Gardening during time of plague - End of the season summation

 Our kitchen garden was a great success this year, although it took some watering to make it happen.  Our successes were tomatoes, Asian eggplant, sweet peppers, zucchini, and basil.  Notice that there is a culinary theme here, and as such we ate well particularly in a Mediterranean sense. It helped to have a new herb and spice store whereby we could get really good harissa.  And even better, most of the garden kept producing until late September and early October.  A late crop of basil allowed for considerable  production of pesto much to Mrs. Phactor's great delight.  A special semi-vacation  new potato and green bean pesto to reprise a Ligurian dish  along with a very nice Tuscan wine. 

There are only two of us, so the zucchini don't have to be awesomely productive to be quite adequate.  The same with tomatoes.  A quart of cherry tomatoes every 3 days is more than enough, but we had some nice little tomato recipes.  The eggplant was nearly our match, and while not large, 6-8 a week is more than enough and fortunately a seared eggplant tinga was originally for zucchini, so it expects you to be nearly over whelmed.  The cucumbers decided to stay male most of the summer and then finally became monoecious in September as sort of a surprise.  Usually cucumber succumbs to a bacterial wilt, but vine survival made for a late crop success, then a friend inundated us with cucumbers and they became a very tasty relish.   

Unfortunately  our Michigan apple source closed because of the family could no longer stay in the business, and we have not yet found a replacement orchard for our supply of Northern Spies. Let us know if you have any orchard suggestions.

The pandemic has not been much of a bother, although we had to cancel travel for two family weddings, and a trip to Scotland.  Mostly we gardened and it not only gave us something to do, but it paid some garden type dividends.  We traded red buckeye seedlings for green dragon seedlings, a good deal we think.  

Fruits and vegetables up close and personal

Here's some pretty neat images of young, immature, fruits and vegetables. See if  you can figure out what you're looking at. Oh, the strawberry does not show you the individual seeds, but the individual fruitlets on the fleshy receptacle, an accessory fruit that will clearly get much larger.  Warning: the images are flogging a book.

Parsnips vs. Turnips

It just happened again. TPP was buying parsnips to make some sausage, lentil, and parsnip soup. The check-out clerk had no idea what the parsnip were and so could not enter the correct reference number. The helpful know-it-all bagger said to the clerk, "You don't know what parsnips are?" And then she adds to me, "They're just like turnips." Amazing. Why do people think this?  Other than having the same basic color, they are nothing at all alike, so obviously the person speaking has never eaten them. Parsnips are much tastier, much sweeter, and a much under appreciated vegetable. Turnips are not a favorite and fall somewhere below kohlrabi on TPP's list of vegetable likes. But why do people think parsnips are like turnips? And nobody ever says, "Yum, turnips."  Is it the -nip thing? A sounds the same, tastes the same kind of association?  Here's TPP's advice on parsnips. Never ever boil and mash them. This is a crime against a nice root vegetable. Peel and slice the parsnips into 1/4 inch thick pieces, cross-wise or length-wise. Par boil for about 8 min. until just tender. Blot dry, and sauté in butter on a griddle until lightly browned and a bit caramelized. Parsnips are quite sweet with a quite unique taste, which is nothing whatever like a turnip. Here's another rule: don't write a blog and try to cook sausage at the same time, you might burn them.

Champion vegetables

Do your vegetables measure up?  How about the UK's annual vegetable championships?  It's not just the size, or shape, or color, but also the presentation.  Check out the photo essay at the link.  Of course it's not just vegetables, but fruit that most people think of as vegetables, like the pumpkin of the other day.  Did you see how long and how straight those parsnip were?  Wow!  TPP didn't have anything near magnificent enough this year to compete even at our local farmer's market. Years ago a family friend was an expert judge of cole vegetables (cabbage et al.) for 4-H fairs and the like.  My Father used to say he had a great head for heads.  What fun!

Eat your vegetables!

If your Mother didn't ever yell at you to eat your vegetables, well, let's just say it's a given part of growing up. Now of course my Mom's motivation was to get you to eat right, and it was such a struggle until you finally realized that your Mother's idea of cooking was to cook everything into submission, and when properly cooked, why vegetables were much better tasting and way more appealing. Funny, the only thing that was actually cooked properly was sweet corn, and that was my Father's special province.
In order to maintain good relationships with my colleagues in the pseudosciences, the Phactor tries not to criticize their research, but this particular study caught my attention (HT to The Thoughtful Animal).
Eating for Pleasure or Profit: The Effect of Incentives on Children’s Enjoyment of Vegetables (Psychological Science 2011 Feb 1;22(2):190-6.)
The experiment, which included controls (yea!), involved giving children rewards (tangible but non-edible, tangible & edible (desert), repeated exposure without reward, and a control. Where was the yelling Mother? OK, pretty unrealistic, but still, OK. The experiment involved having children sample carrot, red pepper, sugar snap pea, cabbage, cucumber, or celery. Well, my plant oriented readers will notice right away that only the 3 Cs are vegetables (carrot, cabbage, celery). And psychologists still think sex and gender are the same thing too.
Ah well, Rome wasn't built in a day. Oh, yeah, the rewards worked. But, if memory serves me, so did yelling.

Kitchen Garden Roundup - 2010 was OK

'Twas not the best of gardens, nor the worst of gardens, as is often the case. The early season garden was great raising expectations; asparagus, rhubarb, salad greens, and berries (red, straw, blue) performed very well. The early summer garden produced plenty of snap peas, broccoli, and beans, but the warm weather crops got off to a slow start and never really recovered, but to give credit where credit is due, while not prolific they hung in there and seldom have eggplant, tomatoes, and peppers all been harvested in October! Still the champion this season for longevity were the cucumbers, which usually die of beetle transmitted bacterial wilt after a month or so of productivity, but this year, a bad year for cucumber beetles we may assume, the cucumbers made it into September, and unlike the terrible bitter, seedy variety grown the year before, these were excellent fruits. The other vine crops were disappointing, first too wet and cool, then too hot and dry; can you imagine not having enough zucchini? In the Phactor's memory this has never happened before, except for the one time the stem borers wiped out the crop when we were away. And of course this year marked the first tree fruit crop - nova spy apples. The late season salad greens were a bust, woodchucked and slugged, but the bok choi and even some spinach may yet be successful, and at long last, the Phactor having temporarily won the battle with voracious herbivores, may yet get some parsley!

Fruit Quiz, Spice Quiz, Veggie Quiz - Take the Challenge

Here's an interesting online fruit quiz that was found via a recent commentor's web page who without noticing that the goods had been given away in a more recent post correctly IDed the eerie lights picture quiz. Congrats to meristemi. There are some interesting botanical posts there at meristemi. By the way, the Phactor totally aced the fruit quiz (11 of 11), so do let us know if you manage to match the master. There's also an obscure spice quiz and an unfamiliar vegetable quiz, links at the end of the fruit quiz too. The veggie quiz was the easiest (no sweat getting 8 out ot 8), but even the Phactor missed 5 of the 11 spice questions. Yikes! Go ahead leave a comment bragging if you do any better. But come on, when you have to guess between ginger and tumeric, well, it could go either way.

Garden Score Board

As summer here in Lincolnland slides into September and as the Cubs sink out of sight, it's time to do some garden evaluation.
1. The decision to save and transplant storm damaged Japanese maple is a clear winner. The now one-sided tree looks great in its new location and the cool, wet summer took the risk out of the transplanting.
2. Tomatoes. Wow! Blight and weather resulted in worst year in my decades of gardening history including the year in tropical Australia when the Phactor planted tomatoes on the sunny side of his apartment in the spring (August) only to realize the sunny side would become the shady side when the sun shifted back north and sunny shifted to the opposite side, a lesson on life in the tropical zone.
3. Squash. In spite of missing the critical period for controlling squash stem borers, the season was good for zucchini and fair for winter squash. Dwarf orange hubbards look worth planting again. Discovered a quick zucchini pickle recipe that can transform a pound of zucchini into the best sweet-sour pickles ever (to be shared in an upcoming post).
4. Wedding veil and netting. Clear winners! Japanese beetle destruction of apple tree foliage was essentially eliminated. First time in years for green beans without beetle nibblings, although inside their rodent exclusion fence (another winner) and under the veil, the beans looked like inmates.
5. Asparagus. Grew like crazy and produced the largest aerial shoots ever which portends good things for next year's crop. Some things liked the cool, wet summer.
6. Peppers. Not great, not awful, but Melrose, a reliable producer here in Lincolnland had one of its worst years.
7. Eggplant (Asian varieties). Doubled the number of plants and still didn't get enough. Combination of weather and flea beetles (too small to control with netting) made for a meager crop.
8. Raspberries. Canes rebounded and produced a much larger crop than predicted. Blueberries produced so few none actually made it out of the garden, but the snacks were appreciated.
9. Spring greens. Excellent year for salads aided by early cold frame start and transplanting of lettuce seedlings. Late season crop is planted, but a little late to be certain of good production.

Typical enough scoreboard. In small gardens you never bat one thousand. What were winners & losers for my readers?

Reasons for gardening

A recent article provides 10 reasons for planting your own garden: preserving seed diversity, self sufficiency, thoughtful gifts, exercise, cut fossil fuel use, save time, lessons for kids, nutrition, harvesting, save money. The Phactor finds most of these completely unrealistic and even a bit naïve. Come on this is the best they could do? Who plants a garden to have thoughtful gifts? Giving away excess zucchini is hardly thoughtful. Maybe throwing an over-ripe tomato at your neighbors' barking dog might count as thoughtful , from a certain perspective. Makes you wonder if the author of this article gardens? Real gardeners aren’t motivated by such reasons, so here’s the Phactor’s 10 reasons for why you should have a garden.
Reality check – Gardens provide a means of keeping in touch with reality. You watch plants sprout, grow, prosper or dwindle, and die. Some things do well, others flop. That’s life in a microcosm.
Taste – Fresh from the garden fruits and veggies tastes so much better than the aged offerings in stores. Only farmer’s markets come close. I doubt there is actually any significant nutritional difference, but who cares.
Berries – Nothing is better than fresh berries, other than value added berries, like a berry pie, especially for breakfast. If you don’t understand this refer back to taste, and of course, marry someone who knows how to bake a pie.
Weather – Gardening puts you in touch with the weather more than any other activity, other than maybe sailing, but that’s hard to verify here in Lincolnland. Highs, lows, rainfall, storms all begin to matter in ways you never noticed before. If you don’t understand refer back to reality check.
Asparagus – Nothing says spring more than fresh asparagus. Oh, this stuff is what it’s all about. Asparagus grows well along fences and borders, but plant it far enough inside your lot that your neighbor can’t reach it. Check the link to improve on something that doesn’t need improvement.
Snap peas – Yes, your kids may decide it’s fun to watch things grow (mine didn’t), and it may be a way to teach them to eat better, but I recommend not even giving kids the good stuff. They’re happy with McNuggets, so why share something as good as snap peas with the little ingrates?
Bragging rights – Gardeners really really like to brag about how big this grew, how many peppers they got, how early their first tomato was. It’s like comparing gold scores, except golf is the antithesis of gardening, unless you go to pick raspberries along the edge of the fairways, and I grew more anyways.
Vine ripe tomatoes – Tomatoes purchased from a store are indistinguishable from red plastic. Lightly toast buttered slices of a baguette under a broiler. Rub them with the cut surface of a garlic clove, and the surface of a dead-ripe just-picked warm-from-the-sun tomato. Toast just a bit more. Eat this toast with a glass of cold bone-dry Spanish champagne. Don’t understand? Refer back to taste. Then go get yourself some McNuggets.
Hmm, that’s 8 reasons. But what does it matter? You shouldn’t need any more stinkin’ reasons; gardening is just what the best people do, no matter what, no matter where! Maybe some real gardeners can suggest a couple reasons more.