Posts Tagged 'Vegetables'

Garlic scapes

I realized this week that the season was moving on for the garlic that I had planted last fall.  I could see that some of them were starting to put up buds for flowers so I began to look up when I’m supposed to harvest them (this is our first venture into growing anything beyond elephant garlic).  And that’s when I read about garlic scapes.  It turns out that culturally one needs to trim off the new buds to allow the plant to put more energy into the bulb (which is the part we normally plan to eat).  But for the hardscape garlic (most of our crop is hardscape whereas commercial garlics are the softscape variety) that new growth comes up on a curly green shoot that makes an epicurean delight all in itself.  By luck I was able to harvest the scapes at just the right time (when they are still curling and flexible).

Cutting up the scapes

Recipes abound online for using these cuttings.  But far and away the favorite use seems to be pesto.  And after our experiment last night I can see why.

Garlic scape pesto

Beth tossed this creamy pesto into a vegetarian pasta dish with sun-dried tomatoes and pine nuts, as well as fresh basil from the garden, and —voila! — we had a delightful eating experience.

Pasta with garlic scape pesto

We also spread the pesto directly on toasted sourdough for a very rich and delicious side dish for the meal… Yum!  The scapes have a kind of essence of garlic flavor with no sharp bite but a delightful aftertaste.

We had also brought in a large bowl of blueberries yesterday morning.

Blueberry pickings

Blueberries en masse

They also had to be part of the menu.  The night before we had taken toasted pound cake (received as a barter gift for blueberries) added unsweetened apricot prevserves, ice cream, blueberries, and amaretto for another sinful eating experience.  Sorry, no picture, that one vanished very rapidly…

Just to show that we don’t just eat around here, we also planted a nice set of Bell Heathers that Beth found at the local Big Box store.  This was a variety, C.D. Eason, that I don’t recall seeing here before.  The test will be how they last through summer and winter, but at the moment they look very nice on the garage bank.

Bell Heathers on the garage bank

Bell Heather 'C.D. Eason'

This is the time of year when I venture to California to visit with my mother.  While yet another snowstorm covers up the snowdrops again I visited my mother last week and checked up on the plants that are growing vigorously almost any time of year.  The outstanding elements in January are always the pair of Camellias that dominate the side of the house.

Camellia blooms dripping off the bush

Camellia wall

They grow so easily and flower so vigorously that it seems almost criminal.

Another spot that gets my every couple of months check is the back bed.  The back of the yard was once a lovely flower garden that my Dad planted but it got overrun with nut grass.  My cure was to build up the bed and put in pots with a drip irrigation system that waters only the pots not the surrounding earth.  This I did quite a few years ago and by and large it works pretty well if the irrigation tubes don’t get knocked off or the timer reset.

The back garden

There are now three dwarf citrus trees along the back wall and numerous perennials.  My mother pointed out last trip the value of pinning down the drip irrigation tubes and that has proved to be a very valuable step.  The citrus are yielding less than last year, but everyone is still pretty much alive back there and that’s a major plus.  That’s Cape Honeysuckle with the orange flowers hanging down from the porch.

Cape Honeysuckle (Tecomaria capensis)

This is a vigorous plant with attractive flowers the year round.

It’s a little bit early for the plants in the back bed to be flourishing, but I did notice that because of the heavy rains last month the part of the garden outside of the pots that does not get watered by irrigation was covered withs seedling Calendulas, a number of which were already up to flowering size.

Calendulas self-seeding

One could do worse than having Calendulas go wild.

I added a few plants this trip, as is my common practice.  This time I found a really nice tall Pink Coral Pea.  It fit in very nicely where the Dahlia had been eaten by snails and next to where the Bougainvillea has not made up its mind whether to grow or not.

New Pink Coral Pea (Hardenbergia violacea)

The large vine provides instant color to the bed.  However the joke was on me.  As my mother pointed out we already had two very large specimens of this big shrubby vine at the side of the house.

Existing Pink Cora Pea

Because the nursery plant was well ahead in flowering I didn’t realize that the same plants were already in the yard.  Credit one to the supervisor.

The Supervisor

I also put in a Peacock flower and an Anemone Coronaria, but the final step as an investment for the future was to add a little tomato plant.

Tomato seedling (Celebrity)

This one is surrounded by diatomaceous earth to provide an ancient drying spell against snails which run rampant in California gardens.  We’ll see if it makes a difference to the slimy sort…

The monthly Picture This Photo Contest sponsored by Gardening Gone Wild has the theme Abundant Harvest.  I can’t say we currently have sufficient output from the vegetable garden to qualify for abundant harvest.  I could harvest all those Cosmos that I pictured in my previous post but that seems a bit wasteful — to pick all those flowers just for a photo op.  So instead, consistent with the GGW guidance, I explored some of our previous harvests.

I went through our many picking basket shots

One of many picking baskets

and the various apple baskets

one of many apple baskets

and the many flower bouquets

One of many flower bouquets

and even the wild wineberries that we harvest.

Wineberries grow wild in the White's forest

I even looked at the fiddlehead fern salad that we enjoyed in Boston

Fiddlehead fern Salad in Boston

but I found nothing that so profoundly expressed the theme of Abundant Harvest as this image from the Lake Market in Calcutta.  This will be my submission to the October Photo Contest…

Vegetables at Lake Market, Calcutta

To fully appreciate this scene you have to understand that these vegetables arrive in the middle of the Calcutta metropolis from market gardens in the suburbs only by a difficult early morning journey (the traffic is incredible) and then they will all be sold that day (forget about refrigeration) for use later the same day.  While Calcutta may not be on everyone’s tour list for the first trip to India I guarantee that a visit to Lake Market will make you think carefully about what you have gained and what you have lost with the demise of the farm/market economy.  Most of the crop land around Calcutta is incredibly productive with as many as three crops a year.  We toured one farm that was about as big as our own 7 acres and it made us think twice to realize how many people were supported by the same quantity of land in the suburbs of populous Calcutta.

The daily picking baskets

I saw a reference to Summer Fest on A Way to Garden and since this was the Tomato week for that celebration I thought it would be good to talk about the tomato harvest here.

Last week we saw the movie Julie & Julia (Great flick!).  It certainly sets a high standard for appreciation of food and it’s preparation (though I probably saw more butter than I’ve eaten in my lifetime).  We have currently been relishing our own incoming produce and the many minor variations of cooking everything that’s being harvested.  It’s mostly tomatoes, peppers, squash, cucumbers, beans, onions, and eggplant.  The evening meal is some variation of tomatoes, peppers, squash, onions and eggplant stir fried together in olive oil and balsamic vinegar with garlic and herbs to taste (Beth uses fresh stuff from her herb garden and I tend to grab the dried products off the shelf).  For protein we throw in some tofu or chicken meatballs and a little mozzarella cheese.  If I’m the one doing the mixing some kind of nuts will be involved (pine nuts, hazelnuts, or walnuts).  Every night is slightly different but always delicious.  The ritual ends with us lifting the plate to our lips and draining the plate of the last of the luscious tomato-based sauce.  Altogether with cutting up this takes two people maybe 15 minutes to prepare and could not be much better.

However, even with this kind of eating we’re not even close to using the produce.  Beth cooked up a couple of  batches of tomato sauce for the winter this week.  This gives her more opportunity to tap into her herb garden.  And we’ve been giving stuff away as well.  And yet, the refrigerator overfloweth.  I feel bad for the folks in the northeast who’ve been hit by blight.  We were fortunate that everything was grown from seed and we have had sort of a mixed bag of rainfall — good rain early on and a lot of dry sunny days in July/August — which has had me doing hand watering but it’s been good for the tomatoes and peppers.  I don’t think we’ve ever had peppers this nice.

Some big blocky red peppers

Tomatoes are slowing down but many still on the vines

The hot weather has made it less desirable to work in the garden and it is starting to get away from me.  But I also know that we are going hiking in the west in a few days so that there is only so much I can do anyway.

Garden is getting overgrown

Hummingbird in the Corn

With all the flowers in the yard doing their thing with the gay profusion of high summer it’s worth noting that there is that ‘other garden’ where all the veggies are coming into the house on a daily basis.  Now that the vegetable garden is fully fenced off from the deer (thanks Benner Gardens) for the first time we are getting yields that are reminiscent of when we first moved here.  That is to say more than any two people could possibly use.

Bringing in the Corn

Of course even though we relish the taste of the fresh beans,corn,squash, potatoes, tomatoes, peppers, peas, and so on, it was never just about the food coming in.  It’s the whole process of putting seed in the ground, feeling that fertile earth between your fingers (and under your fingernails), anticipating the rainfalls that make it happen, and then seeing the flowers that lead to the veggies.  And along the way are all the birds and insects that come with the process.

Over time we have added more and more flowers to the vegetable garden.  I guess it was a gradual recognition that a 5000 square ft garden produces more food than we really can use.  I mean it’s hard to really justfiy 20 tomato plants… .  We now plant a large cutting row in the garden in addition to the sunflowers, dahlias, and gladiolas which have their own dedicated row.  Both contribute to the birds and butterflies that we see in the ‘vegetable garden’.

Cutting Garden

The cutting row is chiefly zinnias, cosmos and marigolds, but any of the wildflower seeds that can compete with them are encouraged to grow as well.

Now it may be the careful digging of all those rows or just possibly one of the rainiest May-June periods that I can recall but the garden as a whole, flowers and veggies, is growing wonderfully well.

Cukes in the garden trail up the fence

Even the early corn is 6' high

Strawberries and Peas

This year I took a good look at the old strawberry row replete with weeds that were very well established.  I decided it was time to start a new row.  This had two major positives right off the bat.  It meant I didn’t have to weed the old row and the weeds would definitely have a slower start on the new row.  On the other hand it’s a fair amount of labor to put in a new row if you do it well.  So I compromised by putting in a partial row on the theory that even unweeded the old row was going to yield some berries.  

I usually plant a double row with 1 foot spacing so even a partial row is 75 plants to be planted by my extensive labor force (me).  The ground has to be well-tilled so it has all the usual problems of trying to get plants in the ground around the April rainstorms.  I finally got them in about mid-April.  And then added pine bark mulch to try to suppress the weeds for a while.  I’ve used straw in the past but it’s tough to find bales with no grass seeds.  

As it turns out we did get a fair amount of strawberries from the old plants and now the new plants are beginning to yield.

The New Strawberry Row

Now a better man than I would have pinched off the blossoms so that the plants could go stronger for next year but I confess to limits in my ability to delay gratification.

Earliglow Strawberries

The varieties I put in are not particularly special (Earliglow, Allstar, and Sparkle) but hey anything you plant in your home garden is so much better than what you find in the supermarket.  And there is nothing quite like picking a hot strawberry and eating it in the garden.

Another daily yield right now is coming from the salad crops.  The combination of actually weeding them and the regular rainfall has given us some of the best greens we’ve had in a while.

Salad Crops in Early June

And with peas and asparagus there has been ample reward to going out to the garden every day…