Saturday, May 24, 2008

May Days

Mixin' it up. This is an example of how I plant my veggies now. If you look closely you can see a pepper plant, zinna and dahlia, yellow squash and cukes. Although it makes harvesting a bit more difficult, I like to interplant vegetables and flowers instead of grouping all of one together. This is how nature does it, and I've never seen a natural planting infested with pests. Confuse the bugs-works for me!
While we've enjoyed banana peppers in salads for a couple of weeks, the green bells picked today have just provide us with enough peppers to enjoy our first roasted peppers of the season.



Although the majority of tomatoes need a couple of weeks to ripen, we've been picking a few green ones that ripen in a few days inside the house. Contrary to popular belief, homegrown tomatoes that are picked green ripen to very good red tomatoes. In fact, if you leave them on the vine too long they are attacked by pests, and if they receive too much water during maturation I believe it dilutes their flavor (true of most fruit). I think the reason store bought tomatoes are so flavorless is not because they are picked green, but because of the varieties planted, chemical vs. organic fertilizer, and soil quality.


This carrot patch has been yielding carrots for awhile now. It was originally planted with spinach which was harvested before the carrots needed much room.







We are enjoying our first corn of the year this week. The patch above was plant in mid February in the main vegetable garden. The top two photos show corn planted in "the annex", an area I started a couple of years ago, mainly for corn as it is such a space and water hog. This corn has 3 plantings spaced in 10 day intervals, so we'll have fresh corn for more than a month.




Some areas of the yard are well planned as to color and placement, but in the vegetable garden I tend to plop in flowers willy-nilly without regard to color schemes. I grow dahlias, periwinkles and zinnas from seed and they are usually multicolor assortments. I plant them in and around the veggies because they attract pollinators and I believe their scents confuse predator bugs. The zinnias above were a happy accident. I wouldn't normally plant orange and pink together, but I love the sherberty colors with the blue larkspur backdrop.


Wednesday, May 21, 2008

Onions!!


We harvested our sweet Vidahlia-type onions this week. This looks like a lot of onions, but we will use most of these before they begin to soften and sprout in 6 or 7 months. I will freeze some mixed with tomatoes and peppers for taco's and pasta sauce. We add them to many of our other vegetables when cooking as well. They especially compliment cabbage, yellow squash and carrots. These onions are great sliced with sandwiches and burgers and added to roasts and stews. Did I mention we eat a lot of onions? We had a brainstorm about how to best clean the dirt off them (I usually hose them off, but this is messy and adds to drying time) and decided to let them dry then blow them with the leaf blower. This really cleaned them up quickly and will hopefully add to storage time.

Sunday, May 18, 2008

Blackberry Jelly


I made blackberry jelly today, for the first time in years. We have lots of blackberries growing wild on the property, and it's really the only jelly we like, but life has gotten busy the last few years, so I've just purchased it at the store. Lately though, it is hard to find, and nearly five dollars a jar when I do. Bill said he'd pick if I'd fix. What a deal! The pickin' takes more time than the fixin' and comes with the scratches to prove it. I'm glad I kept my my jars and jelly makin' equipment. This stash should last us until next blackberry season.