Strawberries and Scapes

It's strawberry season! We've been picking a small bowl every other day for the past two weeks or so.

Saturday's Harvest

Unfortunately there are some critters in our garden that also enjoy the berries.

Critter-chomped Strawberry

I think it's probably mostly birds - but sometimes we find a berry that was dragged to another part of the garden - maybe by chipmunks? We have a lot of robins and blackbirds (not sure if they're *actually* blackbirds or just black birds. I need to consult my birdwatching friend Amy. Either way I get the Beatles song stuck in my head every time I see them in the back yard).  I haven't put up netting because they leave a lot for us, and part of me likes the fact that I'm helping feed the local wildlife. The boys also have fun chucking the bitten berries into the bushes.

My other big garden excitement this past week was discovering scapes on my garlic. This is my first year growing garlic, and until about last year at this time I'd never heard of scapes.

From about.com: Garlic scapes are the "flower stalks" of hardneck garlic plants, although they do not produce flowers. These stalks start to appear a month or so after the first leaves. They are usually cut off of the plant, since leaving them on only diverts the plants strength away from forming a plump bulb. If left on, they eventually form small bulbils that can be planted to grow more garlic, but it takes 2–3 years for them to form large bulbs. Many gardeners simply toss their scapes in the compost, but garlic scapes are both edible and delicious, as are the bulbils.

The curly thing in the middle is a scape.

Scapey goodness

I chopped off some of my scapes on Thursday and made a pesto like sauce that I slathered on salmon before baking it. Woo! Those scapes pack a definite punch! There are still some ready to be harvested so I need to search for some good scape recipes.

In other news, my snow peas are flowering like crazy. The below pic was taken last Wednesday. I just went out and found that there are now lots of little peas. I may have my first harvest by the end of the week!

Yay! Peas!

And here's an overview of my tomato, pepper, tomatillo, ground cherry area. I also just planted bush green beans (Tenderette) in the right third. This was also taken last week. I was out there today and the tomato plants look a little bigger already, and the beans are starting to poke up. Need to get some cages out there for the tomatoes!

I'll leave you with a close up shot of the ground cherry plant that's still in my house because I didn't have room for it in the garden. Lots of little lanterns all over that sucker. I plucked off all the flowers on the plants that went into the garden because they say that helps the plants develop bigger root systems and get larger, but I left them on the plant I didn't have room for in my beds. Now I'm kind of regretting pinching off those flowers in the garden. Those plants are just starting to get flowers again. This one on my windowsill has lots of fruit!

Ground cherries galore!

I planted that guy from seed, and he's all grown up now. I feel like a proud parent.

Tomatoes Have Been Planted!

On Sunday I headed out to Stillman's to buy tomato plants. They're a farm (we were members of their CSA a few years ago), but they also have greenhouses with veggie and flower plants for sale in the spring. Over the winter I noticed that they had an insane number of types of tomatoes available for preorder on their website. I was hoping they'd also have a huge variety on hand for walk in traffic, and I wasn't disappointed! They actually had quite a few that weren't on their order form - and they have 151 varieties listed on the form!

All those plants on the left are tomatoes!

With the help of my first grader, I picked out eleven plants.

I ended up with:

Beauty. Indeterminate, 75 days. While named for its beautiful scalloped appearance, this variety is best known for ts great flavor. Manageable plants produce an abundance of large very sweet fruits.

Black Krim.  Heirloom: Indeterminate, 75 days. Hailing from Russian origins, this tomato is named for the Island of Krim in the Black Sea. Productive plants, yielding slightly flattened fruits of a rich deep purple color with almost black shoulders. Superior full tomato flavor.

Eva Purple Ball. Heirloom: Indeterminate, 70 days. A German selection, plants yield huge quantities of round juicy fruits. A great slicing variety for salads and sandwiches

Fireworks. Indeterminate. 60 days. Known for its combination of earliness, large size and eating quality, this is an exceptional selection. Productive plants.

Reisentraube. Heirloom. Indeterminate. 80 days. A German Heirloom. Reisentraube literally translates to "giant bunch of grapes" for the grape like clusters fruits are borne on. Great large tomato flavor.

Yellow Pear. Yellow pear type: indeterminate, 70 days. Vigorous vines bear loads of small, lemon-yellow pear shaped fruits. Very mild, light flavor.

Aker's West Virginia: These organic tomato seeds produce a vigorous highly productive, regular leaf, heirloom tomato plant that yields an excellent set of large, 10 to 16-ounce, deep-red, slightly flattened tomatoes in clusters of 2. Delicious, robust flavors.

Red Zebra. Plant yields huge amounts of 2-inch, red fruit with light yellow striping (or as some say, yellow fruit with red striping).

Old German. Big regular leaf plant yields 1-2 lb. beautiful fruits. Fruit color is yellow with red mottling and striping on the outside and throughout the flesh. Best color of several strains of this heirloom. 

Bush Champion. Determinate, 65 days. This big and meaty fruit grows on compact (24 in, 60 cm) plants that flower extra early. It resists Gray Leaf Spot and Alternaria well. This slicer produces 9 to 12 oz (255 to 340 g) fruits.

Sioux. Heirloom: Indeterminate 70 days.  Don't be fooled by this tomato!  Extraordinary flavor can exist in a round red tomato.  Originally released by the University of Nebraska in 1944, this variety is still popular today because of its reliable yields and exceptional flavor

Violceum Krypni Roz. 80 days. Prolific pink purple scalloped fruits.

I also had one tomato plant, planted from seed on my own, thrown into the tray with the ground cherries and tomatillos (I had more than one but I trashed them when they were tiny. I'm kind of regretting that now):

Brandywine: Heirloom indeterminate, 78 days. Considered by many to be the "best". Brandywine is the original beefsteak tomato, producing large, pink fruits with a loud tangy sweet taste. One slice covers the whole burger!

Along with the tomatoes, I also planted two hot pepper plants I picked up from Home Depot on Monday, and had one sweet pepper planted started from seed. I also planted one tomatillo plant (I ran out of room or I would have planted more!) and six ground cherries. I still have my mind set on ground cherry pies and jams galore. I had room for only four ground cherry plants in my main bed, but I tucked two more into empty spots in my raised beds, one with the peas and one with the garlic and arugula. It's kind of an experiment. We'll see how they all do in their different spots.

10 tomato plants in the left section, two tomatoes, three peppers, one tomatillo and four ground cherries in the middle. The right area is reserved for green beans. 

Ground Cherry with the peas (in the spot where my failed over-wintered spinach was going to seed)

Ground Cherry (on the left) with garlic and arugula. He's looking a little droopy. Maybe the garlic's too stinky for him.

A Little Greener

I'm long overdue for a garden update. No major news in the past couple weeks. Things have grown a little - that's about it! I am super excited though, because Saturday is our official last frost date! This means I can plant my warm season crops  -like green beans and sunflowers and cucumbers and squash! It's also the very earliest I can add my tomatillo and ground cherry seedlings into the garden, and buy/plant tomato and pepper seedlings (I have a few, but I'll need more). I may wait another week or so to do that though. Ideally overnight temps should be consistently in the 50s before planting tomato/pepper like veggies (tomatillos and ground cherries are in that category too). Looks like we're supposed to get down in the 30s and 40s Memorial Day weekend... so maybe the weekend after that?

Here's what's happening right now:

Garden as of today. Looking a little greener!

New asparagus shoots are still coming up!

Garlic, Arugula and Lettuce. The little arugula/lettuce seedlings are getting bigger!

Grapes... the posts and chicken wire we use to hold them up are a little white-trash- but soon the grapes will totally cover them and nobody will be the wiser. Some day we'll get high class wood posts for these guys.

Can you  see all the grapes-to-be?

My divided baby hostas (and remnants of Sam's chalk drawing behind them)

Baby pears!

And an update on my seedlings: Dudes, I'm so proud of how big some of these guys have gotten! No grow light required!

Tomatillos . A little leggy. I have four of these guys

They're flowering!

And a flowering ground cherry!

Brandywine Tomato.

 The above tomato plant looked like this when I repotted it on May 8th;

What a difference! Poor little guy needed to stretch his legs.  Now I'm bummed that I threw out the rest of my tomato seedlings because they all looked so sickly. Dang.

Yum Yum Gold Pepper

Ground cherry seedlings (below). The larger ones were planted 2-3 weeks before the smaller ones.  It amazes me how fast everything takes off once you put them in larger containers.  I totally learned my lesson about  the importance of potting up plants as soon as they're ready.

I got the idea to use red Solo cups as pots on youtube. My theory is that the red cups act like the red plastic mulch recommended for tomatoes, and  helps the plants grow larger faster. Tomatillos and Ground Cherries are in the tomato family - so I'm assuming they like red too. Next year I'll have to experiment and put a few seedlings in blue cups to see if there's any difference.

And finally Ninja, checking out the garden:

She seems unimpressed. Humph.

Garden Update

This is my garden as of this morning. It's starting to look a little greener!

And my seedlings are getting bigger! I transplanted some of them into larger cups, and those guys are really taking off. I need to transplant the rest of them - but I'm worried about having room enough on my windowsills for that many big plastic cups. The plants are spending most of each day outside now, so it might not be that big an issue.

Tomatillo (with some flower buds!):

Ground cherry:

I think that's a little bud forming on this guy too!

I have all of my raised beds planted with spring crops and perennials. I'll use the tilled bed in back for my warm weather crops (like tomatoes and the tomitillos and ground cherries!) that can be planted after the last frost at the end of May.

asparagus bed

Close up of the asparagus with a few new shoots almost ready for harvest!

I had my first asparagus harvest of the spring on Friday! I was so excited. This is my 3rd year growing asparagus. The first year you don't harvest at all, the 2nd year you harvest just a little, and the 3rd year you can harvest all you want, focusing on the shoots that are thicker than a pencil. You let the skinny shoots develop into these tall fernlike plants, the root  system gets stronger, and you end up with an asparagus producing bed for years and years to come!

Asparagus is one of the few veggies that are ready to eat this early in the spring in these parts, so I am truly psyched beyond belief that I'm managing to grow some!

First harvest of the season!

I have two beds of strawberries, and they're starting to flower.

And the peas planted in my last post are sprouting!

 The pear tree is flowering too:

Garlic's lookin' good. I planted arugula and red leaf lettuce in the empty spaces in the garlic bed. The arugula is sprouting already. Arugula is my favorite leafy green. Love the slightly spicy taste, and it's by far one of the easiest veggies to grow, and also one of the quickest to mature.

Garlic (and lots of pear petals!)

Arugula seedlings and pear petals

Remember the spinach that I planted in the fall hoping it would overwinter and come back to life in the spring to give me an awesome early harvest? Only two spinach tufts survived, and they're still pretty small.  They're in the corner of one of my pea beds. I still haven't figured out how to successfully grow spinach. I think it might involve cold frames, and I don't have one yet.

I'm a survivor!

The grape leaves are coming out.

 One of my new little hostas. It survived the dividing process!

Bleeding hearts:

Blooming rhododendron:

So fluffy and pretty!

 Raspberry:

My bleak looking raspberry area is below. I planted 10 bare root plants last spring. I had a *very*  small harvest last summer (5-10 berries!). Hoping they fill out and give me more this year. Supposedly they're invasive and can take over a yard (which honestly, I wouldn't mind at all),  so they're on the opposite side of the house from my veggie garden.

This tomato seedling isn't looking so hot. See how the leaf is brownish purple on the underside? That means potassium or phosphorus deficiency. It can happen when seedlings become rootbound, so I just repotted it and am hoping that fixes the problem.

This ground cherry doubled in size since I repotted it a week ago!

In comparison, my ground cherries and tomatillo seedlings are looking great. I was Googling last night and found that ground cherries can produce up to *300* fruits per plant (which is about what my one tomatillo plant produced two summers ago), compared to tomatoes which max out at about 21 per plant. Apparently ground cherries are weed-like and grow wild along the side of the road in warm regions of the US. They're sprawling and can take over a garden. Four to six plants is supposed to be more than enough for a family of four. I have about *ahem* 16 ground cherry seedlings. At this point I think I'll probably only keep the six healthiest. I want to save some room for at least a few tomatoes in my warm weather patch, but I also love the idea of making lots and lots of ground cherry preserves!