Pepper Harvest

For a month or so now, George and I have been covering the tomatoes and peppers when temps dipped near freezing.  I'd put big incandescent Christmas lights on them as well and I think that really helped a lot.

Twenty or so peppers and half a dozen tomatoes.  Not too many, but still a pain in the ass.  I was rather sick of it, so today we picked the peppers.  Now that they're sitting on the table all ripe and pretty, I'm thinking it was worth it.

Also, I got a couple pumpkins from work.  I am in LOVE with the white one, but since they were just bought from HEB for decoration, no one knows what kind they are.  I'm pretty sure the cream one is Long Island Cheese, but I sure wish I knew the other.  I'll be saving the seeds even though they may be a hybrid or crossed.  Maybe I'll get lucky and grow the same pumpkin next year.

And two more pumpkins/squashes I'd love to know the type.  

I love winter gardening

Winter gardening is lovely.  The weather is cooler, the weeds grow slower, there are fewer insect pests, and, best of all, the veggies are more beautiful.  The bright and sassy colors of Swiss Chard.  The sexy white curves of Bok Choy.  The fat, deep purple leaves of Red Cabbage.  Just beautiful.

And the flowers.  Pansies are my favorite.  Their little cheery faces looking up at you as you walk by.  It's as if they are gaily saying, "Hello! Hi!"  Corny maybe, but adorable.  

We had the first meal from the winter garden the other night.  I wanted comfort food.  I made stock from some leftover chicken and the smell walking into the house while it was cooking was heavenly.  There's just something so comforting about walking into a warm house with cold-bit cheeks from being outside and having the smell of chicken soup surrounding you.

George and I went to the garden to pick some bok choy.  It was dark already, so he held the flashlight.  I trimmed the bok choy of as many leaves as I thought prudent, then eyed the peppers.  A handful of jalapenos and a bell or two later, I passed the parsley.  Mmmmmm.  Then spied the tarragon.  It had grown so much that it was draping over the sides of the pot.  A couple snips later and we headed back into the house.  

An hour or so later, George and I ladled up bowls of the wonderful stuff.  Some grated parmesan on top, a dollop of sour cream in mine.  Yum!  We found out George likes bok choy!  Broccoli he already loves, and now bok choy.  Hanging around me is apparently a good thing for him. ;)

The artichokes are doing well.  The transplanted one is doing best of all, both parts of it.  It looks like it's forgiven us for the ill treatment (that was the one I ignored the past couple years and George accidentally tilled last spring).  I decided moving it would be a good idea, so divided it while I was at it.  I put each part in the middle of each of the two rows I've dedicated to artichokes, putting two seedlings alongside each one, six in all.  I can't wait to eat those next year.

The free broccoli from work is doing pretty good, too.  The free cauliflower is okay.  But no matter what we get, hey, it was free.  

I've been keeping three wide rows at the far northeast corner of the garden open for onions.  I was going to plant peas in there, but it got late.  I did plant spinach and cilantro in one next to them, with five elephant garlic cloves down the middle.  Hopefully, if all sprouts, it'll look nice.  

I also planted dill in the far four by four square foot garden.  I was going to make it a real square foot garden, but lost my gumption.  

Need to plant carrots.

I also planted some Gladiolus byzantinus bulbs.  I can't wait to see them next spring.

 We still have peppers and tomatoes from summer.  The peppers are just LOADED, especially the Dragon Thai pepper Lauren at work gave me.  I was concerned about the one at first.  While it was still a tiny little thing, the chickens got ahold of it and ate it to almost a nub.  Doesn't seem to have set it back much.

And the tomatoes.  I still have a Juliet, two Romas, the Black Giant and an unidentified one that's probably a Solar Fire.  All of them are just full of fruit, so I hate to just let them freeze.  We strung Christmas lights along them and George has been encouraging me to keep them covered when temps get chilly.  I'm hoping for Christmas tomatoes.  So far, one Roma and three or so Juliets are ripening.


I LOVE that Black Giant.  It was the clear winner this summer for best tasting imho.  Like the Cherokee Purple, my former fave, but more full-bodied in flavor.  And it's prettier, lacking the circular cracks around the top.  It's just a beautiful, smooth, brownish-purple beefsteak-shaped tomato.

And lastly, our Thanksgiving table.  Happy belated Thanksgiving, everyone!

I have a beaver!

And man, has he been busy.  Just two pictures I took of what he's working on, before my camera died.  I'll get more posted soon.  No sign of a dam, dammit.  I was hoping for one.


Biggish mullberry he's taken a bite out of:

The bite:

A water willow he's taken down already.  The ends look like you put them in a pencil sharpener.  Amazing!

Closeup of the branches on the lower left, where he's taken the smallish limbs to make his dam:

Knitting and Spinning

I just realized that, despite blogging off and on for a couple years now, I don't have any posts about knitting or spinning.  It's probably because I haven't really been doing a lot of either.  I tend to do these things in cycles.

I have many crafty interests.  Besides gardening and fiber arts (the knitting and spinning), I do beadwork, leatherwork, sewing, crochet (which is another kind of fiber art, but not one I enjoy as much as the knitting and spinning) and others I'm probably not thinking of at the moment.


I don't do any of them with any regularity except gardening, though knitting and spinning do get paid more attention than the others.

With all the websites getting hacked recently, I decided it prudent to close those website accounts I don't really use much.  This included my Flikr account (I much prefer Picasa now).  There were a lot of pretty pictures there of my spinning and knitting that I hadn't seen in a while.  I'm rather proud of them, so I thought I'd share some here.


Rather than making one massive post, I think I'll break it up into a few.  This one is about KoolAid dyeing.

Yes, you really can dye things with KoolAid.  You just boil the water, turn off the heat, mix in the KoolAid, then add whatever it is you want to dye and wait for the water to turn clear signaling that all the dye has been taken up.  Be sure to soak the item well in water beforehand, and stir it around to ensure even absorption of the color.  If you don't, you'll get a marbled effect, but that really can be quite nice in itself.  So if you want that, just put the item in the water gently when it's dry and don't stir. 


The pictures here are all of yarn and things dyed with KoolAid.  I wish I would have made better notes on which kind I used.  Best I remember, I used Tropical Punch, Black Cherry and Blue Raspberry for these items.

I think the Tropical Punch is what I used on the first two pictures (same yarn in both), Blue Raspberry on the second set (again, same yarn in both) and Black Cherry on the last three (yep, same yarn in those two, too).  I know I used Watermelon as well and a couple others ~ Lemonade I think.  But these are my favorites.

 I dyed the fiber before spinning.  That's where the old saying "dyed in the wool" came from, meaning from the beginning, before the beginning actually, an intrinsic part of the thing. 

I remember having fun watching the color of the fiber change as it ran through my hands, getting a bit lighter as small amounts of the fiber was pulled off the main hunk and twisted.  I also remember the pleasant smell coming off it as I worked.


We didn't really get much KoolAid when I was a kid, instead drinking water, milk or juice made from fruit we grew or wild-harvested.  So no childhood reminiscences here.  But it was still nice.

I noticed that the colors went so well with the natural color of the wool I was using, so I decided to ply them with a strand of white.  This had a nice side effect of stretching the dyed wool so I was able to make much more of it yardage-wise. 

I've also dyed already-knitted things with KoolAid.  The last three pictures are of some socks I knitted, then dyed.  I don't remember which color this was ~ maybe Tropical Punch again?    
They turned out really well.  Bright red, and how!

Maybe now you want to try your hand at KoolAid dyeing.  Go ahead.  You know you want to...

Blue potatoes!!

We dug the potatoes last night.  It was fun.  I'd thought we would have to literally dig them, but the All Blues apparently don't produce very deeply.  George was able to get the vast majority of them out just using his hands, digging around the base of each plant.

I went ahead with the shovel and found a few he missed, though not many at all.  I almost quit, but the soil was turning over so nicely that I kept going more to get the bed ready for replanting than anything else.

I planted four pounds and it looks like four times as many, but weighing them on the floor scales says we only got ten pounds total.  I've long thought those scales lie.

Tomato Taste-Off, Part One

Picked an entire basketful of tomatoes today.  It was glorious!  Something's eating into quite a few of them (20 or so so far, guesstimate), so I need to figure out what that is and hopefully I can stop it.  In the meantime, I'll be picking a few when they are about half ripe and let them ripen on the counter.  German Johnson and Red Brandywine are two I picked early, but they're not ripe enough to eat yet. 

I picked out the ones that weren't ripe yet and set them on the counter.  Next, I picked out some of the prettiest ones and set them aside for eating fresh.  Last were the ones to go in the freezer.  I got two big gallon ziplocs out of the first round and half a ziploc of Romas later. 

The freezer will be full soon at this rate.  They should have company soon ~ two calves we're going to have butchered.  A story for another post...


When George gets time, he'll cook them down for pasta sauce.  It's going to be heavenly!  Tomatoes, onions, peppers, parsley, oregano, marjoram and thyme, all from the garden.  I can't wait to eat some.  It's so satisfying to sit down to a meal that the majority of was raised by me.

As I was sorting the tomatoes, I was also saving seeds.  You may have noticed some black writing on some of the tomatoes in the picture above.  I take a sharpie out to the garden with me and write the name of the tomato right on it to make sure I don't get them mixed up. 

Once inside, I simply cut the tomato horizontally, squeeze the seeds into a labeled cup, fill with water and set off to the side to ferment.  I've got them sitting on a table in the corner of the dining room and they're already drawing fruit flies.  Nine varieties so far (two cups are Cherokee Purple).

Along the way of all this freezing and seed saving I did some tasting.  Here's how the contestants are faring so far.

Black Giant (in photo at right) ~ Flavor: wonderfully acidic and rich, all around really good. Huge slicing size.  Skins very tender. Heavy producer, possibly because it was planted early, in the second wave of planting.

Cherokee Purple ~ Flavor: strong, bold and rich.  One of my favorite tomatoes.  My two plants have produced like crazy, probably because I got them in so early, though I had heard CP produces well in the heat.

Oxheart ~ Flavor: Usual tomato taste, acidic, pretty darn good.  MASSIVE tomatoes at first.  Produces quite a bit, probably because I got them in early (second wave of planting). 

Riesentraube ~ Flavor: full bodied, sweet but acidity shines through just enough.  Large cherry size.  Produces in a large bunch with a dozen or more on each truss.  Has set two trusses so far.

Silvery Fir Tree ~ Flavor: Strong and acidic, VERY good.  Small slicing size.  Average amount of seeds, average to low amount of meat, and tough skins.  Pretty inside regardless.  Weak plant, not drought tolerant at all ~ never got very big (1/6 the size of others planted at same time) and died after a few days without water when others next to it just wilted (might do better in a cooler climate or some other year than this record-breaking HOT drought). 




Juliet ~ Flavor: nothing special, but pretty good when you haven't had home grown tomatoes for a year.  Tough skin.  HEAVY producer, early, too.

Matt's Wild Cherry ~ Flavor: tart and acidic.  Lots of flavor for such a tiny little thing.  Tough skins.  Produces absolutely like MAD.  

Sungold ~ Flavor: nothing special again.  HEAVY and early producer.




Roma ~ Flavor: rich and yummy as ever.  Meaty with few seeds.  Heavy producer at first since it's a determinate.  Will cut it back and fertilize heavily after this flush to see if I can get another.

Principe Borghese ~ Flavor: nothing special and kind of bland.  Supposed to be delicious when dried, so I'll try that with the next few.  Didn't produce too many, but this plant was one of the last I put in.

A NOID

 A customer came in to the nursery the other day with a bagful of plants to ID.  I really enjoy doing that, especially when there are some that take me a while to figure out.  And REALLY especially when one stumps me and everyone else at the store. 

Here's one of those.  Anyone have any idea what it is?  The customers said it had purple blooms that looked kind of like tiny orchid blooms.  That made me think some kind of long-leaved cenizo (Leucophylluim species), so I looked it up.  They said the blooms looked a lot like those, but I couldn't find a long-leaved cenizo that matched it.

It smells heavenly ~ just like a curry plant.  The leaves are quite hairy with soft, white "fur" on them.  Reminds me of a wooly stemodia, only this "wool" is a lot softer and prettier.  Many of us thought white sage or sage brush, but the stems are in no way square.  I also thought some sort of artemesia, but I couldn't find any sort that wasn't yellow-flowered.

They said it gets about a foot and a half tall and comes up all over their plot of land, growing like a weed even with absolutely no care from them. 

Someone at the nursery did say they've seen it before somewhere else, best they could remember it was growing in a weedy-native-plant type setting.  I checked out the Wildflower Center's website, but no dice. 

Anyone?

Colorful harvest, aka a rainbow in my basket

 I had such a nice time in the garden yesterday.  I set out to plant just a few things and you know how it is ... you end up pulling a couple weeds, watering a few things, tightening a few strings on the tomatoes...  Before you know it, you've been outside for a few hours. 

It was getting hot, so I just grabbed the tomatoes I'd had my eye on ~ two more Oxhearts and a Mortgage Lifter that had blushed pink the other day.  Sure enough they were gorgeous and ripe.

Later in the day I went back out to move the sprinkler and noticed a little yellow patty pan squash.  Then I looked over at the peppers and noticed the Chocolate Beauty I'd been watching was ripe.  Then I noticed the Anaheims next to it...

Before I noticed it, I'd grabbed my basket and filled it with all sorts of things.  I hadn't realized that there was that much out there!  And the colors!  Just look at the colors!  Purple, chocolate, yellow, red, organge, two kinds of green and more kinds of red.  A rainbow in the basket! 

In case you were wondering what they all are, clockwise from the yellow patty pan squash are a pile of cherry tomatoes (orange are Sungolds, oblong red are Juliets, and tiny reds are Matt's Wild Cherrys), then Royal Burgundy bush beans, then Cherokee Purple tomatoes, the red tomatoes are Solar Fires, then another Cherokee Purple, a Chocolate Beauty bell pepper and some Anaheim peppers.  The green beans are more Black Valentines, which so far are winning the Year of the Bean race.  They're YUM-MEE!

That's one big-assed tomato!

This morning, as I was setting the water on the new seeds before I went to work, I noticed some red in the Sea of Green that is the first tomato row.  Oxhearts!  That big-assed green one I've been watching was RED!  And so was it's buddy, hanging right there next to it.

*insert golden sparkles and heavenly music here*

They didn't quite look completely red.  They still had a bit of yellow shoulders and could have spent another day or two on the vine.  But I thought of Nancy, the friend and coworker who gave me the plant along with a couple others. "It's Friday," I thought. "Nancy works today, but won't be at work again until Monday.  But we're off Monday.  They'll be waaaay too ripe by Tuesday.  And I really want to share this with her."

About this time Kelly pulled up, so I had to make a decision.  What the hell.  I picked them both quick and hurried out of the garden.  I met George coming off the front of the porch, held them up and grinned the biggest grin I've had all month.  I was still so excited I don't even remember what he said, but he was amazed and agog, big smile across his face.

I got in the car and said, "Lookie what I have, Kelly!  Oxheart tomatoes.  Want one for lunch?"

First thing I did when we got to work was head straight for the weight scales.  I hollered at Nancy to come see what I had.  She got there about the time I found out it was ...

One and a quarter pounds.  Let me say that again ~ ONE AND A QUARTER POUNDS!  This thing was HUGE!

I told Nancy it was an Oxheart from the plant she gave me and that I was sharing it with her for lunch, but first I was going to carry it around the store all morning.

Lunchtime rolled around and I cut into it (had to do it quick before I thought about it, like pulling those damn wax strips off your legs ~ it's worse if you cringe and brace for it).  It was beautiful inside!  All meaty and juicy and RED.

Nancy took lunch before me and gave me a review: tasty, acidic, juicy and meaty.  Overall, delicious.  When my lunchtime rolled around, I found out how right she was.  Man, it was good!  I think it was still warm from the sun, too. 

 And in other news, I have a new calf!!  Born last Saturday night.

Ain't she ca-yewt?!  Sorry about the far-off, fuzzy picture, but see that red cow off in the distance?  That's her big sister.  Mama's bigger.  MUCH bigger.  With even bigger horns.  And just off the frame to the left.  Across the fence that's directly in front of me. 

Mama didn't raise no fool.

For Stefanie

Riesentraube

 Stefanie, the Assistant Head Groundskeeper at work, was kind enough to share some of the seedlings she started this year, so this update is for her. 

The Riesentraube she shared with me is producing like crazy already.  The name translates to "giant bunches of grapes".  I guess so!  There's another bunch of them starting to set as well.  And the plant isn't even two feet tall.  Amazing.

Then there's the Silvery Fir Tree plant.  It's collapsing under the weight of the fruit. 

The Green Zebra's holding up well.  Three tomatoes, but the plant waited 'til it was big to put them on. 

Riesentraube again

Green Zebra

Silvery Fir Tree

Silvery Fir Tree on left, Green Zebra on right.