Planting Fall Garlic

About a month or so ago, I planted my first-ever crop of garlic. It's great for a fall garden because it doesn't have to be covered during the freezing temperatures (although apparently there are two schools of thought on this matter) and seems to be pretty low-maintenance, which is also helpful since during the week I only see daylight from the window on the other side of my cubicle glass. (Seriously, I suffer from Daylight Savings Time Depression.)

Somehow, like many things in life that I don't know until my mom tells me, I had never made the connection that the clove is actually the seed of garlic – to grow garlic, you plant a clove.

Simply peel a garlic bulb, find a nice-sized clove and put it upright in a little furrow in the soil with the pointy end up, the flatter end down. (Just the way a bulb of garlic would sit when upright.)

As always, please excuse my horrible iPhone camera.

Plant the garlic cloves about two inches apart from each other, covered with about an inch and a half of dirt.

Soon enough, you'll see their green shoots sticking out of the ground – a nice sight to see amongst the browns and browns of November.

This top photo was taken about a month ago, just a week or two after I planted the garlic.

The above photo was taken today, November 28, about a month and a half and several freezes after planting my fall garlic.

I just planted more fall garlic today to see if it will survive. I feel like you just can't ever have enough garlic. It's healthy and flavorful, and I put it in everything, in omelets, on salmon, in vinaigrettes – and my mom's Lentil Soup, a nice warm recipe for a forecast of highs in the 40s, lows in the 20s this week. Brrr.

Lentil Soup
¼ cup good quality olive oil
1 red onion
1 medium leek
1 medium carrot, sliced
2-3 cloves garlic, mashed with coarse salt
1 large celery stalk, diced
1 cup lentils, rinsed
5 cups water or stock
1 tsp. salt

Sauté veggies in olive oil until just turning brown, about 7 minutes, on medium high heat. Add lentils, water/stock and salt.

Cook for 45 minutes. Bring to boil and reduce heat to simmer, partially covering with lid. Skim off foam, stir every now and then until cooked. Taste for salt, add pepper, cover again and let sit for 20 minutes. Can drizzle with olive oil upon serving. Delectable!

This Summer in Tomatoes

I am not happy that summer is almost over. As much as the heat has been ridiculous this summer, I'd take sunshine over bitter cold any day. And it's tomato season, so that's exciting.




Tomatoes! (Celebrity heirloom variety)

And more tomatoes!

And a few more tomatoes (Yellow Brandywine variety)

BBLT! (bacon, basil, lettuce and tomato)

Open-face mozzarella-basil-tomato melt!

Tomato-mushroom pizza with half pepperoni!

Julia Child's stuffed tomatoes (Provençal)!

Lasagna!

Tomato pie!

Tomatoes, from small to large: mine, the CSA's, my mom's

And a big bunch of my mom's.

And now I'm going to go eat some leftover orzo with yellow tomatoes and peppers and onions and cheese. Or, since I had that for lunch, maybe a good old-fashioned Tennessee tomato sandwich. 

Why You Should Thin Your Carrots [Gardening]

So this is apparently why you should thin your carrots. In case you were wondering.

I was just trying to pull out one carrot, but these obviously had gotten close.

I wasn't even expecting full-blown, ready-to-eat carrots to come up. Just the spindly little roots that had come up the last time thinning my carrots crossed my mind. But nope, it's officially carrot season. At least they're a little more thinned out now.

What else is in? Peas are gone, but I've had my first tomatoes!

Just the cherry ones. The others – Celebrity, Mortgage Lifter and Brandywine Yellow – are still quite green. And not even fried green tomatoes ready. Definitely not 'mater saminch ready.

The eggplant is getting close to ready. I will be cooking the heck out of some eggplant parmesan. And probably grilled eggplant, too. If some animal doesn't get it before I do.

Speaking of purple veggies, we did have radishes. Well, we had a couple of radishes. As in, two. I think this was another problem related to me not realizing how much root vegetables need to be thinned.

Yes, peas in the background. Yum, but again, not enough. Next year, I may need to adjust the placement of my trellis.

The radishes did make for a good salad. (That's my lettuce mix, too.)

And now we will discuss casualties.

I did have some jalapeno peppers growing....

...but they fell off. They had some sort of brown ickiness on them anyway, so I guess it was for the best. My ancho pepper plant looks great, but no sign of any peppers.

I think the jalapenos died because they were being overshadowed by my squash and zucchini plants. I mean, they are ginourmous, taking up nearly half the bed. And that's just TWO plants.

We did have some yellow crookneck squash, but today I found it off the plant in the bed covered in some gross fuzz that made me glad I was wearing gloves. Squash beetles, maybe? I saw a bug, which startled me, so I threw it to the end of the backyard. Except I accidentally threw it over the fence. Sorry, neighbors.

(Don't worry, no photos of the gross, fuzzy yellow squash.)

However, we are overrun with zucchini. I think the current zucchini is going to turn into chocolate zucchini bread, but in the meantime, we've gotten creative. Zucchini tacos, anyone?

We sauteed the zucchini with cilantro-lime rotel, to make up for that we also used fresh tomato juice (canned by my mom), onions, garlic, cumin, crushed red pepper and fresh cilantro. Then we added the veggie mixture to ground beef, leaving in a separate pan the leftover tomato juice, which we reduced down ith some habanero sauce. And then put the whole mess into a tortilla and covered it in freshly grated cheese (Chipotle Cheddar from Kenny's Farmhouse).

(And then we sat down to watch True Blood on demand, and five seconds into that, we were reminded that you can't eat and watch that show.)

Anyway, it was delicious. I was originally going to make a casserole, but one commenter left an oh-so-helpful message that she sauteed the mixture and wrapped it up in a tortilla. Genius.

Of course, it's good we like zucchini, because we sure have plenty. That, and our mutant carrots.

End of May Gardening Update

So, I have gotten behind at this whole blogging thing. I blame travel, which is a great blog subject, but I'm feeling behind in work and don't want to spend computer time doing personal stuff -- and don't want to spend personal time on the computer. It is summer, after all.

I was in Chicago the week before last, Indianapolis last week, Atlanta this weekend and New York the following week. While I have a moment to breathe, I thought I'd stop and update my loyal (ha) readers on my gardening endeavors.

My mom came last weekend to give me some advice and the disappointing news that the weeds I can't get rid of are Bermuda grass. I pull and pull and half the time I can't get to the bottom of them -- because they were in my dirt beforehand, and they are coming up from the ground. Once they get big enough, it's easier to pull them out and get the root, but most of the time they just break off and I give up. Apparently they can probably choke out most of my garden, so that stinks.




But in the meantime, I have started eating lettuce, kale and spinach from my garden. I promise, it just tastes so much better when you grow it yourself.

So far, my only casualty veggie-wise are the onions. I did actually use part of one onion, but the bulb was about an eighth the size it was supposed to be. And the rest died. Sad. RIP, onions.

Everything else is looking promising, as long as the Bermuda grass and bugs don't kill them. I've planted tomatoes – cherry tomatoes, brandywine yellow, celebrity and mortgage lifter – and I've been using this fertilizer from the tomato-plant seller at Turnip Truck. She calls it "Mater Aid," and it's something gross like fish emulsion and tea, but it appears to be working.

I've also planted squash, zucchini, broccoli, eggplant and peppers since I last updated here. The eggplant and squash are looking awesome. My mom moved two of my squash plants to another bed so they'd have more room (I'm still learning how big plants are actually going to get), and now the big ones that weren't moved are flowering! My peas are rocking, too. They're slowing figuring out the trellis situation.

Of course, all these photos are from the day before my mom came, and my garden looks even better now. Minus all that dreadful Bermuda grass.

We Have Sproutage! [Garden]

My garden is official growing! Hard to believe these baby sprouts will one day be a delicious salad.

Radishes and Mesclun Mix

Spinach

Pak Choi

Peas

Exciting! I tried to post this on Friday, but unfortunately I hadn't yet enabled mobile blogging (which I thought my iPhone would just do, but no).

While I'm at it, here are my seedlings soaking. So far, everything is up except for the carrots, which my mom says take a little while.

I am loving spring. My yard is covered with these adorable little purple flowers. No idea what they are, but they are my favorite color, a dark bluish purple indigo hue.

And all of the trees are at that half flower/half leaf stage that is just beautiful. Except it's wreaking havoc on our breathing capabilities. But still, it's pretty. This tree is in our front yard (well, technically our neighbor's). I love it. Happy spring!

Urban Pioneers [Garden]

"Where you tend a rose, my lad, a thistle cannot grow." – The Secret Garden

I am growing a garden this year. One might think that I would be an expert, or at least familiar with this sort of thing, since I grew up on a farm and my mom grows a huuuuge garden (enough for me to run a mini-CSA at the office last year). Not to mention I edit a magazine called Home & Farm and work primarily on agribusiness publications, all with gardening sections. But I've never done it before. I remember when I was about 7 or 8, one of my mom's friend's kid's (so, my friend) read The Secret Garden and got really excited about helping her mom with a vegetable garden. Yeah, not me. Sure, I loved the book, but I don't recall spending hardly any time in my mom's garden between that age and my sophomore year of college, when I read Fast Food Nation for history class and became quasi-vegetarian and realized where my food came from and how fortunate I was to get all these fresh veggies for free.

So in my college apartment we had an herb garden, which I continued in my Brent(ioch)wood apartments. But now I have a backyard, and so I went to my parents for advice on how to start a real garden. With vegetables and everything.

My mom suggested raised beds, and so two weeks ago, my parents came up along with one of my dad's workers and two trucks to get to work on two raised beds. My dad designs and builds houses, so raised beds were no problem for him. I expected it to take all day, but he busted out two beds in about an hour.

After the frames were done, we put in the dirt. This is the point where I get on my soapbox about certain writers who think that gardening at school doesn't teach kids the things they should be learning. I simply don't see how that's possible. Science was one of my least favorite classes in school, but on this day alone I learned (or was reminded) that plants need certain chemicals, such as nitrogen and phosphorus, so you add compost and lime in addition to the truckbed full of dirt.

Then, you start planting. Well, you plant onions if your mom has brought them to you and says they can go in the ground that day. 

Everything else needed to wait for a rain, but fortunately it rained the next morning. Then you have to go back to Home Depot and buy more topsoil because the rain makes the soil settle. 

But eventually, you have a garden. I'm convinced I'm going to kill 80% of what I planted, but so far the only casualties are some pansies my mom brought for me to transplant, and possibly some other transplants, because I probably waited too long (Saturday to Friday) to plant them. I watered them during that time, but that didn't seem to help. But I have a job, and I didn't have time to plant during the week.

Everything else was in seed form, so hopefully those will survive. On Good Friday, my work oh-so-kindly let out at 2 p.m., so we were at Lowe's by 3 and in the garden by 4. I bought a lot of pretty flowers, because my mom really wanted me to make one of the beds a flower bed. And she's right, colorful flowers really liven things up.

There's hyacinth, the now-dead pansies, marigolds (good companion plants for tomatoes), begonia and I forget what else, but I have the little label things. 

And on the other side of the bed: dianthus, salvia and dusty miller. We'll see.

In the vegetable bed, I planted seeds my mom gave me: kale, radishes, chives, pak choi, swiss chard and maybe another kind of lettuce. All spring greens, for the most part.

I had forgotten that I was supposed to soak the spinach and carrot seeds to help them germinate, and I was a little nervous about the pea trellis, so I saved those for the next day. My mom actually had me soak the peas too – "regular" peas, edible pods and something called "experimental variety." We shall see if those make it... mainly, we shall see if my trellises survive tonight's storm, let alone all the spring storms to come.

The only thing we haven't planted (that we have seeds for) are green beans (snap beans). Waiting until after frosts are no longer a concern. Although with this 80-degree weather, I've almost forgotten the horribly cold and snowy winter we just had. Almost.

Anyway, fingers crossed that some of these veggies survive my non-green thumb. My coworker says being a homeowner in East Nashville is being an urban pioneer (for reasons you can probably understand if you watch the local Nashville news). Just like the pioneers, I'm trying but probably will not succeed at keeping everything in my garden alive. But unlike them, I'm not afraid to ask for help. And I'll be very grateful when others like my mom share their bounty with me.

Cast of Characters, so far:

• Planted 3/27: onions (yellow and white) - veggie bed

• Planted 4/2: kale, radishes, chives, pak choi, swiss chard, lettuces - veggie bed

pansies, dianthus, dusty miller, salvia, begonia, marigolds, hyacinth - flower bed

parsley, cilantro, basil, oregano, pineapple sage - herb garden (container plants)

• Planted 4/3: carrots, spinach, regular peas, edible pod peas - veggie bed

experimental peas - flower bed

• Planted 4/7: hibiscus - side bed (thanks, previous homeowners)

(RIP, pansies. Sorry about that.)