Harvest Monday - 8/17/09

Time to recall everything that came out of the garden in the past week. Only a couple of photos this time, above is a picking of Pimento de Padron peppers and Rat-tail radish pods. Below is another picking of Padrons, Piracicaba broccoli shoots, and Aleppo chile peppers.


The Pimento de Padron pepper plants are producing like crazy. I've been picking amounts shown in the photos pretty much every other day. Most of the time I simply saute them whole in olive oil until the skins blacken a bit the pods are soft, then sprinkle with coarse salt and serve. Yesterday I cooked up a batch but removed the stems and cut the peppers in pieces. Then I sauted some zucchini with chopped garlic, added the padrons to the pan, then poured in some beaten eggs, pushed everything around a bit until the eggs set, topped with some grated gruyere and served. Yum!

The Piracicaba plants produce just enough shoots to serve two this week. The bunch shown above was blanched until tender and then tossed with olive oil, Aleppo pepper flakes, and grated parmigiano. Another yum.

Most of the Rat-tail radish pods went into a pickling solution and the rest of them have been consumed raw. They taste just like radish roots.

I cut off the caps on all of the Aleppo chile peppers and have been putting the pods out to dry in the sun. When coarsely ground, these peppers make a great substitute for store bought chile pepper flakes.

Also harvested in the past week:

• 4 Black Sea Man tomatoes
• 2 Galinas cherry tomatoes
• 6 Isis Candy cherry tomatoes
• 6 Black cherry tomatoes
• more Rat-tail radish pods
• more zucchini than I care to admit to
• numerous basil sprigs
• one small head of di Jesi cauliflower

And here's the bit that I always forget to mention - for more great harvest posts check out Daphne's Dandelions Harvest Monday.

Zucchini Bread

I've been fiddling around with zucchini bread recipes and have come up with one that I like. A lot of the recipes that I found seemed to have pretty much the same proportions of flour, leavening, sugar, eggs, oil and zucchini. I just played around with the types of flour and sugar. And since I can't resist tinkering, the next time I make it I will probably change something again. Today I used part whole wheat flour instead of all white and half brown sugar instead of all white. I also used more nuts than in the typical recipes. The bread seemed a bit less moist than the all white flour and white sugar version. It also had a heartier texture, but I rather like that. My loaf pans are an inch longer than is typical so my loaves baked more quickly and aren't as high.

So here's today's version of

Zucchini Bread

2 cups all-purpose flour
1 cup whole wheat flour
2 teaspoons cinnamon
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon salt
3 large eggs
1 cup sugar
1 cup brown sugar
1 cup olive oil
2 teaspoons vanilla
2 cups (12 to 14 oz) coarsely grated zucchini
1 1/2 cups chopped lightly toasted walnuts

Preheat the oven to 350F. Put the flours, cinnamon, baking soda, baking powder, and salt in a bowl and stir together thoroughly. Set aside.

Beat the eggs in a large bowl until light and foamy. Beat in the sugar, oil, and vanilla. Stir in the zucchini. Add the flour mixture to the egg mixture and stir until just combined, stir in the nuts. Divide the batter evenly between 2 greased 9 x 5 x 3-inch loaf pans. Bake for about 1 hour, or until a skewer inserted in the middle of a loaf comes out clean. Cool on a rack 10 minutes, then turn the loaves out and finish cooling on the rack.

I like to use extra virgin olive oil instead of refined vegetable oils when baking. Refined vegetable oils are treated with some really nasty solvents to remove color, flavor and odor - yuck. I've found that the olive flavor is not at all strong and nobody has ever even noticed the difference.

Oh, Peaches!

I received a lovely basket of fresh peaches from a friend. She stripped her peach tree because the critters were starting to devour them. So I spent a chunk of yesterday afternoon putting some of them up. I got through 5 pounds of them and there is still at least that much left. There's a couple of jars of chutney and four jars of pickled peaches. I'm also trying peach flavored vinegar, which uses the peels and pits. I haven't tasted any of these goodies yet, but when I do, and if they are good enough, I'll post the recipes.


Next up is a batch of peach jam. And then I'm sure there will be enough fruit left to make ice cream or sorbet.

Harvest Monday - 8/10/09

I didn't take very many photos of the harvests last week, how many shots of zucchini can you look at? Last Monday's harvest is shown above. Zucchini.... , a Serpent cucumber, a handful of Pimento de Padron peppers, a handful of Piracicaba broccoli sprouts, amaranth greens, and carrot thinnings.

There's the harvest from Wednesday above. More zucchini and an ounce of caper buds.

Not shown this week:

• another zucchini haul, including one "boat"
• a big bunch of Portuguese kale
• Lacinato kale (Cavolo Nero) for the chickens
• more Pimento de Padrons
• 2 Piment doux Long des Landes sweet peppers, picked green
• 2 additional Serpent cucumbers
• numerous clippings of basil

Next year I'm not going to start the Lacinato kale until late summer for fall and winter harvests. It has been such an aphid magnet this summer that it has not been worth giving up the garden space for it. At least the chickens have been loving it. The Portuguese kale is quite good and nowhere near as aphidy so I will grow that again for next summer.

The Serpent cucumbers have been a disappointment. Three of the four plants died from what I believe was bacterial wilt. The surviving plant is limping along and I picked the remaining 2 cucumbers from it yesterday. It doesn't even have any flowers at the moment. The Japanese cucumbers that I started when the Serpents started to decline are a long way from producing, so I guess I'll be buying my cukes at the farmer's market for a while. I've grown Serpent cucumbers before and never had such a hard time with them, I wonder if it's because my seeds came from a different source this year.

Share your weekly harvest - go on over to Daphne's Dandelions and link to your harvest post.

The Vegetable Garden on August 7

Finally! A tomato that is showing a color other than green. Black Sea Man, the first to set, the first to ripen.

And the parade of green tomatoes (not all of them), there's Giantesque above and Black Cherry below. The Black Cherries are starting to ripen but they are buried down deep in the foliage where I can't get a decent photo.



Blue Beech paste tomato above and Caspian Pink below. That one may win the ugliest tomato competition in my garden.



The tomato/tomatillo jungle as seen from either end of the bed.



Plaza Latina Giant tomatillo, still growing... And a purple tomatillo with a funny hat.

And here's a tomatillo leaf that's infested with spider mites. I applied a sulfur spray this morning to the tomatoes and tomatillos for tomato russet mites and spider mites, respectively.



The "Profumo di Genova" basil at the end of the tomato/tomatillo bed is happy. I've been snipping away at the plants for weeks now. And here comes the pantheon of tomato plant ailments, some of it is russet mites, and there seems to be something fungal, and I'm not sure what else - there's sooo many things that attack tomatoes.





Looking over the zucchini monsters and brassicas at the tomato/tomatillo bed. I was getting ready to plant out my Romanesco broccoli, when aaack!!! bunny attack - so I've got some new seeds started.



Across the main path from the zucchini monsters are the beans. The bush beans were pulled just after I took these photos, they were infested with spider mites. I planted out some "Rolande" bush filet beans in the same spot. Those seedlings are under row cover, as are the pole beans nearby because of bunny, bird, rat, ??? attacks.

There are bean plants growing under there...

The Red Florence Fennel umbels are a pretty copper color as they develop.

Spider mite damage on a bush bean leaf.

Pictured above is the pepper/eggplant patch. It has become quite a jungle.

"Piment Doux Long des Landes" is a sweet pepper. It's delicious either green or red.

The Chilhaucle Negro pepper is still developing.

The unpronounceable Bogyiszloi pepper is mildly hot and ripens red.

Survivors from last year: Aleppo pepper above and Aji Pineapple below.



The bunnies have been munching the leaves of the eggplant.

Rat-tail radishes are growing in the pepper/eggplant bed. Most of the flowers are pure white, but the ones above have a bit of pink in them. There's the developing seed pods below. The pods are eaten fresh or cooked or pickled.



The Magdalena Big Cheese squash plants are growing under protective cover at the end of the pepper bed.

And a nice surprise, the potted "Frederick" passion fruit is setting fruit this year.

Harvest Monday: 8/3/09

I'm joining Daphne in her Harvest Monday posts, although I'm not weighing anything. I'm afraid that if I actually weighed all the zucchini that I'm harvesting (from only 2 plants) that I might never grow it again. Pictured above is one picking of Pimento de Padron peppers. I can't pick too many of those, they are absolutely delicious. Next up you can see one picking of zucchini (with one that got away), a serpent cucumber, and some Guindilla peppers.

And then there's a couple more zucchini and about half a pound of purple (not) tomatillos. The tomatillos were made into salsa with the guindillas which were too spicy to eat as a tapa. The salsa was really good on top of pan roasted halibut.

And then yet more zucchini (shared with shift mates at the Aquarium), more Padrons (all for me), some Piracicaba broccoli sprouts, and caper buds.

Not pictured this week were another handful of Padrons, a couple of Donkey Ears sweet peppers (picked green, sauteed and put on top of pizza), numerous sprigs of basil, some extremely aphidy kale (for the chickens) and a couple more zucchini...

Til next week... I gotta go pick the zucchini that should have been harvested yesterday.

Amaranth Greens

My post about the garden on July 22 included a couple of photos of one of my favorite leafy greens - amaranth. You may be more familiar with ornamental amaranths such as Love Lies Bleeding Amaranthus caudatus or Joseph's Coat Amaranthus tricolor. How about the beautiful but incredibly self sowing Hopi Red Dye Amaranthus cruentus. Or perhaps you have more than a passing familiarity with pigweed? You get a glimpse of what a diverse genus Amaranthus is.

The amaranth in my vegetable garden is a mix of green leaved, white seeded varieties. The flower heads range from green through bronze, both upright and nodding. I got my seeds through the seed savers exchange. Here's the description from the 2005 yearbook:

30 leaf; 130 grain days, for leaf green production, cook as spinach, we are releasing this mix, chosen from our trials and hope it will be widely adapted and will let you select your own local mix, a 4 x 8' bed supplied more leaves than our village could eat all summer, selected for incredibly vigorous growth and soft flavored leaves plus very late flowering so you can pick over and over again without bolting, all white seeded so if you have a long season, you can harvest grain, NOTE: if you reoffer this please (a) do not grow any black-seeded amaranths (they will cross, giving inedible seed) and (b) maintain the ratios of the different types by harvesting separately and then mixing in equal proportions, biomass increase is phenomenal .0002 g seed gives 10 kg plant, a fifty million-fold increase in 90 days, 2 new hybrids added 2003, from CV Vidaverde, mix of late-flowering (short-day) caudatus, hypochondriacus and other hybrids from our collection, original breeding material from David Brenner of ISU, USDA from various countries worldwide.

Right up my alley, if you haven't noticed by now (if you follow my blog) I do tend to go for the rare and/or unusual.

Given the space, these plants can grow up to 10 feet tall. I didn't and still don't have that kind of room so I crowd them together more and keep them cut back. For seed saving I crowd them even more to be sure that I get a good representation of the different varieties. Crowding like that seems to ensure that you get seed from the most vigorous plants that overshadow the weaker ones. Other than that, I just make sure that I don't have any black seeded varieties growing in my own garden. I've saved the seeds for a few years and so far haven't noticed any off types in my subsequent sowings and I've been quite pleased with the eating quality of the plants that I've grown. The aim of the original seed offerer seems to be to develop local vigorous strains from various crosses of the original plant selections so I'm not concerned about isolating the various strains in the mix to ensure their purity. This season I'm not planning on saving seed so I've allowed only a few of the strongest plants that germinated to grow.

The plant shown at the top of the post was direct sown on June 2 and is one of only 2 seedlings that survived the sowbugs. I sowed more seeds in a cell-pack on June 18th and then planted them out when they were large enough to withstand the bugs.

Amaranth is a warm weather vegetable, preferring temperatures over 68F, and thriving in fairly hot temperatures (86F +). In the warmest climates amaranth can tolerate some shade but usually prefers full sun. It's not too fussy about soil and will even tolerate fairly acid soils. It is best to direct sow amaranth, some varieties will tend to bolt when transplanted, but I've had success transplanting very young seedlings. Sow the seeds thickly, whether direct sown or in cell-packs, and thin to the desired spacing. I like to transplant the cell-pack seedlings before thinning and then trim off the weakest seedlings after a few days. The seeds don't germinate well if they receive too much light so they should be well covered with soil.

Amaranth grows very quickly once the seedlings are established. I waited a bit too long to start harvesting the leaves from the first plants and when I finally did I drastically cut back the plants to the ugly stubs you see above, which are actually resprouting fairly well. Behind the stubby plant you can see the new seedlings taking off. Now's the time to top them to encourage stronger side shoots.

Leaf amaranth is a good summer substitute for spinach. Very young leaves can be used in salads but older leaves are best cooked. I prefer amaranth simply prepared. Here's my favorite method for:

Sauteed Amaranth Greens

You will need at least one very large handful of leaves per serving. Remove and discard the stems from the very largest leaves, younger leaves have shorter softer stems that don't have to be removed. Coarsely chop the leaves if they are large. Saute some garlic in a bit of olive oil, add the leaves with a bit of water clinging to them from washing, or add a bit of water to the pan if the leaves are dry. Toss over medium heat until the leaves are wilted, adding more leaves to the pan as there is room - the leaves lose a lot of volume as they wilt. Don't overcook, the leaves become very soft very quickly. Season with salt and pepper to taste and serve warm. Also good with a sprinkle of chile pepper flakes with the garlic if you like spice.

I have lots of seed available to share if you would like to try growing some amaranth greens. You could probably get a crop of greens if you sow some seeds in the next 2 or 3 weeks and can rely on having warm weather for a couple of months after that. Send me an email if you are interested.

Dinner Time!

How many hummers do you see?

This has been the typical dinner time entertainment lately, watching the hummers go through about 9 ounces of nectar in about 90 minutes. This has been going on for a couple of weeks. I believe they are all Anna's hummingbirds. There was one Allen's hanging around for a few days but he seems to have moved on to a less crowded neighborhood (I suppose). What you can't see in the photo are the birds sitting on the fence off to the sides.

I have 4 feeders going now. One is dominated by one hummer and only needs to be half filled once a day. Another one gets filled at dinner and is empty by mid morning to noon the next day. The one in the photo was being emptied in one evening, so I put a second one up a couple of feet away and the two of them last through breakfast, barely. Once the feeders are empty they stay that way until the evening feeding. I think the hummers are waiting close by since the feeding starts almost immediately once I fill the feeders in the evening. It is impossible to count all the birds, but I think I'm feeding at least 20 of them, maybe more.

A Temporary Addition To The Covey

Aaawww, look! Up on the gate...


You looking at me?


I'm just keeping watch over my covey.


And lookin' good while I'm at it.
(Much more handsome than those guys behind me.)

The Garden on July 22

The weather has been grand the last few weeks, warm days and cool, but not too cool nights. Plenty of sun and none of the smoke that plagued us last summer. The garden has been loving it.

That's the tomato and tomatillo bed shown above, with a bit of Profuma di Genova basil in front. This it the first time I've grown my tomatillos in cages, in the past they have been allowed to sprawl. It's much easier growing them in the cages so far, it keeps the fruit away from the sow bugs and takes up much less space.

The downside to growing the purple tomatillos in a cage (above) is that the fruit doesn't get enough sun to turn them purple. I'm sure they will still taste good though.

Here's a "Plaza Latina Giant" tomatillo, the husk is only half full so far. I can't wait to see how big it gets when fully formed! This plant doesn't have as many fruits on it as the purple variety, but the fruit it does have is huge so quantity is not an issue.

And the most mature tomatoes in the patch so far are the Black Sea Man. Anticipation....

The (mostly) pepper and eggplant bed. The white row cover behind is protecting what is left of my edamame plants. I lost more than half of the edamame seedlings to some night time marauder. In that same area I've planted the seedlings for my winter squash (under the protection of 1 gallon plastic water bottles) *sigh* and the replacement cucumber plants *sigh again* (also under protection).

"Donkey Ears" sweet pepper.

"Chilhuacle Negro" baby pepper. These are supposed to be good in mole and chili and also good for drying.

"Marconi Purple" sweet pepper. These will be red when ripe. I've grown the red and yellow varieties of this pepper before, the purple is new in my garden this year.

I've already had two harvests of "Pimento de Padron" peppers. Padrons are picked immature so the plants keep pumping out the peppers all season long. They are absolutely delicious when pan fried in a little olive oil and served warm with a sprinkle of coarse salt. These peppers will convert pepper haters (especially green pepper haters) into pepper lovers. I don't have a photo of any right now because they've been picked and consumed, yum.

"Thai Round Green Petch Parisa" eggplant looking quite happy other than some nibbling on the lower leaves by sow bugs. There's a shot below of the first fruit it has set.



Yeah, the radishes are bolting! Just like they are supposed to. That's a rat-tail radish shown above. They are grown for their tasty seed pods. The pods can be consumed raw, sauteed, pickled... use your imagination.

The "Cocozelle" zucchini monsters. That's just 2 plants shown above, and one of them shown below.



Next to the zucchini are the Cavolo Nero and Portuguese kales, and the Piracicaba broccoli. The Cavolo Nero has been an absolute magnet for cabbage aphids. The chickens have been getting more of it than we have. I spent some time the other day washing the aphids off leaves and now I'm going to finish with some insecticidal soap. The Portugues kale has been less infested and easier to clean so we've been enjoying that. The broccoli hasn't been too badly hit either. On the other side of the kales (to the left and out of view) is what's left of the Senposai. Two of the plants got some kind of rot that effected their cores, so they are gone, another plant is bolting, and I haven't checked on the other remaining plant in a few days....

Here is a closer shot of one of the coreopsis plants that you can see behind the brassicas.

Need to pick some lettuce... And behind you can see the leaves of the "di Jesi" cauliflower. I've harvested the heads and am waiting to harvest the leaves for the chickens.

And one of my favorite greens - Amaranth. I cut one of the big plants back and had the greens sauteed in olive oil with chopped garlic. Delicious, much sweeter than spinach and far easier to grow. It's doesn't seem to be bothered by any pests other than aphids.



The red florence fennel is bolting. It's supposed to form "bulbs" in its second year. In the meantime, the flowers will provide food for beneficial insects.

And here's the reason why I've started replacement cucumber plants. The "Serpent" cucumbers are succumbing to something, probably bacterial wilt. One plant has been removed, two should be removed, the one remaining plant is hanging in there for now. I had old seed for "Palace King" Japanese cucumbers that germinated surprisingly well, so those are getting started in the bed beyond the peppers.

The rest of that bed is in transition. Under cover at the base of the trellises that sported snap and snow peas earlier are seedlings of "Petaluma Goldrush" and "Chaco Canyon" beans. There's one more trellis that I just cleared off that will support "Tarbais" beans. The bush beans are done and will be cleared out soon. There's some seeds of bush filet beans - "Rolande" and "Astrelle" (maybe... very old seeds) - sown in paper pots that will go in this bed.