Start of the Sunflower Harvest

Jenna was home for a day from her summer camp. While she was here, I thought we should start harvesting the sunflowers. Most of the Mammoth variety are still not quite there yet, although we did harvest one head. The Lemon variety were much more ready. In fact, the birds had already done a decent job on a number of the flowers. Still, we harvested more than a dozen flowers that seemed to have a number of seeds still in them. The Lemon variety have multiple flowers per plant. The Mammoth have only one, but it is much larger. The photo is of Lemon variety flowers.

The plan is to follow what has been published. The flowers now sit in a paper bag, waiting for them to dry.

One thing I have noticed is that the seeds all seem to hold to either the confectioner shades of gray and white or the oil producing shades of black, like the one in the lower right of the photo. In theory, all of the seeds planted this year were confectioner. My reading suggests that we may actually have a mixture of oil bearing and confectioner types.

Canning Potatoes

If you ask, "Is it worth it to can potatoes?", the answer is probably, "No!"

In fact, you could probably say the same thing about growing potatoes in a home garden. Economically, there isn't much point. Potatoes are cheap and plentiful and of high quality in any grocery store.

This year's potatoes were planted cheaply. I had some Yukon Gold seed given to me by Denise Stafford. There weren't many, but it was what was left over from what she had planted. I also planted some Russets that had gone to seed in the pantry and some Reds that were of the same ilk. So, the planting was cheap. Essentially, it didn't cost me anything more than the effort and the ground. As a home gardener, I think it is better to be growing something in a garden spot than letting ground go unoccupied, so there might actually be a plus to having planted.

The harvest was honestly a bit skimpy. The Yukon Gold produced nice large tubers for the most part. The Russets and Reds were small. We used some in a few clay pot meals with chicken and some hash browns. There were still quite a few left over. My experience has been that potatoes in North Carolina don't store for very long. Too much humidity and heat. So, instead of just bagging them, I thought I would can some of them this year.

I bought a 23-quart Presto pressure canner. Kathy said it came 32 years late. But we now have it. I peeled for about an hour this morning. Small potatoes are a pain to peel, in case you couldn't figure that out. It made 18 pints and so far, have seemed to turn out OK, except for a few bottles that have too much air in them. Guess we should have tightened the lids a bit more. At least it appears they came out better than the pickles, which should have been canned a different way owing to the fact that I didn't understand the canning directions and over cooked them.

I'm not sure how we use these. We certainly couldn't survive on just our produce from the garden, but there is a sense of accomplishment in doing something.

One thing I learned is to not wait too long to harvest. This year, I kept the Reds in the ground a couple of weeks later than all the others. Too long in the ground tends to lead to some sort of decay.

Problematic Pears

I'm not an orchardist. For Christmas, I received two books about orcharding, but neither prepared me for what has been happening to my pears.

I pruned the trees in February. The three trees had grown quite too tall for me to manage and so I did some drastic cutting. Perhaps I left some open wounds. Although the damage I am seeing hasn't been specifically around where I cut, but on a wide range of branches. Only two of the three trees have been affected. One theory I keep popping around in my head is that somehow, I ended up with a parasite. Or, it could me a number of problems.

I went out this evening and pruned off the branches that had dead leaves and shriveling fruit. Because I'm not skilled, I don't know what else I should be doing. I need to do some research about this.

Other than this, I actually have an abundance of fruit on all three pear trees. This is a very different situation than what I have found on my peaches and plums, which are almost bare.

Sunflowers -- Two Kinds

Jenna wanted to plant sunflowers this year. Entirely her choice. So, I figured out that we could plant 23 per 12' x 4' raised bed planter if we put 8 down either side and 7 down the middle, spaced so that they were 18" apart. What we had on hand were a variety known as lemon sunflowers. I bought two packets of seeds last year because I had the intention of participating in some sort of bee counting exercise and lemon sunflowers were what was called for. I never planted any, so we had just about enough to fill two planters (56 sunflower plants). Of course, once planted, not all came up. (I even pulled one out by accident.)

The obvious solution was to go buy more seeds. The variety that was in the store was called mammoth. So, in the spots were the lemon sunflowers didn't sprout, I replanted mammoth. Eventually, all the spots I had reserved for seeds had sunflowers growing in them. The lemon variety were supposed to get between 6 and 8 feet tall. The mammoth variety was supposed to get 12 feet tall.

Before Jenna left for the first of her many summer camps, I took a photo of her standing in front of the plants. She is 5'2" or so. The ones that bloomed at this point in time were mostly the lemon variety sunflowers. When I first saw them, I was confused because I expected there to be just one bloom and that at the top. Lemon sunflowers produce multiple flowers. By now, because I figured out how to grown them but not harvest them, the gold finches have pretty much stripped them of seeds.

On the other hand, the mammoth sunflowers are behaving more like I expected. The flowers are bigger and there is just one per plant. They are coming in much later. And true to what was promised on the package, the stalks are much taller. I think 12' may be just about what the tallest among them are. Maybe by the time they are all pollinated, I will have figured out how to harvest the seeds before the birds get all of them. Right now, as you can see in the photo, the bees are just getting around to pollinating them. (Not my bees; the hive died.) I think the bee in the photo is actually a bumble bee.

So, Jenna's idea has turned into an interesting plant. I think she just wanted to see the flowers and doesn't care about the seeds. The birds clearly care about the seeds. I can imagine growing some of both varieties each year. Easy to grow. Big! And useful for someone.

I learned that there are two major classes of sunflower seeds. What they call confectioner (meaning, I suppose that the seeds are good for eating as a snack) and oil producing. I believe what I have planted are all confection types. So, if I actually plan this for next year, I would like to experiment with some oil producing varieties.

Adventures with Garlic

Jared told me he missed by blog. It's been a very long time since I've posted anything. When Kathy asked me about it, I claimed having just too much failure. And there has been plenty of distraction. I think I essentially quit trying to garden last year, so there was nothing to write about. But this year, I got busy again. So, my first new post is about garlic.

I ended up with a fair amount of garlic from last year. It hung braided in the garage all winter. Then it started to sprout. I tried saving some of it and took the cloves that hadn't sprouted and dried them in the dehydrator. I used the garlic press to squeeze out what I could and then either took it as it was or used a rolling pin to make it into powder.

But, then I still had a lot that had gone too far into sprouting, so I put some out on the street with a sign inviting neighbors to take it and plant it, gave it away to people at church to plant, and then planted about 20 or so cloves myself. Garlic should be planted in the fall, not the spring, so it was just an experiment. I had actually also planted about 7 or 8 cloves last fall. The fall cloves were large. The spring cloves were small.

Still, you have to do something with the cloves. And given that my last year's bumper harvest all sprouted before I could use them, I decided to take a couple of the big cloves and see what I could do. My first attempt is shown here. I cut the cloves in half and then dehydrated them.. Then i tried to grind them up with a mortar and pestle. Probably the wrong approach. The dehydrated cloves were tough as nails and didn't break up easily. I ended up using a knife to make them smaller.

I did end up with three sizes -- rather large chunks of garlic, smaller chunks of garlic (more like what I think of as minced) and powder.

Then I read that the smartest way to store garlic is in white vinegar. The value is that you only have to get the clove out of its casing. That in and of itself is a little sticky. Although I learned that for many cloves, you can sort of squeeze from the top and the clove will separate from its skin nicely. So, I separated a couple of heads of garlic and stored them this way in a cup-sized jar. The recipe I read said the vinegar doesn't really penetrate the garlic. You just wash it off before you use the clove.

I finally harvested the remaining garlic that had been planted in the spring. The heads were smaller and the cloves were smaller, but I was able to get another three cup-sized jars out of the plants. I canned the jars just like I would anything else. Two of the lids sealed. Two didn't.

There were some cloves left over, so I chopped them up and dried them. They were easier to deal with in terms of getting powder and minced garlic than I had experienced when I tried the same process with the garlic that I had only halved. So, next time, if I want dry garlic in any form, I will cut it up first.

I like growing garlic. It grows well. I don't mind having too much of it. I can always give some of it away.