Late Summer

Each day we take our bushel basket down to the field garden in hopes of harvesting tomatoes, pumpkins, or melons. We often bring back basil, broccoli shoots, or kale.

My mom sent me several dahlia tubers this year. This is the first one beginning to open. It looks rather goofy, like it has bunny ears. I love its vibrant color. 

Baby Pam pie pumpkins, we are forever loyal to you. This variety is so reliable. We harvested our first this weekend.

New this year: Eden's Gem melons. We tried this variety because the seeds were local and the description promised that they would fruit and ripen before the frost. We have six melons that are almost ready! I'm excited, though I am having a hard time determining when they are ready. Any tips? I've been smelling the blossom end for fragrance. None yet.

Abby: these are our spilanthes plants. Every day I pop a flower in my mouth. Herbalists say eating one fresh a day is better than mouthwash. It's an acquired taste but I really like it. It basically makes your mouth feel tingly.

Chamomile in abundance. I've been drying some for my apothecary shelves. Thinking of making a chamomile tincture or a chamomile heavy bitters formula.

The onions are just about ready for harvest. We've already pulled our shallots.

What's happening in your garden this week?

the august harvest

Recently harvested: basil, shallots, broccoli, heirloom tomatoes, green onions, chamomile.

 I thought it would be fun today to share some different ways that we've been preparing produce in our kitchen this summer.

Zucchini: We have a go-to zucchini pancake recipe that we love, and to that we've been adding corn kernels from 2 ears of corn. Make a big batch as these freeze well.

Basil: To top the zucchini pancakes, we made a simple basil oil. It's just basil and olive oil whizzed in the blender with salt and pepper to taste. I think this would also be lovely on sourdough toast.

We added basil to our latest batch of kombucha, and the results were truly delicious. I hope to try a batch with chamomile next.

Blackberries: This year I've been really into making infused fruit vinegars. Just remember to use vinegar that has at least 5% acidity.

Chard: My new favorite way to prepare chard involves removing the rib (and chopping it into small pieces) and then steaming or boiling both the rib and the leaf. This should be a quick process--only a few minutes. Then add it to a skillet with olive oil, garlic, chopped Kalamata olives, and diced banana peppers and heat until everything is warm. Serve topped with a very small amount of feta cheese.


What are some of your favorite, simple recipes for the summer produce you've been harvesting?

An English Pea Supper Galette

Earlier in the year I mentioned that we bought a new variety of English peas for our garden. I'm happy to report that Laxton's Progress No. 9  is quite lovely. The plants are low to the ground and don't require staking, and they are big producers for such little plants. We are just harvesting the last of them.

Tonight, we planned a pea-inspired supper. It's a summer galette filled with spring onions, English peas, broccoli (Fiesta is the variety that I'm loyal to), and some leftover Sunday bacon.

I just knew I had to share this recipe with all of you.

Summer Galette with Peas and Broccoli

For the crust:

1 cup of AP flour
1/4 cup of rye flour
Stick of butter
1/2 tsp salt
Ice water

Combine flours and salt. Cut in butter. Mix in ice water by hand until the dough comes together. Chill in the fridge while you work on the filling.

For the vegetable filling:
2 spring onions, chopped (green and white parts)
1 medium head of broccoli chopped (including stem)
1 cup of English peas *
1 garlic scape, minced
3 pieces of cooked Sunday bacon torn into small bits (optional)

For the cheese mixture:
2/3 cup of cream cheese
3 TB prepared mustard
Sriracha to taste

Saute onions, garlic scape and broccoli in oil or butter until softened. Add English peas and cook for a few minutes more.

Roll out dough and spoon the vegetables into the center. Top with the bacon bits. Dollop the cheese and mustard mixture on top.

Bake in a 375 oven for 35-40 minutes.

**With all of your leftover pea pods, be sure to make a vegetable stock. We made one tonight with pea pods, 4-5 spring onions, sprouting garlic from last season, fresh herbs (oregano, parsley), and sea salt.

Lately

 

A new edition to the garden has been some local straw mulch. Our vegetables seem to be enjoying their new ground cover.

One of my spilanthes plants in bloom. I had all intentions of making a mouthwash but I just keep popping the buds in my mouth when I'm in the garden. If you've never tried it, it's a really intense experience. Spilanthes causes salivation to increase and also makes your mouth tingle.

Snap peas before the afternoon storm.

Our garlic scapes have been harvested, which means it's time to pickle them. This is our very favorite recipe. We love bringing pickled scapes to gatherings. Our friends love them too and have been known to fight over the last scape in the jar.

After my weekend away, I was very happy to see the Musquee de Provence pumpkins growing.

My breadseed poppies are about to bloom.

Whenever we're in the garden lately, we're always snacking on English peas. The peas may not be making it to our freezer but their pods are. We will use them to make vegetable stock.

I must say that out of all of the flowers on this property, I prefer my neighbor's. Particularly these...

and these.

Happy July!

Garden Reads

It's a great time of the year to sit back a little and watch your garden grow. I have two wonderful gardening books to share with you today.

To Eat: A Country Life by Joe Eck and Wayne Winterrowd
Joe Eck lives and gardens in southern Vermont. I've been lucky enough to visit North Hill and hear Joe and Wayne read from their books at past events.  Sadly, Wayne passed away in 2010 and this was the book he and Joe were working on at the time.

It's a delightful little book filled with short chapters on fruits and vegetables with charming illustrations by Bobbi Angell. I've only just started reading, but I can already tell that it is special. As soon as it arrived in the mail (a gift from my mother), I opened right up to the rhubarb chapter. I love how Eck and Winterrowd braid together history, growing tips, and culinary memories in each chapter. This particular chapter ends with a recipe for Rhubarb Custard Pie. Yes, please.

How To Move Like a Gardener by Deb Soule

Don't you just love that title? If you are interested in herbalism and gardening, there is no better source than Deb Soule. As soon as I heard that Deb was writing a new book, I pre-ordered it from her shop, Avena Botanicals. Deb just has a way about her. She is full of knowledge but humble and kind. The book is filled with gorgeous color photographs and would be a great book to add to your collection if you are interested in learning more about herbs, biodynamic gardening, and medicine making.

Which gardening books will you be reading this summer?

June

Vermont in June. You can't beat it.

Delicate pink peonies open.
The thimbleberry shrubs are in bloom
Wild strawberries are growing in the field.
Garlic scapes begin to form.
Lettuce is abundant as are the weeds.
Beets are thinned and added to the latest salad creation.
Our sage plant is in flower.
The hops are growing up their string supports.
The dahlias and glads are poking up from the soil.
The lady's mantle has a spray of golden flowers.
The lemon balm and oregano are ready to be trimmed and used in the kitchen.
Tomatoes need to have their suckers pinched.


So much to do, but I love every minute of it.

I'll be back next week with a new book I think you'll enjoy.

planting tomatoes

Things are moving along nicely in the field garden.

We planted our tomatoes at the end of May and almost forgot that our farmer friend had given us some mycorrhizae for our tomato plants. Earlier in the spring, we visited C. and she mentioned that she was planning to dip her tomato roots in a mycorrhizal solution in hopes of lessening the chances of tomato diseases such as early blight and septoria leaf spot. She doled us out a portion and suggested around 1 tsp per gallon of water.




Bone meal and Epsom salts in the planting holes.

Dipping the roots.

A storm arrived in the days following, and we lost 4 of our plants. Luckily, we have extras.

I'm excited to see if the mycorrhizae makes a difference. The four replacement plants won't be dipped in the solution, so it will be easy to see the difference. I'll be sure to report back.

Have any of you tried this? What have you noticed?

The Delights of Mid-May

 Apple blossoms promising a bumper crop this year. We're hoping to make apple cider, apple cider vinegar, and applesauce this year.

 Good old reliable garlic. 102 cloves planted this year plus a few extra in the front herb beds.

Nothing makes me happier than to see buds on our peonies, or

the neon pink tulips around our cherry tree.

 100 dandelion flowers were collected to make a festive spring drink.

 Dandelion lemon soda (Dandelion flowers, light brown sugar, water, lemon) in the works. Recipe from Backyard Medicine, a new favorite herbal.

The tomato seedlings are getting bigger and needed to be re-potted recently. This year we are growing Orange Banana, Mortgage Lifter, German Pink, Indian, Sungold, Amish Paste and Cosmonaut Volkov.

The view of our field garden from above. Look behind the pond on the right to spot it.

Other mid-May delights not photographed:

Eating asparagus, just picked, from our neighbor's garden
The promise of free raspberry bushes from a friend
The first morel spotted
Sweet Pea flowers emerging from the soil
Weekend lunches eaten outdoors
The backyard garden planted with red and golden beets, alpine strawberries, parsley, cress, lettuce
Making a summer salve
Rhubarb, lemon, vanilla handpies from A Year of Pies
Melissa Clark's roasted asparagus with rhubarb puree from Cook This Now

What are your favorite mid-May delights?

the end of april

Well, here are those pretty spring blooms I promised a few weeks ago. In the final few days of April, we are starting to see major signs of spring. Leaves have started unfurling, the grass is greening up and dandelions are popping up here and there. As a studying herbalist, I have a soft spot in my heart for dandelions.

 

 As we worked to prepare our beds this weekend, I dug up all of the dandelions to use in the kitchen.

 


The dandelion greens made it into our first spring salad of the year along with mixed lettuces from the local market, slivered almonds, and a few overwintered carrots that looked a little pale but still tasted fine.

 

We also foraged some wild garlic to add to the salad. It's easy to find this time of year. Please note that if you're not familiar with wild foods, you should always have someone in the know help you ID the plant. Believe it or not, there are poisonous wild garlic look-a-likes, though they don't smell of garlic.

Dandelion greens are bitter, and this is good for the body, particularly in spring after eating heavy food all winter. Bitters are great for your digestion and easy to consume when added to a salad that is mixed with sweet lettuces. I also mixed up a sweet vinaigrette to temper the bitter greens a little.


A Spring Salad Dressing for Bitter Greens:

2-3 TB olive oil
1 TB raw, unpasteurized apple cider vinegar
1 heaping Tsp dijon mustard
1 spoonful of raw honey (Thank you, honeybees!)
1 small tsp. of fennel seeds (also good for digestion)






Our heirloom tomato seedlings are looking good, and that's spilanthes in the front right of the frame.



 Two kinds of peas have been soaked, inoculated and planted: Cascadian snap pea and Laxton's Progress #9. I always like to have both snap and shell peas on hand. We like to freeze the shell peas and reserve the pods for making stock.

 

Our brassicas (broccoli, variegated collards, Red Russian kale, Lacinato kale, green and red cabbage) are planted and protected with their little cutworm collars. We are looking for ideas of something we can interplant between them other than lettuce. If you have any thoughts, do let me know in the comments.

On Heirlooms

My husband and I tend to favor heirloom vegetables over hybrids in our garden for many reasons. Here are a few:

1. You can save the seeds. If you have the time and know how, you will be able to save some seeds from this year's crop to use in next year's garden. A nice perk is the fact that you will be saving a little money. If you save the seeds of a hybrid plant and plant them in your garden, you never know what you will end up with as it won't grow true to type.

2. Heirlooms seeds have stories that have been passed down from year to year, generation after generation. This fascinates me. I love the names of all of my heirloom tomatoes and am curious to know more about their origin. I recently read Janisse Ray's book, The Seed Underground. It's a great place to learn more about heirlooms and the people in this country who are ensuring that they still exist in the world.

3. Taste. You'll hear this over and over again. Heirlooms still exist because people like how they taste. They were never bred to look beautiful (though some still are) or to be shipped long distances. The main reason for their existence is that they are delicious.

A few places to find heirloom seeds:
Seed Savers Exchange
Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds

Maybe there's even a seed company in your town that sells heirloom seeds, and you just don't know about them yet. My tiny town has a seed company with wonderful heirloom varieties. Do some research! Join a seed saving group. Start a seed saving group. Host an heirloom seed swap. Help preserve seed diversity by planting many heirlooms in your own garden.

Do you grow heirloom vegetables? Do you save seeds? Do you have any seeds that have been saved by your family members and passed down to you? I'd love to hear about it.

Inching Ahead

We're inching ahead here in Zone 4b after Friday's minor accumulation of sleet and wet snow. I'm happy to have this little lungwort in my front herb bed because it's always the first plant to flower after the crocuses.

It's lovely to see the daffodils and hyacinths (pictured here) poking up from the soil. Promises of yellow and pink to come.

The birds are a little more active. Robins are abundant as are the red-winged blackbirds. I couldn't resist this tiny feather caught on a blade of grass.

My husband built us a small cold frame using materials that we had in our garage--a few pallets and an old window. We decided to take advantage of the spring sunshine and let our leek and brassica seedlings enjoy a little extra warmth.

It's a little tricky, though. We've never used a cold frame before. Today we came home from work to find that the seedlings were a little too warm even with the window propped open slightly. So, we've brought them back in for now to baby them just a little more before we try the cold frame again. Natalie and others who use cold frames, do you have any tips for me? We were hoping to use it to help our seedlings grow bigger and stronger.

We went down to our large field garden this afternoon to see if the soil was ready for planting. Alas, it was too wet. The peas and poppies will have to wait a little longer.