5 GALLON BUCKET GARDENING

Recently, 2nd Man and I were talking about how we didn't get our garden up and running for this year.  So many other expenses we've had along the way, that was one we just couldn't justify this season (building raised beds, clearing land, putting a fence, the soil, etc is expensive).  Plus we aren't exactly sure of the spot.

Still, I've had the itch to grow some veggies.  Then I remembered a growing method I've seen online and after some research, off to the store I went one day on my lunch break.

An hour later, I had two 5 gallon buckets (food safe), a large bag of potting soil and a couple of plants!

Now this time of year, garden vegetable plants are few and far between.  Mostly tomatoes and peppers but hey, we're OK with that.

I grabbed a jalapeño and a tomato.  Got them outside and I was ready to start.  I was so excited.

Got the drill with a 3/8" drill bit.  That is a good size for the drainage holes, about the biggest you want to go without losing soil to draining.  Also grabbed a sharpie and a ruler.  The holes don't HAVE to be even but it bugs me if they're not because "I" would know, ha!

I marked them, eight around the outside and four in the middle.  Then I marked four around the sides at the bottom, about an inch up.  This just helps any standing water in the bottom drain out quickly.

Here they are after drilling.

I got the potting soil out. This is the brand we always used in our raised beds and it worked great for us.  This one bag was enough for both buckets with about a 1/3 left over for other uses (or other buckets, ha).

You fill them up to a little higher than you might think it should be and then you water it until water runs out the holes in the bottom.  This will also let it settle.

Here is a great example... you can see the soil had dropped a little and you can see the water running out the bottom.  All is good and ready for planting!

Next, I had to get the tomato ready for planting.  Tomatoes like to be buried deep so you should cut off the leaves and small branches on the bottom 1/3 of the plant so it can go deeper into the soil and develop a strong root system. 

Here it was when I was done.  Nice and bare and ready for planting.

I dug the hole deep so that it would be buried as it should and then filled in around it.

Here they are!  Planted, climbing cage put in place, and now both are ready to go.  Hopefully, they will provide us some vegetables.

We have a "Heatmaster" tomato and a "Mammoth" jalapeño.  The tomato is determinate, which of course means they grow to a certain height and stop, which is good for container gardening.  The jalapeño produces the larger size peppers like you find in stores.

This will be an experiment but at least we can have something growing.  If we have to, we can use these for some Fall veggies too.  It's kind of addicting, I'll have to admit, Or maybe I've just missed "playing in the dirt"!

Let this new adventure begin!

ALOHA PEPPERS

Middle of the week house break, ha.

I saw these in our local HEB the other day and I thought, what the what?

I wasn't even sure what it was at first.  A weird apple?  A strange tomato?

I turned them over for the sticker and it's a pepper!  A beautiful pepper I might add.  Of course, I had to pick up a couple to expand our horizons, ha.  I got home and did some online research.

They are called Aloha peppers (in Europe they are also known as Enjoya peppers and originally Striped Holland Bells).  It is a bell pepper variety with distinctive red and yellow stripes.  They originated in the Netherlands from a natural hybrid/mutation of a yellow pepper that produced red stripes.  Their walls are thick, making them great for stuffing, cooking and of course eating raw.  They have a sweet crunchy bite with a bit of a citrusy note.  The best part?

They are stunning when cut up!  I was hoping to try growing some in the future but being a naturally occurring hybrid/mutation, the seeds inside are growing from the yellow portion and the red stripes are just a mutation that will not happen again.

*update* there are, apparently seeds available for Striped Holland Bells!  We just might have to try growing them when we get our gardens up!

We'll enjoy them when we see them.  They certainly are a conversation starter! 

BIQUINHO PEPPERS NEW EXPERIENCE

Not too long ago, I was grocery shopping and saw these.  Red Peruvian peppers.  They intrigued me and so I figured I'd pick some up.

It's the little self-serve section, so I got some in a container and brought them home.

They are oddly shaped (have a nickname of "little beak peppers") and are called Biquinho peppers.  They have a wonderfully unique flavor profile.  Smokey in a way, sweet and not at all hot, they are on the very low end of the Scoville heat scale, coming in at 500-1000 (considered a rare mild pepper). By comparison, jalapenos come in at 2000-8000.  These originate in Brazil (not sure why they called these Peruvian at the store) but they have a delightful flavor more like the flavor of a roasted red bell pepper with floral and citrusy notes as they say.

I could just eat them like this, just finger food out of the package (and did, ha). They have a pop as you eat them which is kind of a fun burst of flavor.

 ...but we put them into our salads and we love them.  They are a unique addition to a salad.  Best of all, they can also be pickled/canned...and so with that in mind...

...I went online and found some quality seeds and ordered some!

They are supposed to be easy to grow and we figured it would be fun to grow at the new house!  From what we've read, many families in South America grow them in containers on their porch and harvest lots of little peppers.  It'll be fun to at least try to grow some and heck, we might be the only people in our whole area growing Brazilian/Peruvian/Little Beak/Biquinho peppers in their garden!🤣

GREAT GREENS TRIO

 One thing my nutritionist said to eat a lot of, is greens.  Super healthy.  So when we were shopping at the grocery store to stock up (HEB), we saw this bag:

Great Greens Trio from HEB

They call it their "Great Greens Trio" and great they are.  It's a bag of precut and pre-washed combination of collard/mustard/turnip greens.  It is twelve cups (according to serving size) and 1 lb by weight.

We decided to try freezing them, so after cleaning them and drying them in the salad spinner just to make sure, we put them in a gallon vacuum freezer bag.  At first it looked like it wouldn't fit but I poured some in, shook it down a few times until they all fit.  When the vacuum process starts, it shrank it down perfectly.  You can see the vacuum sealed bag in the photo next to the bag as they come from the store.

We froze them and have used them in soups and casseroles and other dishes.  It's a perfect solution.  We have bought them and used them fresh from the bag as well.  It's a great combination of flavorful greens and we are obsessed with them, ha. Hey, they are super good for us too!  That's a win/win!

When we start planting a Fall garden again, we'll make our own "Great Greens Trio", ha.

I'm off today, more on that in the next post!

NEW EXPERIENCE RUTABAGA COOKING

With our new eating style, we're trying new things.  One thing we neither of us had ever had, rutabagas!

First I had to find them in the store.  You can see here, they were near the corn.  Not sure how you pick a good one, so I picked a couple that looked OK, ha.

We had read up on them and you have to peel them, not only to remove the outside skin, but rutabagas are usually covered in wax, one of the few vegetables that is treated in this manner.  They are very prone to drying out and contain a lot of water as they have no natural shield against evaporation water loss so during shipment, they are waxed.  We peeled them well...

...and sliced and diced them up.

2nd Man took them and added them to a skillet with a little bit of olive oil and a few seasonings (no salt) and just cooked them like you were cooking potatoes.

After a few minutes of cooking on medium high heat, they had nice color on them and resembled diced potatoes you might have for breakfast.  They were great!  They are in the brassica family which includes mustard, cauliflower, broccoli and Brussels sprouts.  I thought they tasted similar to a less sweet carrot and 2nd Man thought they tasted more like a turnip.  We really liked them though and will definitely add them to our rotation of vegetables.

Not sure if they will grow here (they are a Winter vegetable so we'd have to plant them in the Fall), but we'll check that out.  They apparently store very well so it has the potential to be a great option at the farm.

Anyone else ever cooked with them or have a great method/use for them?

LAST OF THE COLLARDS AND A MEAL

The weekend before last, I cut the rest of the collard greens.  They were really struggling and we guess that the last couple of light freezes didn't help that.

As things go though, this was a pretty good final harvest.  I cut and cleaned them and then 2nd Man used them for a delicious meal...

...he sautéed them in a pan with sliced up sausage and onions as well as some minced garlic (also our own) and a pinch of red pepper flakes.  The sausage gave off its own fat but he added a bit of olive oil to get everything started and then it just all cooked together.

Once it was all cooked and softened, it was time to dish it up and enjoy it.  It's a very good and satisfying meal and nice to know that we grew a large part of it.

Not sure why they faded so fast though, we thought collards were good with freezes.  It may be more related to them being closer to the end of their life cycle, regardless of temperature.  One thing for sure, we'll always grow Fall collard greens.

GARDEN IN WINTER UPDATE

We might have freezing temps finally but what we do have planted is growing as it should...

The raised bed garlic is doing great and doing what it's supposed to be doing.  Hoping for some great heads of garlic in about five more months.

And then we harvested our first batch of collard greens.  They look great and other than one plant that's seemingly way behind the others, they are putting on lots of leaves.  After this harvest, we should have another batch in a week or two.

Fall gardening, small as it may be, is giving us ideas for future gardening and trying out some other crops next time.  One of our customers was telling me on the phone the other day that they were harvesting broccoli from their Houston backyard garden.  We had never even thought about growing that.  We already know that Napa cabbage works great.  So next Fall we might try some broccoli.  If you've seen our food pics, you know we love us some broccoli!  

We're back up to the 70's after dipping into the upper 20's.  'Tis the season in this part of the world.

 

GARDEN IS DOING NICELY

At the risk of boring everyone with garden pictures, here are the latest, LOL!

Garlic in raised bed

The garlic has ALL come up.  36 planted and 36 sprouts.  That's pretty awesome.  At this point they are pretty much self sufficient and they don't require much water as long as there is some rain.  If it rains a lot during the week, I'll lightly water them on the weekend or if no rain, I'll give them a good soaking.  They are freeze safe so no worries there.  They'll just keep doing their thing until Spring and then it'll be getting close to harvest time.

Collard greens in raised bed

Check out the collard greens!

2nd Man looked at them and said "I think we'll be eating collard greens in a week or two!"  Watch for some collard green recipes coming soon.  Now, we kind of wished we had planted the Napa cabbage, ha.

Fall gardening is much easier than "late Spring/early Summer" gardening that's for sure.  We might need to look at more "cold weather friendly" things to grow.

HOW DOES OUR GARDEN GROW

Well!  (so far anyway, ha)

Garden update:

Raised bed collard greens

Collard greens are doing great and getting bigger by the week.  As we have done for a few years, we've tested various things to grow  see what does best.  We tried mustard greens, turnip greens and collard greens.  Collards were far and away the easiest growing and most prolific for our climate and weather conditions.

Raised bed garlic

Check out the garlic!

I actually counted the sprouts.

Of the 36 we planted, we have 34 that have come up through the straw.  The other two could be late stragglers but hey, even if they don't, that would be a 94.4% success rate and we'll take that!

We love garlic and should have a lot next Spring!

In case you missed it, check out yesterdays post for the big yard cleaning project.

COLLARD GREENS PLANTED

 This weekend was finally so pretty and so cool.  I decided to focus on the garden as one project.  We decided to scale back our Fall garden this year and by scale back, we are only planting collard greens, ha.  Well, also the garlic but we won't be harvesting those until mid next year. 

Collard greens

It got a bit late in the season with our crazy weather and that slowed us down on prepping the garden.  They should have already been in the ground but for some reason it was hard to find the transplants earlier in the season.  Finally, last weekend, we scored these two flats of six plants each.  We babied them in the apartment until this weekend and figure a dozen should give us plenty of collard green goodness.

Raised bed gardening

I added soil and compost to the bed and turned it all and smoothed it out.  Then I dug a dozen holes...

Collard greens raised bed

...and put them all in the soil and tucked them in.

Collard greens

All that was left to do was water them in.  They all look good, now we wait!  We thought about Napa cabbage this year because they did really well for us but they were hard to find too and it's definitely a bit late for them.  Hey, if we get cold early, the collards can have snow on them and be alright as they are tolerant down to about 5 degrees.  It was a good planting day.

Next post...the garlic planting!  

Besides, there is nothing I'd rather do on a cool Autumn day than play in the dirt!

FINAL HARVEST OF THE SEASON

The last harvest from this past weekend...

...things are definitely done for the season.  Our rains were a challenge as we had to turn off the automated watering which caused the garden to get uneven watering.  However, even with those challenges, the few plants and specific varieties we had did well for us.  We got small harvests every weekend and we're ok with it.  Things don't go bad before we can use them and it's fun to just eat something that we grew.

Now it's time to clear out their beds and put them to sleep for the Winter.  Well, maybe for the rest of the Summer, if we decide to do something for Fall.  We're going to have the garlic of course but we might do some collards (those were great the last time we grew them) and then some Napa cabbages (also great).  

Every time we do this, we have a little more data on what works best for us.  

TEXMEX CROSTINI GARDEN HARVEST ON HOMEMADE BREAD

Well even after the downbeat post the other day there was some good to come out of that weed infested garden and it's still producing!  Apparently veggies don't care what it looks like, ha.

Here is the small harvest.  Hiding back behind the tomatoes and cucumbers is a jalapeño that fell off while I had my back turned and I missed it in the picture.

But I had an idea for this harvest...

2nd Man had baked some bread Sunday morning because, well, baking is fun and, so he says, relaxing!  It was also a good way to end the weekend.

TexMex crostini

We toasted some slices, spread some avocado on them and then I made a pico de gallo with some diced up tomatoes and jalapeños from our garden!  All I had to add was some chopped onion and cilantro and sprinkled it all with cotija cheese. 

Sort of a TexMex farmhouse crostini, ha!

MUDDY HARVEST AND ANOTHER FARMSHARK

Forgot to give a weekend update.  It was a mess.  How's that for an update, ha!  SO much rain, so much mud and things are just, well, ugly.  

I drove the mower (see the muddy tracks?) as it sputtered and tried to die over to the "pick up" spot.  They came Monday and picked it up to take it to the shop.  We hope we get it back Friday because if we don't and we have another week of not mowing, I shudder to think of the mess I'll have on my hands.

Oh and I had to park the Jeep on the high spot in the yard and facing out so I didn't back into a low muddy spot if it started raining.  My car is 4WD but I don't really want to go "mudding" in our yard, ha.

The garden is still producing (the veggies are loving the rains).  Here is the haul this weekend.  A few tomatoes and some more cucumbers.  It's kind of nice having these small harvests, it's like going to the store and picking up a few things for the upcoming week, ha.

We used a few of them for a wonderful salad.  There is literally just NO COMPARISON when it comes to home grown tomatoes vs store bought.  It might just be nature's most perfect thing to grow.

Once again, in honor of "Shark Week" on Discovery...

It's SO wet at the farm, you never know when FARMSHARK will breach the surface!