Monthly Archives: August 2011

Harvest Monday, August 15 2011

Posted on August 17, 2011 | 2 Comments

We just returned from a birding trip to Mammoth Lakes California. My husband Vic Leipzig led a group of birders in search of white-tailed ptarmigan, black-backed woodpeckers, and other mountain specialties. And found them!

So my harvest this week was for only four days. The poundage wasn’t spectacular, but the variety was good. I’ve been lagging in photographing my harvest, so here are some catch-up photos of some of my late season harvests as well as this week’s.

My community garden plot provided some really nice onions this year. Here are Texas Sweets and Southern Belles. Both are incredibly sweet and mild, really nice onions.

I grew a nice variety of winter squash and pie pumpkins too. Here are some of them: New England pie pumpkin, Amish pie pumpkin, mini blue hubbard, and mini red kuri.

These Cherokee Trail of Tears pods will provide dried black beans for soup later in the fall.

My tomato harvest at both my home garden and the community garden is really falling off. Harvest of tomatoes should be extending well into October and even November, but my plants at the community garden are nearly dead already. I'm trying to revive them with additional fertilizer and compost and some pH adjustment of the soil, which is too alkaline. They're responding, so I have some hope of getting a few more tomatoes later on in the season.

I didn't get too many peaches from the neighbor's tree this year. The rats got most of them.

The peaches went into a pie along with a Granny Smith apple that an opossum knocked off the tree and the last little drab of blueberries. Here the fruit is in a bowl. I was going to photograph each stage, but forgot. And when the crumb-topped pie came out of the oven, it smelled so heavenly that we gobbled it up. Sorry, no photos of the pie. Trust me, it was beautiful.

The mesclun went into a salad with hot bacon grease-basalmic vinegar dressing with a boiled egg. Delicious! Can't believe I'm harvesting mesclun in August.

Carrots, onions and lacinato kale went into a chicken broth. Then I added egg noodles. If you haven't grown Lacinato kale before, give it a try. It has a much milder taste than Scotch blue curled and a finer texture. I'm hooked on it, but will continue to grow the Scotch blue curled as well.

 

This is essentially an Italian stir-fry. Onions, garlic, eggplant, bell peppers, summer squash, and chard, all stir-fried in olive oil. Then I added some marinara sauce and some cooked pasta. Didn't get a photo of the finished product. Ate it too fast. Delicious!

Here is my harvest for the week ending August 14, 2011.

FRUIT

6.5 oz Apple, Granny Smith (one fell off the tree a bit early so I put it into a peach pie)

0.5 oz Blueberries

1 lb 10 oz Oranges, Navel

Subtotal FRUIT 2 lbs 1 oz

VEGETABLES

8 oz Bell Pepper

6 oz Bok Choy

6 oz Carrots, Kyoto Red (so sweet)

1 oz Chard

11 oz Corn

11 oz Cucumber

3.5 oz Eggplant, Japanese

2 oz Kale, Lacinato

4 oz Mesclun

2 lbs 4 oz Tomatoes

Subtotal VEGETABLES 5 lbs 8.5 oz

TOTAL PRODUCE 7 lbs 9.5 oz plus 5 eggs

Everyone else has already posted their harvests on Monday at Daphne’s Dandelions. I’m late, as usual.  Happy gardening.

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Trip to Big Bear, California, Part II

Posted on August 11, 2011 | Leave a comment

The cabin walls were covered with huge log slabs, very rustic. Our room had a fireplace and a full kitchen, plus a private balcony/porch.

The kitchen in our cabin.

Our little granddaughters would love this children's playground with playhouse.

Our granddaughters would also love this pretty pool.

The hosts at Oak Knoll Lodge often build a campfire on weekends. I was too tired on Friday to take advantage of it, and they didn't build a fire on Saturday, so we missed out on toasting marshmallows.

The landscaping was a riot of color, a mix of wildflowers and old English garden favorites like hollyhocks, foxgloves, larkspurs, and coreopsis.

We had dinner on Saturday night at Peppercorn Grille in Big Bear Lake. The food there was incredible! Great Italian menu.

On our last morning there, we had brunch at the Mill Creek Manor Tea Room. Adorable place, but tea was $5.

What do you think? Is the decor over the top? I liked it, but it made Vic squirm.

They have a hat rack with hats that can be borrowed while you're having tea. I picked one and wore it while we ate.

Do I look like I'm enjoying myself? I was. I thought that the prices were a bit high, but I would definitely love to go back.

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Trip to Big Bear California, Part 1

Posted on August 11, 2011 | 7 Comments

Vic led a birding trip to Big Bear Lake, California last weekend. We mostly drove around on dirt roads in the mountains, then walked a short distance to Bluff Lake. Wildflowers were spectacular. Here are some shots.

Santa Ana River at Middle Control Road near Angelus Oaks

Next to Santa Ana River

Santa Ana River

Santa Ana River by Middle Control Road, near Angelus Oaks

California wild rose

White Yarrow

No clue what these flowers are

Close-up of corn lily flowers

Corn Lilies

Did I mention that it was COLD? Yes, it was August, but there were ice crystals on the grass

Ice crystals on a sage leaf

A sunflower of some sort

If this were spring, I'd say that this saprophyte was snow plant. Others thought it was named pine drops.

Here is the group of birders that Vic was leading. I don't think he's in the picture. Oops, yes he is. Both he and our son Scott pointed out that he's in the red jacket in back. Hey, I'm working with a 2-inch photo, gimme a break.

Backlit Jeffrey pines. If you sniff the deep cracks in the bark, you can smell vanilla.

Western fence lizard

Purple asters. They may be called Showy Asters.

Vic (in red jacket on left) and his group of birders

Our first view of Bluff Lake

Bluff Lake

Bluff Lake

Northern Bluets (I think)

A bumblebee shows us his heinie, and the stuffed pollen sacs on his legs

Rangers Buttons

Paintbrush

columbine

Corn Lily at Bluff Lake

Saprophytes, maybe pine drops

female mallard

Bluff Lake

A saprophyte, maybe snow plant

Old log cabins by Bluff Lake

Can't remember this flower, maybe loosestrife

corn lilies

Scarlet bugler, I think

Lemon Lilies

California wild rose

Great trip. Part II will cover where we stayed.

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Running harvest totals–will I harvest 300 lbs this year?

Posted on August 10, 2011 | 2 Comments

I’ve just added a sidebar with harvest poundage, divided into fruits and vegetables. I also put in the totals from 2010, which is when I began weighing my harvests. Learned that from the rest of you garden bloggers. But keeping up with the spreadsheet on Excel is tedious. I seem to run out of time and/or steam. At least for now, I’m up to date for this year.

Navel orange--I ate this one for breakfast this morning and it was incredibly sweet

We have dwarf fruit trees and small raised beds in a tiny southern California yard, plus a rabbit-infested community garden plot that is on a former gravel parking lot. My harvests can’t compare with the huge hauls that I see on other gardening blogs, but it’s enough for us.

My dwarf avocado tree has a good fruit set this year for the first time ever, about 21 avocados.

I harvested 224 lbs last year from my yard. I had hoped for 500 lbs this year with the addition of my new community garden plot. But that little plot hasn’t been as productive as I had hoped, and rats and possums ate almost all of the fruit harvest in our yard this year. As a result, I’ve downgraded my harvest goal to 300 lbs. At this point, I doubt that I’ll even reach that figure given that it’s already August and I have harvested only 130 lbs. Will I be harvesting another 170 lbs in the next five months? I seriously doubt it. Not with all of our night critters.

I trapped yet another possum last night, the fourth one in four weeks. We managed to kill one rat, but I suspect that’s just a drop in the proverbial bucket. I’m typing this at night and I can hear the dang rats running around on our neighbor’s peach trees. Hey, at least I don’t have to contend with deer.

Granny Smith apple

I’ve managed to make and freeze only two quarts of spaghetti sauce so far this summer. I don’t see a heck of a lot of new tomatoes coming along, so that may be it. But my larder is certainly not bare. I still have tomato soup and spaghetti sauce that I canned last year, plus a large assortment of jams and preserves. I made a gallon jar of dill pickles last year and we’re still working on that.

Amish pie pumpkin

Mostly what I grow in my garden is hope. I dream of future harvests. And that’s what these photos are of: future harvests. For example, the Amish pie pumpkins like the one above are supposed to grow up to 90 lbs. Well, I got several beautiful pumpkins this year, but they were mostly between 1 and 2 lbs. Each one will make one pie. And that’s fine. I don’t need a hundred pumpkin pies.

This is pretty much it for my blackberry harvest. I get a few each week, but don't even bother to weigh them. I just pop them right into my mouth.

And that’s how my garden grows.

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A month of Harvest Mondays and goodbye possums

Posted on August 9, 2011 | 12 Comments

Ack, I haven’t done a Harvest Monday blog post since July 4.  It’s catch-up time.

My plot at the Huntington Beach Community Garden in mid-July

Because of all of the raiding of our garden and fruit trees this year, I’ve been more relentless recently in setting our live trap and removing the larger night critters from the home garden. I’ve trapped and released three opossums in as many weeks.

This female opossum is carrying young in her pouch. Note the bulge.

And off she runs, to happily raise her babies in the wilds of Huntington Central Park, not in my vegetable garden.

We also called Orange County Vector Control, and had them leave three bait traps for rats. I plan to set some snap traps soon as well. The rats are running rampant and eating whatever the possums don’t.

My home garden isn’t the only thing being depredated. The bunny continues to plague my community garden plot. It has now chewed 11 holes in the fence. It chews them faster than I patch them. Gotta put up a sturdier fence. Meanwhile, I don’t dare plant anything new at the community garden because the bunny loves new sprouts of anything.

But I can plant at home. And I did indeed plant something–yams. Out of the 18 yams that I planted (from yams that I grew last year that were too small to eat), 16 have sent up sprouts and are turning into thriving vines. I’m hoping that the first pot will be ready to harvest by Thanksgiving.

And where am I growing them? In my driveway! I use fabric Grow Pots, and keep using the potting soil over and over. I just add more EB Stone Sure Start fertilizer. So far I’ve harvested 2 and 3 crops of potatoes of various kinds (Blue, Gold, Russet, German Butterball and yams) out of the grow pots. I get about three pounds of organic potatoes per harvest per pot, nothing like the 50 lbs that the ads claim. Maybe I need more fertilizer?!?!?!?

My 3-year-old granddaughter Megan harvested the last batch of potatoes. She loved digging in the loose potting soil with her hands. She is quite the little gardener and loves picking and eating tomatoes, snow peas, sugar snap peas and even kale.

A mini Red Kuri winter squash from a seed mix from Cook's Garden

Here’s my harvest for the last three weeks of July.

Week ending July 10

FRUIT

0.5 oz Blueberries

0.5 oz Blackberries

5 oz Lemon, Meyer

4 oz Limes

12 oz  Orange, Navel

Subtotal Fruit 1 lb 6 oz

VEGETABLES

3 oz Bell Pepper

12 oz Cucumber

11 oz Green Beans, Blue Lake and Golden Wax

5 oz Green Onion

4 oz Herbs (mint and parsley)

3 oz Peas, Sugar Snap

8 oz Squash, Summer

3 lbs Tomatoes

Subtotal Vegetables 7 lbs 14 oz

Week Ending July 17

FRUIT

Zip, Zero, Nada

VEGETABLES

15 lbs Beet (won 2nd prize at OC Fair for largest beet)

8 oz Bell Pepper

11 oz Cucumber

2 oz Green Onion

2 lbs 14 oz Onions, Red (won 3rd prize at OC Fair)

2 oz Peas, Sugar Snap

8 oz Squash, Summer

1 lb Squash, Winter

3 lb 1.5 oz Tomatoes

Subtotal Vegetables 8 lbs 14.5 oz

Week ending July 24

FRUIT

12 oz Lemon, Meyer

1 lb 12 oz Oranges, Navel

12 oz Peaches

Subtotal 3 lbs 4 oz

VEGETABLES

10 oz Chard

6 oz Eggplant, Japanese

1 lb 12 oz Pumpkin, Amish Pie

1 lb 4 oz Tomatoes

Subtotal Vegetables 4 lbs

Week Ending July 31

FRUIT

Big Fat Zero

VEGETABLES

10 oz Bell Pepper

3 lbs 10 oz Corn (first of harvest, dwarfed and riddled with corn borers– it took three little ears to make a single serving)

6 oz Cucumber

1 lb Eggplant, Japanese

2 oz Mizuna (took 2nd Place at OC Fair)

6 lbs 3 oz Onions

6 oz Radish, White Icicle (took 2nd Place at OC Fair)

4 lbs 12 oz Pumpkin, Amish Pie

2 lbs 11 oz Squash, Winter (Red Kuri)

2 lbs 8 oz Squash, Winter (mini Blue Hubbard)

2 lbs 12 oz Tomatoes

Subtotal Vegetables 25 WHOPPING lbs

TOTAL FRUIT, 3 weeks: 4 lbs 10 oz

TOTAL VEGETABLES, 3 weeks: 45 lbs 12 oz

TOTAL PRODUCE, 3 weeks: 50 lbs 6 oz plus eggs (I lost count of eggs in July, but only one hen is laying right now, so about a dozen and a half eggs)

A mini Blue Hubbard nearing harvest readiness. These were from a mix of winter squash seeds from Cook's Garden

Yippee, bring on August! Visit Daphne’s Dandelions if you have a harvest to report.

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