The First Dinner of the Season

Tonight’s dinner had a salad with Oak Leaf Lettuce out of the backyard making it officially the first item harvested this year.

Canning Goes Mainstream

Not but two days after I bought a big stack of canning supplies and the New York times runs an article that canning is the new hip thing to do on the heels of the local food movement.


http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/27/dining/27cann.html


The article also has a good slide show which shows canning step by step and a useful link to The National Center for Home Food Preservation which also has a number of good resources on canning and freezing.

Getting Ready For Canning

After looking all over for pickling salt, I checked the Morton salt web site which listed the only store carrying anywhere near me as Wegmans.

Wegmans is a very nice, upscale grocery store with very good produce and fish as well as many other organic and natural products you might not find in the regular supermarket. In addition to the pickling salt, Wegmans also had Ball canning jars and I picked up two dozen quart jars and a dozen jelly jars and some pectin. Strawberry picking is right around the corner and I also hope to put up a lot of pickles and tomato sauce. I had wanted to do this last year, but hadn’t wanted to pay the shipping charges on the jars so it was good to find it all in one place.

Wegmans also had a display of seeds from Seeds of Change which you don’t often see. I got a packet of snow peas and will figure out where to plant them later.

http://www.espoma.com

Last week I picked up a bag of plant fertilizer at the nursery because the plants were looking a little pale. I used a product from Espoma and it worked great. The plants are a lush dark green now and are full of blossoms. The product is also all natural and organic.

Check out http://www.espoma.com for the product details and a lot of other useful information about fertilizers and plant feeding. This is a very useful web site which explains the difference between natural and chemical fertilizer, the difference between fast and slow release fertilizer and why some fertilizers burn your plants.

They also have a lawn product which I am eager to try out.

Lettuce Update

A few weeks back I posted a picture of the lettuce peeking out from under the straw mulch. Here is an updated picture with the lettuce looking almost ready to cut.

Squash and Zucchini!

I went to the victory garden this morning to weed and noticed that the yellow squash and zucchini already had small fruit on them. The fruit was small, only about an inch or so and I didn’t bring the camera because I thought this was too early in the season for anything to sprout yet. If the weather holds, they should be ready to pick in the next week or so.

Peas On The Trellis

Starting seeds from seeds is a lot harder than buying transplants at the nursery. Too cold, too deep, too wet or any of a number of other factors can go wrong and the plants will not sprout. Here is a picture of the peas. Not only did they sprout, but they found the trellis and are starting to climb on their own.

The Mint Patch - Spring Time

When I first started this blog, one of the first pictures I posted was of a patch of mint brown and dry sticking out of the snow. Mint is a perennial (it comes back every year) and it also spreads. Here it is in the spring:

Nice Nursery Pots

This year, the local nursery is offering slightly larger transplants in slightly larger pots in addition to the usual “flats”. The plants are slight more expensive ($20 vs. $12) for fewer plants per flat, but I think the hardiness of the plants more than make up for it.

The pots are also a better size for seed starting:

Organic Plant Food & A First Feeding

Both the home and community garden were looking a little pale, so I fed them both. For the home garden I used an organic product from http://www.espoma.com. The web site is very well done and very informative.

For the community garden, I used a product from a different company which is a mixture of ground tree bark and lobster shells. The product used on the home garden suggested an application once a month and the other product did not specify. I’ll watch them both for a month and then switch to whichever of the two does better.

Heirloom Tomatoes @ The Nursery

The eco boom is catching on with the local nursery and they have a host of heirloom varieties which they have not had in previous years. They are sold by the single plant and are slightly more expensive then the usual nursery stock, but the plants are bigger and healthier. Ox Heart, Old German, Mr. Stripey, Cherokee Purple, and Mortgage Lifter are a few of the names offered.

The Mystery of the Mystery Plant

We throw any vegetable scraps (e.g. carrot peels, rotten fruit, etc …) directly into the garden to rot away with other yard waste and every year we get mystery plants. Mystery plants fall into a strange gray area as they are not weeds in the familiar sense, but they are plants not intended which grow from seeds thrown out from the kitchen. Given that it can be tricky to start plants from seed, there is a temptation to want to let them grow if for nothing other than to see what they are even if they are out of place. Cucumbers and melons are the most common mystery plant, but tomatoes and potatoes have also made previous appearances. One year, a grape vine even managed to sprout which we later transplanted to a nicer spot near the backyard fence.

Stopping Off After Work

Today we stopped by the victory garden after work and spent 10 minutes planting carrot and radish seeds.

After the seeds were planted and watered, we walked the rows to see what the other gardens were doing. A few of them had some very impressive results already for so early in the season.

Being outside like this was also a very relaxing segue in between the drive home and getting home.

Victory Garden - After

Here is a picture of the victory garden after clearing out the rocks and weeds, putting up the fence and planting the plants.

The fence is made out of plastic "poultry netting". It is the same premise as regular chicken wire without all the scrapes on your hands and arms.

The dirt itself is very nice. The dirt at home has a lot of clay in it and is very dense. This is much more loose and will hopefully be good for carrots and radish.

The home garden is for things which get used every day: tomato, cucumber, etc ... and this space for the slower growing items like melons.

Victory Garden - Before

Here is a picture of how most of the plots at the victory garden look when you first receive them:

Groundhog Captured!

Last year, a good portion of the garden was wrecked by a groundhog who thwarted every effort to keep him out of the garden. Today, my neighbor mentioned he caught and re-located a groundhog. I've buried the fence in the ground this year, but hopefully that was the same one and I'll have one less problem to worry about this year.