Feels good to be planting!

It is still too early to plant much - but after a full week of rain it was nice to be able to get out in the garden and plant something.  I only planted 3 things - but all 3 can take a little cold.  As you can see, I planted carrots (scarlet nantes) snow peas (mammoth melting sugar) and Beauty Heart Radishes. 

I can't wait for them to grow and to be able to eat them!  My mouth is watering just looking at these pictures. 

Have you planted anything yet?  Leave me a comment and let me know what you are planting.

Colorful Carrots!

Check out the colorful carrots Andy is holding - orange, red and purple. Growing a rainbow of colors of everything is so much fun. I also planted yellow ones.

Chicken and Bean Soup

I made this for dinner tonight and there were no left overs. This is a very healthy soup - and great tasting too.


Chicken and Bean Soup

½ cup dry garbanzo beans
½ cup dry black beans
1 lb. chicken breasts or thighs cut into bite size pieces
1 ½ cups fennel bulb, trimmed and cut into ¼ inch slices
2 ½ cups sliced carrots
1 cup diced onion
1 clove garlic, chopped
¼ teaspoon salt
¼ teaspoon pepper
4 cups chicken broth
1 tablespoon fresh marjoram
1 tablespoon fresh thyme
1 cup fresh spinach, chopped or shredded

1. Rinse the beans; place in a saucepan and add enough water to cover the beans by about two inches. Bring to boiling, reduce heat and simmer uncovered for 10 minutes. Remove from heat, cover and let stand for one hour. Drain and rinse beans.
2. Put all ingredients except fresh herbs and spinach in slow cooker. Cover and cook on low for 8 to 10 hours or on high for 4 to 5 hours.
3. Add fresh herbs and spinach. Let stand 10 minutes before serving.
4 servings

Growing carrots

I am going to try and ignore the cold winter weather by writing about the different veggies I plan to plant over the next several weeks. I will start today with my family's favorite veggie - the carrot!

Carrots are a favorite in our household. I grow lots of carrots every year. We get carrots from our CSA. And I still buy a 5 lb bag of carrots at least every other week. Andy devours carrot sticks in his lunch, snack on carrot sticks after school and begs for cooked or oven roasted carrots for dinner. Dan juices carrots and loves to munch on them raw. I cook with them and munch on them raw. I plan on planting more carrots this year than last year.

Carrots do well in raised bed gardens as they need loose soil for the roots (the carrots) to grow down deep for good sized carrots. Carrots are direct sown in the garden as soon as the ground can be worked. They can handle light frosts so you really can’t plant them too early. They also will survive into the winter under a thick covering of mulch. The seeds are small and try as you might to space the seeds, you really can’t space them properly so you will need to thin them out as they grow. When they are small, thin them out to about an inch apart. As they grow you will need to thin them more (use the baby carrots to make vegetable broth and in other soups) to 3 to 4 inches apart.

Carrots are a great veggie to grow with children. Kids love to grow foods that they like to eat and most kids love carrots. After you introduce them to gardening with familiar veggies, you can often get them to try other veggies if they had a hand in helping grow them.

I like to make several plantings of carrots two weeks apart so that we have carrots throughout the spring and fall. In the north here (MN) the last planting should be around August 1st. I also like to plant fast growing radishes in the same row – for a couple of reasons, one to mark the rows since carrots are slow to germinate and two just to get double use out of the space since my garden is small.

If there isn’t adequate rainfall you will need to water them. Always soak the ground when you water them – carrots are root crops and if you water too much and too shallow you will not get good root development. You want to encourage the roots to grow downward in search of water to make nice long roots, if the top is always moist there is no need for the roots to grow down and you will not get nice carrots. So water them well and then not again until the soil is dry at least 1 to 2 inches down.

Weeding is important when growing root crops. Weeds will choke out your carrots. Many people mulch around them to keep the weeds down.

You can harvest the carrots when they are whatever size you prefer. It is helpful to loosen the soil around the carrots with a spading fork before pulling the carrots up – otherwise you may just end up pulling the carrot top off and leaving the root you were after in the ground.

The most popular color of carrots is orange, but you can also find red, yellow, white and purple. Actually I think most people would be surprised to learn that these “new colors” of carrots are not new at all. Actually the orange carrot that we are familiar with today is relatively new in the history of the plant. The original wild carrot that became domesticated into today’s modern carrot was purple or black. The different colors of carrots contain varying amounts of carotenoids. In my garden, I like to grow a rainbow when it comes to carrots.

A fact that I just learned this past year is that carrot tops are also edible. I never knew that - I eat both beet greens and beet roots but had no idea that I was throwing something edible in my compost. They can be used in any recipe in place of parsley.

Everyone knows that carrots are a great source of Vitamin A. But did you know that they aren’t really. True Vitamin A only comes from animal sources. The source of Vitamin A in carrots is Beta Carotene which is really a provitamin. A provitamin is a substance in food that is converted into a vitamin by our body. Carrots also contain Folic acid, vitamin C, potassium, calcium, iron and magnesium. Carrots also contain the trace mineral selenium, which is hard to find in food and very important – although the amount of selenium in your carrots may vary according to your soil – some parts of the country have more selenium in the soil; therefore carrots grown in those regions will be higher in selenium than carrots grown in other regions. Carrots also contain a long list of phytonutrients. Carrots are also a good source of fiber.

It's looking like it may be a good gardening year after all!

We had a late start and now it is just hot but the garden seems to be weathering it all. And after all, isn't there always something about the weather to complain about? Every year it is too hot, too cold, too wet, too dry or too something.

Mostly my garden is doing great. I had spotty germination on the parsnips and some of my carrots and Andy's sunflower fort has seen better years - but overall it is doing well. We have been eating lettuce and radishes from the garden for some time.

The strawberries were great this year. The currants and raspberries are loaded. The apple tree doesn't have any fruit this year and it looks like I have lost the peach tree - the green that was there has shriveled up and died. But I keep watering the tree hoping beyond hope that there is some life left in there somewhere! LOL! My plum tree has plums for the first time - I can only find 3 - so not a huge harvest but I'll take what I can get and it is still a very young tree.

I snapped a few pics of the garden this morning -



2 views of my raised bed from opposite angles.


Wayahead Tomato


The dead peach tree.

Pushing myself to Garden

What is wrong with me? I love to garden but this year I am just not doing it. I pushed myself to get out today for a little while. I don't know if it is just that I have so much else going on or if it is the weather.

But I did have a good gardening day today.

I planted:
Carrots - Scarlet Nantes, Tendersweet, Nelson Hybrid, & Atomic Red
Radishes - Easter Egg Mix
Leaf Lettuce - Lettuce Blend
Parsnips - Hollow Crown
Beets - Red Ace Hybrid

I also set my tomatoes out for a few hours today to get them used to the weather and wind so I can plant them out soon. They have grown so tall that they are touching the lights - the weather needs to cooperate so I can get them out in the ground!

I also took a couple of pictures -


The plum tree is blooming. I am hoping for plums this year - it would be the first year - last year we had a couple of blooms, but no plums.


And strawberry blossoms.

In my garden today

The bell peppers are doing nicely - they are not very tall, but they are loaded. The picture isn't real clear, but you can see purple, yellow and green in this picture.


A purple and yellow bell pepper that ended up in tonight's spaghetti sauce - yum!


Carrots from the garden all cut up and ready to eat. I am trying to get away from plastic food containers - so I have these packed in a glass jar and sitting in the fridge. They get eaten much faster when they are cut up and ready.

In My Garden Saturday 7/14/07

I thinned out some carrots and dug some new potatoes. I roasted them for dinner with a few onions from the garden - they were yummy. I just tossed a little olive oil on them and a little salt and pepper and roasted them in the oven at 350 degrees for an hour. YUM!


The two remaining hot pepper plants are getting lots of peppers on them.


The cauliflower is starting to form heads.


Andy's sunflowers are starting to form heads also - Andy can't wait for his flowers to bloom!

My carrots are growing nicely

I was thinning the carrots today and most of them are big enough to be eaten and classified as baby carrots - at least these two varieties are. This is the Yellowstone and the Atomic Red. The Tendersweet and Nelson Hybrids are still quite a bit smaller.

In My Garden Thursday June 28,2007

Here's Andy in his sunflower fort. It won't be long with how quickly the sunflowers are growing that he can actually play and hide in there.


The red cabbage is looking beautiful and starting to form heads.


The bell peppers are still small and just doing OK. I thought they would take off with this heat.


The carrots are doing great!


The onions are already maturing - they didn't get very big this year.

In my garden today 5/29/07

The apple tree is loaded with little apples

I transplanted the pepper plants today - now everything is in the ground

Strawberries are ripening

The black raspberries I transplanted in the spring are flowering so maybe I'll get some fruit from them this year - I thought I might lose a year with a transplant.

The pole beans are all up. The green beans on the right came up before the yellow beans on the left even though they were planted at the same time.

I don't know how well you can see with my cheap camera (my nice one died), but the carrots are all up in nice little rows.

The potatoes are looking good

The currant bushes are loaded.

The sunflower fort has been planted, but this year we put mulch in the middle so prickly weeds don't grow - the boys didn't like playing in there much last year because of the weeds!

7 quarts of rhubarb ready for the freezer. Rhubarb is real easy to freeze - just cut up and put in bags and stick in the freezer - nothing to it!

I have some flowers blooming as well. I don't pay attention to the names of the flowers as I do to the veggies - so I can't even think of what kind of flowers they are right now.

The Minnesota peaches are growing bigger. I just hope I can keep the boys from picking them green. Andy and Vinny (the neighbor) picked quite a few green apples over the weekend - I have told them not to touch the peaches, but they don't always listen.

The tomatoes are bouncing back from transplant shock.

The cabbage and brussels sprouts are loving this cool weather.

In my garden this morning

Lots to see in my garden this morning.

The tomatoes are starting to bounce back from transplant shock. I do think I lost one or two - but most look like this one. Next week they will be looking good.

The Red Cabbage is loving the cool weather and doing good.

The Brussels Sprouts are also doing good.

The cauliflower was planted out this past weekend the same as the tomatoes and they haven't fully recovered from transplant shock yet either - but give them a week and they'll be looking fine!

The onions are looking great. I could start pulling some for green onions now if I needed to.

The last lettuce that I planted out is recovering mostly from transplant shock (this was the third planting) - but I think I may have lost the red one on the right.

The first lettuce I planted out is looking good. I will start picking the outer leaves for my evening salad in the next few days. I can't wait - nothing tastes better than lettuce you grow yourself!

The lettuce I direct seeded in the garden is also up and doing good. To the right you can see the radishes are also up.

The carrots are up - well, not the Nelson hybrid, but all of the other varieties I planted are up.

You can see baby beets here.

And the potatoes are starting to peek through the ground as well.

So far I am pretty pleased with how the garden is shaping up this year.