Sunday, December 06, 2009

Here's a look at what I picked from the garden on Thanksgiving day: beets, kale, and leeks. We used the beets and leeks in our Thanksgiving meal and the kale for another dish.

I have a good crop of leeks this year--probably the best I've ever grown. Beets, however, seem to be in constant shortage. I never seem to plant enough to suit my appetite for them. Next year, I'll definitely plant more. And more kale, too.


Here's how the garden looks today. We had our first snow yesterday. Last weekend I mulched around the artichoke plants and covered the asparagus and garlic beds with leaves raked from the yard. I'm trying to keep the artichoke plants especially well mulched so that the crowns of the plants will make it through winter. In our Zone 7, we are teetering on the edge of temperatures that would kill globe artichokes in the winter, so this is a bit of an experiment to see if they'll make it. We had 5 very tasty artichokes this year. Not many, but they were so delicious (and such pretty plants) that I feel they're worth the effort.

Earlier this week, our neighbors gave us some of their extra Jerusalem artichoke bulbs to plant. Unfortunately, the timing and weather make it impossible for me to get them in the ground right now. Jerusalem artichokes will grow here, but they can be invasive (unless we eat them all, of course!).


Here are the brussels sprouts I grew this season. I haven't harvested any yet, as I was hoping they would get a little bigger. They seem to be opening up more than getting any bigger, though. I will probably harvest a few and try them out this week. Last year, I had NO success growing brussels sprouts, so this is good progress.

Tomatoes for dinner

Tuesday, August 11, 2009

Here's a look at the latest treats from our garden. The first peppers are coming in now, and we've been trying to keep up with a bumper crop of heirloom tomatoes. I know, what a problem to have, right?

We planted four varieties of tomatoes this year: 'Cherokee Purple,' 'Green Zebra,' 'San Marzano,' and 'Gold Medal.' Favorites-wise, I'd rank them in that order, with the 'Cherokees' reigning supreme.

We've been knocking out a lot of these in gazpacho -- a perfect, refreshing meal for hot summer days. We've also had various tomato salads. And here's a tomato stack filled with a tangy chive goat cheese we picked up from the Stonyman Gourmet Farmer. The finishing touch is a homemade chive oil, made by my own resident gourmet, Michael. He creates, and I happily eat!


We made this season's first batch of tomato sauce with the 'San Marzano' tomatoes, and then we promptly taste-tested it for Sunday night's dinner! Mmmm...

We finished off dinner with this fresh nectarine tart I made. There aren't any garden ingredients in there, but it was so pretty I figured it was blog-worthy.

Eggplants coming along

Friday, July 31, 2009

I have at least 5 eggplants that are plumping up now. So far, this is my best success with eggplant -- ever. The variety I'm trying out is 'Black Beauty,' which can grow fruits 8-10 inches long, 1-3 pounds each. The one in the foreground of the photo is not quite tennis-ball size yet, so we still have a way to go before picking. Not a problem, since we are presently trying to keep up with an abundance of ripening tomatoes!

New use for that old pickup truck

Too bad we traded in the old pickup truck. We could have grown food in it! Check out this video about the Truck Farm. Fun idea. Inspirational. And I love the singing. "...The arugula grows, the basil grows, the lettuce grows... oh, oh, sweet, sweet Truck Farm grow...". You've never seen a CSA like this.

Beans, tomatoes, beets & brussels

Tuesday, July 21, 2009

We've eaten a lot of beans from the garden over the last month. Wax beans, green beans, purple beans -- we've had them by the colander full.


My favorite way to eat fresh beans is in salads with a simple vinaigrette. Quick, easy, no fuss summer food.


After several rounds of picking though -- and yet another colander full -- I was getting tired of beans. I'm absolutely hankering to move on to...

'Green Zebra' tomatoes

TOMATOES!

It's been a long wait for the tomatoes we started from seed back in February. This past weekend we had our first couple of ripe 'Green Zebras.' I love their beautiful green contrast when paired up with regular red tomatoes in a salad.

We are about a day away from slicing into the season's first 'Cherokee Purple.' Those were our favorite among the heirloom tomatoes we grew last year.

Elsewhere in the garden, one of my favorite scenes is this one: A riotous mess of greens (and reds!) in all manner of textures.


In here is curly endive (so bitter that we never eat any of it), and bolting red lettuce and 'Red Russian' kale. The spiky plants are my globe artichokes, which I'm really excited about. No sign of any chokes emerging yet, but the plants are absolutely gorgeous.


Whether they get any artichokes or not, I'd consider keeping these plants in my landscape just for their pretty and unusual foliage.


Here's one of my pickings of beets. These were from a 'Gourmet Blend' of seeds that included 'Golden,' 'Chioggia,' and 'Bull's Blood' red. No matter how many beets I get, I never seem to have enough to suit my liking for them. I perpetually have on my garden to-do list: plant more beets.

I've started sowing seeds for fall crops. Yes, beets are in, and so is kale, kohlrabi, carrots, and cauliflower. I have five brussels sprouts plants growing. Last year I failed miserably with brussels, having planted them too late in the season. This time around I planted seedlings right after we dug out our garlic at the end of June. So far the plants look healthy and content, and I can see an add-on of growth with each passing day. Promising!

Brussels sprouts

Growing Eggplant

Wednesday, June 24, 2009

One of the things I'm most looking forward to from my garden this summer is eggplant. We tried growing eggplant at the community garden several years ago, but we were terribly unsuccessful with it. At best, we got one marble-sized fruit from a plant that had leaves as lacy as a bridal veil because of persistent flea beetle damage. I came to the conclusion that it just wasn't possible to grow eggplant around here.

Eggplant and catnip growing together on the left, peppers and marigolds on the right

But I've since heard that others have had success growing eggplant in our Zone 7, and so I decided to give it another go this year. This time, I did more research and wanted to try out a few tactics I'd read about:

1. I sowed seeds early -- indoors in February -- so that I would have good-sized plants to put outside after any danger of spring frost had passed. Flea beetles are less attracted to eggplant foliage that has toughened up. They prefer to feast on young, tender seedlings--something I witnessed first-hand with my own past plantings.

Eggplants, like peppers, are tropical plants that need a long growing season. So I started my seeds under grow lights around the same time I started my pepper seeds, in February. Eggplant plants like to stay warm, so I used a heating mat under their pots. By the time I put my plants in the ground in mid May, they were about 6 - 8 inches tall.

Admittedly, they weren't the healthiest looking plants I'd ever grown. The long stay indoors and the extended hardening off process, repeatedly interrupted by this spring's cold snaps, made the plants suffer. But these were still the earliest and biggest eggplant plants I'd ever started with, and that's progress.


2. I put bricks near the base of the plants when I planted them outside. Somewhere I read that putting stones near the base of eggplant plants will help them stay warm. The stones absorb warmth from the sun in the day and then give off residual heat in the night, creating a cozy micro climate for these sensitive plants that don't like to be in anything below 55 degrees Fahrenheit. The plants have grown up enough now that the bricks are shaded during much of the day, so they probably aren't helping much anymore. Early on, though, perhaps they helped.

3. I made catnip the companion. Catnip is said to be a natural deterrent to flea beetles. I divided the catnip I grew last year (which, by the way, my cat wanted nothing of) and I put it to good use in the bed where I put my eggplants. The two companions are growing well--and I think they look nice together too.

So here we are today and I'm happy to report that I have my best-looking eggplant plants ever. There's even a blossom on one of them!


I do see a few flea beetles around, and there is evidence that something even bigger has been sampling the leaves, but the damage overall is far less severe than what I'd seen in the past when we sowed very young seedlings.


I can't say for sure if this conquering-of-the-bugs success can be attributed to any or all of the above tactics, but something seems to be working. We added mushroom compost to our soil, too, this spring, and that seems to have helped all of our plants come along. I just hope all goes well from here on out. We are already daydreaming about eggplant meals.

Fresh pea soup

Sunday, June 14, 2009

Have you ever eaten fresh pea soup? Prior to this latest experiment with my garden produce, I'd only ever had the kind made with dried peas and ham. Good as grandma's dried pea soup was--and, boy, it was good the way she made it--I was intrigued when I read Alice Waters' recipe for a version made with fresh peas (in The Art of Simple Food).


I needed to gather about 2 to 3 cups of peas for the recipe. And the exciting part here is that, for the first time in my five years with an edible garden, 2 to 3 cups of shelled peas was a real possibility. At last, I had a good space in which to plant a decent quantity of seeds, and I got them in the ground early. The result? A bunch of now-shoulder-high plants, dripping with pods ready for picking.

Having learned in the past that peas get terribly starchy and bitter if left on the vine too long, I've been keeping a good eye on them this year. I picked one round of the plumpest pods early last week. That gave me a little more than a cup's worth, which I decided to blanch and freeze until I could collect another round on the weekend. (Yes, a cup's worth of peas collected in a single day is considered "success" in my still "small scale" veg garden.)


Here's the simple process for blanching and freezing:

• Put on a pot of water to boil while you're shelling your peas
• Get a bowl of ice water ready
• Add the peas to the boiling water and let them cook for about 90 seconds
• Strain out the peas and drop them immediately into the ice bath to stop the cooking process
• Leave them in the ice bath for all long as you boiled them--90 seconds
• Drain the peas, put them in a freezer bag and store
  

That's it! The blanching process locks in the peas' sweet flavor. It's a good process to do if you want to store fresh peas for later use. That way, they don't turn starchy and horrible tasting.


Over the weekend, I picked a second round of peas--about a cup and a half or so--and combined the fresh and frozen batches with onions sauteed in olive oil, salt, and a few cups of water. I put the whole bit through the food mill, and there we had it--the freshest, sweetest, most brilliantly colored pea soup I've ever eaten.


Previous posts about peas:
Eating the Peas
Little Marvels and the Not-So-Marvelous

Plant diversity and benficial insects

Friday, June 05, 2009

Chervil flowers attract beneficial insects

Last night I attended a talk on plant diversity and its influence on beneficial insects, presented by University of Maryland's Dr. Paula Shrewsbury at our monthly Master Gardeners meeting. Going into it, I figured I already knew the gist of the message: gardens with a greater diversity of plant types will provide habitat for a wide variety of insects, and so, in this bug-eat-bug world, there will be enough "good bugs" to take care of the "bad bugs," naturally, without chemical intervention. That was the essence of the presentation, but there were several points that were new and particularly interesting to me:

1.) Structural complexity is as important as plant species diversity. Translating the bio-speak, that means it's good to have a mix of distinctive layers of vegetation in your landscape, if possible: overstory trees, understory trees, shrubs, herbaceous plants, and ground covers, and then a variety of different plants at each level.

2.) Fertilized plants attract more insects. In Shrewsbury's research, insect populations (a bad kind) were twice as high on fertilized plants versus the non-fertilized. I had learned previously that when fertilized plants send out a lot of succulent new growth, they're especially attractive to pests such as aphids. The take-away: don't fertilize your plants if they don't really need it. Personally, I think compost goes a long way to keeping things healthy.

3.) Insects referred to as "natural enemies," the good guys, are beneficial only at certain stages in their life cycle. So, for example, the syrphid flies that I knew to be beneficial only feed upon prey while they're in their larval stage. Adult syrphids don't eat other bugs, they eat nectar and pollen. The take-away: Plant flowers that provide a variety of nectar and pollen sources, so your garden will support natural enemy insects in all of their life stages.

What to plant in order to attract beneficial insects?

Choose plants with long-season blooms and varying architectures. This includes big flowers like daisies or coneflowers, and small lacy flowers such as sweet alyssum, caraway, dill, and parsley. Herbs are great in general, as are cover crops like buckwheat and clover. Members of the mint family, such as catnip and hyssop, are good choices too.

In my own garden, I have catnip, herbs, and yarrow that are good for the insects. And I usually let a few veggies go to flower too, such as my mustards. I'd like to gradually add more native plants, and I definitely want a more "structurally complex" yard, especially the front, which is still mostly plain old turfgrass and ho-hum azaleas.

For more on natural enemy insects, what they look like, what they eat, etc., check out Michigan State University's excellent website: http://ipm.msu.edu/natural-enemies.htm.