Little Vermont Family Garden

These two photos sort of sum up what our holidays have been about.  There has been a lot of handmade around here lately!  Cookies, peppermint bark, fudge, lots of handknits.  Some clay!  Lots of legos.  Christmas decorations…we have really enjoyed ourselves without getting stressed out at all.  Ok, there was a little stress about getting the tree, but that’s it.

Merry Christmas to all of you.  May you have a healthy, happy, adventurous 2009.

Jonas’ gnome tree, with Alec “making” in the background

Yesterday we took a trip up to Montpelier, and it was a very cold day.  I have two hats, both for skiing, both shrunken, neither covering my ears.  Time to knit for me, for a change!  I knit some fingerless mitts on the way up, for my cousin, but as soon as we got home (after having realized the importance of a hat for me) I dug out the stash yarn.  I have plenty left of the yarn I used for the boys’ hats.  Good thing I choose colors *I* love for gifts I give to other people.

I cast on last night as we watched a Sherlock Holmes dvd, and then set the knitting on my nightstand for when I got up.  I was really struck by the lovely colors in the morning light.   See for yourself…

Read the rest of this entry »

A boy with ”a mountain with trees and blueberry bushes”

I finally planted the garlic.  On Friday, it was over 60 degrees here, and I took advantage of the break in the rain to get out and plant.  I have had the garlic for some time, and for some reason I just didn’t get around to planting it around Halloween as I had intended.  I don’t think it’s a big deal that it went in this late, and frankly after the weather we’ve had this week, I’m glad to have waited.  It probably would have sprouted!

I put 133 cloves into the 4×10 raised bed I had prepared, Read the rest of this entry »

It’s been a while.  I’ve been wanting to write, but haven’t had much going on in the garden, and have been deliberating whether or not to start a new blog.  I’ve wanted to write about all the things we’ve had going on, projects we’ re working on, but felt like I might want that blog to be private, or separate from the garden blog.  Read the rest of this entry »

Dry beans.

They were ridiculously easy, too.  Plant, water, wait for them to dry up.  Pull them out, have the boys help me pull the bean pods off and shell them!  S. makes endless fun of me by saying “Wow!  We won’t have to buy beans until…two weeks from now!”  He does appreciate that they’re organic and we had fun growing them, but likes any opportunity to tease me.

He got another opportunity today when I went down to the Farmer’s Market in search of seed garlic.  He went on and on about how he’s never heard of another person who goes to the market for seed garlic!  He always tries to find some parallel about some esoteric aspect of the speaker industry, but said in this particular case he’d never be able to come up with anything.

So, yes.  I bought two pounds of seed garlic from a local farmer today.  A mix of German Extra Hardy and Music.  I’ve not tried those varieties before, but he said that’s all he has had great luck with here, and he sticks with them.  It was $8/lb, which I thought was a lot.  And then I double-checked the web for the garlic I bought last year.  I suspect prices have gone up considerably since then, in fact, I’m pretty sure they’ve doubled.  I do not remember paying $50 or more for 5 lbs of garlic, which is what I got.  It seems to me that the bill was closer to $30.  I ordered two more pounds from Vermont Bean - German Red Rocambole - and it cost me $30 with shipping!  Garlic is apparently going to be one of the more expensive crops I plant.  Back to the German Red - it’s a hardneck variety which is well suited to the northeast.  No more softneck varieties for me.  They didn’t do well this year.  I calculated that one bed of garlic is 160 cloves.  There’s no way I got 160 heads of garlic this year!  Maybe 80, and that’s being optimistic.

In garden progress news…I’ve pulled up the last of the cucumbers and onions and potatoes.  We took care of all the dry beans except for the lima beans, which aren’t even close to being dry yet.  It was a long shot, trying to grow them here, but I don’t think we’ll have a frost in the next 10 days or so, so maybe with some dry weather next week they’ll have a chance.  Both boys really enjoyed helping me with the beans.  They get bored after 90 minutes or so, but that’s pretty good staying power for little ones, I think!  They were actually very helpful, except for the part about wanting to make  bean mosaics, or dropping them all over the floor, etc.  They did do a great job shelling them, and seemed to enjoy it a lot.  Hopefully I’m growing good gardeners here, along with all the produce.  Big boy said he would consider eating soup made from the dry beans.  I will believe it when I see it.  He did say he preferred to play with them.

Still in the garden are some tomatoes, peppers, cabbage, carrots, swiss chard, lima beans, lettuce and spinach, and a little basil.  Not bad.  Some of the peppers are turning red!  Finally!  I have a lot of tomatoes waiting to dry inside.  I need to go get started on them.  S. thinks we won’t need to buy dried tomatoes for two years.  I seriously doubt it - we’ve got a few containers (the large yogurt size containers) full of them, and certainly more to go, but I think we’ll eat them before spring.  He tried to convince me that I only need one tomato plant next year.  Silly, silly man.

That’s all the news I have for now!

It’s almost time to dig potatoes.  I think that may be the most gratifying vegetable to grow, for me.  I really love growing root vegetables!  Onions, garlic, and potatoes give me inexplicable joy at this time of year!  I dug a few potatoes just to see what was going on down there, and I dug about 1/4 of the bed before I could stop myself.  They really need a little longer to make their skins tougher, but technically I could dig them all now, and it takes a little more restraint than I have to wait.  If I do wait, they’ll store better, so I’m trying to wait.

It’s going to be a perfect day outside, so I need to make sure we’re really busy today, just so I don’t go crazy digging everything up.  I’ll try to concentrate on planting instead.  I think I’m going to plant more cilantro.  I miss it.  I planted spinach the other day (maybe two days ago?) so we should have that in a month or so.

I pulled out about half of the onions, and those are drying nicely.  We cooked with one last night and it smelled incredible!  I also pulled out the pinto beans, and have been working on shelling those with the boys.  They have enjoyed helping me with that, which is great since they’re actually good at it.  I love having help when it’s actually help!

I realized the shallots, that I thought were not shallots, ARE actually shallots, unless the package was mislabeled.  They must just be a variety that doesn’t grow clusters.  I’m going to have to look that up.  Since I grew them from seed, it’s unlikely I just goofed.

The pumpkins are turning orange and it is taking every bit of patience the boys have not to pick them!  They haven’t seen what I did to two of the pumpkins yet, but when they do, they’re going to be very excited.

We pulled out the remaining beans and cleaned up two of the raised beds, and weeded among the onions where I pulled some out.  The boys are great weeders, another great help to me!  I just loosen the dirt a little and they pull everything up, shake off the dirt, and toss the green stuff in a large bucket.  It’s great because they know they’re really helping, and at the same time it satisfies their need to be in the dirt with me while doing no damage to vegetables!  I was silly to think that a sandbox would be a proper substitute for dirt.

Here are some pictures to give you a view of the latest…

Some of the onions I pulled up

Corn as tall as the shed

A view of some of the pumpkins

A close-up of a great specimen

Look at how the boys’ pumpkins grew!

I have two helpers, can you tell?

Onions, potatoes, lettuce  (those potatoes are as big as my hand!!)

In the foreground, the bare area is where I pulled out potatoes and planted spinach.  In the background, the circular mass of green leaves is sweet potatoes, to the right of that are the remaining onions, and to the far right, our current batch of swiss chard.  It’s delicious, and we’ve had it all summer.  A good thing, since my lettuce did terribly and I never got any spinach either. 

That’s all for now!

And it’s been a frustrating summer.  We’ve had too much rain, and now we’ve got too many mosquitos.  I’ve made the mental leap to fall already.

 Despite the rain, we seem to be having a reasonably good harvest.  The tomatoes are finally red, and many have been picked and washed and are ready to go in the oven to dry.  We’ve had plenty of cucumbers, bell peppers, jalapeno peppers, and chard.  I harvested, cured and stored the garlic.  Today I dug some small onions that I thought were shallots, but I don’t think they are.  If they are, they grew as single bulbs and not as clusters as I read they would.    My onion tops are starting to fall, but it will be a while before they’re ready to harvest.  We’ve eaten a few red cabbages, and there are a number of them left that are all different sizes, so it looks like we will have a steady supply through fall.  I’m leaving the carrots alone, probably until October, so they’ll be sweet when I finally pull them up.  The corn is starting to look ready (I planted a late variety, apparently, and I also planted it a little late).  There are scallions to eat, and about 9 pumpkins getting big, even though the foliage is dying.  It looked like it had some powdery mildew.  I think it’s pretty funny that I attempted to grow the pumpkins in a raised bed.  It wasn’t raised much, and exactly zero of the pumpkins are growing IN it.  Three are in my neighbor’s yard.  Three or so are next to the bed that had all the beans in it, and that’s the second one from the location of the pumpkin bed.  Beans…yes, we had plenty of beans.  I couldn’t keep up with them, although I did get some in the freezer.  We still have some pole beans coming, but the plants are starting to look ragged.  The dry beans have been left alone and it does look like some may be ready to harvest soon.  I think the boys will have fun helping me with that.

Let’s see…that leaves us with…potatoes.  I have not dug any yet - the foliage is still quite green although it’s falling over.  My guess is that it will be about three weeks til I’m digging those up.  The sweet potatoes should take even longer. 

I think that about covers it.  As I said, I’ve made the mental leap out of summer, and I’m actually looking forward to wrapping up the yardwork out there.  This is Vermont though - I could be mowing or shoveling snow in October.  All in all I would say this has been a successful gardening year, but there were frustrations (cabbage moths!  attacks on the corn!  too much rain!) and there is room for improvement.  So far the only thing I am sure of is that I’ll grow fewer green beans next year.   It’s lovely to think of freezing them to eat, but the truth is that we never buy frozen green beans, so I am not sure what made me think I’d want to eat ours frozen.  I’ll probably be the only one doing so.  Maybe Little Boy Blue, too.

 The other observation - I’ll plant many more peas next year.  We all enjoyed those so much there were none left to freeze.

I have recently planted more lettuce out there.  My lettuces were a spectacular failure this year.  I am theorizing they were too crowded in the flower boxes.   They just grew extremely slowly and never got very large.  Some of them got far too much water (darn rain!) and turned brown before they were large enough to pick. 

Next on the list is ordering garlic for this fall.  I hope I’m not too late - I think I did that in August last year.

That’s all for now.  Sorry it’s been a long dry spell here in the blogosphere.  Hopefully I’ll have more to report soon.

Battered corn (though this specimen is thus far unharmed)

Thinned carrots

Blurry little cucumber

Little Jalapenos

Oddly shaped bell pepper

Tomatoes

Onions

Potato flowers

Sweet potato vines

Pumpkins taking over the whole yard (and the neighbor’s yard)

Loads of green beans

Not so Little Perennials

Beautiful blueberries

About a third of the garlic

That’s all I have for now.  Hungry children calling…

The first:

They are so sweet and tasty!  My funny husband thinks this is an argument against gardening.  He says now he feels obligated to eat peas “at every meal”!  Apparently he’s forgotten about the freezer.  I remind him the point of gardening is to eat a good quantity of fresh, delicious food.  I also told him that I intended to put away some of it so that we can enjoy it later, when peas won’t grow.   This is the part he disagrees with the most.  He says “it’s not the same”.  I agree, but frozen snap peas from our garden are still tastier than the stuff you can buy at the grocery store, they’re far less expensive, and they have traveled only about 50 feet, in a bucket.  They have much to recommend them.  So, I’ll be freezing whatever is left of this bowlful.

The other type of bounty is the one which I will place upon the head of whatever creature has, for a second time, attacked my corn.  We’ve had two episodes.  The first occurred on Wednesday - I went out and saw that one of the stalks had been torn or bitten off, and was resting about 4 feet away in a planter containing lettuce.  I was perplexed, since we’d been outside playing that day and didn’t see anything amiss.  Then yesterday, it was finally time to water again.  I watered in the morning and checked out all the plants and progress.  Then we spent the morning at a playgroup and I didn’t get out to the garden until mid-afternoon again.  In the space of a few hours, someone attacked four more plants.  I just don’t get it!  They don’t eat anything, don’t dig in the dirt, they just rip off a few plants and leave them lying on the ground.  WHY?!  I could almost forgive a creature if they were just feeding themselves.  This just seems malicious!   I just don’t know what to do about it.  S. says “don’t grow corn anymore” which seems extreme, unless you know him.  All gardening involves a little loss to the local wildlife. 

 That’s all for now.  I’m being accosted by the other variety of wildlife here.  Little Boy Blue, to be specific.