Wide Row Thinning

I may have mentioned earlier that I am trying gardening using Dick Raymond's wide row method. This basically entails scattering seed over a wide row (about a foot wide), instead of seeding in straight lines. This causes some congestion as things grow, but allows you to continuously thin your garden. Each time you thin you remove the largest vegetables, allowing more room for the small ones to fill in. The idea is that you get to harvest sooner and for a longer period of time, for an overall larger yield.

Well, last week a "thinned" about five pounds of turnips and rutabagas. One of the hardest parts of gardening is finding ways to use produce that you don't really like, or just have too much of (remember my 12 pounds of radishes last fall?).

I hunted the web for turnip recipes and finally ended up making this turnip souffle. It actually ended up being pretty decent. It is not one of my favoriate all-time foods, but I think it really makes a decent turnip side dish--even if it was quite a bit of work.

Well, today I did some more thinning and brought in about four pounds of carrors (2 each of Nantes and Danvers). I have a total of about 6 or 7 feet planted in carrots, and after picking all of these I still have 6 or 7 feet planted, and I will probably pick them again in a few weeks.

Other thinning was not quite as gratifying. My broccoli, cauliflower, and lettuce were just way too close together, so I had to pull out a lot of it in hopes that I can get something from what is left. I should have done it a lot earlier but I only rarely get myself in the garden with a flashlight to work. Surprisingly all of my lettuce still seems to have survived the freeze.

Going Radish Crazy

So some of you know that I have been spreading radishes throughout my garden in the manner described by Dick Raymond's Joy of Gardening book. The idea is that when you are planting, you plant a few radishes along with everything else. The radishes grow quickly, showing you where you planted, as well as helping to shade the soil (which is important in our Texas heat), and also leave lots of loose soil behind when you pull them.

Well, the first time I tried this I planted way too many, and my chard and beets had a hard time coming through all the radishes. I pulled all the radishes, and the chard and beets are thriving (although that could be because of all the cool weather and rain we have had!). This time, I planted what I thought were a lot fewer radishes, but I replanted almost my entire garden, so cumulatively I still planted a lot of radishes. So yesterday I picked 12 pounds of radishes! I have no idea what to do with them all. They are very good, not the pungent nasty radishes from the heat of the summer, but there sure are a lot of them.

Any ideas?

The Fall garden is taking shape

Okay, so I don't have any picture sof my garden, but I did take a picture of a salad I had for dinner today, which got much of its contents from my garden. I will admit, the lettuce is from Costco, but this salad has radishes, beets (if you haven't tried them raw, they are delicious), beet greens, red chard, and bok choy from my garden.

This has been a very good gardening year for me, but a very slow summer. The summer was long and hot, but we are finally seeing some cooler weather. A few weeks ago I planted broccoli, cauliflower, rutabagas, turnips, bok choy, spinach, carrots, onions, radishes, and scallions. Some of these are doing great, while others are more of an experiment for me. An example of this is the onions. I have little tiny onions plants growing all over the place, but I have no idea how they will do--I have never grown them before!

In addition to everything I just planted, I still have winter squash, chard, beets, tomatoes and peppers from earlier in the year. I am hoping that with the cooler weather the tomatoes and peppers will hurry and put on some fruit, but I am not really getting my hopes up.

Squash has been the most difficult thing for me to deal with. I planted about 40 feet of winter squash in the summer, and have harvested from it about a dozen tiny squash. I blame all of this squarely on the vine borer, which I have posted about before. I knew they would take a toll on my plants, but some of the varieties of squash have given me just a single fruit off of about six vines. It could be that the extra hot summer prevented the plants from thriving, but I can guarantee you that the vine borers didn't help things at all.

Well, I will start posting updates as things progress in the fall. I need to plant some garlic and lettuce in the coming week (once the ground dries out!), and we will see just how much variety this garden can pump out all winter.

July is melon month!

So our melons have been coming on strong during the past week. We have picked all of our Suger Baby watermelon (about 5 of them), and we have so far harvested 8 cantaloupe. The Suger Babies were a little bit overripe, but still delicious. The cantaloupe have been very good as well, although I have learned that you really need to let them sit around a couple days before you eat them, or else they are crisp like a sweet potato instead of chin-dripping gooey like you want a cantaloupe to be.

The bottom picture shows the reason that cantaloupe from the store usually aren't very good--RIPE CANTALOUPE ARE YELLOW!!! All of those green things at the store aren't even worth the time to look at. When they turn yellow like this they literally fall off the vine and are perfect.

After this we should have about another half-dozen cantaloupe, followed by a half-dozen Tennessee Rattlesnake Watermelon which are still growing.

My First Tomato Preservation

So our Roma tomatoes have finally started ripening like mad, so I have been trying to figure out how to use all the tomatoes I have been picking. A few days ago I canned the whole tomatoes you see in the top picture, which consist of about half Roma and half Juliet tomatoes, with a few Early Girl and Better Boy thrown in.

On Friday, I picked about 13 pounds of tomatoes, mostly Roma. Not everything is completely ripe when I pick it--some go in a paper sack and wait a few days before I can use them--so the bowl shows all of them I had ready to be used on Friday. After spending hours laboring over them, I ended up with four measly pints of spaghetti sauce and two pints of tomato juice. It really makes you appreciate just how cheap our food is...I don't even want to imagine what the cost per jar for this spaghetti sauce would be once you factor in all my garden expenses and labor.

Anyway, there is something fulfilling about making things myself, even if I can only justify the expense by calling it a hobby.

Tomato Salad

So today I picked the largest tomato in my garden, a 25 ounce Brandywine. It is really quite large--that is my hand in the photo! It's probably not quite ripe yet, but I honestly am not sure how to tell, I have never actually seen a Brandywine before!

All the information I have seen says that Brandywines get to be about 14 ounce, so I am quite pleased with my monster! Hopefully it tastes great, because from two plants I only had 4 fruits set!

The bottom picture shows the array of tomatoes from my garden this year. From largest to smallest they are Brandywine, Better Boy (Probably the closes to a normal "supermarket" sized tomato), Early Girl, Roma, Juliet, and Sweet 100 cherry.

I tend to pick them a bit early and ripen them inside. This seems to help avoid problems with birds, bugs, rain, and sun, and supposedly they will still taste the same.

Potato Time!

Well my Butte potatoes have been dying back, a few weeks earlier than I had expected. I am not sure if the die back is due to the heat or disease. Only a few of the plants seem to have really been damaged by insects, so I don't think they are the primary culprit.

In the end I have decided to go ahead and dig the potatoes. What I found has been a lot of small potatoes, with only a couple of the baking-sized potatoes that I had hoped for. It got dark before I could finish today, but I dug 15 pounds of potatoes--which seems in-line with what I would have expected for the amount of plants which I dug. This makes me think that the plants may have put on smaller tubers because the soil was pretty heavy around them--it may have just been too hard to push it out of the way to grow a large tuber.

When I finish digging up the row tomorrow or Saturday, I will be able to tally up my harvest to see how we did.