Road Trip!

Posted on October 29, 2012 by Dave @ HappyAcres

Lynda and I enjoyed a lovely, post MG conference road trip to Nashville this weekend. We went to the Ryman Auditorium last night to see Bonnie Raitt perform, and she was joined by a number of Nashville cats including guitarist Rick Vito and singer songwriter John Prine. John joined Bonnie onstage to help sing his classic Angel From Montgomery, which was a special treat for me and the rest of the 2000+ people that jammed the historic Ryman. Bonnie had the old Ryman rockin’ for sure!

But truth be told, the real highlight for me was visiting with our friends Lydia and Mark. I met Lydia while volunteering at the Evansville Christian Life Center, and I quickly discovered she was a fellow gardener, foodie and former propeller-head like me.  If that weren’t enough, she is also a crafty person like Lynda. Talk about having stuff in common! Lydia gave Lynda a lovely bookcase that she no longer had room for when Lydia and Mark moved to Nashville earlier this year, as well as lots of craft supplies and books. So it was great to catch up on things with them.

me and Lynda pose at Puckett’s (click on any image to enlarge)

Yesterday the four of us enjoyed a crisp, sunny fall day and toured historic Leiper’s Fork Village, which is home to several restaurants and art galleries. Puckett’s Grocery and Restaurant is the kind of place where local pickers and singers perform while you chow down on a “meat and three” or other down-home vittles. We opted for lunch at Joe’s Natural Farm Store and Cafe, where we enjoyed grass-fed beef burgers served on fresh brioche buns and topped with smoked Gouda cheese, arugula and pac choi leaves. All I can say is YUM!

great burger at Joe’s Natural

Our weekend came to an end much too soon, as we hit the road after breakfast this morning to return home. We did stop at the Nashville Farmer’s Market before we left town, and got a variety of lovely fresh apples. We will be enjoying them in the days to come as a nice reminder of our great weekend getaway!

apples from Nashville Farmer’s Market

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Baked Cherry Tomatoes

Posted on October 25, 2012 by Dave @ HappyAcres

Cherry tomatoes could easily be called the overachievers of the gardening world. One plant can often grow to be 10 to 15 feet long if it is left unpruned and kept well fertilized and watered. And in the course of a growing season that one plant can produce hundreds of yummy little tomatoes, though sometimes it can seem like there’s thousands of them!

Cherry tomatoes are also very versatile in the kitchen. At Happy Acres we love them on (and in) salads, and lots of them get dehydrated and slow-roasted for use long after tomato season is over. You can also make a great Cherry Tomato Salsa with them. And of course many of them get eaten straight from the garden, not to mention all those that actually get eaten out in the garden. Now that’s what I call dining alfresco!

(click on any image to enlarge)

This simple side dish pairs tomatoes with a couple of their natural companions: garlic and basil. The tomatoes are tossed with olive oil and garlic plus a little salt and pepper and quickly baked until the skins start to shrivel and burst. Add a little basil and you’ve got a quick, easy and tasty side dish. These tomatoes are also great tossed with pasta. Add some beans or meat to the pasta and you’ve got a complete meal that’s ready in no time!

Baked Cherry Tomatoes

Baked Cherry Tomatoes Print This Recipe Print This Recipe
adapted from several recipes

1 qt cherry tomatoes, whole
2 tbsp olive oil
4 cloves garlic, chopped roughly
1/4 tsp kosher salt
pepper to taste
2 tbsp basil leaves

1. Heat oven to 400 degrees F. Combine all the ingredients except the basil in a roasting pan. Roast for 15-20 minutes, until the tomatoes are just bursting. Carefully transfer the tomatoes to a bowl and add basil. Serve warm or cold.

Servings: 6

Nutrition Facts
Nutrition (per serving): 65 calories, 42 calories from fat, 4.8g total fat, 0mg cholesterol, 88.2mg sodium, 242.1mg potassium, 5.5g carbohydrates, 1.2g fiber, <1g sugar, 1g protein, 10.2mg calcium, <1g saturated fat.

 

 

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October Harvests: Greens, Roots, and…Green Beans?

Posted on October 22, 2012 by Dave @ HappyAcres

By this time of year the pace of the garden here has usually slowed down quite a bit. And that slower pace is always a welcome relief to me!  Greens and root vegetables often play a starring role at this time of year, but this October they are joined by an unlikely companion: green beans.

I don’t usually grow green beans here in fall but this year I had plenty of seed and a bare spot in the garden so I decided to give them a try. I planted some Derby seeds in early August, and the beans came on just in time before a fairly light frost did in the plants. I got 2 pounds of beans from my little planting, so the gamble definitely paid off. In past attempts my fall beans have fallen victim to either mildew or pest issues, but this year they did fine. I’ll have to give them a try again next year. We have a lot of beans in the freezer from the spring planting, but it was sure nice to have a taste of fresh ones once again.

fall green bean harvest (click on any image to enlarge)

We’ve also been enjoying all the greens the garden has been giving us. The Beedy’s Camden kale has been tasty, as usual. I’ve got Lacinato kale that’s ready to eat too. I’ve started cutting some of the cut and come again lettuce I have planted in my mini-salad boxes (aka Lettuce On Wheels). There are lots of salad greens planted in the cold frames and greenhouse, so we should be set for the next couple of months.

bowl of salad greens

And even though we’ve had a couple of light frosts, some of the tomato vines are still giving us fruit, most notably Sun Gold and Juliet. Those two just keep on going and going around here. I harvested a whole quart of Sun Golds this week, some of which wound up on a salad. The rest of them went into a baked cherry tomato dish I made, and I’ll share the recipe later this week. They’re not as sweet as they were this summer, but they’re downright tasty for a tomato this late in the year. It looks like Sun Gold might well be the first tomato and the last tomato we enjoy in 2012.

quart box of Sun Gold tomatoes

In the root department, I started pulling turnips a couple of weeks ago for the roots and the greens. My wife and I both love turnips in every way they can be fixed, which is usually quite simply. We’ve also eaten some of the small white Asian ones raw, with some yogurt/mustard dip. I planted extra turnips where some of the 2011 garlic crop grew – mostly the Purple top variety, and I plan on giving these away. I also started a jar of lacto-fermented turnip pickles last week, and I’m thinking about trying to make a small batch of turnip kraut before all the turnips are gone.

Hakurei and White Lady turnips

The fall planted carrots are sizing up nicely, despite the fact the local deer herd munched on the tops about a week ago. They’ve now been sprayed with deer repellent, so hopefully that will be the last attack. The deer also ate our almost-ripe rose hips. Frankly, I would love to ‘harvest’ some of the deer myself, which would help make up for all the misery they cause us, but that is a topic for another day. It is safe to say that hunting the deer will ultimately be the only way to thin their numbers down. There are way too many deer in our suburban area, and no real food for them except for lawns, backyard flowers and vegetable gardens. It is a sad, no-win situation for all involved, deer and humans.

fall carrots

A crop I’ve been harvesting pretty much all summer is celery. This is the first time I’ve grown celery in a number of years. I only have four plants, but that has been more than enough to keep us supplied with celery as we need it. For all that I’ve read about celery being difficult to grow, I have to say it has not been that difficult so far. I lost a few plants before they got well established, but once they were growing they did quite well, and survived the heat and drought nicely. It is nice to have the fresh celery available, and I do plan on freezing some before the cold weather does them in. This year I grew the hybrid Tango variety.

Tango celery

That’s an update on what we are harvesting here in October. To see what other gardeners from all over the world are harvesting, visit Daphne’s Dandelions, host of Harvest Mondays. And Happy Growing to all of you gardeners out there!

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CoCoRaHS: Measuring Rain, Hail & Snow

Posted on October 15, 2012 by Dave @ HappyAcres

I’ve always been fascinated by the weather. When I was still in grade school, my parents got me a weather station setup one year for my birthday. It was pretty cool for its time, with an anemometer to measure wind speed, an indoor-outdoor thermometer, and a wet/dry thermometer to measure relative humidity. I still remember wetting the little ‘sock’ that went on the wet/dry thermometer (also known as a sling psychrometer) and whirling the thing around.

These days, weather stations have gone high tech, with wireless transmitters to send data from the outside sensors to the inside weather station, and uplinks to the Internet. Fellow blogger Daphne got a nice one for her birthday a couple of years ago. She has it setup to upload her data to Weather Underground, and has a widget on her blog sidebar to display current weather conditions. I’ve been tempted to get one for myself, but so far have resisted the urge to add another gadget to my collection. Of course if someone gave it to me, that would be quite another thing entirely!

I have been involved with a weather project myself for the last two years, but it’s decidely more low-tech. I have been a volunteer weather observer for the CocoRaHS organization. CoCoRaHS is an acronym for Community Collaborative Rain, Hail, and Snow Network. According to the NOAA website, “CoCoRaHS is a non-profit community based network of volunteers of all ages and backgrounds working together to measure precipitation. The network originated at Colorado State University in 1988 and has expanded to thousands of observers in over half of the United States.”

Data is currently being collected from over 15,000 active U.S. weather stations like mine. The data is used by weather researchers, meteorologists, water utilities, farmers, teachers and students, and backyard gardeners like myself. Volunteers measure the amount of rain, snow and hail that falls in their location, and record the results daily. The data is captured online, and CoCoRaHS collects, summarizes, and makes the data available to all who want to use it. I often check out the daily precipitation map for our county, which gives me a quick look at how much rain my neighbors and I are getting. I have to admit I am amazed to see the wide variation of rain that falls on an area even as small as a few square miles. Of course what usually matters most to me is how much has fallen in my own backyard, and now I know that to the nearest hundredth of an inch.

high-capacity rain gauge

The only special equipment involved is a high-capacity 4″ diameter rain gauge, which costs about $30. The rain gauge needs to be mounted somewhere in the open, usually on a wooden post. Mine is currently mounted on the side of a wooden barrel planter, but when my garden fencing project is complete next month I plan on mounting it on one of the wooden corner posts. Measuring snowfall and hail is a little more completed, but the CoCoRaHS website has complete instructions available, even slideshows and videos for training. We normally get very little snow here, though we are overdue for a big snow event.

If you’re interested in the amount of rain (or snow and hail) your area receives, you might check out the CoCoRaHS website. The main page features a clickable U.S. map where you can drill down to your state and county and get precipitation information in a variety of formats. If you don’t find any weather stations close to your area, you might consider volunteering yourself. It only takes a few minutes of active time each day. And if you already regularly check a rain gauge in your backyard, you might as well get an ‘official’ one and join the CoCoRaHS team like I did!

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Impact Community Garden Fall Update

Posted on October 12, 2012 by Dave @ HappyAcres

I promised an update on the Impact Community Garden and here it is (finally). We had a sweet potato digging party there this week, and I took the opportunity to bring my camera and get a few photos of the garden. For those of you not familiar with this project, it is a community garden we started in 2011 on the property of Impact Ministries in downtown Evansville, IN. I serve as gardening guru, assisting a wonderful group of folks who either don’t have the space or the gardening knowledge to garden on their own. They all share in the work and the output of the garden, and we all have a lot of fun as we learn to garden together!

digging sweet potatoes (click on any image to enlarge)

The overall yield of the sweet potatoes this year was less than last year, but the potatoes themselves were nice sized. This pretty well mirrors how they did here in our home garden.

two nice sweet potatoes from the Big Dig

The fall plantings have done well. The rains finally came in time to help things grow for the fall season. We planted one row each of kale, collard greens, turnips, cabbage and broccoli back in August. Other than the broccoli, all of these are doing great. Some of the top heavy tomato cages  keep falling over on the row of broccoli, smothering the plants. We removed a few of the toppling tomato plants, and hopefully there is still enough growing season to make some broccoli. We also learned not to plant anything in between rows of caged tomatoes, at least not in fall. It worked fine this spring when the tomatoes were better behaved!

turnips and kale are growing lush

The turnips sized up nicely. We have Purple Top and the white Hakurei varieties planted. These are growing where potatoes were planted in spring. We do our best to maximize the garden space with succession planting.

some of the turnip harvest

We planted two rows of Asian greens and lettuce last month. These faster growing plants really took off. There should be greens and lettuce to cut in about a week or two. All of the fall plantings were mulched with a combination of leaves, grass clippings, shredded paper and newspaper. It all serves to keep down weeds, conserve moisture, and add organic material to the soil when it is worked in.

lettuce plants mulched with grass clipping and newspaper

We made a conscious effort to do more mulching this year, and it has worked out well. With the cost of straw going up each year (it was $6 a bale this year), it pays to find alternative FREE mulch materials like leaves, grass clipping and paper. We also plan to use cardboard on the pathways to keep down the weeds next year.

komatsuna plant mulched with shredded paper

Another project we need to work on is a compost bin. I need to pick up some wooden pallets so we can make some compost bins like my Brown Gold Yugo here at HA. I am hoping I can find some free pallets so we can get the bins built before cold weather really sets in. Right now we are piling up the garden waste, which is inefficient as well as unsightly. Our pallet composter here might not be fancy, but it gets the job done AND it looks better than the piles of stuff we have now.

wooden pallet compost bins at Happy Acres

I hope you have enjoyed this update of the Impact Community Garden. Until the next time, Happy Growing from Happy Acres to all you gardeners out there!

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