Carrots

I decided it was time to harvest the carrots that I planted in late summer last year.

At first it seemed like a great harvest, but it turned out that probably almost half of them were unusable due to either splitting open or having slugs and other critters eating out the middle of them. Still, I got about 1.25 lbs of good carrots.

The rest of the garden is making progress. The garlic and shallots that were planted last year are doing well, though the multiplier onions didn't fare nearly as well over the winter. About half of those died, and the other half didn't send up much in the way of spring greenery. I planted replacement bulbs in the spots where none came up. The instructions I got with the onions say that you can plant them in the spring, but you will get dramatically lower production. Here is what the Allium patch looked like as of last week(I didn't get around to posting this till now). Thats garlic on the right, shallots on the left, and some multiplier onions in between them.

Most of the seeds that I planted in the garden have sprouted. The timing worked out well as we had exceedingly warm weather for a couple weeks, which allowed the seeds time to germinate and sprout. We hit all kinds of temperature records, and some went so far as to say that it was a 4 or 5-sigma weather event.

Recently, the temperatures have dropped back down and we have actually had a week of below average temperatures. All the stuff I planted was cold-hardy and survived temperatures in the mid to upper 20's. It even snowed last night.

There were two things that didn't sprout, though. The kale and scallions did not come up. They were both older seeds, but I'm surprised that they didn't come up. The beauty of being able to plant so early is that I can just plant replacement seeds, and I will be right back on my original schedule of planting cold-hardy seeds around April 1st.

Indoor seed starts are doing well, and I'll have a picture of that for the next post.

Its Spring?

I had planted some broccoli, cauliflower, and scallion seeds back in February, but I planned to start the majority of my indoor seeds right around the 1st of March. Due to a vacation and general business, I just got around to doing that planting this weekend. In addition to the aforementioned veggies, I planted tomatoes, peanuts, okra, cantaloupe, cucumber, and 3 kinds of peppers. That should be all of the indoor starts. The seed flat now looks like this.

After last year's disaster of a spring, I didn't have any plans to start working in the actual garden till around the first of April. However, with recent warm days and forecast LOWS in the upper 40's and 50's for at least another week or so, I have changed my mind. I spent a couple hours out in the garden laying out this year's paths and beds and turning over the soil in the beds that will be used first. Here is what it looked like as I was just getting started. Note the small mound against the cement wall on the left side. That is the remains of the compost pile that had all my fall garden waste and leaves and stuff like that.

I found some interesting stuff in the remains of the compost pile. Here are a pair of stems still brightly colored. The purple is a kale plant that had been on top of the pile. The chartreuse green is a broccoli plant (I think) that was buried down in the pile. The picture doesn't do it justice, it really is quite shockingly brightly colored.

I was surprised to also find some baby brussels sprouts poking out of the compost pile.

The brussels sprouts plants didn't have time to mature last year and the buds got no larger than the nail on my index finger(at best), so come December, I cut the plants off at ground level and tossed them in the compost pile. Apparently the buds grew from the energy still left in the stems. Here is what it looked like after I gently pulled out one stem.

Rather than kill off such determined little fellows, I buried the stem in part of what will be my brussels sprouts bed. I tried a few google searches to see if you could grow brussels sprouts plants from the buds, but I couldn't find anything. We shall see what happens.

The garlic plants seem to have a good start going. You can see them in the picture below. They were planted in late October along with "potato onions" and some shallots. Those have not poked up through the leaves yet, but I peeked under the insulating layer of leaves that I piled on them, and they look to be just starting to grow.

Here is what it looked like when I was done. Not too impressive, but at least half of the beds have been turned over. I'm hoping to plant a bunch of cold-hardy stuff like arugula, kale, and rapini this week sometime.

Garden Planning

Its that time of year again. The time of year when I get 1 or two seed catalogs in the mail every day, even though I never asked for them. I also have no need for them since I've already purchased my seeds for next year! I ordered some from www.groworganic.com, a company that I've been happy with over the last couple years. However, they don't sell hybrids there, and there are some vegetables that I really wanted to get hybrid varieties of, so I ordered some from www.burpee.com.

If you're wondering what I'm going to grow this year, take a look at my tentative garden map for next year. New additions this year are shallots and multiplier onions (both planted in the fall along with garlic) and Okra, per Jaime's request. I'm also trying peanuts again, but I ordered "peanut seeds" this time as opposed to trying to use unroasted peanuts from Wegmans.

Apple Wine Update

I was in a bit of a rush to try the apple wine around the time of the first apple wine post since I was having some friends over and I wanted to have it available for consumption at that time. Over the weeks since then, it continued to settle. It now is crystal clear and the yeasty flavor is entirely gone. It still lacks apple flavor and has too much acidity, but it is definately better than it was. I can now give it a 5 out of 10.

Hot Sauce!

If you recall a post from a few months ago, we had a bumper crop of peppers this year, including cayennes.

What better to do with excess cayennes than make hot sauce? I made two different batches. One was intended to mimic Frank's Redhot, while the second would be a bit more custom. Here is what the peppers looked like. Some of the peppers had fuzzy mold inside. I'm wondering if this was because I left the peppers that ripened early in the season on the plant rather than taking them off? Anyway, here is what it looked like when I was chopping them up.

I found a recipe online that said it was a copycat recipe for Redhot, so I decided to start with that. The recipe is quite simple. Pepper, vinegar, garlic, and salt. Boil everything together for a while, then put them in a blender and strain the resulting liquid. I got about 8 fluid ounces from the recipe. Using small pieces of bread to dip in the sauce, I decided that it had too much vinegar, not enough salt, and the vinegar flavor didn't seem quite right. It wasn't necessarily bad, but I also wouldn't say its all that great.

For the second batch I decided to use more salt, less vinegar, and use half apple cider vinegar. In addition, I used more salt, more garlic, and added a bunch of black pepper. Unfortunately it didn't work out too well. There wasn't enough liquid so I put in some water, but it ended up too liquidy. Somehow I managed to put in too much salt also. Its a shame, too, because if it wasn't for the excess salt/water, I like the underlying flavor of that batch quite a bit.

I didn't have any empty hotsauce bottles around, so I put the sauces in 4 oz. jelly jars. Makes it a bit inconvenient for using it. Here is what the final product looked like.

Here is a visual comparison of the two homemade sauces along with Redhot and a random hotsauce that I happened to have at the time. This is after letting the sauces rest for a few weeks.

Both homemade batches are slightly hotter than the commercial sauces, but not overwhelmingly so. The vinegar flavor in first homemade sauce seemed to mellow a bit in the jar. It tasted reasonably good, though it didn't have a lot of depth of flavor. The second batch continues to be too watery and salty, but the underlying flavor is quite good. With less salt and water, I think it would be right there with my favorite commerical sauces like Redhot and Cholula.

With very good (and reasonably cheap) commercial hotsauces widely available, I don't see a lot of reason to keep trying to make my own hotsauces. However, I do plan to grow at least one hot pepper plant next year since they are great for throwing in stir-fries and other dishes.

Year End Garden

Here is what the garden looks like as of 12/26.

The carrots are still fine, the scallions are sort of ok (partially frost damaged), while the lettuce and arugula finally got killed off in a hard frost in mid-December. The weather has been unseasonbly warm here this month. That is nice for the heating bills, but it confuses some of the plants. The garlic, onions, and shallots that I planted in October have started to sprout above the leaves that I put over them.

The garlic I planted last October did the same thing and it turned out OK, so hopefully they will all be fine this year too. I'm thinking next year I'll plant that stuff in November rather than mid-October.

Holy Cauliflower

I was recently in Wegmans and I saw some massive heads of cauliflower in their locally grown section. I was satisfied with my ~1.0 lb per plant yield, but these cauliflower put mine to shame. I measured one of them and it was around 4 lbs! I don't even know what somebody would do with 4lbs of cauliflower. Either have a cauliflower party or freeze it, I guess.