Christmas Outside

I created three of these wooden thermometer houses last summer. The temperature reading pretty much sums-up December around this area. Temps only get into the twenties by mid-day and generally go down to the low teens each night.

I've seen no evidence of the garlic bolting, so that's good news. My only concern is that I may have been a week or two too late in getting them into the ground. They may not have had enough time to establish roots before the ground became frozen. We'll see...

I shoveled some ashes from the stove down the center of this garden last weekend. It can only help - and I personally disagree with the experts that say to limit the amount of ashes thrown into the garden. They're wrong!

This is what's left of the seed bell that I set-out for the birds 6 days ago. There was a 2nd bell hanging next to it, but the raccoon pulled it down!

I created this birdseed sanctuary to entertain my 2 cats. The Blue Jays start early at 6 AM, then the Black-Capped Chickadees spend the rest of the day feasting on the seeds. FYI: The Black-Capped Chickadee is the official State Bird of Massachusetts.

I've also got plenty of suet hanging for the birds. This bird feeder is something I designed earlier this year. I plan on making many more of these to attract a larger bird population to the gardens.

This is as bleak as it gets as far as the big garden looks... It boggles my mind at how barren this scene appears right now - when only a few months ago it was lush and green and teaming with life - weeds & all!

Things may have screeched to a halt outside, but inside, next to a warm wood stove, the dining room table is adorned with seed catalogues. Each page teams with life and color!
A spark of hope kindles my imagination and glows within my mind - the garden planning for next season has begun!

I will list these seed catalogues (as photographed, left to right) below with links to each website. These are my favorites and the best sources for rare heirlooms in the country:

Johnny's Selected Seeds
955 Benton Avenue
Winslow, Maine 04901-2601
1-877-564-6697

Vermont Bean Seed Company
334 W. Stroud St.
Randolph, WI 53956
1-800-349-1071

Totally Tomatoes
334 W. Stroud St.
Randolph, WI 53956
1-800-345-5977

(Yes, I was surprised to see that the above two catalogues have the same mailing address!)

Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds
2278 Baker Creek Road
Mansfield, MO 65704
1-417-924-8917

Comstock Seeds
263 Main Street
Wethersfield, CT 06109
1-860-571-6590

Seed Savers Exchange
3094 North Winn Road
Decorah, IA 52101
1-563-382-5990

Click here to print or download this list in MS Word format.

Let's get busy and start ordering seeds!
:)

November Garlic

Time to plant the garlic!
After hanging in the rafters since late July, it was time to cut them down and break open the bulbs to get the official tally.

The bulbs cannot be broken up until the day of planting to ensure good germination. The first step is to cut-off the dried stalks from the bulbs.

It's always a good idea to do this work outside where it is easy to sweep-up afterward.

So after planting 46 cloves last fall, 100% grew into 46 bulbs which average 4 cloves each. A few had 5 cloves and one ended up with only 3. The grand total of cloves this time was 174!

I waited a full month later than previous years to plant because of the warmer weather. These were planted on November 7, 2010. I ended-up doing two rows and planted 162 cloves. The extras were saved for the kitchen!

I am amazed when I think back only 3 years ago when I started with 10 little cloves of this German Extra Hearty variety. With 162 planted, I should be able to sell some bulbs next season as well as save a year's supply to eat.

Looks like I got the garlic in the ground just in time! It snowed a bit the next morning...

No problem though, the snow was melted by noon and I was able to place straw over the two rows for the long winter.

I can't figure how the straw stays in place with all of the howling winter winds before the snow cover, but it stays-put!

I can relax now that the garlic is tucked-in for the winter under that protective straw blanket. I won't have anything else to do (besides occasional watering) until the first week of July when it's time to cut-off the scapes. Garlic is the easiest thing to grow!

This is a rare squash called Pipian from Tuxpan known for its unusual-looking gray & white seeds. The squash grows 4 to 6 lbs and the seeds are great for roasting.

The squash can be cut like butternut winter squash and prepared in the same way.

There's something about the sky in November that makes for great photos.

This photo looks great on my desktop! Yup, looks like winter is very near. Time to enjoy the winter squash at Thanksgiving and eagerly wait for the first seed catalogs to come in the mail.

:)

The 2010 Peppers

This was my first successful season with a few new varieties of hot peppers. The three best were Beaver Dam, Tomato Pepper, and the Fish Peppers. All three of these varieties were harvested before the first hard frost.

I love the Beaver Dam Peppers so much, I dug one out of the garden a few weeks ago and put it into a large pot in the greenhouse. It is still producing and living happily amongst a few other peppers in hanging baskets; Paper Lantern and the world's hottest - the Bhut Jolokia or "ghost peppers."

From what I've read in garden books, pepper blossoms are self-pollinating just like tomatoes, so no need for bees or other insects to do the job. These are blossoms on a paper lantern pepper plant.

The Paper Lanterns have a ton of baby peppers on them! And one of the Bhut Jolokia plants is forming its first flowers.

There must be 30 peppers forming on each of these two Paper Lantern pepper plants!

These plants will remain in the greenhouse until the begining of December, then I will have to move them inside. I have read that some folks have successfully kept pepper plants alive for many years - I'm eager to give it a try!

During sunny weather I make sure to set the onions outside to cure. At night they go back inside the greenhouse. After a week of curing, I will hang the onions from the rafters of my breezway (nexy to the hanging garlic) in custom made burlap boxes to access throughout winter.

here is a crosscut section of a tomato pepper. Not many seeds, but I saved every single one I could find! This variety is pleasantly hot - but not too hot, just like the Beaver Dam peppers.

I suppose this is why the Tomato pepper gets its name, it is shaped simular to a flat tomato or a mini version of a snow white pumpkin.

And last but not least, my favorite the Beaver Dam pepper shown cut open. The seeds are located on the top of the pepper just as you would see in a common bell pepper. And yes, I have saved well over 100 seeds for next season.

I can't get over how great this variety tastes and produces. I still have one plant in the garden that is hearty with new peppers on it - even after half a dozen frosts! This makes me wonder if I can set them out earlier in the growing season... I will have to try in 2011.

:)

September Update

September is a busy month mostly spent outside. Weeds now dominate in most sections of gardens that were not protected with bales of straw.

Here's an example of how the straw triumps over weeds with these six, caged Better Boy tomato plants. All of these plants are over 6 feet tall!

These tomatoes are hybrids which were planted specifically to make spaghetti sauce. I began harvesting them on September 19, 2010 - but I could have started a week earlier.When I began filling my wicker harvest basket with Better Boys, I had no idea how heavy the basket would be once filled. When I first tried lifting the basket, it was more like trying to carry a bag of cement!

That got my curiosity up, so I got out a scale and weighed the basket on the concrete floor of the garage... That got my curiosity up, so I got out a scale and weighed the basket on the concrete floor of the garage...

Ah ha! That's why it was so heavy - 40 pounds of tomatoes!

Here is the 2nd harvest one week later - I got smart and used the wheel barrow!

This 2nd harvest weighed 52 pounds! That makes 92 pounds total!

I'm so glad that I bought this machine - it's a
Roma Food Strainer & Sauce Maker
- Model No. 07-0801 Which I bought on Amazon.com

I highly recommend this machine - but it's not just for tomatoes,
it does pumkins, berries, salsa, grapes and even apples!

I chose to flash-freeze most of the sauce right away. But I did make a large amount of fresh spaghetti sauce on the 2nd harvest. I found that it takes about 7 hours to render-down the sauce to a good thickness for spaghetti and pizza sauce.

Don't forget the hot peppers for the sauce! What can I say, I've fallen in love with these Beaver Dam peppers. Perfect heat (not too hot) with a deep pepper flavor. The plants start producing in August and I've gotten about 10 peppers per plant right through the 2nd week of October.

I even dug one out of the garden and put it into a large pot and placed it in the greenhouse!

Needless to say, I have already saved hundreds of seeds for future crops.

Pictured from top to bottom: 1 Beaver Dam, 3 Wisconson Lakes, and 5 Fish Peppers.

The WI Lakes peppers were a dissapointment - no heat, so no seeds saved.

The Fish Peppers are fantastic! Watch out, these guys are a bit hotter than Jalapenos.

As you've learned, I have a compulsion to let vines grow up, not all over the ground.

The cukes loved it, the Marketmores did great growing up strings

as did this rare winter squash called Pipian from Tuxpan.

I noticed that the Pipian from Tuxpan had a flower-type patern on it, so I decided to compare it to a sunflower!

:)

Real Peppermint Schnapps

I can't believe how easy it was to create my own organic Peppermint Schnapps. I cruised Google for directions and within about 10 minutes found some extremely easy recipes. I've simply used them for some basic guidelines which I will provide in photos below.

The ingredients are simple: pick fresh leaves and add 80 proof vodka, simple huh? If you prefer a sweet tasting schnapps, you can add stevia leaves to each jar.

All you need to do is pick enough leaves to fill the jar (these are spaghetti sauce Ball jars) about 2/3 full and add vodka. Fill the jars to the top with vodka. Seal lid tightly and shake it a few times. Place each jar in a dark area, but make sure they are easy to get to because you must shake them at least once a day.

Let the jars sit for about two weeks (10 to 15 days), and shake daily. Then you're ready for the straining of the leaves.

Place a colander over a large sauce pan and pour out the contents. Only a few of the leaves will fall into the colander. I then get 2 paper towels and place these into the colander.

Shake the leaves into the paper towels and then get ready to squeeze the remaining liquid into the sauce pan.

It's not much, but I feel it's got more concentrated flavor, and why waste it?

I then use my handy-dandy jar funnel to pour the strained schnapps into clean jars. At this point, the Schnapps is very flavorful, but you really should age it for 6 months. The aging will mellow the Schnapps over time. Always store jars in a dark place such as a cubbard.

So there you have it; simple Schnapps - but don't stop at peppermint. I have also started orange mint and spearmint schnapps. I'm so glad to finally be using a lot of my mints from the garden. They would usually just get lightly picked each year with me drying about 10 sprigs of each in the rafters.

:)

August Gardens

Now that August is here, I will share some of the photos that were taken in late July. This has been a spectacular year for gardening. My only complaint is that the record heat means watering just about every night.

This photo was taken on August first and shows how I like to tie-up everything! If it has a vine, it gets tied-up! In the front, to the left, is an Ali Baba watermelon growing up a string. Behind that in the next row back is Waltham Butternut squash and Amish musk melons. And behind them, in the third row is Pippin squash and cucumbers - all tied-up and happily growing up their own string to the support wires about 7 feet above the garden.

And of course, the heirloom tomatoes are tied-up as well. I'm a little embarrassed at the weeds shown here. I lost the upper hand on this section of garden mostly due to constant fence construction that consumed nearly all of my free time each weekend. But I'm happy to report that all of that hard work has paid off, with no more attacks from the relentless ground hogs.

This is a Fish pepper with spectacular white and green leaves. I've read that these pepper plants are sometimes used in landscaping because they're a real eye-catcher. I've also read that these are hotter than Jalapeno peppers, so I'm eagerly awaiting their harvest. On a sad note, I lost about 60% of these plants to the extreme heat in early July.

I read about these peppers called Beaver Dam in the winter edition of The Heirloom Gardener (the same one I was featured in...) and just had to have them! I only had a handful that made it to the garden and of the 6 planted, 5 have made it.

So far each plant has given me 2 fantastic peppers. There are a few more that will mature in about a week from now. I'll keep track of yields, but if I only get 4-5 per plant, it's definitely worth it! These taste so good!

This was my first Beaver Dam pepper that I harvested on the evening of July 29th. This is a wonderful tasting pepper that has taste & seed characteristics of a bell pepper but is pleasantly hot (I would rate it as half as hot as a Jalapeno). Needless to say, I saved the seeds and marked as "first" to be grown next season.

This is the front garden with my Better Boy (6) and Trip-L-Crop (2) tomatoes climbing up 6 feet of caging. So far this experiment has been a great success. Please see older posts to get information about the book. The photo above was taken on August first (believe me, they're taller as I type this)!

And this was taken on July 17th - that's only 3 weeks apart, wow! Today, August 7th, 2010, There are hundreds of green, baseball sized tomatoes on the 8 plants. This method of gardening has changed everything. I will be using this method for all of my tomatoes in 2011.

:)