Shiny Cooking» garden porn

how does your garden grow? labor day edition

Amy — Sun, 05 Sep 2010 22:22:18 +0000

It’s Labor Day weekend, and the steamy, blowsy days of August are behind us, we hope. With the heat came fast growth, bringing us tomatoes and melons for the first time in two years. For ages after planting the garden in spring, each new crop was anticipated and loved: Look! Radishes! Kohlrabi! And now baby beets!

Then late July, August hits and everything is ready at once. Cucumbers. Zucchini. Sweet corn. Carrots. Green beans. Eggplant. Swiss chard. Onions. Peppers, sweet and spicy. And tomatoes. So many tomatoes. See those tall plants in the back? Those are the tomatoes.

There. A closer look. Yes, they’re six feet tall.

Rainbow chard. Swiss chard with prettiness.

I haven’t picked a leaf of it yet. That’s okay. It can stay until frost.

My Lacinato kale. Same deal.

show me something pretty already

When the lettuce bolted, one variety sent up such lovely flower stalks that I let it stay in the garden, even though (gasp!) it was no longer useful. Same for one of the red onions that decided to make a pincushiony seed head. Too cute to destroy.

And same for the garlic chives. I can still pick and eat them, too, in spite of the delicate white flowers.

I have four Genovese basil plants and two pumpkin plants. The basil and pumpkin are getting along for the time being, but the pumpkin would like nothing more than to absorb the basil into its vine-ridden maw.

The pumpkin also enjoys nom-ing on parsley.

Doesn’t this zucchini look like a tentacled space monster?

The poblano and jalapeño peppers grow tall on their supports like the tomatoes do. They’re also enjoying the hot summer and fruiting like crazy.

Dad’s cats love (fertilizing) the garden. It’s a myth that cats are solitary creatures. The cats do not care one bit about the garden…until a person is in it. Then they converge, they swarm, they pounce, they play, they get in the ever-loving way. Spaz, above, is a bit more mellow now, at least.

Whew. These pics missed so much, too. Nothing of the marigolds, parsnips, tomatillos, onions, marjoram, watermelon, dying cucumbers, carrots, beets, cabbage and I don’t remember what else. What’s still growing in your garden?

tomatoes for pasta sauce

Amy — Sat, 28 Aug 2010 14:50:13 +0000

I’m making pasta sauce today. Woo! It calls for 45 pounds of tomatoes. Check this out, dudes. It’s nearly 15 pounds of tomatoes. See? 45 pounds isn’t that bad. The recipe, which is from the unfortunately-named Ball Blue Book, claims to make 14 pints or 7 quarts.

Yeah, right. Only if you can watery sauce. Blech.

What else was I going to say? Oh, yeah. I get to set up the Vittorio strainer today. Which reminds me, Mom, can I come borrow it?

Okay, I’m off. Bbl with updates and recipe.

time to blossom

Amy — Mon, 03 May 2010 21:54:12 +0000

In terms of making new beginnings and forging new paths, New Year’s takes a distant third on my internal clock. New Year’s is the new beginning of the earth’s rotation, marking the end of the year’s shortest day and looking forward to lengthening ones.

New Year’s is a quiet time, as far as heralds go. Party revelry aside, it’s marked by a sunrise a wee minute earlier than the day before, sunset a wee minute later. We are inspired to set plans in motion, but the still-long darknesses encourage long nights under the covers and slow-cooker meals.

First place for new beginnings, for me, is autumn. School is starting, whether we are still going or whether we are 20, 30, or more years out; it’s in us to buckle down, get harvests in, plan for those winter holidays that are designed to ease the tedium of winter’s darkness. Still full of summer’s energy, autumn is another time when plans are made, definitive and time-delineated.

Spring, though, while it takes second place, is a time of special beginnings. Everything is growing, blossoming, and we blossom too, even if it’s confined to a tiny space deep in our solar plexus. We can’t help it; we are bound to nature as nature is not bound to us. The apple trees don’t need our help. The bees will gather and spread the pollen. The currant bushes send up wild canes whether pruned by our hands or not.

Spring is when this blog began, last year. It didn’t emerge fully formed in June. It began in March, April, with research and reflection and coding.

Lots of coding.

what are your spring projects?

I’ve always had luck with projects begun in spring, and I think you will too. Form your plans in spring, work on them through spring and summer or however long it takes. Dream. Write down goals. Then write down the steps you can take today or tomorrow or next week that will go towards achieving those goals.

And that, that is the most important part. Dreaming is vital, recording goals is vital, but none will ever come to fruition without real, tangible steps you take towards those goals. Just so, pear trees will never bear fruit without the bees pollinating them, much as their blossoms’ goal is to become a pear.

What are your goals for this spring/summer? A garden? Reading some books? Canning? Making pie? Do share in the comments.

easter, and spring, and budding growing things

Amy — Sun, 04 Apr 2010 16:17:05 +0000

Spring has sprung, and flora are stretching, budding, opening for their sun. This is a forsythia’s flower. Forsythia are wild bushes. Lanky as a teenage basketball player, they lengthen and sprawl, and reward our patience with their disorganized antics by bursting into yellow blooms in spring, spring only.

It may be Easter, but for some there’s still work to be done before dinner, because tomorrow it might rain.

It might always rain tomorrow.

New shoots are most noticeable on the fruiting trees, maybe because we watch and train their shapes so closely. We bend them to our wills, in a promise: we know you want to grow, but you want to create fruit even more. Let us snip these branches. Trust us. And trees, being slow to move, have no choice but to assent. We prune, and their fruits get light and air, and repay us in volume.

The garden, early April, is just one very long row and change. Shelling peas, sugar snap peas, kohlrabi, parsnips, and finally lettuce are in the ground, nestled in cool earth. See how little space they are taking up. These early vegetables keep to themselves. Peas like to climb, yes, but cold-weather vegetables are stoic, self-contained; they would not dream of being so blithe as to send vines willy-nilly across the garden in a lazy sprawl, as the warm-weather melons are wont to do.

The young Dutch willow. Where once were three ancient trees, trunks two people could hug without touching, there’s now only this five year-old sapling, at one time merely a branch off the last of the surviving old ones, shoved bare into soft spring earth.

That last tree was blown over onto the house in a windstorm a few years ago. It fell gently, with only a low boom, and was polite enough to leave the roof unscathed save for a few shingles.

The grapevines are old, no one’s told me for sure just how old. Linda prunes them every spring, stripping them clean of wandering vines. They look bare and worrisome when she finishes, but the grapevines are pleased; in two months the new shoots will have covered the supporting wires and poles in a wall of vines and leaves.

Beneath the grapevines, tiger lilies poke up. I don’t know why they’re there, but they’re pretty. And “they’re pretty” is as good a reason there is to plant something.

plant something

If you can, plant something this Easter, or this week. Because it’s pretty.

What will you plant?

how does your garden grow? oh s*** edition

Amy — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 23:24:14 +0000

Previously: How does your garden grow? 8-11-09 edition

What follows is a chronicle of a giant, weed-infested, blight-ridden, cool-summer-stricken garden. It seemed like overnight there were 3-foot weeds in there. And that annoying fungus had killed the cukes and melons near dead.

I guess if the frost holds off til November, we might have tomatoes. That’s a joke, because it usually frosts here by the end of September. Sigh.

Let’s take a tour of the post-apocalyptic mess that is my garden, shall we? What you see above is one of the very few plants that looks normal or, nay, even healthy. Herbs are tough little guys. Including parsley.

The long view. Long garden is long. Yes, it’s a triangle. Those tall things in the back? Tomatoes. For reference, those yellow and orange spots in front of them are 3-foot-tall marigolds.

tomatoes and marigolds and weeds, oh my

This was the compost end of the garden last year. You can tell by all the tomato plants. They’re rogues. They came up by themselves. They do what they want and they don’t answer to anybody.

They also smoke and loiter outside the high school in their tomato-leather jackets.

A closer look at tomato alley. Those plants are taller than I am, nearing 6 feet.

Too bad tomato alley has yielded only 4 ripe tomatoes so far. These opalka plums will probably never ripen before frost. The Fonzie tomatoes, on the other hand, have been giving up lots of nice ripe guys. None of them are pink brandywines though, and those are the tomatoes I’ve been waiting nearly 2 years for.

there has to be some good news, no?

The second crop of beets is lookin’ pretty fine. The first crop was lookin’ pretty anemic. Hope I get enough to make pickled beets. Mmm, pickled beets. (Insert Homer Simpson drool here.) Also hope they don’t get bit by all that nasty blight you see on the cukes and melon in the background.

The leeks are coming along too. Look ma, no blight!

The cabbages all got nibbled by bunnies when they were babies. So they’re kind of late, too. Gee, just like everything else. Something else is nibbling on them now, but just the leaves. I’ve decided it’s pretty and to name the effect “lacy.” To decide otherwise would be futile.

Herbs always seem happy and bug-free. Maybe I should just do an herb garden. A giant herb garden.

holy crap, don’t you ever weed?

Why no, no I don’t.

Nearly half the carrots are pulled out. I should put that pea-support fencing away I think. What? Peas have only been done like a month.

I know this was in the last garden update, too. Marigolds and dill, together at last. Just like nuts and gum. The dill heads have gone to seed and are drying. Is this where a Simon and Garfunkel song starts to play?

Oh gods. More stuff to do. Those 2 rows of onions on the left, see them? All the ones whose tops have fallen over? That’s a secret message. It means, “PULL ME OUT NOW AND SET ME OUT TO CURE IF YOU WANT TO HAVE ANY HOPE OF ME KEEPING TIL WINTER.” The row on the right? Way, way, way overgrown green bunching onions.

I still like them anyway.

The west end of the garden, looking south. Apparently I’ve also been too lazy to remove the orange “SEEDS ARE HERE, IDIOT, QUIT STEPPING ON ME” flags. This part looks good because I spent a few afternoons crawling the hell around there pulling goddamn weeds.

I am not bitter about this.

The zucchini look pretty good, still. Shocker.

How about some fancy macro shots?

Probably the only swiss chard leaf in the garden without any holes in it. Must preserve this semi-perfection for posterity. And so I can pretend to people later that I didn’t have any bugs.

This little fella is about the size of a softball. He’s an Eden’s Gem melon. An heirloom I haven’t gotten to taste yet since the plant’s gotten blight both years I’ve tried it. I don’t think this one’s going to live long enough to ripen either.

Zomg! A red pepper is turning red! I heart you, pepper plants. You never get diseased and die like (glances at melons) some others I could name.

And we close with the joy and wonder of new life. A parsnip, just gotten its grown-up leaves.

Too bad it’s going to die before it gets big enough to make the part humans want to eat. I miscalculated the planting of them a tad. Just a tad.

What a depressing garden!

first tomato of the season

Amy — Sat, 15 Aug 2009 15:35:38 +0000

Hell yeah. Time to inaugurate the “tomato” tag.

I’d go on about heirlooms and brandywines and tell cute little stories involving one of my grandmas, or, if it were of special import requiring massive genetic support, both grandmas.

But I have to get to the Blueberry Festival in 45 minutes, and to the gym 26 minutes after that (sorry, couldn’t resist).

This little fella is from one of my rogue tomatoes, which you may have caught a glimpse of in the ruthlessly onanist garden porn gallery. He’s shaped like a brandywine, stretch marks and veins and all, but he’s small, about 4 inches across. A cross between a brandywine and a cherry, maybe? Do they even like each other? I don’t know. He’s really red, though, so maybe he’s just one of those icky red brandywines we planted last year.

did someone say icky?

Look at that flesh. It’s not got the look of awesome tomato flesh. It’s got a grainy look. This prejudiced me against it.

Then I tried it. Yeah, it wasn’t awesome. Not a lot of flavor, and really acidic.

Threw it into the fridge to put in salad or cook with. Maybe the next one will be good.

how does your garden grow? 8-11-09

Amy — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 02:40:22 +0000

Warning: massive photo post ahead. Like, 30 photos. All of my garden. Yeah, real exciting.

Inspired by the lovely Diana and her garden porn.

First, let’s try and get an idea of the scope of this garden. It’s roughly triangular.

Sheesh, it’s so big you can’t pick anything out.

At least now we can pick some stuff out. Looks like some big ass tomatoes.

Wow. Taking pictures at midday was so not a good idea. But see, we’re getting some perspective. There’s those tomatoes again, with a rogue muskmelon (we think) growing between the first two, oregano, rosemary, and peppers in view.

of cages and flowerpots

Parsley and basil, both nice and gigantic. I should make some pesto, shouldn’t I? The basil keeps sending up flower stalks and I keep having to pinch them off.

I fear the basil is in some sort of willful reproductive battle with me.

See that flowerpot? I used it to cover the basil after it was transplanted, when we got some low-temperature nights in early June. It was once that small.

Here’s an opalka plum heirloom tomato. I tried these and Amish paste last year, and the opalkas won by a mile. They taste great and they’re pure flesh — nearly no seeds and little juice. They’re great for sauces and supposedly paste too, but I’m not anal enough to make my own tomato paste.

I just might be anal enough to make my own ketchup this year, though. But seriously, if you’re going to try a plum/paste tomato, forget the overrated Amish, get an opalka.

The tomato cages? About five feet high. The tomatoes are kind of short this year due to the cool season we’re having.

aww, those poor beets

Don’t laugh at my poor beets. Please. The carrots are nice and fluffy though. Check out the dying peas to the right and their pathetic fence.

Many of the beets are showing this weird blight. I have no idea what it is, but it doesn’t seem to bother them. My gardening philosophy is, if it doesn’t destroy the part I eat, let it slide. However, if you know what it is, let me know!

broccoli gives good head

Ha, the broccoli leaves are getting chewed up too. Wait til you see the chard. But the plants are making damn nice heads. Which is a surprise, since they got chewed down to nubs by baby bunnies right after transplanting. They recovered. Obviously.

To the right you see a few of the 4 brazillion rogue tomatoes that came up. We saved a few because I have a soft spot for plants tenacious enough to come back. Even after I beat them down repeatedly.

See? I told you the broccoli gave nice head.

2 heads 1 cabbage. I have to stop making these dreadful allusions.

Oh! Check out the upper left corner! That’s my top-secret gardening trick. Throw all food garbage in the garden. Ha ha.

a leaf says eat me

Swiss chard. Lookin’ good.

Maybe not. The same little dudes who are snacking on the cabbage and broccoli leaves are chomping on chard. I just knew I should have begun picking it last week, when the leaves were still whole.

it wouldn’t be garden porn without a suggestive cucumber

Are camera angles the expression of our subconscious? I did not position the cucumber in any way.

We’re trellising the cucumbers and melons this year. Well, caging. Same diff. They seem to like it so far. Cukes are just starting to mature.

Check out the forest of dill. That’s what I was talking about in the dill dip post.

ha, she said melons

The Eden’s Gem melon, caged. It has a rogue tomato kind of invading it, but it seems pretty happy still. We decided to train up the cukes and melons because they keep getting hit by powdery mildew every year. I hope this helps.

My green bunching onions are all growed up now. They’re way big.

The hall of tomatoes. Two rows, about 10 plants total. We cut back this year. There’s stupice, Sudduth’s brandywine, black krim, eva purple, cherokee purple, opalka plum, and cherry roma. I think that’s all. I’m the only one who likes black krim. We got eva purple by accident last year and liked it a lot — it has beefsteak heirloom taste but looks as round and perfect as a supermarket tomato. Cherokee purple and cherry roma are new this year. Sudduth’s (pink) brandywine is the best. Tomato. Ever.

If you’re wondering why the rows are so far apart, we planted the tomatoes too close last year. They grew over the path and created a forested bier we had to walk under. A dark tomato tunnel.

Awww, check out the little kohlrabi!

Leeks. They’re much bigger now than they were. Which is good, because they kept being pulled out as weeds. “Look! There’s little onions growing here!” “Yes, those are leeks. Want to put them back in the ground?”

dill is the most promiscuous of all the herbs

Marigold and dill, together at last.

Marigold and tomatoes, together at last. It was supposed to be only marigolds. But again, my soft spot for plucky little plants won over.

weird, i’m all out of immature jokes now

Yellow onions. Soon they will be ready. Yesss.

i didn’t even know that was possible

The poblanos are getting big! All the peppers look really nice.

I let the last radishes go to seed because their little flowers were so pretty. To the right you can see the last of the lettuce.

I told you the radish flowers were pretty.

Two zucchini plants. Only it might be more like four, because we didn’t thin them. But they’re in two spots. Surprisingly, we’re keeping up with them pretty well. Only had a few monsters escape our eagle eyes so far.

Tomatillos and in front, an eggplant. To the right, two red cabbages.

halp! tomato disease emergency!

This looks a bit like something Kristen over at Gezellig Girl blogged about with her tomato. It died.

So far this is only on this one plant. Any ideas?

But let’s finish on a happy note. This little dude is almost ripe! It’s the first one! It’s on one of the rogue tomatoes too. Go rogues go!