I Survived!

Coriander flowers

I survived the heat and humidity last weekend: this isn’t a digital Ouija board talking. But when I got back onto the wart after picking peas (which lose a lot of sweetness in hundred-degree heat, as do I) I had to strip off and literally wring out my shirt and shorts and leave them to dry (!!) on the wart rail. Whenever I strip down on the wart (tick checks, muddy clothes, sweaty drenching) I’m sure to wave towards the neighbahs’ house. The sights G and D must see during gardening season could curl the whiskers on a cat!

I picked another half basket of peas and pulled most of the first-planted vines, and a small half-basket of the French purple peas. Those might be all podded out when I get into the garden this week, though there were still quite a few flowers on those long vines. I also decided to yank the one shallot bunch that had fallen greens, and a handful of onions that had keeled over; and since I was doing that, I pulled a leek, too.

Scarlet runner bean flowers

This is the first year I’ve planted leeks so I don’t really know what I’m doing, but many are fairly thick already, so I figured - what the heck? And as it turns out, it was worth it. I gave away a good handful of my leek set during planting time – the set bunch had something like 100 baby leeks in it – but that still means I have what is technically called a shitload of leeks. I think that instead of just adding them to soup, as I do weekly, maybe I can dedicate a few to experimenting - braising them or roasting, or both.

I picked one baby zucchini – all of 3.5 inches long – and a first bunch of fava beans, enough for a meal plus extra to go into this week’s soup. I love fava beans, they’re such an odd critter – black and white flowers all up and down the tall plants, and pods, which grow straight up in the air, that appear to be lined inside with a soft Styrofoam-like layer. 

The French pumpkin plant (get the theme?) has taken off and is sending vigorous shoots towards the onion and leek bed. I’m trying to get it to crawl instead down the path by the flax and into the field, and down the path behind the compost beds and into the field by the apple tree. So far it’s winning, but I haven’t given up yet. Last year I had winter squash vines throughout the raspberry patch, which wasn’t too awkward. Kept the grass and weeds down some. 

French pumpkin vines

I cleverly planted a row of sunflowers in the field in front of one of the old compost beds, which is this year a tomato bed. I was very proud of myself – I love sunflowers, I love watching the birds denude the sunflowers, but they are really, really big, throw a lot of shade, and get in the way of other plants. So I was thinking that planting them in the field on the west side of the tomato plants was a clever idea. And it might have been, had I put them more than 6 inches away from the bed. Now they’re 4 feet tall and climbing ever higher and wider, and I can’t squeeze between them and the tomato plants. And just to round out that planting idiocy, on the other side of that bed of tomatoes I planted what I thought was a flower amaranth, which I planted last year and it was so gorgeous I had to have it again. However, it now seems that what I planted this year was grain amaranth, and the absolutely beautiful maroon plants are close to a staggering six feet tall – and I can’t get between them and the tomato plants.

The Tall Guy, who was an organic farmer for a long time (farmer: intends to make sort of a living from what is grown and sold, versus gardener: hopes to manage to grow enough to feed self and family and bless all the neighbors with excess zucchini) pointed out that I could pull up the amaranth …and I whined, “But it’s soooo pretty!!” The amaranth lives. There are two more sides to that bed of tomatoes, after all, and the sun spends a lot of time directly overhead.

Amaranth

I’m not sure whether, when I’m planting, I’m bedazzled by the tiny little seeds into bad math, or if I can’t seem to remember that a 63-year-old doesn’t fit into narrow spaces like a 6-year-old, or even 26-year-old once did; or if I’m just an idiot. I do remember thinking about this very possibility and congratulating myself on how cleverly I’d a) saved garden space and created a sunflower fence (and unknowingly, an amaranth hedge) and b) found a way to have more sunflowers than ever! 

Sigh. I’m an idiot. I’ve been gardening (or been garden slave labor) for at least 57 years now. I still squoosh too many plants into too small a space, and give way too much room to self-seeding annuals and even intriguing perennial wildflowers that have made their way into the garden. But you know – just about now, and on through the fall, the garden is lush and magical and drop-dead gorgeous.

The blueberries are also full-on ripe, 2 weeks early this summer, and the birds and we are having our fill and we are trying to tuck a fair number of bags of them into the freezer (blueberries, not birds – we leave them unfrozen). Besides having a yard sale on Saturday, my list of what needs to be done this weekend includes: pick favas, pick purple peas, check for green beans (no signs except flowers as of last weekend), explain again to the pumpkin where it’s allowed to go and where not, check for summer squashes, replace bamboo stakes surrounding the new asparagus with metal fences (OSJL – where you always find what you didn’t know you needed!), pick blueberries, pick raspberries, pick swiss chard and broccoli shoots, manure and put down wood chips around clematis, ditto the two hardy hibiscus, weed, fertilize the new peach and cherry trees and put slow-release fertilizer down for the apple, pear and sour cherry trees; weed, weed some more, and weed. 

Sea of dill flowers

After startling the toad that lives in the garden this summer for the third time in an hour, as I was headed back to the wart (even on that hot hot day Buzzy Boy had given me a dive-bombing warning that I was out too late), I noticed that the potato plants have mostly died back in two bags and completely died back in one bag, so I went in for another basket and emptied that one bag’s contents: Red potatoes with pink insides, and they filled most of a basket. In potato bags the potatoes rarely get really big, but that’s ok because I like the small ones better, anyway. The soil left in the bag – you have to use potting soil plus compost, garden soil’s too dense for potato bags – gets dumped into garden beds and worked in; in this case into the new beds with the winter squashes.

Add emptying out the remaining two potato bags to that list of things that need to be done this week.

End of path towards blueberries

I boiled a potful of the smallest potatoes and put the rest in an airy basket, to dry out of the sun for a few days before they get stored in the pantry basket (prevents mold). Once the potatoes were cooked and drained (do save vegetable cooking water for soup stock, whatever you’ve heard about not doing so is nonsense, let’s not waste the nutrients – and flavors! - that cook out into the water), I put a big hunk of good butter in the pot along with the sliced green tops of several onions and half a small minced onion fresh from the garden, the very tiny bulbs of garlic I found on a scape I’d missed when I cut them a few weeks ago, and torn dill weed, dill flowers (if you’ve never tasted dill flowers, you need to!), tarragon, basil, and a good grind of salt and black pepper. Slap the cover back on the pan and shake it all up – the potatoes will break open and the butter and herbs distribute themselves amongst them. This herb and butter treatment is also wonderful, with or without some grated parmesan cheese, on pasta, too.

Early garden food to die for, and do lick out the bottom of the pot!

For the blog: herondragonwrites.blogspot.com      July 25, 2019

All photos Deb Marshall