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digitS'
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!potatoes!, I thought you would say something about potatoes :wink: !

We had mashed potatoes with celery root last night and a curry with carrots, onions and potatoes, today. That was also what I reported on back in November :).

And, that's just about the last of the potatoes. By the 1st week of August, I'd dug 93 pounds. The average American eats 124 pounds a year so, I guess, DW and I had a few too many store-bought French fries over the last 5 1/2 months :roll: !

This year, I'm growing at least one late-maturing variety of spud so that I can get a few more pounds out of the 100 square feet I allocate to them and so that I can expect a little longer storage life. Every one that was peeled today had some sprouts to break off.

A few more onions and a lot more carrots are still in storage but - down to just frozen produce from here on out, otherwise.

Steve :)

Farmer Bob
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Hi Ted,

All u do is peel the rough skin off from the loofah, rinse and then slice the loofah diagonally ( increases the surface area for heat for quick cooking).

Stir fry ( preferably on gas - more intense heat) Heat sufficient cooking oil in a wok or large surface pan. Add freshly finely chopped garlic ( 1-2 cloves). Sprinkle some salt over the loofah and stir away til just limp. Remove from heat and serve as a side dish.

What I do is grow my loofah on trellises or even use nylon netting ( the kind used by couriers to keep parcels / cartons falling off open LDVs ( light delivery vehicles). That way I can control red spider mite which seems to just love loofah leaves . Harvest the immature loofahs before they get overmatured and stringy. ( Usually a week and a half to two after the flower has fallen off the fertilized female flower )

I recall pics of your trellises that you use for your beans. Those would do just fine, as these guys climb so fast and cling to whatever.! You may even have to guide them as I do as I have very limited space.

Give it a shot. You're a great enthusiast.!

Happy gardening.!

Bob

rkunsaw
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Yesterday we had sauerkraut with smoked sausage,potatoes and squash.
Today we are having crowder peas and turnips with greens.We eat something from our garden almost every day.
Larry

gumbo2176
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Steamed Brussels Sprouts and a nice pot of Broccoli Cheese Soup last night. Tonight we'll be eating some chicken/sausage jambalaya(not from the garden) along with a nice tossed salad consisting of many of the greens I am growing this fall.

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!potatoes!
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'!potatoes!, I thought you would say something about potatoes Wink !'

yeah, well...just moved into a new place this year, with a root cellar...which froze solid at least twice this winter. we are assured that it's not a normal occurance, but the poor blackened potatoes are not consoled. sunchokes, on the other hand, don't seem to mind a bit of hard freezing.

bit of work needed on the rootcellar before next winter, though.

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applestar
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Here's a thread with my attempt to grow loofah this past season. Not enough days to produce fruits even though I started them early in the house and the loofah vines did their best to swallow the house. :lol:
https://www.helpfulgardener.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=169789#169789

I'm going to look for shorter season loofah, if there is such a variety....

Farmer Bob
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Hi applestar,

Wow! Nice pics of that very healthy loofah vine/s.

I start my loofahs right at the beginning of Spring and sow directly into the soil. They haven't done very well as they did last year, as we had an extended winter here in South Africa. Once they start climbing, they just go crazy all over the show and very rapid growth takes place with flowering after about a month . Normally 2 weeks later you should have nice immature loofah to eat.

Apparently one can get a smooth skin loofah . these are from Taiwan. I have the ridged skin loofah.

Regds,
Farmer Bob[/img]

Farmer Bob
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Had some basil and tomato with Mozzarella cheese as a starter. Oreganum and Marjoram in a chicken and pureed tomato sauce with penne pasta.

Also tried water melon soup. Yes, water melon soup. ( Not from the garden).We took the skin, peeled it and cubed it ( 1cmx 1cm cubes ).

Cooked some chicken bones to make some stock, removed the bones after half hour of boiling , added some salt to taste with the cubed water melon skin. Cooked it until soft and yummy! A lovely soup. try it sometime folks.

mansgirl
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I made a Zucchini pasta bake. While I had to buy the zucchini, (I wish I could freeze whole zucchini!) I did use a frozen red bell from the garden last fall, and our dried pepper seasoning. It was soo yummy to have zucchini again! I'm really starting to get spring fever.. : )

DoubleDogFarm
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Duck egg omelet. It's not just for breakfast anymore. :D


Eric

tedln
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Nothing yet, but I'm thinking about some snow ice cream from my garden. Would that count? With the wind blowing in gusts to around 40mph, it would be snow and dirt ice cream. That seems a little more organic than just plain old snow ice cream.

Ted
Last edited by tedln on Tue Feb 01, 2011 1:15 pm, edited 1 time in total.

tedln
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DoubleDogFarm wrote:Duck egg omelet. It's not just for breakfast anymore. :D


Eric
Eric,

I enjoy watching the old Julia & Jacque cooking shows on PBS. A couple of weeks ago they made an Ostrich egg omelet. One egg filled the pan almost half full. It did look good. Julia had to crack the top of the egg with a small hammer. You need to raise some Ostrich and tell us how good their omelets taste.

Here is how they do it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LLZ5VWlKGzQ&feature=related

Ted
Last edited by tedln on Tue Feb 01, 2011 1:12 pm, edited 1 time in total.

DoubleDogFarm
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[img]https://i67.photobucket.com/albums/h300/eric_wa/tedln.jpg[/img]

What did he just say? :twisted:

No thanks Ted, I'll stick with duck. :D

Eric

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lorax
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Huge wahoo pad-thai style stirfry, including the following from the garden: baby zucchini, burgundy bush beans, green semihot peppers, celery, diced orange Mashua (Tropaoleum tuberosum), lemongrass, sweet limes, green mango. I wish I had enough room to grow my own peanuts, too, but it is not to be at this house.

That went over coconut-turmeric quinoa and rice; the quinoa was mine, but the rice wasn't.

*sigh* I miss red Cargo rice.

tedln
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Lorax,

What did you do with the "green" mango. I love mango, but they have to sit around until they are really soft for me to eat. I've tried to eat them before they were really ripe and they were almost tasteless.

Ted

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lorax
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Ted, first of all a Green Mango is technically any unripe mango one finds, but particularly there are a couple of cultivars that are intended specifically for unripe harvest and consumption - they have very little fibre (stringy stuff), a higher volatile oil content, and fairly small pits, and are sort of paisly shaped. Personally, I can't stand the true green mangoes when they're ripe - they're so strong by then that they can be used to strip paint.

This said, I peel the mango and chop it into cubes or julienne it, then soak the pieces in lemon water until they're ready to use (this keeps them nice and pale and keeps them from going limp). They go into the stirfry like any other veggie, generally at the same time as hard veg like celery. I normally add a bit of powdered chili pepper to anything containing green mango, because the two flavours complement each other nicely. If you have one of those rotary apple-peeler machine thingies, you can also sort of spaghetti green mango and use it raw with a bit of salt instead of pasta.

You can do the same thing with half-ripe mangoes, but the flavour is very different since the sugars have developed more fully.

Green mango (at least, the green mango I'm familiar with) has a tart, agreeable flavour similar to a granny smith apple with hints of pine. It's also a popular snack here simply cut into long slivers and dipped in a mixture of salt and chili powder - there are mango carts all over the place right now, because it's mango season.

Part of your problem might also be that you're stuck with the bog-standard Tommy Atkins mangoes, which are hideous even when they're ripe (again, I'm spoiled for choice here, but they really are skanky). Try cruising your local Oriental and West Indian produce stores - they'll have a host of different types available. In particular, keep an eye out for the gold-skinned/red blushed 'Julie' and 'Juliet' cultivars (very flavourful even when a little green), and the all-gold, tiny 'Ambassador' (which is a fibreless mango used as a natural juicebox - you mash them up between your hands, then bite a little hole in the bottom and just slurp the juice out.) 'Tis the season, so with a little luck you'll find something tasty.

:D

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For my sandwich today, I REALLY wanted some lettuce. Now I know many of you have on-going lettuce production indoors, especially the hydroponics folks, but I only have a couple of small experimental lettuce growing and I knew I didn't have enough to harvest for an entire sandwich....

So, I took 2 small leaves from one, 1 leaf from another, then a couple from a red mustard, a leaf from a Holly Basil, a couple of garlic greens and onion greens, and a few weakling sprigs from the rosemary plants. Then I chopped them all into thin strips, layered on top of chopped pickled hot peppers out of my own jar from the pantry, then finished building the sandwich. Yum, yum!

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Halfway
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[url=https://img257.imageshack.us/I/13feb111.jpg/][img]https://img257.imageshack.us/img257/2710/13feb111.th.jpg[/img][/url]

Harvested a couple large salads from the latest lettuce grow in this new deep water culture system.

Spoiled rotten on fresh greens!

gumbo2176
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I harvested three 5 gallon buckets of various greens from the garden yesterday. Collards, lettuces, kale, chard. I'll send my wife to work with a bag of Collards for one her fellow employees and I made up a bag of mixed greens for one of my wife's friends that is currently only finding part-time work while pursuing her education in her late 40's. The rest, I'll likely eat away on for the next few days in salads and cook down some collards for the freezer to have when the weather warms and the plants are done.

tedln
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Gumbo,

You are more patient than me. I always plant turnips, collards, chard, and different varieties of lettuce to grow and produce during the winter. While they do well, I impatiently pull them or turn them under in order to prepare my beds for my spring planting. I should let them continue producing a few more weeks, but I have a hard time waiting. I did let a bed of Romaine lettuce continue producing, but we had a few days of nighttime temps around 10 degrees with wind chill temps below 0. That finished my Romaine, but it is regrowing from the center.

Ted

gumbo2176
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Ted, some of the lettuce I now have is beginning to show its age and will likely be turned under in a week or so. The red oak leaf is doing fine and is plentiful along with some of the other bitter greens I planted. I'll sow some more lettuce once I get the layout finalized and put it between larger plants like peppers, eggplant and such. By mid June it gets too hot for lettuce in my garden, even in shaded areas.

The local nursery is getting a truckload of 4 and 6 packs in this weekend, mostly tomato, which I already have, several varieties of peppers, lots of strawberries and okra. I am starting my own peppers this year and I direct sow okra in mid March for a long summer of harvest.

I did put in some artichoke today. The nursery had 4 inch pots with 2-3 plants in each pot for $1.89 each. I couldn't pass them up. I've grown them before and they are a beautiful plant, but BIG. The last time I had them, they didn't do much the first year but did real well the next. I was looking forward to a nice third year harvest but Katrina took care of that.

tedln
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Yes, I've already planted some bitter greens and Italian mix lettuce along the edges of my tomato and squash beds. I am anxious for my Romaine to recover from the hard freezes we had last week. I noticed my carrots have started sprouting with the warm weather we are having. I'm also anxious for my different varieties of Chard to sprout since I have always planted it too late in the spring. After two years of trying, I still haven't eaten chard from my garden. I also planted some spinach in my straw bales. I have no idea how well that will work, but I should know in a few weeks. I can't wait to report all the fresh greens and radishes I am eating each day.

Ted

tedln
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Halfway,

I grew a lot of "Black Seeded Simpson" lettuce in containers about the same size as yours under lights this winter. I grew it in about 1" of soil less potting mix and it did very well. I don't know how to grow it only in water unless you have some kind of floating medium like grow sponges.

The grown under lights lettuce was great. It had a very crisp texture which I like and since I was only harvesting the outer leaves, it produced well until I needed the light space to start my tomato seedlings.

Edited to say:

Okay, I read your link and learned a lot about hydroponic growing. My system using a light weight, fluffy, mix worked well by adding the mix to the container to 1" of depth. Determine how much seed to plant and add it to the soil mix. Place the lid on the container and shake the seed/soil mix throughly to achieve even distribution of the seed. Add moisture with a mister until the soil is only 3/4" deep. Replace the snap on lid and place the container under the lights until the lettuce germinates in about one week. Remove the lid after germination and water about every four days. It made some great lettuce all winter.

Ted



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