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Friday PhotoEssay
It’s that time again! This week has just flown by. This might be long, because I took a whole bunch of pictures this week.
The leeks we transplanted this spring are growing like crazy. We hilled them up a little bit this week, to encourage them to have nice long white stems. We’ll have to find some mulch or compost to hill them up more in a couple weeks.
Our beautifully photogenic radicchio is no more…It decided that the hot and cold temperatures were more than it could handle and started bolting. (Bolting is another way of saying that it was putting up a flower/seed stalk.) Most leafy greens are no longer edible once they’ve started bolting.
The ‘Caraflex’ cabbage is beginning to roll up the center leaves to form a head. This is a mini cabbage that will have a conical shape. You can sort of see that shape developing already.
The strawberries are absolutely loaded, and they seem to show no signs of stopping blooming! How many potential red, ripe strawberries do you count in this picture? (Hint: I got well over 30 before I lost track of which ones I already counted!) And this is only about 1 sq. ft. of our strawberry patch. Yikes! I hope we get enough rain to produce large berries.
The ornamental alliums are the big, showy splash in the middle of the garden right now. Aren’t they stunning?
Our obnoxiously thorny gooseberry bush is once again loaded with fruit. Our thornless gooseberry bush once again has almost no fruit on it. There must be a correlation between thorns and fruiting volume!
The cool season veggies are sure growing by leaps and bounds! The unimaginative might just see this as green, green, and more green. I would challenge you to look again and see how beautiful and artistic the different shades of green are, especially in combination with the different leaf textures!
Have a great weekend!
Friday PhotoEssay
This week has been crazy busy – and it has also just flown by! Signs of spring are showing up all over the place in the Demo Garden.
The grapevines are finally starting to leaf out. I was actually a little concerned about them. I had to look for awhile to find a live, green shoot and bud a couple weeks ago.
The strawberries are beginning to bloom. You can see the “king flower” or primary flower (which will become the largest strawberry) blooming here, with all the smaller flower buds waiting to open. In about a month, we will harvest our first strawberries, weather permitting.
The seeds we planted about 10 days ago are popping up all over the place in my office! This one just happens to be a Chocolate Habanero. Sounds hot to me!
A pile of harvested Micro Rainbow Beet Greens I was growing for an experiment. Aren’t they cute?
This pile of micros all Bull’s Blood Beets, hence the uniform pink color.
Have a great weekend! Get out and do some gardening!
Late Berry Pruning
We are late getting our berries pruned this year, because I wanted to use them for the workshop last Saturday. I pruned most of the raspberries on Saturday, but we still had to do some cleanup and then prune up the currants and gooseberries.
Pruning and some good old fashioned TLC has done wonders for this black raspberry. 2 years ago, I was determined that it would get one last chance before getting torn out. It had about 6 berries in 2008. With some fertilizer and pruning, it was fairly productive in 2009, and then last year…
Yeah, I can’t wait for summer either! It was definitely vigorous last year, and we had to prune out lots of canes that were trying to root themselves all over the place.
We pruned out all of the old, diseased red raspberry canes, leaving just these new shoots to become this year’s primocanes. Because of the problems last year, if we see any signs of disease this year on these berries, I think we will remove the plants.
We also pruned out some dead canes in the currant and gooseberry bushes. They are already blooming, which is a bit late to be pruning, really. I checked last year, and I took pictures of the currant and gooseberry blooms on April 4th, so we’re apparently running about the same as last year. (I think we might be a hair behind right now, the flowers aren’t open quite as much.)
Fun Fact: Studying the timing of when certain plants bloom, etc from year to year is called phenology.
There’s an Apple Tree in My Office, Dear Liza, Dear Liza….
Actually, there are 2 apple trees in my office. They are the columnar apple trees that have been in containers out in the garden.
I have to admit…they kind of look like Charlie Brown apple trees…
Any guesses as to why I have the apple trees in my office? I might have a free grafted tomato plant to the first person who guesses correctly! (Then it’s your problem to get it through until May! Ha!)
Persimmon Salsa & Preserved Basil
Not being a Southern girl, persimmons are not in my cooking lexicon. My only experience with them was learning to distinguish between them and tomatoes for a horticulture judging contest in high school. So, when one of our Master Gardeners gave me 2 Fuyu persimmons from her father’s tree in California, it was quite a process to decide what to make! We finally settled on making a salsa to go on top of some pork chops.
Alas, I didn’t get a picture of the persimmons before we peeled and quartered them. Aren’t they a nice, bright orange color? The persimmons were cubed into about 1/2″ pieces.
The salsa recipe also called for a tablespoon of minced fresh basil. Yeah, right. I’m not going to buy basil from the grocery store at any time of the year, let alone in December! Luckily, we had the basil that we had preserved at the end of the summer. I decided to use one of the frozen-in-water cubes of sweet basil. It was pretty coated in ice crystals, and the top basil was kind of brown and discolored. Doesn’t look too tasty, does it?
However, once I melted that ice cube, the basil looks really good! Obviously the water is a little discolored, but the basil itself was a nice green color and fragrant.
So, it is good to know that at least one of the basil preservation methods worked pretty well! I’d say that salsa is a good test, because slimy or off-tasting basil would show up pretty clearly.
The salsa also had a couple teaspoons of minced fresh ginger, a tablespoon of finely minced onion, 1 serrano (seeded and finely chopped), salt, and pepper. It called for mint too, but we didn’t have any mint. (I think I could have scrounged a couple sprigs out of the Demo Garden, but I forgot about it.) Very simple, but I think it turned out pretty good.
Yum! It looks so summery, even though it is December. It was also really tasty on the pork chops.
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