Square Foot Gardening with a Planting Jig

It's March 31 and I am spending most of the day out in the garden.  I've just finished direct sowing the carrots and beets.   What's amazing is that I am doing it in the sun on a very warm day.  In March.  In Washington!  The gardening gods are smiling today :)

This is my "root vegetable" bed.  It is deeper than the other beds and has a permanently installed soil warmer cable.   I plugged it in three days ago and now the soil is up to 70 degrees and ready for planting.  I'll keep the cable plugged in for another 10 days or so, until most of the carrots have sprouted.  You'll notice off to the left the drip system that I drained and set aside at the end of the "dry" season.  What I've found works well for hooking it all up again is to get the seeds and/or transplants into the  bed and then string the drip system for the best coverage.

I'm using the planting jigs FitzGyver made for me last year.  They really make it easy to plant a Square Foot Garden.  I place one seed in each hole ....

... cover the holes with a thin layer of vermiculite ...

...remove the jig ...

...and then gently firm the seed and vermiculite in to the soil.

I used a 16 plants per square foot jig for the carrots and a 9 plants per square for the beets in the back of the bed.

Enjoy!

FitzGyver To The Rescue!

It's that time of year in Washington ... sun ... clouds ... sun ... rain ... sun ... clouds ... (of course that's actually most of the time in Washington except when it's clouds ... rain ... clouds ... rain ...clouds).  It was really making it hard to keep the temperature in the greenhouse consistent.  The greenhouse kit came with a shade cloth but trying to get it on and off, especially for someone like me who who is a little bit "height challenged" was a problem ... FitzGyver to the rescue ...

Pull the ropes ... shade cloth comes down ...

... turn the wheel ...

... shade cloth goes up.

Thanks FitzGyver!

Enjoy!

In A Pickle ...

I believe that I have mentioned that I'm a relative newbie at gardening.  I certainly proved it last week!  My friend Carolyn was over for a joint canning extravaganza (post on that coming soon).  We were walking around looking at my garden when she noticed my cucumbers and mentioned that they were over ripe and needed to be picked.  Later I went back and looked at them and thought "no, they're all leathery and fuzzy ... I need to wait for them to get smoother...".  So I waited ... and waited ... and waited ... because I still didn't get it!   I thought the cucumbers went from this ...

...to this ....

When, of course, because these are a pickling cucumber, they go from this...

...to this ....

...when they are over ripe and need to be picked.  "Carolyn, I can here you snickering out there!"

So that would be why I have a whole basket full of very over ripe cucumbers that are useless for pickling! *sigh*

Thankfully my friends at a local produce shop had a whole bunch of  pickling cucumbers and were only too happy to let me buy some of them ... so now on to the recipe portion of our program ...

I've been seeing a lot of posts about fermented dill pickles on some of the cooking blogs that I follow with many different recipes and decided that I wanted to give it a try. Carol (Annie's Granny) shared a recipe with me after I asked about pickling.  I used the technique in the recipe Carol sent me with a few variations of my own and made up my own recipe for the pickling spice...

Spice Blend for Dill Pickles

1/2 cup  brown or yellow mustard seeds (I used a combination of both)
1/4 cup coriander seeds
1/4 cup allspice
1/4 cup peppercorns (I used rainbow peppercorns)
4 - 3" cinnamon sticks, crushed
1/4 cup dill seeds
1 tablespoon whole cloves
5 bay leaves, crumbled
1 teaspoon red pepper flakes

Combine all the ingredients and store in an airtight container.

For The Pickles:

1/4 cup pickling spice blend
1 head fresh dill
1 cup vinegar
3/4 cup sea salt
1 gallon water (chlorine free)
4 - 8 cloves garlic, peeled (optional - I used 4 since I don't like garlicky pickles)
enough pickling cucumbers to fill a crock about 3/4 full ... (preferably from your own garden, not the ones you had to buy because you didn't know the difference between a ripe and an over ripe cucumber "Quit snickering, Carolyn."

 First I put the water, salt and vinegar into a large bowl and stirred it a few times to dissolve the salt (some of the recipes say to heat it up to dissolve the salt, but the sea salt dissolves just fine without heating and I didn't have to wait for it to cool down again).  Then I put the spice blend, garlic cloves, fresh dill head and the cucumbers in the crock and poured the brine over the cucumbers.  Most of the recipes say to weight the cucumbers down with a plate in the crock to keep them submerged in the brine.  I found that this didn't work very well for me ... first try finding a plate that fits into the crock and then when I finally did find one  the cucumbers kept escaping and popping up onto the plate... so instead I weighted the cucumbers down with  a plastic freezer bag filled with the leftover brine... wish I could take credit for that idea, but I saw it here.  One thing Erica didn't mention in her post was that you should put the empty bag into the top of the crock and then slowly add brine until the cucumbers are submerged.  Don't fill the bag full of brine and then plop it into the crock or the brine in the crock might overflow and make a big mess ... "go ahead, ask me how I know this"...

So after I cleaned up the mess it looked like this:

Now I needed to put the crock in a cool, dark place like a root cellar for a few weeks, except that we don't have a root cellar even though I've asked FitzGyver to build one for me ( root cellars, chickens, another puppy... sometimes he can be really stubborn) ... "So I'm using the guest room for a root cellar, FitzGyver, because it's cool and dark in there most of the time and hopefully none of our guests will complain that it smells like garlic and potatoes and fermenting pickles." ...but I digress...

The next step is to check the crock every day and skim off any scum that forms on the top and theoretically I will have deli style dill pickles in about 3 weeks.  I hope so ... I'll keep you posted...



Enjoy!






6/24/12

Oops! One of my readers just pointed out that I never did the update on this post (thanks, Peggy!)
Well, after 3 weeks I rinsed the cukes in fresh water, made up a fresh batch of brine (the first batch became quite cloudy during the fermentation process) and transferred them to a gallon jar which now resides in the refrigerator ...

... and then I started a second batch!  Wow!  These are good!  After the second batch had fermented for 3 weeks I rinsed them and added them to the same mason jar ...

After 10 months they are still crisp!  I still have enough left to get us through the BBQ season (these are GREAT sliced and topping a hamburger) so I figure I'll make 2 more batches when ripe cucumber season rolls around  ... "I DO now know what a ripe cucumber looks like ... quit snickering, Carolyn!"

:)

Greenhouse Update ...

The greenhouse is starting to fill up!

I have a station for potting in the least sunny corner ... and my boombox :)  Tomatoes and peppers under lights at the far end of the shelf.

More tomatoes, peppers and some eggplants under the snazy grow light that came with the greenhouse kit.  The potatoes are still sittin' and chittin' while my hanging baskets are starting to look really good.  Yep!  Deb's a happy camper!  Thanks, FitzGyver!

Enjoy!

No Harvest Monday ... and Greenhouse Raising!

I have no harvest to report this week. Some of my Asian Greens are almost harvestable but I'd like to give them another week to size up a bit. I'm joining other bloggers over at Daphne's Dandelions as we share our weekly harvests...it's fun to see what others are harvesting and what they are cooking up with it...check it out!


It's time to show you the progress on the greenhouse and tell you how it happened :)  Mike and I settled into a tradition early in our relationship.  When it came time for all the "gift giving' occasions (birthday, Christmas, anniversary, Valentine's et.al. ) we decided that instead of trying to figure out what to give each other (given that we were in our 50's when we met and each had more "stuff" than we really needed) we would give each other a "gift certificate" that could be redeemed any time during the year for something that was really wanted.  Some years we have gone without redeeming them since there was nothing that was really wanted or needed.  This year Mike redeemed his for a compressor to fill our scuba tanks.  I redeemed mine for a greenhouse :)

I looked at several styles and brands of greenhouses and let FitzGyver have a lot of input with regards to energy efficiency, ease of construction etc. and we decided on a Sunglo greenhouse manufactured here in Washington and sold by Costco (and on sale for $400 dollars off that month! :)  We started construction about 3 weeks ago and I thought it would be fun to show you the process ....

First we had a local landscape company trim the limbs from several trees to give the
greenhouse area more light ...

... the greenhouse arrives in several BIG boxes.  As FitzGyver put it "What Costco doesn't tell you is that there are 251 parts that need to be assembled with 330 long and short rivets PLUS the foundation, utilities and ancillarily equipment for growing plants!!! But that said, it goes together fairly easily for a handy mechanical engineer! And the rain showers are helping because I get one thing done and then have to come in to watch the DVD or read the directions for the next step... "

The foundation with water and power lines ...

The bottom railings and first side goes up ... (You can see that it is wet ... FitzGyver wasn't kidding about working between rain showers!)

Three sides up!

Starting on the top section ... Yes!  The sun finally came out to play!

Getting ready to start on the roof ... the blue plastic pieces all over the place were protective coverings on the plexiglass sheets.

The roof is on!

The cedar shelves go in ...

... and the first plants settle into their new home :)

The fourth raised bed goes into position and trenches are dug for a power line to the greenhouse and water lines to the raised beds ... FitzGyver said I need steel toed boots and a hard hat if I wanted to enter the construction zone!

There's still some work to be done on the electrical panel.  The greenhouse came with controllers for the fan and vent, temperature and a timer for the lights!

At this point in time one half of the greenhouse is still FitzGyver's ...

... and the other half is mine!  Mike says he should be done with the electrical work sometime this week ... I'll keep you posted on the "Grand Opening" celebration :)

Enjoy!

Harvest Monday ... and the First Planting Update

I'm joining other bloggers over at Daphne's Dandelions as we share our weekly harvests...it's fun to see what others are harvesting and what they are cooking up with it...check it out!

I won't have a harvest from the garden for quite a while yet ... my arthritis flare up in the fall kept my fall/winter garden from getting planted (I didn't even get all the fall cleanup done ... it's a mess out there that I am just starting to tackle).  We are still eating from our frozen and canned stores, though.  I made lasagna rolls with some of the Oven Roasted Tomato Sauce Saturday night and (Whoo Hoo!)  my first  homemade ricotta cheese!  It came out great but was unfortunately camera shy (next time, I promise :).

The first of my seedlings are starting to sprout in the potting shed ...

And today the weather was nice enough for me to get the first of the raised beds prepared ...

... and planted my first batch of carrot seeds.  FitzGyver made me some new "Square Foot" planting jigs that I think I am really going to like using.  I have one with nine holes per square foot and another with sixteen.  These are going to be great both for direct seeding and for spacing transplants.

My first 32 carrots were quickly seeded  ...

... and tucked in under a germination mat.  I'll start checking for germination in a few days and remove the mat once the first seedlings appear.

I put the plastic cover back over the bed ...

... and that's one bed started, only 5 more to go!

Enjoy!

I'm Back ... and Pot Roast

I have to apologize for another long gap between posts. I've had the flu for a couple of weeks (that's why there haven't been any posts and why I had ABSOLUTELY NO SEEDS STARTED UNTIL TODAY!!!)  I was actually feeling better a few days ago and was wanting some comfort food (something besides my homemade chicken broth that I lived on for the two weeks prior ... thank God I had plenty canned and in the pantry).  FitzGyver was going to run some errands so I gave him a grocery list and asked him to check over the chuck roasts on sale at Safeway and if they looked good to get one for dinner.  The photographs of the roast and the recipe would have been the subject of this post if it were not for circumstances beyond my control.


While FitzGyver was gone it occured to me that a pie would be nice for dessert ... so I pulled some peaches and raspberries out of the freezer and whipped up a pie crust ( YES!! I can actually "whip up a pie crust" now!  It only took me 58 years to figure it out *blush*)  I put the pie in the oven and called FitzGyver and asked him to add some vanilla ice cream to the shopping list.

FitzGyver came home, put the groceries on the counter and stalked off to his man cave.  Being a supposedly intuitive female I should have been alerted that something was wrong in Paradise at that moment, but I was in comfort food bliss ...

I started the roast and when FitzGyver came back in I asked if he would help prep the veggies to go with the roast ... which he did without any comment (I missed that black thundercloud hanging over his head ... I really need a refresher course in feminine intuition ).

An hour later the post roast was done ... and the mushroom gravy ... and the biscuits to go with it all ... comfort food heaven!  And I called to FitzGyver that dinner was ready ... and HE EXPLODED!

Yes, dear reader, he exploded!  He accused me of attempted "Murder By Pot Roast"!  Now, you have to understand ... Mike has a high cholesterol problem (which is really NOT due to my cooking but to his unfortunate genetic inheritance from his ancestors).  I've got great cholesterol genes (thanks Mom and Dad), but have really tried to change my cooking style to low fat and healthy for my husband's sake ... but I'd been sick ... really sick ... and I was craving some comfort food.  So ...

Me: " What part of  I said we'd have pot roast if he bought one was he missing here?"

FitzGyver: Something about fat and cholesterol ... a little bit garbled so I can't quote exactly (I really need to get a recorder for times like these).

Me: "You helped prep the veggies for the pot roast ... so what part of we were having pot roast for dinner did you miss? "

FitzGyver: "Blah, blah something ... expletive deleted." ... it was getting harder to make out his words at this point ... and I have to admit, by this time I was sitting down and enjoying my meal ... it was wonderful!

Me: "You know, I can fix you something besides the pot roast ... would you like a spinach salad?"  At this point I was spooning up some of the pie and slathering it with vanilla ice cream ... ah, bliss!

FitzGyver: "Blah, blah, blah ..."  ... something to the effect of the pot roast is there and now he can't help himself ... words to the effect of I was offering candy to a diabetic ...

And I thought to myself  ... you bought the roast ... you helped cook the roast ... and NOW YOU SAY I'M TRYING TO KILL YOU WITH THE ROAST ???!!!

And I looked down at the bowl of pie and ice cream in my hands and ...

There was a reason why I was always the last person picked in school for the softball team ... I've got most of the peaches off the lighting fixtures and the cupboards ... still a little on the ceiling and I think I'm going to have to paint ... maybe sponge with something raspberry colored ...

*sigh*




PS. I did receive some rather lovely flowers ....

PPS.  It will be a while before I cook another pot roast and post the recipe ... I'm sure you understand ...

Hearth Side Cooking ... Corned Beef and Cabbage

There isn't much going on in the gardens right now (although I am starting to plan my spring planting : ) so I thought I'd share my latest adventure with hearth side cooking.  I put a corned beef brisket in a 4 quart Dutch oven and dry roasted it for an hour, turning the pot several times so that the side closest to the fire wouldn't burn (I use welder's gloves to handle the hot Dutch oven).

After an hour I added a cup of water, let the beef cook for another half hour and then added the vegetables.

I let it cook for another half hour, keeping the fire fairly small ...

One end of the meat did get a little overdone, but  all in all, I'd say this was a successful experiment ...

Enjoy!

Updated:

I thought I'd show you what the fireplace looks like in case you were thinking that you need some kind of massive open hearth to cook this way ... it's actually quite small ...

...and here's FitzGyver installing our "Green" fireplace insert ....

Enjoy!