Not so merry anymore

The marigolds appear to be finishing.  I think that some judicious deadheading might encourage them to hold on to life a little bit longer, but basically there are more ex-flowers than flowers on all the plants.  They've had a good run.  

Up Front

The front yard ... I haven't mentioned it lately.  As the unpopular child, that's to be expected, but I can find some things to say about it.  

The yellow-flowering bush is still going.

The hosta did, indeed, come up with quite a charming set of bell-shaped flowers and they weren't killed by the painters.  Hooray.  It makes me think that I should get more hostas.  It's very nice.

The huge weeding I did ages ago is actually holding up well.  I don't have a picture, but it is much, much less weed-infested than the rest.  

In the un-weeded part, there grows a weed I don't recognise.  It has lovely little berries, though.  I'm sure they're deadly, but I can't help but admire them.  

RRRrrrrrrrr.....

I am eagerly anticipating our first raspberries.  I lurve raspberries.  I have spent a fair amount of money buying raspberries to eat.  More in the past 7 days than we did on the raspberry plant, I think.  Hopefully it will get enough sunshine to give us some ripe red fruit.  We're tantalizingly close.  

Bean there.

The first beans came off our bushes this afternoon!  This calls for a celebration.  Involving a steamer and a dollop of butter.  I like 'em cooked just past squeakiness, but I know there are lots of people who think that the squeak is proof that they're cooked just right.  However they're cooked, beans from our own plants are the best beans there are.  

It's a modest haul, but we weren't trying to clear the plant, just to grab enough for dinner.  When we went to the market on Saturday morning, I didn't think we'd have beans this week, so I got a healthy amount of beans then.  Not all of them have been eaten.  To be honest, I am not at all sure that all of the beans we picked (and then blanched and froze) last year have been consumed.  

We'd both been under the weather for the past few days.  As a result, we hadn't even seen the plot since Friday.  We knew to expect some zucchinis to be ready.  Actually, it's not as bad as I thought.  Only 6 were ready for picking and only one of those 6 is really big.  I think we should have a stuffed zuke for dinner tonight, just to get the biggie out of the way.  Or else we can save the stuffing recipes for later and make a cake or some bread with the large fellow.  Decisions, decisions.

The weather has turned into almost perfect growing conditions.  We get huge amounts of rain followed by a day or two of hot sunshine.  The rainy days are not mediterranean-ly outnumbered by the sunny days, but I hold out every hope of successful tomatoes.  There are fruit coming along and they still have at least a month to get red.  

The beets are not done yet, but we picked two more today and sooner rather than later all of the others will come out, too.  We had some lacklustre beet greens (from the market) over the weekend and it cast a pall over our plans to chomp them all down in a hurry.  I guess they're all getting older now.  

The spring onions have worked out very well.  It turns out that thinning can happen whenever.  I generally pick big fat ones from bunches of thinner ones and then when I come back, the thinner ones are growing into bigger fatter ones.  The little tiny ones were also good to eat; great in salad dressings and on potatoes as though there were very potent chives.  I'll have to remember that trick for next year:  Just plant the whole packet and deal with what comes up.  Some thinning will be required, but not as much as they say on the packet.  

The egyptian walking onions, on the other hand, are making babies all over the place and need some abortions.  I think we'll just do away with them completely.  They're not good for eating and we really want to devote our space to things we can eat.  

The potatoes are finished flowering.  Does that mean we can start having new potatoes soon?  There are few things better than a potato fresh from the ground.  Who knew that the floury, starchy vegetable that we eat (and I enjoy) all winter long starts its life as a wonderful creamy confection?  That's the joy of gardening, I guess.

Hope springs eternal

The strawberries I transplanted from the herb garden at the plot which then died...

They're coming back.  No fruit, of course, but it's heartwarming to see that you can't keep a good strawberry down.  

Why this doesn't make me think of Zombie fruit, I don't know.

Herbs

I don't know what it is, but every summer we get to just about this time of year and I see the herbs for sale at the farmers' market and I think that I urgently need lots of herbs.  Lots.  They usually sell them for 10 for $20 and I usually think that 10 is just about the right number.  

On Saturday at the market, partial sanity caught hold and I only got 3 herb plants.  I haven't put them into the ground yet and I'm not sure that I have the right places for them.  But they're all things that I like and in principle I want around in growing quantities.  

There's red leaf basil.  This is an annual anyway, so it might as well just go into a bigger pot and sit on the back steps.  I'd need potting soil, but I think I can manage a largish potsworth.  

There's curly parsley.  I only sometimes manage to use a full bunch worth of parsley.  I like it enough to make sauces with parsley as a main flavouring, and I do love me some tabouli.  However, a lot of parsley has gone off in our fridge over the years.   I think it's time for us to have our own little supply of "just enough" in a pot indoors.  Also our own supply of more than enough greening up the outside world.  I think this batch will go into greening up the outside world.  I have been getting a kick out of growing things from seed.  I'd like to try it with parsley.

There's mint.  I like spearmint.  I like a sprig of mint on a dessert.  I like mint tea.  I think that a couple of bits of mint in rice, potatoes, and peas makes things nice.  I like lamb and sometimes mint sauce with lamb is an absolute necessity.  I like ice water with some lemon slices and a few mint leaves buried at the bottom.  

The mint is the big challenge because I know that it can take over.  Look at it!  It's already busting out of its pot.  It's an aggressive plant.  Well known fact.  I've read about burying pots in the ground to contain it.  Perhaps I'll try that.  Our winters are too wintery to imagine that things might survive in a container out of the ground, but perhaps I can have mint next summer if I just plant the mint in a pot and plant the pot.  Here's hoping.  

 

Fine Dining

This evening we dined on plotfood.  

We had omelettes made with potent little spring onions accompanied by beet greens sauteed with zucchini and garlic.  Thrills.  

Gadzukes!

I suspect we'll be needing this recipe soon.  

We pulled by the plot this afternoon and it's positively exploded with zucchini flowers.  

I'm not complaining, mind you.  I do love zucchini in its many guises.  I love stuffed zucchini (when you've neglected to check every day and one enormous one pops out all of a sudden), I love zucchini lasagna (where you slice tender young zucchini into ribbons and use them instead of pasta, layered between tomato sauce and oodles of cheese), I love zucchini stir-fried, sauteed, in a salad and smothered in mint yogurt.  All good.  

I know that I'll be sick of it sooner or later, but it's been so long since I was in a zucchini producing household that I've forgotten that heart-sinking sensation of seeing the giant green monster lurking behind a leaf.  I can't wait.  

What happened?

So, what did happen in the garden in those weeks that I was away?  

The daylilies came out.  

The delphiniums bloomed.  Then they were bent and destroyed by the painters.

The mystery plants in the front that I have diligently removed thinking they were weeds year after year before finally realising this year that they don't spread like weeds and they always come up in the same place so maybe, just maybe, I should give them a chance ... they bloomed.  And were then bent and killed by the painters.

The zinnias finally came out.  Well, a flower on some of the plants came out.  This was not a success.  Note for next year: No zinnias in the side yard.  Nonetheless, there they are.

The gazanias finished.

The herbs (except the lavender, perversely) have flowered.  

And been painted.  

The glads seem to be still coming out but I worry very much about their chances of surviving the attack.

The bush on the front side bloomed its one week of magnificent white blooms; I only know this because I have evidence of their demise.  

The other bush on the front side is blooming with a few yellow flowers.

The hosta in the front looks like it may be about to flower.  I don't think it ever has before, so that would be exciting were it not for the fact that it will undoubtedly be destroyed shortly.  

I think my favourite news is that the nasturtiums bloomed.  Well, some did.  These are the nasturtiums that we started from seed indoors and watched sprout and grow and put out just before heading away for our vacation and then they got snowed on and all sorts of terrible things and most of them died, but not all.  That's a true success story from the indoor planting.  

Pain(t)

Well, I knew it would be bad, anyway.  I knew that getting the house painted would be death to the garden, but the house REALLY needed painting.  It's needed painting for as long as we've lived here, and after we got it insulated (remember all the bits?) the problem was all that much worse and obvious.  

I assumed that it would be death to the garden by way of tarpaulin covering, crushing, and killing all plant life.  I hoped that it would all happen while I was away so I would get home to a shiny newly-painted house which might comfort me through the funeral for my sad dead garden.  

Oddly enough, there hasn't been the death-by-tarps I expected.  Given that "clean-up" is part of the contract, I am not quite sure what will be done here.  Still, many deaths in the side yard and front yard are in the cards.  

The good news is that we both really like the colour (blue) now that it's on the walls and it doesn't clash with any of our neighbours.  We live in a part of the world where people paint their houses vibrant colours and it's nice to join the club after years of pinkish-greenish-brownish indistinction.  The painting is not yet finished, but it should be all wrapped up in a few days.  Then I can start the process of healing the sick (amputating the painted-on leaves), burying the dead (in the compost), and bringing in new recruits (carefully chosen to complement the new colour).  

Back to Bounty

It's great to be home, and not just because the veggie garden is bearing fruit!  Nonetheless, it was very, very nice to go down to the plot and survey the miracles.

There are tomatoes on the way.

The plants were donations from the public gardens greenhouses, so we don't know what varieties to expect.  I deliberately chose plants with different leaves, though.  

Zucchinis galore.

Beans being babies.

We even dug up some garlic!  I'm very excited about that.

The radishes had bolted! It's amazing.  We pulled up the enormous, woody-stemmed plants.  There were radish-looking things at the base of many of them.  We'll see what they taste like later.

I also picked some more green onions.  They're not obviously minding being very close-packed.  I think I'll enjoy eating lots of little tender baby spring onions instead of proper-sized bunching onions.  

The potatoes are flowering and looking very promising.  After the success of last year's potatoes, I can't wait for the first creamy bite of fresh potato this summer.  

I pulled up a few of the beets to make room for their neighbours.  I'll make beet greens out of their leaves; there isn't really enough beet on most of them to be worth cooking.  

A few years ago, I had edible beet greens for the first time.  I had previously always treated beet greens like spinach and as a result hated them and stopped trying to eat them.  Then my own dear and wise mother showed me the way and I've been an enormous beet green fan ever since. Remember that this is a recipe for people who like to eat food because it tastes good.  This isn't for a purist who wants to extract the maximum amount of vitamins from their vegetables.  

Beet Greens:

Wash the greens thoroughly (rinse at least 3 times, more if the water is still sandy).  Toss the undried greens into a pot with a heavy bottom and a lid.  Let them cook down in the water that was clinging to them.  Cover them and stir frequently, making sure that the leaves don't stick.  Boil the heck out of them.  Boil them until the stems are starting to be properly limp (more limp than you'd want your asparagus, but less limp than spaghetti) and then take the lid off.  Add butter (let's guess about a teaspoon per 1/2 lb of greens) and minced garlic and let the water boil off, stirring all the while.  You should be left with a lovely buttery red sauce and delicious beet greens.  I sometimes add the garlic while there is quite a lot of water remaining in the pot, which basically allows me to add several cloves without anyone noticing much because the boiling makes the garlic a little more mild, but it infuses the sauce more, too.  

Radish Harvest

The radishes are up and at them.  The sweary one showed them to me as we were iChatting  last night and I took a screen snap.  It's not a good picture, but you have to admit, they are radishes.

Best of all, they're radishes that are beautiful and red and not split or worm-eaten.  It's good.  A happy day.