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Thinking of Summer

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It’s official, the order is in:

We’re not going to talk about the total cost of the seeds this year.  After all, we don’t do this to save money.  We do it so you all can continually ask us, “How on earth do you have time to do all this gardening?”  (Answer: it takes way less effort than you would think.)  We are expecting it might be another year where they send us one of these in thanks:

Or perhaps call us personally.  New for this year – mini cabbages, a lettuce mix, blue potatoes (seriously, they apparently stay mostly blue when cooked; I can’t wait!) a new type of early corn, another type of peas (snow) and some new herbs.  There might be a few more things, but I can’t remember.  It was a long list.  It includes flowers once again.  We’re also planning on building another new raised bed to accomodate the root vegetables, which were very successful this year.

In other news, we’re now on Twitter.  Follow us @CocktailFarmers.  I cannot promise the tweets will be any more interesting than the posts.  But we never promised you excitement.  Only vegetables.

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Thanksgiving is officially cancelled!

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Because look what arrived in the mail today, our earliest arrival ever:

Ok, so we’re not really cancelling Thanksgiving (in fact, ALL of our vegetable sides will be from our garden tomorrow – some will be pulled fresh from the raised bed in the morning) but it sure is tempting.  I’ve already been through the entire catalog, and circled more than a half-dozen seeds.  But I would have more time to look at the catalog if we served pizza tomorrow.

Fortunately, J is on the case already for the turkey seasoning:

Fresh from the garden tonight!  You can’t beat that.

Have a Happy Thanksgiving!

inside jokes, monsterous vegetables, radishes

We should really watch more television

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So by now you are undoubtedly familiar with our obsession with Halloween and burning pumpkins.  We only sacrificed two pumpkins this year:

We actually burned the second one on Halloween night, as our (meager) trick-or-treaters were tailing off.  If I’d had marshmellows, I would have roasted them over that fellow.

A few posts ago, I talked a little bit about how some of the vegetables got completely out of hand this year, particularly the radishes out back that were mixed in with the pumpkins and watermelons.  A few of the radishes in the front also got away from us, but our determination to leave them in the ground was deliberate in the main kitchen garden, as opposed to just missing them out back.

This past Sunday J turned over the gardens with the rototiller since frost was predicted for several nights this week.  Turning the ground just before a frost helps kill off any bacteria or bugs that might be found in the soil.  It’s not a guarantee, but most farmers follow that rule of thumb.  So finally the last of the radishes had to come out of the main garden.  This one doesn’t even look like a radish at this point, it’s so monsterous:

And because we cannot leave well enough alone, we decided to allow the radish to express its true personality.  Ladies and gentlemen, I give you……Count Radicula:

Yes, we are completely ridiculous.  Hello, we have a blog about gardening.  What will be worse is when we do it as part of the decorations next year, because we have lots of sets of fake vampire teeth.  You probably don’t want to know the story behind that.
family traditions, recipes, root vegetables

November Harvest

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I never would have believed I could be harvesting vegetables in early November.  I did a lot of gardening with my grandfather when I was young (or should I say, my grandfather did a lot of gardening and I futzed around, screeched at the sight of tomato worms, and occasionally helped weed) and all my memories of gardening have the season ending in late September or early October.  But we almost exclusively grew warm weather crops (cucumbers, squash, tomatoes, peppers, pumpkins) that die off with the first frost.

Not so much with the root vegetables.  I must say, I like the plant-’em-and-forget-’em aspect of putting seeds in the ground and walking away.  I put the carrots and parsnips (first year for those) in the ground in April and have been watching the greens grow merrily all summer.  I was particularly excited when the greens got big enough to crowd out weeds in the bed, meaning no more weeding.  The French Breakfast radishes were a second crop in that same bed, planted after the potatoes were harvested and the soil amended. 

This past Sunday I decided to do a crock pot roast with root vegetables.  The recipe called for turnips and rutabegas, but I substituted parsnips.  This is what I picked out of the frosty ground early Sunday morning:

Very impressive.  Of course, when you cut off the greens, it’s not quite so overwhelming:

And you’re left with an entire basket of greenery for the compost bin:

I am pleased to say the pot roast was a hit, too.  Right in line with the do-it-and-forget-it aspect of the vegetables that went into it.  I also used a few of the potatoes I harvested from our garden back in August. 
The recipe is by Robin Miller, courtesy of Foodnetwork.com:

Ingredients

  • 1 onion, chopped
  • 4 small red potatoes, quartered
  • 2 carrots, peeled and chopped
  • 1 turnip, peeled and chopped
  • 1 rutabaga, peeled and chopped
  • 1 (3-pound) chuck roast
  • Salt and ground black pepper
  • 3 tablespoons all-purpose flour
  • 1 (15-ounce) can tomato sauce
  • 2/3 cup brown sugar
  • 2 teaspoons chili powder
  • 1 teaspoon ground cumin
  • 1 teaspoon mustard powder
  • 1 teaspoon garlic powder

Directions

Arrange onion, potatoes, carrots, turnip, and rutabaga in bottom of slow cooker. Season beef all over with salt and black pepper. Rub flour all over beef. (I skipped this step out of sheer laziness.)  Place roast on top of vegetables in slow cooker.  Whisk together tomato sauce, brown sugar, chili powder, cumin, mustard powder, and garlic powder. Pour mixture over beef. Cover and cook on LOW for 12 hours or on HIGH for 8 hours.  Serve 1/3 of beef and all of the vegetables with this meal. Shred and refrigerate remaining beef until ready to use.
crazy plans, flowers, spring

Big Plans

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 Well, the tulip bulbs are now in.  While other people battened down the hatches for Hurricane Sandy (which thankfully did nothing to us) we dug up an area of approximately 50 square feet in the front yard around our crabapple tree.

First we cut away the sod and hauled it off to another part of the yard:

Then we dug down about 6″ into the dirt.  We uncovered a few shallow tree roots, which we cut off.  If the tree dies, we won’t be upset because it only blooms every other year and when it does bloom, it lasts about a week, then 8,432,452,917 crabapples form, weighing down the branches and leaving a mess on the lawn.  Also, the tree is crooked, as you can see in this photo:

I added bulb fertilizer to the entire area, then I placed all the bulbs in the pit according to the plan I had developed.  There are 11 types of tulips, ranging in height from 10-12″ up to 24-26.”  So I needed the plan.


Trust me, it’s about 6 inches deep



And now we wait, and hope they come up, flower, and actually look good.  Here are some of the types we planted:



Apricot Impression



Blue Parrot
Burgundy Lace

Golden Artist

Ice Cream
Professor Rontgen


You’ll have to wait until spring to (hopefully) see the rest!

bulbs, crazy plans, flowers, spring

Thinking of Spring

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I have always loved planting spring flower bulbs.  Even as a teenager, passing by displays at the local nursery or in Home Depot, I would stop to see what was available and more likely than not, pick up a package to put in the ground.  Daffodils are my absolute favorite flower, but I also really love tulips.

This past April, J and I took a visit to the Netherlands for our April anniversary.  I have always wanted to see the tulip fields.  Interestingly, tulips are not native to the Netherlands – they were imported by Ogier de Busbecq, the ambassador of Ferdinand I to the Sultan of Turkey around 1554, and spread across the continent.  For some reason they took off in the Netherlands.

As our flight was landing at Schipol Airport, you could see these huge swaths of color dominating the landscape.  It was every bit as amazing as I thought it would be.

Near Amsterdam, in the town of Lisse, is the world-famous Keukenhof Gardens, a flower park featuring more than 7 million tulips, daffodils and hyacinths.  We took a day trip out there to admire all the flowers:



Ice cream tulips



Keukenhof very thoughtfully has several tulip vendors situated within the park, where you can view their color catalogs of tulip bulbs, make your selections, place your order, and those vendors will very helpfully ship those bulbs to you in the fall for planting.  It’s not legal for you to pack the bulbs in your luggage because they must be inspected by USDA inspectors before shipment to the United States, and if you had to carry them back in your luggage you might feel more restrained in your purchasing.  By simply filling out the order form and handing over your credit card, buying tulips is virtually painless!
Until half of the 240 tulip bulbs you ordered show up on your front porch one cool October afternoon:
I will say that these bulbs appear to be the healthiest I have ever purchased – a quick inspection shows they are free of bug damage, rot and mold that have plagued purchases I have made in the U.S.  I would hope they would be a higher quality, given the cost associated with them.  However, the tulips were ones I had never seen here in the U.S., so they were worth it.  To me, anyway.
I can’t help but think that in 16th century Amsterdam, I might have been a victim of tulip mania.  Probably not, though.  I don’t play the stock market now, so I would have been unlikely to speculate on the value of something I would be most interested in planting in the ground.
“Every person is like a single tulip.  While they may blend when together, each one is special in its own light.” – Daniella Kessler 
pumpkins

It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown

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Once again we have outdone ourselves in the pumpkin department.  Every year we do better and better, and this year we actually have a fairly decent crop for decorating our front porch:

Remember that Batwing pumpkin I posted about, way back when?

It turned into this:

Amusingly, the bottom even sort of looks like a bat:

Ok, so you have to squint and use your imagination.  I’m just trying to keep it interesting, people.  There’s only so much excitement to be mined from writing about vegetables.

Once again, the Jack-be-Littles proved themselves to be stellar:

There were a total of 18; three went to my in-laws and three went to my neighbor’s children (for helping me plant fall mums in my window boxes) before I snapped this photo.  Now that I’m thinking about it, I should give some to my parents, too.
The Jack-be-Littles are scattered all over the downstairs of my house as decorations, safe until it’s time to change everything over to Christmas decorations.  But the large pumpkins on the porch?  Well, I think we all know what’s coming:

A FIREY DEATH!

buffalo, rabbits, squash

Squash

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This year one of our experiments was to try and grow butternut squash.  Growing this type of squash is an exercise in patience, because it takes all season and you might not get that much.

We managed to get 4 vines to grow and ended up with about a half-dozen squash of varying sizes.  This one is one of our best:


What lovely color you have, my dear.  All the better to eat you!

That’s actually still sitting on our kitchen table even though it was picked about two weeks ago when the vines started to die off.  My memory of winter squash is that it will keep a while, so I’m just leaving it on the kitchen table with the Jack-be-Little pumpkins (more on them in another post) as an ornamental gourd.  I plan on peeling, chopping and cooking it for Thanksgiving.  If it starts to go soft before then, I will do what I did with some of the smaller ones – peel, chop & blanch before freezing.

We actually ate a couple of the smaller squash that we picked, figuring it was probably a good idea to see if they tasted okay before we make them a component of our Thanksgiving meal and they’re terrible.

I know you’re probably thinking, what a cute little squash!  Not so cute?  What was done to it:

It was not only the squash that was a victim of something’s teeth – a watermelon and a couple of pumpkins also fell victim to an all-you-can-eat buffet.  It was fine in both cases – the part of the rind that was nibbled got cut away, and we composted the pumpkin because it was starting to break down where teeth met skin.

We’re thinking it was probably not this guy that did it:

At least he’s on the right side of the road

It actually didn’t take me that long to try to figure out how to work putting a photo of a buffalo on a blog about gardening in New England, in case you were wondering.  It’s a quick leap from “rabbit” to “buffalo” in my world.  Also, this will allow me to add the tag “buffalo” to the list of labels for this blog, which amuses me immensely.

I will tell you that buffalo is an incredibly tasty meat if you like a carnivorous side with your vegetables for dinner.  No, we did not eat the guy in the photo.

monsterous vegetables, rabbits, radishes

Monsterous Vegetables

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Hey, it’s October, and I am completely focused on Halloween, my favorite holiday.  In the spirit of that, I give you photos of monsterous and mutant vegetables.

This is one of the radishes that grew out back with the pumpkins.  The stalk on it got long enough that it trailed down and intertwined with the pumpkins, so it was not until the pumpkin vines started dying off that we noticed there was this monsterous mutant growing with the pumpkins.  It’s about the size of a softball:

Way too large for a radish.  It did make us wonder how long we could leave them there and just how big they would get.

As you know, our squash plants were decimated by squash beetles.  Our neighbors, J & S, just a few hundred feet from us, saw virtually no damage at all.  They planted quite a bit of zucchini & summer squash, and it often gets away from them, as is evidenced in the photo below:

They are arranged in an oversized mixing bowl in that photo, and the soda bottle you see in the upper right corner is actually a 2-liter bottle of soda, not a 16-oz one, just so you have perspective.
We actually consumed all that squash (I made epic amounts of chocolate chip zucchini bread, which freezes really well), but we chose to leave the radish for the rabbit.
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Too much of a good thing…..

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I now find myself searching for new and inventive ways to prepare beans.  Remember last weekend’s bean haul?

Welcome to this week’s:

Beans are the 2012 squash & zucchini problem we normally have.  I’ve taken to handing out recipes with the bags of beans.  When people aren’t shushing their children and pulling their shades when they see me coming.