Garlic of the Day - Georgian Fire

Introducing the " Georgian fire "
Grows well in most states even some years in Warm Winter Areas, but will be marginal there in years with early hot summers.
Harvests early-mid summer - stores into spring.

Georgian Fire, like most porcelains is a large and beautiful garlic with rich robust flavor that is strong and has an aftertaste that lingers. The clove covers are a light brown streaked with purple From a growers perspective, it is a large and healthy garlic to grow and appears to be relatively resistant to most of the diseases that can affect garlic. It originated in the Republic of Georgia. 

Unusual Favorites of Year's Past

I like to grow the vegetables that produce well for me, but there are a few things that have made it to my plant for the sheer fun of it list.

1.  Ground Cherry - These easy plants may be bought as starts from Seed Savers, or as seed from a variety of sources.  The fruit look like tiny tomatillos and have a tart pineapple taste.  My kids have both stood as toddlers eating them straight off the vine.  They dry well and cook into cookies nicely too.

2.  Cucuzzi Squash - This is an edible gourd. As with most gourds, plant them far from your home.  The vines are long and prolific.  They bear a lovely baseball bat size gourd that can be eaten when picked young. Even if you look every day, these will sneak up and scare you by not being there one day and being the size of your leg the next.

3.  Burgundy Okra - Lovely and tall, this is a wonderful plant to grace the garden.  These okra are more tender than others and have a wonderful flavor raw or cooked.  Instant ticket to feeling like you are the best gardener out there.  Pretty and huge.

4.  Red Chinese Long Bean - This yard long bean grows quickly and easily.  Tasty in bean salads and numerous other recipes, this bean loves the warm weather and needs a fairly tall trellis.

5.  Cardoon - A relative of the artichoke, these must be started indoors due to the long season that they need.  I rarely actually eat these which is a shame, but I love their exotic look.  It's a bit finicky, but the years they succeed, they provide a lovely accent to the garden.

March: What to Plant

Time to start if you haven't already!  Don't know what to plant?  Here's a helpful guide:

Brassicas:  Kale, Mustard, Cabbage, Broccoli, Cauliflower, and Brussel Sprouts

Beets & Turnips

Green Onions

Tomatoes, Peppers, and Chilies

Carrots

Eggplants

If you haven't gotten a head start, there is still time to plant broad beans, onions, leeks, peas, arugula, parsnips and spinach outside.  In flats you can still sow radish, lettuce, celeriac, celery, and globe artichoke.

Want some more help planning your garden?  Check out Sprout Robot!

Garlic of the Day - Amish

Todays Garlic of the day is the Amish ....Harvests early-mid summer - stores through fall into winter.
Amish Rocambole may be an heirloom garlic, who knows? (a garden plant whose lineage can be traced for a 100 years or more) It is a generally a vigorous grower with large foliage that is dark green and results in a pretty good sized bulb. Being a Rocambole garlic, its flavor is very strong, hot and spicy and sticks around for a long time. From a growers perspective, it grows well in cold winter areas, but does poorly in warm winter areas, and usually grows healthy fairly uniform sized bulbs. It has thin bulb wrappers that have a lot of purple and brown .Amish Rocambole usually has anywhere from 8 or 9 easy to peel cloves that are of good size, with no smaller inner cloves. The outer bulb wrappers are thin and flake off easily so it is not a very good storer, but no Rocambole is - through the fall and into winter. Great taste is their claim to fame, not long storage. For those up North who want to grow their own garlic it only takes a year or two to grow all you can eat. It harvests in early summer along with most of the other Rocamboles. Bulbs are usually over 2 1/2 inches in diameter and are of good size are grown primarily for their particularly rich flavor.

Time to Plant Potatoes, but What to Plant?

Potatoes are easy and fun to grow.  They are also very easy to plant.  Throw them on the ground, cover them with straw and keep adding straw when the plants grow 9" above the previous layer of straw.  It helps if you throw some manure on the ground first, but really they are not too high maintenance.  One of the most difficult decisions is what kind.  Rural King sells cheap 50 lb bags of the standard varieties, but what do the varieties mean?

Early, Mid-season, and Late

There are three main areas of harvest time.  Early are ready in about 90 days, while late may take 150 days to mature.  Early is great if you want baby potatoes to can up.  They have lower yields than the late varieties.  Late varieties are excellent if you want to store in your root cellar.

Eating Qualities

Texture, flavor, and even color vary from potato to potato.  Think about what you normally buy to eat and then look up the qualities listed in a seed catalog.  If you want to branch out, pick a new potato with similar qualities.  Waxy potatoes are good for boiling and stay firm when cooking.  These are great for salads.  Mealy potatoes are great baked, roasted, or fried.  Some are nutty in flavor and some are fairly mild.  Color may attract you as well, but often doesn't affect taste.

Disease Resistance

Some are better for some reasons than others.  If you ave nematode problems, you may want to search out a potato that is less effected by your local pest.

Early Varieties

1.  Foremost
2.  Red Duke of York
3.  Accent
4.  Caribe
5.  Chieftain
6.  Dark Red Norland
7.  Superior
8.  Adriondac Blue
9.  Adriondac Red
10.  Rose Finn
11.  Purple Viking
12.  Sangre

Mid-Season Potatoes

1.  Charlotte
2.  Belle de Fontenay
3.  Carola
4.  Kennebec
5.  French Fingerling
6.  Desiree
7.  Nicola
8.  Bintje

Later Varieties

1.  Yukon Gold
2.  Pink Fir Apple
3.  LaRatte
4.  All-Blue
5.  German Butterball
6.  Russian Banana

A more comprehensive list can be found here!

Understanding the Options When Ordering Seeds

Gardening is on an upswing in the nation currently.  With the enthusiasm, come the gardening catalogues, but how do you know what you are getting?  What do all the terms mean and how do you know you are getting heirloom vegetables and what are heirloom vegetables anyway?  Don't feel bad, terminology provides a stumbling block for many people, but we can try to help out a little.  I've been gardening since I was a child and it still trips me up.  Every year there seem to be new marketing words that I don't get.  Here are some explanations to help clear it up.

Organic Seeds

Organic seeds come from organic farms.  To understand that you need to know what organic gardening is.  Organic gardening isn't simply not using chemicals.  According to the IFOAM (International Federation of Organic Agriculture Movement), “Organic agriculture is a production system that sustains the health of soils, ecosystems and people. It relies on ecological processes, biodiversity and cycles adapted to local conditions, rather than the use of inputs with adverse effects. Organic agriculture combines tradition, innovation and science to benefit the shared environment and promote fair relationships and a good quality of life for all involved.”  What this means is that these farms may indeed use approved chemicals, but they do it in an environmentally friendly way.  Organic seed also has guidelines set by the USDA on how the seeds may be treated.  These processing techniques include treating seeds with hot water, using legume inoculants to protect against disease, pelletizing seeds (encasing them in a protective covering) as long as no fungicides are included in the pellet, as well as various other treatments such as the application of microbial activators and bacterial inoculants.

Heirloom Seeds

Seeds saved from one season to the next and passed down from people to people.  One of the Carondelet Garden farmers has a cherry tomato seed that he has over 50 years of saving!  Seeds were traditionally saved this way.  This doesn't mean they are organic.  It does mean they are probably open pollinated.  Seeds saved within a community can be specialized to the local weather.  A gardener may have selected for a specific characteristic such as taste, marketability, disease resistance, etc.

Open Pollinated Seeds

Open pollination is pollination by insects, birds, wind, or other natural mechanisms, and contrasts with cleistogamy, closed pollination, which is one of the many types of self pollination. Open pollination also contrasts with controlled pollination, which is controlled so that all seeds of a crop are descended from parents with known traits, and are therefore more likely to have the desired traits.  What this means is that the grower hasn't really selected for anything specific.  What it could mean to you is that you will find my variance in the characteristics of the plants.  Plants grown from controlled pollination will be more uniform and predictable.  I think this label is being used to promote a more organic feel to seed selections from catalogues.

Hybrid Seeds

Hybrid seeds are produced by companies through careful pollination of two specific varieties. Normally, this highly selective plant breeding is done to bring together two traits in each of the chosen varieties so that the resulting seed has both of the traits.  Seeds collected from these plants will not grow into necessarily the same plant.  The positives for hybrid seeds are that they tend to perform better in your garden in terms of more fruits and vegetables produced, more plants surviving disease and pests and more flowers. For a gardener, this can mean an increased return for all the time spent in caring for a garden.

Genetic Modification


Scientists can now bypass the traditional breeding methods of manipulating plant characteristics. Rather than cross-breeding plants, they can work directly with plant DNA -- the genetic code containing the blueprint for all characteristics. Scientists can now take pieces of this code with the qualities they want and insert them into any cell.  Genetic modification of seeds primarily occurs to make plants resistant to herbicides or pesticides. The field can then be sprayed, leaving the modified plants unharmed. This process is used mainly in crops grown on an industrial scale. This form of seed underlies a huge debate in food growing circles.  We believe you should "Just Say No to GMO".

What does all of this mean for you?  That depends.  If you are just starting out in gardening, probably nothing.  Get some seeds from neighbors or from the catalogue and have some success with growing.  If you are an experienced gardener, you can use these terms to better select for your needs and to establish your own seed library.  People used to save their seeds.  This saving inadvertently bred more varieties of vegetables each suited to it's own region.  Seed Catalogues sell to all growing regions and will breed to the lowest common denominator.

If you are serious about your seeds, I recommend joining and supporting Seed Savers.  It's worth the annual membership.

As always save your seeds and join our seed swaps.  The more seeds offered, the better we can meet the food security needs of our community.

Garlic of the Day - Rogue River Red

Todays Garlic of the day is.... Rogue River Red !! 
Rogue River red is an early-mid season harvesting medium-rich flavored and medium pungent softneck Artichoke with straw-colored clove covers and often a lot of purplish color to the bulb wrappers. Excellent all-around garlic that can be braided and stores into mid-winter.

It is good to grow these along with Porcelains or Silverskin garlics so you can have both early season and longer storing kinds. You may not ever run out of good garlic.

Grows very well in most of the USA and can even be grown in warm winter areas quite well.

Garlic of the Day, Burgundy Garlic!

 
and todays Garlic of the day is the stunning Burgundy!

 Burgundy is as beautiful a garlic as the name implies. The Creole group may well be the most beautiful of all garlics for more than one reason. It was hard to believe Creoles were silverskins as they don't resemble any other silverskins in any way. Botanists assu"red" us; however, that they were genetically silverskins, but it turns out not to be so. They are in an class all of their own and it shows. If I have a personal favorite garlic, this one is it. I love so many of them it is hard to pick a single one, but I could not leave these beauties off any list of favorites. They look almost too pretty to eat-until you try one, then you realize they're too beautiful not to eat.

The bulb wrappers have a lovely deep rose color to them and the more layers you peel off, the prettier they get. When you finally get down to the cloves, which are arranged in circular fashion around the center, much like rocamboles, the clove covers are almost "red" with delicate burgundy colo"red" vertical streaks. They look more like flowers than garlic and are so perfectly arrayed that you are reluctant to pull off a clove and disturb the symmetry of it all. You almost feel as though you are violating it. But you have to taste test it so you pull off a clove and peel its cover off and take that first bite almost with a feeling of regret and apologizing to it for doing such violence to it. You bite off the upper half of the naked clove and fall in love with it as it tastes every bit as good as it looks. Burgundy has a wonderfully mild, yet full flavor with only moderate heat. In my view, it is one of the best of all garlics for enjoyable raw eating. It is so good that you eagerly rip off another clove and dig in without apology (Once is never enough with a garlic like this.) 

Burgundy is about the size of the average silverskin and stores just as clean and firm almost as long, but not quite. Burgundy tends to grow clean also and seems almost immune to some of the problems that can plague some of the other varieties. That may be because Burgundy grows better in warmer climates than many kinds of garlic. Not all cultivars are well suited to growing in mild winter and warm to hot spring climates but the Creole garlics do very well here in central Texas and other warmer climates. The excellent condition of our original seedstock that we got from Filaree Farms in Washington implies that it does pretty good in the cold areas also. You might want to buy a handful of these garlics even if you hate garlic; they make a fabulous centerpiece for the festive table.

Welcome to the blog

Thanks for following us!  This is the site of our new blog following the activities of the Carondelet Garden Urban Farm.  Our mission is to grow and share food and the knowledge and skills you need to do the same.

Join us for our free class series and on our project days.  Mark your calender for the upcoming Garlic Fest, and feel free to contact us with any questions.

Please subscribe to our blog and recommend us to friends.  We love garlic, but hopefully we can help you in your journey through growing all kind of food!