Room for Improvement, Soil Improvement

This being our first growing season in the new house, we're starting to find out what does well in our soil and what really doesn't.  We've yet to do a soil test, and we haven't added any amendments, but we're working on that.

Last weekend we had the wonderful opportunity to attend a potluck dinner with the Community Gardens of Chester County.  Dinner was amazing and made even better by a talk on the manufacture and use of biochar by our gracious host.  The wheels are already turning as to how we'll be adding this medium to our soil.  Our big hope is that we can lighten the heavy clay in our soil with material sourced from our own yard.

Our garlic, it appears, doesn't like our heavy soil much at all.  The Gardeness dug up the German Extra Hardy today, and even though the leaves looked fine, almost all of the bulbs are rotten.  The Romanian Reds seem to have fared better, but they're small, with only a couple of cloves each.  I hope this doesn't mean bad news for our potatoes as well.  As you might recall from last year, the Romanian Red was the variety that survived when the other rotted out then too.  It's really important to me that we keep this stock going, even if that means replanting all of it this fall and having nothing to cook with.

On a brighter note, our heirloom family corn seems to feel right at home, and all three varieties of beans have sprouted and are growing nicely.  Our goal is to find plants that do well here naturally, and save those seeds year after year.

Garlic on an Autumn Morning

Now that it's November, and the risk of scaring off any Halloween vampires has passed, I took advantage of my extra hour (given the fact that I forgot to change the clocks until after I woke up this morning) to finally plant our garlic. If all goes well, we should get about 70 heads of garlic come sometime around July. We ordered two varieties of organically grown garlic - Transylvanian and Romanian Red - however the Transylvanian was back ordered and then replaced with Russian Red Toch. Romanian Red is an heirloom hardneck porcelain variety, which should have large cloves and a strong flavor, and should store very well. Russian Red Toch is a softneck artichoke variety which should have small to medium cloves, a flavor mild enough to enjoy raw, be ready to harvest early, and be able to be stored for 5 to 6 months. My big hope now is that the squirrels don't dig up all the cloves before the ground freezes. You wouldn't think they'd be interested, but they've been eating everything from pumpkins to jalapenos, so I wouldn't put it past them. I've never planted anything this late in the year before, but I have to say that I really enjoyed having one last chance to get outside and put my hands in the cool dirt before winter. Soon enough there will be snow on the ground and we'll be knee deep in seed catalogs planning for next year!

Spicy Dill Spears

Last week we found time to make a batch of refrigerator pickles from a few of our cucumbers. It has been a week and they are now fully flavorized. We threw together four pints of deliciousness from cucumbers and fresh dill out of our garden. Along with store bought dried spices, the recipe called for dried hot peppers to give them some bite. We also added some Amish garlic to ward off the evil spirits in these parts.

Now that we have a cucumber plant we've gone through more vinegar in the past two months than the three years we've lived in this house. It's wonderful learning how to prepare simple foods that we take for granted as coming from a jar or can. We hope to step up to an actual canning process for our next batch of cucumbers (not just refrigerator pickles).