The best part about growing garlic.

I actually have green stuff in the garden!  In mid January!  In Pittsburgh!  This is the first year we've overwintered garlic (or grown garlic at all for that matter) so it's fun to see signs of life in my otherwise dead front yard.  In late fall I picked up several varieties of organic hard-neck garlic from Enon Valley Garlic and planted one of our 5.5" square beds with it.  I'm sure I could mulch a little deeper, but considering the weather has been unusually warm I think we're OK.  

My Fall-Planted Garlic

If you're in Western PA (or Eastern OH) and want to try a fantastically wide variety of hard and soft-neck garlic, stop by the Enon Valley Garlic booth at one of the farmers markets listed on their home page.  They're a family run organic garlic farm and will even give you pointers on growing your own gourmet garlic at home.  Check out their website for an excellent primer on how to grow garlic.  They also have a photo guide to the different types of garlic they grow.

Pittsburgh Children's Museum Garden: Who knew?

Today we took a largely unplanned trip to the Pittsburgh Children's Museum and I had the pleasure of being able to photograph a really cool little educational veggie garden set up in front of the Museum!  Here's a quick photo tour that highlights some really neat ideas that I just might need to steal next year.

The garden is mostly raised beds and containers made from clay drainage pipes (or something like them).  It is situated in a little outdoor nook between the registration lobby and the gift shop.

I'm not big on fruitless flowers, but these are really pretty.  They were probably planted among the veggies to attract pollinators.

Is this purple broccoli in the front?  Or something else...I just don't know.

This faux (or real) log was planted with several herbs.  The vertical clay pipes were also planted with herbs and small veggies, and surrounded a long raised bed.  Such a cool idea!  

Brussel Sprouts

An Asian eggplant of some type.

Another beautiful and healthy eggplant...much healthier than my own at least.

Rain barrels!  They had a rotating composter too but I think I only snapped it in the background once or twice.  

More clay pipes were used as planters along the wall further in.  There are also some amazing  rough hewn wooden benches to sit on.

I just can't get over what a great idea those pipes are.  I have probably seen a ton of them laying around and never thought twice about using them in the garden.  Being square makes them quite a bit more useful than the round pots as they can be used as a border or lined up against each other for more stability.

A view from the end of one of those wooden benches.  The raised beds were quite high off the ground.  You can see a tiny bit of the city skyline in the background.

This is the best shot I could get of the long bed created with a border of clay pipe containers.  

A beautiful heirloom that I didn't see a tag for.

Tomatoes on the same plant but less ripe.  I MUST grow some like this next year.

Chard  :)

This photo is on the way home.  You can tell how many kids probably feed these squirrels.  This fat little guy didn't even blink when my son walked 2 feet from him.

This one just sat a few feet above us quietly observing.

A view of the beautiful day we had here from the car ride home.  I shot that through my windshield (while my husband drove) if you can believe it.

The Pittsburgh Children's Museum Garden itself actually has a blog, which you can find here if you'd like to take a look.  They host several educational workshops for kids and schools, though I've never been to one since we just discovered this garden today.  I love finding new gardens around town :)  

The rabbits are becoming less cute by the day...

Seriously?  My fall crop of bush beans are all just stalks now.  I don't even want to think about my melon patch.

Rabbit damage to the now leafless bush beans.

Rabbit damage in the melon patch.

The vine this watermelon was attached to was severed by a rabbit.

I did discover a really cool place after my root canal on Monday though!  I was wandering around with my face half numb looking for the spot I had parked my car in Pittsburgh's South Side (if you've ever been there you'd understand) and I saw a giant poster with a kid or something on it and words like "sustainable" and "recycle" attached to a building that looked oddly retrofitted with green upgrades.  Considering the whole area is filled with giant 100 year old brick row house buildings, I knew this had to be something neat.

I went inside and found myself in a small lobby filled with information brochures with a glass door leading to a larger lobby with no one manning it in sight.  I started trying to process the brochures in an attempt to figure out where I was, when a nice lady who looked to be returning from her lunch break walked in behind me.

"Can I help you with something?"

I turned around, smiled a half-novocained smile in what I hoped was a very uncreepy manner and replied: "No I uz ust undering ut thiz place uz."

I then decided that the drool, slurred speech, and garden dirt stained clothes I wore due to an emergency tipped tomato plant right before my appointment might be giving the woman the wrong impression, so to combat that I managed to rankly overcompensate by telling her that I was looking for my car after a root canal and liked to garden and was intrigued by the posters outside all in one godawful slurred run on sentence.  I'm totally sure that I came across as a nutcase.

ANYWAY it turned out to be a green building that even collects difficult-to-recycle items like CFL bulbs and batteries.  I am still not completely clear about whether they are some type of outpost of the PRC (Pennsylvania Resource Council) or just a different non-profit that works with the PRC, but any place that has bags of worm poop in their lobby for a small donation is pretty cool in my book.  They also give tours of the building to school kids or anyone interested in seeing how it operates!

It's not every day that you leave the house to get a root canal and return with a sandwich bag full of  worm compost.

So I guess things aren't too bad since the worm compost seems to have been just what my ailing eggplants needed to perk up a bit.  However, if anyone out there is keeping count, this makes two baby water melons and four baby musk melons bitten off by the bunnies.  

I really have no idea what I am doing.

Really.  This is sorta the third year we've had a garden here, but only the second where we'll actually get a harvest since that first year we lost our whopping 8 plants to late blight.

So far the missteps haven't been as profound as last year, and we seem to be on the verge of getting a good amount of food out of our front yard, but I love seeing people around town who are doing it better.  Last year I found a few random people with really neat urban gardens scattered around Pittsburgh.  This year I want to actively seek them out because they let me know that what I'm trying to do is possible (and also because they are just so cool).

Today I managed to get out to Wilkinsburg to FINALLY try to get new eggplant seedlings from Garden Dreams.  They did NOT have any Turkish Orange left (damn) but I found several other varieties of eggplant as well as seedlings for ground cherries, green tomatillos, purple tomatillos, and a bunch of cherry tomatoes.  I also picked up some variety of white tomato...not because I need another tomato, but because I've never grown a white one and I couldn't resist.

They occupy two city lots and the whole garden is just amazingly landscaped.  There are several areas full of potted seedlings for sale which make up the bulk of their business currently, but later in the season they will also be selling their naturally grown produce to the public.  There were so many different colors and types of pepper, tomato and eggplant seedlings available that I can only imagine the rainbow that will be their harvest.

But enough words!  Here are some pictures I took there earlier today...if you're ever in Pittsburgh, they are definitely worth a visit (even on a gloomy day such as today):

(A haunted house.  Or a non-haunted house doing a really great impression of a haunted house.)

I can't wait to go back in a few months when the veggies start to ripen!  Next time I'm bringing the kids.

Food everywhere!

We're reaching the part of garden season where the kids start to REALLY get excited.  Harvesting is much less work and much more fun than all the stuff that comes earlier in the season.  We're also getting more variety with our CSA, which is awesome because it forces us to try and figure out how new and creative ways to cook food that the kids will eat.

One of the big success stories in this arena, is actually my first attempt at quiche.  After being inspired by this post and recipe by Chris over at Adventures of a Thrifty Mama I decided to give it a try using ham, broccoli, garlic scapes, fresh basil, and spring onions all from the amazing Kretschmann Farm CSA.  It was surprisingly awesome, and even better than the quiche I remember eating all the time when I worked at Whole Foods several years ago.

I tied up the volunteer tomatoes growing behind the bush beans.  The peas have been yanked and more beans have been planted on each side of the tomatoes.

An entire melon cluster has been eaten by bunnies.  They were spaced too close anyway, so it's not a huge loss, but this is a trend I would like to stop.

Austin picked one of his "spicy peppers" (Garden Salsa).  Not sure what we'll do with it yet since we have no tomatoes.  

Today's harvest was one weirdly shaped Space Miser Zucchini, two immature gypsy bell peppers, one garden salsa pepper, and one small kohlrabi.

Zucchini and eggplant harvest!

These are going into stir-fry tomorrow with some left-over great northern beans and whatever else we have in the house.  I picked them a tad small because I just couldn't wait  :)

We've given up on peas until fall and yanked all of these out of the pea circle today.  In it's place I direct seeded a zucchini called "Sure Thing Hybrid".  I'm thinking I will just plant beans and zucchini where ever I have room at varying intervals since they grow so quick and we could never have too many.   Plus last year we lost all of our summer squash after the first few harvests.  Also, check out the little volunteer tomato in the lower right part of the picture...I'm going to leave it alone and see if it can compete with the grass).

 Ugh.  My eggplants are all covered and this is the plant that looks the healthiest.  I think I'm going to lose my only traditional eggplant, so I need to make a plan.  Even my tiny little Turkish eggplants in a different area of the garden have been totally destroyed now by the flea beetles.

I'm pinning all my hopes on finding replacement seedlings at Garden Dreams later this week.  I have my heart set on growing some Turkish Orange stuffers, and it's included in their list of seedlings.  As a bonus, they are having and end-of-season sale with all seedlings at 50% off PLUS a free tomato, eggplant and pepper plant with each purchase!  If you're in the Pittsburgh area, go check them out...currently they are Certified Naturally Grown, but are working towards becoming Certified Organic.  If I come back with new eggplants, I will be potting them in an entirely different part of the yard and covering them until they get to fruiting stage.