Sweet Potato Harvest

Adam and I harvested roughly 25 sweet potatoes from our garden today. I have plans for these potatoes: ranging from a savory sweet potato bread to sweet potato soup. For tonight, we made a two potato gratin that I got from a Moosewood Restaurant cookbook.

First, let me just say that I love the Moosewood and all of their cookbooks. If I could take Ithaca and subtract the 100 ft of snow they get every year, add in some southern accents and food and shake it until it ended up closer to my parents in Arkansas I would totally live there.

This gratin was the perfect recipe for Adam and I because it combined one of his favorite foods (potatoes) with one of mine (sweet potatoes) and topped it with a mutual favorite (cheese). I have to say, though, I think I'd add less cheese than what the recipe required. What you see here is 4 oz of grated Havarti but it kind of overwhelmed the sweet potato flavor. All in all, however, the gratin was spectacular. So spectacular, in fact, that I forgot to take a picture before we dug in.

Relish Your Garden

In the height of the summer, Adam and I ventured out to the garden in the early morning hours to pick all of our green tomatoes, peppers and onions. We then spent the next two days in my parents' kitchen making my Gram's relish.

This particular relish is a family recipe and, therefore, a big secret. I can tell you there is a lot of chopping involved and several cups of vinegar and sugar but a better accompaniment to black-eyed peas I've never found. Luckily, we had some red peppers in the mix so the relish looks Christmas-y and will make great gifts when that time rolls around.

The huge benefit to making this relish is that we put so many tomatoes to good use. Not being much of a fresh tomato eater myself, Adam and I were often lost as to what to do with the vast amounts of tomatoes we had on hand. Luckily, this relish pretty much wiped us out.

The best part of making this relish is that Adam and I got the very first quart all to ourselves.

Vacation: All I ever wanted

We should have done a little post about how we were going to be absent from the blog-o-sphere for a while. But we didn't. Sorry if you were wondering.

We have been on vacation - not the entire time we've been absent from the blog - and now we are back to the real world.

At least, I am. Since Adam is a lucky ducky teacher, he has the summer off. Since I am a poor pathetic grad student, I have two classes and two jobs for the summer. Fun.

Our garden is going bananas. While we were out of town my parents watered and harvested. Here is what has been harvested so far:

zucchini
bell peppers (!)
herbs
lettuce (but it was bitter-y so we yanked it out)
one okra pod

Everything else is doing really well. Sweet potatoes, potatoes, onions, beans, watermelons, tomatoes and flowers.

Our only failure so far has been our cucumbers. They got the evil cucumber beetle and never recovered.

Pictures soon to come, I promise. Adam may be doing most of the posts for the next two months because of my aforementioned dreary summer plans.

May showers bring slugs

Our garden is growing very quickly now. Our onions are thick and dark green, the potatoes have shot up


we've got our first tomato



and our first little zucchini



BUT, we also have our first pest of the season. Slugs.

It has been so wet this season and the slugs seem to really like the nice, moist mulch we have provided. We first noticed them when we harvested lettuce for the first time and had to pick several slugs off the inner leaves.

Then, yesterday, we went to the garden to discover they had severely munched on our zucchini and cucumber leaves.


We're not real worried because the zucchini, cucumbers and lettuce all have a lot of new growth so they are far from dead.

But we need to get rid of these slugs.

Our plan of action: get the slugs drunk. That's right, apparently, slugs LOVE beer. They love it so much that if you leave a bowl of beer out they will crawl right in and drown. We are also going to spray the leaves of the plant with a soapy water mixture to make them distasteful.

We'll see how it works!

Shout Out

This post is for you, babies Mason!

Last night I saw this pretty little red strawberry with a not-quite-ready berry growing right next to it.

Adam and I are currently blessed with two nieces, one nephew and one mystery niece/nephew on the way.

But this picture reminds me of my little red-headed niece Dorothy and her still-growing baby brother or sister. So this little post is dedicated to them.

Uncle Adam and Aunt Erin wish y'all lived closer to us so we could make you some fresh strawberry shortcake! In the meantime, we'll make do with blog shout-outs.

(And I will continue to look forward to the day when all my nieces and nephews hit the 2 year mark so that I can start referring to them in years instead of months. The month-age thing just confuses me.)

Honey Do

Last week, Adam went out to the farm to make some improvements while I stayed at home and worked on my research papers.

And since a large part of my waking hours since then has been consumed with finishing those research papers, I am just now getting around to writing about his accomplishments that day.

First, he made some bean poles out of bamboo. We are late planting our beans so we don't have any actual bean plants yet - but we've got some beautiful bean poles!


Second, he mulched our seating area. The county is putting in a sewer line near the farm and, therefore had to cut down some trees. They turned those trees into mulch - free for the taking!


Third, he planted our second round okra and covered them with cloches to prevent them from being nibbled on as they were the first time.

All in all, he got quite a lot done! I suspect he also drank a cold beer (or two) under our nice little umbrella but we don't have a picture of that.

Next on the to-do list:
1. Plant beans
2. Plant corn
3. Plant flowers

Summer Plans...

The weather here lately has been summery to say the least. We reached 90 degrees one day this week and weren't far from it during the rest.

These warmer temperatures have been cooking a few ideas I have in my mind for summer projects.

Unfortunately, my summer is not shaping up how I thought it would. Whereas I once thought I would take no classes, I am now taking two classes and will be working a job and (hopefully) a summer assistantship to pay for them.

So, my summer schedule thus far is the most hectic of all.

But after this semester ends (classes end in another week and my assistantship ends on the 15th) I will have one blissfully empty week before summer classes begin.

This is where my mind is currently focused (not, unfortunately, on a paper due tomorrow) and where my "real" summer plans reside.

During that week, I want to:

1. Make a garden apron (like I saw here and here)
2. Make some rosemary shampoo, tarragon perfume and herbal deodorant
3. Construct a ladybug house
4. Make these cute row labels (good ideas here)
5. Drink a cold bottle of wine (and have Adam drive me home!) in the garden on a cool night

Sounds good, right?! It might be a little ambitious for one week, especially since I won't actually be in town for that entire week, but I am looking forward to it.

Now I just need to focus on my papers.

Thank you, mulch.

We got a lot done at the garden today and our garden, I must say, is doing very well. So far, we haven't had many weeds (except in the aisles - which Adam tilled today) and we are thanking the mulch for that. Although we've only had to spot-weed, we are on the lookout for more mulch.

So, to update you on some things:

Onions



Zucchini



Lettuce


Potatoes


The cabbage, cucumber, peppers, strawberries, tomatoes and herbs are also doing great.

We did have a fatality this week - our okra.


I was shocked! Okra was the one plant we could really count on last season. Although we initially blamed deer (more on that later), Adam thinks slugs were the culprit. Ew.

Oh well, we'll try again. And this time we'll probably cover them, like we did with our lettuce on the second go-round.

While Adam tilled our rows today, I planted some mint (in a pot so that it doesn't take over)...


...and some wildflowers (these are going all along our fence).

Happy Earth Day!

(Incidentally, doesn't our earth look kind of like brownie batter? Yum.)

Mad Planting

On the way to the garden today, Adam and I got into a little fight. We don't fight very often but I love how we can both keep our sense of humor during a fight because, usually at some super dramatic moment, one or both of us will start laughing at the ridiculousness of it all. And it is hard to fight in earnest after you've had a good laugh.

That happened today when we were planting. Well, at least, it happened for me. Once we got to the garden we were both steaming and we proceeded to plant in stony silence.

That silence was periodically broken by tersely worded questions like "Where does this basil go?" or "The cabbage perked up" followed by a grunt of acknowledgment.

This is what got me laughing.

Anyway, the long and the short of it is that we made up. We are one little happy family again. I was a little worried that our plants would be affected by the harsh words that we uttered while planting. But we made it up to them too.

So today we planted:


basil (not pictured)

zucchini

okra

cucumbers

And our cabbage has, indeed, perked up.

Speed Planting

Today we (quickly) planted more peppers, tomatoes, marigolds and tarragon. The reason for our haste was because we had to be back home by 8pm for "Lost." We are a bit obsessed.

I'm particularly excited about the tarragon. I love tarragon - the taste and the smell. I happen to have a recipe for tarragon perfume I'd like to try out this year:

Tarragon Perfume (from The Encyclopedia of Country Living)
2 Tbs fresh tarragon, crushed
1 cup quality oil
1 tsp distilled vinegar

Place crushed herbs in a bottle. Cover with the oil and vinegar. Cap the bottle and place in the hot sunshine. Shake the bottle twice daily for three weeks. Strain and use. This can be used as perfume or in dishes. Yum!

I hope to try this as soon as I have enough tarragon. I'll let you know how it goes.

Phew!

We went out to the farm today for the first time since the storm and pretty much everything was intact. The only thing out of place was the cover to our little tool "shed" which had partially blown away.

Here's the status on everything:
lettuce and tomatoes= excellent
onions, herbs, collards and strawberries = good
cabbage = rebounding
peppers = so-so
potatoes = no growth yet

Of course, I forgot the camera so I wasn't able to take any pictures. I did pluck the flowers off some thyme and took a picture when I got home.

Picture of the Day

Who knew potato eye-sprouts could be so pretty?

These here are from a red potato.

Picture of the Day

We've never really had a problem with pests in our little garden. Some of our plot neighbors are obsessed with keeping deer, rabbits, etc. out but we've really only seen a few rabbits and absolutely no deer.

So it surprised us when our first round of lettuce was pecked to death by birds.

We wised up and protected our second batch.

So far, so good.

All in a Twitter

We will be out-of-town this Easter weekend but it looks like our little garden should be getting a fair amount of rain while we are gone. If it does get a little dry, wouldn't it be great if our plants could let us know they're parched?

Well now your plants can Twitter you. Granted, I don't really understand what Twittering is (I have yet to master "texting") but apparently a new device will allow your plants to Twitter when they need water.

I'm not so sure about this. I think we all know those people who are constantly checking their phones or updating their Facebook status with such mundane things as "I'm brushing my teeth and then I'm going to floss!" What if I become obsessed with my plants' hydration status?

Or worse, what if my plants become obsessed with telling me their hydration status?

So, I think we'll forgo this foray into gardening technology for the time being. I like my plants to be the strong, silent type.

Send good thoughts to the garden!

Arkansas has been pretty lucky this year weather-wise. We haven't had any major storms - unlike last spring.

We did have some serious storms move through tonight though. Luckily, central Arkansas did not have any tornadoes but we had a lot of wind and a lot of hail. I kept picturing our poor little peppers being ripped to shreds by apple-sized (yes, apple-sized) hail.

In a side note, how do you like the new layout? Yay or nay?

UPDATE: Forget the garden, send good thoughts to Mena, AR instead.

Watering Woes

One big goal for this year is to figure out our watering system. Last year, we were plagued with watering problems. The water pressure at the farm is so strong that our cheap-o hoses were constantly busting, creating "Lake 25x50" instead of "Garden Plot 25x50."

When we finally bought a decent hose, we showed a remarkable inability to learn from our mistakes and hooked it up to a cheap-o sprinkler. The water pressure caused the sprinkler to rise up and flop around in the dirt so that we had to drive spikes through it in order to keep it stable.

A million other little problems kept creeping up with our sprinkler system last year of which I will spare you the details.

So, this year we have created a new watering system. We put two poles in the ground in the middle of the garden. Initially, we attached oscillating sprinkler heads but these proved to be too powerful for our little space.


Then, Adam brought out the very first watering sprinkler-thing we ever used: The Pound of Rain. This he haphazardly attached to one of the poles and it watered the front half of our garden beautifully without also watering our neighbor's plots.

So, we bought another Pound of Rain (so that we'll have one in front and one in back) and found two tiki torches (on the side of the road) which will work better than the two poles when it comes to holding the Pound of Rain.

We are going to test it out today. If it works, we are going to bury the ugly bright yellow hose so that we aren't constantly tripping over it. Wish us luck!

UPDATE: New watering system works wonderfully. We weren't able to bury the eyesore of a hose tonight but hopefully we'll get to it next weekend.

Cold Peppers

Winter decided to make a final push here in Arkansas. The temperatures on Sunday fell dramatically and the whole state was under a hard frost warning for both Sunday and Monday night.

So, we ventured out to the farm in a swirl of bone-cold wind (particularly jarring since we've been enjoying mid-70s weather) to protect our peppers and tomatoes with homemade cloches.

Our plants owe a debt of gratitude to our addiction to seltzer water because we had a large quantity of empty plastic bottles on hand. Adam, ever the boy scout, tells me he was saving these for just this purpose. We'll remove them on Wednesday when the temperatures return to their normal springtime haunts.

Picture of the Day

Look what I found wiggling through our dirt!

We named him Cletus.

After a brief talk (in which I told Cletus I hope I don't accidentally spear him with a garden tool when next we meet) I bid him goodbye and wished him many worm children.

One Tomato, Dead Tomato

Not sure what happened to this hapless tomato but it just did not make it!


Our other tomatoes look great though. You win some, you lose some.

In other news, today we planted potatoes! Yukon gold, red and sweet potatoes.


We used a similar method as we did last year:
1. Cut off portions of the potato with several "eye sprouts",
2. Plant the potato chunks with the "eye sprouts" facing up
3. Cover with dirt and mulch.

Our potatoes did well last year so I'm hoping we are just as successful this year - particularly with those sweets!

Up next:
1. More planting (flowers, herbs and beans)
2. Figure out our watering system