And they all came tumbling down

The other day I looked out my window, and much to my non-astonishment discovered a tragic sight.

Those pole beans finally did in the plastic posts I had attempted to support them with. Since I haven't been able to be using the beans anyway, and it's near the end of the season, I just pulled them all out, poles, twine, and all. It never ceases to astound me how much these pole beans just keep GROWING! And I still have the beans in my planter (on the right in this pic) so I am not lacking in beans after pulling these suckers out. (I am really hoping to get some seeds out of the beans still in there, but the weather is turning yucky real fast so I'm a little worried).

Next year we are most definitely doing something different with these beanies. I have thought about growing them against my house, but I think it does not get enough sun for beans. I have also debated about growing them up a part of my fence. The back fence would be ideal since it is chain-link, but our yard is quite large (three-quarters of an acre large) and I had a hard enough time getting out to pick the beans when they were right next to my house. I also may grow them up the fence behind my flower bed which is just off my house, and I know they'd get plenty of sun there. The only catch is that I would have to put some netting or fencing against the fence for them to grow up since it is a wood slat fence. And then there is my original idea of building a wood frame, which would look very attractive and still may be my method of choice but does require the most effort of the three.

A long and tiring time...

So I have not posted in a long time due to my pregnancy starting to really take its toll on my energy level! I have not even been out in my garden very much this month. All those poor beans I picked just got sent to the compost pile, because I just did not have the energy to blanch and freeze them! And then I just haven't even picked any beans after that! I even have a bowl full of tomatoes in my fridge right now that desperately need to be frozen. There is just a lot that needs to be done that hasen't been. I am getting some things done, but not as much as there is to do. *sigh* I didn't think quite far enough ahead when I decided to grow a full-blown garden this year. I have been learning a lot this year, though, so it's not a total loss. And we did get to eat quite a bit of the stuff from the garden, epsecially earlier in the season when I had more energy and it was exciting that things were starting to grow! I am glad for all the things I have been learning and am excited for next year to be able to do things even better (and hopefully with a lot more energy!) One idea I am getting really excited about for next year is to have a farm stand out in front of our house. I just kept thinking it was a shame to be composting so much of our garden's produce, and then I decided woudln't it be fun if I could try to sell some of it! And with a little more structure of the space out there, I could easily have plenty of plants growing lots of produce to sell! We'll see where I am next year but I am very excited to try out this idea.

Veggie Pizza with Sorrel Sauce

I made this veggie pizza for myself tonight (made a more normal pizza for the rest of the family), and I thought it turned out the most delicious pizza I've ever tasted!

So this was after I had eaten one piece, and decided I just had to put it in here. It looks somewhat weird, but it tasted SO good!

The sauce I made with sorrel, which is a leafy green I discovered from my friend's farm this summer and absolutely love (and plan on growing next year!). It has a very strong lemony-taste and can be eaten both fresh or cooked. When you saute it, it "melts" into a sauce, which is fascinating! The whole leaf just kind of melts all apart. So for this pizza sauce, I sauteed some shallots in butter first, then added the sorrel leaves (with the stem parts removed - probably about ten medium-small leaves, they really melt down a lot) and sauteed that out until it was all melted down, then I poured in some heavy cream - just enough to make it a little thinner than I wanted, and then I simmered it for just a few minutes to thicken it up to be just the texture I wanted for my pizza.

Then I spread the sauce on the pizza, and topped it with sliced tomatoes and zucchini (the zucchini was sliced very thin) and covered it all with some parmasean cheese and mozzerella (I could have used more mozzerella, as you can see).

The sauce is what made the whole pizza! It was creamy and tangy, and complimented perfectly with the tomatoes and zucchini! I would have never thought before to put zucchini on a pizza (or sorrel for that matter) but it turned out spectatular! I shared a piece with my husband, and he said it was really good (this coming from a "I don't like veggies" guy). I definitely will be getting more sorrel from the farm this week and making this again (especially since I have TONS of tomatoes and zucchini coming out of my garden now!).

Now I just need to find a good gluten-free family sized pizza so I'm not having to do so many personal sized ones!

Garden Veggie Shepherd's Pie

Here's my on-the-fly version of a shepherd's pie kind of dish with my garden veggies:

(Ok, so I confess, those are ALL from my garden. Actually, only the green beans are. But those veggies COULD all be from my garden. I had some produce from a nearby farm that needing eating so those went in there instead. But I do have all the veggies in there growing in my garden, including the onion.)

All I did was put in chopped scallop squash, green beans, carrot, onion, and browned ground beef in a cassarole dish. I poured over that some chicken stock and cream, and added summer savory, salt, and pepper. Then I made up some biscuit dough (I'm gluten intollerant, so I use a gluten-free baking mix that is superb!) and dolloped that all on top. Then baked it at 350F (it might have been 375F) for about half an hour. The biscuits were nice and golden, though some of the veggies were still a little crisp, so it probably would have been better to cook on a lower temp for a little longer. But it was really yummy still! I was pretty proud of myself for being able to toss it all together, and even my husband said he really liked it. It's a keeper.

Tomato Pruning

So this year I tried a new method of pruning tomatoes that I learned from my farmer friend (this is how they do it on the farm and it's suppose to boost the plant's production). I'm not sure officially what it's called, but I call it the tall and skinny method.

It's simple - you find the main stem and prune the suckers out.

Not so simple is to figure out what exactly a sucker is.

But I tried it on a couple of my tomatoes, and I think I actually got it right finally on one! Here's what it looks like now:

This is one that I am growing under the eves of my house on my deck where it's nice and hot and sunny and the Seattle summer rains won't bother it. It has been growing fabulously, despite my son hacking at it several times with a pair of scissors (hence the reason it is pretty bare on that bottom half). As you can see it has grown very tall. I actually have twine strung up from the base of the plant to a nail in my house eves to support it, and that has been working quite well. It did take a little longer to show flowers and produce tomatoes, and I think starting to prune it earlier would have helped. But now it has got some tomatoes and lots more flowers in the works at the top!

It turns out the sucker is the little part that grows out between a leaf and the main stem:

And here's another pic (sorry it's fuzzy).

You can see with both of them the sucker grows out of the middle of the stem and the branch. So you let all the branches grow, just not these little suckers. If they grow, they become another stem. (That's how tomatoes normally get so bushy)

This method is suppose to help the plant concentrate on just that one main stem and since it's spending less energy growing stems all over the place it's supposed to grow more fruit.

(And another benefit of the tall and skinny method: my kids can't reach all the tomatoes!! Hooray to actually having tomatoes ripen on the vine!)

I really like this method, and next year I plan on doing it with all my tomatoes. It saves on tomato support as well - they will all only need one long stake or some stringing up like I did here!


A side note: as you can see I have basil planted in the pot with the tomato. According to my new favorite book, Roses Love Garlic and Carrots Love Tomatoes, it is mutually beneficial to grow basil and tomatoes together and since I love cooking with basil I love that I can have it grow with the tomatoes right by my back door! (Tomatoes are also good to grow with a whole slew of other plants because apparently they have a chemical they produce in their roots that deters a lot of bugs that pester other plants). I highly reccomend this book. I wish I had gotten it earlier since it is a fabulous book and very fascinating! I plan on using that book as my guideline for planning next years garden! (Something to do during those cold winter months when I can't be out there in the dirt!)

The Tomatoes Are Coming!

My tomato plants FINALLY started pumping out their tomatoes!

Here's today's harvest (I got about the same amount yesterday too but gave them to my mom since she helped fund most of our tomato plant section)

Aren't they pretty!

We've got several varieties out there. Most are normal red tomatoes (some roma-style, some beefsteak), but we've also got a couple Green Cheroke tomato plants (the yellowish-green tomato front and center) and Purple Cheroke plants (hard to see in this pic, they are just slightly purple-ish - the one in the upper left corner is one).

Many of the plants have started not looking very happy about a month ago, but they still seem to be able to give us some tomatoes.

I plan on freezing most of my tomatoes. I was going to can them, but I am a bit intimidated by the whole process plus I'm not sure I'll have time (or energy - pregnancy really sucks that out of you). Freezing is just so much simpler, and it's suppose to better preserve their nutrients. I did research yesterday on how to freeze tomatoes, and there are several ways, but the simplest is to cut out the stem scar and surrounding hard area, then freeze whole on a cookie sheet. After they're frozen you put them all in a ziplock bag and pull them out as you need them. To get the skin off, supposidly you can simply put the frozen tomato under hot running tap water and the skin is supposed to sepparate and come off. I guess we'll be seeing how it works this winter!

Obviously you really can only use frozen tomatoes for sauce and such, since freezing them gives them a mushy texture (I suppose that would be a benefit of canning). But since that's pretty much all I use canned tomatoes for anyway, I think I'll be good.

My First Green Bean Crop & Thoughts on Pole Beans

Those pole beans all of a sudden have started producing green beans out my ears! Here is my very first full crop picking of green beans (minus some that got eaten on the way in):

I'm so proud!

I was going to freeze them, but after cutting them all up, my mom told me that it's really best to use only the skinnier, younger green beans for freezing, not the bigger lumpy ones. *bummer* So I'll have to start really being better at picking when they're young, which I haven't been.

I did have some thoughts come while I was picking.

I have two areas of pole beans, one long double row which I made a fancy twine lattice for all the plants to grow up, and another bunch in teepee style.

Here they are when the plants were young:

And now this is what they look like!

At first I thought the teepee style looked much nicer (plus took MUCH less time to do). But as they've grown the plants in the teepee have way overgrown their stakes and fallen back down around and all over the place, so now it looks more like a pillar than a teepee. And they are bunched really close together. The plants in the lattice have also grown everywhere, but are still spaced much farther apart. As a result, I discovered while picking, the beans on the lattice plants are much easier to see and pick, where the teepee beans are all hidden underneath all that overgrown folliage and very hard to pick!

The one problem I have run into with the lattice plants is that the stakes I used for the ends are too weak to support all that growth (I had no idea they would grow THAT much!) and they have started bending over. I've had to make-shift supports by tying rocks on twine to the end poles to pull them back out.


So next year, I have two ideas for how to better grow pole beans (which I think I may still grow since it's fun to watch them grow crazy! And I can get seeds from my plants this year).

One is to build a sturdy frame out of wood with sides & beams across the top box-style - untreated pine probably since I have some already - and then I can string the twine down from that to the plants like I did before, only I think I will do two plants to a string intead of each plant getting it's own string.

The other idea I just had while reading Better Homes and Gardens and seeing how they use plants on verticle surfaces, is to grow the beans along one side of my house on my deck! I would just have to put pots on the ground, and then hook some netting onto the side of the house, and the beans would grow right up! It's north facing, so I'm not quite sure it will get enough sun, but it's warm and I think it may get just enough sun (I'll have to keep track and see if it's getting at least 6 hours).

I may try both methods in case the house one doesn't work.

Also I am going to do more pinching of the runners as they reach the top to hopefully not have so much overgrowth at the top and more bushiness down at the bottom (a tip from my mom).

Today's Harvest!

Today I went out and got a great harvest from my garden!

LOTS of green beans, several summer scallop squash, three yellow zucchini, four tomatoes, five ears of corn (I could have pulled more probably), and my four walla walla onion, plus I cut some dahlias and hydrangeas. I just thought it looked so pretty all together!

I think most of my corn is finally harvestable! I've never grown corn, so I'm not sure how to tell it's ripe. But according to my mom, the tassles should be brown, and then she usually peaks to see if the corn looks developed. There are several ears out there on the bigger stalks (the ones I started indoors) that the husks on the corn have even started drying out, so I figured they were probably ready and picked five of those for us to have for dinner tonight. They were perfect! My whole famly loved them, and they are so much sweeter and crisper than when you buy them at the grocery store! Thought I am a little dissapointed that you only get one or two ears of corn per stalk! This summer I've been looking at a seed catalog (which my mom lost, so now I have to rememer which company it was for) that had a corn variaty that was multi-colored AND got 5-6 ears of corn per stalk! I think I will try that one next year.

My onions I really had no idea when to harvest them, and I guess with onions you can harvest them young and they taste just fine just smaller sized bulbs. I forgot to mark when I planted my onion starts, so I didn't know when the 110 day growing period was supposed to be up. But they had really just stopped growing (may be because kiddos kept ripping all their leaves off, the poor things), so I decided just to pull them up. One onion is HUGE! An awesome specimen of walla walla. The other three are just ok, one being really on the small side. This was a first time for onions as well, so it was a fun experiment! It will be fun to see if they taste sweet like walla wallas traditionally do when I go to use them!