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Friday PhotoEssay
I have two sets of pictures that I could use for today’s photoessay. I have the “happy” pictures of pretty flowers and vegetables, and then I have the depressing pictures of sick and dying plants. Since I’m guessing that most of you would rather see the “happy” pictures, and I couldn’t figure out how to turn this blog post into a “choose your own adventure” type post, I’ll go that route. However, if you really want to see the plants in throes of pain and suffering, I’ll give you a link after every happy picture to balance it out.
This first picture is a bit of a mixed bag in and of itself. This is our 100 gal. Smart Pot that has 4 pepper plants and a cucumber plant in it. The two pepper plants on the left are gorgeous and flowering. The two pepper plants on the right are pale yellow (looks like they need some nitrogen!), and chewed upon. The cucumber isn’t bad, it’s just being really really pokey about growing. I suspect that it thinks it isn’t getting enough sun in that spot.
Our three bagged apples on the columnar apple tree are growing and doing well inside their little baggies..so far. Even though this kind of looks like a smothered apple, if you want to see another sad plant picture, you can click to get an eyeful of some Black Rot on our grapes.
The Brandywine Tomato is finally starting to flower. It’s been taking its own sweet time about it. This flower is huge, and it looks like it’s actually a double. See the two centers? If this flower sets a tomato, it’s going to be huge and strange! If you want to be morbid about it, you can take another look at the Early Blight that’s getting started at the bottom of this same plant.
This ‘Early Sunsation’ Bell pepper has a few baby bell peppers set. They should get a lot bigger before harvest. Technically they will also turn yellow if you leave them on the plant long enough. I think the plan this year is to harvest them when they are mature size but still green, since that means that the plant will actually produce more peppers instead of pouring all it’s energy into 2 or 3 yellowing peppers.
Completely unrelated to peppers, but if you want to see another diseased plant, you can look at the gorgeous, highly decorative spots that are showing up on our strawberry leaves. If you find you want to know everything there is to know about Strawberry Leaf Spot, you can check out this website from Cornell. Since ours is not a commercial plot, we probably aren’t going to do much about it at this point.
This is one of the immature tomatoes on the ‘Brandymaster’ tomato plant, the hybrid version of the Brandywine. It is definitely earlier in setting on fruit than it’s heirloom parent, but the fruit at least promises to be as strange. Both plants are getting absolutely huge!
Our beets are also looking a bit puny, although they are a bit better after getting a little fertilizer. Of course, all is not perfectly well. Some of them have more of those beautiful spots…in this case they are Cercospora Leaf Spot.
The Chinese Long Beans are starting to bloom, which means we’ll have cute, tiny “long” beans next week. In the meantime we have these gorgeous flowers to enjoy!
Sorry, no more sick plant photos. It’s too depressing! Have a great weekend!
A Bit of Britain
In honor of the England vs. U.S. soccer game over the weekend, I thought we might make this blog a little more international in flavor by featuring some rather English dishes. (Actually, it has nothing to do with the soccer game. It’s just a coincidence.)
I’ve been showing you pictures of our red currants and red gooseberries for awhile now, and the time has come to figure out what to do with them. Since both of these fruits are more common in Europe, it took awhile to find recipes that would work. I actually gave up on the red currants, and adapted a recipe that calls for raspberries, because I couldn’t find any good recipes calling for fresh red currants!
So what did I end up making? Two rather British desserts, Gooseberry Fool and Red Currant Scones. Red Currant Scones & Gooseberry Fool (PDF)
First, let’s talk about the Fool. A fool is a dessert that basically consists of a fruit puree that is folded into whipped cream with enough sugar to make it tasty. It is simple, but a bit of a step up from the mere “berries with sugar and cream” option.
Here is my 8 oz. of gooseberries, with the stems and tails still on. The stems come off pretty easily (usually during picking), and the “tails” scrape off with a knife.
Into the pot they go! I maybe added a bit too much water, which resulted in runny juice later on.
I strained and mashed them after cooking. The “glop” looks rather unappetizing, but the juice is a glorious crimson color! I mixed all of the glop and about 1/3 of the juice (since it was runny) into the whipped cream to make the fool. Oh yeah, and sugar. Don’t forget the sugar!
Yum! The finished Gooseberry Fool. I garnished it on top with some of the extra gooseberry juice. I could probably even thicken it a bit to make more of a sauce.
Next up, the Red Currant Scones! (Adapted from a recipe for Raspberry Scones)
The scone batter is pretty simple to make. The key to good scones, from what I understand, is to make sure your butter is cold and then cut it into the dry ingredients with a fork or pastry blender. After that step, I gently mixed in the currants, followed by the whisked eggs and milk.
The batter was really soft and a little sticky, which made shaping it into rounds a challenge. I made 2 rounds and cut them into 6 wedges each, then sprinkled them with cinnamon & sugar.
After baking, the scones are soft and delicious. They are much lighter and less flaky than a lot of scones I’ve had, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. The tang (read sour) of the currants complements the sweetness of the scone nicely. I think these will make an appearance at our Master Gardener fruit training this fall. (Now if that isn’t an inducement to become a Master Gardener, I don’t know what is!)
Friday PhotoEssay
Okay, this week’s recipes are posted on the Lunch in the Garden page. I made the slaw, but I’m also providing recipes for some really awesome potstickers that I made last weekend. They were too much work to make for this class!
A couple other things of interest before I move on to the pictures:
One of our K-State Plant Pathologists (think plant diseases), Megan Kennelly, was recently in Tajikistan. You can read about why she was there on the KSU Turf Blog, and see some pictures of her trip on Flickr.
Also, just for fun, here’s a blog with some beautiful pictures of lettuce planted very artistically.
All right, on to the pictures!
These are some beautiful red gooseberries that I picked from one of the plants in the Demo Garden this week. Apparently, the tradition in the U.S. is to pick gooseberries when they are green and very sour. I don’t pretend to understand. If you let them get fully ripe, they are edible fresh! I’ll be sharing a recipe for gooseberries sometime next week (after I try it out)!
The ‘Cascade’ Red Currant bush just keeps on giving. I’m getting close to having enough berries to make a pie. I’m trying to decide if I’m going to freeze them to use later or do something with them now. I’m leaning toward saving them to make a dessert for Master Gardener Basic Training in the fall.
Sorry, I had to show off another picture of the black raspberries. I know it’s rather mean of me.
I don’t know how it happened, but there are a couple of jalapenos ready to harvest already!
Aren’t the baby beans cute? This is actually from Monday, so they are a lot bigger by now. We’ll probably pick a few beans early next week.
Keeping Insects Out – Literally
This morning in the Demonstration Garden, we implemented 2 1/2 methods of insect control that are maybe something different from what you’ve seen before.
The first thing we are trying out is bagging our apples. We have all of 3 apples on our tree, so it wasn’t too labor intensive!
We just took 3 sandwich bags and zipped them over the apple, enclosed on the stem of the apple. Then we put a staple on either side of the stem to help hold the bag in place. The idea behind this is to prevent most of the insects that infest apples from laying their eggs on the apples. This method is supposed to work very well against apple maggot, but I don’t know how effective it will be against codling moth. It will be interesting to see how the apples do!
We also put up this pheromone trap for the Squash Vine Borer. The intent of this trap isn’t to catch every single Squash Vine Borer moth so that they don’t lay eggs on the squash plants. The goal is to catch some of the moths so we know when there are squash vine borer moths out flying around and laying eggs. When we catch a moth or two, we know that it is time to spray the plants to kill off any larva that are hatching. The general recommendation to prevent squash vine borer is to spray every 7-10 days! The trap could help us only spray when we really really really need to. (This is the “1/2” of a method, in case you were curious.)
The other thing we are doing to try to outwit the squash vine borers is
to use light weight row covers on hoops (low tunnels) over our new squash seedlings. Similar to the apple bagging, this method is trying to exclude the pests in question. By putting on the row covers, the moths won’t be able to lay eggs on the plants. The only way this method works is if you are rotating where you plant your squash, because the pupae of the moths overwinter in the soil near where the plants were the previous year. The moths hatch out when it gets warm in early summer. Obviously the row covers would be a bad idea if the moths hatch out under the row covers!
Strawberries!
I went out to the garden this morning and scrounged around in the wet, soggy strawberry patch until I found a handful of mostly okay strawberries. Between the roly polys enjoying the wet weather and munching on some of the berries and a number of berries that are bright red on one side but not on the other side, it was actually kind of challenging to find these 8 berries.
They certainly aren’t spectacular, and the flavor is nice, but nothing to write home about. I’m getting very close to writing a discussion of whether or not I would recommend this variety (‘Eversweet’) for planting. I’m tempted to just give you my complete analysis now, but in fairness to the variety, I want to give it another couple weeks of spring production.
The Demo Garden Blog 
