Ending the garden season
Thanks to other people for inspiring me to tally up this year's yield from the garden.
It's more than I thought, and made me realize my garden is bigger than I thought, or at least it has a lot of different plants in it.
greens:
- 3 kale + mustard-green harvests of ~1.5lb each, and near-zero spinach and chard, despite roughly equal-size plantings.
- 8-10 small heads of lettuce, and another small bag of non-head lettuce leaves
- I haven't picked to sorrel yet, but there should be enough for a batch of soup
- I've made one batch of pesto so far, and could pick basil for another batch, where "batch" means freezing 2 dinners' worth and eating 2 dinners' worth. Not as much as last summer but that's okay.
Vegetables (okay, included technically fruits, yeah, whatevs.)
- about 1.5 quarts beans
- about 10 peas
- 6 lemon cucumbers, maybe as many as 10. All I know is N of them is N-1 more than I wanted. I'm not impressed with the lemon cukes, skin too tough, flesh not crispy enough, too watery, giant seed region, medicre for eating, terrible for pickling.
- about 8 mini-sweet-peppers (1"x3" size, red/orange/green) and a few more still ripening
- somewhere between 6 and 10 eggplants, depending on if you count midgets as 1.0 or 0.5
- about 8 large ripe red tomatoes (2 plants, stunted by hornworm)
- about 7 big and 5 small delicious yellow tomatoes (1 plant)
- a shit-ton of little orangey grape tomatoes that were absolutely delicious
- a roma tomato plant that produced like a champ, at least 5 times that I filled a half-sheet tray to make roasted tomato sauce.
I planted 3 summer squash plants and 2 winter squashes, and the yield was:
- 2 dead plants
- 1 zucchini harvested off a dying plant
- 8 Pomme D'Or winter squash the size and color of small tangerines, total weight approx 2 lbs
- enough white scallop summer squash to make 3 squash-based dinners, several side dishes, 3 quarts frozen, 2 large fruits waiting in the fridge, and about 6 more on the vine assuming the slugs don't eat them first.
Lesson: when the plants go nuts, they go nuts. I wish it had been zucchini, the scallops are funny shaped.
Non-vegetable Fruits:
- 3 quarts raspberries, maybe more, it's hard to add it up when you harvest a cup a day.
- almost a quart of gooseberries, maybe?
- similar amount of blueberries.
- a really large number of very small strawberries. I had 8 alpine strawberry plants, and each plant produced approx one ripe berry every other day for 3 months. Seriously. I can go outside every couple of days and pick about 6-8 berries, right now on October 1, and they were just getting ripe when we were in Brazil on July 1. Fantastic!! Except each berry is smaller than a supermarket blueberry, so they don't add up fast. And maybe they stopped producing for a while in August. I would be surprised if the total was more than a quart.
ROOTS:
- 8.5lbs disfigured carrots that were impossible to peel (from 3.5 square feet)
- 8 beets of size ping-pong ball or smaller, and associated tuft of greens - irksome to get 4 beets out of a square foot in which I planted 16.
- 6-10 tiny heads of garlic. Hilariously tiny.
- Leeks the size of pencils. Isn't that the size they say you're supposed to thin them at in May sometime? No, for me apparently that's fall harvest size.
- Scallions, slightly larger than pencils. Some are left over from last year, when they didn't grow any bigger than chives, but this spring they perked up and kept going.
Speaking of which, my chives didn't grow hardly at all, despite the fact that they're not dead yet.
Ditto fennel. I harvested two small flowering tufts, and a small flowering tuft with a bulb at the bottom smaller than a scallion and twice as tough. Inedible.
There's a mega-harvest out there right this moment, almost ready to be brought in... the sunchokes grew splendidly! A week or so ago I dug around in a square foot that used to have beans in it, neighbor to a sunchoke, and came up with plenty of roots to fill out a root-vegetable roast I was doing - a big pint, maybe a small quart. That's in a neighbor square, not the main root bulb under the plants, and the time between blooming and first frost is when all the plant energy goes into growing the roots as big as possible. I expect that was about 1/20 of the total harvest. The good news is, I don't have to harvest it all at once, they're perfectly happy sitting underground waiting for me to dig them up, only hazard of frost is if it freezes solid that I'm not able to dig any more.
In short, I'm stunned at how much food actually came in from the garden, now that I write it down.
Also stunned at what a tiny percentage that contributed to what we put in our mouths this summer. We've eaten all this, as well as CSA vegetables, and I've frozen just a small amount of stuff, and canned almost nothing. Gaping maws of hunger, we are!
This is a clear indication that the reason we pay farmers to grow food for us is because growing food is expensive and time-consuming. The cost of my prolific scallop squash would only compare favorably to the $0.89/lb peak squash season at the supermarket if I disregard all my time, tool purchases, and set-up costs on building and filling the garden beds, and say it's $3.00 packet of seeds plus a summer's worth of water. (and disregard the two other packets of seeds for the plants that lost at Squash-Borer-Roulette)
It's a good thing I like growing stuff and think of it as a hobby I can eat, rather than a crucial tactic in the frugal arsenal. I guess it's also a crucial tactic in the "supply of unusual edibles" plot, but that's another story.
It's more than I thought, and made me realize my garden is bigger than I thought, or at least it has a lot of different plants in it.
greens:
- 3 kale + mustard-green harvests of ~1.5lb each, and near-zero spinach and chard, despite roughly equal-size plantings.
- 8-10 small heads of lettuce, and another small bag of non-head lettuce leaves
- I haven't picked to sorrel yet, but there should be enough for a batch of soup
- I've made one batch of pesto so far, and could pick basil for another batch, where "batch" means freezing 2 dinners' worth and eating 2 dinners' worth. Not as much as last summer but that's okay.
Vegetables (okay, included technically fruits, yeah, whatevs.)
- about 1.5 quarts beans
- about 10 peas
- 6 lemon cucumbers, maybe as many as 10. All I know is N of them is N-1 more than I wanted. I'm not impressed with the lemon cukes, skin too tough, flesh not crispy enough, too watery, giant seed region, medicre for eating, terrible for pickling.
- about 8 mini-sweet-peppers (1"x3" size, red/orange/green) and a few more still ripening
- somewhere between 6 and 10 eggplants, depending on if you count midgets as 1.0 or 0.5
- about 8 large ripe red tomatoes (2 plants, stunted by hornworm)
- about 7 big and 5 small delicious yellow tomatoes (1 plant)
- a shit-ton of little orangey grape tomatoes that were absolutely delicious
- a roma tomato plant that produced like a champ, at least 5 times that I filled a half-sheet tray to make roasted tomato sauce.
I planted 3 summer squash plants and 2 winter squashes, and the yield was:
- 2 dead plants
- 1 zucchini harvested off a dying plant
- 8 Pomme D'Or winter squash the size and color of small tangerines, total weight approx 2 lbs
- enough white scallop summer squash to make 3 squash-based dinners, several side dishes, 3 quarts frozen, 2 large fruits waiting in the fridge, and about 6 more on the vine assuming the slugs don't eat them first.
Lesson: when the plants go nuts, they go nuts. I wish it had been zucchini, the scallops are funny shaped.
Non-vegetable Fruits:
- 3 quarts raspberries, maybe more, it's hard to add it up when you harvest a cup a day.
- almost a quart of gooseberries, maybe?
- similar amount of blueberries.
- a really large number of very small strawberries. I had 8 alpine strawberry plants, and each plant produced approx one ripe berry every other day for 3 months. Seriously. I can go outside every couple of days and pick about 6-8 berries, right now on October 1, and they were just getting ripe when we were in Brazil on July 1. Fantastic!! Except each berry is smaller than a supermarket blueberry, so they don't add up fast. And maybe they stopped producing for a while in August. I would be surprised if the total was more than a quart.
ROOTS:
- 8.5lbs disfigured carrots that were impossible to peel (from 3.5 square feet)
- 8 beets of size ping-pong ball or smaller, and associated tuft of greens - irksome to get 4 beets out of a square foot in which I planted 16.
- 6-10 tiny heads of garlic. Hilariously tiny.
- Leeks the size of pencils. Isn't that the size they say you're supposed to thin them at in May sometime? No, for me apparently that's fall harvest size.
- Scallions, slightly larger than pencils. Some are left over from last year, when they didn't grow any bigger than chives, but this spring they perked up and kept going.
Speaking of which, my chives didn't grow hardly at all, despite the fact that they're not dead yet.
Ditto fennel. I harvested two small flowering tufts, and a small flowering tuft with a bulb at the bottom smaller than a scallion and twice as tough. Inedible.
There's a mega-harvest out there right this moment, almost ready to be brought in... the sunchokes grew splendidly! A week or so ago I dug around in a square foot that used to have beans in it, neighbor to a sunchoke, and came up with plenty of roots to fill out a root-vegetable roast I was doing - a big pint, maybe a small quart. That's in a neighbor square, not the main root bulb under the plants, and the time between blooming and first frost is when all the plant energy goes into growing the roots as big as possible. I expect that was about 1/20 of the total harvest. The good news is, I don't have to harvest it all at once, they're perfectly happy sitting underground waiting for me to dig them up, only hazard of frost is if it freezes solid that I'm not able to dig any more.
In short, I'm stunned at how much food actually came in from the garden, now that I write it down.
Also stunned at what a tiny percentage that contributed to what we put in our mouths this summer. We've eaten all this, as well as CSA vegetables, and I've frozen just a small amount of stuff, and canned almost nothing. Gaping maws of hunger, we are!
This is a clear indication that the reason we pay farmers to grow food for us is because growing food is expensive and time-consuming. The cost of my prolific scallop squash would only compare favorably to the $0.89/lb peak squash season at the supermarket if I disregard all my time, tool purchases, and set-up costs on building and filling the garden beds, and say it's $3.00 packet of seeds plus a summer's worth of water. (and disregard the two other packets of seeds for the plants that lost at Squash-Borer-Roulette)
It's a good thing I like growing stuff and think of it as a hobby I can eat, rather than a crucial tactic in the frugal arsenal. I guess it's also a crucial tactic in the "supply of unusual edibles" plot, but that's another story.