All about tomatoes

NOTE TO SELF - GET PICTURES!!!!!

I LOVE growing tomatoes. I love the way the plants smell, and the way my hands smell after handling the plants. I love the amazing variety of shapes, sizes, and colors. I love the taste! And the versatility of using them. They're delicious fresh in salad, or any number of appetizers. They're delicious on pizza. They make fantastic sauce for pasta or eggplant parmesan. Tomatoes juice is yummy and nutritious. And ketchup! Yummmmmmmmmm.

In my garden, I have six heirlooms (which I believe I wrote about in a previous post), and 24 roma tomato plants. The heirlooms are in cages, and I did try to limit the number of vines they have, although I haven't been too successful. A few of them aren't looking all that great, but a couple already have some nice-sized tomatoes. They're planted down at the end of the rows of romas.

The romas are planted about 18 inches apart in two rows, which are about two feet apart. There's just enough space for me to walk between the rows. I'm keeping myself busy, especially now with the warm weather, because the plants are growing quickly. I'm busy picking off the side shoots, to try to keep the plants to one main stem. The problem is that I'm not sure whether these romas are determinate or indeterminate. If they're determinate, I'm not sure that picking off the side shoots is the best idea. But it's what I was told to do, so I'm doing it. I'll have to look into it more next year.

The plants are anywhere from 1 to 2 feet high right now, and I've just begun tying them to their stakes. I think perhaps I put the stakes a little too far from the plants. They're about 4-6 inches away. I'll update later on how things turn out later in the season.

At this point, I've gradually decreased watering from twice a week to once every 5-6 days. I try to let the water run for at least an hour, more if possible. Today I probably let it run for almost 2 hours. This is really what tomatoes need.

We certainly have our first green tomatoes. When we have our first red, orange, yellow, or purples tomatoes - I'll certainly post a picture!

Summer garden shaping up

The weather is officially warming up, and the garden is slowly transforming from spring into summer. It's amazing how quickly everything takes off as soon as the warm weather arrives.

Here's a brief diagram of what things look like right now:

The tomatoes are growing like crazy, and I can't always catch the suckers before they get too big. Luckily, I've still got things mostly under control, and I've starting tying up the vines to their stakes. I'll write more about the tomatoes soon. Suffice to say we've got quite a few green ones.

The zucchini is also growing amazingly quickly. We have one small green one, which will probably be ready today or tomorrow. Now THAT was fast!

The green beans already have tiny, little fruits, I'm really looking forward to eating my first green beans of the season. I have at least two or three varieties planted. Green beans seem to go through a shock when they're transplanted. They always seem to wither a bit and take a few days to recover. The most recent transplants are still suffering, but the older plants are quickly turning into bushes.

The carrots are coming up just beautifully. (Reminder to self - post a picture!) Despite my thinning, they are still to close together, but I'm trying to pick the bigger ones in each group and leave some space for the smaller ones to grow some more.

The eggplants aren't doing much. I'm hoping they wake up soon, and realize that summer is almost here!

I may have planted the beets a little late, I was just trying to get something into the ground in a small patch I have available. I'm actually having weed issues in that corner of the garden. The peas are drying out, and almost not producing at all anymore, so they're coming out soon, possibly this weekend. After I harvest the beets (and carrots), I may do a serious weeding session and try to conquer them. The real issue is my garden neighbor, who lets his lot go pretty badly in the winter. The weeds just keep spreading over to my side from there.

The garlic and shallots are drying out! I turned off their sprinklers a couple weeks ago, and they're starting to turn brown. Good timing, since our garlic from last year is going bad pretty quickly. Lukcily we only have a couple heads left. I'm really looking forward to braiding the garlic this year, and also to trying our first home-grown shallots!

Everything else is doing really well. The basil plants are quickly becoming bushes, the cucumber is starting to climb it's cage, the ambrosia melon is spreading in all directions, and the leeks are ... still there. They don't seem to be getting much bigger, but they're just as delicious at the size they are now.

And that's everything! I guess my updates aren't ever really that quick!

Biking

May is National Bike to Work month, and I did my part a couple times. My house is almost exactly 16 miles from my office on my biking route (according to my bike computer), which takes me a little over an hour. Traffic lights can sometimes add 5 to 10 minutes. It's a long, boring ride, completely flat and almost completely straight. Four miles of it is on the Yolo Causeway, the elevated freeway that crosses the Yolo Basin, and the bike lane actually shares the roadway with the cars, separated only by a three-foot wall and a chain-link fence. Another long section is through West Sacramento, the land of semis, trailer parks, and rent-by-the-hour motels.

I pledged 120 miles for May, and as of today I will have done 107. So I just need 13 tomorrow to make my goal! I didn't actually bike 120 commuter miles, though. Loris and I did a 35-mile loop a couple weeks ago, and a lot of the rest is from running errands around Davis. I’ve actually only biked to work twice this month (that I remember).

For a year and a half, I actually rode the bus from Davis to Sacramento and back, every day. It added about an hour to my workday, but it gave me a lot of free time to read. It was fine, except for occasional days when it would add more than an hour to my day, when I would grit my teeth in frustration. The final straw came when the Tower Bridge into Sacramento, which is the usual bus route, was closed for construction. My commute was starting to regularly add two hours to my day instead of just one. Since I bake all of my own bread and grow my own vegetables, I just couldn’t afford to lose that extra hour. I started driving to work, and I never went back.

It’s funny how things in life often come full circle. For the next month, a portion of I-5 will be closed through Sacramento. I generally use this section of I-5, but it’s not essential to my route, and I can easily just drive a different way to work. Unfortunately, the impact of this construction is going to affect traffic throughout the area. I’ve even heard rumors that commuters should expect to add up to an hour to their commute. Like I said, I only go about 16 miles. An extra hour is just crazy. So now the plan, generally, is to bike to work in the morning, then schlep myself and my bike over to Amtrak for the 15-minute train ride back to Davis. I won’t be able to put it into action completely until July, because of the stupid rules for parking at my office – so update in July! Right before I leave for Italy!

I do all this inter-city riding on my bee-you-tee-ful Specialized road bike. What about my crappy bike? I still use it around Davis, and it comes in handy. The baskets fit a TON of stuff – backpack, books, groceries, veggies from the garden, climbing gear, etc. The main drawback is that it is really heavy. But it’s good exercise, right?

In which I remember my bread-baking origins

I've been baking bread for more than 10 years, but my hobby has changed dramatically since I first started in high school. My mother bought a bread machine when I was younger, and I remember delicious, fluffy loaves coming out of it. The only issues were that the paddle left a big hole in the bread, and it tended to be a bit soggy because it had a cooling off period inside the machine where it would basically steam itself after the baking cycle was done.

My family was crazy about challah, the sweet braided Jewish egg bread, typically covered with poppy or sesame seeds (poppy seed were our favorite). The bread was really expensive, so we tended to eat it as a treat. My mother bought a few bread machine recipe books at one point, and it suddenly occurred to me that I could actually make challah for a fraction of the price of buying it.

I honestly don't remember my first attempt to make challah, but I suspect it went well or I may not have stuck with it. The recipe I used was extremely easy and forgiving, and yielded excellent results despite my occasional mistakes or my forgetfulness. Since the machine mixed the dough, the only thing I needed to do was braid it, let it rise, do a quick egg wash with a sprinkling of seeds, and stick it in the oven. After 30 or 40 minutes, we almost always pulled a hot, sweet, delicious poppy-seed covered loaf from the oven, and my family would devour it eagerly, most of us with a huge spread of "butter" (I'm a child of the 80's - as far as we were concerned, margarine was butter and we used the terms completely interchangeably).

I do vaguely remember my later attempts to diversify my portfolio, most of which failed miserably. Challah was probably halfway between a cake and a bread, and the eggs and copious amount of sugar made for an excellent texture despite my lack of technique. Making real bread, on the other hand, was a disaster, leading mostly to what my dad called doorstops. I especially liked whole wheat bread, which has an even greater tendency towards heavy, dense results.

Over the years, my skills have been honed quite a bit, thanks in large part to the likes and dislikes of my Italian husband who is very particular about his bread and continues to offer me plenty of encouragement - and who will eat what I bake no matter what. I eventually gave up my bread machine for a mixer (since I never used the machine to do the actual baking anyway), then acquired an even bigger more powerful mixer after I burned out the engine on my standard-sized one (but I really miss the beautiful yellow color of the old one).

I also purchased a fibrament baking stone, which I love dearly, and which I honestly believe has helped compensate for my 70's era electric oven.

Thanks to a few books and a few websites (see sidebar), I learned a LOT of new techniques, and I've come up with a really basic "recipe" I'm using these days for some simple, white Italian-style bread with what I hope is good flavor, light holey crumb, and a crunchy crust. My husband seems to approve, and I'll take whatever appreciation I can get.

Tuesday morning musings

We have had cooler weather here the last week - after a week of record hot temperatures. We also had Memorial Day weekend, and I was so busy that I didn't have time to get out to the garden almost at all. I only spent about an hour there yesterday, just enough time to prune and water the tomates, pull a few weeds, and plant the green beans and yellow summer squash that I just bought.

I counted my green bean plants - if you include each individual plant, we have 50. I'm even considering planting more, because they're so versatile. We make green bean salads, put them in pasta sauces, make soups, add them to giardiniera, and I can freeze them. I could try pickling and canning them, too. This year I got smart, and I've planted them around the edge of one of my beds for easy picking.

I think the peas are going to have to go soon. They're drying up, and I haven't seen any new flowers in a while. We have only a handful in the fridge, so we'll probably make a pasta sauce with them.

The garlic and shallots will be coming out soon - I just turned the water off to them yesterday. I need to decide what I'm going to plant there when it's available, and also what I'm going to plant when I pull out the peas. I already have plenty of tomatoes, and I'll have plenty of peppers by the end of the week (I hope!). I may leave the space for the peas open for the melon I have planted over there. And I suppose I could plant either more eggplant or a winter squash where the garlic is. The problem is that there's really not enough room for a winter squash, because it's pretty close to the zucchini, which I know is going to get big. So I don't know what I'm going to do yet. I'll have to give it some thought.

Another pea recipe

I made up this recipe last night to use what is starting to be the last of the peas from our garden. Next year, I'm considering planting more peas, and possibly planting climbing peas. I can put up a fence or something for them to grow on. Right now, it's really difficult to pick them, crouching over and trying to reach the middle of the bed. I see other people picking them easily from their garden paths, and I'm jealous.

For this recipe, I used all the peas I picked in one day, which came to about 2 cups shelled. I also used up half of a bag of frozen zucchini (maybe another two cups?), a chunk of frozen basil (a few tablespoons, probably), and 2 or 3 of our small leeks. This can all be adjusted according to taste or what you have on hand.


Green risotto (with leeks, peas, zucchini, and basil)

One largish zucchini and 1 or 2 smaller ones (I used maybe 2 cups of chopped frozen zucchini)
A couple of cups of freshly shelled peas
Salt and pepper to taste
Olive oil
Some leeks
Veggie broth
2 cups of arborio rice
Some wine (.5 to 1 cup?)
Basil (fresh or frozen)
Parmesan cheese


Finely chop some basil to garnish, and set aside.

Shell the peas (if you haven't already). Set aside.

Chop up the large zucchini and bring to a boil in a pot with broth(about 4-5 cups). Boil until soft, then puree with a stick blender, standard blender or food processor. Return to pot and keep on low on the stove.

Chop up the leeks and saute for about 4 minutes in olive oil in a medium to large saucepan. Add the rice and stir until it starts making clicking sounds, about 4 minutes. Add the wine and stir until it is absorbed.

Start adding a couple ladle-fulls of the zucchini/broth puree, slowly stirring the rice with a wooden spoon while it absorbs the liquid. Each time you can see the bottom of the pot when you stir, add some more liquid and puree. After about 5 minutes, add the peas so that they will cook along with the rice. If you prefer the peas to be very well done, add them when you start adding broth; if you prefer them less cooked, add them a bit later.

It will take anywhere from 25-45 minutes for the rice to cook and absorb all or most of the liquid. After 25-30 minutes, start tasting for doneness. If you don't use all the liquid, it's ok - if you need to add more liquid, add water, broth, wine, or anything else you think of to create a different flavor.

Add the chopped basil, and pass the parmesan cheese at the table to add on top. Enjoy!!

Cabbages, winter 2008

We had a good year for cabbage. Or maybe not, depending on your point of view of cabbage. As I believe I mentioned in an earlier post, I planted 6 green cabbages and 6 red cabbages this year. I don't remember the exact dates, but I planted the green ones quite a bit later than the red ones last fall/winter.

The red cabbage was wonderful. It all formed beautiful purplish, mottled heads, and after I realized that it would grow small side heads after cutting the main one, like broccoli, I was careful to leave enough of the plant for this to occur. We actually still have these mini-heads in our fridge, but I'm not sure we'll get around to eating them - they may be headed for the compost pile.

I had read about cabbage heads cracking, but never experienced it until this spring, when it happened. I wondered what it would look like - would it be difficult to see the crack, so that you wouldn't notice until it was too late, and the head was rotting fromt he inside out? I carefully inspected my cabbage every time I went to the garden just in case. Then one day it happened - the last red cabbage had cracked wide open, like a flower bud blooming. It was definitely obvious, beautiful, alarming. I harvested the cabbage immediately and we made some delicious buttermilk cole slaw (with the buttermilk from my home-made butter campaign).

The green cabbage didn't do as well. I thought it was forming heads, and we did get one really beautiful head (which I gave to my mother), but when I checked the other heads later, I realized that the heads weren't solid - they were just large leaves, somewhat tightly wrapped. The tightest one we took home and made more cole slaw. The others went into the compost. I think the lesson learned is to plant cabbage a bit earlier in the fall - the problem is that my garden isn't big enough - I have to wait until the summer/fall plants are done before I can plant the winter garden. The obvious solution - I need another garden!