Garlic and carrots

carrots from the deep raised bed

My deep raised bed has actually produced some pretty big carrots, in spite of my fussing about not being able to grow good carrots.  These are big, and tasty, too, especially when cooked.

Apparently in the mountains, I can start sowing carrots for fall in mid-July.  I think I'll do that!  Maybe they'll be extra sweet after a bit of fall frost.

A quick trip down to the Piedmont meant harvesting a block of potatoes and a lot of green tomatoes (I didn't like the idea of leaving them for the resident woodchuck).

Hopefully the tomatoes will ripen and be decently tasty, for cooking at least.

fresh garlic ready to use

I've 'processed' plenty of garlic; it's all cleaned and ready to use.

I'll probably use it up more rapidly this year, as curing conditions weren't so good for long-term storage.

Local food and thanks to farmers

Fresh garlic needing to be cleaned

I've been cleaning a lot of garlic, potatoes, and onions lately.

Much is destined for fresh use in the next couple of weeks, rather than storage, but preparing vegetables for either requires work - removing dirt, extra foliage and roots, sorting out for drying, taking all of the clippings out to the compost pile, etc.

I'm quite certain I didn't appreciate the effort required in producing a bag of onions in the grocery store before I started growing them myself.

Maybe they bounce down a river of clean water in industrial agriculture, but someone still needs to trim their roots and stems and remove their tops (maybe this is a subject for a web search-- Hmm... check out this article about onion cleaning procedures on a small farm).

Fresh onions are totally delicious, of course, being juicy and succulent when cooked.  Quite a different vegetable than the cured ones for long-term storage.  Ditto with garlic.  And fresh potatoes are exceptionally tasty, too.  But, it's worth considering what it takes to have a bag of red potatoes at the grocery perfectly cleaned and ready to take home. 

This is about as big as my carrots ever get.

I'm not complaining, really, but am glad for the experiences which remind me how fresh food, grown locally (or far away), ultimately depends on the folks who grow, harvest, clean, and package fruits and vegetables.

And whether we buy at a tailgate market or at a supermarket, it's well worth thinking about who grew those vegetables and how, and what it took for you to be able to put them in your shopping basket.

Cleaning a couple of bushels of small onions has reminded me to be (more) grateful for folks who grow our food.

(Here were some previous thoughts along the same subject, but focusing on greens).

Raised beds

The raised beds in front (of our house in the mountains) are looking good.

The last sugar snap peas are giving way to tomatoes and pole beans (greasy cut beans - an Southern Appalachian heirloom bean and yard-long beans - the Asian version (twining) of our southern cowpea -- but much better in my opinion.

I harvested bunches of beets, carrots, and onions from the raised beds this afternoon -- they'll be tasty roasted for tomorrow's dinner.  (And I'm thinking I need to head down to our Piedmont vegetable garden to harvest the rest of the garlic, maybe most of the onions, and check the potatoes.)

A new red potato popped up when I was checking some "leftover" plants that I'd stuck in a corner here in the mountains. What fun!

Family Farm Tour (ASAP)

The Appalachian Sustainable Agriculture Project's Family Farm Tour in Western North Carolina included a diverse mix of small local farms in the counties surrounding Asheville.  The farms range from CSA and market garden producers such as Flying Cloud Farm, small homestead farms like Elk Knob and Sunswept Farm Conservancy, and dairy goat operations (Round Mountain Creamery), which were among the farms that we visited over the weekend (there were 26 on the tour).

Growing fall vegetables for transplant at Flying Cloud Farm in Fairview, North Carolina

These folks are willing to invite us 'farm tourists' to see what they're doing and ask (sometimes) naive questions about raising animals, processing milk, and packing vegetables (but isn't that the point?)

Organic cherries at Elk Knob Farm

Flying Cloud Farm produce packing shed (note washing sinks and cooler)

Produce cart at Flying Cloud Farm

The tour helps interested consumers understand a bit better about local small farms, and encourages us to support them at local farmer's markets and at the farm.

We finished the tour with a fresh awareness of the day-to-day work that it takes to raise livestock and grow fruits and vegetables.

I have an appreciation of the produce side of things, but actually thinking about what's required in a small-scale dairy goat operation to keep sanitation standards required by USDA for commercial operations -- it's definitely more involved.

Growing beets

I've been delighted to have robust-looking beets growing in my raised beds in the mountains.  I definitely haven't been successful growing beets before. 

They need neutral soil, a deep bed for the roots to develop, and plenty of moisture, not always easy to provide in the acidic soils of the Piedmont, where I've been growing most of our vegetables.

So, I'm happy to have harvested a few 'first' beets, two 'regular' and one golden.

They were delicious!

Growing vegetables in containers

I like to think the soil in my garden beds is excellent (hmm), but often lettuce, greens, and mustards grown in flats or containers filled with planting mix and organic fertilizer do far better than when directly sown.

I'm quite sure it's because of extra nutrients and 'fluffier' soil; it does question the idea that healthy soil webs and organic-rich soil is the only way to grow vegetables, at least in my mind.  There's a reason that vegetables grown hydroponically flourish in solutions of water-soluble major- and micro-nutrients.  But remember my challenges in the fertilizer department, too!

Even' star mustards

So, I wasn't surprised to have a lovely harvest of mustards from this small container recently.  Quite tasty!

Raised beds for vegetables

We'll be building new beds this weekend on some unused driveway space up in the mountains.

I know I'll be a happier gardener to be tending more vegetables and herbs, away from my main spaces, which will benefit from a break, especially the main vegetable garden, which needs to be fallow, to reduce root-knot nematodes.

But there are gardening activities here to be done, too. The major task is freeing many mulched beds from their cloak of (weedy) winter annuals. Uh, and my gardening companion has yet to get the lawn mower out; I'm not a lawn person, but what's out there is getting pretty sizeable. He's had other distractions, certainly, but hopefully he'll crank up the riding mower soon.

I'm afraid I've only mowed a lawn a couple of times in my gardening life, and that with a push gasoline-powered mower back in Statesboro, GA in our first house and garden, in the last summer there, after my gardening companion (AKA my husband Tim) had already relocated to Clemson, SC.