Must have done something right with the eggplant seeds this year. I was feeling behind, off to a late start on the seeds I usually start in February. So I soaked the eggplant seeds for a day before planting them. Eggplants need warmth to grow quickly, so their seed trays are also parked on a seed heating mat, and located near the woodstove. It all seemed to make a difference: eggplant seeds that often take 2+weeks to germinate were up in a record 5-7 days!

We’re growing 4 varieties of eggplant: Japanese Long Pickling, Pingtung Long, Rosa Bianca, and Snowy. The Asian varieties are more reliable, earlier fruiting, and perhaps grow a little faster. Snowy is a white eggplant that was one of the few productive survivors of last year’s eggplant debacle. Rosa Bianca is a beautiful eggplant dream I chase…. supposedly requiring too long a season in this area to produce, but the fruit are so delicious and so beautiful that I will try until I have reason to give it up. Last year I ended up with only 3 specimens of Rosa Bianca fruit - but the circumstances were extreme! Hoping for better this year….

Someone commented to me last night, “Well, so the garden is finished now, right? You’re not getting anything much out of it anymore?”

There is so much. We are so fortunate to still be pulling so much fresh food out of the garden for most meals. I guess, sometimes it’s hard to see beyond tomatoes, basil, potatoes, and zucchini, and recognize what’s still there when they’re gone.

So here’s what we’re still harvesting:

Brussels Sprouts… my favorite at this time of year. They are so good after a couple frosts, and just very lightly cooked until they are bright green. Dress with butter, some chopped chervil, parsley or dill, or balsamic vinegar.

Oh, the chervil, parsley and dill come from the garden still. And green onions. And thyme and sage.

Broccoli (little tiny florets “pre-cut”).

Celery. Beets.   Leeks…tons of leeks.  Radiccio.  Cabbage.  Carrots. Still have some potatoes to dig, just a few.

Parsnips and Rutabega. There are some Turnips there, but have been harvesting greens from them more than liking the roots.

Greens: (Our house salad mix is currently lettuce-free, as the voles ate ALL of several plantings of lettuce)…Mizuna, Chard, Kale of several types, Mustard greens, Arugula, Spinach, Beet greens

Corn salad is coming along, not ready quite yet.    Found a couple self-seeded Radishes.

There is still so much in the garden.

We are blessed with a quince tree in the back yard.

It blooms with beautiful white flowers in the spring, and by fall, if it’s a good year, the branches are weighed heavily by fuzzy yellow fruit.  This year was a great year for the quince tree!

We picked quinces a week or two ago on a rainy day when our raincoats exactly matched the color of the fruit.

Quinces are an intriguing fruit that looks like a combination between a yellow apple and a pear.  But if you bite into one raw, the high level of tannins make you feel like the insides of your cheeks are trying to adhere to your tongue!  They need to be cooked……next post!

The garlic is finally all planted, as of today. We planted nearly 600 cloves this year - alot for two people fitting in planting around jobs, weather, and early darkness, but little in the sense of selling market garlic. I also started a nursery bed to experiment with some small-but-potentially nice garlic found growing wild on a roadside, and some bulbils we let mature on the two varieties I’ve grown for about 7 years now. It might take several years of planting, culling, and replanting to see what those can do, but it’s a fun experiment.

Last year I didn’t plant as much as I’d planned on, because the ground froze sometime in October or November when I was counting on planting more, and didn’t really thaw again. (Garlic goes in the ground in the fall, overwinters, then sprouts early in the spring and grows a new bulb ready to harvest in July or August.) But we had a nice amount to sell steadily at the Westside Farmer’s Market from July through the end of September. We saved the best, largest for replanting for next year’s crop. Before planting, we spent a couple hours breaking up bulbs & sorting and counting the best for planting.

The yearly garlic planting ritual here usually involves at least one session of planting in cold blowing wind and rainy drizzle - feeling rushed in case the temperature suddenly drops; this year it’s been much warmer than some past. But the amount of rain we’ve had in the past few weeks ensured coming in from each planting session with gloves, jeans, and boots caked in mud and grime!

Everyone’s talking about tomatoes!

Some have lost them massively to the blight. Others are up at 3 am catching up on the canning.

I feel fairly content with where we are at tomato-wise. I planted about 8 varieties, grown at home from seed. I also allowed certain strong seedlings that self-seeded in the garden, ending up with a few unnamed mixed varieties. We have many beautiful tomatoes, despite the cool summer that slowed production and encouraged disease. But - I planted more tomatoes this year than I have ever before, and have less of a harvest than I have had many years.

This year we have a lot of Caspian Pink. Flavor-wise, it may be my favorite beefsteak type tomato, but it is problematic. It's bottom can start to rot before the top is ripe, and it splits very easily. It's hard to get a perfect one for market purposes.

Usually Costoluto di Genovese is one of my favorite and most prolific tomatoes to grow; this year it did very poorly. It seemed particularly susceptible to the blight or other diseases that did afflict some of my tomatoes - particularly the early planting set out under row covers. In fact, it seems the earlier the tomato was transplanted, the greater the chance of total loss to blight.

Last year, I discovered a new way to use Caspian Pink (and any other soft sweet beefsteak). We are drying them to make tomato chips! These are dried tomatoes with a twist - they end up so thin and crisp and intensely sweet that we just tend to eat them just like that!

The art of canning seems to be going through a revival, but the art of drying food is more seldom mentioned! We love our dehydrator, and are running it round the clock for the tomatoes, zucchini, corn, and herbs right now.

Cherokee Purple I tried for the first time. It’s okay, when I can get a good one off the plants. Tends to split and show blight spots on the top, in my garden.

Other standbys are Polish Linguisa and Opalka - two sausage-y paste tomatoes that look so similar I lose track of which is which. They are huge and fabulous and make great sauce.

Pineapple is a new tomato for me this year, that I haven't grown before. It is a beautiful (and luxuriously tasty!) thing.

Beautiful range of colors in tomatoes cut up for drying! Back to front: Cherokee purple, Pineapple, Caspian Pink, Pineapple.

In addition to the drying, I’ll be canning too, whole tomatoes, sauce, and maybe pizza sauce again.

It makes us so happy the way everyone exclaims over our nasturtiums at the market! Nasturtiums get some of the most frequent comments. People have asked a lot about how we get them to flower like that, because theirs don’t. Hmmm… I don’t know that I do anything special. I got my seeds from Fedco, and have been thrilled with the results. They are generous with their seeds amounts, nearly every seed I planted seemed to grow, and they have a nice mix of colors.

Other than that, I started them early in flats, and make sure they’re in good sun when they get planted out. They don’t get a lot of pampering attention otherwise. Perhaps they bloom more because I pick a lot of them.

Nasturtiums are edible flowers. You can add them to salads, or put them on any kind of crudite plate to add color. Some people stuff their centers with a little cream cheese spread. They are really pretty atop a bowl of guacamole. They are a combination of sweet and zippyspicy. Some flowers are spicier than others; some people eat them whole and the stems too; others just eat the petals, and the leaves can go in salad. (I put a few young ones in the bags of “wild baby greens” we sell at the market). I’ve read recipes about pickling the seed pods to use like capers, but haven’t tried it.

The gardens are, of course, full of critters.  There’s thems we tire of (the moles, the slugs), and thems we can’t get enough of.  Here are three of them from our recent camera rolls.

Sleeping cat buried in weeds.

A mantis in the tomatoes

A 3 inch garden spider on its web above the strawberries.

Last fall I created some low tunnel hoophouses over some vegetables to extend the season. They are very pieced-together: rib supports of springy high-tensile wire someone didn’t want, some low fencing sections, and wire cages, and covered by leftover strips of plastic given away by a real hoophouse builder. They covered beds of celery, carrots, kale, cabbage stalks, lettuce, kholrabi, and swiss chard. And a few radiccio that hadn’t done anything by the time it froze.

The edges of the plastic are held to the ground by stray bricks, rocks, and a few terracotta pots. Money spent on my creation: $0. The system was great in November, and then froze solid and immediately was buried under snow for the duration of December and January. I felt sheepish and ridiculous every time I looked at the things all winter, but this week we got a big thaw, the snow disappeared, and I was able to slog through mud to peel back the plastic. And I got a nice surprise.

Things are growing under there! Amidst lots of dead stems and leaves, there are new greens ready for salad. The mizuna did the best. It was too peppery to eat much of by the end of the summer, but the frilly new growth is tender and mild. Chard and kale are coming back too. The new little leaves stand in for lettuce.

So we had a great midwinter salad, and the hoophouses earned their keep, haphazard as they are. I even threw in a few new seeds of cornsalad and spinach for hopes of an early start. Perhaps we can upgrade our cobbled mini-greenhouses this year, but for now….. they worked!

Winter is here suddenly. Temperatures haven’t gone above 30’s during the day in a few days, and the ground has a frozen top crust. I had left the hardy vegetables in the ground to keep cool, but the sudden threat of temperatures in the teens in the next few days (and a day when nothing thawed during the day) sent me running to spend my day off work pulling everything remaining that is not under cover.

Several patches of carrots were first. The carrots taste amazing after frosts, and they are so crisp you have to dig carefully, if you bend them slightly, they crack and snap. The harvest was about 6 or 8 pounds of nice carrots. (Edit: P. says I estimate low and it’s 12 pounds or more)

A row of rutabegas had to be pulled, big leaves cut off, dirt dusted off, and packed away. Probably nearly 20 pounds of rutabegas. They are an underrated vegetable. Grown under the right conditions they taste great, and better than a turnip, to me. They are phenomenal cut into french-fry shape and roasted in cast iron in the oven, sprinked with coarse salt, pepper, and a squeeze of lime. And indispensable to pasties and stews. The rutabegas in the stores are waxed - crazy things - not something we’ll be doing here. They will store in cool damp conditions without such treatment, and taste much better for it. I might try sprouting the tops in damp sand indoors for some fresh green chicken food during the winter.

Leeks were fast to harvest. I never seem to have enough of those, and I’ll continue the ongoing quest next year by starting seeds in January. Got about 8 or 10 good leeks. 6 brussels sprouts plants were pulled up by the roots to plant in a bucket of sand to keep better, and 2 more stems were harvested for eating soon.

Parsnips…stay in the ground for now! They are okay with that, and many people believe, taste better for it. I did pull a couple to see what they look like and have as a treat now. If I get to it, I’ll mulch them over a bit to protect them some.

The remaining potatoes took the longest. We grew a lot of potatoes this year. (P. thinks 100 lbs+!) I already had saved a lot of seed, and bought some more of new varieties I wanted to try, and then was gifted with a big pile of sprouting overflow seed potatoes from my sister. Most of them have already been dug, but about 3 5-gallon pails full of potatoes were lined up by the time I finished wrestling with the potato fork and the lost rows. This will be about the third year in a row that I have had no need to buy a potato for anything but planting in the ground as seed. It’s even hard to imagine eating supermarket potatoes, when I see the ridiculous green-tinged things lying around in the light there. The picture shows the newly dug potatoes, and behind those are a few brussels sprouts stems standing up. And behind those are the hoophouse row covers housing the greens and celery that are still in the garden. I pulled back the covers long enough to pick this fabulous salad…