vegetables – grouchyfarmer

Solar Update: Well it’s almost 7 days now of running the house completely off grid and I’m still a bit surprised that this is all working so well. For the first couple of days I was very anxious, kept checking the system all the time, worrying about the numbers, waiting for something, anything to go wrong. But it didn’t. The EG4 12000XP has been just loafing along, easily handling everything we’ve been running. It’s internal cooling fans never even had to ramp up above a whisper. We’re only using about 20% – 25% of our battery capacity over night and we’re making enough solar power to not just run the house during the day but to recharge the battery bank by noon at the latest.

I’ll probably switch back to grid this evening before we start to use the battery because we’re supposed to be looking at rainy weather now for a couple of days. I hope it comes soon. We need rain very badly.

And to add to an already very pleasant day, I managed to snag a photo of this little guy just a short time ago when I was out on the front deck. There were actually two of them coming to the feeder in the space of just a few minutes.

Garden update

The gardens are all looking good after a slow start. Some of the stuff looks like it got hit by frost judging from some of the leaf damage I’m seeing, but all of our plants made it through and are looking pretty good.

The garlic we planted last fall is looking amazing. My only regret is that we didn’t plant two or three times as much. We’re going to correct that this fall. We’re going to massively expand the area for garlic. The bulbs keep very well, too. Just let them “cure” in the garage on a screen for a week or so, then put in net bags and hang them up in the basement where it’s cool, dark and relatively dry. They keep for months that way, as do our onions. As we’ve discovered with just about every vegetable we’ve ever grown, the home grown garlic always has a much richer, more intense flavor than the grocery store stuff

In this bed we have cilantro on the left and carrots on the right. The cilantro re-seeded itself from last year. We didn’t have to plant anything. We harvest some of the seeds in the fall to use as coriander and just let the rest drop to the ground to grow back the following spring.

Lettuce, beets and onions here. Lots of beets and lots of onions. We love our beets: roasted, fried, sweet sour, pickled… Yum. And we go through a lot of onions here too. We’ve had good luck with planting onions all around the outside of the beds with other veggies planted in the central areas.

Three tomato plants in this one. They’ll almost completely take over the entire bed once they reach full size. And, of course, more onions. We were only going to put in 3 tomato plants this year because we have quite a bit of canned pasta sauce left from last year but somehow we’ve ended up with 6 in total.

This bed is all celery. We didn’t plant any last year and regretted that. Home grown celery is so different from the stuff you get in the grocery store it’s almost like they aren’t even the same species of plant. The flavor of the home grown stuff is just so much more intense that you’ll never be satisfied with grocery store stuff again once you try growing your own.

You’ve no doubt noticed the liberal use of #10 cans around some of the plants. That’s a trick MrsGF has been using for decades now. The cans help protect the young plants from light frost, being battered by high winds, and especially from those stupid rabbits. Once the plants are strong enough and well established enough, we pull the cans off. By that time they’re usually too mature to be tempting for the rabbits.