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We're beginning a new month here with lots of rain. While the rain prevents a good bit of gardening, our raised garden beds had really dried out last month. We were in the U.S. Drought Monitor's Abnormally Dry classification most of June. It appears that we'll end up receiving several inches of rainfall over the 48 hour period ending this evening. I took the peelings of our garlic from yesterday's adventure in making garlic powder and all of our leftover, mostly dried out garlic bulbs from last year to our compost pile. I also took my pocket knife and a bar of Irish Spring bar soap with me. I spread chips of the soap over our newly emerging sweet corn and kidney bean plants to deter deer. While the soil in the East Garden was wet, I didn't sink in the mud, a sign that even our East Garden had significantly dried out. After last night and this morning's downpours. I dare not step into the East Garden today unless I want to dig a shoe out of the mud. While we've had some nice harvests from our garden so far this year, July promises to produce tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, carrots, beets, onions, green beans, and yellow squash to harvest and enjoy. The row of Eclipse and Encore supersweet peas I stopped picking early is now filled with maturing and drying pea pods. It should supply a good seed crop for the once patented pea varieties.
Other The Indiana Department of Natural Resources has asked that all Hoosiers remove their bird feeders. The Indy Star reports, "Cardinals, robins, grackles and blue jays are getting sick and dying across Indiana, and the Indiana Department of Natural Resources isn't sure why." While I haven't put seed in our bird feeder since the request, I also haven't brought in our hummingbird feeders. Several clutches of hummingbirds have recently hatched out and our feeders are quite busy. Fortunately, our county is not adjacent to any of the Indiana counties experiencing bird sickness and death. It's been hard to miss either the drought affecting the western United States or the incredible heat wave of the Pacific Northwest. I've suffered a bit with our hot spell that pushed temperatures into the 90s and the heat index above 100° F. Working outside in such conditions wore me out and left me dehydrated. I can't imagine what folks out west are facing in conditions almost 20° hotter.
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Friday, July 2, 2021 - Grinding Garlic The garlic I began drying on Wednesday was ready to be ground into garlic powder this morning. While some sources suggest a dehydrator Scraping the dried garlic chips off the dehydrator trays was the hardest part of this morning's job. The garlic tends to bind to the trays. I used a tablespoon and a fork to release the garlic, but also had to soak the trays in hot soapsuds to clean the last of the garlic off of them.
When checking for time and temperature for dehydrating garlic, I ran across some good pages on making garlic powder:
This and That With space opening up soon in our main raised garden bed, it was time, actually past time, to get some replacement plants going. I seeded a small pot of Genovese I bagged, weighed, and froze our Champion of England and Maxigolt mix of saved early, tall pea seed. I'm calling this saving a mix instead of a landrace variety, as peas self pollinate. I'm not sure how much crossing occurred between the two pea varieties. After freezing a lot of peas for table use, we still got 10.2 ounces of saved seed.
Wednesday, July 7, 2021 - Gloxinia Seed
I've really pushed on hand pollinating blooms this year, as I ran out of seed produced in 2020. I'll let the seed collected sit in a paper bowl to dry a bit more as I collect more seed as other seed heads mature. Eventually, I dump the seed into plastic seed vials that go into a labeled seed envelope and into the freezer. One downside of saving gloxinia seed is that it makes our collection of blooming plants look pretty ratty. It's hard to tell at first if a bloom is pollinated, so I have to leave browning blooms and pollinated bloom spikes on the plants.
Our how-to, Saving Gloxinia Seed, tells all about how to hand pollinate gloxinias, save, and store the seed. Good Germination Test
Before I froze our saved Champion of England and Maxigolt pea seed, I set ten seeds on a wet paper towel to do a germination test of the seed. It appears that all ten seeds germinated. Of course, this was fresh seed that will sit in the freezer until next March. But I know for sure that I have good seed.
Monday, July 19, 2021 - Garlic and Onions
All together, we got over sixteen pounds of garlic, including almost two pounds of cull garlic bulbs with split wrappers or other abnormalities. The cull garlic is still good for fresh use or drying for garlic powder. It just won't store as well as well formed bulbs. The bagged and braided garlic now hangs from ceiling hooks in our basement plant room. I'll soon need to move out some of the excess garlic to friends, family, and our local food bank to make room for storage onions (or hang more ceiling hooks). Onions
The good news is the onions pulled filled our drying table. As with our garlic, I'd already been stealing a fresh onion or two for cooking over the last few weeks.
A Personal Note I received a nice email today inquiring if I was okay, as I haven't posted much here this month. I appreciated the concern and have known for some time that I'd need to make this posting. On July 3, I fell off our back porch head first when hanging a hummingbird feeder. I remember a loud crunching sound in my neck as I hit, followed by incredible pain. A trip to the clinic resulted in a trip to the emergency room. After some x-rays, a CT scan, and an emergency MRI, it was determined nothing was broken, but there were some problems with my neck and spine. I've had one trip now to a neurosurgeon and a later consultation with a son-in-law who is also a neurosurgeon. I have an appointment later this week with one of my son-in-law's associates that I hope will determine whether or not I need surgery (first neuro said yes, son-in-law said no). But at this point, I'm getting a little better each day and able to do more things like trimming garlic and pulling a few onions. Full gardening is out of the question for now, so I'll just write about what I can do and have done recently. Zinnias While I've had to just let our large East Garden plot go for now, the row of zinnias that line the east side of the area are putting on quite a show.
Our zinnias are almost all from saved seed. I do add a couple of packets of cheapie zinnia seed off of seed racks each year to add some more variety to our zinnias.
We saved about four ounces of Eclipse seed, but just an ounce of Encore seed. But with what we have left, we should be able to do nice plantings of each variety next year. Since the plant patents on these varieties have run out or just about done so, we may be able to share seed from them in a year or so. Rain It seems incredibly unfair that we now have had lots of rain. With the western United States having horrible hot spells, drought, and wildfires, everything here is wet. We received over two inches of rain on Friday alone and are over four and a half inches of rain mid-month for July. We usually are into our annual mini-drought by mid-July each year. Cooking
Tonight's dinner was my second try at a pork chops and peaches recipe. It was good the first time I made it, although I got the peaches a bit overcooked. This time around I ignored the recipe's peeling direction for the peaches and just used a potato peeler. I also cheated and added three tablespoons of Smucker's Peach Preserves. It turned out to be good, but not great. The real find of my recent cooking efforts is a recipe for Best Grilled Chicken Breast from Delish. While I follow the recipe pretty closely, I do use filleted chicken breasts instead of whole breasts. The thinner fillets cook quicker and more evenly than full breasts and get a nice, crispy black coating from the marinade/basting in the recipe. I've become quite fond of thin slicing leftover grilled breast meat and rolling it up in a flour tortilla for a quick snack. Other
While the links above lead to our offerings via the Grassroots Seed Network, I suggest folks buy their Earlirouge seed through the Turtle Tree Seed Initiative. I sent them some tomato seeds several years ago. They were good enough to grow them out and now offer the Earlirouge and Quinte varieties commercially from the seed I sent them.
Wednesday, July 21, 2021 - Smoke Haze
My prayers go out for folks living in those areas and the brave firefighters trying to contain the blazes. Good Report
BLTs? I've set the bacon down to thaw, bought a head of lettuce and a loaf of our favorite hearty white bread, and made sure we have plenty of mayonnaise. Now all we need is a ripe tomato for our annual celebration of our first ripe tomato of the season with a bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwiches feast. We have one tomato on our Earlirouge tomato plants showing some red (and a bug that intruded on the photoshoot). Our Earlirouges are absolutely loaded with tomatoes this year. After putting our plants out a bit too early last year in some unusual weather, I waited until mid-May to transplant these Earlirouges. While we certainly won't have the first tomatoes on the block, waiting appears to have paid off this year. Other
I checked our green beans again today and saw that we'll probably have beans ready to pick as young, gourmet beans by tomorrow. Steamed with baby carrots and seasonings, they're a taste treat. In a few days, we should be able to do our first picking of beans for canning. As to carrots, our spring carrots are ready to dig. The beets at the end of the carrot planting are also ready. And for the second year in a row, we've grown some nice looking celery. Since I didn't blanch the celery by putting paper sacks or soil around it, I'm not sure how sweet it will be.
We got over four pounds from our spring carrots. However, almost two pounds of that number were culls with bad spots, splits, and other abnormalities that make them poor candidates for long term storage. The good carrots got scrubbed with a soft brush, dried, and stored in the fridge in Debbie Meyer Green Bags. We've had good luck storing our fall carrots until spring in the green bags. I left processing the cull carrots until today. I didn't plant a lot of beets, as I'm the only one in our home who likes beets. I boiled, skinned and made the beets into Harvard beets, using The Spruce Eats recipe for Classic Harvard Beets. After some sampling, they made two pints frozen. This morning, I moved the last of our onions, about twenty-five of them, from our garden to our drying table. The rest of the day was occupied with off and on peeling of the cull carrots. Since I don't look down well, I'd peel a few and stop and rest my neck for a while.
By afternoon, I had the culls all peeled and sliced. I blanched the carrot pieces for a little over three minutes. After the carrots dry, I'll spread them across a cookie sheet and freeze them, with them eventually going into a freezer bag for when we want just a few carrot pieces.
Sunday, July 25, 2021 - More Garlic Powder
So I made good use today of the small bag of garlic culls that had been sitting in a corner of our kitchen since the garlic was done curing. There were four elephant garlic and several much smaller hardneck and softneck garlics. I spent most of the afternoon peeling the garlic and chopping the larger cloves to a size that would fit into the feed tube of our food processor. The peeled and chopped cloves made four cups.
The food dehydrator went on top of our garage freezer. I set it at about 105° F. Tomorrow morning, I'll set it down to 95° F and take a shot at spreading the garlic out a bit more. While higher drying temperatures are often recommended, I prefer to let the garlic dry longer and hopefully more thoroughly without the danger of burning it. It will probably take 36-48 hours to dry this batch. I told earlier this month about grinding our last batch of garlic to garlic powder. A section of our Growing Garlic how-to is devoted to making garlic powder. Let me add here that if you're planning on planting garlic this fall and need sets, now is the time to order. Seed houses quickly sell out of favorite garlic varieties by August each year. We've gotten our best garlic for planting over the years from the Territorial Seed Company, Burpee, and Johnny's Selected Seeds.
Hummingbirds A couple of weeks ago, I was filling our three hummingbird feeders twice or three times a day. I'm now filling just one feeder once or twice each day. Obviously, many of "our hummingbirds" have gone elsewhere or possibly have begun their fall migration south. That's a little earlier than usual. Maybe the tiny birds know something about coming weather that we don't.
Monday, July 26, 2021 - Green Beans
I follow the Ball Blue Book Guide To Preserving for canning the beans. There is a short version of canning beans online, although the Blue Book gives fuller directions. Since there's only Annie and I at home now, I pressure can the beans in pint jars. Pints take twenty minutes if you don't add any meat such as ham or bacon to the beans. I did add three big sweet onions the the eight quart kettle I boiled the beans in.
Our efforts yielded twelve and a half pints of canned green beans. Tomatoes
Morgenstern Books A new bookstore has opened in Bloomington, Indiana. Morgenstern Books returns to Bloomington after 25 years by Iris Kreilkamp tells of the once favorite bookstore of many now returning to Bloomington. Annie and I have twice toured the store that opened today, as one of our daughters and her husband are now co-owners of the store. It's beautiful inside, stocked with loads of books and featuring a café serving local foods, like Brown Country Coffee and Scholars Inn Bakehouse goods. On our last visit there, I was given a carrot cake that was incredible. If you live in the Bloomington area, put "849 Auto Mall Rd, Bloomington, IN 47401"into your GPS and prepare for a real treat.
Saturday, July 31, 2021 - July Wrap-up
Our jar of garlic powder is now filled to the brim. I did a second drying and grinding of our garlic culls this week. With some clumpy garlic slices and humid weather, it took over 48 hours to dehydrate the garlic this time.
And to make this month more unusual than it already has been, we'll probably end up with around five inches of rain for the month. We typically have a dry period in this area that begins shortly after the Fourth of July and extends into August and even early September some years. To wind up this posting, let me write that I'm happy to still be around. Each of the doctors I saw after my neck injury said that I was lucky to be alive after the fall! I now have some good days when I can get out and do some minimal gardening. Other days are filled with intense pain. Aspirin, Ibuprofen, and some good scotch whiskey get me through those bad days. My wife, Annie, has been an angel in taking care of me.
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temperature of 150° F for the drying, I kept our unit between 95 and 105° F. That made the drying take longer than the four to eight hours suggested with the higher temperature, but also ensured not burning the garlic chips.
It's been an interesting month. I'm still recovering frustratingly slowly from my fall off our back porch. It's a toss up whether or not I'll be able to plant any fall crops. I'd like to plant fall carrots and kale.
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