Final Harvest?

One more generous harvest of raspberries. And some potatoes that I didn't even know were out there!

Low Hanging

Yum!

More Yum!

Spicy green yum!

Healthy and spicy green yum!

One of the amazing things about gardening on the Lake Michigan shoreline is that we have a little micro-climate that supports growth long after things have frozen just a few miles west of us. Our everbearing raspberries are still bearing up a lot of fruit--about 2 full cups on Saturday, and we only have about a dozen plants. They are situated between our house and the fence of the house next door, a distance of about 6 feet. So not only has it only frozen twice this fall, they get heat radiated off the house to keep them growing.

Likewise, the arugula is still doing well. The sawhorses are covered by our white cold frame fabric when necessary (which has only been two nights so far). We hope to have it well into December, for a crisp green salad when our bodies need it most.

Bountiful Pantry

Here is our full pantry shelf. We (or rather, Tim) had time to can this fall.
The top shelf has dried cherry tomatoes in the white bin (a bumper crop!) and salsa to the right; just below that is dilly beans and pickles.
Here're all the canned stewed tomatoes. Not sure how we will manage to use all of these, since we also have a few gallons of pasta sauce in the freezer. And the vegetable delivery continues, bi-weekly, until Thanksgiving. Plus two cabbages and lots of arugula still out in the garden, and about 15 winter squash in the attic. We'll have plenty this winter!

Colorful Dinner

This is the vegetarian saute I made for dinner last night, and wrapped up in a tortilla with some corn salsa. Onions, red peppers, purple cabbage, and spinach, all from our CSA farm box from last week. I sauteed it in bacon fat. Is that so wrong? (the bacon was from the local Farmer's Market--maple cured with no nitrites. OK?)

First Frost!

I don't remember when this was last year, but this year we have a record of it. As soon as I hit publish.

Growth and Decay

Here are some lovely photos from August 15:




Hard to believe this is just 5 weeks ago. The garden is a mess now. The tomatoes have something that is making all the leaves turn brown and limp. It looks like they were hit with frost, but it hasn't been at all cold. I need to keep up better. But it was a lovely summer, cool and green, little rain in July, but plenty after that. Too cool for tomatoes. Not many this year, even though we planted a lot.

Tomatoes on the driveway

Here are the tomatoes which line our driveway. There used to be small shrubs all the way along here, which we took out to make room. This is looking east from the driveway.Click here for an earlier view, looking west, about 6 weeks ago.

Full garden views

Here's the garden, freshly weeded, from the west looking east: Here's the lettuce bed:

Here's a close-up of our new little tomatoes starting. They are about the size of grapes, but I think this variety is one that gets to be about the size of a tennis ball.

Garden looking west from the deck. Note fresh straw between the rows:

Tomatoes and Peas, then and now

Progress--After (trellis is about 7 ft high) July 13th Before: May 25

Kid's eye view

Billy had the camera on Sunday while we were weeding, and took these pictures of plants in the tiered garden off the deck. I like his perspective. Tomato plant: Red Cabbage:

Nasturiums:

Lovely Lilies

For scale! Lilies and one 44 inch tall 4-year-oldbunches of beauty

So many blossoms

Up close and pink

Here is one leftover vestige of the previous owners of our house. He was a landscape architect, so did a lot of nice work, but most of it is in prime veggie growing areas, so we took a lot of it out to make more room for food plants. This bunch we left. They are so beautful and getting more abundant each year. We'll be splitting and planting these all over the yard and giving them to neighbors this fall. They have tomato plants on either side of them, up and down the driveway (see more recent posts).

Lazy gardener

I'm not sure what happened to the last 5 weeks--illness and injury (both minor) have taken up some time, but that's no excuse, really.

The garden is doing pretty well. The tomato plants are huge and starting to flower. We have harvested some small carrots, beets and some bad turnips. I guess planting the turnips and hoping they'll grow isn't going to work. Perhaps I'll read about it before fall planting.

The peas are growing extremely well. Too well, as we are also getting about 2 lbs per week from our CSA.

So we seem to be retaining our title of Tomato Pros. And that is saying something, so I shouldn't complain. Or work too hard on the rest of it.

Making use of space

This is the south side of our driveway... ...and this is the north side:

This otherwise unused space gives us lots of sunny growing areas. The trellises on the side of our house support snow peas (to eat) and sweetpeas and morning glories (for beauty). There are also tomato plants in those cages. They produced wonderfully last year.

Growing and Warmth

Here's our growing boy (with growing squash plants in the background). Kitties (black and blonde) warming up in the sun...

It was the black kitty's idea to come out here and lay in between the rows.

This also gives an idea of the size of the garden (not big!) Posts showing other growing areas to follow...

Tomato plant count

Here are the tomatoes we planted, and the number of each variety:

Australian Oxheart (3)
Black Cherry (3)
Black Krim (3)
Brandywine Yellow (5)
Cherokee Chocolate (4)
Green Zebra (3)
Kellogg's Breakfast tomato (4)
Principe Borghese (4)
Yellow pear (5)

The only new one is the Black Krim. They all have different uses, which I will chronicle as we harvest them.

A Day of Mothering--plants.

Mother's Day, and I'm busily trying to get plants to produce offspring. We put in the entire garden today, planting:

• Leeks
• Summer squash
• Cucumbers
• popcorn
• sunflowers
• other flowers and herbs
• two avocado pits in pots (since we had guacamole for dinner)

transplanting:

• Fennel
• peppers
• herbs
• tomatoes (34 plants in the ground and in pots)

Also discovered the joy of stewed rhubarb this weekend. SO GOOD.

In comparing notes with other midwesterners, we are lucky to be close to the lake, and west of it. It has a moderating effect on the weather--it is supposed to get to 38 degrees tonight, but it is freezing elesewhere. We've been harvesting kale for two weeks. The Rhubarb is hearty and producing well. The tomatoes we transplanted earlier this week are thriving. Will be interesting to see what this does over the years, if it changes, etc.

At any rate, a good day of gardening.

Turnip sprouts!

I have no photographic proof of this, so you'll have to take my word for it, but there are tiny turnip sprouts coming up as of today!

Our seedling set-up

Hard to believe these photos are a month old! This is the set-up on our enclosed front porch where we grow our seedlings. Which means we have a grow-light on in the late-night and early morning hours--I wonder if it annoys dog walkers and the paper delivery person. (I did not know until last year that the light retards growth--it keeps the plants from growing too quickly and getting "leggy" as they do most of their growing in the dark.)

Last weekend (April 18 and 19) we put in the first of our outdoor seeds: Peas, beets, carrots, turnips. We were also delighted to discover that Kale is a perennial--we have Kale coming up in a row in the garden and a few clumps in the front of the house. In a week or two we can harvest and add all those healthy vitamins to our frozen soups.

We had one spring day on Thursday (about 60 degrees) and up to about 75 on Friday. But today it has been raining and the temperature has been dropping so now it is 40 degrees. We hope it doesn't go much lower--the forecast says no. The seeds got a good 5 days of soaking, two warm days, and now they got soaked again. If warmth comes again next weekend, we should see sprouts.

Kitty Assistant

This got edited out by blogger yesterday, and rather than re-post the entire entry, I will give you here a solo photo of our curious kitty, ready to help with the planting. He's the best kitty in the world, and he loves gardening. He hangs out in the garden when we are out there, loves to sidle up and rub against us when we're working. I'd grow a whole garden full of cats if I could be guaranteed that they'd all be so perfect!

Starting

We are using the guidance of this site to begin our seedlings this year:
http://www.yougrowgirl.com/
Here's our seed collection. These are from Victory Seed Company (all heirlooms):

These we bought at the local Stein's Garden Center.

There's a seed starting calculator somewhere on the site http://www.yougrowgirl.com/ but I can't locate it just now. It told us to plant this weekend, so we did.

Then I went to the farmer's market on Saturday and was told it was way too early to be planting seedlings by a very experienced gardener. Sigh. I'm sure it will be fine, and seed pots are enjoying their time in the laundry room on top of the warm, sunny and vibrating dryer (spouse/botanist says that the jiggling strengthens the growing plants. We'll see).

Best Gift Ever

A bit late in blogging about this, but this was my favorite Christmas gift this year. I haven't really looked at it yet, but I subscribe to this gardening philosophy, and I'm sure I did not spend more than a minute per day on the garden last summer if you spread it out over the entire growing season. And still, we had incredible yields (definitely spent more than a minute a day in harvesting, cooking and preserving from the garden!) Imagine how we'd do if I spent two or three minutes a day!

This gift is from our local used book store so I'm not sure it can be purchased anymore (too lazy to do a search on it). This year for Christmas, my husband, son, and I decided to buy each other a book from this store. So we each bought two and each received two. It was a major success and we were all very happy with the choices. I think we'll make it a tradition. It was fun and has the whole buy locally/recycle advantage as well.