Got our next farm shipment yesterday. Included in the farm shipment is a squash the likes of which you’ve never seen. Oh – you wish you’ve seen something like it – but we both know you haven’t:

“What the hell is a Kohlrabi?”

This is:

We started getting out farm shipments yesterday.  We joined Monroe Organic Farms.  We got butter lettuce, some other kind of lettuce, some fresh peas, some onions, and … kohlrabi?  Imagine being on an alien planet and being handed a plant that has purple bulbous growth and these weird purple spaghetti-stems.  We honestly didn’t know what to eat, the leaves or the root!

Turns out you can eat both, but you’re only really supposed to eat the root.  So we peeled the purple off of the root and cubed it and put it in salad.  Not too shabby.  It tastes cabbage-y, but maybe a bit sweeter.  Neat.

I think this picture works a little better, because you see it as it grows – how weird is that?  What dude went up to this plant and was like “ARR NUMM NUMMMM!”

We babysat Alex when we were gardening.  As such, when we were planting the garden initially – and by we I mean me – there were not many pictures of the planting part.  There are, however, tons of the littlest Jones.

So this afternoon I went out and took a bunch of pictures of the garden as it stands.  It’s doing well – we have a lot of seedlings that took off, and a lot of seedlings that died almost as soon as we put them in the ground.

We also have bonus plants – seeds that grew up that I tilled under at the end of last season.  So not only are we going to have a lot of tomatoes this year – we’re going to have a lot of tomatoes.

Planted the veggies yesterday.  Forecast is for an inch of snow tomorrow.  After mother’s day, my ass!

Today was the first day of fake spring. I say that because today, and the past few days, it’s been in the seventies and sunny. Some of our plants have taken advantage of this weather – which is their folly!

Tomorrow, it’s supposed to be in the 30’s and 40’s with potential for snow, or just really cold rain.

Here’s pictures of what we’ve got now, including some of the gardening stuff and an extra surprise!

The next weekend is the first weekend in March.  This means it is time to start planting for this year’s veggie garden!

I’ve spent a lot of the off-season reading about things that we can do to build on last season’s successes.

• I’ve started composting, but it’s not likely the stuff that we’ve kept to compost will be usable for the garden.
• We’ve gotten a lot of moisture (snow) this season, and I intend to be diligent in turning the soil once it thaws out and the soil melts.
• Read about drainage problems, since last year we obviously had some.
• Figured out how to water more efficiently

I’m going to build a seed station this year that will help keep the seedlings warm and (reasonably) humid, which should help.  Last year we were very lucky with our seedlings.  Usually you can’t expect but half of them to live once they are in the garden – but just about all of them did last year, save the slugs!

We also joined a CSA, which seemed like a good investment with food prices rising. We’re going to have so many damned vegetables this summer it’ll be ridiculous.

We did our first major haul of the crop. We’ve been picking at it here and there, but today we went out and got a bunch of stuff. We’ve given away about ten-fifteen tomatoes so far, with more to come. They’re racing with the frost!

We’re doing our second “annual” labor day BBQ this weekend on Sunday. So if any of you tens of Colorado readers haven’t actually been invited, consider yourself invited now – unless I don’t like you. In that case – I uninvite you right now.

We’re going to be razing the garden, I believe. We’ve got at least three freakishly large cucumbers, for which we will make some kind of cucumber salad (or Anna wants cucumber mojitos). We have about twenty-odd tomatoes, two of which are near-ripe, and the rest of them are steadfastly refusing to become edible by any other means than frying. We’ll have some squash, of course, and tiny decorative pumpkins (which aren’t edible, and thus anger me). We’ll also be using basil in the drinks – making a watermelon-basil-lemonade, and perhaps mix the basil with the hundreds of cherry tomatoes we’re growing. There are about four jalapenos – don’t know what I will do with them.

We have one butternut squash – I’ll keep that. I loves me some butternut squash, and that’s not really a summer/bbq thing anyway.

In addition there will be pork spareribs, beef smoked sausage, and some chicken. Oh, and fake chicken for the one vegetarian. I think I intend to make one batch of normal Chopper-style BBQ sauce, and one batch of Chopper-style BBQ sauce with a few drops of this.

The garden is fun – but it’s starting to get cold at night, so I think its time is drawing near. I hope to take a lot of food pictures while we’re preparing the food for the barbecue.

More garden photos. There’s a bush right next to the garden that gets tons of bees – and is the reason why the garden is going so well.

So here, BEES!

Got some maters.  There’s also a picture of a kitty in there.