Harvest Monday - 29 June 2020

Hello again from Eight Gate Farm. Oh dear, we seem to be heading into another summer drought like four years ago. Actually we're in a worse rainfall position than last time. Of course, anything can happen with the weather, and we may get a reversal. But for now, it's just too much of a job to keep anything but the vegetables sufficiently watered. The field will just have to brown out

In spite of the heat and drought (or maybe because of it?), we got a number of exciting "first harvests" of the year. We got the first picking of pea pods. Here is "Super Sugar Snap."

And here is "Avalanche," a snow pea.

We got the first kohlrabis. These are about billiard-ball size, which we prefer.

Kolibri F1 kohlrabi

We got the first pickings of mature spring onions. This is "White Lisbon," which is not supposed to bulb, but these clearly are. No matter, they are still delicious.

I'm growing three kinds of broccoli this year. As always, "Blue Wind" is first across the finish line, making heads before the other varieties even have buttons.

Blue Wind broccoli

Iceberg lettuce seems to get a bad rap among the culinary set. But we love it. I've never grown it before, but I scored a free packet of seeds, so I started six this year. They are growing beautifully, and the first cutting affirmed our opinion, being wonderfully crisp and delicate.

Iceberg lettuce

My only regret is having them all come to maturity at the same time, as well as the two rows of salad mixes. That's a lot of lettuce for us, and there's no way of preserving it as far as I know.

The lettuce bed

Last year a volunteer caraway plant sprung up, and this year it set seed. I cut the seed heads and am drying them now. This is good, because all my remaining seed failed to germinate. Now at least I'll have some fresh seed for next year. I really like caraway seeds in a dish The Kitchen Goddess makes: a ground turkey and shredded cabbage stir-fry.

Caraway seed umbrels

Lastly, we picked a small quantity of cilantro.

Cilantro

That night TKG made tortillas from our own corn flour, to serve with blackened mahi-mahi and guacamole for fish tacos. The cilantro really went well with that.

About a month ago I took some drone photos of our gardens to document progress from a different perspective on a monthly basis. I took another set this weekend. Here's the "field garden." In this and other pictures you can really see the bad condition of the grass, but the garden is doing pretty well.

The field garden

Here's the "stock tank beds." The zucchini, cucumbers, and melons are really starting to fill out.

The stock tank garden

And here's the main fenced garden.

The fenced garden behind the barn

If you are interested, here's a link to the last set of photos I took.

That's all for this week. Thank you for reading, and thanks as always to Dave at HappyAcres.blog for hosting Harvest Monday.

Harvest Monday - 15 June 2020

Here's another Harvest Monday update from Eight Gate Farm. Weather-wise, the days have been quite pleasant, but the nights cool. In fact, early this morning (Monday) we registered 48 F. (~8.9 C.). Fine for the brassicas, not so much for the solanacea. But much warmer weather should be arriving later this week.

Starting with the "first harvests" is a cutting of garlic scapes from about a dozen of the 40 plants I grew. They are early this year. We love this useful "by product" of garlic production.

Another first harvest is the result of a few onion sets planted last year that only grew this year. When this happens, they inevitably send up a flower stalk. We pulled them and got a nice bit of green onion.

For continuing harvests, several times we picked salad greens from the two mixes, along with more radishes.

Also, we cut what will probably be the last asparagus spears before allowing the plants to leaf out. We will miss having homegrown asparagus!

One of the two salad mixes has some spinach in it, which started bolting this week. We picked it, and enjoyed a nice spinach salad. Also, the remaining Asian greens were all bolting, so they came out too.

Left: spinach, right: various pac choi

The Kitchen Goddess tried a new Paleo dish called "Asian Kebabs," consisting of ground beef and Asian greens, both mostly pre-cooked then seared on the charcoal grill, served with a spicy almond butter-based sauce using coconut aminos instead of tamari. A small acorn squash (store-bought) was also baked, then put on the grill. The meal was very delicious, and for us a novel way to use Asian greens.

That's all for this week. Thanks for reading, and thanks to Dave at HappyAcres.blog for hosting Harvest Monday.

Harvest Monday - 8 June 2020

Here's another Harvest Monday update from Eight Gate Farm in southern New Hampshire. Leading off with the "first harvests" of the year is one of my favorite Asian greens, "Brisk Green" pac choi.

I didn't get fussy about turnip planting this year, just scratched out four rows and poured seeds in. This is the result of thinning them, a nice batch of baby turnip greens.

Hooray, first homegrown salads of the year! These are pickings of the two rows of salad mixes I planted.

We love chive flower vinegar, and it was time to pick the many flowers. We added some garlic chive leaves to give it a twist.

The Kitchen Goddess packed it all into a quart jar, added vinegar, and now it sits for two weeks.

For continuing harvests, to accent the salads, fresh radishes!

A number of the other Asian greens were bolting. At this stage they are hard to distinguish, but here are Pechay, White Stem, and Toy Choi.

I discovered why my asparagus were curved, and generally not looking right. In one patch I found a large number of adult Common Asparagus beetles that were feeding on the spears. In another patch there were adult Spotted Asparagus beetles. This means their larvae had already done damage. I quickly sprayed with spinosad, marketed here by Bonide with the very Jimmy Buffett-esque name "Captain Jack's Deadbug Brew." If you're not familiar with it, it's approved for organic gardening but can be harmful to pollinators. Luckily the asparagus is not near any plants currently requiring pollination.

That's it for this week. Thanks for reading, and a big shout-out to Dave at HappyAcres.blog for keeping the Harvest Monday tradition going!

Harvest Monday - 1 June 2020

Hello again from Eight Gate Farm! In these posts, I like to lead off with the first harvest of vegetables I am growing this year. This week, I got a first harvest of spring onions, AKA scallions. It's actually the first ever time I've grown spring onions, for some reason. So here are thinnings from the crop of White Lisbon.

Another first harvest is radishes. This was mostly to see how they are doing. Here we have "French Dressing," a French Breakfast type, and the familiar Cherry Belle. The seed packets always claim radishes mature much faster than they do for me, as these were planted April 19.

Another first harvest is Toy Choi, on the left below, with another picking of Asian Delight that I showed last week.

We continue to get small harvests of asparagus, every other day or so.

Now I'll show progress made this past week. I transplanted 18 indeterminate tomato plants, in two 3x10 beds.

Indeterminate tomatoes

I also transplanted 16 determinates, into one and one-half 4x12 beds. The remaining half bed was planted with 8 eggplants/aubergines.

Determinate tomatoes

I also transplanted 12 winter squash, in the "row garden" area of the fenced garden. I gave them plenty of space.

Winter squash

Last year I experimented with growing peppers directly in 10 straw bales. They did well, but you only get one season out of the bales, and it takes a lot of fertilizer to condition them for planting. So I'm not going to repeat the experiment. The partially rotted bales were perfect for spreading out for mulch across the squash and the solanacea beds.

In the two galvanized stock tanks, I planted hills of two melons, two summer squash, and four cucumbers.

Melons and cucumbers

A day later I set out 22 pepper plants, over two beds. In addition 4 peppers went into containers off the kitchen herb garden.

Peppers

I also planted bush beans, scarlet runner beans, and yelloweye dry beans.

Whew! So that emptied out the big plant-starting rack in the sunroom. All that's left is three six packs on a side table, with seedling kale, Chinese cabbage, and more Asian Delight. The end of May is really the hard push, and it feels good to have it accomplished.

One of my post-retirement hobbies is drone flying. I bought a DJI Mavic Mini, and have had a lot of fun learning to fly it. I'm very pleased with the photo and video quality for such an inexpensive drone. A project is to take aerial photos of the gardens over the season and document their growth. So here are some shots taken May 31.

The Field Garden. It's fully planted but all you can see from altitude is the garlic on the left, and the two rows of potatoes.

The Field Garden

The Stock Tank Garden:

Stock tank planters

The Fenced Garden:

Fenced Garden

We had a cold front come through yesterday, and this morning the temperature is 39F (3.8C). We'll have another cold night tonight, but that should be it. I will plant the last batch of sweet corn after it is over. Then virtually all the planting will be done. Thanks for reading my [long] post, and thanks to Dave at HappyAcres.blog for hosting Harvest Monday.

Harvest Monday - 25 May 2020

Hello again from Eight Gate Farm. We've had a week of pleasant weather. One day it got to 85 degrees F (~29 C), but nights have dropped as low as 42 (5.5 C). Of course, it's the lows that we gardeners most closely watch. 42 is too cool for the solanacea to be happy. But it looks like the 40s are behind us, so I'll be transplanting tomatoes later today. I'll wait for the peppers and eggplants until later in the week. It will be a relief to cease moving all the trays in and out to harden off the plants.

We love Asian greens here, and use them extensively in soups and stir-fries. I'm trying three new varieties this year, and the first pickings were done this week.

This is "Pechay" from Burpee Seeds:

Pechay

This is "White Stem" from Botanical Interests:

White Stem

And this is "Asian Delight" from Johnny's Selected Seeds:

Asian Delight

You will of course notice the flea beetle damage on all of them. This makes them totally unmarketable, but doesn't really bother us.

The Kitchen Goddess took some of each and made a delicious egg drop soup. It was a perfect light evening meal on the screened porch, paired with a nice chardonnay. Do you see our new tabletop gas fireplace? It adds cheer to an already cheerful space.

The asparagus is continuing to produce a few spears at a time. There is nothing like fresh asparagus.

In wildlife notes, TKG spotted this Gray Treefrog. This guardian of the garden really needs to work on its hiding skills! Against tree bark it is almost invisible, but in a flower pot? I'm looking forward to its trilling calls on sultry summer afternoons.

Gray Treefrog

That's all for this week. Thank you for reading and commenting. Please join me in reading all the Harvest Monday posts, hosted by Dave at HappyAcres.blog.

Harvest Monday - 18 May 2020

Hello for the first time this season! Like so many, we've had a cool spring so far, and for us it seems to be the new normal. Lately the days have been pleasant, but the nights cool down considerably. Anything I've sown or transplanted is growing very slowly, and they are all "cool-season" crops, but I guess they still need warmth to really take off.

Even the asparagus is poky. But last there was something to harvest and share at Harvest Monday.

I could have waited to cut the smaller ones, but I didn't want the bigger one to get woody.

A day later I discovered this overachiever:

How did I miss it? It was growing amid some raspberry vines that had spread to the asparagus.

Anyway, good to savor something from the garden.

I've been using the cool weather to really get going on some tasks that will make the late-May planting rush easier. The biggest project was to build five new 3x10 raised beds. This time I used real cedar, which is super-expensive, but hopefully will last for years. We got five cubic yards of loam/compost delivered and filled the beds. Already I've planted artichokes in two of them.

I also used cedar to replace a 4x12 bed,, which is to the left in the back row. We had a tree service do some work here repairing storm damage (broken pine nearly hit the house in an ice storm). We used the results from their woodchipper to refresh the paths in the fenced garden. Looks nice.

Out in the field garden I've got things in the ground, and am all set for planting dry beans when it finally warms up sufficiently. In the background is a row of garlic, doing well, then two rows of sunflowers (planted), then three rows of beans, then two rows of potatoes (planted). Then I don't know what yet, maybe some pole beans on tipis?

And I also rebuilt the bed that houses the kitchen herb garden. I used pressure-treated lumber for this.

I've mentioned before that we have two struggling pear trees, that were planted in the wrong location and get heavy shade from the spruces next to them. I was happy to see they have more flowers than I can remember.

Pear trees in bloom

So, lots going on, and lots of work to do in the next few weeks. Thank you for reading, and thanks to Dave at happyacres.blog for hosting Harvest Monday.