Category — Gardening

Over the weekend, we tidied up the last of the plants in the garden.  Out came the broccoli and the last row of carrots.  We’re now down to the last stalks of swiss chard, spinach and the hardy herbs.

Sunday afternoon was spent canning five pounds of tomatoes into tomato jam.   There’s probably less than three pounds of tomatoes left to ripen fully in the basement.  Who knows, I may get one more tomato sauce out of them.

It’s pretty amazing how many tomatoes grew in that one bed of tomato plants.  This year I planted a mix of Siberian and Tiny Tims.  The Siberians I would grow again, they ripened early, produced heavily, resisted blight and looked *just* like the packet picture.  They were a great tomato to grow and versatile in the kitchen: sliced in salads, roasted for tomato sauce, cooked into jam and dehydrated into “sundried” tomatoes.  They did it all.

The Tiny Tims were great in salads, but one or two plants is plenty.  I definitely didn’t need six.  Next year, I’m thinking of growing a couple funky heirloom varieties instead.

The broccoli I grew was Green Magic and it’s another keeper for next year.  It was packed with flavour and made the garden look like it was straight out of a Beatrix Potter story.

The carrots were a success this year.  Thanks to the raised beds and fluffier soil conditions, the carrots grew deep and straight.  Last year they were knobby and crooked.  Now I’m growing Peter Rabbit quality carrots.

Convince me that these are not the cutest carrots ever.  Eat your heart out Peter Rabbit.  Paws off these babies.

As for next year – I’m planning on more strawberries, a full bed of garlic and more hardy greens.  I’m a little worried already that my dream garden of 2012 is too grand for our little space.  And Alden, your little sandbox is awfully tempting to co-opt into a strawberry patch.

Yes, I’ve already started plotting out next year’s beds.  I’ve got a stack of quirky seed packages from Solana Seeds that I can’t wait to use next year.  Summer, I miss you already.

Last week flew by.  Every evening was filled with some activity: a cooking class on Monday, grocery shopping on Tuesday, birthday party on Wednesday, playdate on Thursday (complete with bee stings – only to me, but ugh!).  That’s a lot of out-and-abouting for someone who’d rather just be home picking tomatoes, reading cookbooks and playing legos with the boys.

I insisted on Thursday evening, that I wanted to cook Friday night’s dinner.  The husband had worn the apron all week by cooking and BBQ’ing and all I had accomplished cooking-wise was slicing tomatoes and tossing them into the dehydrator.

After my cooking class on Monday, I discovered that I might not hate polenta after all… the issue may in fact be my own cooking techniques.   So, I decided to give it another try.  Broccoli on polenta.  It’s a date, cornmeal.  The broccoli in the garden was at the perfect picking stage.  Look at that broccoli!  It’s straight out of Peter Rabbit!

I mostly-ish followed the instructions from this Food and Wine recipe except:

• I used regular broccoli, not rabe
• I added bacon, not sausage
• I omitted the wine and used chicken stock instead.  (No wine in the house!)
• In the polenta, I used chicken stock and water.. instead of just water.  I also added a bit of milk and parmesan.

I guess I followed more of the process than the finer details.

And voila. The finished dish. Even the boy poked his fingers in the polenta, but he feigned cooked broccoli. The young one, he is a purest. For him, it’s the raw way or the highway.

So, my final thoughts on polenta. With a bit of TLC and some add-ins: parmesan, milk, salt, pepper – it can be pretty tasty. But best of all, it’s fast. And it’s cheap. Ding ding.

I bought my dehydrator to make one thing: sundried tomatoes.  I was only able to find one brand of sundried tomatoes at the grocery store that wasn’t packed in oil and it had a “may contain nuts” warning.  Nuts.  In the tomatoes.  Grrr.  So I bought a dehydrator. And I didn’t have intentions of using it for anything else.

And yes, it seems crazy to buy a large appliance soley to make one thing.  But the food allergies, they will make you do these crazy things.  To balance out the crazy, I’ve been trying to broaden my dehydrating skills.  Herbs seemed like a good second project.  And right now, the garden is exploding with herbs.  More than we can use in our day-to-day cooking.  And more than I can give away.  (See previous post on my parsley surplus.) So, it made sense to dry them.

I started with some woody herbs: thyme and oregano.  It took several hours on a low setting to get them dry and crispy.

Once they were dry, I simply ran my fingers over the stems to remove the leaves.  Then I packaged them into some zippy bags ready for storage.

Next up: parsley.  That Italian flat-leaf parsley grows like a weed!

My mom used to garnish our plates with parsley.  I distinctly remember scowling and saying, “Mom, don’t put grass on my food!”.  Oh wait, maybe that was chives.  Hmm.  Or dill.   Double hmm.

At any rate, I’m sure there was parsley and I didn’t care for it.  And despite what my herb garden looks like, you’d think I was parsley mad.  Not the case.  I have even given handfuls of it away.  Handfuls.   And still, there is still so.much.parsley.

I needed to find a way to use a lot of parsley and fast.  I narrowed my options to: making tabbouleh, drying it, giving more away or making gremolata (something I hadn’t tried before).

Tabbouleh?  It gets stuck in your teeth.  I’ll definitely be drying more, but that’s not very exciting.  So, gremolata.  Let’s do that.

I blitzed it all in the food processor. (Of course, I should have used the blender since it leaked out the top.)  I threw in some extra basil too.  I just can’t stick to a recipe.

The salmon marinated for a couple of hours before cooking in “en papillote” (AKA, in a tin foil bag) on the BBQ.

Dinner is served!  We dished it up with some of the “artisan bread in five minutes a day” bread (that is for another post, long story), a simple salad with blueberries, snow peas with olive oil and mint and iced tea.

Hey.  I think I like parsley now.

The windstorm the other week did a real number on my onions.  The tops blew over and started to turn brown.  This signalled that it was time to pull ‘em out.  To store onions to keep, they first need to be “cured”.  Basically, they need to dry out a bit so they don’t rot in storage.

With the weather forecast calling for several days of sun, it was the perfect time to pull out the onions and get them ready to cure.  Once the onions are out of the ground, you lightly rub excess dirt off the bulbs.  Dollar store mini gloves are perfect for this task.

Dust dust dust.  Pat pat pat.

I laid them out on an old screen to dry in the sun.  After a couple of days of drying in the sun, I moved “the harvest” up to the porch to finish the cure.  The way we go through onions, I know these won’t last long.

I went a little wild at the fruit stand over the weekend at the Ottawa Farmers Market.  Well..  these days, my version of “wild” means overspending our grocery dollars on fruit.   I live on the edge.

The fruit vendor (Warner’s Farm) was stocked with cherries, sour cherries, currants, gooseberries and more.  Many of which, I’ve never cooked with before.  While my loyalties lie with strawberries, their season has almost come to an end and I need to fill the berry void in my heart.. and my fridge.  This week, I picked up gooseberries as well as red and black currants.   Let’s not mention the litres of strawberries or blueberries that also came home with me.   I will dub it, the splurge before the storm.  Later that same day a massive wind storm blew away our six foot long outdoor carpet from our porch, blew it over our house and into the Centretown netherworld (update: our neighbour found it!) AND our air conditioner died. Sigh.  (Someone’s getting a new AC for her birthday this week!  Dear husband, can you put some frosting on it and call it a cupcake?  I’d like that.)

Ok, so my freewheeling berry buying halcyon days may have come to an end, but at least I’ve got a fridge full of fruit to cook with.

I chose this lemon balm and gooseberry syrup recipe from Pickles and Preserves to begin.

I love making syrups to add to soda water.  It’s a quick and easy way to use a small amount of berries and not be a slave to jam or jelly making over a hot stove.  I stepped outside to pick some of my rogue lemon balm (I didn’t plant it!) which is THRIVING in its neglect.  I picked more than the recipe called for to keep it from taking over my rosemary zone.  (Hey, giant Italian parsley plant.  Your days are numbered too.)

Like the lavender syrup that I made a few weeks ago, this gooseberry syrup is a great addition to soda water.  Refreshing!

Three wheeling with veg

We made our first deliveries of veg over the weekend courtesy of my three-wheeled vegetable delivery man.  His tricycle trunk was overflowing with baby bok choy and snow peas.  Good news neighbours, the tomatoes are coming along and we’ll soon have some zucchini and broccoli!  Herbs, as always, are plentiful.  Delivery hours can be arranged around outings to the splash park.

Mom's chives - so pretty

I will admit, I’ve turned into one of those Ontario-ubran-hippies: we garden, we bake bread, we don’t own a car, we bike.  We are “those people”.  Now, my parents (who live on PEI) aren’t much for biking or catching the bus, but they do garden – in a big way.  Which I suppose is one of the reasons why I now garden too.  While I can’t compete with the size of my mom’s garden, I can compete with its productivity.  And right now, my Ontario garden is WHOOPING her Island garden.  Sorry mom.

My parents' garden

The Island’s cool spring pretty much killed most of her plants.  Strawberry rhubarb, chives and some other herbs were hardy enough to grow.  A few onions popped up, but many rows remain empty.  Duh duh duh.  Nice red dirt, though.  And a LOT of coriander that had gone to seed is now popping up everywhere.

Rhubarb growing

So, it’s only natural that we’d hit up the garden stores while I was visiting so that mom could replace some things that had died in the garden.  We did the “big 3″: Veseys, Jewell’s Country Market and York Greenhouses.

Veggie shopping at Yorks Greenhouse

I picked up some lupin seeds at Vesey’s and some more seeds for next year’s garden.  You can never have too many lupin seeds.

Must buy: lupin seeds

Oh! And cheap asparagus crowns.  Yeah, $2!  Into my checked baggage they went.

Woo! Cheap asparagus crowns. This made my day.

This is what my garden looked like when I left for vacation.  Delicate little plants.  Ho hum.

About three weeks ago

And this is what I saw when I arrived home. My garden had exploded.

Kaboom!

Tomatoes tumbling over

There was so much growing, we easily had two big salads of spinach and strawberries without needing to run out for groceries.  I’ve got some green tomatoes coming out, lots of radish, baby zucchini and tooooons of bok choy.  The tomatoes had grown so much they were flopping over.  I propped them up in their cages after I took this photo.

Welcome home lunch

My patch may be smaller, but right now… it’s Ontario for the win.

When we moved into our house two years ago, the yard was quaint.  It looked ok, but it wasn’t our style.  The wavy flower beds were annoying to trim around and I didn’t care much for the flowers that were planted.  I was more interested in having a strawberry patch.  And that enormous overgrown hedgey thing was great at hiding passers-by on their way to church, but it occupied a solid 6 feet of yard space that we desperately wanted to reclaim.  And the 4-5 foots slope/drop-off onto the sidewalk was a major safety concern with a curious toddler. To the left is a parking lot with a large chain-link fence – it was nice to have a fence, but it didn’t make the yard feel very homey.

2009

2011

Two years later, we have completely fenced in the yard – the solid cedar now blocks the view into the parking lot and the metal fence sits atop a new stone retaining wall that gave us a solid 6 extra feet of yard space.  It counts!  We chose the open metal fencing so that from street level, it didn’t make our home look like a fortress.  And mostly, we like watching the street traffic and frequent fire trucks that zoom by.  (Ok, Alden likes the firetrucks.)

We added the small stone patio in the corner that currently houses the cafe table and picnic area.  This is such a treat to have a shady spot in the late afternoon where we can escape the strong westerly rays.  Much still needs to be done in the garden area next to the cedar fence – we need to restablish it as a mix of veggies, flowers and decorative grasses that has some sort of cohesive look.   I’m having a hard time with this task and spend a lot of time on gardening sites looking for inspiration.

Pole beans

This part of the yard still drives me a bit batty. At some point someone planted morning glories to climb up the chain link fence and while they are pretty, they are a total pain in the butt weed. They grow everywhere and getting rid of them has been painful. Two years later, I still need to pluck little sprouts out of the garden. Hate them. I have dug out a lot of the dirt, pulled out some of the larger bits of the root system, but I see this as a long term extermination project.

Sunflowers

We’re also growing some sunflowers here – Alden looooooves his Sunbutter, so I want to show him how they get sunflower seeds. I imagine he will be impressed. (ha)

The above photo was taken on May 20 and boom! look how much greener it looks just days later on May 23. Last week’s rain sent our lawn into hyper overdrive growing mode, so I tossed the clippings onto the garden for “mulch”. (Thanks to the tip in Grow Great Grub!) Not only is it good for the garden, but I think it improved the garden’s appearance too.

While the rain was good for the veggies, we were greeted with a sea of dandelions when the sun finally came out. An honest to god sea. I filled our entire green bin with them and then ran out of room. You can see the enormous dandelion pile by the fence that still needs to be dealt with. And let’s not even talk about the remaining stragglers. (I’ll get you my pretties!) At this point, I think our lawn is actually mostly weeds. We have very little true grass.

The idea crossed my mind of gathering up the offenders and taking a second crack at dandelion jelly, but really, I just wanted them gone. Long gone. Foraging smoraging.

Now that things are sprouting, here’s a run down of all the things we’ve got growing.

Raised beds:

• Easter egg radish and watermelon radish
• Carrots
• Snow peas
• Borlotti beans
• Broccoli
• Onions
• Peppers
• Strawberries
• Tomatoes
• Raspberries
• Chives

Container pots:

• Lettuce
• Spinach
• Swiss chard
• Rocket
• Beets

Herb garden:

• Thyme
• Basil (sweet, Thai)
• Mint
• Rosemary
• Cilantro
• Lemongrass
• Oregano
• Italian parley
• Lavender

In fact, things have been growing so quickly, we’ve already picked our first radish!  I let Alden do the picking – he didn’t look very pleased.  Maybe he thought we were growing cars and trucks.  Maybe he’ll be more excited about the carrots.  Maybe.

After a day of gardening, we kicked back with some homemade popsicles.  Good times in garden land.

One year ago: I thought the garden was behind compared to last year, but my photo evidence says that I’m right on track.