A Hill of Beans

Last year, I grew dried beans for the first time. I bought one packet of Maine Yellow Eye beans, and planted them in late May, in three six-foot rows in my garden. (Johnny's has several dried bean varieties available here.) I probably planted them a little too close together, which is pretty typical of my gardening style.

These are a bush bean, so they are pretty easy to grow - the only big issue I have with beans is invasions by the Mexican Bean Beetle. I've talked about these before (Click here and scroll about halfway down to see pictures.) Otherwise, as long as you keep them watered and cultivated, you can just let bush beans grow. You don't have to worry about trellising, and they won't take over the garden.

Dry beans are even easier to manage than fresh beans. You just let the beans grow until they are very ripe, starting to dry out, then pick them. Last September, I picked the ripe beans (already pretty dry on the vines) and put them in a bucket. Then life got in the way, and I forgot the bucket of beans in the garage all winter. Thankfully, our garage is dry and cool, and mostly free of pests, and the beans were still there, untouched, where I left them. I rediscovered them when I went out to do some gardening this spring. So, a couple of weeks back, I shucked them, and put the shells in the compost bin. I found some desiccated bean beetle larvae in a couple of the shells, and a few beans that had been harmed by the larvae - I discarded these.

After picking them all, I had nearly filled a pint jar with dried beans. A packet became a pint (and a pint's a pound the world around) - which will become a hot and yummy pot of baked beans.

Talk about some easy to quantify gardening - with fresh veggies, I know our family eats them day-to-day, and you lose count. When I can, it's somewhat easier to count jars of pickles and salsa. But counting these beans was quite literally cut and dried.

(Do you have a favorite baked bean recipe? Mine is here: Yankee Maple Baked Beans. I usually put in a few pats of butter instead of salt pork, and they are very tasty.)

Snowmatoes

On this annoyingly snowy April Fool's Day, many New Englanders might be having the same thoughts as me: I should get my tomato seedlings started.  Or they might have had the thought a day or so ago, when the snowbanks were just about gone and the garden reappeared from under its winter blanket.

Last year I planted too many tomatoes, as usual; we ended up with 50-odd plants in the ground. Of course, when I planted my seedlings, I was about 4 months pregnant, so we'll blame that on second trimester energy.

However, when they started to ripen, I was well into the third trimester, exhausted, with swollen ankles and feet that I was ordered to stay off of as much as possible. My husband did the majority of the picking, and no canning was to happen last summer by my hand.  We ended up with several overflowing baskets full, as last summer was one of the hottest to happen in a long time, and the plants produced prolifically:

Tons of tomatoes!

 We ate a lot of the tomatoes fresh, gave a bunch away, but what to do with the rest?

Caprese salad with fresh tomatoes and basil, and fresh (but not homemade) mozzarella.

Well, it might seem surprising, but you can actually freeze whole tomatoes.  Don't expect to put them on your salad later, but they are surprisingly resilient and easy to work with after the fact.  Just pop them into some freezer bags and toss them in the freezer, easy as that.  You can wash them or not, it doesn't really make a difference.

Frosty tomatoes

To use frozen tomatoes, just rinse them under cool water and the skins will split so you can peel them right off.

A pan of peeled tomatoes

You can then use them in any cooked tomato recipe you like.  I filled up my turkey roaster with peeled tomatoes (I also sliced off any bad spots - just be careful when using a knife on frozen goods) and threw them in the oven at about 400, stirring occasionally.  I cooked them until they fell apart, then pureed them with a stick blender, and cooked them a bit more to concentrate them a bit.  Then I put them in a pan with some other veggies and meatballs.  I wish the basil and oregano had still been available fresh from the garden, but dried was fine.  A little salt and pepper, and viola, homemade pasta sauce.

Sauce cooked down, then pureed

Now, I don't mind tomato seeds, but if you do, you could run this through a food mill to get rid of them before adding it to the meatballs, veggies, and herbs.  It made a delicious sauce - a bit lighter in color than your typical supermarket can, because we grow a lot of colored heirlooms, but very tasty and fresh nonetheless, and a lot less sodium.

So if you want to keep that garden bounty going, and don't want to feel bad about starting too many tomatoes, keep your freezer open as an option. 

Our little pumpkin, who won't be eating tomatoes until summer 2012.

Almost Summer!

Now that it's almost summer, it's about time I get some progressive shots of my garden up for you! Of course I started taking these back in April, when I planted my seedlings, so we'll just start from the beginning.

This is the workbench in the basement where I have grow lights and heat mats set up, so I can easily start seeds:



Here is the giant pile of seeds from which I have to choose. You can see I'm an excellent organizer... I have organized the pepper, eggplant, and tomato seeds, but the rest are a free-for-all (literally; many are expired Johnny's packets; not up to our quality standards for sales, but fine for employees to grab before they end up in the compost bin):



Here are the seedlings about a week old:



Tiny pepper plants take a long time to get going. I usually plant them a couple of weeks before tomatoes, but this year I wasn't with it:



You can see my labeling system - very high-tech; I use large popsicle sticks and a Sharpie. I put them in at an angle so that the tray cover would fit on a little better, and moisture would be conserved. I've trimmed the sticks in the past but this year didn't bother, and it worked out fine.



The next two photos were taken on May 6th, so the seedlings are a bit over 3 weeks old. The tomatoes are growing very well:



But the peppers are still just a bit smaller; again, this is why I start them earlier, usually:



On 5/31/10 we planted the seedlings outside (after hardening them off in a cooler corner of the yard for about a week). Peppers are in the background and look quite healthy, and the tomatoes are very vigorous:



I set up the potato cans again this year. I'm planting the potatoes in Johnny's 512 Mix, and I did cut them up. I planted Russian Banana and French Fingerlings this year; fewer per can, in one-eye-per-piece chunks. They were planted on April 24th:



And doing quite well by May 31st:



This year we added a fruit garden on the side - it is 4 feet wide, by about 40 feet long. My husband dug up and transplanted all the grass from the area, put in edging, and tilled in compost. He is tilling the garden in this April 24th shot - something I normally do, but this year we're expecting a baby, so he took over the heavy work. You might notice odd looking white piles in the garden - that's ash from the woodstove - we just till it in in the spring. You'll also notice the tangle of IrriGator in the distance, next to the a-frame trellises - I just picked it up and put it in a box last fall.



We relaid the IrriGator - actually, it was a lot faster to just unwrap and lay it out than it is to take it apart and put it back together. Howerver, one drawback of this is that crops don't get rotated.



And the usual mulch - plastic and paper this year. I thought it would be interesting to try the SRM Red Mulch, made of plastic, and see how the tomatoes, peppers, and eggplants fare. I also wanted to test another biodegradable product, so I used our Planters Paper Mulch. We set the mulch out in late April, but didn't get a chance to plant until May 31st. Unfortunately, the wind blew quite a bit and tore up the staples from the edges of the paper.



I had a good idea to fix this - make wide staples from cardboard - I cut squares out and pushed the staples through, and it seems to be holding somewhat better. Traditionally, people bury the edges of the mulch in soil, but I don't want to do any weeding at all. Things are looking good - we build a new tomato trellis from aluminum electrical conduit and zip ties (to replace the old bamboo and zip tie model) and put it in place, and got the seedlings planted. We really lucked out, too, because it rained on and off for about a week after we got the seedlings in - nothing like mild weather to increase a garden's success rate.



And the fruit garden is planted, as well. From front to back, we have a cranberry, three blueberry bushes (with strawberry planters next to them), and 14 raspberry canes (black, yellow, and red). Can't wait until this garden comes to fruition!



I hope your gardening endeavors are going well! I will keep you posted about the new things I'm trying. If you have any questions or comments, I'd love to hear them!

-Daria, the webmaster

The Webmaster's Garden Redux

First, let me apologize for my paucity of posts. I never wrapped up last summer! We implemented a new website here, and things got a little busy for a while. They're still busy, but it's getting to be the time of year where we all think about getting our gardens started, so I thought I'd better finish up my 2009 garden first!

Here are some Nastirtiums from last October. Color - don't we miss it this time of year!

Here is my garden through the season, from May through October.

5/03/2009

Mid May 2009

5/20/2009

6/18/2009

7/07/2009

7/29/2009

8/08/2009

8/28/2009

9/13/2009

9/25/2009

9/25/2009

10/11/2009 - Before Harvesting

10/11/2009 - After Harvesting

You can see the progression of a few months - how everything explodes into life in late July and August (VERY late July this year, with all the rain), and how things start to diminish and grow stale into October.

Of course, with all the rain, I had my share of late blight.

Late blight on Eggplant

A perfect looking Kellogg's Breakfast tomato - ready to slice onto that BLT...

Except when you flip it over, yuck! Luckily, we were able to salvage a good portion of this tasty tomato - sadly, this was the only one that ripened.

And so it was with tomatoes late into September - we'd get a few small ones (cherries and 1.5 inch varieties like Black Prince, the mystery volunteer plant) but the big ones pretty much just went bad before they ripened. So no home-canned salsa for us this year.

Other things turned out much better. As you recall, we harvested onions and garlic in mid-September. They hung out in the warm garage for about a month, curing, and I spent an afternoon cleaning them - wiping off the dirt and dead skins and trimming the tops. We ended up with quite a haul!

Garlic harvest 2009

Onion harvest 2009

Shallot harvest 2009

We still have plenty of these allium crops left - I'll have shallots to plant in May, and I should make a big pot of French Onion soup one of these days. The onions are small but tasty. I'm going to experiment with better spacing this year, and see if I can't get more size out of the onions. I definitely can't complain about the garlic harvest!

Our big harvest happened on October 11th, and none too soon - we had a killing frost a couple of nights later (then no frost for about a month, darn it!), and it would have compromised the quality of things like squash, and ruined many other vegetables.

We did well with squash, too! I planted Honey Bear and Waltham Butternut and got good yields.

Honey Bear squash in a basket

Waltham Butternut lined up by the woodstove

I put the butternut squash by the woodstove to cure, because it still had green lines. We had to harvest it a little earlier than optimal; it didn't grow as long as it should have, as it took so long to get going in July. But it's still good in the kitchen, and very tasty!

Eggplant (made into a parmesan casserole, put in the freezer), Baby Bear pumpkins (barely lasted until Halloween), the ubiquitous beans (got 25-30 pounds last year!), and Wonder Light tomatoes

The pepper crop was pretty good this year.

Most of the peppers now reside in these jars of Hot Pepper Jelly - if you've never made it, you should. It is fabulous on crackers with cream cheese, or baked with brie. The recipe is in the Ball Blue Book.

I love tomatillo blossoms - they are just so pretty and interesting looking.

As the fruit grows, it looks like little balloons. They slowly fill up with nice round tomatillos, and you peel the husks to get the sticky fruit out. These are husk cherries, and they grow in a similar manner, except that they are much smaller.

We did very well with the tomatillo crop this year!

I believe I ended up with about 16 pints of Tomatillo Salsa (I use the Ball Blue Book recipe).

The sweet potato harvest was OK - I'd never grown them before so I didn't know what to expect. Unfortunately, the vines I tried to keep ended up dying. They are piled up on top of the potatoes in this picture.

I'll definitely try the sweet potatoes again - I need to consider a better place to put them, and think about how they spread and that the vines like to dig into the ground.

Potato harvest - about a quarter-bushel.

The potato harvest is another story. The plants were beautiful, but the amount of potatoes in the converted garbage cans was a bit disappointing. I was hoping for a whole bushel! Next year, I need to:

1. Cut the potatoes up so there is one eye per piece. I have a terrible habit of not cutting potatoes, and I hear that's the worst thing you can do for your potato yield.
2. Plant fewer potatoes in each barrel. I again went overboard and crowded them. To prevent that, I ordered only 2 varieties this year.
3. Use a less rich soil. The compost was convenient, but the potatoes were scabby.

Of course, the potatoes were delicious, and we just ate the last of them in a beef stew a couple of weeks ago - I stretched them to make them last.

All in all, I'd call the 2009 garden a success. Potatoes and tomatoes were disappointing, but beans were amazing, tomatillos were excellent, peppers did well, and squash was a surprising front runner. I think the only thing I would not grow again are the Red Noodle beans - they took way too long to ripen, and I just didn't like the texture of them cooked. I am sure they have their place; it just isn't in my garden or kitchen. I got to can and put up a lot of yummy home-grown food (I don't have pictures of dilly beans and zucchini casserole, but the cupboards and freezer are still full), and we had lots of fun gardening, as always.

Here's to a successful garden in 2010 for everyone! I'm itching to get those seedlings started, but I know I need to wait a bit; too soon and they'll be leggy. More on that later!