The Right Side

Hi Friends, how was your fourth? Ours was festive and fun and spent with dear friends. We spent time down at our hometown parade and came back and had a wonderful non traditional all veggie meal followed by a completely all american favorite dessert of smores. We wrapped it up by watching our town’s fireworks through our tree filtered view in our bedroom. It was a great day.

And it kept me busy, too busy to wrap up the rest of the garden tour, so let’s get that done, shall we? The section we have left is the right side and here’s where it was back in April.

We have a lot of onions in this section. Some are flowering with their long twisty, turny stems.

And others are pulled and left to dry out in the sun.

This bed contains peppers, three types of basil and two eggplants. We’ve been trying our hand at eggplant parmesean and sneaking in pesto into all sorts of dinners. The peppers are far from ripe yet, but they are growing indeed.



We’ve also got watermelons growing too! Our first successful year at it. Apparently they need a pollenator, so we planted two varieties together, Ali Baba and Sugar Baby, and it seems to have worked. They are growing like crazy:

Thanks for taking a walk with me through the yard!

My favorite section

The center section, at this slice in time, is my favorite part of the garden. (here’s where it was in April) It’s lush and over flowing and producing like crazy. Our breakfast, lunch and dinner plates are full of zucchini, cucumbers, herbs, kale, lettuce and now plums from this section. And very soon tomatoes, beans, melons and peppers.

This new raised bed is bursting at the seams with cucumbers, both pickling and japanese, and bush beans. Amazing, this is how little they all were exactly a month ago. The flowers from the bush beans are gorgeous:

Moving back a bit, if you use your hands to part through all of the vines:

You’ll find a few cantelopes growing along with some crenshaw melons:

And onto the next bed are the tomatoes, big growth since last month. Yes, the irony is not lost on us that the shortest tomato plant we have is placed in the 10 foot cage.

And lastly, we have those three new raised beds that have given us all the spring spinach and lettuce they could and are now blessing us with kale, cilantro, parsely and a volunteer tomato and melon….who knows what they’ll be.

The Russian Red kale seems to be the healthiest we’ve every grown it. It’s just beautiful.

Have you ever roasted kale? It’s one of our favorite ways to eat it. Cut the leaves up roughly, toss with olive oil, salt and pepper and bake in a 350 degree oven for about 20 minutes until the edges are crispy. Drip a little aged balsamic vinegar on them and it becomes an incredible side dish. So easy too!

The Left Side

It’s been a good long while since I’ve done a complete overall look at the garden, so let’s do it! Like before, I’ll start with the left side. This poor left side is in a bad state of transition. It’s going from it’s beautiful spring bounty to a sad state of waiting for the winter squash and peppers to grow in. But grow in they will and soon it will look just as lush as the rest of the yard. The broccoli, romanesco broccoli, peas, cilantro, and radiccio are all gone and have been replaced by peppers.

and more peppers.

We’re going to have a serious pepper profusion soon, because these are only a fraction of a our pepper crop this year. Watch out!
We’ve also put in some winter squash and as you can tell, I’m slightly in love with photographing this Potimarron squash plant. It’s just so lovely growing against our ‘weedy’ amaranth.

And it’s such a beautiful and tasty squash. I love to have winter squash all around the house in autumn and bake them up into our dinners.

We’re also trying a new winter squash called Buttercup. I’ll keep you informed as to how the come along.

As with every year in our tomato growing, Scott always says, “we’re only growing four this year” and each year we end up with….oh, how many do we have this year? Right around 11 or 12. We’ve tried to grow all sorts of things in this spot and they’ve all died, but so far these tomatoes seem happy.

That’s about it for the left side. We’ll move on over to the center plot next!

It’s not plain old cauliflower at all!

Come look! Remember a while back I posted a picture of my dreamy cauliflower? Well, look how its coming along.

Its Romanesco Broccoli! Pretty isn’t it? We were expecting just regular old cauliflower, so this was a nice surprise.

We did a little research as to if you can eat the leaves of cauliflower and broccoli and you can. You can eat the stems (the stems are our favorite parts actually) and leaves, but as the plant matures you will want to peel the stems of their heavy outer coating. And may want to think twice about eating the leaves. When they are young the leaves are tender and good for eating, but as the plant matures they can get rather bitter, tough and not so tasty. Good to know!

A Little Zucchini Sex for You

We don’t get much time for uninterrupted talking time these days. With two talkative kids who constantly ask questions, fight and need a booboo kissed, its a rare moment when we can utter more than a three word sentence to each other. But this weekend we got a moment and what did we talk about? Oh, that’d be zucchini sex. You know, what every couple talks about in their spare time. (We seriously need to get a life!) But I thought I’d share with you our findings on zucchini sex. Mind you, these musing are only learned by observation and not by fact or science or anything reliable other than our experiences.

So I posted that beautiful picture of the zucchini blossom the other day and I expected to see a zucchini grow from it, however when I walked out into the garden yesterday it was completely dried up and dead with no sort of zucchini in store. However when I looked at the next door plant there was this below zucchini growing just fine and the flower hadn’t opened at all yet. What the heck?

Well, Scott explained that the first flower I saw was a male flower and they don’t produce zucchini, their job is to provide pollen for the female flowers. Okay, that makes sense. But then why is the female producing a zucchini when she hasn’t yet been pollenated? Well the answer, we think is that its a hybrid. Heirloom females do need the male’s pollen to produce an offspring, but it looks like hybrid women are, ahem, self sufficient in the fertilization area. There you go ladies, in the hybrid zucchini world, men are totally useless.

We, in the past have always grown heirloom zucchinis, but when our neighbor gave us one of this Portofino squash last year, we had to try growing our own. The one he gave us was large, over a foot long, but the flower was still in tact at the end of it. We liked it because it had that crisp skin and sweet taste that the young, small zucks have without the pulpy seedyness that the older heirlooms get. And of course the hybrids wouldn’t get seedy, because they aren’t breed for saving seeds. They are breed so that you’ll buy seeds again the next year (tricky little business move, eh?).

So, what are we going to do with all these useless men? Eat them of course (very black widow of us, isn’t it?). Hopefully in the days and weeks to come I’ll be able to share with you some squash blossom recipes. Oh, and since you’re dying to know, the later planted zucchinis are the ones that have the first zucchinis on them. So back to my on-going self-debate, its not worth it to plant seeds ahead of time.

(Oh thanks to Compostings for such a lovely write up about us, we’re blushing.)

What are you doing to eat more plants?

So what are you doing to eat more plants? We all know we need to eat more of them, we’ve read about it and seen it. But how do you actually incorporate it into your everyday life? More salads, more stir fries? Have you ever tried a green smoothie?

We go through phases. A week or so where we’ll do really good at incorporating plants into our day and we’ll feel good. Lighter, healthier, a bit more bounce in our step. Then we are tempted to have on teeny, tiny bite of chocolate chip cookie, and then another, and next thing you know we’ve eaten that as well as the rest of the dozen and we’re back on the pasta, meat, and sweets train and we go back to feeling heavy and slow.

Luckily the bounty of this late spring garden is helping us. How can you not eat all of this wonderful mustard, lettuce, radishes, broccoli and collard greens? That’s one good thing about having a garden. No excuses not to eat the healthy stuff, it’s right outside your backdoor. And if you leave it go to bolt then you feel like a heel for not eating it in time.

So how do you eat more plants?

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:

 

Tomato & Squash Update

Just thought I’d give an update of Tomato Alley. The original post I did has been my most viewed post, hopefully people will try this growing method and have great success. I think the beauty in it is that by putting the drainage pipes into the ground, you are able to get more water and oxygen down to the roots which makes for a happier plant. Scott mulched this past weekend with straw. By using a thick layer of mulch and our pipes we only have to water them once a week. Which, when we are facing certain water restrictions this summer, is a welcome thought. All plants are looking happy and healthy and this latest little heat wave did them well. We even spotted our first San Marzano.

We love San Marzanos. Because of their meatyness they make for great sauce.

It seems I turned around the zucchini grew from seedling to adolescents. Isn’t that the way it is with zucchinis? So the interesting thing about these guys is that Scott started that one in back at the end of March on our potting table. Then a month later when it was ready to plant out, he did so then put in two more seeds into the ground next to it, which are the other two plants you see. They are the same size! Sometimes its just not worth it to start sewing seeds early, in our yard at least.

oh, cauliflower, you’re so dreamy!

Whoever thought that cauliflower could look so dreamy?
We spotted the start of a head this morning.

Hey, is that bug in there I see?

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!