Bees and Beans

July 8, 2015 Elizabeth Boegel

The new season of Growing a Greener World has begun airing on PBS. The first episode of the season is about backyard beekeeping, and if you're considering keeping bees, this is a great episode to watch; even if you aren't considering it, there's a lot to learn from this episode. You can find it here. The host, Joe Lamp'l, uses Langstroth hives, and I use a Top Bar Hive, so it's a little different from my method of beekeeping, but it's definitely much more typical to do it the way he details here.

As for beans, we noticed the first fruit today on the trellis. We ate all the ones we found, right off the vine.

Pretty soon, the vines will be loaded, and we'll be having beans with every dinner.

Canning Salsa

July 7, 2015 Elizabeth Boegel

The last two days have been spent in the car, driving the kids to various sleep-away camps. My butt was tired of sitting and my mind was tired of the monotony of the road, so when I got home today, I decided to make salsa.

I used a recipe from Ball, makers of Mason jars. I halved it, as we still don't have a huge amount of tomatoes.

Before, when I've made fresh salsa to enjoy right away, I've just chopped everything up and mixed it, or even faster, thrown it in the food processor, voila. But when you water-bath can this stuff, you've got to skin the tomatoes and chop everything roughly the same size, all of which takes a good deal of time. I can't say I had fun doing this exactly, but it was satisfying. Especially considering that all the ingredients, besides vinegar and salt, came from our garden.

Cilantro, shallots, garlic, tomatoes, sweet peppers, hot peppers, all from our garden

The other step that was different was cooking the salsa for about ten minutes

But now we've got our first batch of salsa on the canning shelf!

In future, I may search around for different recipes, or try fermented salsa, which folks really seem to like (but does it add a weird kimchi taste?).

Meanwhile, there was a little bit leftover that was too small to can, so we'll have that tonight on our steak. Yum! Tom's official review after trying it with chips: "It has a nice balance of flavor."

What's Flowering in the Garden?

July 5, 2015 Elizabeth Boegel

In all the excitement about the true harvest beginning, and produce trickling in every day, I often forget to look around at the flowers in the garden and appreciate them fully. Each one is planted for a reason; the most vital function is to provide something useful for wildlife. I notice all kinds of pollinators visiting our flowers, from hummingbirds to tiny native bees, and that definitely gives me pleasure, to be feeding so many creatures. But beauty is another very important function, and I have to remind myself to stop and enjoy it. My goal is to have a plethora of blooms at all times of the year; right now, it's easy to achieve that. Long, sunny days and very warm temperatures lend themselves to some beautiful shows in the garden. So let's take a look, shall we?

Dill, about to bloom. Certain insects prefer these large umbel shapes.

cornflower

chamomile, with a beetle

Borage. Bees just love it. I plant a lot of herbs just for their flowers.

Tidy Tips, closing up for the night. This is a CA native, usually seen in Spring.

Cosmos, just about to bloom

Gaillardia or blanket flower

Echinacea or coneflower

Scabiosa or pincushion flower

Asters (Corethrogyne filaginifolia), going to seed.
I let a lot of my flowers go to seed rather than dead-heading them.
Birds eat the seeds, and also I get volunteer plants.
Not to mention, they're pretty.

Dahlia

Nasturtiums, aloha mix

Clarkia, farewell-to-spring

Coreopsis in the foreground, cosmos in the background

Rudbeckia, or Black-Eyed Susan

Nicotiana jasmin alata -this flower just keeps going in my garden.
It started blooming in Spring and hasn't stopped. It's taller than Tom
and covered with blooms that droop in the day, but perk up in the
cool mornings and evenings. It has a heavenly smell, and the
native bumblebees have been all over it.

Flowering pomegranate

Yarrow Achillea millefolium rosea

CA goldenrod Solidago californica

CA fuchsia or Zauschneria californica- soon this will be blooming everywhere
as I have a lot of it in the garden. All the bees love it and it provides color
when not a lot of other stuff is blooming.

I just want to assure you that I don't know the Latin names off the top of my head. I always have to look them up. I feel like an idiot when horticultural types throw the Latin names around, though I understand that it keeps everything very clear. But I figure the common name works just fine most of the time, right?

I don't want to leave out you vegetable fans. Tomatoes are starting to come in, in earnest, now. This was this morning's harvest; four more ripened just in time for dinner tonight.

The Pepper Problem

July 3, 2015 Elizabeth Boegel

Well, it's not really a problem. It's just that our hot peppers are growing and fruiting like mad, and we have so many. Last year, I grew them in the South Garden along with everything else, because the North Garden didn't exist yet, and the crop was quite mild because the South Garden gets shade in the afternoon. Now, I'm starting to see what can happen in full sun all day!

I planted four kinds of hots, though all of them are on the mild side; Jalepeño (Jalafuego), Serrano (Hot Rod), Ancho Poblano, and Padrón. The latter are especially interesting, because you never know if the pepper you bite in to will be mild, or hot. It's like the Russian Roulette of peppers. Something like 1 in 10 are crazy hot, and there is no way to tell until you eat it! I couldn't resist planting that.

I'm not a huge hot pepper fan; Tom and Adam both like them a lot and add them to sandwiches and hamburgers, etc. I was surprised how often we used our homegrown jalepeños last year - as long as the seeds and ribs are removed, they're not terribly hot, and they add a brightness that is quite welcome in lots of dishes. But primarily we used them to make salsa. However, the tomatoes are taking their time. So salsa is not possible yet (though as soon as it is, I'm canning salsa - I think we could go through a quart a month). We're getting a couple of tomatoes every day, so it won't be long...

Since I'm not sure what to do with all these peppers (and it's a tough sell giving them away, frankly and surprisingly), I've been freezing them. I started out by roasting them, then removing the seeds and ribs, then freezing. I've cut out the roasting part. Now I just cut 'em up and put 'em in an ice tray and freeze them; then I transfer them to a mason jar the next day.

a day's harvest

into the freezer

then into jars and back to the depths of the freezer

Tom's found a recipe for hot sauce, so that's a project for the coming week. We'll let the peppers hang out on the vine a day or two longer than usual until we have a pound's-worth, and then get cooking and canning. That'll be a spicy day in the kitchen!

Meanwhile, if you have recipes for small, mildish-hottish peppers, please pass them along. I'm game to try anything!

Here Comes July

June 30, 2015 Elizabeth Boegel

Hot, hot, hot here. I've been dipping in to my rain barrel for some supplemental water every day; luckily I still have half a barrel left from our last rain, which was over a month ago. Everything is droopy by 10 a.m.; nothing looks nice during the day! so these pictures were actually taken just before 9 p.m. on June 30, 2015.

We are harvesting the first cherry and slicing tomatoes, sweet and hot peppers, strawberries, raspberries, blackberries, collards, carrots, and romaine lettuce. I expect the tomato glut to begin any time now, but at the moment, it's just one or two every day, and they get eaten quickly. The beans are flowering, so soon it will be bean time. The peppers are starting to get away from us, especially the hot ones. I'm freezing some practically every day.

As always, it's great to just go in to the garden for our meals. Lettuce and tomato on a cheeseburger, collards for a frittata, carrots to go with lunch. I quite like it. And now we are getting five eggs every day (soon, six!), so we always have something to eat if I forget to go to the store. And having our pastured, grass-fed meat delivered to us once a week is also really great. Not only does it taste good, and we know the animals lived a good life, but we're getting interesting cuts of meat which force me to cook different things, and I like that. Tonight we had flap steak. I've never had flap steak before, and it was delicious, especially with Farmer's Market corn (thanks Mom!). Summer on a plate!

So here's your photographic tour of the garden, at the beginning of what is proving to be a hot summer.