Sunday, September 8, 2024

As I did my daily watering of succession crops direct seeded on the first and second, I thought I saw some tiny sprouts yesterday. Today, it was clear that some of our Vates kale was beginning to germinate. We're getting close to the time when the Walla Walla onions for overwintering, the kale, our fall carrots, and a row of spinach should begin to emerge...if they're going to.

I'm backing off picking any more sweet corn today. The white corn I picked the last two days was just barely ripe. One of the glories of growing sh² sweet corn varieties is that they hold on the stalk or even in the fridge for several days before seriously converting sugars in the kernels to starch.

I started growing sh² sweet corn varieties back in the 1980s during my farming years. We grew 2-4 acres of the corn each season to roadside. Most folks at that time didn't know about supersweets and absolutely loved our sweet corn. In recent years, the sh²s have become harder to find from seed vendors as newer types of supersweets have taken over a lot of the market. Since all of these sweet corn types require isolation from other types, I've just stayed with the sh²s.

About half of the varieties planted this year are new to us, so we'll see how they do. We planted Anthem XR (74), Vision MXR (75), X-tra-Tender 3473 (75), Yellowstone (76), Honey & Pearl (76), American Dream (77), Enchanted (78), and Supersweet Jubilee (85). With the dry, hot weather we've experienced, I'm really pleased with how well the sweet corn has done.

Chicken Nuggets

Instead of any serious outdoor gardening today, I chose to try making homemade chicken nuggets. We always have lots of chicken tenders from the chicken we buy (bone in, skin on chicken breasts). The problem with the tenders is that they have the chicken's trachea running into them. The tracheas are very tough.

So I thought grinding the tenders, tracheas and all, might make things tender enough to use for chicken nuggets. Since I was using a really old meat grinder that binds up with really soft meats, I ground the tenders when they were still partially frozen.

Most online recipes suggest grinding chicken breasts in a food processor. Ours is difficult to clean, so I went with the old fashioned meat grinder. Note that most of the online recipes I found from a search for "homemade chicken nuggets" listed some ingredients, but almost always without amounts! Since I've fried an awful lot of chicken breasts, I went with my instincts and past experience. The ground chicken got garlic powder, paprika, seasoned salt, and cornstarch worked into it. Then I formed small nugget sized pieces on a floured cutting board and coated them with flour. The nugget pieces, per an online recipe's instructions, then went into the freezer for a bit.

After freezing a bit, the nuggets went through an egg bath and were coated with Italian bread crumbs. Then they went into a pan of hot grease. Unlike my upbringing where there was always a can of bacon drippings on the stove, I keep a quart canning jar of mixed grease in our fridge to fry stuff in. The used grease is a bit nasty, but it does help brown stuff.

Annie and I enjoyed the nuggets with the excess going into our freezer for snacks. They were delicious.

Saturday, September 7, 2024

We have a near perfect fall day today. Temperatures have stayed in the low 70s with a light breeze at times. Perfect would include a little rain, however.

I didn't get around to writing a posting for this site yesterday. It was a busy day. The highlight of the day was probably having corn on the cob from our East Garden plot with our supper. The sweet corn was planted on July 7. Unless my math is really wrong, that's around 68 days from seeding for the Anthem XR, Vision MXR, X-tra-Tender 3473, and Yellowstone varieties I picked. They're all 74-76 days-to-maturity varieties. Online pages about degree days are a bit technical, but what has happened is that the extreme heat we've experienced at times this summer has matured some of our sweet corn a week or so early.

The corn did have earworms in some of the ears. That's the insect kind, not the song that gets stuck in your head. Some of the varieties we grew on the farm had very tight ear wrap which prevented some earworm damage. I sprayed the corn silks with mineral oil today. It won't help the already infected early corn, but may prevent earworm damage on second ears and later maturing varieties. Of course, it may already be too late for such a treatment to be effective. In that case, I'll just have to keep cutting out the bad spots the worms leave.

Cucumber and Pepper Seed

The cucumber seed I saved on Tuesday fermented big time. I'd added water to the fermenting jar and forgot about it. My wife had to work around a real mess when making coffee in the morning, as the fermenting cukes had built up enough pressure to leak cucumber goo past the lid of the jar.

After cleaning up all the ferment on the kitchen counter, I began pouring off “floaters” and cucumber goo, thoroughly rinsing the seed to be saved. I'm guessing the seed will germination test good, as a few seeds had already sprouted. While tomato seed generally takes four days to ferment, cucumber seed often takes just two to three days.

When making sweet pickle relish on Thursday, I used our best red peppers for the mix. But I'd also come across some wrinkly, slightly overripe peppers when picking. Those peppers got stripped of the seed for seed saving.

Unlike tomatoes and cucumbers, peppers are a sticky seed that doesn't require fermentation. I did let the pepper seed dry a day before soaking ten of the seeds for a germination test.

And while this has been a tough year for me in gardening, we have some neat stuff going on in our East Garden plot. Our usual eighty foot row of zinnias is gorgeous right now. Blooms are beginning to mature, so I'll need to begin picking and drying the mature blooms and seeds. Zinnias are really easy!

While weedy, our sweet corn is producing and our kidney beans have pods filling out on them.

Thursday, September 5, 2024 - Sweet Pickle Relish

Our air conditioner got fixed yesterday. I was glad, as I worked on a batch of sweet pickle relish in air conditioned comfort. Both yesterday and today have been quite warm. I was a sweaty mess when I came in from watering and later picking ERS peppers for the relish yesterday.

I first scrubbed around twenty Japanese Long Pickling cucumbers with a brush to remove the spines from them. Then I trimmed off the ends and used a potato peeler to remove a few bad spots on the surface of the cucumbers. I cut the cucumbers into six inch sections and split them open. Using a teaspoon, I scraped the seeds out of the centers of the cucumbers before slicing them lengthwise and cutting the slices into fairly small pieces. The somewhat chopped cucumber pieces then got chopped into smaller pieces using our Pampered Chef Food Chopper. After a decade or so of use, I think the tool’s blades are getting dull.

I started out scraping the finely chopped cukes into a large glass bowl. I quickly realized that the bowl was too small and switched to an eight quart pot. After a couple of hours of chopping cucumbers, I switched to chopping five Earliest Red Sweet bell peppers, three onions, and six garlic cloves before covering it all with ice and canning salt to brine for several hours.

After the brining, it's important to drain or press out as much water as possible from the relish mix. I didn't know to do that the first time I made relish years ago and ended up with a disappointingly watery relish.

Then the mix goes into a hot solution of apple cider vinegar, celery and mustard seed, tumeric, and lots of sugar for ten to twenty minutes. After that, it's just a matter of ladling the relish into jars and water bath canning them for around ten minutes.

This batch made five and a half pints of sweet pickle relish. With some leftover from our last batch of it, that should last us until next season. Note that high acid products like pickles and relish last in storage a long, long time.

We use the relish on hot dogs, of course, but also in potato, ham, and chicken salad.

Let me add that it takes a good bit of time to make sweet relish (at least for me). Also, here are some good sweet relish recipes:

• Ours, of course
• Allrecipes: Sweet Pickle Relish by Cindy Martin
• The Spruce Eats: Classic Sweet Hot Dog Relish by Leda Meredith
• The Genius Kitchen: Sweet Pickle Relish by Donna Matthews

Tuesday, September 3, 2024

My first and pretty much only gardening job for today was to water all the stuff I've direct seeded the last few days. Since I watered the furrows before seeding, the surface watering is just to keep the soil from drying out. The seed was actually planted about a half inch deep into mud.

After some mundane household jobs (trash to the street, cleaning cat litter boxes, etc.), I moved on to harvesting Japanese Long Pickling cucumber seed from around twenty yellowed and cured cucumbers. I’d let the cucumbers cure for several weeks on our drying/curing table in the garage. My hands were full when I went to the garage, so the camera didn't go with me. But I have a very old shot of the process when I used to do it in the kitchen.

I cut the cukes into sections using only the really fat ends of the cucumbers with the most mature seed. I slice the cucumber sections down the side, split them open, and scrape out the seed and juices. That went into a quart canning jar with a teaspoon of sugar to help speed fermentation. Fermenting the seed removes goo off of the seed and also lets immature seed (floaters) rise to the top to be skimmed off.

The stuff in the jar will ferment in four days or less, depending on ambient temperatures. Then the floaters get washed off and the rest strained, thoroughly rinsed, and laid out to dry.

Monday, September 2, 2024 - Labor Day (U.S.)

I direct seeded carrots this morning. As usual, I watered the planting furrows before seeding. The seed used was all white pelletized seed which made spacing the seeds a lot easier than with non-pelletized seed. I started with the short season Mokum variety, but only had a few seeds of it left. I finished the rows with Napoli seed, a slightly longer season variety. The two carrot rows were spaced just six inches apart. That's been a spacing that has worked well for us over the years.

The carrots have a decent shot of producing a harvest...if we can get them to germinate. According to the Oregon State Extension Service: "Semi-hardy vegetables that can withstand light frost of air temperatures in the range of 28 to 32 degrees include beets, carrots, parsnip, lettuce, chard, garden pea (before flowering), Chinese cabbage, endive, radicchio, cauliflower, parsley and celery." A late first frost and the use of floating row covers just might make this planting work.

After planting the carrots, I put in a single row of our favorite spinach variety, the open pollinated Abundant Bloomsdale. This may be another one that will be tough to get up out of the ground. While Abundant Bloomsdale seed is commercially available, I used seed saved over the last two years for the planting.

Besides some flowers I put in to replace row marker stakes, I also transplanted two pots of Sugar Cube muskmelon I'd been torturing by our back porch. I never got around to planting melons in our East Garden this year. With space left in our main bed, I decided to take a shot at getting something from the delicious variety. And come to think of it, I don't remember ever growing melons of any type in this bed.

Sunday, September 1, 2024

I got out early this morning while it was still cool out and raked about half of our main raised garden bed. After hauling some compost to our compost pile and picking up groundfall apples (two were good), I moved on to planting. At this point in another dry spell and with just 44 days left until our first frost date, the plantings are really iffy.

While out, I noticed several sweet corn ears with silks beginning to brown. But the ears of the early varieties were awfully thin.

I started planting with a row of Walla Walla sweet onions to overwinter. As I mentioned last month, we successfully overwintered onions in 2022-2023. That planting was based on a High Mowing Organic Seeds page, Time to Plant Fall Onions for Overwintering. Then came two rows of Vates (Dwarf Blue Scotch) kale.

I watered the furrows for the plantings. Soaking the seeds could have sped germination if I hadn't had them frozen until planting time.

I still had carrot, beet, spinach, and lettuce seed out to plant. But the day's heat set in around noon, and I was done for the day. While our hot spell was supposed to be over, today's high temperature was over 91°F.

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