Surprise Vegetables

Today I finally got around to weeding around the greenhouse and the road garden. To my surprise some carrots and a potato somehow survived the Weedpacalypse.

A Peck of Peppers

 One peck is 8 dry quarts, or 1/4 of a bushel.
Yeah, I don't know what to make of that either....

Well, I am not Peter Piper, and the peppers are not pickled, but I probably picked a peck of them this evening with the help of the oldest boy and his flashlight. The cold wind and clear skies spell killing frost to me, so I thought I should get them done ASAP.

Then, I get them into the house, and the wife says- "Where did these come from? It's mid-November!"
So, anyway, since we cannot possibly use them all fresh, I diced up a kilo of them, wrapped them in 100g packets, and put them in the ziplock. The only problem is that if I did all of them except for the 10-15 we might get through fresh, we would have a freezer of nothing but peppers...

Hellooooo neighbors and students!!!! Or if you live in Japan and want to share the bounty, drop me an e-mail.

But at any rate, if you find yourself with a peck of peppers and some freezer space, just dice them up and put them in sandwich bags or plastic wrap, then into a big ziplock and freeze them. You don't need to blanch them, making peppers the easiest garden veggie to freeze for the winter.

This winter's spaghetti sauce will be twice as good due to these beauties.


Now what to do with 2 Kg of green paste tomatoes.... Suggestions?

Switching To Flowers

The plan of growing my own food has taken a bit of a detour thanks to the ongoing Nuclear crisis. The wife (rightly) put her foot down and said: "No more garden or local vegetables for the children or me."
As much as it pains me to admit it, she is right. The Japanese Government allows ridiculously high levels of contamination- up to 100 Bq/Kg.
I found this online-

Given several uncertainties in the data basis for risk assessment we must recommend that infants, children and adolescents be given no food or beverages with a contamination of more than 4 Becquerel of the leading radionuclide Cesium-137 per kilogram.We recommend that grown-ups refrain from consuming food and beverages with a contamination of more than 8 Becquerel per kilogram of the leading radionuclide Cesium-137.

 I of course plan on having my crops tested at the city testing station, but they can only measure down to16Bq/Kg. What if there are 15 in my food? They would come back as "clean".

I have a pathological need to grow things. I can't help it. So I am switching to growing flowers mostly. Of course, I will grow the most wonderful flowers in the world- Sunflowers! Giant ones! 2m and more! (insert joke about men always thinking about size here) I will also grow some pumpkins for Halloween, and a few vegetables for me and me alone. They say as a rule of thumb, that 1% of the soil contamination will enter your crops. I have 400Bq/kg in the soil, so I can expect about 4 in the crops. But since I can't prove that it is less than four, so I won't feed them to my kids. I am 40 now, and think I can probably take that chance.

As an added bonus, I plan to test the garden soil again before the sunflowers, and again after I take them out by the roots. I will also test the roots of the flowers to see how much Cesium-137 they suck up. In the control plot I will fertilize with heavy N and P, but no extra K. I hypothesize that the plants will take up extra Cs, thinking it is Potassium.