Port Potager

Continuing around the garden to the swingset quadrant, we have our planting plan for the 2018 season: On the left, as always, is the asparagus . It’s not nearly as productive as it once was, so this spring we will try renovating it by resetting the crowns lower in the earth and adding some lime to counteract the soil acidity from a nearby evergreen tree.  Across the top are perennial grapes and herbs — nothing to see there.  Along the right side is space for Jenny Lind melons, which is a new variety of small, green fleshed melons. This is an heirloom variety popular among the Pennsylvania Dutch, and we got the seeds on a trip to the Landis Valley Village and Farm Museum last spring. There’s also a potato patch. Along the bottom is a very small length of trellised cucumbers, which will be for slicing. We have tons of pickles from last summer, so we won’t be planting any pickling cukes at all. There’s also an assortment of dill, arugula, beets and cauliflo...

The section of the garden near the swings is always on the easiest to plan. It’s reliably sunny, but two large swathes are already spoken for, with asparagus along the left side and grapes and herbs across the top.  To the right will be Brussels sprouts and a row of fennel bulbs, along with a large bed of leeks, which hopefully do better this year. Along the bottom is a trellis of peas and a row of Amish paste tomatoes for saucing.  In the center C are beets, chard, okra, and potatoes.  And that’s it! This section is full of big plants, or big patches of some of our favorites, so it’s just not very complicated — which is a nice change of pace.

After nearly losing our whole beet crop earlier this summer, we were so happy to harvest pounds and pounds of beets this weekend. We left some in the ground, where they should be fine as long as the ground doesn’t freeze. The first thing we did was roast a couple of pans  of beets with shallots, rosemary, and olive oil to get them ready for pickling : We also roasted a couple more pans without the seasoning, so we could peel and freeze them. The frozen beets can be used throughout the winter for tarts , brownies , and other goodies.  We also still have a whole crisper drawer full of beets that we haven’t done anything with — yet. After clipping some rosemary for the roast beets, I dug up our plant and potted it for the winter. In the past I have always held out hope that enough mulch would help it through, but it’s just too cold here in the winter for rosemary. It will sit in a sunny window until spring. By the way, if you attended my wedding you...

From our very cold, slow-to-start spring and  current drought  to the loss of pollinators and groundhog raids , it’s been a really rough go of it this year. Though we were beginning to despair of ever having food to eat this summer, a bit of rain this morning and some successes have us feeling more optimistic. Here’s what’s going right this week:   Remember the beet leafminers that nearly defoliated all of our beets and chard? Thanks to a regimen of removing affected leaves and twice-per-week applications of neem oil, both beets (above) and the Swiss chard (below) have bounced back quite nicely, and we’re now able to harvest both at will. The cold, cloudy winter and spring made it hard to get our tomato seedlings started indoors, and many didn’t make it when transplanted because they were so puny. Then came the drought, and though we have some blossom-end rot due to those conditions, we also have plenty of tomatoes headed our way. They’re a couple weeks...

This spring has brought us a few new insect problems. In addition to the usual cutworm issues  in beds where things were wintered over and very minor winter moth problems , we’ve got some new bugs as well. The potato beetles have pretty well ruined one potato bed and ignored another — in the latter, the ladybugs seem to be prevailing .  Our other insect infestation this spring is affecting our beets: This is one example of a scorched-looking leaf. We’ve seen these in our beets, spinach, and Swiss chard this spring, and at first we assumed that the sun had burned them out on our first hot day a few weeks ago, since the issues seemed to coincide. But there were also other leafy greens in the same bed that were unaffected, and once we realized that the problem was only with plants in the same family, we figured it was either a disease or an insect issue. A closer look makes it fairly obvious that bugs are the problem:   I’m not sure what gardeners di...

The final quadrant of our planning for the upcoming growing season is the one nearest to the driveway: Along the top is a long trellis of peas, which is on the northern end of the bed so as not to shade the zucchini and annual herbs grown in the rest of the area (basil, fennel, parsley, and celery). To the right is another 27-foot trellis of peas. We don't usually orient them this way, but since it's to the east, we are confident that the Roma tomatoes behind it will get enough afternoon sun. The peas will also be gone by July, well before we expect to harvest any tomatoes anyway. Along the bottom are crops that can handle a bit of shade from the house as fall comes. Here we have another zucchini plant, summer carrots, beets, mesclun lettuce for the summer, and a short trellis of snap peas. We also have a block marked out for something new: cauliflower. I have never been a big fan, though my distaste has probably always had more to do with the whiteness of the wh...

Another Thanksgiving has come and gone, and we are still eating our way out of several gigantic containers of leftovers. That is in no way a complaint, by the way--we're loving it. Perhaps one of the reasons we have so much food left over this year is because we filled up on appetizers throughout the afternoon. Here's our cocktail snack spread: That all looks perfectly reasonable, until you remember the 22-pound turkey and vat of mashed potatoes waiting in the kitchen. Any other day of the year, this would have been a light lunch.   In addition to a nice, cured salami and several cheeses, we had bites of red and blue tart , made from some of the last Chioggia beets of the year. Chioggia beets are my favorite because they are extra sweet and not so earthy. When raw they are red and white striped, but after you roast them the colors blend into the pink you see above. Kirk went fairly light on the blue cheese, which probably pleased our younger guests. Th...

After a week in which we were struggling to acclimate ourselves to the blustery cold, today we were granted a sunny, almost-warm day. It was actually pleasant to be outside again, so we wasted no time picking up the last of the leaves and cleaning up the last bits of herbs that finally died in the freezing temperatures of the past week. We also were able to bring in a surprisingly ample post-frost harvest. There's still plenty of food out there under the cover of glass, plastic, or straw, so we should be eating well for the next few months. It may well be the last nice day, but it's not the last harvest. Here's what we brought in today: This kale bouquet is just a small bit of what we have. A lot of the Russian kale got nipped back by the cold since we left it unprotected, but we fixed that today, and there are still a whole lot of leafy greens left for the winter. Our last three cabbages were unaffected by the freezing weather, but won't last forev...

Sometimes, Sundays are about slow roasting meats and veggies and hanging around the house, enjoying the aroma. And sometimes Sundays are about running half-marathons and going to baby showers and playing with the neighbor kids until the sun goes down. This kind of Sunday is fun, too, but it doesn't leave much room for a big, beautiful dinner. Enter tarts: I've sung their praises before, because they work in the summer  and they work in the fall, they work with veggies and they work with fruit . They are like fast food for gardeners, and tonight they helped us use up a lot of extra Swiss chard that we had to cut to make room for our greenhouse tunnels earlier this week. (They also helped us not blow our entertainment money on junk food when we didn't much feel like cooking.) For our quick dinner, Kirk made two tarts: The  Red and Blue beet tart  we've had before, but the Swiss chard and feta one is new. To make it, he steamed about a dozen chard...

There's nothing quite like coming home to a house full of good baking smells — especially after a day as dreary and raw as the ones we've been having this week. While lately I've come to expect the warm deliciousness of homemade bread , today I walked into something different. Really different. Yes, it's a brownie. But not just any old brownie. That there is a beet  brownie. We're no strangers to the mingling of chocolate and beets . It's a surprisingly good favor combination, as the beets add a complexity and texture to the chocolate that is really interesting. Kirk got this idea from his favorite gardening cook, Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall. The original Chocolate and Beetroot Brownie recipe is from River Cottage , but Kirk ended up modifying it to make the beet more prominent. Because Kirk loves beets, and we've got about a zillion giant ones to use up. Here's Kirk's version of beet brownies. You should make some, because we won...

Sometimes, it's hard. Not just hard work, which is no big deal. Today was not that (although it involved elbow grease, too.) More just a mistake-riddled, bad-luck-prone, exhaustion-inducing day. First off, beginning to process the peaches took a lot longer than I thought. I cut myself, burned myself, and I still have cramps in my hands from peeling and pitting just the first five pounds of our big harvest . And then this happened while I was processing the jam: One of the jars broke in half. See the bits of peaches floating in the water bath? That was super-fun to clean up. Also, I'm not sure if this jam even set up properly, after all that. More on this tomorrow. In the midst of the canning madness, a crying child came home with this nasty gash down a shin: The quarter is for reference — this is the shot I texted to Kirk to get an assessment of its suture-worthiness. In the end we decided to let Nurse Dad patch it up with Steri-Strips when he got ...

A portion of yesterday's harvest: In this basket are (what must be) the very last of the snap peas, tiny "Paris market" carrots , a pair of red onions, and beets. The onions aren't quite ready to be picked, but I needed some to fulfill a promise to Tiegan. This summer she is planning to make dinner for us once a week (supposedly with help from her brother, but his enthusiasm for this project remains to be seen). She has gone through Kirk's old " Meals of Many Lands " children's cookbook and decided on Scandinavia. Thus the request for pickled beets. So that these would definitely be ready for next week's dinner (I convinced her to do France first), I am going with a quick refrigerator pickle rather than a ferment . I used Alton Brown's recipe  with a few modifications: After washing and trimming a dozen small-to-medium beets, I drizzled them with olive oil and added a couple cloves of peeled garlic (instead of shall...

This weekend we got our cold frame back in place over the soil we managed to turn last weekend : As you can see, we added a new frame on the end. We have what seems to me much more than our fair share of blustery days here, and back in December  the wind took out more of the old storm windows that we use to cover our cold frames. That incident finally left us with no more back-ups, and one less than we need to cover the whole cold frame.  For a free fix, Kirk used some scrap wood to build a frame the size of the gap, then stapled some plastic around it. It's not at all pretty, but it should serve the purpose. We'll see how it holds up in the rain and snow — we may need to put some leftover chicken wire or a crosspiece to support the plastic if it starts to get weighed down in the middle. This should get us through the spring, and over the summer we plan to build some new cold frames that will be sized properly for these beds anyway. Once the cold frame was re...

With the holidays fast approaching, this week kind of got away from me, and I realized I never finished this post about the excellent dinner that Kirk made last Sunday. We've been doing our Advent Sunday celebrations up right this year, with really excellent dinners to enjoy while we light the week's candle and reflect on hope, peace , love, and joy. Last Sunday was the Sunday of love, and we observed it with a December turkey dinner. Along with turkey comes stuffing, and it's easy to see why that's a traditional food at this season of the year. The things we have from the late fall garden are exactly what we need for stuffing: Here we have the dried out ends of bread, and a pan of diced carrots, leeks, and the last of our celery. Kirk cooked them a bit to soften them up, then used his hands to mix it all together in a big bowl. Also in the mix: That’s thyme, sage, and rosemary. Although we cut large bunches to dry before frost, we still have these h...

Remember all those beets ? We had way more than fit in that red and blue tart, so Kirk puréed and froze the extra roasted beets. I just picked some more this weekend, so we decided to use up a bunch, this time in a dessert: This is chocolate beet ice cream, and it is delicious. Do not be afraid! It is awesome. Kirk got the idea from River Cottage , a BBC Show about a guy who grows lots of great food in England. I think he's rich and has an estate to play with, but it's still a good show despite the jealous-making aspect of it. The River Cottage recipe called for eggs, so was really more of a frozen custard. As I mentioned before , we are not fans of ice cream with eggs in it, so we modified this recipe to be a Philadelphia-style ice cream. Here's how we did it to make a half gallon: 1 cup milk 3/4 cup sugar 1/4 tsp. salt 1 cup half and half 2 cups heavy cream 1 1/3 lb. roasted beet purée (room temperature) 1/2 lb. semisweet chocolate chips, ...

Another crop coming into its own this week: beets! This is a couple four-foot rows' worth, but we also remembered that we had more back in our cold frame bed. Those are old and big, but we added them to the mix anyway. The big ones just got cut down into manageable pieces for roasting: I have to admit, I'm not the world's biggest beet fan, but I did have a bite of one of these raw, and it was very, very sweet, and not too earthy. Kirk roasted this batch up in the oven at 375 degrees for about an hour. He put them in a pan with a bit of water and covered it with foil. The water helps to avoid char beets  and gets gorgeous results like this: What to do with them now that they are ready? We turned them into a light, summer supper with more puff pastry magic: We're calling this a Red and Blue Tart: the beets are the red; the blue is crumbles of blue cheese on top. I love anything as a vehicle for blue cheese, but Kirk found it a little stron...

When we closed down the garden a couple weekends ago , I forgot to mention that we also pulled some beets. Throughout the fall we had mostly been using the beets for salad greens (their red stems are pretty, and they offer a different flavor), but we pulled the roots of all that were left. You may also recall that we had a fire to warm us while we worked outside that January day: So what could be better than roasted beets? Kirk washed them off, wrapped them in foil, and tucked the packet in among the smoldering bits of wood that had fallen through the grate in the fire bowl: As you can see above, this was hardly a great, roaring fire. The beets were added near its end, and it had died down to mostly coals rather than flames while the beets were roasting. Kirk figured we'd let the fire burn out, and he'd grab the foil packet later in the afternoon when it had cooled (so as not to worry about burning his fingers or having to find any of our old fireplace tools). Resu...