The Asparagus Project and More

Last weekend we had snow, and just 7 days later we all have our first sunburn!  It was in the mid 70's all weekend and we got a LOT of our garden planted.

We started off with tackling the "1000 Asparagus Root"project (yes, Jeff, Jens and Zach decided this was a good idea and promptly ordered 1000 roots).  We planted about 1/4 of them in our garden, but the remaining 750+ roots were planted in Zach and Rachel's new Asparagus Patch.

For a break, we trimmed grape vines ... down to the last few rows of Corot Noir.  These grape vines are nearly as far along as the Concord vines, with imminent bud break.  Luckily we are pruning them last!

The garden is disked, and several rows of plastic with irrigation lines are already laid down.  Getting ready to plant!!  We did get seed potatoes, red beet, carrot, spinach and lettuce seeds....plus some parsley and cilantro plants for the herb garden.  Sadly we ran out of time, and the potatoes will have to wait until next weekend.

What a Weekend

Our weekend got off to a great start:  a new granddaughter was born on August 21, just before noon. Welcome Elena Weyant, at 6 lbs 14 oz, and 17 inches long...

We also harvested most of our corn and worked on blanching and freezing on and off all weekend - with help from Zach, Rachel, Toben, Fiona and Adelaide.

And Tina continued staining barn boards - using up another 5 gallon bucket of stain - slowly making progress.  Someday we will have the most awesome barn in the county!

Garden Started with Cold Hardy Plants and Seeds

We are actually on time this year with planting the early spring garden. For the last two weeks Jeff has been plowing, discing and laying some plastic and we now have the following seeds and plants in the garden:

Brassicas ready to plant

• 50 lbs of peas
• 50 lbs of red potatoes
• somewhere in the neighborhood of 200 onions plants
• 2 flats of cauliflower
• 1.5 flats of broccoli
• and half a flat of Brussels Sprouts

We also doubled the size of our asparagus patch.

Tomato Cages and "Basket-Weaving"

Our tomatoes are finally getting big enough to be trellised.  After one more thorough hoeing last night,  we spread a thick layer of "mulch-hay" (i.e. hay that had gotten wet after baling, and then sat around rotting for over a year).  The hay should help keep moisture in around the plants, which is important, even with drip irrigation lines everywhere.




After the first row of 75 plants was mulched, we put tomato cages around each plant to help keep the plant growing upright and keep the fruit off the ground.  This is not only convenient for picking tomatoes, but it prevents rotten fruit and decreases disease issues.



For our second row of tomatoes we will try the basket-weaving method of trellising. (We ran out of tomato cages)  We already pounded in posts every 4 plants, and tomorrow, we'll weave twine around each tomato, and secure it at the post.  Here is a  link to a video, produced by the Maine Ag Extension service, that shows an easy way to basket-weave tomatoes.

Garden Progress

The majority of our garden is now planted - even though we are still a couple of days away from the traditional "frost date" for our region.  Some of the hardier crops  - peas, onions, cauliflower, broccoli, cabbage and potatoes - have been in the ground for a few weeks.  This weekend we planted all our tomato seedlings... meaning all 120+ of them.   Except for the tomatoes, all other seedlings are planted in plastic-covered rows.

We simply ran out of time to also plant our peppers and basil seedlings  Next weekend we'll finish it up with cucumbers, melon,s pumpkins and zucchini.  Then once the peas are harvested, we'll sow green beans and winter vegies, like rutabagas, turnips, winter squash and red beets.

Same cabbage plants from the
April post - one month later

If you look carefully, you can
see tomato plants!

First Plants for 2014 Vegetable Garden

We finally got to set the early plants out this weekend.  Yeah!  During the week, Jeff laid 4 rows of plastic, and this morning we started bright and early planting cabbage, broccoli and cauliflower plants :

• 2 flats of broccoli
• 2 flats of cabbage 
• 3 flats of cauliflower 

(one flat = 48 plants)  

We also got onion plants, which Jens had ordered for us, but we just ran out of time and only got about 50 planted so far.

Seedlings Update

Looks like our start-up seeds are thriving...actually thinking that we need to re-pot some of them into larger containers soon.  The frost date is still over a month away after all, and we want these plants to be strong and sturdy.

Tomatoes and Marigolds

Peppermint

Pruning and Seeds

It got warmer - even 41°F seemed balmy enough to work in the vineyard all morning.  We nearly finished the Chambourcin patch #1 with basic pruning and if it would not have been for the gusty wind, we would have gotten even further.  Instead we started pruning the upper blackberry patch, which we never finished last fall - this is our newer, not yet bearing, patch of Triple Crown berries.  Hopefully, we can get ahead of the weeds by starting early.  Unfortunately, half of this patch was still snow covered and the ground was frozen so hard, that we could not get all the weeds out - so the pruning was limited to certain sections of the patch.

And - we started our first seeds:  Bell Pepper, one seed packet of a mixed variety (that did really well last year), and a second packet of just red roasting peppers.  Probably should have started these a week or two ago, so I am hopeful that they will get strong enough by mid May to plant outside.  Also started some Marigolds, just for fun!  It is so nice to see flats of seeds on the windowsills.

Fall Finishes

Garden:


Our garden is definitely finished for this season - the last vegetables to harvest this year were load of peppers (of all things).  They did really well and we managed to get 3 large bowls of peppers right before the first frost.



Berries:
Jeff completely finished pruning, weeding and mowing the large blackberry patch.  He also tied up all the remaining primocanes to protect them from being blown around by winter winds. Tina finished weeding all the blueberries, and we even found time to tie up our sparse raspberry patch.



Yard:

Not too much for us to do at the farm, except for finishing one last mowing  But when we visited Zach and Rachel in Ohio last week, Tina and Toben had a blast raking up all their maple leaves.









Apples:

We are NOT yet finished with processing apples, as a matter of fact we just bought another "bin", which is roughly 20 or so bushel.  We've been making and canning apple sauce and will be pressing more cider this coming weekend.

Lucky Auction

Sometimes we are just lucky when it comes to auctions:  Caleb, Sam and Tina went to a farm auction today, which turned out to be mostly vegetable growing equipment and supplies.  The best buy was probably a plastic layer, which Caleb successfully bid on.  Tina and Sam got huge stack of tomato cages, as well as stakes, flats, flower pots and industrial sized bags of potting soil.  Plus it was a really pleasant fall day, which already got us thinking about garden plans for next year!

Sweet Corn and Spaghetti Sauce

The blackberries are pretty much done with - we are only picking some "stragglers", enough for a pie here and there, but that's about it.  Luckily they are done, because we've been picking and freezing corn all week long.  This weekend, we picked over 150 dozen ears.  We've been selling most of it at the produce stand and via facebook (go Sam!!)  Whatever is not sold by the end of the day, we freeze - so far we have over 90 quarts.  The Silver King corn should be finished by the end of the week, at which point the "Incredible" corn should be ripe.  In between all the corn, Sam and Jeff managed to make the first batch of spaghetti sauce:

August 4 Harvest Update

All of a sudden, everything is ripening at the same time!

• BLACKBERRIES:  Still picking and processing blackberries.  As of today, we have picked about 1700 pounds of berries.  Grammy and Koty came to visit for the whole week and helped to pick.  They took a trunk full of berries back to Bedford County. Tina made 4 batches of jam yesterday and the rest of this weekend's berry harvest was frozen.

• POTATOES:  All our potatoes were harvested this week, we ended up with over 18 bushel.  They are spread out on the upper floor of the barn to dry, before we put them in crates and keep in a walk-in cooler for the winter.

• CORN:  Yes, our sweet-corn batch #1 is ready.  We've been eating it all week, but the individual kernels were not really filled out yet.  But they were today.  We sold some at the produce stand and then husked and blanched 4 bushel.

"Mulch" Hay for Vegetables

We are trying something different this season - mostly due to the fact that we got a whole load of "mulch" hay, courtesy of Caleb, who donated it for our vegetable garden.   Mulch hay is hay that got wet and started rotting, so it is no longer good for animal food or even bedding.  Hay, unlike straw, contains a lot of grass and weed seeds, but we are using it anyhow.  We'll see if it does more good than bad later this fall.


Today, after weeding the tomatoes and peppers, we spread over a dozen bales of old hay around the plants, ensuring that the irrigation lines are still close to the stem of the plant before covering them up.   Much of the hay was rather matted together, so it made  a pretty solid cover.  We carefully spread the loose hay around the plants, making sure that all the leaves were above the hay.

The amount of hay we used barely made a dent in our large pile, but then again, we only covered 2 rows of vegetables in the garden so far.

Garden is Started!!

Rachel and Fiona came out
to help plant potatoes

Finally this weekend the weather was nice enough - and we had time - for Jeff to plow part of our garden.  We planted 4 rows of potatoes, some lettuce and spinach on Saturday.  Easter Sunday was rather cold and rainy, so we did not do anything outside, other than a quick run.  But the rain was good for the newly planted grapes as well as the garden.



 

Today, Jeff and Sam planted 20 lbs of peas - using the broadcast spreader on the tractor.  Jeff followed up with the disc, to help cover up the peas.   These peas take up about  "3 tractor widths", according to Jeff's measurements, and we now have nearly two thirds of our garden planted.

Garden Update?

We are so caught up in the remodel project, that is seems we are not thinking about our garden, brambles and vines - but that is not quite true.  Tina actually started 3 kinds of peppers a while back, and created a page on this blog to attempt and track the vegetable garden for a year.  We also purchased several packets of seeds already and Jeff has been checking out the various heirloom websites trying to decide which seeds might be fun to "play" with this year.

We have also been trimming the blackberry bushes, whenever it is not too cold or windy and we are making some progress with it.  We are still holding off on trimming grapes until it is just a bit warmer.  We don't have that many to do this year, so we are taking out time with them.

Last Garden Update for 2012

We got the last of our crops out of the garden today - sweet potatoes. We had planted different types: white, red and orange yam.  We filled up the entire four wheeler and will let the potatoes dry for a day or so, before sorting and storing them in a friend's cooler.

We also pulled out all the irrigation lines and the plastic which we used this year.  Jeff used the potato digging plow and ran it along each row edge, which loosened the plastic enough so that Lars and Tina were able to pull it out easily. 

We disked half the garden, and then made a row at the one side to plant garlic.  This is the first time we are planting garlic in the fall - previously we only used the fast-growing, single season, type.  We had ordered two different types of garlic:

• California Early, an artichoke-type, softneck garlic  (8 oz)
• German Extra Hardy, a purple striped-type rocambole - hardneck garlic (16 oz)
• Music, a porcelain type hardneck garlic (16 oz)

We had enough garlic for 2/3 of a row... so possibly we'll find something else to finish off the row before winter.

Tina also finished cleaning up the strawberry rows - getting them ready for the winter.  Just need to cover them with straw yet.

Garden Update - September 8

We are coming rapidly toward the end of harvest time.  This week we canned our last batch of spaghetti sauce and our tomatoes are pretty much done.  We dug the remaining potatoes and started digging up some sweet potatoes.

Working on the second cutting of herbs and we've been drying a lot of mint, some rosemary and more oregano as well.

We still have a few onions, melons, green peppers, carrots and parsnips, as well as some pumpkins.



White Sweet Potatoes

Pumpkins and Potatoes

We mowed off our potato patch to get ready for digging and found several pumpkins within the weeds.  Our pumpkin vines have been very prolific this year and some stretch the entire width of our garden.  Jeff smashed quite a few stray pumpkins while mowing, but the orange ones caught his attention and were "saved".  They now decorate our kitchen door.

We only dug a bushel of potatoes today - enough for all our visitors to take some home and a side dish for tomorrow's pig roast.  There are still plenty of potatoes and pumpkins to harvest.

Garden Update August 18

• Corn:

Still working on our sweet corn. Unfortunately we kind of lost track of our harvest numbers. But at least we know what we froze so far:

• 180 quarts of corn for our family
• 140 quarts we helped family/friends

We have also sold some corn and given more away to neighbors and friends - we just don't know how many dozen - or even wagonloads... Oh well, we do know that we are over half done with the corn.  Our Silver King variety is ripening now, and our best guesstimate is that we have at least 300+ dozen of this.  We actually put an add on Craigs List this morning, just to see what might happen.  We had 2 calls so far :)

• Tomatoes:

We are on our 4th batch of spaghetti sauce, and there are still loads of tomatoes left.  We'll just keep plugging away at them.

• Melons:

Never ever grew such nice melons before.  We think it may be the plastic that we used, as all our viney plants did much better this year (sweet potatoes and pumpkins are going nuts).  We have amazing cantaloupes and very tasty watermelons - every day! 

• Grapes:

Our Chambourcin grapes are ripening nicely.  We took some sample grapes from different vines, smashed them, and then used our refractometer to figure out the sugar content:  It is currently 17% Brix, so definitely getting closer to picking time - we think about 2 weeks or so.


Shrub & Zucchini Bread

• Blackberries:

Made one last batch of Jeff's Shrub recipe, with lots of lemon.  Turned out very tasty.

• Other:

Still picking potatoes (did not harvest them yet, we just dig out what we need for dinner).  We have lots of onions, which we get for our spaghetti sauce, and as needed.  Have lots of herbs, especially basil, which we use for different recipes.  Started cleaning/weeding both blueberry patches  - nearly done with those and ready for mulching later on.  Also still grilling zucchini for dinner and using them for zucchini bread.

Efficiently Processing Sweet Corn for Freezing

For years we have been processing our corn outside - from start to finish, keeping the sticky mess out of the house.  We save a lot of time and energy by setting up "stations" to move the corn through our "production cycle".

Our goal is to get the corn picked and blanched in the fasted time possible - the longer the corn sits around after picking, the more of its sugar content will turn to starch.  So while half the team goes out into the field to pick sweet corn, the other half gets the stations ready for processing in a shady spot in the back yard.

Station # 1:  Husking and Brushing
We set up several chairs (depending on how large our group is), a wheelbarrow and old clothes baskets for the husks, and  several buckets turned upside down for keeping sharp knifes and brushes.  (Knives for cutting out bad spots, soft brushes to remove extra silks.)  We also have a couple of large stainless steel bowls ready for the ears of corn. 


Station # 2:  Blanching and Cooling
For this station we have a patio table, a turkey fryer with propane (we use a heavy duty burner, like the kind you would use for making beer), a large pot with basket insert (usually comes with a turkey fryer), the gadget to lift out the basket from the pot and potholders.  We have stacks of dish-towels to cover up the husked corn bowls.  This station also has several large tubs and coolers, as well as a water hose with shut-off valve at the end, and several bags of ice on hand to help keep the water cool.  We also have colanders with bowls ready.

Station # 3:  Cutting Corn off the Cob
Another patio table that can easily be washed off with a water hose, covered with thick towels and another stack of dishtowels.  Several sharpened knives and a steel are on hand, as well as more stainless steel bowls or pots.  Also have empty buckets for the left-over cobs.

Station # 4:  Bagging
Depending on how many people are helping, we either set up another patio table or we use the table for the blanching station.  For bagging, we use quart size freezer bags, a measuring cup and a canning funnel - as well as broiler pans or trays for moving the bags to the freezer.

As soon as the first load of corn arrives (back of the four-wheeler  or on a small wagon), the first group starts husking.  At this point, we start filling the pot with water and bring it to a boil.  Meanwhile, all the tubs get filled with cold water as well. We move filled bowls of husked corn to the blanching station, where about a dozen ears of corn get blanched at a time.  As soon as the corn is blanched, it gets dumped into the first tub of water.  While the next batch is being blanched, we move the cooled ears of corn from tub to tub, adding ice to keep the water cold.  The faster we can cool down the corn after blanching, the better.  No corn leaves the cooling tubs until it sinks to the bottom and is very, very cold. We usually dump out the first tub and refill it frequently - while we may just add ice to the other tubs, making sure the water stays very cold. Then the corn gets moved into colanders, with bowls underneath and carried to the cutting table, where it sits to drain-covered with a dishtowel.  Once the corn drains off, we just lay them on the towel covered table - again covering our piles with dishtowels to keep flies and falling leaves off.  The corn is cut off the cob into large bowls.  As soon as we have a bowl full, it goes to the bagging station - where we usually use 4 cups of corn per quart size bag.  We use actual measuring cups to fill each bag - and we use a canning funnel (the kind that has a large bottom opening to fit on a quart jar) to get the corn into each bag without making a mess.  We squeeze out any extra air and zip the bag shut.  As soon as we have 10 bags filled, we carry them to one of our freezers.  (that way we can kind of keep track of how many bags we filled).  We spread out the filled bags across different freezer shelves - and several freezers, never more than 2 bags high - to make sure that the corn freezes quickly.  If the corn is not cold when it is bagged, and too much new corn is placed in the freezer at the same time, there is a definite risk of spoiling - the corn will turn sour before freezing - which will be a sad surprise later on.

We froze over 50 quart sized bags this weekend, and sold an additional 75+ dozen.