Harvest Time

Well this week I started to harvest most of my herbs, some spinach and corn. Its the greatest feeling seeing the reward for all of your hard work.

In this picture I have four fresh sprigs of herbs; parsley, oregano, basil and thyme. This is the easiest and my most successful way of keeping some new dried herbs on hand. I started out by bundling them at the bottom while they were still in the ground then i cut, cleaned and hung them upside down on my pasta dryer with some twine. After they dried out and became nice and crunchy i de-stemmed the leaves and stored them in an airtight spice jar. I love doing this because herbs and spices can be pricey and they are fresher than store bought. Although nothing can beat fresh cut or frozen, its the next best thing.

Our family really loves rasberries, and right now my mom has been working on making fresh jam from our home grown and wild berries. The biggest problem has been getting enough fresh berries accumulated to make a full batch of jam, so we started freezing them in ziploc baggies

. -- this turned out to be a bit of a blunder because they would freeze into a huge brick and just a pain to defrost. So we started to spread them out on a half cookie sheet lined with some parchment paper/wax paper/silpat and froze them.

Problem solved, individually frozen berries, after a day or so, dump them in a food sealer or ziploc. We still have a good stash from last season and its easy to open up a bag and grab a few, instead of chizzling them off a huge frozen brick. And yes, thats Moose and Alaskan Salmon fillets!

Last but not least, Im not quite sure if anyone else has ever harvested full plants like spinach before but I had a bunch of scrap left over -- Roots, stems, rotted plants, etc.

And I had nothing to do with it since we dont have a composter set up yet. So I thought to myself, why not just stir it into the dirt?

So i did, and its worked just fine since i wont be using that section till next summer. Easy way to compost a small amount of scraps without making a composter, i also did this when i initially made this growbox, i just tilled the grass and buried it with more gardening dirt. We got a truckload for about $50 by the way.

Yukon Gold Potatoes

Digging up some potatoes for the week. You can just put your hand in the soil and feel around for the size you want and that way, keep the smaller ones growing... or get them all if you like to eat them small or roast them.

Yumm... We like to roast them with some of our zucchini with a little olive oil and crushed rosemary....   nothing like fresh potatoes!

You know you've got little potatoes after they bloom, then its just a matter of deciding how big you want them to get. We dig them up all summer long.

too much soap

So, I used the bright idea of spraying some of my plants with palmolive dish soap (diluted) because I had heard that it worked on aphids and stuff like that... well everything was fine but the tomato plants.. it got rid of the bugs but killed half the leaves... so moral of the story,  try it on one leaf first -save most of the plant.  I was so bummed out!

Otherwise, everything is growing great.  My pumpkin patch is going awesome.  Its my favorite part of my garden.

These ones are the Atlantic Giant and I love them because the insides are all spongy, like a cucumber.... and they smell great.

Watering Cones

I found these watering cones at Harbor Freight for $1.50 for 6.  They just go in the ground with 2 liter bottles filled with whatever going out into the soil as it drys out through these pre-drilled holes in the post.  It works fantastic, I am filling mine with the fertilizer tea I made and that way getting to specifically fertilize some of the plants I want to focus on.  I am excited about that. 

I put them on my pumpkin plants, my tomato plants and squash.  So, now I am going to see if they are bigger then the other plants because they got focused fertilizer..... 

The transplant shocker

My Mom's

My garden

This year my mother and I began our gardening indoors and of course, we became slightly competitive..

A month or two went by and most our plants were the same, but then the dreaded hardening and transplanting time came. Mom had began hardening about two weeks early when it wasn't entirely summer and left them outside through the night (covered of course.. only around 40 degrees F) Eventually she had her garden set up and chose to plant. Having a smaller crop I was able to move mine outdoors quite easily and being a procrastinator i waited until my plants were bigger and it was warmer outside until I hardened mine off and began planting. In theory hers would have been larger still, and better off because there wasn't much shock and the roots systems weren't as developed when transplanted and mine worse off. But lo and behold, both of our gardens are flourishing. There seems to be a critical planting time period when a plant is still small enough to fit into a pot but big enough to be transplanted without dying from shock.

Just another trial with having a very short summer..