Vegetable Garden


An unseasonably cool and wet spring slowed things down a bit, but currently our vegetable garden is booming.  Everything planted is now up.  We’re harvesting snap peas, lettuce, prize choy, turnips, broccoli, collards, swiss chard, and herbs (parsley and cilantro).  Various kinds of beans, cowpeas and cucumbers, are scurrying up my three trellises (I seem to add a new one every year).  I don’t think I’ve ever seen such healthy-looking potato plants (with not a single Colorado potato beetle yet, although we do have an ample supply of Mexican bean beetles).  This year I tried a new variety of turnip offered by Baker Creek: Boule d’Or.  With a flavor both mild and rich, it did fine as a spring crop, despite the advice on the packet to grow it in the fall.  With all the stuff coming in, you learn to be creative.  Monika and I ate turnip oven fries last night!

 

 

Based on my experience the past three years down here along the Blue Ridge Mountains, I sowed much of the spring garden early in March: snap and snow peas, lettuce, collards, swiss chard, cold-weather herbs, and turnips.  By this time in those years, virtually all those seeds would have sent up healthy shoots and leaves.  But March this year has been a different story–much colder than usual, with temperatures in the 20’s or low 30’s most nights.  And to top it off, we got five or six inches of snow again yesterday.  Nobody’s happy about this, not even our chickens, who, having rushed outside in their usual way, rushed back inside when they saw the snow.  Later, a few ventured out into the white stuff, but most stayed close to home.

 

click on image above for a larger one

Since Monika’s diagnosis of kidney cancer in January, our life has been something of a treadmill of medical tests and doctor appointments, culminating in a ten-day stay in Johns Hopkins University Hospital, where Monika had her left kidney and the tumor on it removed.  Before, during, and after, we’ve both been greatly moved by the outpouring of support in the form of cards, emails, prayers, best wishes, and good vibes.  A particularly special one was the poem above by our dear friend and former colleague at Rutgers, Rafey Habib.  I’ve used a picture Monika took of the Blue Ridge mountains she loves so much as a backdrop to Rafey’s poem.  We both find it profoundly moving.


 

 

2013 will mark our fifth vegetable garden in Virginia.  Based on the first four years, the one predictable thing is unpredictability.  Each year has been totally unique, with its own challenges and rewards.  2012 was marked by a violent spring hailstorm, and an early summer derecho which flattened much of our forest and parts of the garden, and unusually long dry hot periods.  So who knows what the inauspiciously-named 2013 will bring?

Seed catalogs started flooding in even before Thanksgiving, and I now have a basic plan for the spring and summer gardens.  For those interested in such things, here are a few new directions:

Focusing on Softneck Garlics.  Garlic was the first thing planted for this year’s garden; it went in last September.  But based on several years of significant spoilage of hardneck garlics (which I have favored because of their easy-to-use large cloves and their unique flavors), I mainly planted softneck garlics this time around: some from bulbs I’ve grown for several years (Inchellum Red and S&H Silverskin) and a new softneck, Polish Red, which is supposed to have the virtues of excellent storage capacity and a bulb structure much like a hardneck, i.e. fewer but larger cloves.  Hopefully this year’s harvest will get me through to the next year’s, a goal that I’ve never quite reached yet.

Experimenting with Hybrid Tomatoes.  I’ve always resisted hybrid plants in favor of heirlooms (and would never grow genetically-modified ones), but several years of Fusarium Wilt and premature die-offs of tomato plants as early as June convinced me this past year to go out looking for hybrids with disease resistance.  Since by then it was late June, the pickings were slim and the plants scrawny.  But the ones I planted came back to life and started producing in late August and continued well into October, without any evident disease problem.  Taste was good, though not exceptional.  So I’ve ordered seeds for five hybrid tomato varieties to try out, along with the more successful heirloom varieties I’ve been growing.  It’s a compromise I’m not entirely happy with, but the alternative hasn’t been happy either.  I’m also trying some hybrid squash seeds, after some unhappy experiences with cucumber and squash bugs.

Growing More Cowpeas and Dry Beans.  I grew cowpeas for the first time this year, and both Monika and I really like them.  In fact, we used a bunch of them tonight, along with the remaining collards still growing in the garden, to make Hoppin Johns, a classic southern recipe that we make pretty regularly.  Cowpeas originated in Africa and constitute a unique botanical family: vigna unguiculata (somehow that doesn’t sound appetizing, but they are).  Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds has the best selection, and in addition to sticking with Six-Week Purple Hull cowpeas, I’m adding Monkey Tail and Haricot Rouge Du Burkina Faso, which together will provide a nice range of colors; creamy to deep tan to reddish-brown, all with a pink or black and white eye.  (The new ones were chosen partly for the fact that they are supposed to be climbers, and hopefully will scramble up my trellises rather than sprawl extensively on the ground, which many varieties do.)  I’m also trying two bean varieties that dry on the vine and are then shelled, much like cowpeas.  A great virtue of both cowpeas and dry peas is that they are virtually ready for storage once you pick and shell them.  And they look handsome in glass jars on the kitchen counter!

Trying New Varieties of Old Favorites.  I’m a sucker for trying out new varieties of vegetables and herbs I always grow, such as snap beans, cucumbers, cilantro, etc.  Since there are many more varieties of bush beans than pole beans, I’m trying several of these, along with such things as Prize Choy, lemongrass, Turnip Boule D’Or, and more.

Planting a New Crop: Sweet Potatoes.  I like to try something new each year (last year it was peanuts and cowpeas), and inspired by the huge (and tasty) sweet potatoes of our friend Axel Goetz, I’m planning to try two heirloom varieties, most likely from the quite amazing couple that run Sand Hill Preservation Center in Iowa.  They are preserving and selling close to 200 varieties of sweet potatoes alone.

Producing Chicken-Friendly Excess.  Needless to say, we grow a lot more than we can eat, even after freezing or canning it.  But our chickens are happy to oblige in disposing of the excess, so we do keep an eye on what they like or is particularly healthy for them.  Partly for that reason, I’m planning a significant patch of broccoli in the spring, since they love the stems.  (They probably love the flower heads too, but they’re reserved for us.)

The attached list is mainly for my records, but anyone interested in my seed list for 2013 may click on more below.

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While we continue to get lettuce and other greens from our fall garden, our last real crop harvest was parsnips.  Planted in April, I basically left them alone, with their above-ground leafy greens shading and keeping down weeds.  I grew two varieties: Harris Model and Hollow Crown, with the former producing on average a better yield; both have a nice nutty flavor.

Wanting to make a dinner that showcased our late fall garden and other local sources, I settled on the following menu, which worked quite nicely: Kibbeh, using ground beef from a one-quarter (cut-up and packaged) cow we purchased from nearby Davis Creek Farm along with mint still thriving in our garden; Mashed Carrots and Turnips, a recipe we’d picked up at the mountain farm exhibit by the Humpback Rocks Visitor Center along the Blue Ridge Parkway, including a golden-top turnip from our garden; and Parsnips Glazed with Sherry, Ginger, Thyme, and Lemon, using some of our just-harvested parsnips along with fresh thyme still growing in our garden.  If you’re interested in the recipes, click on: (more…)

While Monika and I were in Maryland last weekend, mice apparently found my peanuts curing on screens in the kennel and devoured a substantial proportion of them.  But about three-quarters remained with no or limited damage, and so today I roasted them in the oven.  I shelled the damaged ones and left the rest in their shells.  You spread them on baking sheets and put them in a 350 degree oven: 20 minutes for peanuts in their shells and 25 minutes for shelled peanuts.  (This may seem counter-intuitive, but the air in the shells heats up and cooks them faster.)  It’s important to let the peanuts cool completely before eating–only then do they become crisp and exhibit their full roasted flavor.  They were yummy!

To make peanut butter, I put one cup of shelled peanuts and 1/2 teaspoon of salt in a food processor.  While processing, I added about two tablespoons of  vegetable oil and about a tablespoon of honey.  The result was  the most tasty peanut butter we’ve ever had!

This year I tried out two distinctively Southern crops I’d never grown before: cowpeas and peanuts.  Cowpeas, also known as southern peas, were brought to the American south by enslaved Africans.  They come in many varieties, the most well-known being black-eyed peas.  They have a high protein content and are easy to grow.  Being a legume, an added benefit is that they fix nitrogen in the soil.  I chose to grow a variety from Baker Creek called Six Week Purple-Hull Cowpea.  A package of seeds produced about five cups of dry beans.  A great thing about cowpeas is that if you just leave them on the plant until the pods are dry, they’re pretty much instantly ready for storage.  This one has a particularly nice buttery and nutty taste.

 

Peanuts originated in South America; the Spanish encountered them first in what is today Mexico.  It’s been surprising to me how many people don’t know that peanuts grow mainly underground–I learned this early living in Tanzania, where peanuts are known as groundnuts.  The nuts grow mostly underground on string-like tethers from the many branches of the plant.  They take at least four months to mature, but they are heat and drought tolerant.  To harvest, one loosens the plant with a pitchfork and then pulls it out.  A single plant can have 50-70 peanuts, although some may have considerably less.  You leave the nuts on the plant to begin drying for a few days, then remove them and dry them on a screen for about three weeks.   After all the nuts have been cured, roasted peanuts and homemade peanut butter are on the agenda!

Of course, the classic crop of Southern planters, from colonial days well into the twentieth century, was tobacco, which devastates the soil, quite apart from its other pernicious effects.  Decaying tobacco barns still dot the countryside here, but Nelson County is happily making an agricultural transition to healthier and more varied harvests.  Just today we bought a quart of sorghum molasses at the annual Sorghum-making festival down the road, and a bushel of Fuji apples at a nearby orchard!


Sorghum stalks being fed into press;
the resulting juice  is then boiled down

I harvested most of our potatoes mid-July, but in the past few days, as I’ve dug up part of the potato patch for plantings for the fall garden, I’ve been coming across the ones I missed.  So I’m still harvesting!  We estimate a total harvest of about 170 pounds of three varieties of yellow potatoes (Satina, Carola, Yukon Gold) and one white potato (Kennebec).   While Satina was the most productive, Monika’s and my eating favorite so far this year has been the Carolas–nice color and great texture and flavor, especially when boiled, mashed, or fried.  Our onions were grown from sets rather than seeds, and experience seems to be teaching, as the gardening literature suggests, that onions grown from sets don’t store all that well.  We’ve had to throw out quite a few soft ones, and next year I’ll try seeds instead.  They taste fine, though.

 

We continue to get a steady flow of cucumbers, and several varieties of squash, including the prolific and interestingly-shaped Zucchini Rampicante, pictured above near the row of sunflowers we planted this year.  Several varieties of pole beans are now coming along strong, and butternut, spaghetti, and acorn squash have spread out extensively and appear to be ripening nicely.  Most of our first original tomato plants, after an initial period of high productivity, have succumbed to heat and wilt, but we’re just beginning to get tomatoes from a second planting of wilt-resistant hybrids that I planted in early July.

 

Our eleven chickens continue to give us 6-8 eggs most days, despite the heat.  Between the barred rock on the left and the Rhode Island Reds on the right, Monika holds Poet, one of our two Black Australorps, who has the misfortune to be at the bottom of the local pecking order and therefore gets extra TLC from time to time.

After four solid weeks without a drop of rain (the wind storm described in my last post was completely dry), we had a good downpour yesterday afternoon, with our rain gauge registering 1.3 inches.  Our gardens look much relieved, and summer’s bounty is beginning to flow.  Lots of squash, tomatoes, and cucumbers, with red and yellow peppers not far behind.  Potatoes, scallions and onions ready to be harvested whenever I get to them.  My various pole beans have been stunted by the dry weather, but today they look quite perky.  As always, the trick is to keep up with the flow!  Monika’s just (almost) gotten through over a bushel of peaches we bought a week or so ago–canned as halves and processed and  frozen as cobbler, ice cream and sorbet, and cakes.  (All really good!)

 

I’m generally not a huge fan of either radishes or pickles, but an article in the February/March Organic Gardening induced me to order seeds for  the “watermelon radish” (less picturesquely also known as the “Chinese red meat” radish) from Baker Creek.  As the pictures above show, the radish when sliced really does look like a miniature watermelon, and the taste is sweet and mild as radishes go.  Dipped in lime juice, it’s especially nice.  For a cup of watermelon radish slices, a recipe in the article also recommended pickling in 1/2 cup Champagne vinegar, 1/4 cup sugar, 1/4 cup water and a pinch of sea salt.  They’re ready to eat in two days and have gotten good reviews from friends who are more pickle aficionados than I, who likes them too!

Despite the radish’s classification as a fall radish, I successfully grew it in the spring, although it does take about twice as long as a regular radish to bulb out.

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