Eat Close To Home

Well, things are winding down in the garden. For the first time, it seems less like I’m racing the frost and more like I’ve eaten everything interesting in the garden. Here’s a recap:

• Over 125 lb. of produce to Food Gatherers this year!
• Peas – fabulous! Over 14 pounds of edible pod peas, between the greenhouse and the garden. My sweetie has decided they are the best raw vegetable ever and eats them in preference to carrots in his lunch when they’re available. I planted a second crop July 23 (some in and some out of the greenhouse) that is just starting to set pods – we’ll see if there’s a second crop or not.
• Green beans – also my best year ever. Nine quarts in the freezer and five pounds to a potluck, plus lots fresh.
• Carrots – planted Napolis and Danvers. One of them – I think the Napolis – branched a lot. Got a nine-pointer the other night. I still have a hard time growing carrots, but I want to keep trying because we like them so much.
• Parsnips – haven’t harvested most of them, but the ones we got (Turga variety) were good.
• Rutabagas – Very good crop, though somewhat wormy. Try covering the crop next year.
• Turnips – Ditto. Planted a second crop Aug. 25th but I think that was too late to even get greens.
• Squash – blah. Got squash bugs. Harvested a goodly number, but they weren’t very ripe or sweet.
• Tomatoes – Don’t die of shock, but I think I may not grow any tomatoes next year. I don’t really *like* tomatoes all that much, and I found I can get organic tomatoes for 80 cents a pound if I want to make a batch of salsa.
• Onions – were troopers, as always. I went to the trouble of planting out leek sets I’d bought this year, and they grew into onions, not leeks. *facepalm* I really want to grow leeks – from side shoots and bulblets, if not from tiny hairlike transplants.
• Radishes – quick, easy, and way yummy to pickle!
• Pickling cucumbers – great crop (“little leaf”), and I think I will plant the same number next year. I planted 24 plants; about 2/3 survived, and that gave us a quart or two of cukes every other day for a month. I’ll pick them smaller next year, but I think I can’t get enough to pickle a quart if I don’t have at least a dozen plants.
• Potatoes – definitely planting Kennebecs next year if they hold up well in storage. These were prolific and medium-to-large in size.
• Sweet potatoes – They are still in the ground, mostly, so no final report yet. The couple plants I did dig up already yielded about a pound of finger-sized roots between three or four plants in the greenhouse. They were tasty, baked whole with a little oil and salt.

I’ll write up a separate report on the greenhouse.

I’ve been tracking my garden planting and harvest dates (Southern Michigan, US zone 5a in a particularly cold microclimate) in Google Calendar and decided to make these into public calendars. You can see the calendars at the addresses below, and if you have a Google Calendar account, you can subscribe to them and view them in your own calendar. I’ll update these as I plant and harvest more crops. I’m not guaranteeing these are ideal dates, but they’re at least a guideline.

I’ve put the addresses through TinyURL to make them more manageable; they won’t spam you.

• http://tinyurl.com/gardenplantingzone5
• http://tinyurl.com/gardenharvestzone5

I’m having a really good year for succession planting. I’ve never done so much of it, nor has the timing ever worked out so well! Here are a few things I’ve been doing:

• Green beans. On April 24, I planted Contender bush beans. I had to protect them from a couple frosts, but they rewarded me with nice harvests starting the third week in June. On May 25th, I planted Fortex pole beans and EZ-Pick bush beans. The EZ-Picks started to bear about July 21, and the Fortex started a week after that. (The Fortex never looked very happy; I think they might make a better fall crop bean.) I just pulled the Fortex and EZ-Pick a couple days ago, and lo an behold – the Contenders are bearing again! They are my favorite beans this year, and I’m especially proud because these are first- and second-generation seeds that I’ve saved.
• Peas. The greenhouse peas finished up just as the outdoor peas were starting to bear (third week of June – saved seed from the very tall Sugar Ann variety). When the outdoor peas wound down, I pulled those and replanted a shorter variety (Dwarf Gray). We’ve been about 6 weeks without peas, but I think we should start getting a fall crop in the next 2 weeks.
• Potatoes. I harvested potatoes August 11 and August 23 (still have 1/3 of the crop to go). In one of those spots, I’ve put a late crop of Purple Top turnips (for greens) and the other a cover crop of buckwheat.
• Cucumbers. I’ll pull these vines out later this week. They look like they’re setting up for another run, but man, after nearly 20 pounds of cucumbers, we’re done. Out they come. I will plant the whole 3×6 bed with chard and beets. Hopefully, I’ll get a nice run of chard to take to Food Gatherers and maybe some tiny beets for Thanksgiving dinner (but I might be too late on that).

I’ve also been very good and gotten my fall crop of kale in on July 21. This crop will go into the greenhouse, and I’ll try protecting some of the huge swath of kale that’s currently outdoors, too. I might finally have enough kale to not need to steal from children and the elderly* last past December.

It was so nice looking around the garden tonight. I’m really pleased with what I’ve done. I’m especially pleased that my “scaling-up” experiment has worked so well. The extra 1000 sf of garden I added this year has been very much plant-and-forget-it: potatoes, squash, rye, corn. I haven’t even watered any of it, because the rain gods have been so kind and the mulch so deep. Squash beetles are getting into the vines, but I’m hoping the Delicatas will ripen enough so it’s not a worry…but it’s really not been all that much work. And I dropped off 40 more pounds of food at Food Gatherers today and have several pounds of spuds in the “root cellar.”

I like gardening.