let's see your veggie garden {pics}

[deluxestogie]

Out of a couple of dozen Daikon radishes still in the garden there was not sufficient root to fill this 1/2 pint jar. The critters have been relentlessly eating the tops, so they just couldn't grow. Five of them, the largest of the lot, were about the size of small salad radishes. So I sliced those. In order to fill the jar, I added all the cloves (8) from a head of garlic, then picked some tender, green radish seed pods from my overgrown French Breakfast radishes. This all worked out about right. Of course, I added dill seed, mustard seed, and whole black pepper, along with a dried, hot Japanese red pepper.

The kosher-style brine is 1/2 cup of distilled water, 1 tablespoon of white vinegar, 1/2 tablespoon of pickling salt, heated to just below boiling. Every drop of brine in the pickle jar left me with about 1/2" of headroom. I use a little circle of polypropylene needlework grid to keep the veggies below the liquid. I'll let it sit on the counter for a week or so, then keep it in the refrigerator for another several weeks.

Maybe this will be usable, maybe not. The cooked radishes were not so great, but the pickling may be what it needs.

Bob

 

[ChinaVoodoo]

Out of a couple of dozen Daikon radishes still in the garden there was not sufficient root to fill this 1/2 pint jar. The critters have been relentlessly eating the tops, so they just couldn't grow. Five of them, the largest of the lot, were about the size of small salad radishes. So I sliced those. In order to fill the jar, I added all the cloves (8) from a head of garlic, then picked some tender, green radish seed pods from my overgrown French Breakfast radishes. This all worked out about right. Of course, I added dill seed, mustard seed, and whole black pepper, along with a dried, hot Japanese red pepper.

The kosher-style brine is 1/2 cup of distilled water, 1 tablespoon of white vinegar, 1/2 tablespoon of pickling salt, heated to just below boiling. Every drop of brine in the pickle jar left me with about 1/2" of headroom. I use a little circle of polypropylene needlework grid to keep the veggies below the liquid. I'll let it sit on the counter for a week or so, then keep it in the refrigerator for another several weeks.

Maybe this will be usable, maybe not. The cooked radishes were not so great, but the pickling may be what it needs.

Bob

Daikon is a common ingredient in kimchi, I think. Picking it makes sense, although I would add some chili pepper flakes and garlic if I was you.

 

[DIY Pete]

Black walnuts aren't that hard to get open. You just need a brick, a 16oz framing hammer, and some diagonal cutters. The wife and I were too busy to mess with Walnuts this year so we have just processes a couple hundred. We have taken 4 pickup loads to the brush dump. Next year or maybe the year after I am going to automate the process of getting the soft outer layer off the shell and then sell the nuts in the shell by the 5 gallon bucketful.

Pete

 

[OldDinosaurWesH]

The Cranberries are starting to show up in the stores now. October is the harvest month for Cranberries. Best to buy them fresh, make the relish or sauce out of them and refrigerate. If you wait 'till Thanksgiving a third of them will be rotten due to long term cold storage waiting for the Thanksgiving market. I make a sauce out of mine, which has a whole lot of sugar and citric acid in it. This high acid high sugar food stuff will keep in the fridge for months. And it gets better with time, as the sugar and acid has time to migrate into the berries. My brother hates them. He won't eat anything even mildly acidic. Tough beans I say, I make 'em the way I like 'em.

Just a thought.

Wes H.

 

[wooda2008]

I wish I knew that radish pods were edible. I just threw all my daikon greens in the compost.

Had a couple decent sized roots and this monster.


Also have some jalapeno and tabasco peppers to spice up the kimchi, and still more kale. So much kale...

 

[deluxestogie]

Black walnuts...Next year or maybe the year after I am going to automate the process of getting the soft outer layer off the shell...

That's it! A common technique is to auto-mate them. The green-covered nuts are spread onto the driveway, then driven over with an auto. It crushes off the green husk, but the tires are too soft to crack the harder nut shell. (That doesn't work as well with a gravel driveway, since the pointy gravel can crack the nuts sometimes.)

Bob

 

[deluxestogie]

Daikon is a common ingredient in kimchi, I think.

I just opened the cap, and smelled the pickling Daikon. Yeow! I had always assumed that it was the cabbage or maybe some odd herb that made kimchi stink. Nope! It's the Daikon! Oh, man, is that Daikon pickle stinky.

When you eat kimchi, the sulfur odor appears in your sweat. So, apparently it's the odor of Daikon.

Maybe this wasn't such a great idea. I really liked the pickled radish seed pods from earlier in the season.

Bob

 

[deluxestogie]

Banished

I had a thought. If the Daikon pickle was able to fill the house with a sulfurous aroma for over an hour, just from opening the lid to take a quick sniff, then maybe the outgassing sulfur would dissipate over time if the lid were left off. Since that was just not going to happen inside the house (I had to open some windows to clear the smell.), I decided to banish the radish to the porch.

I carried the offending jar out to the front porch, then removed the lid. In order to keep the bugs out, I added a square of Agribon AG-15, held with a rubber band. I'll leave it out there, until time to go into the fridge. We'll see if the sulfur odor is inherent in the radish slices, or evolves into the solution, then evaporates.

Banished Radish.

Sitting out on the porch, I smell it continuously. But at least it's not inside the house.

Bob

EPILOGUE: I had to set up a fan on the porch to blow the smell away from me. Mind you, I'm smoking a cigar, but still smelling the sulfur enough for it to be distracting.

 

[OldDinosaurWesH]

Radishes are in the Mustard family, the Brassicaceaes. Pretty much all of the members of this family like to accumulate sulfur in their vegetation. Fermentation will only amplify this phenomenon. Chili Peppers go through a similar process when you ferment them, they get hotter as the fermentation mobilizes the capsaicin oil. Hot mustard, Chili Peppers, horseradish, and Hot radishes all effect the same receptors on your tongue.

I have a jar full of hot mustard seed you can have. All you have to do is grind some of it dry, and it is fairly piquant in it's dry state. Ferment it and look out! Cabbage, and horseradish are also members of the Brassicaceae family.

I've only eaten kimchi once, and it was commercially made stuff. It was okay, and had a certain amount of bite to it. I suspect the real Korean stuff is very different. I've been told (by mostly veterans) that kimchi is both "fragrant" (aka: it stinks) and hot spicy. If I want hot spicy, I've got some nearly lethal chili peppers that will do just fine, thank you.

Good luck with your "home brew".

And by the way, my now late neighbor used the same method to get the skins off of her black walnuts. Drive over them with the car. I have fond childhood memories of playing in the treehouse that was built into that black walnut tree. Alas, that tree became firewood many decades ago.

Wes H.

 

[deluxestogie]

I collected seed from the wild mustard that grew up in the pasture, just beyond my yard. I haven't ground any of it yet, to see what it's like. The seed is just about the same color as my India Black Mustard, though smaller.

Apparently the dried seed of any brassica can be made into prepared "mustard", if you let the plant go to seed.

Bob

 

[OldDinosaurWesH]

A common weed we have around here is brasica nigra, the black mustard. I'm guessing that is probably what you have. Black mustard seeds are smaller than most cultivated mustards. If you can manage to capture the seeds, they are edible. The plants are pretty efficient at scattering their seed all over the place, making the harvesting time a critically narrow window. Black mustard is a cultivated plant that has escaped and dispersed itself all over. Black mustard and white mustard have significant botanical and culinary differences. Most of the mustards grown for food are in the white mustard group.

There a few people around here that have occasionally grown mustard, mostly for the oil seed industry (canola, which is in the rapeseed group), and of course for a crop rotation. The fields are very beautiful in the spring blooming season, and can bee seen from many miles away. Of course around here you can drive ten miles or less and gain enough elevation to see Steptoe Butte from here. That's nearly 100 miles away. For the aircraft stationed at Fairchild AFB outside Spokane Wa. Steptoe butte is a major navigational beacon, formerly for the B-52's, now the air-tanker squadrons. We call those giant aircraft an "aluminum overcast" especially when they practicing radar avoidance by flying low. The navy also uses Steptoe as a navigational beacon when they fly out of Whidbey Island NAS. I used to see EA6-B's flying low on a regular basis. They like to "hide" in the Snake river canyon which in places is 2,000 feet deep.

Wes H.

 

[deluxestogie]

My wild mustard is more likely B. juncea, since it grows only to a height of about 3', and tenaciously keeps its seed within the long, dried pods.

Bob

 

[OldDinosaurWesH]

Good luck and have fun!

Wes H.

 

[ChinaVoodoo]

This is really cool. My tomato stalks filled up with frost and exploded.

 

[OldDinosaurWesH]

Wow! That must have been some very cold temps. Up on the north slope in Alaska, when it gets cold enough (-50 or less) the trees literally explode like they had a small explosive in them.

Wes H.

 

[deluxestogie]

Pepper Clean-up

4 pounds of mixed peppers.

It looks like I'll get a frost late tonight. It's that time of year that I need to consider bringing my pot of fall Mums indoors at night. But I still have 4 varieties of peppers laden with fruit, and still creating more.

I picked every pepper that looked developed enough to be worth eating: Sweet Red Cherry, Sweet Banana, Golden California Wonder, and Quadratto d'Asti.

The green cherry peppers will turn red on the window sill. The banana peppers just get dumped into a crisper drawer in the fridge. This season, of the Golden Cal Wonder bell peppers, I've gotten exactly one to actually mature to yellow. (That gives new meaning to the term, "wonder".)

Quadratto d'Asti is an Italian square bell that is supposed to produce a nearly burgundy red, richly flavored flesh. For some reason, all the blossoms on both of these heirloom plants dropped off shortly after forming. This happened all summer long. A few weeks ago, both plants began to form fruit. As they were plucked, still green, from their stems today, the largest was a little under 3", and still deep green. I can leave them on the window sill, so long as they don't dehydrate too much. Maybe I'll get a red one.

The sad part of this tale is the several dozen huge blackberries that are still immature. They will either freeze or not.

So, my food gardening season for 2017 is history.

Bob

 

[deluxestogie]

After last night's "frost", my pepper plants appeared to be just fine this morning. No more forecast of frost for the next 10 days. Sigh.

Bob

 

[OldDinosaurWesH]

How appropriate! The three frogs are representative of the bureaucratic weather service organization.

Do you get enough heat and sunshine around your area to grow good quality peppers? We don't get enough of either around here. I can grow peppers, but they just don't have the thickness or heft of the commercial variety. The Yakima Valley is where it's at for that kind of activity in our region. They grow nice peppers of both the Bell and Chili types. If you run across a seed for Chili Peppers call "Hot Apples" buy it and try it. Nicely sweet with just a hint of hot. Very Tasty.

Wes H.

 

[deluxestogie]

Do I get enough heat and sunshine? The success or failure of my pepper endeavors varies by variety and year. One year, I planted pepperoncini, and was swept away in a pepperoncinami. Jalapeños grow well, though I prefer "Fooled Me". Bells of various sorts have mixed results. Sweet banana peppers always do well. Feher Ozon paprika always dies. Pimentos will grow well most seasons. Sweet cherry peppers usually do fine.

Do I get enough heat and sunshine? Maybe.

Bob

 

[OldDinosaurWesH]

Peppers are very sensitive to temperature, that's why I ask. Chili peppers like lots of heat and lots of sunshine. Chili peppers are believed to have originated in the tropical foothills of the Andes mountains. The modern chili pepper is descended from those small round "Bird Peppers." (I have a couple of books on the subject.)

I used to do business with a farmer in Wapato, Wa. In the Yakima Valley. He grew among other things, 30 to 50 acres of peppers. Usually around 50 different types. Wapato Wa. gets the heat and sunshine to grow excellent peppers. I've never seen so many in one place. I had said farmer custom grow super hot chili's for me. I grew the same type in my garden and mine were never as large or as abundant as his. His Habanero peppers were 3 1/2 feet wide and 3 feet tall and had two hundred or more pods on each. As he put it, "if they won't make tonnage, there's no point in picking them." The hand labor in the harvesting being about 50% of the total cost of the crop. If he was having a bad year, he would just plow the peppers down, having never picked them. Those plants with 200 pods were right at the margin of being worthwhile to bother to pick. Wapato is a very dry place with 300 or so days of sunshine per year. Wapato also has a very long growing season. They can set peppers starting on May 1, and let them grow 'till Oct. 1 reliably. Around here, you are taking a chance by setting peppers out any earlier than June 1. The cool weather we frequently get in May will forever stunt them.

Also, there is a reason that Jalapeno's (Capsicum Annuum) are so common and readily available...They make tonnage. Jalapeno's are one of the more reliable varieties of chili peppers out there. You should see the Jalapeno's that that farmer at Wapato grew. Impressive indeed. That's why the farmers produce a lot of them. Conversely, you don't typically see a lot of Habanero's on the market. The Habanero plants are unreliable in their annual production, and finicky about modest weather events. Habanero means "from Havana," and they are a very long season plant. (150 to 180 days) Some of the newer hybrids such as the super-hot "Ghost Pepper" are a cross between two species, and are more tolerant of less than ideal growing conditions. (Capsicum Chinense x C. Frutescens)

Incidentally, Wapato is the Indian name for a plant that lives in wet soils that produces a golf-ball sized root that is highly desirable for cooking and eating. The root is starchy and sweet. Lewis and Clark wrote about Wapato, and would trade with the Indians whenever they could get some. It just so happens that the Yakima Indians had a subsistence economy based on Salmon and Wapato. Nowadays, I think they make more on their Casino at Toppenish Wa.

Fortunately, tobacco is more tolerant of cold, or I couldn't grow it around here.

Wes H.