Vegetable Gardening

[BleeckerSt_Girl]

A GOOD garden day- for dinner we had the very FIRST modest harvest from our big new veggie garden...three different kinds of lettuce for our salad: green and purple romaine, loose leaf, and butterhead. Oh, and also a few lovely young beet leaves. Then from the 'old little garden' (which is losing steam fast now) I got some tomatoes and my very first bunch of scallions I have ever grown. Then I had plenty of fresh alfalfa sprouts on hand that I grew in a jar in my kitchen.

So for dinner we had beautiful big salad platters with lettuces, tomato slices, sprouts, scallions, and some garlic-herb creamy goat cheese (the one thing i bought). It was fabulous and so exciting.

[Eden]

Not having a garden, I went out and did a little urban foraging the other day. The blackberries here are superb and plentiful this year (I've heard it was a good year for berries in general in the Pacific Northwest). I picked probably 25 or so cups of big, beautiful tasty berries. There are so many that I didn't even have to get all scratched up to get them - I just worked my way around the edge of the bushes and picked only the ones easy to reach - and I could still be choosy about only getting the best berries. I've made a "slump" and some freezer jam so far. I need to use them up though, they'll only last a few days in the fridge.

[OakLeaf]

Canned 20 pints of cut-up tomatoes, and working on sauce.

Need a chest freezer.

[NoNo]

Went back to my aunt's last night, as I was told there were blueberries to pick. Took a walk around the garden to see what else I could pick, and was shocked to see the stringbeans were still growing! I'd harvested quite a few about a month back and I thought they were done, but I was happilly mistaken. Also, the zucchini had totally rebounded from whatever was affecting it a few weeks ago, and the leaves looked healthy, flowers were blooming, and we picked four more. Grabbed a few cucumbers, some eggplant, a few peppers, and lots of cherry tomatoes:


Then I took a trip to the blueberry bush. I cannot believe how many blueberries we've picked off this single bush so far, and last night was no exception!


Those bowls quickly became these:


This weekend I'm going raspberry and pear picking, and we'll be doing some more canning on Sunday

[spokewench]

Everyone's harvest is looking great! I went to Utah - Kanab, Bryce Canyon, Escalante, Torrey and then back home through Mexican Hat on the motorcycle this long weekend. It was great fun and absolutely beautiful.

I saw some wonderful gardens up in Utah as well! I was drooling over their corn, squash, dinner plate dahlias, etc., etc.

Well, we drove down from Byrce Canyon to Escalante and I know Escalante to be in a "banana belt" good growing area and thought I would be able to find a peach at a roadside stand. I could not find a roadside stand, but Hubby and I stopped at a little park in town off the main road to rest and have a snack; across the road was another wonderful garden. The owners had a bunch of llamas also. It was a wonderful sight! The owners were out and about in their garden and pretty soon the lady walked across the street with a box she took out of her car. She had just been at the farmers market trying to sell veges and fruits and the box was full of ripe peaches! She gave us some for free and that was my lucky day! What a sweet woman.

[smilingcat]

was at a local "organic" grocery store of sort. Walked by a refridgerated section and on the shelves were all these sprouts.

a light bulb goes off in my head !!!

Hey, those sprouts... They've sprouted duh!!! and they were cheaper than seed packets and to boot, they've all sprouted duh!! ...

So bought a pkg of sugar snap peas for less than a buck. scattered them peas all over one cleared area and scattered some compost over the top and some uncomposted dead stalks and leaves from my veggie plants for cover.

voila.. Most of them have already shot through the compost cover and I can see all the green shoots poking their head through the ground cover. very very cool!!! If I'm lucky, I'll have a whole lot of sugar snap peas.

Sugar snap pea I think is a nitrogen fixer so it should help the soil too.

oh gotta can more tomatoes... make jalapeno pepper jellies... dry some serrano chilli and grind tem up substitute for cayenne pepper...

soetimes life is good.

[BleeckerSt_Girl]

It will be frosts in 4 weeks here.

But I've kept up with sprouting alfalfa in jars in my kitchen...every 5 days or so I start another jar going, and I have a continuous supply of nice fresh sprouts for salads and sandwiches... Each large jar only needs two tablespoons of seed, costing me maybe 25 cents?
This will be great this winter when the snow is flying... jars full of bright green, sparkling on the windowsill....

[OakLeaf]

Picked the rest of the sweet corn yesterday. I really didn't intend to put any of it by, but wound up planting more than we could eat, so I froze 3-1/2 pints.

I'll do another batch of tomato sauce some time this week. My plants hung in there, barely, from the bacterial speck, but they didn't produce nearly as much as they would've if I'd kept them healthy, and the main crop's just about done. I've still got volunteer tomatoes coming on though.

I'm sure glad that chest freezer fit in the back of my Prius.

[GLC1968]

We have been totally neglecting our garden for the past 3 weeks. We've been watering...but that's about it. So yesterday we had a couple of extra hands, so we had a good harvest... This was what we ended up with (leaving a ton of blackberries & grapes behind!):





The massive zucchini's you see are actually going to be goat treats. The acorn squash was our bonus compost plant - so we have no idea if it'll taste ok but we plan to try it tonight!

[BleeckerSt_Girl]

Great harvest pix, GLC!

I just got home from a firend's house where I picked a big batch of her pickling cucumbers and left her a big bag of fresh lettuce and scallions in exchange.
Going to make my first bread and butter pickles this week!

Deeaimond- tomato looks good- loosen those ties around the stalk so the stem can keep growing without getting choked. Looks like it could benifit from a bit more sun if you have it. Worm castings are good for it!