Beets, Radishes, and Their Greens

I'm two weeks behind again with the garden photos, but anyway. We pulled up our beets and turnips because it was time, and because they didn't seem to be growing anymore. The harvest was a little disappointing.

I'd expected larger produce based on how healthy the leaves had looked above ground. But even though we amend the soil with compost and peat moss and coffee grounds, the community garden soil is still not great. So we got small, not-very-round beets; some of the turnips fared better, but many of them were small as well.

You see, rather than haul in tons of really nice garden soil right off the bat (and spend lost of money doing it), we're hoping our yearly tilling and composting are gradually improving the soil of our plot while we deal with a so-so harvest the first few seasons.  (In the past, okra, squash, and beans have done pretty well—it's these other veggies that aren't as forgiving.)

After pulling up the beets and turnips, we prepared them for refrigerator storage. Chop off the tops, separating the greens from the roots and composting any shriveled leaves. The roots will keep for awhile in the fridge (it's been two weeks now and I'll be using them soon).
 

The greens get triple-washed and then dried in the salad spinner (gotta store 'em dry or they'll get slimy faster). They would start to wilt in a few days, so we started cooking them up to use like spinach with almost every meal—in tacos, in omelets, in a veggie lasagna, and on a great garden pizza that I'll post next.

Quick, Belated Garden Update

There is so much more to do with our summers than sit in front of the computer updating a blog. I do feel guilty, though. I had a goal, after all. And much of what busies me is indeed relevant to this blog. So many post ideas...  I'll give you some garden photos instead.

All of these, except for this first one of the garlic, are about two weeks old.  The garden has changed since then, and I will try to post another update in a timelier fashion.

Here's our first head of garlic, pulled a little early as you can see by the still-green leaves resting on the porch railing below and thus, small. Our garlic plants are just starting to brown at the bottoms, so yesterday I dug up this one just to see. It's a head! It has cloves! Grown from just one clove! I'll leave its siblings in the ground until their leaves completely brown out. Perhaps the extra time will make those remaining heads of garlic bigger.

These are from our, um, extended garden. It's called urban gleaning, OK? And we've talked about it before. We had a surprise apricot season here. Suffice to say the tree we thought was dying for the last two years is actually just on a three-year cycle or something and produced like crazy this year. By mere chance, I biked past the tree and saw the fruits ripening a whole month earlier than our 2009 super apricot harvest. Must be the heat. Pardon the strange lighting; this was taken indoors, against sheer white curtains on a bright, sunny day.

At left, a tiny bunch of tiny grapes that may or may not make it to autumn ripeness thanks to 100-degree days and hordes of Japanese beetles. The skeletonized leaves in the photo on the right were our first evidence the beetles had reached crop-decimating adulthood. We try to keep them at bay by regularly spritzing the leaves with soapy water (because then the leaves don't taste so good!). It somewhat works.

A bloomin' onion. Those pretty white flowers have since closed up into little seed pods. Soon they'll be dry, ready for saving, and I'll pull the onions themselves out of the ground.

The potato patch. Or should I say potato pile? As the plants grow taller, we keep heaping on the mulch, soil and used coffee grounds. The spuds seem to like it.

The beans, shortly after sprouting.

And their friendly neighbors, the carrots.

And Len, sprinkling some spent coffee grounds over them both, enriching the topsoil a bit. We've been collecting coffee grounds from a Caribou coffee shop near us. We drop off a five-gallon bucket (with a lid) and they dump their used grounds into that instead of the trash. About once a week, Len trades them an empty bucket for the partially full one, and we haul the grounds out to the garden or dump them in our compost bin. No coffee grounds for the front yard garden bed, though. That soil was already too acidic from the evergreen bushes that used to be there.

I suppose that's plenty of garden updates for now. As you can see, not much harvesting going on yet, just a lot of watering, weeding, soil amending, and pest control. So I'll leave you with one last pair of photos.

The cat, enjoying some homegrown catnip. What a life.

Berries

The lovely little flowers on our blueberry bush have turned the color of blueberries. But they are small and shriveled, and they look like small, shriveled, bell-shaped flowers, not really like berries at all. So, I don't know. I suspect a fungal infection and will have to keep an eye on the plant to make sure the whole bush doesn't die.

Across the yard, though, our raspberries our ripening—by the hour, it seems! And they are delicious.

The grapes have passed their flowering stage and are slowly filling out, some bunches better than others. The grape flowers didn't look like much—just a tiny green ball with pistil and stamen coming out of it, no petals to speak of. Probably thanks to the cold snap, many of those flowers were not pollinated, so I think we're going to have some random-looking grape bunches in the end (if we can protect them from the birds as they ripen!), but hopefully they'll still turn out better than our last so-called harvest in 2009:

Our first grapes, 2009.

Let it Mellow

Let's talk about water. I don't have much to report about the garden -- it's the time of year when all we do is water mostly bare spots of earth, pull weeds, and wait. The weeds grow so fast. The vegetable seedlings grow so slow. Oh, and the temperature just went from 95 to 45 in less than a week.  But, at least it's raining, so we don't have to carry water out to the garden for a couple of days, although I'm sure Jack-and-the-Beanstalk-size weeds are now crowding out our poor tomato plants (which, by the way, are not enjoying the erratic spring weather).

But, water plays a big role in the garden's life, even at this seemingly stagnant stage. So let's talk about it.  Specifically, let's talk about conserving it.

Have you heard about Rip the Drip? He's a sort of spokesperson for water conservation on the Wasting Water is Weird website. You may have seen him in some odd TV commercials (my favorite is the empty dishwasher one). Anyway, there is tons of conservation advice out there and hundreds of ways to reduce your water usage. The following tidbits are just a few most relevant to my life.

I should note that conserving water isn't about the money savings for us (though it could be for you). Our water bill happens to be included in our homeowners' association dues, so we pay the same amount every month regardless of how much or how little water we use. We could take the all-you-can-eat-buffet approach and use gallons and gallons of water with no financial consequences, but this is all about saving the planet -- while potable water may seem a constant to us Midwesterners, it is scarce in many parts of the world. And guess what? All of us earthlings essentially share the same water supply -- the amount of water on this planet is fixed, while the number of people drinking it increases. Better to conserve water where it is an abundant natural resource, so that our "excess" can be given to the citizens of dryer places. But I digress.

When it comes to conserving water in the garden, the most obvious action is to install a rain barrel beneath your downspout. This is something we'd like to do; our obstacles are getting approval from our homeowners' association (may or may not be a problem) and the cost of rain barrels. The lowest price we've seen for rain barrels is $75, which isn't bad I guess, but we'd like to find them just a little bit cheaper. See, we'd like to install at least one under each of our four downspouts, maybe two (to handle overflow) under the downspout that collects the rainwater from the largest section of our roof.


Another great way to conserve a little water and still give your plants the drinks they need? Collect your shower water while you wait for it to heat up. Our shower, which is on the second floor, can sometimes take full minute to bring hot water up from the water heater, which is on the first floor.  Maybe a minute doesn't sound like much time to you, but let me tell you, there's a lot of cold water doing nothing but running down the drain during that minute -- a lot of cold water wasted. The solution? Stand in the shower (yes, naked and ready to go) with a large bucket and collect the running water until it has reached the temperature you desire. Then, set the bucket aside and go on with your shower. Whether you use the bucket of water straightaway on your house plants or collect it over the course of several showers before hauling it out to the vegetable garden, it's a more efficient use of your tap water than simply wasting the shower water in the moment and later having to run your garden hose. Friends of ours told us about the bucket thing. They do it. I'm going to try to remember to do it.

Another shower-related, water-conservation tip: Take shorter showers. Duh. There's the extreme version, the navy-style shower, in which you quickly get wet (just a few seconds of running water), then soap up without the water running, and then rinse off, using less than 30 seconds' worth of water. Or, for those of us who enjoy spending a little more time in a nice, hot shower, there is simply a shorter shower. We got a handy shower timer for free at a green fest a couple of years ago, but you can find a variety of shower timers online for a variety of low prices. Ours is a five-minute hourglass timer that suctions to the shower wall. A cheap and easy way to reduce your water usage, as long as you remember to keep your eye on the sand!

Stepping out of the shower and toward the toilet... Perhaps you've heard this little rhyme regarding conserving toilet water: "If it's yellow, let it mellow. If it's brown, flush it down." Need I explain? Let me instead tell you to get over the ick-factor and, I'm just gonna say it, know that it really is OK to let a few rounds of pee sit in the toilet. We're not talking about public toilets here. Your own family's urine, just hanging out in the toilet bowl for a few hours, will not hurt you. It will not stink up your house. (OK, maybe if you all just ate asparagus or a lot of onions, you'll want to flush after each turn only for your noses' sake, but other than that...) Save yourself several flushes a day at home. People do this. I won't say who.

A Permanent Addition

Do you remember these little babies?

Those are our apple trees when they were just sprouts. This photo is probably from early winter 2008 (there's snow out the window in the background), and the seedlings barely had their first true leaves.  Links to our previous posts about the apples are at the end of this post, but I'll recap:

In the fall of 2008, we got a gigantic apple from Len's Wisconsin cousins, and we saved its seeds to plant. We later found out from the cousins that it was a Wolf River apple, and we did get to see the "mother tree" on their farm last September. (Will our trees produce apples similar to their parent variety? Hopefully, time will tell.)

Our research showed we should refrigerate the seeds in a damp paper towel to germinate them.  After weeks in the fridge, our seeds looked the same as ever, so we just put them into some soil in a six-inch pot. The photo above is what happened soon after.  Six of the seeds had sprouted. Whether the refrigeration helped that along or not, we just don't know. They seemed to grow rather slowly over the next several weeks, but then we separated them, and after that, they grew a little faster. By April 2009, the tallest of the six was eight inches high.

We kept them in the house until late spring or early summer and then put the pots outside to enjoy direct sunlight, summer heat, and fresh air. Sometime over the summer, or just before, we lost one of the six trees. The other five continued to grow, and we re-potted them—the smallest two into only slightly large pots (10-inch, probably), and the other three into much larger containers. And they continued to grow. For the winter of 2009, they would all stay outside but would be protected in some way: In November, as the young trees began to shed their leaves, we buried the smaller two (in their pots, most of the stems/trunks still exposed) in the mulch in our front garden bed, and we brought the larger three into the garage, where we wrapped their pots in layers of newspaper and blankets—to insulate the roots against freezing through.

All five trees made it through the winter! In March 2010, the trees were waking up from their winter nap, so we brought the large trees out from the garage back to the sunny (but still snowy) front yard. We kept the small ones buried a while longer since their roots were more vulnerable in those small containers to the unpredictable nighttime temperatures of early spring. Rabbits had nibbled down the stems of those two buried outside, but they bounced back and sprouted as many leaves as their stubby little stems could hold.

I believe it was in the summer of 2010 that we gave our smallest two trees to Len's aunt, and they are steadily growing in her backyard. Then we re-potted our three remaining trees one more time into even larger containers (but containers still small enough to carry into the garage for the winter again).

Once again, when the winter temperatures led the trees to dormancy, we moved them into the garage and wrapped them in newspaper and blankets. Once again, the trees overwintered successfully, and  we moved them in their giant pots out to the front porch again in the spring. We knew they couldn't stay in their pots forever, and that even in the pots they would eventually become too large to keep moving back and forth, but what were we supposed to do?

Our small and shady backyard already had a tree. Could we get away with digging it out and replacing it with one of these apple saplings? Not likely. Not very practical, either. Our front yard was even smaller than the back, but it did have enough space for planting small trees. In fact, each of our next-door neighbors had a tree in their front yard. Those trees were part of our neighborhood's very tidy pattern for trees in the front yard—every other house. Would our homeowners' association let us break the pattern with our apple trees? Also not likely, but it was our best shot.

Late in the summer of 2011, Len submitted the paperwork, and against all odds, the association approved our request! Next hurdle: call the utility hotline to see where we could safely dig. Eesh, it was tight. And maybe that's what the association was counting on; maybe they approved our request to seem accommodating, figuring we'd discover there was no place to plant the trees anyway. Ha! We squeezed two trees in, one at each corner of our big front porch. I should say, Len squeezed the two trees in. He did all of the digging to plant those suckers—holes nearly twice as big as the large pots they were in—and that is no easy feat when the earth here is mostly heavy clay and chock full of rocks.

Now only one tree remains in a pot, and it spent its third winter in the garage. It is back on the front porch now, enjoying the southern exposure with its siblings. Those two spent the winter outside in their new, permanent locations. They are looking healthily bushy this spring, so I think we'll do our first pruning in the fall. And, now we wait to see if the trees will flower in the springs to come.

In the meantime, we need to find a home for that last potted tree.

Our apple tree history:
April 21, 2009 (seedlings)
November 3, 2009 (winterizing)
March 20, 2010  (after winterizing)
March 4, 2012 (pruning)

Shared at Eat Make Grow 

What's New in the Garden

Here's a bird's-eye view of the community garden only a a couple of weeks after it officially opened. By late summer, it will no longer be a picturesque patchwork of neat garden plots but instead a tangled jungle of vegetables and prairie weeds. Let's zoom in on our plot.

Garden plots on left and right, parking lot in center.

Last year we planted a lot of winter squash. Some varieties didn't make it, but if I remember correctly, we harvested several small pumpkins, a few calabaza (downside: it was a humongous plant for a little produce; upside: it seemed the most resistant to powdery mildew and pests), I think seven sweet dumplings, only one delicata, and three butternuts. Not the yield we'd hoped for, but not too bad. Yet after battling powdery mildew and squash bugs almost all season (for the second year in a row), we decided that 2012 would not be a squash year.

I may do the sweet dumpling squash again, because they are light enough to grow on a simple vertical frame, they're small, and they were delicious. But otherwise, we have a lot of space open without those gourds in our 20x30-foot plot. Some new crops will take their place.

The potato patch. Last year we produced a handful of small potatoes—it was a casual experiment. This year, we bought a 5-lb. bag of red seed potatoes and planted them all! This photo was taken after we had cut the seed potatoes into sections (one or two eyes per piece) and were letting them sit out and callus for a few days, following the instructions on the bag. Yes, that is a pizza box they're sitting on. Reuse, right?

Carrots. We were lucky enough to get another gardener's extra carrots last year, and it inspired us to plant three rows of our own.

More beets! I thought I could plant the beets in stages for a longer harvest period. It got too hot too quickly and only my first round of 2011 beets did really well.  This time, I'm just planting them all at once in a bigger area, and we'll just eat a lot of beets while we can. And hopefully pickles some, too. Then maybe I'll plant a fall crop in the bed in our front yard (no time for late plantings in the community garden before it closes for the season).

Trying harder at the tomatoes, peppers and eggplant. Because I failed at those last year. So far, our tomato seedlings did great under the grow light, and we just transplanted them outside this weekend. But the peppers didn't even sprout. Is it too cold in our house? Our my seeds old? I think we'll have to buy pepper plants instead of growing them from seed. And I have two very tiny eggplant seedlings. I guess it's not too late to plant a few more seeds and hope the warmer weather induces faster sprouting and growth, because I gotta get those babies outside soon!

The other new stuff in our garden isn't over at the community plot, it's here in our yard. We dug out one more evergreen bush from our front yard and expanded the garden bed. It's now about 10x4 feet. I realized too late last year that the soil there was too acidic for most veggies, probably due to all those evergreen needles composting there. Not much would grow. Len and I have added a lot of our own compost as well as some composted manure we bought, as well as peat moss, to hopefully balance out the soil pH. Just this weekend, I planted a bunch of herbs and lettuce and stuff, so we'll see if the seedlings come out better this time.

Also in our front bed is this mammoth brussels sprout plant, which my parents gave us from their garden. Their climate was a little too warm for the sprouts to develop properly, but ours might be perfect. I know the plant looks mangled and droopy, but it's just too big for itself. It is in fact growing little brussels sprouts right now near the top of each stalk. Here's the thing, though: I think brussels sprouts are supposed to be a late fall crop; I hear they taste best if you wait until after a frost to harvest them. So, will these take all summer to grow? Or, are they developing too early because this was already a mature plant (two or three years old, in fact)? Also, can I keep them cabbage moths and caterpillars from destroying them? (Last year, they ravaged our kale.)

Off to the side of the front-yard garden, grapes! Dozens of grape babies—just like this little bunch pictured below—have formed on our vine, and I am so excited! Perhaps our vine has finally matured—I think it's four years old now, possibly five. It has produced grapes only one other time, and that was two very small bunches of very small grapes. Japanese beetles feasted on the grape leaves last summer, so we'll have to watch for signs of them and kill on sight. I wonder if the bird feeder hanging by the grape vine will attract birds who will then go after the beetles? Or, will the birds just eat our grapes instead?

In our backyard, blueberries! Last fall I planted a nice-sized Liberty blueberry bush. Apparently, optimal fruit production comes from having more than one variety of blueberry nearby. So this spring, I planted next to it a small Pink Lemonade blueberry bush. Then rabbits nibbled on it and made it even smaller. Rgh. I've since wrapped some fencing around both blueberry bushes to protect them from critters, but I don't think I'll see any awesome dark pink berries from that one this season. The liberty, however, has a few clusters of lovely flowers.

We're now growing four kinds of fruit in our yard: blueberries, grapes, raspberries, and strawberries. It's actually six kinds of fruit if you count two varieties of raspberries, two varieties of blueberries, and the future apples (more on that in another post).

Lastly, from the garden, "Hello" from Mr. Toad.

Tamales, by gollies!

Corny title, yes. But tamales are a corny food. The main ingredient is masa harina (a sort of corn flour that is usually white and is much finer ground than corn meal), and then you wrap them up in corn husks.

Anyway, for Cinco de Mayo, I attempted homemade tamales for the first time. Here's a pictorial account.

First, the ingredients list:

Tamale Filling
1 1/4 lbs. pork shoulder
half a large onion, chopped
2 cloves of garlic, minced
a generous sprinkling of your favorite taco seasoning (I used Penzey's Arizona Dreaming)
Water to cover

Tamale Dough
2 cups masa harina
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
2 cups water or broth
2/3 cup shortening

And...
about 16 corn husks (I ended up with only 13 tamales but did occasionally double-wrap when the husk wasn't very wide)

Here's the pork shoulder, onion, garlic, and seasoning after cooking all day in the crock pot. Oh yeah.

I shredded the tender pork into smaller pieces and transferred that and all its juices into a little frying pan over medium-high heat so I could boil away most of the water, thickening up the savory liquid and almost caramelizing the meat. In other words, this:

Became this:

While the meat was bubbling away, the corn husks were soaking in warm water. Here, I weighed them down with a plate to keep them submerged, a trick I learned from watching Rick Bayless.

And while the corn husks were soaking while the pork was bubbling, I prepared the tamale dough. First, mix together the masa, baking powder, and salt. By the way, thanks to the large Mexican population of our area, our grocery store carries ingredients such as masa and corn husks in quantities that are not, let's say, novelty size. I have plenty of masa leftover to practice making tamales for a while.

The next step is adding the water to the dry mixture. Use your hands.

Find any little clumps and squish them with your fingers until you have a soft, uniform dough.

In another bowl, beat the shortening until it is fluffy. Then beat in the masa mixture until the dough is spongy. I had the mixer on for less than a minute. I guess the dough seemed spongy.

Drain and rinse the corn husks and lay them out on your work surface. You'll see they naturally curl into little boats. So drop some dough into each boat and spread it about a half-inch thick. I think I had about the right amount of dough in each husk—maybe a little too much in some—but mostly I should have spread it a little wider rather than so thick and right down the center.

Arrange a tablespoon or so of meat down the center of each tamale.

Then roll them up, folding the ends toward the center. I only folded up the bottom (the skinny end of the husk), because I saw on a cooking show that you could steam the tamales with one end open—the top end. And actually, I felt this was easier, because you don't have to worry about finding a way to keep the top edge folded down.

You steam tamales in a tamale steamer, of course. You can use any steamer, really, but we actually have a real tamale steamer. It's the giant pot we use to make our apple butter in the fall. We bought it because it was huge and inexpensive, but it also came with the round, holey insert (appropriately called the steamer insert) you see resting on top of it there. Do you see that indent near the bottom of the pot? Well, that it is where the steamer insert rests inside the pot, and you pour water in to just below that level.

Large as it is, the tamale steamer is meant for the large batches of Christmas or New Year tamales that families often make. My single batch of thirteen tamales didn't even come close to filling all the space in this big pot, but I had to make them stand on end since their tops were open. So I filled the extra space in the pot with something else that can withstand boiling temperature, something we always have around the house.

Now put the pot on the stove, put the lid on the pot and crank up the burner. Steam the tamales for about an hour. To check if they're done, pull one out with tongs and gently unwrap it. If the corn husk pulls easily away from the masa, then the dough is cooked!

Success! As I mentioned earlier, I need to improve my dough-spreading, but the pork I cooked was outstanding (especially the leftover bits Len and I ate right out of the pan while the tamales were steaming), and the tamales held together and turned out pretty tasty. Next time, I might also try the fried chile sauce that traditionally goes with the tamales.