Strawberries, Late June Thai-style stir fry and one tough flower garden

It's been ten days since my last post, and there are plenty of updates.

1) Strawberry season has flown by - Dawn and I went strawberry picking at Land Sakes farm in Weston to get a couple of quarts of the extra-sweet June-bearing strawberries for jam. We pretty much ate all of our fruit as soon as it came in, and so we bought a few quarts at the you-pick-it operation. Land Sakes isn't certified organic, but it used to be, and they say they haven't changed their practices since they stopped getting certified. I wanted to find somewhere organic because strawberries are supposed to soak up chemicals like a sponge - and we were not disappointed. The strawberries were at an orgasmic peak of ripeness. More pictures posted when we actually get our jam on.

(Dawn is very excited about the strawberries!)

2) We went to the Cape last weekend, and over the summer solstice, apparently summer happened. We came back to a million snap peas, big tufts of lettuce, some carrots, big radishes, etc.  Now the work of the garden is mulching, weeding, harvesting and cooking - the trick now is to actually use the stuff I grew while its in season.    Tonight I got to make my first all-garden dinner.
I wanted to make a stir-fry from this magical period when my ichiban eggplants overlap with the peas, bok choi, and garlic scapes. Recipe below.

 Stir-fry satisfaction.   Squishy eggplants with crunchy peas and delicious, fried garlic scapes - Seriously delicious. 

3) Last, I put in a sweet perennial garden at a rental house on Cape Cod. Since no one will take care of these plants all summer, I wanted to make sure they were hardy. I split up my wild yarrow, moonshine coreopsis and some unkillable groundcover, transplanted some lillies and some yellow coreopsis that were growing nearby, and put in an echinacia I bought. Here's a picture of it at the beginning of the summer - we'll see how it looks by the end, after the deer have had plenty of time to feast.

Late-June Thai-style stir-fry w/brown rice and fried tofu.

Ingredients:
One package firm tofu

potato flowers and, garden stir fry and birthday apple Trees!

So - garden updates:

1) one, it's been wicked cold and rainy in the past couple of weeks, so pretty much nothing has grown - or shrunk, so I guess it's even steven.

2) two, we have some food in the works - little tiny eggplants, raspberries and some bok choi.





 3) three, we're making another garden dinner tonight - with a little help from Boston Organics.   Homegrown green onions and bok choi in the stir fry, along with onions, garlic, broccoli and squash and various Asian condiments.   This time of year we just have a few garden items ready: radishes, lettuce, Asian Greens, green onions, peas and herbs, so I try to find ways to work them into dinner when I can - I find they add a lot of flavor.

4) Plus, we have some new, odd, exotic flowers....

Potato flowers!   Who knew that such ugly plants could grow such nice flowers.....some folks say you can harvest right after they flower, but I'm still waiting a bit.



Last, best birthday present ever:  Columnar Apple Trees....

Now I will possibly have apple trees growing in my backyard - of my rental apartment.   Apparently they will grow right off the tree.   More updates as they grow.

Permaculture and the backyard garden

Permaculture stands for "permanent agriculture."   To learn more about permaculture, check out my last post.   I had a love-hate relationship with it, but there were some Permaculture slogans that, after three or four years of planning my own garden, (and much to my chagrin) have become part of my own basic philosophies in gardening. Enjoy.

1) Plant in “zones”

In permaculture, a "zone map" becomes an intricate diagram of an entire farm: zones zero through five indicate a range of planting activities, from an herb garden all the way out to a semi-forested orchard-and-grazing area, for all those sheep I will never have. But the concept is practical:

How I learned how to learn about gardening

In college, I took a course in Permaculture, or permanent agriculture, from a pair of dreadlocked hippies journeying through Southern California. They ran their own bio-diesel-powered sustainability bus tours, teaching like-minded folks across the Southwest how to dig up their lawns and make gasoline from fast-food fry oil. They got a gig teaching this Permaculture class to me and about eight other food-growing hippie wannabes, and proceeded to try to download a lifetime's worth of engineering and gardening knowledge in one college semester. They seemed to have as many slogans as Mao's little red book, with themes like, "protracted observation, not protracted labor!" and "yields are potentially infinite!" They were zealots, that's for sure, out to to save us from future starvation with smart design. Nothing was to have just one use: beans fertilized the soil, chickens not only laid eggs but could be placed in a "chicken-tractor" for soil prep, grape vines provided fruit and summer shade, and our shower water could be filtered through a system of ponds (filled with edible fish, of course) to irrigate our fruit trees.

I remember baking out on a California hill, trying to handle my pencil, my notebook, and an A-frame level, trying to map out elevation for a potential terraced orchard, thinking, I will never get this down.

Grown in the Dirt - food from the backyard

In the last few weeks, I’ve feasted on our first strawberries of the season, out of our backyard patch. Our backyard strawberries are sweet, but they are not just sweet. With cool nights and days during their growing period this year, they are not the syrupy, sickly sweet of June, store-bought strawberries. They are a little tart, like blackberries. In my experience, store-bought strawberries are either a little sweet, or else they are limp, white and flavorless. But in our backyard strawberries, lack of sweetness does not mean lack of flavor. Our strawberries sucker-punch you: sweet, tart, and then a burst of sizzling, tingling tastes and sensations on your tongue. Eat one of these, and your tongue comes alive.

I had no idea food could be like this. I figured broccoli tasted like broccoli, cucumbers tasted like cucumbers, and fruit, living in New England, mostly didn’t taste that good. I always hated oranges, which were always tart and stringy, and peaches were always rock-hard and bitter. Apples were the only thing that had a season, and I figured that apples tasted pretty much the same anyway – some tart and juicy, others mushy and flavorless. I do have a memory of biting into a summer plum so juicy and delicious that I licked my fingers afterward – but no one connected the dots for me between “summer” and “yum.” As a kid growing up I dutifully ate my veggies, biting off the tops of broccoli crowns and shoveling peas onto my fork so I could get dessert. As a grown-up I continued to do the same, especially after it was pounded into my head that veggies were good for our health: cram as much flavorless lettuce into your salad as possible, for fiber, or gnaw on a tough carrot for a snack. Vegetables became like vitamins or medicine: hold your nose, shove it in your mouth, get it down your gullet – never mind the taste.

New section on Gardening Website + tomatoes!

This is my front walkway - my own little perennial border.

Two new little news tidbits -

one, I just added a new section on my website, the Boston Backyard Gardener, about flowers, bugs and beneficial insects. Check it out.

Boston Backyard Gardener




Also, just found a few little green tomatoes on my store-bought Roma tomato plant....I can taste the sauce already. Go, Roma, Go!

My Birthday, 2010

Today is my twenty-ninth birthday. Whew. Just saying it out loud kinda hurts a little. I always thought I was going to be at some magical, different place when I was almost-thirty - like....have some job with an important-sounding title, be dashing about solving the world's problems - I don't know, be in *charge* of something.

But as it is, I'm in charge of this little corner of the world. I'm in charge of my stories, of maintaining my friends and my relationships. I'm in charge of keeping my house going, and of maintaining a good, healthy relationship with the families I babysit for, toddlers included (especially toddlers - I find having a good relationship with them to be a lot like any other one: try to honor both your needs and wishes, have fun, and maintain good boundaries). I''m in charge of my writing, and the little community I'm growing of other writers around me. And I'm in charge of manifesting all this food in my garden, and a little corner of really pretty stuff all around my house.

I guess it feels very private, instead of some big, public life (filled with public accolades, etc.) that I'd been imagining, but it also feels very real. I think everyone fights very hard for the little pieces of peace of mind we achieve - the good times with friends, a decent job, a little corner of quiet tucked into a busy life. I appreciate what I've got.

So, as I look forward to a summer filled with work and writing and friends, I feel really grateful. As I look out into my garden, it's only June 6th and the garlic scapes are already curling twice around, there are little flowers waving above my potatoes, the lettuce is ready to harvest and there is already a tiny little eggplant forming on my deep purple ichiban. It's enough to make you grateful for another day like this one. Two years ago my Dad took me to a nursery on my birthday, handed me a hundred dollar bill, and said - "go wild." It was one of the best presents I've ever gotten - the beginning of my perennial flower garden, that comes up bigger and brighter every year. I also used his gift to buy myself my first rose bush - the flowers are pretty small, but they smell divine. They are blooming right now, and as I walk through my garden everything smells sweet and flowery....like I said, it feels like a good day to be alive.

To another great year,

Abby

First "backyard" ingredient salad of the summer

Today I ate one of the first "backyard" meals of the summer: tuna pasta salad, made with backyard radishes, cucumbers, onions, celery, lemon, mayo, salt, pepper, backyard dill, and the "blushing Italian" herbal vinegar I made last year with garlic, oregano, rosemary,basil and aging red wine. It was DELICIOUS. Basically, since we're so early in the season, I'm just finding excuses to gussy up meals with backyard ingredients - but it really does make a difference. As we get closer and closer to summer, I'm getting fed-up with bland vegetables - I'm so excited to eat dishes where the veggies bring their own flavor. Me and Dawn have also been more-or-less on a tomato strike all winter. Locavores we are not, not by a long stretch, but after ice-cream sundae-level delicious tomatoes last summer, we just couldn't get excited about watery, bland winter tomatoes. We made do with lettuce, cucumber and crouton salads, which felt about right for the winter. Now that the season is starting, I'm so excited to eat food from the backyard - herbs included. We are more or less in the "salad season" - the stir-fry vegetables are still really too small to eat, so we get lettuce, radishes and early-season carrots (which I opted not to plant this year!) - plus herbs. This time of year I love coming up with a recipe just so I can chop up sage, oregano, parsley and dill and sprinkle them all on top. Roast Chicken, anyone?


Also, with all the warm weather we've been having, the garden is more or less ahead of last year - my garlics already have little scapes on them! For those not in the know, garlic "scapes" are the little seedheads of the garlic plant. The garlic is ready for harvest when the neck of the plant curls around twice, and the scape on the end grows. Last year, the garlic didn't even grow scapes until mid-June, so I'm psyched for some early garlic. Also, you can eat the scapes - I've heard they are delicious pickled, but I could never save enough to pickle - I always chop them up and throw them in the stir-fry - they have an awesome, delicate garlic flavor!