Christmas Diversion

I've been a little busy, but in the kitchen rather than the garden.

But since this is a gardening blog, here's the one thing I've accomplished in the garden this week.

First broccoli and cauliflower of the season!

All of this will be represented on the table at Christmas Eve dinner this year. Yum!

December Dig

I finally got around to digging up those potatoes that got zapped by the freeze before Thanksgiving.

Digging with the garden spade was pretty easy thanks to recent rain and all the organic matter in the soil.

From one potato plant

And here's after I dug up the whole row. The potatoes in the bucket are what I got from it. If we didn't have that early freeze the plants would probably still be alive and putting more nutrients into the tubers.

Remember when these little guys were planted?? Way back in August?

You can read the full blog post here. I guess this means the potatoes are the first crop I've blogged start to finish!

Broccoli and Cauliflower and Brussels Sprouts, Oh My!

They're getting close! Well, at least the broccoli and cauliflower are. The Brussels sprouts are just pea-sized buds at this stage.

Almost ready to pick! Waiting for the center florets to develop a little bit more.

Cauliflower crept up on me. They should have been tied up a week ago. In order to keep the heads creamy-white, you need to cover them with the nearby leaves and loosely tie them shut with twine to shade them from the sun.

The Brussels sprouts are not making much progress, but they are healthier than the attempt from this spring.

Better start researching recipes!

Cold Snap

Here's the expected average temperature for the past week:

And here's what it really looked like:

Yup, that's right SEVENTEEN DEGREES. When it's supposed to be in the MID-FORTIES!

Sorry about the all caps. But when one gardens in the south, one counts on those averages for the fall garden to remain alive until harvest.

Here's how my garden survived:

The first few nights when temps flirted with the freezing mark my priority was to cover the frost-susceptible plants. I had a few remaining bell peppers in one tank, and a bed surrounded by spaghetti squash vines. I also had Irish potatoes in two of the beds. These were the priority for covering, as I didn't have a huge amount of time to properly prep.

I use Garden Quilts, which the label says is rated down to 24 but during last winter's single-digit cold snap it kept my broccoli and carrots alive.

I got a few more days out of the garden, which meant I got another dozen peppers picked. Then when the temps threatened to drop into the 20's I went into full winter mode.

The peppers and squash were sacrificed. The Hi-Rise Super Hoops went in. The broccoli, cauliflower, and Brussels sprouts were saved!

The potatoes however did not make it. I guess you can't win them all.

Mid-Fall Update

What does a fall garden in Alabama look like?

Clockwise, from lower left: Spaghetti squash vines, kohlrabi, beets, volunteer Yukon Gold potatoes

Foreground: Dakota Pearl potatoes; Background: parsnips and carrots

Marigolds, cauliflower, Brussels sprouts, broccoli

Sugar peas

Garlic! (shallots in there too, but not up yet)

Trying Turnips

I get sucked into the "exotic" garden produce I see on television cooking shows. Like root vegetables. Granted, as a kid most of our garden-produced vegetables were probably blanched, frozen, and then reheated in the microwave before being finished with a pat of butter and a little salt and/or pepper. Obviously potatoes and squash didn't go this route, but this was the case for green beans, English peas, sweet corn, kohlrabi, beets, and a few others well suited for this type of food preservation.

So imagine my fascination when I see things like parsnips, rutabagas, and turnips appearing in various baked and mashed root vegetable concoctions. Between the camera angles and the hosts' descriptions of the final dish, I was sucked in. And then I see them in the seed catalogs and even my handy ACES Vegetable Planting Guide - I can grow them down here!

After careful planning and selection based on available space, growing days available, and my own curiosity, I dutifully planted carrots, parsnips, and turnips for my fall root vegetables.

My first clue that maybe I should have reconsidered was when my friend's dad asked what they were, and said he had only heard of Southerners growing turnips for the greens. (For the record, I can't stand any type of traditional Southern "greens" whether they be collards or otherwise.)

My second clue was one of my online friends commenting that turnips were an "old person's food" and even though her family was often planting heirloom and heritage crops, they never planted turnips.

Then came the day that the turnips were big enough to begin harvesting.

First I tried them roasted. I scrubbed and cubed them, tossed them with olive oil, herbs, and kosher salt, and set them in the oven at 450 degrees until they were browning on the edges.

Though they had a pleasant aroma, the flavor was decidedly not. I can't quite describe it. I choked down about half of the final product and tossed the rest.

So I set out to begin exploring all of these great turnip recipes I had seen on television. Scalloped, mashed, pureed, I was determined to try several to see if it was just the way I had made it. I saw most recipes called for boiling the turnips in milk or using a milk-based white sauce.

I tried a recipe from a never-failed-me-before website. There was more dairy than turnips in the finished product.

Turnip gratin

Again, though it smelled wonderful, I could only handle a few forkfuls. The slices of turnip ended up just a carrier for the delicious melted cheese and white sauce.

I promptly pulled out the remaining turnips and threw them on the compost bin.

The more things stay the same

Remember this picture from an earlier post?

US Drought Monitor map, Sept. 30, 2014

Of course you do. It's from the last post I wrote. (Sorry about the lack of posts - you should have seen my work calendar last month.)

It doesn't look too much different from this, does it?

US Drought Monitor map, November 4, 2014

Well, not much different for my location anyway, though I still argue that my own little corner of Macon County should be in the tan or mustard yellow zone and not the sunshiny yellow blotch.

See, the more things change, the more they stay the same. Not looking toward the next water bill given how much I've had to run the sprinkler in the garden.

Rain, rain, come this way

This week's Drought Monitor map for Alabama  is featuring some pretty colors, and that's not a good thing.

Originally posted on WSFA Weather's Facebook page. Like them. They're good folks.

Yellow means abnormally dry and tan is moderate drought. My little slice of land hugging the Macon-Lee county line falls in "abnormally dry" but I know from my own rain gauge that I've had 3.6 inches of rain from July 1 to October 1, plus another 0.2 inches yesterday. Average precipitation for that same period of time is around 12.5 inches. I don't think "abnormally dry" is a suitable description of what is going on around here.

How, then, do I keep my garden going in these conditions? I have a few different tools in my arsenal.

Soaker Hoses

I love these things, unless of course I accidentally stab one with my garden spade fork. Snake and loop it around vegetable plants for a growing season, coil around new blackberry bush plantings to encourage root development, or wind around new rosebush plantings and landscape shrubs before putting down the mulch for multi-year irrigation options, lots of uses around here.

Soaker hose hook-up peeking out from under the hay mulch around the blackberry bushes.

In the vegetable garden they work best for me when placed around bigger plants rather than rows. The hoses prefer to take on curving shapes rather than straight lines. It works pretty good to make serpentines around a row of broccoli plants or make a string of loops around tomato plants. This spring I wove it around my row of potato hills and buried it as I added compost and dirt to make the hills.

There is some necessary planning when trying to use these. My preferred brand comes in 25 and 50 foot lengths. Push-in metal garden or landscape pins are necessary to keep the hose anchored where you want.


Two big advantages for using this watering system. First, I can turn on the hose and walk away. When I was getting rosebush plantings established the last few springs I would come home from work, turn on the faucet, and turn it off before going to bed. The other advantage is that you don't have the evaporative or air loss as with sprinklers and other aerial watering. The hose slowly weeps out water which trickles to the ground or, in the case of plantings where the hose is buried under mulch, the water never really reaches a surface where it can evaporate. In other words, excellent water conservation. 

The hardest thing for me about using these is that the hoses are 1/2 inch diameter, and so I have to hunt around a few stores to find a hose repair kit that small. Also, my hoses tend to have a life span of 2-3 years under the best of circumstances. Those that get moved around a lot tend to kink, and that's where the leaks usually start, sometimes in the first year. Those that stay put a while (rosebushes, transplanted trees) usually last a little longer but will weaken if exposed to the sun too long.

Sprinkler

Self explanatory, I hope.

Quick, minimal labor, and easily adaptable to water where needed. Also, stick a rain gauge in the ground and you will know fairly accurately how many inches of water you provide (I aim for 1-2 inches once a week if I go this route).

A couple of drawbacks. My beds are four feet wide with three feet of pathway between. So in the above picture, there is almost just as much square footage of non-growing space getting watered as the actual raised bed area. I try to reduce the waste by putting potted plants and hanging baskets in the walking areas while the sprinkler is running. The other concern is evaporative loss, as some of the water will not ever reach the ground. Evaporative loss is worse on dry, windy days and if watering in the middle of the day when the sun is hottest rather than early morning or evening.

Rain barrels and watering cans

Labor intensive, definitely. Water conserving, certainly.

My barrels are set up to catch rain water off the house roof. Usually a half-inch of rain is all that is needed to fill these three 50-gallon drums. There is a hose bib near the bottom of each barrel and a short hose that is just long enough to reach a watering can.

Three big benefits. First, I'm not paying the municipal water authority for this water as I do for anything that comes out of the faucet. Second, I can easily mix in fertilizer into the watering can as I fill it, not possible with the other methods. Third, I can specifically control which plants receive water and how much. So those super thirsty tomatoes would each get two cans of water whereas the smaller pepper plants would get one can per two-to-three plants.

***
Which one do I use? It depends. This afternoon I had all three going. The sprinkler was getting the raised beds, the rain barrels were used to fill the watering cans for plants outside the range of the sprinkler, and the rosebushes in the front yard (struggling in the drought) were benefiting from the soaker hose I put in three years ago at planting.

Digging the Sweet Potatoes

This is the first year I tried growing sweet potatoes. I put them in one of the water trough raised beds because I thought it would be easier come harvest time.

June 1

July 6

August 28

I must admit, I got a little impatient. Most of the references I checked said 90 days to harvest, so based on the time stamp on the first photo I waited until Labor Day to do a test dig. One tuber was bigger in diameter than a softball, but very oddly shaped - like it grew toward the side of the raised bed and had to double back on itself. The others that came up were on the smaller side so I decided to water deeply several times a week (we were in a mini-drought) and let them go a few more weeks before harvest.

Filling in the walking paths

Finally this week I took the plunge. I started by hacking back the vines, but as I pulled up the vines I discovered the vines had started setting tubers in the mulch and under the weed barrier around the raised beds.

Once I cut back all of the vines and pulled up all of the tubers in the mulch I attacked the ones inside the raised bed. Usually they came up in clumps around where the original sprigs were planted.

 One of the challenges with sweet potatoes is that the skin is rather delicate. I've read that in commercial sweet potato production they have to be hand-dug because mechanical harvest does too much damage. At one point I dug down in the dirt and tried pulling out one really big tuber, and this is what my fingernails did:

 Some were absolutely enormous, others no bigger than a fat finger. For reference, the holes in the sides of my plastic bins are about an inch in diameter. 

So here's all the tubers that came from the mulch. 

And this is what came out of the raised bed. 

What's next? They need to cure in a dry, dark place, and the weather we are having right now apparently is the ideal temperature for curing.

Not sure if I can wait much longer.

Plethora of Peppers

I have eleven bell pepper plants this year.

In some ways I have learned my lesson from previous years. In 2012 and 2013 I planted one red, one yellow, and four green bell peppers (there was a special on the four-pack at the garden center). I have learned that I don't care much for the green ones, or rather the bumper crop of greens that comes with that many plants.

So this year I bought one each of the red, yellow, orange, and green. And then I saw this in the seed catalog:

Sweet Rainbow Mix Peppers - Park Seed

I couldn't resist. I have seven plants from this, but in general you don't know which ones you have until they ripen and change color.

Which leads to my current plethora of peppers. Pecks of peppers. It's a pepper-palooza!

Here's Saturday's harvest:

That doesn't include the six other peppers already in the refrigerator, plus sections of three more from what I had sliced or diced up earlier in the week.

More are on the way. Here's a quick preview from the garden this afternoon. They taste better if they can mature (completely change color) on the plant, so these are several days away from picking.

Yellow

Red

Orange

Purple (matures green)

White (matures red)

Chocolate

Some I give away. Others I'm trying to cook and freeze. Any recipe that uses two or more peppers is fair game, even better if it uses more.

First it was home made pizzas with thinly sliced peppers and red onions. 

Then there was a grilled mix of peppers, mushrooms, and red onion that had been tossed with a teriyaki marinade.  Much easier to manage in a grill basket than on skewers.

Last week I made pork chops with peppers and onions. Probably won't do that one again, it was rather bland and I can't figure out a way to tweak it to make it better. 

Tonight I tried a recipe for one-pot lazy stuffed peppers. Quite tasty, good for using up those partial peppers, and looks like it will freeze well for lunches. I like stuffed bell peppers in concept, but I tend to get overwhelmed with ratio of pepper to filling. And who really wants to eat the same thing every day for a week when a single recipe makes 6 servings unless you really, really like it?

I'm eager to try this beef with peppers stir fry, especially since I loved the way the other beef stir fry recipes from this author/blogger have turned out. Actually, I've loved the way everything from this author/blogger has turned out.

And then there is my favorite basic chicken fajita recipe, though now after having made it a few times I have my little tweaks and adjustments (like adding fresh chopped cilantro, using three bell peppers, Mexican shredded cheese blend, etc.). Probably on the agenda for later in the week.