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Garden plan for 2015

Monday, February 9th, 2015

It’s finally starting to warm up here, which has prompted me to get serious about planning this year’s garden. Here’s the preliminary plan:

garden map 2015

Not dramatically different from what we’ve grown in the past with a few exceptions. Peppers are new. (I’ve tried them in the past with no luck.) Same with eggplant. The leeks are new, but are already in the ground. (I got some from a neighbor.) Ground cherries are also a new addition. If you’re not familiar with them, they are are nightshades, and the fruit resembles cherry tomatoes but they grow in a husk likeĀ  tomatillos. The ones I got are the poba, and they taste like pineapple.

I’m mostly planning to grow lettuce and greens in our cold frames, but I may sneak some into some other beds as well. Same with radishes.

We’re looking forward to spring asparagus soon!

Beans

Saturday, January 3rd, 2015

This week I finally finished shelling all the dry beans from the garden this year.

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The two bags on the right are white cannelini beans, my favorites. The others are Bisbee black cow peas. As you can see, a few beds of these seem to be going back to regular light brown cow peas. (All of these beans were seed saved and are on their 2nd or 3rd year.)

These are big gallon ziploc bags. I’m not sure we can eat this much beans in one year, but one of their attributes is that they last.

We have a winner!

Saturday, October 25th, 2014

After the javelina trampled through out sweet potato bed and ate all the greens several times now, I’ve been wondering if we’d have any potatoes at all this year. Normally, we wait until the first frost to harvest, but I couldn’t wait any longer, so this morning we dug up one corner of the bed.

We have a wonderful crop. Yay! We harvested a little under a third of the bed and got more than 50 pounds. Some are quite huge.

There’s almost nothing more fun that harvesting sweet potatoes. You just never know what they’ll be like.

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Getting ready for winter

Saturday, October 18th, 2014

This week we did a lot of things that anticipate the changing of the seasons. While it’s still in the mid-80s during the day, the nights are dipping into the 40s, and a frost could be around the corner.

First, we finished the repairs on the driveway after the post-Odile floods. This ended up entailing bringing in a whole truckload of gravel. In addition to fixing the damage, we filled the depression near the gate that always fills with water when it rains.

In the garden, we cleaned out some beds and got our garlic planted. (Separate post coming on that.) I planted a few leeks and some winter lettuce; am hoping to get fava beans in this week. We’re also disconnecting the drip irrigation and going to hand watering for winter. (Connected hoses can freeze and break pipes.)

We finished processing apples. Yay! We’re both a bit sick of them. We have found some new delights to make with apples though, including an apple french onion dip that was amazing.

On the houses, I worked on resealing the door frames on both houses. The combination of hot sun, gusty winds, and blowing dust is quite hard on things here.

We had more rain a week ago and are supposed to get yet more this week. It almost seems as though we’ve finally gotten enough rain, but I’m not complaining.

Fig tree

Saturday, October 11th, 2014

We’ve been wanting to get a fig tree. They seem to grow well here, and we love figs. It’s a good time of year to plant, and our many recent trips to Tucson afforded us the opportunity to pick up this Black Mission fig. This picture shows the size when we planted it. Hopefully, there will be future pics of a larger tree.

fig

A lesson in resilience

Monday, October 6th, 2014

I’m learning a thing or two from my tomatoes this week.

About 10 days or so ago, the javelina came back and decided, having eaten all of his preferred sweet potato greens and watermelons, he’d give the tomatoes a try. He gave two beds a good stomping through and ate as he went, destroying some expensive insect netting as well.

I mindfully reflected on all the many tomatoes we’d eaten, given away, and canned. It was our best tomato year ever. So I declared it the end of the season and tried not to be unhappy.

Going out to start clearing the beds today, I found though that the tomatoes are having a mini-resurgence. Huh.

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Oh the tomatoes!

Monday, September 1st, 2014

This weekend we canned salsa, chutney, plain old tomatoes, and a few jars of sweet yellow tomato jam. These will be so good this winter! And there’s lots more coming. We’re going to need more jars.

 

Garden update

Friday, August 8th, 2014

Despite the trials and tribulations of this summer, most of our garden is doing quite well. The monsoons have been good and steady, and after a very hot stretch in May, it’s been more moderate.

This is what the beds look like full of plants. They grow to fill the shape of the netting.

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The tomatoes have done especially well. I’m not sure what to attribute this to, but possibilities include good seed (all locally seed saved), continued enrichment of our soil, new organic fertilizer, the weather, and/or a new method of watering which involves not only drip, but a low level sprinkling (generally sprinkling is thought to be bad for tomatoes, but we speculate that this cooled the beds, possibly allowing for fruiting during hot temperatures, which is normally our biggest problem).

We are currently getting a good size bowl of tomatoes every other day, and the bulk of the tomatoes are not yet ripe. There must be well over a hundred green tomatoes with some getting quite large. Definitely the best tomato crop so far here.

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Other crops are doing well. We continue to eat lettuce and have had yellow squash and cucumbers as well. Cantaloupe and watermelon should be ready soon. The beans are thriving as usual. Even the sweet potatoes appear to have come back from their run-in with the javelina (though it’s hard to tell with the actual potatoes being under ground, but the greens look very healthy). Barring any particularly bad insect invasion, which could come any time now, we should have a lot of food here.

An abundance of basil

Thursday, August 7th, 2014

As you might remember, last year, we planted a large bed of basil. It was quite lovely, but there was really a lot of it.

This year, I decided to plant just a few small pots. (We still have pesto in the freezer from last year, and all of our neighbors have probably had their fill too.)

However, the bed from last year reseeded itself, and I am loathe to pull out healthy volunteers, so we now have a large amount of basil among our cantaloupes and lettuce. (At some point, all of my beds will be a mix of everything because of my reluctance to eliminate volunteers. For example, this year we have tomatoes in 3 or 4 different beds. This is a nice treat though.)

In the course of perusing food blogs this summer, I saw a recipe for basilcello. (If you haven’t tried limoncello, you should. It’s an Italian lemon liqueur, best served ice cold.) So naturally, I thought I’d give it a try. And I made it with lemon basil, which I love, hoping that lemon flavor would come through.

The results were fabulous. And you could taste the lemon flavor as much if not more than the basil. Here are a few pics of the process.

First you start with some vodka in a mason jar.

After washing the basil leaves, you par boil them, plunge them into an ice bath, and then add them to the vodka.

The basil then steeps in the vodka for a week. It gradually becomes green colored.

You then strain out the basil leaves, add some simple syrup (with relatively little sugar overall), chill the final beverage, and it’s ready to consume.

Cheers!

Garden update

Tuesday, May 27th, 2014

We ate our first French breakfast radishes today.

radishes

And here’s what the front beds are looking like. Starting to get filled up with sweet potatoes, tomatoes, beans, and greens!