Category: garden

End of the season.

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It was bound to happen – the first frost of the year, putting an end to bounty from the garden.  I still have some greens and herbs out there, but the days of fresh basil, peppers, tomatoes are over until next year.  Sigh.
I ran around Friday and harvested.  I filled a garbage bag with basil and Saturday, I made a few batches of pesto and froze it.  I also froze a few bags of tomatillos, picked a bowl of tomatoes and a huge bowl of peppers.  I think most of them will get pickled.

I picked every last flower that was blooming and threw them in a vase.  I meant to go back and ‘arrange’ them, but then realized I really liked them just the way they were.  And I loved how they looked on the coffee table next to my Aunt Anita ‘family’ sculpture.
It was also the end of birthday week.  Edie had a slumber party, which meant we were kid free for a night AND the next morning.  A dear friend suggested we go to dinner and so in the process of tossing about places to go, we found ourselves agreeing to at least begin with a margarita from Continental Divide. Surprisingly, it wasn’t too crowded and we thought about staying for dinner.  But as we toasted my age and I joked that I was now “Two 21 year olds”, I looked around realized that I was easily twice the age of oh, more than half the folks in there.  And suddenly realized that the C&O option sounded way better than Continental Divide.  So, away we went.  We were lucky enough to walk right in and get a cozy table in the bistro.  A bottle of wine was ordered and I had the rare delight of not being involved in the selection!  That right there was a gift.
Having worked at a few variations of wine bars on the downtown mall, as well finding myself writing a monthly wine column, people seem to think I know wine. As a result, I am often consulted about what to drink.  I loved being surprised by a bottle of Haraszthy Zinfandel, that had to be retrieved from the shed.  Apparently that’s where they store wines that are not frequently ordered, which was quite exciting for the staff, as well as myself, I have to admit.  It was a nice, big red to go with the cold evening.  The fellows had the trout, which was about the most perfect fish I’ve had in I don’t know how long….and I had my usual C&O standby of rabbit, also wonderful, in a house made Boudin Blanc.   I also had a glass of the Knight’s Gambit Petit Verdot.  I mention them in my upcoming November wine column, so I couldn’t resist.   For dessert I had the chocolate bread pudding, which is better than I make.  And that’s saying something.  They use brioche, making it incredibly light and dreamy.  A Baileys and coffee was ordered for me and the two paired just wonderfully together.  A fabulous cap for a fabulous evening.
Sunday morning, Pat & I headed out for the last birthday hurrah – brunch at The Villa.  We hadn’t been there in ages and other than a name change (From the Italian Villa), it hasn’t changed much.  It was parents weekend at UVa, so the place was filled with college students and their parents, as well as a few Zombies from the Zombie run that took place in the morning.  It was a lovely finish to a good birthday week.
Next up, candy season.  Happy Halloween!

Tomato Soup

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I find motherhood often makes me a better person, whether I want to be or not.  Take for instance, tomato soup.  Despite my fondness of tomatoes, tomato soup has always turned me off.  One day however, in being presented with a bowl of homemade tomato soup in front of Edie, I realized I needed to at least try it.  You know that whole thing about telling kids they have to at least try it to be polite and to see if they like it.  Ahem.  Turns out I liked it after all.  (I chalk up my former distaste of it to my complete & total distaste of all canned soups).  I got the recipe and have made it a few times since.

Last week, the squirrels finally left me some decent sized (non-grape) tomatoes to pick.  Thanks to the 6 inches or so of rain we got last week, all the tomatoes were split and needed to be used asap.  Looking for something quick and easy and different,  tomato soup it was.  It was just the thing for a chilly, rainy day.

Tomato Soup
In olive oil or butter, saute minced garlic and chopped onion.  Add chopped tomatoes, salt, pepper and tarragon.  Cook until tomatoes fall apart.  Puree soup and add cream and/or milk until you achieve the consistency you desire.  I like to add a little bit of cream cheese too, for extra creaminess.  Serve.


What’s shaking around here.

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As if Betty’s departure and the beginning of school wasn’t enough to shake things up, Mother Nature has really thrown us for a few loops around here this week.  The little earthquake over in Mineral apparently had quite an impact all over the place.  We’ve felt a few of them before, but were absolutely shocked that it was felt so far away this time!  I think the 4.5 aftershock at 1 a.m. the next night threw us for more of a loop than the ‘big’ one, especially with the weather report as we were heading to bed predicting widespread destruction from Hurricane Irene. (or maybe because I was at the pool with a gaggle of girls for the first one and sound asleep in my bed for the big aftershock, which is infinitely more jarring in my opinion).   Thankfully for us, she stayed east, and we got to stay on the western most fringe, which meant a rainy, breezy day that felt like it should have been a college football Saturday.  One more week….
Meanwhile, school started, soccer practice started, I attended my first PTO board member meeting, I vaguely started planning the year for our Girl Scout troop AND, inspiration has happened on my plan to not really go back to work for someone else!!!  Turns out reality has thus far been quite kind. (See, I knew if I ignored it, it would be fine. It always is.) Although, I am sort of not too pleased that I am suddenly back to waking up every morning at 5:30 again.  I suppose it will make it easier to get back into that early morning gym routine that I swear I’m going to get back into one of these days…
And that’s not all that we’ve been up to.
We dog sat our favorite old, brown dog this week, who handled the earthquakes much better than the hurricane.  (Although he certainly dilly dallied on our walk in the middle of the storm on Saturday, which bothered a certain someone to no end.)

I braved the muggy, windy, rainy morning to haul my rear to market early Saturday morning and picked up this case of scratch and dent tomatoes for $10 and spent my Saturday canning ‘maters.  I got 18 pints out of it, bringing my stash to 3 full cases for the upcoming winter season.  Not too shabby.
I also whipped up a wicked roasted salsa the other night and then canned the leftovers (after adding vinegar to maintain the acidity).  I’ll open a jar this week to see how it fares. 
Saturday night, we had friends over to try this out for dinner.  We let the kids roll their own and they loved it.  I added some marinated tofu to the mix, which just hit the spot.  In this cookbook there is an eggplant teriyaki recipe that has a quick and easy sauce that is my go to.  Basically, it’s equal parts sesame oil, OJ, and tamari, with some garlic.  Boiling your tofu beforehand makes it firmer, and I’ve heard that it also makes it more amicable to soaking up a marinade.  I use Twin Oaks tofu, which is local and infinitely better than any other tofu I’ve found in any grocery store.  It’s one of those things that’s always in my fridge.
And last, but certainly not least, the squirrels finally decided to back off the garden and I picked a whole bowl of tomatoes!  Okay, so it’s a candy dish and it’s grape tomatoes.  Still, on principle, I’m pretty darn tooting happy about them.  I broke out the china for them!

(Mis)Adventures in Gardening, August Edition

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This is the state of my garden.  Slightly overgrown, slightly unkempt…

Some hints of yellow here & there from the recent dry spell (and the fact that it’s August), along with some holes from the insane microburst we had on Sunday that tore some of my plants in two.  I’ve neglected my garden here lately, neglected documenting it as well as weeding and sometimes even watering it.   You see, while it looks luscious and fruitful, the neighborhood squirrels have feasted off of most of the bounty of it. (I’ve talked much of this, both here, in person and on Facebook).   Despite our efforts to hold them off, at one point, they had stripped EVERY tomato plant of every green tomato.  Even the smallest ones.  The squash never did do much, sucumbing to the squash bug way too early in the season. I went with bush beans instead of pole beans this year and remembered why I prefer to grow pole beans – they yield more.  Much more.

My peppers have done well though.  That red one is my first pimento pepper, not quite ready to pick.  I think another day and it will be fully red and ready.  I have visions of making pimento cheese with my own peppers this year.  (I’m a cow away from making it completely homemade!).  My tomatillo plants are hearty and starting to fruit up nicely.  The brussel sprouts I planted last spring that I thought would just be a spring crop (turns out they can go for a loooonnnnnggg time) are looking good.  Good to the point where Edie is talking about how good they are going to be roasted.  I still have some chard and some kale that have weathered the heat beautifully.  The new sage & thyme plants I planted this year have taken off.  The fennel I planted is doing nicely too.  And bonus, I discovered a volunteer golden cherry tomatillo (also known as a pineapple tomatillo) plant!  I harvested some seeds from some last summer and while they sprouted up, they never did anything this year.  I was quite pleased to find it, as we really enjoyed them last year and were bummed to think we wouldn’t get them.  They were a most pleasant surprise.

While my kitchen counters haven’t been overcome by my tomatoes,  I have been lucky enough to have generous friends share their bounty, so that we have still been able to eat homegrown tomato sandwiches for as many meals a day as we care to.  Thankfully, tomato plants have growing season, and the blooms I saw a few weeks ago are now green tomatoes that are weighing down my plants again.  And I got to pick a red one yesterday!!!  A very small grape one, but, a red one nonetheless.  Perhaps the battle has turned in my favor?  One can only hope…..

Of Tomatoes.

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Tomatoes are where the whole foodie thing started for me.  I realized back in college, some 20 years ago, that they were really only worth eating when they were in season where I lived and not trucked in.  Since then, not only have I almost always had a little spot of tomatoes growing somewhere, I’ve learned how to put them up, so I can eat my tomatoes all year long.  I started canning well over a decade ago, having scooped up a canning pot at a rummage sale for a song, then took a food preservation class up at Monticello one Saturday morning.  I’ve taught countless friends how to can over the years too.  I’m really uptight about knowing where our food comes from and how it’s packaged, so canning is essential to me. 
When Edie & I visited Pete and  Renee in June I mentioned I was in the market for a new canner – mine was starting to get some rust spots.  Renee pulled hers out of the shed and gave it to me, as well as bunch of jars. Mine was quite a bit larger, but I realized, they hold the same number of jars! (I think my big old one is meant for quart jars, while I prefer to can in pint jars.) Yesterday was the first time I used the new canner, and while there were some adjustments to it, I really liked it.  For starters, my old one was so big that it took over an hour to get it to come to a boil from the time I filled it up and set it on the stove.  I  would center it over 2 burners and crank them up and that would speed up the process, but it would make the kitchen just ungodly hot.  With the new one from Renee, it fits beautifully on one burner and takes about half the time to heat up.  Of course, canning is a hot process, especially tomatoes, because you have to process them in a hot water bath for 45 minutes. Which means, boiling them for 45 minutes.    It wasn’t quite as hot as it has been here, but it still is August and this is Virginia, so putting up 27 pounds of tomatoes wasn’t the coolest thing I could have done, but come January and February, when I open some of those jars, I’m going to sniff in the smell of August and remember how hot I was, how hot the kitchen was that day.   As someone who is always freezing during the winter, it generally raises my inner core at least 5 degrees to just smell that jar.

That’s what 27 pounds of tomatoes look like, in a box.  They were ‘scratch & dent’ tomatoes at the farmer’s market,  which is the way to go if you are buying tomatoes to put up.  Last winter we went through not quite 4 cases of tomatoes.  I yielded 18 pint jars yesterday – a case and a half, so I will need to spend at least one more afternoon in the kitchen, maybe two before the end of the growing season, just for tomatoes.  I still need to put up some peaches and I’m getting requests for more of my green bean pickles. 
I usually do supplement what we grow, as our garden is small. This year though, the squirrels have been completely & totally out of hand.  I suppose it’s how hot & dry it’s been (dry as in, no rain, not dry heat), has been a factor, although their crawling up the screen doors and yelling at me while I’m standing in my kitchen does seem a bit over the top.   They’ve stripped all my tomato plants of any fruit, leaving me pretty ticked off.  They also got everything off the peach tree and I’m sure a good portion of the cherry tree, although they did have to battle it out with some birds who kept attacking them everytime they went near the tree.  (That was pretty funny to watch too and kept us entertained for a few weeks.).  It’s man vs. nature here these days, as we curse the squirrels.  I grabbed the very last green tomato off the vine the other day for us, but it’s August, there are still blooms on the plants and I am still holding out hope we can eventually triumph over the squirrels.  Sadly, living in the city means we can’t shoot them, but I’m hoping Edie’s picked up enough archery skills at camp this summer to want to practice on them when she gets back. 

Summer Eating, Part Two.

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Edie went downtown with friends the other night, leaving us on our own for dinner.  I didn’t quite feel like cooking, so I whipped this up instead.

I toasted some rosemary-black olive bread from Whole Foods, spread some Caromont Farm’s Farmstead Fresh goat cheese, added some fresh tomatoes and basil, some olives and marinated artichoke hearts on the side and voila.

It was the perfect, filling nibble while we sat outside and enjoyed a nice beverage.

First Tomato!

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A Green Zebra Stripe.  It was yummy, although slightly on the small side.  Pat & I had it on a nice salad the other night for dinner.  (Edie was off having dinner with friends.)    I picked an Early Girl this week too.   My granddad used to say life was good if you could pick your first tomato before the first of July.  I concur.

I fried up a mess of green tomatoes the other night.  I bought them at the farmer’s market – I’m not quite ready to donate any of my tomatoes to that endeavor yet, despite our fondness for fried green tomato sandwiches.  Come August, when I’m starting to get worn out on dealing with them, I’ll pick one or two for that.  But for now, I’m looking forward to an abundance of home grown goodness and all the things I’m going to do with them.  Caprese salad.  Italian bread salad.  Tomato sandwiches. Salsa.  And of course, canning them for the upcoming winter months.  What’s your favorite way to use fresh tomatoes?

My Weekend.

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Every tent needs a disco ball.
This weekend Edie’s soccer team was in the Sunburn Tournament.  She had been to a birthday party the evening before and brought her party bag along, because in her words, you never know when you’re going to need a party bag.  I discovered a disco ball necklace in there, so I hung it up in one of our many team tents.  We like our flair.   
It was warm and sunny and there was lots of soccer.  We had a few hours break between games Saturday, so as a team, we tailgated it, which may have been the highlight of the tournament.  We came darn close to winning the first game on Saturday and after that, lost to teams that were better than us.  Our girls still played their hearts out though and handled it well.   We treated them to many popsicles, and after their last game on Sunday, burgers at Riverside.  We definitely think our team had the most fun.
Sunday afternoon, our friends from Snuggle Acres dropped by for a visit.  We hit the pool, the kiddos picked the first blueberries from our bush for a snack and we had a quick little dinner before they hit the road back home.  It’s always good to see them and I love that we just happen to live on their way to visit Will’s folks in Lynchburg.

Munching Blueberries.

Edie & Abigail getting sunscreened for the pool all by their big girl selves.

Dinner, picnic table style.
Blueberries!
Speaking of blueberries, this morning I went out and picked a pint of berries for blueberry muffins for breakfast.  I love, love, love being able to go pick breakfast, lunch and dinner from our garden.  It just doesn’t get any fresher than that!

Pretty garden pictures and life lessons.

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The most perfect strawberry and my first tomato in the morning light.

I finally got out there and finished the last of my spring planting.  While I was dumping my weed bucket in a far off corner of the yard, I decided to yank out what I know is a weed.  Which lead to pulling out handfuls of roots, as Pat had recently mowed everything down for our big bash. It’s much easier to clear that way you know.   Of course I was barehanded, I only wear gloves when I’m using a shovel or hoe or anything that might callous my hands.  Of course I wrestled a root or two and of course I now have poison ivy on my forearms, behind my knees (where I wrestled the viney root out of the ground) and in between my fingers.  Of course my cold has gotten worse and is being aggravated by allergies, so I’m officially miserable.

One of these days, I will learn to wear gloves when I pull strange things out of the ground.  One of these days I will learn what poison ivy looks like.  At least I’ve learned to resist the urge to scratch the poison…..

Gardening Hits & Misses.

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On the very right in the black plastic tray are the tomato seeds I started March 1.  Pretty small and sad looking plants if I do say so myself. On the very left are the so-tall-they-need-to-be-supported tomato plants I bought at the farmer’s market yesterday morning, also started March 1. 

Clearly, I need a greenhouse.  At the very least, I need to spend some time reading about starting my own seeds if I’m going to do it again. 

On the plus side, they came up.  So, that’s a success.  They just didn’t do much.  They were in the sunroom, but when they sprouted and then sat there, I got concerned they weren’t getting enough light, so I carried the tray out to the garden, where they have sat and done nothing for a few weeks now.  I have a friend who had the same experience, so it was slightly comforting to hear she had the same luck I did.  I keep telling myself, at least they came up.  A good many of the seeds I harvested myself from plants I grew or outstanding tomatoes I bought at the farmers market that made such a good sandwich, I saved the seeds from the heel of the tomato, so I count being able to harvest my own seeds a success as well.

The tomatoes inbetween the stunted and the leggy are the ones I bought at Southern States.  Once again, I got myself an Early Girl, because I really, really like being able to pick tomatoes in June and early July.  I am a girl of very little patience.

I also attempted to start some pepper plants, and only had one of them pop up.  Yesterday though, as I started setting pots where they were going to go into the ground, I noticed the Serrano seeds had finally sprouted and this morning I noticed they put out more leaves!  I had received those seeds from a friend last spring and put them in the ground about this time last year and had limited success with them, for various reasons, but mostly because I thought they went in late.  This year, I’m right back where I started from with them last year, but I intend to show them much more attention and see where that gets me.  At the very least, I hope to get at least one pepper for me to harvest the seeds and try again next year. 

In the background of that photo are my bolting broccoli rabe plants.  I’ve never grown them before, can’t say we’ve eaten them either, but thought I’d give them a whirl.  I plan on yanking them in the next few days and I’ll let you know how we like them.  Currently they are taking up the space usually dedicated to my pole beans and certain members of the household cannot believe it’s May 1 and I don’t have my beans in the ground yet.  Nevermind that we have a chance of frost for a few more weeks….

All together, I think I have 8 different types of tomatoes planted this year.  I went ahead and stuck my tiny sprouts in the ground anyway, we’ll see how they fare.  I have a black cherry tomato, a German cherry tomato, my Early Girl, some Bigger Boys, Mr. Stripey, Green Zebra, Mortgage lifter, and the mystery awesome sandwich tomato (which I sense may be a mortgage lifter, but we’ll have to see what they do before we can make any determination).  In addition to the Serrano pepper, I planted an Anaheim, a hot pepper who’s name escapes me right now (and since it’s raining, I’m not running out there to check) and a pimento pepper.  How awesome is it going to be to have pimento cheese with my own peppers?!?! 

I’m a total food gardening geek I am.

While we’re on hits and misses,  my volunteer strawberry patch isn’t faring as well as I’d thought it was.  As I feared, a good portion of it didn’t make it through last summer’s drought and neglect on my part.  It was also over run by wild strawberries, so it’s not quite as big as I thought it was.  But it’s still there.  The volunteer patch under the compost bin seems to be happy and expanding though.

And I seem to have what appears to be a spider mite on my mint and it’s quickly moving to the black eye susans, newly planted sage and my rosemary.  Must do something about that this week.

That’s the all gardening news around here.