Cucumbers, cherry tomatoes, and zucchini are here

I spent a week away from DC, and mother nature did not provide a drop of rain during my absence. I was sure that my plants would shrivel and turn a faint yellowish hue in the 90 degree heat. Some indeed did. A few zucchini plants would crumble with the faintest touch. However, my cucumber plant grew about 2 feet and produced two rather large cucumbers in steamy conditions. One shriveled zucchini plant did put forth a nice four inch zucchini. I also had my first cherry tomato last night. My cherry tomato plant seems so small compared to my memories of an overgrown August cherry tomato plant. We'll see what it can produce in the next two months.

Blessed Beets arrive

Their scarlet color may stain your countertops. Their bulbous shape is not the easiest to peel. These challenges are easily forgotten once the cooking begins. It is the season of beets, and I am in bliss.

I planted a short row of beets in April, and I now have about 10 small to medium sized beets ready to be roasted beets. The beets are smaller than those that show up in the store, so one needs a few more beets to fill out beet recipes. I sauteed three last night with carrots and homegrown onions for a delicious beet soup. There are so many recipes to choose; I only wished I had grown more beets earlier in the spring. I planted many more in May and early June, but I am not sure if it will be too hot for them to grow. Rather than worry, I will simply hope for more blessed beets.

Other love letters to beets
NPR's Kitchen Window "The Beet goes on"
Eat Local Challenge "And the beet goes on"
About.com: Greek food "And the beet goes on"
Penn State University (recipes and gardening tips "And the beet goes on"
...and thousands more with the same title. Let this be a lesson that your creative play on word may not be as unique as you thought...

Book Review: Animal, Miracle, Plant

Many individuals look for the "grown locally" sign at their grocery store and frequent the weekend food markets to support local agriculture. The desire to eat the tastiest tomato, cut down on the food miles it takes to grown one's food, and support the livelihoods of neighboring farmers drive the buy local movement. Babara Kingsolver and her family took this initiative a bit further when they decided to move full-time to a Virginian farm where much, if not most, of the locally obtained food could be obtained from their backyard and through their labors. Her description of planting, weeding and harvesting showcase the crisp naturalist prose for which Kingsolver has received much acclaim. She is also at her best when she frames the scale of labor and the timing of the farming year. I did not welcome a lot of the agri-business op-eds that largely equated big as bad and small as good. I didn't necessarily disagree with their arguments, but they failed to cite statistics and references to back up their cases. I would still recommend the book to any vegetable gardener for the recipes, garden humor, and celebration of growing one's own food.

Zebra tomatoes almost here; Eggplant has arrived

The heat index will hit in 98 degrees today, and even my colleagues look a bit wilted. I watered my garden around 6:30am to give my plants a good drink before the hot day was too much underway. The plants that had been thinned this weekend looked pretty sturdy and happy to have more space to grow. I don't know how I missed it this weekend, but one of my ichiban eggplants had grown four inches long. I have 3 or 4 zebra tomatoes that are about 3 inches in diameter and the correct color. There are numerous green romas of appropriate size that still need to ripen My peppers are just beginning to flower. Although others are eating their zucchinis, I simply have blossoms at this point.

Recipe: Cream of Chard and Beet Greens

With the arrival of fresh garlic in my garden, I find myself sauteing garlic, onions, olive oil and the vegetable du jour every night. Although I could continue this pattern until the garlic runs out, I thought I should try something different. I decided to make a cream of chard and beet green recipe from the common ingredients found in a cream of spinach recipe. It was heavenly.

Recipe
2 Tbsp of butter
2 Tbsp of flour
2 small shallots (courtesy of my garden)
1 cup of skim milk

a big bunch of Swiss chard stemmed
a good handful of baby beet greens
1/8 cup of grated fresh Parmesan cheese

salt, pepper and nutmeg to taste

I simply melted the butter over medium heat and then sauteed the shallots for a minute or two. I then sprinkled in the flour while stirring vigorously with a silicon spatula. Once the mixture was smooth and bubbling, I added the milk and greens. The greens begin to wilt as the milk heats up. I grated the cheese and nutmeg directly onto the mixture when greens the had cooked down and the sauce was thickening.

Weeding and Thinning - unintended sacrificial kills

I spent about nine good hours weeding my garden this weekend. The blessed rains that had nourished my garden had also quenched the thirst of little weeds staking territory in my plot. I arrived on Saturday morning to find a thin layer of weeds covering every inch of my garden. With cultivator in hand, I was ready for the task.

I actually don't mind weeding. Weeding is fine when you still think you are winning the battle. It is a quieting activity, but some vegetables require more attention than others. I prefer weeding around beans and okra because I am more confident that my cultivator will simply take out the weeds. Weeding around young carrots, beets and chard sprouts requires more patience and technique. Their thin roots seem almost eager to fall over with even the faintest vibration. Such nudges are hard to avoid when the weeds are less than an inch away. It is a cruel fate to kill one's plants when trying to remove the weeds, but a few extra carrots and beets were lost in the long weeding war this weekend.

I wasn't too worried about the accidental thinnings because I needed to purposefully thin through my carrot and beet rows. I had to thin the carrots back severely because the seeds were sown so heavily. Few of my carrots germinated last year, so I was more generous while sowing this spring. The pendulum had swung in the opposite direction this year. My carrots came up mere millimeters apart. Rather than pullout the root of the sacrificial thinnings, I used a scissors to cut off the tops because I did not want to destroy the root structures of the carrots and beets anointed to live. I couldn't help avoid moving the soil ever so slightly; the cardinal sin of thinning. After all of the stress, my beet and chard plants did provide 8 cups of delicious tiny salad greens. The sacrificed carrot tops simply gave me heartache.

Book Review: United States of Arugula

My favorite dinner was peanut butter on white toast for a certain period of my childhood. I turned up my nose to meatloaf, frozen peas and many other frozen vegetables. If it was green, I did not want it on my plate. Yet the landscape of what children put in their lunch boxes has changed dramatically over the past 30 years. Sushi is in school cafeterias; school pizzas are topped with sun dried tomatoes, and even if they are not, kids wish that it were so. I think that many kids would still protest if they found brussel sprouts at the dinner table, but the spectrum of acceptable flavors and textures has augmented dramatically in the past couple of decades. And not just amongst kids.

To gain a better understanding of why olive bars are frequented, well more frequently, I recently devoured David Kamp's United States of Arugula. Kamp's history of American food culture is driven by personalities. Economic factors such as the advent of just-in-time supply chain management and the development of hybrid varieties capable of weathering long distances make no appearance in his analysis. One knows that these and other very boring economic factors influenced changes in food culture, but it is simply more entertaining to hear how the chortles of Julia, inner-temptations of James Beard and the coke-driven madness of Jeremiah Towers changed what we eat for dinner.

The book is mainly the journey of those who put down their jello molds, frozen peas and hamburger-helper mix. Americans already eating kim-chee, burritos, and caprese salads as a part of their family traditions are laregly ignored. Yet, all of us can now get arugula salads at McDonald's. We all see celebrity chefs on the Today show with regularity, and I am fairly certain that many Americans can name more famous chefs and foodies than U.S. senators (and I am not saying that this is a bad thing). Even with the omission of ethnic diversity and economic factors, I would recommend this book. Kamp writes a witty and convincing tale of idiosyncratic Americans propelling us into a new reality in which there is chevre in my neighborhood bodega, Chipotle offers free range meat and curious Americans will stroll to their local farmer's market on Saturday morning to see how the swiss chard is looking these days.

Recipe: Tilapia with cherry tomatoes, olives, and parsley

The recipe below will be even better when cherry tomatoes are in season, but fresh parsley and fresh garlic made it taste heavenly tonight. I think this is a nice simple dish to cook on a weeknight with a glass of pinot grigio. It is also a nice way to end the weekend without making too much of a mess in the kitchen.

SPICY SAUTEED FISH WITH OLIVES AND CHERRY TOMATOES
Via Epicurious and Bon Appétit, May 2002, Candida Sportiello, Ventotene, Italy

I made this with a half pound of tilapia, two hand full of grape tomatoes, fresh parsley, and cracked green olives from Trader Joe's. I usually coat the fish in flour per the suggestion of others on the Epicurious website and deglaze the pan with a little white wine. I tried coating the tilapia in almond meal rather than flour with favourable results. To avoid smoking the olive oil, I needed to keep the heat at medium rather than medium high.

Garlic, onions, and parlsey oh my

I picked my first bulb of garlic and a handful of small onions yesterday. I am still searching through recipes to find a new a tasty meal with onions, garlic, and parsley, which is the basic foundation of any good meal. The onions are small, but were removed to make room for their neighbors to grow larger. The garlic was a bit lilliputian, but it had broken through the ground and was thus vulnerable to little critters or the covetous hands of someone wandering near my garden. Our community garden does have its fair share of "volunteer harvesters" who come to our garden to do their shopping. Petty garden theft is a somewhat complex issue of food security, the urban environment, and cultural misunderstanding that I will write about later. Let's just say for now that I wouldn't even think of curing my onions in my garden. The technique of drying out the onions by laying them out in the soil for a month at a time would only, in my humble opinion, invite these volunteers to take the onions. No matter, I have found a bit of shade in front of my apartment.

For more information on curing onions, try this resource from the University of Illinois Growing Onions

okra plants, beets, and carrots on their way

I feel as though I have needed to start each post with the phrase "nevermind" as of late. My frustrated attempt to diagnose the barren appearance of a patch of garden that I sowed with beet, carrot, chard, and okra seeds nearly a month ago has filled my blog posts as of late. Yet, I was greeted with dainty okra, beet, and chard seedlings when I arrived at my garden on Friday. This patch had looked like fallow grounds on Wednesday night, but it was now filled with incredibly lovely short rows of budding new plants. The seedlings were exactly where they should have been. I guess my garden is more forgiving than myself. It is clear that more water would have brought me to this happy state sooner, but it came when it needed. The predicted light rains should help these new plants grow taller and stronger

I was so flush with happiness that I called my mother right away to tell her the good news. I began my happy tale with, "so you know how I have been so worried about my seedling that never came." Someday I know I will worry less. There will always be odd years for gardening, rain will come down in heavy down pours, and sometimes it will not come at all. Perhaps reading a year's worth of blogs in which my worries melted with each rain will teach me to be more patient. Right now, I am just so pleased to look at those proud short rows of plants.

Not enough water (mystery solved)

Although I may have waxed philosophic about the failure of my seeds to germinate on my Monday-June 4th-post, a wiser neighboring gardener told me that I just didn't water my garden enough in May. He encouraged me to water last night even though DC was soaked on Sunday because the ground was still so dry. He dug into my garden, and sure enough, the ground, and thus roots systems, were dry after about 4 inches. In addition to the derth of rain in May, the topography of my garden leaves me particularly vulnerable to dry soil. My garden gently slopes downward, and thus the rain waters drain into other gardens down the hill. My garden is near the crest of the hill.

My neighbor offered some parsley cuttings along with his evalution of my garden's health, and I think he is going to add a sunflower to my plot as well. That is how we offer up bad news in our community garden association.

NOAA provides some very useful climate reports on the obeserved temperature, wind, and precipitation for different time periods. I checked the monthly climate report at the National Weather Service, and DC only received 1.76 inches last month. The average is 3.81 in for May in our region. While I did water my garden on the weekends, it is hard to germinate plants when little moisture and high temperatures dry out the soil.

More stats from NOAA to come.

Easy Chard and Pasta Recipe

After an unfortunate squirrel incident, I only have a few chard plants producing leaves. I supplemented my supply with pickings from my local farmer's market last Saturday and tried the following recipe from PBS's Victory Garen website on Tuesday night with moderal success.

Fettuccine with Swiss Chard, Walnuts and Lemon

The recipe has a good balance of ingredients, but the temperature settings for cooking the chard seemed way off. I think that the recipe asks one to cook the chard on high heat to soften up the chard stems more quickly. I have found it easier to cut out the stems and steam them seperately for 5-10 minutes (depending on the toughness of the stems) and then simply add the softened stems and leaves together in a sautee of olive oil and garlic over medium heat. The greens will wilt quickly event at this lower temperature.

I also added a bit of white wine in place of some of the chicken stock to deglaze the pan. Given the ample nutrients provide by the chard s(see University of Illinois extension), I decided that I had earned it :)

May Climate Fast Facts for Gardeners

I was completely surprised when I read the National Weather Service's May Monthly Weather Summary for DC. I had thought that my plants had suffered due to what I thought was the abnormal temperature extremes in the area. The observed values almost completely matched the normal values.

http://www.weather.gov/climate/index.php?wfo=lwx
accessed June 5, 2007
Weather Observed Value Temperature (F) : Highest 91 (May 26th) Lowest 44 (May 8th); Normal Value highest 90, Lowest 44; Departure from Normal: Highest 1, Lowest 0

The real abberation was found in the precipitation we received last month.

Roughly 50% of our rainfall is attributable to a single rainstorm (which I was caught outside in) on May 12th. Many of my seeds didn't get sown until a week later.

too much dirt...or too little...or

My rows of beans, carrots and beets that were planted on 5/20 have yet to break free from the soil. This is not a good sign. It usually does not take three weeks to germinate. I have tried to delude myself that some weeds were actually beans, but I know that the weeds will look even more like weeds and less like vegetables when I return to my garden on Friday. In addition to a healthy does of denial, I am still trying to figure out what I did wrong. Either I planted the seeds too deeply and they didn't have enough energy to make it to the surface, or I planted them to shallow and the heavy rains washed away the seeds. It is also possible that the seeds didn't receive enough moisture during germination. There is also option "d", none of the above.

I think we are usually conditioned to think that we can learn from experience. However, gardening regularly challenges this thought. After many springs, one might have a better grasp, but there are so many things that are just unknown to the novice. Although frustrating, it is probably good that I can't research out the answer or test my hypothesis. Instead, I can simply shrug my shoulders and plant again on Friday.