Monday Recap: Gobble Gobbled

Posted on December 1, 2014 by Dave @ HappyAcres

I think it is safe to say my wife and I have gotten our fill of turkey for a while. Last week I picked up a fresh local turkey from Uebelhack Turkey Farm that weighed almost 18 pounds. I baked it for Thanksgiving, and we’ve pretty much been eating on it ever since!

Rosemary Roasted Sweet Potatoes

Rosemary Roasted Sweet Potatoes

It was just the two of us celebrating Thanksgiving, but we tried to do it in style. In addition to the Big Bird we had Rosemary Roasted Sweet Potatoes and cooked up some frozen Derby green beans for side dishes. We used our Beauregard sweet potatoes for roasting. I know folks (some of them relatives) that won’t eat a sweet potato unless it is swimming in butter and loaded with sugar and marshmallows, but thankfully my wife and I agree that simple is better when it comes to most vegetables, including sweet potatoes.

pumpkin pie

pumpkin pie

My wife baked one of her yummy pumpkin pies for dessert, using our frozen Canada Crookneck Squash puree. It was the best tasting squash in our recent Pumpkin Smackdown, and I need to do another tasting of the remaining varieties soon. It was great in the pie.

taco salad using leftover turkey

taco salad using leftover turkey

We had leftovers of all the above on Friday. Saturday we took part of the turkey meat along with some frozen tomato sauce and made Turkey Chipotle Taco and Burrito Filling. Some of that went into a taco salad for dinner, and the rest went into the freezer for later meals. We made broth with the bones, and froze the broth along with meat for soups. We will be enjoying this turkey for some time to come! The lettuce for the taco salad was some of the Spotted Trout that I harvested a couple of weeks ago.

Coalition Mix Kale

Coalition Mix Kale

I did harvest some of the Coalition Kale Mix last week. My wife cooked it up for a side dish. I love this mix, and I will be growing it again for sure. I have no idea how winter hardy it will be in our area, but it has made it so far.

large kale leaf

large kale leaf

Though it’s a mix of quite a few different kales, several of the plants I wound up with this year have huge, flat leaves that almost resemble collard greens. The taste is all kale though, and after a few frosts it got even better.

harvest of turnips

harvest of turnips

I also pulled a few turnips yesterday, which I plan on cooking up tonight. The white ones are Hakurei and the long purple ones are an Italian heirloom variety called Mezza Lunga Bianca Colletto Viola. We had the greens from the turnips last night, along with a grilled turkey sandwich.

Cream of Asparagus Soup

Cream of Asparagus Soup

Though we both worked on the Thanksgiving meal (and its aftermath), it was my wife’s turn to cook last week. She used some of our 2014 frozen asparagus to make a batch of Cream of Asparagus Soup. Despite the name, there is no cream or milk in the soup, and only a little bit of butter. It is mainly asparagus cooked in chicken broth, then pureed until nice and smooth. It was a great change of pace after our turkey-thon! My wife stirred in a bit of plain yogurt in hers, but I sprinkled on a little bit of my smoked paprika, which gave it another nice layer of flavor, not to mention a bit of color.

Dark Rye Potato Rolls

Dark Rye Potato Rolls

Since the soup was the main (and only) attraction for the meal that night, I volunteered to make some rolls to go with it. I made a batch of my Dark Rye Potato Rolls, which gave me another chance to tweak the recipe a bit. I will share it here once I get it worked out to my satisfaction.

chipotle peppers

chipotle peppers

Last week I used a few of the smoked jalapenos to grind up for chipotle powder. And let me say it was h-o-t. I was sneezing and coughing while grinding them in the spice grinder, and that was before I took the lid off! I love the flavor of them, but they are so hot I may have to tame them down a bit by adding some of the milder smoked peppers. I think I may try growing TAM jalapeno next year. I’ve grown it before, and it is a milder jalapeno that registers about 1000 on the Scoville scale. That’s still plenty hot for me, but less so than the El Jefe variety I grew this year. It is an o/p variety developed by Texas A&M University, hence the name TAM.

That’s a look at what’s happening here at HA. To see what others are harvesting and cooking up, visit Daphne’s Dandelions where Daphne hosts Harvest Mondays. I’ll be back later this week with a review of how my smoked pepper project turned out.

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Planting Green Garlic

Posted on November 25, 2014 by Dave @ HappyAcres

Today I took advantage of a sunny but cold day to plant some garlic for green garlic. For those not familiar with it, green garlic is to garlic what a green onion (or scallion) is to a mature onion. I think it sort of resembles a scallion, but the taste is all garlic. Both the green and white parts of the young garlic are edible, and it can be harvested early on before the main crop of garlic is ready.

green garlic

green garlic

Green garlic can be planted any time from fall on up through late winter and early spring. I like to use garlic that is already sprouting, which will be up and growing in no time. It is also a good way to use any of those small cloves you might have, since you’re not trying to grow a big head of garlic.

sprouting garlic for green garlic

sprouting garlic for green garlic

I prepared an area where radishes had been growing earlier, adding some compost and a little organic fertilizer (3-4-4). I planted the green garlic fairly close together, about two or three inches apart. Since the soil was fairly loose, I just poked a hole with my finger and then dropped in a clove of garlic. After they were all planted I covered them with a little soil, and then added a bit of straw for mulch.

green garlic after planting

green garlic after planting

I also sometimes grow green garlic in containers. It is easy to grow that way, and can be grown indoors or in a greenhouse to supply a little taste of green garlic even in the middle of winter.

green garlic growing in container

green garlic growing in container

I love garlic in all its forms, and my goal is to have homegrown garlic year round. With a fresh, garlicky flavor, green garlic is great way to enjoy the taste of garlic early in the season. And it’s also easy to grow!

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Monday Recap: Return to Normal

Posted on November 24, 2014 by Dave @ HappyAcres

I am not sure what normal weather is anymore, but after ten straight days of colder than usual weather, our snow is all gone and temperatures here have returned to more seasonal levels. I didn’t do a lot of harvesting last week, since we still have quite a few veggies in the refrigerator from the previous week. I did pull a few carrots though. That’s Yaya in the below photo. I got them out after the ground thawed, and while the tops were a bit ragged the roots were just fine.

Yaya carrots

Yaya carrots

My wife roasted those carrots, plus kohlrabi and potatoes from storage. She also threw in a couple of ripe peppers (last of the 2014 harvests). I had to buy a bag of onions, since our stash ran out. One of those joined the mix. Then she added some of our garlic (of which we still have plenty) and tossed them all in oil before roasting. I love roasted vegetables. The combinations are endless and almost all vegetables work with this simple treatment.

roasted vegetables

roasted vegetables

We are not big chard eaters, but I cut a few leaves from the greenhouse to saute for a side dish one day for my lunch. I let Verde da Taglio go to seed in the greenhouse this spring, and now I have volunteers in there.

Verde da Taglio chard

Verde da Taglio chard

And though they were harvested months ago, let me give a shout out to the blueberries. We have some nearly every day with our breakfast cereal. It was a great year for them, and my wife froze these all summer long. I had a dream about moving the other night and in it I kept thinking “what will we do for blueberries?” Of course we are not planning on moving any time soon. I mean, what would we do for blueberries?

frozen blueberries

frozen blueberries

One of the smallest harvests of the year was from the Elephant Head Amaranth plants. The total amount of seed was slightly less than one ounce. I really harvested the seed for replanting and for sharing, but I would like to try popping some of it and see how it does. I do want to try growing amaranth for seed, and maybe next year will be the year.

Elephant Head Amaranth seed

Elephant Head Amaranth seed

Saturday I managed to get some planting done in the cold frame beds. I planted one bed in spinach, a mix of Viroflay, Giant Winter and Amsterdam Prickly Seeded. I’ve been having good luck with starting spinach seed indoors, then setting it out when it’s about three weeks old. The plants are not as big as they look in the below photo, and you can see the seed leaves are still attached.

planting spinach

planting spinach

Another bed got some spinach plants plus Mizspoona, which is a Frank Morton cross between mizuna and tatsoi. The leaves are supposed to look more like ‘dark green monster mizuna’ than tatsoi. Since it’s quick to mature like both its parents, I should know what it looks and tastes like in about a month or so.

Mizspoona Salad Select plant

Mizspoona Salad Select plant

Also on Saturday I baked some of my Multi-Grain Seeded Dinner Rolls to go with cauliflower soup my wife made that night. I was actually craving these crusty rolls, since I hadn’t made any in a long time. They were a nice companion to the soup, and together it made for a great dinner meal.

Multi-Grain Seeded Dinner Rolls

Multi-Grain Seeded Dinner Rolls

We also found time to make soap last week. One batch was a new recipe for a Neem Peppermint Tea Tree soap. That is our version of the Neem soap we bought on our Asheville trip. It has lots of organic cold-pressed neem oil plus neem leaf powder, which adds a greenish tint. The other soap we made is our Sunny Calendula, featuring our own calendula flowers infused in olive and coconut oils. The calendula turns the soap a lovely and natural orange color. That one has lemongrass essential oil in it. After cutting they need to cure for several weeks before we try them out. The neem soap is pretty stinky at this point, and hopefully it will be less so after it cures. Anyone who is familiar with neem oil should know the smell!

soap cut and ready to cure

soap cut and ready to cure

And speaking of calendula, I let some of the flowers go to seed this year. Compared to the amaranth seed, the calendula seeds are giants! Our calendula plants bloomed all summer and fall until a hard freeze finally did them in. Their dried flowers are now starring in the infused oils we use to make soaps and salves.

calendula seeds

calendula seeds

I hope you have enjoyed this recap of current happenings here. To see what others are harvesting and cooking up, visit Daphne’s Dandelions where Daphne hosts Harvest Mondays.

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Getting Organized

Posted on November 20, 2014 by Dave @ HappyAcres

It is safe to say I will never win any contests for neatness. When I was working for a living, my messy desk was almost legendary, and I once had the fire inspector shaking his head at all the computer paper in my office. But despite the mess, I always knew where to find everything important. Which goes to show that being messy is not the same as being disorganized. And conversely, being neat isn’t the same as being organized, either.

According to the Merriam Webster online dictionary, to organize means “to arrange or order things so that they can be found or used easily and quickly.” One of my goals this year was to organize our garden tools in a better way. We have a garden shed, but it is sitting far away from the house, which makes it rather inconvenient to go there for gardening tools. Happy Acres also came with an outbuilding closer to the house that previous owners built to store their boat. We now use that as a storage area for the lawn mower, tiller, and shop equipment. That’s where we decided to put our most-used garden tools.

garden tools on shop wall

garden tools on shop wall

With help from our friend and neighbor Ken (who is both organized and neat), I found some hooks in various shapes and sizes that I could mount in the drywall or studs in the shop. This lets us store things like our favorite shovels, digging fork, garden rake, pruning shears and assorted hoes in an easy to access location just inside the shop door. I was also able to mount the battery powered weed-eater and blower, plus the battery charger for them. This will be so convenient, and already I am loving the new arrangement.

storage for winter squash

storage for winter squash

While organizing in the shop, we freed up a shelf unit. After cleaning it up, we brought it inside and down to the basement. The shelves will do a good job of holding the winter squashes. It looks like we will be well-supplied with squash for the coming months!

new potting bench in greenhouse

new potting bench in greenhouse

This summer I also did some organizing in the greenhouse. Summer is a good time to get in there since the greenhouse has less going on then. I replaced both the table and potting bench with new ones. The old ones were brought over from my old place, and were close to 20 years old and in not in very good shape. The new ones are made of Western Red Cedar, and came from Charley’s Greenhouse & Garden. They are well made, and will likely outlast the greenhouse itself.

shallow Tubtrug holds small hand tools

shallow Tubtrug holds small hand tools

While I was replacing the bench and table, I took the opportunity to do some organizing too. I spend a good amount of time out there, so it really pays to have things organized. I used a Tubtrug to hold my small hand tools like scissors and shears. Another Tubtrug holds soil amendments and other often used things like Sluggo and deer repellent.

Microtub holds smaller items in greenhouse

Microtub holds smaller items in greenhouse

I love the Tubtrugs for lots of different gardening chores. They are great for carrying compost to the garden, and harvests back to the house. I even found some tiny ones (Microtubs) just big enough to hold my widger, marking pen and plant labels.

I hope you have enjoyed this update. The weather here is slowly returning to more normal temperatures, and the snow is melting away. I will be playing catchup with gardening chores in the next few days.

 

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Novembrrr Snow Daze

Posted on November 18, 2014 by Dave @ HappyAcres

A local meteorologist has a contest every year to guess the date of the first one inch (or greater snowfall. I wonder if anyone chose November 17th this year? We not only got that inch, but several more to go with it. After measuring in several spots, I called it 5.1 inches for my CoCoRaHS entry. It’s not the earliest we have ever had snow in my area, but it’s the earliest we’ve had it in a long time. I used my antique Red Spot Paint & Varnish yardstick to make the measurement.

measuring the snow

measuring the snow

With the snow comes more Arctic air. The temperatures last night got down to 14°F here at our place. Hopefully the snow will protect what’s left in the garden, which is actually quite a bit. We still have kale, spinach, arugula, lettuce, carrots and turnips growing outside. Some are protected by a cold frame, but the rest are now covered in a blanket of snow. And I’ve got several flats of spinach seedlings in the greenhouse, waiting to go in one of the cold frame beds once it thaws out. The gardening season isn’t over here by a long shot, despite the weather.

November snowfall

November snowfall

It was a wet snow to begin with, and clung to the trees. It is pretty to look at, but so cold outside. Today’s high is forecast to only get up to 25°F. Which is why I calling this month Novembrrr!

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