Ypsi Cooks

It’s that time of year again. Time to get dirty.

Our tomatoes, broccoli, eggplant, and cabbage are all popping up, reaching for the flourscent lights, and the garlic in the garden is peaking out from the leaf cover. We are getting ready to plant our potatoes, peas, and onions in the upcoming weeks.

Last year we had a great time and grew a ton of food (more accurately about a quarter ton). I attempted to weigh and keep track of how much, but after a while it just gets old. According to my notes from last year we stopped counting at 132 lbs of tomatoes, 32lbs of watermellon, 20lbs of eggplant, 8 ice cube trays of basil pesto, 35lbs of cucumbers, 18lbs of green beans. And the list goes on.

Our seed order this year is: (bold denotes a new variety or veggie for us)

• Provider Bush Green Bean
• Rattlesnake Pole Bean
• Multicolored Pole Bean Mix
• Midnight Black Turtle Bean
• Fleet Bicolor Sweet Corn
• Sugar Ann Snap Pea
• Sweet Dakota Rose Watermelon
• Waltham Butternut Winter Squash
• Red Cored Chantenay Carrot
• Danvers Carrot
• Early Wonder Tall Top Beet
• Cracoviensis Lettuce
• Strela Green Lettuce
• Green Deer Tongue Lettuce OG
• Broad-Leaved Sorrel
• Limba Broccoli
• Winterbor Kale
• Black Prince Tomato
• Goldie Tomato
• Opalka Paste Tomato
• Speckled Roman Paste Tomato
• Cilantro
• Danish Ballhead Cabbage

There are also a bunch that we have saved or left over seeds (this is by no means a comprehensive list)

• Red Russian Kale
• Dino Kale
• Arugula
• Random Greens
• Swallow Eggplant
• Jersey Wakefield Cabbage
• Uncle Davids Dakota Dessert Squash
• Cascadia Snap Peas
• Spring Treat Yellow Sweet Corn
• Arava Cantaloupe
• Suhyo Long Cucumber
• Gentry Summer Squash
• Waltham Butternut Winter Squash
• Cherry Belle Radish
• Cross Country Pickling Cucumber

We also have 4 varieties of Potatoes, red and yellow onions, and 75 cloves of garlic in the ground from the fall (each clove develops into a head). Also something exciting is that we should be able to harvest some of our asparagus this year and maybe have some cherries from our tree and bushes.

We are excited, but we also need to get cracking at some of the preserved food from last year. It is easy to get into the mindset of saving and to save them for “later”. Next thing you know you are picking some and still have a bunch frozen or canned from last year.

We only have a couple months until strawberries are ready. We still have a bunch in the freezer. What should I make?

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 27th, 2011 at 1:14 pm and is filed under Things we Made. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.