Radishes come to those who wait

I planted radishes in the spring.  They are supposed to be a 30-day crop.  So plant them, and harvest a month later.  I spent late spring and early summer pulling up a radish each week to see if they were ready.  No dice.  No radishes, just skinny roots.  Probably I planted too late in the season.  Better luck next year.

Today I thought I would see if the radish bushes had any radishes.  They were very large plants, with little white flowers.  I pulled them all up.  Mostly they were still skinny-rooted.  But I did find these (with, of course, Buzz’s head for scale):

Note the one towards the bottom of the photo – very *ahem* suggestive.  You want to see it close up, don’t you.  OK then.

Interestingly, the largest radish was hollow and contained water.  Now you know how to find water in a radish if you are desperately thirsty.  Radish-flavored water, to be sure, but probably potable.  Here’s the inside of the radish:

I’m not sure any of these will get eaten, as we also have radishes in the fridge from the CSA.  But who knows?

Big Bertha

My husband claimed, at first, that this was a butternut squash.  I think it isn’t, but I don’t know what kind it is.  I thought maybe a banana squash, but those get even bigger than these, so probably not.  So for now, I am calling it Big Bertha, after the German howitzer.

Anyone want to tell us what kind of squash it really is?

(the sandal is a women’s US size 7)

UPDATE:  my husband received this e-mail from the seed company today:

Dear Gardener,

Thank you for your order and interest in our company John Scheepers Kitchen Garden Seeds.

Your squash looks like an off type or mutation from the Milano Black Zucchini; we actually don’t carry that type, the Yellow Zucchini is a bright lemon yellow, it is not a Butternut! I would be interested in how it cooks and tastes??

As always please feel free to contact me directly with any questions, comments and complaints at 860-567-6086 or mailto:lance@johnscheepers.com.

Regards;

Lance Frazon
John Scheepers Kitchen Garden Seeds
Ph: 860-567-6086 Fax: 860-567-5323
www.kitchengardenseeds.com <http://www.kitchengardenseeds.com>

mmmmm, mutation!

Minor

Our CSA has been giving us gorgeous purple beans lately.  Since we have our own green beans, we eat them together, which makes the purple beans last longer and compensates for the fact that we only get so many ripe green beans at a time.  Here they are:

Unfortunately, they turn green when cooked, due to the breaking of the vacuoles containing anthocyanins during the cooking process.*  They just wash away in the cooking liquid!  Here are the cooked beans, a minor disappointment:

Ah well, at least they taste good.

*McGee, Harold, On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen Completely Revised and Updated. New York: Scribner, 2004. 267- 268.

There is a first time for everything

Inspired by the plastic-shopping-bag-full of cucumbers my husband brought in from the garden yesterday and Marisa’s facebook-status-via-twitter about making bread and butter pickles, I made my first pickles today.

I used the recipe from Slashfood that Marisa pointed me to.  First, I needed jars, which I got at the supermarket. The cashier was very surprised that the store even sold canning jars, and then it turned out that the UPC code wasn’t in the scanner and so I was the cause of the Express Lane being held up because the cashier had to send a bagger for a price check.  I felt guilty, though it wasn’t my fault.

Then, there was the cutting and slicing.  Thank goodness for the mandoline, but man, those onions made tears and mucus run down my face like a waterfall!  Here’s my sliced veggies, before and after being mixed with salt and soaked in an ice bath for three hours:

The next step was sterilizing the washed jars and heating the veggies in the brine.  The brine tasted just right for bread and butter pickles, so I think I did it right.

Finally, here are my jars of pickles!

I actually made eight jars, and I plan to do four more tomorrow, because I have enough cucumbers for at least another half recipe.  Guess what you are getting for Christmas?

Transformation

I apologize for falling behind so much in blog posting, but I plan catch up now that I am on vacation.  There is an old saw that says the best things about being a teacher are June, July, and August, but I think of it as just a different phase in the yearly cycle. Now is when I get all those weekends back that I spent at Physics Olympics or Science Bowl or writing tests and getting mad at Microsoft Word, or fretting about all the stuff I had to get done.  Now is when I can stay up late enough to go out and see friends, and watch movies from my Netflix queue, and do jigsaw puzzles!  I can do more sewing projects and MAYBE, just MAYBE, organize my school files for next year.

But that is not what I want to talk about.  I want to show off our garden, with some “before and after” photos and praise for my husband, who is tickled to be growing things he can eat.  Never mind that he is growing a lot of cucumbers, which he does not eat all that much of.  He told me this morning I could make pickles.  Shyeah.

Anyway, remember that “cosmetic surgery” photo of the roses?  Here is the “before and after:”

You’ll note the giant squash plant in the foreground.  We’re doing a modified “three sisters” form of agriculture, apparently – call it two sisters and a cousin.  Squash, beans, and roses.  Though rather than try to pick beans out of the rosebushes, my husband has stuck some bamboo poles in the ground for them to climb.

Also, remember the peas that looked like mini-marshmallows?  Here’s another before and after:

In between the rows of peas are my radishes and a surprise hosta.  The peas are quite tasty, though we only get a few at a time.  Here is a pea closeup:

This photo makes me hungry.  Or maybe it’s just that I’ve spent the morning getting things accomplished, and it’s getting towards elevenses!

Things I can check off my list:

• Take winter wool clothing to the dry cleaner
• Take mail to the mailbox
• Remove growth of weeds from the curb in front of house
• Remove dead blossoms from roses
• Lop branches that overhang the stoop so it’s easier to avoid being soaked when coming in the front door (we’ve been getting a lot of rain lately, non-local readers)
• Clean out refrigerator of old leftovers
• Vacuum unfinished portion of the basement (where the cat’s box is – it had gotten so I didn’t want to walk past in bare feet)
• Write a blog post!

Yep, I think I deserve lunch now!

Cosmetic Surgery

I do this every year.  Well, one year my husband did it instead.  We remove 90-95% of the rose biomass in the front garden, going from this:

to this:

in the space of an hour.

I like this task.  It is one of the very few gardening tasks I actually enjoy.  I get to do it standing up.  It doesn’t take long.  The results are immediately obvious.  It keeps my mind active as I make multiple decisions on where to cut with the following goals in mind:

• make the canes shorter than waist height
• keep the plant “airy” without a lot of center growth and without criss-crossing canes
• remove diseased bits
• guide each plant to grow in preferred directions (i.e. up and sideways, not out over the driveways on either side)
• leave a few leaves so the plants can still get energy from the sun

It’ll seem like no time between now and when the roses are once more taller than me.

More Spring Stuff

My husband has decided to try planting vegetables this year.  He decided this before Michelle Obama decided to have a vegetable garden at the white house, and has been pondering where to put the seeds he ordered.  I’d like to put in some rosemary, which I have always kept in a pot, but which I’ve seen survive the winter a couple of blocks away so I want to try it in the ground now.  I have to wait until all the veggie seeds are in the ground, though.

I know some of the veggies will go in among the roses, but today was pea-planting day.  Yes, we know peas are supposed to be planted on St. Patrick’s day, but it was pretty chilly here on the 17th and it was rainy the day my husband took a day off from work, so today it was.

Now, I did not see the seed packet these came in, nor did I look closely at the seeds (it isn’t my project, after all), but I trust that my husband planted peas and not mini-marshmallows.  If these grow, I’ll try to remember to post more photos!

Fiiii-nally

I am very glad that it is spring.

The longer daily period of sunlight, the blooming flowers, the lack of upcoming science competitions to prepare for, all contribute to my lighter mood!

I love that the crocuses that I planted over a year ago are in their second blooming season and they have clearly multiplied!  I have had snowdrops blooming since January, and they got buried several times in snow.  But now, I have many crocuses!  Look!

That last photo is of the mini daffodils that are next to bloom…soon!

I hope you are also enjoying spring!

Snowdrops again

This blog isn’t quite a year old, and it was last February 10th that I first posted about the snowdrops blooming in my garden.  Well, they are blooming again, earlier this year!

Probably Deadly

We came home from our trip to find a lonely cat, a lot of weeds in the garden, and some giant white mushrooms among the marigolds.

I pulled them all out and took some photos, and I poked about online to see if I could find out if I could of eaten them if I hadn’t put them all in the garbage.  Most sources say that if the gills are pale or white, don’t eat it!  Also, these don’t look like any photos of edible mushrooms I could find.  So I’m glad I followed the mushroom rule: if in doubt, DON’T EAT IT!

Here is another photo of a bunch of them next to my foot (size 6.5 wide) for scale.  Can anyone identify these?  I’d like to pin a name to them, if possible.

UPDATE: I found mycologist Tom Volk of the University of Wisconsin – LaCrosse online and sent him the link to these photos.  He thinks they are Chlorophyllum molybdites, which are definitely poisonous but generally not deadly.  See also this site.