Turnips! Garden update? Global bucket disassembly.

Those turnips I photo'd and posted last time?

A big one and a little one. The others? Well.. they didn't blow up.. they just bored straight down and looked more like skinny carrots. Dunno what happened there, but these were the two that were useable. So.. I chopped 'em..

Sauté'd 'em in just a bit of olive oil..

..and then slapped 'em with some butter and ate 'em.

They were actually fantastic! I was expecting a more bland, potato sort of flavor, based on what I'd heard 'em these guys, but they were remarkably more tasty than I imagined they would be. I'll definitely be growing more of these next year.

In addition to this, I also pulled the tomato's in off the deck. They were still green out there, and big, but we're expecting a frost tomorrow, so.. ah. Yank 'em and see what we can do with 'em on the window.

This is a few pics of the Global Bucket project I pulled apart and got a glimpse of inside. What a fantastic growing device this and the Earthbox were. Oh yeah, I also pulled the Earthbox apart and got that cleaned up and packed away for the winter. Check out the root development on this thing as it reached through the perforations in the bottom of the upper bucket:

The upper bucket pulled apart from the lower bucket..

The lower bucket, with some green funk in the bottom..

Closer shot of the roots and the fill pipe..

And I thought this was pretty interesting. The roots came through the perforations in the upper bucket to reach the water in the lower bucket, as we sorta expected, but instead of getting all crazy in here, they just kinda reached for the water and then stopped. The other two containers were all jammed up and mostly root bound.. they just kept reaching for something they weren't going to find.. but this one was smarter. I'm really looking forward to growing the Romas in cages inside these buckets I'll be doing next year. Should grow like a charm in that arrangement.

Lots more to post.. maybe tomorrow. Carry on..

Garden update.. and invaders!

I totally forgot about this one till just now, and I'll tell you why. Here's some pics of the garden as it stands now. i planted a bunch of cold weather stuff, and it's sitting under the hoop house covering now. Then, I went to check on the horseradish on my way back to the house and it's *covered* with caterpillars. Different ones than those who were attacking my radishes earlier this year.. bigger, greener. Check 'em out:

No, that ain't tequila. I think they're Cabbage worms. Look what these bastards did to my plant!

Hand picking is the answer to these as well, so I just pulled another 25 of the damn things off and drowned them in the Jar of Death. It felt good.

Check these Tomatoes out.. you think I could get some red in these things before they freeze solid?

And this.. It's October isn't it? Why are these chille's still producing?

Turnips are behind, but we're getting close to harvesting these guys..

The other stuff is doing well.. little green things popping up all over the place. I'm not convinced the lettuce will make it all the way through, but I've heard great stuff about Arugula and Spinach for cold weather growing, to say nothing of the Chard. The Arugula is already all out of the ground, sprouted like a champ. The Spinach is not up yet though, and neither is the chard. But those have time.. they're not quite up to the 7-14 days germination time yet. Check this radish square. Two days and they're out of the ground!

Hoop house got covered..

Because it's so nasty chilly, wet and windy out.. I figured I'd just cover the hoop house and see how it went. After seeing how thin this plastic stuff is that I had here, I'm glad I did, because I'm gona have to find something different to use, as this is gona get all torn up in rapid fashion I  think. It's really flimsy stuff. IT started to tear up right away from the staples, so I used some red duct tape as a sort of batten tape, until I can come up with something better. I also used that red tape to bunch up and secure the extra plastic on the ends, so it looks sorta ghetto right now.. but The Boss said it hailed here last night and the thing *appears* to be ok, although I'm just looking at it from the deck so far today. This rain is just gross, and I don't wanna go out in it to see any more..

We'll see how this does for a bit. When it breaks, I'll cover it with something else..

NYC and related things..

So, we took a tiny trip into NY City this weekend.. Friday evening to Sunday afternoon, in fact. Something to do with a 10th anniversary of something or another. Spent a couple nights in a fancy hotel and saw some sights. This post is a bit picture heavy, so I'm going to clump some of them together for sake of brevity, but our trip was great. I'm not going to post about everything, but we did do lots of stuff that I was really looking forward to. The major things to get done was a 'Voyage of the IPA's' boat trip/beer fest on the Clipper City, a concert where we got to see The XX, The Bodies exhibit, and then everything else was just funny stuff we figured we'd try out while we were in there. This is a view out of the room where we stayed, and you can see from 5 floors up we have a nice view of the skyline and a small slice of Times Square was also visible, if I had been facing in the other direction when I pulled the trigger on this one. 

Here I am sipping an espresso at Abraço espresso in the East Village area. The espresso was awesome. The 'drip coffee' was well done, but not out of this world. It must have been a blend of some type, but was not identified as to what. It was prepared on a row of Hario V60's lined up on one of those multi-level shelves what hold the ceramic drippers above the cups you're dripping the coffee into. I forget what you call 'em right now.. but it was those things. I enjoyed it all quite a bit, but the place is so small, and apparently so popular, it took a while to get my order.. I still prefer Grumpy's, then, as I enjoy S.O. coffee over espresso still and Grumpy's has a much larger (nay, any, actually..) selection. And hey, they have Clover's, which are still fascinating to me.

After coffee, we hit up the Bodies exhibit at the seaport, but we can't take pictures there.. so, no pics. But honestly, it wasn't gross at all. There were no floating brains in buckets to see there.. the brains were all properly secured. Quite interesting, still.

This is me and The Boss at Jeremy's Ale house, at the harbor area, just before we got on our boat. That's Sa and her truly ghetto/huge Hard Cider in a 32oz styrofoam cup. Sweet. The draft line is below that, displaying a few of a truly generous selection of bra's, which hung by the hundreds from the ceiling at this place. Do not ask why, as we were there during the daylight hours, and it was fairly tame inside, still. And finally, me, with my Mothers Milk, Milk Stout. 16oz only, thanks.

Then, we got on the "Voyage of the IPA's" cruise for two hours, which was truly more magnificent than I originally had any idea that it would be. It was more like a beer fest, on a fantastic ship, that had no beer lines at all to stand in, with a good selection of only the best IPA's from the area. And, we got so close to the Statue of Liberty, we could have nearly reached out and touched 'er. Here's a bunch of those pics:

Some guys, loading the kegs..

Raising the Brooklyn flag..

"I'm the king of the world!!" Sorta..

If you're a fan of Garret Oliver, here's a couple pics of him. He was the ringleader of the show, and I cannot tell you how really personable and friendly this fellow actually is.  Really an approachable guy and a funny bugger to boot. And his pants rocked! He and Sarah talked fashion for a bit while I was getting a different brew up front, or so I'm told.. heh.

He continually referred to himself as "Captain Garret" and advised he would use his position of power to get immediately to the bar to obtain any beer he needed, if it came to a point where lines actually formed. Fortunately for the rest of us, that never became an issue. Funny guy!

Here's that statue I mentioned prior, as well.. we damn near pulled right up along side of it. Great tour, this was. I'd highly recommend it to anyone.

This, sadly, is the best pic we got of the xx concert. Sad, like I said. But the concert itself was really nice. Well done, and we enjoyed it quite a bit.

There was lots more we did too, but didn't get pics of everything. Some of it was small stuff that I just have always wanted to check out, like the big library in NY.. I've always wanted to see what that was like inside. It's cavernous. I *did* get lost. I've also always wanted to sit in Bryant Park, my favorite park in NY, and just sip a coffee and read a couple chapters of a book, and so we did that Sunday morning. Also, breakfast outside on the sidewalk at this place down the street from our hotel was also fun, and something I needed to do as well. And it was beautiful, and I'll probably remember all of it in great detail until at least past tomorrow or Wednesday. :) Quite fun, and I'd even do it all over again.. maybe in another 10 years?

Carry on..

Garden update.. a little halfassed SFG going on!

SFG = Square Foot Gardening. Here's a pic of the twine I put up where I have my squares marked off into 1ft sections.

You'll see there's a bunch of stuff (Turnips, some older lettuce (both red and green) and a handful of peas..) I still have in here on the other, far end of the bed, but the near side has the squares all strung up and you'll also see theres three lettuce in the bed in the lower left corner of this pic. These are transplants I had that I planted in 4" pots up on the deck that I now had room for down here. So, I strung up the twine, tilled the soil with a trowel, added a couple scoops of compost and then set everything in according to hos it's supposed to be spaced out. There's radishes in here, a lot of lettuce, some spinach, Arugula, and a bit of Swiss Rainbow Chard.

Here, you can see those Habanero's are still going out of control in the upper bed:

All that red in there is well grown peppers. They are loving life in this bed, still. It's supposed to go into the 30's this weekend, so we'll see how much they're loving it in a couple of days.. but hey, maybe all the more reason to throw the cold frame over 'em? Hmm..

Here's a couple shots of the tomatoes I picked off my container plants in the deck a couple days ago..

I actually ate that one on the bottom there, that's all cut up. And I don't even eat tomatoes raw. But I did. It wasn't too bad, although the texture still freaks me out.

The Belgian Dubbel I did up with Jeremiah is bubbling away just fine downstairs.. it looks like it's starting to wind down, in fact. It took two days to start fermenting, and although the yeast pack from WYeast literally says "This yeast is a slow starter" on the side, I was not really prepared for that kind of delay. It gave me fits. I was not a big fan of that slow action at all.

Soil pH..

Took a pH test of my upper and lower beds the other day.. this is the upper bed:

And this is the lower bed:

They're a little different, but then again, one uses a different soil than the other one. I wonder if that had anything to do with the success of the peppers in the upper bed? I'll have to look into that. It's a good time of year to take a pH reading.. gives the amendments you may make to the soil time over winter to make the appropriate changes to the soil. It's the little things that count..