The Stinking Rose

"The Stinking Rose", aka garlic, is one of our favorite seasonings to add to dishes. It is very flavorful and has been shown to have great health benefits. These benefits increase if you let the garlic sit after being crushed or chopped before cooking. Allicin is a sulfur compound that remains intact for 2-16 hr after being released. Garlic can help improve iron metabolism and a good source of selenium. There may also be cardiovascular benefits associated with consuming garlic. For more detailed information I have included a great website that details some of the health benefits of garlic.

Garlic bunch

Clove with narrow side up

We planted an entire garlic bunch in our front garden near the herbs. To plant the garlic the bunch had to be broken up into individual cloves, but you leave the husk on. Each clove was planted pointed up (wide end down, pointy/narrow end up) about 4 inches apart and a couple inches deep. Nate ended up ordering a garlic bunch from Amazon, our natural go-to! The kind that we bought was organic and intended for being grown in a garden.




  

Garlic garden - sprouting

We planted four rows with about four to five cloves in each row.

Garlic plant - small sprout

Now that every clove has sprouted, I needed to figure out when we can harvest! After reading multiple websites, I realized that we may have planted the garlic a bit late in the season. However, it seems like they are sprouting and growing as expected.

The sprouts start to turn yellow and fall over and you want to harvest before the plant gets dried out. I took pictures of our garlic garden and you can see from the photo that each of the cloves have sprouted. The bottom has started to yellow and so I thought that maybe the garlic was almost ready to harvest. I pulled one out to see how far along the plants are - and you can see from the photo they are not ready yet :-) I will still keep an eye on the garlic throughout the summer and I imagine that towards the end of the summer or maybe early fall we will have some garlic to cook. It will be really nice to be able to just walk out to the front door and pull a bunch out for cooking.

My next post will likely be about cooking green tomatoes. We found a recipe for fried green tomatoes and since we have a handful of medium-sized green tomatoes I figured I could try making the dish this weekend.

Websites:
Health benefits of Garlic: http://www.whfoods.com/genpage.php?tname=foodspice&dbid=60
Growing Garlic: http://www.almanac.com/plant/garlic

Bean, beans, beans!

Green bean and soaker hose

My string beans have finally come in! They are our first vegetables grown from seeds to flower and fruit this season. They come in as sets so I can only pick a small handful at a time. The bean plants are neat - the leaves are huge, but the plants were sneaky when flowering because I didn't notice until there were actual string beans! From what I have read you need to harvest before the seed pods get too large, and often to promote more fruiting. I hope to make a salad with beans and also a side dish when enough get picked. The sooner after you pick the beans is better for eating because the beans will still be nice and crisp.

In general, it seems as though much of the garden plants grow better and tend to have less disease problems if you use a soaker hose. This is because the water is going directly onto the soil and thus, the roots, rather than the leaves which would promote disease. I mentioned the new watering set up in my last post, but want to give a little more detail here. Nate ordered about 50 feet of the soaker hose from Amazon (where else?!). For those of you that don't know, this type of hose is black and once hooked up to water will drip out at a pretty slow but steady rate. Perfect for watering plants. We ended up cutting the hose in a few places so that they could be hooked up to a regular hose (with connectors) and snake around both the tiered raised garden on the deck as well as the two square foot gardens on the ground next to the deck.

Hose on the tomato and pepper plants

The hose is on a timer and I tried out several different lengths of time for the water to be turned on in order to promote the best soil dampness. Right now the timer has been set to go off once a day in the evening, as the sun goes down and the temperature starts to cool, for 20 minutes. This may change depending upon how hot this summer will be. The timer also has a nice feature where you can delay a watering for 24 hours if we would get a nice rain or storm. The other nice thing is that you don't have to worry about watering your plants when you go on vacation as we did last week. It seems like it's been a great set up so far and I like that I can be more relaxed and almost lazy in taking care of the watering. Now, that's not to say that there isn't a lot of work, because believe me there certainly is! But, it is very nice to not worry about watering every day.

I am making mental notes about what I would change for next year's gardens and I think one would be to make sure that my bushier plants gets thinned a little more so that they have more space.

A Tomato is a Fruit!

Tiered raised garden

It has been a while since my last post, but I have a lot of great news for my fellow gardening friends! For my birthday last month, Nate got me a raised tiered garden and we put it together on the deck. The picture to the left shows the raised garden filled with soil.

We filled it with Mel's Mix (1:1:1 of black cow; vermiculite; sphagnum moss) and mixed it throughout each level. The raised garden uses a LOT of soil. The bottom tier goes all the way to the back, so we were not just filling each "third." I think we used something like 10 bags of black kow, 10 bags of vermiculite, and the same proportion of sphagnum moss that we bought in a larger size. The garden was pretty easy to put together, but we did buy a 4ft x 4ft slab of plywood so that the garden had a bottom. This allowed us to fill the garden with the mix.
 
The next thing to do was decide what type of plants to put into the garden. This spot gets a lot of sun, probably between 8 and 10 hours, and has a fair amount of space.  Recently, Nate and I have been going to the Farmer's Market just down the street from our house. There are several vendors there that sell tiny seedlings that look pretty well take care of. Between the two squarefoot gardens we only had one tomato plant and one pepper plant and since we like both we decided to buy additional plants. We ended up getting eight tomato plants and I planted 4 cherry tomato plants on the first level and 4 big beef tomato plants on the second level.

First two levels with tomatoes

Here I am planting the first tomato seedling!

The deck is the perfect spot for the tomato plants because they get plenty of sun. I read somewhere that they should get at least 8 hours of sun daily. These tomato plants have really taken off. So much so that within two weeks I had to purchase tomato trellises for each plant! The most exciting news is that the Early Girl cherry tomatoes have flowered and each one is fruiting. I am hoping that within the next week or so we will have a few ripe tomatoes.

Early Girl Tomatoes

Hose set-up; trellises on the tomatoes

Watering the tomatoes takes some careful planning. It can be bad to water on the leaves as this promotes fungal growth. I was watering from a hose with a nozzle attachment. Recently, with Nate's help, we installed soaking hoses where the water drips downward. This way I can be sure that the roots of the plants will be directly watered. In addition, this hose is hooked up to a timer so I have it set to water once a day for 20 minutes. This may change depending on how soaked the beds get with each watering.

Now, the pepper plants have been hit or miss. I bought three from the Farmer's Market, but one of them went kaput pretty early on. I also bought a bell pepper plant from Ace hardware that had two baby peppers and one fell off. The other pepper plants seem to be growing well, despite earlier mishaps. Hopefully, a little bit later on I will have better news regarding the pepper plants!