Catching Up

I’ve been laid up. I had knee replacement surgery on May 19th, and was ordered to keep my foot 18” above my heart as much as possible. Other than Tom taking me out for ‘airings’ (that’s me, well-wrapped up and happy watching the shorebirds at Pt. Pinole while Tom had a long walk), completing my daily range-of-motion exercises, and doing some rudimentary gardening, I’ve been following doctor’s orders. I’m starting to feel better, and am hoping that I will be cleared for some walking at my next PT appointment.

I don’t know if it was entirely allowed (don’t tell my PT), but I did harvest the garlic and shallots at the beginning of the month. Tom hung the garlic in the garage (our usual method), and spread the shallots on the front porch bench to dry. It’s imperative, if you want alliums to last a long time, to get them as dry as possible (“cured”) before hanging them inside the house. I expect they’ll be ready for braiding by the end of this month.

This past winter, we dug up the hops that we used to grow every year in large containers on our back patio, and donated them to my school garden, where they are happily growing up the side of a shipping container. To replace those, I ordered four new clematis vines from Brushwood Nursery, which Tom planted while I was in Georgia. They’ve begun blooming, and every day I spend a few minutes just admiring them. One is yet to open (‘Emilia Plater’), but the other three are so lovely.

‘Arabella’

‘Blue Angel’

‘Black Prince’

We have a family of Cooper’s Hawks in the neighborhood, which are keeping me entertained while I’m resting on the back patio. I’ve also delighted in watching the lizards hunting honeybees below the hive, and swallowtail butterflies foraging in the pollinator gardens. It’s been quite nice to have some time to just sit still and watch, even though my knee aches while I sit there.

All the orchard trees have survived and are thriving. Recently, the persimmon bloomed. We’ve had some windy days and some of the blossoms have blown off. I collected them and arranged them on a table, because they are so beautifully wing-shaped (photo above). I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a persimmon blooming before.

Rin drove me to the garden center (Rin is walking and driving again!) so I could get some bedding plants to refresh some containers. I keep trying different things in the pallet planter, which is in a very hot and dry spot. Nothing ever lasts long. I’ve decided to try portulaca (moss rose) this summer and I hope it survives. I’ve made some pretty groupings of pots in different parts of the yard, and I must say they look really nice. These are the sorts of things I haven’t had time for, since I’ve been teaching. It feels good to spend time in the garden and spread some love. The blueberries and raspberries are coming in, and soon we’ll have tomatoes and peppers and beans and cucumbers!

Maintenance

It’s about 80 degrees at Poppy Corners, and it’s that exact time when, every April, we say to ourselves, “Is the neighborhood pool open yet?” The season of flip flops and tank tops signals also that it’s time to do some much-needed maintenance at home. Tom and I always keep a running list, inspired by Monty Don and Gardener’s World, called ‘jobs for the weekend.’ We add to it all week and then begin to tackle it as soon as we’ve finished our coffee Saturday morning. Our list this week was literally as long as my forearm - typical for this time of year.

Luckily, I’ve already planted most of our summer veg, which I normally wouldn’t do until the temp is consistently over 50 degrees at night. But I’m scheduled to have knee surgery on May 8, so I thought it would be good to get all that done before then, and luckily everything has survived. Since we removed all the raised beds from the North Garden (to make the orchard), I used that wood to make the raised beds in the South Garden taller. We’re not getting any younger around here and taller beds will be helpful in that regard. I ordered three cubic yards of planting mix from a local nursery, and added that to the beds before planting. It’s good to have all that done.

But today, the first thing on our list was the irrigation system. Now that we’ve had the last of our (prodigious!) winter storms, it’s time to begin a regular irrigation schedule. It’s important to start out with 100% saturation in your soil; if you do that, you’ll just be topping it off every time you water, instead of playing catch-up. But the irrigation system hasn’t been used all winter, so it’s not as simple as just turning it on. Inevitably there will be some problems - breaches in the lines, clogged drips, broken micro-sprayers. Tom and I turn on one ‘zone’ at a time and go around watching what happens and making notes. Often, I’ll see an area that needs coverage, and we’ll add some lines. Sometimes an area is too wet and we’ll adjust that too. Tom always has a lot of repair work to do. It’s really good to get all that done before irrigation becomes crucial.

Can you see the swarm?

After that, Tom opened our top-bar bee hive. Two days ago, I was out running errands when I got texts from two different neighbors: “Your bees are swarming!” So I rushed home in order not to miss it and to see if I could capture it for my dad, who always wants our swarms. Alas, it was too high to reach with our ladder. I’m not even sure if they were our bees (there are many beekeepers in the neighborhood), but it was a good reminder to spend some time looking through the hive and adding bars for new brood and honey. Everything looked as it should, and Tom took a full bar of honey out for us. Opening the hive is now Tom’s job since I’ve become allergic over time; he’s gotten really good at it and never gets stung anymore. I hang back and look on longingly, peppering him with questions which I’m sure he just loves. At least I can handle the messy job of cutting up the comb and extracting the honey, though gravity does most of the work.

I also spent a good deal of time today cleaning out our enormous passionvine. It’s a Passiflora ‘Blue Horizon,’ and has gorgeous flowers and small black sour fruits. It supports a huge number of gulf fritillary butterflies every year, and is a stopping place for every curious neighborhood child in summer. I bought it as a living deer fence, assuming that it would die back every winter with our frosts (and therefore remain manageable). It’s never done that, only gotten more and more enormous each year. It’s extremely promiscuous and shows up in all sorts of places I don’t want it to, so I’m always pruning the thing. However this year, we had so many nights of truly cold weather that the vine died back, leaving a hedge of dead leaves and flowers a foot thick. That was fun to hack through and remove. Now it looks quite bare, with just foundation vines on the trellis, but it won’t be long before that monster puts out new growth and begins the cycle all over again.

Tomorrow, we plan to wash the windows and screens, a once-a-year job that we loathe but that always makes such a difference in the way the light comes in our windows, so is totally worth it.

We also have reserved time for hiking both days. After all this rain, the hills are simply covered in wildflowers. This morning, we walked up to Shell Ridge where a guy named Phil (a volunteer with the Walnut Creek Open Space) has been working for ten years to restore a giant hillside with native flowers. This year it is simply spectacular, with every kind of California native annual you can imagine. Below you can see a very small section of the hillside, covered with poppies and chia. Tomorrow, I’m hoping we will have time to go a little further afield and hike in a place where we can ford some streams, which never gets old in our normally-arid Bay Area, and see nature-planted flowers.

Green Bean Season

Pole beans are one of those crops that go from flowers to fruit in about a day. On Monday, you can look at the plants and find zero beans at all, and then on Tuesday, there will be approximately 43 million. The vexing thing about beans is that they need to be harvested regularly, or they’ll stop fruiting ; so you’ll have a lot all at once, and across a long season. They’re good do-ers, as the old-timers say!

I personally love pole beans best when picked young and tender, then blistered in bacon fat or olive oil with plenty of salt and pepper. However, one can only eat so many beans prepared this way; eventually something new will be most welcome. We had such a great response to zucchini recipes that I thought we could do the same with string beans. What are your favorite recipes?

To start things off, here’s one of our family’s favorites that incorporates green beans (and other summer fruits) - Garlic Lime Steak and Noodle Salad from Smitten Kitchen. (Deb Perelman from SK also has a great many fabulous zucchini recipes, by the way.)

‘Rattlesnake’ is my go-to variety of pole bean; I’ve tried others, but I always come back to this one. Along with being delicious, they have beautiful flowers and interesting speckled bean pods, and they are very prolific. They can also be used as dried beans later in the season, when you’re sick of eating them fresh.

Happily, it’s also blueberry season. Despite having eight bushes, we never get enough at once to make a pie or anything substantial, but we like to pick them every couple of days and eat them as a sweet finish to a meal. If we do get a bumper crop, I like to either make clafoutis or cobbler, or freeze them for later use in the winter.

Please share your favorite bean or blueberry recipes in the comments!

Crop Swap

My friend Kerstin has started a Crop Swap in Oakland. This will take place from 10 am - 12 pm on the second Sunday of every month, starting July 10th, in Snow Park. Snow Park is located at 19th and Harrison Street, not far from Lakeside Drive and Lake Merritt (why not combine it with a walk around the lake, or a visit to the Lake Merritt gardens?). For more information, you can email Kerstin at cropswap.oakland@gmail.com. You can also reach her @cropswap.oakland on Instagram.

This is a great way to trade something you have too much of (peaches? zucchini? cilantro?) and go home with something you want more of (avocados? peas? sunflowers?). Don’t let that excess produce go to waste!

I Swore I'd Never Eat This Again

Well, the day has come. I’m going to eat zucchini, a vegetable I swore I’d never eat again, after growing up having it with nearly every dinner in the summertime. I just don’t get why people like it - it’s mushy, it’s tasteless, it’s watery. You have to jump through hoops to make it taste good, adding all kinds of other things until it doesn’t even resemble its original form. You can’t just roast it in olive oil and salt, like you can do with so many other vegetables, and have it taste good.

But, dang it, my students planted a bunch of it in the Environmental Center garden at Merritt, and I must admit it’s a lovely plant, with those enormous green leaves and bee-friendly yellow blossoms. It grows fast, it grows big, it shades the soil and keeps out weeds while retaining moisture in the soil, and by golly it makes the garden look professional and productive. I’ve been delighted with its appearance and growing habit, but also eyeing it with a certain amount of dread, knowing that the day would come when the plants would finally put out fruit, and then I’d have to face it.

Today is that day.

I can’t waste them - the zucchini must be eaten! This presents me with a challenge: Find the most delicious recipe for zucchini; or, if that sounds too lofty a goal, find a merely acceptable one. So my friends, I throw it out to you. I am asking for your favorite recipes for this questionable vegetable, especially since I know this is just the beginning of the (long, long, long) harvest season. Please post your recipes below, and I guarantee I will try them all.

Tonight, I think I will make lentil-zucchini fritters, to go with the Middle-Eastern meal that Adam is cooking for us. If they taste terrible, I at least can smother them in tzatziki!

*P/S: I found this hilarious article from Bon Appetit about zucchini. I guess I’m not the only person in the world who finds this vegetable disgusting.

*P/P/S: The fritters were freaking delicious. I didn’t make the sauce because we had leftover tzatziki. Definitely a winner recipe, thanks Barbara!