Raspberries!

This is what Brynna and I picked from our raspberry bushes this evening - about 3/4 quart. It might have been a full quart all told, but a great many ended up in Brynna's mouth before reaching the basket. I don't mind: this is a very fine time of year, and picking berries off the bush is about as good as it gets! Yesterday we got about one cup. There is a great bounty beyond that will gradually ripen over the next few weeks, and one or two smaller bushes that will put out fruit later in the summer.

Spring is Here!

In great contrast to my last post (oh so many weeks ago, I know), there are some signs of Spring around Concord. Despite the fact that it has been pretty cold this past week - the first week of April - we are well on our way:

1. Maple Syrup season is just about wrapped up. After reading Maple Syrup Season by Ann Purmell about twenty times in February and March, we went out to see sugaring in action a few weeks back during NH's official maple syrup weekend. The season was already pretty far long, because we sampled some hot Grade B fresh from the evaporator. In other news


2. I sent off an order form for seedlings for our vegetable garden. Sure, we won't pick them up until Memorial Day weekend, but it is a comfort, looking over the strawa-covered raised beds on a grey morning - to know that our tomato, pepper, tomatillo, and brocolli plants are at that moment growing in a greenhouse a two towns away.


3. The raised beds may be looking a bit forlorn and have nothing but old straw to show at the moment, but there are twinges of green to be seen as well: garlic popping up


4. Although it's been chilly when we do it, Hilary and I have been able to do some outdoor bike rides in the last few weeks. We even did a 30-miler last weekend coming back from an Easter get together in Amherst.


5. Easter! We aren't particularly observant, but Easter is always a fun holiday for us. At the said family get-together, Brynna's easter egg hunt was a real crowd pleaser. Picture one adorable and giggling 4-year old chasing through a yard with 9 adults trailing behind with cameras. Or, better yet, observe:

source: Bill R.


6. The end of snow. Enjoy it while it lasts, Jasper!
source: Bill R.


7. March Madness. Go UConn Huskies! What do you mean "men play basketball, too"?


8. Changing wardrobes. We have bins of hand-me-down girl clothes from our former neighbors. Just today Brynna and Hilary did a grand changing of the wardrobe: culling the extra warm and increasingly small clothes and replacing them with sundresses and shirtsleeves for the coming summer.


9. Ice cream. Sure, it was hovering around freezing when we got it, but the neighborhood ice cream shop opened for the season on April 1st - and we made a point to be there! Not that we sat around outside to eat it through.

Fence - Nearly Complete?

A few weeks back I finally got around to installing the gate. It took me a while to get around to it after putting in the rest of the fence. In the meantime it had just been gently leaned between the fence posts. This was sufficient to keep Jasper from escaping, but also greatly reduced the urgency to get the project finished. There were two other hiccups in the way: 1) the fencing distributor had given me a crap set of hinges not suited to this application, and 2) neither had they provided me with the proper cladding/trim pieces that need to be installed before the gate hardware.
 
I got around to it eventually, though, and am rather pleased with the results.

 

Plumb and level, with a nice uniform gap
 

The bottom corner of the open edge bulges out about an inch. This is not my fault. The posts on either side are plumb and parallel; it is the gate panel itself that is not flat.
 

 

It may not be obvious without close examination, but I needed to take a hand saw to the gate when I installed it. The fence rails are 2x3s, but the gate panel was assembled using 3x3s. This means that, when I installed the hinge and got the pickets all in the same plane, the rails of the gate panel were an inch (well, 3/4") too thick. So here, where the gate mates to the open side post, I notched the gate panel rails. This has the handy side benefit of keeping the gate from swinging too far closed.
 
As I said, the fencing distributor didn't really give me the right trim pieces for covering up the metal fence posts. While the flange of the metal post can be covered with a 1x4, it really ought to be done with a 1x6. I haven't gotten around to picking those materials up yet. Better hurry I suppose, or it'll be winter before I get around to it.

Love Summer

Fence Update

You would think that, after racing for 2-1/2 hours on Saturday and traveling halfway across New England, I would make Sunday a day of complete rest. That would have been a smart idea, but the endless task list beckoned. Up next: more work on the fence.

It started off with a simple goal: get the fifth and final post into place. I had been holding back on this one, because I knew it was in the vicinity of a natural gas line. About a month after the old fence flopped over, National Grid decided that it would be a good time to update some of the natural gas lines in the neighborhood, and move everyone's gas meter to the outside of the building. No problem with that, but I didn't know exactly where it was. After a call, the DigSafe people came out and marked, and I thankfully had a bit more room than I'd thought at first. Still, between the gas line and the foundation, there wasn't a whole lot of space for digging.
 

And as it turned out, I had less and less space as I went down. Below grade the foundation is made of a very large and rough-hewn granite blocks (yay New Hampshire!). It appears that the blocks inch their way outwards the further down you go. So after digging down a foot, I would hit the edge of a block, then have to shift a little further from the house and closer to the gas line.
 

Eventually I did get down deep enough to set the post properly. I was on a roll by then, having caught my fourth or fifth wind, and decided that it was be positively easy to start hanging the fence sections.
 

It took a little doing to manhandle them into place, wedge them to the right height, level them left-to-right, then predrill the holes and set the screws. It's probably a job better suited to a crew of two or three. It got faster as I went along.
 

I call that a pretty good result.
 

It's not a perfectly straight line, but I'll call it pretty good for a first attempt.
 

The scalloping is a decent look. But there are still those unsightly metal posts to cover up.
 

Another board does a pretty good job of covering them over, except when viewed from an angle. Six-inch boards would have done better, but would have looked pretty chunky for this low decorative fence.
 

The fence section closest to the house ended up being too long. Or, put differently, the post ended up too far from the house. So I hacked off a bit of it and cantilevered that extra section off the side. Not the sturdiest, but should hold up. At the very least, it'll keep Jasper from wandering.
 

I had to improvise how to tie the old fence into the new post. Here's my solution rigged together with a 2x4 and some screws. I'm hoping that this will only be necessary for a year or two, by which point I'll have the rest of the fence replaced. Considering how tired my arms and hands are today, it may well be longer!
 

More of the tie-in to the old fence.
 

Here is some of the treatment around the gate post. After five hours of work, I'd decided I had definitely had enough, and so left hanging the gate for another day.

Garlic

This was a good year for the garlic. These pictures are from when I yanked it out, back in early July. They've been spending the weeks since then hanging up in the garage, curing, so that they now have papery husks and should keep for at least a couple of months.

Holy Cilantro!

I can't tell if it self-seeded from last year, or if this is the result of a handful of 2-year old seeds I tossed a few weeks back. In any event, this is a whopping big bunch of cilantro I pulled from the raised beds today. This is really only about half of it - there're more yet to come. It's particularly impressive, given that we have had almost no luck, ever, in getting cilantro to survive long enough to be worth harvesting. It would grow, bolt while still really small, then shrivel and die before ever reaching a harvestable amount. Bummer, too, because we actually use a lot of it - one store-bought bunch ever week or two.

The stems, some of which are as thick as a pencil, are for the most part to tough to be useful at this point. The leaves and smaller stalks are fine for cooking. I filled our salad spinner completely, twice, by plucking this bundle. After washing and spinning, it amounted to one gallon ziplock bag. For most of what we use cilantro for, freezing this batch and using it later (limp and definitely no longer fresh) will be fine.

Slice, Chop, Repeat

Although we try to eat with the seasons, and eat locally where possible, we still use 1-4 peppers a week for much of the year. In winter, they come from greenhouses in Mexico and Holland, and that just doesn't sit right with us.

But it's not quite winter yet: it's harvest time. Even though peppers are supposed to be a summer crop, here in New Hampshire they don't start turning colors until mid-September. We've still got a whole slew that are racing the end of the season with lots of green still showing. But, amazingly enough, we have gotten some from our garden already, and have stocked up when possible at the Farmer's Market. We cut them and freeze them for later use. Break out the whetstone - I like a sharp blade for this kind of work!

Before:

After:

Garlic Harvest

When I first put the garlic into the ground last fall, I didn't know when you are supposed to pull it out. My one previous attempt to grow garlic may or may not have made it to harvest time - we couldn't very well bring it cross-country from Minnesota. So, like most of this gardening stuff, I've had a bit of learning to do.

Cutting the scapes a few weeks back was important, because that tells the plant to not bother putting energy into the flower, and instead direct it into growing the bulb. A few times over the last couple weeks I've pulled the dirt away from one or two plants so that I could gauge the size of the bulbs, and they have definitely been getting bigger.

The next milestone in the growing was when the lower leaves of each plant started to brown and die off. Depending on who you read, after the bottom-most five or six leaves have died off, it is time to pull them. Letting things go much longer risks having the bulbs split open underground, at which point it can be difficult to 1) harvest them without breaking them and 2) store them for more than few weeks without spoiling. Having an intact skin around the whole head is important for storage.

I have also been told to avoid watering them in the last week or two prior to harvest - this can help them pre-cure in the ground and reduces the risk of having them split open. This I couldn't do, because the garlic is intermixed with other plants, and all those others have been in desperate need of watering during this scorcher of a week.

All this lead up to today: harvest day!

I quickly abandoned my small trowel and stuck to excavating with my hands. I didn't want to risk gouging anything!

After exposing the top of the bulb, I undercut a bit with my fingers, grab the neck, and slowly pull. The roots eventually give way, bringing a clump of dirt with them. Some shaking follows to clean the roots and return the soil to the ground.

Look! A double!

The total haul was nearly 20 heads large and small. I won't know for a while if the heads are divided into a handful of large cloves (good for cooking) or many small cloves (pain in the ass to peel!) until I start using them.

After a bit more cleaning I bundled the necks and leaves with twine and hung them in the garage. That's a nice hot and dry place where they can cure for a few weeks - turning the tough outer skin to paper, and sealing the delicious cloves inside. With nay luck, after they've cured, they should keep through the end of the year. I'll probably use the cloves from the largest head or two for planting next year's crop.

Raspberries

Some of you may remember that my Dad and I put in some raspberry beds.


I figured it would be a few years until they bore fruit. And, indeed, some of the canes have clearly died since planting. But, nevertheless, we have harvested a small clutch of raspberries this year. I have been training some of the longer canes up into the guy wires of the trellis, and we'll see how things go in the years to come.

Scapes

Here's the first product of this year's garden: garlic scapes. These are the immature flowering stalks of a garlic plant. Snipping these off before they are more fully formed encourages the plant to put its energy into developing the bulb. Plus, they make for an interesting cooking ingredient. The most adventurous can use them as a 1:1 replacement for asparagus or green beans in some dishes.


I chopped these and used them in place of most of the garlic in the sofrito base for a cuban black bean soup earlier this week.

Spring Planting

We got some pepper plant seedlings a little while back, and have only just now gotten them into the ground. They did alright sitting on the back steps, but really need some space to grow. They look small next to the enormous spreading leaves of our garlic, but they should catch up before long. B enjoyed helping:


This weekend is the first of the season for the Concord Farmer's market. We hope to score some nice tomato seedlings to put in alongside.

Spring Stirrings

If the calendar says so; it must be true! Spring it here! Most of the snow is gone, including that covering our raised beds. Over the weekend I had a quick look in the plots where, last fall, I'd planted in some garlic. Viola!




Alas, the day after these pictures were taken the garlic was covered over again by another 3 inches of heavy wet snow. Nevertheless, the opening salvo has been made.

Harvest

What you see is a sample of the ongoing harvest from our garden. It's taken a lot of work, but is now (literally) bearing fruit. Geek that I am, I've been keeping stats on our yield. To date we've gotten about two dozen tomatoes, about twice as many tomatillos, and exactly two small red peppers.

The tomatillos have ranged from a few plum-sized ones at the start to much more numerous golf ball-sized ones now. It's been rainy the last day or two, otherwise I'd have another handful. These we've used almost exclusively to make salsa verde, which generally we use in a nice black bean enchilada recipe we've been making for years.

We planted four different varieties of tomato, but managed to get them a bit mixed up between the seedlings and the transplanting, so I don't know exactly what the red ones are. The orange ones, however, are Moonglow, an absolutely wonderful variety that is all tomato flavor and sweetness with very low acidity. We also have some brandywines that are very, very slowly making their way to full ripeness. If the frost holds off another few weeks, we should be able to get another dozen or two. Even though the weather has turned cooler of late, we still love to have fresh tomato and pretend it's still July.

I simply cannot explain the peppers: they have great soil, they've have abundant sunshine and hot weather, but also plenty of watering. And yet, the two peppers you see above may well be the only fully red ones we'll get this year out of eight plants. The plants themselves are stunted and stressed, not at all like our last experience with peppers, which by comparison was downright bountiful. Perhaps they got overshadowed by the voluminous tomatillos, perhaps they needed better staking and support, perhaps we should have started our seeds in March, rather than late May. Ah well. We use peppers in a lot of our cooking, so we will redouble our efforts come next spring.

Handyman Gardening

I built the planter boxes, and we filled them with plants a few months back. There was another facet to that project that, until recently, had fallen by the wayside: how to support all these tomatoes and tomatillos that were going to become tall, heavy, and floppy? This past week they started becoming more or less flattened under their own weight, so it was time to finish the job I'd started.

I could have just bought a bunch of tomato cages and called it a day. But good grief, they're expensive! I'd have dropped upwards of $200 for a full complement. Sure, I could use them year after year, but it still seemed a bit of a large investment.

Following the tips from the Square Foot Gardening book, I decided instead to build a frame from which I could hang netting, into which the plants could them be trained. Their suggestion for how to build this frame: electrical conduit. This is non-structural pipe that is strung together in just about every type of building except for residential, through which electrical and networking cables get strung. Because a couple hundred thousand miles of it are extruded each year, it is relatively inexpensive: about $0.25 / ft. To make a frame from it the suggested method is to bend it into a long U-shape, much like a soccer goal.

That's all well and good - electrical conduit is made to be bent. The only problem is that one usually needs a conduit bender of the correct pipe diameter to do a proper job of it, otherwise it'll likely just kink. A 1" conduit bender goes for $50-75 from any hardware store. That seemed a little excessive for a tool I'd use only a handful of times. I brought the conduit to my workplace, figuring that in an engineering company spanning several rennovated buildings, there's sure to be a conduit bender on hand. Turns out there isn't: all the bending gets done by electricians when they're brought on site for a specific job.

So I decided to make one myself. It wasn't too difficult, though it took a few hours of work to do it properly. Some might point out that I was trading my time, which is very costly, against out-of-pocket money. And in truth, I would have to value my time very little to say I came out ahead on that one. But it was a chance to do some woodworking, for which I grant myself a substantial discount. The most time consuming part was using my router to carve out the quarter-rounds from some scrap plywood. I have a circle-cutting jig for my router - almost like a draftsman's compass - but it does take a little time to set up a proper cut. The 2x4 was also some scrap material that would give me proper leverage when making the bend.



A 1/4" bolt restrains the conduit in place at the start of the bend. After that, it is a simple matter of gradually rolling the bender until the conduit has a nice smooth 90-degree bend in it.




Were I to follow the square-foot gardening plan, I would then get some lightweight netting with coarse spacing and string it across this frame, creating a plane of support down the middle of the planter box that I could then train the plants into. Such netting turns out to be surprisingly difficult to track down. Yesterday, in desperation, I instead bought a pair of replacement soccer goal nets. These happen to be just the right size to allow me, without any cutting, to drape across the conduit in an A-frame arrangement: the least sheltering pup tent ever. Rather than stake out the bottom edge, I added some screw eyes to the boxes, and just pulled the netting tight under them. This also served to stabilize the conduit frame by guy-ing it out to either side.






I admit, the netting stands out rather a lot, but it functions quite well and should hold up well in the weather. I should also be able to break this all down for storage in the fall without a lot of trouble.

And to prove that all of this effort is showing some payoff, behold our first two tomatillos of the year!