Food and Flowers
The old fashioned crookneck squash and Gold of Bacu beans are from our garden; the corn’s from the farmstand up the road and the vanilla butter* is the touch that turns them from yellow vegetables into winter joy.
Official Kitchen Garden Day was August 22, but at the time I was too busy planting fall crops, harvesting the everlasting beans and squash, canning roasted tomatoes and making plum jam to do any live-blogging, and yesterday was much the same except for an evening pizza party with freshly picked peppers, tomatoes and basil and the whole family around the outdoor oven.
If you actually have a kitchen garden, every day is Kitchen Garden Day – that’s the whole point. All spring, summer and fall, you plant and eat. All winter, you eat and plan for next year.
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Our 2010 cherry tomatoes, left to right: Black Cherry, Gajo de Melon (yellow), Maglia Rosa, Sun Gold (orange), Green Grape, and Juliet, with Matt's Wild Cherry on top.
Like most Northeastern gardeners, I planted this year’s tomatoes with fear and trembling, still in shock from last year’s late blight and almost afraid to hope.
A certain amount of apprehension remains – in gardens it’s never too late for disaster – but so far, so more than good. Like everything else goosed forward by heat waves, the Hudson Valley tomatoes are way ahead of schedule. There are a lot of them and they are delicious. (Nothing like nights in the 70′s to make a tomato plant happy, no matter what they do to the rest of us.)
Unintended consequence: we are drowning in cherry tomatoes
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This picture was taken on 7/22, after what will no doubt come to be called The Deluge of 2010. If you don’t know what our tiny creek looks like in late July, you see a fair amount of water. If you do know, you see Niagara Falls.
Rain gauge
When we left for an evening opening at Caldbeck Gallery, in Rockland, I put an empty bucket in the driveway, carefully avoiding measurement complicators like overhanging trees and dripping eves. When we got home (after crossing three low spots that should by all rights have stopped the car, since the water was up to the doors), it was overflowing. That is not a doctored photo; we got over 8 inches of rain in less than 4 hours.
Also the lightening was nonstop throughout. Also a giant elm branch fell on the sailboat parked in my neighbor’s yard. Also many roads were washed out; basements flooded…
People are pretty much alright, however, so I’m free to say the unusual storm is a perfect symbol for the usual Summer Crescendo: way too much of everything all at once.
Fruit is ripening - fast! These blackcaps came and went in about two (glorious; I made jam) weeks.
Mushrooms are popping up everywhere. (I fried these chanterelles in butter and froze them; they were the third batch this size in 8 days.)
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Ornamental millet ‘Limelight', in a bed with peppers (at right) and Verbena bonariensis. That's the tomato patch in the background.
Not long ago, I found and wrote a brief post about an amazing millet bug – amazing in that it was huge, gorgeous, and something I’d never seen before.
I was hoping somebody would recognize it. So far no luck. Also, at least so far, no one who shares my appreciation of its beauty. Commenters have been silent, but e-mails and conversations with friends have reminded me that for many people, bug = disgusting.
Too bad. Some insects are just plain creepy – earwigs come at once to mind – but a lot of them are drop down gorgeous, however disgusting their behavior.
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Will these Brandywine blossoms make it to tomatohood if the weather stays hot hot hot?
Our friend Melinda writes:
“It’s been my understanding that when it’s too hot for a sustained period (including high overnight temps–like around 80), that many veggie plants drop their flowers before they fruit (e.g., tomatoes, peppers, squash, etc.). Is that true in your experience?”
Yes, but less often than you might think – or fear, given the ongoing heat wave. High night temperatures sterilize pollen and flowers that are not pollinated fall from the plant. But the window for this kind of blossom drop is comparatively narrow.
Pollen forms before the flower opens, but not that long before, and after the flower opens it must be pollinated within a day or two (over the course of a single morning, in the case of squash), no matter what else is going on.
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FGFP stands for Food Gardeners Fine Points and I’m putting pea varieties there because a recent NPR story, Why Supertasters Can’t Get Enough Salt, implied supertasters were the only ones who could taste differences between peas.
Phooey. If you’re any kind of taster at all, you know instantly when snap peas are too young or pod peas are over the hill. And if peas were sold by name, like tomatoes, you’d have little trouble noticing that different varieties have distinct degrees and kinds of sweetness, more and less tenderness, juiciness, grassiness…
And then the words start failing. I can say things like “Early Perfection has a slightly spicy note,” or “Casselode has old fashioned pea flavor with faint echoes of field peas.” But vegetable-speak has a long way to go before it’s as useful as wine-speak. I’m working on helping the produce catch up, so if you have good ways to describe the many, many tastes of peas, please write and let us know.
- Left to right: Early Perfection, Laxton’s Progress #9, Casselode, Sugar Ann, Gonzo, Sugar Sprint
Can’t expect tasters to know how different the plants themselves look. That’s a treat for gardeners.
This is how our squash bed/pea patch looked yesterday, 2 weeks after the version that ended Eric’s post on companion planting.
asparagus to the rear, mowed central path at the right. Actual distance between: @ 20 feet.
The plan: Early in spring, plant lettuce, fava beans and peas at the path edge of what will become the winter squash bed. By the time it’s warm enough to plant the squash, the peas will be flowering. By the time the squash flows lavalike over the edge of the bed, the early things will be all done.
Big question for today: will they be all done?
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Pole green beans as only children - read on for why
If you want a stellar example of the First Peoples’ agricultural smarts, it’s hard to beat their companion planting of The Three Sisters: corn, beans and squash.
Corn, being tall and straight, provides support for the beans. Bean vines, being strong and wiry, build a framework around the corn that helps keep it from falling over. The big squash leaves cover the ground, conserving moisture and shading out weeds.
And just to put the fudge on the sundae, the beans, being legumes, provide extra nitrogen for the corn and squash.
Ever tried it?
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It’s certainly shaping up that way. Here in the Hudson Valley we’ve had temperatures in the high 80′s (and more) on and off for about a week now, making this our third blasting heat wave before the first of June.
May 26th, 2010. Outdoor temperature on left, indoor on right. It WAS 4:30 in the afternoon, and the probe though in the shade is on the west-facing porch. But still...
It’s dry, too; the thunderstorms have missed our place, but even the people they’ve hit haven’t gotten much in the way of rain.
Midcoast Maine’s the same, in its cooler (but-not-as-cool-as-it-should-be) way, and now on the morning weather report, this:
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When our friend Eric isn’t managing Yale’s Marsh Garden or playing music, he’s cultivating his own garden, and – at least in this one instance – ignoring his own excellent advice. Unless he’s selling the stuff on the side or donating it to a food pantry, he has succumbed to temptation and planted too much lettuce all at once, just for the sheer beauty of it.
“Note the color and texture variation in the Larson Lettuce Bed,” says Eric. “ I prefer looseleaf and buttercrunch lettuce, but also grow Cos. But I love the salad bowl with red, green and even dark purple leaves. A very vigorous variety ‘Speckles’ is not pictured, but I’ll follow up in the fall with more.”
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