Garden time

This year, I found an interesting deal online for 100 packets of seeds for $$59 at GetSeeds. Given that theses seeds are organic heirloom, that's a fantastic deal. My packets arrived in a nice big bag. Here's the bag, not that they attached some buttercup seeds to the outside:

And here's the seeds:

It was a lovely variety, great for a large plot. There were tons of herbs, as well as a nice mix of peppers, tomatoes, squash, beans, corn, and so on. There were no instructions, but since they put the variety on each packet, it's easy enough to look up.

I started a large tray of peppers and tomatoes this year. Oddly, the peppers are doing better than the tomatoes. Usually it's the other way around. Generally I like peppers better, so I suppose it's a good thing, but I can't seem to figure out why the tomatoes aren't doing well.

The annual garden plots at Codman Community Farm are opening up today. Apparently they had a record number of new gardeners applying for plots. It's great that everyone is so interested in gardening. Looking forward to the new season.

Happy Spring

Spring came early this year. I've done some work in the gardens already, planting snap peas and cutting back an akebia vine that was getting invasive. Still a long way to go there.

Akebia is a beautiful flowering vine, but if planted with another variety, it produces fruit too. Max and I are dying to try out this fruit, so we picked a white variety to go with our rosy-colored flowers. It might not work this year, since the flowers are budding so early and the white hasn't been shipped to us yet, but we'll give it a go. It's a good excuse to tame it and try to make the tangle into something productive.

We went a little overboard this year picking out plants. I've pinned a bunch on Pinterest on my Edible Perennials board. I found out that companies may not send ribes, such as gooseberry plants, to Massachusetts. I checked the trusty Wikipedia article on ribes, and it is because it causes White Pine Blister Rust. I hadn't heard of this, but I don't argue too much with stopping non-native disease. No currants or gooseberries in my garden.

I picked up my ever-reliable meat share this week from Chestnut Farms. Kim was dealing out "extras", including beef bones, pork bones, and leaf lard. I made a pork bone soup by boiling the bones for a couple hours the first day (we ate the broth straight), then removed the bones and added sliced baby bella mushrooms, sweet peppers, scallions, and some bok choy. Pretty good! The beef bones are great just roasted for the marrow or in a soup. I like making sweet potato soup with that broth. And the leaf lard is supposed to be amazing for pie crust. I'm looking to make a gluten-free, egg-free, dairy-free crust, so maybe leaf lard is the answer. It's a tough search on Google, and I'm not sure it's been done before.

Max cooked up four steaks in our share for a family visit. For his birthday I ordered miso from the South River Miso Co. They make several non-soy misos, anywhere from rice to barley to dandelion leek. We marinated the steaks with miso and a few other ingredients, which is always a nice treat. (My recipe is usually miso, sake, mirin, and sugar, sometimes with soy sauce and scallions.)

Happy Easter to everyone, and hope you got to enjoy some local food.

Miso zucchini

Last year I was completely, utterly bombarded with zucchini. You know how they say that if you let the zucchini grow too large, the plant stops producing? Not only did the zucchini grow too large, the plants didn't stop producing until the frost killed them. Months of baseball bats. I brought some to work and received an email, "I hear that you have some weapons-grade zucchini on your desk. I would love to take one off your hands." Love.

So this year I did NOT plant ANY zucchini. In a way this is sad. I was always guaranteed a grocery bag of zucchini. But I am using the space for more winter squash, and the patty pan squash I grow is an adorable, round little yellow zucchini. But it's not, you know, ZUCCHINI, stuff of nightmares.

Still, no matter what you do, if you live anywhere near a farm or gardener you're going to end up with someone, um, "gifting" you zucchini. And I just didn't want more stirfried zucchini with garlic, or to put it into a curry. Last year I bought the cookbook Bento Boxes: Japanese Meals on the Go, which I love. The book presents a different way of cooking, combining, presentation than traditional big dish American cookbooks. I've cooked a lot with miso this year, partly due to that cookbook, so I decided to try a miso zucchini.

Miso zucchini

Serves 2

One knob of fresh ginger
Splash of sesame oil (for cooking)
2 tablespoons of miso (the paste, not the powder)
2 tablespoon of Mirin (or a sake/sugar mix)
1 tablespoon of soy sauce
1 smallish zucchini
Sesame seeds

1. Chop the ginger. If you like to chew on ginger, then do a rough chop. If you like the flavor but hate the texture, mince it. 
2. Slice the zucchini into thin rounds. (Gadget alert: If you have a mandoline, this is the sort of thing you should use it for.)
3. Heat a fry pan on medium and add sesame oil. 
4. When the oil is hot, add the ginger.
5. When the ginger has cooked for a couple minutes, add the miso, mirin, and soy sauce. This will form a sort of paste.
6. Add the zucchini and stir to cover with the paste. 
7. Cook, stirring off and on, until the zucchini is floppy, but still holds its shape.
8. Remove from heat.
9. Toss a few sesame seeds on top, give it a quick stir, and serve hot.

It's a sweet and salty side dish that takes about 15 minutes to prep.

Bitter melon and bitter gourd seedlings

A couple weeks ago I posted about growing bitter melons and bitter gourds, but didn't know what the seedlings would look like.  I couldn't find the pictures online, so I'm contributing to the Internet today by posting a few pictures of my germinated seedlings. The gourds and the melons look similar.

Progress

Every year I wander around the community gardens with some jealousy. Why are everyone's tomatoes taller than mine? Well, because I try to start them from seed. Inevitably, some of the seedlings die, and then I replace them with purchased tomatoes from, well, everywhere. Farmer's markets, gifts from friends and coworkers, Wilson Farms, Pemberton Farms.

My garden is taking on a life of its own through its various deaths. I keep replacing and diversifying. A coworker of mine left me a bag of homeless plants, so I popped in a couple eggplant, a tomato, a jalapeno, some basil, and a parsley. Luckily, with the exception of the jalapeno, the plants were new varieties. Why I prefer to have two kinds of basil and parsley instead of one is beyond me, but it seems to appeal to my innate need to have as many options as possible. Or, my innate need to hoard. Spring has sprung; I am decluttering the house and cluttering the garden.

But I had a couple people tell me my garden was off to a good start today, and as I know these folks are well weathered gardeners, I'll accept their opinions with optimism.

The corn is about 8 inches high, and the beans are all popping up out of the ground. I'm willing them to send up tendrils so that I can watch them curl around the corn. Doing the same with my sunflowers. Last year, I rebelled against beans, not a one in the garden. This year, six kinds! Soy, red cranberry, scarlet runner, two green pole varieties, and fava. Can't wait. I think I was just avoiding the classic green bush beans. They grow like mad and then you're stuck eating them. Apparently not everyone shares this opinion, so I started giving them out last time I had a glut.

All my squash are doing beautifully. One of the gardeners suggested that in 5 minutes with a stirrup hoe, I could clean out all the weeds in my three sisters. It was true! I mulched the squash down after the weeding, finally. A nice solution. I have four kinds of winter squash and some patty pan going. Still managing to hold off on the zucchini!

I planted bitter melon and bitter gourd to cook with pork later in the summer. And now I have this conundrum...I don't know what kind of seedlings I'm looking for! In this case, I normally let everything grow, including the weeds. Woe. These seeds looked like weird flowers, not like normal seeds. I have only had the melon in dishes at restaurants, so I've never even played with the fruit before.

Meanwhile, I'm eating a lot of greens, radishes, Hakurei turnips, and scallions. It's going well, but I was sure thankful that some hot peppers are setting. I'll give them another week. Dinner today was kimchi fried rice made with Chestnut Farms hot dogs, greens and turnips from my garden at Codman Farms, and kimchi that I bought at Ebisuya but that is made at Chung Ki Wa.

I visited Chestnut Farms this weekend and we took lovely pictures of all the animals! Hoping to post a few soon.

Heat

We're having a heatwave in Massachusetts. I love the heat! And, sadly, I spend my entire days inside a freezing air-conditioned office. But at 6pm, the worst of the sun is over...though I put on the sunscreen anyway, redhead thing...I'm outside in the fields. I wish I were there every night, because every day there's something to take care of, something to miss. Still mourning some lost peppers, but I put in some transplants from Wilson Farms today to alleviate the loss. It gives me more variety. The plants are at the rootbound stage, the "on sale" stage. I think of being a rescuer here, taking in the lost lambs...

I think I've lost plants mostly due to the deadly combination of sun and little rain. Most of my basil has shriveled. You read gardening books, the step-by-step, the pretty pictures, 1-2 pages of info for all sorts of generic crops, and yet, it has so little to do with reality. Reality says "plant me on a day when it will be cool or wet for a couple days" and yet today is the day you have to plant, and it's going to be hot and sunny for a week. Throw in the fact that the water broke in our corner of the farm, and me carting around my amazing orange watering can still isn't a match for the heat.

But why is it that even though my plants are drying up, the weeds are flourishing? I wandered into my perennial plot today to find...a jungle! Weeds pushing up through the strawberries, plants I'd "moved" popping up everywhere, vines going absolutely nuts. I pulled a few weeds, and lo, the first strawberry! And a second due in a day or so. It was magic. The weeds must've hidden it from curious eyes. This weekend I'll need to go at that plot with a vengeance.

Every day I go to the farm I set out a list of must dos. Today it was to get the plants into the ground, and finally get the okra, 3 varieties of cukes, and Korean and tigger melons into the ground. I managed all of that, plus some weeding and much watering. I'm awaiting the moment that the beans I planted this weekend emerge from the soil, the soy, cranberry, and fava popping up in a green mat, and the pole and runner beans entwining themselves around the corn and sunflowers that so graciously germinated and seem to be giving the weeds a run for their money.

Meanwhile, the peas, radishes, scallions, and greens are flourishing. I picked a plastic grocery bag's worth of the stuff today (the strawberry I just ate right out of the plot), and then made a bacon and greens stirfry, then a bacon, radish, and scallion pizza. I love my Chestnut Farms bacon! This weekend is meet the meat time, so my brother and I are taking the trip out. Hopefully the heat keeps up.

May garden update

And suddenly it's the end of May. My leeks grew up and I've put them in the garden. I also put in a ton of pepper, eggplant, tomato, flower, and other seeds. Most have been popped into the garden at their own peril.

On Thursday I was rushing. It was after work and I got there around 6. I really wanted to put the melons in before the hot summer days coming up over the weekend. And I was so sad for my new little seedlings. It would be unseasonably warm all weekend, with little water, and me, well I was off to Acadia for some camping, fishing, and hiking. (During the drive up, I watched the temperature fall from 86 to 52.) As always, I tried to cram too much into my day...sweet potatoes and tomatoes to transplant, watermelon seeds to plant, everything to water, and my my aren't the weeds getting tall these days?

The mosquitoes had their revenge. They wrote "3" on my left arm...a message that my boyfriend and I have yet to decipher. Though I did get a few bites up in Acadia, it was nothing like my late evening gardening trip.

But it sure paid off. I came back and my corn is now ready for stage 2. I'm trying out the 3 sisters planting...corn, beans, and squash. You plant five hills of corn, with four seeds in each. Then you plant 4 hills of squash, and we picked 4 different kinds. After the corn is 4 inches tall, you plant pole beans that grow up on the corn. And you have this lovely mess of companion planting, tall and short. So far it's quite nice looking, and I'm hoping for productivity.

I'll admit to a bit of jealousy when I look at some of the neat, tidy gardens with careful veggie choices. My garden is focused on getting out as much food as possible in a small space. In my 15x30 plot, I'm hoping for about 50 varieties of veggies. It's pretty easy to do when you only plant one or two square feet of of several veggies. My problem is that it also leads me to buying too many seeds. Johnny's Seeds has been great, and I particularly like their sweet potato sets. But next year I might go for the High Mowing Seeds, since there are less choices and they are all organic. I'm finding that it's a lot easier for me to control my shopping when there are less choices, especially when they're all high quality. Clothes, menu choices, seed catalogs, less is more darling.

The tragedy of the week was that I burnt out some of my peppers and eggplant. I'm thinking that I'll try to replace them with other seedlings from the garden shop. Last year I similarly had problems with both, so I'll need a different strategy in the spring for starting. I figured that my grow light would solve my transplanting needs, but I think I'll need to get everything bigger pots too. I read all the seed packets and try to follow the rules, but so very often it doesn't work out in the soil as it does in black and white. Will keep on truckin'.