Eclipsed $100 in Produce out of the garden

Just went over $100 dollars of produce out of our garden.  Harvesting something everyday now.  Tomato's are averaging 1-1.5 pounds every couple of days!   By far it's been the biggest producer.  Here are some highlights:

19.5 lb of Tomato's

3.5 lb Red Potato's

5 lb of Russet Potato's

2 lb Bell Pepper

Ton's of little Thai Chili's

3 lb Cucumber

1 lb Okra

1 lb Lettuce

1.5 lb Green Bean

2 lb Beetroot

1 lb Squash

Good start so far this year.  Hopefully continued production as the blueberry's, blackberry's, and grapes ripen in late June.

Solar Cooking: Solar Brisket and a Potato Bag Harvest

Solar Brisket

 

Recipe

 

1 Brisket

8-10 Mushrooms

1/2 Large Onion

3 Carrots

1 tbsp Chili Powder

1 tsp Onion Powder

1/4 tsp Cayenne

1 tbsp Lawry's Seasoning Salt

1 tsp Garlic Powder

Not adding any liquid at all

 

Steps

 

Mix the spices

 
Rub the brisket with the spices
 

 
Rough chop the carrot and onion, leave the mushrooms whole
 

 
Add around the brisket in the pot
 

 
Cover and place in the solar cooker.  I'm shooting for 250-300 degrees for 5-6 hours.  Like I've said before, when I'm done "cooking" I just won't re-aim the oven and let it cool to warm (180-200 degrees)
 
Results
 




 
Looks great and look at all the fat and liquid.  Take note, added no liquid to this and put the brisket in frozen.
It turned out terrific, juicy with a slight spice to it.  Definitely a keeper.  No Lessons Learned on this one.
 
Potato Harvest
 
Decided to pull a grow bag of potato's tonight and here are the results.  Pretty decent harvest but the best part is the boy digging through them finding the treasure!  3 lb 7.8 oz
 

 

 

 
BTW, we have recouped over $57 at this point.

Couldn't Resist: New potatoes for Dinner.

Pulled up one of the plants last night.  Just really curious!  Pulled off 3 nice young potatoes and added them to the beef stew.  The plant had another 6 very small potatoes on it, just too small to use.  But, a good sign of a big harvest to come.

UPDATE:  I was wondering if I might have left some in the dirt, so I dug down and found 3 more potatoes so 6 usable in total and 6 too small but that would have been 12 total on the plant.

Garden Update....So far so good.

It's been a little while but I've been a bit busy lately!  The garden is doing well and I have a lot to update.

Some new developments:  I have two blueberry bushes to go in near a fence and some strawberry's to replenish my strawberry patch.

EDIT:  Just to note about the corn, I have two stalks coming up already.  Normal germination is 4-12 days.  I soaked the seeds for a day and a 1/2 and planted 7 days ago.

First, all the corn was planted on Feb 24.  Should be in good shape, no frost or overly good weather in the future.  Do have an 80+ predicted for tomorrow though.  The corn all went into the three sisters 5x5 garden.  Had some seeds left over and didn't want to waste them so I planted about 25 in each of the grow bags behind the bed.

To the right of the corn, you can see the Topsy turvey I mentioned in an earlier post.  I ended up planting 10 jalapeno seedlings into it.  Again, it shouldn't be too cold for them.

The potato's are growing well.  It is interesting that some are growing so much better than the others and the red potato's are growing the best.  I did have a little cold weather damage but the plants have pushed through and created new leaves.

The tomato's are doing pretty well.  I have lost a few, but those were the hot weather variety that I probably should have waited to put in.  The okra, on the bottom right, could have probably waited as well.  It's pretty sickly looking compared the the okra directly to the left that I just transplanted today.

The buds on all the cuttings look like they are going to produce leaves so I'm excited about the 42 that I planted in the quart containers.  There are buds on the vine that look about ready to say hi as well.  It was about this time last year the first growth appeared.

On the bottom left of the picture I planted four horseradish roots.  They were pretty well developed so they should do well.

So, on to the 4x4 garden.  As they say, a plan is not a plan until you run out of time for changes!  The asparagus roots just didn't seem to make it through the winter.  Might have been too wet as the roots were decomposing.  Had to change the plan.  So now there's celery, peas, lettuce, greens, beets, and radishes.  I am succession planting here.

In the grow bag is the cucumber and below that two other tomato plants.  

Succession planting can be very powerful.  I can't count how many times we had garden food rot because everything matured at the same time.  Decided to get smart this year.

l-------l--------l---------l---------l

  4 Cel   4 Cel    16 Pea

l-------l--------l---------l---------l

  5 Let   5 Let  5 Let   5 Let

l-------l--------l---------l---------l

  5 Grn 5 Grn  5 Grn   5 Grn

l-------l--------l---------l---------l

      32 Radish     16 Beets

l-------l--------l---------l---------l

The back left half will be 8 celery, planted 2 at a time every 10 days.  

The right half of the back is 16 pea's which all went in at once.  

The next row 3 lettuce planted today, then alternating 2/3 every 10 days.

The next row of greens done identical to the lettuce.

The radish is planted 4 at a time every 10 days.

The beets planted 8 a time with 20 days between.

Thanks for visiting.  If you have any tips or advice or questions don't hesitate to post them.

Grape Vine and Garden Update

First, the grape vine.  Finished pruning back the vine to take the shape I wanted.  I have three main vines trailing up to about five feet and have run wire across the trellis for this years growth.

Here's how I have been replanting some of the pruning to try and root some more vines.

You can see below that I've trimmed the piece of vine into two sections with two to four solid buds on each one.  Also, at the planted end, I stripped it to the core before dipping it into the 'take root.'

I was pretty liberal with dipping the root end.

And here, the finished product.  Only about 38 more to go!!!!!!

For the Garden, first the potato's are coming in really well.  Every planter potato has bloomed.

I've prepped the 5 foot by 5 foot bed that the Three Sisters is going to be planted in.  I added 3 forty pound bags of composted cow manure and mixed into the top 4 inches.  Watered it well and am letting it settle.  Plan is to plant the corn the 24 of February.

The first casualty of the year is one tomato plant.  The two year old fell and butt planted on one of the Manaluce tomato's!  No worries, I've got four more.  The cucumbers have all started to appear and I moved the bag to take advantage of the trellis by the 4 by 4 bed (top right corner of the photo below).

Lastly, here's two heads of cabbage I started from seed in the garden in October.  The heads are about the size of baseballs so these should be ready in the next four weeks.

Potato's going in, Seedling Update

First, the potato's.  The buds have come in well, I'll only plant the strongest buds in the bags.  The red's seem to have budded a lot more than the Russet's have but both are good enough to plant.

I might be going a little much with how many I'm planting in the bags but we'll see when everything is mature.  Bag one 4 Russet, Bag two 5 Russet, Bag three 6 Russet, Bag four 6 Red.  I'll weigh the yield to see if the amount of plants made a difference or not.

Bag one, 4 Russet

Bag two, 5 Russet

Bag three, 6 Russet

Bag four, 6 Red

Now the seedlings.  True leaves have emerged throughout the seedlings.  Everything except the Cayenne peppers seem to be doing well.  Might have had a bad batch of seeds with those, none have germinated and I replanted.

Celery is coming up, very young, just took longer than I expected.  I added the second flat which has onions, eggplant, spinach, sage, and oregano.  A lot of it is coming up now.



I started watering with a mixture of fish emulsion to give the seedlings a little boost.  Looking at the warmer February and March, I may be putting plants into the garden a little earlier than March 10th.

Prepping Potato's for a late January Planting

Had to start getting the potato's ready to plant at the end of this month.  Don't use potato's from the store, they've been treated with chemicals and are not intended to be grown.  I ordered organic red and russet potato seedlings.  Pretty inexpensive, I think it was about $6.

The apples in the paper bag give off a gas that promote the budding of the potato's.  When I put them in there were no buds present whatsoever (about 5 days ago).  Now you can see the budding quite well on the reds.

I plan to plant 6 seeds per bag.  The bags are 15 gallons.  I might be pushing it but it's a learning experience.  Have never done potato's before.

I'm only planting one bag of red potato's.  The three other bags for the russet potato's.  We eat more of the russet's but wanted to see how the red potato's would grow. 

Hopefully I'll be able to hold over my own seed potato's for next year so I won't have to invest in seed again.  I bought some burlap sacks for storage.




Based on where I live, I should have planted these in the fall like the asparagus but didn't know I was going to do it till December.  So we'll see if that affects the growth as well.

TIP OF THE GARDEN:  Succession Planting:  Just one other note from the lesson's I've learned especially over the last few years.  When it comes to greens or other plants you wish to eat fresh, succession planting is essential.  Basically, it's starting plants with an amount of time between starting them so you don't have 12 heads of lettuce mature at one time.  So say if you wait 7 days between starting seedlings for arugula, you'll have a head mature once a week for however many successions you plant.