymour’s. I haven’t ordered from egardenersplace because I’ve already made my 2012 seed purchases, but I have checked the veggie-seed catalogs, and the SKU for Amish Paste tomato is the same in all.

The egardenersplace homepage shows the covers of the eight catalogs and says readers can order from all catalogs and just pay one shipping and handling fee, which appears to be $6.00 for orders under $60.00. At the site, you click on a catalog, search or leaf through, select packets, and then go to another catalog, if you wish, to make more selections. Check-out procedure is like that at most websites.

This Frugal Gardener likes the idea of buying from several catalogs and paying just one shipping and handling fee. Now I wonder whether I should recommend that Vermont Bean change its name to Wisconsin Bean.

And a final finding that made Frugal Gardener smile: Though packets for the same seed variety have the same SKU numbers, prices occasionally differ. In the two catalogs that I used to make my buy list, I found 5¢ and 10¢ differences in two packet prices. Frugal Gardener, though, doesn’t see such massive savings reason sufficient to buy from one catalog and not the other. If he did, though, perhaps he should start calling himself Pinchpenny Gardener.

If you’d like to take a look at the eight catalogs on the egardenersplace website, CLICK HERE.

Notes: (1) You can order all eight print catalogs through the egardenersplace website. (2) Mention of specific products, brands, or companies is not intended as an endorsement by the University of Maryland. (3) I do not receive consideration of any kind for mentioning products, brands, or companies in my postings. The seed catalogs I review are those from sellers from which I have previously bought seeds.

2012 USDA Plant Hardiness Zone Map

2012-01-26T12:09:00.010-05:00

Fresh from the press, this is the new 2012 USDA Plant Hardiness Zone Map !

Enter your Zip Code to find witch zone you are.

In Central Maryland, we are now a zone 7a

Seed Catalog: Pinetree Garden Seeds

2012-01-24T08:24:00.001-05:00

I order more seeds from Pinetree than from any other catalog, which is the bargain-hunter, practical me coming through. Where else can you still buy a packet of seeds for under a dollar? I qualify as a long-time customer, having received the catalog back when it was pretty much colorless, and then later getting onto their website, still barebones and IE-only when everyone else was mounting more up-to-date technology. Both the catalog and the website have improved since then, though content still wins out over appearance.

Pinetree caters to small-scale home gardeners, the idea being that most of us don't need a packet of 50 tomato seeds, 25 will do fine and then you're not paying for seeds you will never use. With the exception of some fancy hybrids and rare seeds, the prices are $2.00 or less per packet. Seed counts are provided, so compare. In most cases, you're paying the same or much less per seed than with other catalogs and comparable prices to buying off a seed rack; there are exceptions.

Tomato seeds as compared before: Celebrity, 15 seeds for $1.75; Brandywine, 25 for $1.35. Black-Seeded Simpson lettuce, 500 seeds for 95 cents!

Descriptions are homey and personal; they've tried all these seeds and it shows. You are seldom going to find the latest fashions in vegetables here, but you'll get a wide selection to choose from, including hybrids, open-pollinated and heirlooms. They also sell herbs, flowers, plants, bulbs, etc., along with a whole lot of books (some discounted steeply) and supplies for gardening, kitchen use and crafts.

Finding things in the catalog can be a little challenging, due to an odd organizational system in which vegetables are listed by type and then you also get a section of international vegetables by region and then a section of container vegetables. There's some cross-referencing, but it's still confusing - for example, to find Bull's Blood Beet I had to look under Dyeing Herbs. (I like to eat it, thank you.) Searching on the website solves this problem.

This is also not a catalog where you get the Latin names of plants provided (a personal preference not shared by everyone, I realize). But if you're looking to not spend a lot of money while still ending up with most of the seeds you wanted, Pinetree is an excellent first stop.

Notes: (1) You can order a print catalog through most of the catalog websites (or in some cases, download a PDF version). (2) Mention of specific products, brands, or companies is not intended as an endorsement by the University of Maryland. (3) I do not receive consideration of any kind for mentioning products, brands, or companies in my postings. The seed catalogs I review are those of sellers from which I have previously bought seeds.

Frugal Gardener: Free coffee-shop garden kits

2012-01-22T10:58:00.001-05:00

Free garden kit begins at your favorite coffee shop

Hey, Frugal Gardeners, when you next shell out a buck or two for a morning coffee at your favorite coffee shop, drink your coffee but save the cup, the top, the cardboard insulator, and the wooden stirrer to help start your Garden 2012.

The coffee, of course, will cost you something. But after you’ve enjoyed the hot java recycle make a coffee-shop garden kit out of your “trash.” Here’s how this Frugal Gardener recycles these throwaways, but you may be even more creative:

Cup: Punch two holes in the bottom with a Phillips screwdriver and use as a starter cup for vegetable, herb, or flower seeds. I prefer cardboard cups because they decompose over time—in a landfill after I’ve used them to start plants. I prefer standard 12-ounce cups to the Starbucks “tall” cup—which is taller by comparison but narrower too—because I think the slightly shorter but wider cups accommodate multiple plants better.

Recycle your "trash"

Top: I cut a pie-slice wedge out of a plastic top and use it as a divider to make two starter cells as I add sterile starting soil to a cup. When it’s time to transplant into the garden, the plastic wedges make it easy for me to gently pull the two plants apart with minimal root damage. Sometimes I make the wedges from plastic clamshell containers supermarket berries come in.

Stirrer: I mark an abbreviation on a stirrer and use it in a cup to indicate the seed variety in the cup. For example, CELE means Celebrity tomato and RS means Red Sails lettuce. I could use stirrers to mark the ends of rows in the garden if I didn’t use branches cut from our forsythia bushes.

Insulator: Most cardboard insulators have a row of perforations that make it easy to divide each insulator into two equal pieces. I wrap each piece around the stem of a tomato transplant, with half the insulator above ground, half below, to keep cutworms from chainsawing the young plants just above soil level.

Those four “gardening kit” parts come with your order at most coffee shops, but one shop has a policy of doing more. That shop is Starbucks, which requires its baristas to prepare bags of free coffee grounds for gardeners to use to amend their soil.

Look for the brown barrel
with the silver packages

The baristas at the Starbucks in our local Giant Foods store said bagging grounds is part of their job description—and they do it when their other work assignments permit. If there’s a line of customers, for example, grounds don’t get bagged. That Starbucks kiosk has a short, brown “barrel” near the pick-up counter where the baristas put the silver-colored bags labeled, “Grounds for Your Garden.” The heavy-gauge plastic bags of grounds each originally held five pounds of beans.

I’d had gardeners mention they’ve never been able to get a bag of Starbucks grounds. The baristas advised that a disappointed gardener should stop and ask about the best time to find bags available. They also said sometimes a gardener takes every available bag. Yes, sometimes I find the barrel empty.

One barista gave me a valuable tip: Take a bag that seems full but relatively light. The grounds in that bag probably are from the espresso machine and are “dry” compared to the “wet” ones from the regular brewing machines, so the bag contains more grounds, less moisture. And I’ve noticed that sometimes the bags are only a quarter full, which may indicate that perhaps some baristas aren’t exactly excited about bagging grounds.

Even though your local coffee shop doesn’t have a comprehensive recycling program like Starbuck’s, perhaps staffers there would save you a bucket of grounds. Nothing ventured, nothing gained, so smile and inquire about possibilities.

Over the last couple of months I’ve been saving parts of coffee shop “garden kits” for springtime use—and I’ve added a dozen bags or more of Starbucks “Grounds for Your Garden” to our garden soil—all for free—well, free if you don’t count the cost of the coffee you’ve enjoyed.

Please post a Comment telling how you recycle everyday throwaways by using them in your garden.

Seed Catalog: D. Landreth Seed Company

2012-01-20T09:18:00.001-05:00

Landreth's is one of the few seed catalogs out there you have to pay to receive ($5) but it's more like a historical document than a list of seeds. The company has been in business since 1784 in various Mid-Atlantic locations, and they've been publishing catalogs since 1847. Many of the covers, engravings, and bits of wisdom from those catalogs are reproduced in this 78-page volume. It's gorgeous, and fun to browse through.

Landreth's has a good, not enormous, selection of seeds: enough choice to find something satisfactory, not enough to feel daunting. Most are open-pollinated, with a few exceptions such as corn. The seeds are presented in simple lists (in, I must say, rather small print). Photographs of many varieties are sandwiched into the middle of the catalog, or you can find them on the website.

Several special collections of seeds have been put together that could be used for a themed garden, including an African-American heritage collection created by Michael Twitty.

This is a catalog I'll save when the 2012 gardening year is over, and perhaps I'll cut out a few of those full-color cover reproductions and frame them. What a great connection to history.

Prices are low to average, mostly between $2 and $4 a packet but bunching up on the lower side. Brandywine tomato seed is priced at $2.50; but of course you don't just get tomato seeds, you also get (from the 1848 Landreth Catalogue):

"This plant is a native of South America, and perhaps of the West Indies; thence introduced into this country. But a few years since, it was scarcely known as an esculent--now it is in very general use. There are six or seven varieties, between which there is not much real difference; the common red is equal to any. Cultivation same as directed for the Eggplant. It is, however, more free in growth, and will produce fruit tolerable early, when sown on the open border. On the approach of frost, pull up some of the plants (root and all) which are well laden with fruit, and hang them up in a dry, airy apartment. In this manner, it may be continued in perfection for some time longer than the natural season."

Notes: (1) You can order a print catalog through most of the catalog websites (or in some cases, download a PDF version). (2) Mention of specific products, brands, or companies is not intended as an endorsement by the University of Maryland. (3) I do not receive consideration of any kind for mentioning products, brands, or companies in my postings. The seed catalogs I review are those of sellers from which I have previously bought seeds.

Jung Seeds & Plants

2012-01-19T10:38:00.013-05:00

Many seed catalogs have arrived but I ordered from Jung's first, why is that? I attribute it to flawless marketing: offering what gardeners want, reasonable prices (comparable to most of the big seed houses; hybrids command a premium -- Rocky Hybrid Cukes are $4.95 for a packet of 10 seeds), good follow-through with delivery and a superbly designed catalog. I think it was also one of the first to 'sprout', maybe in December already, staking an early claim to the coming summer's garden dreams.

It took a while to ferret out the subtle design genius of the catalog. Almost all plant varieties are illustrated with well chosen color pictures and the text is always close by and never never requires turning a page. And while there is plenty of color, the designers managed to restrain the rainbow just this side of color fatigue. I personally find the old-timey catalogs that feature woodcuts of plants and produce a bit tedious after a few pages. Other catalogs are on such high gloss paper and have so much color that my eyes and brain literally need a break.

Nice clean type-face, font sizes that skillfully guide your eyes and, good layout of the varieties with clean boxes that signal when the corn ends and the cukes begin all contribute to an easy reading experience that lets you concentrate on the seductive text that is the mainstay of all seed catalogs.

Anyone with aspirations to creative writing only needs to spend a few hours with a seed catalog to master the basics. First, best, vigorous, highly productive, gourmet flavor and a few exclamation marks lead me down Jung's carefully designed catalog path as I eagerly imagine Touchstone Gold beets whose 'pale orange roots have brilliant gold flesh... and exquisitely sweet flavor that's second to none. The light green, golden-veined tops are so delicious you could grow these beets for their tops alone." Sigh. A multi-pupose vegetable... wonderful ...efficient.

As added reinforcement, almost like side dressing a crop in mid-season, Jung sprinkles in colorful decals that signal NEW!, Jung Top Pick, AAS Winner, or Customer Favorite.

Filderkraut - 'An old German favorite (but NEW! for Jung) with excellent taste well-suited for making 'kraut'. How can I resist this exaggerated tear-drop shaped cabbage that is 'Well-liked in Germany for its taste and unique appearance.'??

I placed my order January 10 and it arrived about a week later via snail mail in a neat and sturdy box complete with a cute little air bag to keep the contents firmly packed. Postage was reasonable and there were only 2 advertising inserts from garden-related businesses. Included were my free trial packets of Classic Fantastic Bachelor Buttons and Purple Plum Radishes. The NEW! Rocky Hybrid Cucumber must be very popular as it was marked in ink to be S.L. (shipped later). Only the promotional seed packets were embellished with color photos. Kudos to Jung for this cost-saving measure that also helps the environment.

Notes: (1) You can order a print catalog through most of the catalog websites (or in some cases, download a PDF version). (2) Mention of specific products, brands, or companies is not intended as an endorsement by the University of Maryland. (3) I do not receive consideration of any kind for mentioning products, brands, or companies in my postings. The seed catalogs I review are those of sellers from which I have previously bought seeds.

Carroll County's Kay Sedlak shares her green thumb!

2012-01-18T19:24:00.004-05:00

Master Gardener Kay Sedlak shares her wealth of expertise and and a lifetime of experience on "Extending the Gardening Season" during the continuing GIEI Classes being held at the Carroll County UM Extension. In addition to sharing her "green thumb" with the public, Kay leads the Heirloom Garden at Carroll County's Farm Museum.

Additionally, Sue Parks & Judi Johnson taught participants skills in growing herbs and Joan Epler led a discussion on growing small fruits. Lastly, Chef Henry Lysy prepared and shared a fantastic spinach & basil pesto.

This year’s courses are again a great success with 50+ attendees each week. The group has another learning event scheduled for this Saturday January 21, 2012. Course content includes starting seeds, container gardening and back yard composting. Congrats to a great team and wonderful audience.

Seed Catalog: Southern Exposure Seed Exchange

2012-01-18T12:08:00.000-05:00

We don't have a lot of seed companies in the Mid-Atlantic region. There's Meyer Seed in Baltimore, whom I've dealt with only peripherally, and Landreth in Pennsylvania (I'll write about them in another post). And then there's Southern Exposure Seed Exchange, in earthquake-central Mineral, VA.

What makes Southern Exposure different from all those other purveyors of organic-friendly, open-pollinated seed? For us Marylanders, it's location, location, location. They make a point of emphasizing seed that's tested and does well in the Mid-Atlantic. Varieties that can deal with our climate are marked with a sunny little symbol in the catalog. There's a low-key, friendly-neighbor feeling to the recycled-paper catalog illustrated with both photos and color drawings. The selection is ample enough to make you take time over decisions; the descriptions are good; and the prices are reasonable. ($2.50 for that Brandywine Sudduth's Strain tomato, with at least 40 seeds in the packet.) This is a good place to find lots of choices for lima beans, Southern peas, okra, collards and other specialties of the South, as well as plenty of tomatoes and... well, just about everything else too.

Look for the extra-winter-hardy greens developed by Brett Grohsgal of Even' Star Farm in St. Mary's County, MD.

Cooperatively-owned Southern Exposure sponsors the Monticello Heritage Harvest Festival each September - a great event!

Notes: (1) You can order a print catalog through most of the catalog websites (or in some cases, download a PDF version). (2) Mention of specific products, brands, or companies is not intended as an endorsement by the University of Maryland. (3) I do not receive consideration of any kind for mentioning products, brands, or companies in my postings. The seed catalogs I review are those of sellers from which I have previously bought seeds.

Seed exchanges coming up!

2012-01-18T07:35:00.000-05:00

Coming up soon: the Washington Gardener Seed Exchanges! The January 28 event at Brookside Gardens will feature our own Jon Traunfeld as well as the great Ira Wallace of Southern Exposure Seed Exchange (of which more in my next catalog post). February 4 at Green Spring Gardens brings you Barbara Melera of Landreth Seeds, and Linna the Locavore.

Seed exchanges are a great chance to try some new seeds without committing to buying a whole pack, and to share what you've gathered yourself from your garden or what you have left over and won't use. Plus a chance to learn something about seed saving and to spy on what everyone else is growing. What could be better?

If you know of any other seed exchanges going on in Maryland to which the public is invited, please mention them in the comments. Thanks!

January supermarket surprise

2012-01-17T21:00:00.000-05:00

Giant surprise!

Surprise! Just beyond the stacks of bags of potatoes and onions and next to tropical houseplants and the “balloon center”—a Burpee seed rack—at our local Giant Foods store on January 6.

I don’t know what magician controls the timing of wintertime appearance of retail seed racks at our local stores, but last year seed racks appeared the first week of February.

Not quite in numbed shock, I hustled right over to the Burpee display to take a look. Hmm—a panel of standard vegetable seeds—a panel of organic vegetable seeds. I needed look no farther.

One packet caught my eye: Marketmore 76 cucumber seeds, $1.79, 3 g. Just a few days earlier I had searched the Cornell University vegetable site in an effort to find a cuke variety that is resistant to various mildew diseases and other leaf diseases too and had zeroed in on Marketmore 76 as a likely candidate. I picked a packet off the rack and turned it over: “Resistant to scab, cucumber mosaic and mildews.”

Two years ago, powdery mildew wiped out my whole cuke bed. In 2011 I planted Diva, a mildew-resistant variety, but leaf-spot diseases wiped out that planting. Will the third time, with Marketmore 76, be the charm? I hope so, so I put the packet into my shopping cart.

As I walked toward the dairy section to pick up some provolone and a dozen eggs, I wondered whether Burpee or Giant has “inside information” that spring will come a month early this year. Punxsutawney Phil, shadow or not, you’re fired! Groundhogs get no respect here at Meadow Glenn, especially those that climb our hill and fence and chow down on springtime veggies.

Frugal purchases

Today (Jan. 17) I went to Home Depot in Columbia to pick up a 10-foot PVC pipe that I’ll cut into 3 1/2-foot lengths to make “underpasses” for hoses under our front and back sidewalks. Those projects have been on my to-do list for 10 years, and, hold your breath, I installed the front one—the easier one—in less than an hour before lunch.

While at Home Depot I glanced into the garden-supply room and—yes, you guessed it—two staffers were setting up seed racks. I temporarily abandoned my push-cart with the PVC pipe and took a look at the seed racks—Burpee, Ferry-Morse, and Martha. I suppressed the question of whether there’s horticultural significance that the two seed companies established by men go by their surnames while the one established by a woman goes by her given name.

Since I already had looked over the Burpee rack at Giant, I looked at the Burpee racks at Home Depot first. At Home Depot, there must have been three or four times the number of vegetable and flower varieties and packets. The packets looked the same, but there were differences.

The first difference I noticed was price. Most of the veggie packets at Giant were $1.79. At Home Depot, most were $1.00 or $1.49. The second difference was that Burpee racks at Home Depot had more varieties of each vegetable—about a half dozen varieties of cuke seeds—but not Marketmore 76. Don’t assume the Burpee seed rack at Store A contains the same varieties at the same price as the Burpee seed rack at Store B.

Not only veggies

I went to Home Depot this morning to buy PVC pipe, but I added seven packets of seeds. Herb and veggies: Lemon basil, $1.00, 200 mg.; Roma tomato, $1.00, 500 mg.; Detroit Dark Red, Medium Top beet, $1.00, 5.5 g.; Short ‘n Sweet carrot, $1.49, 2 g.; and Pic-N-Pic summer squash, $1.49, 2 g. Annual flowers: Red Velvet celosia, $1.49, 160 mg. and Exquisite zinnia, $1.49, 500 mg. This Frugal Gardener remembers that the price of most similar packets in the Burpee catalog is $3.95.

The seed racks I visited were good reminders that I’ve got to get out my seed catalogs, make selections, and order the rest of my 2012 vegetable seeds.

Seed Catalog: Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds

2012-01-17T13:25:00.000-05:00

In December, Bob gave us several posts about his favorite seed catalogs - and now I'm going to continue the series with some of mine. I'll cover five or so in the next week. Feel free to tell us about your favorites in the comments!

Okay, let's be upfront about this. I have described Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds' catalog elsewhere as "food gardening porn" and as long as UME doesn't censor me, I'm sticking to that description. This is the most luscious, seductive piece of seed advertising I have ever seen. Which is amusing, as the Gettles, who run the Missouri company, have a very clean-cut image. Don't get me wrong; there are no bikini-clad people of any sex showing off the fruits of garden labor - the fruits (or mostly vegetables, with herbs and flowers as well) show themselves off. But who else does double-page photo spreads of carefully-posed and lit... squash?

This catalog isn't just a pretty face, though. They have a huge selection of heirloom and other open-pollinated cultivars (no hybrids), with particular specialties in melons, squash and tomatoes. This is the catalog you bring along on a trip when the weather looks like it might ground your plane for hours. And then you want to buy everything because it all sounds so good (I am convinced they spray the catalog pages with something addictive). Prices are mostly between $2 and $3 a packet; to continue Bob's comparison, Brandywine tomato seeds (took me a minute to find them in the 30-page tomato section organized by color and half taken up with huge glossy photos) sell for $2.25 a pack, minimum 25 seeds.

The catalog suffers a bit from what I call Cute Caucasian Child Syndrome, but all the kid-photos are actually of the Gettles' daughter, who is indeed quite cute. As opposed to the vegetables, which are absolutely gorgeous.

Notes: (1) You can order a print catalog through most of the catalog websites (or in some cases, download a PDF version). (2) Mention of specific products, brands, or companies is not intended as an endorsement by the University of Maryland. (3) I do not receive consideration of any kind for mentioning products, brands, or companies in my postings. The seed catalogs I review are those of sellers from which I have previously bought seeds.

Beets, carrots, turnips: One last supper

2012-01-15T19:30:00.000-05:00

Last Harvest from Garden 2011

When I heard the temperature was going to drop into the low 20s just after New Year’s, I took a bucket to our vegetable garden and pulled the last of our late-season root crops: a half dozen or so Cylindra beets, three Short ‘n Sweet carrots, and a dozen Golden Globe turnips. On one of those April-like days last week, I washed the veggies and that evening we savored roasted vegetables—one last supper from Veggie Garden 2011.

As I washed and pared them, the two-thirds bucket of roots, to which we added some garlic, two large onions, and five potatoes, tossed with some olive oil and sprinkled with some crushed rosemary, slimmed down considerably to two cookie sheets of chopped veggies ready for a 425°F oven for about an hour.

Last Supper from Garden 2011

Ah, what a dish—so simple to put together that I can name and pronounce all the ingredients—so fragrant while the veggies are roasting—so mouth watering with earthy chunks of beets, sweet carrots, and tongue-assaulting turnips. What a soul-satisfying dish to set before a veggie gardener. Even the potatoes that had nestled with beets blushed a bit in delight.

This feast reminded me that many root vegetables store well in place in the garden until the temperature sinks into the teens and the soil freezes deep enough to freeze the veggies. It also reminded me that I should plant more rutabagas next summer and forget about the strong-flavored turnips that are prone to slug damage, though I did get three solid turnips out of two short rows.

The only edibles left in our garden now are the three Red Sails lettuce plants in my experimental mini-greenhouse, and they may be damaged tonight (Jan. 15) if the forecast of “temperatures in the teens” is accurate.

If you missed my posting about slugs damaging my turnips, CLICK HERE.

Kale Soup for National Soup Month

2012-01-11T11:16:00.009-05:00

January is National Soup Month. (Big Surprise – it’s also National Hot Tea month, something the Grow It Eat It crowd can plan for next summer when the mint and raspberry and strawberry leaves are available). “Soup, “ according to Christopher Robin (Winnie the Pooh) “is a comforting sort of thing to have.” Even better when you have the satisfaction of having grown at least some of what’s in it yourself.
As I said, this kale isn’t mine, but I’m fortunate to live down the road from uncertified but definitely organic Colchester CSA to which I’ve loaned my rototiller. As a result, Theresa Mycek, the manager/farmer will often give me some veggies, including several varieties of the beautiful kale she grows. Yet this stuff didn’t come from her either since she’s selling what she still has in the fields to one of the local restaurants, and I don’t take anything that could turn into revenue for the CSA.In this case, I didn’t grow the kale I’ve just chopped for today’s lunch, but I’m definitely going to eat it. I had Red Russian kale early in the season – though it was not much to sneeze at, sadly. I had started it in the greenhouse, planted the seedlings out in the garden in Feb. with high-ish hopes as an experimental thing beneath what turned out to be a very flimsy cold frame. A big wind collapsed the cold frame, so I covered the seedlings with row cover. It saved enough to make several soups with, and I got more from a later direct seeding.

SO, I got the kale at the supermarket, and am still glad to have it. Kale is one of those super-foods – a great spring tonic after heavy holiday meals, and a vitamin-packed leafy green that’s easy to cook in a variety of ways.

Sometimes I sauté it in olive oil with shallots and salt and pepper for lunch (I have a home office). Sometimes I make kale, bean and tomato soup using some of the dried beans I’ve grown along with the tomatoes I’ve grown and canned and feel inordinately, goeth-before-a-fall-type pride in. But on busy days, or when I just want something light, I chop kale with a little onion and cook it in a little frozen homemade stock, which is what I’m doing today. This time, it’s lamb stock, made from the leftover roasted leg of a freezer lamb I bought from a friend down the road.

Once you have good homemade stock in the freezer, soup is just about fifteen minutes away. Even if the stock starts out frozen. I freeze mine in quart or half-gallon plastic containers, which is easy to stack in the chest freezer. Take one out, run the unopened container under warm water to loosen the sides so it will slide out into a pot. Cover the pot and put it on low to thaw while you’re chopping up vegetables or opening canned beans or a jar of tomatoes or whatever. When it’s thawed --or even before – throw in the vegetables, simmer on medium heat until they’re done to your satisfaction and serve. Smells great, tastes great and is virtuous. What more do you want for National Soup Month?

There’s a recipe for Roasted Iranian (or any other winter squash for that matter) Soup at http://nancytaylorrobson.wordpress.com/ .

Winter solace in our raspberry bed

2012-01-10T20:41:00.001-05:00

Raspberry bed before cutting & weeding

Yes, I did mean “solace,” not “solstice.” Solstice was last month. Solace was two hours this afternoon.

Just after noon when I looked out our kitchen window, the sunny scene beckoned me to come outside and enjoy a beautiful winter afternoon. As I looked at the scene, I noted some green in our small raspberry patch—green as in winter weeds.

Why not go out and cut back the raspberry canes and weed that bed, I thought? The sun is brilliant, the temperature 42°F and slowly rising. The brick wall of the detached garage protects the bed from the light afternoon breeze from the northwest. I can sit with my loppers and short-handled weeder in the comfort—the solace—of the January sunshine. In an hour the job will be done.

The January sunshine was comforting, even relaxing, good for a gardener’s impatient wintertime soul that already thinks about spring plantings. I filled the wheelbarrow with cut canes. As I loosened and pulled winter weeds, the six or seven I had estimated turned into 16 or 17 and then 60 or 70, and then I lost count. I filled one five-gallon bucket with weeds and leaves, then a second bucket, and then a third.

The cool breeze stiffened, and the wind-chill factor dropped slowly as the sun moved lower in the western sky. A drop of sweat formed on the tip of my nose. Hmm, that wasn’t sweat. My nose was getting cold. I soon finished and wheeled the “harvest” downhill to a crude compost pile at the edge of our woods.

Raspberry bed after cutting & weeding

But the job was done. The canes were cut to the ground. The winter weeds were history—hopefully, but I know there must be hundreds, if not thousands, of dormant weed seeds just waiting to sprout during the next warm spell. The raspberry bed looked relatively neat, even ready for spring. I’ll add a thin layer of composed leaves/horse manure when I buy a load at the composting facility at our county landfill in February or March.

Have you ever thought you’d like to grow raspberries?

Our patch is seven years old now. I bought six plants by mail order. I suppose I had beginner’s luck when I chose Heritage, a red primocane-bearing variety. I really hadn’t “read up” on raspberries before I got started, but I had learned that there are two basic kinds of red raspberries—summer-bearing and primocane-bearing (sometimes called everbearing). Primocane-bearing varieties fruit in late summer until frost on canes that grew that year. Summer-bearing varieties fruit earlier in the summer on canes that grew the previous year.

The difference was attractive to this rooky raspberry grower. With primo-cane bearing plants I would have simply cut all the canes to the ground, and, presto, the plants would grow new canes and fruit the next year. If I had bought a summer-bearing variety, I would have to keep track of which canes grew which year and remove only the “old” canes and not the “new.” Now which cane is “old” and which is “new”? Actually, it’s not too hard to tell, but, as I said, I knew little about raspberries then.

August 5, 2011, picking from our small raspberry bed

The Heritage raspberries have done us well. We pick quarts each summer from their small, 10’x10’ bed. Early on we eat them out of hand as we pick then. Then we use them on summertime cereal and in fruit salads. Some go into freezer jam. We share some with friends. Ellen spreads the “extras” on cookie sheets, freezes them for a couple of hours, and bags them for wintertime use.

When fresh raspberries sometimes cost $10 to $12 a pound at the grocery store, we just smile and wonder when other gardeners are going to start planting raspberry patches. I certainly encourage you to grow this mouth-watering, easy-to-grow fruit.

But if you decide to start a raspberry patch, I highly recommend that you to learn as much as you can about growing raspberries before you begin. A great place to spend an hour getting an unaccredited B.S.R.G. (Bachelor of Science in Raspberry Growing) is the 40-page Chapter 8, “Brambles,” in The Mid-Atlantic Berry Guide for Commercial Growers. You can access the Guide online by CLICKING HERE.

You can cross-check the Guide’s list of recommended cultivars with the much shorter University of Maryland Extension’s “Bramble Cultivar Recommendations” by CLICKING HERE.

And I add one note that most publications haven’t yet added to their text: Raspberries are a favorite food of brown marmorated stink bugs. If you have concerns about using pesticides, you should do additional investigation into what researchers are recommending to control this destructive insect.

Incredible edible Todmorden and Baltimore

2012-01-10T10:32:00.001-05:00

A couple of links for your reading pleasure today!

I can't remember if we linked to this before, but a replay never hurts: here's Incredible Edible Todmorden, and an article in The Independent (UK) explaining what they're all about. A whole village dedicated to the idea that food should be for growing and sharing! (Thanks to Marney Bruce for sending this on.)

And, more locally, here's a post by culinary historian Michael Twitty on Denzel Mitchell of Five Seeds Farm in Baltimore. Cheers for urban farming!

While you're at it, check out these pictures of Michael's own garden.

Carroll County GIEI 2012 Program Begins

2012-01-07T19:24:00.004-05:00

Carroll County Master Gardener & chef extraordinaire Henry Lysy prepares a delicious treat of Potato Leek soup during the team's 2012 educational GIEI kickoff. This year's launch saw fifty-four (54) attendees learn to do soil analysis, soil amendment, soil assessment and integrated pest management. The team has a robust schedule including four additional three hour sessions to include composting, raised bed gardening, herbs, small fruits, extending the season, seed starting, container gardening, edible landscaping and pollinators. The program resumes with classes from 9AM till Noon on Jan.14th, Jan. 21st, Mar. 3rd and April 7th. Henry plans a special recipe each session. What a great kick-off Carroll GEIE team. For additional information please contact Steve Allgeier at hortman@umd.edu.

Jim's row cover protects kale into January

2012-01-06T16:21:00.001-05:00

Jim M. pulls back row cover that protects kale

After Irene M. of Columbia noticed a mention of row covers in my recent posting about my mini-greenhouse, she sent me an email note: “Jim has had a row cover on kale and it is going strong.”

Irene, a Howard County Master Gardener, wrote that note several days before temperatures dipped into the teens here in Central Maryland. Temperature was 13.3°F here at Meadow Glenn at dawn Wednesday, the day I had arranged for Ellen and me to visit Irene and Jim to check out his row cover –and to see her pesebre.

“I’ve never grown kale before, but in October I saw some plants at Frank’s Produce and Greenhouse,” Jim said. “I thought I’d buy them and see what happens. Most fell over after I planted them, but soon their leaves turned up and resumed growing. When the weather got colder, I thought I’d extend their growing season by giving them some protection with a row cover.”

Jim said the temperature Wednesday morning at their home was 17°F. He hadn’t yet checked to see how his kale had weathered the cold, but when he pulled back some of the row cover from its PVC support hoops, the kale appeared in perfect condition—ready to cut and take into the kitchen.

Jim's kale thrives under row cover even
when temperature drops into teens

“I use the row cover in the spring also,” Jim said, “to protect my early vegetables from late frosts.”

A row cover is a very light synthetic fabric, often described as “gauze-like,” that gardeners drape over plants. The ultra-thin fabric lets in sunlight, air, and water but, when properly installed, excludes insects and other pests. In cooler weather it can create a warmer micro-climate that helps protect plants from the cold. The fabric comes in various lengths and widths and can be used in a variety of ways. Jim’s row cover forms a protective tent over his raised bed of kale and onions.

Here are two sources where you can learn more about row covers. To view the first, a short (<4 min.) University of Maryland Extension Home & Garden Information Center video, “How to Use a Row Cover in Your Vegetable Garden, CLICK HERE. For the second, a print article with more than 20 explanatory photographs, “Stink Bug Barrier for Tomato & Pepper,” in a Maryland Home & Garden newsletter, CLICK HERE.

This posting is about row covers, but I did mention Irene’s pesebre. A pesebre is a traditional Nativity Scene with roots in Spain. Irene continues a family tradition started by her father 60 years ago. To see the 2010 setup of her pesebre, CLICK HERE.

Got a new tool for Christmas!

2012-01-06T09:08:00.008-05:00

Got a new tool for Christmas! It’s a multi-purpose garden knife from Jackson Tools, the professional tools division of Ames True Temper.

I will say, this tool is a hybrid version between a narrow hand shovel and the traditional hori hori ; the traditional Japanese flat blade knife used to work the garden soil.

If you need to tamp down, pry, dig, shovel, plant, open, cut, design, measure, mark, weed, etc. with minimal soil disturbance and/or in small area like a container, this is the tool you need.

Your favorite blue hardware store sells a lighter version for few dollars less, under the Ames brand, but you will not have the reinforced handle and the well-designed sleeve.

2012 will be a bad year for the weeds ;)

Frugal Gardener: Greenhouseperhaps becomes mini-greenhouse

2012-01-02T21:49:00.001-05:00

Frosted greenhouseperhaps after
December 29 flurries

We’ve had temperatures as low as 22°F and snow flurries in late October and December. So how’s my $13.67 greenhouseperhaps doing?

My inexpensive—ok, cheap—greenhouseperhaps is a plastic storage container from which I cut the bottom. I then installed the box in our garden as an experimental greenhouse. As I wrote in a September blog, “Why not ‘build’ a very small greenhouse to see how long I can get lettuce to grow in our garden as winter approaches. I’ll call it my greenhouseperhaps until I see if it really works.”

My experiment in frugality has lasted longer than I imagined because of our extra-warm fall and early winter. Yes, we’ve had a few flurries and quite a few nights with sub-freezing temperatures. The warm weather caused my September lettuce plantings to grow rapidly. I harvested that planting and then moved the greenhouseperhaps to a more protected location and planted a second crop of three Red Sails lettuce plants that I had started in yoghurt cups inside our house.

So how are the three lettuce plants doing? Fine, thank you.

Unprotected Simpsons Curled lettuce
after December 29 flurries

When I unlatched the two click handles today and lifted the top off the box, a sheet of thin ice slipped off the top and shattered on the garden soil. Inside the box, the three Red Sails lettuce plants are growing slowly and showing no signs of freeze damage. Outside the box just 40 feet away two Simpsons Curled lettuce plants stand as slushy evidence of what sub-freezing temperatures can do to lettuce.

Why has my greenhouseperhaps worked so far? I think there are several reasons.

First, Red Sails lettuce seems slightly more cold-hardy than other lettuces, such as the Simpsons Curled.

Second, I’ve positioned the box about three feet from the south side of a brick wall, where it will benefit from winter sun and have some protection from cold north winds.

Third, the plastic container creates a slightly warmer microclimate for the three plants. The soil there is dark brown because I’ve added plenty of compost over the years, so the dark soil absorbs warmth from the sun’s radiation. The lidded box itself helps keep heat in and cold out and helps protect the plants from chilling winter breezes. Even though a sheet of ice slid off the top of the lid this morning, the inside of the lid and the walls of the box were covered with drops of condensation.

How long will the greenhouseperhaps keep the Red Sails lettuce from freezing?

Red Sails lettuce January 2
inside greenhouseperhaps

I’m a realist. I have no illusion that the lettuce will grow until spring. At some point, an Arctic blast will burn the leaf edges and then turn the Red Sails into green mush. That could be tomorrow night, when the local forecast calls for a low of 19°F. I’ll keep you informed.

At this point I’m surrendering on one point, my use of “greenhouseperhaps” as the name for my winter lettuce box. It works. From now on it’s my “mini-greenhouse.”

What has my experiment taught me?

Creating a microclimate that lets cool-weather plants grow longer through the fall and into early winter doesn’t have to be expensive or complex. A $13.64 plastic box in a semi-protected location works quite nicely, thank you. The box works on the same temperature-moderating principle as do cold frames and row covers.

I think I’ll try my mini-greenhouse again as spring approaches—perhaps as soon as there are hints in February that spring is getting ready to, well, spring. I’ll start two or three lettuce plants—perhaps Red Sail or an even shorter variety—inside our warm house and transplant them when they’re about two weeks young.

I’ve enjoyed this simple experiment. Jeanine S. of Harford County (Maryland) read my original blog and experimented too—with an even simpler mini-greenhouse. She didn’t cut out the bottom. She just turned a lidless plastic container upside down and positioned it over young lettuce plants. In her Christmas Eve greetings, she wrote: “I will be picking lettuce from under my plastic storage tub for tonight’s dinner with the boys and their families. No, there will not be enough for a whole salad, but enough to add a touch of special flavor and color. That was such a great idea!”

Perhaps the mini-greenhouse idea is somewhat less than “great,” but it works.

Shouldn’t you try it next spring or fall?

If you want to read details of how I created the mini-greenhouse, CLICK HERE.

Another benefit of using compost

2012-01-02T11:56:00.000-05:00

Here's a reason not to cart those vegetable peelings to the curb:

Woman Discovers Lost Wedding Ring Growing on Carrot

A woman in Sweden found her wedding ring, sixteen years after losing it in the kitchen, growing on a carrot in her garden. She thinks the ring accidentally went out to the compost pile all those years ago, and made its way into the soil.

(I lost a small diamond out of my engagement ring in the garden a number of years back, and unfortunately it has never turned up in my harvest; I don't wear the ring while gardening any longer. Spoons quite often seem to turn up in my compost pile; jewelry, never. Oh well.)

Prepping in Winter

2011-12-27T17:38:00.005-05:00

I view people who manage to put their gardens beautifully to bed for the winter with envy – and a little suspicion. I simply can’t believe anyone has that kind of time and energy in the fall. They must be slacking off in other areas -- the canning gets short shrift, they forget to bake for the school fundraiser, the closets are crammed with the moldering remnants of past lives or their desks are buried beneath an avalanche of paperwork.

At least I hope so; I not only fail to get fall cleanup done ‘on time,’ i.e. before the weeds scatter seed and the pests I’ve been dealing with have dug in for next year, I’m guilty of all those other things, too. I’d like to be Martha Stewart, but I’d need her staff and regular doses of Prozac to get there.

I do have a few legitimate excuses for not doing the end-of-season clear up. One is exhaustion coupled with the unforgiving deadlines of canning added to the other deadlines in life. Another is the habitat and fodder that the desiccated stalks and seed heads that wave over my untended garden offer wildlife. About 14 different bird species flit through it right now. But a big reason I wait is the pleasure I get from working outside on a beautiful winter day without the sense of urgency that the seasons often impose.

Boxing Day (December 26th) was mild and sunny. I’d been eying the overgrown raspberry patch for a while. The patch, comprised of several varieties each of black and red raspberries, is planted in a large U with a path down the middle. The black raspberries (Rubus occidentalis) originally occupied about eight feet on one side, but insist on reaching long, lethal-thorned tendrils to root in other sections. The red raspberries, comprised of both June-bearing varieties and so-called fall-bearing varieties, are less ambitious, so I have to keep after the blacks.

The blacks and some reds are June-bearers (floricanes, which produce fruit on one-year wood). They bear fruit early in summer, while the fall-bearing varieties (primocanes, which fruit on both one-year-old wood and on new green canes) will, if left to their own devices, produce twice a summer -- once around mid-June and a second time from late August to frost. Often the fall fruiting is more abundant than the early summer crop, which is why most people simply cut down the whole patch at the end of the season, allowing only new wood to spout up and produce the single end-of-summer fruiting. I don’t. The weather is squirrelly, (and I'm greedy) so I figure whenever those babies want to offer up fruit, I’ll gladly take it or offer it to friends.

Plus, the past two or three summers, the weather here has screwed the pooch for the fall crop. Mid-summer drought, despite drip irrigation, slowed cane growth and blossom production. Torrents in September encouraged fungus, which considerably diminished yield, so for the past couple of years, the early crop has been the more productive. Whatever, it works.

In addition to using them fresh, I make raspberry shrub, jam, raspberry cordial, raspberry vinegar, and freeze fresh berries like mad for winter pies and cakes and trifles. But by the time November rolls around, I’ve about had it with raspberries. The patch is overgrown and I have no ambition left to deal with it. Until now.

Monday in the late afternoon, I went out with the nippers in hand and cart in tow. Thick with timothy, the blowsy seed heads of spent wild aster, blackened mare’s tail, and the pathetic remains of the moonflower vine that grows up one northwest support, and a percentage of finished two-year-old canes, it looked doable in the allotted time frame between gorgeously slanting sun and twilight.

I yanked out the most egregious offenders including lots of rooted, lethal-thorned black raspberry whips and clipped the remaining canes to hip height. I left the invasive white mulberry saplings, which will need digging, for another day. The pace was delightfully contemplative. Twilight descended, and I trundled back in, delighted with having gardened.

Night of the radishes

2011-12-23T07:19:00.000-05:00

Wikimedia Commons

Tonight in Oaxaca, Mexico is the celebration of Noche de Rábanos, the Night of the Radishes, in which the public square hosts an exhibition of figures carved from enormous radishes. The radishes (I don't know the variety; does anyone?) are kept in the ground growing larger until just before the festival, when artists dig them up and create religious tableaux and village scenes, historical events and mythical tales. (Tip of the hat to the Writer's Almanac for informing me of this charming custom.)

Season's greetings, everyone, and may your radishes be artistically-shaped!

Gardeners, rejoice!

2011-12-22T10:12:00.000-05:00

Today, Thursday, December 22, has the shortest day and longest night of the year. Yesterday, today, and tomorrow all have nine hours and 26 minutes of daylight, but today is one second shorter than yesterday, and tomorrow will be three seconds longer than today. Soon daylight will be noticeably longer—and winter temperatures will bottom out and spring will be just a few weeks away.

Take a look around your landscape. Are daffodil leaves starting to poke through your mulch? Are buds on your maple and redbud trees beginning to swell? Does that red flag on your mailbox mean you’re mailing your order for tomato, pepper, and chard seeds for next year's garden?

Gardeners are born optimists. When days are short, temperatures plunge, and ice coats and snow needs to be shoveled, gardeners smile and plan March plantings of “cool weather veggies” and salivate at the mere thought of next August’s ripe Brandywine tomato.

Yes, spring is coming to your garden—soon!

To expand your weather knowledge, CLICK HERE to read the excellent explanation of the winter solstice by Justin Grieser of the Washington Post’s Capital Weather Gang. He answers questions you and I haven’t even thought to ask.

Seed Catalog: R. H. Shumway’s Illustrated Garden Guide

2011-12-21T18:52:00.000-05:00

Step right back, ladies and gentlemen, into the nineteenth century. Turn the oversize pages of Shumway’s Illustrated Garden Guide slowly or you may miss the rattlesnakes you want to add to your 2012 garden. This is the company’s 142nd year of seed selling.

Unlike most seed catalogs, Shumway’s is illustrated with line drawings in the style of a hundred years ago. Sixteen of the catalog’s 64 pages are in color, but the rest are in stunning black and white. Most of the color pages offer flowers and herbs, and all of the black-and-white pages offer fruits and vegetables.

If your dad—like mine—spoke of planting by the moon, don’t miss the great offer on the 2012 paperback edition of Moon Sign Book, “a popular astrological guide since … 1905 … complete tables and instructions on planting and harvesting … accurate and reliable.” It’s the same moon, I suppose, but it now has some human footprints.

If you order the moon book, why not add the Tomato Holder? I love the description: “There are two sure ways to avoid cutting yourself when slicing tomatoes. 1. Have someone else hold the tomato. 2. Use this tomato holder. Gives you a firm, safe grip, and knife slots measure perfect slices every time. Great invention! Aluminum.” If you tend to amputate fingers while slicing tomatoes, hey, cut your losses and order a Tomato Holder.

The corn pages contain varieties I’ve seen in no other catalog—Bonus Hybrid ‘Baby Corn’ that produces those miniature ears you find in salads and exotic foods and Goliath Silo or Ensilage Seed Corn, which grows to 15 feet and yields up to 50 tons per acre. Your cows will be delighted if you cut, chop, and ferment it in your silo for their winter feedings.

And for violence-prone gardeners who are sick and tired of burrowing mammals, there’s the four-pack Revenge Rodent Smoke Bomb to toss into those burrows … “safe [for the quarterback, not the receiver] and easy-to-use … absolutely guaranteed.” Many years ago I tossed something like that into a groundhog burrow under one of the huge tulip poplars at the edge of our woods. Apparently there was an interception because the next morning I found the bomb about three feet outside the burrow entrance. Groundhog 1, Bob 0.

I haven’t ordered from Shumway’s recently, but I’m going to order a moon book, maybe some rutabaga seeds (I seldom see them on seed racks locally), and maybe a rattlesnake or two. The reptiles, of course, would be Georgia Rattlesnake Watermelon and Rattlesnake Climbing Bean. Second, thought, our little plots on our hillside don’t have room for such wide-ranging veggie critters.

Prices are reasonable: Celebrity Hybrid (30 seeds), $2.75; Juliet Hybrid, not available; Better Boy Hybrid (30), $2.45; Brandywine Pink (30), $2.10; postage/handling, $6.00 on orders up to $30.

To take a look at Shumway’s catalog, CLICK HERE. Unfortunately, veggie illustrations online are mostly color photographs, which makes the Internet edition colorless, as far as I’m concerned. If you want to see the “real” Shumway’s catalog, go online and order a print copy.

Additional Recommendations from Readers

Anne posted a Comment after my last catalog review posting: “My favorite home garden seed catalog is Pinetree Garden Seeds. They sell nearly everything you might want to try, the quantities are small and prices are very reasonable. So instead of agonizing over which variety to get, I can go ahead and get several kinds, often for less than a dollar a packet and just enough seeds for a season or two.” To take a look at Pinetree Garden Seeds online, CHECK HERE.

Kent recommended Meyer Seed Co. of Baltimore: “You can find Meyer Seed on the web and order a catalog. They carry most of the varieties recommended by the University of Maryland. Their prices are pretty good compared to a lot of the mail order companies.” To check out Meyer Seed Co., CLICK HERE.

Notes: (1) You can order a print catalog through most of the catalog websites. (2) Mention of specific products, brands, or companies is not intended as an endorsement by the University of Maryland. (3) I do not receive consideration of any kind for mentioning products, brands, or companies in my postings. The seed catalogs I review are those from sellers from which I have previously bought seeds.

Seed Catalog: Seed Savers Exchange

2011-12-20T18:30:00.001-05:00

“Most beautiful” is the phrase that pops into my mind when I think about the Seed Savers Exchange catalog.

Seed Savers Exchange is a non-profit organization with a mission—to save our diverse but endangered garden heritage by building a network of people committed to collecting, conserving, and sharing heirloom seeds and plants and educating people about the value of genetic and cultural diversity. Sales of seed packets help fund that mission.

The Exchange sells the kind of open-pollinated or heirloom vegetable and flower varieties that our grandparents and great-grandparents planted and saved because the open-pollinated varieties grew with the same characteristics from year to year.

Access to the Exchange’s catalog, both print and online editions, is free. You can also become a member (I am one) and receive an inch-thick Yearbook of thousands of open-pollinated seed varieties grown, saved, and made available by gardeners across North America.

Every year the catalog features several new varieties. Two this year are White Vienna Kohlrabi, a pre-1860 variety, and Georgia Southern Collard, which dates to about 1880. Ok, maybe they are the kinds of vegetables your great-great-great grandparents grew.

The vegetable section takes up nearly 70 of the catalog’s 100 pages and is followed by sections of heirloom herbs and flowers. Most veggie offerings take up two or three pages, but tomatoes have eight pages, from Amish Paste to Crnkovic Yugoslavian, from Green Sausage to Hillbilly Potato Leaf, and from Jaune Flamme to Speckled Roman and Wapsipinicon Peach.

I think you should get an honorary B.H.G.H. (Bachelor of Horticulture in Garden History) if you read the seed descriptions. For example, the annotation for Red Fig tomato states, “Philadelphia heirloom documented to 1805. Heavy yields of 1½” pear-shaped fruits that are great for fresh eating. Used as a substitute for figs years ago by gardeners who would pack away crates of dried tomatoes for winter use.” Maybe that information will help you in a game of Trivial Pursuit some winter evening.

Since the Exchange doesn’t sell hybrid seeds, I cannot compare most of the prices I’ve listed in other catalog reviews. The only one of the tomatoes available is Brandywine (Sudduth’s Strain) (50 seeds), $2.75. Postage/handling is $3.00 on purchases less than $10.

If you wish to check out the online catalog, CLICK HERE.

Additional Recommendations from Readers

Two readers have sent personal catalog recommendations after reading my earlier catalog postings.

“TankMan” recommended that readers interested in hot peppers should check out Pepper Joe’s website, which sells seeds for, among scores of other fiery varieties, the Ghost Pepper, also known as Bhut Jolokia or Naga, and at 970,000 Scoville Units (11 on Pepper Joe’s 10-point scale) is billed as the “hottest pepper in the word.” To check out Pepper Joe’s, CLICK HERE.

Another reader recommended that anyone seriously interested in beans should check out the 11-page bean section of the Vermont Bean Seed Company catalog, which contains more than 40 additional pages covering other vegetables, herbs, fruits, and flowers. To check out Vermont Bean, CLICK HERE.

Notes: (1) You can order a print catalog through most of the catalog websites. (2) Mention of specific products, brands, or companies is not intended as an endorsement by the University of Maryland. (3) I do not receive consideration of any kind for mentioning products, brands, or companies in my postings. The seed catalogs I review are those of sellers from which I have previously bought seeds.

Seed Catalog: Johnny’s Selected Seeds

2011-12-19T14:44:00.000-05:00

Johnny’s catalog is designed for two different types of food growers—backyard and commercial or market. Because of that, this catalog contains varieties and comments that you won’t find in most other catalogs. For example, in the “Greenhouse” subsection of eight pages of tomato seeds, you’ll see “Rebelski aka DRW 7749 (F1) … The Best greenhouse tomato for fresh market.”

Johnny’s 206-page catalog—which is perfect bound like a small book—contains a wealth of information that serious gardeners can mine to improve their wisdom and skills. Before each vegetable category appears a column labeled “Growing Information.” The one about tomatoes has 16 entries: determinate and indeterminate (definitions); growing seedlings; transplanting outdoors; fertilizer; diseases; blossom end rot; insect pests; harvest; storage; days to maturity; seeds to plants ratio; average planting rate, seed specs; packet (number of seeds); and germination chart showing optimum temperature range.

Scattered through the catalog are other charts—some of primary interest to market growers but containing all sorts of information that can give a backyard gardener perspective—and appreciation of the knowledge required to successfully produce vegetables sold at farmers’ markets or grocery stores. One page gives “Seasonal Salad Ideas for Your Markets.” Another page contains “Glossary of Terms,” “Life Cycle Codes,” “Vegetable Disease Codes,” and “Hardiness Zone Chart.”

The catalog also has large sections of herbs (20 pages) and flowers (36 pages). Johnny’s encourages commercial growers to diversify to meet the changing interests of buyers—and you’ll likely see the result when you check out offerings during your next visit to your local farmers’ market.

I’m utterly fascinated—as you can tell—by all the information in this catalog but even more so by its “Tools and Supplies” section. Many of the offerings are designed for commercial growers, such as a precision seeder that holds 7.3 quarts of pea, corn, or bean seeds. If you’re hankering for a broadfork, Johnny’s has three sizes for tilling and one for harvesting. I had never heard of broadforks until I saw them here.

Finally, I want to yell, “Bingo!” because one page lists four long-handled, high-quality weeding hoes: a 4-inch wire weeder, a 3¾-inch collinear hoe, a 5-inch trapezoid hoe with replaceable blade, and a 3¼-inch stirrup hoe. Hoe, hoe, hoe, hoe—maybe you should give a hint to someone you know who is dying to give you a super-special gift.

I’ve bought seeds from this company. Prices are reasonable: Celebrity Hybrid (40 seeds), $3.45; Juliet Hybrid (15), $3.45; Better Boy Hybrid, not available; Brandywine (40), $3.45; postage/handling, $7.25 on orders from $10.01 to $30. I also like the idea that it’s an employee-owned company.

If you wish to check out the online catalog, CLICK HERE.

And while you’re spying out Johnny’s website, check out the Video section. Want to see how to use a collinear hoe? Watch the video. Want to know how to use a row cover? Watch the video. The video list is long, but, hey, it’s winter and evenings are long.

Notes: (1) You can order a print catalog through most of the catalog websites. (2) Mention of specific products, brands, or companies is not intended as an endorsement by the University of Maryland. (3) I do not receive consideration of any kind for mentioning products, brands, or companies in my postings. The seed catalogs I review are those that have arrived in our mailbox unsolicited.

Seed Catalog: Totally Tomatoes

2011-12-18T09:35:00.001-05:00

When is “totally tomatoes” not “totally tomatoes”?

When Totally Tomatoes is a seed catalog. The company’s 60-page 2012 catalog has more than 30 pages of tomato seeds followed by nearly 15 pages of pepper seeds and more on other vegetables.

The hundreds of varieties of tomato seeds are divided into categories, such as giants, large hybrids, medium to large, rainbow, mountain (especially for the Southeast and mountain areas), open-pollinated and heirloom, and cherry. If I see a trend, it’s the addition of new, “short” varieties for container gardeners.

If you’re a new gardener, you should check out your tomato-growing knowledge at the catalog’s two-page how-to-do-it guide, “These Simple Steps Yield Totally Terrific Tomatoes,” which covers seeding, growing plants, hardening off, site preparation, transplanting, culture, disease and pests, container gardening, and preserving.

I have ordered seeds from this company for several years. Prices are reasonable (I plan to compare prices as I review catalogs): Celebrity Hybrid (30 seeds), $2.75; Juliet Hybrid (20), $2.45; Better Boy Hybrid (30), $2.45; Brandywine Pink (30), $2.10; postage/handling, $4.95 on orders less than $25.

If you wish to check out the online catalog, CLICK HERE.

Notes: (1) You can order a print catalog through most of the catalog websites. (2) Mention of specific products, brands, or companies is not intended as an endorsement by the University of Maryland. (3) I do not receive consideration of any kind for mentioning products, brands, or companies in my postings. The seed catalogs I review are those that have arrived in our mailbox unsolicited.

How to comment on our blog

2011-12-12T08:03:00.001-05:00

It's come to our attention that some readers want to communicate with us, but find the process of leaving a comment a little confusing. If this is true of you, don't worry: you're not alone. Below is a quick summary of ways to stay in touch, but let me say two things up front:

You do not have to be a member of Blogger, Google, or anything else to leave a comment.
We love to hear from you! It feels good to know we're talking to someone.

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Tomato Patch: Tomato plants for holiday decorating

2011-12-09T09:38:00.001-05:00

Ready for the mantle?

Veggie growers will have to admit the University of New Hampshire has come up with a brilliant idea: Tomato plants as holiday decorations and gifts.

This tomato grower is smiling from ear to ear, and beyond, after reading today’s Associated Press story about the university’s experiment with dwarf tomato plants—deep green leaves and bright red fruit—for Christmas decorating and gift giving.

The idea has gotten rave reviews from people who’ve checked out the plants.

What fun! Just walk over to the holiday plant on the mantle, pluck a juicy fruit, and munch away. Can’t do that with the decorations on a Christmas tree!

Why not this?

What next—pots of rhubarb chard?

Hoe, hoe, hoe.

Smile.

To read more—including the names of tomato varieties used in the experiment—CLICK HERE.

Cutting lettuce in December

2011-12-08T14:01:00.001-05:00

Simpsons Curled (left) and Red Sails lettuce
cut December 2

We’ve had many hard frosts during the last few weeks. One morning the temperature was 27°F at dawn. Many mornings our lawn is frosty white. What am I harvesting from the outdoor freezer?

“Bob, we’re out of lettuce. Do you still have some in the garden?” Ellen recently asked.

I went to the garden and brought in the last of the lettuce I had planted in September in the experimental greenhouse or lettuce box—the one I called a “greenhouseperhaps” in an earlier posting—a bright-green Simpsons Curled plant and a Red Sails. After I washed both lettuces, I stored them in a large plastic bag in our refrigerator between sandwiches and salads.

We’ve had such a warm fall that in early November I removed the box from around the lettuce and moved it to another location to protect three just-sprouted Red Sails plants, which continue to grow slowly. This is a first-time experiment to see how long lettuce can continue growing as late-fall temperatures work their way down the thermometer. Will some super-cold night soon kill the young plants? Or will I pick lettuce at Christmas or New Year’s—or beyond?

Red Sails seedlings in "greenhouseperhaps"
in early December

What have I learned so far from this experiment?

First, with a little thought and care, I can pick lettuce—often called a “cool weather” vegetable—during most of the year if I plant small, successive crops every two to four weeks. If I plant seeds in mid-March, I can begin picking small leaves as I thin the plants in April. From May through November I can pick beautiful, mature plants. Photo 1 shows the two beauties I picked even later, on December 2.

Second, my small greenhouse experiment quickly taught me that “short” lettuce will grow best in the box’s limited height. Simpsons Curled and Red Sails top out at a foot or more, taller than the box. When their leaves touch the top (lid) of the box, where moisture collects and freezes on frosty nights, ice crystals sometimes encase and damage the tallest lettuce leaves. This winter I must buy a packet of seeds of some “short” head or leaf lettuce that will grow in the box without pressing against the icy top.

Third, the “greenhouseperhaps” is small, so the number of plants that can grow without overcrowding is limited. For my first crop I transplanted 10 times too many plants and seeds in the box—a row of Simpsons Curled plants and a row of Red Sails seeds. Within a few weeks the Simpsons Curled covered the Red Sails sprouts, which struggled in the deep shade. My second attempt (Photo 2) has just three Red Sails seedlings, which I started in our sunroom in yoghurt cups and then transplanted.

Will I pick lettuce at year end—or even in January? I’ll let you know what happens as increasingly cold weather impacts on the three Red Sails lettuce plants growing in the mini-greenhouse.

The roots of the garden

2011-12-07T13:20:00.000-05:00

This is the first of my planned posts on successful crops I'm going to revisit in the demo garden next year. I thought I'd start with what seems fundamental: root crops.

They're successful because, for the most part, they are easy; although, as Bob's last post showed, they can have pests, both below ground and above. However, given good soil, plenty of water and some attention, they usually thrive.

We will certainly be growing potatoes and sweet potatoes, but I won't discuss those here. Nor will I mention root crops I've struggled with, like parsnips. Which of this category of plants will I definitely be growing? Beets, carrots, turnips, onions, radishes, and (the odd one out) celeriac.

Beets are one of my favorite vegetables... okay, I know, some of you don't like beets. I suspect that this is mostly because of what happens to them when they're canned, so please do try them fresh; you're allowed to still not like them afterwards! I will eat your share. They're tasty and easy to grow: you need a nice loose soil with good fertility, and you need to water them, but they have few pest problems (except rabbits and the like) so usually the greens end up looking good enough to eat - and please do! The varieties I have most fun with are Bull's Blood (for the spectacular deep red leaves as well as the roots), Chioggia (for the bull's eye red-and-white striped interior), and golden (Burpee's Golden and others) as shown above. These have a nice mild flavor and the advantage of not staining everything in their vicinity pink.

Carrots are a bit more of a challenge to grow, but I've had great success at the demo garden with them, probably because of our great soil. Carrots need deep, loose soil - not the clay we generally have around here before adding amendments - but at the same time you don't want to overdo the fertility, because too much nitrogen causes the roots to grow lots of hairs, or even to do this -->

I had great luck with Cosmic Purple carrots this year - I forgot to harvest them from a spring sowing until mid-July, and they were still tender and delicious, plus they look beautiful with purple skin over an orange and yellow core - so I will probably do those again, and maybe some other colors too. I may also try a row of little round Paris Market-type carrots in a salad table. The round kinds are good for gardeners who have not yet achieved the perfect soil. Try amending with coarse sand as well as peat moss or coir and not too much compost to fix your soil for longer carrot-shaped carrots.

One curious incident in the world of carrots happened to me this year: a flower. Carrots are biennials; they'd prefer to grow leaves and tasty roots in their first year from sowing, and flowers and seeds in the second year. We usually interrupt this cycle by harvesting the plant to eat, but if you are planning to save seed from carrots, you need to let them winter over and bolt up into flower the next spring. This carrot decided, in July, that it had already had a winter's rest, and needed to make seeds right away. I'm sorry to say I didn't let it get that far (I needed to plant something else there) but I did leave the flower for a while to bemuse gardeners and provide tiny insects with a drink of nectar.

Carrots can also be planted in the late summer/early fall for fall or winter harvesting. Mm.

Turnips have a few root pests and also get hit in the leaves by harlequin bugs, cabbage loopers, and other Brassicaceae pests, so whether planting in spring or fall I usually start them under row cover and keep them there until they get too tall. Turnip greens are great for adding bitterness to a saute of mixed greens, but it's tough to keep them looking good while growing organically. I have only grown Purple-Top White Globe, which is a reliable standard, but I'd like to branch out into some of the little white or red-skinned types.

There's a whole world of onions out there to try. I plan to grow a lot of them throughout the garden next year, mostly started from sets (because they are easy) but I'll also do some smaller ones from seed (Cipollini onions, cute little flattened disks, can be started right in the ground in spring for summer harvest). Onions can have pests, but I have never had a serious problem with them (aside from the occasional rotted one) and I know the rich soil in the demo garden treats them well.

Let's grow radishes in every color - yellow and black as well as the more common pink, red, purple and white. Fast and easy and a great addition to salads or (especially the longer Daikon radishes) to stir-fries. The leaves can go into that sauteed mixed greens dish - spicy! Brassicaceae pests do damage the leaves, but harvest comes so quickly it usually doesn't matter much.

Celeriac is pretty much the opposite - it needs a place in the garden to mature over a long season, but I'll give it one because it's such a rewarding plant and the leaves are just as edible as the roots.

And that concludes my tour of root vegetables you'll (most likely) see in our demo garden next year! Don't forget that you can learn more about growing most of these crops (we seem to have left out celeriac, so far) at the Vegetable Profiles link on the Grow It Eat It website.

Root crops are magical and fun and good additions to your menu as well as your garden! Try some!

Sherlock Gardener: Case of the hollow turnips

2011-12-03T19:49:00.001-05:00

My discovery: Hollow turnip

How disappointing! The leaves of my fall crop of Golden Globe turnips (Burpee Organic) were nearly picture perfect, but when I pulled some before Thanksgiving, they had underdeveloped roots. When I cut off the stems and the tips of their taproots, I made an unusual discovery: The turnips were hollow.

What gives? Bad lot of seeds? Wacky growth because of our extra foot of rain this year? Insect damage?

I searched the Internet for information about “hollow turnips” and didn’t find much. Several sites talked about a variety of pests that attack turnip leaves or roots from the outside—but I found no descriptions or photographs of huge cavities caused by disease or pests. Several sites mentioned that turnips and rutabagas sometimes have hollows because of a boron deficiency of the soil, a problem often linked to repeated turnip crops in the same area, but that wasn’t the case here.

My second investigation

It was time for some expert consultation. I fired off email queries to Burpee and to the Maryland University Extension Home & Garden Information Center.

HGIC replied first: The hollowed turnips might be caused by a boron deficiency, and I might want to water down next year’s turnip patch with a weak boron solution, but there are other possible environmental factors….

Burpee also replied quickly. Yes, boron deficiency is a possibility, but….

On Tuesday a downpour short-circuited my landscaping project, and I decided to pull more turnips and to look more closely at the problem. I pulled four. Three were underdeveloped and hollow. The fourth was almost a perfect three-inch globe.

I shook most of the soil off the four turnips, cleaned them a bit more by rolling them in puddles on our driveway asphalt, and took them to our kitchen sink, where I cut them open while giving them a final rinse.

Traffic report: Sluggish, just inching along

Hey, what was that washing into the In-Sink-Erator—a piece of mulch—or a small slug? Unfortunately I didn’t react in time to grab and examine whatever it was. After taking photos of the hollow turnips, I again searched for anything online about slugs stunting and hollowing out turnips—and found nothing, even in sites from Great Britain and New Zealand, apparently slug capitals of the world because of their slug-friendly climates.

I fired off an update to HGIC with my suspicion that slugs might be the culprits, noting that in the most recent photo, which shows the three hollow turnips with their tops up in the picture, there’s sort of an entry way from the top of the turnip into the root cavity.

Having second thoughts about a slug in our kitchen sink, I went to the kitchen to clean up a bit more. When I lifted the sink mat—there it was—a living, crawling slug. The next morning I found a second inch-long slug crawling up the side of the sink, apparently after overnighting in the In-Sink-Erator.

Next morning: Slug 2

Mystery solved—in my opinion. Newly hatched slugs most likely ate their way from the crowns of the plants into the roots and hollowed them as they dined on the softer flesh. Maryland slugs must be super smart if they can find such nearly perfect places—inside my turnips—to live, eat, and grow.

Hindsight says I shouldn’t be surprised. I planted the turnips next to river-stone mulch along the side of our detached garage and just across the sidewalk from a large bed of sedums—both excellent slug habitats.

If your turnip crop yields stunted, hollow turnips, consider the possibilities—unusual weather—a soil deficiency—insect predators—but don’t overlook the possibility that slugs have found and adopted your turnip roots as near perfect places to live. And remember to remove all slugs from the kitchen sink before U-Know-Who sees them.

If I plant turnips next year, I plan to locate them far from favored slug habitats and, for good measure, occasionally sprinkle iron sulfate slug-bait pellets, such as “Slug Magic,” “Sluggo,” and “Escar-Go!,” in the turnip patch.

The thinking season; and whither stink bugs?

2011-12-03T08:50:00.000-05:00

In theory I am all in favor of year-round gardening, using season-extension techniques to produce food even in the dead of winter, and probably I will do more toward that goal in the future, but... it's nice to have a rest, too, and to be able to sit back and plan next year's garden without having it merge into this year's.

We put the Derwood Demo Garden to bed in November. There are still a few miscellaneous greens growing there, including in a cold frame, and I will be stopping back on occasion to check on them and harvest. But really it's planning time: the thinking season. My goal for the garden next year is two-fold: first, we've formed small teams to address the problems we've had recently with particular crops (tomatoes, beans, squash, cucumbers and melons) and try to get good yields out of them next year. Second, in the spaces between I'm going to feature plants that have done very well in recent years. In upcoming posts, I'll show you some of those plants.

On a sort-of-related topic: one of the crop problems that we need to address is damage caused by brown marmorated stink bugs. They were devastating in the demo garden this year, and pretty bad in my home garden, and all over my house last winter. I've talked to gardeners across the state who had varying experiences with them, from none at all to so many they felt like throwing in the trowel. But - and I say this with caution, because I'm sure I'm jinxing myself - after a brief and mild home invasion in September, I've seen very few of them indoors this year. The same thing was true last fall - saw lots early on and then they disappeared - but they came back as soon as it got cold, I assume migrating down from the attic, and so far the recent cooler spell after our long warm fall has not brought a bug-flux. I've only seen two in the last week (admittedly, one of them was resting on a tissue I used to blow my nose, so that wasn't pleasant) and I'm hoping that will be the rate they appear at all winter. Fingers crossed. We also saw close to none in the shed at the demo garden during fall clean-up, and last year they were everywhere.

How about you, Maryland gardeners? What's your inside stink bug count this fall? How bad were they in your gardens? What about next year; any predictions?

Winter crop that never fails

2011-11-27T20:30:00.001-05:00

Rutabagas ... eaten

Thanksgiving guests have long since departed. We’ve just about liberated all leftovers from our refrigerator. It’s now time to turn my attention to our vegetable garden.

Not much that I planted remains to harvest. I pulled the last of our rutabagas for a simple Thanksgiving side dish—boiled rutabaga mashed with butter and a little salt. I didn’t have an answer when a guest asked, “Why are your rutabagas so good when the ones I buy at the store are so strong and even bitter?” I guess I could have answered, “Well, I grew them 20 feet from our kitchen door and pulled them an hour before I cooked them.”

I do have a short row or two of Cylindra beets to pull for another early-winter treat. I’ll simply boil them and anoint them with a pat or two of butter. Late-season Red Sails lettuce continues to grow in my “Cheap Greenhouse”—the experiment I’ll report on when this warm fall turns into frigid winter. Drum roll … How long will the lettuce plants grow before they surrender to the cold?

Yes, a few vegetables that I planted still are growing. But other plants that I don’t want are growing larger every day, seemingly doubling in size when the temperatures zip into the 50s and 60s. Those plants are winter weeds.

Winter weeds ... flourishing

Every garden likely has some winter weeds that sprout in late fall and grow rapidly during warm fall and winter days. I used to ignore them and turn them under on sunny February days, but some, especially chickweed, would be so thick and tangled that it was easier to roll them up like green rugs and toss them over the back fence.

But I’ve found a better way to control winter weeds. From Thanksgiving until garden soil freezes solid and when I have 15 minutes or a half hour on a sunny day, I take my weeding hoe and make mayhem on winter weeds. I decapitate them just below soil level, roll most of the soil off any roots with backstrokes of my hoe, and hope the sun dries the roots and kills the weeds.

I don’t stoop and pull weeds, generally, because that gives me an Aching Back. My goal isn’t a garden without a visible weed. I hoe the biggest weeds first, especially those that are blooming—and if I miss some, I attack them the next time I hoe.

Weeding hoe ... to the rescue

So my small, hillside veggie plots are not weed free, though some are nearly so. And each week that passes more will be browner and less green. When the sun begins to warm in February and the topsoil thaws a bit, I’ll be out there, a few minutes now and then, with my hoe.

This short, periodic hoeing helps me keep weeds under control. I no longer have to stoop and roll green mats in early spring or struggle to turn the mats under with a shovel. My Aching Back aches less, and if a few weeds still grow in March, I’ll turn them under with my shovel.

Now that you’re rested up from your Thanksgiving extravaganza, move your weeding hoe from your shed to your garage. On the next sunny day put on a light jacket or an extra shirt and grab your hoe and do a little winter weeding. Take a few deep breaths of the cool, crisp air, and hoe, hoe, hoe.

And while you’re working, think through your plans for Veggie Garden 2012—what you might plant and where. Perhaps you’ll even smile and plan the perfect answer when someone asks you what you’d really like for a holiday gift: “Well, I’d really like a high-quality, narrow-bladed weeding hoe.” That would be so much better than another necktie or box of chocolates, now wouldn’t it?

Hoe, hoe, hoe.

Extra: To read Patterson Clark’s “Urban Jungle” feature, “Wrestling with winter’s weeds,” in the Washington Post (Nov. 22), CLICK HERE.

Thankful for salad tables!

2011-11-26T10:08:00.000-05:00

We had home-grown salad for Thanksgiving dinner this year, thanks to a salad table in a sheltered spot just outside the back door, a wood-and-chicken-wire cover to protect plants from squirrels, and an old sheet to throw over it on frosty nights. When I remember to.

We also ate the last of the home-grown tomatoes, though I decided not to put them in the salad because after ripening from fully green they were still kind of hard inside, like winter supermarket tomatoes but without the perfect skin. So I cut them up and stewed them and then added them to a side dish of mushrooms and onions. They softened up fine, and added a rich flavor to the dish.

While cooking I snacked on the last of the roasted seeds from a Marina di Chioggia squash we got for a Halloween decoration (those little gourds? Vanished the next day for a squirrel's lunch) and later turned into soup.

It had the biggest seeds I've ever seen in a squash or pumpkin (pumpkins are squash, of course). They took a long time to roast and were still very chewy, but tasty. (My roasting method: clean the seeds as best you can, boil in salted water for about 10 minutes, then spread on a tray, mix with oil and seasonings, and bake at 375-400 (depending on seed size) for as long as it takes to get them crisp but not burnt. Try 10 minutes to start and then check every 5 minutes, giving them a good stir. When done, leave them in the cooling oven for a while and then turn out on a towel (one you can wash). Do not store in plastic or they'll get soft again.)

We had what I think was a Red Kuri squash for Thanksgiving, cut up and steamed, then roasted with olive oil, balsamic vinegar and honey. I roasted those seeds too, but they were too tough to eat - unusually thick for squash seeds, almost gourd-like except much bigger.

I'm thankful to be able to grow some of my own dinner and buy the rest (from farmer's markets in part). Hope you enjoyed your holiday meal and have leftovers to munch on!

I'm thankful he lifted me over the fence

2011-11-22T21:22:00.001-05:00

Is a child watching?

“What do you think they are?” asked Mr. Rau as he lifted me high enough to peer into his rain barrel. I must have been five or six years old, and Mr. Rau was our next-door neighbor on Main Street, Alloway, New Jersey.

My eyes focused on several living and moving things just below the waterline in the oak barrel. I had no idea what they were.

“They’re mosquito larvae,” Mr. Rau explained.

That encounter took place at least 65 years ago. Mr. and Mrs. Rau—I never would have thought to call them Carl and Mary—welcomed my daily visits. At first Mr. Rau lifted me over the fence that separated our yards. Later I learned how to climb over myself. Mr. Rau called me “Farmer.”

“Yes, sir, you’ll always be Farmer Nixon,” Mr. Rau chucked as he puffed on his pipe years later when I visited as an adult. “Mrs. Rau and I had a good laugh when we looked out the kitchen window one January day and saw you planting seeds. You were having a tough time with your gloves on, your thick Mackinow coat, your hat, the packet of seeds, and a trowel. But the next summer that bed produced the best crop of zinnias we’d ever seen.”

I’m sure I had zero skills for growing great zinnias. In fact, as I recall those early years, I realize I was the learner and Mr. Rau taught me important principles of good gardening just by practicing them and letting me watch and help.

Mr. Rau’s rain barrel: The rain barrel sat at the corner of the Rau home closest to their large garden. The rotund oak barrel sat on several bricks, and Mr. Rau bored an overflow hole near the top and built a wooden top with handle. He painted the exterior white to match their house but hadn’t thought of installing a screen at the top to keep out the infamous Jersey ‘skeeters or a spigot near the bottom. Rain water Mr. Rau used from the barrel meant he didn’t have to pump water from his well.

Mr. Rau’s drip irrigation system: Mr. Rau would be fascinated by today’s simple and inexpensive drip irrigation systems, but he made do with the simple materials he had at hand. I used to watch him dig-in clay flower pots between his tomato plants and fill them with buckets of water from the rain barrel during summer droughts. Today I place five-gallon plastic buckets with holes drilled in the bottoms in my Tomato Patch.

Mr. Rau’s pole limas: In post-World War II years when nearly every backyard in Alloway still contained a vegetable garden, Mr. Rau often commented that other gardeners—especially Mr. Bowling just a few houses closer to the center of town—were trying to see who would grow the best pole lima beans.

Beans are beans, I suppose, to most modern shoppers, but pole limas were the prized vegetable in South Jersey gardens in those days. They’re notoriously temperamental. If the weather is too wet or cold, the seeds may rot before sprouting. And when they grow, sometimes they produce a huge harvest—and sometimes little or none.

I used to watch Mr. Rau set up his two rows of bean poles in late spring. He used a heavy, pointed steel bar to make holes every four feet for the cedar poles that were all approximately the same size. He’d plant hills of lima seeds around each pole. Then he’d string binder twine across the tops of the poles and in huge Xs between them. As the plants grew, he’d guide them along the twine.

Growing limas took lots of work, time, patience, and good weather, but near the end of the growing season the rewards were mouth watering, a “mess of limer beans,” as a visitor from New York City once joked, or one of the signature dishes of South Jersey cookery, lima bean potpie. Lima bean potpie also was work intensive, but I’ll not detour there.

Planting onion sets: One early-spring day I watched over the fence as Mr. Rau worked in his khaki shirt and pants in his garden in early spring. I climbed over for a closer look.

“What are you doing, Mr. Rau?”

“Planting onions, Farmer.”

“Can I help?”

“Do you know how to plant onions?”

“No.”

“Well, watch what I do. First, take a set from the paper bag. … Put the round end down in the row I’ve made with the hoe. … Put the next set down about here. …”

Mr. Rau took my small left hand and placed it between the two sets he had placed in the row.
“See,” he said, “that’s how you do it—one set every five fingers.”

I must have finished planting the onions in a reasonably acceptable way because Mr. Rau didn’t redo them before he carefully hoed soil up around them. When he had finished, he said, “Here, Farmer,” and placed a dime into my dusty hand.

I can’t recall whether I climbed over or flew over the fence on my way home, but I remember yelling as I ran into the house, “Mom! Look! A dime! Mr. Rau gave me a dime!” Ten cents then was enough to buy two huge single-dip ice-cream cones at Ewen’s General Store or Dunham’s Market, the two small groceries at town center.

Thank you, Carl G. Rau, 1893-1971, for lifting me over the fence and letting me learn by helping in your garden.

Is a child watching as you work in your garden? Lift him or her over the fence into the fascinating world of gardening.

Tiller radish = improved soil

2011-11-22T11:39:00.000-05:00

Ray Weil, a professor and soil scientist at UM, and his graduate students study and promote tiller radish as a fall cover crop for farmers and gardeners. Here's a photo of tiller radish (a.ka. forage radish or Daikon radish) interplanted with oats at the Central Maryland Research and Education Center in Clarksville.

The large white storage roots grew to 8 inches in just 6 weeks-7 weeks. The radish roots "bio-drill" the soil which opens up large pore spaces and improves the structure of soils high in clay. soil structure. Both crops are killed by freezing temperatures leaving a mat of dead plant residues that help suppress weed growth in spring. The radishes decompose rapidly leaving behind large pore spaces that increase air and water movement and biological activity, resulting in better root and plant growth next season.

Two caveats: the tillage radish can provide a comfy late-season home for the harlequin bugs you battled on your fall kale, mustard, and broccoli. And if you plant a large area to these radishes you and your neighbors may detect a sulfur aroma as radishes rot in the soil. Still, this is an exciting new cover crop to try spring or fall.

Thank you, Master Gardeners, for sharing

2011-11-20T09:14:00.001-05:00

When I unfolded the Washington Post Business section thismorning, huge headlines proclaimed, “Food in the bank: When a pantry had toshut its doors, the public came to the rescue.” And then one of the many subheads caught my attention: “2,500 lbs. of produce/Donated in a week byMaster Gardener volunteers in Dale City.”

Thank you, Master Gardeners, for sharing more than a ton of yourbounty. You make me proud.

The Post article described the plight of a food pantry innorthern Virginia, but Master Gardeners in Maryland and many other states eitherpersonally or as a group contribute some of their fruits and vegetables tocommunity organizations that help those in need. If you personally or as part of the MasterGardener program contribute your produce, please post a Comment about how youshare. You may encourage others to dolikewise next gardening year.

To read the short Post article, CLICK HERE.

If you’re a Maryland gardener and want some ideas about howyou can share extra produce, CLICK HERE to check out the "Grow It Share It"information page.

Change of subject: A“Recap” from page 2 of the Business section: “USDA said sales of ‘local foods,’ sold at farmers markets or throughgrocers or restaurants, amounted to $4.8 billion in 2008—several times greaterthan earlier estimates—and it predicts sales will grow to $7 billion thisyear.”

Damrosch on ‘earth vegetables’

2011-11-19T22:06:00.001-05:00

Buried treasure

Here’s a link to Barbara Damrosch, “A Cook’s Garden” columnist in the Washington Post, on “What on earth? Winter’s buried treasure”—“earth vegetables,” as she calls them, that make good winter food and can be stored in the ground, in a root cellar, or even “a garbage can or large picnic cooler sunk into the ground.” CLICK HERE.

Reflections on Tomatoes, 2011

2011-11-15T14:37:00.000-05:00

Article by Sabine Harvey, Kent County:

Which tomatoes performed best during this challenging season? Between the Victory Garden at Kent County Middle School and my home garden, I planted 9 different varieties. At the Victory Garden, we covered one bed with red plastic mulch and one with straw.

The first observation is that the bed with the plastic mulch did indeed do a lot better, as the experts claim, than the bed covered with mulch. In fact, by the middle of September, the vines in the bed with the red plastic mulch were still doing okay, whereas several plants in the other bed had died already.

Now for the cultivars: as always Celebrity Hybrid and Early Pick performed steadily and well. They both produce nice size tomatoes. They start early and they keep going after other tomatoes are done.

I have never liked beefsteak tomatoes but I thought I should give them a try. After this season I must say, I still don’t like beefsteak tomatoes! First of all, they took forever to turn red; not just in my gardens, but this was a complaint all over the county. Secondly, they take so long to grow that between the hot temperatures, downpours and insects, we actually did not harvest many edible tomatoes of these plants. Sure, the ones that we did get were gigantic, but I think over the entire season they produced a lot less than other plants.

Heirlooms. We tried three different varieties: Amish Paste, Mr. Stripy (like Striped Zebra) and Black Krim. I wish I had something good to say, but Mr. Stripy and Black Krim were an absolute bust. The tomatoes went from not ripe to rotting in no time, or they started to rot before they were ripe. They also seem to have been the favorites of all the critters that like to munch on tomatoes. Since heirlooms don’t have much disease resistance, the plants got sick fairly early in the season.

As for the Amish Paste the verdict might still be out. The plant in the bed with the straw died in mid July. The plant in the bed with the red plastic was still doing pretty well by mid September. The problem with this plant was that the bottom part of the tomatoes would be very ripe, while the top part stayed green. Eventually we got all red tomatoes, but that was at about the same time that it didn’t stop raining: all the tomatoes cracked severely.

Maybe it is just me! So far I have not grown a paste tomato that does well. If you have grown paste/roma tomatoes successfully, I would love to get some suggestions!

Big Boy/Better Boy. They both seemed to perform pretty well, all things considered. Perhaps Better Boy did a little bit better, but there was not much of a difference.

Long Keeper. This plant produces tomatoes that you can keep in your house for a long time. The tomatoes are a nice small size and there were a lot of them. The problem is the taste, in particular the skin. I guess you can save these tomatoes longer because they have a really thick skin, kind of unpleasant. To an extent, these tomatoes reminded me of the ones you buy in the store. So, although the plant performed well , I am not sure I will plant it again.

I had two more varieties in my own garden: Tomosa and Juliet. I have grown Tomosa for three years now and I SO want to like this plant. It makes beautiful 4 oz tomatoes, it produces early in the season, then it slows down and keeps producing until frost. What is not to like? Well, it is more suitable for a European climate and ultimately I am not sure it can really withstand the high humidity and crazy rain. I did not harvest an edible tomato of this plant since early August. When it is happy, it makes great tomatoes. The question is, is it happy here?

Last but not least, Juliet. Yes, I did save the best for last. This is a keeper!!! This is a grape tomato, recommended by our state Master Gardener, Jon Traunfeld. Well, obviously Jon was right! The tomatoes are about twice the size of a cherry tomato and they are possibly the sweetest tomato I have ever eaten. The vine produced all summer long, but not in the overwhelming crazy way that a cherry tomato does. It was still producing beautiful tomatoes in October! This variety was the success of the season; it will become a regular in my garden!

Now I am curious whether you grew any tomatoes at home this year. If so, do you have any observations/recommendations you would like to share? I would love some suggestions for next year.

Sabine Harvey

Prize-winning summer camp

2011-11-12T07:57:00.000-05:00

Just want to share that our own Anne Arundel County Master Gardeners won third place in the 2011 Search for Excellence Innovative Project competition at the International Master Gardener Conference in October, for their Grow It Eat It Summer Camps. Go AA MGs!

Read about it here.

Your favorite vegetable cookbooks!

2011-11-09T10:29:00.000-05:00

Nowadays it seems that if I have a vegetable ingredient and I want to find a recipe to use it, I can just do a search on the Internet and find a dozen interesting possibilities in five minutes. However, there's still something about having an actual cookbook on hand that I can bring into the kitchen and spill on, and that I can trust because I've tried the author's recipes.

Let's share in the comments. Do you still use printed cookbooks, or are you all about the web? What's your favorite cookbook for vegetable recipes? Do you have a favorite recipe from that book? Is there a blog or website you prefer for online recipes?

I'll start. It's hard to choose, but the cookbook I turn to most when I'm trying to use up garden produce is Marian Morash's The Victory Garden Cookbook, an adjunct to the old PBS show. It's organized by primary ingredient, so you can look under spinach and find all the ways to use it, from the simple to the complex, with suggestions for other leafy greens that might substitute. Probably my favorite recipe is Sweet Potato-Chocolate Cake, a marbled bundt-pan cake with cooked and pureed sweet potato all through the batter, half of which is flavored with melted chocolate. I will probably make this for our annual MG holiday party (unless I make chocolate-covered pomegranate seeds. Any MoCo MGs dropping by can vote).

Alas, it is out of print, but used copies can be found - Bookfinder tells me it can be had for as little as $16.41. Or you could check libraries.

You're next!

Crunchy tubers: yacon and dahlia

2011-11-07T14:14:00.001-05:00

Apologies in advance: this post contains some of the most boring photos ever. :)

I mentioned in a previous post that I was going to harvest dahlia tubers and eat them after the frost. I also may have mentioned at some point in the past that we were growing yacon at the demo garden. Here it is:

Yacon is a relative of sunflowers, and of Jerusalem artichokes, which also produce edible storage tubers, and in fact of dahlias. They are all native to the Americas and have all been known as food sources for centuries.

If this plant had been given a slightly longer growing season, it might have flowered, but yacon does not produce viable pollen or seeds (it must have, once, but has now been cultivated into a non-seeding type) and so must be propagated by dividing of the root crown. (Plants don't grow from the tubers.) I was given this crown by one of our MGs last year, stored it in a cool room over the winter buried in peat moss, and planted it out in May when it had sprouted.

After digging up this plant (it's not hardy here) I have some good crown material to store and plant next year, and also got a few tubers (next year's crop should be better).

They are easily cleaned with a scrubbing brush, and don't have to be peeled. They can be cooked, but for my first time eating yacon I wanted to try it raw - and loved it! Crisp like a water chestnut, slightly sweet and FULL of water: very refreshing.

You can kind of see the water beading out of the tuber slices.

For more about growing and eating yacon (you just knew I'd have a William Woys Weaver article, didn't you?) click here and for storage information here.

Next, the dahlias. Here's a dahlia root with tubers attached. This one's from my garden; we dug a large number out of the demo garden last week, and those are in storage for next year's garden. Again, you can store them in peat moss in a cool place above freezing.

Edited to add: here's a timely post on the topic from our MG friends in Franklin County PA. With a shout-back to us, how nice!

Here's what the tubers look like cleaned and sliced. I found these, eaten raw, a little less pleasing than the yacon - not as refreshing and more fibrous, with a slightly harsh spiciness. But they are still quite edible and I like them better than I do Jerusalem artichokes.

Here's the article I cited last time for growing and serving information.

My advice? If you can get hold of a yacon crown and have a little space (the plants get 3-4 feet tall), try it, especially if you like crisp, sweet, water explosions in your salad. If you already grow dahlias and don't want to store the tubers, or have one with flowers you don't like, then eat those tubers too. I think next year's flowers may be a better bet, though.

Fruit salsa

2011-11-04T08:53:00.000-04:00

I made a tomato and fruit salsa that was a big hit with my fellow MGs yesterday, so even though I didn't note exact quantities while preparing it, I thought I'd share the Sort-Of Recipe.

The tomatoes were from my garden: I picked them green before the frost and they've been ripening nicely indoors since. A mixture of colors is attractive for this; I used about 3 medium red and 2 medium yellow. Cut out any hard and nasty bits; dice the tomatoes and put them in a colander to drain. If you have a choice, the firmer-fleshed tomatoes are better, but don't worry about skinning and seeding.

Chop one small red onion (or a portion of a larger one) into little bits (everything is in little bits here). Add in a diced mango, two diced kiwifruit, and a few slices of canned pineapple, diced. That's what I had to use; other soft fruits such as peaches would do as well. Apples, though seasonal, are problematically crunchy, but you could try them. Pears might work. I also threw in the spoonful of pomegranate seeds I collected from my remaining wee pomegranates.

Mix everything together, add what you like in the way of hot peppers, chopped very small (I used four fish peppers, and I could have used more, but didn't want to offend the taste buds of anyone I was serving to). Then add a tablespoon or two of lime juice and another tablespoon of a light vinegar (white wine, champagne, or rice), some pepper (I used a lemon pepper blend), salt if you wish, and whatever quantity of cilantro you want if you like it. (I didn't have any fresh, so I used a few frozen mini-cubes, thawed.) Let it sit and marinate in the fridge for a few hours to overnight, and then transfer to a serving container with a slotted spoon, so you leave excess liquid behind.

I served it with chips as a buffet item, but it would also be good on chicken or vegetables.

Any hot peppers to your taste will do for this (or sweet peppers if you really don't like heat), but I do love fish peppers for their beauty as well as their flavor. You'll be hearing a lot more about them here in the next year! Here's a photo I took a couple of years ago of my fish pepper harvest:

Yes, all those colors on one plant at once!

How gardeners watch TV

2011-11-02T11:33:00.000-04:00

screenshot by ABC

Last night I checked out the first two episodes of the new ABC show "Once Upon a Time," about fairy tale characters with amnesia living in a small Maine town. It's quite fun, but I couldn't help noting, when Evil Queen/Mayor Regina brings a basket of apples to Emma's door, and claims they are from her Honeycrisp tree, that they look a lot more like Red Delicious.

And the tree is suspiciously pristine-looking; and I wouldn't wear that outfit in Maine in September or October when either of those apple varieties would be ripe.

Please tell me I'm not the only gardener who watches plants on the small or big screen.

Summer Jean, in autumn

2011-11-01T17:06:00.001-04:00

In the category of "vegetables I will definitely grow again" - this is a Brassica rapa cultivar bought under the name "Summer Jean" (it looks to me like a sort of Chinese broccoli, and Johnny's no longer sells seeds by that name, so buy what you can find, I guess). Despite the warm-season moniker, it is a spring and fall vegetable, and I'm voting for fall, though like most fall vegetables it is a pain to germinate in August.

Anyway, what I like about it is that you can eat the whole plant - the thicker parts of the stem require some real cooking, but the rest can be braised or stir-fried quickly: leaves, broccoli-like florets, and even the yellow flowers that result when you only visit your plants once a week. The florets are so yummy I couldn't stop snacking on them in the garden - they lack the bitterness this sort of plant acquires in the spring, and are really quite sweet. Perhaps not trick-or-treater sweet, but pretty close in their own way.

Here it is in place with some misome and not much else. We have achieved fall clean-up! What miracles a team of Master Gardeners, some wheelbarrows and newspaper, and a truckload of donated Leafgro can accomplish!

Also, isn't this radicchio pretty? I just thought I'd throw that one in.

Enjoy your November gardens, whatever's left of them!

Glimmer of Hope: Bats & the Lethal White-Nose Syndrome

2011-10-31T13:26:00.000-04:00

A lethal disease is ravaging bat colonies from eastern Canada and New England to North Carolina. The disease, white-nose syndrome, is caused by a fungus that causes holes to form in the membranes that enable bats to fly. Surveys indicate that in some areas the population of little brown bats has declined 91% and that of northern bats by 98%.

The economic implications for agriculture can be dramatic because a colony of 150 bats eats about 1.3 million insects each year, according to one study. Fewer bats, of course, mean more insects and more alternative means of insect control, which generally means more pesticides. One estimate values bats at more than $3 billion a year.

There is a glimmer of hope, however. Scientists see some evidence that the disease may not be as lethal in warmer climates. Note the operative word: perhaps.

If you have any interest in bats and their relationship to the environment, or just enjoy watching a little brown bat swooping over your garden in search of insects, you’ll want to read “On the trail of a bat scourge” by Darryl Fears in today’s Washington Post. CLICK HERE.

Everything but the pie !

2011-10-30T20:14:00.015-04:00

Welcome to the 2011 pumpkin weekend where, during Halloween weekend, the goal is to make dishes with the pumpkins we grow.

Sadly this year, we had no carving pumpkin for Halloween. :( . The only one we had didn't have a long shelf life. The other can be seen in the picture below. The vine measures 50 feet long from the green arrow to the end.As you can see, it's not ready yet. Thanks to the pickling worm who destroyed (almost) all the female flowers on this vine.

Fortunately, we did have these four pie pumpkins. For the record, there are no pickling worm holes on these pumpkins. :) Let the fun begin!

Sure pumpkin pie is always a good idea but during the weekend we ate.....

Pumpkin Ravioli. Easy to do: just mix grated cheese and pumpkin puree, add some herbs and nutmeg and squeeze a teaspoon of the mixture between two sheets of won ton pasta wrappers.

Pumpkin Stew and Pumpkin Rolls. The stew was made with carrots from our garden and served with fresh homegrown wax beans. For the rolls, they were like my wife likes them : doughy and fragrant.

To close Pumpkin Weekend why not put some pumpkin ice cream on top of chocolate ice cream? It's not home made but locally made.

Vote for Kent County MS Victory Garden!

2011-10-28T15:23:00.001-04:00

Radishes!

Hello everyone!

Sabine Harvey of Kent County Extension has signed the Kent County Middle School Victory Garden up for a Mother Earth News Garden photo contest. The editors of the magazine will pick two winners from the 25 gardens that get the most votes from the public. The winners will receive $500 for the garden and they will be featured in the magazine. Sabine and countless volunteers have kept this garden going throughout the heat of the summer and have donated over 500 lbs of produce grown in the garden to the local food pantry. Additionally, the children that participate in helping with the garden are learning so much about where their food actually comes from.

Please take a moment and vote for this garden (also, check out all the photos). You can click here to go directly to the KCMS page, and here to see the main contest page.

You are allowed to vote once every 24 hours ONLY UNTIL Tuesday, Nov. 1.

Other blogs to visit

2011-10-27T15:29:00.000-04:00

As we madly finish up our fall gardening tasks and anticipate winter, you may wonder what you'll be reading on those cold days and dark evenings when the garden just doesn't call.

We'll have plenty for you here on Grow It Eat It, but if you'd like to expand your blog horizons, those of us GIEI bloggers who write elsewhere would be pleased if you'd visit. I've recently started a blog called Rogue Eggplant to explore other aspects of my gardening life. Bob Nixon writes at Blog of an Ancient Gardener - you may find his series about dealing with deer especially useful! Dale Johnson is one of the contributors to Backyard Farming, a blog about the urban homestead. And our own DivaGardener welcomes you to her piece of Fat Earth.

Also check out all the blogs under "Favorites" in our left sidebar. They are all great! And be sure to take time to thoroughly explore our University of Maryland Extension sites, Grow It Eat It (the website) and Home and Garden Information Center. Check out our Facebook page and Twitter feed, too! And watch all our videos - they are both educational and funny.

If you've got blogs you'd like to recommend, mention them in comments. I'm sure we'd all like some book recommendations, too - I'm ready to hunker down and read while the snow swirls outside...

High Night Temperatures Can Lower Yields

2011-10-26T09:55:00.000-04:00

I am in fall gardening mode which means I’m still thinking about some ofthe state-wide complaints from gardeners about lower than expected bean,pepper, and tomato yields during the hottest weeks of the past summer (mid-Junethrough mid-August). Although many factors can reduce flowering and fruiting Ibelieve that high night temperature is a growing, and overlooked, cause of thisproblem.

In general, warm-season crops can tolerate high day temperatures but canbe negatively affected by higher than normal night temperatures, which hoveredaround 80°Fin Maryland’s urban and suburban areas for most of July. Here’s an overview ofthis aspect of climate change from the USDA:

Some crops areparticularly sensitive to high nighttime temperatures, which have been risingevenfaster thandaytime temperatures. Nighttime temperatures are expected to continue to risein the future. These changes in temperature are especially critical to thereproductive phase of growth because warm nights increase the respiration rateand reduce the amount of carbon that is captured during the day byphotosynthesis to be retained in the fruit or grain…. Common snap beans showsubstantial yield reduction when nighttime temperatures exceed 80°F. http://downloads.climatescience.gov/usimpacts/pdfs/agriculture.pdf

Many of us observed healthy mid-summer snap bean crops with few flowersor pods. Yields increased once the weather cooled in mid-August. Experienced gardenershave lamented poor lima bean crops in recent years. Stink bug feeding has been aproblem in beans but increasing night heat could also be at play. Researchstudies have shown that high night temperature causes sterile pollen anddamages flower buds. Cowpea (a heat-loving crop!) yields consistently decline whennight temperatures increase from 60°Fto 75°F.http://www.plantstress.com/Articles/heat_i/heat_i.htm

On another global warming note… I attended the annual meeting of theAmerican Society for Horticultural Science a few weeks ago and heard aninteresting talk on how Shading Levels Affect Bell PepperFruit Yield (Juan Carlos Diaz-Perez;University of Georgia). The researchers found that erecting shade cloth overbell pepper plants increased yields. The lowest yields were from completely unshadedplants and the highest yields were from plants with 30% shading. Shadinglowered leaf and root temperatures and reduced the incidence of blossom-end rotand sunscald.

http://ashs.org/abstracts/m/abstract6327.html

So what’s the upshot? Climate change is real and nighttemperatures are on the rise.

Some garden-level responses? Try providing some shade topepper plants in full-sun gardens. Plant snap beans multiple times and focusmore on spring and late summer plantings. Plant limas late so they bear pods fromlate August through September. Experiment with planting bean, tomato, andpepper in spots where they will receive some late afternoon shade.

Swiss Chard Pancakes

2011-10-24T11:15:00.004-04:00

In honor of World Food Day, I made Swiss Chard Pancakes and shared them at work.

I was listening to the Splendid Table on NPR on Saturday and thought all of the recipes sounded really yummy. I was getting hungry just listening. Vietnamese Pho was just what I wanted, but didn't have the time or ingredients at hand. But I did have Swiss chard ready to harvest and couldn't wait to try out this recipe. Dorie Greenspan's recipe for Swiss Chard Pancakes makes 40 pancakes. I cut the recipe in half but it only made about a dozen 5 inch pancakes. I served them with a dollop of creme fraiche topped with red caviar.

Swiss Chard Pancakes (adapted from Dorie Greenspan's recipe)

1 cup 1% milk
2 1/3 cups flour
2 large eggs
1/2 small sweet onion
1 clove garlic
leaves from about 7 Italian parsley sprigs
sea salt and freshly ground pepper
1/2 teaspoon dried thyme leaves
5-7 Swiss chard leaves
peanut oil

Blend milk, flour, eggs, onion, garlic, parsley, salt, pepper, and thyme in a blender. Tear leaves from chard stems and mid ribs and add to blender.

Heat about 1 tablespoon of peanut (or other oil of your choice) in non-stick skillet. Swirl in pan to coat bottom. Pour about 1/4 cup of mixture into pan for each pancake. I could fit 3 pancakes at a time into my pan. Flip after about 3 minutes when top looks dry and bottom is lightly browned. Cook for another minute or 2 until other side is lightly browned. Remove and keep warm until all pancakes are cooked. Add more oil to pan as needed.

Serve as-is as a side dish. Or you can top with a dollop of creme fraiche and a little bit of red lumpfish caviar for a real treat. Looks great too!

Really cool information for gardeners

2011-10-23T17:57:00.000-04:00

Frosted sungold tomato (Nov. 11, 2007)

Whenever two gardeners chat these days, one almost always asks the question, “Have you had a frost yet?”

The temperature here at Meadow Glenn was 38°F. this morning. I thought there were frost crystals on the roof of our house, but there were no pockets of frosty grass in the low spots of our lawn. The leaves of the super-sensitive basil in our garden remain bright green, not the drooping black they would be if frost had kissed them good-bye.

Today is October 23, and the 10-day forecast on Weather.Com lists the lowest temperature as 42°F. Isn’t our first freeze overdue?

The short answer is, “Yes,” but other than from daily observation and recording of temperatures, which I haven’t done, where can I find out when the first freeze will be in the fall and the last freeze will be in the spring in our neighborhood?

After years of wondering, I’ve finally found a good source. My discovery started last Friday with a posting by the Capital Weather Gang on the Washington Post website: “When should the Washington, D.C., area expect to see its first freeze of the cold season?”

I read their article with increasing interest and began following highlighted links. One spreadsheet, “List of locations included in the contour map,” contained first-freeze dates for 58 locations here in Maryland—and eight in Delaware, three in New Jersey, three in Pennsylvania, 72 in Virginia, and 18 in West Virginia.

I skimmed down the Maryland list and found Clarksville and Brighton Dam, both of which are about three miles from our home. The compilation says the average first-freeze date for both locations is October 12. Since today is October 23, yes, our first freeze is late this year.

Frosted strawberry leaf (Nov. 8, 2007)

The Capital Weather Gang explained that the first-freeze metric is “tricky … and it’s often first elevation dependent, then later (November onwards) dependent on the strength of the cold air mass, and in many cases one’s proximity to water.”

I’d like to add another complication: First-frost may come before first-freeze. How can that be? I noticed several years ago that frost often forms in our garden when the official temperature is above freezing by a degree or two. When I researched that issue, I found that the thermometers used to officially record temperatures generally are located about six feet above ground. Under certain conditions, the temperature at ground level can be freezing while the official temperature is slightly warmer just a few feet above.

If you are a curious gardener, I recommend that you read the Capital Weather Gang’s posting, and I even more strongly urge you to follow the link to “weather cooperatives through the broader region,” which takes you to the Utah State University website with historical weather information. When you arrive at the site, you’ll find “Utah” in the box where you are to select a state. Select Maryland, or another state, from the pull-down list and click Select again, and you’ll find great information for scores of locations. There are early/average/late dates for both “last spring freeze” and “first fall freeze,” plus short/average/long “freeze-free days,” which you might call the “growing season.”

Here are the dates for our town, Clarksville: “last freeze,” April 14 early, May 4 average, May 22 late. “First freeze,” Sept. 24 early, Oct. 12 average, Nov. 5 late. “Freeze-free days,” 138 short, 161 average, 188 long. I can use that information, for example, to help determine when to start seeds indoors or plant them in the garden—and for spicing up gardening chats: “Well, you know, [clear throat at this point] on the average we should have had a frost on the twelfth.”

Now it’s time for you to explore. To link to the Capital Weather Gang’s posting, CLICK HERE. To link to the Utah State University site to check out spring and fall freeze dates for your town, CLICK HERE.

The last summer harvest

2011-10-22T18:31:00.000-04:00

Well, the last harvest of summer plants, anyway (I have some turnips left, and whatever kale the hungry animals getting into my garden leave me).

My pomegranates didn't look entirely ripe, but I harvested them anyway, for fear of frosty nights or hungry squirrels/whatever (I have already found one partially eaten lying on the ground). I'm very proud that my dwarf pomegranate actually grew, um, dwarf pomegranates (the largest one was about the size of a lacrosse ball). Now let's see if I can nurse it through the winter outdoors.

Ripe or not, the big one proved to have edible seeds:

And they were tasty, too! I just ate them as a snack.

The rest of today's harvest can be seen below. I think we're going to roast some of the green tomatoes and freeze them; I canned them dilled last year and I'm kind of tired of that. Some of them may ripen indoors. There is some sorrel in there, and a bunch of small green mystery peppers from the plants I rescued from the compost bin (they were growing in there; possibly seedlings I thought weren't going to make it and tossed?).

What are you still harvesting from your gardens?

Grow It Eat It! does NOT include Groundhogs!

2011-10-19T19:21:00.016-04:00

If I could misquote the late, great George Orwell, of 'Animal Farm' fame:

'Two legs good, four legs BAD!!!' (Look it up for today's literary lesson.)

Exhibit A: This is what my fall broccoli looked like after the groundhog got through with it:

Oh, it's too painful - this was a few weeks ago and I've just now gotten the courage to write about it. I know it was a groundhog, because on Saturday morning, when I was leaving to run an errand, he was just finishing up. I chased him under the woodpile (the local critters' favorite hang-out spot). Nicolas and I set out to try to trap the fella, and I thought I'd patched up all the exit holes around the pile except for the one in which we placed the trap. Well...

When I returned from my errand, the trap had been tripped, but guess what - no groundhog. Drat!!!

I reset the trap, knowing it was probably pretty futile. BUT...later on in the week I found the fella munching away in our compost pile (after all, there was no more broccoli to eat). I chased him under the wood pile, and got a little smarter at plugging up holes. Again, I set the trap, pretty sure this time that there was only one way out. I'd even heard the little guy scratching around in there, trying to find an escape. The next morning, I tentatively went out to check the trap. Nope. No groundhog. Hmmmm...how did he get out? Surely he didn't spend the night in there??? Hmmmmm...

Well, later in the day, I got a call from Nicolas - guess what we got? GROUNDHOG!!!! Safely in the trap. Yay!! Happy ending!!! Joy joy joy!!!

'Two legs good, four legs BAD!!!!!' (rarely a happy ending with groundhogs, is there?)

As it turns out, Nicolas hadn't had time to dispatch the groundhog (calling the local authorities, etc), and so I was going to take care of it all when I got home from work later that day. Guess what? When I got home, all excited, NO GROUNDHOG!!! That little bugger found his way out of the cage! He managed to get one of the clips unclipped and squeezed his not-so-little self out. Oh, woe is me!!!

Again, I was so mad, but what could I do? Now I'll never get him/her. Serves me right, though, because I really should know better than to leave things unprotected. The good news, though, is that I left the broccoli there to see what might happen, and here's what one looks like now:

They're determined to keep on growing (yay!). While the weather will probably get too cold and dark before this guy can grow a head, I'm going to see if I can overwinter it for a spring harvest. I guess that's what gardening is all about, right? Surmounting challenges and making the best of the situation.

As for that pesky groundhog, I haven't seen him since. Nor has he returned to re-eat the newly revived broccoli. I figure he's probably getting ready to hunker down for the winter to prepare for making plenty of groundhog babies next year...

'Two legs good, four legs BAD!!!!!!'

End of Season Reflections on Bitter Gourd

2011-10-19T18:16:00.001-04:00

Last year I taste tested bitter gourds prepared a few different ways and it drew so much attention that I found myself writing down recipes that would never have been recorded. Despite all that creativity, I noticed that my family’s behavior and attitude toward this special vegetable remained unchanged. So this summer I grew fewer plants and spoke even less about it.

However, I began sticking it into just about all my meals in small quantities.

Chop up the bitter gourd into fine bits as you would an onion and use in same way as onion, garlic or hot peppers. A few days ago, I threw about 1/3 cup of bitter gourd right into my omelet along with chopped up eggplant, squash, peppers, dried cherry tomatoes, garlic and onion, and no one noticed. Consider adding finely chopped bitter gourd to your quiche, spaghetti sauce, stews, soups, fried rice, lo mein and just about anything else.

Here are pictures and recipes of some of the ways I managed to sneak it into my family’s diet without anyone noticing.

Barley and Garden Veggies

In this preparation, I used Korean Squash, another lovely large crunchy vegetable with a delicate taste, celery, red peppers, green peppers, onion and garlic from the garden, along with shitake mushrooms from the farmers’ market. I sautéed everything, including the finely-chopped bitter gourd, and tossed it all into the pre-cooked barley. I then added some chicken broth (vegetarians could use water or a different broth) and baked it in a low 325 oven until the barley was fully cooked and had absorbed the flavors of the vegetables. No one noticed the presence of bitter gourd.
Chicken Curry

Bitter gourd is typically not hidden in chicken curry in Indian cuisine. However, since my family likes chicken curry, I thought it presented a good opportunity. Here’s one version of a chicken curry that even those who don’t like very spicy food may like.

For this curry, you start by washing your cut up chicken in watered down lemon juice. In a separate bowl, place enough non-fat yoghurt to cover all the chicken and mix in the following powdered spices: coriander, 1tblspn; cumin 1 tspn; chili, ½ tspn; paprika, ½ tspn. Mix the spices into the yoghurt, add chicken, mix well and let sit for about two hours.

Fry together the equivalent of roughly one medium onion or two shallots, about one inch of ginger finely chopped, about six cloves of garlic, finely chopped. This is the place to also add about one cup or more of finely chopped bitter gourd. Sauté well. Then add about 6-10 whole green cardamom pods and 6-10 whole cloves, one 4-inch piece of cinnamon stick, broken into two or three pieces. Continue frying for about two more minutes. Finally, put in the chicken/yoghurt mix and cook gently until the meat is cooked through. Then sprinkle a teaspoon or two of Garam Masala (available at most grocery stores in ethnic food section) and simmer for about 20 minutes. Serve garnished with fresh chopped cilantro. The rich flavors of this curry completely hide the bitterness of the bitter gourd. In the curry pictured above, I also added some celery and a little green pepper from my garden, just in case someone noticed green bits. Any vegetables that are not soggy may be added, such as potato, turnip, carrots, green beans, etc.

Cous Cous
The last recipe is for cous cous. Much like the barley, I simply chopped up whatever I had in the garden—in this version, there is purple and white eggplant, finely chopped green beans (they are tough at this time of year!), green, yellow and red peppers, garlic, onion, and, of course, the bitter gourd. I sautéed everything, added 2.5 cups of chicken broth and brought to boil. Then I sprinkled one cup of cous cous, turned off the flame, closed the dish and let it sit until the cous cous cooked through. This is another family favorite, and no one noticed the bitter gourd.

This year we have consumed far more bitter gourd than we did last year. In fact I have none left to freeze for use in the winter. I’ve had to forego my preference for simply steamed bitter gourd as that tends to draw too much attention to it. However, I have managed to get it into my family's diet, and happily so.

Tomato Patch: Time for green manure?

2011-10-18T08:53:00.001-04:00

Green manure--or something else?

I’ve bought many bags of composted manure over the years, and when I opened them in our garden, the manure was dark brown. When I buy a pickup load of composted horse manure and shredded leaves at the Howard County Recycling Center, the compost is, well, dark brown.

So what’s with “green manure”?

“Green manure” is the name often given to plants that overwinter on tilled fields and then are turned under the next spring. Another term is “cover crop.” Whichever term you prefer, it has two basic purposes, to enrich the soil and protect it from erosion by winter weather.

The University of Maryland Master Gardener Handbook explains “cover crops” this way in its “Vegetables” chapter: “Cover crops are mostly small-grain species, like oats, rye, and wheat, and legumes, like clover and vetch. … These crops are typically planted as early as August 1, but no later than October 10. They should make some growth before the first hard frost. Some are killed by cold winter temperature, but most go dormant and resume growth in the spring. Cover crop roots grow deeply into the soil pulling up nutrients that might otherwise leach out of the soil. The crops are turned into the soil before going to seed, usually sometime from mid-April to early May.”

A Handbook table lists these typical cover crops with directions about when to plant seed and when to turn the plants under in the spring: alfalfa, barley, buckwheat, crimson clover, forage radish, spring oats, winter rye, hairy vetch, and winter wheat.

I began thinking about “cover crop” when I tore out the dying vines of Tomato Patch 2011. Should I plant a cover crop? Are there alternatives—especially for small, hillside plots that this gardener tills—a youth-challenged gardener, by the way, who is prone to “aching back”?

Thinking I might experiment with a cover crop, I hopped into my Tacoma and drove up to the Southern States farm supply store in Ellicott City, the one place in Howard County that I thought would stock cover-crop seed.

“Do you have seed for any cover crop?”

“Sorry, not today, but next week we’ll be getting in a mixture of rye and wheat.”

“Will it be in bulk? I only need a few ounces for my garden.”

“The smallest size will be three pounds.”

So much for my Green Manure Experiment. Back home, I looked at the vineless Tomato Patch and decided on an alternative to a cover crop. I had mulched our tomato plants in the spring with straw which now was starting to disintegrate and become part of the garden soil, but it is still recognizable as straw. If I don’t turn it under to hasten decomposition until late winter, it can serve as a “cover crop” to protect garden soil from the ravages of winter storms.

Straw mulch will work

So this winter Tomato Patch is sporting a straw “cover crop” that died in 2010 or earlier and in color is definitely beige, not green. Will this crop improve the soil? Little, if any, I suppose, but I think it will do a reasonable job of protecting the soil from the elements.

And as I rearranged the straw to cover as much of the soil as possible, I thought of a very positive outcome of my choice: the straw will continue to decompose over winter and I’ll have a relatively easy time “turning it under” with my garden shovel in late winter. Manually turning under a cover crop can be an “ache in the back,” to say nothing of muscle pain. Score one for the Ancient Gardener.

What else could I have used?

Grass clippings or shredded leaves will do too

Since I don’t have enough straw to spread on all my small hillside garden plots, I protect the soil—and enrich it to some degree—with whatever I have at hand. I’ve already spread grass clippings on two or three plots—sort of a wimpy “green manure” approach, wouldn’t you say? When leaves begin to fall, I’ll bag some with our lawn mower and spread the semi-shredded leaves like a brown blanket on other plots, where they’ll also both protect and decompose over winter.

Disappointed that I couldn’t buy a small amount of cover-crop seed locally, I checked availability on the Internet. Territorial Seed Company has a paragraph explaining cover crops with several links you may enjoy investigating, including one showing varieties of available fall-sown seed. Johnny’s Selected Seeds also lists a variety of seeds under “green manures.”

There is one green-manure cover crop I don’t want to grow—winter weeds. Alas, winter weeds are sprouting everywhere these days and growing rapidly in this extra-warm October. Today’s chickweed seedlings might protect the soil over winter, but by early spring they will have become thick mats and will have sown thousands of seeds for future crops.

To read the University of Maryland Extension's one-page fact sheet on cover crops, CLICK HERE. If you’re a new reader, check out earlier postings about Barbara Billek, who uses hairy vetch as a cover crop in her raised vegetable beds, and Susan Levy-Goerlich, who uses shredded leaves to protect her garlic crop over winter.

Drink your hibiscus and eat your dahlias

2011-10-15T09:38:00.000-04:00

For Garden Bloggers' Bloom Day I promised some flowers, so here we go.

This (as the sign says) is Hibiscus sabdariffa, or Roselle, a hibiscus with small but lovely flowers and edible leaves. The flower buds are used to make drinks. They're usually dried (sometimes only the calyces are preserved) and then steeped; if you buy any herbal tea that has hibiscus in it, this is what you're getting.

I picked the last flower buds this week (the plant was beginning to suffer from the cold nights). Here they are posing with an Aji Limon pepper.

Steeping a handful of fresh buds in hot water for five minutes or so produced... pale pink water. So I left them in the teapot longer... and then longer... and finally overnight. Eventually I had something that looked like a real drink.

The flavor wasn't strong, but it did have a mild sweetness and tartness. I think I will try drying the remaining buds to see if something stronger and quicker to prepare might result. More experimentation is called for, next year - I'll definitely be growing this plant again, because for one thing, it's pretty.

One of our biggest successes this year, flower-wise, was Unwin's Dwarf dahlias - MG Madgie started these for us from seed this spring, and they were blooming as early as late June.

Here's one of the resulting flowers - they also came in varying shades of red, pink and yellow, and varying amounts of doubleness. They framed one of our tomato beds - still do, in fact, even though the tomatoes have been pulled up. We'll dig up the dahlias next week, perhaps (or the week after; I hate to disturb something that's doing so well, and there's no frost in the forecast yet). I'm sure I can get volunteers to store the tubers inside over the winter, and then some of them can go back into the garden next year.

But a few of the tubers -- we should eat!! Yes, dahlia tubers are edible, as are the flower petals. Can't say I've tried them yet myself, but I will do so and report back. They are supposed to taste rather like Jerusalem artichokes (and are related to them). Here's an article by William Woys Weaver on growing and eating dahlias. It's probably best to eat the tubers from the plants whose flowers you least liked, and save the other ones for planting. I'm going to have a hard time choosing...

Mushroom madness: What lurks below?

2011-10-13T21:03:00.000-04:00

One of the byproducts of all the rain we’ve had this year—more than 13 inches above average to date in this area—is that mushrooms are popping up here, there, and just about everywhere in our gardens and lawns. The photos with this posting are some of the mushrooms growing here at Meadow Glenn.

So if I have mushrooms growing in our own yard, why did I stop by the Giant Food store to buy two handfuls of two kinds of mushrooms? You know the answer: mushrooms are notoriously difficult to identify. An edible variety may look nearly identical to its poisonous relative. A deer or squirrel may eat one, but it might kill you.

In his “Gardening” column in Thursday’s Post, Adrian Higgins took a look at some common wild mushrooms and explained why wise gardeners leave picking them to the experts.

Higgins also taught me something about the “leviathan” that lurks below the mushroom that pops up in our garden: “Here’s the thing about the mushroom. It is merely the fruiting body of a much larger and permanent organism that lives beneath the soil. It is akin to the flower of a plant, dispersing its seed. I like to think of a mushroom as the dorsal fin of some great whale that lives in the depths. It flashes, it is gone, the leviathan passes from our consciousness, but it is still there.”

If you’re curious about the mushrooms growing in your garden or lawn, take a few minutes to read Higgins’ article, “Beneath the planet of the mushrooms,” and look at the photo illustrations. CLICK HERE.

And remember to leave wild mushroom harvesting to the experts.

Celeriac!

2011-10-12T10:14:00.001-04:00

This year in the demo garden we grew one of my favorite vegetables, celeriac (also known as celery root or turnip-rooted celery). It's a form of celery grown for the knobby root, though the leaves and stems are also edible (best in soup, though). Here's a huge one we harvested yesterday:

It's about five inches across, and may end up being a little woody. The one I took home last week, a bit smaller, was delicious, though. I prepared it very simply, first peeling off the rough exterior of the bulb, and then cutting it into bite-sized pieces (you can pop them into salted water as you cut, to stop discoloration). Boiled the pieces until tender, and then did a quick saute in olive oil and lemon juice.

Celeriac is also good raw, particularly paired with medium-tart apples in a salad, or cooked till soft and pureed, perhaps with some butter and seasonings. Yum. The flavor is like celery but with a mellower feel, sort of like the difference between turnip greens and turnip root, but with none of the bitterness either of those can have.

The plant is easy to grow, though it does take a long season to mature. I started my plants inside in early April, just to get a head start, and planted them out late in the month - and here we are harvesting in October, though September would have done. No pest problems to speak of; even the rabbits didn't bother them. They do need to be watered, but excessive heat doesn't seem to affect the growth or flavor.

The other form of celery we grew was cutting celery (also called soup celery), grown mainly for the leaves, as an herb or flavoring. Those plants succeeded beyond our wildest dreams, and now have hollow stems thick enough to be called regular old stem celery, although they haven't been blanched (usually, growing celery for the stems, you have to either pile up soil on the growing plants or grow them between boards to keep the stems white and tender). I find them quite edible nonetheless, good for snacking on in the garden.

Tomato Patch: Last pickings

2011-10-10T22:16:00.000-04:00

The end is near

The diseased leaves and vines of Tomato Patch 2011 told me it was time to pick the last of this year’s tomatoes and tear out the nearly dead plants—three or four weeks before I usually do this sad job.

I describe the job as a sad one because I just plain hate to see the tomato season end. When we cut the last red fruit that we’ve harvested from the Tomato Patch, we get that nearly hopeless feeling that we’re left with those red “things” we will not be even tempted to buy at the super market until our memories of our mouth-watering home-grown tomatoes fades with our memories of this year’s autumn leaves.

I tore out the dying vines over three days, a couple of hours here, a couple of hours there. The first day I picked about 20 big-reds, mostly at breaker stage or beyond, that I thought had a reasonable chance to ripen in our garage, and I took down the cages that had supported the vines. The second day I picked a half colander of little-reds and then removed their cages too.

Last of the big reds

On the third day I pulled out all the plants and wheel-barrowed them to a “compost” pile near the edge of our woods. Since the vines were diseased, I had no thought other than to remove them completely from our vegetable garden. Next year I will plant tomatoes in a totally different area of our garden in order to minimize disease carry-over from this year.

My experience with ripening end-of-season tomatoes is that those with cracks around the stem are much more likely to spoil before fully ripening, so most of the fruit I moved into the garage were small Brandywines and the other varieties with few cracks—Celebrities and Juliets.

A week after moving the last tomatoes into the garage, I can report that the extra-warm temperatures of the second week of October 2011 are causing them to ripen rapidly, and I have to check them every day to make sure we eat them before they spoil.

Last of the little reds

Even though I picked the last of this year’s tomatoes and pulled up the vines, I’m not ready to write “The End” to Tomato Patch 2011. I have a few chores yet to do, and in future postings I’ll show you what I do.

Stink Bugs: Chainsaw 128, Peach Trees 0

2011-10-06T20:37:00.000-04:00

Stink bugs on my tomato

Stink bugs this year destroyed most of Frank Gouin’s peach crop, so Frank’s going to take his chainsaw to his 128 peach trees.

Is that an overreaction to the stink-bug invasion?

Adrian Higgins, the Washington Post’s “On Gardening” columnist, told Frank story in Thursday’s edition. Frank is a horticulturist who has tended his orchard from Day One 20 years ago, when he started rootstock from seed and the next year grafted buds of his chosen varieties onto the rootstock seedlings. He’s been a realistic peach grower who been spraying his crop every 10 to 14 days to manage all sorts of pests and diseases.

And then came the stink bugs. In 2009 Frank lost about two percent of his crop. Last year he lost 10 percent. This year he lost 60 percent.

Higgins wrote: “Scientists are working hard to find a natural predator for the bug, but for Gouin, time has run out. After a lifetime of dealing with and beating pests, he is calling it quits. This winter, he will take a chainsaw to his 128 peach trees.”

And Frank isn’t alone. Recently one of my gardening friends announced, “I’ve had it. The stink bugs have destroyed everything. I’m not going to plant a tomato next year.” Others have told me that stink bugs have taken all the enjoyment and satisfaction out of vegetable gardening.

What to do, what to do, what to do? Fruit and grain growers face huge, if not potentially catastrophic, challenges. We consumers may see higher food prices and have new questions about pesticide residues in our food.

I haven’t surrendered. My tomato yield improved significantly this year because I periodically used a commercially available garden spray that kept the stink bugs largely, but not totally, off my growing tomatoes. I’m learning to share a little and don’t mind a few “pin pricks” or “dimples” or other evidence of stink-bug feeding on my tomatoes.

Please “take five” to read Adrian Higgins’ article about Frank Gouin and its short sidebar, “Beating the stink bugs.” CLICK HERE.

You see that bright thing in the sky?

2011-10-06T12:37:00.000-04:00

It's called the sun. Remember that? Don't look right at it.

The disappointing (to me, at least) 2011 vegetable growing season is gurgling to a close. At the Derwood Demo Garden, we are not yet finished working, but we'll be cleaning up over the next month (fall and winter gardening is great, don't get me wrong, but try getting volunteers to show up once a week in January). Our big event of the year, the Harvest Festival, was rained out Saturday - some intrepid folks came out to enjoy the farm in the chilly rain (the Italian ice truck was not mobbed, though I think hot cider and roasted chestnuts did pretty well), but the Master Gardeners left en masse about 1:30 to go home and thaw.

It's lovely now, of course, and we did get some work done Tuesday, including harvesting. Not post-mortem time for everything yet, but I can tell you pretty much what didn't do well (I have probably complained about that ad nauseum already) and what did... well, let's be positive. All the edible gourds did well, the cucuzzis at least until Irene did them in; bitter gourd and luffa are still producing. We had, as usual, a wonderful sweet potato crop:


Barbara Knapp harvests her sweet potatoes

On the other hand, potatoes were very disappointing, though if we'd harvested in July when they were ready, they would have been okay - keeping them in the ground, which we do just to accommodate the Festival, did not work out this time due to all that rain. Most of the potatoes rotted, and many sprouted and grew new plants.

Phaseolus beans - i.e. regular green beans, dried beans, and limas, from the Americas - are producing now but did poorly over the summer. African and Asian Vigna beans, cowpeas and long beans, have done very well. We also have a nice crop of mung beans coming along, though I don't know if they will have time to mature and dry on the plant (started them late). Also started late and not likely to mature completely, the sorghum, shown here next to its African neighbor cowpeas:

At least the sorghum is still alive, unlike its relative popcorn, a total bust (stink bugs and weather, as well as a poorly-selected location between Jerusalem artichokes and sunflowers).

Carrots did well this year, despite rabbits chewing on the greens, and now that the harlequin bugs seem to have vanished, the few fall greens that germinated in all that rain should produce nicely. I have a fantastic crop of cutting celery, which has now formed stalks thick and tender enough to qualify as snacking celery, at least that's what I was doing Tuesday. And we also had some beautiful celeriac, grown for its bulb. Also some lettuce, and a bumper crop of upland cress.

Malabar spinach on left, hyacinth beans right

As usual, the Malabar spinach grew fast and thick in the hot days of late summer, even though it got off to a slower start than usual:

And as always we had plenty of mouse melons! We also had success with several useful flower crops, but I'll wait for Garden Bloggers' Bloom Day to post about those.

So, some real successes, some significant disappointments. Time to regroup, think about how to do better next year (assuming that there will be horrible weather and lots of pests), and reread the late great Henry Mitchell:

Now the gardener is the one who has seeneverything ruined so many times that (even as his pain increases with eachloss) he comprehends - truly knows - that where there was a garden once, it canbe again, or where there never was, there yet can be a garden so that all whosee it say, "Well, you have favorable conditions here. Everything growsfor you." Everything grows for everybody. Everything dies for everybody,too.

There are no green thumbs or black thumbs. There are only gardeners andnon-gardeners. Gardeners are the ones who ruin after ruin get on with the highdefiance of nature herself, creating, in the very face of her chaos andtornado, the bower of roses and the pride of irises.

And the pride of beans and tomatoes, too! Next year we'll have them, perfect and in abundance... defying stink bugs and hurricanes along the way.

Happy October!

Smarter Food: New Washington Post series

2011-10-05T07:54:00.001-04:00

School gardens & nutrition education = fresh, local ingredients to school fare. To read “The pizza starts here,” by Jane Black in today’s Food Section of the Washington Post, CLICK HERE.

My pumpkins's new friends

2011-09-28T23:56:00.002-04:00

Ladies and Gentlemen, I’d like to introduce you to my newest ‘friend’:

Public this is pickleworm - Pickleworm, this is public

According to the University of Maryland Home and Garden Information Center (HGIC), this pest, a member of the Lepidoptera family, immigrates from the south to Maryland every summer to lay eggs on your favorite cucurbit cultivars: cucumber and summer squash. They also like, to different tastes, watermelon, muskmelon, cantaloupe, winter squash, pumpkin, and gourd. No cultivar is resistant but the damage will vary dependent on the variety. Also, the damage is not limited to the fruit but to the flowers and vines as well.

Fun fact: at this year’s Alaska state fair, a 1700lb Cucurbita maxima - a variety of giant pumpkin - was disqualified because of a tiny hole on the bottom of the pumpkin. :(

In our garden, pickleworms attacked the pumpkins, but not the squash, zucchini, cantaloupe or watermelons. We suspect the pickleworms destroyed the female pumpkin flowers.

As opposed to the cucumber and summer squash, where if you find a hole you must discard the fruit, a pumpkin - according to the HGIC - can be saved if the fruit has not rotted.

Let the fun begin!

At first look, these pumpkins look good except for some 1/8” holes.

But not all holes lead to a tunnel.

But sometimes, yes. Ewww!

and look who’s here! A squash vine borer ! Re-Ewww!

Once a pumpkin is cut open, you can see where the damage is.

But then once cleaned, it looks like nothing happened.

One last question rests on suspense: What to do with the pumpkins?
Answer: Pumpkin bread!

(Thanks to my wife, Donna, for making such a lovely loaf, or two, or four…)

Beans, apples, grass: Washington Post gardening articles

2011-09-28T19:33:00.001-04:00

Heirloom snap beans, 10 apple varieties, goose grass—here are links to three recent Washington Post articles about gardening:

For Barbara Damrosch’s “A Cook’s Garden” column about Italian heirloom snap beans, such as Garrafal Oro, Yellow Anellino, and Anellino di Trento, CLICK HERE.

For Tony Rosenfeld’s article about apples, “What’s to be done with you, Elstar and Matsu?” which includes a sidebar with photos of 10 “new” varieties with short descriptions of tastes, uses, and seasons, CLICK HERE.

For Patterson Clark’s “Urban Jungle” column on goose grass, the tough weed we love to hate but in a pinch could eat its seeds, CLICK HERE.

You know it's too wet when...

2011-09-27T18:34:00.000-04:00

... you have mushrooms in the salad table. I'm sorry, but - mushrooms. In my salad table. At least they're small.

No, I am not going to put them in my salad.

Aside from that, the fall salad table is doing nicely with a successful crop of lettuce and arugula.

I could wish (as could many of you, I'm sure) that the year's rainfall had evened itself out a little, but at least what's still alive is growing, and we've been made aware of any drainage issues we might need to deal with. Every cloud has a lining that's all shiny with knowledge and learning, hm?

*mutters* Mushrooms... hmph.

The failure of one thing

2011-09-23T08:06:00.000-04:00

Hyacinth beans at Monticello

Last Saturday, I had a wonderful time attending the Heritage Harvest Festival at Monticello, where along with enjoying the food and vendors and music, I took two fabulous tours of the vegetable garden, the first, with a seed-saving theme, given by Pat Brodowski, the head vegetable gardener, who is full of useful knowledge and happy to share it, and the second led by Peter Hatch, director of gardens and grounds at Monticello. Hatch's new book, Thomas Jefferson's Revolutionary Garden, will be out in the spring, and his tour was a rehearsal for a new special tour based on the book (you can go and take the tour next year! It was great!).

Hatch can quote Jefferson's Garden Book sideways and upside down, and one point he brought out that I really appreciated after this rather disappointing gardening year was that failure is inevitable in gardening, and that Jefferson failed perhaps more often than the average gardener, or at least unflinchingly recorded his disasters in more detail. He wrote "The failure of one thing is repaired by the success of another" -- we always do seem to get balance in the end, or enough successes to want to keep going, and we can always learn from our failures and turn them into successes in the long run.

Failures in the garden, to me, seem to come in two categories, which I will ineloquently call the "oopsies" and the "oh wells." The oopsies are actual mistakes, that might have been avoided with better research or just remembering that you knew better, e.g. putting the tomatoes too close together, thereby inviting lack of air circulation, disease, and handy pathways for stink bugs. The oopsies are what I'm going to work hard on repairing next year in the demo garden: lots of trials of options and techniques for common plants like beans and squash and cucumbers, none of which I had much luck with this year.

The "oh wells" are things you can't help, mostly having to do with weather or, to a lesser extent (this is the oopsy-oh well gray area), pests. We had our share of both this year, from voracious rabbits and bugs to horrible heat and torrential rain. Remember my last post about the cucuzzi gourds and what Hurricane Irene did to them? Well, straightening up the arbor didn't actually help, and after Tropical Storm Lee's week of rain, this is what the cucuzzis looked like:

It was, I admit, less of an "oh well" and more of a "oh %&$!!" - I was really looking forward to showing off those huge gourds at the Harvest Festival next weekend (October 1, 11-6, hope to see you there!). But weather happens, and things do fall over and die sometimes. Alas.

I'm reluctant to trumpet our successes in the next week for fear of tempting fate, but we do have them! And we learn from successes as well, even if it's sometimes along the lines of "wow, I didn't expect that to work." One of the great things about Jefferson as gardener was that he wasn't afraid to try new things; some of them worked in his Virginia climate and some didn't, but they all added to our knowledge. And one of the great things about YOU as gardener is that you can do that too, even without a place like Monticello (or the much smaller and less efficient Derwood Demo Garden) to experiment upon. Successes, admittedly, are usually tastier than failures, but both can be valuable, and you shouldn't be afraid of either.

Happy gardening!

Tomato Patch: Beginning of an early end?

2011-09-21T06:00:00.000-04:00

Tomato Patch 2011: An early end?

Sometimes the Tomato Patch gets too much of a good thing—rain.

Early in the season I searched the sky for signs of rain clouds as I filed my drip-irrigation buckets. In the last month we’ve had abundant rain, and then some, from Hurricane Irene and Tropical Storm Lee. Weather data for nearby BWI Marshall Airport reports seven inches of precipitation above normal to date for September and more than 12 inches above normal for the year.

The effects of all the extra moisture are evident in the Tomato Patch. Many of the plants are dying from early blight and from a variety of leaf-spot diseases. Such plant dieback is pretty much an annual event—but one that usually concerns me in October, not September.

Now chilling out in our freezer

Realizing that Tomato Patch 2011 is ending early, I picked about 20 Celebrity tomatoes at breaker stage on Sunday and took them into the garage to fully ripen and picked nearly two colanders of paste-type tomatoes—Super Marzano, Big Mama, and Juliet—and then made 16 cups of sauce, which are now in our freezer. Tuesday, as a heavy drizzle began what the forecast calls another damp week, I removed the 10 drip-irrigation buckets from the Tomato Patch and hosed them clean inside and out.

What’s left in the Tomato Patch? Not much—a few Celebrities that I’ll pick and move into the garage when they show a bit of color—and a handful or two, perhaps, of smaller varieties—Sungolds and Juliets.

And I’ve had a strange thought for September—that I should start thinking about shutting down the Tomato Patch. Some of my tomato-growing friends have told me they’ve already done that. But somehow shutting down the Tomato Patch and pulling up the spent vines is something I should do in October, not September.

Maybe I’ll think about that drastic step for 10 days.

Reminder - This Saturday September 24, Carroll County Sweetpotato Expo

2011-09-20T13:15:00.006-04:00

Saturday, September 24, 2011 2-4PM

UMC Core Center Demonstration Food Garden(Behind Shipley Arena at Carroll Agriculture Center)

Come out & meet our own Mr. Sweetpotato

Activities include Games; Contests

Be sure to bring your biggest Sweetpotato

Bring your Best Sweetpotato Pie

Wear your Best Sweetpotato Hat

- Most original

- Funniest

- Looks most like a sweetpotato

Tomato Patch: Is it "mealy, mushy" time?

2011-09-16T11:00:00.000-04:00

Celebrity tomatoes (and a stink bug)
when the temperature was under 50 this morning

The thermometer got me to thinking this morning. It was 43.7°F just before sunrise, the lowest temperature in the Tomato Patch since I set out the plants in May.

Most veggie gardeners know tomatoes are “warm weather” plants, not “cool weather” plants such as chard, turnips, broccoli, and cauliflower. Many articles about tomatoes warn not to put them into your refrigerator because the 40°F temperature there will turn them “mealy” or “mushy.”

That was my concern this morning I read the outdoor temperature on our digital thermometer. Will my “big reds” turn mealy at that temperature? I vaguely remembered a Washington Post article I had read on the subject years ago, and after some searching on the Internet I found it.

The article is “Chilling Thoughts,” by Robert L. Wolke, professor emeritus of chemistry at the University of Pittsburgh when he wrote this article at the beginning of the tomato season in 2005. Here’s the question he addressed: “Why is it that people say it ruins a tomato to put it in the refrigerator? How can this be?”

I’ll skip his comment about flavor chemicals, which he says do not decompose at cold temperatures. He then addresses “texture,” which gets us to “mealy” or “mushy.” Here’s the key part of Wolke’s answer: “Tomatoes can suffer … ‘chilling injury’ if held at temperatures below about 50 degrees…. The nature and extent of the injury—which mostly involves changes in the tomato’s texture rather than its flavor—depends not only on the temperature and duration of chilling but also on the fruit’s ripeness. That’s why no simple generalization can be made about the effect of refrigeration on tomatoes.”

The important factors: temperature + duration + ripeness. Temperature factor is any temperature below 50°. For duration, long-term chilling is worse than short-term. On ripeness, Wolke explains that chilling tomatoes not fully ripe stops the ripening process and prevents development of full flavor and color.

How do I apply Wolke’s refrigerator principles to what’s happening in the Tomato Patch? Nighttime temperatures are starting to dip below 50°. A few dips probably won’t do much damage to taste or texture, especially to fully ripe fruit, but as the weeks pass and low temperatures increase in length, damage potential increases, especially on tomatoes not fully ripe—the kind still growing in the Tomato Patch.

I plan to keep an eye on my tomatoes—the ones the stink bugs didn’t pinprick beyond edibility or the rains of Hurricane Irene and Tropical Storm Lee didn’t split—and at some point start picking and moving the best looking ones into the garage as protection both from late-season stink bugs and frigid nighttime temperatures.

I don’t plan to start moving them this week. I’ll monitor local weather forecasts and the condition of remaining tomatoes. If we have especially cold nights in late September or early October, perhaps I’ll some top-quality breaker-stage tomatoes into the garage. If the nights stay relatively warm, perhaps I’ll move none.

Alas, fall is coming. A killing frost will visit many of our gardens within the next month or so. The end of Tomato Patch 2011 is a sad thought, but then in a few weeks the seed catalogs will begin arriving to jump start our fantasies about Tomato Patch 2012.

If you’re a genuine tomato freak and wish to read Wolke’s Post column, CLICK HERE.

White Hats and Black Hats

2011-09-15T16:02:00.008-04:00

by: Dale Johnson

As a child in the early 60’s, I would turn the black and white TV on and more often than not, there would be a western on. I instantly knew who the good guys were and who the bad guys were. Roy Rogers, the Lone Ranger, and Jared & Heath Barkley wore white hats and the bad guys all wore black hats (Nick Barkley was kind of a jerk). Nowadays things aren’t so clear. In movies you don’t know who the good guys are or who the bad guys are until the end of the show. In the garden, you may or may not be able to tell who the good guys are and who the bad guys are. For example, in the following photo, it is easy to tell who the good guys are because they are wearing white hats.

This is a horn worm that has been eating my tomatoes – a real bad guy! The white hats are eggs implanted by a parasitic wasp. The larvae from these eggs will kill this horn worm. GO! GO! GO! The Lone Ranger rides again! And there are a whole bunch of Lone Rangers!

Now, check out this guy! Is he a good guy or a bad guy?

Obviously he is a bad guy because he has spines on his back and he had been eating my raspberry plant with that mean looking mouth. Not so! He is a good guy – an assassin bug. Look what he is doing in this photo.

He is sucking the guts out of a stink bug that has been eating my raspberries. GO! GO! GO! I feel like I am watching the Roy Rogers rolling around in the dirt with a bad guy, knowing in advance who is going to win the fight. This one of the funnest parts of gardening, watching the good guys battle it out to save my garden from the bad guys and knowing who is going to win.

My stink-bug trap experiment

2011-09-14T08:54:00.000-04:00

When it came to natural disasters, stink bugs were worse than Hurricane Irene for many of our vegetable gardens this summer, and we all are asking, “What can we do?” One possibility is to use commercially available stink bug traps. I’ve just posted a report about my two-week experiment with one such trap. If you’re interested, CLICK HERE.

And if you didn’t read Erica Smith’s posting about stink bugs here on the Grow It Eat It blog yesterday, take a few minutes and check it out and follow the great links she’s included. I especially enjoyed Mike Raupp’s video about how to keep the stink bugs out of your home and his “Bug of the Week” report, which includes a short video of a praying mantis eating a stink bug.

Go Mantis!

To eat a stink bug

2011-09-13T16:32:00.000-04:00

I just wanted to call your attention to two encouraging posts/videos on Mike Raupp's Bug of the Week blog:

Chinese praying mantis eats brown marmorated stink bug

Black and yellow garden spider captures stink bug

Enjoy!

I for one am seeing many fewer bmsbs in the garden these days and more in my house: the nights are getting colder. But please encourage the praying mantises and spiders, for next year!

Here's another video: Keeping Stinkbugs Out of Your House. Good timing!

Frugal Gardener: My $13.67 greenhouseperhaps

2011-09-12T07:00:00.000-04:00

My $13.67 greenhouseperhaps

Finally one of my dreams has come true: I have a greenhouseperhaps. I bought it for $13.67 at Wal-Mart Saturday night. I prepared it for installation in less than an hour using one tool, a carpet knife. Installation in our garden took five minutes.

I’ve oohed and aahed at greenhouses through the years as I’ve leafed through gardening catalogs. Greenhouse kits for “serious home gardeners” range upward from about $700. But, really, I’ve told myself, a greenhouse doesn’t fit well on our hillside lot. And, Frugal Me, I’ve often thought that buying a greenhouse just isn’t too practical for someone who probably won’t be doing “a lot” of gardening 10 years from now. But, yes, I still pause and fantasize when I see a greenhouse in a catalog.

Recently I thought that maybe I should “think small.” Why not “build” a very small greenhouse to see how long I can get lettuce to grow in our garden as winter approaches. I’d call it my greenhouseperhaps until I see if it really works.

I decided to buy a large, translucent, plastic storage container to serve as my greenhouseperhaps. I’d cut out the bottom, and I could use the top to protect plants growing inside from downpours or even light frosts or snow flurries.

I cut out the center of the bottom

At Wal-Mart I surveyed available clear or translucent storage containers of varying sizes. I paid particular attention to heights (so the plants have room to grow) and bottoms (to be cut out so I can plant directly into the garden soil). I chose a Sterilite 105-quart box that is 13 ¾” high by 19 ¾” wide by 83 1/8” long. Price: $13.67.

I bought the Sterilite box because I thought the bottom was more soft than rigid so would surrender quickly to my knife. When I began to cut I discovered the going slow because the sides are molded thicker where they meet, though the center rectangle of the bottom is thinner than its edges. I used the carpet knife to cut along the line where the thicker edges met the center of the bottom. This “five-minute job” took nearly 45. The bottom edges that remain will help anchor the greenhouseperhaps.

My new greenhouseperhaps is now installed in the garden. I’ve planted three-week young Simpsons Curled and Red Sails lettuce seedlings in one row and Red Sails seeds in another. About six hours after I planted the lettuce, dark clouds ushered in a 20-minute downpour and I rushed to put on the lid to protect the transplants. I think the “click handles” will keep the lid in place during fairly strong wind gusts.

Ready for frosty weather?

Will my greenhouseperhaps work? I’ll let you know in a month or two. If it works this fall, I think it should work next spring to grow an extra-early crop of lettuce.

I hope my greenhouseperhaps turns into just a plain greenhouse.

And to think it cost only $13.67.

A pomegranate is born

2011-09-11T20:40:00.003-04:00

After five years, the weather this year must have been perfect because, voila...tasted great too, but got only one fruit...

Deer Country: Pawpaw, a native, deer-resistant fruit tree

2011-09-08T20:45:00.001-04:00

Would your landscape benefit from a native, nearly pest-free, fruit tree that deer don’t eat and which produces delectable, custardy fruit and grows well in relatively small, shaded spaces—but stinks?

In her “A Cook’s Garden” column, “Return of the native? Papaws’ proponents,” in the Washington Post, Barbara Damrosch recommends the native pawpaw (Asimina trilobia) tree, which is spelled “papaw” in the story but appears in other sources as “paw paw” and “paw-paw,” in addition to “pawpaw.”

Damrosch’s suggestion sounded interesting so I surfed to Wikipedia, which supplied additional information: This native of eastern North America produces large, edible fruit that tastes something like banana custard. In addition, deer, rabbits, goats, and most insects avoid its “disagreeable smelling” leaves, twigs, and bark, which also contain a natural insect repellant. In his Manual of Woody Landscape Plants, Michael Dirr says the stems have “fetid odor when broken.”

Disagreeable smelling leaves and branches? What about its flowers? Wikipedia describes their “odor” as similar to that of “rotting meat.”

Dirr points out that pawpaw fruit attracts animals, especially raccoons. Wikipedia adds foxes, opossums, squirrels, and black bears. Wikipedia adds that the larvae of the zebra swallowtail butterfly eat the tree’s leaves, which give the butterfly lifelong protection from birds and other predators.

Perhaps the reason pawpaws grow mostly in the wild is their odor potential, but apparently the problem isn’t insurmountable because Damrosch’s article lists nurseries that sell young trees.

If you’re interested in this native, deer- and insect-resistant fruit tree, be fully informed before you invest. Read the Damrosch and Wikipedia articles, which contain photographs, and do additional research. For Damrosch, CLICK HERE. For Wikipedia, CLICK HERE.

Apples !!!!

2011-09-08T10:19:00.009-04:00

To start, we needed some apples from the tree behind the house. In fact, these apples are just a part of what we used.

Next, the apples needed some preparation such as peeling/coring/slicing and removing the stink bug damage. From there, everything is possible with the apple slices.

Et voilà !! Just 9 hours later we have 13 quarts of sauce and 7 quarts of slices. The Grimes Golden apple on the right is a nice 12 ounce specimen for 3.5 inches in diameter; supposedly a normal size for this apple.

Next week-end, it will be time for a more serious business : pie making.

The Dirty Life....

2011-09-08T08:52:00.000-04:00

Hello garden gals and guys! My blog is about all things farming, so I thought I'd share a book that I read today. It's called The Dirty Life: A Memoir of Farming, Food and Love by Kristin Kimball.

Now before you decide not read it, let me tell you that this is one woman's account of how she fell into farming--literally--and the ups and downs that she and her husband faced as they started their new farm.

I read the book in about three days but could have easily read it in one weekend! It was entertaining, educational and just downright funny in some spots. If you've ever thought about having a farm, this book gives you an eye-opening look at what it really takes to run one. Give it a read! There should be a copy at your local library.

Well, that's all for now garden gals and guys! Until next time.....

happy garden thoughts!

Tomato Patch: Ginny's thick & quick tomato sauce

2011-09-05T19:43:00.001-04:00

Ready to make sauce

My tomato sauces for years were, well, unremarkable. To be honest, sometimes I thought they were more like tomato juice than sauce. I read magazine and newspaper articles and answers to Frequently Asked Questions in my quest for recipes and how-to-do-it tips that would give me a reasonable amount of thick sauce in a reasonable amount of time.

I blanched and peeled and cooked. I put raw tomatoes in the blender and then tried to separate thick from thin. I cooked tomatoes and put them through our food mill and then cooked them some more. The result usually was a sauce so thin that it barely stained the pasta through which it ran to the plate. Saucy friends winked and told us how to resolve this dilemma: add a can of store-bought tomato paste to thicken the thin when we used it.

This year, I vowed to “get it right.” I cooked, milled, cooked, and simmered two batches for more than three hours last month. One batch yielded three cups and the other four of thin sauce. I shook my head and said to myself, “They’re still too juicy. I should have simmered them another hour or two.”

Enough of this culinary futility, I thought. Five hours of work that yields four cups of thin sauce isn’t reasonable. The greater bargains in time, effort, and thickness seemed to sit in bottles on shelves of the pasta aisle of our local Giant Food store.

Tomato pieces ready to start simmering

So I surrendered, and when friends visited last weekend, I gave a whole bucket plus a plastic grocery-store bag of paste tomatoes to Ginny B., who said she wanted to make sauce. A day or so later she called to thank me for the tomatoes.

“How many cups did you get?” I asked, thinking she might have gotten ten or twelve.

“Twenty-nine,” she replied, “and they’re all in the freezer.”

“Twenty-nine?” I couldn’t believe it. “Were they juicy like the sauce I make?”

“No, it was thick.”

“What’s your secret?”

Ginny told me how she makes her thick and quick tomato sauce, and I’ve now made three batches. I have to admit that I’m back in the tomato sauce business again. I worked on the third batch on Labor Day morning. Here’s how I did it:

This made the difference

I started with about a half bucket of large paste tomatoes—Big Mamas and Super Marzanos—and a quarter colander of Juliets, a small paste- or Roma-type tomato usually used for snacking. I washed them, cored them, gouged out the gel and seeds with my thumb, cut off any damaged or otherwise objectionable parts, cut the good stuff into chunks, and filled a six-quart pan nearly to the top. I brought the tomatoes to slow boil and then simmered them for about 50 minutes. Then I used a measuring cup to put two-cup batches into our blender and pressed “blend” to break down all the remaining tomato parts. The measuring cup helped keep things fairly neat and gave me an idea of how much sauce I’d made.

While I was blending the tomatoes, I sautéed an onion and four or five garlic cloves in olive oil in another large pan. As I finished blending each small batch of tomatoes, I added them to the simmering onion-garlic mix. When I had all the tomatoes in the second pot, I added some salt and simmered the sauce for another 20 minutes. Just three or four minutes from the end of the cooking time, I added a handful of thinly sliced basil from our garden.

The sauce was beautiful, thick, and delicious. It filled three three-cup freezer containers. I spent about an hour preparing the tomatoes and another hour for the cooking. Bottom line: I had doubled the amount of thick sauce in less than half the time.

Beautiful, thick, delicious

All things considered, I think I’ll call this sauce recipe “Ginny’s Thick & Quick Tomato Sauce.” Thank you, Ginny. I’ve adapted the procedure from Ginny’s explanation, and if you try to make sauce this way, adapt my outline to your taste and the way you think you want your sauce to taste.

Ginny, for example, doesn’t remove all the seeds from the tomatoes. She sautés onion and garlic at the beginning and then adds the fresh tomatoes for cooking. She adds leaves from a couple of sprigs of thyme for additional herbal kick. She adds fresh basil at the very end, just as she removes turns off the heat.

What tips do you suggest to make this thick-and-quick tomato sauce even better?

Grow It. Eat It.

Sweet shop for wasps?

2011-09-03T10:27:00.000-04:00

The Red Noodle yardlong beans at the demo garden didn't get picked this week - here's why:

If you can't see well enough, click to enlarge; it was hard to get a good photo, but those are wasps on the stems, just below flower and/or pod. The whole bed of long beans was humming with many different species of wasps, from yellow jackets to European hornets, every size and color.

I was a little nervous about getting stung, so I didn't harvest, though I probably didn't need to worry. I also wondered why they were there! Apparently (I found after doing some searching on the 'net) this is a pretty common phenomenon with Vigna unguiculata varietes (our cowpeas were buzzing too, though not as much). The insects are not in the flowers, looking for nectar and pollen; they are likely sucking up something sweet exuded by the plant stems. It is possible (this has been documented in other plant species) that the plant is doing this "on purpose" in order to attract the wasps. Why, if they are not helping with pollination? Long beans attract aphids and several kinds of caterpillars, which can be destructive. Some types of wasps prey on aphids and caterpillars, usually carrying them off to feed to their young. Having wasps visit might be helping the plants survive attacks.

All I can say is, the last time I grew long beans they were covered with aphids, and this year I've had no problems. I'm happy to keep the wasps happy, because they do a lot of good in the garden generally.

Will the wasps sting me if I try to pick the beans? Probably not: they looked pretty mellow, like most stinging insects when engaged in feeding. Grabbing the stems to pull the beans off might not be a good plan, so I'll use pruners to clip the beans off. I'll keep an eye out for any wasps acting aggressively, as that means their nest might be nearby. Otherwise, we can share the space - and the beans!

Tomato Patch: Do They Have More Fun in Spain?

2011-09-02T12:09:00.000-04:00

Tired of weeding your Tomato Patch? Tired of fighting the stink bugs? Tired of uprighting tomato cages tilted by a passing hurricane? Maybe you’re itching for a good tomato fight.

When I was a teenager in New Jersey and picked tomatoes, it was a big no-no to throw tomatoes at another picker, however inviting on occasion that might have been. But revelers in Buñol, Spain, during the last 70 years or so have perfected the art of throwing tomatoes at each other during their annual “Tomatina.”

The juice and—dare I call it—sauce sometimes get deep enough for body surfing. Really—I kid you not.

To see photos from this year’s “Tomatina,” CLICK HERE. And don’t those red projectiles appear to be Romas or a similar paste-type variety?

Smile. And, please, no throwing tomatoes in your garden.

Balloons in the demo garden

2011-09-01T14:45:00.000-04:00

The challenge: MG Barbara Dunn needed to update portions of her map of the Derwood Demo Garden. She often uses publicly available images such as satellite photos to aid in mapping, but wanted a closer view: aerial photos from perhaps 15-20 feet up.

What we all got to watch on Tuesday: Barbara launching a camera with a timer, attached to a bunch of helium balloons.

Bracing strings tried to keep the balloons steady in the air, but even the small camera turned out to be too much weight, and the lift wasn't great enough.

Solution: more balloons! (This is always a good solution as far as I'm concerned.)

That gave the camera more launch, but still not enough to counteract the breeze.

A steadying influence was needed, and we happened to have a lot of extra bamboo poles lying around. However, the straight-up-in-the-air method produced a photo of the pole with Barbara looking at up it. Whoops!

Another pole was taped on, and the camera was steady if not quite as high as originally desired.

Okay, so she was photographing the vegetable garden, but otherwise this is not a very Grow-It-Eat-It post (I feel rather hungry for birthday cake, however). But in case you ever find yourself needing to take an aerial photo of your garden, this is one method. (With the poles, the balloons may not be strictly necessary, but probably they save a little muscle work. And they certainly look cheerful.) Barbara is interested in trying another technique involving kites...

Ooh, she really DID!

2011-08-30T13:42:00.000-04:00

Today was demo garden workday at Derwood, and I was anxiously waiting to see what happened as a result of the hurricane. Well, on the whole we didn't fare too badly - some tree limbs down in the shade garden and a few other plants knocked down or broken. But then there were the cucuzzis. Here's the cattle panel arch (plus next door bamboo trellis) covered with huge gourd vines, a couple of weeks ago:

And here's the same arch when we arrived today:

Right over on its side, pulling the bamboo trellis partway over as well! But, with MG muscle, some big metal stakes, and lots of twine, we got things righted again. A few of the gourds had broken, but we still have plenty of giant ones: I measured one at 46" last week.

We also spent a lot of time tying up Jerusalem artichokes that had crashed down on top of other plants. But really we were very lucky.

More demo garden adventures to come, including why we looked like someone was having a birthday today...

Oh Yes, she DID!

2011-08-29T11:23:00.002-04:00

She came and went wreaking much havoc in her wake. Four of our trees, with the help of a soggy soil, needed to be straightened after Irene visited us Saturday night. The biggest tree of the lot was one of our apples trees. Bad hurricane, bad girl.

On the first picture, this is the tree standing a week before the storm.

After Irene.

After some efforts from my wife, Donna, and me.

Big job need big ropes.

The good side is I didn't have to climb a ladder to pick the ripe apples on the top of the tree.

These are the apples only found on the ground. The red ones are from the other apples tree.

Oh No she DIDN'T!!!!!

2011-08-28T07:32:00.004-04:00

So...I blog pretty regularly here. If you've ever read one of my posts you may have noticed that I end each blog with either "happy gardening" or "happy garden thoughts" (when the garden season is over or not yet begun).

*Ahem* Well apparently I guess I am just a little too happy and Ms. Thing--otherwise known as Irene--tried to do my happy hind parts in.

Yes, we weathered the storm last night. Just a lot of rain and wind. I didn't know it but my hubby said the power went out for about 30 seconds at around 11:45pm. I didn't even know...I was fast asleep. Well, I woke up this mornin' just happy (see....there's that word again) that things didn't get crazy.

Then my phone rings. It's 6:00AM. I'm thinking it's my parents calling to see if we are OK. Nope. It's my neighbor Steve. Here's how the conversation went down:

Me: "Hey Steve!" (I saw his name on the caller ID)
Steve: "Hey, honey, I'm sorry about the damage to your cage."
Me (inside voice): Oh damn, what the (&$#(&#(& happened now?!
Me(outside voice): "What do you mean?"
Steve: "My tree fell on your garden cage."
Me: (silence as I run to the back window) "Oh. I see it. OK. It just looks like the branches are leaning on the chicken wire. None of the beams are broken."
Steve: "Honey, we are getting that tree removed as soon as possible and will pay for any damage."
Me: "Aww thanks, Steve."

Then I went outside to get a closer look to be sure there was no damage and here is what I saw:

As I took this picture I said in my Diva attitude voice: "Irene, no you didn't just try to take out my cage!"

I don't need to remind y'all of what happened to my cage during Snowmageddon:

Well, I immediately get "happy" again to spite her! The roots from that tree always kept me from planting deep on the left side of the cage and it also blocks out the morning sun.

So I guess I should be thanking Irene. Yeah, whateverrrrrr! She still tried to do my cage in!

Well, I'm going to read more about hydroponics, y'all!

Until next time.....

Don't worry....be HAPPY!!

Damrosch: Are veggie gardeners snobbish, elitist, unkind?

2011-08-26T11:41:00.001-04:00

Barbara Damrosch, the Washington Post’s “A Cook’s Garden” columnist is at her best when she’s ranting, and her latest column is a glorious rant. Three cheers—two thumbs up—for Barbara Damrosch!

Example: “I don’t care how much you earn, how fine a car you drive or what college your child attends. If you eat flavorless food, low in nutrients, grown in lifeless soil, you are poor….”

To enjoy her seven paragraphs, CLICK HERE.

Note to the Washington Post: Please tell the editor who wrote the headline for Damrosch’s column, “Jejune produce in August,” to throw away those flashcards for “1,000 Words to Dumbfound Your Readers.”

Tomato Patch: Getting ready for Hurricane Irene

2011-08-25T07:00:00.002-04:00

Ready for Irene

Just how much trauma can the Tomato Patch take in one week—a 5.9 earthquake on Tuesday and a brush with Hurricane Irene on Friday or Saturday?

The earthquake had no visible effect on the Patch. I haven’t found one tomato that I think the quake shook from a vine. But I am concerned about the effect the passing hurricane may have this weekend.

In recent years, August has been a relatively dry month with our lawn of crabgrass reduced to stubble and me dreaming of late-afternoon showers of relief for our gardens. But this August is different. Our lawn is bright green, and the official weather data reported in the Washington Post indicates that BWI, our nearest airport, has recorded 5.30” of rain so far this month, compared to the normal 2.49”.

Now the weather news is about Hurricane Irene and what her effect may be on the mid-Atlantic states. The latest computer models indicate Irene most likely will parallel the coast as it moves north and possibly give eastern portions of our area “damaging winds” and “flooding rain.”

The Tomato Patch already has good moisture from recent summer downpours. Several more inches of “flooding rain” combined with “damaging winds” could topple some of my less-protected tomato cages, especially those with tall, indeterminate vines now top-heavy with late-season fruit. Softened soil plus top-heavy tomato plants plus wind gusts easily can topple tomato cages.

Wednesday morning I picked two buckets of break-stage tomatoes—Brandwine, Virginia Sweets, Super Marzano, and Big Mama. Moving their weight from the top of their vines to a counter in our garage should help keep my tomato cages upright if Irene’s rains and winds come our way.

And today I plan to reinforce three cages that recent summer storms have tilted a bit and, if the soil is dry enough, I’ll do a little extra hilling around my young fall vegetables—rutabagas, turnips, beets, and lettuce—to help them resist the downpours that probably will come this weekend.

Gingered Butternut Soup

2011-08-23T08:49:00.001-04:00

Recently, I picked a small butternut squash from my garden; one of many we have growing freely. The question was, what to do with this guy? We can say the same thing with an apple from one of our apple trees found on the ground. Both fruits have damage from sucking bugs. If the apple was damaged recently, the butternut squash was damaged way back in the early stage of its development.

Short story, I found some inspiration and adapted some recipes into this one.

Ingredients:

2 tablespoons olive oil
1 small onion, diced
1 large carrot, peeled & diced
1 large boiling potato, peeled & diced
1 small butternut squash, peeled and seeded, diced
1 medium tart apple, peeled, cored, and diced
0.5 inch piece ginger, peeled and grated
2 garlic cloves, roughly chopped
3 cups veggie stock, chicken stock or water
Few leaves of basil
Salt and pepper to taste. *
*It's time to use your special salt. I used Apple Smoked Salt from the Maine Sea salt Co.

Heat the olive oil in a 2.5 quart pot over medium heat. Add the onion, ginger, garlic and cook for 2 minutes. Add the potatoes, squash, apples, carrots, cover and cook for five minutes, stirring occasionally.
Add the stock or water. Bring to a boil over high heat, then cover and reduce the heat to maintain a simmer. Stir occasionally, until all the vegetables are very tender, 10 minutes or more depending on the size of your dice.
Remove from heat, add salt, pepper and basil and carefully purée with an immersion blender until smooth. If the soup is too thin for your taste return to a boil until the desired consistency.
Serve hot.

Tomato Patch: Coping with stink bugs

2011-08-23T07:00:00.004-04:00

They're back on the windows

“Where are the stink bugs this year?” friends asked in May and June.

“Outside breeding so we’ll have a generous supply trying to figure out how to get into our homes in September and October,” I usually replied. It’s late August now, and the brown marmorated stink bugs have started to show up on our windows and sunning themselves on the western sides of our homes in late afternoon.

I’ve seen them all summer, of course, in our gardens. Their favorite foods at Meadow Glenn include tomatoes, raspberries, blackberries, green beans, cucumbers, and squash.

Stink bugs dining on Virginia Sweets tomato

In the Tomato Patch, the stink bugs seemed especially attracted to two large-fruited varieties, Virginia Sweets and Brandywine Red. Virginia Sweets is a large yellow tomato with reddish blush. Perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised that the stink bugs like the big yellow because researchers have found the bugs have some preference for that color. I haven’t figured out why the bugs preferred the Brandywine Red to the nearby Brandywine (Sudduth’s Strain) fruit.

The small Sungolds seem untouched, though I haven’t used a magnifying glass to verify that fact. The larger red Juliets showed minimal damage, though I think my picking at “breaker stage” this year helped minimize the bug attacks.

Brandywine with stink bug "pinpricks"

In mid-June, when I saw the carnage the stink bugs were starting on our berries and tomatoes and realized my daily attempts to control the bugs by drowning them into soapy water was not going to be effective, I balanced the risks and began periodic spraying with a commonly available garden spray, Ortho Max Lawn & Garden Insect Killer (bifenthrin), which lists stink bugs among the insects it kills. I strictly following directions and the more stringent California “days to harvest” after each spray. My decision to use a pesticide was difficult because I have had an essentially organic garden for at least 10 years.

Within 10 days the number of stink bugs went from “impossibly high” to “seldom seen.” Last year we harvested few raspberries, and those we did were usually stink-bug damaged. This year we harvested many quarts of beautiful berries. Last year we threw away many of our large tomatoes because of stink-bug damage. This year we have eaten most.

I've turned off the night light

Before dawn Sunday morning I found evidence of the stink bug hordes that soon will be seeking ways into our homes for protection from cold weather. As I stepped out of the garage to walk to our mailbox to get the Sunday Post, something caused me to glance up at the overhead night light. Scores of stink bugs swarmed around the light. Sunday night for the first time in 15 years I turned off the light.

Scientists from multiple disciplines are studying brown marmorated stink bugs and how they may be managed. I posted earlier about the EPA’s approval of pesticides for stone and pome fruits and for organic growers and about USDA experiments with tiny, parasitic wasps. An excellent overview of what’s happening is the University of Maryland Extension’s Entomology Bulletin, which details symptoms of the insect’s damage on crops and ornamentals and includes outstanding photographs. To link to the bulletin, CLICK HERE.