Visiting Seed Savers Exchange Part Two (and a chance to win heirloom seeds)
While visiting Seed Savers, you will be able to see a lot of the varieties from their catalog in the gardens. There are several trial gardens filled with vegetables and flowers, they’re organized into different families. So there’s an entire garden dedicated to cabbage family plants, onions, members of the nightshade family, etc.
Even though they’re only planting a few plants of each variety and only a few of the varieties available, it really does make you realize the number of options that we have for our home gardens.
How can you not love the classic red barn and buildings? I think they provide the perfect backdrop for heirloom vegetables and poultry.
The plants are labeled well so you can note different varieties, and decide which ones you’d like to grow in your own garden. I especially loved these galvanized seed packet holders, I must find some of these!
You’ll also be able to check see some heirloom poultry and the Ancient White Park Cattle, the rare breed of cows that they keep at Heritage Farm.
After looking through the demonstration gardens and the gift shop, you can head down to the orchard to see the fruiting plants. During our visit some of the apples were ripe. They had a sign asking you not to pick apples from the trees, but to feel free to pick any up off the ground. We picked up a few and took some photos next to their labels since we’re hoping to put in orchard someday.
I’m so glad we hit the gardens when we did, the end of August. Everything was at the height of it’s beauty and production, which made up for the fact that I missed out on this in my own garden since I was gone almost the entire month of August.
Ironically as we left, we passed what you see above – field after field of hybrid and GMO corn test plots. A stark contrast to what we had spent the morning hours enjoying at Heritage Farm.
Of course, I couldn’t leave without purchasing an heirloom seed collection to give away here on the blog. After looking over all the seeds, I finally settled on the Heritage Farm Favorites Collection. It contains: Chioggia beet, A & C Pickling cucumber, Dragon carrot, Dragon’s Tongue bean, German Pink tomato, and Seed Saver’s lettuce mix. All you have to do is comment on this post for your chance to win. Winner Chosen:
If you were in charge of keeping one kind of edible plant from extinction which one would you choose?
See more from my visit:
Visiting Seed Savers Exchange Part One
For more photos of my visit to Seed Savers that didn’t make the blog, head on over to my Flickr photostream.
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Finally, A Decent Onion from My Garden
I’ve declared my love for all things of the allium family before. I really do love onions and have always been disappointed that the ones I harvest from my garden are small. I’ve tried growing onions from seed, from sets and from plants. Each year I harvest mostly teeny tiny onions. I’m pretty sure it’s soil here, which is very, very lean. This year I planted my onions in the new garden that I prepared in the lot we purchased this spring. I started them from seed early in January and transplanted them as quickly as I could, which was not super early since I had to clear the lot and make a new garden area.
The new bed was amended with a generous amount of bone meal and I was religious about weeding the new onion bed, going through it once a week and the onions seemed to really appreciate my extra efforts in this area. I gave them a watering with Neptune’s Harvest once a month. The onions weren’t quite ready to harvest when we went on vacation and I was hoping it wouldn’t be too late when we got home. Luckily, it wasn’t.
I’m a big believer in planting different varieties of vegetable to find one that does well in your particular micro-climate and soil. Each year I try different kinds of vegetables to find the one best suited for my garden, every now and then I get lucky and find one the first year that does very well (like ‘Boston Pickling’ cucumbers). Of the several of onions I planted, two of them produced much larger nicer bulbs than the rest. Which ones?
Yellow Sweet Spanish Onion – These golden onions produce fruit up to 1 lb (16 oz.) and their great flavor lasts longer than most other varieties. Yellow Sweet Spanish onions are gardeners’ favorites because they grow quickly without much effort. You will be able to harvest your onions less than four months after planting. (Source: Sand Hill Preservation)
These onions did very well and I’ll definitely be growing them again, especially since they’re supposed to be a good storage onion. I need an onion that will store into April, hopefully these will.
Borettana Cipollini – Gourmet Italian. Small, flat yellow onions. Shaped much like a button. A long day type with average storage ability of around 4 months. Mild well developed flavor. These flattened little onions are sought after for their distinct sweet taste. They command a high price at specialty markets. Small size 1-3 inches in diameter by 1 inch depth. For pickling, grilling and in salads. A good onion for colder climates. Comes out firm, stores well. Fills the gap between winter-stored onions and the early new ones. (Source: Sand Hill Preservation)
I was also quite happy with these little lovelies, for cipollini onions they’re quite large. I really love the flavor of these, especially when used whole in roasts, so I’ll be growing them again as well.
Not all the onions grew to a substantial size, I still had some tiny ones from the other varieties I tried. I don’t really mind, as they’re quite nice peeled and used in dishes whole as pearl onions. This doesn’t mean that I won’t be trying other onions and other methods of growing onions in my garden. There are a few varieties that have been recommended to me that I want to try (like ‘Copra’). I’m also going to try to overwinter some onions to see if that will work here. I’ve read it only works down to a zone 6, but with a good layer of mulch it can work in a zone 5 as well. Overwintered onions are supposed to grow bigger and mature faster in summer.
Do you ever grow different varieties of vegetables trying to find which ones do best in your garden? Have you found any that work particularly well for you?
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Gardeners Should Not Go On Vacation
If you’re a gardener, you should not go on vacation for most of the month of August! It wasn’t that I particularly wanted to go on vacation in August, but it worked best for our schedule and our friends who met us in Seattle. I buttoned up the garden as best I could before we left, making sure to pull all weeds and water everything before we left. We set off and I hoped for the best. We paid the boys from the farm where we get our milk to come feed our cats and to water the potted plants. They did a great job, the cats were well fed and the potted plants were all thriving when we got home.
The edible gardens were also doing well, the tomato vines were heavy with ripe fruit. The boys picked tomatoes and peppers while we were gone to keep the plants from ceasing production (one of them is a salsa maker so he was happy with the different kinds of peppers I had in the garden). They gave me an in depth update about all the things they’d spotted in the garden while I was gone: pumpkins, watermelons, leeks, etc.
The weeds thrived while we were gone and the garden was overgrown when we arrived home. I’ve only had time to spend one evening in the garden weeding since we got home, I’ve been busy catching up on work (on of the bad parts of being self-employed). One evening I was able to spend 2 hours with Mr Chiots joining me for one of those hours.
Between us we pulled five wheelbarrow loads full of weeds from the new garden area up front (the asparagus bed lined with boxwood). Since this is a new garden area this year, it has more weeds than other areas of the garden that are more established. I have found in my few years of gardening that if you are diligent about pulling weeds in new garden areas, eventually you’ll exhaust a lot of the seed bank and you’ll have fewer and fewer weeds each year. My established beds only had a few weeds in them, the new garden areas were a mess!
Many of the weeds were starting to set seed, which is not a good thing. I always try to pull weeds before they produce seeds. There are still tons of weeds in the garden and the new edible garden on the new lot still needs weeded. No doubt it will take me a few weeks to get things back under control.
Do you have someone tend the garden while you’re away on vacation or do you leave it to it’s own devices?
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Here They Come
On Wednesday I noticed that one of the big tomatoes was starting to ripen. As I thought, it’s a Silvery Fir Tree. I’ve been picking a few Tess’s Land Race Currant and Sungold Cherry tomatoes, but no large tomatoes.
Saturday it was finally ready to harvest. I plucked it from the plant, brought it inside, sliced it and we enjoyed it on a sandwich with local bacon and homegrown arugula on homemade sourdough bread. BLT’s are the perfect summer meal, super quick, easy and so delicious – they’re even great for breakfast! Is there really a better way to enjoy your first tomato?
How do you enjoy the first ripe tomato from your garden?
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Learning to Love Kale
The first time I grew kale in the garden was 3 years ago. I planted some ‘Red Russian’ kale in my winter garden after reading Four-Season Harvest by Eliot Coleman. It overwintered beautifully, seeded down, and I’ve had an abundance of kale in my garden ever since. (seed source for Red Russian Kale: Baker Creek)
This year I also added ‘Lacinato’ Kale to my garden (seed source: Southern Exposure). The only problem is – I’m not a big fan of cooked kale. I don’t mind a few handfuls thrown into soup, but in general I have never been a big fan of cooked greens, something about the texture. I love cabbage and other brassicas, but kale has always been at the bottom of the list. I’ll keep trying different ways of cooking it.I am determined, however, to not let my dislike of specific things hold me back from eating things that are healthy and good for me. So I keep growing kale, and I keep trying different cooking methods.
Kale is a member of the brassica family along with: cabbage, broccoli, cauliflower, brussels sprouts, arugula, rutabaga, radish and mustard. Along with other brassicas, kale is a powerhouse vegetable. It provides more nutritional value per calorie than almost any other food around. It contains over 45 different flavanoids, vitamins A, K, C, magnesium, copper, calcium, vitamin B6, potassium, and many more. It also contains antioxidant and anti-inflammatory nutrients, macronutrients, and cancer-preventive nutrients called glucosinolates. Cooked kale is healthier than raw kale, so it’s important to cook it lightly and with some fat to make the vitamins more available and more easily absorbed. Here’s a great article on the health benefits of kale if you’d like to learn more. Kale is also easy to grow in the garden, especially here in NE Ohio where our summers can be fickle and can easily cause broccoli and cauliflower to bolt before them produce heads. Kale seems not to mind the warm weather, although it’s flavor is mellowed by frost and cool weather. Kale overwinters beautifully without any protection at all. I have had Red Russian kale growing in my front flowerbed for the past three years. It survives the winter, flowers in spring, seeds itself down and I have a nice crop for harvesting throughout fall, winter and spring.
Last week we had kale braised in bacon grease with garlic with eggs poached on top. It was pretty good, not my favorite food, but that’s OK – sometimes eating is about nourishing yourself and not about loving what you eat. I hope that someday I will love kale, but I’m not sure that will happen. Another way I’ve discovered that’s pretty good is to make a very garlicky chicken stock and throw lots of kale in about 5 minutes before you’re going to serve it. I’ve also got a batch of kale kimchi brewing at the moment and we’ll see if we like that as much as cabbage kimchi.
How do you feel about cooked greens? Any great recipes to share? Do you grow anything in your garden that you’re not particularly fond of eating?
