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Post by steev on Sept 8, 2011 13:08:26 GMT -5
No way will you ever catch me tossing turnip greens and keeping the roots; well, maybe if I had to put turnips in storage, but they winter fine in the ground for me. Even then, I think I'd search out a recipe to pickle, saurkraut, or kim-chee them. I value greens, even rough ones, very highly; good for flavor, good for nutrition, good for the gut.
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Post by Joseph Lofthouse on Sept 10, 2011 2:06:46 GMT -5
Today's melon harvest (Sept 9th): That makes 12 ripe cantaloupes for the year. I ate the large oval one for supper, it was a bit odd, but still better than what I can get from the supermarket. I ate the top middle one for an after supper snack. It tasted good and had good texture. The four oval shaped cantaloupes that I have harvested so far split on the blossum end... The two I ate yesterday tasted good and had good texture. They are a bit odd shaped, like a double oval, or a squashed oval if you prefer. The earliest cantaloupe last year was also a splitter. Guess it runs in the family. After I get the earliness issue taken care of then I can work on taste and non-splitting. I have a confession now... I was weak and allowed a neighbor to take the three small cantaloupes from the other day with a promise to return the seeds to me. I sure hope that he is reliable... The watermelon on the bottom of the photo is Charleston Grey, the variety that my daddy has grown for years in our village. It's smaller than normal, but this year any melon is a good melon. I have one melon plant with huge (for my garden) fruits on it growing in my diversity patch... None of the mother fruits from last year were anywhere close to that big. Perhaps one of the so called huge melons that didn't produce a fruit for me last year managed to contribute some pollen.  |
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Post by bunkie on Sept 10, 2011 12:18:22 GMT -5
awesome melon harvest there joseph!
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Post by 12540dumont on Sept 10, 2011 20:44:24 GMT -5
Last two melons in the field. Sigh. It was a good melon harvest. Time to start on the corn harvest. Posole is coming out today. Joseph, I sent seeds of every melon I grew that was worth a darn. Yesterday I drove to Baker Creek, not my favorite seed source, but I was in Petaluma and I purchased every watermelon they had that was 80 days or less. I'm going to take out half the seeds, and send the rest to you. Regards, Holly Attachments:
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Post by 12540dumont on Sept 10, 2011 20:49:30 GMT -5
And if anyone knows the name of the grey green melon in the foreground, let me know. It does turn yellow when ripe. Hey, what do I know, it smelled ripe, it slipped, but alas it was pepino...like a cucumber. The following week I picked a ripe one and it was the best melon I've had in years. It's orange in the inside. (Joseph, since I didn't know what it was, I just called it grey-green). We had really good honeydews and casabas and canaries this year. Too many cantaloupes! I was plying my CSA with them! Next year...more watermelon. Attachments:
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Post by Joseph Lofthouse on Sept 10, 2011 21:42:37 GMT -5
Thanks Holly! I was shopping for garlic yesterday. Yikes!!!!
This year I got boring in naming my melons: I'm taking a marker out to the field and as i harvest each melon I am labeling it with the date harvested: So today I harvested 2011-09-10. But I harvested 3 fruits today, so I added A, B, or C to the name. Then when I cut it open I'm adding a couple more designations to the label: size: Small, medium, large. Shape: Oblong, round (no bananas so far this year) Taste: great, bland. Texture: Mushy, crisp.
Except that I have a photo of a great tasting small melon, but I don't have a corresponding packet of seeds. That means I mislabeled something or lost some seeds. Oh well. I'm planning on planting them fruit-to-row next year so maybe it will show up, and maybe my brother was an efficient cleaner. Even better, I'm planning fruit-to-row in order of harvest, so the earliest fruits are most likely to be pollinated by other earliest fruits.
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Post by olddog on Sept 11, 2011 10:25:00 GMT -5
The onions in your photos are beautiful, what a wonderful harvest.
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Post by Joseph Lofthouse on Sept 14, 2011 22:40:26 GMT -5
Oh no! I forgot to take a photo of this weeks CSA basket. They contained grapes, strawberries (day-neutrals), tomatoes, carrots, lots of potatoes, plenty of cucumbers, a dozen ears of Lofty corn (AD X se+), sweet peppers, green onions, summer squash, turnips grown from this years seed, and cabbage. Some boxes got cherry tomatoes, kohlrabi, or cantaloupe (harvested 6 more today). A very abundant basket this week!
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Post by castanea on Sept 14, 2011 22:49:59 GMT -5
Joseph, What varieties of winter storage onions are you growing? Are they one of your developments?
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Post by Joseph Lofthouse on Sept 14, 2011 23:28:10 GMT -5
Alas. I keep trying to develop my own onions, but I ain't got it right yet.
I grow "Utah yellow Spanish onions", and "Red Burgermaster" from sets. I also grow "Big Daddy" and "Walla Walla" from plants. Big Daddy is for short term storage only, and Walla Walla is an immediate use onion. I get them all from the nursery. I produce yellow onion seed every year from the best storage onions, that part is easy, but I haven't been able to get the timing right in order to grow my own sets. If I plant the seed first thing in the spring, I get about walnut sized bulbs by fall. If I plant anything larger than a cherry they go directly to seed without producing a bulb.
This summer I almost got it right. I planted seed at the end of June. It produced onions of the right size by fall. But I let the area go to weeds, so I didn't get a large enough harvest. Next year I'll try again by pre-soaking the seed, and planting into a seed-bed that has been carefully prepared well in advance to exhaust the weeds.
This year I made a step in the right direction though. I saved the best growing bulbs from the early spring seed, and will use that to produce my seed crop next year, rather than using bulbs from sets grown by the nursery. That gets it one step closer to being my own variety. My seed planted in early spring gives me lots of great green onions during the growing season, so that's a bonus of working on this even if I still have to buy sets for storage onions. I guess I bought 30 pounds of sets this spring at $2 per pound. Half were used for green onions, and half for storage onions.
The Utah Yellow Spanish is already well adapted to my garden, since we have miles of onion fields that grow this variety less than 30 miles away.
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Post by castanea on Sept 17, 2011 18:33:00 GMT -5
Thanks. I find onions to be a massive challenge, in terms of growing your own, saving seeds, planting them at the correct time etc.
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Post by mnjrutherford on Sept 18, 2011 11:41:55 GMT -5
Joseph, if you suddenly find a couple baskets of onions missing... I might have escaped NC and visited! That's a bounty I'd like to get out of my ground as well.
I'm with you Castanea! Onions are perplexing, though I think I might be getting the general idea. This is how I'm seeing it:
SPRING: plant seed
SUMMER: harvest green onions for eating but leave some to grow a little bit of bulb
FALL: plant the "little bits of bulb" to grow into bigger, usable bulbs
WINTER: wait
SPRING: plant seed, plant bulbs that lasted through the winter
SUMMER: harvest green onions, leaving some behind\
FALL: harvest seed from replanted bulbs
Sound right?
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Post by Joseph Lofthouse on Sept 18, 2011 13:37:11 GMT -5
I'm with you Castanea! Onions are perplexing, though I think I might be getting the general idea. This is how I'm seeing it: SPRING: plant seed SUMMER: harvest green onions for eating but leave some to grow a little bit of bulb FALL: plant the "little bits of bulb" to grow into bigger, usable bulbs WINTER: wait SPRING: plant seed, plant bulbs that lasted through the winter SUMMER: harvest green onions, leaving some behind\ FALL: harvest seed from replanted bulbs Sound right? My climate and seasons are radically different than those found in North Carolina: I don't have a fall growing season. In my garden, by the time a seed planted onion gets big enough to harvest as a green onion it is just the right size to plant as a set for the next growing season. So I'm thinking I should stomp on the tops of the green onions in order to stop their growth and get them to bulb up... Or maybe plant them under that damned box elder tree where it is too dry for anything to grow so that they go into early dry-down. |
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Post by ottawagardener on Sept 18, 2011 14:42:50 GMT -5
MNJ: Another person living in a radically different place then you. I am guessing you can grow over winter? Nifty. As I'm sure you are aware, onions are daylight sensitive so you have to grow the right kind of the right harvest period.
As for my onion growing know-how, such as it is. Seed is started in Jan/Feb for planting out in April. Harvest is sometime in late summer. They don't like suffering round here. In other words, you have to give them good spacing, no weed competition and descent soil.
Or I plant sets in spring.
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Post by grunt on Sept 18, 2011 15:30:22 GMT -5
Here, most years, I can direct seed onions as soon as frost danger is past, and harvest good sized storage onions in the fall. It's worked with Copra (hybrid) Australian Brown, and Amish Bottle, so far.
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