New England, August 2015

I'm bad about blanching. I just hate it. So I just stick them in the baggie and hope for the best.

About the garlic, we plant garlic in the fall - early November here. I'm not sure how it's done in Ohio, but I'll bet it's sometime in November. I love that about garlic, no spring panic.

I blanched and blanched and blanched last summer, but didn't do so with the peas.

When I thawed and ate them, I didn't much like their texture and flavor, so this time I'm going with blanching.

The beans I blanched last year had good flavor and texture.

It's really not that difficult to do; just Google which veggies require how much blanching time, buy a quantity of ice and some freezer bags, and perhaps a blanching basket.  The lack of the latter item did slow me down last year, so I've ordered one this time.  

Oh!  Another tip:  spread your beans out on a cookie sheet or the like after draining them, cover with paper towels to absorb more of the moisture , put in the fridge overnight, then remove the paper towels and freeze on the cookie sheet before bagging and storing in your freezer.

NHGardener wrote:I'm bad about blanching. I just hate it. So I just stick them in the baggie and hope for the best.

About the garlic, we plant garlic in the fall - early November here. I'm not sure how it's done in Ohio, but I'll bet it's sometime in November. I love that about garlic, no spring panic.

OK...here is the deal, my kitchen gas stove is a BEHEMOTH MONSTER COMMERCIAL GIANT that literally cannot be used except in winter. Heats up the entire house even in the short term. So I will realistically never blanch anything, ya know?

SR
http://www.walmart.com/search/search-ng.do?search_query=hot%20plate&adid=22222222224188854223&wmlspartner=wmtlabs&wl0=1096799558&wl1=b&wl2=jcpenney%20hot%20plate&wl3=11684121046&veh=sem

Blanching takes very little time and improves the quality of food that is stored for months. I blanch the green beans 2 minutes only, drain and put them in freezer bags.

http://nchfp.uga.edu/how/freeze/blanching.html

sanderson wrote:SR
http://www.walmart.com/search/search-ng.do?search_query=hot%20plate&adid=22222222224188854223&wmlspartner=wmtlabs&wl0=1096799558&wl1=b&wl2=jcpenney%20hot%20plate&wl3=11684121046&veh=sem

I would be afraid a canner may fall off one of these things.

Scorpio Rising wrote:

NHGardener wrote:I'm bad about blanching. I just hate it. So I just stick them in the baggie and hope for the best.

About the garlic, we plant garlic in the fall - early November here. I'm not sure how it's done in Ohio, but I'll bet it's sometime in November. I love that about garlic, no spring panic.

OK...here is the deal, my kitchen gas stove is a BEHEMOTH MONSTER COMMERCIAL GIANT that literally cannot be used except in winter.  Heats up the entire house even in the short term.  So I will realistically never blanch anything, ya know?

You clearly need a summer kitchen!

SR, my mother blanches in the micro.  No heating up the house with that.  I guess it's more like steaming - a tad of water in the bottom and hit hi for 1 min or so. Then spread for the freezer like Donna described:
I put mind on parchment paper first.

Oh, and that particular squash in the other photo is a Delicata.  I also have trellised Tromboncinis just starting to take off in my old school SFG:

Bucket watered the SFG this morning - oh my aching back.     I paid close attention & it looks like each square is getting 1 to 1.5 gal of water twice a week.

PS Have you guys seen those ding dang puppies in the New Spacing thread??? The cuteness made me cry here at work.

Camp, I meant for boiling water in a pot for blanching, not canning!!

Blanching in the microwave? Wow! Now that I could get into.

One reason I think your garden looks so healthy and beautiful CC is that you give everything s-p-a-c-e. It's not all growing on top of each other. Plus, I love your woodchip things.

Pulled all the different onions and a few shallots today. Drying now:
 
I think the larger ones are the Green Mountain multipliers and the other joined ones are the regular potato onions. The green stocked ones are from seed 2 yrs ago. I guess the only way I'll ever see large globe onions as if I plant purchased sets.

Does anybody can onions? If so, pressure or water bath? I'd like to just peel them whole and, since they're small enough,  can them up.

CC, why would you want to can your onions?  Those Green Mtn Multipliers especially should keep until Spring, easily (unless you eat them first). Sweet onions won't store so well, so those you could freeze, if you grew any.  Wouldn't the pressure canning process turn the onions to mush?  Maybe leaving them whole would help, but I don't think I'd try it, myself. And unless you're pickling those onions, don't all veggies require a pressure canner?

+1 Molly. CC, those onions and shallots will keep.

The evenings are so chilly that the tomatoes and eggplants just arent getting where they need to be. Kind of sad.

Got some ribbons at the fair and enough prize money to buy 2 pizzas this year.  

There are pickles in the crock.

Is there a plate under the jar, holding the pickles down? So, what ribbons did you receive?

I picked these 3 Spacemaster cukes yesterday (my first of the season) and another one today.  They were sweet and crunchy and delish.  Also several tomatoes as they ripen daily.

Best garden ever.  These are an Italian braiding onion.  They are small variety, but they did great so when the husband builds me three more boxes next year, I'll expand the planting.  I planted four straight in the garden and nothing happened, these were started in February indoors.

Deborah.....Those onions look terrific.  Great job.  Its always nice to expand the garden and grow more crops.  They always taste so much better than store-bought.  Enjoy.

Beautiful!

Every year it seems some things do better, some things do worse.

Last year I had a bumper crop of butternut squash. This year they didn't really take off, and neither did the cucumbers. Squash & zucchini continue to do well, kale is booming. The eggplant, altho looking good, never progressed to the blossom stage soon enough. Was our summer a little too cool?

This is the onion haul from yesterday. I've never had onions this big or successful, so maybe, Deborah, we had perfect conditions for onions!

NHG, those onions are so beautiful! Yes, last year was cooler than this year. Even so I still can't grow a big onion. Did you grow yours from sets? What variety are they?

After watering, I planted out some more seeds for fall today - carrots, three types of lettuce, bok choy and radishes - and transplanted some small kale and collards from a window box into the SFG.. I know I've forgotten some things but I lent my book to someone who started her own SFG from it and I haven't got it back yet. She lives off Cape so she's going to take a photo of my fall planting page and email it to me.

Why a gorgeous day!

NHG and Deborah, those onions look really nice. And I love the way you braided yours, Deborah. That's an awesome look, as good as any decoration of any other kind and more charming than most.

Hi Deborah! I don't know how I missed that gorgeous braid of yours earlier. What variety are those? Is there another name besides Italian braiding onion? Did you start them from sets or seed?

Guess I'll be asking the same questions of anybody that can grow onions so I can figure this out. Lol

CC

CC,

Although my onions and garlic weren't very large this year, I CAN grow them. Generally, I start them from sets, although I also did experiment with replanting the bulbs of some supermarket green onions, and actually harvested two fairly good-sized specimens from that source.

I have one surviving red onion sprout that I started from seed (first attempt with this method).

I find that too much water usually causes rot.  

Hope this info is helpful!

Thank you Marc and CapeCoddess.  I ordered RED MARBLE CIPPOLINI ONION seeds (80 days) (HEIRLOOM) W28104 from Pinetree Garden Seeds and started them in the basement in February under a grow lamp.  I planted four seeds directly in the garden and nothing came of it.

Thanks to CapeCoddess's posts about garlic, I had an okay garlic harvest.  I planted in the fall but they didn't get very big.  I figure I planted one bulb and got two bulbs back.  It is really spicy.  I used the variety that they have at my local farm supply store.  The leaves fell off so I couldn't braid them.

And then thanks to the internet, I found out how to braid the onions.  I'm trying to get my garden to be as good as my husband's grandmother and mother.  They were both from Italy and the garden supplied most of the food for the year.  They would plant one or two acres and their families were depending on the harvest so they had a lot invested in it.  Unfortunately, my mother-in-law taught me how to cook but she didn't teach me how to garden.

Some of the onion is going in the spaghetti Sunday.

I planted onion from seed indoors sometime around February, too. This year I planted one to a cup in a tray (you know those planter inserts you put in trays - what are those called?) instead of planting an entire tray of them and then having to separate them to transplant.

I'm thinking my seeds were over a year old, but I have to check my packets and see if I still have the packets. These were red onions so I think it's easy to tell where they came from. I may have bought this onion packet this year.

Then transplanted outdoors. I waited until they were more hefty this year before I transplanted them, last year I don't know what happened, I transplanted an entire bed but they kind of disappeared. Whether they got eaten or what I don't know, but this year they were bigger seedlings, so that may have helped.