Homemade pickles!

This might be the largest cucumber I have ever seen. I was working on the squarefoot garden this morning (next to the deck) and noticed this sucker growing underneath the deck. Unfortunately, I have not been taking great care of the garden as the one on the deck since the whiteflies invaded. Side note: the insecticidal soap does seem to have helped - time will tell. So, I was fixing the cucumber vine when I saw a huge cucumber fully grown (too grown, really) underneath the deck. Since I already made cucumber salad (http://stephmixson.blogspot.com/2014/07/two-five-minute-appetizers.html), I Googled cucumber recipes and homemade pickles came up. I love cucumbers, and I also love pickles. With this huge cucumber I figured that pickles would be a good way to use the vegetable. For the recipe see the end of this blog.

As usual, here is the obligatory ingredient photograph. The recipe calls for 6 cups of sliced cucumber. Believe it or not, this huge cucumber is about 6 cups worth of slices. I ended up slicing and then halving the whole thing. The end that is on the whiter side I left out because it isn't ripe, or rather is overripe. The recipe also calls for green pepper, which is from the garden - we picked up a plant the other day. There is also distilled white vinegar, white sugar, and salt. Pretty simple!

To prepare the pickles, I followed the recipe as written. I didn't want to make up anything this time around since I am not sure how specific the ratios are for pickles. With the amount of sugar, I am sure these will be sweet after they marinate over night!

First, boil 1 cup white vinegar, 2 1/2 cups sugar, and 1 tablespoon salt for about 10 minutes. The point is to fully dissolve the sugar before adding to the vegetables. While this was boiling, I sliced the cucumber, green bell pepper (1 cup), and onion (1 cup) and placed in a mixing bowl. After the sugar mixture dissolved, I added it to the vegetables and mixed with a spoon. Then, poured everything into a Tupperware container for storage. The recipe calls for a sterile container (if I was pickling for the long term I would have done this), but I figured that a plastic container would work for the time being. I did taste a cucumber slice, but it had not been marinating that long. After about an hour or so I tried another piece and it did taste like a pickle! I bet that after sitting overnight in the vinegar/sugar mixture the pickles will be ready. Delicious!

If you are looking for another way to prepare your cucumbers, check out Allrecipes.com. There are tons of recipes out there for cucumber salads and Greek dressings as well as additional recipes for pickles.


Online Recipe:
http://allrecipes.com/Recipe/Homemade-Refrigerator-Pickles/Detail.aspx?evt19=1

Farmers' Market Volunteers

Nate and I have signed up to be volunteers at the South Durham Farmers' Market (http://www.southdurhamfarmersmarket.org/). We helped out for the first time this past Saturday by setting up before the market opened - 7AM. I am sure that people think we are crazy for being up so early, but honestly we are up every day around 5:30 or 6AM because of Deacon. Setting up at 7AM works better with our schedule than taking down everything when the market closes at 12PM.

Obligatory "Before" Shot

The other nice thing is that the market is literally just around the corner so we can leave a few minutes before 7AM to get there on time. Nate contacted the South Durham Farmers' Market Manager, Elizabeth, to ask how we could help out. The morning set up involves setting up several tents, tables, cones to block off the parking lot, etc. We helped by moving tables from storage over to the parking lot. It's amazing how fast set-up can go when you have several hands to help out! In addition to Nate and I, there was another woman there to help out. She, coincidentally, also lives in Parkwood :-)

Kids Tent

We set up the kids' tent, which is where kids can come and do arts and crafts and play while their parents are checking out the produce. The tent was actually really easy to set up - you just pull apart the four posts (helps to have 4 people!) and they lock in place. The backdrop was painted with a barn, tree, and some farm animals and was attached to the top with Velcro. Very cute.

"After" Shot

As I mentioned earlier, there are also signs and cones used to block off the market so that cars don't drive through - apparently that has happened in the past!

Unfortunately, they do not allow pets in the market so we couldn't bring Deacon. It only took us about 30 minutes to set everything up including a table where they sell Farmers' Market T-shirts. Naturally, we both got a t-shirt to support the market!

Farmers' Market T-Shirt

I think it would be neat to be a vendor at the Farmers' Market in the future. You pay an annual fee of $75 as well as a $15 daily stall fee for when you are there. That would mean we would need to be able to sell enough to cover those costs. Of course, right now we do not have any excess produce to sell, but it is fun to think about. Nate also sent me a list of the top most profitable specialty crops to grow. This includes Bonsai trees, mushrooms, Ornamentals, gourmet garlic, etc. (http://www.profitableplantsdigest.com/10-most-profitable-specialty-crops-to-grow/). I'm just taking it a day at a time to see what we can grow with our current set up of raised gardens and eventually the greenhouse. 

I also came across this neat site that describes 8 foods you will never have to buy again (http://www.unbelievable-facts.com/2014/08/8-vegetables-you-only-need-to-buy-once.html). We are already growing garlic, and I plan to keep one bunch from the ones growing now to use as future garlic! I thought it was interesting that you can regrow carrots just using the tops. If I can get this new crop of seedlings to be successful, I will definitely be trying out this trick. The last one that I thought was interesting was that romaine lettuce can be grown by reusing the bottom of the head. I bought a bag at the store today (sorry Farmers' Market) and once we eat a few of those, I would like to try regrowing the lettuce. 

Support your local farmers! Go to a Farmers' Market near you - the produce is fresh and delicious and usually about the same price, if not cheaper, than your grocery store. 

Homemade Sausage and Hashbrowns

We made a fantastic breakfast Sunday morning of homemade sausage and hashbrowns (recipes from Allrecipes.com are at the bottom of the post).We were at the Farmer's Market Saturday morning and bought 2 lb of potatoes and some sausage from one of the vendors.

The ingredients for the hashbrowns included potatoes, diced onion, egg, salt, pepper, and olive oil for cooking.

In addition to the sausage (which was fresh from the market!) we needed brown sugar (we had to substitute regular sugar), cloves, red pepper, salt, pepper, and we added rosemary and parsley from the herb garden.

Nate prepared the sausage by first mixing all of the dry ingredients together and we improvised based on what was available in our kitchen - 2 teaspoons salt, 1 teaspoon pepper, 1 tablespoon sugar (we should have used less because brown sugar is less sweet than regular), 1/8 teaspoon red pepper flakes, a pinch of crushed cloves, a couple leaves of parsley minced with the herb scissors, and some rosemary.

Dry ingredients for sausage

Patties ready for cooking

Nate added the package of sausage to the dry ingredients and mixed well with his hands. The patties were formed by hand and cooked on a skillet with a tiny bit of olive oil. The patties were cooked for a couple minutes on each side.

Grated potatoes

While Nate was preparing the sausage, I made the hashbrowns using potatoes from the Farmer's Market. The recipe calls for mashed potatoes and if we had some leftover that is what I would have used. Instead, I ended up grating a couple cups worth of potatoes and using that instead. I diced the onion using the vidalia onion chopper to make it easier. I added an egg, salt, and pepper to the potatoes, mixed well and cooked that on the skillet.

Dicing onion

As you can see from these photographs, the sausage patties were cooked on the skillet as well as the hashbrowns. I didn't make the hashbrowns into patties, which would be easy to do with mashed potatoes. Instead, I went for more of a skillet hashbrown that ended up being very tasty. This had to be cooked for longer (about 15 min) since the potatoes were uncooked in the beginning.

The sausage patties were very good - reminded me of Dad's homemade sausage (although he grinds his, and I'm sure it has some sage for flavor). Next time, we'll need to make sure that we have brown sugar or to use less white sugar in it's place. These will make great leftovers for breakfast this week! The hashbrowns were also very good, and if you like onion, then use an entire one in the mix. Yummy breakfast :-)

Online Recipes:
Breakfast Sausage: http://tinyurl.com/ls9npo8

Homemade Hashbrowns: http://tinyurl.com/l4wfpct

Greenhouse Update

We decided to do a little bit of work on the greenhouse this past weekend - and Sunday the weather Gods were nice enough to give us a break in rain. Although humid, and the ground muddy, Nate did an amazing job working on getting the greenhouse ready for construction. See my previous blog post for the first greenhouse update (http://stephmixson.blogspot.com/2014/08/designing-greenhouse-and-update-on.html).

Working on the greenhouse - Deacon is overseeing

The metal poles that will serve as the structural grounding were less than stable after removing the fabric from when it was a pool, as well as removing one section that will serve as the doorway of the greenhouse. Nate went around and dug all of the pole bases into the ground several inches. He then placed an entire ring of stones on the outside, which has helped tremendously with the stability. The stones came from the turtle pond (sad day - the pond has been somewhat dismantled; don't worry - the turtles have been safely moved to an aquarium indoors). Once a plastic layer is on top of the poles and the edges held snugly under the stones, everything should be held in place.

Buried poles and stones lining the greenhouse

Nate spreading gravel

He then shoveled a layer of gravel from part of the pathway - however it's very muddy. Maybe after several rinsings (and it has been raining quite a lot here) it should be a good surface for walking as well as providing excess drainage, which will be good for the raised gardens.

Future steps include finishing the raised gardens - design-wise I have decided that we will need 6 total, which leaves space for a workbench. Two of these gardens have been built, just need to place inside the structure on top of the gravel and fill with the 1:1:1 mixture of soil (http://stephmixson.blogspot.com/2014/04/gardening-101.html). Another two I want Nate to build tiered so that the back half is taller than the front - this should work well for veggies like onions, carrots, and potatoes. I have been growing seedlings in the AeroGarden (http://stephmixson.blogspot.com/2014/07/starter-seeds.html) for only two weeks now and already the corn, okra, squash (yes - I am trying again despite my earlier failure), and broccoli have been transplanted into larger pots (not too large as they are still seedlings) and placed to the sides of the AeroGarden. Once the raised gardens are ready for planting I plan to put these seedlings into the greenhouse! In addition to all of this, as if we don't have enough going on already, we want to have a round pond, possibly about 4 ft tall, in the center of the greenhouse. The pond will help with heat retention - you can see the circle left in the middle in the photograph. 

A hard day's work!

The dome and insulation still needs to be completed, but we have until October or so before we need that part to be completed. Hopefully having gardens planted won't get in the way of piecing the greenhouse together. The geodesic dome is 8 ft tall, which, when placed on top of the current framework, will make the entire structure about 12 ft tall. I will give an update later on as we continue on this project!

Zucchini Fritters

For those of you lucky enough to grow zucchini in your garden, I discovered a good recipe for zucchini fritters. This was one posted on someone's FB page, unfortunately I cannot remember who posted the recipe! The link can be found at the end of this post.

Ingredients for zucchini fritters

The recipe only called for a few ingredients: zucchini, feta cheese, garlic, egg, flour, and some spices (I added my Dad's mix as well). The egg is from a vendor at the Farmer's Market - I love the taste of these eggs, much more flavorful than anything you buy at the store. I would love to say that the zucchini is from the garden, but I have had no luck with squash this year. However, there are several vendors at the Farmer's Market who have plenty to sell! I eyeballed the amount of zucchini and grated them into a colander. I added about a teaspoon of salt, mixed well, and let them sweat in the sink for about 10 minutes.

Grating zucchini

Notice the frog sponge holder??

Grated zucchini

Fritter batter

While the zucchini was being salted, I combined the remaining ingredients into a bowl. This included 1/4 cup wheat flower, ~ 1/4 cup feta cheese (I didn't measure this out, just eyeballed it), 4 cloves of minced garlic, 1 egg (bought at the Farmer's Market!), 4 tablespoons of olive oil (added more because the batter wasn't mixing completely), 2 tablespoons of dill, 1 teaspoon of black pepper, and 1 teaspoon of Dad's Mix (JGM Mix 4+).

Nate helped out by whisking the fritter batter together and forming the fritters by hand (photographs above). We made about 8 fritters total and placed them on a greased pan and baked for a good 45 minutes or so. The recipe calls for pan frying them, but I was already baking chicken in the oven so we figured it would be OK to bake. They didn't turn out pretty, but they tasted great. If we were to make them again, I would recommend trying to pan fry them to hold the fritter together and using less dill (unless you love the taste of dill, then 2 TB is perfect). This is a nice recipe and you could really do this with any vegetable that can be grated - carrots, peppers, etc. I highly recommend trying it out and changing the spices to what your taste buds will enjoy!

Online recipe:
http://12tomatoes.com/2014/08/vegetarian-recipe-zucchini-fritters.html

Pests of the Garden

Whiteflies on leaves

That's right...we have garden pests. On our tomatoes! This is very disturbing news for me - and rather gross. There are a ton on the plants right now. I first had to figure what the little guys were. Originally I thought that they were aphids because those are pretty common pests. However, after watching a YouTube video (see below for the link) I realized that while the plants have white bug bodies (aphids leave white bodies when they transform to the adult form) they are not yellow or green in color. These guys are white, and tiny. They fly in swarms if the plant is shaken. The photographs don't really do it justice, but if you look hard enough there are thousands of tiny white bugs all over the tomato leaves.

They are doing some damage to the plants because the leaves are starting to shrivel and die. The bugs are definitely whiteflies because there are so many and the way that they are killing the tomato plants by sucking out the juices.  These plants have a lot of green tomatoes on them so I'm hoping to save the plants before these bugs kill the plants.

I did a quick Google search to see  what I could do to get rid of the little buggers. I don't really want to use pesticides if it can be helped. This is mainly because of Deacon and I'd rather not have to worry about that at all. One website mentions several home remedies including soapy water (which primarily affects aphids - I thought that's what they were at first so I used this remedy originally). I sprayed the plants thoroughly with soapy water for a couple days in a row, but quickly realized I was battling the wrong bug.While the soapy water did disturb the guys, it did not get rid of them.

Many sites recommend using an insecticidal soap and Amazon sells a concentrate by Safer that is safe for garden plants, humans, and animals. I bought some as well as a sprayer and should be able to start treating in a couple of days. I really hope it works! I'm worried for my tomato plants. If it does, then I also know what to look for in the future with additional gardens. Wish me luck!

Online Resources
Aphids:
http://www.almanac.com/content/aphids
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G8sajFaKMig
Whiteflies:
http://www.almanac.com/content/whiteflies
Tomato Pests:
http://www.planetnatural.com/tomato-gardening-guru/pests-disease/

Designing a Greenhouse (and an update on the AeroGarden)

Now that we've taken apart the pool and I am starting new seedlings in the Aerogarden, it's time to design and build the greenhouse! We kept the poles used to frame the pool, but just removed the fabric. This is going to be the base of the greenhouse and we will add a canopy on top to complete the building. It is 16 feet in diameter and since the greenhouse will be round it takes a little bit of thinking to plan out the design of the inside.

View of pool frame from deck

Location of the greenhouse is important. We don't really have a choice in the location of our greenhouse since it is where the pool used to be. But, it will get a lot of light from the East, which is ideal. This will get the most light from November until February making the plants happy! We do have a magnolia tree that is evergreen so it keeps its leaves during the winter months. I didn't know that magnolias can be either deciduous or evergreen! There are plenty of websites that detail this (see below). While this isn't great for the greenhouse, I think it will still get plenty of early morning light.

Frame with "doorway"

Because we are having a freestanding greenhouse structure, we will need to worry about getting electricity out there for heat during the winter. In addition, water must be available. We already have electricity connected to our shed with a GFI outlet on the side closest to the greenhouse. We plan to have a small pond in the middle to help control humidity. It may be possible to get water down to the greenhouse, but most likely we will have to set up a hose system with drip irrigation. 

For the top part of the greenhouse we are going to purchase a kit (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CMsRCiYZl0A&sns=em). Ideally, we would like to make it ourselves, but cutting the piping and making sure that the angles are correct is likely to be a very complex job. This kit comes with the piping to make a dome on top of our current structure and also two liners for the dome. The floor is going to be gravel that we have laid out for a pathway in our backyard. Since we don't really use the path that much, it makes sense to re-purpose it for a greenhouse floor!

Since it's still nice and warm outside, we don't have to worry about getting the dome topper put together quite yet. I think as long as we can get everything together before the weather gets too cold at night (October-ish?) we will be in good shape. But, we can start building the foundation and creating some raised gardens for inside!

I already have some seedlings growing in the AeroGarden - and they really took off. It's only been a couple of weeks and I've already had to transport the corn into their own containers! I'll keep them inside next to the AeroGarden for now until they get taller and I'll be able to transplant them outside into our newly built raised gardens. The AeroGarden makes starting plants from seeds a breeze. So, once these seeds have sprouted into seedlings that can be transplanted I will get another starter set and plant an additional round of seeds!

This morning I went ahead and transplanted two of the corn seedlings into new containers (just slightly bigger) until they are well established and can be put into one of the raised gardens in the greenhouse. I used a little bit of black kow, garden soil, and peat moss and mixed well before planting the two corn seedlings. You can see from the photograph to the left that the corn has a huge root! This is great news because it means that they have been growing well in the AeroGarden. I had to carefully remove the pod from the AeroGarden styrofoam holder to transplant them into the new pots. The pots were placed next to the AeroGarden so that they will still get a fair amount of light.











For the raised garden, Nate has become quite the handyman! We bought three 2in x 8in x 10ft boards from Lowe's. They have a wood cutting area in the back so we had the guy there cut the boards into four 4 foot length sections with the remaining all 2 foot sections. We'll end up with two 4ft x 2ft raised gardens that are about 8in in height. Ideally, I think we would want a little bit deeper, but 8in is probably enough for the first two sets. The corners are set with 4inx4in posts.

Goodies from Lowe's

Nate the HandyMan

Above you can see our wood purchase from Lowe's placed in the car. To the right is Nate with his protective gear (safety glasses and ear protection) and a new circular saw. We figured it was a good purchase because we'll be building a lot of raised gardens and who knows what else!

Raised garden in the greenhouse

Here are the pieces of wood ready for the raised garden assembly. Nate is holding the 2ft board against the 4ft board with a 4x4 post in the corner. He assembled the garden using wood screws and the finished product can be seen above! We bought enough wood to make two raised gardens, but just finished one today to see how it looked in the greenhouse.

The photograph on the right shows how the raised garden will look inside the greenhouse. We figure that we will need to make 7 total to fit all around the outside of the frame. The corners will touch so that there is a triangular space between each garden. I figure in these spaces I can have some hanging plants and flowers to fill in. There is plenty of space in the middle for a small circular pond (maybe with a fountain?). We'll fill in the bottom with gravel from the pathway and once that has been evened out, we can finish making the raised gardens and get the seedlings transplanted to their new home!



Online Resources:
http://www.wvu.edu/~agexten/hortcult/greenhou/building.htm
http://homeguides.sfgate.com/deciduous-vs-evergreen-magnolias-27694.html