Pickin' Sweet Corn

We grow a couple of heirloom varieties of sweet corn each year like we've done for umpteen years or so.  Sweet corn is one of those things that has at least two rows allocated each spring.  It grows fast and grows tall.  It feeds on the nitrogen in the soil provided by composted chicken litter and that homemade funky smelly fertilizer we've learned to make.

When I said it grows tall, I'm not pulling your leg.  Eleven feet from ground level to the top of the tassel!  The height is impressive, but it's also a curse of sorts.  When spring rains come they're usually accompanied by winds ahead of the thunderstorm.  Those gusts tend to lay the corn on the ground.  In the past, I'd stand them up and press dirt around the base to hold them straight.  That was a time consuming and unsuccessful venture.

For the past several years, I've opted for a better solution, using the "Florida Weave" method that I use for trellising tomatoes, but more simplified.  I drive a t-post on each end of the row and weave baling twine in and out all the way down the row and around the other t-post.  Coming back I weave the twine on the opposite side and cinch it up tight to the t-post on the end.  That way it makes the corn stand up straight again, which is important.  The tassels produce pollen that fertilizes the ears and that pollen uses the wind and gravity to do its job.  If the corn is laying down, my guess is that a lot of the ears will have blanks.  Each silk thread equates to a kernel of corn.  If pollination is not successful the ears will have blank spots.

Just look at that beautiful red silk!

A Beautiful "Red-Head"

Here's how you know when the corn is ready for harvest.  That beautiful red silk will turn brown.  When that happens, you've got to be ready to pick.  If you wait, you are in danger of a big fat worm eating its way through the ear or the corn will not be as juicy as it would have been if picked earlier.

It was a hot, humid morning and by the time I had picked every ear that was ripe, I had soaked my shirt.  I brought the crate of corn into the garage and put it in the refrigerator to cool down.  I wanted to cool down to, but there was still work to do.

I cut the corn stalks and carried to Nicky, the bull.  Nicky was thankful.  Popcorn the buck was grateful as well.

Aww Shucks!

A customary corn harvest day always involves eating a bite-full of raw sweet corn right there in the corn patch.  I want to show you my favorite variety - Country Gentleman.  I like the name of this variety.  I think it sounds noble.  Wouldn't you like to be considered a country gentleman?  This is a white shoepeg corn.  I like it also because the kernels are arranged in random, haphazard fashion unlike the uniform organization of 'normal' corn.  Somehow I can identify with that jumbled, unorganized arrangement!

Here is the other variety - Stowell's Evergreen Sweet Corn.  These kernels are lined up in neat lines like you're used to eating when you enjoy corn on the cob.

We blanched all the corn on the cob for nine minutes, cooled it in a sink of iced water and then used a sharp knife to cut the corn off the cob, scraping the cobs to get all the juicy corn "milk".  Then I spooned it into quart ziploc bags.  Yes, we re-use bags that are still in good shape!

Later, we'll thaw and make our two favorite dishes with sweet corn - Corn Macque Choux and Elote (Mexican Street Corn).  I think if it ever stops raining, I'm going to go plant a couple more rows of sweet corn.  You can't have too much of this in the freezer or to eat fresh right off the cob.

One of the Sweetest Things in the Garden

Sugar Snap Peas!  I would say that they are #3 on the list of sweetest things in the garden.  Sugar cane definitely holds the top spot, followed closely by sugar beets, but sugar snap peas are wonderful.  We like to stir fry them with fried rice, but also like them raw.  They trellis up nicely on the trellis we use for cucumbers.  The added bonus they bring to the table are the beautiful blooms!

They vine up the trellis, clinging to it with tendrils that wrap around and hold on for dear life.  The peas load up with pods.  You must be judicious in picking them, for if you wait too long, the peas get overripe and become tough.  The size in the photo below are perfect for how we harvest them.

I generally make a couple of passes on both sides of the trellis to make sure I get them all.  It takes a second look because sometimes some of the pods can be hidden and you'll miss them only to find them a day or two later and have to feed them to the chickens or goats as by that time they'll be too tough for human consumption.

For the ones that I pick, I'll wash them up and then 'string' them, pinching off each end and pulling the string that lines each side of the pea pod.  Then they're ready to cook!

The sad thing about sugar snap peas is that they don't tolerate the heat.  As soon as the days get into the 80's, they quickly start dying off.  That's too bad.  No more sugar snap peas until fall.  But I'll use their space on the trellis for growing Black-eyed snap beans on.  We'll likely be planting those tomorrow!

Onions Coming in

At around this time each year like clockwork, the onion harvest begins.  It's a good thing.  We're out of onions and have been purchasing them.  To be fair, we like onions and cook with them often.  In harvesting the onions, it is a process that takes a little while to get them where we want them - inside and/or cut up and in the freezer.  Here's a shot from about a month ago, of our onions slowly ripening, all lined up like soldiers.

And here we are again at the tail end of April in the same onion patch.  They don't look quite as lush.  Some are ready to be pulled.

The photo below shows how you know which ones are ripe.  The neck of the onion folds over and the weight of the onion tops causes it to bend to the ground.  It's as if to say, "I give up.  I can't do this anymore."

Once it bends over, it's time to pull it from the ground.  Many people let them dry in the sun in the garden after pulling them.  Here is a photo of a big, fat Yellow Granex Onion.  This is a sweet onion, the ones marketed as Vidalia onions.  I think this is my favorite variety!  We also grow Early Texas White, Texas 1015 Sweet, and Red Creole Onions.

Because it gets so hot and humid here so very quickly, I like to pull them and put them on an expanded metal patio table so that the air can flow around them and begin drying them out.  After two days here, I'll get some clippers and snip off the onion top about an inch from the onion.  I'll let it continue to dry out on the table for a day or two more.

Then we bring them into our onion drying room.  Actually, it is our parlor, or living room that I've taken over momentarily, spreading a blue tarp on the floor to catch onion skins and dirt.  We lay them on a baker's rack for drying.

We keep a fan going all day to allow for good air flow.  Sometimes, if you don't, the onions will get soft and go bad on you.  We can't have that going on!

This is about half of the crop so far.  Each day more fall over and I pull them and put them on the table.  They'll eventually move here.  No more buying onions for quite a while.  We'll eat all of these and we will also chop some of these up and freeze in ziploc bags for cooking with.  Dixondale Farms, the company we purchase the onion starts from, just sent out a recipe for Carmelized Onion Quiche.  It sounds like something we'd like to try out.  I'll pick out a few of the Yellow Granex onions and get them chopped up to make that quiche!

Finished with the Fall Carrots

It's March 7th, and it is warming up.  It feels like summer already with mid-day temps hitting 83 already.  What that means is I have to get moving!  Warmer temps means the cabbage all needs to be harvested.  If you don't, the snails will wreak havoc on the heads - nasty critters, I tell you.  I harvested all of the heads, except for three.  I have one big bin of cabbage heads in the outdoor fridge.  I see coleslaw, homemade egg rolls, cabbage/sausage jambalaya (yum - I call it deconstructed cabbage rolls), cooked cabbage and yes, jars of sauerkraut in the near future.

Then there is yet another row of carrots.  We harvested the first row a couple of weeks back.  We've been roasting them in the oven and using them to dip into homemade radish dip (finely chopped radish, cream cheese, garlic and other seasonings.  This second row of carrots must come up today.  They're already too big.  The soil is soft and they are easy to pull, so let's get this show on the road.

Halfway through and I filled up a plastic bin.  All of the beautiful tops were thrown over the fence to hungry cows and goats that greedily gobble the greens down.  See those carrots?  They are mighty dirty.  This is a perfect time to try out the garden sink.  I spent the morning working on the sink.  Unfortunately, the hard freeze in late January - early July played a number on the plumbing to the garden sink, breaking the head to the sprayer.  We'll try out the sink to see if it works once we get that second row of carrots pulled.

I filled both sinks with water and everything seems to be working nicely.  I'll let the carrots sink in order to clean them up and wash off all the topsoil.  I'm catching it all in a tub beneath the drain.  I'll also use a vegetable scrubber to get the carrots super clean before bringing them inside.

And here we go: Two tubs of terrific tubers.  How's that for alliteration?  These will be stored in the outdoor fridge as well.  I plan on putting these up, blanching and freezing them, canning them, and making Ginger Carrots (sort of a carrot sauerkraut - cool and tangy)!

It's good to have the carrots and cabbage harvested.  That frees up room to plant sweet corn and okra as well as the tomato, pepper and eggplant seedlings that I'll be transplanting from our seed starting trays in about another week.

Trying Out the New Garden Sink

We have two rows of carrots in the back of the garden.  It's past time to pull them.  I pulled one of the rows yesterday.  You can kind of see where that row was in the lower part of the photo below.  I planted seven hills of zucchini and seven hills of crookneck squash between the carrot rows.  I hope I didn't jump the gun as I saw that after a week of temps in the upper 70's this week, early next week we'll see low temps at 33!

I had quite a pile of big fat carrots on the ground in front of the garden sink.  I couldn't actually put them in the sink as I have it against the garden fence and the cows were craning their necks over to try to eat the carrot greens.  Patience, cows!  I'm gonna feed them to you, but I have to cut the greens off the carrots first!

In the last week of January we had hard freezes for several nights with lows in the low 20's so I had turned the water valve off that controls water flow to the rear of the garden.  To wash up the carrots, I turned the valve back on.  Oh boy!  When I did that, water sprayed everywhere!  The sprayer portion is made of plastic, of course, and split right down the middle in the hard freeze.  I was sure that I had drained all the water out of it, but apparently not.  I'll have to replace the sprayer as it is beyond repair.  I was still able to wash all the carrots, in workaround fashion as I just held the carrots up to the busted sprayer handle.  Not exactly what I hoped for, but I was able to complete the job.

These are Danvers carrots and I waited too long to harvest them.  They'll still be good to eat, they're just fat and some are misshapen.  This happens when they are overcrowded and compete for nutrients.  I need to do a better job of thinning them out.  It's all good though.  We'll eat every last one of them.  I need to harvest that last row next week.

After washing them all up, I brought a big basket of carrots inside.  The basket must have weighed 15 pounds.

We'll roast most of these in the oven, but will also make Cream of Carrot soup, eat some of them raw on a vegetable platter with dip, shred some of them for use in cole slaw and sauerkraut, make fermented ginger carrots and finally make a big carrot cake!

I have to put another item on my to do list:  Fix the sprayer on the new garden sink before I harvest the other row of carrots.

Preserving the Cauliflower Harvest

Gardening can be a funny thing.  Some years, even though you do everything you've always done, the yield is less than desirable.  This year the sweet potato harvest was lackluster, at best.  Some years, though, everything clicks on certain crops.  This year the cauliflower harvest can best be described as a bumper crop.  That term originates from the 19th century when things exceptionally large were termed as "bumper."

Before the big freeze we harvested all the cauliflower as exposing the heads to a deep freeze causes the cauliflower to become mushy and damaged.  We ate all we could, but decided we would need to blanch and freeze the excess so that we could preserve the harvest and eat it throughout the upcoming weeks and months.

Cauliflower grows with large leaves that curl around the head, leaving the head mostly protected.  As a result, the heads are snowball white, clean, with no blemishes or damage.  Tricia and I formed a quick assembly line, cutting off any remaining leaves and stem bottoms.  The upper portions of the stem are tasty and edible. 

We disassemble the heads, cutting them into florets a little larger than a golf ball.  While we are working on this, we get a pot of water boiling.  We also clean the sink and fill with cold water and ice.  We're about ready to get things going.

With the water at a full boil, we drop a batch of cauliflower into the water.  Once the water is boiling, we start the timer for three minutes.  It takes 3 minutes to blanch cauliflower.  Blanching the cauliflower (or any vegetable) does a couple of things: it preserves the color and it preserves the texture prior to freezing.

The beeper goes off, alerting Tricia that it's time to take it out.  I say "alerts Tricia" because I can't hear the beeper.  The timer sounds at a frequency that I cannot hear.  Years of running a crawfish boat with no hearing protection (my fault entirely) have resulted in hearing loss of certain frequencies.  There are worse afflictions, I suppose.  

Once the beeper sounds, we quickly remove the blanched cauliflower into a colander, allowing the hot water to drain out, and then we put the cauliflower into the cold water bath.  We want to immediately stop the cooking process.  To do so, we add more ice to the sink as needed.  Simultaneously, we put another batch of cauliflower florets into the water and start the whole process over again.  Rinse, wash, repeat... Literally.

Once the cauliflower has cooled, we bag it up into quart-sized Ziploc bags and put them into the deep freeze.  We yielded nine bags.

Of course, we did hold back 3 or 4 cauliflower heads to put in the crisper in the fridge and we'll eat that over the next week or so.  We always like to eat as much as we can fresh from the garden, but it's always important to be able to preserve the harvest.

A Warm January So Far

A look at the 3-day forecast reveals that it's been unseasonably warm in our neck of the woods:

We have only lit the fireplace one night so far this winter.  I'm sure we'll get cooler weather before all is said and done, but the warm weather is causing the grass and plants to grow quickly.  Take, for instance, the broccoli.  The hotter than normal weather has caused the broccoli to grow quicker than normal.  I wasn't watching it as closely as I should have and I almost let the first big head of broccoli flower.  Had I not found it and waited one more day, it would be covered in yellow blooms and the honeybees would've been all over it.

When the head begins to spread apart like you see, you've let it go too long.  It'll still be fine for eating, but I would have liked to pick this one 3 days ago.  It's still a nice head.  I think Tricia was going to make a quiche with this and some kale in the near future.

After you harvest a big head of broccoli like this, it's not over.  The plant is desirous of producing seeds, so it will send forth a multitude of florets off every shoot of the plant.  If you're diligent and pick the florets every day, I think that you can harvest more broccoli from the little florets than you get from the big head of broccoli.  I haven't weighed the florets in comparison with the weight of the head to confidently say this, but I'm sure that's the case.

We'll be eating lots of broccoli as well as blanching and freezing it over the next month.  Right behind this will be the cabbage, carrot, and cauliflower harvest.  The warm weather will cause everything to ripen quicker this year, so I'll have to keep a close eye on things so as not to allow the crops to over-ripen.

Picking Tomatoes at the Breaker Stage

I've been gardening for a long time, but learn new things virtually every day.  I'm going to share something with you that has made a big difference in our tomato quality.  For too long, I was snookered into believing that the best tomatoes are those that ripen on the vine.  You see all the marketing on canned tomato labels that say "Vine Ripened Tomatoes."  So naturally, I would leave my tomatoes on the vine to ripen.

Well, several things happen.  It rains a torrential downpour and by the time you go to pick them, they've split.  Or worse than that, we have huge problems in our area with stink bugs and leaf-footed bugs.  If you leave your tomatoes on the vine, the tomatoes get damaged by these pesky pests.  Here are some of those dreaded stink bugs here:

So what's a gardener to do?  You pick them at the breaker, or break-over, stage.  Right when the tomatoes start to "blush," pick them and bring them inside.

Is it tricky?  Absolutely.  Sometimes you leave them one extra day and they've ripened past the optimal point of picking.  It's not an exact science, but an art.  I don't always get it right.  

I bring them inside and put them on big trays where they'll continue to ripen to perfection.  One day they look like this:

And the next, they're ALMOST to perfection.  As you can tell with the tomato at the 6 o'clock position, I waited a day too long and the rains came and the tomato split open.

What we've seen since implementing this, is higher quality tomatoes and we haven't sacrificed any taste.  The tomatoes ripen on their own off of the vine.  If you want to call them vine ripened tomatoes, that probably falls in the little white lie category, although you might argue that they were ripening on the vine, you just picked them before they were totally ripe.  Research tomato breaker stage and aim to start picking them when they start to blush.  If you don't already do this, I think you'll be pleased with the results.

Bringing the Onions In

Each year we purchase onion sets from Dixondale Farms in Carizzo Springs, TX.  I always order Yellow Granex, White, and Creole Onions.  This spring I planted three and a third rows of onions.  That was the least amount we've ever planted.  I think next year we'll go back to our normal order of 300 sets.  In this photo below, Some of the onions are telling you that they're ripe and ready to pull.

This is how they tell you.  The neck bends over and touches the ground.  When this happens, the onion is signaling to you that it's done growing.  I pull them up at this stage, but I don't bring them in for another day.

I will pull them and lay them on their side and allow the sun to gently cure them or dry them out for one day.  I only pulled the ones that have bent over.  The rest of the onions will be left to grow until they bend over.

But we're not done.  I bring them inside where I've converted the parlor into an onion curing room.  I have a drying rack brought in and have the fans running at full speed.  As the onions come inside, I'll cut off the "onion tails" and under the fan and lower humidity, the onions will begin to cure.  We still watch them closely.  Any that show signs of softening will be diced up and frozen for use in the kitchen later.

We'll go through these pretty quickly.  That's why we're going back to 300 plants for next year.

2025 Sweet Corn Harvest

We planted two rows of sweet corn this year.  We usually plant a couple of heirloom varieties - Country Gentleman and Stowell's Evergreen.  They aren't prolific producers (only one to two ears per stalk), they grow very tall and tend to blow over in the wind and rain, but they are non-GMO and are sweet.  I gathered my clippers and a laundry basket and decided I would go ahead and harvest in the morning before it got too hot.  It didn't matter.  It was hot and muggy and my shirt was soaked through and through almost before I got started.

I watched as a four foot long king snake slithered into the garden, unfazed by my presence, and nestled into the snap beans.  He knew I wouldn't do anything to him.  He's a "good" snake.  Still, if I was picking beans and didn't know he was there, he'd give me quite a start, for sure.

The way I judge if the corn is ready to harvest is by looking at the silk.  If it has turned brown, like you see below, it's ready to pick.

If it still has a red-color to it like you see below, I leave it to mature for a couple or 3 days.  Of the two rows, I left about 15 stalks standing that I'll go back and pick in a day or two.

The cows (in this case, Nick, the bull, takes great interest in the corn harvest as they eat the leaves and stalk of the corn plant.

In the end, we got a laundry basket full of sweet corn.  Not a tremendous harvest, but not terrible, either.

Aw shucks!  I began shucking the corn, removing the husks and silk.  Here is an ear of the Country Gentleman variety.  You'll notice that this variety is different in that the corn kernels are not arranged in uniform rows on the ear.  They're just haphazardly on the ear.

Here is an ear of the Stowell's Evergreen Corn.

We had a lot of damage this year from worms.  Most every ear had damage on the ends that I had to cut off.

After cleaning it all up, I took it inside where Tricia blanched it on the cob.  Once cooled, I cut the kernels off the cob and scraped the "milk" from the cob into a big stainless steel bowl.

We began bagging it all up in quart-sized zip loc bags.  We'll eat all this up later.  Our two favorite recipes to make are Mexican Street Corn and Corn Macque Choux.

Now that most of the corn is out of the way, I think I'll get some purple hull peas planted and maybe some pumpkins.