Flat Potatoes, plus lots of update photos

So in anticipation of my leggy potatoes falling over I tied them up with sizzle and bamboo canes. I guess I did not tie them up well enough because they fell over anyway. I think this is caused by several things that hopefully I can rectify next season:

• I planted whole seed potatoes with lots of eyes, next year I am going to reduce the eyes per plant in hopes of reducing the multiple stem competition.
  
• Being planted in a small raised bed I do not have room to hill the potatoes as high as they should be for support, next year I am going to dig deep trenches, store the soil in bags and fill the trench as the potatoes grow thus creating underground hills.
• I am going to install either horizontal trellis netting across the bed or install cheap tomatoes cages around each plant to give the plants support.

Everything else is really starting to chug along and I am going to predict that in 3-4 weeks I should be able to start harvesting warm weather crops:

Cucumbers are rambling up the trellis, about 2 feet high and starting to get bloom clusters

My eaten beets rebounding, well at least the Chioggia's. The Cylinder's are not going to amount to anything they are still being eaten and now shaded by the carrots

If you click on this carrot image you will see that one of the carrots is bolting. This is a little strange because carrots are a biennial and should flower the following year. I am going to let it go to seed so maybe next year I will not have to purchase seed.

Onions are finally starting to do something but I am not holding out much hope for large onions. I will have to try harder next year, maybe plant earlier with row cover?

Brussels are just starting to form, they are best eaten after a hard frost so I hope they take that long to develop or I may have alot of bitter tasting sprouts.

The cherry tomato is start to really develop, doesn't it have rather massive leaves for a cherry tomato. I am wondering if it is an F1 Hybrid or even has had its chromosomes double or tripled.

Borage is starting to flower around the tomato pots. It is a nice herb the always pops up in the garden without planting, that is once you have planted it once in the first place. You can eat the flowers which have a cucumber taste.

Mild Banana Pepper's are starting to form, no sign of the chocolate or red peppers yet, just flowers.

July already.....

Another long weekend has pasted, this time for Canada Day. My day was spent tinkering around the house on never ending renovations, weeding the perennial borders which have not been getting much attention with all the vegetable action and of course lounging on the patio.

I was in Hamilton over the weekend as well and stopped in Harpers Greenhouse in Ancaster. I found another Banana plant, this one has red and green leaves. This is the third Banana plant I have and this one I placed in the front perennial border because I am out of large containers and it costs a fortune to fill them with potting soil. The tag says it will grow to 5-7 feet so I will keep everyone posted on how it does. I think this will be the last Banana I can accumulate, I over winter tropical plants in my basement under a metal halide grow light which is almost at a bursting point with plants.

Now about the veggies, all my tomato plants now have a few tomatoes each starting to form with the Japanese Black Trifele being the larges of them all. This is the first time growing this tomato so I am excited to try it. The peas are just starting to plump up and I have already shelled some baby peas and they tasted like pure sugar almost! I am hoping the peas hurry up because I am going to plant turnips in their place and they are also shading my peppers. Next year I need to put more thought into plant placement.

The broccoli is almost ready to be pulled out, it is still producing side shoots but they are bolting before they are big enough to eat. I think I will pull them and plant some radishes for the time being. The second crop of broccoli that I started has not done well, the slugs keep eating the new leaves. I have started new transplant, this time inside, in a south facing window. I am hoping they do better then the first ones.

When I was taking some photo's of the vegetable garden I came across the little guy below. We have a far amount of garter snakes visit our yard and this is one of the smallest ones I have seen. He was hanging out in the rhubarb and hopefully was resting after eating all the slugs that ate my broccoli transplants.

Veggie Patch Update

First off, can anyone help me identify if the photo below this is a zucchini plant? I made a mound of compost and then planted zucchini seeds in it. When they started to germinate I realized that I have some kind of squash or melon seeds in my composter and they started to germinate as well. I think I have thinned the right ones but I have no clue what a small zucchini plant should look like.

As sides from my zucchini mix up things are going well. The peas have started to form baby peas which is exciting, I have never eaten a fresh peas before. The beans have climbed about 2 feet up the trellis so I suspect they should start leafing out along the tendrils soon. My potatoes are getting massive, almost 3 feet high!

I have started to blanch my celery plants, I have read conflicting things on weather you should blanch celery or not but I am going to go ahead and try. My first through was to use PVC waste pipe but I could not find any that was wide enough. I ended up using 1 gallon perennial containers with the bottom cut out of them, they seem to do the trick. They seem a little small so I think I will keep a look out for larger containers but for the time being they do the job.

The heirloom tomatoes all have 3 clusters of flowers per plant and I am patiently wait for the kings of the garden to form and ripen. The photo below of the tomato blossom has to be the largest tomato blossom I have ever seen, they are larger then a quarter. The plant is the Hillbilly Potato Loaf tomato, I think I bought these seed last year just because of the name and it turned out to be a very nice tomato.

Now for the failures, my butter crunch lettuce is in the composter. It formed lettuce that looked more like romaine and only one plant formed a butter crunch head about the size of an onion. I think this was caused by using lettuce grown in cell packs because every lettuce that I planted from transplants did poorly well the lettuce that I seeded in the ground grew get. This fall on, I will only grow lettuce from seed not from the nursery.

My beets still have leaf miner, it doesn't seem to be as bad as it was but they are still munching away. This probably would not be the case if I keeped up my spraying schedule, shoulda woulda coulda I guess. I did a posting on garden web and was told that leaf miner should not kill the beets and that it would be okay to just leave them be. That is what I am going to do and hopefully still harvest some kind of beets.

I think I will end on a lighter note by protesting my jealousy of all the zone 7-9ers that are beginning to harvest many things. Going though all these harvest posts makes me want to move to a warmer climate. I think I would kill for a warm tomato right off the vine right about now. With all the magazines starting to publish recipes for things like cucumber gazpacho, tomato watermelon & feta salad, pork tenderloin with charred tomato salsa and so on doesn't help. That made you hungry didn't it?

Strawberry Time!

It is such a nice day today that my Mom and I went Strawberry picking this morning. The berries seemed a little small this year, this maybe because it is still early in the season through. We ended up finding a place that is just on the edge of our City this year which is rather convenient. The last few seasons we have drove about 40km round trip to a farm that is to the west of us. With the amount of gas the truck burns combined with the price of gas it is really not very cost affective anymore to drive that kind of distances just to pick strawberries, low food miles are all the rage now.



We ended up picking 15 Liters (approx. 16 Quarts) of berries so we should be stocked up for the season. I am going to make my strawberry jelly again this year, the recipe is on my Mom's baking blog if anyone is interested at the following link. I have also been eye some recipes for strawberry cannoli, ricotta strawberry muffins as well as a savory strawberry chutney to be paired with fish, pork or chicken. I will keep you posted with what I try and the links to the recipes as I am sure everyone is craving everything strawberry this time of year.

Well thats all folks, Tomorrow I will do an update on my veggie patch!

*sent from my patio via WiFi, oh the beauty of technology.

Home Made Recipe for Caesar Dressing & Croutons

When I notice that I needed to harvest some of my romaine because they were growing to closely I decide to finally try to make my own caesar dressing and croutons. I have always wanted to do this but never tried so I figured if I am making the effort to grow romaine I might as well make the effort to make my own dressing.

Croutons

Ingredients:
ciabatta buns or bread
oil
2 garlic cloves
salt to taste
2 tablespoons parmesan cheese

Start off by cutting your Ciabatta into large bit size cubes, this type of bread can be found at most groceries stores and is a drier bread with large interior holes. Then add a few glugs of oil to a pan and turn on the heat. Once it is hot add two whole, halved clovers of garlic.


When the garlic has lightly browned remove and set aside for later use. Now add the bread cubes to your flavored oil and toss until nicely browned. Lastly mince one of the browned garlic clovers and add it back to the croutons along with the parmesan cheese and salt. Toss and let cool well you are make the dressing.



Caesar Dressing

Ingredients:
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 reserved, browned garlic clove
1-2 anchovy fillets (Optional)
1 tablespoon grey poupon or dijon mustard
2 egg yolks
1/2 - 1 tablespoon fresh squeezed lemon juice
pepper to taste
3 tablespoons grape seed oil or any light flavored oil
parmesan cheese

In a large bowl add salt, garlic, anchovies and use a fork to grind the ingredients into a fine paste. I omitted the anchovies because I ended up purchase sardines by accident, all through I am not a fan of anchovies they are authentic in Caesar dressing and apparently does not make the dressing taste like fish.



Add the mustard, egg yolks, 1/2 tablespoon lemon juice and pepper to the paste and then use a whisk to incorporate well. Now it is time to make an emulsion, with your whisk in one hand and your oil bottle in the other start drizzling the oil into the bowl, whisking briskly to incorporate. Continue this until the dressing is the thickens of typical dressing, approx. 3 tablespoons of oil.


Once the dressing is to the desired thickness, taste it to check for tartness, if it needs a little more add the other 1/2 tablespoon of lemon juice and whisk in. Lastly add Parmesan cheese to taste and mix in.

(thickness reference & of course tasting)

Now you can toss your romaine right in your dressing bowl, serve on plates, then top with the homemade croutons, crispy bacon and I also add grilled chicken to make it a whole meal.