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Summer Garden Recap
My food growing was a disaster this summer. At least that’s how it felt as I surveyed the mass of weedy overgrowth this evening. I put all my energy into the new pond and quail keeping, and I let the weeds run amok and didn’t feed the plants or top off compost as I should have. For my future self, I’m documenting the season and will start with the positives because no one likes a whiner. Wins One apple tree out of three and one pear tree out of two finally started producing just a few but still very exciting fruits. One really good peach tree yielded 35lbs of peaches.…
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Essential Garden Edibles
After nearly 15 years of growing food, I have settled into my garden and learned the local climate, built up my soil, and developed planting rhythms, growth expectations, and a list of essential garden edibles that work best for my garden and household. These 13 fruits, veggies, and herbs have become my essentials because of their flavor, versatility and/or preservability: tomatoes, peppers, zucchini, okra, cucumber, sugar snap peas, carrots, potatoes, garlic, onions, basil, dill, and cilantro. What should go on the list? While I grow tons of different things, these emerged as the foods that I look forward to eating, that I enjoy growing, and that I can combine easily…
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6 Tips for Growing Tomatoes
Over the past few years, I’ve picked up some valuable tips for growing tomatoes. This by no means implies that each summer I’m guaranteed a beautiful crop, and in fact am yearly frustrated by the usual problems – pests, disease, cracking, blossom end rot. These tips can help improve crops. 1. Pinch those suckers. Different gardeners will tell you different types of tomatoes should or shouldn’t have the suckers removed. If you are planting in a small space and deal with crowding, go ahead and pinch them to make sure to keep the growth in check and allow plenty of air movement around plants. My first crop of indeterminate tomatoes…
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Summer 2012 Tomato Evaluation
Every year I plant a large variety of tomatoes, and I’m losing track of how long I’ve planted each different variety. The obsession began when I purchased a packet of Burpee’s Rainbow Heirloom Mix. That packet included Omar’s Lebanese, Dutchman, Djena Lee’s Golden Girl, Golden Sunburst, Aunt Ruby’s Germany Green, and Black Russian. Since I didn’t know for sure which tomato was which, I saved from the tastiest and labeled the seed bags “Large, red beefsteak, sweet, Omar’s?” and “pink beefstake, large, not many seeds, Dutch?” Each year I’ve continued to plant those pink and red seeds, as well as Aunt Ruby’s German Green. I liked the large red ones…
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Sun dried tomato sourdough bread
There’s a new favorite bread in our house, and it was born out of a desire to use up the cherry tomatoes. I’m going to skip the narrative and get straight to the recipe. Ingredients 3 cups bread flour 2 – 3 tbs sugar, depends on if you want the bread slightly sweet or not 1 tsp salt 2 tbs olive oil 1 cup sourdough starter 1 cup caramelized cherry tomatoes in olive oil or your choice of sun dried tomatoes in olive oil. Directions Starter I’ve been making a quickie sourdough starter where I combine 2 tsp bread machine yeast, 1 cup warm water, 1 tbs sugar, and 1…
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Caramelized Cherry Tomatoes in Olive Oil
There is no doubt in my mind that fresh tomato and basil is the official taste of the summer. I can understand the argument for watermelon, especially as I have friends who live for Cookout’s seasonal watermelon milkshake, but there is nothing that compares with some homemade bread topped with pesto and cherry tomatoes. Our garden is currently overrun with two things: climbing squash vines on which no squash are currently growing and cherry tomato plants – Matt’s Wild Cherry to be exact. I don’t like killing volunteers, and anyone who has grown cherry tomatoes for more than one season knows that there are plenty of cherry tomato volunteers. I…
