Garden Notes: January 2024

Rainfall

• 6th: 1.29"
• 9th: 4.35"
• 12th: 0.89"
• 16th: 0.14"
• 23rd: 0.04"
• 24th: 0.26"
• 25th: 1.68"
• 26th: 0.11"
• 27th: 1.93"
• 31st: 0.07"
• Total: 10.76 inches

Temperature

• range of nighttime lows: 10 to 60°F (-12 to 15°C)
• range of daytime highs: 40 to 71°F (4 to 21°C)

Weather Notes

• Warm temps coincide with rainy days, cold temps with clear weather.
• What the temps don't reflect is the wind, which has been blustery and bitter. Even on mild days it's often not appealing to work outside. 

Garden Notes

• It's too cold for things to grow, so after finishing up mulching the beds, I've been working on the weediest aisles, scraping the weeds and old mulch. Then I put down a new layer of cardboard and fresh wood chips. Not sure if I'll finish the entire garden, but I like working there on nice days.
• Other than that . . .

Jan. 7th: we ate the last of our 2023 fall tomatoes. I saved the seed.

Greenhouse Notes

• 12 outside, 25 in the greenhouse
• 31 and sunny outside, 74 in the greenhouse
• One thing that's really thriving in the greenhouse is the volunteer chickweed.

Chickweed in the front pot. broccoli behind.

Temporary growing table with kale and lettuce.

Harvested

• lettuce
• turnips
• Jerusalem artichokes

Greenhouse lettuce. Not enough for  salads, but enough for our Sunday burgers.

Nicely sized sunchokes from a patch I didn't dig last winter.

Pantry salad: canned green beans, cherry tomatoes preserved in olive oil and
vinegar, and black olives. The oil and vinegar from the tomatoes is the dressing.

Transplanted

• thyme
• lambs ear
• echinacea

The goal with the transplanting to to disassemble one of my front yard herb beds. While I really like having it, there's a battle every year to keep the wire grass at bay. That and the dozens of acorn seedlings that come with the wood chip mulch. Neither is conducive for the easy growing of perennials. We will likely try some annuals in the bed next summer.

That wraps up our January. How about you?

Garden Notes: January 2024 © January 2024

by Leigh at http://www.5acresandadream.com

My Poor Garden

It's not all bad. The first half of summer was devastatingly hot and dry, but Mid-July through mid-August finally brought us plentiful rain and the garden recovered. Now September has continued the earlier trend toward hot and dry which has meant the end of some things. Even so I'm still harvesting

Sweet peppers

Okra, which is benefiting from

Greywater, which we finally got set up.

I'm also getting

Cantaloupes. They are small from not enough water, but
they are very tasty and sweet; perfect for the two of us.

Green beans. Just a handful every other day or so.
Not enough to can but enough to enjoy for dinner.

I'm getting tomatoes again although the plants look pretty raggedy.

I call these my "comeback tomatoes" because every summer my tomato plants succumb to blight. Gardeners are advised to pull and destroy such plants immediately, but I rarely get around to doing that. I find that when the weather begins to cool down a bit, the plants make a comeback with new vines and leaves and more tomatoes.

I've been seed saving too: tomato, cucumber (now finished), cantaloupe, and green beans.

Sweet basil going to seed.

What's not going so well is the annual takeover by the wiregrass. Those midsummer rains saved the harvest, but also caused the wiregrass to start growing again.

Wiregrass is one of the few things that thrives in drought-like conditions. What makes it discouraging is that it takes over heavily mulched areas too. It just grows and grows like an indeterminate tomato vine, both underground and over the top. Nature is a mightier conqueror than we like to think, and every year I feel like this stuff sends us back to gardening square one.

Wiregrass in the tomato bed.

The tomato rows you see above were mulched with cardboard, empty paper feed bags, and about six inches+ of wood chip mulch.

You'd never believe this was all cultivated earlier this summer.
I tried to grow summer squash here, but it didn't make it.

I might have finally found some answer for it, however, in this article, "Resolving the "Wiregrass" Problem." I don't know if I have the same species mentioned in the article, but it indicates that the stuff usually grows in low-phosphorous soil. I know our soil is low in phosphorous, so if I can resolve that, maybe I'll resolve my wiregrass problem as well.

In the meantime, I'm getting the hoop house ready for fall planting.

Wiregrass comes up in the hoophouse raised beds too.

Temperatures remain in the low 90sF (low to mid 30sC), and between that and my bone dry soil from no rain, I somehow don't feel like fall planting. August and September are our times to plant cool weather veggies, however, so I need to get on with it.

One last garden shot

Jerusalem artichokes are blooming.

And that's it for me. How about you?

My Poor Garden © Sept 2016 by Leigh  at http://www.5acresandadream.com/

Roasted Jerusalem Artichokes

When I mention our Jerusalem artichokes (or sunchokes), people often ask me what I do with them. Well, I feed them whole to the pigs, and wash and chop them for the goats. Some people eat them raw, but we find they are gas forming. Instead of raw, I like to lacto-ferment them. They also make a nice addition to roasted vegetables. Since it's nearly the end of the sunchoke harvest, I decided to roast a batch the other day as a side dish for homegrown chevon burgers.

Roasted Jerusalem Artichokes

• Jerusalem artichokes, cut or sliced into bite-size pieces
• olive oil
• salt
• pepper
• garlic powder
• Optional: any other veggies you'd like to roast with them, cut or sliced into similar pieces

Mix all of the above, coating the pieces well. Spread out on a baking sheet. Bake at 425°F (220°C) for 20 to 30 minutes or until golden brown.

That's my standard veggie roasting recipe, but since it seems to be such a universal favorite, I'd be curious as to how others do it. Care to share your roasted veggie secrets?

Roasted Jerusalem Artichokes © April 2016
by Leigh at http://www.5acresandadream.com/

Lacto-Fermented Jerusalem Artichokes

Freshly harvested & washed Jerusalem artichokes

Besides sweet potatoes, Jerusalem artichokes are the one root crop that did well for me this year. I feed them to the goats (used to feed them to my rabbits), and we eat them too. They are great cooked any way you can think of and can be eaten raw too. Unfortunately, neither Dan nor I can digest raw ones well, so I decided to try lacto-fermenting.

Although it doesn't effect the flavor, we find we like various cuts for various
lacto-fermented items. Cabbage we like shredded, but turnips in thin slices.
I shredded the artichokes in my King Kutter & we liked this texture just fine.

The recipe I used was from this book, Preserving Food without Freezing or Canning. It's actually for sauerkraut ("Sauerkraut in Glass Jars" page 68) but I've substituted turnips and now Jerusalem artichokes for the cabbage.

Fill a wide mouth quart jar and pack down (I use a wooden potato masher). Add a tablespoon of sea salt and about 10 juniper berries. Cover contents with warm, non-chlorinated water.

I've been researching salt and recently bought some Real salt for the minerals

I had about two quarts, so I dumped it into a crock. I cover the contents with a small saucer and weigh that down with a water filled half-pint jar. I cover the whole thing with a clean cotton dishtowel and let it sit on the countertop for about three days. Then it goes into the fridge.

Lacto-fermented Jerusalem artichokes. Yummy!

When we first started with sauerkraut we loved it. Then I tried turnips for sauerruben and we liked that even better. The Jerusalem artichokes are best of all!

Lacto-Fermented Jerusalem Artichokes © February 2014 

by Leigh at http://www.5acresandadream.com/