Mistress Mary quite contrary...

The best part of gardening is gathering in the harvest. I love the shallots and garlic especially. The butter lettuce and arugula are the best I've ever tasted. Lovely little carrots and the ubiquitous zucchini.

Peter piper picked a peck of pickles

My lemon cucumbers are planted in a raised bed. They are cascading over the 5 foot trellis. Beautiful ladies, green, almost perfect with gorgeous yellowy fruit.The picklers... well not so pretty but producing. At first just a few curly, crazy, cukes good for nothing but a quick bite or two with a dash of sea salt. But today was the day. 3 decent sized picklers and 4 lemon cukes.

I harvested a single, grumpy looking, white wonder cuke and there was just enough.

Pickle time!!!!

For those of you who do not like pickles, I pity you. I opened up the jar of pickling spice and had a few moments of sweet, spicy heaven. Quickly I gathered the jars, the vinegar, garlic and onion harvested from the garden. I could hardly contain myself. Should I can them in a hot water bath and keep them on the shelf for a few weeks before eating them? Nope. This first batch was destined for a brief refrigerator existence, with near instant salivatory gratification.

15 minutes after making the bread and butter pickles, I was fishing in the hot jar and slipping a few beauties between slices of ham, cheese and whole wheat bread. No decent sandwich is complete without homemade pickles. If the juice is good enough, you don't even need to blot the pickles before slapping them on a sandwich. The juice is that good. I could die happy with a half eaten ham sandwich in my fist as long as a good pickle was in attendance. Insert sigh of contentedness here.

Someday I'll be perfect...

Someday I'll be the perfect gardener. I'll be able to time the harvest of my vegetables so I can eat the perfect salad with all it's individual parts harvested at the same time. Until that perfect time comes I'll just have settle. I can have butter lettuce, peas, carrots, arugula and onion from my garden, throw in a few things from the store, and voila... almost perfect salad.

My garden is coming to the end of the spring vegetables I'm on the last of the peas and lettuce and the first of the zucchini and green beans. The carrots are small but yummy. I've been too impatient to let them get any bigger.

I love my little baby peas in a pod. I like to zip them open and eat them in the garden as I'm watering. It's luck alone that these babies made it to the bowl.

My tomato plants are huge. Tons of flowers, a few black crim tomatoes forming, lots of green cherry tomatoes and noth'n else. Hmmm. I'm sure they will come around. (Threats of being tossed into the fiery furnace should do the trick.)

This morning I discovered a new love. Garlic blossoms. Also known as scapes. The scapes form when garlic is just about ready for harvest. A long green stem grows from the center of the leaves. It can have a couple of flirty curls/loops to it before ending in the blossom. The whole stem and unopened flower head is edible.


Boy howdy is it edible. I made a breakfast omelet with the scapes and zucchini.

Mellow, roasted garlicky goodness. Topped with a little fresh basil and swiss cheese.

Would sour cream be over the the top? Since I didn't have any I guess we'll never know.

Chard Tacos?... Oh yes I did!

I asked my self, self what should I do with a gorgeous bunch of neon lights chard. So I googled, "What to make with chard". I found a recipe on Martha Stewart for tacos with garlicky Mexican greens. Hmmm, sounds intriguing. The original recipe was meatless and called for feta cheese. My carnivorous, cheese nazi wasn't going for it, so I added ground beef and stuck with less stinky shredded Mexican style cheese.

Garlicky Greens

12 oz of chard
salt
1 tablespoon of oil
1 diced onion
4 cloves of garlic finely chopped

Boil the chard in salted water for 1 to 2 minutes.
Drain the chard and let cool on a plate. Heat oil on medium and saute onion for 10 minutes until golden brown. Add garlic and saute another minute. Chop up the chard and saute with onion and garlic for another 1 to 2 minutes.


Outstanding colors and texture and tasted great by itself. I piled it on warm corn tortillas with all my favorite taco fixings. Homemade roasted tomatillo salsa sealed the deal on a great meal.

Oatmeal, fresh strawberries, raw milk...ecstasy

My strawberry patch is yielding about a handful of strawberries every other day. Not enough for much jam but enough to add to a salad, make a strawberry milk shake or throw some in my oatmeal. A lovely little addition that adds zip to a simple meal. Plenty of berries never make it out of the garden. It's too hard to resist popping a couple in your mouth as you go about gardening duties.
I have recently discovered that my lactose intolerance is completely cured by consuming raw, unpasteurized milk. I had not had a glass of milk with my cookies or milk with my cereal in years. Ice cream was a lost lover, achingly missed but avoided like, well, a literal case of the runs. After reading "Nourishing Traditions" by Sally Fallon, I decided to give raw milk a try. I read all the warnings from the USDA et al but hey, you only live once. Giving up ice cream and cookies and milk for the rest of my life seemed like too high a price. Quality of life issue!!! I've been consuming raw milk products for about 3 weeks now. Voila! A new lease on milk drinking life.
I'm not sure if I want to join the raw milk evangelists. There are genuinely good reasons that milk is pasteurized. E coli, listeria etc. For me personally, I think the benefits out weigh the risks. I just love raw milk with my strawberries.
What do you think?
For more on the raw milk debate click here:

Against raw milk http://junkfoodscience.blogspot.com/2009/01/raw-milk-debate-helping-parents-wade.html

Raw milk compromise http://www.theatlantic.com/life/archive/2010/04/the-raw-milk-debate-dont-have-a-cow/38730/

In favor of raw milk http://www.raw-milk-facts.com/index.html

Lan and Moiraine, Save us from The Blight!

Describe a land that is foul and evil smelling. Where green plants yellow and the beautiful fruit rots and becomes a malodorous mushy mess. No, I'm not writing about "The Wheel of Time" (book 14 not coming out until 2012, grrrr). I'm talking about my own personal potato famine. The unusually cool, wet, spring has spread the dreaded fungus, phytophthora, to my yukon gold potatoes. A late frost killed the top growth of these plants but they came right back. Then black spots appeared on the leaves. This is my first year growing potatoes so at first I thought it was more damage from frost. But nooo... some of the plants started to yellow. I pulled one of the offending specimens and the potatoes were still good. We had fried potatoes. Man were they yummy.

So I decided to wait for the other plants to go ahead and keel over in order to maximize my harvest. Bad girl, no, no, no! I pulled a particularly sorry plant and the stinky, slimy, disgusting mess was amazing. Truly blighted instead of truly scrumptious. (Thank you Robert Jordan, I now know what "the blight" is all about.) Next, I tried a fungicide... all to no avail. Insert sigh of utter despair here. My new plan is to pull the plants in between beginning to yellow and rotten slimy stinky mess. Good Plan!
I pulled 3 plants today and harvested the potatoes. They are quite lovely. The green parts are going into the green waste. I don't want to infect my compost with blight. Looks like salad and fried potatoes for lunch. Muy delicioso, Oishi desu, hao chyr, yum.

Backyard Orchard Culture

My new favorite way to grow fruit trees is with the backyard orchard culture method. You can maximize your space by planting three or four trees close together and keeping them pruned small. When you plant several varieties of fruit with different ripening times you can stretch out the harvesting time. Instead of two or three weeks of harvesting peaches, you can harvest peaches for six to eight weeks. The trees are cross-pollinated more effectively and you get more consistent production.


I have three varieties of peaches planted in one raised box. (I put them in the raised box because my yard has a problem with drainage.) There is an Elberta, a Babcock and a Hale Haven. I can't wait to harvest peaches. I keep thinking of homemade vanilla ice cream, fresh sliced peaches and hot fudge poured on top. If you haven't tried it, you haven't lived---groans of immense pleasure abound.

Last week when I was shopping at Whole Foods, they had a plant display in front of the store. Local trees for $7.99 each!!! A total steal. I bought cherry trees, 2 Rainiers and a Lapin. The Lapin is self pollinating and is also a good pollinator for the Rainiers. It will be a few years before they will set fruit but it's well worth the wait. There might be a cherry pie in my husband's future.

If you are interested in learning more about backyard orchard culture click here.
http://www.davewilson.com/homegrown/BOC_explained.html