Tomato Surprise

Tomato Surprise sounds like a recipe you might find in a Betty Crocker cookbook from the fifties.  Probably a cassrole including ingredients like canned tomato soup, saltine crackers and cheese.  But no, read on to learn about our tomato surprise.

Here is the scene about every other day.  The cukes and squash are getting pretty thick.  Dating each bag is critical to making sure we are on a "first in, first out" program.  The blueberries have been plentiful enough to start freezing some.  We are up to 2 quarts in the freezer, as many as we can eat fresh and lots more on the bushes. 

Don't get me wrong, this is a good problem to have, but the need to process is a bit oppressive at times.

This is the other fairly constant scene in our kitchen right now.  Despite eating as many as we can, processing for sauce, freezing whole, making BLT's, gazpacho, salsa and they just keep coming.  I actually made a sauce last night with Sungold cherries because they were on the verge of going over and that would be a crime.  The sauce was fantastically sweet, I put it through the food mill to remove the skins, and then cooked it with some Japanese eggplants and a load of garlic and basil. Yeah.

The big surprise in the mater patch this season were the Aunt Ruby's German Greens.  Now I knew I had started some seeds but somewhere in the translation of seed flats to stepped up pots, I thought none of them had sprouted.  I found the seed in a last seasons reduced bin and so I figured maybe they just had not been good seeds.  Luckily, they did sprout and were mislabeled.  I planted a couple in the group of plums thinking they were sauce tomatoes.

As they started to mature it became apparent they were no kind of plum tomato but some sort of heirloom.  I thought they were Georgia Streaks, yellow with a red sunburst on the bottom, but the mystery tomato was ripening later.  Not until a couple of them started to rot on the vine did it occur to me they were the German Greens. 

What a fantastic tomato!  They have a silky texture similar to a Cherokee Purple and that gorgeous sunburst of pink at the bottom. Even with very green shoulders, they are perfectly ripe, with a nice balance of acid and sweet.  Fortunately we made the realization before they all went bad.

Here a dynamite salad made with the Aunt Ruby's Green tomato, watermelon, purple onion, feta and topped with peanuts.  I did a dressing with peanut oil, rice wine vinegar and fresh basil.  It was super tasty.

Fortunately I think I have enough plums for one more big batch of sauce and the crop seems to be winding down.  Then we will go through withdrawal because we will no longer be eating 2 or 3 amazing tomatoes each day.  Oh well, can't have it all.  If they were available all year like this we wouldn't appreciate them as we do when they only are at their peak for a couple of months.  But we will have them frozen and canned to enjoy over the winter.

Praying for Rain

And perhaps the prayers will be answered.  It is so parched and dry the weeds that make up our lawn are starting to die. Many plants around the yard are drooping, despite spending hours each day standing with the hose to give a hope of continued life to the many shrubs and trees we've planted over the past few years. 

The bonus to standing with the hose is a chance to take in a slow view of things. Watch birds flit about the yard.  Or clouds move across the sky casting shadows on the parched landscape. A moment to pluck and crush Japanese beetles munching away on the apple trees. Or pick blueberries while the hose rests at their feet, giving the roots a deep soak to yield plump berries. 

Happiness in Blue

I resorted to the rain bird today.  We rarely use a sprinkler, as they seem wasteful, but it's come to that, too many vast dry areas and too little time to spare.

It did rain today, but only briefly.  I went out and just stood, listening to that sound of water hitting leaves, ground, roof.  I thought "Come on, come on, keep going, PLEASE."  It has been nearly a month since we had any appreciable rain, so it's getting critical.  More is forecast for tomorrow.  Fingers crossed that we are under the 60% of sky that's predicted to give a decent shower. We'll need at least an inch to even begin to soak down into the baked and cracked soil.

Good news is that diligent watering does yield vegetables.  And the lack of rain has probably saved our tomatoes from the blight that was overtaking them earlier in the season after the one heavy rain we had back in May.

 

Happiness in Red and Yellow

 

We are also fortunate to have a well.  Here's hoping it keeps on pumping cool clear water from deep in the ground for many years to come. 

Nothing really says July quite like day lilies.  This one is a fave with its green throat in contrast against those velvety purple petals.

 

This two-toner is another beauty

I've noticed the plants with tuberous roots; day lilies, ginger lilies, peonies, are much better able to endure the lack of water.  But even they are beginning to show signs of distress.  

Come on.  Rain.

Berries = Pie

 Bowl of blue deliciousness

The blueberries started ripening in earnest this week and then the blackberries began to follow suit. The blues have been the plumpest ever thanks to our record breaking rainfall over the past month.  Ten inches of rain fell in June and we've had another 1.5 inches just in the past 48 hours, it seems like it just won't stop.  But I'm trying not to complain given how much I've complained about drought over the past few years.

I do begin to feel like I'm living in a rainforest.

The berry patch

We have about 18 blueberry bushes of varying age and variety.  Most are rabbiteye and they begin bearing in July and continue into late August/early September.  The oldest were planted about 8 years ago, the newest last season.  The varieties include Premier, Columbus, Tifblue, Delite, Onslow, O'Neal and Powder Blue.  The older ones came from Finch Blueberry Nursery, a well known NC blueberry grower, the newer ones from Camellia Forest.

A few ripe blueberries with many more to come

And blackberries too

I'm not as happy with our blackberries, they are a thorn less variety, can't remember the name though they are all named for native tribes, I think Arapaho or maybe Navajo?  Not sure why they are named this way.

I would like to try a different variety and see if we have better luck, while these do make nice large berries, they are not as sweet as one would hope, nor as plump as other varieties I've seen.  They'll do for now.  If you have a favorite blackberry variety, please comment and tell me what it is and where you found it.

So with some berries mounting up I knew it was pie time.  I like to use my friend Karen Barkers recipe from her Sweet Stuff book. She includes orange zest and juice and a hint of cinnamon, that together with the 2 kinds of berries yields a really fragrant flavor, not too cloying, not too sweet.  I used 3 cups of blues and 1 cup of blacks (Her recipe calls for 4 cups of blues and 2 of blacks, I didn't have that many and it turned out fine, I just reduced the sugar and flower a smidgen.)

This is what I am talking about!

With ice cream for dessert last night, with cappuccino for breakfast this morning, and more to come. Not exactly slimming for my waistline but I'm getting to where I think that slimming my waistline may be a lost cause.

For a little more pie fun, check out the movie Sweet Land, a wonderful film about a mail order German bride coming to the Midwest in 1920, there is a fantastic pie scene about 45 minutes in and the whole movie is a very sweet love story worth watching.

The Lotus Pond

Last summer David brought home a black plastic tub and some tiny lotus plants.  He filled the tub with mud, brought water from the farm pond to introduce a few water creatures, nestled the plants into their new home and we waited.  Within a couple of months we had breathtaking, spectacular flowers.

D would visit the little pond daily to see what was up, who was hatching, growing, zipping in and around the floating leaves.  All kinds of frogs moved onto the scene.  The lotus pond became a source of entertainment and natural wonder.

During the first warm nights this past spring, when we opened the windows to let in the night air, along with the breeze came a deafening call of dozens of tree frogs just outside the bedroom window where the little pond sat.  David constructed a plywood sled that he hoisted the pond onto and then used to drag the heavy pool across the yard and settle the tub further away from the bedroom window.  He brought soil to pile around the edges and planted iris and ginger lilies to soften the black plastic rim.  Just this past week the lotus began to bloom again. 

They are ethereal.

Along with the frogs and whirly gig beetles, tadpoles and skimmers came dragonflies.  Nymphs that spent the winter in the mud began to crawl up out of the muck onto the stalks. Their backs split open and out hatched the winged creatures, filling up like butterflies coming out of a chrysalis, then taking wing around the yard, snatching up mosquitoes and other small flying insects.

Dry nymph shell above, dragon ready to fly below

Buddhists consider the lotus to be representative of the journey to enlightenment, from the murky mud rises a beautiful flower, its opening an awakening or rebirth.  I'm glad to see the fat purple buds and pink flowers gracing the yard again and its timely that they came at the summer solstice, I certainly have felt my own energy rising after the passage of the first day of summer.  I've not reached enlightenment, I'm far from that, but I do feel a release from things that were weighing me down, a renewal of my spirit moving me forward to new things. 

I'm trying to embrace summer as best I can.  

Swimming outside, riding my bike, long evenings drinking gin and tonics, playing croquet and watching the fireflies rise up from the lawn, suppers of tomatoes, corn, squash and cucumbers, and I picked our first ripe blueberry today.

Yep, summer has arrived.

Free Time

Here is an example of what can happen when a person has some extra time again.  Lemon-blueberry muffins from the last of last years blues, making room in the freezer for the new crop.  It'll be coming along soon now.  The berries are beginning to have a blueish cast to their greenness, I can hardly wait.

I have to admit I've been reveling in a bit of freedom for the first time in a while, doing things like swimming laps and walking and going to yoga class again.  Cooking, reading, hanging out with my honey.

I finally got some more beans planted this week, about a month later than normal, yellow Roc D'or and flat italian Pension and borlotto beans for shelling.   I also put in a row of okra and planted a row of purple hull peas on either side, we'll see how that works out but I think they should be able to co-exist in the wide bed I put them in.  I don't plant okra every year as it takes a lot of space.  You need a fairly long row to have enough to actually "make a mess'" as they say here in the south, since they only put on one okra per plant at a time and don't store well at all in the fridge.  My favorite thing to do is pick them small, about 3 inches long and saute them up whole, quickly in a hot skillet in olive oil with garlic, salt and pepper, just till they are bright green, still a little crunch left and not getting too slippery.  If there is a surplus I will pickle them.

It's Memorial Day weekend, the political start of summer, and even though the longest day is still 3 weeks off, it's feeling pretty summery around here, both weather wise and mood wise.  Let me just say, I am ready.

Adolescent Fruit

Now that the strawberries are finished I’m looking forward to the next fruit crops, it will be a few weeks before the first blueberries are ripe enough to eat, happily we have 5 varieties so the blueberry season continues for a couple of months.

Then the blackberries will come along in July and make me want to bake pies.

The highest hope for the season are our first peaches and apples. We had a few peaches on the tree last year but the pesky squirrels ate them all when they were still green. That was the act that made us take up arms and eliminate 9 squirrels from the yard last summer. They are re-infiltrating of course, but maybe they haven’t discovered the fruit trees yet? That’s doubtful so we’ve already started taking a few shots at them as they graze on bird seed below the feeders, but either our aims went bad over the winter or our scope has gone out of calibration, perhaps a bit of both. We haven’t killed one yet this season but not for lack of trying.

The apples are particularly exciting. We planted five heirloom varieties nearly 4 years ago, they were bare root sticks and we’ve been patiently waiting. This is the first year they have bloomed and set fruit so we are filled with anticipation for their ripening, even if we only get a handful from each tree it will be a thrill.

I check from day to day on the various fruit, since the big rain earlier in the week things have really plumped up and I think we’ll see a decent crop on most things. The pubescent fuzz of the peaches and sheen on the apples fill me with expectancy, give me something to look forward to. Having fruit really lets you know you’ve been in the same place for a while and plan to stay.

We joke about planting pecan trees, but don’t believe we would ever see a nut, and besides, we don’t really have space for those giants. My brother Jonny and his wife Candy just put in fruit at their new house, he said they've been chanting "blueberry, blackberry, raspberry, fig". To that ditty I would add "bake me a pie and dance me a jig!"

Turtle Gertie

Been seeing a lot of our resident turtle Gertrude lately. I imagine she's lived in our yard longer than us, but for sure we've been seeing her for 12 years since we moved in. I'm not sure if she's on the move from all the rain we've been having or if she knows we'll give her some tomatoes to eat, today she was in luck.

I finally finished the blueberry patch. Its taken me weeks, beginning with taking apart the potato cages which I had set up in between the plants planning to use the soil we piled in there to improve the rows.

When we originally planted the blues, we set them far apart and not in much of a line so mowing around them has been a pain. I decided it would be good to create rows, so first I had to remove the grass in between, then I spread that good dirt from the potato bins, I added 3 more plants to one row, and finally today I put down newspapers and covered the whole thing with 4 big cartloads of mulch. I think they are going to be real happy and hope they'll spread towards one another and fill the rows. And mowing is going to be so much easier now too. I'm sure they will never look this good again so feast your eyes

End of the Berries

Last pie o' the season

The berries have been good this year. Especially since I killed all the squirrels. They haven't moved back in either as I thought they would, probably in the fall we'll begin to see some Shorty's again?

We picked blueberries and blackberries for about 6 weeks and there are still a few ripening up. Our line-up starts with O'Neals in mid-June, goes to Climax, then Premier and finally Powder Blue. I just got three new plants of a variety called Delite that are covered with berries so I'm hoping they will extend the blueberry season to 8 weeks next year. I planted those in the ground this morning to fill out a row. All that's left in my berry patch maintenance program is to lay down some mulch. It's looking sharp down there.