beets ready to roast

Today's fresh beets, ready to cook my favorite way! Two deep red Merlin's and one pink Chiogga.

I love to roast them in foil. It's so simple and it keeps in all the flavor. Just clean and trim the beets, wrap them in foil and roast at about 400 F til tender, about 45 minutes depending on size of the beets. The skin peels off easy after roasting and they're ready to eat.

With these beets I made a beet salad with goat cheese, candied walnuts, a nice vinaigrette, and baby green lettuce. I used this recipe: Beet Salad with Goat Cheese, from AllRecipes.

today's harvest

The last of my garlic, a couple cucumbers, and three very beautiful beets.

garlic envy

I visited my Mom 's garden yesterday. I weeded her paths dense with purslane and grasses. I fertilized her tomatoes and squashes, pulled her spent pea vines, and gave Charley a bunch of old broccoli stems and a few last peas to eat.

I also pulled my Mom's ripe garlic. I had serious garlic envy last year. My heads were so small, hers were nice, and I vowed to work on my soil to get heads as big as hers. A week ago I finished pulling my garlic and it is much bigger than last year's. I was pleased. But yesterday, head after head, I pulled my Mom's and it's amazing. Even bigger than it was last year and definitely bigger than mine. ---- So I still have garlic envy. And will vow another year to work on my soil.

sprouting fall seedlings and evading the chipmunk

My little fall greens seedlings are sprouting. No thanks to the chipmunk that dug up several of the pots. Maybe he didn't find much, maybe I had planted twice what I needed, as it seems I am getting a lot of sprouts anyway. Lettuce, escarole, arugula, bok choy. They will fill in the spaces left by spent spring vegetables. I moved the seedling tray to a safer location that chipmunks can't get to.

donation

Today I donated a big box full of fresh vegetables to a local food pantry. Squash, cucumbers, broccoli, broccolini, bulb fennel, green onions, beets, radish, kale, peas, and parsley. It's a great feeling to grow enough food to give it away.

today's harvest

indoor gardening on a rainy summer day

A dreary, rainy day here. Cool for us (upper 50's). I missed getting outside to work and having sunshine. But I know my gardens loved the rain. We got just under an inch of rain - a steady all-day rain.

Instead of outdoor gardening, I "gardened" inside.

- I've been meaning to clean out and organize my little room off the garage that I use for indoor gardening, honey, canning, and root cellar. It's all organized now.

- I also planted a tray of fall greens. They are listed on my 2017 planting list (the link is on my on side bar). Lots of lettuce, arugula, broccoli, napa, and escarole.

garden work: weeds, weeds, weeds

Today I spent a couple hours working in my community garden plot. Where do all these weeds come from? I think I pull them and then I turn around and they have grown up again.

Weeding takes most of my garden time now, but I do other fun stuff too.

 (Someday I'll do a post on all the different ways to weed, and maybe even one on all the different types of weeds I grow in my gardens.)

Today's garden work (besides weeding):
- Remove salt marsh hay mulch from my garlic bed (I harvested the garlic last week) and put it on my recently planted seedlings (cabbage, Brussels spouts, and broccoli)
- Remove lower leaves from tomato plants and weed well around them to maximize air flow - in our damp and humid summer, the plants have a very large amount of early blight and leaf spot
- Harvest summer squash, cucumbers, dill, and cut flowers (tall blue ageratum and nigella)
- Plant a few winter radish seeds, watermelon and black radish - it may be too warm for these now but I'll find out
- Train butternut squash and cucumber vines up their trellises
- Begin to cut off and compost potato plants that are all mostly done (brown and dry) now
- Water
- Spray brassica plants (broccoli, cabbage, kale, and Brussels sprouts) with spinosad (for cabbage worms).

backyard garden

I used my cell phone for panorama photos of my backyard garden. It would be really cool to have curved raised beds like these photos.

buying fall seeds

I'd like to plant some carrot seeds soon for late fall harvest. I'm out, so I checked a couple local nurseries. One is sold out of all carrot seed, the other has sold out of all of their seed for the season. Few gardeners plant crops for fall. So I placed a nice big order from Johnny's Seeds. Five varieties of orange carrots and a purple carrot, a black radish, a small Chinese cabbage, purple stock flowers, red salanova lettuce, pickling cukes and teddy bear sunflower seed for next year, and dubuisson endive.

Fall crops I've already planted are Brussels sprouts, broccoli, and of course lettuce that I am planting about every 3 weeks. I've also planted Belgian endive (wiltloof) that I am looking forward to trying for the first time this year.

my first summer squash

This is a great, early, and very and prolific yellow summer squash variety. Yellow Multipik. I harvested my first one today.