Garden Planning

Planning my garden...already...in January...with a foot and a half of snow covering my back yard. It seems early, except that I need to order seeds and seed potatoes. And Ty said he's going to build me two new beds (though together they'll be about the same size as the one I already have). Yay for doubling my growing space!

I just placed my order for seeds potatoes. I got three fourpacks of different varieties from a supplier out of Bowden, AB. Eagle Creek Farms has a CSA program, a u-pick, a sunflower maze, and a huge selection of seed potatoes. Instead of the generic bag of seed potatoes that I bought from Safeway last year (which were fine and tasty mind you) this year I''m planning for Banana Fingerling, Russian Blue, and Russet Burbank.

We have these bricked in planters on the front of our house but we get so much sun out front that the beds had just baked into a brick. Last year I got one side dug up, weeded, and mixed in some compost and a ton of water and planted potatoes there. After harvesting those potatoes I planted garlic for the first time back in October so I'm looking forward to seeing how that pans out. I'll be repeating the fixing up and poto process on the other half of the house this year.

I'm also getting ready to start my tomato seeds inside . I''m thinking seven starts as I'm sure two or three won't take off as well. I'll be pruning my tomato leaves far more aggressively this year as last years summer was so terrible I barely got fruit off the plants.

Early Planting - Spring 2009

Man, is it spring time yet?

Finished...and not

Here are the two shelves in the basement that I've appropriated for canning storage.From left to right on the top shelf we have:

• Crab Apple Sauce
• Crab Apple Jelly
• Rhubarb Vanilla Jam
• Strawberry Rhubarb Jam
• Blu-barb Jam
• Raspberry Jam

The bottom shelf holds (again, left to right)

• Rhubarb Chutney
• Corn Relish
• Dilly Beans
• Pickled Jalapeno and Serrano Peppers
• Peaches
• Tomatoes (two pre-spiced as per a recipe in my Bernardin Canning book)

I've canned over 5 dozen jars of food this year, all in small batches. I was done, finito, all ready for fall (along with all the freshly frozen veggies in my deep freeze and my carrots and potatoes from the garden - most of the carrots are still there in fact). I've washed all the canning equipment, save the pot since I'm using the water in it to water my houseplants and then dad called to ask me to can him some pickled beets.

I'm too nice.

Skillet Delicious

It definitely doesn't have to be fancy to be delicious. That was the lesson learned after eating this amazing Friday night dinner. Everything in the pan came out of our backyard garden except for the sausage and the the salt and pepper. Plus I'd dug most of it up that after noon so there was no arguing freshness.

It started with the final potato harvest. I'd already dug up 4 of our 11 plants over the last 3 weeks but with all the frost hitting now I wanted to get some progress done on the garden clean up. (That and I was planting garlic bulbs in the front potato patch and needed to harvest the potatoes and do a quick weed and rake first.) The smal bowl of potatoes on the right was used for dinner (with leftovers of course). I washed them well and then diced up the larger pototoes so that all the pieces were the size of the tiny ones.

I'd cooked the sausage (sweet basil italian) about 3/4 of the way through and removed them to a cutting board to slice. Giving the skillet a quick wash and oil I added some oil and the potatoes and cooked them at medium-low for about 20 minutes. Once cooled, I sliced the sausage and added it back to the skillet. I cooked the sausage and potatoe for another 5 or so minutes before adding all the veg, which in this case was one zucchini, the handful of green beans I got (cry), 5 small carrots, 3 mini bell peppers, and two diced serrano peppers. A touch of salt and pepper and another 8ish minutes to cook the veggies through.

I call it Skillet Delicious - because it was