Potatoes!

Here is what the garden looks like in mid-october. Its still surprisingly green and growing. The potatoes (bottom right) look like they are just starting to die out. It doesn't matter if they are done or not, because I need to plant next year's garlic where they are now!
After some digging it quickly became apparent that the early-season Red Norland potatoes (died off in early july) did not do too well this year, while the late-season Kennebec Whites (the ones that are still alive in the picture above) exceeded expectations. Thats why I planted a couple different varieties. If the conditions are poor for one kind, they might still be good for the othe kind. After all the digging and washing, this is what the potatoes looked like. I put the camera lens cap there for some scale, but it still doesn't quite convey how big some of those white ones are. How much potatoes is that you ask? After taring the weight of the bin, those potatoes weighed in at 41.2lbs!! I've already asked Jaime to start looking into potato recipes, but its likely that we'll have to give some away because there is no way we can use that many potatoes. Combined with the 2.5lbs of red potates I harvested earlier in the year, that comes to 43.7 lbs. Approximately 5lbs were red and 38lbs were white.

Here fishy fishy fishy

The Miller homestead focuses mostly on growing vegetables, but we also take part in harvesting fresh local protein when the opportunity arises. Late September is the beginning of the local Salmon run. While the pacific northwest seems to get all the salmon run press, we have one as well, right within the city limits of Rochester.


Last year I went out with a few friends and tried to catch salmon with absolutely no luck, not even a bite. This year, I've been out a couple times with my friend Mike. The first time I had one on, but it got off as we were trying to figure out how we were going to land it without a net. The second time, Mike brought a net and we fared better. He landed this "small" 14lb King Salmon. I say small because other people who were nearby told us that this was smaller than average and they get a lot bigger (up to 40lbs or so).

After spending a little while figuring out how to gut it and remove the head, we took it home for further processing.
We probably spent about 1.5 hours cutting this thing up. Mostly it took that long because we didn't really know what we were doing, but it also took a while to remove all the pin bones. In the end, we were left with two sizable filets that we portioned. In the end there was about 5.5lbs of meat. I haven't actually had a chance to try it yet, but hopefully its yummy.

I was a bit hesitant to eat the fish since I had heard some unflattering things about Lake Ontario Salmon, but I did give it a try. I pan seared the Salmon and did a side-by-side comparison to some wild Washington state Coho salmon. In the picture below, the Coho is the pinker one. I actually had some wild King from Washington state and it was paler than the coho, but not as pale as the fish we caught. The Lake Ontario Salmon was significantly milder than the wild Coho. Much less fishy, but also less flavor in general. The texture was good. It was moist and soft. Not bad at all. I would eat it again, which is good since I have another 1.5 lbs of it! Also of note from this meal, the beans and potatoes are from the homestead, as well as the rosemary and sage used to season the potatoes and fish. Also had a pretty solid harvest from the garden this week. >1 lbs of bell peppers, >2 lbs of green beans, plus small amounts of broccoli, peas, and small peppers. The peppers that you see in the picture below had to be harvested because the branch they were on broke off due to the weight of the peppers and the heavy rain we got over the weekend.

Melon

Here is my one good melon. Unfortunately I had to pick it before it was 100% ripe. There was a dent in the rind (just above my thumb) that was getting bigger and softer, so I decided to harvest it before it got any worse.

Here is what it looks like inside. Not too shabby! It seems that the dent was an area of thin rind that was allowing the melon under it to dry out or something. Its wasn't rotten or moldy at all. The flavor was just OK, though. It wasn't as sweet as I'd like. I suspect that was because I picked it before it was fully ripe. Sadly, this is probably both the first and the last melon of the year since the vine is dying back.
On the other hand, the pepper plants are definitely NOT dying back. They are going crazy. Here is one of the bell pepper plants covered in peppers.
This is the largest of the peppers I've harvested to date. It would actually fit right in with the grocery store peppers. In the background you can see the rest of the recent harvest. The last cucumber of the season, 1.25 lbs of beans, 3/4 lb of broccoli, and a small amount of snow peas.

Its (unofficially) Fall

Night time temps are dipping into the low 50's or even lower. Some of the daytime highs aren't even hitting 70 degrees. That hasn't stopped the garden, though. The beans continue to grow, and while I was gone for a little while they overtook one of Jaime's herb pots. The beans have tons of flowers and little beans on them, so at least they're being productive while being annoying.

The corn looks like its ready to be bundled into a front-porch decoration.
The potatoes are somehow still going strong. What you see here is actually half of the potato plants. I grew early season red potatoes that finished and died off in june. Since I had some potatoes in my root cellar, I just left them in the ground. Now the long season Kennebec potatoes have totally overgrown a huge area and show no signs of slowing down. I can't even get to the early potatoes without damaging the greenery, so I've just decided to wait till it all dies back. Also in the picture below is a random broccoli plant that is just now growing its first head.
After being away for a while there was a good amount of stuff that was ripe/overripe and needed to be harvested. Broccoli, peas, beans, and two kinds of peppers. There are tons of Cayennes that are ripe also, but I'm leaving them on the plant as long as I can so that I will have a maximum number of ripe peppers at the end of the season for making hot sauce.
After harvesting the onions at the beginning of July, I replanted the area with various greens and some radishes. Seen below is one of the radish plants that is neither bolting nor growing a radish bulb. It is just growing like crazy instead. Radishes are supposed to be easy and quick, but I have not had good luck with them.
I had a viewer request for a picture from further back showing the whole garden. This is about as far back as I could get. This shows about 90% of the garden. What is left of the three sisters is against the garage to the left, peppers, broccoli, and brussels sprouts in the middle, pototoes on the near right side, and greens and peas in the back right.

Its about time for an update

For various reasons I haven't been giving my garden much attention lately. I finally got around to doing a bunch of needed work on it today. One of the things I did was thin out the carrots that I planted in July for (hopefully) fall harvest. These thinnings, while small, look promising. There are actually little baby carrots there!

For the last month or so, I noticed that there was a "volunteer" cucurbit growing out of one of the compost piles. Its not in the way of anything (its in a mostly shaded area), so I've been letting it grow. It has started to flower and by the looks of one of the female flowers, it seems to be a zuchinni plant. We'll see if it actually makes any zuchinnis before it gets too cold out. Here is said plant.
This area is a bunch of greens that I planted in July and August for fall picking. They are growing very well and need to be thinned out. There is lettuce, arugula, pak choi, and rapini in there.
Here is the pile of bean vegetation that grew up a couple of wooden stakes that I leaned against the garage. The stakes are 8', and the beans grew above that and up into the lilac bush. This variety is supposed to consistently grow beans all summer long. They certainly grew well all summer, but never produced a single bean. The crazy thing is that now they are covered in flower buds. I think they should have time to mature into beans before it gets too cold.
Meanwhile, the other bean variety has produced beans all summer. I'm not sure how I feel about the taste or texture of them, but they are productive. It turns out that if you let the beans keep growing without picking them, they can get huge.
Its always tough to get a good picture of the peppers since they are shrouded in foliage, but I was doing some re-staking of the pepper plants that are currently over-burdened with peppers and I was able to get a reasonable shot of the two cayenne pepper plants. There are (quite literally) dozens of cayennes on each plant and they keep growing more of them. I planned on making hot sauce out of them, but I may have more than I know what to do with.

Yet another garden update

A random closeup shot of ripe edamame on the plant.
Here are the fall greens that are coming along nicely. There is arugula, lettuce, rapini, and pak choi. They sure are doing a lot better than the same seeds in the spring.
Sad looking tomato plants in the topsy-turvy that are somehow producing tomatoes.
The first melon. I have high hopes for at least the flavor of these melons if not the quantity.
Harvest of the day. Broccoli, a couple small bell peppers that have blemishes, edamame, and a couple red popper peppers. I tried one of the red poppers and it just tasted like a red bell pepper to me.
The garlic and onions have been curing/drying in the garage for the past few weeks are done now.
Here's what they look like after the tops were cut off and the dirt gently brushed off. Almost two pounds of garlic. Two pounds of red onions, and almost 5 pounds of yellow onions.
Here is the garden during a downpour. I took this moments before it started hailing. There was a little bit of hail damage on the baby greens, but I think they'll be ok.

The next day I took a look at one of the oldest ears of corn and realized that it was borderline overly ripe. Looking at a couple of other ears, they looked ready to pick also. These ears almost look respectably sized, but it turns out there is a lot of empty space inside those husks. Some of the ears clearly didn't get pollinated as well as they could have been, even though I manually pollinated all the ears for the first few days that each ear emerged.

Here is what they look like inside. Hmm...I've seen bigger ears of corn. On the other hand, the reviews came back overwhelmingly positive for the flavor and texture.

After another rainstorm, I looked at the corn and found that the bean plants have broken the tops of some of the corn plants over. This 3-sisters thing is a terrible idea. I don't know what those indians were thinking. If I ever grow corn again, I will not be growing it together with climbing beans. Its only the top foot or so that is bent over, so hopefully it won't stunt the rest of the corn ears that are growing. These rainy days have been pretty common lately. In the last 17 days it has rained 4.79 inches. In the previous 60 days before that it rained 2.02 inches. On the one hand, I haven't had to water the garden at all in the last couple weeks, but on the other hand, yesterday I had to mow my lawn for the first time in literally two months.

Random Garden Stuff

Yeah, I don't know about this whole three sisters thing. Either the indians had way better corn than I do or they had way worse beans than I do. Note that all four bean plants in this cluster of corn have found their way to the top of the plant and now don't have any idea what to do. Since I don't have anymore long poles or branches, I don't know what to do either. Unfortunately, these bean plants seem more interested in growing long rather than making beans. This variety of beans hasn't made a single one yet!

On the other hand, the corn production is starting too look up. Even though the plants didn't grow very high, they all have corn on them and some are starting to get to a size that makes me think they might actually end up usable.
Waiting for peppers to ripen is painfully slow. Hurry up already. they've looked about the same for weeks now. Actually, thats not quite true. You can see the very tip of one of the cayenne peppers starting to turn red.
I don't think I've really had any good pictures of the asparagus so I figured I'd take a couple. There are 4 or 5 plants crammed in along the fence. Some are doing better than others. Note the thick clump of asparagus about a foot off the ground most of the way towards the left side. That is about 8-10 mini stalks of asparagus from the same plant, but none have gotten more than about 18" high.
Most of the other asparagus is doing better than that. They keep sending stalks up every once in a while. Is August the time for asparagus to be sprouting? This plant seems to think so.
The day's harvest. Several cukes, a small amount of green beans (from a different variety than the one shown in the first picture), a bunch of micro-greens (AKA thinnings from the fall seeding), and about a 1/4 lb of edamame. I wasn't really sure when to harvest them, but some of the pods were looking awfully plump, so I figured I should pick them before they get over-ripe.
I don't know why this picture showed up at the bottom. It should be up with the other bean picture, but its a pain to move it at this point, so I'm leaving it here. I knew this patch of corn wasn't doing well, so I took the two 8' poles that I used for tomato stakes last year and leaned them up against the garage, training the beans up them. The beans seemed pretty happy about that.