Garden Living; The Best Leafy Greens For The Garden

Garden Living

The Best Leafy Greens For The Garden

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Swiss Chard and Kale, and even Beet Greens

We prefer swiss chard in our Maine vegetable garden for many reasons. It is so much more desirable then spinach due to its size and much tastier then bok choy.  

1. The large leaves make it easy to harvest.  Making a full meal of spinach leaves takes an exhaustive amount of time, not so with Swiss chard or beet greens. 

2. Both kale and Swiss chard are very hardy plants and we continue harvesting these leaves into winter. 

3. Sautéed with some garlic and onion, Swiss chard is delicious and the kids are even asking for seconds. 

4. It’s a very colorful veggie choice with a rainbow assortment of stem colors making it beautiful both growing in the garden and cooked on your plate.

5. Swiss chard is packed with vitamins K, A, and C as well as magnesium, potassium, iron, and fiber. 

The nice thing about growing beets is being able to enjoy the whole plant.  We eat the beet greens when the plants are still fairly small and enjoy a nice red beet at the end. 

 Beets stain everything red, so they are a colorful option full of fiber and folate (vitamin B9).  Later on we harvest large beets; they are a sweet vegetable.

A big bowl of chopped kale ready for the pot.  One of my favorite recipes from my Portuguese family; kale soup is simple and healthy.

We decided to can the soup so that it won’t take up precious fridge space and it will be ready to share on a cool Autumn night.

Green Beans; A Plentiful Harvest

Canning That Produce

Picking those fresh green beans is a job for the whole family.

Preparing the green beans for canning by washing and snipping the ends.

Washing the canning jars and lids.

Stuffing the jars as full as possible.

Adding 1tsp of canning salt for a quart of green beans and water to the base of the rim.

Sterilizing the lids by boiling for two minutes.

Placing the complete cans in the pressure cooker.

Pressure cooking for 20 minutes.  It takes quite a while of boiling for the pressure cooker to build up enough pressure to be ready.  There is a pressure release valve that pops up when it is ready.  That’s when you start the 20 minute timer.

It takes a long time after the 20 minutes of time pressure cooking for the pressure to decrease to a safe level to open the pressure cooker.  The cans will then be moved to a towel and wrapped together to slow the cooling process.  

Once we canned enough green beans, we still had enough extra that we sold them in our virtual farm stand.  We had plenty to eat ourselves as well.  Fresh green beans are delicious and enjoying your own canned beans later in the year is very satisfying.  Beans are fairly easy to cultivate and a few plants give a lot of beans. Give it a try a provide for yourself a very healthy home grown food.

This is the photo Amelia submitted to 4H for their first virtual exhibit hall 2020.  Check out all of the 4H projects done by Amelia and her siblings at our 4H post.

Laying the overgrown beans out on some paper in the sun, helps the bean to dry up and be ready for storing.  When the bean is dry and firm, it is ready for cracking.  This is more then enough for next year’s planting. They can also be used from a family recipe of homemade brown beans..

 

Growing Potatoes: A Traditional Maine Crop

Growing Potatoes

A Traditional Maine Crop

This Post is Co-Authored by Angela the Blogger 

and her daughter Alexia, 

who would like to be an author someday.

At planting time, the potatoes themselves are the seed.  To increase the number of plants we get and therefore the number of potatoes, we cut the biggest potatoes in half.  When we plant potatoes, we cover them up in a mound of dirt to keep them  deep and to help the plants stand up and we continue to mound them back up throughout the year.  The photo below is a young potato plant; notice the nice mound of dirt it is sitting in.

Potatoes attract potato bugs.  My siblings and I have the job of plucking the potato bugs.  We have to squish the potato bugs or else they would make their way back to the garden.  This is an important job, otherwise the leaves would be full of holes and the potato plants would not be healthy. The photo below shows the potato plants growing nicely, but there are a few leaves with holes in them; a sign the potato bugs are around and time to start searching for them.

You can tell it is harvesting time when the potato plant leaves start getting a yellowish orange hue. See the photo below for a visual on how they would look.  

When it's harvesting time, we prepare by gathering a potato rake or a hoe and some large buckets.  These tools will both be useful when we're digging for potatoes.  The first step to picking potatoes is pulling up the plants.  If there any potatoes that come up with the plant, we can pull them off and put them in the bucket. When we are done pulling up all the plants, we can use our potato rake and scrape the mound to find and potatoes that have certainly fallen off.  This job takes a few people as we don't want to miss any potatoes blending in with the dirt.  The potato rake can damage the potatoes, so we have to be careful.

When all the potatoes have been collected and are in the bucket, we set down newspaper on the cool dry garage floor where they won't be bothered.  We spread the potatoes down on the newspaper and leave them there for a couple of hours to make sure the moist dirt is dry so that it falls right off.  If this step is skipped, the potatoes would rot in their bucket or box.  This is also the time to sort our potatoes.  The little ones we use that week for a meal with boiled potatoes; straight from the garden to the plate!  The damaged ones should be used right away or cleaned up and canned.  Canning the potatoes might be an extra step now, but it's great for making a delicious brunch later in the year with the potatoes all ready to go. 

This picking season, we used some of the damaged potatoes for homemade french fries.  This is an especially nice treat for us, because we keep our fryer gluten free so that everyone in our family can enjoy it.  When we can't make our own, my husband raves about Gluten Free: Tripp's Farmhouse Cafe and Bakery in Auburn, Maine.  

Twice Baked Potatoes 

Gluten and Dairy Free

Recipe coming soon...

 

Garden Living: Processing Broccoli

Garden Living

    🥦 Processing Broccoli  🥦 

Broccoli is ready to be cut when the florets have that classic soft look.  It’s too early when it is still firm on top and too late when the flowers actually start to open into their little yellow flowers.  After you have cut the main head of broccoli, leave the trunk as you can continue to get shoots of broccoli all summer long; how much depends on the type of broccoli you have grown.

  

     

       

    
Too Early!

          Just Right!          Too Late!

                                                        

 Fresh broccoli is great right from the garden, but it does need to make one stop in a salt rinse first; we use our sink.  Any bugs or worms that are hiding in that luscious canopy will come to the surface to avoid the salty water, pluck them out and it’s ready for the pot or the fridge for another day.

Freezing broccoli for a later time: from experience, keep the stems short as the long pieces get quite firm and stringy. You could also peel the stems and freeze those in pieces. Freezing should occur the day you cut your broccoli, perhaps the next day with good results, but any later and you risk losing that fresh taste. 

Prepare your space:

• Soak your broccoli in the salt water as described above. Boil a pot of water
• Prepare an ice bath (a big bowl of icy water). You will need to have extra ice ready if you’ll be repeating this process multiple times.

Have freezer bags ready and labeled with the date.

Blanching: 

• Drop your broccoli in the boiling water and set your timer for two minutes.

• Be ready with your handled strainer.  This process from blanching to ice bath should be quick.

• Move all the broccoli to the ice bath and reset your timer for two minutes.

• Remove the broccoli from the ice bath and onto a clean dry cloth or skip this step and put them into the labeled freezer bag.

 

• Move to freezer bag and squeeze out as much water and air as possible and seal.

• Put your broccoli bags in the freezer; a deep freezer is best.

It’s great reaching into your freezer or canning shelf months from now, still eating a variety of veggies that you have preserved!  And it all started from these little plants in a well fertilized earth.

For more information on how to grow broccoli and other veggies in the garden... check out my post 

Garden Living: How to Battle the Elements.

Garden Living; Peas In a Pod

Garden Living; Peas In a Pod

How we grow and process our peas

Seedlings in the garden:

 

• We put up our posts and fencing first; you can also use a trellis.

• We plant 2 rows of peas, one on each side of the fence 1 inch apart and 1 inch deep.  

• Weed early to give your plants a chance to root.

Caring for the pea plants