urban homestead

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Shelling beans

November 23, 2016 In the Kitchen, Other recipes

In the true homesteading spirit, I made sure to harvest every last bean off of the plants when I pulled the string beans a few weeks ago. I had mainly left the plants in the garden that long in order to allow the beans to grow big enough to produce seed for next year’s garden. However, not all of the beans on the plant had become viable seed by the time frost hit and the plants had to be pulled, so I was able to set aside a giant bag to use as soup beans instead. Whereas string beans are harvested when the pods are nearly flat and the beans inside have...

Sweeter things

November 14, 2016 Weekly Updates

With less than two weeks to go before Thanksgiving, it’s starting to both feel and look like fall in the garden. This past Friday, I finally made the call to pull out the pepper plants as temperatures were forecast to drop into the upper 20s for the weekend. Peppers and the plants they grow on cannot survive in freezing conditions, which cause their cells to burst. However, I was able to protect them from the earlier light frosts by keeping the plants shielded under a layer of floating row cover and adding on a heavy tarp on particularly cold nights. Both help keep the heat in, preventing the covered area from experiencing as...

Pulling and planting

November 6, 2016 Weekly Updates

With a steady succession of frosts every few nights, the garden is quickly becoming much more two dimensional. At this point, the three tallest crops, the eggplant, tomatoes, and beans, have been removed after getting significant frost damage. I was okay with sacrificing them to the frost before it happened, being pretty sick of harvesting tomatoes and beans by this point. But once it came to actually pulling the plants, I couldn’t help but be sad as that really does mark the beginning of the end of the season.  At the start of the season, I was envisioning the garden as a source of home food, but was also planning to sell...

October Photo Shoot

October 28, 2016 Monthly Photo Shoots, Weekly Updates

We’ve had a chilly end to the month and it feels like winter is really on its way. This past week we had our first frost. I left the eggplant and tomato plants to fend for themselves. It’s good that I harvested off most of the edible fruit, as both suffered some serious frost damage to their leaves. We’re planning to start the big job of pulling them out this coming weekend. I decided to cover the peppers, which still had much more fruit on them, in order to protect them from the frost and that did the trick! We’ll be able to keep harvesting peppers for a least a little longer....

Peppers galore!

October 21, 2016 Garden techniques, Tips & Tools, Uncategorized, Weekly Updates

Fall is the time of year when most people think of harvesting greens and root crops from the garden. However, one thing that I always have a huge amount of in the fall is peppers. Because I like to harvest sweet peppers when they “color”, as opposed to what we think of as green peppers, it takes a good while for them to ripen. Therefore, I end up bringing in a majority of the harvest from mid-August onwards. And by this point, our fridge is more or less packed with peppers! Over the years, as with many other crops, I’ve narrowed my focus to growing the pepper varieties I particularly like- Carmen and...

A slower time

October 12, 2016 Weekly Updates

It’s been another rough couple of weeks as I try to recuperate from yet another cold! At least this time of year isn’t the worst to be forced to take a break. During the summer, even a few days away from the garden can lead to an unmanageable amount of backed-up work. However, right now is the sweet spot of the season. It’s still warm enough that everything is producing and therefore we don’t yet need to start the big job of ripping out plants and preparing the beds for winter. At the same time, it has cooled off enough that growth has slowed on both the crops and the weeds, meaning harvesting...

Rain and critters

October 1, 2016 Weekly Updates

Well there’s nothing better than waking up on a rainy morning to find that your entire tomato trellis has collapsed sideways onto the peppers and eggplant! So instead of getting to enjoy the relaxing morning of sitting inside and drinking cocoa that I had imagined while lying in bed and listening to the rain, Mike and I got to don our rain gear, stick Caleb into his stroller under the front porch, and try to pull thirty feet of sopping wet tomato plants back to a vertical position. I will be the first to admit blame here- as you know, the first section of tomato trellis collapsed on itself a couple of...

Sweet potato greens

September 29, 2016 Garden techniques, In the Kitchen, Other recipes, Tips & Tools

In a small garden space, I always aim to grow as many crops as possible that allow me to plant the bed space more than once a season. However, there are certain veggies we love enough that it’s worth growing them even if they do take a while. Sweet potatoes are one of those crops that take up bed space for a long time, from mid-May until at least mid-September. The upside is that you usually get quite a hefty harvest of tubers at the end of this time. And, even better, sweet potato plants actually offer a second harvest option that many people don’t know about- the greens. All you...

Bean crazy

September 14, 2016 Pests, Tips & Tools, Weekly Updates

Last week’s mild heat wave gave new life to the summer crops and forced me to withdraw from my “no more canning” stance. I simply couldn’t help but put up another round of pickled roasted peppers. Additionally, we’ve seen a new influx of cherry and slicing tomatoes, which are now once again covering much of our kitchen counters. But the real beneficiary of the warm weather was the string beans. I harvested almost 3 pounds in one day over the weekend and then another pound two days later! Harvesting beans even this far into the fall is something new for me. At the farm I managed until this year, we had a serious...

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