Dreams of Fresh Vegetables

Happy New Year! The New year always brings with it the thoughts of fresh starts and new beginnings, dreams of fresh vegetables...

It’s January 26th and we just had our first snowstorm of the 2016 season over the weekend The National Weather Service had been touting it a ‘historic’ storm making me skeptical that we would even get any snow.  As it turns out, we had about 16 inches dumped in our backyard and NYC broke historic records but Snowstorm Jonas only ranked #2 in that area overall.  Officials were worried about the potential for flooding as Saturday was also a full moon event and thankfully the winds switched from coming from the northeast to north alleviating much of the well-founded concerns. They predicted the worse of the storm would by in the Washington, DC area, which certain did get hit but the storm cruised up the coast and targeted New York City before heading out to sea.  Queens hit the hardest had upwards of 30”+.  As it turns out Snowstorm Jonas took 30 lives from start to finish, putting states as far south as Georgia and Tennessee on state of emergency. As of last night news, many people in the outer boroughs of New York were still trapped in because of snow-clogged streets.

Marley checking out the garden

Everything looks okay here

Looks like it could use more hay

The aftermath of #snowstormjonas

A thick blanket of snow

The day before the storm I took a walk in our backyard to survey everything before the fresh white blanket would cover everything.  I put some hay down on a few beds and containers I had neglected earlier this winter or looked a little thin, particularly for what was heading out way. I enjoyed the quiet before the storm and started to think about last year’s garden as it pertains to this year’s garden.  Remembering the beds filled with vines of cucumbers, squashes and cherry tomatoes, sweet potatoes, peppers and heirloom tomatoes. Right now it’s a blank canvas.

Since Christmas there as been an influx of seed catalogs being delivered to our mailbox. I love sitting with a stack of these catalogs on dreary winter days and dream about the delicious and beautiful possibilities we can have in our garden.  It’s difficult not to want to fill up the garden with delectable varieties of heirloom tomatoes. My eyes widen as I glance through the beautiful and enticing photos, wanting to plant more and more every year.  We had a client this year who bought so many plants for her garden that we had to make the garden grow space bigger with grow bags since she didn’t have enough room in the raised beds.  This year I purposely didn’t open any catalogs up until I drew out my detailed plan for year’s garden first.  We use crop rotation as a method of organic gardening. Crop rotations lessen the chances of soil borne diseases from building up.  We always amend our soil before growing but planting things in the same place year in and year out leads to trouble.  Things may continue to grow but not as prolifically and may even die off once they have started depending upon how severe the soil situation has gotten.  Same place year in year out leads to nothing but trouble and more work for the home gardener, which can be easily avoided by implementing a simple crop rotation. 

I printed out a copy of last year’s garden to remind myself of things – it’s difficult keeping 20+ clients gardens straight and I tend to forget about my own record keeping at times. There is a fabulous garden planner online called Mother Earth News Vegetable Garden Planner - we highly recommend it! 

We love growing things that we can preserve and can– allowing us to enjoy our harvests well after the season has passed.  Last year we made a lot soups, as well as our traditional sauces.  Some of the new things we tried were huge hits with the family and will be added to this year’s roster of things to grow.  I highly recommend growing something new and different each season – even if you think you are not fond of something try growing it first before you make up your mind completely.  I say this because for most of my adult life I thought I hated summer squash that is until I grew it myself.  Perhaps its because I was a city-kid and didn’t always get the freshest of vegetables or perhaps the variety of squash available to me in the mass market of grocery stores offered a bland variety which traveled well and looked good but had little flavor. I tend to think it is more the latter since studies show that the produce we purchase at the grocery store has traveled on average 1500 miles before reaching our hands!

Some of the repeated favorites that had a second or third go round in our garden included growing our own potatoes.  After a few years of growing potatoes and last year doing it both in grow sacks and in the raised bed – I will always grow our potatoes in grow sacks – we harvested many more in the sacks than we did in the garden. Plus it was a royal pain in the ass to harvest the potatoes from the raised beds – having to carefully hand dig them up so as not to harm the potato.  The grow bags I simply dump the bags out over our sifter we made for sifting compost and collect the used soil to spread somewhere else for reuse.  Again the flavors from the different varieties are unmatched by anything available in the grocery store – plus growing potatoes has got to be one of the easiest vegetables to grow, particularly in grow bags where you can eliminate some of the pest problems that can plague in ground grown potatoes.  We also grew corn last year – our third year growing corn. Last year’s harvest was pretty good but I think this summer I will go back to the Three Sisters bed and couple corn up with beans and squashes.  The 3 Sisters is an ancient Indian organic farming method that employs the usage of companion plants to benefit one another. The beads provide nitrogen for the squash and corn while the corn provides support for the beans to grow and the squash protects the soil from weeds and protects the crops from critters with their thorny vines.

Last summer we tried a whole bunch of new things including spaghetti squash and sweet potatoes. Loved, loved, Loved – the sweet potatoes! Yes we grew our own sweet potatoes – two different varieties New Jersey Yellow and Okinawan Purple. Many people confuse sweet potatoes with yams and I will address the differences and confusion in another blog post very soon. We also grew Brussels sprouts – these delicious treats took a while to mature but it was well worth the wait.  I even cut down the last of the stalks right before the storm and harvest a number of baby sized Brussels sprouts; what they lack in size, I am sure they will make up in flavor.  I have definitely noticed that the flavor in homegrown food is so much tastier than anything bought at the store.  When I first started growing carrots and these little things came out of the ground as opposed to a 6 inch long carrot – it didn’t make much of a difference when it came to taste – it was like concentrated carrot!

New things this season I would like to include would be melon – although we’ve grown watermelon before, the sugar box small ones in containers in the past quite successfully – I would like to try growing a cantaloupe.  Varieties like a Golden Jenny catch my eye; described by the Rare Seeds catalog as “an outstanding golden meated version …short vines go wild with succulent sweet 2 lbs beauties… Early and productive.” Who wouldn’t want to grow those?! Or another variety called “Collective Farm Woman” described as an heirloom from the Ukraine that the “melons ripens to a yellowish gold and the white flesh has a very high sugar content. Ripens early even in Russia and tolerates comparatively cool summers.” We had cool summers for the last two seasons, so this perks my interest.  I get lost in descriptions of some of the possibilities – words like succulent, sweet and prolific pull me in.  I love the stories associated with some of the varieties and the names like Drunken Woman Frizzy Headed Lettuce, Paul Robeson and Mortgage Lifter catch my eye as I peruse the pages of food porn.  Learning the history behind the fruits and vegetables adds to my enjoyment of planning out the gardens.

One thing I plan on including in the garden this summer is a sunflower garden. I love to include sunflowers since they add a certain majestic beauty to the garden. I’m looking to include many varieties with colors ranging from the pale yellows of a Giant Primrose to the bold reds seen in a Red Sun.  Along with the sunflowers we’ll include pole beans that will happily run up the strong stalks and help them stand tall throughout the season. 

Flowers are an important part of the garden and including edible flowers such as sunflowers, nasturtiums, pansies and many other varieties can do double duty in the garden providing nectar for pollinating bees and color to the garden as well as delicious treats to add to your own meals. 

There are 6 weeks until spring officially starts, I know they will whizz by in the blink of an eye despite being cold and snowy.  Time waits for no one and it’s the perfect time to dream and plan.

"A flower does not think of competing with the flower next to it. It just blooms. - Zen Shin

A look back at weather 2015

The end of 2015 causes me pause to reflect on the season of 2015.  The weather more than anything else dominated my thoughts much of the season and provided us with plenty of challenges.  For Homegrown Harvest it was our third growing season as a business and as professional growers. The year began with cold but dry air with the snows holding off until mid January. I remember vividly since we picked up our riding mower/ snowthrower on January 6th from Sears. It took Mark a week of working on it to put the snow thrower attachment on it; he finished right before the first of what turned out to be thirteen snowfalls that were big enough to plow. I believe it snowed around 60"+ where we are in zone 6b; parts of New England saw much more such as Boston at 109"+ where Mark's son lives.

The springtime came in cold and wet; the snows gave way to rain and it was a soggy season.  We were able to seed early crops of peas and greens without any problem in the raised beds by  March 6th just about the same time as our last big plowable snowfall.  The top two inches of soil at that point were workable and I started throwing in seeds I could beginning from that point on.

Summer continued to be cool but the rain stopped altogether for months. Clients who didn't water their gardens regularly didn't get the yields that others who had some sort of irrigation in place did. The cooler temperatures stalled and delayed the ripening of many tomatoes and other warm weather crops.  But in time and with patience we got fantastic yields overall that just took a while to ripen.  For instance, some of our hot pepper plants, we had at least 3 - had so many peppers on them - one plant per variety was plenty.  Thankfully Mother Nature finally turned up the heat for a few days with degrees of 90+ then summer and remained comfortably warm for the fall season allowing for an early winter harvest of  broccoli, peas, carrots, greens and other fall crops.  The parsley, sage, thyme and mints continued to thrive throughout autumn. Kale pops up in the path prolifically where I let last winter's crop to go to seed.

Winter has started slowly easing in with the same temperatures we enjoyed during the fall.  No snow, but the rains returned finally. Christmas Eve and days surrounding it were warm reaching the 60s. We were able to sit comfortably around the firepit the night before Christmas sharing stories , drinking wine while opening a few gifts with our children.  The moon was full, the first time since 1977, the next will be 2035 or something - we watched it as it travelled across the night sky.

As we come to end of 2015, the temperatures have dipped to where they should be. I take solace in knowing I was given the extra nice weather to prepare everything for winter. Fall had been personally tough for my family. A personal tragedy touched our family, forcing many things to have to take a back seat.  The extra nice days served me well as I was able to tend to closing up our own garden and not freeze my hands off in the process. We had spent time in October and November closing up our clients' gardens. - many of them pleasantly surprised at the elongated season and the growing potential they had harnessed.

Currently our 11 raised beds and 20+ containers, we are growing in 7 beds and probably about 10 containers a variety of  lettuces, radishes, carrots, garlic, onions, shallots, spinach, broccoli and last of last season's Brussels sprouts. Some beds are covered with a variety of cold frames, cloches or low hoops; the others simply have a thick layer of hay on top.

We just pulled in our Tower Garden a few days before the new year- two broccoli plants have started, so once we put the grow lights on it, we should be able to add other seed starts to it and enjoy more fresh veggies during winter 2016. The winter of 2016 will be here and we are ready for whatever it brings. The early stages will be filled with seed catalogs and dreams.  Happy dreaming.

A Bittersweet Time in the Garden

I came to love my rows, my beans, though so many more than I wanted. They attached me to the earth, and so I got strength like Antaeus.~ Henry David Thoreau

Just as the Farmer’s Almanac called it, this autumn has been on the milder side. It’s not to say we haven’t experienced our first light frost – that happened the weekend of October 17^th and 18^th and again the other night. Having Mother Nature remind you of the impending change of the season during a warm autumn can shock crops – depending upon what’s still in the garden and what you have done to prepare for extending the season and fighting a little frost.

Peppers ripening on the counter

The beautiful autumnal colors of reds, oranges and yellows sprinkled through the beds in the form of tomatoes, peppers, eggplants and marigolds up until mid-October. At that point we decided to harvest the tomatoes and let them ripen indoors. We always choose to do this at the end of the season for 2 reasons: 1. Tomatoes will continue to ripen off the vine and 2. Too many people, including us have left them out too long and Jack Frost has nipped them and that’s that.  This year due to the cool temperatures throughout the summer we still had tons of hot peppers fully developed but had not yet changed from their green color.  It’s not as well known, as there is some debate depending on what you read, as to whether you can finish ripening green peppers to their colorful counterparts once it has been picked. I had always thought that you could not do this; however, I have discovered that peppers that have started to change colors can be picked and they will continue to ripen of  But I have also read that as long as they are mature in size, given time, green peppers will finish ripening off the plant, according to Big Stone Bounty.
f the plant.

tomatoes ripening in bins

We’ve known this about tomatoes but not peppers – this good info. Of course, pulling any fruit off the plant before fully ripened results in lower nutritional content and they aren’t as sweet as their fully ripened counterparts, but I think anything from your own garden is way better than from anywhere else. Plus I usually only do this at the end of the season when I am worried about impending frost.

Peppers ripening in a bag with tomatoes

I’ve also read a lot of conflicting data about whether or not peppers react to ethylene gas or not. Ethylene gas helps stimulate the ripening process in many fruits including tomatoes. I’m currently conducting my own experiment to see if the peppers I put in the paper bag with the ripe tomato and ripening tomatoes accelerates the process of ripening the green peppers vs the ones one the counter on a dish. We have so many green tomatoes that I have been using unused earthworm bins that have holes on the bottom to layer the green tomatoes so they can ripen. The aeration helps the process. All the cherry tomatoes are in three bins and then I have a platter full of standard-sized heirloom tomatoes stacked up.

Cold frame is up

There can be so much to do to get ready for winter, particularly if we get a winter as snowy as last year. Once again the Farmer's Almanac Winter Forecast confirms our fears that we could be in for a doozy. To finish readying the garden beds for winter, we need to be sure any remaining tender crops have all been weeded out and pull any weeds that may have crept in over the summer.  By doing so we remove any possibility of leaving behind vegetation which may add to the promotion of disease. We put a cold frame over part of one bed where we are currently growing some broccoli - our broccoli in the past has been attached so I tend to cover it up to provide a little added TLC to give it more of a chance. We put another cold frame upon a bed of lettuce, carrots and arugula.  The hay/straw mulch still needs to be put down and I need to gather some pine needles for the asparagus bed.  

Yesterday during a break from the computer, I went out and pulled the entire bed of remaining bean, cucumber and morning glory vines.  All of which will be dumped in the woods since I worry about the morning glory seeds taking over.  In a few days I’ll harvest some more herbs – the mint, rosemary, sage and thyme should be trimmed back – as should the oregano.  I will leave some long and wild for the birds and bees to continue to enjoy. There won't be too many days left where the weather will allow me to be outside and to me there is nothing better than working out in the garden.

3.5 inches of much needed rain

Asparagus ferns

It rained 3.5 inches yesterday and last night – we desperately need it. It’s why I ran outside the day before to deal with the vines since I knew I’d be stuck inside to deal with computer work and filing if the weather reports were right.  There is nothing I rather do less than file, which is apparent since I am finding statements from 2011 in the pile.  The spare garlic, shallots and onions I managed to plant in some containers and the remainder of the two beds I had planted some in last week. We use a ton of all three when we cook and buying them – particularly shallots – can be expensive; so there is nothing better than growing your own.  At this point the garden is ready for it hay/straw mulch in some beds.  I'm still waiting a little while longer before cutting the asparagus shoots down to 2- 3" and mulching; their ferns are just turning a yellowish brown but most remain green still.  Once we cut them down we'll mulch with as many pine needles as we can rake up from under our own trees and top off with the hay/straw mulch we use to protect the freshly cut tops from the wind and frost.

Our Brussels sprouts are still coming along - its our first year growing them so there is a learning curve. We had some pests eat away at the leaves at one point during the summer but we planted enough that we only really only lost one to the pests - the rest now have started to sprout their little sprouts which it fun to see. The end of the season list continues with dumping the new compost into the the 12 foot bed we had to empty thanks to the morning glory infestation.  We need to throw down some new compost in a few containers as well before putting the straw/hay mulch down. 

It's a bittersweet time of year for us. We have worked in our garden as well as in our clients' gardens all season. Preparing soil, seeding, planting, staking and supporting, watering, feeding, weeding, waiting, watching nature do what she does so well - grow, thrive, produce, feed.  It's the most satisfying feeling in the world, helping people grow their own food.  But alas, all seasons must come to an end and our business, Homegrown Harvest is coming to the end of our third growing season.  We were thrilled the other day to receive photos from one of client's boasting about their garden.  It's the best feeling in the world when you have one of your clients send you pictures of her garden thriving or her standing there with a Cheshire cat grin holding a huge platter of homegrown vegetables. We are truly blessed!

As the season winds down we can take solace knowing that the garden may be still but underneath the soil, wonderful things are taking shape to fill our palates next season. 

The glory of gardening: hands in the dirt, head in the sun, heart with nature. To nurture a garden is to feed not just the body, but the soul. ~Alfred Austin

If the day and the night are such that you greet them with joy, and life emits a fragrance like flowers and sweet-scented herbs, is more elastic, more starry, more immortal - that is your success. All nature is your congratulations, and you have cause momentarily to bless yourself. ~ Henry David Thoreau