Corn Harvest

So yes, we are still thinking about all that grows over here.

Corn is a summer food in USA, but it comes in quite late in the season in Sweden.

Somethings are better left to the farmers for us amateur gardeners, and corn was one. We planted a few seeds, but they did not do anything. A good crop takes space, and more know than we have. We were looking for a Saturday activity and we were in the harvesting mood after the potato pickin'. SwedeDadddy wanted to pick corn, so we found a little farm that had sold it's promised crop, and opened to the public to pick what remained of the sweet corn. They had a little ad on blocket, which is like craigslist of Sweden.

A blowy September day. It can be very windy in Skåne

Playing in the field of corn

Just 2 kronors an ear, a third of what I would pay if I was lucky enough to find sweet corn on the cob

With a little boost from her dad, Swedegirl towering over the field

We were given a wheel barrow to bring in the harvest, great fun for the girls!

A typical small farm in Skåne, houses arranged in a U to protect from the wind.

Shucks!

We got 50 ears, ready to freeze. Corn on the cob is one of the favorite veggies of the girl.

Tonight we ate some combined with the rainbow chard in the garden.

Mmmmmm, garden fresh rainbow chard.

Perfect for this recipe from Moosewood Lowfat cookbook for Black Bean Chilaquile which calls for corn and chard, a tried and true favorite Mollie Katzen recipe at our house.

Little Potato, You come from Underground.

Click here and open in a second window for a little musical accompaniment to these photos. A favorite song from the days of gazing at newborns (music player at bottom of page) http://www.starbittrune.com/Jack/littlepotato.html

May 23 we put the spuds you see in the right foreground in the front garden.

And Sept 17th we got them out, a nice potato harvest! We thought maybe they were goners, as the greens were dead. Amateurs! That is what potatoes do, apparently. You harvest them 2 to 3 weeks after the greens die.

We had to water them through the drought in July, but they did fine with nature alone through August which was rather wet.

We planted 4 kinds.

The letters on the sign weathered away, so we are no longer sure what they were...

We found little garden friends while we harvested.

Earthworms.

Ladybug...one of my favorite swedish words, nyckelpiga. Such a fun word to say, we choose to always speak of ladybugs in Swedish.

We got 4 kid sized wheel barrows full!

64.4 pounds of potatoes, 29.3 kilos of potatoes!

Given they are 6 kronors a kilo in the market, which would be 175 kronors, we nearly made back the 200 kronors in seed potatoes we started with, ;).

Plus a little satisfaction.

Of each kind :

19.1 pounds, 8.7 kilos

9.3pounds , 4.24 kilo

22 pounds, 10 kilos

14 pounds, 6.36 kilos

Home Again, Home Again, Jiggedy Jig....

After our long trip away we are back to home sweet home. In the heat of Italy I thought lots of Florida, and when I miss my people on long trips I still pine for the home I have in the hearts of those in Florida. I had little heart strings pulling me back to Florida sometimes on our trip. But that vanished as we came back to our sweet little home in Sweden. It is green and damp and mossy like a Swedish September. We turned on the heat, brought in some fire wood, made a pot of soup, and got out the sweaters and rain gear.

Even little people have rain gear in Sweden

I was anticipating what would be going on the garden the whole trip. It is only my second year gardening, and I could not wait to see what would come of it. We left the garden with no watering system, and were chancing it to the rain and sunshine.....

And boy did they come through for us!!

The onions are no bigger than when we left, the swiss chards is big and beautiful, and the cabbage moth larvae have been feasting on the Tuscan and green kale, leaving little green skeletons in the garden.

The Hungry Little Caterpillar, who pillaged the Kale

The spinach died out totally, but the iceberg seeds and romaine lettuce in the self watering containers are glorious!!!

Only two tiny pumpkin fruits, and long windy vines with big yellow flowers. And the most pitiful excuse for a watermelon vine ever is tucked away in there too.... If we select a few flowers we hope to still get pumpkins for Halloween, that is a good 6 weeks or more away, right?

The apples in the front on one tree are ripe, and there are a few scarce black currants holding on. I loved these the most last year (black currant sauce on morning oatmeal is so YUMMY!!) , but did not have time to pick them before we went, and sadly most have fallen away....

A few black berries still. Swedish blackberries are tasty. We ate tons of these in Germany, but the Italian ones had a special odd flavor, and were no good at all!!!

Out front, the potato greens have died, I thought we had lost them all to diseases. But we have been told this is normal to lose the greens, and that we should just check the potatoes and harvest when no longer green. Any potato farmers out there? This is my first try at this.... But the carrots are really growing!

The kids picked a few baby carrots for our lentil soup. It was nice to have veggies when we came home with out shopping!!!

A few tomatoes have ripened, but the bushy plants are growing and growing up making green leaves and more tiny fruits. We were advised to stop their growth by clipping them so the energy will go into the fruit. I think I will take this as a metaphor, and do the same for all my fall projects- let the energy I have go into ripen what has already fruited around here instead of sending too many new shoots out this fall.

Not sure if someone picked a few peas when we were gone, but Swedegirl's peas have grown but have just one flower and no pods.

Lots of wild mushrooms in the yard. A friend came by and told us a few we have are edible!

(Not this one, it has gills, ones with pipes underneath are the best bet)

Told these are edible but I am still a little reluctant and scared to eat my yard mushrooms!!

But it was the zukes that came through to impress us most!!! Last year it was the quantity that excited us, after a bit of neglect it was the size that was so exciting this year!

Left unpicked for 5 weeks, they were HUGE!!!!!

BIG!!!!

We left the biggest and picked this one, which was not the largest, but weighed 4 and a half pounds!

What to do?

I thought the big ones would be old and dry and hollow, no good to eat. It was actually sweet and good. People talk about the joy of baby zucchini, that they are young and tender, but big ones like this that can be sliced like lasagna noodles, or make crackers sized disks are pretty special and worth growing, I tell you!!! I baked some with fresh herbs from the garden and some Parmesan, and was starving and found little slices with left over olive pate from Italy was delicious.

The kids finger painting, making themselves at home, getting messy, and reacquainting themselves with the joys of home that they missed on the road.

When we arrived home at 10pm at night, both kids woke up and tried on all their shoes in the closet, with squeals of glee! Fun to see what makes a home a home. Home is where our rain boots are for now.

The Garden

This is our second year trying our hand at vegetable gardening. Last year the garden went in in early June and that felt late, as the tomatoes did not ripen until September. So I vowed to start earlier. I eagerly tried to start seeds in our raised bed in April. I struck my shovel to the bed to turn the dirt, and it gave a clunk. It was still frozen solid. So I waited a week or so and planted some kale, carrot, and radish seeds in early May. May 11th I put in some onion bulbs.

May 13th I had sprouts, things were looking good.

We waited. And waited. The carrots took 21 days to germinate. They came up and I felt hope. The onions greened up. But the radish and kale seedlings were not doing much.

By early July we had radish sprouts that had bolted and a little progress on the thick planting of kale sprouts. The radishes were so pitiful I pulled them all and never took a picture. In a feeble attempt at enjoying the radishes as we pulled them I ate the prize one, which was about 2 cm in diameter. Pulling them was a fun job for the 5 year old, though. She loaded them very purposefully in her wheel barrow. I was doubting the garden was going to do anything, but remembered in my eagerness to start I had not fertilized, so I thought I would give that a try. I was sensing my greens needed nitrogen.

So I pulled everything leaving only the onions in place, and dug in a bunch of fertilizer and compost in to the bed and let the July sun do its work. Things looked better, with the kale thinned and in tidy rows. But the warmed up ground and long sunny days seemed to be the thing that was really making the difference.

I also started applying seaweed tea, a nasty smelling brew made from seaweed harvested from the shore near Swededaddy's childhood home, then soaked in water. It is my secret weapon. The right to collect seaweed from that shore is deeded to farmers, so it must be good for something. I worked on a farm and they always applied fish emulsion to the greens. Seaweed tea smells as bad, so and hopefully it is giving them a mineral boost and the nitrogen they need to flourish.

I love greens and they are not sold widely in stores here, so I am going heavy on the greens in the garden. I also hear they are very resilient.

I have Tuscan Kale. And regular curly green Kale. Look I grew something from seed!!

And Swiss Chard, which I bought as a plant start at the garden store and put in in May. The chard seeds did almost nothing, so it was a good thing I found these plants! It is already ready for cut and come again harvesting.

We have eaten it three times so far...

July 6th SwedeDaddy made a new bed for the tomato plants. The tomatoes dominated the one raised bed last year, and are not supposed to be replanted in the same soil the next year. Ours did get a disease late in the season, so hopefully this new bed will be a comfy fresh start. Here they are July 13th. They are bigger already, I put up trellises now.

I also made two self watering containers and tried some spinach, romaine, and ice berg lettuce seeds in them. We will see how that goes.
We have a yellow tomato, a danish export tomato, a flavorino, some other cluster tomato, and two cocktail tomatoes. Hopefully there is enough time for them to do something this year. I think last years slow harvest may have been the result of me trimming the wrong part of the plant last year, so I hope they produce earlier. There are tons of Swedish tomatoes in the stores, I have concluded they are greenhouse tomatoes. Here is the first fruit on a cocktail tomato, July 13th.

We got some zucchini starts last year and had three really great producing zucchini that made us feel like successful gardeners. I was combing the garden centers looking for the zucchini, and had no luck. I picked up some celery, a yellow peppers, and a sweet melon as that was all they had for plant starts.

Yellow pepper, in a container.
The sweet melon start from the garden center

I never found my zucchini plant starts, much to my dismay!!

They were the one thing that we really ATE lots of last year that made the garden fun!

But I did have some seed packets.... It was so late for seeds, though!!! As a last ditch effort for zukes and pumpkins, I planted the seeds July 10th. Three days later, I was checking them three times a day and watching them change before my eyes.

Zukes really do grow that fast. If you start one thing from seed, start zukes!

So July 13th, SwedeDaddy put in a bed for the zukes.

We are starting to call it the pappaledig garden, since he is home from work on parent leave this summer. We tucked some pumpkins and watermelon in with the greens. The zukes are getting their third leaf now on July 20th. We will see what they do, the Internet says they are 45 to 65 days till maturity. We are hoping everything will grow grow while we are gone on our summer trip, and be ready for eating when we are back in September. The first freeze was not till late October last year, and the greens are best after they have been touched by frost. So hopefully we will have late maturing plants and be able to eat off this a bit this year! Maybe planting late was a good thing this year, as we will be traveling most of August.

The best and worst part of gardening with kids is that they like to play with the hose when you water. My mud monster.

We have a little berry patch we planted last year, the deer ate the plants last year so we had only one or two berries! Now its the kids eating berries here and there from our own little strawberry patch. It only produces enough to go from hand to mouth. But we also have found a little secret abandoned garden in the village, and we picked that berry patch clean. It has a little strawberry patch and a big cherry tree we have been visiting. It has kept us happy until we made our big berry picking trip today.

Baby has had to learn to ask before she pops those berries in her mouth!

Out front, we have the potato patch we started May 23rd. We also started carrots in the front, and they took just a few days to germinate now it is warm, instead of 3 weeks in the spring. I think I am getting why people start things in greenhouses now. WARMTH is key to growth. Maybe this is why the Rudolph Steiner people make a big deal out of keeping kids warm, and having a hat on in winter. Warmth equals growth.

You can see how big the sunflowers are in the foreground, this photo was taken July 6th.

Here they are 13 days later on July 19th

Things change. This is what a garden will teach you.