Indoor Lettuce Revisited

I get dozens of hits every day on my main blog, Northview Diary, for growing lettuce indoors. It is absurdly easy to do, just plant lettuce in a container and put it in a sunny window.
Water.
Wait.
Hey presto, clean, tasty, homegrown salad in the middle of the winter. I love it and planted some yesterday. I put it in a pretty blue flowered pot, which will look nice, as well as providing a treat in a few weeks.
I need to bring more pots inside and get more started. Every year I threaten to grow pots of lettuce for Christmas gifts and never get around to it.
This year I am gonna actually do it.
I swear!
(Hey family members, let me know if you want one of these. It might get me moving on this project.)

It is over

Or mostly anyhow. Here in upstate NY, except for cleanup and planting garlic the garden season ended with a whimper when it got just cold enough to nip all the tomatoes even though they were covered. The whimper was mine. I love puttering in the garden and am already suffering deprivation.

Soon I will start some lettuce seed in flower pots. It won't be too long before it is time to start next year's geraniums. However for now I will just look out at the bare, too wet to work on earth and be grouchy. Bah humbug!

Tomatoes

Lots of them this summer. I am boiling them up into something that can either be finished as a red sauce or made into soup. They are about as good as I have ever grown.

The best variety this year is cluster grande. They produce five or six perfect tomatoes per stem and taste wonderful. They make up the main ingredient of my sauce as there are so many of them. I just add seasonings and simmer....then strain out the seeds and skins. We made pasta with some last week and loved it. Tastes a lot like Campbells tomato soup without all the salt and sugar.

Poor neglected blog

You would think from the number of posts here that nothing has been happening in the Northview Dairy farm garden. Nothing could be farther from the truth. This year we have had the best garden in years. It sure has been fun to take care of it.


We have had lots of potatoes with more to dig. A certain amount of potato scab and some hollow ones showed up, but they taste incredibly good. Lots of tomatoes, zucchini (although never enough) the best crop of sweet corn in a decade, carrots, herbs, hot peppers, giant sunflowers, a few beans and peas...man we have been eating like kings.




Liz and I have been putting up all we can. We need to get some paper bags for the rest of the potatoes. We would like to get out and pick some raspberries at the pick your own up the road, but time is an issue (there is the reason for no posts...time). Soon we will get a frost and the fall apples will ripen up. Then we will make some jelly I hope. I add cinnamon to my apple jelly, which makes it much more interesting in flavor. This year I am going to spice some with the seasonings you would normally put in apple pie...hopefully resulting in apple pie jelly......imagine apple pie on toast......yummmmmmm.


This summer I have been dabbling in saving seeds. I have always saved 4-o'clock seeds and a few other flowers, but this year I saved lettuce, giant sunflower, and hyssop seeds and am going to try to get some seeds from the vegetable marrows. It was such a great year for the garden that we even got a nice crop of acorn squash out of the compost bin.
I hate to see the season end!

Home again

Petunia Dolce Flambe
I have decided that I like it after all

Came home to a garden gone crazy. Weeds were even worse. I hilled potatoes, cleared a lot of amaranth and lambsquarters out of the hot peppers and picked a bunch of over-sized zucchini.


Froze the latter today after I finished paying the bills. Ended up with four nice gallon bags full. Lots of soup this winter I hope. Can't wait for the sweet corn (if it makes it-we planted pretty late).


Rainbow carrots are coming along good too. I really should plant more of them!

High summer

And everything is weird. It rains almost every day. Always enough to shut down the haying. Never enough to actually get the plants wet. I have had to water all the bucket and pot plants all summer.


The winesap apple set lots of fruit, but most of them are falling off now. They seem to have been pollinated, so maybe it is a characteristic of the type of tree. I don't really know as this tree has never set any amount of fruit before. I am not even sure it is a winesap, as I don't remember which tree was which. Peg had them...the other was a black astracan ( a historic variety to which there doesn't seem to be much reference). I am hoping even a third of apples that are left hang on to the tree. We are not set up to do anything about insect control, but they would make nice applesauce I think.

I am going to pick whatever zucchini is out on the vines today. We will be gone when it matures and I don't want to waste it. If I find enough I will cook it with some of our homemade breakfast sausage, baby rainbow carrots and rice for dinner tonight.


The sunflowers are way over my head now. Geraniums and petunias grown from seed are beginning to flower. It is always so exciting waiting to see what color they will turn out to be as I usually plant mixes.

Cobweb hens and chicks

The jury is still out on the Dolce Flambe petunias. They are an interestingly delicate combination of white, pink and yellow, but are not very eye-catching from a distance. I am waiting to see if they become more showy as they develop more flowers. Meanwhile there are a lot of things blooming now and we and the hummingbirds are much enjoying them.

Jesse's Giant Sunflowers

Liz and I put the last of the tomatoes into the ground today...not that I don't have more plants, because I do...just no more room. I will try to get at least some of the rest into containers....in fact I need to go out right now and do that.

I also hoed the whole upper garden and hilled up the potatoes up there. Some of the winter squash was eaten right down by something so I just put tomato plants in the empty holes in the mulch. There are baby squash on the greyzini already! Beets are up. Indian corn is knee high, which is amazing as it has been in less than two weeks. Merveille de quatre saisons lettuce is forming heads even though I have it planted in half a fifteen-gallon barrel. This lettuce is great stuff...seems to stay sweet and crunchy forever. I will certainly plant more when we are done with this bunch!