Sunday in the garden + potato salad recipe

I spent this Sunday afternoon  as I've done for the past couple of weeks: in the garden.   There's lots of other stuff I should be doing on Sundays - writing, grocery shopping, paying bills or getting my car fixed.  Looking for work in the fall.   But there's something truly seductive for me about the backyard on a quiet weekend afternoon.   It's at the point right now where the garden needs a few hours of work a week, and then it will be more or less happy.   But its just a wonderful thing to do, on a day to myself, to give attention back to the plants that will feed me.  Last week I fertilized the nightshades, peppers, and vines, and planted about nine more feet of carrots to come up this fall.   Even out in the hot sun, I love puttering out there: stringing up cucumbers that are trying to grow upside-down, pulling crabgrass out of the beds, checking the tomatoes to find out that we have FIVE new super-ripe Roma tomatoes.    Deciding to cook them up into sauce, and invite a friend over for potato salad.  Pulling up a few big, bulbed out onions, tiny beets, yanking out a few purple carrots that after 2 1/2 months are finally big enough to eat.   Emptying out a couple potato buckets to find out how they did, pinching suckers off the tomato vines, harvesting basil or sorrell, or transplanting teensy, tiny little lettuce plants from the shady part of the yard.   After a week full of work and driving around, errands and deadlines, it's nice to slow down for a few hours, exist in greenspace, and tend to something - All this week, I'll know that my garden will grow healthier, and more food will be ready because of the work I put into it.  

Upstairs, I cooked the onions under low heat, skinned and seeded the tomatoes, and stewed them together for a little bit of sauce, along with salt, pepper and some basil.  Ate it for lunch over raviolis - without any extra sugar, the tomato sauce was a little acidic, but full of flavor.   Potato salad tonight was a little bit more complicated, but the basic idea is fresh, boiled potatoes, oil, vinegar, a little bit of mayo, and anything fresh from your garden you want to add....

Hot Summer Harvest time

So after much too much time away, and several technical difficulties (many of these pictures were taken with the tiny camera on my Blackberry, thank you very much), I am back, and better than ever.

Last week, with temps in the 90s, rendered me completely incapable of caring about anything that wasn't air conditioned.  I guess that's why I'm a gardener and not a farmer, huh.   But a short visit with my friends at First Root Farm, for a writing-and-gardening workshop (what could be better?!) re-energized me, and I've been working my butt off in the garden, trying to catch up.  I got rid of the spring veggies - harvested the bok choi, cut down the last of the somewhat dead peas, and general clean-up.   Into every generation, they say, a Weeder is born, chosen to fight the crabgrass, the clover, and the lamb's-quarters that threaten the garden.   And right about now, I think that might be me.

A note on the farm - it's two friends of mine who founded an acre farm and CSA on a national historic park in Concord, MA - really inspiring and lovely - they welcome community helpers, and sell some kick-ass organic eggs, so check them out if you are into local farms.  http://firstrootfarm.wordpress.com/.




Other tasks: stringing up the tomatoes and cucumbers, more weeding, transplanting some underperforming cukes, and some squash that really randomly got into my columnar apple trees, more weeding, and HARVESTING!  The garden is just big and fertile right now, and a lot of herbs have gone to seed (note the gigantic dill), and they are all buzzing with parasitic wasps and flies, and other beneficial insects that help protect the cucumbers and beans.  The bean teepee has just started, and I'm pulling up a few (purple!) carrots, teensy beets, the garlic, an eggplant, a first zucchini, and the first round of potatoes!

I'm "curing" the onions in the basement, which basically means I set them on some old upturned pots and let a fan blow on them for a few weeks.  After that, they should be ready to store for as long as it takes us to eat them.   They say to harvest garlic when 1/3 to 40% of the leaves have turned brown.  Then wait for a dry day and gently dig them up with a shovel...or wait until they look entirely dead, like I did, and pull them up by their roots, which I also did.

Garlic!

For the potatoes, it's always a bit of an oddessy - most of mine are ready after 60-80 days, but I plant them so early, and then it takes weeks for them to sprout, so I never know when to start counting. Once they flower, you should be able to harvest baby potatoes after about two weeks.   My roommate, from Northern Maine potato country, said to start harvesting them when the stalks start looking a little dead and flopping over, and mine were starting to do that, so I dug them up.

In the beginning, potatoes in pots.   Then, two months later, the pots got filled with dirt, the vines grew, flowered, and pretty much died.   But never fear, it's time for harvest!           

I love the way red potatoes look in the dirt.  It's like finding Easter eggs when you start to dig.  I stuck a shovel into the dirt under the plants, then started using a digging fork. I dug them up very carefully, but still speared a few with my fork - ate those last night!    The rest can get stored in my dark-but-air-circulating onion cabinet in the basement all summer and into the winter..if they make it that long.   We plan to eat these right quick.   These are a  "red thumb" variety of fingerling potato - they are not just red outside, but threaded with pink color inside - really beautiful and delicious.  These are the soft and creamy potatoes I was talking about.   The whiskey barrel did better than any other kind of growing - I was just rooting around the bottom for about fifteen minutes, pulling up more and more potatoes.   Good to know for next year. 

More pictures soon, but I'll leave you with one of my least favorite garden pests....they haven't been too bad this year, but in a rainy year they can get out of control - until I pour Sluggo on them (it's organic, don't worry) and then they just go away, poof!   Maybe some day I will have ducks to eat them in a very circle-of-life like manner, but for now, I loves me some Sluggo.

This sucker is seriously three inches long.

Escape!   Escape!  

(he didn't, don't worry)

(splat, bye bye sluggie!)