Back on Track

August 15, 2017
Still quite exhausted and having bad side effects from the medication the doctor put me on, so I'm struggling to keep up with the garden. Keeping up with the blog has unfortunately fallen by the wayside.  So instead of the play by play for the last 3 weeks, here are some highlights:

We harvested Kent strawberries for pretty much the entire month of July. The grand total, including at least a pound of them that we ate straight off the plants, was close to 18 lbs. This was out of one 4' x 8' bed. Here are a couple of the stranger berries we came across:

We harvested a nice bunch of garlic scapes in early July, just over 4 lbs in total. We gave a few away and made pesto. I still have a bunch in the crisper I need to either pickle it or make more pesto to freeze. Garlic scapes are a nice little bonus when you grow garlic. They are a bit similar to green onions, but less tender. You can make a pesto with them, toss into a stir-fry, or dice them up and use them as you would green onions.

The scape is actually the seed head forming on the garlic. If left to continue growing, the pointy arrow-shaped end will eventually swell and then pop open to reveal tiny flowers that turn into bulbils. You can then plant the bulbils for more garlic, however this process takes a couple of years for the garlic to mature, so most people plant the cloves of the bulbs instead. Each garlic clove you plant will become a full bulb throughout the growing season. The scapes should be harvested as soon as they make a complete circle/curl to ensure all the energy from the plant goes to sizing up the bulbs, instead of flowering.

A few weeks later I noticed a number of the garlic plants didn't look so hot, most leaves had died and they were still very small. I think this was due to the repeated freeze/thaw cycles we had this spring. So I lost a few more plants, but on a positive note, the plants that were still good were gorgeous. I harvested a total of 9 lbs of garlic, most of which were large to very large bulbs. Considering we lost probably half the crop between spring and harvest, 9 lbs (150+ bulbs) made me pretty darn happy.

Garlic drying in the sun.

Bulbs all trimmed, cleaned, and sorted for storage.

The biggest and most pleasant surprise of the season has been my peppers. Mind you, we haven't had a super hot summer, and it's been quite dry as well, but my peppers don't seem to care. They're fruiting like crazy and the peppers are just gorgeous.  I picked 2.29 lbs in my first harvest of jalapeños. There are still lots of smaller peppers so I expect a second, possibly even larger, harvest in a few weeks. Since I had no immediate need for some 63 jalapeño peppers, I decided to pickle them to use throughout the winter, though we admittedly already opened a jar. Delicious addition to our potato salad for supper last night.

The recipe for Pickled Jalapeños can be found here, on my Mulberry Kitchen blog.

The jalapeños aren't the only peppers that are fruiting well. I also harvested 1.2 lbs of poblano peppers. They were a very nice size and absolutely gorgeous. I left a number of smaller peppers on the plants to size up, so should have a second harvest of these in a few weeks.

I decided the best way to preserve these to use in the coming months was to dehydrate them. I've had good luck dehydrating peppers before, the little red Thai Chili peppers you see in the photo here. Once dried, they will keep for months, if not years.

First I washed, dried and trimmed the stems off the peppers, arranging them on the dehydrator tray so they could all get lots of air.










It only took 12-15 hours at 120 degrees to dry the peppers enough that they were leathery and the seeds rattled inside. I put them in a mason jar for further storage.

There are a number of other pepper varieties in the garden that are doing well. The bell peppers are HUGE this year. Usually they are about 1/2 the size of grocery store peppers but this year they rival their size. Here are a few shots of the other varieties:

The blueberry harvest is lingering on, though only a few berries left. We froze most of them, minus a few handfuls eaten fresh in oatmeal or for snacking. Erin usually picks a few liters of wild low-bush blueberries as well, but hasn't had the opportunity to this year. We have a total of 6 blueberry bushes now, only two fruited this year though. I'd like to add another 6-10 throughout the yard at some point though, as we do enjoy them quite a lot. I harvested about a pound off of each bush. The berries were plump and sweet this year. We ate a few fresh, but froze most of them for blueberry jam.

The raspberry patch grew quite a bit this year. I'm not sure how much we harvested because mostly I just picked them right off the bush and into my mouth. They were absolutely delicious. I really enjoy having the variety of berries we're growing now and I'm hoping to add more in the future, including goji berries, seaberries, blackberries and gooseberries.

Now that we're back on track. I'll close out with a bunch of random pics of the garden. We're harvesting lots of yellow, green and dragon's tongue beans. Flowers are blooming like mad. Kale is booming and we're in our second planting of lettuce as the first has mostly bolted.