Many thanks to carolee of herbalbelssingblog for her suggestion on how to cook our little beets.
She wrote:
Even tiny beet thinnings are wonderfully tasty! Pulled whole and left intact, scrub the beet and root to remove any soil and give the green parts and stems a good rinse. Heat butter in a skillet and throw the entire beets in. Cover with a lid and let cook a couple minutes. Add a bit of chicken broth or water and cover again. Cook just until beet is barely tender and greens are wilted. Salt and pepper. (If beets are 1″ or more, I cut them off and cook them a couple of minutes by themselves before adding stalks and greens.) Enjoy!
Which sounds awesome!
Me being me, I had to modify things a bit. After scrubbing the beets, I found I did have to cut off the remaining greens and trim bits and pieces off, then cut them into similar sized pieces. I started them in butter, as suggested, but I didn’t have chicken broth.
I did, however, have leftover roasted ham still in its gel, so I cut off the last bits of meat from the bone, and used the gel as the liquid with the beets.
Because you can’t go wrong with pork, right?
There was quite a bit of the gel, and not a lot of beets, so I cooked the liquid down until it was basically a glaze.
My apologies for the following picture. :-D
This is the better of the pictures I took.
Those deep red beets make it all look like carnage happened! :-D
You can still make out the rings in the beets with alternating red and white rings, though the white is dyed pink now! The golden beets were so few and so small, you can’t really see them at all. There is one right on top. Honest!
But those deep red ones… wow!
So how did this crazy combination taste?
Really good! It had a salty, “meaty” flavour, but the sweetness of the beets still came through, and the flavours complimented each other surprisingly well. Some major umami happening in there!
In another pan, I browned the last of the ham bits, added cubed sunburst squash and green zucchini, with a bit of water to cover and steam them, before cooking away the liquid. Lastly, I covered it all with beaten eggs and covered the pan again, turning the egg mixture a couple of times to make sure it was cooked through.
And that was lunch. :-D
I’ll likely try beets cooked this way again, though with some other liquid. Maybe even the recommended chicken stock! :-D
Meanwhile, I picked more sunburst squash this morning and we’re getting to the point of having to start preserving them. I’ve looked at some recipes to do a quick pickle with them, but so far, none have really appealed to me. Plus, they all called for ingredients I don’t have.
With today looking to hit 30C, it’s going to be an inside day, so I’ll have plenty of opportunity to look up other ideas.
While doing my rounds this morning, with my usual checking of the garden beds, I decided to try and harvest some of the beets.
Our poor, sad little beets.
I could tell that a deer had visited last night, as pretty much the last of the larger beet greens are gone. I had been looking at them while doing my rounds yesterday evening, thinking about how they were the only ones left, and now they’re gone, too!
Of the three varieties, the dark red Merlins have managed to survive the most, and have the biggest beets. This is the bed furthest from the spruce grove, and the one that had the last of its big leaves eaten last night.
The yellow Boldor variety seemed to be a favorite of the deer! As you can imagine, they aren’t very big. In fact, some of the ones I picked are so small, I’m not sure they’re even edible. I’m not sure, but I don’t think they have a developed flavour at that size. I’ve never tried to eat beets that small, so I really don’t know!
The Chioggia, which is supposed to have alternating rings of purple and white inside… I was able to pick only three of them.
It’s looking like most of the beets are a write-off.
But at least we’ve got lots of sunburst squash!
Yesterday, I was going to try cooking in the fire pit, and had prepared things in foil packets. It was way too windy, unfortunately, so I just baked the packets in the oven. With one of them, I’d cut sunburst squash, and all 3 kinds of zucchini, into similar sized chunks. After tossing them in olive oil and seasonings, I wrapped them in several layers of heavy duty aluminum foil, sealing them tight. After baking them for half an hour at 350F, I cut open the foil, added dollops of butter, then put them back into the oven until fork tender. They turned out very well! I think they would have turned out even better, cooked over a fire.
Among the things we’ve learned since moving here is, when we do set up a permanent outdoor cooking area, we will have to make sure there is shelter from the wind! It’s frustrating to have a wonderful day to cook outside, but not be able to do it safely because of the wind.
As for the beets, I’m not sure what to do with them. There are so few of them to work with!
I realized I’ve neglected to take progress photos of some of our garden beds, so I got a few this morning.
Here are our two potato beds.
I was shooting blind, because my phone’s screen went completely black in the sunlight. Still, you can see the potatoes among the mulch, separated by a path of grass. Some have bloomed and the plants are starting to die back. We could probably harvest baby potatoes now, if we felt like digging under the layer of straw. I’ve never grown potatoes this way, so it should be interesting to see how they did.
This next photo is the second squash bed.
I just happened to catch a locust flying by in the picture!
We are currently inundated with grasshoppers and locusts right now. Hopefully, they won’t eat up too many of our vegetable plants.
This second bed is the one we planted the day after we were hit with one last frost. The sunburst squash are huge, with many flowers and many little squashes. The mixed summer squash has a couple of plants that are doing well. Interestingly, it seems that plants on the south end of the bed are struggling more than the ones at the north end, rather than any particular type of squash having a more difficult time.
Here is the first bed that got planted.
These are the ones that got frost damaged, even though we had covered them for the night. Some died completely, but a surprising number have managed to survive – with some downright thriving!
This picture is the same bed, from the other end.
The transplants had died at this end, so when some gourds in the seed tray actually germinated, I transplanted them here. Three of them are marked with bamboo poles. Much to my surprise, the one that got dug up by a skunk digging for grubs is surviving. Given how late they germinated and got transplanted, I’m not actually expecting much from them at all, but it will be interesting to see how much the manage to grow.
Then there are the pumpkins.
These were from seeds that were being given away for free at the grocery store near my mother. I had taken one (it even had a sign asking people to take only one), and then my mother gave me two more. Clearly, she didn’t read the sign, because she still had a pack she kept for herself and planted in her own little garden plot that she has this year!
The pumpkin in the above photo is the one from a pack that had 5 seeds in it (the others had 3 seeds). This is the only one of the 5 that germinated, and it came up much later than the ones that germinated in the other two mounds. One mound had 2 seeds germinate.
In spite of such late germination, this one is probably the biggest of the bunch.
It is also the Northernmost mound.
When we started planting here, I’d made a point of planting in the Northern 2/3rds of the area we had mulched. The south side of the area has a lot more shade from the spruces my parents had added to the north side of the maple grove. I didn’t even try planting at that end for that reason. The middle third of the area still gets a lot of sun, but the north third gets basically no shade at all, at any time of the day.
I think that might actually be why I’m seeing differences within the same beds of squash, and the pumpkin mounds.
Something to keep in mind for any future planting in here!
Then there are the beds we made where the old wood pile used to be.
The beets we got were a collection with Merlin (a dark red), Boldor (golden yellow), and Chioggia (alternating rings of purple and white)
In the foreground, you can see the parsley bed in both photos. It is doing very well. To the left of the parsley bed are the deep purple carrots, with white satin carrots on the right. The carrots could be doing better, but overall, they’re okay.
In the midground of the photos, there is a bed of rainbow carrots above the parsley bed, and beets on either side . Another bed of beets is in the background, beyond the rainbow carrots.
I don’t know how well you can tell in the photos, but there are not a lot of beet greens. The deer have really done a number on them. :-( We should still have some to harvest, though.
Of the two muskmelon we bought to transplant, one died. This is the survivor.
We planted a lot of kohl rabi, but this is all we have that came up and survived.
The large leaves that you are seeing are from 2 plants.
Yup. Out of all that we planted, only 2 survived.
Actually, there had been four.
It turns out that deer like kohl rabi, too. You can’t even see the second one that was nearby; it, too, was reduced to a spindly stem!
In case you are wondering about the plastic containers…
Those are what I used as cloches to cover the muskmelon overnight, to protect them from colder temperatures after transplanting. The containers used to hold Cheese Balls that we got at Costco. I just cut the tops off, then drilled holes around near the bases for air circulation.
I now have them set up near the surviving muskmelon and the kohl rabi. When watering the garden beds, I fill those with water. The water slowly drains out the holes I’d made for air circulation, giving a very thorough watering to the plants. The first time I’d tried this was with the muskmelon, which was pretty small and spindly. The next morning, it had grown noticeably bigger and stronger! So I put the second one by the struggling kohl rabi, and the difference the next day was just as dramatic.
Until the deer ate the two littlest ones.
This worked so well, I’m trying to think of ways to use other cloches we have, most made from 5 gallon water jugs I’d bought for the fish tank, to set up near some of the more struggling squashes.
This morning is the first time I’ve harvested some of the parsley, along with a few carrots. What I don’t use right away will be set up to dry. Which is what will happen with most of the parsley we planted, as we tend not to use fresh parsley all that much.
And now I’m going to stop struggling with our nasty internet connection, which really doesn’t like inserting photos right now, and start on the scalloped potatoes I have planned for supper. I think I’ll find a way to layer some carrots in with the potatoes, too! :-)
While my daughters and I were in the city, my darling husband finally got through to our internet provider and had a little chat with them.
We had internet soon after.
The problem is still not solved, though. It’s just a make-do until a tech comes out to check the secondary account’s satellite disk.
When they first brought this up with my husband, they said it would cost us $125, just to have someone come out.
By the time he was done with them, that fee was waived!
Also, we are back to using our primary account for now, and we will NOT be charged double the price per gig. However, anything we do use is that much more on our bill, so we will be rationing our data for a lot of things.
While we do have a signal with this dish, it is not the same as it was, before all these problems started, just a few days ago. Data transfer speeds are insanely slow, and it can take several attempts just to get a web page to load. WordPress has always been troublesome, but it took me about 8 minutes just to get the editor loaded so I could write this post!
Still, it should mean I can catch up on posts with images. I always resize the images into smaller file sizes, so they don’t take up much data. The following photos all uploaded faster than I could get the editor to load!
So these go back a couple of days. :-)
In the last while, we have been regularly putting the kittens and Beep Beep in the basement for the night, then my husband is usually the one who opens the door for them in the mornings. So we still have cat food both upstairs and down.
The cats, of course, always act as though they’re starving, even though there’s plenty of food in the upstairs bowls. What they’re really begging for is wet cat food, and they get that only once a day. The dry kibble is always available.
Since the adults cats now go into the basement regularly, they’re also going for the kittens’ food bowls, so I added larger tin, so that the kittens could still get at some.
Just look at those buggers! They’re crowing around the smaller containers, like they haven’t eaten in a week!
We have been mixing kitten kibble in with the adult kibble. I think the adult cats like the kitten kibble better! :-D
While I was tending to the kitties that day, it was also the day to check the temperature and humidity in the root cellar. While there, I noticed something I had forgotten about.
The two bottles of our most recent batch of mead!
We were supposed to taste test a bottle after different lengths of time. One of them was supposed to be opened up on my birthday. I completely forgot about it!
At some point, I’ll grab one and bring it up for a taste test. :-)
While checking the garden plots, I discovered something unfortunate.
All three beds of beets had quite a lot of their greens missing. It seems we had a deer visiting! She especially seemed to like this Baldor variety.
In the squash bed, I had a more pleasant surprise.
The largest squash plants that I thought were green zucchini turned out to be…
… sunburst squash!
From the number of buds we’re seeing, it looks like we’ll have quite a lot of them over the summer, too. :-)
I had one last surprise that morning.
While checking the usual spots for fallen branches, I went by the fire pit, which hasn’t been used in over a year. I noticed the skunks had been digging in the dirt, right beside it, and something in the dirt caught my eye.
That white you see?
That’s a glazed brick. One of the many we have all over the place.
Looking around at other spots the skunks had dug up, I saw signs of more.
The fire pit has a ring of bricks around it, completely buried.
It must have taken years for them to be covered by that much soil!
With no fire bans right now, we can actually use our fire pit, and uncovering the bricks will be a good thing to get done, too.
I am really looking forward to being able to do cook outs again!
We’re having another wild and windy day! Still, stuff needs to get planted. I made a quick trip into town and my errands included stopping at the hardware store. Their garden centre was open, so I checked it out.
I couldn’t resist.
I bought some muskmelon transplants. Muskmelon is a type of cantaloupe that I remember we grew here when I was a kid. I absolutely loved them. I only got 2 plants, and we shall see how they do.
In preparation for today, my daughter and I made a bunch of markers to label our plantings.
We made one for each variety of seeds or transplants we have, plus an extra. The cucamelon don’t need one, since they are going to be completely separate from everything else.
We… won’t need to use all of them anymore.
I’ve been hardening off our seedlings. Because of the high winds, I’ve been leaving the trays inside the mini-greenhouse with the flap completely open – that way, they’d get some wind, but still be protected from the worst of it. I also put the mini-greenhouse in front of the old basement window, where it is more sheltered from the wind, and still gets full sun. When I brought home the new melon transplants, I tucked them into an empty shelf in the mini-greenhouse.
When it was time to start planting in the garden, I came out and found this.
My initial thought was that the wind had done this, but now that I think about it, I have changed my mind. If there were a wind enough to knock those trays – and their shelves – down, the whole thing would have been blown over.
I am now thinking a cat decided to go exploring.
Unfortunately, the squash seedlings are now all mixed up. The gourds still haven’t emerged, so at least we can guess that if there is no seedling, it’s a gourd, but there were still some other squash that hadn’t germinated.
I think the few fennel seeds that germinated and promptly bolted are a lost cause. :-(
Most disappointing.
Still, I’ll transplant what I can, tomorrow. One of the seed packets I got was a “surprise” mix. Now, they’re all going to be a surprise! :-D
This is where we focused on today.
Even though this area is turning out to be pretty well sheltered from the wind, there is still enough to really dry out the soil. I watered it earlier in the day, then watered it again before planting.
I also re-arranged the pieces of wood to make different sized beds, taking into account that I now have kohl rabi seeds and muskmelon transplants.
This is how it looks after the girls and I finished.
We still have seeds from the 3 varieties of beets, and kohl rabi left.
One of the things I’ve been doing is keeping the large plastic containers from some treats we sometimes get at Costco; cheese balls and pork rinds. I took two old cheese ball containers, drilled holes all around the sides near the bottom, then cut off the tops. I have a wood burning kit that includes a knife, and I used that to cut the tops off. Much better than hacking away at it with a utility knife or scissors! :-D These are now being used as cloches for the melons, which are surrounded by a mulch of straw. The cloches are tipped a bit sideways right now, but I will put them down for the night, when I do my evening rounds. In the morning, I will tip them over again.
Before the melons grow much bigger, I plan to add a trellis of some kind for them to climb.
Once the seedlings emerge, we’ll remove the plastic and the boards. The seeds were planted with square foot gardening in mind, and after the boards are removed, I will most likely add straw in between the beds for foot paths. An odd problem to have here, is that the soil is so soft, we sink when we walk on it. Our usual problem is the opposite. :-D
Here’s a bit more about square foot gardening.
When we do get do building raised beds, they will be quite a bit taller than the ones made in the video, for accessibility requirements. For those, we plan to use materials to fill the beds that turn out to have a name. Hugelkultur.
Or maybe more like this…
Basically, we’ll use whatever we’ve got to fill the bases, then topping with a soil mix. It might be a few years before we reach this point, though.
There is still one section of the new garden plot with nothing planted, and that may just stay empty. Tonight, I’ll be prepping the area in the old garden, where we will be planting our squashes, so we can start transplanting tomorrow. Then we’ll focus on the sunflowers next. Depending on how things go, we might plant some of our leftover seeds from the beets and kohl rabi, elsewhere. There is still the old kitchen garden area available, so we’ll see how things turn out.
The Re-Farmer 