The end of summer is approaching, and it’s time to review how the season went at The Woks of Life HQ.
We had some excitement this year with our first real fruit harvests (last year we lost almost all of the fruit in our orchards to squirrels, birds, or fungal problems), as well as some new vegetable garden successes.
Let’s take a really quick tour!
The Harvest
The season started out strong, with some lovely zucchini and yellow squash. This year, we tried to stay disciplined with harvesting them small, and even harvested some of the flowers to make pastas in early summer.
Happy to report we minimized the number of giant monster zucchini with lots of seeds, and enjoyed them while they were still nice and tender!
We also started cooking lots of beet greens and kale, usually stir-fried with some garlic as a side dish.
The kale on the below right overwinters usually, and it’s much more tender than store-bought curly kale or even Tuscan kale. The stems are actually edible, because they’re not too tough.
Another big garden success this year was our sugar snap peas. We were harvesting five pound bags of them every few days, and enjoying them in stir-fries as well as developing new recipes with them like our Snap Pea Salad:
Last year, we grew potatoes for the first time, and it was a revelation! You just put some sprouted potatoes in the ground, cover them with soil as they grow to prevent light from getting to the growing tubers, and in a few months, you find that your potato in each hole has multiplied!
We doubled down on potatoes this year and had many plants and varieties, like Norland Red, Adirondack Blue, etc. We did find that our container grown potatoes did a bit better than the ones we planted in the ground, since it got rather rainy around harvest time.
Some of our potatoes rotted in the ground (they smelled awful), but we did harvest a good number of red and blue potatoes, as well as yukon golds and fingerlings!
We still have a bunch left in cold storage to enjoy over the next several weeks!
If there’s one crop that’s worth growing every summer—with the biggest bang for your buck and the most difference in flavor between garden-grown and store-bought—it’s tomatoes.
Nothing can beat the sweetness of a home-grown sun-ripened tomato. We had big beefsteaks, cherry tomatoes, as well as sauce tomatoes with few seeds (a San Marzano hybrid called Pomodoro Squisito).
All were delicious! We’ve already frozen some for use in winter, and we used them in big tomato salads, this lovely eggs benedict birthday brunch we had for my mom, tomato egg noodle soup, and many other dishes. (Also enjoy some photos of the flowers we have growing around the place—we’ve had fun making small bouquets for the house with them.)
We haven’t had to buy scallions all summer, sustained by our little patch of scallions in the kitchen garden. The Chinese eggplants produced some nice fruit this year—tender and great for stir-fries like eggplant with garlic sauce. Plus, we tried growing both Indian bitter melon in addition to our Chinese bitter melon!
Read more about how to grow bitter melon and how to grow Chinese eggplant in your own garden!
We experimented with a few new gourd varieties this year, including butternut squash (below left), which produced lots of small-ish 8-inch fruits, perfect for roasting or soups, as well as birdhouse gourd, known in Chinese as húlu (葫芦).
These gourds are often dried and are symbols of health, longevity, and prosperity. From a practical perspective, after drying, they can also be halved, hollowed out, and used as ladles!
We grew green beans and okra…
And our shallots grew pretty well, as well as our perennial garlic chives planted last year.
But the most exciting harvest developments this year were in the sweet fruit department!
First, we had our first real harvest of raspberries! Last year, we each got to eat maybe 2 berries total. 😅
We also have a couple Asian pear trees on the property, and after losing our harvest last year to animals and fungal diseases, we were determined not to make the same mistakes this year.
We dutifully sprayed the trees leading up to the growing season to prevent fungal growth. Some pears did still succumb to it, but we ended up with a decent harvest. The pears were crisp, crunchy, and delicious. We ate all of them within a few weeks and shared them with friends and family.
After getting a total of 0 peaches last year, we did manage to get some this year! It took them a long time to grow and ripen—perhaps we need to prune the tree better next year so the peaches get more light, and also thin them out a bit more.
But the peaches were sweet and tasty. We’re big fans of Jersey peaches. We haven’t tried the Georgia variety, but Jersey peaches are hard to beat!
One tip that we owe this year’s pear and peach harvest to: foil pans on the lower branches of the tree! We saw someone on YouTube suggest it. Apparently the squirrels and other critters trying to crawl up the tree hit the foil pans, which make a kind of thunderclap noise, scaring them away from the tree and preventing them from climbing up to munch on the fruits. It worked, folks!
After dutifully wrapping our fig tree last year, we unwrapped it this year only to find that it had rotted into a sad moldy looking stick. Womp womp.
In May, after unwrapping it, we cut it back to the ground, and the plant shot up lots of new shoots:
So now we have a fig bush. Not sure what we’re going to do to winterize it this year if anything, but after a few years of destruction and regrowth, the thing is still hanging on!
We also sprouted and planted some grocery store ginger in a warm spot by the barn. Jury’s still out on whether there’s any actual ginger under there, but we’ll see in a month or so!
Some real progress has been made on the building of the greenhouse as well. There’s a stone foundation in place. Would you believe that all those rocks were picked up from around the property?? Around the stream and wooded areas, we have tons of these big rocks.
Using these found materials will definitely make the greenhouse feel more connected to the house and property!
If you’re looking for an update on the barn, it stalled for a bit this summer, since we had trouble sourcing 16 ft. cedar boards to replace the siding. However, we did eventually get them in and get them painted. With the windows all in place, we just have to put the siding back up!
The kitchen design for our cooking studio is also coming together—we’ve chosen appliances and are finalizing the layout now. Can’t wait to share more as we make further progress on it.
We had a couple more swarms with the bees (which was definitely a setback), and realized that the split hives we had earlier in spring weren’t quite strong enough to stay individual hives. We ended up re-consolidating them into two hives.
We’re feeding the bees supplemental sugar, but we’re happy to report that the queens in the two hives are laying healthy brood, and that they’re producing some nice honey for the winter.
We didn’t harvest honey this year—the bees need it! However, we’re looking forward to getting the bees through the winter season and seeing how they do next year.
To support the bees in late summer, we’ve also been planting flowers to give the bees more forage in what can normally be kind of lean times for them.
The chickens and ducks are still going strong—particularly our ducks! They’re champion layers—each laying a big duck egg daily.
We’ve been making big batches of salted duck eggs, which have been a hot commodity within the fam. All the elders and cousins—when they come over—fight over the ones we have “in stock” and ready to eat!
That’s all for now! We hope you enjoyed this quick summer farm update, and we’re looking forward to the weather cooling off and one of our favorite seasons here—fall!
