torley manor

We grew Red Norlands this year, and they look like pink jewels coming out of the ground:

We only dug up one plant to see how things were looking, and jeez louise, they are lookin’ GOOD! We were out and about running errands and decided to stop at the community garden plot just to see how things were looking and could not resist getting at least a little dirty.

The beans look pretty safe since we deer-proofed them, but of course the deer went for the next unprotected crop: the sweet potatoes. So we netted those too, for now.

Honestly, if we get nothing from that plot but those gorgeous red potatoes, I think I’ll still be happy.

Also, this Saturday (7/9/11) is the Fourth Annual Torley Manor (Angry) Gorilla Blues and Folk Fest. Q and I will be performing a handful of fun songs, and we are making mountains of food. I confess that part of my excitement is that I’ll get to give garden tours!

And so have I: Artnoose saved the very last “UP THE PUNX over 30″ card for me!

How is it that every year, after a long winter of eating string beans that we’ve blanched and frozen (and then steamed for dinner), I forget about the soft fuzz on a brand new freshly-picked string bean? Every year I forget this and am amazed to be reminded.

Well shoot! We’ve been doing a lot in the garden (and on a million other projects) lately. A quick run-down of the home garden before I move on:

• Strawberries produced beautifully this year. Ate enough fresh to make our mouths prickle, made a small batch of jam, and also froze a few pints for the winter. I thinned the bed majorly before they started really moving in the spring, and I think that made a big difference. Smote a lot of slugs in there. I think I’ve finally just about gotten over how gross it is to slice them in half. It’s just the most effective method.
• Sweet potatoes are finally taking off. We pulled the garlic about a week earlier than usual this year to make room for more sweet potato plants. Should be a good sweet potato year!
• Blueberries aren’t doing a lot this year. We gave them a big pruning last year and I think they’re recovering. We ate I think six berries. I’m ok with that. They’re pretty elderly bushes too, but they look healthy and good.
• Asparagus had a tough time this spring — it was wet and very cool and asparagus just doesn’t like that. I was feeling upset like I’d done something wrong or hadn’t given the bed enough attention, but once it warmed up, we got a good harvest. We put a big load of compost on the bed and topped it with a thick layer of mulch so they can feed happily while they’re all ferned out.
• Raspberries are all filled out and tall and grand, but there is (oddly) one little cluster of berries. I think that cane is confused. We’re expecting a late summer showing from them.
• String beans are CRAAAAAZY. We should get to eat the first ones tonight! Q really probably overplanted them and they are insanely dense, but who cares?  They’re not suffering for it.
• Popping corn is taller than I am and a lush dark green.  This photo is from June 26. Go, corn, go!!!

As you can see from that photo, dill has volunteered all over the garden. I’m perfectly happy with that, as it brings in the good bugs, and puts me in the good graces of friends who like to have fresh dill heads for pickling. Let me know if you want any!

Torley-on-Stanton updates below!

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Things are going well out at the community garden plot. We spent a good amount of time re-turning over the soil and getting things planted in the last couple weeks. Two weekends ago we finished turning stuff over and got all the corn and beans planted. We’ve been dealing with some issues with the peas. And the potatoes are looking great.

PEAS

Somethings been munching on our peas

Although we haven’t actually seen any, we assume its something like a rabbit. We realized that the holes in our gate were big enough to let smaller mammals through, so we put a little hardware cloth over the bottom section of the gate. We also have been spraying the plants with a cayenne pepper/water mixture. As a final step, we decided we would try to trellis the peas (which perhaps we should’ve done from the beginning) to keep them as much off the ground as possible. All these measures have had an effect as the plants seem to be recovering and are getting some flowers on them. We’re still holding out some hopes for a good harvest.

POTATOES

The potatoes came up a couple weeks ago

Since then they have been growing at a pretty good pace. As they have been growing, we have been hilling the dirt back over the plants. Into the mix with the garden soil, we have been adding layers of straw and some leaf mulch from the pile at the community garden. Even if we only get a small handful of potatoes from each plant, with a 25′ row of potato plants, we’ll be looking at a pretty decent harvest.

BEANS! BEANS! AND CORN!!

We planted 8 rows of corn (4 rows of white, 4 rows of yellow) and 10 rows of beans (1 row of baby limas, 1 row of Calypso beans, and 8 rows of black beans. It’s our grand experiment to see if we can grow ourselves a good supply of beans to dry for use over the winter months. In the last week, there are good signs of life from all of the seeds.

black beans — at one week

Calypso beans — at one week

Baby limas — at one week

ETC. ETC.

We also planted a few extra brussels sprouts plants out at the community garden (we have 3 plants in the home garden as well.) We cut the bottom off some old unusable freezer boxes and used these to protect the small seedlings.

Other things out at Torley-On-Stanton include one paste tomato plant and a handful of sunflowers (no photos, sorry). We still haven’t figured out a water situation out there and we have a summer’s long fight with the weeds (so much ragweed and so many thistles!), but we’re feeling pretty good about how things are looking at this point in time.

Upon claiming our community garden plot we were excited to see that the entire perimeter was fenced in and the fencing was in good shape. There were a couple sections that required some additional staking to solidify them, but we felt generally pretty good about the fences ability to keep out the forest critters. The gate to the plot however was just a section of wire fencing that just sort of flapped around in the opening. You could hook it onto the opposing fencepost and it made a somewhat convincing barrier to the outside world, but it just didn’t seem to be the best solution.

So being that I work at a place that makes ironwork, I figured “what the hell? why don’t i just make us a gate?” Of course, at my job I don’t actually make ironwork; i just work in the office. I’ve toyed around with a welder a few times before, but its not a tool that i’m 100% comfortable with. Nonetheless, I went forward with my plan. There was some old 1″ square tubing that I thought I could use to make the frame and then I would use some 1/4″ square rods to make a grid in the opening. Nothing fancy.

I cut the frame pieces to length and prepared to weld them together. Knowing very little about how to adjust the settings on the welder, I just grabbed the nearest welder and took a shot at it. As it was, my boss had been using the welder for some really heavy steel stock, so he had the welder cranked pretty high. When I attempted to weld my relatively small and thin tubing together, it basically just melted holes in it. After getting some advice from the boss on the proper settings, I was off again and got everything welded together. The old rusty stock that I was using was a real pain to weld (note: nice clean steel welds much nicer than rusty steel), but it was pretty sturdy. I then added the grid to the inside. Once again, the rust made the welding tough, but it all went together and was sturdy, so I wasn’t too concerned about how pretty my welds ended up.

For the last week or so the gate has sat by the side of my desk as i’ve planned to put some proper hinges on it. After not getting around to it, I finally just decided to go gutter tech. Today I just drilled several holes in the one vertical piece of tubing and took it out to the garden. There I put in another fencepost and used baling wire to tie the gate to the fencepost. It might not be pretty. It might not last forever. But it’s working pretty nicely right now. I then tracked down an old tomato cage and hacked off a small piece of steel to make a latch for the gate.

Here it is in all its glory

Maybe if everything goes well with the community garden plot this year and we keep it for next year we’ll get a more proper gate, but for now, this’ll do us just fine.

What is this “dividing bulbs” thing I have heard of but never actually bothered doing? Was I supposed to do this several years ago?

I figured they were looking pretty tightly packed in our little half-barrel herb garden, and (like many things) offering some to a pal was the motivation to finally dig the chives up and divide them.

I pulled them all up in one gigantic clump!

Look at this crazy root mass!

I threw some in a pot to give away, and then started to carefully separate the individual bulbs, shortly realized I was crazy for thinking I should do that, and instead just (gently) tore the initial clump into about 6 sections. I spaced them out in the herb barrel, and now I know!

It’s been a couple years since we’ve tried to raise potatoes. We did it for a few years, but decided to stop after getting disappointing yields for the amount of space the plants took up. After we signed up for our community garden plot this year we realized we had a lot of square footage to work with and we decided to give potatoes another shot.

We picked out the Red Norland potatoes from High Mowing Seeds. A good choice for Northern growers, a good keeper and supposedly resistant to scab. We got 2.5 pounds of seed potatoes to plant.

There are a lot of ways to grow potatoes. Recently Organic Gardening magazine did an article outlining Seven Ways To Plant Potatoes. We decided to go with a hybrid approach, using some mixture of raised bed and straw mulch methods.

Along one side of our plot there was a section that had seemingly been worked more recently or more thoroughly in the past. The ground was much looser than the rest of the plot. We continued to work that strip over the last couple months, amending the soil with leaf mulch and most recently mixing in some straw. At this point the soil is significantly looser than the rest of the plot and looking pretty nice for potato growing.

Emma’s dad brought us several hemlock boards to use to make our raised beds. Along the edge of the plot, there is already a small wall of cinder blocks, so we decided to use that for one side of our raised beds and then just create another hemlock wall across from it.

Here you can see the hemlock wall after we put it up

To build the hemlock walk, I picked up some 24″ steel stakes. These can be found next to the concrete at the Home Depot. I nailed one of these about 4″ in from each end of the hemlock boards with the top of the stake even with the top of the boards. This left about 10-12″ of stake left to sink into the ground. I then hammered two other stakes on the opposite sides of the boards spaced evenly over the length of the boards to provide support from both sides.

Once complete, I dug a trench down the middle of the bed, hilling the dirt on either side of the bed. The seed potatoes will be planted in the middle of the trench. As the plants begin to grow, we’ll just pull the dirt from the sides of the bed to hill around the plants. We’ll then add some straw to help mulch and build up the mounds without having to import as much dirt.

Here you can kinda see the trench in the middle of the bed (late evening shadows made getting a photo of this difficult

We’ll probably plant the potatoes over the weekend.

Oh, yeah, peas are looking great. While I was building the potato beds, Emma was weeding and mulching the peas.

Triumphant farmer!!

Well ok! This turned out alright!

Lookin’ a little crazy-eyed but happy with the soup. All I did was clean up the ramps, chop the bulbs and stems and cook them up first and then add in some chopped potatoes and homemade vegetable broth. Gave that a whiz with the immersion blender when the potatoes were tender, then added the chopped ramp greens to wilt. Threw in some celery seed, rosemary, dill, salt, pepper, and a little soymilk, and served with some back yard chives on top.

Lesson learned here: don’t hesitate with ramps. I guess I mean that two ways: a) they’ll be great no matter what you put them in, and b) seriously, they are so much easier to clean before they start to wilt and get slimy. Put the hustle on.

Holy smokes, our ramp benefactor gifted us FIFTEEN POUNDS of ramps. In a garbage bag. We had the singular pleasure of bagging them up and delivering them to friends, playing ramp fairy to our neighboring pals. So fun.

Our first go with them this time around was cornbread with ramp greens:

We have bandied about the idea of pickling the white parts for cocktail onions (!) and I’m pretty sure we’ll have a go at potato & ramp soup, here too. Or ramps on pizza?

Other meals around here have included our first two harvests of this year’s asparagus. HURRAH!!!!

Playing backup to the asparagus here is some polenta with basil (frozen from last year’s garden) and tempeh with bell peppers (our own, frozen) and shallots.

Then out at Torley-on-Stanton, we did a little more work to prepare the potato bed. We wanted to add straw to loosen it up a little, and also to reduce the need for stealing dirt from the rest of the garden. We got a bale from McTighe’s in Glenshaw, which was a hilarious and wonderful experience. If you’ve never driven past it on Route 8, you might not know that it is a home and garden center AND a beer distributor. So to buy the straw, we went to the garden center side, paid up, and then drove through the beer distributor to pick up the goods.

Then for a treat when we got home, I made us some smoothies with our own strawberries from last year (frozen), some peaches we got at a farmstand in Erie last summer (also frozen), a banana and some OJ. Every new thing we learn about putting food by is making my life so much better.

Somehow, right around the end of the summer, we stocked up on sriracha, chili garlic sauce, and dried red pepper flakes (!) which means that I hadn’t really needed to use any of our home-grown, home-dried chilis. I’d envisioned crushing them and just using the flakes, but as we ran low on chili garlic sauce and did not run even remotely low on flakes, a plan was hatched! As I was picking stems off of the peppers, I only noticed two little chilis that looked a little funky. I couldn’t for the life of me tell, though, if they’d been dried by tying the stems or by threading a needle through them. Would have been nice to know. Next time!

So it turns out that store-bought chili garlic sauce has a lot of crummy ingredients in it, which I somehow never realized, and also we still have lots of our own garlic in addition to lots of dried peppers, so …..! Here we go! Our garlic is really holding up pretty well, too — a few sprouts here and there, but they’re holding steady!

My first quandary was about the peppers themselves — whether I should crush them first, and whiz everything together in a food processor and then cook the works, whether I should rehydrate the peppers and then chop them up, whether I should skip cooking the works, etc. I decided that I’d rehydrate the peppers in a small pot on the stove, with a bit of water. As I brought it to a boil, I:

a) maced myself and the household (sorry everybody.) and
b) realized I was out of rice vinegar.

Genius.

So the new pepper method involved packing the peppers in water in a pint jar in the fridge to soak overnight, which seemed to work ok. I drained the peppers before putting them in the food processor and deliberated for a minute about saving the spicy water, but decided to ditch it, figuring that if I wanted something to be spicy, I’d probably want to use the chili garlic sauce, right? So I threw the peppers and about a head of peeled garlic into the food processor with some salt and rice vinegar (all totally eyeballed. If I had a kitchen scale and/or had thought this through at all, I would have weighed the peppers to at least have a starting point for recreating this). And then look what we have here! I’m just holding a jar of chili garlic sauce in my lap!

I’ll fix a meal with it soon and report back!