Cherokee Trail of Tears Beans

The fall season is well underway, and most of our vegetables are completely finished, but our Cherokee Trail of Tears beans are one of those vegetables that have been still coming steadily in. Our Cherokee Trail of Tears beans are really maturing now, and all well on their way to being completely dried. The above picture shows a lot of the beans as dark purple, but this picture was taken about a month ago. Some beans are still at this stage, but most of them have turned a tan colour and have completely or nearly dried.

Recently we were finally able to harvest most of the beans. Below shows a small amount, but since this picture was taken we've picked many more.

We shelled them and laid them out on a cookie sheet to finish drying, although most of them felt very hard, so I'm sure they were probably dried enough. The beans are really shiny and black, and almost a kidney shape, although much smaller than a kidney bean. They are really pretty. 

In the end, I think we have two full pint-sized jars, but there are still some beans on the plants.

Megan

Chioggia Beets, Beans, and Tomato Harvest

Over the past week we've been getting more tomatoes than we can eat out of our garden, but we've also been seeing some great results from our beets and beans. I picked six relatively large Chioggia beets, with many more coming along nicely, as well as a mix of yellow beans and Blue Lake pole beans, and a Green Zebra tomato one day.

Since we aren't quite at the stage where we're getting enough beans from the garden for a meal for four people, our mom has been blanching and freezing the beans as we get them. The Blue Lake pole beans are really starting to speed up though. We have one plant that wasn't really producing, but it looks like now it's starting to.

With the Chioggia beets, I decided to try pickling them. I used a recipe from The Art of Preserving, with a few minor changes. The recipe was really basic, because once you've cooked the beets until tender, you make a simple pickling liquid from vinegar, sugar, reserved beet cooking liquid, and spices. The recipe called for apple cider vinegar, but I used plain white vinegar that had the same level of acidity, because that's all I had. The recipe also called for cloves and cardamom pods; I used the cloves, but I didn't use the cardamom because I didn't have any on hand. Instead, I added a sprig of rosemary to each jar. Onion also went into the jars with the beets and pickling liquid. I ended up with four 500 ml jars. The jars have to sit for at least a week before opening, so I have to wait awhile before I can try them.

Megan

First Week of August Harvests

This week we've been finally seeing some of our hard work paying off. In truth, most of the harvests I'm showing today are things that our mom planted, but there are a few things we grew as well that we've finally been able to harvest.

It started off with a small bowl of yellow and green beans that our mom planted, as well as a small bowl of our mom's Sungold cherry tomatoes and our Yellow Pear tomatoes.

A couple days later we picked the first Early Girl tomatoes, as well as a few more Sungold and Yellow Pear tomatoes. The Early Girls were planted by our mom as well.

Our mom's cucumbers have been very successful too, although we didn't notice one so it grew huge.

We got a few Roma tomatoes and Early Girl tomatoes out of the garden today, as well as more Yellow Pears. I also picked our first few Blue Lake pole beans.

Lastly, I got another small bowl of Sungold tomatoes out of the garden today.

I noticed our Cherokee Purple, Red Zapotec, and Purple Calabash tomatoes are beginning to show blushes of colour, so I'm sure we'll have a few of these off our plants very soon. 

Megan

Tomatoes in July

Red Zapotec Tomato

Our tomatoes are doing quite well. All plants have plenty of blossoms and have set more tomatoes than we'll probably really need this year.

In particular, we are excited about the Red Zapotec variety, with it's pretty pleats. Unfortunately we weren't lucky enough to get to try this one last year, because all of our plants died during the hardening off process, but luckily we have four Red Zapotec plants this year. While these don't appear to be producing as well as our other heirloom varieties, we have at least five on most of the plants, and knowing this will probably be a larger tomato, that's not too shabby.

Purple Calabash Tomato

The Purple Calabash plants, like the Red Zapotec's, are ones that didn't survive last year, but they are certainly doing well now! On just one plant I've counted over thirty tomatoes so far. These plants grow relatively short compared with the Red Zapotec's and Yellow Pear's, but they're really bushy, branching out into the pathways in the garden, weighed down by fruit. I had to tie many of the branches up, mostly to get the tomatoes off the ground, but also to create more room to walk between the rows.These certainly win on production, but I wonder, will they win on taste? We'll have to wait and see.

Yellow Pear Tomatoes

One of our favourite tomatoes last year were the Yellow Pear tomatoes, and anyone who tried them seemed to agree! I've noticed that it's become a very common heirloom variety. In fact, it's so common that we've seen it in garden centres, and even in Walmart. It's easy to understand why, because between growing them this year and last year, they seem to be consistently excellent producers that keep producing, and they have such a tasty tomato. Between the four plants we have this year, we're probably going to have too many!

Green Zebra Tomato

This year we have three Green Zebra plants in the garden, and they seem to be doing just as well as last year. Between all three plants, I've counted over thirty tomatoes so far, but there's still plenty of blossoms, so I'm sure that will change.

Purple Cherokee

And last but not least, here's our Purple Cherokee tomatoes. I must admit that these weren't a favourite last year, but since we have the seeds, we wanted to give them another chance. I must say that these are doing much better than last year too! We only have two Purple Cherokee plants this year, but both are producing  a lot more heavily than either of ours did last year. We are really excited to see what these are like again, and to see if we've changed our minds about this pretty tomato.

Megan

Summer Garden Salads

Three days ago, Megan and I got the first Chioggia Beets of the season out of our garden. These were five relatively large beets with very leafy tops attached to them. I decided that I would make a salad out of them with a nice light vinegar dressing. The result was sweet, acidic, and tasty, and the salad was a nice pairing to our barbecue meal of hamburgers and baked potatoes. We saved the beet tops for a stir fry later on.

Beet Salad With Mint

Ingredients

5 medium to large beets
3 tbsp water
3 tbsp white vinegar
1 tsp white granulated sugar
6 to 10 mint leaves, julienne
salt and pepper to taste

Directions

1. Parboil the beets with a tiny bit of vinegar or lemon juice in the water to prevent the colour from running.
2. Peel the beets and slice them very thinly.
3. In a bowl, emulsify the water, vinegar, sugar, salt and pepper.
4. Toss the beets in the dressing and garnish with the julienne mint leaves.

I also chose to make a cucumber salad with one of my mom's garden cucumbers. This was inspired by the cucumber salad that my Oma makes which has a vinegar dressing as opposed to a mayonnaise one.

Cucumber Salad

Ingredients

1 cucumber, peeled and thinly sliced
1 small white onion, finely diced
3 tbsp water
3 tbsp white vinegar
1 tsp white granulated sugar
salt and pepper to taste 

Directions

1. Emulsify the water, vinegar, sugar, and salt and pepper in a bowl.
2. Toss the cucumber slices and onion in the dressing.

Jennifer

Blossoming Beans

Bean patch with cedar poles

Our Blue Lake Pole Beans and Cherokee Trail of Tears Beans are growing high, blossoming, and setting beans. I have to admit that I sorely underestimated how high pole beans can grow, as my sister and I placed only  2 ft bamboo poles alongside them. Our Dad had some 7 ft cedar poles lying around that he wasn't using which are accommodating the bean plants heights much better than the bamboo ones did.

Cherokee Trail of Tears Blossoms

Cherokee Trail of Tears Beans

 The Cherokee Trail of Tears blossom beautifully with lovely purple flowers and their beans look to be green with purplish hues. The Blue Lake Pole Beans are a little bit behind, so I don't know what their blossoms look like yet. They had buds though, which is an excellent sign!

Blue Lake Pole buds

I can't wait to get a nice harvest of these beans. We will probably eat them all fresh, but if we find our harvest to be very prolific, we might dry some too.

Jennifer

Garden Pictures

It occurred to me today that there's a few garden pictures we haven't posted yet, and there's a few harvests we haven't mentioned, although they are a bit outdated now. The above picture is of some lovely radishes we got out of our garden about two weeks ago.

We've also been very lucky to harvest some tatsoi for the first time from the garden. This was also harvested about two weeks ago. Unfortunately the tatsoi was close to bolting at the time, so we haven't been able to get much more out of the plants. We might replant the tatsoi in the fall, as I think we'll have more success with it then.

This was a little radish harvest from awhile ago as well.

Megan

Final Week of June: Harvests

In the final week of June we managed to be quite successful in terms of harvesting from the garden. Considering we didn't have much of a harvest at all until July 1st of last year, I think we're becoming much more successful at gardening. We've been very lucky to get a couple lettuce and arugula salads, radishes to snack on and throw into salads, and tatsoi in May and June alone, whereas last year we didn't have much to show for our gardening until July, and even then, we didn't have much at all until August.

 It's getting so hot here now that many of our greens and radishes are beginning to bolt, so we had to pick them quickly, but we also managed to harvest something completely new: red currants.

We have two red currant bushes on our property and a black currant bush. I've found I'm not a big fan of the black currants, but the red currants have a tartness that's similar to cranberries. We like to use them in scones, but we have quite a few of them, so we plan on freezing some too.

We also harvested lots and lots of arugula. The above picture was our first harvest of the week. The three pictures below are of three other colanders full of arugula from later in the week. We ended up blanching the later arugula and freezing it because we couldn't possibly eat it all in such a short time. It tastes similar to spinach once it's cooked (at least that's what we thought), so we can potentially use it in lasagna and that kind of thing later on.

Our radishes have also been doing quite well too. The first row of radishes that we planted have bolted, but this last week our next row started maturing. I expect to see many more in the coming week. Jennifer pulled the following radishes from the garden, but we have had a few more harvests since.

Megan

Summer Fruits and Vegetables Update

Bulgarian Carrot Pepper

As you know, Megan and I planted fifteen pepper plants; four Shepherd, five Bulgarian Carrot, and six Jimmy Nardello. They have all grown and developed leaves and some are even producing their first blossoms! Surprisingly though, it is our Bulgarian Peppers starting with the blossoms. I thought it would be the Shepherds that produced blossoms first because they were store bought and much more developed than the Bulgarian Carrots or Jimmy Nardellos that we started from seed. The blossoms are not visible in the pictures yet though.

Yellow Pear Tomato

Tomato-wise, things have changed a lot, as they have certainly doubled in size, maybe even tripled! Megan and I have noticed little blossoms starting on these too, although they are not entirely visible yet. I'm hoping to see some tomatoes form on these soon. They must be loving this hot weather!

Musquee de Provence

I love the looks of our pumpkins! Megan put a few more seeds in the mounds along with the plants we started indoors, because last year some of our plants mysteriously disappeared. Maybe we can get more than two pumpkins this year.

Cherokee Trail of Tears Bean

 Our Cherokee Trail of Tears Beans are growing so large that I think the bamboo stakes we placed beside them won't be enough to hold them. We'll have to remedy this issue soon, maybe with some wire.

Jennifer

Root Vegetable Update

Mixture of Radishes

 For our second installment of updates, I would like to tell you about our root vegetables, which are almost all late-summer veggies. The exception is a combination of easter egg, cherry belle, and mixed radishes which we planted in two rows at two different times. We harvested many beautiful radishes from the first row, mostly of the easter egg and cherry belle varieties, but the majority of our mixed radish pack went to seed before they developed their roots. I think the varieties in the mixed pack, like white icicle, were too large to develop in our short cold season so we might stick with smaller varieties like french breakfast, cherry belle, and easter egg for the fall and next year.

Our second row of radishes are on their way, so I hope the heat doesn't negatively affect them or make them go to seed, before they can develop roots and be harvested.

Chioggia Beets

 Our Chioggia Beets are looking beautiful with their robust leaves, however, we realized the space we planted them in could take a lot more plantings, so we purchased two packs of Detroit Red Beets to fill in some gaps. None of them are up yet, but soon they should be. The amount of beets we'll have this year will be more than last year, which should allow us to try a lot of recipes like soup, salads, or pickles.

Four Carrot Pots

Our four pots of carrots are doing wonderfully with exceptionally healthy looking tops. One pot is Nantes, one is a mixed pack, and the other two are Little Finger carrots. Just two weeks or so ago, Megan and I planted two more pots of carrots on top of that, one of which is Little Finger carrots, the other Nantes. We planted quite a few more carrots this year than last year too, so we hope to get a few meals out of them.

Jennifer

Leafy Greens Update

The weather has warmed up and things in our garden are moving fast, so this is a good time to do an update on all of our fruits and veggies. In this post, I will specifically talk about our green leafy vegetables.

Firstly, our first lettuce plantings have now gone to seed, so we're taking a break from eating lots of lettuce. Our second lettuce plantings are coming along though and I expect we'll be able to cut them anytime now. Unfortunately we've run out of our mixed lettuce seeds that we collected last year, so we purchased some endive frisee seeds, or chicory seeds as it is called in the US, and I planted a row of those. I am really happy to see the little seedlings poking out of the ground.

Second Lettuce Plantings

 To help fill in some more space, we purchased six radicchio which is an Italian head lettuce. It is very bitter when eaten, so it's best in combination with other lettuces. I don't have a picture of any of it, because it was eaten down by something; probably a rabbit or some deer.

Arugula

 The growth of our arugula has increased immensely so we are cutting a lot of that. We might even have to give some away to friends who live nearby. I love the peppery bite of this green! Thus far we've been eating it a lot as a salad, but it would be fun to try it with a homemade pasta, and maybe some lemon and Parmesan. We'll see.

Tatsoi

We cut the first of our tatsoi mustard green, which is an Asian green. I've read that it is supposed to have a spicy flavour, but when I tasted it fresh I found it to be more reminiscent of the bitterness and sweetness of eating fresh peas with the pod straight out of the garden.

Unfortunately, we noticed some of this green going to seed already due to the humid hot weather we've been having here in southern Ontario, so we chose to cut some whole bunches of the tatsoi out of the garden and left some of the younger ones in. Hopefully we'll be able to harvest more of this before they all go to seed. You can eat the leaves fresh as a salad, but we wilted them with a dressing of sesame oil, rice wine vinegar, soy sauce, sugar, and sesame seeds which tasted very good.

Lucullus Swiss Chard

Our Lucullus Swiss Chard is well on its way to being of a size to harvest and we're hoping we will get a lot more of it than we did last year. Swiss chard is so delicious sauteed with some olive oil and onions as a healthy side dish and we've even added it to lasagna and pasta too.

Jennifer

The Season's First Arugula and Radishes

Our radishes have been coming along really well over the last few weeks, and last week was the first time we were able to pick a few radishes. The picture above shows some lovely Easter Egg radishes and a French Breakfast radish. We used them in an arugula salad with our first big batch of arugula straight from the garden.

Jennifer and I have never grown arugula, but it truly is very easy to grow. The arugula in our lettuce pot grew small like the baby arugula you can sometimes buy in salad mixes from the grocery store, but the arugula sown directly in the garden grew large leaves; I cut a bit of both for our salad, and I found there really wasn't much of a difference in texture and taste between the larger and smaller arugula leaves.

Upon mentioning to people that Jennifer and I have been growing arugula this season, we've received a lot of questions about what arugula is. I'm quickly realizing that although we're quite familiar with it, there are many who don't know about it, so it's only fitting that in our first post about harvesting arugula from the garden, we discuss some of the history of arugula and what exactly it is.

Here in Canada, we know this Italian salad green as arugula, but to those in the UK you might know it as rocket. It's flavour is slightly peppery and strong, it makes an excellent salad green when mixed with other types of salad greens due to its strong flavour, but I also like it on its own.

I've referred to arugula as an Italian salad green, but what I should really say is that it's a Mediterranean green, considering it's also native to places like Morocco, Portugal, and Turkey. I've read that in these regions it consistently gets used as a sauteed green as well, although in North America we're more familiar with using it as a salad green or fresh on sandwiches.

I actually found that I've enjoyed growing the arugula, and I think it's much nicer than having to buy it at the store, as the arugula we've grown seems to have more flavour. It has a much more pronounced peppery flavour. Plus, we also get to cut the arugula a few times a week at its peak.

Megan

Beet Salad with Arugula, Goat Cheese, and Walnuts

Megan and I are having so much fun finding uses for our lettuces and arugula, especially since we have so much of them. In the last week, our garden arugula has become quite sizable so we cut that a few days ago in addition to some in our lettuce pot. Since we didn't have enough to make just an arugula salad, we decided to combine it with sliced red beets, goat cheese, and walnuts, and made a delicious vinaigrette to toss the salad in. The beets we used were not garden beets (we hope to have some soon!), but we can still hold some pride in the fact that the salad contained our own arugula and some fresh herbs from our herb garden. Here is the recipe:

Beet Salad with Arugula, Goat Cheese, and Walnuts

Ingredients:

6 small to medium size beets
2 to 3 cups arugula leaves, approximately
1/4 onion, cut into strips

1/4 cup olive oil
1 tbsp lemon juice
1 tbsp white vinegar
salt and pepper to taste
1 or 2 tbsp of fresh chopped herbs (I used oregano, chives, and mint)
A pinch of sugar

goat cheese, crumbled for garnish
walnuts, chopped for garnish

Directions:

1. Peel beets and boil them until just tender, but not falling apart
2. Cut beets into thin slices and mix them with the arugula and onion in a salad bowl
3. In a separate bowl, combine olive oil, lemon juice, vinegar, salt and pepper, herbs, and sugar and emulsify
4. Dress salad with vinaigrette
5. Serve salad family style and allow everyone to garnish their own portion with goat cheese and walnuts

I really liked the end result of this, but if I really have to be critical of our creation I would say that I would like a little more texture. If I had a mandolin slicer to cut the beets really thin, I might have left them raw. Also some more sharpness in the vinaigrette could be good to hold up to the robust and sweet flavour of the beets. The oil to acid ratio is what I typically use for lettuce, which is more delicate in flavour than beets, so maybe there needs to be more acid to match up with the beets. Either way this was a delicious and refreshing salad to eat!

Jennifer

Herbs and How to Use Them in Food and Drinks

Boxwood Basil

 Basil is the herb Megan and I use the most in cooking. We love the flavour of italian basil in pasta or on pizza. Every summer, when tomatoes start coming in, we use basil in tomato salads or in bruschetta as well.  Another delicious way to use basil is in delicious homemade tomato soups.

Due to our love of this herb, we have some cinnamon basil growing in a pot outdoors and we also purchased boxwood basil from our local garden center. I think the boxwood basil is so pretty with how bushy it is and you really don't need to use a knife to cut the leaves, since the leaves are already so tiny.

Unfortunately, basil is an annual in our southern Ontario climate, so we might have to see if we can dig this up at the end of the summer to bring indoors.

Oregano

Like with basil, Megan and I consistently use oregano in pasta by just tossing our noodles with this herb before serving. It adds some earthiness to our pasta dishes. I also love to use this in vinaigrettes.

Lemon Thyme

I haven't used lemon thyme before as this is the first year that we've had it, but previously I've used regular thyme when roasting meats like chicken, or making beef stew. It is also excellent to stir through soups. Thyme is also a natural pairing when sauteing mushrooms. Yesterday, Megan came up with the most delicious mushroom filling with thyme for ravioli.

Sage

Sage is a lovely herb, that is attractive when it flowers, and has a minty flavour. You can use it to make a sage brown butter for pasta or in pumpkin dishes. Megan and I have tried in on a pizza before with squash and pancetta that tasted very good.

Mint

Mint grows like a weed and if it isn't managed, could take over your garden. We haven't found too many uses for it, but it is delicious to make a tea from by steeping it in hot water, and I've even found it is nice as a flavouring in iced green tea. Just make sure you remove the leaves after a few minutes or the tea could become bitter.

Pineapple Sage

Megan and I just bought this pineapple sage and we honestly don't know how we'll use it yet. The leaves smell like fresh pineapple though, so I imagine this would be delicious to enhance pineapple flavour in a salsa or fruit salad.

Jennifer