I'm a Cheater

Apologies for the blog hiatus. Rest assured, I have tons of backlogged pictures to post.  But first I'll start with a confession. I'm a basil cheater. There, I said it. The past two years we have tried to grow basil from seed and both times we got abysmal success rates and very slow growing seedlings. So, one day when we were at Lowes, I spotted....basil plants! I picked up four, and took them home to the garden and no one was the wiser. Well, until now.

Any lingering guilt I felt over adulterating our garden with store-bought plants quickly evaporated as these basil plants flourished and started producing tons of sweet, sweet basil leaves.

Basil leaves that can be made into pesto:

I usually go with a super simple Food Network pesto recipe.  Just basil, pine nuts, olive oil, garlic, and parm, with salt and pepper to taste. 

And...so good I forgot to take the finished picture.  I'll include it later - basil is almost ready for a second batch:

Garden progress: kale, kale, kale

The garden is coming right along!  Here's the overhead view:

Garden overhead view May 1

Garden overhead view May 31

After traveling for work for a week and a half, it seemed like I returned to a new back yard. There were actually some vegetables ready to eat! Radishes are a new gardening experience for me. I had to look up the harvesting instructions for them. I had no idea they helpfully pop out of the ground so you can check if they're about one inch in diameter and ready to eat.

Kale, spinach, and arugula are also making a strong appearance.  There is so much kale I made a salad from a recipe I learned from my friend Stephanie and took it to a neighborhood BBQ. The salad is appropriately called "crack kale salad" and it is amazing. 

Cabin Fever

According to the schedule, last week we should have planted spinach, peas and radishes outside. Last year at this time, we had already started spinach and peas outdoors.  Good lesson for gardening (and life, I suppose): every year is different.  The weather has been wildly uncooperative this winter for both gardening and bike commuting.  Here is a picture of our garden as of this morning:

Snow-covered backyard and garden - March 1, 2015

The good news is that we will probably have a shorter wait for peas once we get them outdoors, since this year we started them inside:

Peas: one is already blooming

Last year the peas took 90 days from planting outdoors February 21 until the first harvest. This year, since we planted indoors in January, we should expect to start harvesting about a month earlier or possibly more, since we've given our peas a head start with the artificial lighting and heating pad.

As we wait for the snow to melt and the soil to thaw, we've been busy planting and replanting inside. We moved tomatoes, kale, broccoli, cabbage, cucumbers from the small tray to individual pots:

We've planted basil, peppers (cayenne, jalepeño, bell), and eggplant in the small tray over the last few weeks. Once we can move the hardier plants outside we'll transfer the new batch to individual pots and wait for the last frost (around April 10 with 90% likelihood according to the University of Virginia Climatology Office). 

The outlook from the National Weather Service looks promising for above freezing temperatures, if not ideal for biking.  Maybe we'll be able to update next week on outdoor planting.

Alexandria, VA forecast for the week of March 1

Back in Business

It's cold, wet, and windy outside, which means one thing: it must be time to start our 2015 garden!

Peas seven days post-planting

The beginning of this planting season is all about acting on lessons learned from last year. For example, some of our plants didn't hit their stride until too late in the growing season, resulting in low yields.  So this year we started kale and eggplant in the first round and plan to harvest them in late April and July, respectively. 

Organizing the seeds so we can remember what we planted

All the tools - bucket of home grown dirt on the right

Seeds in - ready to put under the light

Another difficulty we have growing inside is a lack of natural light and cool temperatures - it is usually around 62 F in the back room where the plants are, but seeds like to germinate at temperatures between 70 and 80 F.  Without turning up the heat and doubling the gas bill, we decided to get a heating pad for the plants and an industrial size LED light on a timer.  Roger's dad was in the process of retrofitting his farm with LED lighting - something that will result in huge energy savings for his business - and was nice enough to send us one of the 4-foot LED lights for our little experiment.  

Putting old textbooks to good use

Heating mat

The heating mat gets the soil temperature up in the 70-80 F range, ideal for most seeds (if we wanted to be precise, we would move peppers to separate pots and heat them up to 85 F, but we'll see how this works for now).  The light is timed to turn on at 5:30 AM and off at 8:30 PM, simulating a longer growing day.

Anecdotally, these measures seem to be making a difference already, although I don't have measurements to back that up.  These are pictures taken 7 days after planting:

From front to back: 2 rows kale, 2 rows tomatoes, 2 rows cucumbers, eggplant/peppers, broccoli, 8 rows peas

Left to right: peas, broccoli, cucumbers

The 2015 Garden Plan

New year, new plan for the garden!  We've changed up what we're planting this year, and where everything's going.  Last year we learned some key lessons the hard way:

• You reaaallly only need 2 or 3 jalapeño plants, or else you'll be force feeding jalapeños to your friends, neighbors, and random people you pass on the street.  Seriously we had about 10 lbs of jalapeños from the 4 plants we grew last year.
• Last year we got a little over-excited and planted too much stuff, resulting in a jungle of tomatoes and beans that we couldn't hack through.  We ended up not picking a lot of veggies because we couldn't reach them, and they smothered other things we tried to grow, like swiss chard
• We could have planted a lot more spinach and other early spring veggies.  This year we're going nuts with the spring veggies, and starting them a lot earlier

So without further ado (drumroll), here's the Official 2015 Garden Plan!!



The biggest change this year is that we're going to try and do two major plantings: an early spring crop and late summer crop.  The spring layout shows a lot of peas, spinach, kale, and other cold weather crops.  Then around early/mid-May, we'll switch to the Summer layout!

Just like last year's layout, each square is one square foot of our garden.  The brown squares is the footpath.  The dark green squares are where the trellises will go.

Spring Layout

Once summer rolls around, we get to the good stuff: tomatoes, cucumbers, eggplant, peppers, etc all growing on the trellises!  A lot of the non-trellis plants (carrots, kale, cabbage) stay the same year round.

Summer/Fall Layout

One last thing - here's our predicted yields.  They seem wildly high to me, but we'll see what happens!  Anyone know what to do with 70 lbs of beets??

* Yield estimates are from here: http://commongroundkalamazoo.com/images/YieldCalc.pdf and a few other sources I found on google.

Last Harvest

The first frost of the season should be here any day now, which means it's time to harvest most of the remaining vegetables. Here is a recap of today's harvest:

• The Brussels sprouts were a complete bust. Bugs have eaten all the sprouts and I'm really disappointed about it.  No pictures because it's too sad.
• Kale is not doing much better, but we are going to keep that in the ground because it is frost resistant.
• We got a huge new batch of cayenne peppers! They are now strung up in another south facing window.

Just picked from the garden

42 cayenne peppers in total

From an earlier harvest of peppers; took about a month to get this red

• Bell peppers have stopped turning red, so I picked the rest of the green ones.  Healthy snacks all week!

• What in the world are we going to do with all these flipping jalapeños?? 2.5 lbs. We already pickled 5 lbs of these, and there is no way I'm doing that again (will have to post on that later). We've been making a LOT of jalepeño poppers, but you can only eat so many of those in one sitting before feeling like you are permanently damaging your esophagus lining.  The good news is that these stay fresh a really long time, so we can probably draw this batch out through December.  Any jalepeño recipe or preservation ideas?

• And finally, I just picked the rest of the eggplants and cherry tomatoes. Those green things are the few sad little kale leaves that were ready.  See all the holes from where bugs are eating them?  Arg!  The good news is that eggplants are good to eat at just about any size, so you can either wait all those weeks and get a huge eggplant (enough for one eggplant parm), or just pick the little ones and use them for other things.  I'm going to try to make eggplant chips with these - I'll report back in another post.

Stay tuned for recaps on more vegetables and some future work on getting the garden ready for winter!

It's getting hot in here (so hot)

One of the biggest surprises of the season was cayenne peppers.  The plants took the longest time to germinate, and then only a few survived long enough to be transplanted outside.  One went up on our deck and one was planted among the jalepeños.  

I didn't take much notice of these plants while we were bringing in loads of cherry tomatoes, beans, bell peppers and jalepeños.  Then one day we were on the deck and noticed a long green pepper hanging from one of the pepper plants.  Upon closer inspection downstairs, the plant was actually pretty full of peppers ready to be picked, they were just the exact same color as the rest of the plant, so we weren't noticing them:

How many peppers can you spot?

We probably took about 20 peppers off the plant that day:

Not wanting to find ways to eat 20 cayenne peppers right away (our digestive systems probably thanked us), and also not wanting to burden our neighbors with even more spicy pepper give aways (more on how we are testing the limits of friendship by pushing jalepeños on neighbors, friends and relatives in a future post), we looked to alternatives.

Our friends Luther and Tina are experienced cayenne pepper dryers, and we took their advice.  I didn't take any how-to pictures for this, but it's exactly what it looks like: take a needle and thread and string the peppers together, hanging them from a wall or window frame.  The pictures show roughly weekly progression of drying/reddening for the cayennes:

Just to get the whole picture, we have two more strings this size in other locations around the house, and will probably double that judging by the number of peppers still growing on the plant today.  And this is just from the one plant that survived in our garden!  The other plant just popped out that single pepper and died (we didn't pay very close attention to our roof plants, so that's our fault).  Moral of the story:  one healthy cayenne plant is all you need unless you're planning on opening a sriracha factory.

So now the next step is figuring out what to do with a bunch of dried cayenne peppers.  We could grind them up into a powder (I'm not sure if they are dry enough for that yet), or freeze them.  Any other suggestions?