Garden Club Mob

A very tidy garden, peppers and zinnias in the distance, still going in mid-November!

With a little help from our friends, the veg patch is looking very spiffy right now.  There was an amazing stretch of warm weather last week with Sat-Mon  in the 70's,  nothing like warm sunshine to motivate outdoor work.  On Saturday our besties John and Michele came out in the afternoon and together we cut back the dead fern and weeded the two, forty foot asparagus rows that we share.  Yesterday I picked up a scoop of compost from the landfill and John and I worked together to top the beds with a couple of inches of that black goodness and finished with a few more inches of composted leaf mulch.  I said to him "These are some of the best cared for asparagus beds in the world".

In between the asparagus marathon, my friends Diana and Celeste and Celeste's friend Weegy came out on Sunday for the first of what we hope will be an ongoing joint gardening effort among friends.  Locally and  now nationally there is a crop mob movement.  More geared towards large scale sustainable farms, a big group of folks work together at one location on major projects to help the farmer, they share a meal and each time go to a different farm belonging to one of the members of the mob.  As I toiled away on the homestead here I kept thinking how nice it would be to have help on certain projects, just to make more headway, and isn't it sometimes more fun to do work with friends to talk to? Not to mention more hands always make daunting jobs feel lighter.  When my friend Celeste said she was wanting to form a garden club, I proposed we combine the two ideas and the garden club mob was born. 

The sad news is that almost everyone we know that has a garden seems to also be too busy to share time in this way.  But I still have hope that our little garden mob may grow.  If you're in the vicinity and want to join the group let me know and I'll plug you in.  We are scheduled to meet at Celeste's house in early December and take on some weeding, mulching or whatever she deems most useful for her.  

Lettuce, spinach and beets, blankets ready for the frost, if it ever comes...

The group helped me tackle a corner of the veg patch that has gone to ruin over the past couple of seasons mainly because its gotten too shady to really grow veggies, so we've just been neglecting it. The result; lots of weeds, some various overgrown flowers that got tossed there on their way out of one spot but without a new home to go to, some very rambling tomatillo plants that actually put on quite a few late season fruit.  I just cooked up a couple of quarts to freeze for green salsa this winter.  The crew also helped weed and mulch the winter veg.  It was really nice to have help and company to face a job I had been avoiding for months, moral support is a wonderful thing sometimes.

Fall greens; weeded and mulched and ready for harvest and cool nights

Work done, we took a tour of our place which continues to show lots of fall color.  We still have not had a frost so mums, ginger lilies and roses are blooming.  We finished with a little potluck luncheon including home grown salad greens. Everyone came and went from 10-2 and there was still time for people to do more with their days.  I hope we'll be able to keep it going and get more folks involved, seems a very civilized way to see some great gardens, help each other out, and hopefully share plants and garden knowledge too. 

Eat Your Veggies

In an effort to combat the onslaught of calories that have already begun to creep into my diet and thereafter inevitably onto my waistline, I'm making a vow to take a long walk every single day and eat more veggies.

It's hard to go wrong with carrots like these at the ready.  These were sweet, tender, crisp and thin skinned.  I gave them a good scrub and down they went with lunch, crunch, crunch, crunch.  Bugs would have been jealous.  I could dig another 20 bunches like this before we eat all that are in the garden.  In addition, I added a few large handfuls of fresh spinach and some side shoots of broccoli  to leftover pasta at lunch time and felt like my halo was tight.

Tonight we'll be having roasted peppers and shrimp over pasta and a green salad with radishes.  It's amazing that we are still eating fresh peppers though we are getting down to the dregs.  The plants finally took it on the chin before Thanksgiving, when the temperature dropped into the 20's, that was the death knoll.  We picked all that were of size and put them in a paper bag closed at the top.  Over the past 2 weeks they've slowly been ripening up.  We've lost a few, and some have gotten a little dried out and shriveled,  but overall they turn red and are still sweet and good to eat.  When we finally run out of those we'll have lots in the freezer, both fresh chopped and roasted and peeled, to get us through the cold months.  Today I cut down the plants and put them in the compost pile, pulled out their cages and put those away, raked up all the dead leaves and piled those in the bin to rot down and become more food for the garden next summer.

As long as I've been gardening in this climate it still floors me that on December 11th we can still be harvesting lettuce, cabbage, broccoli, collards, beets, carrots, kale, chard, bok choy and cilantro.  Very little has needed protection.  There is one gorgeous head of cauliflower growing out there, always a challenge for me, only a few of the plants survived and only one has a decent sized head at this point.  We've covered those plants for the 20 degree nights of this week and hope they will put on a bit more growth.

I've joined the 10% Campaign sponsored by the NC Center for Environmental Farming Systems (CEFS).  Each Sunday I try to remember/estimate, how much money we spent on local food in the past week and how much money I saved by eating homegrown.  This is a bit of a challenge but also rather eye opening as to how much we are actually saving, or what it might cost us to buy all the stuff we grow if we were purchasing organic from the store or market.  For the 2 of us, it's working out to between $30-$40 a week and I think I actually tend to low ball.  I don't count all the fresh herbs for example.  So the goal is to eat/buy at least 10% locally each week, I think we are at about 40-50% because of the garden.

I feel sure that if we didn't have the garden, we would not be eating nearly as well as we are.  And on that note- I'm off to prepare another in a long line of excellent meals featuring loads of local food, including the shrimp.

GREENS!

First mess of collards, last bowl of tomatoes

We have been eating greens every night and it's such a pleasure.  Good and good for you, after a summer of eating beans, squash, tomatoes, corn and cabbage, it's a treat to be back to good old greens in so many forms.  I've been sauteing kale and beet thinnings, spinach and chard. Tonight I'm going to shred that pile of collards above and saute them up in some olive oil with garlic and red pepper flakes, toss in a little water and put on the lid to let them steam until they are tender.  We'll have a squash casserole that I froze in July and a chicken breast to round out the meal.

 

Tender mesclun in the garden ready to cut

  A lettuce salad is pretty much required daily to stay on top of the crop.  Ripe peppers, tomatoes, blanched and chilled green beans and radishes dress them up.  I also buy those giant storage beets this time of year.  I don't think you could ever grow one that big in NC.  You can find organic ones at the grocery, they are ridiculously expensive, but who knows how long it took them to get that big.  I'm talking about beets that weigh a pound and a half.  Wash and dry and rub with oil and wrap tightly in tin foil.  Roast in a 375 oven for about an hour to an hour and a half or until a small sharp knife sticks easily in.  Cool and peel, they are tender and deep purple and sweet as candy.  And one 24 ounce beet can cover a lot of salads, so don't blanch when it rings up as $4 or $5 at the store! 

Some Winter Veggies are Still Alive

I was thinking my faithful readers might be wondering- what happened to all the veggies under the remay tunnel during the cold weather? Well, the broccoli took it on the chin along with the radish greens- but not before I harvested some very nice large radishes which were a bonus I hadn't expected.

The kale, mustard, tatsoi, spinach and lettuce have continued to perk along, not really growing but still edible. The cabbage suffered some frost damage and should probably be harvested and eaten. When we got ready to leave town for 2 weeks we decided to just uncover everything and let it die if it was going to, but things have just kept going. I harvested a half dozen big leeks tonight to make some soup with, there are still carrots in the ground that are sweet as ever, the collards are a bit limp but still edible.

The cilantro is the queen of the winter garden, never happier. Perfect to zip up soups, quesadillas, scrambled eggs, guacamole, chickpea and other salads, I'm glad to have something green to add to things this time of year.

The new spinach and lettuce is tiny, but starting to grow, in another month- I hope to be harvesting some. Got the tomatoes, peppers and eggplants into flats this week, a bit late, but done. Another season rolls around.

Nine Degrees!

Well winter arrived with a vengeance. I know people up north will think I'm silly when I say its been really cold. I know compared to places where the mercury has been below zero for days that 9 degrees could seem like a heatwave, but its cold in this house, despite burning the stove hotter than normal, I can feel it seeping in through the windows and the walls. And it's not going to warm up much for several days.

I'm so glad I do not live in the north. We took a stroll down to the creek this afternoon to check out the ice and there was quite a bit decorating the edges of the creek around the rocks, abstract patterns created by sheets of ice thawing and refreezing. It's a rare sight around here and made everything extra sparkly in the sunlight.

I've been meaning to post these photos of the garden taken on January 3rd. This time last year I had made a big harvest of veggies just before a cold snap. This time I put the blanket over it all and am hoping for the best. I have not peeked under there but I will tomorrow and see how things fared. Monday I harvested tatsoi and kale and last week I actually harvested a bit of lettuce that was protected under the big leaves of the broccoli plants.

For this design, I pounded 2 foot pieces of re-bar into the ground about a foot deep and then slipped PVC pipe over the re-bar to form the arch. The remay is two layers thick and I weight it down with bricks and open it up when its warm, close it at night. I tried clear plastic to see if it would be warm enough for things to actually grow but it got too wet inside and things just started to rot so I scratched that idea and went back to the remay row cover.

The veggies are all tucked in and I hope you are. Keep Warm!