…To start thinking about your garden. Especially if you’re getting ready to start your first or giving it another attempt after having difficulty in the past. Here’s a link to a couple of previous posts about planning a successful garden.

One thing I don’t address in those posts is how I think some inexperienced gardeners get discouraged by comparing their produce to what they in the supermarket. Below is another excerpt from Eliot Coleman’s book Four-Season Harvest that addresses that issue.

“Let’s dispense with another garden negative: produce envy. Do [my] yields measure up? Is [my] lettuce as big as the supermarket variety? Forget all that stuff. This is your garden, and the rules are your own. You don’t need to do what the pros do, what your neighbor does, or what any book says. The commercial standards of industrial agriculture are meaningless in the home garden. Besides, they are achieved with innumerable chemicals that artificially expand and disguise poor produce by doping up the plant’s metabolism. In addition to not wanting to eat such produce, you certainly don’t want to emulate the techniques.”

“Enormous size should not be a criterion for garden success. It usually indicates overfertilization. If the vegetables look healthy and taste good, they are winners. Take lettuce as an example. If at the start you have trouble growing large heads of lettuce or prefer not to, plant two to four times as many, plant them closer together, and harvest them small. You now have baby lettuce (a gourmet item), which has taste and tenderness virtues all its own. In addition to enjoying greater variety, you will also experience far fewer pest and disease problems by harvesting your crops in their youth. Commercial standards are concerned with packing, shipping, and wholesale marketing, not flavor, tenderness, and eating pleasure. Ignore the commercial hype and concentrate on the standards that really count.”

Butternut Squash- Blemished, but perfectly edible

The squashes you see are all from my garden this past year. You’ll notice lots of imperfections and a wide variety of sizes. Most of these squashes would be rejected by supermarket produce buyers, but I can tell you from experience that they will all taste great, as good or better (mostly) than anything you can get in the supermarket. The only thing you occasionally need to look for is some of the squashes that are more heavily blemished may start to go bad sooner than others. To put this in perspective, it is now 4 months after I harvested the last of my squash and I’ve only had 1 squash that started to go bad. If a squash does start to go bad, just cut off the spoiled section, roast the remainder and freeze the squash.

Coconut Milk- Vegan or Not

On a completely different topic, I have received the definitive answer regarding whether commercially-produced coconut milk is made with water or milk as discussed in my last blog. It’s water not milk, making coconut milk a vegan product and the Green Bean & Sweet Potato Curry recipe a vegan dish.

In the original post for this recipe I mentioned that it is not a vegan recipe because of the coconut milk. A friend thought I was joking because she thought that the coconut milk that is sold in supermarkets was made from the fluid that’s inside a coconut. This is not the case.

Coconut milk as used in Asian cuisines is actually made by scalding milk, soaking dried, unsweetened coconut meat in the milk and then straining out the coconut. Some recipes will distinguish between Thick and Thin coconut milk. The difference is that Thick coconut milk is made with milk and is the initial pressing of the coconut meat (analogous to extra-virgin olive oil) while the Thin type is made with water and is a second pressing of the coconut.

My friend took a look a can of “light” coconut milk in her pantry and noticed that it was made with water not milk, so if you want to make the Green Bean and Sweet Potato Curry as a vegan recipe you can probably use light coconut milk in the recipe.

If you want to make your own coconut milk at home the proportions are below. Scald (just below boiling) the milk, add the coconut, and let the mixture cool before straining. I use a fine mesh strainer to get most of the milk out, then spoon the coconut meat into knee-high nylons and squeeze to get out as much liquid as possible. If not using the coconut milk right away, I freeze it in ice cube trays and then put the cubes into ziploc bags for storage.

I’d gotten a bit tired of my usual green bean recipe (Green Beans w/Coconut & Popped Rice) but with a little research I found this one in Madhur Jaffry’s World Vegetarian cookbook. The original recipe called for potatoes, but I thought sweet potatoes would go well with the curry, and make the dish more nutritious. I’m not really a big fan of sweet potatoes unless their sweetness can be masked which the spiciness of this dish does well. I serve it over brown rice, which when combined with the green beans in the dish gives you complete protein in a vegetarian dish (not vegan because of the coconut milk).

Green Bean & Sweet Potato Curry

You can find the recipe here.  Enjoy

Hope you all had an enjoyable Xmas. One present I got was book called Four-Season Harvest by Eliot Coleman. He’s an organic farmer from Maine who I’ve heard of especially regarding his ability to grow veggies throughout the winter. I’ve wanted to get one of his books for some time and now I have one. I’ve already enjoyed a lot of what I’ve read and I’ll be sharing various excerpts as I come across them.

This first excerpt concerns why to garden organically and contains a philosophy that I completely agree with.

“Let’s take a moment to discuss the benefits of organic gardening. No fearful tales are involved. I have no moral sermon. I have no plan to drown you in pages of factual data. Our home garden is organic, as it has been for thirty years, for a practical reason. Organic methods are simpler and work better. That’s right, they work better. Chemical agriculture is one of the great myths of the 20th century. The chemical salespeople swear that chemical fertilizers and pesticides are indispensable. In our experience, they are totally superfIuous. They are necessary only as a crutch for the weaknesses of industrial food production.

Basically, organic gardening means a partnership with nature. Nature’s gardeners are numerous and eager to help. Millions of beneficial organisms (everything from bacteria to earthworms to ground beetles) thrive in a fertile soil, and make things go right if the gardener encourages them. The gardener does that by understanding the natural processes of the soil and aiding them with compost. The inherent stability and resilience of natural systems can be on your side if you work with them. Organic gardening is a adventure, an expedition into a deeper and more satisfying understanding of vegetable production. You are now a participant rather than a spectator. You share creation.”

So your garden is done for the year (or with some good planning from earlier you’re still harvesting), but you’re already thinking about your next garden and you want an even better harvest.  Maybe you had a really good harvest, but didn’t know what to do with all those veggies. Or there was some bug or disease that devastated that vegetable that you waited all summer for.

The solution is Gift Certificate for one of our Organic Gardening/Cooking Classes or for a Garden Consultation. It’s great gift for the gardener or cook in your life or for yourself.

You can get more details on the classes, costs and how to buy them here

I’m on an email list for the Union of Concerned Scientists and was recently sent a link to a document that they’ve developed called “The Climate-Friendly Gardener.” It has a lot of good information, a fair amount of which I’ve given to you over time (if you read my posts regularly), but also a fair amount that I haven’t. The additional info especially covers gardening other than vegetable gardening. Overall, I think it’s a document that would be an asset to your gardening, so here’s a link to it.

Hope you all made it through the storm (8 inches of snow in October, sheesh!!) without too much trouble.

There are still leeks, chard, beets, lettuce, broccoli, scallions and peppers in my garden, but the season is running down for me and you and there things you can/should do to keep your garden as healthy as possible. The most important of which is making compost.

Chard in October

If you want a thriving vegetable garden that gives you a good harvest with minimal problems, no pesticides, little fertilizer, and reduced watering, you need healthy living soil. In your quest to achieve that goal your best friend is compost. Compost is extremely simple to make at your home (even inside an apartment), though it does require occasional attention, work and the proper ingredients.

Compost is composed of once-living materials that are being  broken down into their basic components by the action of insects, fungi, and bacteria. For home composting only plant materials are used to make the compost (with eggshells as one exception). Animal products can be composted but unless handelled carefully will attract animals, so they’re not recommended.

Composting materials are divided into greens and browns and you need the approximately equal amounts of each to make a successful compost pile. Greens include grass clippings, vegetable peelings, and manure. Browns most commonly are autumn (dead) leaves and straw (not hay which has weed seeds).

One complication of home composting is that most browns are available in one part of the year and greens in another. One way to deal with this is to build up a supply of either greens or browns you can use when the other is in short supply. Greens are a little hard to store because their moisture content makes them rot in relatively gross ways if you have a big pile of them. If you really need more greens for your compost pile you can sometimes get vegetable scraps (corn husks especially)  and rotting veggies from your local supermarket (for those of you who live around here, Adams already sends all of this material to local farms for animal feed so you can’t any greens from them-I asked). Also, even if your compost has too much of one component or another, it will still break down and be a valuable addition to your garden.

Leaf Pile Before Mowing

Browns on the other hand store much better. You can buy straw specifically for your compost pile, but if you mulched your garden with straw (as I recommend) you can pull that off at the end of the season and save it for your pile. But the best, cheapest way to get your browns for storage, is to use the leaves that are falling in your yard right now.

Leaf Pile After Mowing

The only problem with leaves is that they take up a tremendous amount of room because the stiff, oddly-shaped leaves don’t fit well together. So I collect my leaves, bring them to the one spot in my yard where there is no grass (under the big oak tree, which also happens to be right next to my compost bins) and run them over with my lawn mower. As you can see from the pics there is a huge reduction in the size of the pile after mowing. Chopping up the leaves also will increase how quickly they turn into compost.

When you cleanup your garden at the end of the year, don’t throw any diseased plants into your compost pile, because then you’ll just be putting the disease back in the garden when you add the compost to your garden. If you’re not sure if a plant is diseased then be on the safe side and don’t put it in.

In my experience, the most commonly diseased plants are tomatoes, with a variety of diseases, and all of the squashes (including cucumbers), which commonly have powdery mildew. I’ve also read that club root is a common disease of the cabbage family and though I’m not sure whether I’ve ever had it in my garden I routinely don’t compost the roots of my dead cabbages and broccoli. Generally, I let the plants dry out and then burn them and then put the ashes in my compost pile.

I know they say time travel is against the laws of physics, but biology can accomplish it.

The Potatoes of Gardens Past

What you see above are potatoes I never planted or at least ones I didn’t plant this year. I can’t be sure, but I think these potatoes actually derive from the fruits of some potato plants I had in this garden two years ago. “But potatoes don’t have fruits”, I hear you cry. In fact they do, they just aren’t edible.

Potato Fruits

As you can see above, potato fruits look like oddly colored cherry tomatoes.

Last year I had some potato plants in this same section of my garden where I harvested the potatoes pictured above. I assumed they had come from potatoes I’d missed during harvest of 2009 (as I usually do miss some and they come up the next year), but when I went to harvest them last year there weren’t really any potatoes to harvest. As I remember the plants were also fairly puny. Perhaps when coming from seed, potato plants don’t produce sizable tubers until the second year (some quick research has given me no answer to that supposition).

Chard of Gardens Future

There’s a Home Show I go to every March to promote my business and this year I actually started a number of plants in January so they’d be ready for my garden display. Among the the plants I grew were Chard, also known as Swiss Chard. Chard is a beet that doesn’t form an enlarged root (the beet), but grows much larger leaves than ordinary beets and comes in a wild variety of stem colors.

Ordinarily Chard is a biennial, which means it doesn’t form flowers or seeds until its second year. However, a couple of my Chard plants did go to seed, I assume because they were planted so much earlier than they should have been.

Chard Fruits

Once Chard goes to seed the leaves are much smaller than usual so I couldn’t really harvest them for their leaves, but since I had enough other plants I let them keep growing to save the seeds for next year, which I have done.

Chard Seedlings (self-seeded)

Of course a number of the chard fruits (they really look like oddly shaped nuts) fell off the plants before I got to them and have started to sprout. I’ll be interested to see if they survive the winter and whether they act like first year plants (and give me big leaves) or second year plants (and give me seeds).

Onions Walking into Next Year

Last year at one of Catskill Native Nursery’s Ugly Plant sales I bought a couple of Egyptian Walking Onions. They are called Walking Onions because a flower stalk forms from each onion and each flower, at the end of the stalk, forms a new small onion. When the stalk sags to the ground the new onions (called onion sets) root themselves into the ground. Lo and behold, it works!

Egyptian Walking Onion Sets

I gently pried apart the groups of onion sets, making sure each one got some roots, and replanted them so they’ll have enough room to grow into full sized onions next year.

Separated onion sets ready for replanting

I also had garlic sets form on one of my garlic plants from which I missed removing the scape.

If you think about/plan your garden as an ongoing enterprise you can use intentional garden time travel, as well as some happy accidents to keep your garden even more productive and sustainable.

Hope you’re still harvesting!

Just to be able to have a bit more space than what’s available in my yard, I have a plot at a local community garden this year. I’m growing a few things that  wouldn’t be main crops, necessarily. These include sweet potatoes, lufas (that scrubby thing that people use in the shower is from the inside of a squash), cantaloupes, and a few overflow sweet peppers.

The sweet potatoes were looking great, the tops anyway, lush, green, tall, very few holes in the leaves, even a few pretty flowers (sweet potatoes are related to morning glories). I was looking forward to a big harvest.  Today when I was there I decided to feel around in the ground and see how the tubers were developing. I knew it was getting near time to harvest (sweet potatoes don’t like it when it gets below ~55 F regularly), but I wanted to keep the sweet potatoes in the ground as long as possible because sweet potato tubers never stop growing until they are harvested.

As soon as I touched the first one I knew there was a problem. I pulled it out and it looked like this.

Sweet Potatoes- Eaten by something, probably mice

I pulled out another and it looked very similar. Clearly something had been eating them, and not a bug, but something bigger, as there were what appeared to be distinct tooth marks. Though there has been a groundhog terrorizing the garden this season, I didn’t think this was from him. Since the tubers were underground and there wasn’t any obvious disturbance to the ground I figured it had to be something smaller that was tunneling underneath.

I continued to pull out a few more and got some good ones, but also ones that while they hadn’t been gnawed on were split and cracked.

Cracked Sweet Potato- from too much water, most likely

I wound up harvesting the whole patch to salvage whatever I could.

A bit of subsequent research revealed the potential for mice infestations and that sweet potatoes need dry conditions while the tubers are developing especially if it was relatively dry during the earlier development of the plant (as it was in July). Even without Hurricane Irene, it’s been a rather wet August, which probably accounts for the cracking.

This is one of the lessons, at times painful, of gardening, some years harvests will be really good, some really bad, most somewhere in-between and weather is all important. Also if you have a problem, salvage what you can. I’m going to cut out the good section from my damaged sweet potatoes, cook them, an throw them in my freezer.

I hope your recovery from Irene is going well.

Taking a break from preserving my harvest.

While it’s great to be able to go into my freezer or open up a jar in February to get a taste of summer, veggies are best when used fresh so I’m always keeping an eye out for recipes that can use multiple items from my garden.

14 lbs of Chard

As I harvested 14 lbs of chard just before Hurricane Irene, I thought finding a chard recipe might make sense. And so I found this one, which I adapted slightly so it uses a number of other veggies from my garden, including the peppers, leeks, oregano, garlic, and even the tomato paste (from last year’s tomatoes).

Enjoy.