What to do with dozens of jalapeños...

We pickled most of them with some of the more irregular carrots.  And then made some jalapeño infused vodka that has a great burn to it.

May Harvest Update:

May was a super productive month with all of the veggies started in February and March ripening up over several weeks.  Here's what we devoured.

Crap picture, but the lettuce heads we didn't trim salads from too often grew huge!  Still have 4 heads to pick off of and planted 8 replacements 2 weeks ago.

The root veggies did really well last month

Beets, Scallions and radishes were often on the menu. (Sorry scallions are sideways. Too lazy to fix.)

Brassicas:

Plenty of beets and kohlrabi (super easy to grow).  Actually had enough kale to preserve some for when garden greens are a distant memory...hoping that's not until late January.  Just slap em' in boiling water for 2 minutes then dump em' in ice water for a minute, pat dry and freeze portions.

Random Happenings

Still room for ornamentals... This is a rose I picked up when I was surrounded by roses every spring while working at the local nursery 7 years ago.  It's called "Scentimental" and has a modern eye-catching look with a classic heavy spicy rose scent.  It's very productive and has good form to boot.

18 hour old quail hatchlings to replace the adults we've had for almost a year.  They do loose egg productivity over the months so we are opting for more replacements.  This is the F2 generation now.

Greens!

So we've had the luxury of daily salad since the end of April.  Butterhead lettuce, red oak lettuce, chard, kale, pea shoots, beet greens, baby romaine lettuce and radishes have been the staples. Also had some lambs quarters to throw in that seeded in last years pots. These pics are from last week and everything has really taken off with the warm rains this week.  Curious how other gardens on LI have been doing.

From disaster comes new function

 Hurricane Sandy is what it took to finally take down the crooked chimney.  After a few weeks of no hot anything we finally got a new one and suddenly had our neighbors yard with a literal ton of bricks.  In the quest to utilize everything to the fullest an expanded garden design was created.

Put together 2 new 6" raised beds with the rubble.  The one to the left became a pea bed and the one to right was devoted to strawberries.

25 organic "seascape" strawberry crowns arrive in early April.  Had to stick with a South Shore scheme.  They are also supposedly very delicious everbearing variety.

They don't look like much at first...

3 weeks later and I'm already undertaking the terrible dead of pinching off the hundreds of flowers they are producing.  Going to keep it up until July in order to get stronger fruiting plants late this year and more production for the next few years.

Pea trellises made from cotton twine and maple tree branches that were pruned last year.  Have about 40 pea plants starting to climb not including the thinnings that went into salads.

2013 Seedlings and the Science of Cheap Lighting

From left to right in rows of 8 blocks: basil, amaranthus, jalapenos, bell peppers, tomatoes, kohlrabi, green onions and lettuce.  All were planted on March 23rd with the intent of transplanting early May.  The lighting system this year has been great. Using six 4 foot normal tubes of varying wavelength output there is no need for expensive full spectrum bulbs. Here's why...

The highest line represents the combined photosynthetic absorption of the light spectrum for your average chloroplast.  It's easy to see that plants specialize in utilizing the violet/blue end of the spectrum along with the orange/red end of the spectrum the most.  Because of this you can alternate the placement of "cool" bulbs in the 675 nm wavelength range with "daylight" bulbs in the 450 nm wavelength range to grow some fantastic seedlings and save about $15 per bulb.  (Actual sunlight would be much better of course but my 2 south facing windows are occupied by houseplants.)

4" tall marigolds starting to bud after 7 weeks under the lighting system.

On to the transplants...

The first batch hardening off to go in the beds March 30th

4x4 brassica bed with 12 broccoli plants started 2/19 and 9 kohlrabi started 3/1

Root vegetable bed with 9 beets, 8 green onion clumps(for lack of better word) and carrot and radishes planted direct 4/7

The kale experiment from last September where I planted about 35 seeds to see if they would overwinter.  They did! Ended up with 26 mini kale plants to spread out on 3/9. Already making some great quail egg and kale breakfasts.

The beautiful lil' lettuce heads started 3/1 and transplanted 3/30.  The green butterhead is "Ghandi" and the red oak leaf is "Cantarix".  There's also some rainbow chard and seedling spinach and romaine lettuce in the other half of the 8x2.5 foot bed.

I figured a good way to start this site would be with a quick photo tour of last years successes and disasters...

Extending the beds in mid April

Inspecting the broccoli in June

Pigs begging to come into the garden 

Front yard mini corn bed.  Looked great and got a lot of smiles but no actual corn.  Going to try to stagger the planting of rows by 2 weeks next time.

Rabbit drooling over the carrots

The larger Fowler's toad that called the garden home last summer. Great slug control!

Some of the veggies

Compost bin # 1 made from 2x2's and chicken wire

The Quail experiment begins in fall 2012