Dandelion Wine - Part Two

So it was time to rack the Dandelion Wine this week!  Hard to believe two months has gone by already!  I just wanted to post a couple pictures of how it's looking.  It has REALLY cleared up a lot.  In the second picture you can see my hand through the wine.  So it got racked into another clean carbouy and another crushed Campden Tablet was added.  It should continue to fall even more clear as time ticks on and more sediment falls to the bottom.  I'll be racking the wine again in two more months...Keep an eye out!!

It's Tomato Time!!

Hello everyone!  It's been way too long since we got a post up here.  Please believe me when I say we've been quite busy around here.  Children, market commitments, garden work.  Oh, and did I mention that being 8 months pregnant in the summer heat wears you out?!  Anyways....We have heirloom tomatoes now!!!  I am so excited.  Every year we wait and wait for the middle of summer to arrive here at our house because that means we don't have to buy the cardboard-like ones from the store anymore!!  Here is a large basin of them I brought in a couple days ago.  These were the first of the season!  And since we do only grow heirloom there are many colors, sizes, and shapes. 

Here is what may be my all-time favorite tomato...the Black Pineapple or Ananas Noir.  It may not be the prettiest of tomatoes, but the flavor and texture are unbelievable.  When you slice into it it has this pretty assortment of green, red, and almost purple stripes.  This is the fourth year I've grown this tomato and I intend to for now on.

This is a Green Pineapple.  It is in fact green when ripe.  It does gain a slightly yellow tinge once it's ready to come off the vine.  It's a nice little trick to know.  It's almost neon green on the inside and so sweet with a nice amount of tang.....a real keeper.

The tomato on the right is a Costoluto Genovese and the tomato on the left is a Japanese Black Trifele.  The JBT is slightly pear shaped and more of a purple/brownish color.  Like so many of the purple family tomatoes is has a wonderful deep, smoky, wine like taste almost.  So very good.

These are just few of the many tomatoes we'll have this year.  We even have white tomatoes...yes white!!  Come see us at the Grandview Farmers Market over the next weeks for some of these beauties.  Take care everyone!

Potatoes Part One

I decided to give potatoes another go this year.  I never seem to have much luck growing them despite soil amendments, growing techniques, etc.  I always ended up with hardly any potatoes that were small and just not that great.  This year I decided to try to grow them in large fabric-like bags specifically designed for growing potatoes.  They are the Jumbo Potato Bags from Gardener's Supply Company. The reviews were quite good and apparently people get nice potatoes out of these things!  So off I went to get some good organic fertilizer, soil to fill the bags, and of course my seed potatoes.  I decided to grow four varieties this year, Kathadin (white), Red Pontiac (redskin), Yukon Gem (yellow), and Purple Majesty (purple-skinned).  The idea of these bags is you start by putting about 4 inches of your soil into the bags along with about a cup of fertilizer.  The sides of the bags have been folded down half way and as the potatoes grow they get unfolded.  They're made out of this polyester felt-like material that allows for water drainage and soil aeration.  I got them in blue...my favorite color.  Here is the soil/fertilizer mix.  I used a good quality top soil/compost/peat mixture I mixed myself.

I just mixed all this together and smoothed it out.  Then I put all the seed potatoes in the bags.  Think about if you've left a bag of potatoes from the store in the cupboard for too long.  You come back to them eventually and they've all sprouted.  Well, these are now seed potatoes and you could plant those for new potatoes a few months later if you wanted to!  Here is my very dirty hand holding one on the Purple Majesties.  Even the sprouts on it are purple!

So, I got all the potatoes arranged in the soil so they weren't too close to each other.  Here you can see what they looked like before I covered them with the next layer of soil.

The potatoes at this point were ready to be covered with another 4 inches of soil.  Again some organic fertilizer was mixed in.  Potatoes like to feed!  Not too much nitrogen though.  You'll get a lot of green leafy growth, but you won't get too many potatoes.  The instructions that came with the growing bags said that for every eight inches of leafy growth add four more inches of soil until you've filled the bags with soil.  So that's what I did until the bags were full!  The potatoes poked their leaves out of the soil within a few days and they've just grown at warp-speed since then.  I should add that I got them planted back on May 14.  They finally seem to have leveled out now here that it's July as they're putting all their energy into growing new potatoes.  Or that's what SHOULD be happening!  Here they are a couple days ago.

Once the tops have basically died down it'll be time to dump out the bags and unearth what I'm hoping will be a lot of nice colorful potatoes!  Obviously I'll be sure to get pictures and let everyone know how this experiment in potato growing goes.  Keep your fingers crossed for me!