Nelson County Rocks

After having become accustomed to home-grown garlic from last year’s harvest, it was traumatic to run out around March and have to resort to the anemic stuff in the supermarkets.  So this year I planted more cloves and more varieties, and this past week harvested and began the curing process for 120 bulbs, including some of the largest I’ve ever seen.  This year’s varieties include four from last year (Music, Brown Tempest, Inchellium Red, S&H Silverstein) and two new ones I picked up at the Montecello Harvest Festival last fall: Appalachian Red and Romanian Red.  It also proved to be the time to start harvesting onions and to complete harvesting the spring turnip and kohlrabi crop.

As the picture above shows, even a larger-than-usual storebought garlic doesn’t come close in size to most of our homegrown ones–and the taste difference is even greater!

some more pictures here

Today I pulled our spinach and kale plants, which were bolting in the heat, and this seems representative of the shift from the spring to the summer garden.  We’ve been harvesting lettuce, spinach, collards, kale, swiss chard, turnips, kohlrabi, radish, and snap and snow peas, but now the potato (6 varieties) and tomato plants (14 varieties) are flowering, and squash, pepper, eggplant, beans, and edamame are planted and on their way, in addition to longer-maturing spring plantings like beets, fennel, and parsnips.  Starting a number of plants from seed under grow lights indoors gave us a head start. Onions and garlic, planted last fall, will probably be harvested in late June.  So far it’s been a good spring for growing–regular rains and temperatures not too high.  The eating has been good!

click here for more pictures

Pictures from March 1st: Veggie garden being expanded to double potato production; green areas are garlic and onions planted in the fall.  Daffodils had just come out, and are now blooming throughout our woods along the road.  Peas, turnips, and spinach have since been planted, with collards, kohlrabi, chard, spinach, six varieties of lettuce, chives, parsley, and cilantro all growing inside under grow lights.  Spring peepers are peeping and a new set of green frogs has colonized our little pond, so spring is definitely arriving!

my current favorites: Seed Savers Exchange, Johnny’s Selected Seeds, Southern Exposure Seed Exchange, Baker Creeek Heirloom Seeds, and The Maine Potato Lady

It’s that time of year for gardeners: dreamily thumbing through seed catalogs in anticipation of a new (and always better!) gr0wing season.  After a promising start, last summer’s heat and dryness (and attendant pests) were disastrous for our cucumbers,  squash, and lima beans, and very stressful for mid-summer tomatoes, although we had lots of early tomatoes and late-planted tomatoes did well in later summer.  In fact we were eating fresh tomatoes (ripened after threat of frost inside, wrapped in newspaper in a dark closet), well into December.  Most everything else did pretty well, and we still have quantities of frozen string beans, peppers, turnip greens, zucchini bread, and squash pancakes, along with garlic harvested in mid-summer.  Plus of course lots of canning jars of homemade jams, sauces,  and tomato salsa.

Potatos were our major new crop in 2010, and we got a little over four months of good eating of the four varieties we planted: Satina, Romanze, Carola, and German Butterball.   Our goal this year is to double the size of our potato patch and hopefully triple our potato production (Monika is German, you know).  This year’s varieties will be Satina, Sangre, Keuka Gold, Yellow Finn, and Kennebec.  Garlic was also a new crop (planted in fall 2009) and was quite successful too; we still have a reasonably good supply, despite the fact that we use and gave away a lot!  I planted this past fall several new garlic varieties, including Appalachian Red and Romanian Red, while continuing with Music and Brown Tempest, as well as Inchellium Red and S&H Silverstein, from bulbs harvested in early summer.  All but the last two are hardneck garlics, which we prefer since they produce fewer, but larger, cloves that are easier to peel (those supermarket bulbs with a zillion tiny cloves are softnecks).  Hardneck garlics also produce the edible garlic scapes which we enjoyed and wrote about this past spring.  Edamame (soybeans) also proved to be a welcome new crop.

This past year we also increased the variety of vegetable plantings for spring and fall; we especially enjoyed the mix of shell, snow, and snap peas in the spring, and collards, turnips and kohlrabi in the fall.  Since most fall vegetables will also do well in the spring, we’re planning to increase our spring plantings significantly.  Along with some heirlooms with curiously interesting names like Drunken Woman Lettuce, I’m also trying for the first time fennel, parsnips, and lemon grass.  Well, at least the seeds are ordered…..

In the fall we also planted 350 bulbs for daffodils, lillies, iris, and bluebells, which hopefully will add even more color to spring.

Monika’s and my other big project (for which she is the main initiator) starts with eggs, not seeds….but more about that later!

Click here for garden pictures from 2010

Winter hasn’t yet officially begun, but we had our second snowstorm on December 16th: about five inches and COLD.  But we were cozy in our house, amidst holiday decorations and our wonderful wood stove.  A more complete set of views, inside and out,  may be accessed here.

In late fall we  visited various friends to learn about raising chickens (for eggs), a project Monika and I intend to undertake in the spring.  We continued to harvest turnips and chard  (see basket above) as well as collards, kale and lettuce until the second week of December, when a cold spell did most of the remaining garden in.  In mid-November Nic and Alison came over and made us  delicious roasted stuffed pumpkins!

For our Thanksgiving turkey, which we took up to family in Maryland, Monika found Open Gate Farm in neighboring Albermarle County, which raises heritage turkeys and sells them fresh (our turkey from Polyface Farm last year was frozen).  We went out to the farm on the Monday before Thanksgiving amd got a delightful guided tour from Tom Ward.  We also got a surprise: our Bronze Standard turkey had turned out to be much larger (38 pounds!!!) than expected.  This posed a series of challenges: locating a large enough roasing pan;  locating a container large enough to to brine it in;  fitting it into an oven just barely larger than the turkey; and figuring out how long to cook it.  Regarding the latter, we were many hours off in our estimation, but fortunately got the turkey out in time and it was the best turkey ever.  Pictures of our Maryland Thanksgiving may be accessed here.

Early morning view from our front deck

Life in retirement is great!

It’s hard to believe that summer is officially over  (despite 90 degree temperatures).  We were pretty focused on Tim’s and Megan’s wedding for the first half of the summer, and the rest seems to have just gone poof.  But actually the second half of summer has been interesting and varied, and below is a kind of late summer photo potpourri.

We’ve stayed pretty close to home, but we’ve begun to explore the Shenandoah Valley, on the other side of the mountains, somewhat more.  One particularly interesting visit, with our friends Anke and Axel, was to the Frontier Culture Museum, a living history museum in the mode of Sturbridge, Shelburne, and others.  But rather than strictly focusing on recreating pioneer life in the 19th century here, it also attempts to showcase the rural culture that immigrants (including those enslaved) both left and brought with them: German, English, Scot-Irish, and West African (Igbo).  It’s very nicely done and we had a gorgeous day to walk and explore the different parts.  Click here for more pictures of the Frontier Culture Museum.

In early September, we celebrated Nic’s thirty-first birthday with his wife Alison, and local friends Virginia Page,  Axel and Anke.  Earlier, we hiked to the St. Mary’s Falls (see previous post), where Nic scared the bejeebies out of me by leaping off the cliff into the deep but narrow pool below.  A few less birthdays for me, I’m sure…  Alison took the picture below with their cell phone.

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With almost no rain all summer, our vegetable garden has been less productive than last year, but surprisingly good overall, with the exception of cucumbers and squash, which were done in by insects that seemed to thrive and multiply in the dry weather.  In addition we bought lots of fruit from local orchards, and Monika made all sorts of wonderful jams, sauces, and deserts for canning or freezing.  Currently we’re getting lots of string beans and peppers, some tomatoes, lettuce, chard, herbs (there’s been tons of basil for making pesto), with fall vegetables–collards, spinach, kale, and kohlrabi coming along.  And we still have lots of garlic and potatoes that we harvested in mid-summer.

One summer project has been to complete a little trail system in the woods that surround three sides of our property.  That and enjoying nature and the beauty of our immediate surroundings.  For a late summer photo potpourri of these things, click here.

This was our first season growing potatoes, and I’d decided–to Monika’s skepticism–to try growing “straw potatoes,” which replaces dirt hilling of potato plants with a layer of straw.  However, following Barbara Damrosch’s advice in The Garden Primer, I planted the potatoes just barely beneath the soil surface, instead of on top, as is often done in straw potato culture.

In any case, my potatoes gave me a scare through the spring and early summer, as the plants grew healthily but no potatoes seemed evident below the straw I piled on.  But Monika was convinced that there had to be potatoes there, and so today she and I went down to the potato patch, pitchfork  and broadfork in hand, and found that there were indeed lots of potatoes, but they’d chosen to grow underground rather than above in the straw.  (This probably means that I planted the potatoes a little too deeply, but all’s well that ends well and I’ve concurred with Monika that we should revert to more traditional hilling practice next year.)

Our harvest for four of our almost 80 plants was about ten pounds of potatoes, which suggests an eventual harvest of well over 200 pounds.  Most importantly, at dinner tonight the Satina early-season potatoes we harvested left our store-bought potatoes in the dust (and headed for the compost pile, such was the difference).  In addition to the remaining Satina, three other varieties of German origin are due to follow: Romanz, Carola, and German Butterball, all from the Maine Potato Lady.

Note: The dinner picture above also includes pesto made from garden Thai and lemon basil and garlic; a sauté of garden onion, garlic, swiss chard, squash, and tomatoes; and three varieties of garden tomatoes.  Hard to eat much more local than that!

We’ve been in a heat spell for a while now, with temperatures well into the 90s and rainfall irregular and reduced.  This has speeded up some things and stressed others.  I was concerned that my two beds of garlic were showing signs of drying up, but then (fortunately) received an email newsletter from Southern Exposure Seed Exchange noting that their garlic had matured early this year.  So I went ahead and harvested the four types of garlic I’d planted: Brown Tempest and Music (both hardneck garlics) and Inchelium Red and S&H Silverskin (both softneck garlics), as well as white onions.   I let them dry off in the sun for a day or two, and then moved them on screens into the garage to cure.

Today, Nic and Alison and two friends joined Monika and me in a garlic tasting exercise.  The unanimous sentiment was that while mild differences could be detected, it was hard to describe them and all were excellent.  (However, from the point of view of easy peeling, I much prefer the hardneck garlics.)  The 100 garlic bulbs harvested should get us through the next year, we hope!

Tomato season has happily begun, with Paul Robesons, Brandywines, and determinate yellow and orange tomatoes being the first to mature.  But the Eden-like quality of last year’s garden has not been replicated this year.  We’re having significant pest problems, especially with cucumber beetles and squash bugs, which have pretty much done in my first plantings of zucchini and other summer squash.  Tomatoes have been taking a hit from crows, various insects, and the (amazingly large and voracious) tomato hornworm caterpillar, and my pole beans by Mexican bean beetles.  One must learn to share, I guess….  BTW, for anyone pondering the complicated relationship between gardening and nature, I highly recommend Michael Pollan’s Second Nature: A Gardener’s Education.  It’s funny, informative, and deeply smart.

Planting for our spring garden began last fall, when we planted garlic and onions in October.  After an unusually snowy winter, we planted in March peas, turnips,  a variety of greens, including lettuce, an Asian “stir-fry” mix, and collards, and have been munching on these since April.  (We also planted potatoes, which have recently been in bloom.) The pea season pretty much ended this week, but we’ve both enjoyed fresh and frozen away abundant garden, snow, and snap peas.  Today I pulled out most of the peas and replaced them with a second planting of pole beans (the first planting is already almost up to the top of the trellis).  And as if to symbolize the transition to summer vegetables, a half-dozen or so of golden and green zucchini will be ready to pick tomorrow!

Who will be the first to identify the curving stalk in this picture?
(Hint: it’s a current rage among foodies)

This year for the first time I am experimenting with fluorescent grow lights, and so “spring planting” actually began on February 19.  My makeshift system appears to have worked well, and has produced over 100 seedlings: herbs (mainly parsley and basil), vegetables (peppers, tomatoes, eggplants, and lettuce); and flowers (mainly cosmos and zinnias).  It’s been fun to watch their progress and make the necessary adjustments in the lighting, and so far the parsley and lettuce has been transplanted into the early spring garden.  In addition, I’ve planted from seed peas (garden, snow, and snap), spinach, swiss chard, arugula, mixed greens, lettuce, and cilantro, along with onion sets.  From last fall, two raised beds of four varieties of garlic are also coming along.

In the process, Tim and Megan were pressed into service moving dirt and Nic for removing a stump that turned out to be under ground in my newly-dug potato patch.

Above: Bob cuts seed potatoes into planting pieces; Bob with seed potatoes in three trenches;  Monika anticipates good German-style eating! (All four potato varieties chosen, Satina, Carola, Romanze, and German Butterball, are German in origin.)