It's Easy Being Green

As you round out your seed orders for the 2012 vegetable garden, have you considered adding any heirloom vegetables or fruits to your shopping list? This year we are making the push to dive even deeper into heirlooms and I encourage every gardener and homesteader to do the same.

Heirlooms are open-pollinated varieties of plants that are often 60 or more years old. Most date back 100 years or more. Heirlooms are the truest plants, often showcasing eyestopping individuality and some of the finest flavors you can get in a fruit or vegetable. Aside from sticking it to large agri-business based seed companies who deal in hybrid or Genitically Modified seeds, heirloom seed can be saved and replanted year after year. You can read more about it here.

If you’d like to learn more about heirloom gardening, you should pick up a copy of a brand new book on the subject. The Beginner’s Guide to Growing Heirloom Vegetables: The 100 Easiest-to-Grow, Tastiest Vegetables for Your Garden by Marie Iannotti.

If the 250 pages of scintillating photographs of heirlooms don’t have your taste buds watering and your green thumb twitching, I’m not sure what will. Iannotti gracefully shares her 100 favorite heirlooms, treasures that should be kept under lock and key. She also shares the wonderful stories that round out the unique history of each featured heirloom.

Don’t let the title fool you either. This book should also be a prize for any gardener with more advanced skills. I give it two green thumbs up!

Now you can win a copy of the book along with a spectacular heirloom garden prize pack including 35 packets of heirloom seeds and a bareroot tree! Click the link to head to Timber Press and enter The Heirloom Garden Giveaway

What’s your favorite heirloom fruit or vegetable to grow?

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Proof positive that raised bed gardening has its perks: I unearthed these gems this cold late December afternoon out in the garden here at the Half-Acre Homestead. These were planted in late spring and there are many more in line to mature behind them. For anybody who doubts you can grow your own food in the winter this should tell you otherwise!

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Frosty windows, glinting grass and foggy ponds overtly demonstrated the seasonal change this morning. Tri-Staters, if you didn’t catch the word yet, tonight we’re getting our first freeze warning of the year. That means you gardeners will have some work to do if you haven’t planned ahead.

We did and last night marked one of my favorite nights when it comes to the kitchen garden. It’s what I have affectionately dubbed the Hustle Harvest. This hurried effort is brought on once a year, every fall, when the forecast calls for the first frost of the season. When the call for frost is finally made by the National Weather Service, we bundle up and hustle through the garden harvesting every bit of tender produce that will be ruined by frost. Tomatoes, peppers, basil and other tender herbs that are still hanging on need to be picked.  Even all those green tomatoes will ripen over the next few weeks inside your home. You might even have delicious, bright red homegrown tomatoes to share at your Thanksgiving feast.

Last night was no exception. Talina and Everly had picked most of the tomato plants clean by the time I got home and had quite the wagon load waiting for me to haul in. I bundled up and with the fall nip descending as quickly as the sunset, hustled around picking a load of late season peppers and trimming down the basil plants. We ended up with abouts 30lbs. of green tomatoes that will ripen inside over the next couple of months, 2lbs. of bell and banana peppers and several bushels of fresh basil. The kitchen smells wonderful…that heady spicy scent of basil filling the air.

True, the Hustle Harvest means the end to another gardening season. This one was not quite so productive but it means the beginning to a new gardening year is just around the corner. The anticipation will last all winter.

Hustle Harvest 2011 netted about 30lbs. of green tomatoes, another large bushel of basil for drying and a handful of bell and banana peppers.

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A spur of the moment video shot in our square foot garden while we worked to cleanup the last of the garden plants bit by our first big frost of the year.

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My two zuchinni plants have grown to encompass probably about four square feet of garden space a piece now and are popping out some whoppers!  The zuchinni plants really seem to suck up all the rain water they get which in turn produces some that look like they’re vying for world domination.

This week's harvest from the backyard zuchinni plants

This picture shows this week’s total take.  We’ve been eating a lot zuchinni and are skulking around for some more recipes.  Usually we just saute it up with some butter, herbs and wine and eat as a side dish.  I know I’ve seen recipes for stuffed zuchinni that looked pretty good so I guess I need to go track that down again.

Do you have any great zuchinni recipes?  What do you currently have a bumper crop of in your garden?

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It’s been a whirlwind past few weeks as we get into the final days of my wife’s pregnancy.  I can’t believe how quickly times has flown by and how much I’ve had to get done.  Admidst all that, I’m ramping up for the Summer garden season and am getting ready to get our vegetable patch going.

I probably should have started my seedlings a lot sooner but since this is my first season here in the Midwest, I’m a little behind the curve.  We’ve been saving our used cardboard egg cartons and just turned those into a seedling factory a couple of weeks ago.  They work great and don’t drain water all over the place and they save space too.  Eventually, you’re supposed to be able to just clip the individual egg cups apart and plant the whole thing just like a peat pot.

Another egg carton seedling tray with lemon cucumbers and yellow squash reaching for the sky.

I had a few loose seed packets left over from previous years so I started some lemon cucumbers, zuchinni, yellow squash, Trip-L Crop Climbing Tomato, Benchmark Tomato, Jumbo Tomato and some bush beans.  So far, the sprout factory is off to the races with with many of the squash plants winning.  Some are even ready to be potted up because they’re getting a bit leggy now.

My next task is to get the future garden plot prepared for planting.  We’ve been inundated with rain for the past three weeks or so and it seem like we’re finaly going to get a short dry spell.  That will hopefully allow me the chance to actually get out and get some soil turned over and ready to go.  The composter is set up and already on a roll.  We just cleaned out the rabbit hutches and that provided a lot of great compost material, along with our usual kitchen scraps and trimmings from the bushes and flowers around the house.

So, how does your garden grow this time of year?  Are you a Midwestern gardener with some time tested tips?  Let me know what you’re growing and what you can always rely on for a bumper crop harvest!

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If you’re like me, by this time of the year you start itching to get out of winter.  As much as I love it I also can’t wait to warm up into Spring and get back outside into the yard and the garden.  It’s a time of the year that signals plenty of produce and fresh food in the months to come.  By the time January rolls around, I anxiously await all 50 of the gardening and seed catalogs that pile into our doorside mailbox.  I’ll spend hours planning, plotting and circling seeds I want to order out of every catalog.

Before you buy enough seed to start a small farming operation though, you should carefully consider your garden plans and how much you really need to order.  First pick out the size and space that your garden will take up.  Some vegetables, like Globe Artichoke, can grow up to 4 feet tall and spread just about as wide.  Carrots however don’t take up much room because they grow down.  Make sure to pay attention to the growing requirements listed in the catalog because they’ll help you plot out the growing space.

Also, pay attention to the days it takes the vegetable to get to maturity.  When we lived in Flagstaff, Arizona, our growing season was extremely short.  It lasted just about 90 days which for most vegetables isn’t enough time to come to harvest.  We always had to pick vegetables that required short growing times.  In Indiana though, we’re now looking at a growing season that’s double that at 180 days.  That opens the door to more and more varieties of things to grow.

Lastly, don’t buy seeds for vegetables you know your family doesn’t like or doesn’t typically eat.  If only one person enjoy radishes you probably shouldn’t plant an entire section of your vegetable garden just dedicated to them.

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