October 3rd, 2009
Day 3: Spring a-fed/Fall snack
So Steph and I have pulled up 75% of the plants from our spring garden. The vast majority of them were still healthy and growing when we did it, so I thought there would be feelings of guilt during the act, but it ended up being extremely gratifying.
I don’t know if it was the tactile joy of ripping something up, the excitement over making such a drastic change to the space, or the relief of finally doing away with so many of these needy, needy organisms that we’d coddled and cajoled and what did some of them give us in return? Barely a mouthful of edible matter….
Not to name any names….cucumbers.
Seriously, two cucumbers this whole time? That’s all I’m going to get? Did you even think about the salads we could have made together? I enjoy cucumbers, so I’ll be attempting them again next year, but I am majorly put-out with this particular veggie.
Following closely on cucumbers’ heals for the coveted “Worst Plant in Our Garden” award is the lima beans. And I know my inexperience as a gardener is to blame here. As I mentioned in the post I made at planting time, I put things in pretty tightly in some places. The row of lima beans had tomatoes on one side of them and pole beans on the other, and as those plants grew tall, these poor guys in the middle were completely shaded out. During the peak of the season, we yielded just enough to make one pot. They were tasty, but the picking process (i.e. squatting down, searching for pods that look very similar to leaves on the shrubby little bushes while the surrounding plants’ branches beat you about the head and shoulders) and, once you get them in to the kitchen, the shelling, have me thinking they are too much work for too little benefit.
Jalapeños: never again. These things were far too prolific. I planted an entire row for some reason and going out and plucking 10–15 per day off of their stems got old fast. Even if you made a dish, every single night, that warranted jalapeños, how many would you use? One? Two maybe? I couldn’t even give them away in any substantial quantity. Same with the cayenne peppers. When it comes to the spicy stuff, Steph is in the category referred to as “wuss,” or, as she claims it’s more accurately known, “hasn’t scorched her taste buds so badly that they can no longer feel feelings.” Either way, I can’t throw hot peppers in with our cooking, and, honestly, once we’ve finished preparing a meal, going through the trouble of washing, slicing, de-seeding, chopping up, and stirring a couple of these tiny food items into my portion loses out to simply sprinkling on some Tabasco or Texas Pete.
Steph and I got enough pole beans that the two of us could both have a generous side-portion about every two weeks, which I can’t complain about. Green beans, in my opinion, are infinitely better when they’re fresh, so they’re on the list for the next go ’round. Next time however, as soon as they emerge from the soil as fragile little sprouts, I’m going to build them a more solid trellis, preferably a heavy-duty type of structure that will still be around after the nuclear holocaust.
The bell peppers from our garden were much smaller than what you see in the grocery store, but they have a milder, “fresher” flavor, which I think is nice. They got a late start producing, but they’re still at it, so they are part of the 25% we left. We’ll do ’em again.
The summer squash was plenty productive through July. It’s huge leaves hogged a lot of sun, but the bi-product was worth it. We’ll do these again as well.
Probably because we only grew two small rows of it and reduced its ability to pollinate, our sweet corn didn’t yield like it could have, but what we did get was phenomenally good and it was fun to watch little seedlings transform into for-real giant stalks of corn in midsummer.
Producing tomatoes was a life-changing experience for me. Most people say it’s not worth trying to direct-seed tomatoes, so, at the beginning of May, I went to the state farmer’s market and got some starters. All the vendors seemed to be selling was the ubiquitous, probably commercially-patented variety known as “Better Boys.” That’s what I got. Later that month, Steph’s mom offered to give us some heirloom tomato starters to put in as well. I didn’t exactly see the need, as we already had 12 tomato sprouts in the ground, thriving, but enough people suggested we try them that I tucked them into one of our rows. In July, we began harvesting both species and my eyes were opened. We did a taste-test, cutting a slice of each and sprinkling them with salt and pepper, and once I bit into one of these “Italian Sweets” (as this heirloom is known) I knew I had never really tasted a tomato before. It had more flavor, a fuller texture, and was less watery and far less acidic than any of these fruits that I had consumed in the past. As they have been propagated this way for ages, one of the neat things to do with heirlooms is sacrifice a better specimen and put it through a process to save its seeds. You can then use those to make a whole crop of them the next year, then save the seeds again, make a crop the next year, and so on. I’m studying up on tomato-seed-saving now and its more involved than it sounds, but from where I’m sitting I would very much like it if Italian Sweets were the only tomato I grew for the rest of my life, ever. And since (of course) the original plants came from some little old lady in the mountains of Virginia that Steph’s family is not sure if they’ll ever cross paths with again, properly preserving these seeds has become a priority. (I’m coming to the realization that acquiring more unusual, interesting vegetables for your garden is sort of like scoring good dope. You can’t just order it from a catalog. You’ve got to know a guy who knows a guy who’ll meet you behind a Dairy Queen. That kind of thing.)
So Steph and I are now giving fall gardening a shot, attempting some cooler weather stuff like: carrots, radishes, cilantro, mustard greens, leaf lettuce, and kale. All highly desirable food items, in theory. If things are going well by the time the frost sets in (around November 1st) we may even really geek out and get season-extending covers. We’ll just have to see what autumn holds….
Tags: 14 posts, garden - No Comments »
