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.

Three varieties of eggplant and a very pretty little pattypan squash

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.

Cherry tomatoes

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!

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)

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.

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.

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.

Purple cabbage - so beautiful to look at that it earned its keep without ever producing even a tiny head of cabbage

Over the last couple of days, I’ve removed most of the remaining plants from last fall’s garden. The potatoes are all scrubbed and distributed in my refrigerator and those of a few neighbors. The sugar snap peas I planted in February are still in the ground with zillions of pods just starting to fatten up, and I’m waiting for two small patches of leeks to flower, so I can refresh my dried leeks and lavender arrangement. Everything else (except a short row of shallots) is gone, and the beds have been prepped for planting.

My vegetable garden, all ready for planting summer vegetables

It’s late. I normally plant my tomatoes on or near April 10, after I’m sure the soil is warm. This year it has been so cold that all I did on April 10 was email Natural Gardening and ask them to delay shipment two weeks on my tomatoes, peppers, and basil.

One and a half boxes will be devoted to six big cages of tomatoes (top right and lower left), peppers and basil will share the box at top left where the peas are growing now, the first crop of green beans will grow on my new bean fence in the box at lower left, and somewhere in the spaces left I will have pattypan squash and lemon cucumbers.

It’s cold, rainy and windy today, but the 10 day forecast shows nothing but sunshine after a few showers tomorrow morning. So now I’m just waiting for the UPS truck to deliver my plants and the rain to stop.

Last September, when I was shopping for vegetable plants for my winter garden, a nursery employee mentioned that they would be getting in gourmet seed potatoes “in a few weeks.” I’d never grown potatoes, so I set aside one of my raised beds for potatoes and went back in a few weeks. At the nursery they told me it would be a “few weeks.”

This went on, with me going to the nursery every two weeks, until late November, when they admitted they didn’t know whether the potatoes would be in before spring.

In desperation, I bought some organic Yukon Golds at Whole Foods and decided to plant them. My mom, who has lots of potato-growing experience from Montana and as a child in Wyoming, was very skeptical, but she helped me dig the right-sized and correctly spaced holes. We planted them, and I began to watch for something to start growing.

Newly planted potatoes

Suddenly, at the beginning of February, I saw little green leaves emerging, and within a few weeks, every single potato was growing happily.

The plants looked great, and before long Mom was helping me hill them up, at least as well as I could manage in the raised bed.

Potatoes by late March

Finally, earlier this week, I just couldn’t stand not knowing another minute (a recurring problem I have with root crops). I pulled one plant and dug out about a dozen potatoes, most about the size of an egg, a few larger. They were delicious!

So this morning, I pulled another. Voila! That’s a standard-sized dinner plate. They weighed a little over 2 pounds.

Newest of the new potatoes

Volunteer lamb's ears and alyssum

These are a few rules I’ve adopted after 24 years of working on the same small urban garden. None of these are rocket science, or anything new, but they are things I only really grasped after making the same mistakes time and again.

NO invasives allowed! I’ve fallen for so many over the years, only to have to fight them off for a few years once I’d decided they were trouble, trouble, trouble. I’m sure what turns out to be a pest varies depending on where you are, but a few I’ve brought home and come to hate are red valerian, Mexican evening primrose, several ornamental grasses, especially wild oats and pink ribbon grass, and worst of all, ornamental strawberries. These are all charming plants that soon became a nuisance in my garden.

Ornamental strawberry went wild in my yard! Mom and I managed to get most of it out this spring.

On the other hand, I love other plants that could be called invasive: tiny blue forget-me-nots, alyssum, lamb’s ears, and Mexican feather grass, which has has such fashion sense, knowing just where to sprout to do its feathery accent thing.

Don’t buy plants on a whim without knowing where they’ll fit. I try to follow this one, I really do, but sometimes I just can’t resist bringing something beautiful home and then searching for a place to put it.

Don’t scrimp. Bargain plants are rarely bargains. I buy healthy plants at nurseries where I know they are properly cared for. This is a rule that I never break anymore.

Experiment, but don’t hesitate to change course when it isn’t working. I can’t even count the number of times I’ve tried things that turned out to be really bad ideas. The best (worst) example is the flagstone paving I had installed with big gaps to grow lots of pretty groundcovers. Even with weedcloth under it all, the gaps were soon full of weeds. My followup experiment for this one is working better. Now those gaps are filled with a mosaic of pebbles and colorful tiles.

It took a long time to fill all the gaps between flagstones, but it was worth it!

Yes to mulch, no to chemicals.

Compost, but don’t compost weeds. Beware of buying compost that might contain weed seeds. I’m still paying the price for that load of composted rabbit poop I bought 12 years ago.