Freezing and Canning

The last few days I have spent a lot of time coming up with the best ways to preserve the harvest based on how the families' picky eaters eat.

Blanching and freezing many veggies is one. My sister-in-law has a huge nearly empty freezer, which just makes sense to fill to the brim. So days at the family garden are filled with the twins helping me harvest and wash produce. We did a huge mess of gnarly carrots yesterday. Gnarly, because the soil is hard and needs a lot of aeration to produce good carrots. The picture above show nearly perfect carrots harvested from my village potager grown in the sandy loam with lots of organic material of a well-worked garden.

The biggest difference from the potager and the family home garden is, based on veggie plant appearance, nitrogen. The potager grows a lot more leaves on the plants, yet the family garden' plant have set up a lot more veggies.

The 'Siberian' tomatoes, while being among the first for harvest have not impressed me with their size. They are about 1 1/2" inch in size versus the reputed 2"-3". There are lots of tomatoes set on each plant.

Tomatoes are one veggie that even the picky eaters eat so it is important we harvest every one.

I cut open a 'Charentais' melon yesterday only to be disappointed with its lack of ripeness. It is edible, but not with the honey-tinged sweetness I had hoped. The 'Earlichamps' are ripe and we have harvested two. The twins were enchanted with the still hairy, fertilized ovules that may yet mature into honeydew melons.

And I have been canning cucumbers. Pickles. Hamburger dills, Russian dill pickles, sweet pickle relish, and am still working on sweet icicle pickles.

And I have hundreds of pounds of cabbage. Anyone have a good storage method?

Best Practices in the Vegetable Garden

Picture of the Day: last year's parsley!

It's not dead, until it's warm and dead!

Working in the garden yesterday, I uncovered last year's parsley. Parsley is not perenial here. It sure looks alive though. I guess I can hope.

Over the last couple years I have been trying to come up with the best practices and best seed selections for vegetable gardening in central Wisconsin. If you have any ideas or something that worked really well for you I am interested in hearing about it. I believe the best gardeners are observant gardeners.

I saw someone was looking for information on whether thunderstorms are good for the flower and vegetable garden. Our "air" is like 70% nitrogen (according to my chemistry-nut son). (Regardless, of whether he has his percent right, it is a big percentage.)

When it drizzles and gently rains for a long period during a day, it is gently bringing that nitrogen down to the soil so it is accessible to your plants. It is not your imagination that everything seems greener after a gentle spring rain. It is not only having all the moisture they need, but the extra nitrogen which is responsible for greening up foliage.

The flip side of rain is when it is torrential, it pushed the nitrogen down through the soil and away from the plants and their roots. I've seen corn, a big nitrogen lover, go from a nice blue green to a sickly yellow green after a period of excess and torrential rains. I'm sure many of you have seen corn that was fairly yellow looking in standing water or flooded areas.

So if it is nice gentle rains, like I imagine they typically have in Britain, it's all good. Those torrential rains we have had often the last few years in the Midwest, not so good.