Garden: Welcome Green Beans, Watermelon, and Hello There's a Zucchini!

Ok I could not wait to post another update about the garden. I went out there tonight after work and I could not believe what I saw.

Let me start with yesterday morning when I went out to the garden and saw that the zucchini plants finally had HUGE yellow open blooms on them. Later in the afternoon I went back out there and the blooms were all closed. Now I have been watching the fruit grow on my grape tomato plant for the past couple of weeks. Tomatoes grow out of the middle of the bloom on the plant. So when I saw the zucchini blooms closed I wondered how the heck are zucchinis going to come out of the closed blooms?

After work tonight I went straight out to the garden to check things out. I am standing there staring at the closed blooms on the zucchinis when suddenly my eyes are open and I see a good size zucchini right in front of me!


That thing is going to be ready to pick in a few days I think. The zucchinis apparently grow out from the bottom of the bloom, not out of the middle. I have no idea how I did not notice this thing until today! I mean it couldn't have just appeared out of nowhere. At least now I know what to look for.

The bush beans that were blooming last week now have beans on them!


And I just noticed teeny little watermelons today as well:


The last picture I wanted to post is of the sunflowers. I knew they would be higher than the compost bin this week:


I can't believe how everything is growing. There is also a tiny little pepper growing on one of the pepper plants. It's not much to look at and I almost missed it. And one of the Roma tomato plants also has a little fruit on it too.

It's going to be so much fun watching all this stuff grow in the coming weeks!

Previous gardening posts:

Garden - 6/25/08
Garden - 6/19/08
Garden - 6/12/08
Garden - 6/2/08
Garden - 5/25/08

Afternoon Links: Pick Your Own

I'm messing up my posting routine now!

My mom and I were at my grandparents' house a couple of weeks ago and we got to talking about how my mom LOVES blackberries. I said that we should find a place where we can go pick them ourselves because I think that would be fun. She agreed. How does one find one of those places? A quick google search brought me to:

Pick Your Own

On this website you can find PYO farms in your area and information about what they grow and when you can pick certain items, etc. etc. We found a couple of farms in our area that grow blackberries and are planning to go in July when they are in season.

Hopefully this will inspire you to go to one of these places and support your local farmer!

Garden: Blooms Everywhere!

I've gotten into a bit of a routine this month. CSA post, garden post, recipe post or two. Lather, rinse, repeat. Since I posted about my CSA last night I will now post an update on the garden. I took these pictures Monday evening. It seems like everything is growing really fast now and almost everything is on the verge of blooming. Blooms are exciting because blooms mean fruit!

I saw what looks like a little bean on the bush beans. Turns out it's actually a bloom because a day later some of them started opening into flowers. Beans will follow soon though!

This is one of the yellow bell pepper plants. It also has tiny buds on it.

A view of the garden from the south. The zucchini plants have merged and are about to take over the world.

Watermelon is sprawling everywhere and is also blooming.

Sunflowers continue to be insane. See how high they are compared to the compost bin? I bet they reach the top this week.

Pole beans are off the charts! And off the poles!

Eggplant blossom. This plant doesn't look very big so I was suprised to see a blossom on it. It's a really pretty purple blossom.

Grape tomatoes on the plant. This plant has decided to grow out instead of up. It's kind of crazy. It has about 13 little green tomatoes on it as of last night.

These are the nasturtiums I planted in the afternoon before the storm. I thought they might have been washed away but they are coming up very nicely. Nasturtiums are supposed to help repel pests.

The zinnias have made a huge comeback. I think their buds are really neat looking.

Everything is looking really good so far. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that it stays that way!

Previous garden posts:

Garden - 6/19/08

Garden - 6/12/08

Garden - 6/2/08

Garden - 5/25/08

CSA: Week 6

This week in my CSA share I received:

Turnip with greens attached
Mustard Greens
Lettuce
Green onions
Dozen eggs

The hen union must have come to terms with their employer because they appear to be back to work. :)

I've learned with my CSA produce that I have to wash all the greens on Tuesday night when I get home or I'm probably not going to end up using them. If I wash them immediately and store them in my salad spinner I'm a lot more likely to pull them out and eat them. If I just stuff them into the crisper drawer in the fridge or just shove the entire bag in the fridge then they more than likely will not see the light of day until I realize they are dried out or wilted and have to chuck them into the compost pile.

Tonight I did not just shove my greens and lettuce into the fridge, I took the time to wash them and cut off some of the big stems before storing them all in my salad spinner. By the way I highly recommend a salad spinner if you eat a lot of fresh lettuce. Back in week 2 I received a huge amount of lettuce and it stayed fresh in my salad spinner for over a week.

This week the lettuce came on its little stems instead of all loose. I was in the process of separating the leaves from the little stems when A BUG CRAWLED OUT FROM UNDER A LEAF. Now it's not that I am afraid of the bug. It's the surprise of the bug being in a place where I am not expecting it. And this was not just a tiny little bug. It was minimum 3/4 of an inch, maybe an entire inch long.

Of course I screamed like a wussy girl and threw the lettuce with the bug into the sink full of water. I then jumped up and down in the kitchen for a few seconds going "ew! ew! ew!" Then I proceeded to drown the bug with the sink sprayer. I managed to separate the bug from the lettuce so I could pull all the lettuce out of the sink sans bug. Then I drained the sink and watched the bug go down the drain. And that was the end of the bug.

I then went back to separating the lettuce leaves from the stems. When I was finished I turned back to the sink to refill it with water. And I am not kidding you - the bug was crawling out of the drain!!!!!!!!!!! I have no idea how the bug survived the water massacre I bestowed upon him. I hit him with the sprayer again and then dumped three changes of sink water on him as I finished cleaning my greens.

Whew!!!!!

Previous weeks:

CSA: Week 5
CSA: Week 4
CSA: Week 3
CSA: Week 2
CSA: Week 1
How I decided to join a CSA

Rosemary Roasted Potatoes

On Wednesday night I stopped by the farmers' market on the way home from work and picked up a few things including some new potatoes. They looked so good that I went right home and cooked them up my favorite way. This recipe is courtesy of Betty.


Roasted Rosemary-Onion Potatoes
4 servings


1 1/2 pounds new potatoes
1/4 cup finely chopped onion
2 tbsp olive oil
2 tsp dried rosemary leaves
1/4 tsp dried thyme leaves
1/4 tsp salt
1/8 tsp pepper


Preheat oven to 450 degrees F. Spray a 9 x 13 dish with non-stick spray.


Cut potatoes into one inch chunks. Mix remaining ingredients in a large bowl. Add potatoes, toss to coat. Spread potatoes in prepared dish.


Bake uncovered for 25 minutes, turning occasionally, until potatoes are light brown and tender when pierced with a fork.


I loooooooooove these potatoes. So easy and simple yet so tasty.

Garden: Okra Comes Around

The garden is going strong! The okra has finally starting growing some new leaves and is getting bigger.

The watermelon has started sending out little vines.

The roma tomato plant is just about to flower.

The grape tomato plant has several flowers and four tomatoes on it so far. They are pretty big but still haven't started turning red yet.

The zucchini is still going crazy. Those two big bushy plants in the front are them.

The leaves are huge! I took these pictures on Tuesday and I think that now the leaves are bigger than my head.

Some of the pole beans have almost reached the top of the supports. I'm not sure what happens when they reach the top. Do they just stop growing?

Bush beans also look good.

This basil plant has a big yummy leaf.

The broccoli that we direct sowed has started sprouting. It already looks stronger and healthier than the seeds I started indoors a few months ago.

The sunflowers are getting bigger and bigger. I'm starting to believe that they might actually reach 12 feet tall.

Finally the pepper plants have little flower buds on them. Hopefully the flowers open in the next few days.

Whew! That's a lot of pictures. The excitement is just beginning.

CSA: Week 5

This week in my CSA share I received:

Turnips
Mustard Greens
Turnip Greens
Green onion
Lettuce

I was supposed to get eggs this week but Karin said the hens were on strike and she'd have to make up my dozen next week. That was fine by me because I still have quite a few eggs leftover from last time. I was hoping for peas again because I really enjoyed them last week but we didn't receive any this time.

The shares have been pretty light lately and I'm getting a little tired of so many greens. Karin said that soon we'll be getting some other vegetables which will be nice.

I also hit up the midweek farmers' market tonight and luckily someone had peas! I bought a bunch of peas, a zucchini and a bunch of potatoes for $5.50. I was pretty excited about that.

I plan to use half the zucchini as a test batch for freezing. I assume you can freeze zucchini like you can freeze anything else. I'm hoping that's the case because with my monster zucchini plants I think I'm going to end up with a large quantity of zucchini. I've never frozen zucchini before so if anyone has any tips please send them my way.

Previous CSA shares:

CSA Week 4
CSA Week 3
CSA Week 2
CSA Week 1

Cheesy Turnips & Carrots

In my fourth CSA share I received turnips which I have never purchased, cooked or eaten before. They never really sounded appealing to me before. However now that they were in my possession I felt the need to at least try them. I researched recipes and found this one. I figure you can put cheese on anything and I'd at least try it. The dish might not taste much like turnips but for my first time I think that's okay.

I made a few modifications to the original recipe. First I halved everything. Then I switched the quantities of the turnips and carrots because the two turnips I received in my share only yielded one cup after they were diced up. I also took out the celery because I'm not a huge fan of the stringyness and replaced with celery seed to retain the celery flavor.

Cheesy Turnips & Carrots
2-3 servings

1 cup diced peeled turnips
1 1/2 cups diced carrots
1/8 tsp ground ginger
1/2 cup water
1/2 tsp salt, divided
1/4 cup chopped onion
1/4 tsp celery seed
2 tbsp butter
1 1/2 tbsp all-purpose flour
1/8 tsp pepper
3/4 cup milk
1/2 cup shredded cheddar cheese

In a saucepan, combine turnips, carrots, ginger, water and 1/4 tsp salt. Cover and cook over medium-high heat for 10-15 minutes or until vegetables are tender; drain and reserve liquid. Set vegetables aside. In a skillet, melt butter and saute onion and celery salt until tender. Stir in flour, pepper and remaining salt. Add milk and the vegetable liquid; bring to a boil. Cook and stir until thickened and bubbly. Stir in cheese until melted; stir in the vegetables and heat through.

This recipe was pretty easy to make but I did have one problem. All the water cooked out of my vegetables so I didn't have any to reserve for the next step and I burned them a little. The rest of it went just fine though. I picked out a few of the really burned veggies and mixed the rest in.

In the end this dish turned out pretty good. It was an excellent side dish and a good way to use my turnips. I actually really liked the cheese sauce and I could see myself making that again to put on broccoli or cauliflower. Next time I make this I will use more water to cook the vegetables so they don't burn. If you've never had turnips before but would like to try them, I would recommend this recipe.

Garden: Zucchini Gone Wild

It's been almost two weeks since I posted an update on the garden. I took some new pictures this past Monday night. In less than four weeks the garden has gone from this:


To this:

You can actually see the plants in the garden! And now for a little update on everything.

First off the zucchini are by far the biggest plants in the garden. They have huge stalks and leaves now but still no flowers. The picture doesn't do it justice:

The grape tomato plant has flowered and started growing little fruits. I can see a lot more flowers forming so I should have a lot of grape tomatoes to look forward to in the near future. Ranch black bean dip here I come (I will post this recipe sometime - it's the best!).

The sunflowers are the second biggest plants in the garden. One foot down, eleven more to go my friends:Watermelon is growing nicely as well:

These are the yellow bell pepper plants that I bought at a local nursery. I don't feel like they have gotten any bigger since I planted them but they do have tiny little buds on the top. Hopefully they will flower soon.

Despite a beetle infestation the beans are doing pretty good. The bush beans have gotten rather large and are putting out new shoots and leaves and the pole beans are starting to climb the supports. Bush beans:

Pole beans:

And then finally the strawberries. I have picked 10-12 strawberries from my two plants so far. They have been very delicious.

We've added two eggplant plants that were purchased at a local nursery and planted them where the brussel sprouts were before they all died. They don't look too exciting right now so I didn't post a picture. We direct seeded broccoli on Sunday but I'm afraid the seeds were washed away in the storm.

I've also added two mint plants. Mint is supposed to help repel pests in the garden. The thing about mint is that it grows like crazy and quickly takes over everything. So upon a recommendation in a gardening book I planted two mint plants that I purchased in clay pots and set them in the garden. Hopefully that will keep it from spreading everywhere. I also planted some catnip seeds in a pot in the garden. Catnip is part of the mint family so hopefully it will also repel pests.

The last thing that I have added to the garden is nasturiums. These are flowers that are also supposed to help repel pests like marigolds. I have direct seeded these in a row along the fence by the watermelon and also in a pot set in the corner of the garden. They look really pretty on the seed package so hopefully they did not drown in the storm.

It's amazing to me that all these plants have grown in less than four weeks. I can't wait until the actual vegetables start to grow!

CSA: Week 4 & the First "Harvest"

This week there are two new items in my CSA share:

Turnips
Peas
Lettuce
Mustard Greens
Turnip Greens

In case you didn't know this is what a turnip looks like:


I've never had turnips before so I'm excited to try them out. I found what sounds like a good recipe for them and I plan on making it tomorrow night if I have time. I was going to make it tonight but I was outside too long cleaning up the storm debris.

On Sunday before the storm I picked my first strawberries!

These kind of don't count as a harvest because there were green berries already on the strawberry plants when I bought them. There were only six of them but one was pretty good sized. I ate them on a spinach salad with feta, walnuts and balsalmic viniagrette. They were fantastic!! I think strawberries are my most favorite fruit. I hope the plants produce more and more and more of them.

CSA Week 3

CSA Week 2

CSA Week 1

Storm Damage

On Sunday a crazy storm swept through the area with crazy winds that knocked down a bunch of my trees. I've never seen anything like it. Of course I have a ton of tree damage and my neighbors have next to no damage. Go figure! Here's what it looks like:

That tree knocked out my power line. It may have also damaged the roof, siding and gutters but we won't know for sure until it is removed (hopefully today). Here it is from the backyard:

Normally you can see the fence there! It looks like we may lose this tree altogether which makes me very sad. It's BEAUTIFUL in the fall. I won't miss raking all those leaves though...

This redbud tree cracked in half and fell on the deck:

Lefty inspects the damage. Here it is from the yard:

The top of this tree was completely torn off by the wind:

Here are the branches lying in the yard:

There is one other tree in the front that has a big branch down, but the pictures of that one are not as exciting as these so I didn't post those.

We are very lucky that no one was hurt and that no trees were knocked INTO the house (ie. through a window - eek!). So far it doesn't look like the damage to the house is too bad - the roof is not leaking or anything thank goodness. We'll just have to wait and see how it looks in the next few days.

The garden however survived the storm with almost no damage. Yea for that!

CSA: Week 3

Wow I am behind on my posts. Last Tuesday I picked up my third CSA share and got the following:

Mustard Greens
Spinach
Lettuce Mix
Green Onions
Turnip Greens
A dozen eggs

No radishes this week and the lettuce and spinach was a lot less than in Week 2. And the eggs looked like Easter eggs! All different colors - white, brown and greenish-blue. I took a picture of them but haven't had a chance to upload yet.

Unfortunately I haven't had any time to eat any of my third share and I'm already picking up a new share tomorrow! Last week was kind of hectic for me. Work was busy plus a good friend of mine got married over the weekend. The wedding weekend was very fun but it was capped off by a not-so fun event last night. A huge storm swept through our area and took down some HUGE branches out of four of our trees. And one of those branches happened to come down on the power line and on part of the house. Of course the part of the power line that was torn down was a part that the electric company does not fix so we had to call an electrician out to the house to repair the power line to the tune of $500! Thank goodness for a coupon in the yellow pages or else it would've been closer to $600. The power was off all last night and most of the day today. NOT FUN. Now we have to figure out how to get the rest of the tree off the house.

The damage could've been A LOT worse though so we are very lucky. There doesn't seem to be major damage to the roof or the siding or the gutters. We'll see in the next couple of days once the tree is removed! I took a ton of pictures so I will try to post some soon.

I also need to put up some new pictures of the garden. Everything is growing like crazy! I've picked a few strawberries (the first harvest!). We've also planted eggplant and mint seedlings purchased from a nursery. Then we direct seeded broccoli yesterday before the storm came. Hopefully this time the broccoli will do better as opposed to the seeds I started indoors which all ended up dying. Unless the storm washed all the seeds away which is entirely possible. We'll just see what happens!

Garden: Strawberries, Peppers & Marigolds

On Memorial Day I went to a nursery here in town and picked up some new plants for the garden. I bought two strawberry plants, a grape tomato plant, four yellow bell pepper plants and about twelve marigolds. One of my coworkers has a strawberry patch at home and has been bringing bowl after bowl after bowl of strawberries to work for everyone to enjoy. She inspired me to get some strawberry plants of my own.

The grape tomato plant was purchased to replace a Big Boy tomato plant the died. It already has two flowers.

I bought the pepper plants to supplement my own pepper plants. I dug up two of my pepper plants that I started as seeds and then planted all four yellow bell pepper plants. Now I have six pepper plants though two of them are so teensy, I'm not sure if they will ever grow.

I bought the marigolds because marigolds are supposed to help repell pests in the garden. I planted them sporadically throughout the garden.

Strawberries:


The little green berries are so cute. I can't wait for them to start turning red!

Roma Tomato:


Big Boy Tomato:


The tomatoes are finally starting to put on some weight.

Sunflowers:


Watermelon:


Zucchini:


Bush Beans:


And finally the marigolds that I grew from seeds are finally blooming!