A couple weeks ago, I had the pleasure of visiting the garden of new friends in the neighborhood, WT and Erich; I met them at our last WHA blogger social. They are the forces behind Gardenfreude, a terrific Astoria blog about food, health, gardening, design, and knitting. I hear they are excellent knitters and make some amazing sweaters and things over the winters (I, on the other hand, can make a scarf and a hat, but that’s about it). They are also passionate gardeners, and we three connected over gardening and food especially.
Their garden is quite large, especially for NYC standards. They have an arrangement with their neighbors to use their yard, which gives them a lot of land to work with. In face, they currently only use half the yard, but have gotten the green light to use the rest of the space, so they have plans to expand next spring.
This week’s share was a bit more modest than last, but still full of amazing fruits and vegetables. We got:
1 bunch beets
1 pound zucchini
1 head red leaf lettuce
1 pound string beans
1 bunch carrots
1 bulb fennel
1 cucumber
2.5 pounds red plums
2 pounds nectarines
The carrots came with the fronds, and I’m looking into ways to use them. They could be good!
I was considering lacto fermenting the fennel with carrots, but I’ve read that fennel can get bitter in the fermentation process, with lots of shrinkage after a few days. Carrot fennel slaw I think is in my future, instead.
The fruit continues to be amazing and I am loving eating the plums with raw yogurt for breakfast. Jenny from Nourished Kitchen recommend poaching yellow plums in honey-vanilla syrup, and I bet these red plums would also be great that way.
We’ll be eating salad with the lettuce as opposed to the no so successful lettuce soup I made last week.
Zucchini will be eaten with tomatoes from my garden!
This week in our CSA we moved full force into stone fruit season – yum. Nectarines and peaches made their debut, which made me really happy. There’s also lots of green stuff this week. We got:
1 bag of snap peas
1/2 pound of zucchini
1/2 pound of cucumbers
1 head of lettuce
1 pound of wax beans
1 bunch of spring onions
1 bunch of sorrel
1 pound of yellow plums
2 pounds of nectarines
2 pounds peaches
5 apples
I’ve already eaten the lettuce head. A recipe for a lettuce and mint soup arrived in my inbox, so I tried it. I must admit, it’s only ok. But ok enough to continue eating it over the next few days. I like drinking it out of a mug. I was able to use the onion heads in it, too. I also made a simple salad of chopped cucumber and onion in sherry vinegar and olive oil, with some hot peppers added.
I may pickle the snap peas again, and perhaps even make lacto-fermented dilly beans with the beans. Or saute them with garlic and ginger for dinner this week.
The peaches have been great in raw yogurt, and the plums are awesome for simply snacking on.
The way life has been moving at this point in my life, summer really will be over in the blink of an eye. Hard to believe we’re already at mid-July. September is just around the corner. I plan to enjoy the high summer bounty as long as possible and really savor it.
There’s a lot going on in my garden right now and the growth is impressive – it seems like there is recognizable growth every day. I love this time in the garden, as it is full of hope and promise. And the green colors are just amazing.
This year I have a good number of volunteers. Volunteers are those plants that just grow on their own out in the dirt, without any planning on my part. In my garden the source is usually something in the compost that I add to the dirt. Or seeds from last season that drop into the dirt, and then sprout the following season.
There are four volunteers in my garden – a cucumber, some kind of summer squash, ground cherries, and a tomatillo plant. I think this is a cucumber:
Cucumber flower from volunteer
And this is some sort of summer squash – could be zucchini, could be yellow crookneck, could be some other kind. I hope it’s crookneck.
Summer squash volunteer
If it is indeed a kind of summer squash, I hope to make something tasty with the squash blossoms.
A lone tomatillo plant grows in the back of the garden, and it’s flowering!
Tomatillo flowering
I’ve been told that you need at least two tomatillo plants in order to get fruit, but last year I had two plants and nothing happened. Both plants flowered but no fruit resulted. So frustrating! Maybe it will work out differently for me this year. I sure hope so, as I love tomatillos!
Finally, my ground cherries. So many of these little plants popped up this spring – probably close to 3 dozen, no doubt from dropped seeds in the ground from last year.
Ground cherries
They are even starting to fruit! I hope to make some ground cherry jam this year.
I’m happy to say that my garden is planted and on its way to providing me with a harvest. Most of it will likely come at the end of summer, but some things are happening right now. I was especially pleased to spy some tomatoes on my Tommy Toe plant!
The first of the Tommy Toe tomatoes
As you can see in the picture, there are some creepy crawlies on the tomato plant. I’ve been having to deal with aphids and such this year – they were not an issue last year, so I find this bizarro. I guess it’s just nature, though – unpredictable.
So far, they haven’t wrecked havoc on my plants, and I hope it stays that way. Ladybugs and garlic spray are certainly options. I do check the plants each morning and shake off the bugs, which has seemed to work fine so far.
I’m actually growing a variety of tomatoes: Tommy Toe, Mexican Midget, Blondköpfchen, Silver Fir, and Stupice. The Blondköpfchen, Silver Fir, and Stupice are small but chugging along.
June tomatoes
I’m also growing peppers! Tolli, a sweet italian pepper; Jalepeño, which is of course hot; and Bull Nose, a sweet bell type pepper. Thanks to my friend Alex for gifting me these peppers. I was also given a bunch of bean starts from my neighbor Nick. I asked him what kind of beans they are and he said “long”. So, we’ll see how they end up.
Peppers and beans
My boarge is doing well. Since I planted it, I’ve learned about all sorts of things to do with this plant. I originally planted it for the beautiful blue flowers – I thought I’d put them in iced tea or lemonade, and also use them as bee attractors. But I’ve learned that you can also use the leaves, too. Apparently they have a taste reminiscent of cucumbers. I would consider using the flowers also in fresh goat cheese and in salads.
Borage is an herbalist’s favorite, so it seems. Lots of information can be found here.
Borage
I’m also pleased that some volunteers have made themselves known:
A volunteer - maybe a cucumber?Ground cherries from last year
As far as volunteers go in the garden, there’s another cucumbery looking plant, and a tomatillo, of all things (none of my tomatillos fruited last year). I’ve also planted a Mexican Sour Gherkin, Edens Gem melon, and a Charentais melon. They are a bit thin, thanks to the leggyness from the spring, but I expect they’ll grow and get stronger. I’ll post photos of them soon.
Summer gardens are always very exciting! More images of my garden can be found in my Garden 2011 photoset on Flickr.
Well, my garden is still pretty green – foliage is thriving, though no red tomatoes are to be seen. I did spy my neighbor’s garden from the back deck Sunday afternoon, and saw only one red tomato amongst the urban-vast stretches of green, so perhaps our little microclimate is just sluggish in getting our tomatoes to turn red.
The tomatoes that are on the vine are green, firm and healthy… except for another small tomato found with blossom end rot (BER). This tomato was on the same plant, in the same part of the plant as the other tomato with BER. Both tomatoes were sharing a branch that created “big bertha”, as I endearingly call her – a gigantic tomato, probably 5 inches across. I wonder if that tomato is just sucking up all the nutrients, denying the other two tomatoes any chance of thriving. This question will be answered perhaps if this gigantomato turns red without any rot.
I also picked this beast of a lemon cucumber last weekend:
It’s about 3 inches across, by far the largest lemon cucumber I’ve ever seen. It was hiding under the leaves in the corner, so I’m glad I found it when I did.
Remember this?
This is a mystery plant that appeared under my ground cherries and in the middle of my tomato plants. I thought it was summer squash but now believe it to be more cucumber plants; the flowers are quite similar to the cucumber flower on my lemon cucumber plants. I’ll know for sure once it starts fruiting.
I’ve also started harvesting ground cherries.
These ones beat the pants off of the ones I grew last year – they are sweeter, tastier, and bigger. I believe the quality of soil I’m using is just much better than the soil I had access to at the community garden. The weather – hot, hot, hot – probably has something to do with that, too.
This week we got a wonderful variety of vegetables in our veggie share, and some delicious stone fruit in the fruit share. I decided to display them in a grid this time. From top to bottom row, left to right:
lettuce, green beans, spring onions, carrots, cucumbers, plums, nectarines, peaches, mint.
I forgot to take a picture of the zucchini! This week I got a large one, which I’ll use to put in zucchini muffins most likely. The zucchini from last week went into zucchini fritters. I’ll post about them at some point, after I tweak a few things.
The weather was better than last week – not great, but better. It was much cooler, thanks to thunderstorms that passed through this afternoon. It’s still humid, though, and a heat wave is expected this weekend. I have hopes that it won’t be as intense as last time.
I have plans to make a sorbet out of some of the stone fruit. Perfect for hot weather!
Additionally, I got a chunk of chevre and some ground pastured beef. Looking forward to having hamburgers tomorrow!
And finally, our dry bean and grain share was this week and the most striking thing was the oats. I don’t think I’ve actually seen whole oats before. They look perfect to sprout – I’ll have to look into a grain mill attachment for my Kitchen Aid. Or, perhaps I will eat them as hot cereal. I also came across a recipe for a sprouted oat milk, which is intriguing.
