This past week brought us many delicious vegetables and fruit. We got:
1 pound japanese eggplants
2 pounds tomatoes
1 bunch leeks
1 head lettuce
1 pound summer squash
1 pound green beans
2 pounds apples
1 pound nectarines
1 watermelon (missing)
Sad news about the watermelon – it kind of died. Hard to describe, but it was very sad. I’ve also been on an apples and peanut butter kick, which is a terrific, satisfying snack.
The tomatoes went into tomato jam. Everything else has been eaten as is, sauteed and such together – all these summer veggies go so well together! Except the lettuce, which is languishing in the fridge. So much lettuce.
I have no idea what I’ll do with the bitter melon. It is a mystery to me. The tomatoes are gone, eaten in part with the cucumber. I think I’ll pickle the peppers. The eggplant was made into baba ghanoush – quite garlicky this time around.
I made the peaches into peach cobbler on Sunday, and it is quite tasty! The sprouted flour gives it a bit of a crunch. I may make this instead of crisp topping in the future, as I can get around the need to soak grains this way, plus it’s much less sweet. It’s sweetened with sucanat, which goes great with the peaches. It’s so far my favorite recipe in which to use sucanat.
I’ve been eating the apples out of hand. Sadly, the plums bit the dust after sitting out too long. Our plums this year have been a bit problematic, arriving over ripe to begin with. Still, the ones I’ve been able to eat have been fabulous.
This is the share we got a couple of weeks ago, on August 2. This was the day before I left for Washington, so I left most of it for our housesitter. So, we got:
1 head of lettuce
1 bunch radishes
2 pounds mixed of summer squash and cucumber
2 bell peppers
1 pound white peaches
1 pound plums
1 pound donut peaches
I ate half the tomatoes the night before I left. I took a few donut peaches and plums with me on the airplane, and they were a welcome change from the starchy snacks I was offered there.
I ended up fermenting the radishes with carrots from the week prior, and am excited to see how this mixture comes out. The white peaches ended up going into peach thyme jam this weekend.
The following week, Week 9, will not be documented, for a variety of logistical reasons. Week 10 is this week, though!
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.
