Happy Memorial Day from the Rockmans!
We’re harvesting our garden and cooking ribs!
First, the garden. It’s been raining here and I’ve been sick, so honestly it’s been a few days since I was out in may garden tending to it. This morning I go out and fine 9 cucumbers and two enormous zucchini.
Your eyes do not deceive you. One zucchini is 14 1/2 inches long and the other is 3 1/2 inches in diameter at it’s widest point! There were also a lot more cucumbers ready on the vine than we can eat so we were able to share them with a neighbor who has been admiring our garden for a while. So that was nice.
Next it was time to harvest our first potato plant. How many potatoes would there be? Would it even work since we started them in the bag and transplanted them after they were already growing green leaves? Would they be big? Small? Rotten?
This plant had grown the most when we transplanted it from the bag. The green was already above the ground so we don’t know if 4 potatoes is what to expect from the rest or not. We’ll be waiting longer to harvest the others – we want the plants to be more dead than this one was.
A few things I learned about potatoes in this process:
- their stalks are surprisingly woody
- they get “tomatoes” which are very poisonous and also very rare
- fresh potatoes have very tender skin. Rinsing them in water ripped the skin away from the flesh.
- I failed at growing potatoes in a bag but in the ground seems to have been a success.
- Potato plants get much larger than I expected and shaded out some of my other plants.
- We haven’t eaten them yet so I have yet to test out the freshness factor for taste!
That’s it for the garden! On to the ribs!
My husband never used to like ribs. In the past few years we’ve had some really good ones and he’s since decided he doesn’t like saucy (or crappy) ribs. So he wants to try making them on his own. As is his habit, he did some research. He spoke with my dad about it. He spoke with a coworker about it. And he spoke with the internet about it. He then mashed together everything he heard and did four different methods.
He started with baby back ribs and St. Louis Style Ribs.
We tried all four kinds and decided on a few tweaks. But overall for the first shot at ribs I think it was a success!
