What are you eating from your garden today?

broccoli side shoots, an onion with lots of green tops and parsley in an omlette for breakfast. parsley over a canned veggie soup for lunch.

I have chard, lettuce, collards, broccoli side shoots, a few carrots, radishes and some onions available for harvest. My spinach is alive but barely has true leaves. I have high hopes for an early crop when the days lengthen.
Kale is further along but not harvest size.

All are under plastic hoops or inside a plastic greenhouse with a small heater set at 45* Daytime temps have stayed above freezing and only a few nights below freezing.

Kay

Frozen green beans and shallots were part of supper tonight.

Harvested our first 2 heads of cabbage for New Year's Day lunch (sauteed with bacon- yum!!), have broccoli, cabbage, carrots, lettuce, spinach, collards, carrots, swiss chard & onions still growing. Had pork chops, broccoli, salad (lettuce from the garden) and fried okra (frozen from summer) the other night for dinner. Looking forward to starting seeds for our summer garden in a week or two!! Yippeee!!!!

True to an old recipe .. " Welsh Cowl " ( pronounce cowl as Korl )
It is a thick mutton & veg stewsoup , made for as many veg out the gardens as possible a couple of months ago in a massive 10 x 3 people batch of meals then frozen down to minus 21 oC .
It freezes and reconstitutes very very well , no mushiness at all . Though we did need to add a shake of sea salt and some ground black pepper corns to bring it back to as how it was on day one.

Served with five or six 1/2 inch chunks of strong white welsh cheese per person . Lovely fare , a complete meal in one.

Cucumbers, beans and capsicum. Oh and one or two dodgy tomatoes, something has been eating them and a few of them have started rotting at the bottom before they were ripe so I'm not sure what's going on there!

I have more cucumbers than I know what to do with, might have to investigate pickling them. I don't like pickles but hubby does...

Erica ,
For your tomatoes look up bottom end rot .. I think epsom salts helps correct its effects.


Cucumbers ..... thinly sliced in slightly sweetened brown malt vinegar served ice cold on salads , used as a beauty treatment to cool and reduce baggy skin around the eyes ( no vinegar or sugar though ) or in salmon sandwiches or pimms and citrus lemonade or better still as my old aunt Gin used to say , "In the dust bin " , she couldn't stand them either .

ericam.....To foil Blossom End Rot (BER), sprinkle around the plant and dig a little in around it with powdered milk. The plants need calcium. The next flush of tomatoes will be BER free as a rule, but you may save some of the current batch with powdered milk.

Some folks say to add copper to the soil. I've never tried that, only the powdered milk, and it worked for me.

Epsom salts and steady watering helps too. There are numerous backthreads about correcting Blossom end rot (BER).

Thanks guys, I had actually backed off the watering as I thought that might be the problem so I guess I'd better go back to watering a bit more. I've got both powdered milk and Epsom salts so I guess I can use either, will do some reading later.

My poor garden is a bit neglected at the moment, I've either been too busy or it's been too hot!

Erica,

maybe you would like sour and half-sour pickles which are not pickled in vinegar. My husband makes these and, in the opinions of many people on the floor where I worked, are amazing. All winter, these ladies would remind me to bring in pickles for them come summer.

Laurie

nycquilter wrote:Erica,

maybe you would like sour and half-sour pickles which are not pickled in vinegar. My husband makes these and, in the opinions of many people on the floor where I worked, are amazing. All winter, these ladies would remind me to bring in pickles for them come summer.

Laurie

receipes please. These sound interesting.

Kay

A breakfast of a farm fresh egg with a generous side of sauteed summer preserved orange and green bell peppers, and sweet banana peppers with seasonings.

ericam, I'd read that the calcium needs the Epsom salts in order to be absorbed by the plants. I've actually used some of both around some of my tomatoes, about a handfull of each buried in the soil, and it worked and didn't hurt them that I could see.
You'll have to experiment to see what works best for you.

Thanks quiltbea, I did some reading yesterday afternoon and found the posts mentioning that so I put both in last night. We'll see what happens.

nycquilter, the pickles sound interesting, I agree with walshevak, recipe please!

Hi everyone. Sorry for the delay in posting this. It's my husband's recipe and I had to check with him that I was taking the correct recipe. This recipe comes from Cooks.com--No-fail sour pickles.

1 c. kosher salt to 1 gallon water
several sprigs of fresh dill
3 or 4 garlic cloves, cut in half
1 bay leaf
1 tbsp. pickling spice
2 or 3 whole allspice

Wash and dry sufficient small pickling cucumbers to fill a gallon jar. Add the herbs and spices. Mix up the salt water mixture and pour it over the cucumbers covering them totally. Cover the jar.

Let the jar stand 5 days to a week at room temperature. As they start to pickle, gases will form in the jar and the mixture will bubble over unless you open the jar daily and release these gases. The pickles will be half-sour at this point and can be refrigerated. They will continue to get sour in the refrigerator and will keep well for about 2 months or more, depending upon the firmness of the variety of the cucumber.

Enjoy! They are really good.

Laurie

NYCQ, how many pounds of cukes will this do?

that depends on the size of the cukes and if you use a gallon jar. We don't; we have a very large plastic thing that I used to store flour in. But the salt/water is given in a ratio. That way, if the cukes are not covered, simply mix another gallon or half-gallon and add 'til they are covered. We also do them in batches as the cucumbers ripen. That's the best answer I can give you.

Thank you!

Still getting a trickle of green beans from the 3 squares I haven't pulled yet. Peas are in full swing...golden, snow, snap, and shelling. Chard is a constant. Still a trickle of sweet peppers, but mostly pulling them from the freezer now. Harvested my first head of broccoli with more on the way.
All of this combines with sliced Tromboncino from the freezer (holds up beautifully!) and the occasional okra and/or eggplant slices from the freezer to make a great stirfry that I am eating 3x a week or more.

had tuna sandwhich with 2011 cucumbers/pickles ( ran out of refrigerator 2012 cucumbers/pickles .....oh they were sooo good!)

happy gardening
rose

This afternoon I got to use both dehydrated sliced summer carrots and eggplant pieces in homemade beef barley soup, then added some brandywine roasted tomatoes from the freezer. It's fun and satisfying when the garden goodness keeps on giving during the winter

" Darling before it snows can you get me a few carrots for tea " .... " Yes my love " and so off I go to the veg bed nearest the bungalow to get the carrots ...notice anything strange ? They tasted normal .


Then just after I washed them off it was , " Sweetheart , I forgot , can you get a parsnip or two for soup , about a pound and a half please".

I went to a bed I am clearing out and saw just a little greenery left of a parsnip , went and and tried to lift the parsnip out the ground with my fingers like normal. I could only get hold of a tiddley bit so went and got a garden fork & found myself with a fight on my hands
This is what came up all 3 & 3/4 pounds of it .


It turned out to be four individual parsnips intertwined because my MM had too much newly composted bird muck in it

That is AWESOME! Well done that you came out on the good side of the fight. Was it tasty?

camprn wrote:That is AWESOME! Well done that you came out on the good side of the fight. Was it tasty?

Dunno .. the soup is for tomorrow .
It took a while to untangle the four roots to get them as individual parsnips and then chop all the extra legs and arms off.
Peeling and sorting it all out took just over 15 minutes and took 3/4 of a pound off the initial weight .
I'm going to buy some carrots to finish the soup with as there is no way am I using five square feet of baby fingerling carots out my ANSFG beds for it , I'd rather have them as orange fingers with other veg and meat on a plate instead .

plantoid wrote:" Then just after I washed them off it was , " Sweetheart , I forgot , can you get a parsnip or two for soup , about a pound and a half please".

I went to a bed I am clearing out and saw just a little greenery left of a parsnip , went and and tried to lift the parsnip out the ground with my fingers like normal. I could only get hold of a tiddley bit so went and got a garden fork & found myself with a fight on my hands
This is what came up all 3 & 3/4 pounds of it .



It turned out to be four individual parsnips intertwined because my MM had too much newly composted bird muck in it

Hope it tastes terrific after you fought it and won!