Garden progress report
And now for a long overdue garden progress report.
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| East-interior bed built | East-interior bed filled | 14 pounds of garlic |
We've been busy over the last two months with the usual fall stuff: moving this year's firewood into the garage, splitting and stacking next year's wood in the woodshed, cleaning and organizing the garage for winter and rather a lot of other things as well. In addition we have been working towards finishing off the dome and the most recently completed major project is the construction of the east-interior bed - first two photos above. We finished getting the bulk of the soil into it earlier today and now all it needs is some topping up with a peat-moss/fine soil mixture and it will be ready for planting winter veggies like carrots, swiss chard, kale and lettuce. Next up for the dome is installing a little solar panel which will power the sub-soil air fan and also power the water feature. Then there will be some building of shelves and storage spaces.
To the right of the new bed there are lots of thing growing in the east outside bed. At the very front there are the sweet potatoes, more about them later. Then there is a profusion of late-fall and winter items: lettuce, kale and carrots although the carrots are still too small to be seen in that photo. Way at the back, just to the right of the rotary composter, is our tangerine tree. We picked that up in the spring and it has been doing well ever since; at the moment it has a bunch of white blossoms on it that are quite fragrant. We are hoping the dome will be warm enough over the winter that the tangerine will make it through to spring; we'll see.
In mid-August we harvested 14 pounds of garlic, third photo above. Needing a warm, dry, well ventilated place to let it cure, we hung it in the woodshed for two weeks which seemed to work well. 14 pounds is probably more than we need for a year, but when we planted this garlic last November we hadn't gone through a full year with home grown garlic so we were still learning. In November we'll plant for next year's garlic but we will probably plant about half as much. In the meantime we're not sparing the garlic when cooking.
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| "Soldier" beans | Sweet potatoes | 16 litres tomato sauce |
The first photo above shows a few "soldier" beans that we grew in an outside bed. This was our first year growing drying beans, we didn't know what to expect and those beans got pretty beaten up by the hurricane that hit in late July. We got only a few beans from what remained of the plants, but they are nice beans and I would be inclined to plant a bunch of them next year.
Next we have the sweet potatos, shown here in the dome in mid-September looking like they are doing well and with lots of foliage. We expect to harvest these sometime in the next few weeks, so we will find out how they turned out.
And finally the 32 half-litre jars of tomato sauce that we canned. The tomato plants in the dome grew really tall but they didn't set as much fruit as we would have liked. Next year we will trim the plants so they don't get quit so tall (even with a ladder I have difficulty reaching some of them), we'll water them more and we'll spend more time "tickling" the blossoms as in the dome there is no wind to aid pollination. However, 14 litres of tomato sauce isn't bad and that doesn't count the sauce that we made and used directly and the tomatoes that we just sliced and ate.
In late September Transition Bay St. Margaret's co-sponsored a "Food Up!Skilling" event and we volunteered to do the boiling water bath canning workshops. Thus, 13 of the jars in the photo were ones that we did over the course of two, one-hour workshops.
The jars at the very end of the row have pink lids. Up until now we have been canning in the conventional manner, using "two piece" closures that consist of a metal screw-band and a "single-use" lid-with-sealing-compound. That works fine, but one has the expense of buying new lids every year and if for some reason the lids were unavailable then you would simply be out of luck. This year we are starting to experiment with Tattler reusable lids. These work with our existing mason jars and metal screw-bands but then they have a plastic food-grade lid (pink in our case) and a reusable rubber sealing ring. We did the last few jars of tomato sauce using these closures and so far they have worked without problem.