Spring chicken

... or eggs.

I just found out that one of my coworkers lives on 5 acres and has chickens. She sells her eggs to coworkers, and I got to buy one of her first batches last week. They were absolutely beautiful, brown, white and green, and super-fresh.

We made them into a local dinner. Loris cooked up a frittata with parsley from our garden, I made some cole slaw with home-grown cabbage, and we ate them with home-made pretzels. So yummy!

Monday night

I stopped by the garden today on my way home from work. It's looking great. I accidentally picked our first tomato, which isn't quite ripe yet, but will be shortly. I also picked another zucchini, a few handfuls of green beans, basil, and parsley.

The lima beans are already up, they started poking out of the ground and uncurling their first sets of leaves on Friday. More are still coming, as I can see from where the dirt is cracking open. The two melons are getting bigger almost daily, but I still don't think we'll be eating them before we leave for Europe.

Tonight for dinner we had green beans cooked with onions, tomato sauce, and parsley, and store-bought gnocchi with freshly made pesto. And homemade bread, which is getting a bit old. And the last bits of cheese from our rafting trip yesterday. We just took a walk to our "neighborhood store" (Rite Aid) to buy milk to eat with our leftover chocolate chip cookies. It's going to be a good evening =)

Garden update - end of June

It's the last week of June, and things are looking pretty good. Here’s a rundown on the garden:

1. Cucumber – really great, we’ve had 4 cukes so far and they’re all delicious. These are pickling cukes, so I could pickle some, but I have to check and see how many jars we still have from last year. We don’t eat a whole lot of pickles normally.

2. Melon – doing fantastic for now! We have two melons about the size of a baseball. Unfortunately, they’re starting to climb the leeks that I haven’t gotten out of the ground yet. I’ll have to take care of that this weekend.

3. Basil – growing quickly. We still have frozen pesto from last year, so I’m not really sure what I’m going to do with it yet (except make liquor!).

4. Sauce tomatoes – the roma tomatoes are doing very well, we have a lot of green tomatoes so far and they’re growing nicely. I’m doing my best to keep them trained to the stakes, and it’s going decently well. I think these varieties are a bushier variety and training them to stakes may not be the way to go. Some of them are climbing the stakes pretty well, but others aren’t. I can’t help wondering if I’m accidentally limiting the harvest by pruning them or not. I have to learn more about it.

5. Heirloom tomatoes – 5 plants now have little green tomatoes! Woohoo! The last one doesn’t – it’s a beefsteak, which I’ve read don’t do that well in Sacramento because it’s slightly too hot here. We’re having a spate of slightly cooler days now, so I’m hoping it will set fruit. I’m so excited about slicing into our first heirloom tomatoes.

6. Peppers – I can’t remember if I posted that I planted 6 MORE pepper plants. I believe I now have 36 plants (plus one spicy pepper for Loris). A bunch of them have pretty good-sized peppers on them now – I’m quite happy with how it’s going.

7. Zucchini – We’ve had 5-6 good-sized zucchini so far and they keep coming. Yum!

8. Shallots – I dug up one bunch and they were delicious. It seemed like they’re still dividing. I don’t know how/if I should store them, so the others are still in the ground.

9. Beets – doing well – see previous post(s)

10. Lima beans – Just planted, June 22. Total experiment – let’s see how it goes!

11. Green beans – are doing extremely well. Most of them have grown big and bushy, and we’ve had enough to make a big green bean and potato salad, with another big batch in the fridge.

12. Yellow summer squash – this seemed to suffer after I planted it, but now it’s picked up and doing pretty well. I expect it to start producing any day now.

13. Carrots – Doing well, but they’re also sort of “unwrapping” the outside layer from the core. They’re still edible, but they look awfully funny. I didn’t do the best job of thinning them, so I’m not sure if that’s part of it or not. They do seem to be too close together.

14. Eggplant – The four original ones I planted are getting big and starting to flower. I think we’ll have some eggplant when we get back from Italy, if not before. The last one, which I just planted within the last month, had a hard time after transplanting, but seems to finally be perking up. Whew.

15. Parsley – Growing quickly into bushes. Hopefully I didn’t plant too much! We’ll be making a lot of bagnet this year, I hope.

16. Leeks – are flowering. Not good. They’re forming a woody center stalk, which makes them difficult if not impossible to eat. I have to get them out of the ground to salvage what I can. They do have beautiful flowers at least. They never got big like the ones you buy at the store. Loris says it’s because they’re too close together. Honestly, I’m not sure they’re worth the trouble. I can see lining the border of a bed with them, but dedicating a whole space to them is probably not the way to go. We just don’t need that many.

Tomatoes, tomatoes and more tomatoes (and peppers!)

Just went to the garden after a weekend away, and I came away with a cloth bag 2/3 full of romas again. I counted my jars of sauce today - I think I have around 54 (they're not all pint jars, but a few are bigger and a few are smaller, so I think they balance each other out). I think that's enough tomato sauce for one year. Luckily, the last time I made sauce, after straining it through a T-shirt to try to get rid of excess water, I found that at a certain point it just wouldn't strain anymore and I ended up using a hand-held strainer to scoop out the tomato flesh and dump it into my anti-seed-and-skin machine. What I was left with looked like tomato juice, so, being the tireless kitchen taster that I am, I tried it. It tasted like tomato juice, too, except better and with a lot less salt. Yum! So that's what I'm going to do with the last of my tomatoes before I leave for Italy in something like 5 days.

A note on preserving basil. I have made TONS of pesto. More than we will ever use (well, maybe not). But anyway, I wanted to preserve some basil as just basil, and not a paste with olive oil, and salt, and garlic. So I looked up info online and in my various cook books and garden books and herb books (yes, I have books just about herbs), and consulted with my food-snob Italian husband, and decided to freeze it. I stripped the leaves from the stems, blanched them in boiling water for about 8-10 seconds, patted them as dry as possible, and packed them in a thin layer in a freezer bag and stuck them in the freezer. I haven't tried them yet (I still have way too much fresh basil), but it seems to have worked well. So today I'm doing a ton more basil, a bit of purple basil, and some parsley. I guess we'll see this winter.

And the peppers are coming! The peppers are coming! They're all turning beautiful shades of red, orange, and yellow, in spite of their burned spots. A few of them unfortunately rotted, but I am getting quite a few. Right before I leave, of course. I think we'll make peperonata today (still need to post that recipe), and at the end of the week I'll roast whatever's left and preserve them under oil or vinegar or something. I guess we'll see.

Our last two melons (out of five) came off the vine today. It's possible there are more I haven't noticed, but I'm not sure the melons were worth growing. They only cost 50 cents to a dollar to buy them, and they take up a lot of space in the garden. But they are really good. I'll have to think about it for next year.

A last note - I decided to check on one of my butternut squashes that is close to the sprinkler, to make sure it wasn't rotting from sitting in a wet spot. I lifted it up and twisted it a bit to check underneath and snap! Off it came. So it's my first experiment in curing winter squash. I think I'll stick it outside in the yard in the sunny end where the sprinklers don't reach, and see what happens in 5 days or so when I have to pick all the rest right before I leave. If I can say anything, it's that we won't starve this winter with all that tomato sauce and butternut squash!

More of everything and zucchini soup

I spent a good part of my morning in the garden, picking veggies, weeding, and generally checking on things. I picked green beans, sauce tomatoes, heirloom tomatoes, only one zucchini (woohoo!), an eggplant, a bunch of peppers (with burned spots), and parsley. And a ton of weeds. I have bermuda grass in the garden. That really sucks, especially because it's underneath a lot of my plants I don't want to disturb too much, and getting rid of it requires disturbing things, so I'd rather wait until I pull the plants out altogether. Which means I have to hope the grass doesn't take over the garden by then.

Bermuda grass is really evil stuff. It spreads everywhere. It's incredibly invasive, and difficult to get rid of without completely turning over the soil and digging out all the roots. I'm not looking forward to it.

I'm learning more and more about growing peppers. Since my plants aren't standing up, they are (of course) falling over. Which means sometimes a pepper or two is sitting in the water when the sprinklers have been on. Which means that sometimes they rot. Sorta the way some of the tomatoes do. So having a plan for next years' peppers is going to be crucial. Especially since buying peppers costs more than a mortgage for a house. Anywhere but Davis, that is.

So anyway, after spending a good part of the day making and canning more ketchup, for dinner tonight we had zucchini soup, based on Loris' family recipe (which, as all Degioanni family recipes, is rather loosely passed on). So here goes:

A bunch of zucchini (two large ones made a good pot of soup)
Some onion
Broth
2-3 potatoes
Parsley
Salt
Olive oil

Chop up the zucchini into smallish chunks. Chop up the potato as well.

Chop the onion pretty finely. Put some olive oil into a decent sized pot and set it over medium heat. Add the onion, and stir-fry for several minutes until the onion starts browning and getting fragrant. Add the zucchini, potatoes, and enough broth to cover the veggies. Cover and let cook until the veggies are soft. Add the parsley (to taste) and salt (to taste). Blend. If you prefer a thinner soup than what you've got, add more broth. Adjust the seasonings (parsley and salt), and serve. That's it!