2014 beginning

Leave a reply

cold frame 2014This week I’ve collected all the seeds I’ll need for an early spring garden. I also built this cold frame out of scrap wood laying around the house. I really didn’t need one, I just wanted one. This will be perfect for use in early spring and winter this year. When I look at the soil inside the cold frame I can still notice a shadow of about 6″ in the front of the bed. This is being cast by the wood in the front of the cold frame and the sun still being a little bit low. I’d say if you want to have success in a cold frame early, make sure that the entire soil area in the cold frame gets 100% sunlight with no shadows. As I’ve watched weather underground I can see that the low’s for evening temperatures are a little below freezing for the remainder of the month. That, along with noticing there will be 10 hours of sunlight on January 30th tells me it’s soon time to start planting. In two weeks I’ll begin direct seeding right into the cold frame and the garden beds. Next week I’ll begin to start a few things indoors-leeks, a few varieties of lettuce, poc choi, and chard. There’s still quite a bit remaining in the garden right now-carrots, potatoes, spinach, arugula, rosemary, parsley, and mache. It’s been a fun winter experimenting with all sorts of different things. Spring season is getting closer.

[ois skin=”below post”]

More winter harvest time

Leave a reply

red pontiac potatoes on 123013Today is December 30th and was able to harvest red pontiac potatoes along with some delicious carrots. I’ve already begun to add leaves and finished compost to some of my garden in preparation for an early spring harvest. I don’t have a cold storage in our home. This is the best way for me to do it with things like potatoes. First, dig down into one of your squares about 8 inches. Put your potatoes in the hole. Add leaves you’ve collected this fall, then add your soil back on top. I have a covered hoop house so I’ve been able to not have the ground freeze under the hoops. Then when you want some potatoes, just push over some dirt, dig down, and pull out what you want. There is nothing as great as a potato just pulled out of the ground on on to your dinner table. It’s so much different than what you buy at even the best vegetable aisles! For the square foot gardener, you can count on 6 pounds of potatoes per square. I’ve got about 20 pounds left.

[ois skin=”below post”]

A highlight of the winter garden

Leave a reply

claytonia 110113I’ve had a lot of fun harvesting salad greens this far into December. Combining all the different crops to make dinner salads this year has been a real treat. A snip of this, another of that, etc. has left us bewildered at how great these cold hardy crops really are. At last count I have 24 different crops still growing under the greenhouse. And we’ve had a lot of snow and freezing weather to go along with it. With the exception of some lettuce that I let get to big before harvesting, everything is alive and doing well. After a freeze or two those larger leaves of lettuce just turn to mush. I should have started harvesting these lettuce leaves at the smaller stages. Right now my garden is a refrigerator-keeping our food in a cool climate until we’re ready to eat it. One of the biggest and best tasting of the new cool weather crops is pictured here-claytonia. Also known as miners lettuce, it’s a prolific and heavy crop. We’ve been able to not only add this to the regular mesclun salad mixes that I put together, but I’ve also been able to cut some of it and lay it on top of a fancy chicken dish for a garnish. Nobody knew what it was but they all loved it. They also couldn’t believe that I cut it a few minutes before dinner. If you’ve never tried this, keep it in mind for next fall and winter as it will not grow in the warmer weather.

[ois skin=”below post”]

Almost 8 inches of snow

5 Replies

greenhouse after the big storm3-120513It was a pretty good snow storm that came through Utah 2 nights ago. I had a problem with the snow load on the greenhouse and had to do some last minute fixing. I also had to change the shape of the greenhouse to the rounded instead of the Gothic arch. The Gothic arch added another foot and a half of height so the wind was really blowing it around. My only concern now it this shape of greenhouse and it being able to handle the snow load. I’ve tried to do this on a major budget but have learned that you’ll need to do some critical things to make it more solid than the simple Eliot Coleman PVC and rope greenhouse. That’s simply not going to work when you have the kind of weather that we have. But he’s in Maine so it should be a little similar I would think. At any rate, it was 8 or 9 degrees two nights ago and underneath the greenhouse it was 34. I’ll post soon to show what it looks like under the greenhouse. It’s great under there. I was able to go out into the garden and effortlessly harvest loose leaf lettuce, mizuna, tatsoi, mache, spinach, and arugula. More snow on the way and single digit temperatures at night for many days to come.

[ois skin=”below post”]

Arugula and radicchio with a Honey-lime viniagrette and carmelized pecans

Leave a reply

arugula and radicchio saladI have many hobbies-in fact my wife calls me the “hobby king.” To this day I’m not convinced she says that in a good way. But when you have a garden that produces such tasty things as this, how could you not develop a cooking hobby? That’s the case with me. Tonight I harvested arugula and radicchio from the garden. It’s been grown in cold weather so the arugula doesn’t have that overpowering peppery taste that usually comes with it, and the radicchio is no longer bitter. Slice some Granny Smith apples, make some carmelized pecans and a honey-lime dressing, and top it with blue cheese. I promise-you’ll have people asking you for the recipe. The winter harvest-the absolute best.

[ois skin=”below post”]