Upon arriving at the garden today, I was told I could pick my own raspberries. Well, you don’t have to tell me twice. I skedaddled on over to the berry patch and commenced to picking. And eating, and picking. And eating. I tried to make it look like I picked just a few berries: I returned to pick up my veggies and showed them I had just a small container of the little red gems. No, I didn’t hog them all. But I wanted to. (A note: I am harvesting my golden raspberries at home right now and they are lovely!).
Today’s earthly bounty was big and hearty; a nice handful of beautiful fresh carrots. Five slender orange gorgeous carrots. These will be eaten ‘as is.’ No fussing necessary.
One head of Pirat red oak leaf lettuce, kind of holey (not holy), but with a little clean up, probably good enough to make salad for just two. As the farmer says, “Enjoy it, it’s the last fresh lettuce for a few weeks till the warm weather varieties kick in.”
Nasturtium flowers and leaves: the leaves add a zingy pepper taste to a salad or are really tasty on an egg salad sandwich. I am planning to use the flowers on a big salad I am making for a party tomorrow night. You know, to show off.
Dino and Redbor kale combo: a small portion of this as the aphids make havoc with greens in the summer heat. I have a big flower pot of arugula that is about to bolt, so I will harvest that, mix it with the kale and viola! ……a mess of greens. My blood is feeling pretty pure these days after a month and a half of anti-oxidant green cleansing.
Purple scallions: These look like a nice bunch of green onions only they are firmer and purple and go with anything savory. And I mean anything.
One fine first-of- the-season- happy zuke green, shiny, firm, warm, yummy. I will slice this in half, drag a fork across the exposed center to score it, brush with olive oil and salt and pepper, then grill. Put the green skin side down first, then flip over to the pale side which you scored.
I scored a huge helping of small white turnips tonight. They didn’t look very pretty so some folks were kind of afraid of them. I will wash them, spray with olive oil, add salt and pepper, and grill. A metal basket works well for this. Or just run a metal skewer through them and put them over the fire.
Glory be! fresh basil. Bring it on! Big leaves of fresh basil with a fragrance that just say summer. Where oh where are those tomatoes????? Hurry please.
No you did not miss week 6, Gardener Casey took a one week break between the cool season crops and the warm season crops. We did not have a pick up last week.
I am referring to the air in Idaho. In Boise, ID. I can barely see across town, or up to the foothills because we are enveloped in a white haze. Smoke, my friends, gets in your eyes. From the California fires. What a mess. If you hold your nose just right, you can even get a whiff of it.
Icccccck
A mild 93 this afternoon. I hate summer in Boise. Guess I am glad I am not in Afghanistan.
One of the ways to rid your garden of earwigs is to roll up a newspaper, several pages, put a rubber band around it and set it out in the garden overnight. In the morning it should be full of the nasty little buggers and you can dispose of the paper/earwigs/etc by putting the paper in a plastic bag and in the trash. Repeat. I have also used the cardboard roll from a roll of paper towels.
You can dust for them using a pesticide, but I HATE to do that because I have a pet.
You may also want to call the local extension office, 377-2107 and ask them for the latest techniques for ridding the garden of earwigs. A link to their site is to the right on this page, in the blogroll.
We dashed out of town for an overnight trip to McCall to work on the sprinkler system. Wellllll, truth betold, I just kept the sprinkler repairman good company. In my infinite wisdom I also rewarded Mr. Sprinkler Repairman with a kitchen pass to go fishing while we were in McCall. Of course, he insisted the trip to the fishing hole was for the benefit of the pupster, afterall, he needs lots of exercise.
So note the incredible abundance of Xerophyllum tenax, or bear grass, which looks like a giant Q tip. I haven’t seen a stand like this in years!
And can someone please help me identify what looks like a wild lavatera? Roadside, near the Old Finn Church at Donnelley.
And those three little brook trout? Dinner that evening. We could have easily had a dozen.
The National Gardening Association’s Charlie Nardozzi had a great email article yesterday about growing elderberries for beauty and bounty. In the section on Edible Landscaping, he details the available varieties of sambucus and how to tend to them.
Now, Idaho has tons of elderberries, all along the highway, on riverbanks, ravines, etc. The problem: where you find elderberries you are likely to find rattlers. Frankly, that gives me the heebee jeebies. So, unless I can stand in the back of a pickup and snatch the berries from the branches that way, well, the berries will just stay on the bush, looking all tempting and purple and luscious.
So imagine how happy I was to discover two of the new varieties, Black Lace and Black Beauty, produce decent and EDIBLE berries. So far the shrubs have been well behaved in my landscape. Well, truth be told, I killed a couple of my freebie Black Lace plants by putting them in containers in full sun (and you thought I was a good gardener?HA! I garden a LOT, not necessarily well). Black Beauty has survived even my best attentions and is loaded with berries. The foliage color is really lovely against the pink stone veneer of my house, so………looks like we will be putting in a couple more. Singing all the while:
Well I can’t help thinking
About the times
You were a wife of mine
You aimed to please me
Cooked black-eyed peas-me
Made elderberry wine
But gentle, devoted reader, you are being rewarded for your persistence. Here it is in it’s entirety:
(Note: this is from LAST Monday. Week 6 will be reported to you on Thursday so please stay tuned.)
The Salad Days of June
June 23, 2008
Mary Ann Newcomer
I find myself kind of looking forward to Mondays. Monday afternoon is my designated pickup time at the Earthly Delights farm.
I grabbed a bunch of plastic grocery bags (recycling is g-o-o-d), a large paper bag and a large plastic yogurt container…..just in case there is a large supply of warm strawberries again this week. Please. Please oh, please.
A note of catch up from last week: I have a head of lettuce left (again) this week and just today, for lunch, I had 6 sugar snap peas that I found lazing around in the crisper drawer. Honest, if I had known they were there, they would have been gone days ago.
5:30 pm. Picked up the week’s treats. No berries. Sadness.
Here’s what we DID gather up:
*Bronze Pirat lettuce, another beautiful head of it. I have company so it will be all gone in the next day or so.
* Two lovely heads of romaine lettuce which will be for dinner tomorrow because I will STILL have company. I am thinking all this fresh lettuce will dazzle them.
*A generous helping of sugar snap peas, probably enough for three people. I have already blanched these. OK, I blanched the ones I didn’t eat on the way home. Here’s how it’s all shaking down tonight:
The snap peas, 4 new garlic scapes, the bag of what farmer Casey is calling “seasonal zesty salad treats” (nasturtium leaves, purple orach leaves, curly cress, and wrinkled crumpled cress which sounds like it hails from my dryer), plus a handful of fresh basil – all these are going into a pasta salad. We don’t have round peas but we have snap peas so maybe we could call this Pasta Primavera? Give peas a chance.
I cooked a box of bowtie pasta in salted water, drained the pasta, then tossed it with the green garnishes. I will let folks add stuff to their pasta with green bits: offerings include a bowl of chopped hazelnuts, some grated smoked cheddar, a olive/mushroom tapenade which came in a jar from the Boise Co-op and a bowl of breadsticks.
Not to worry, one bunch of kale came was in the bag today so husband has one more week of greens.
Happy eating green until next week.
Oh, and here’s a litte sumpin’ sumpin’ extra for your devotion:
Recommended reading:
The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan
Plenty: One Man, One Woman and a Raucous Year of Eating Locally by Smith and Mackinnon
Animal, Vegetable, Mineral by Barbara Kingsolver
Cooking Outside the Box: Easy, Seasonal and Organic, by Keith Abel
Coming Home to Eat by Gary Nabhan
Apologies to all for the goofy layout on the web post yesterday. Something is haywire with the code, maybe from the photos…….anyway, bear with while I try to straighten it out. Thanks.
For my Red Dirt Girl who said SHOW ME,here’s the scene from smokin’ hot Idaho. I hate to say it, but as I type I think I see a nasty smoke cloud……just over the horizon. 105 in the shade and we aren’t even in July yet. Everybody into the pool!
So Dee, here you have a few snaps of my weekend.
Coral is my darling niece. Tells me she is two and won’t be three until her birthday next week. And she wants cupcakes AND a cake. I will have to dust off the cupcake tins…..
The wispy graceful echinacea is spending its second season in the garden….they are lovely. I bought them online last year, from somewhere in the Midwest.
The cottony scale looks like someone threw dryer lint on my apple espalier. I went in and pruned hard (undoubtedly part of the problem…..all things in the garden are overgrown or languishing due to benign neglect). I will try to knock it down with some water sprayed from the hose. If not, well, you have heard me before, “I am organic except when I’m not.”
For BOTH Debra and Dee, I wish I could tell you that the little plants were a gift. They weren’t freebies. No siree. I paid good money and THEN let them sit there hanging on for dear life. Fortunately, many things survive in spite of me.
Just finished another wild week of gardening related activities, family stuff, business stuff, etal. Pooped, I am, I tell you. One day I even had to get up for my first magazine photo shoot (Jeffie’s garden) at 4:30 am. Crap of dawn, I tell you. O’ dark thirty. Worked two nights until 10 pm. Last night I dragged home after a gazillion events/meetings/yadayadayada at 8:40 pm.
So today, was MY DAY.
First, two hours of gardening for ME. I even planted some plants that came in the mail in April which have been struggling in little 4 inch pots. Shame on me. Dressed the new side bed with compost and then some new bagged black garden soil, plus potted up some 4 inch plants into bigger pots (1 gal) so the little darlings could get a bit of a root system before I slam them into the parched earth of Boise ID and 105 degree weather.
Pruned the two out of four of the climbing roses; the wiley and wild wisteria, plus the lilacs along the side of the house. The strategy, and I did have one this time, was to work in the shade as long as possible.
Done at noon.
Now, the house is comfortably cooled by a/c, I have the new Gardens Illustrated in hand with an article about the incredible Piet Oudolf, a new issue of Cottage Living (where I would live if I didn’t live in a mid century modern because my husband likes mid century), and a stack of other reading about two feet high. While Boise goes into scorched earth mode, I shall be reclining with a glass of Earl Grey iced tea.
