New things coming up

Ahhh.  Onions.  Always one of my first happy, hearty plants to emerge in the garden.  I have selected a few more beds to plant in the square foot method this year and onions were one of the obvious choices this time.  For those of you unfamiliar with square foot, check out their website squarefootgardening.org  It is a beautiful site with lots of photos that will explain things in much greater detail than I will right now:

1.  Make a 4x4 grid
2.  Use it as a spacing guide to plant your seeds

That's it.  Like I said, visit the site, you will get much more than that, because obviously it is much, much bigger than that...

No, I have not fallen off the planet...

So it has been an interesting year.  Last June rumor started around work that the hubby's job was on the chopping block.  I know, don't listen to rumor... needless to say, it was a stressful summer with no work local.  An even more trying fall followed with him taking a temp job four hours away and only coming home about every 3rd weekend. Christmas brought a new job that only has an hour commute and we are all back together again.  God is good, all the time.
As I planted my tomato seeds this week while looking out at the snow still in our back yard, it occurred to me that I had not posted on my blog for a while.  I know, a year is not "a while", but I am fairly sure no one who reads my rambling was really holding their breath waiting for the next installment of food related, well, rambling.
I am rededicating myself to posting.  Why?  To tell you the truth, I'm not really sure.  I think this has evolved in my mind to a sort of diary that I can look back on and see some of the day to day humdrum that I don't remember any more.
That, or I am just that kind of crazy.
Tomatoes to come!
Sonja

Starting Your Seeds

The "pretty" version of my garden.  Nothing like real life...

We are using tomato plants to start

 Soooo, it is that time of year again, spring, where everything in Wisconsin is waiting for the snow to melt the ground to warm so that we can get out into the dirt.  Don't get me wrong, we love it here, but the growing season is so short it makes the gardening season somewhat of a race.  Because we get the itch in January  like everyone else, but can not do anything outside until Memorial weekend, we start on paper.  This year we are trying something new.  Rather than attempting to manage 5000 square feet of weeds, we are going to use the Square Foot method by gardener Mel Bartholomew in a few sections and see how it works for a garden the size of ours.  This reduces our space to a more "manageable" 2500 feet.  More to come on that as the year goes on.

So what does a person in Wisconsin do eight weeks before you can get into the actual garden?  We pretend we have little gardens in the house.   The initial challenge is deciding what you would like to plant, and how many.   For this post, I am doing paste tomatoes.  In the lower right quadrant of my plan, you can see some sideways words "Heinz" along with dots.  I plan to grow 20 in my patch, and one of the three gals who garden with me is also growing a block of 10.  My seed tray has 36 spots, my seed pack 70+ seeds.  This way I start both of our tomatoes, allowing for a few that may not germinate, and have enough left in the pack for next year.  The stick helps me push the seeds into place, and the grow sheet or dome help hold in moisture and warmth which tomatoes love.

In goes the dirt

 First we start by filling the cells with a seed starter mix.  I know, it is not organic, but around here, you take what you can get at this time of year.  The tomatoes will need to be potted on at a later date, and at that time I will switch to a local compost that one of the ginseng farms sell.  Fill the cells to the top, smoothing out the dirt, but don't really worry about squishing it in there.  You just want to be sure they are all filled to the top. Messy job so you can put newspaper down on your counter for clean up.  I prefer the mess, helps perpetuate the illusion that I am really outside working ;-)

Pressing it down using another set of cells

Now we take another set of cells and squarsh down the mixture in our tiny pots.  Too much air is not good for germination and growth.  When you compact the seeding mixture, you are creating a nice snug bed for your seeds.  Seeds require good soil contact.
There is a method of starting seeds that involve something called soil blocking.  It eliminates the need for plastic or peat pots and uses a mixture of peat, lime, sand, soil and compost that are formed into, well, soil blocks... The blocks stand on their own in a tray until they are placed in your garden.  The mixture helps them hold their shape on the tray and the roots actually help strengthen the whole structure.  When a plants roots encounter air, they stop growing that direction, so there is not worries about plants attaching to each other.  Pretty cool, huh?

 I pour out my entire packet of seeds into a little cup at this point.  I do this so that I am sure to have enough to plant the whole tray at one time, and count what I have left in the pack for bookkeeping purposes.  As I said, this pack has over 70 seeds, so I write on the envelope approximately what is left so that I do not reorder these next year.  This packet of seeds are the Heinz variety from Territorial Seed company out of Cottage Grove OR.  Their catalogs are some of my favorite winter reading.  These beauties will be diced, sauced, salsa-ed, juiced and catsuped next fall as each plant has a ton!

One little tomato to be...

 Here is one seed in a cell.  Sooooo happy in his little dirt bed!  I use the stick (wooden kabob type) to help me push the seeds where I need them.  It is my favorite planting tool at this stage of the game as it is much smaller than my finger, can be used to make holes if I need to, and if I drop an extra one in a cell, I lick the flat end and touch the extra seed.  It attaches to the end of the stick and I can easily move it to another spot.  When all the spots are filled, I sprinkle dirt over the whole tray to the top and repeat the squarshing, ensuring everything is touching.  I have also filled the tray underneath with water to wet the dirt from the bottom up.

Now, we wait, don't mind the blinding snow in the background

 In this photo, you can see I have placed the clear dome over the whole works. I opted to not use the germination sheet, as we are leaving town on Friday, and I want to have a stable environment set up by then to hold over the weekend of being alone.  This tray is now placed on top of a heat mat, on a shelf in my indoor greenhouse.  I found the greenhouse on clearance at Menard's for $18 during the winter.  The trays,of which you can pick up replacements for $0.99, heat mats and my other two greenhouses were purchased during previous gardening years, and I reuse them from year to year.
This brings me to one of my favorite topics on gardening.  The cost.  That package of seeds was $3.55, the dirt, of which I used a fourth of the bag, was $3.44.  I am splitting the seed cost with another girl and based on the size of our gardens, she pays 1/3 of the cost.  Keep in mind also, that we are only using 1/2 of that pack this year.  So for those of you who are keeping track..

                                                                My seeds  $1.17

                                                                         Dirt  $0.86

                                      Total for tomatoes this year  $2.03

That is for 20 organic paste tomato plants.  This means my cost per plant this year is $0.10.  I can't even tell you what each jar of diced, sauced, salsa-ed, juiced and catsuped tomato product will cost, because my brain can't do that type of tiny math.  Kinda makes you want to get in the dirt, huh?

Blueberry Jam

I made blueberry jam.  It is a beautiful thing, looking at eight jars of black yumminess sitting on my counter, still warm from their magical preserving bath.  Eight cups of hand picked, organic, raised four miles from my house kinda local blueberries that I lovingly crushed and turned into jam.
All I can say is...

Yuck

I used pectin like everyone else does, only this time I thought I was smart.
Low sugar, the box said.
No sugar needed recipes, the box said.
At least 25% less sugar than regular recipes, the box said.

Ok, we all know I am not drinking the aspertame kool-aid  substituting anything for natural sugar in my house, so I was pretty sure I was going to need some sugar.

Four and a half cups later...

Yes, we all can do the math on that one.  That means that roughly half, HALF, of each one cup jar is sugar.  I tasted it, hoping against all logic that it would be ok.  That it would still taste like a sun ripened blueberry.
Wrong.
So wrong.
Might as well have drank the kool-aid, sorry Dees...
Damn.

The Garden

Here it is, in all its 20,000 square foot wonder, complete with a few weeds

Squash, cucumbers, peas and onionsThe root bedBeans, pole beans, potatoesTomatoes, peppers and sweet corn

Starting tomatoes

Nothing like a little green in your house when everything outside still has a touch of brown. It seems like I started our tomatoes only yesterday, and the little darlings have got real leaves on them now. My husband searched high and low (at our local Fleet Farm) for heat mats so that they would get a good start. He ended up splurging on large pots filled with organic compost from our neighborhood ginseng farm so that I would not have to transplant the little guys before they were to go outside. All told, we spent less on heat mats than if we had ordered them from a catalogue, didn't pay shipping, and got trays with 70 expandable pots in them, included. I ordered tomato seeds from Territorial again, and all 30 of them germinated. This gives me the 16 or so I need and plenty to bless my friends with. I plan to reuse the pots and trays again next year, needing only to get dirt to fill them. This way I don't add to the landfill or recycle pile, shop local, and save myself more money next year. My tomatoes are not as big as last year at this time, but these are shorter day ones, so no fear. Next time I will show you my other green beauties...Come to think of it, I may be able to part with a couple more, say, if you were related to me and felt like making a trip up here in a couple weeks to get them... (hint hint)
What about you? Are you itching to be outside? Have you started anything growing in your window?

Pumpkin

I was blog surfing the other day, something I find I don't have much time for, and I found several posts about pumpkin. Normally I would have been drooling into my computer, but these were scary posts.... about.....A PUMPKIN SHORTAGE! How can this happen you ask? One blogger blamed it on loss due to a cold snap in pumpkin land. I don't know if this is true and I have not gone looking for any at the store to confirm the shortage because there isn't one, at our house at least.
Back in February when I was drooling over seed catalogues, #3 said to me, "Mom, we HAVE to grow pumpkins so we can have pie!" So he picked out the seeds, and then in the spring, he "helped" me plant them. We were a little concerned about the dry weather this summer, but our neighbor brought over a wagon of soybean straw to put around the plants as mulch and here we are in October and we have loads of beautiful round orange pumpkins. We have so many different ones, we invited our neighborhood to come help themselves to some too.
So, what do you do with a pie pumpkin you ask? Easy as... well pie! Cut it in half like this.
Now scoop out the seeds, and place it cut side down in a baking pan or roaster. I can fit three pumpkins in my turkey roaster at once. Then put it in the oven for two hours at 350, much like cooking squash. You may want to check it every once in a while, but when you see the tops starting to cave in, you know they are done. Pull them out, scrape them out and mash up what looks NOTHING like canned pumpkin. Measure it into quantities of your favorite recipe, mine is two cups, and throw it in the freezer. Done! Six pumpkins gave me enough goo for ten pies. I will probably do ten more as we eat a lot of pumpkin things, but that will still leave me with some for the neighbors. Yay! Later I will post what I did with my first batch of fresh, organic, home grown, frugal pumpkin.

Apples, Apples and More Apples

I commented before about how much I love a good deal and apples and here I am again, with more apples and a better deal! My wonderful neighbors have three apple trees and this year they have been particularly blessed with apples. In turn, they bless the rest of us with apples by the bucket. I don't mean kids bucket, or ice cream bucket, I mean good old five gallon feed pail buckets! Our family loves apples, apple pie filling with french toast, apple butter and apple crisp. More than anything, we go through gallons of apple sauce over the course of the winter. We love it plain, with sugar, cinnamon, cream, in bread, to replace 1/2 the butter in baked goods and whatever else we can do with it. I wish you all had e-smell so that you could enjoy our house as much as we do. To top it off, I have a vanilla scented pod in my warmer.... Like pie a la mode.... mmmmmmmm pie.....

Garden follow-up

Wow, it has been a while since I have written about the garden project and boy have things changed. I never get tired of seeing the new green spring out of the ground in late April, and that is just the weeds! Remember the potatoes? Well, here they are now...
Here is the rest of the garden too, pay no attention to the weeds, that is 2700 feet of love! I am so excited to start eating out of it on a regular basis. We have been in the lettuce patch for a while, and every once in a while I steal a baby carrot from the row.
Now I can go pick peas to go with those carrots and I have spotted baby tomatoes coming too. I have a feeling that now things are really growing, I will have to do a couple updates on this one...

Things I love on a Tuesday

I love the smell of bread....
This is Laura's recipe for Whole Wheat Honey Bread which actually makes two loaves. Unfortunately I can only show you one, since I turned the other one into a pan of cinnamon rolls and we ate them this morning before I baked the bread.

I love fresh strawberries, too.
I can show you these that are from our garden, but what I can't show you were the ten pounds I turned into strawberry spread for the rest of the year. I don't love that jam recipes have so much sugar in them, six cups for a batch! So I found this great product, pectin that doesn't require sugar, and I only added about 3/4 cup of sugar for an entire batch. We tried a partial jar that I immediately opened after canning, and you know what? It tasted like... strawberries!

Good Food

Today I am starting the Eat More Fruits and Veggies Challenge, and I am grateful that I don't really have to try to get good food for my family. Everything we could want is available for use to enjoy by simply walking into a store. There are no lines (third world country), we don't have to mail order them (middle of nowhere Alaska), and they are never out of season (almost anyway). I am most grateful that I live in an area that supports local agriculture, so rather than eating fruit from half a world away, I had a great salad with locally grown lettuce for supper last night. Just a few short weeks, our garden will be producing it's first yummy goodness. Now that is local... Hop on over to Laura and see what else there is to be happy out this Gratituesday!

Potato Thyme

I can't believe how nice the weather has been over the last 24 hours. They were predicting rain for the entire week, and while we have had a few nice showers, the weather today was phenomenal! I got my seed potatoes from Territorial a while a go and they have just been patiently waiting in my garage for the snow to melt. While living in Wisconsin is beautiful, the weather is crazy, and you never know when it is going to snow. But today, it reached a whopping 66 degrees and I felt crazy enough to chance it and start digging in the dirt. Here are the cut up seed potatoes.
While harvesting them would be a lot easier in a box, they are really waiting to go in the ground in a trench about 6 inches deep. This will be the first row in our 30x90 foot garden space, and I am planting cranberry and Yukon gold in two rows. Then I will cover them up with about 4 inches of dirt. After I water them, we wait....
(Game show music plays) Ok, we have to wait for a while, but I will be sure to show you when they peek through.
In the mean time, thyme! This is an ongoing project in our front yard. It used to be boring and look like this.
Then, last summer, it looked like this...
And this...
Now, it looks like this. The green is mulch holding down the annual rye grass we planted this spring. I tried to be frugal and plant my own creeping thyme, but it didn't go quite as well as some of my other things. So, for Mother's day this year, I asked for two things, a composter (got it) and plants (got those too since Gander Mountain was running a double points deal on their credit card, which will in turn earn money for hunting gear for one of the kids this fall, or mom) So out I go to plant some thyme between the rocks. Wouldn't it be nice to be able to plant some time for yourself, you would never run out!

Green Thumb

I love Wisconsin weather, you never know what your going to wake up to. I had an idea though since I spent most of yesterday watching it switch back and forth from slop to snow. Outside my kitchen window it looks like an early October snowstorm since there is a hint of green grass under the white. It's ok though, my dad left me a gift that makes it worth the wait for spring. When we were little, we spent hours outside and part of that time was in the ginormous gardens we had. So many years later, I miss him, but treasure the gift that he gave me of a green thumb. These are just my tomatoes (you can just see the snow out the window) and they are huge! What you can't see are the three other racks of plants and whole other greenhouse next to it. I can't wait to be out in the garden again, but in the meantime, I will just putter in my dining room.