The Harvest continues

It's a wonderful time of year in the garden, getting more food out of it everyday. Just in the past week I had enough cucumbers to make pickles, I've harvested the Garlic,discovered that I have lovely large straight carrots, dried the blue podded peas for winter use and had my first fresh fennel.

Lacto Fermented Dill Pickles

I decided to try my luck at making traditional Lacto Fermented Dill Pickles in my new pickle crock. I got the method from the Wild Fermentation website.

Timeframe: 1-4 weeks

Special Equipment:

* Ceramic crock or food-grade plastic bucket
* Plate that fits inside crock or bucket
* 1-gallon/4-liter jug filled with water, or other weight
* Cloth cover

Ingredients (for 1 gallon/4 liters):

* 3 to 4 pounds/1.5 to 2 kilograms unwaxed
* cucumbers (small to medium size)
* 3⁄8 cup (6 tablespoons)/90 milliliters sea salt
* 3 to 4 heads fresh flowering dill, or 3 to 4
* tablespoons/45 to 60 milliliters of any form of
* dill (fresh or dried leaf or seeds)
* 2 to 3 heads garlic, peeled
* 1 handful fresh grape, cherry, oak, and/or
* horseradish leaves (if available)
* 1 pinch black peppercorns

Process:

1. Rinse cucumbers, taking care to not bruise them, and making sure their blossoms are removed. Scrape off any remains at the blossom end. If you’re using cucumbers that aren’t fresh off the vine that day, soak them for a couple of hours in very cold water to freshen them.
2. Dissolve sea salt in ½gallon (2 liters) of water to create brine solution. Stir until salt is thoroughly dissolved.
3. 3. Clean the crock, then place at the bottom of it dill, garlic, fresh grape leaves, and a pinch of black peppercorns.
4. Place cucumbers in the crock.
5. Pour brine over the cucumbers,place the (clean) plate over them, then weigh it down with a jug filled with water or a boiled rock. If the brine doesn’t cover the weighed-down plate, add more brine mixed at the same ratio of just under 1 tablespoon of salt to each cup of water.
6. Cover the crock with a cloth to keep out dust and flies and store it in a cool place.
7. Check the crock every day. Skim any mold from the surface, but don’t worry if you can’t get it all. If there’s mold, be sure to rinse the plate and weight. Taste the pickles after a few days.
8. Enjoy the pickles as they continue to ferment. Continue to check the crock every day.
9. Eventually, after one to four weeks (depending on the temperature), the pickles will be fully sour. Continue to enjoy them, moving them to the fridge to slow down fermentation.

After only 24 hours the salt has removed enough water from the cucumbers that my boiled rock has sunk below the brine.



August 10, 2010: Today is day number 3 and there is something happening there is foam from fermentation bubbles on the surface and the brine has darkened so I can no longer see the pickles or the plate. I tasted the brine and there is a nice dill flavor.

Weekly Garden Update

I'm starting to get enough produce from the garden that I can freeze some. So far zucchini, peas and beans. The blue podded peas are all filled out and I hope to pick them soon and dry them for winter soups. I was surprised to read in my copy of, Preserving the Harvest, that they should be blanched for three minutes in steam before drying them just the same as you would do if you were freezing them. Lots of mystery squash on the vine from the seed packet labeled, Fun with Winter Squash, the latest one that I discovered yesterday looks like Acorn squash, maybe a yellow variety. (Not shown in the video.)

Scones baked in my Solar Oven

Trying out my new toy, doing a comparison of Scones backed in my gas oven and ones baked in my new Solar Oven. Just a very inexpensive $22.98 light weight Solar Over called Sun Chef which I bought from Pine Creek Enterprises.

If you know what the mystery squash and tomato are leave a comment.

Squash are starting to appear on the vines of my heirloom fun with winter squash plants but I not sure what they are, at least not all of them so if you can identify them please leave a comment. The same goes for the mystery tomato in the the garden center it was just labeled Heirloom, I've never had a tomato shaped quite like it before so if you can identify it I would appreciate it. Getting more produce from the garden almost on a daily basis today I had my first cucumber from the greenhouse and more peas from the garden.

Getting produce daily from the square foot garden

It's a wonderful time of year when the garden starts to yeild enough that I'm eating fresh produce on a daily basis. No sign of a ripe tomato yet but that is quite normal for this area I'm usually well into August before I get my first tomato. Some of the ones in the greenhouse are reaching full size though so it shouldn't be much longer.

A beautiful day for a walk in the park.

It was a hot July afternoon so I decided to go to the cool side of the island for a walk in the park land, cool breezes and fog.

July 13, 2010 Weekly Square Foot Garden Update

The garden is progressing nicely and seems to be really enjoying this fine summer weather that we have had lately. I've had an unwanted visitor in the garden digging up my potatoes and I suspect it is a raccoon. I've left him a little surprise for his next visit. I had several pairs of robins nest on the property earlier this spring and I enjoyed talking to them as they fed their young and taught them to fly. I wasn't aware that they nest twice in the same season until this week when I discovered two new nests in the gardens.

Green tomatoes in the greenhouse.



Greenhouse cucumber Carmen starting to produce.

Square foot garden update July 6, 2010

At last we had a whole week without rain, next thing you know I will be complaining about all of the dry weather, there's no satisfying a gardener. The week without rain was wonderful and I was able to produce several batches of compost tea and apply it to the garden.

Things are growing quickly now with the warm weather and all of the sunshine. I had some zucchini, kale and Swiss chard for dinner last night and today I had some of my lettuce and radish in a salad, it's great to be getting produce from the garden again. Today I see several of the winter squash are in bloom as well as some of the cucumbers.

My video is a day late this week because for some unknown reason I haven't been able to upload to YouTube for the past 24 hours.

To date there have been 1,893 different people from 56 different countries visit the blog but I don't seem to get many comments. Please take a moment make a comment and let me know where you are from , I would love to know more about who is following the blog.

Special hello to all of my friends in the Yahoo Heirloom Gardening group.

Heirloom fun with winter squash., originally uploaded by Campobello Island.

I want to take this opportunity to welcome the members of the Yahoo Group HeirloomGardening2 who are visiting my blog for the first time. The group is a great source of knowledge and heirloom seed varieties through their seed bank. Click on the link above to have a look at the groups web page. I'm growing mostly heirloom vegetable varieties this year and most of those came from the seed bank. A few photos taken in the garden this morning:

Clicking on any of the photos will take you to my flickr account and more info on the variety in the photo.

The bunny is back

My bunny is back and this morning he clipped a branch off a high-bush blueberry and enjoyed the leaves, this I don't mind just stay out of my vegetable garden and so far that is just what he has done, no garden damage yet.

We had a week of fairly wet weather, 2.5 inches of rain, so I wasn't able to do any compost tea watering this week. I'm pleased with the progress of most things in the garden, so far the only food from the garden has been parsley, lettuce and radish but several other crops are starting to grow nicely now and it won't be long before kale, chard ans zucchini will be ready to eat and preserve.

I took this little clip at Rugosa Rose Alpaca Farm earlier in the week.

Chianti, bred by David Austin, England 1967

Chianti, bred by David Austin, England 1967, originally uploaded by Campobello Island.

I took some footage of this rose in this weeks update but I just had to show you this photo too, it is really putting on a show right now.

As you can see from the video things are progressing along quite nicely in the vegetable garden. I've had a meal of garlic scapes and I'm using my own lettuce regularly now, some time this week I will pick the first crop of French Breakfast Radish I ate one in the garden this week but they weren't full size yet. The weather has improved much warmer now and not so much rain in the past week we only had a half inch of rain, but the forecast calls for showers for the next couple of days so that should give everything a good watering.

I'm still very pleased with the results that I'm getting with compost tea and of course it has the added bonus of being completely organic.

I planted a Plum tree today and in the process dug up a nest of earwigs so I suppose they will be the next curse to hit the garden, my neighbor has made traps which he say work so maybe I should build some too. He filled a 2 inch piece of black plastic pipe with drinking straws, the earwigs hide in there you tap it on the ground and they come out so you can spray them with soap and water which kills the.

After I had taken the video and posted it one of the Blue Podded Peas bloomed. It is every bite as nice as a sweet pea it just doesn't have the nice fragrance.

June 15, 2010 Weekly Square Foot Garden and Compost Tea update

Most of the garden has had two compost tea applications, the first one was kind of lite because the ground was already very wet after a weeks worth of rain. But the past week was rain free except for a shower last night so the second application was a real watering. I'm seeing good results within a few days of first using it plants that had been kind of yellow and limp were standing at attention and getting greener. The tomatoes in the greenhouse still aren't as green as the ones in the garden but there is a big improvement and they have grown several inches this week. I think there are a couple of factors at work here just a few days before the rain started I gave all of the established plants a feeding of a slow release organic fertilizer then the rain would have leached a lot of that into the soil and from what I've been able to read on the internet the compost tea both feeds the plant and enables it to better use nutrients that are already in the soil. So I guess it was lucky that I put the fertilizer on when I did. I've seen real improvement in beets, fennel, chard, lettuce and tomatoes.

My Ground Cherries in the grow bag greenhouse are in bloom, first time I've grown these and I have never tasted one so I'm kind of excited.

SFG up-date and Compost Tea

Things are progressing in the garden as well as could be expected after a week of wet weather. I've been seeing a lot on the internet about the benefits of the new method compost tea. In stead of just steeping a bag of compost in water as people have done for many years the new method says to add two tablespoons of molasses, a crushed 1000 milligram vitamin C tablet and some seaweed or fish emulsion to five gallons of water and to bubble air through this for 24 hours. The resulting tea is applied both to the foliage and soil in your garden and must be used immediately as it has a very short shelf life. From what I've been able to learn from the internet the enzymes, bacteria and fungi that develop in the tea are both a nutrient to the plant and help the plant to process the nutrients that are already in the soil.

Well I bought an aquarium air pump and some material to make compost tea bags from and I have made my first batch. I didn't add any seaweed or fish emulsion but the compost that I'm using is Seafood Compost. The first batch has been applied and the next batch is brewing. It is recommended that you reapply the tea every seven to ten days, with the size of my gardens that means I will likely always have a batch on the go, because by the time I finish one application it will be time to start over again.

Lakeland's Easy Scones

Lakeland's Easy Scones, originally uploaded by Campobello Island.

Lakeland's Easy Scones

ingredients

* 375g self-raising flour
* 1 tbsp caster sugar
* ¼ tsp salt
* 30g butter
* 180ml milk
* 125ml water

method

1. Prepare a flat baking sheet. Sift flour, sugar and salt into a large bowl, rub in butter with fingertips.
2. Using a spatula, stir in the milk and enough water to make a sticky dough.
3. Turn dough onto a floured surface, knead quickly and lightly until smooth.
4. Use hand to press dough out evenly to 2cm (¾") thickness, cut into 5cm (2") rounds. Gently knead scraps of dough together and repeat pressing and cutting out of dough. Place rounds on baking sheet, brush with a little extra milk, if desired. Bake in a very hot oven for about 15 minutes. (I baked mine at 450F for ten minutes)
Lakeland recipe link.

Look who visited my garden today

Square Foot Garden weekly update June 1, 2010

Now that the garden has been planted and most things are up and growing I've decided to do a weekly video update for the remainder of the summer. This will let anyone who is following the blog know what is happening and it will give me a video record to refer back to in future years.

My timing couldn't have been better this morning just as I was finishing this video it started to rain and has been raining all day.

May 26, 2010 I finished planting the Square Foot Garden

Well everything is in the ground now if I can stop whatever it is that is eating my brasicas I'll be a happy gardener.

This is my first year with the Square Foot Gardening method and I must so far I really like it. It is amazing how much more you can plant in a small space using this method. I can see that it will be much easier to keep the garden weeded too. Just like everthing else weeds need space to grow so the more space taken up by vegetables the less space there is for weeds.

Today was cool and cloudy so that was ideal for transplanting looks like the weather is going to be good for the rest of the week so I'm expecting to see beans up and growing soon.

Victoria Day in the Square Foot Garden

It's Victoria day so it's a rule all Canadian Gardeners must work in the garden. What a day it has been we had a little fog early this morning but then it cleared and has been sunny and hot all day. I didn't get around to checking the temperature but it must have been close to 30 it is almost 25 right now at 8 PM.

I worked all day in the square foot gardens. I'm trying to get the last of the seedlings from the light garden transplanted so today I did tomatoes, chili peppers, ground cherries, parsley and some more lettuce. I also built and installed the last of the trellises this one for the cucumbers to grow on. I decided not to build one of the tomatoes I'm going to grow them on the steel spirals that I have used for years now. The heirloom varieties are all indeterminate and would grow tall on a trellis if I lived in a different climate. With our short season I will have to stop the top growth at 3 to 4 feet as soon as there are a couple of trusses of tomatoes, if I don't they will never ripen.

For my last project of the day I started transplanting the left over seedlings in large pots full of compost from my composter.

Transplanting squash and pumpkin May 21, 2010

A lot of work but the squash and pumpkins have been transplanted, now to hope we don't have any late frosts. It will be fun to watch this squash patch to see what grows out of it. They are all heirloom varieties that came in a seed packet from the Yahoo Heirloom Gardening group labeled, “Fun with winter squash”. I added some buttercup and blue Hubbard and pumpkin seed but I have no idea what the other seeds are. Hopefully I will get to try some varieties that I haven't had before.