Ali Baba is the Best!

We’ve had a troublesome history with watermelons. It’s like us and watermelons never really jived. We started to think that maybe we just weren’t watermelon-growing kind of people. But this year things have been different. Maybe it’s because we planted two different kinds together. Or maybe the stars are just aligned like one big watermelon this year, but it’s been a good year for us and watermelons.

Sugar baby

We grew Sugar Babies and Ali Babas. The Sugar Babies, they were pretty good. Smallish and roundish with dark skin and a nice red center. But they were only mostly sweet and they were full of countless little black seeds. Which made for a lot of spitting. So much spitting that we barely got to taste the flesh.

Ali Baba

But the Ali Babas…. Now those are our kinds of melons. So sweet that you don’t even know what to do with yourself. So full of flavor. And the seeds are big and not so plentiful, so when you take a bite, it’s an easy ‘patooie’ to spit them out. And did I mention the flavor? Oh, we’re in watermelon heaven. It’s a good thing that it’s so incredible because so far we’ve harvested two and this one here is 14 pounds. The previous one wasn’t far from that weight. We’ve got a lot of melon eating to do.

The story behind these Ali Baba’s is pretty cool too. The seeds were given to Rare Seeds from a man who collected them from Iraq before the war started. Now its virtually impossible to get seeds from that country. “A rare genetic treasure” reads the description.

And look, it’s beautiful growing in the yard. You must all put this melon at the top of your list for growing next year. You won’t be disappointed.

All about our Carrots

I’m quite convinced that everyone needs a few purple haze carrots in their life. Especially sliced thin. So beautiful. This is what I like about growing our own food. We have the option to fill our meals with little works of art like these. They say it’s the small things in life that make you rich. This is one of those small things that we try and fill our days with. Sliced purple haze carrots. And our lives are ever so slightly improved because of them.

We picked (or rather Scott picked) all of the carrots around the tomatoes Saturday. He was inspired after reading the “All About Growing Carrots” article in the new Mother Earth News. They wrote that you shouldn’t leave mature carrots in warm soil any longer than necessary because critters start to find them. And we have started to notice that a few were getting nibbled on.

We also learned that carrots are divided into five types: Nante, Chantenay, Miniature, Imperator and Danvers. our Purple Haze falls into the Imperator category which means that they have long, tapered roots with stocky shoulders and that they store well.

Our little Thumbelinas rightly fall into the Miniature category, who’s notes say that they have a sweet flavor when mature and have only limited storage potential.

So what can we do with this carrot bounty? Well, we can freeze them, eat them raw, can them, pickle them, but I prefer the carrot cake option. Yes, I see a carrot cake in our near future.

If you come to Sonoma…

….be sure to wear Purple Haze carrots in your hair..

You got the song reference, right? Yes, my sense of humor does border on cheesy, or rather is firmly planted in cheese.

Anyway, we’ve taken the Growing Challenge from seed to harvest! They taste good too (the carrots that is). Sweet, but not too sweet.

Since we’re in the kitchen, I opened the fridge door a few minutes ago and saw that Scott had harvested our first zucchinis and blossoms. (oh, note to self: you can easily increase blog traffic by using that little three letter word…and maybe not quite the kind of traffic you want. ooops.) Also our first pesto of the year augmented with spinach which we enjoyed on our leftover gnocchi. A tupperware full of last years defrosted nectarines. And three dozen eggs. Anyone have any good egg recipes?

Another Tomato & Squash update

It’s amazing what a few days will do. Our little San Marzano is getting so big and look, he has brothers!

The cucumbers (both lemon and japanese) and getting there and the beans are happy and growing. (oh and that’s Bo, our cat, in the background looking for bugs to catch).

 

Oh, and remember how I wrote that although these portofino zucchini’s were planted at different times, they had all caught up in size? Well, the one we grew earlier from seed is blossoming earlier, so there you are, it IS worth it to start earlier after all. Below is it’s neighbor who’s seed was planted about four weeks later:

 

ever curious about what horseradish looks like?

So were we, so we grew some:

triple digits

Really now? Do we really need to be having this 100+ degree weather already? This is coming from a couple who dream of summer days getting to a maximum of 80 degrees. You know it’s going to be a toasty day when you open up the doors and windows of your 85 degree house at 7am and the air outside is not much cooler. Days like this are a tough one for the garden, but at least good for air drying laundry.

The cherries that we tried so desperately to save from a huge flock of cedar waxwings that decended on us last Friday are now a deep dark burgandy. It seems like last week they were just blooms, but already it’s been two months! How quickly time flies. It is wonderful to taste our first fruit of the season. Last year the birds for some reason let us have every last cherry on our tree and we made tarts and pies and we canned jars and jars of jam. This year they left us with only enough to eat, which is just fine. We have plenty of last years jam. The below photo is a cherry tart I made last Mothers Day from Mario’s book, it was incredible.

I noticed our first pea on the vine. Last year we were also bombarded with peas. I spend a lot of afternoons pureeing them into Charlie’s first food. This year, not so much. Maybe we planted too late?

The hardneck garlic is ready for picking and drying. We stopped watering it because we noticed that one started to rot.

We also ate our fill in artichokes last night. Even our three year old has demanded his own artichoke, eating not only the leaves and the heart but the stem too. Our three year old is the defination of a locovore. The only, and I mean only time he eats vegetables is if he sees them coming from our garden. Not a green veggie has passed by his lips all winter until last week when we picked our first spinach salad, then he kept asking for more. Hopefully his little body gets all he needs during these summer months because once winter comes he won’t touch anything green. Each winter I get worried that he’s not eating any vegetables but Scott keeps reassuring me that he’ll get his fill once summer comes.

happy may day & the left side

Happy May Day! We sent our oldest to preschool this morning with a bouquet of backyard flowers to decorate the May Pole. The teachers were busy attaching streamers to the pole and it brought me back to fond memories of my own preschool May Days. After dancing around the may pole, we’d fill a basket with flowers and excitedly run across the street to leave on the neighbors front porch, ring the bell, then quickly dash away giggling. As Julie and I discussed the other day, its a lost holiday these days. Its too bad, what a nice uncommercial cheerful day to celebrate.

On the left side of the garden, to wrap up our tour, I thought we’d start at the back. In our back bed we keep an odd assortment of herbs, garlic and chard. These chive flowers are fairytale like this time of year. I keep expecting a Peter Cottontail to come along and nibble on these.

And the garlic? It looks like long graceful limbs of dancers in this light.

In front of them is our potato trench. We dig a deep trench (notice I use the royal we here, actually Scott digs a deep trench) about 18″ deep and plant the potatoes there, then as they grow and sprout we keep filling the hole over the plant to encourage new potatoes to grow until the ‘trench’ becomes ground level. These are yukon golds:

In front of the potatoes is a bed with currently two peppers and two eggplants with basil seeds just sprouting. Oh, and what else is that you see in the picture? Oh, yes, that would be even *more* wonder berries and amaranth!

Ahead of the ‘mediterranean bed’ is an entire bed devoted to strawberries which in hopefully another week will be bright red and ready to eat.

And at the very front of the left side is a bed of onions and leeks:

Notice how much bigger these are than the garlic in back? Planted on the same day too. The magic of raised beds, I tell you!

The Center Plot

It’s windy today, and sunny but with big huge clouds looming in the sky. I wish it were just plain sunny and warm because tonight is the farmers market in town and the new Ben and Jerrys on the square is giving away free ice cream tonight! Now of course I’ll take free ice cream in any weather, but wouldn’t it be so much nicer if it was warm? Anyway, I’m taking you on a tour of the middle of our veggie garden today, please don’t mind the weeds. It was recently covered in favas and vetch, but now that those have been pulled and tilled, its full of little seedlings. Oh and one more artichoke plant:

Behind the artichoke and the new raised bed (that’s waiting for cucumber seeds to sprout), we have the melon row. Here’s one of the few melons that survived the frosty mornings, a crenshaw.

Behind the melons is tomato alley:

In the tomato bed is a sea full of volunteer amaranth, wonder berry and purple haze carrots (those we actually planted).

As you’ll notice in all of our pictures we have those purple amaranth and little wonder berries. Both of those things we started a few years ago, just with one plant and now they come up *everywhere*! The wonder berries were advertised as being just like huckleberries, but I’m here to report that they are not at all like huckleberries and I wish those stinkin’ little sprouts would just go away already. The amaranth, however are a beautiful and welcome surprise to find around the yard. Both the leaves and seeds are edible. You can eat the leaves young in salads, older steamed like spinach and the seed is a grain that you can eat like rice or quinoa.

Behind the tomatoes is our new three part bed that Scott just made. This bed receives quite a bit of shade in the summer because it’s right by three huge cedar trees and our weeping santa rosa plum tree. So in go the cooler season crops like another lettuce bed (lettuce is so easy to grow, its a sin to have to pay for it at the store):

Spinach:

and French breakfast radishes:

Throughout this middle section is a scattering of borage (again another one we started with just one plant and now have little volunteers everywhere):

Well, the little ones are up, so I must go. Next up, the right side of the garden.

Chef Celebrity Sighting & The Left Side

Yesterday we made a trip down to Marin to go to the Farmer’s Market, which we try to do at least once a month. (oh and Katrina, even with your notice, we of course arrived without our own bags at Bring Your Own Bag day!) As we were strolling through the middle aisle I realized that Tyler Florence, his wife and young son were walking right towards us! I had heard that he had moved somewhere around here. Anyway, we were trying to play it off very cool, as though, ‘oh yeah, that’s just Tyler Florence shopping at our market, no biggie’. But of course as soon he passed we turned right around like gaping fans and looked as he walked by. Poor guy, just trying to shop with his family and he’s got people like us staring at him. Over the years we’ve watched almost all of his shows but Tyler’s Ultimate is my favorite. My mouth is always watering at the end of the show at whatever he’s just created and I always think, I have to download that recipe. He’s a great food stylist and his lighting guru is a master. And it was nice to see him just walking around with his family taking in a lovely Sunday at the market. His son looked just a bit younger than our youngest and I smiled as I passed him later struggling to keep his son from wiggling out of his stroller….a situation I deal with daily. It made him seem like a real and genuine person. From the look of his website it looks like he’s going to open a place in Mill Valley.

So, onto the garden. I’ve been so overwhelmed with all that has gone on in it. April is always full of crazy growth, and new plantings so it’s hard to keep up. So this week, I’ll be starting from the left and moving, as the week goes, over to the right of the yard. Scott constructed some quickie, pell-mell sort of raised beds to house our cold weather spring crop and they look very happy there.

We are trying collard greens for the first time, planted with some very slow growing peas, cilantro and parsley.

Next to that is a bed of broccoli, cauliflower and raddiccio hidden in the middle, contained by our snail guards. I think a few carrot seeds were sprinkled in there last week, but none have come up yet.

And next to that bed, is this bed of bok choy. It’s our first year growing that too and we are enjoying having it young. You know how fiberous it can be when it’s fully mature—chew, chew chew.

Behind all of those we have a bed of radishes, remember when they were so tiny? Radishes grow quick. In fact at the begining of October of 2006 one of our neighbors who runs the Slow Food Movement in town was running for city council. He stopped by our house campaigning and gave us a package of radish seeds and told me, “plant these today and by the time you are ready to eat them, you’ll remember me and hopefully vote for me on November 7th.” Sorry to report that he didn’t win the election, but I certainly voted for him.

Next to the radishes is our lettuce and raddiccio patch. We’re growing a bunch of different lettuces there and since the chickens have been relegaded to the cottage yard (note to self: chickens love lettuce), they are all growing beautifully.

And to cap off the left side of the garden, our artichokes. We aren’t getting that many this year. In fact it seems like artichoke prices are through the roof this spring. One sign at the farmer’s market this year read ‘$4/artichoke’! Has anyone read anything about the artichoke crop this year?

So that is the state of affairs for the left side of the yard, next up, the center plot.

Planting up a storm

Are you ready for this? I told you Scott planted up a storm this weekend:

Straight into the garden (all seeds except as noted):

Scallion bulbs mixed among the veggies

More peas

The tomatoes (2 San Marzano, 1 Brandywine, 1 Yellow Brandywine) are in

Purple Haze & Thumbelina Carrots among the tomatoes because Carrots Love Tomatoes afterall

Hollybrook Luscious melons

Crenshaw melons

Honeydew melons

Ambrosia melons

Oakleaf lettuce

Some sort of Italian lettuce

Borlata onions mixed in with the bed of lettuce

Spinach mixed with French Breakfast radishes (only took 3 days to sprout with this warm weather!)

Parsley

A Japanese eggplant plant was put in a bed with the three Territorial peppers and basil seeds were planted all around

On the growing table:

Pimentos

Ali Baba & Sugar Baby Watermelons

Sweet 100 tomatoes

Serrano Peppers

Nasturtiams & Sunflowers

Camomile

Fenugreek (crazy huh? We’ll tell you how it goes and what we do with it. Too bad I’m not still nursing.)

Oregano

Lovage

Lemon Balm

Carmen peppers

Quadrato d’Asti Giallo peppers

Quite a list, eh? Hey, I told you the guy was a planting fool this weekend, didn’t I?