First harvest: Kohlrabi

I know that yesterday’s post went on for pages, so this one will be short. I just wanted to finally share with you the joy of harvesting something from our garden that we had planted from seed and getting to eat it!

Tonight Charlie dashed outside (before we heard about the tornado watch, hah) and pulled up these two lovely bulbs of kohlrabi. One had a little munch taken out of it where our groundhog friend enemy tried to eat it before we did! I can’t really blame him. The kohlrabi was delicious and I kept sneaking pieces of it to eat raw before Charlie could get to cooking.

We made an awesome stir fry with tofu, a lemony ginger sauce, and tons of vegetables. It had cabbage, farm share green onions, broccoli, farm share carrots, farm share zucchini, and of course, the kohlrabi from our garden. Since Charlie is generally the master of stir fry around here, I’ll have to try to get him to give me some approximations from his head for a recipe because it was so delicious.

Our meal had something in it that was from seed to table. So freakin’ cool.

Fruiting summer crops while planning for fall.

Let me start this post by saying that it was recently my birthday, and my awesome partner bought me a new set of bamboo gardening gloves. They’re so great. I love them because the arthritis in my hands makes a lot of gloves feel uncomfortable, and I already have limited dexterity at times, so really bulky gloves make movement very difficult. These gloves are thin and the fabric is soft, which makes my fibromyalgia happy, since my overactive nervous system is very sensitive to rough things.

These are the nifty gloves…

Now, onto the garden. My knee is definitely not healed, and while I’m off crutches, I’m still hobbling around on a cane most of the time unless it’s a really short distance. I just couldn’t stand to not plant my sugar pumpkins, though, so I decided that I’d go outside today to get them in the ground. I can’t bend my knee very well and I definitely can’t kneel, so I brought a beach blanket type thing outside and set it up next to the area where I was going to work. Then, even more slowly than usual, I dragged all my supplies over to where I’d be working. Instead of standing to till the soil like I usually do, I used a short cultivator and was able to still get the work done fairly quickly. There were awkward moments, sure, and I definitely was in a bit more pain than I would have liked, but I’m thrilled that I got some planting done.

Here’s a tour around the garden. Nearly everything is either flowering or fruiting, and it’s pretty awesome.

The eggplants, as I’ve mentioned before, were seedlings from our CSA. They’ve been doing wonderfully and at least six eggplants have started to take shape, with more flowers closing and looking like they’re going to be eggplants. I’m hoping to serve grilled eggplant at a BBQ this weekend and impress our guests!

This kohlrabi might be one of our most successful plants so far. It’s just about ready to harvest, and we started it from seed!

I really thought my shelling peas were a lost cause. They weren’t doing well, they weren’t climbing up in the three sisters plot, and they just looked kind of ratty. Lo and behold, however, I straightened this guy out and tried to help him back onto a stake, and he was flowering! I may try peas again for the fall, but in containers so that I have a bit more control over them.

These crazy vines are all are all a result of only two honeydew plants. (They end about halfway down the row, and that’s where the kohlrabi begins.)

It looks like this flower has closed up and is trying to start a honeydew!

This next one I just can’t get over. Our watermelon vines are growing all over, though they don’t have nearly as many flowers as the honeydews. This is so freakin’ adorable, though, and you can totally tell that it is a tiny, tiny watermelon!

And finally, my pride and joy: my corn. It got pretty trashed in a terrible thunderstorm we had the other night with winds up to 60mph, and I didn’t think any of it was going to survive. We watched out the window as stalks just got smashed down. We picked the stalks back up a few days ago, though, and a few of them didn’t get wrecked to begin with… and it’s starting to get somewhere! I believe “tassling” is the correct term.

It is so incredible watching all this stuff grow.

I got started on my plans for my fall garden today, too. Sugar pumpkins have been a high priority, since, well… they were the first thing I tried to grow, and that was a year ago! I planted late last year, though, and we had an early frost, so I wasn’t successful. I’m actually a bit late again this year with them because of my knee injury, but our vining plants have been growing like crazy because of the heat, so with any luck, they’ll catch up just fine.

I got the sugar pumpkins in the ground today, and I evaluated the seeds that I had available for what would be good to plant for a fall harvest. Some crops, like kale, are even more delicious in the fall, since the cold weather makes them a bit sweeter.

Kale is definitely on my list of things to plant, and I’ve been looking forward to planting it (and Charlie’s been looking forward to eating it!). I think I’ll also try to do some lettuce, though I don’t remember exactly what variety I have seeds for. I’m going to put that in where the kohlrabi is now, as that is just about ready to be harvested. I have plans for a small area of cabbage (maybe 3 plants) and a small area of winter squash.

The winter squash that I have is a bit of an experiment, really. It’s called Butterbush, and it’s a space-saving variety. It’s a vining plant, but it’s compact and will take up about a quarter of the space of regular vining squash. I’m particularly interested to see how this goes because, as you can see, our vining plants got really out of control this year, so I might be interested to try some of the compact varieties of melons next year. As I may have mentioned, though, the seeds that I have were seeds that I bought when a Cost Cutters was going out of business, and the seed packets were 20 packs for $1! I just bought whatever varieties they had that I knew we would eat, and that’s what I’ve been growing.

Spinach! It just occurred to me. Spinach is what I’m missing. I don’t think I have any seeds. Perhaps I’ll go out and buy some. I have one row of unplanned space (plus whatever frees up when these monstrous melons finish), so I’ll be able to stick some in there.

Next on my list? Figuring out how to get that pesky groundhog that’s been eating everything to leave my veggies alone!

My knee injury is ruining my gardening time!

I haven’t posted in a bit, particularly about the garden, and that’s because I had a pretty terrible fall about ten days ago. I tripped outside of Charlie’s house and, if you’ll excuse the expression, ate shit. Pretty much my entire weight went on my [already arthritic, twice operated on] left knee, so Charlie has been holding down the fort with the garden and we’ve been eating miscellaneous take out and quick meals. (In case you’re wondering, I’m currently in physical therapy for a subluxation of my patella, and they’re going to decide if I need surgery for my meniscus tear in a few weeks.)

The good news is that the garden is at the point where it mostly just needs watering. The plants are big enough that they’re battling it out against the weeds (I’m sure there’s some weeding to be done, but it’s not as concerning as when the seedlings were tiny). Charlie’s been checking to make sure that the white cabbage moths leave our broccoli and kohlrabi alone, and those are doing much better.

Here’s the word of mouth report, passed on from Charlie, and based on what I can see through the window! (I’m on crutches and can’t really make it down to the garden.) Our pumpkins are growing like crazy already, which is awesome. Both our honeydew and our watermelons are spreading out and have flowers on them!

Our corn is getting very tall. Last night we had our volunteer shift for our CSA, and our farmer was there. We had a nice chat about what we were growing and how we were doing with it (I loved it when he said it sounded like we have our own little farm going on!). He said that the saying is that corn should be “Knee high by the fourth of July” and ours is definitely that tall, so it seems like that is right on track!

Are you ready for the most exciting part?

We have an eggplant!

The first actual crop of the season is here and growing besides the blueberries. This photo was taken on the first day that Charlie noticed it, which was taken a few days ago, so it may be even bigger by now, assuming that some greedy animal didn’t steal it. The eggplants are a bit ahead of the game because when we got them, they were giant seedlings from Farmer Rich, but hopefully any day now, we’ll have fruit developing on the things we started from seed!