Winter Blues Cure: Crates of Vegetables

I always love photos of crates full of veggies. Here a few photos from last summer than I never got the opportunity to share.

Mixed heirloom tomatoes

Banana fingerling potatoes

A week's worth of veggies harvested from the MSU Horticulture Garden's  that were donated to a local food bank.

Grocery Store Wars

This video has been out for like 6 years, but I just found it and thought it was worth sharing. I think the message gets a little lost, but it's so darn clever!

First Vegetable Sown for 2011

I've been patiently waiting for months (and months and months) to start sowing seeds for my vegetable garden.  Gardeners here in my part of Michigan are finally 10 weeks away from the last frost date, which means things like onions, celery, and celeriac can finally be started.

Giant Prague Celeriac sown March 19, 2011

New Year's Carrots

I never thought I'd be harvesting from my garden in January! I pulled these carrots out of my garden on New Year's Day (we had unusually warm, 55 degree weather).  I've never been good at growing carrots, but these sized up fairly well (even if they are all short and stubby). I finally got around to cooking them last night and the carrot flavor was so much stronger than store-bought carrots. Yum!

Vegetable Varieties That Didn't Make The Cut

While I am generally happy with most of the vegetables I grow, there were a few new things that I tried last year that I will probably never grow again! Since my inventory of tomato seeds has recently ballooned up to about 20 varieties, I'm happy to cross at least a couple of those off my list. Here are the seeds I will not be growing again in 2011:

1. Lemon Lime Basil: This basil was not as vigorous as the regular lind. I'm also not sure why this seed packet caught my eye in the first place. Why would you want lemon-lime scented/flavored basil anyway (that would make some pretty funky pesto)?

2. Pineapple Tomatillo (Groundcherry): I grew this entirely out of curiosity last year. I was completely caught off guard (and pleasantly surprised) by how much fruit the plants produced! However, I wasn't psyched about the flavor. I would describe it as just plain weird. Luckily, my farmer's market customers seemed to like them. I sold out both weeks that I took groundcherries to the market.

3. Mustard Greens: We never ate cooked greens when I was a kid (I'm trying to teach myself to like them as an adult), so I wasn't too sure what to do with these last year. The leaves were prickly and spiny and just didn't seem like they should be edible! I took a few bags to the farmer's market and one customer laughed at me. I didn't realize that between the three bags I brought (which I thought were huge) there were really only enough greens for about one person (since they cook down so much).

4. Anna Russian Tomato: I purchased these seeds because the catalogue description said that the fruit were extremely large for how early they ripen. For Michiganders, this is always a plus with tomatoes. I don't know if it was just a bad year, but the flavor was not good. The fruits seemed very watery and there was some strange off-flavor (bad enough that I never want to devote garden space to this cultivar again).

5. Peach Blow Sutton Tomato: While the flavor of these strange fuzzy tomatoes was actually excellent, the fruit looked unappetizing and discolored. The fruits had a bruised and lumpy look that made me think they were rotting on the vine. Furthermore, their yield was pretty low and the plants were one of the first to get scraggly and diseased looking.

6. Purple-Top White Globe Turnip: As with the mustard greens, we were never fed turnips or turnip greens when I was a kid. However, I recently had turnips in an absolutely delicious Jamie Oliver-style roast chicken with root vegetables. Besides not being very excited about turnips in general, the ones I grew last year were very gnarly and woody looking. I probably left them in the ground too long, but I'd rather just forget about turnips and free up the space for something else this year.

Have you ever grown any varieties that you'll never grow again?

The Final Cut

Here's the "final" list of what I will be growing in my vegetable garden for 2011. I put "final" in quotes because I know I'll probably give in to seed lust at some point or another and add a few more things. Of the varieties listed, about 50% of them I've never grown before! Not on this list are the potatoes and onions that I will be growing (because I don't know what kinds I'll be getting yet). I also already have garlic in the ground as well as some raspberry plants.

The items highlighted in blue will be grown for sure. The items in highlighted in yellow are on my list of "maybes".

Arugula
Basil	Sweet
Beet	Chioggia
Beet	Burpee's Golden
Broccoli	Calabrese
Broccoli	Romanesco
Carrot	Short 'n Sweet
Carrot	Nantes Half Long
Carrot	Kaleidoscope Mix
Carrot	Parisienne
Celariac	Prague
Cucumber	Lemon
Cucumber	Picklebush
Cucumber	Suyo Long
Cucumber	White Wonder
Cucumber	West Indian Gherkin
Dill	Long Island Mammoth
Fava Bean	Windsor
Fennel
Gourd	mini bottle
Gourd	birdhouse
Gourd	Corsican
Gourd	Swan
Gourd	Egg
Gourd	Corsican
Gourd	Snake
Gourd	Bushel
Green bean	Triumphe De Farcy
Kale	Red Russian
Kohlrabi	Early White Vienna
Lettuce	Green Deer's Tongue
Lettuce	Simpson Elite
Lettuce	Green Oakleaf
Lettuce	Italian mixture
Lettuce	Buttercrunch
Lettuce	Red Sails
Lettuce	Four Seasons
Lettuce	Cimmaron
Lettuce	Marvel of Four Seasons
Lettuce	Pinetree Mix
Mache
Melon	Charentais
Mizuna
Pea	Snowbird
Pea	Mammoth Melting Sugar
Pepper	Carnival mix
Pumpkin	Jarrahdale
Radish	Red Heart
Soybean	Envy
Spinach	Space Hybrid
Spinach	Bloomsdale Long-standing
Squash	Benning's Green Tint Scallopini
Squash	Early White Scallopini
Squash	Costata Romanesco
Swiss Chard	Bright Lights
Tomatillo	Verde
Tomatillo	Purple
Tomato	Kellog's Breakfast
Tomato	Yellow Pear
Tomato	Bloody Butcher
Tomato	Japanese Black Trifele
Tomato	Aunt Ruby's German Green
Tomato	Principe Borghese
Tomato	Martino's Roma
Tomato	Polish Linguisa
Tomato	Matt's Wild Cherry
Tomato	Pruden's Purple
Tomato	Taxi
Tomato	Green Zebra
Tomato	Tigerella
Tomato	Black Krim
Tomato	Goldrush Currant
Tomato	Brandywine
Tomato	San Marzano
Tomato	Amish Paste
Tomato	Moonglow
Watermelon	Sugar Baby
Watermelon	Cream of Saskatchewan

Green Zebras for Christmas dinner

Can you believe we actually had green zebra tomatoes from my garden in our Christmas salad? I picked these months ago and they finally ripened. I was doubtful that they would taste very good, but they were just fine. Some of them had a few mealy spots, but overall they were still tastier than store bought tomatoes.

The Miraculous Fruits and Vegetables of Online Farming Games

Whether it's Farmville, Frontierville, Farmtown, or any of the many other permutation of the farming-themed online game, these highly popular games are giving people the wrong ideas about how food is produced.

I cringe when I see how the maturity rates, morphology, and developmental stages of certain plants are portrayed. Yes, I realize these are just games and not real life, but sometimes I wonder if the game developers even consulted a farmer or gardener before making their cucumbers as big as a horse and making fruit trees that are harvestable several times in the same amount of time it takes to grow a single crop of carrots.

For example, according to many of these “Farmgames”, potatoes grow on top of or just partially submerged in the soil. Actual farmers and gardeners know that potatoes grow underground, and you usually avoid eating the ones that pop up to the surface and start photosynthesizing (they are likely to contain poisonous compounds, so don't eat green potatoes).

The harvestable size of pattypan squash in “Farmgame” is about dinner plate or frisbee-sized. In reality these squashes are prized as baby vegetables. Similarly, bell peppers are the size of watermelons. The watermelons, by the way, are the size of a sheep!

“Farmgame” apple trees are harvestable every single “farm day”, yet corn takes three “farm days” to grow. In real life, an apple tree takes a full year to produce a crop, so according to “Farmgame” corn would take about three years!

Twelve crops of “Farmgame” strawberries can be grown back-to-back in the same amount of time it takes to collect milk once from a dairy cow. In real life cows are milked once or twice a day, so that means strawberries would grow from seed to fruit in an hour or two!

I also don't appreciate how the actual growing cycle is portrayed. In “Farmgame” you simply plow a plot, sow the seed, and wait until harvest. Watering, weeding, pruning, fertilizing, and pest management doesn't seem to exist.

I guess I wouldn't mind being able to grow crop after crop of fifteen-minute giant mutant blueberries, but it just doesn't work that way.

Orange jarrahdale pumpkin?

Does anyone know why my one of my jarrahdale pumpkins is turning orange? The obvious answer is that it is ripening, but I was under the impression that these pumpkins were supposed to be green when ripe.

A couple months ago, I brought in the four jarrahdale pumpkins that my garden produced this year. They have served as a nice fall decoration and I love the gray-green color of their skin and their deeply ribbed rind. This was the first year I grew this variety of pumpkin and I'll definitely be adding it to my list again for 2011. My harvest was a little disappointing though. I planted at least six plants (I don't keep very good records), but only got four fruit. 

I've read that these pumpkins can store for a year or more if the conditions are right. Mine have kept very well the last couple months inside, but I will probably turn them into pumpkin puree fairly soon (I'll start with the orange one).

Get Jarrahdale pumpkin seeds here!

Pitiful Parsnip Harvest

My garden has been frosting over nightly, so I figured it was about time to harvest my parsnips. Parsnips should be harvested after the first frost for the sweetest roots. 

I was very disappointed with my crop! I planted an entire packet of seeds this past spring and I only got four roots (and three of them are tiny)! At least I can look forward to a single serving of delicious roasted parsnips in the near future.

Any hints on growing parsnips?

Get parsnip seeds here!

Garlic is Growing!

I planted several heads of grocery store garlic a few weeks ago. It already started peeking through the mulch and has grown quite a bit during the warm-spell we had the last couple weeks. Hopefully this growth spurt isn't going to compromise their winter survival (I'm pretty sure this happened last year too and it grew just fine). 

Fall-planted garlic on Nov 14

This fall and last fall I planted grocery store garlic.  It did great last year! I was surprised because most of the garlic at the grocery store is from California, but it did just fine in Michigan.

Garlic for sale at my 2010 farmer's market stand. These heads were grown from grocery store garlic cloves!