Why We Garden

These tiny little eggplants are called Fairy Tale. I don't actually remember ordering them but I started some seed and planted one good plant into the garden. We are growing 4 kinds of eggplants this summer, Rosa Bianca, Black Bell, Fairy Tale and Orient Express. They are doing quite well and all have good fruit set. We only have 6 plants, 2 each of the Rosa and Black, one each of the Fairy and Orient. It's enough. We can make ratatouille and baba ganoush, imam biyaldi (the priest fainted), asian eggplant salad, eggplant parmesan, have plenty to eat and some to freeze. We would be hard pressed to find all of these at market. I priced organic eggplant yesterday, it's going for $2 a pound and tiny ones like the Fairy Tale are $4/pound.

We try some new varieties every year. Another new trial this summer is Haricot Verts Tavera. It took us about 10 days to pick enough of these for two generous servings as I only planted a small section with them. But let me tell you, we simply blanched them and ate them at room temperature with NOTHING on them, not even salt, they were scrumptious. Here they accompany the best and simplest pasta ever, fresh tomatoes, basil, and garlic, cooked in olive oil, tossed with penne and topped with the real deal, Reggiano Parmesan. The little eggplants I halved and cooked slowly with S&P in olive oil. They were creamy, sweet, no seeds, totally delectable. Here they are dressing up the pasta plate.

Latest "In Season" Column in CH News

Check out my latest column in the Chapel Hill News "Battle for the Garden Never Ends". My working title was Reality Check. I fear our little home town paper may be on its last legs, but hope not. They are now only running my column every other month it seems, the paper shrinks by the week and they've let most of their regular paid columnists go. It'll be a sad day if all our newspapers dry up and die.

Freezer Iron Chef

I defrosted the freezer this week in anticipation of whats to come and decided a little Iron Chef competition was in order for us to use up the stuff that's got some age on it. I don't like to keep things in the freezer for more than a year and preferably less than that. Food starts to lose its nutritional value after a few months in the freezer and eventually loses its taste too. We actually did pretty well eating stuff up this year, I only had one small basket of items on the use first list.

What could you make with kasha, hazelnuts, tomato soup, whole tomatoes, green beans, black-eyed peas, pistachio nuts, sausage, bacon, roasted poblanos, serranos, corn, coconut and cranberries? In addition, we are picking loads of green and yellow beans and squash now and still have some of the shitakes from two weeks ago floating around in the fridge that need eating too.

My first effort was outstanding. A soup made with bacon, onions, garlic, corn, squash and poblanos, all cooked up with chicken stock, a little cumin, cayenne and white pepper. I pureed this base, added cream, salt and lime juice. Garnished with bacon bits, grilled chicken, green onions, pumpkin seeds toasted with chili and salt, and sauteed shitakes. WOW! This was inspired and tasty.

Tonight we'll have a black-eyed pea salad as part of our supper and I'm planning a baked orzo with that tomato soup. We'll see what else inspires us.

If you haven't yet voted for the Carrboro Farmers Market as the best market so they could win $5,000, you can do so by clicking on this link: http://www.care2.com/farmersmarket/

Help them out and tell your friends you don't have to live in Carrboro to vote.

Onion dissapointment/fiasco

So you might remember that I was super proud and excited about the onion crop last year, lots of huge and perfect onions. Even though we harvested them during a wet period, they dried out and kept really well right through the winter.

Onions from summer 2008, many of the yellows weighed more than a pound each!

Well this year the crop was not nearly so impressive, I blame my planting them too close together, in a shadier and less nutrient rich section of the garden. All three factors ganged up for a smaller than hoped for crop.

But to add insult to injury, after I pulled the onions and had them laying on the ground to cure, I decided to put a layer of remay (spun polyester floating row cover) over the top to keep them from getting sunburned. It was really hot, in the 90's this week. When I went back that evening to take a look at them, the remay had made it so warm underneath that many of the onions had literally cooked. When we picked them up they were soft, when we cut them open they were transluscent and smelled like roasted onions. Bummer. We picked them up and put them on a screen to finish drying in a shadier spot but I think many were ruined already.

The entire crop from 2009, half the size as last year and probably half of these are COOKED!

Mushroom City

With the rain and warm weather of late, it's been mushroom city around here. Not only are the wild mushrooms going to town, but David recently soaked the shitake logs to get them going, so at the moment we seem to be inundated with mushrooms of every kind.

D harvested, cooked and froze about 10 pounds of chanterelles this week. And now we are trying to get through some of the shitakes. I'm guessing we've harvested about 10 pounds of them as well, been giving a few away, eating them on everything and about to put some of them in the freezer too.

Garlic!

I harvested the garlic today, after 4 inches of rain in the past week I thought I better get it out of the ground to start drying. It was a good haul and about 35 of the heads are what I would call really big, another 25 were quite respectable, there was just a handful that were puny for some reason. So we enter another season with a good garlic crop to get us through making lots of tomato sauce and ratatouille and pesto and last us again into the late winter I hope, it's more than one head per week and I think that ought to do us fine.

David has been harvesting chanterelle mushrooms from the woods this week and we will be eating squash very soon too.

Very Small Scale Community Supported Agriculture

I planted more beans today, If you read my blog last summer you'll know I'm a little wacky about beans, but they are a great source of nutrition, can be stored frozen or dried, and they help build the soil up by fixing nitrogen so whenever I see a small spot of bare dirt in the garden, I think of putting in a few more beans. Their seed is really easy to save too.

Today I planted three, 30 foot rows of purple hull black eyed peas, and about 15 feet of pole beans; turkey craw which are for shelling and supposedly were found in the craw of a turkey, they are brown with one end a little lighter in color and cook up like a super meaty pinto, yard longs, great for stir fry and freezing, and the new favorite from last summer, Garden of Eden, huge luscious flat beans, tender and tasty. The top new variety of anything we grew last year.

I'm also trying an experiment of planting a one foot square parcel in mixed lettuce and arugula in a spot that gets afternoon shade and just see if I can't grow salad greens all summer if I pick them when they are small. I'm going to try successive plantings every week or two and see what happens. If you live in the south, tell me, have you ever tried this or heard of it? How did it go?

I also embarked yesterday on an experiment in Community Supported Agriculture, you might call it a boutique CSA, I am going to see if I don't have enough to make a share for two of my friends over the next couple of months.

Here's what they got on their first week. One big head of bok choy, a nice size bunch of chard, another of baby beets, about 6 leeks, a bag of peas, radish sampler and a bag of arugula. I thought it was a pretty good mix of stuff and my friends seemed happy.