Garden Blogging

The tassels are on the corn ...



The bloom is on the tomatoes ...



The melons are setting ...



Summertime in the garden!

The Fall Garden

My son and gardening apprentice, Andy, was home from school last weekend. So we took advantage of the cool drizzle to reinvigorate our soil and do our fall planting:



Some of these beds have been resting since the end of summer, with compost mixed in. Those we turned over and beefed up with organic steer manure.

The others still had the remnants of tomato and pepper plants in them. We removed those, dug up the soil, lined the beds with dry leaves, then layered back in topsoil and manure, moistening as we went along.

Here's what we have planted: Lettuces, rainbow chard, kale, spinach, broccoli, cauliflower, basil, Italian parsley and jicama. An artichoke plant that barely survived the hot summer seems to have rallied, so I have high hopes for it to produce by the spring.

In the center washtub, you'll see the blueberry bush I bought at the L.A. Arboretum plant sale last spring. It produced about two dozen berries and made it through the summer. It has about doubled in size, so I hope all those new canes will be loaded with berries next year:

A Ray of Sun(flower) Shine

Aren't sunflowers cheery? It makes me happy just looking at it.

Harvest Time

We've been picking green beans, cucumbers, basil, peppers and tomatoes from our summer veggie garden for a while now.




But yesterday was the first time we picked some corn. Test for readiness by stabbing your fingernail into a kernel. If it just sits there, no dice. If the kernel squirts milky fluid in response to your stab, you're good to go.



We ate these ears a few minutes after we harvested them. Yum!



The sunflowers must be over 8-feet by now (Andy is over 6') but the flowers haven't opened yet. What's the matter, guys - not hot enough for ya!?



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Foraging

This weekend I took three bags of Meyer lemons to the Produce Exchange in Monrovia.

After getting up early Saturday and picking said lemons in the rain (waterproof poncho and rubber galoshes do come in handy, even in SoCal!), I was glad to take home a bag of tangerines, tangelos, oranges and sage. A local coffee shop contributed grounds for compost, so I took a bag of those also.

I'm sure the bounty will expand beyond citrus this spring and summer, so I look forward to sharing the fruits and veggies of my garden with this group again in March. They meet on the first Saturday of the month, in the basement of the Monrovia United Methodist church.

Heather, the woman who organized this group, told me about Meyer lemon shaker pie so I'm trying out the recipe right now. Not sure how it will taste, but it smells heavenly in the oven.

Speaking of using your garden bounty in the kitchen, check out Forage, a new restaurant in Silver Lake.

Home gardeners bring in their produce and the chefs design a dish around it! You even get a shout-out if they use your foodstuffs on their ever-changing menu. Wow. Talk about the ultimate fun for a proud home-tiller!

I would love to try it sometime, maybe when my summer gardens starts to churn out goodies.

Weekend Watermelon

Vacations are great, but the best part is always getting home. Don't you agree?

When we rolled into the organic garden last week a special surprise awaited us:



This is the largest of about six melons on our vine. Anyone know how to tell when a watermelon gets ripe enough to pick?

Sunday Garden Blogging

Our organic garden is chugging right along, producing tomatoes, green beans, eggplant and a plethora of crunchy, delicious cucumbers.

As you can see above, however, these cukes don't look like the ones you see in the store. They have been really long, thin and they come in crazy shapes, like the corkscrew variety I'm holding here:



Weird, huh!? Good thing I don't care what they look like, as long as they are tasty.

Garden Bounty

I hoped to start harvesting veggies from the garden this week, and we have!

Here's a sample of the goodness - and it's barely summer:



We will be well-fed this summer, no doubt about it.

I took the White Beauty eggplant and Cue Ball zucchini above, cut them in half, hollowed them out and stuffed them with sauteed vegetables and bread crumbs, topped with parmesan cheese. You can add some crumbled, cooked sausage or ground meat, but they make a nice vegetarian side dish also.

Have a great holiday weekend, everyone! I'm taking a couple days off. :-)