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Summer’s end in the garden

By on September 27, 2010 in Garden, miscellaneous

All in all, it hasn’t been a bad summer in my vegetable garden. Strangely cool and mostly beautiful weather has given me tomatoes that just keep setting fruit at a nicely measured pace. Only once this summer did I find myself temporarily overwhelmed with tomatoes ripening all at once. That batch went into tomato soup.

I knew ripe carmellos and big beefs had recently begun to outpace what I was using, but I didn’t realize until I made a concerted effort to pick them all this morning that I had another 21 pounds to deal with somehow. The cool summer weather has given way to sizzling hot fall weather (did I mention this was a strange year?), so my usual fallback of slow roasting them in the oven just isn’t going to happen this week. My sunny kitchen is already the warmest room in the house, so I NEVER turn on the oven on hot days.

Instead, I prepped a big jelly roll pan of quartered, seeded tomatoes, drizzled with olive oil and sprinkled with garlic cloves, thyme and salt, and let them roast on my Weber gas grill all afternoon, with just the back burner turned on low. They’re looking and smelling great, and the only real disadvantage is that I can only do one pan at a time. Another batch tomorrow will give me four good-sized vacuum packed bags for the freezer.

The only other summer crop still going strong is basil. Most years it flowers and gets tough as soon as it gets really hot, but this year it still looks fresh and tastes great. I’m going to try to make pesto for the freezer this week.

My fall pole bean crop is blooming and beginning to form tiny beans. Sugar snap peas I planted a few weeks ago germinated poorly for some reason, so we replanted this morning. I hope it’s not too late to get a fall crop. And I’ve got half a box full of carrots just beginning to show their first true leaves.

The beast in the photo is Charlotte, who has had an enormous web between my sungold plants and the back fence (a distance of about 8 feet), for the past couple of months. We managed to stay out of each other’s way until yesterday, when I completely forgot and marched right through her web. Now I know how those flies feel.

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Green beans — another August garden update

By on August 11, 2010 in Food, Garden

I don’t know whether green beans are tempermental for everyone or just for me. One year they’ll be wildly successful so I think I’ve got it all figured out, then the next year they’re not so hot.

This is mostly a not-so-hot year. I’ve switched over to growing all pole beans since I put up my two bean fences, because I find pole beans easier to pick than bush beans, and it’s a better use of my limited garden space.

This year I planted one whole fence (8 feet) in blue lake beans, then a couple of weeks later, I planted the other fence with four short sections, one each musica, rattlesnake, purple pole and french gold. The blue lakes and musica tasted good, but there haven’t been many of them, the french gold produced nasty tough little curly yellow beans, and the purple beans are good, but they’re very slow, and just now starting to produce a skimpy crop.

The rattlesnakes, though, are fantastic! Long, slender, sweet, juicy, and plentiful, they’ve produced as many beans in their little two-foot section as everything else put together. They lose their pretty purple speckling when they’re cooked, but it really doesn’t matter since they taste so good.

The seed came in a mixed packet with the purple pole beans from Renee’s Garden Seeds, so this week I pulled out the blue lakes and replanted using all the remaining rattlesnake seeds from the packet. Depending on the weather, I may or may not get a nice fall crop.

I googled the bean to see whether it would be hard to find more seed for next year, and found that they are valued for hot and humid conditions in the south, and they are often grown for dried beans. Hot and humid is certainly not what they encountered here, but they were clearly happy anyway! One source said the name comes from their habit of forming a coil when they are fully mature.

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Tomatoes — August garden update

By on August 11, 2010 in Food, Garden

Normally I have a love-hate relationship with August, when I have an abundance of tomatoes but it’s too hot to pick them after 8 am. This year it’s all love-love, glorious tomatoes and lovely summer days in the low 80s!

A few days ago I picked 29 pounds! I’d been letting the full-size tomatoes stay on the vine until they were completely ripe, but it was still a surprising large one-day haul for my 6 cages of two plants each. I made a huge pot of tomato soup using this recipe. I have 10 quarts in the freezer. I also gave a bunch away, but we still have huge bowls of them on the kitchen counter and we’re eating tomatoes every meal and for snacks.

I’ve only had two tomato hornworms this year.  I saw minor damage from one about two weeks ago, but I could never find it and the damage stopped, so I assume a bird got it or something.  I spotted  the second before it did much harm and dispatched it to the trash.  I’m sure there will be more before the season is over!

With one exception, I’m very pleased with the varieties I’m growing this year.

Sungold cherry tomatoes, my longtime favorite, taste as good as ever but don’t seem quite as productive as they have in past years. Maybe this year’s unusually cool weather has slowed them down a bit.

My new red cherry tomatoes, sugar snacks, are wonderful. They’re not quite as sweet as the sungolds, but with a more pronounced tomato flavor. They produce lots of long clusters of plump fruits that never seem to split. I’ll definitely plant these again, since they’re far more satisfactory than the sweet 100s I used to grow.

The big beefs have been wonderful, HUGE beefsteak tomatoes with perfect color and flavor. I picked one a few weeks ago that was 1.3 pounds! These make the best BLTs, meaty enough that they don’t make the bread soggy, but still juicy and sweet.

Carmellos are a nice mid-size salad tomato that I always grow when I can find the plants. They’re as good as ever this year, although the size of the fruit seems more variable than usual.

I had one success with my two experiments, pruden’s purple and persimmon. The persimmons are big tasty bright orange tomatoes that I would happily grow again. The pruden’s purple has produced two huge mushy flavorless tomatoes, kind of an anemic pink, with blossom end rot and serious cracking. That variety will NOT be invited back!

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Aubergine revelation

By on July 11, 2010 in Food, Garden

Gratin with onion, eggplant, peppers, fennel, summer squash, tomatoes, herbs and cheese

Sometimes bitter, sometimes tasteless, but almost always slimy, especially deep-fried with a greasy coating, eggplant has always been right up there with beets and okra on the short list of vegetables I really, really dislike. I even hate the name “eggplant,” although I love “aubergine,” the French name.

The plants are attractive, though, the fruits beautiful, and I’m a sucker for attractive plants with beautiful fruits, so that’s why I have eggplant on hand in spite of my dislike for it.

I’ve been reading the blogs of Ken and Walt, Americans who live in my favorite part of the Loire Valley in France, for years now. (They live only a few km from the place where we love to stay in the Loire, so we were lucky to spend some time with them on our last visit in 2007.) I have always marveled at their blog posts about the wonderful food they cook, so I paid attention when Ken commented on my recent post about my eggplant problem and suggested a gratin recipe.

I was starting with too big a gratin dish and too few eggplants, so I when I roasted the eggplant slices ahead of time, I also roasted a couple of thick-sliced sweet Walla Walla onions, two big red bell peppers and one yellow one, and a couple of fennel bulbs. Then I layered it all into the gratin dish: onions first, then eggplant, chunks of roasted pepper, a generous sprinkling of fresh thyme leaves, grated mozzarella, then fennel, a few summer squash, and a layer of thickly sliced tomatoes. I topped it all with more mozzarella, more thyme, and a drizzle of olive oil. After an hour in a 400-degree oven, I added freshly grated parmesan and lots of torn basil leaves, turned off the oven and let it continue to cook down for another 30 minutes or so as the oven cooled off. With a crusty baguette and glass of rose, it was dinner.

Now. Given those ingredients, this couldn’t be bad, but I fully expected to pick out the eggplant and eat the rest. Instead, the silky–not slimy–slightly sweet flesh of the aubergine was my favorite part of a really delicious dish!

I’ve made vegetable gratins before, but my results have always been sort of ho-hum. I think the difference this time was roasting the vegetables ahead of time for more flavor and using more cheese instead of just a perfunctory sprinkling of parmesan.

Thanks, Ken! The recipe will be fun to play with all summer, varying the herbs, cheese, and selection of vegetables. Whatever else I do, next time I’ll use more eggplant aubergine.

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July Garden Update

By on July 6, 2010 in Food, Garden

After a very slow start, summer weather has arrived and my garden is finally starting to produce. I’m getting about a dozen a day of each variety of cherry tomatoes, the sungolds and the sugar snacks, but none of the large tomatoes show any color yet. The plants are loaded with big green fruit, so it will be fantastic when it finally happens.

For the past few days, I’ve been collecting three or four green beans a day and adding them to a bag in the crisper drawer waiting to accumulate enough for two servings. I’m tired of waiting, so tomorrow night’s dinner menu will feature a tiny helping of perfect little beans.

Only one summer squash so far, the beauty you see in the photo above. I may carve it up and serve it with the beans.

The eggplants, on the other hand, are producing like crazy, especially the plant with the little purple ones. I’d love suggestions for what to do with them all, because I don’t normally use them except in ratatouille.

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In honor of summer: Sungolds!

By on June 22, 2010 in Garden

My first ripe tomatoes of the season

My Sungold tomatoes have started to ripen. They are orange cherry tomatoes, so the three brightest colored ones are fully ripe. Or make that two, because I had to eat the one on the far left right after I took the picture. This is three weeks later than normal, and the plants went in three weeks later than they usually do. I didn’t expect that time to be so precise. All of my tomato plants are now LOADED with fruit, some full-size, although I don’t see any others ripening just yet. It’s going to be a good year!

My blue lake green beans are reaching the top of their trellis and blooming, and the four other varieties I planted a few weeks later are growing like crazy. The Spanish musicas are especially fast and have almost caught up to the blue lakes. It’s fun to see the differences between the four bean varieties side by side. My peppers and eggplant have a few small fruits, and the summer squash has a bunch of flower buds.

Summer is really here!

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Best garden tour ever

By on June 7, 2010 in Garden

Permaculture garden on the side of the river levee. The summer squash are already producing, and look at that fennel!
(Photo by Dave Larzelere)

The very best garden tours take you to real people’s real gardens, where you can talk to the gardeners who created them and do the work. The tour I attended yesterday may be my favorite of all time. Just five gardens, but incredible variety!

First, the permaculture garden created by Holly. The large mixed ornamental/edible garden with terraces on the side of the Sacramento river levee just vibrated with life and fertility. I loved to listen to Holly – she’s incredibly knowledgeable about permaculture, but even more than that, she seemed so attuned to that space and those plants that she knew exactly what they needed to thrive.

Mine was second, then Elizabeth’s back yard garden. I loved it. She had curving beds carefully situated throughout the back yard to take advantage of sun and shade and lots of wonderful plantings and whimsical accents. I also really liked her outdoor dining area–so comfortable and inviting that I just wanted to plop down and stay.

Dave’s large garden was a revelation to me. He chooses beautiful, vigorous, waterwise plants and just sets them free. He has a deep backyard with a winding path through the middle and a riot of beautiful plants, such as huge purple butterfly bushes, that have been allowed to spread and intermingle in a completely natural way. This whole approach made a deep impression on me. I doubt that I’d ever be able to relinquish control that much, but I just love the beauty of what he’s created. And I’ll definitely think twice before I pull up a volunteer next time.

One of Karen's two large, beautiful koi ponds.
(Photo by Dave Larzelere)

Finally, Karen’s garden was amazing. She grows all edibles — bananas and kiwis and avocados and every fruit tree imaginable, plus she has gorgeous koi ponds in the backyard, a freestanding music/band room that she built herself for her own rock band and her sons’ bands to practice, a beautiful mosaic-tiled sitting area in front (she did it herself), murals she painted on the garage wall and a “Monet” mural she’s painting for the garden gate, a beehive, a bat house, and on and on. She’s a whirlwind of creativity.

Karen's beehive. She attended beekeeping school to learn how to care for them!
(Photo by Dave Larzelere)

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June garden, April weather

By on June 5, 2010 in Garden

Tomatoes lower left and upper right, basil, eggplant & beans lower right, squash and beans upper left. Leek flowers in background and nasturtiums here and there.

After a long, cool, wintry spring, we may be about to jump headfirst into summer. The forecast says the temp will finally reach 90 today, weeks later than our normal first 90 of the year.

Except for some powdery mildew on my roses and crepe myrtle, the cool, wet spring doesn’t really seem to have done any harm. In fact, I think my tomatoes are better for having a chance to get settled in and growing well before that first blast of summer heat. They couldn’t look healthier, and the two cherry varieties (sungold and sugar smack) have reached the seventh rung on the tomato cages, about 36 inches. They were about 12 inches high when I did the last blog update, 17 days ago!

Every tomato plant has set little tomatoes, and the sungold has several of those long clusters that make me so happy. Normally, I would have found one or two ripe sungolds by this time, but it looks like that’s still a few weeks away.

Everything else is growing just as well. I pulled out the peas and planted an assortment of other pole beans on that long trellis. The other trellis is all Blue Lake pole beans, so on the new one, I planted 1/4 each Spanish Musica, rattlesnake, purple pole and French gold. If nothing else, it should be colorful!

Elsewhere in the garden, things are looking good. The raised planter on the side of the house (pictured in my header) is overflowing with color, dominated by the snapdragons I planted for winter color last fall. They just sat there looking uncomfortable until about a month ago, and now they’re blooming their heads off. It will interesting to see how long they last in the summer heat. My back fence is completely covered with white star jasmine blossoms that perfume the whole garden, house, and probably the neighbors’ as well now that it’s finally warmed up. That’s only fair, considering the cold suppressed the citrus blossom smell almost entirely this spring.

About a year ago, I joined a yahoo group of mostly women gardeners here in East Sac. Tomorrow we’re having a private tour of one anothers’ gardens. I’m looking forward to seeing the rest of them and showing off my own.

Jasmine keeps growing over this sun and a matching moon plaque. Occasionally I remember them and prune away enough to expose them again.

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Summer garden progress

By on May 19, 2010 in Garden

The peas should probably be classified as winter/spring garden plants, but this year’s cool weather has allowed them to linger on and on and on. I love sugar snap peas, but I’m beginning to tire of them! Also, I think I probably should have shopped more carefully for the seeds I used. I bought a package of “Suzie Irwin’s Squirrel’s Choice Sugar Snap Pole Peas” at my garden center, and I seem to have an assortment of the sugar snaps I expected mixed with snow peas and regular garden peas. I won’t buy that brand again.

When I take the peas out in a few weeks, I’ll plant a second crop of pole beans. I NEVER get tired of green beans.

I planted tomatoes May 1, when they looked like this:

I measure the growth of my tomato plants by the squares in the cages, which are about five inches. When they were planted, they just barely reached the first five inch mark, but now they’ve more than doubled in height. Two and a half weeks later, the same plant looks like this.

(That’s Fat Lizzie doing her head-down badger walk in the background.)

I planted six California Wonder pepper plants, three gold and three red, about a week ago. The plants were small, but they seem to be off to a good start.

My Blue Lake pole beans are just getting their second set of leaves after a cruel attack by snails (Sluggo to the rescue), and my lemon cucumber and green and yellow pattypan squash seeds just sprouted in the past couple of days.

I also planted three eggplants, even though I’m not all that fond of eggplant, because they are such beautiful plants. I do like ratatouille (well disguised eggplant) and I can always leave them on the neighbors’ porches.

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Planting tomatoes

By on May 2, 2010 in Garden

I order my tomato plants from a company only 80 miles or so away. I don’t start them from seed because I don’t really have a place indoors to do it, and because I have room for only one or two of each of five or six varieties.

I used to buy them at local nurseries, but one too many times I got tomatoes that obviously weren’t the variety labeled. I don’t know if it’s the fault of the nursery, or the wholesaler, or careless customers, but it made me crazy.

Anyway, Natural Gardening Company has a wonderful selection of varieties and strong, healthy plants. They arrive at my house just one day after they’re shipped, in beautiful condition.

This year I planted 4 Carmellos, 2 Sungold, 2 Sugar Snack, 2 Big Beef, 1 Pruden’s Purple, and 1 Persimmon. I planted them two to a cage on April 29, almost three weeks later than normal, because of our cold rainy spring. In my experience, it works better to wait than to set plants out too early — they really don’t like the cold.

I know most people would tell me that it’s a terrible mistake to plant them two to a cage, but I tried it several years ago with one cage and had wonderful results, so I’ve been doing it successfully ever since. I also don’t prune suckers from my plants. With Sacramento’s hot sun, I think the extra leaves help protect the fruits from sunburn.

I usually get my first ripe tomatoes (a few sungolds or other cherry size) by June 1. This year I think I’ll be lucky to have any by mid-June.

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