Snowy Garlic and Seedling Update

After days of temps in the 70s, we had snow last night. Luckily the garlic doesn't seem to mind too much.

 Meanwhile inside, the seedlings seem happy.

Cabbages!

One Giant Cabbage

That one cabbage that's bigger than the rest was moved out of the little peat pots and into a big red cup two weeks before the others. I'm learning that if you don't plant up the little seedlings (cabbages, tomatoes, or whatever ) as soon as they get their first set of true leaves, they wont' grow as quickly as they could.

Whopper Tomatoes

Cherry Tomatoes - ready to be moved to the red cups!

Romaine Lettuce- a little leggy and also ready for the red cup treatment. Kale at the top of the pic will be ready for up-planting in a week or so.

My ground cherries finally sprouted!

Baby Ground Cherries

 I just looked back at my blog entries from last year at this time. My ground cherry seedlings were slightly bigger but my tomatoes were a lot smaller. I started everything later than I did this year, but the ground cherries sprouted on my first attempt last spring.

According my my gardening books I can plant my peas and add my cabbage plants to the garden five weeks before the last frost - which is Monday!  Hopefully we'll be done with snow by then. :/

Seed Starting 2014!

 I'm baaaack! It's been a while, but it's springtime, and that means I'm starting my seeds!

About two weeks ago I planted ground cherries, tomatoes, lettuce, kale, eggplant and sweet peppers.

Last year I grew Aunt Molly's Ground Cherries for the first time. They ended up being my favorite plant in the garden and were insanely productive (we still have ground cherry jelly in the pantry!) so I thought I'd try two varieties of GCs this year.

 

 On the tomato front, I decided to go with a couple hybrid varieties to see if they produce better than the heirlooms I grew last year.

I also thought I'd try starting lettuce and kale inside for the first time (Territorial Seed Company's packets are so pretty!).

Incidentally Territorial Seed and Park Seed are my two favorite veggie seed companies. Their catalogs are insanely easy to read with amazing photos, descriptions and planting instructions, and I've always had great luck with their plants and seeds, even though neither is New England based.

The pepper and eggplant seeds were free from an awesome event I attended at the beginning of March: the Growing Places Gardener's Gathering.  If you live in north-central MA, and you garden - this event is a must do in the spring! They had a seed exchange table with lots of free seeds for the taking. Unfortunately I forgot to label all the seeds I picked up and had to guess when I got home...

Two weeks later, this is how everything is looking:

In the above pic, left to right we have one row of kale, two rows of romaine lettuce, a row of eggplant, a row of what was peppers (whic never germinated - so yesterday I planted more ground cherries), a row and a half of big beef tomatoes, a row and a half of cherry tomatoes, and two rows of ground cherries (which aren't doing so well yet... see below).

Kale and lettuce are growing like gangbusters!

Happy Little Tomatoes!

Not so happy ground cherries... If you look hard you can see a few little sprouts - there's also this weird mossy mold stuff that seems to be doing better than the ground cherries...

My one and only fully sprouted ground cherry.

So yeah, I think my mistake with the ground cherries this year was planting just two seeds per square. The seeds are incredibly tiny. Last year I planted a clump of about 10 seeds per square. That gave me much better odds. In a lot of my squares the seed seems to be stuck on the end of the little plant stalk, and is too hard for the leaves to break through. This kind of thing happens with tomatoes pretty often (ground cherries are in the same family). I always end up with a few duds whose leaves never do emerge from the seed shell. They just get stuck in there and the plant eventually dies.  Ground cherries do have a longer germination period than tomatoes... so I'm hoping a few manage to break through.  Just to be on the safe side I planted big clumps of GC seeds in the row where the free pepper seeds never grew. Last year I had four big ground cherry plants and that was more than enough for our family to eat fresh and can, so I really just need four of them to survive. Go Ground Cherries! Go!

The awesome thing about Ground Cherries is once they make it through this semi-difficult baby stage, they grow like gangbusters. They're much easier to grow than tomatoes. They're basically very weed like and can take over sections of your garden (which I see as a good thing because I love them so much!). I wish I could find seedlings locally...

I also started some cabbage seeds I snagged at the Gardener's Gathering. The cabbages are living in the family room window right now, with some flower seedlings  my eight year old planted in Cub Scouts, lots of matchbox cars, and the cats.

Cabbages!

 

A well used window

Tomatoes and Beans and Ground Cherries, Oh My!

Sorry for the lack of posts! I need to get out there and take some pictures of the garden. In the meantime, here's what my harvest looked like late last week:

The things in the blue bowl are ground cherries. At this point we're harvesting that many every 2-3 days.  I *really* want to make jelly out of them, but we keep eating them straight from the bowl before I get a chance to jammify them. Peeling off the paper lanterns around them feels a lot like unwrapping candy before eating it. I need to hide them from the family (and myself!) until I have enough to make a few jars of jelly (or maybe a pie!).

Tomatoes and hot peppers are coming in in dribs and drabs. All of my tomato varieties this year are heirlooms. They taste sooo good, but I'm noticing that neighbors who planted all big-beef type tomatoes have a lot more red fruit on their vines. Next year I'll definitely plant a combo of everyday varieties and rarer types.  My favorite heirloom so far has been Black Krim, but I still have a few plants that are longer season tomatoes and don't have any ripe fruit yet (Aker's West Virginia, Sioux, Eva's Purple Ball and Brandywine), so I'm reserving my final judgement until I try them! Hopefully I'll get at least a couple fruit from each of them before the first frost!

And green beans, we have them coming out of our ears! This has definitely been the largest green bean harvest I've ever had. We've been looking up green bean recipes and having them with dinner a few times a week. We've had salted french fried green beans (our favorite so far), green bean casserole, and barbequed green beans. We gave a gallon zip lock bag of them to my in-laws when we visited, and we *still* have a gallon of them in the fridge. Time to look into freezing methods, me thinks.

We're finally in a bean-picking lull, but they're starting to flower again. The dang bean beetles have nibbled some of them to within an inch of their lives. I've been out there picking them and their eggs off whenever I can spot them. I'm thinking of paying the boys a quarter for every beetle found and smushed, and a dollar for any eggs found and smushed - although at this point the whole family is so beaned out I don't think anyone would be upset if there were no more beans (except maybe me!).

The kids went back to school today, so hopefully I'll have lots of time on my hands for some late season garden blogging, and start updating a lot more often!

Beans! (and a few little tomatoes)

It's finally bean harvest time! This was my second harvest of the week. the first, the day before yesterday, was a little smaller.

I've noticed that most veggie gardeners have a favorite green bean variety, and that's definitely true for me too. I *love* Tenderette bush beans. They're one of the few ever-bearing bush varieties. They're also heavy producers, and once they start, they keep you up to your eyeballs in green beans all summer.

Last year I decided to try pole beans for the first time (Kentucky Wonder), and by this date last year I still had no beans. I did end up with some good harvests a little later in the season, but not as good as the years I'd planted my precious bush beans. Plus pole beans require trellises. and I remember spending a long time building teepees last spring. 

So there you have it. If you're thinking of adding green beans to your garden next year, I highly recommend Tenderette!

Notes to Self

Just a mini entry. The garden's still in the in-between time, with not much to harvest right now. I'm kicking myself for not planting zucchini or cucumbers, and wanted to jot that down for when I'm referring to this year's blog entries at planting time next year. I did have reasons for not planting either of those  - mostly that I have limited space in my garden and zucchini and cukes take up a lot of real estate. Also, the  squash borers get my zucchini every year, and I thought maybe taking a year off would teach them to look elsewhere and save my crop next year. A girl can dream!

One more note-to-self. Next year plant some non-heirloom tomato varieties. I'm still having the problem where the majority of my tomato flowers dry up, fall off and don't become tomatoes. Some plants are worse than others. The Yellow Pear is going crazy (in a good way), and the Black Krim is producing well. But my Aker's West Virginia still doesn't have a single tomato. Grrrr. It was a good learning experience if nothing else. Next year I'll go with a majority of Big Beef, Jet Star and generic grape and cherry tomatoes, and will probably plant at least one Yellow Pear and Black Krim.

For now, here are some pics of my flowering green beans (mini beans are forming... could have first harvest next week!), and my small ground cherry, berry, tomatillo and pepper harvest from Saturday.

Baby Beans a Formin'!

Bean Bed

Jalapenos, Sweet Peppers and Tomatillos, Oh My! (and one yellow pear tomato)

Blueberries, Strawberries and Ground Cherries. I had ground cherry Greek yogurt that afteroon. Yummy!

In-Between Time

My garden's in sort of an in-between stage right now. The spring crops are about done, and the summer crops aren't ripe yet.

I harvested the garlic today, along with the last of the snow peas, a few strawberries, and a lone ground cherry.

I need to clear out the dregs of arugula (all flowering at this point) in the garlic bed, and crackly yellow pea plants in my two pea beds, and quickly figure out what to plant in those spots next. I'm thinking short season pumpkins in the pea beds. I'm not sure what to plant where the garlic was. Beets? Mini carrots? Or is there such a thing as a short season cucumber? Is it too early/hot to plant cabbage or broccoli for a fall harvest? I need to do some research, STAT.

My ever bearing strawberries are in a lull right now, but are flowering again, so it should be strawberry fiesta time again soon!

My warm weather crops are all getting bigger, but aren't quite mature yet.

Summer crop beds

The bush beans on the right are *just* about to flower. The ground cherries (front center) are going crazy. There are already hundreds of green ground cherries all over them, and more flowers coming.

Peeking in on the ground cherries

Tomatillos are doing well too.

My tomato and pepper plants finally have fruit! But nothing's ripe yet.

I'm also having the problem with my tomatoes that I seem to have every year. I have lots of flowers, but many of them just shrivel up and die before becoming fruit. I'm almost positive this is because it's been so insanely humid lately. Tomato flowers are self pollinating. In theory as long as there's a breeze or a bee to jiggle them around they should become tomatoes. When it's extremely humid though the pollen gets sticky and doesn't work its magic. A few days ago I started going out each morning to manually shake my tomato plants. Hoping that will help!

It takes about three weeks for garlic to dry out and cure before it's ready to eat and store. Within three weeks I  might just have ripe tomatoes, tomatillos  and peppers. I think I see salsa in my future!

Catch up!

Quick update! The kids finished up school for the year, my parents came to visit, and then it was the 4th of July - and um, I've kind of been neglecting my blog!


Here's the non-raised bed area of the garden as of 30 minutes ago:

For comparison's sake here's the same view taken on July 1st - just 4 days ago:

We're in the middle of a very humid heat-wave, and apparently the plants are loving it!

What else... I picked 3 1/2 pounds of snow peas last week! We're still eating our way through these. There are more peas to harvest, and they're blooming again.

I tasted my very first ripe ground cherry, and it was sooo yummy - kind of like pineapple. Sweet and mellow. Sam tried one and proclaimed that it tasted like "tropical fruit".

Sam helping out.

The reason they call them ground cherries is that the fruit isn't ripe until it's fallen off the plant and been "on the ground" (in a bowl is fine too) for a few days.  At this point the only ripe ground cherries I've harvested have been from the plant I ended up putting in a pot because I didn't have space for it in the garden. I plucked the flowers off all the other ground cherry seedlings to encourage root growth, so they're a little behind this guy fruit wise (but are *much* huger).

Fallen ground cherries.

As you can see, the cherries grow in little husks, like tomatillos. Inside there's what looks like an orangish/yellowish berry.

Not my pic, but I hope to have a harvest like this soon!

I read that each ground cherry plant can produce up to *300* fruits. so with any luck by the end of summer I'll have ground cherries coming out of my ears. Ground cherry preserves anyone? If you know me there's a good chance you'll get some for Christmas!

I'd also read that ground cherry plants can take over a garden. I'm on the verge of experiencing that.

Ground Cherries 7/1

Ground cherries today (and my feet!)

Looks like we should also have an awesome grape harvest this year - so big batches of Concord grape jam may also be in our future this fall! Here's hoping!

A glimpse of some grapes-to-be

I love gardening season - even if I don't have time to write much about it!