Harvest Monday - Feb 19th, 2018

Hope you like Chard...

...because my stomach doesn't. I've been trying to eat down my dozen plants so I can tear them out. Did I honestly think I could eat a dozen swiss chard plants? By myself? Because that... well, that was some ridiculously optimistic thinking Day.

I mean, cripes, this is one of the plants I have to tackle. See that center leaf, the one facing us looking all pretty?

This is for scale. The leaf behind it is an elephant ear. You could make a burrito the size of a baby with it.

So this Harvest Monday post is also me coming to terms with the fact that most of this chard is going to end up in the compost pile in the near future. I'm genuinely ashamed of that. It's true I need more green layers in the compost right now, seeing as it's full of dry leaves, but I prefer to use inedible sources for my nitrogen kick.

But I can't help it --  my body just can't do anymore chard and nobody else wants to take it.  
("Swiss... what?" they say, peeking cautiously over the fence and staring dubiously at the green stuff.)

And when I say my body can't do anymore chard... I don't mean it's a taste bud thing or a lack of inspiration on how to prepare it. What I mean is -- my GI tract is in full rebellion, torches and pitchforks, marching down main street level unhappy. It does not like chard. At all. Beets, cool, no problem. But chard? Burn the witch to the ground.

I'll save you the details, suffice it to say I thought it was the fava greens (above) so I stopped eating those for most of the week, and doubled up on chard instead. That... was a mistake.

Awkward 'on the trellis' photo. I need a potting bench.

I only took harvest photos of the endless chard when I also had something else to show, however small. See that pea shoot on top of the pile?

It attacked me.

I was just checking on the favas, minding me own business, and wham! punched right in the earlobe. Now, I didn't mean to break his arm off entirely, but c'mon... if something's poking around in my earhole, you can be damn sure I'm gunna go full ninja about it.

Anyway, the offending shoot was supposed to get cooked with the chard, but he got lost during meal prep. When I eventually found him while doing dishes, he was collapsed by the sink, wilty and sad. Aw.

Oh heartstrings, you pluck for the strangest reasons...

So he got a teeny vase. And a toothpick to hold. For whatever reason, I feel much better now.

Apart from chard, my biggest harvest this week was Golden Sage.

I mentioned a while back that I had two plants that needed to be lopped back. Cutting the first one gave me two jar vases of fresh sage that I'm still trying to use up. But I couldn't stand staring at the second, leggy, scraggly sage anymore. So I sheared him too, and I decided this batch was going to be dried straight off.

After a wash (evicted: 1 cabbage looper, 1 startled moth, and lots of dust) the sage made three hefty bundles that are now hanging to dry above the fridge.

Up until planting sage, I didn't cook much with it. I associated it with 'meat cooking,' and though I eat meat, I don't cook with it all that frequently. And while I do bake with eggs a lot, I don't prefer them alone. I've never been an eggs for breakfast person, bleh.

Last week however, I got distracted with life and didn't make it to the grocery store when I needed to. The cupboards were bare. Boo. I did have eggs, though, so I scrambled some up. Fine. I threw in some sage. Why not.  

Oh my. It's strange how some things smother sage's flavor, and other's highlight it. The eggs definitely highlighted it, in a very good way. And while I'm still not a convert to scrambled eggs, I'll remember the sage next time I'm forced to eat them alone.

Mitoyo Eggplant, tiny Paul Robeson Tomato, Swiss Chard

And while I'm on the topic of food conversion, I decided to try eggplant again.

Last summer I grew half a dozen eggplant plants (plant plants?) of two varieties: Mitoyo and Casper. Well, the spider mites had a fucking holiday on them, and at the end of a long and bloody war only one stood victorious: a single Mitoyo plant, since named Moriarty. But victorious is a very generous word... he lived. Barely.

During the battle I ate a lot of small and tender eggplant  from both varieties. I didn't find them insipid, but I couldn't fathom why people got excited about them. The plants were difficult to germinate, grew slowly, attracted every pest on the planet, and for all the care they required, they returned the favor by producing lots of flavorless oil sponges.

Hm.
I didn't get it. I tried cooking it a lot of different ways, and the appeal alluded me.

But it's been half a year since my last bite, so I decided to try again. I'll save you the cook&prep hoohah and get to the point: nope, not converted. I did nibble on some of the raw flesh while cooking, and it reminded me of a grocery apple when it gets spongy and dry and old. Still, it was very faintly sweet. Not the worst thing I've ever tasted, but not something I'd snack on. Though I did prefer the raw to the cooked, to be perfectly honest. 

I wanted to like it, guys, I really did. But bleh, pass. Oh well -- you win some, you lose some.

Moriarty and his new best friend.

Moriarty will, however, get a reprieve from the compost pile and continue to live and grow purple sponge grenades despite my taste preferences. Eggplant make a perfect gift to give my neighbor-who-cuts-my-hair. So while I'm not eating them, at least someone is.

And the lacewings love Moriarty, as you can see. Though that's only because he's overwhelmed by spider mites... again. But that's enough about spider mites for now. It's only Monday.

Also, I nearly forgot, in the above above photo, you can see an itty bitty teeny weeny Paul Robeson tomatey.

Ok, it was mealy and tough skinned, but with decent flavor. I don't blame the plant. It's had a rough life. It made better fruit, once upon a time. The fact that it's even attempting to make tomatoes right now makes me happy. So I took my small victory and ate it during meal prep.

Um...
I guess you could call this a harvest... though it wasn't a happy one. And there were many more where this came from, unfortunately.

This year I'm growing four types of peas: Sugar Snap, Cascadia (snap), Golden Snow, and Sugar Magnolia Tendril (snap). As it turns out, my Cascadia gene pool is a disaster. They are supposed to be bush snap peas with white flowers. Well --

Golly gee willikers, I have tall plants, short plants, purple flowers, white flowers, snow pea shapes, shelling pea shapes, snap pea shapes  and way, way, way too many fibrous, inedible pods.
 
That one you see above is the first I discovered, as I innocently bit into it. In this particular one, the peas themselves were also super bitter. The shock and horror of it all had me gracelessly spitting the whole thing out onto the path.  No shame.

Above left: what a cascadia pea is supposed to look like. Above right: one of the many rogues, likely due to accidental crossing resulting from poor isolation practices.

So lot of my un-photographed 'harvests' this week were pea taste tests. When I found a fibrous one, I played the super confusing game called follow that stem! down to the root line so I could pull out the whole plant. And since the peas were growing in a wild mix of bush and pole, it was chaotic pea tumbleweed labyrinth to navigate. I was as delicate as I could be... but one of the patches still looked like this after I was done:

What a mess.

To add insult to injury, when I made my pea crosses last month I may have used pollen from some of these fibrous plants. I tag the females so I can find the pods I've crossed, but I don't tag the males. So despite the best laid plans of mice and Day, I may be culling the fibrous gene out of my pea crosses for years to come.

Once again: you win some, you lose some!

These beans were itty bitty things, grown mostly as a nitrogen ground cover. Most are Purple Teepee, which was a bean that grew poorly for me, set poorly, and produced tiny, scythe like beans.

I tried growing them twice last season, at different times of the year and in different places. Same results. So the few beans I had left in the packet were sown haphazardly before my five week disappearance. This week I pulled all the plants as they were getting powdery mildew.

The bitty baby beans were thrown into a stew. The few green ones are Calima, which is actually a great bean, but the plants were shaded out by lettuce so grew much slower.

The bowl is actually quite full, though not like you could tell: photo bomb courtesy of Greynoodle Noseypants who had to take a quick 'niff in case they were meats and I was holding out on him.

~*~*~

That's it for this week at the Shandy Dandy -- Harvest Monday is hosted by Dave @ Our Happy Acres: make sure to swing by and see what's he's harvested, and link up if you have harvests of your own.

Happy Planting!

Harvest Monday - Feb 5th

Happy Monday!

I tried to invent harvests in January when Michelle was kind enough to host Harvest Monday while Dave was away getting a tan and almost blown up. But alas, the harvest gods were like... nah, you wait. The only harvests I had were cheater harvests like trimming herbs and shelling fall corn. Boo.

So I waited.

That said, inspired by Michelle, I tried several varieties of Fava beans this year, including one that performed very well for her in the past: Extra Precoce a Grano Violetto. So before getting to the main Harvest Monday part, I want to quickly show off a picture of EPGV growing next to Ianto's yellow.

Extra Precoce a Grano Violetto, right of center. Ianto's yellow from flag to flag. Golden Sweet peas intermingling and climbing the wall.

No contest here. Look at all the blooms on the EPGV to the right!

EPGV, apart from being a mouthful (and having a jargon acronym), has done great in my garden - excellent germination, upright, ignored by aphids, and earlier to flower than the other varieties I'm trialing (Aguadulce, Robin Hood, Ianto's Yellow, Sweet Lorane, and Broad Windsor.)

Unfortunately, Favas have a difficult time in my climate. It's just not cool enough or wet enough. Even in winter, like now. Because, see, it's currently 86°... so much for winter. I'm not complaining, but the favas are. Despite the flowers, no beans are setting. The blooms just shrivel and die... and then it puts out more blooms.

I was very much hoping for beans, but I've been settled for eating the growing tips of the less precocious varieties for now. Lorane has since been nommed and pulled, making way for tomatoes in the coming weeks.

Since all the favas must come out between now and March, I don't think any will have time to mature pods, for eating much less for seed. But hey, it's not all bad -- they will provide lots of soil improvement and green manure, and currently feed the beans and my stir-fry dinners.

Fava Bean growing tips

Now, on to Harvest Monday!

Seems only fair to start with the fava greens, above. That was about 1/6 of last weeks harvest, with much much much more to come. Maybe too much. We'll see how the guts like me by Friday!

Here are the cheater, boring harvests -- let's get them out of the way. Firstly, Golden Sage. I have two plants and they both need cutting back. So far one plant has gotten a drastic haircut, and I now have two elegant 'vases' (old jars) of sage to show for it; plenty to use for cooking and tea.

While I don't personally ecommend a cup of tea made entirely of sage, some fresh or dried added to your tea contributes a subtle but pleasant heartiness to your cuppa. Hard to explain, lovely to taste.

Also, I finally shelled out my Painted Mountain Corn. Ended up with a good sized snack bowl (as the ones saved for seed were shelled elsewhere). Yup, I said snack bowl. Painted Mountain is a very soft flour corn, and, no joke, I grab a few kernels and pop them in my mouth whenever I have the munchies. Hey, don't knock it until you tried it.

I still don't have a grain mill, so for now these will be snack food and possibly parched like corn nuts in the near future. Another fun experiment I'll try to remember to document. I added some to my slow cooker baked beans the other day, halfway through the cycle. Delightfully chewy, but probably should have added them from the start. I was afraid they would disintegrate. That fear turned out to be unfounded.

These ears were the ones saved for seed. They've since been shelled as well, but didn't end up in the snack bowl. Ok, I maaay have nibbled a few from that rightmost ear one... hush. I keep your secrets.

Chard. So. Much. Chard. It's an apocalypse vegetable. Humans, cockroaches, Microsoft paint, and Swiss Chard. Everything else will perish. This is about 5 leaves washed and rough chopped. It'll take me at least two days to go through, and that's if I'm not also eating fava greens.  I could harvest twice this amount per day, easy.

See my problem?

I have over a dozen plants (why Day) that need to be completely consumed in the near future. Why completely consumed? Because I just had a much better idea for the prime real estate space they're occupying.

I'm not going to show you a picture of that real estate, however.

Because apart from the chard and a few sad favas, that bed is... well, it's a cinder block raised bed I made in a flurry one afternoon after getting jacked on caffeine and scrolling through too much Pinterest.

Raised bed, cement, hot climate... why I thought that would be a good idea I'll never know -- oh, wait, coffee and pretty pictures. Right.

We all have our weaknesses.



This is the beet bed -- and even the beets are contributing to the Chard glut now. The Mammoth Red Mangels were being impolite and shoving their fingers in their neighbor's faces. And so, in the wise words of Hannibal Lecter:

Whenever feasible, one should always try to eat the rude.

And so they, too, were nommed.

As you can see, Greybooger the curious goober cat decided to sneak in to add scale. Top left you can also see Mr. Stoner the volunteer tomato. He's growing like crazy and putting on flowers and has some forming green fruit already, which unfortunately aren't visible in the photo. I'll post more on him another day.

Speaking of tomatoes, somehow my 'Paul-Robeson-in-a-storage-tub' is still alive from last year, and hot damn is he committed to the cause. Atta' boy. First ripe tomato on February 1st, though technically I cheated since it's from a 2017 plant. But all's fair in gardening and war. Or... is it gardening and taxes?

Who cares, I have a ripe tomato in February.

The other side of the tomato is almost entirely purple, odd since it's the side facing away from the sun. Naturally, I couldn't get a good picture of it, precisely because my phone won't shoot into the sun.
(in full Harvest Monday disclosure, I'm saving seeds from this puppy so I didn't actually harvest it this week. But I could have harvested it. That counts, right?)

Oops. Ok, I cheated. I wasn't going to eat my peas. But but but.... ah... I love peas. And, spoiler alert, I finally learned how to cross pollinate peas! (post to come.) So as a reward, I've now given myself a pass to eat a few here and there... so long as they're not adorned with dangling jewelry tags,

Clearly, I did not have the self control to take a 'before' picture. Nom nom nom.

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That's it for this week. I do have two eggplant sizing up nicely on Moriarty, who despite my best efforts is swarming with spider mites again. But the eggplants still need another week and they're going to be given to my hair cut lady anyway. Hm, maybe I can pawn off some of the chard on her too...

Harvest Monday is sponsored by Dave over at Our Happy Acres -- head on over, say hi, and take a gander at what everyone else has harvested this week. Link up if you have harvests of your own!

Happy Planting!

Hakuna Matata!

slimy, yet satisfying.

What a wonderful phrase
               Hakuna Matata!
                         Ain't no passing craze
                                   It means no worries
                                             For the rest of your days
                                                       It's our problem-free philosophy
                                                                 Hakuna Matata!

Hakuna Matata: when you pull up a dozen Figeater Beetle larvae for every third shovel of compost.

Hakuna Matata: when the elder weather council predicted steady rain today, and so you push off watering for a week... just to watch the chance of precipitation fall from 93 to 0% over the course of a single morning.

Rain canceled due to lack of weather.

Hakuna Matata: when your first batch of homemade compost, the one so full of pine needles and leaf stems it took a year to breakdown, is finally distributed... and delivers a hidden army of cutworms and pill bugs that decimate your squash seedlings.

Headless Squashman

Hakuna Matata: when the gorgeous tree sprout you found in the cucumber bed, the one you want to grow as a houseplant,  turns out to be (probably) a black walnut. Which means there's a mother tree nearby, somewhere...

The evil queen in disguise

Hakuna Matata: when you're drooling to eat the snap peas, but since your cool season is short and unpredictable (could end in march, could end tomorrow) you've dedicated all plants to increasing seed stock so that next year, next year, you can sow and consume with absolute abandon.

Can't touch this.

Hakuna Matata: when the seeds you collected from Olsen, the twin mini-white cucumber, germinate at an extremely poor rate... and the few that do survive look like they belong in a "Honey, I Shrunk the Cucumbers" remake.

honorary member of the itty bitty cucumber committee

Hakuna Matata: when the onions you were convinced did not survive the five weeks no water end up sprouting after all... exaaaactly where you've now planted your cucumbers. Way to poke companion planting in the eye.

Onion ambush

And, at the same time --


Hakuna Matata: because the peas are flourishing, with flowers and pods joyously forming, ignorant of my nearly overpowering desire to masticate them.

Hakuna Matata: because Moriarty the unkillable Eggplant is happy even after a dramatic haircut, putting on a huge flush of fruit that will need to be thinned soon... lest his arms fall off.

Moriarty... and his previous neighbor, Godzilla (eaten by cutworm, RIP.)

Hakuna Matata: because Stoner Tomato the mystery volunteer is setting stripey fruit, and is probably a mediocre tasting Black Vernissage plant, but nevertheless totally content sharing a bed with the beets and getting by on next to no sunlight.

S'all gooood.

Hakuna Matata: because my dry farmed lettuce cover crop accidental experiment has turned into a lawn, and is now one of the prettiest parts of my garden.

May have over planted... just a little

Hakuna Matata: because I have an entire (haphazardly organized) card table full of healthy and vigorous tomatoes, melons and seeded peppers and squash awaiting transplant and the return of the sun.

Beam us up, Scotty!

and finally,

Hakuna Matata: because I was lucky enough not to get hit in the head by this jerk when he tumbled forty feet from the sky.

Hose Sprayer for scale...

...but scale is cheeky.

So yeah... I think Hakuna Matata sums it this last week pretty nicely. No worries.

Happy Planting!

Pea Genes, if you peas...

Two cool new 'Pea Things' have revealed themselves in my garden.
Let me introduce you:

This is a Sugar Magnolia Tendril Pea. I'll just call him Magnolia for now, because his official title is a mouthful and SMTP doesn't roll off the tongue either.

This is my first year growing Magnolia. They're pretty fun. They're a hyper tendril pea, which means they stick out  a crazy, almost disconcerting amount of grippy-grabby tendrils lacking leaves. They start like this...

HI.

Then they grab stuff...

MINE.

.... then more stuff, until they turn into little fists and punch each other while trying to grab more stuff.

MINE MINE MINE MINE MINE

They also have quite pretty flowers:

I'm pretty.

They have purple flushed pods, though I don't have any photos since mine are just starting to flower. But all in, that's what a typical Magnolia pea is supposed to look like.

Now... check out this Dude.

 

I really want to nickname it the "Lilliputian Leaves" pea but, alas, after a bit of research I discovered it already has a name: Parsley Pea.

(booo... fine.)

Here are few more pictures -- though my phone is obsessed with dirt and refuses to focus its attention elsewhere without some literal handling. 

So... what is a Parsley Pea and how did it get in with my Magnolias? Genetics time.

Now, if you know nothing about pea genes (but want to!) here's a fantastic link: Andrew's Blog - Following in Mendel's Footsteps. (I'm familiar with Andrew and his work on peas from the fantastic forum: Homegrown Goodness. If I haven't posted on my blog in a while, this is probably where you'll find me! It's definitely one of the best in-depth resources for anyone looking to know more about the vegetables that they're growing, and all the fascinating genes behind them.)

In a nutshell, the Magnolia type hyper tendril peas occurs when you outcross a Parsley pea with a regular pea. Though I haven't discovered how many genes are involved (still doing research!) it appears that within the Magnolia gene pool there are still enough recessives to occasionally unite and, with their powers combined, throw a Parsley pea.

Of the 30 or so Magnolia seeds I planted, two are growing like Parsley peas. And while they are very cool to look at, there are a few downfalls.

Firstly, since every tendril terminates in a leaf, the Parsley pea has no 'grabby hands.' Though mine may appear to be climbing, they are in fact just swept up in the arms of their neighbor Magnolias, being cradled and carried aloft. Ooo la la, how romantic.

Secondly, research has shown that the pea yield from Parsley peas tends to be very low, and much later in the season than Magnolia or other traditional varieties.

Regardless, a very interesting pop-up in this batch of Magnolia, and something I'm looking forward to saving seed from later in the season! Who knows, maybe they'll have purple flushed pods, too. We can only wait and see ~


OK< NEXT PEA


Second on today's agenda, a pea that caused a minor stir on this Homegrown Goodness thread earlier this week.
(spoiler alert: mostly unwarranted)

What's this red and white flower doing in my patch of Cascadia, which normally have all white flowers? Great question. Even stranger, when I posted an inquiry on the forum, a few people (remember Andrew, from above?) were genuinely surprised at the color arrangement. They'd never seen it before.

And while the good folks at Homegrown Goodness haven't seen everything, they sure have seen a lot.

Curious.

Remember the pink/purple colored flower from the Magnolia section? That type of coloration is quite common in peas. However, the particular and distinct division between red & white on the flower above was not something anyone on the forum had seen before. Also, see the slight red pigment where the leaves connect to the stem? That is also not traditionally present on the heirloom Cascadia plants (though you will notice, both the Magnolia and Parsley peas have it).

So over the next few days, I took photos and kept track of the flowers progress. It went a little something like this:

Interestingly, as the days went on the red & white flower turned more and more traditionally purple. The yellow spots indicate a different blossom on the same plant. I followed its progress closely, so see if it would open up red and white, like the first one, or go straight to a more traditional pink/purple.

Traditional pink/purple it was! The top blossom is the same as the one with the yellow spot next to it in the previous graphic. The darker purple one below is the original flower, that has begun to dry up and shed. If talking this subject has interested you, you can also check out this LINK for another short overview of the genetics behind purple flowers.

Now, why the first blossom looked so different and unique to anything we'd seen before remains a mystery.

But I have do a theory...

...wait, wrong theory.

Daylight. On Monday and Tuesday of two weeks ago, we had a crazy 48 rainstorm and extremely heavy cloud cover. The next day, the first blossom opened. It was overcast that day too. However, on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday the sun came back in full force.

I suspect that, like some tomatoes that turn purple when exposed to light (while the shaded ones remain red), the first blossom remained such a distinct red color due to a lack of sunlight exposure on that first day.

The second blossom, which emerged pink/purple, did so during several days of heat and bright sun.

Perhaps this is the cause of the unusual red & white color? But what it doesn't help to explain is how colored genetics ended up in my white flowered gene pool of Cascadia. Since white flowers are recessive, the most likely cause is an accidental cross that happened at the seed farm (since all my Cascadia seeds this season came straight out of a packet).

Another strange arrival this week at the Shandy Dandy that I will definitely be keeping an eye on (and saving seeds from) in the near future!

In the meantime, this colored little Cascadia still needs a nickname. Thoughts?

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PS. It took me a few days to write/compile this post, and in the meantime the original red & white flower has started forming a pod.

Happy Planting!