Garden In Late June

Today when we got home from an overnight visit to Wilton, near Sacramento, the squash plants had produced another 7 very large zucchini squash.

The garden is looking so great right now. I also harvested another handful of snow peas and noticed that some of the pumpkins are getting bigger. The photo above is of both pumpkin and zucchini plants plus the very energetic morning glories I planted from seed I gathered last year.

The pumpkin plants by the climbing rose and lemon tree will probably need to come out because they are taking over the area and spilling well on to the sidewalk to the barn. I'm going to see if a neighbor wants them. I think some of them might transplant OK even though they are getting big.

The poppies are giving lots of color to the bed by the front porch. I love seeing what blooms each morning.

Just wanted to share some of the photos I took on Saturday morning. Quite a change from a month ago. back by the red rose are the snow pea plants. We'll be getting beans in a week or so from plants just to the left of the snow peas, and the cucumbers are finally growing strongly, so maybe mid-July for the first cukes from the garden.

Happy Summer!

Scenes from the Garden

Along with all the other fun in life, working in the garden has taken up time and has been a joy these past few weeks. We ate the first decent sized zucchini today (had a tiny one grilled last week...just a baby) and it was so good.

The new garden next to the steps up to the front door and deck is looking really great! The morning glories produce varied colors to welcome each day, the bright orange nasturtium flowers look wonderful next to the brilliant blue of the lobelia.

 In the main garden, near the barn, the peas and beans are up, along with tiny basil and nasturtium seedlings.

Sweet peas should be blooming soon and so should some lovely poppies. The transplanted lemon tree, rose and daphne shrubs are doing well and sending out new leaves. Here is the daphne, along with a beautiful pink geranium and bocopa.

 I think I'm going to have a bumper crop of pumpkins with seedlings that have sprung up from the pumpkins I put in the spent beds to compost. Should be fun to see what they turn out to look like! It's a treat each day to see the growth that spring brings! Look at how much they have grown since May 5th. I just thinned them out a bit, so they should really grow now. They share the barrel with seedlings for morning glories and zinnia.

 One of the biggest changes has been to the main planter near the walk
.

 Here is a wide view of what I see from the kitchen window.

Eat From the Garden

Farm to table is really big right now in the restaurant world. That is probably a good thing because getting people to really taste fresh veggies and fruit soon after they are harvested might help generate demand for that taste hit in regular and fast food restaurants, to say nothing of in grocery stores.

Even better than farm to table is garden to table. To have planted the little seeds, nurtured them, set them out in the garden when the time was ripe, kept them going with regular water (and plant food as needed), tying up the tomatoes and re-routing the wayward pole bean vines, watching the first fruits form and grow and ripen...then to pick and eat that ripe food shortly after picking. Bliss.

I usually try to do as little as possible with the harvest if I only harvest enough to enjoy that day. Today I harvested enough lovely green bush beans for Sweetie and I to enjoy with our dinner. All they needed was a quick rinse and a rapid steam to turn them brilliant green and heat them enough to enjoy. Nothing else was needed! We had them last night, too. The thing to remember if you decide to grow bush beans is that they come in almost all at once...within a week or so. Great if you are canning them, but otherwise you need to pick them almost every day and figure out what to do with them. My pole beans seem to take a bit longer, so I harvest them less frequently.

The small tomatoes (Early Girls, I think) also got a quick rinse and then were sliced. The slices were laid on a platter and I sprinkled on a tiny bit of garlic salt and freshly ground pepper.

These tomatoes never saw the inside of a refrigerator, so they were room temperature. They taste like summer...juicy, tart, the essence of tomato. Last night's cherry tomatoes were even simpler. Wash, put on plate. Remove green top, eat, repeat.

If you don't have a garden or a neighbor who wants to share, try a good farmer's market. It will be almost as fresh and very, very delicious.

For those who are keeping track, we now have a counter and sink and faucet in the baking center, so washing up is easier. The photo of the tomatoes and cutting board shows a sliver of the new quartz counter top. Still no regular stove or oven, but Sweetie is patching some dry wall tomorrow and I'll be working on the mural this weekend, so it won't be too much longer before I can bake again.

More Plum Lucky

Another part of our luck in landing here in our beautiful home is that we are right next to the volunteer fire station. When we first moved here we weren't sure how lucky that was because they still used the siren to call the volunteer to the station to go out on a call...sometimes at 2 am! Eventually we learned to wake up hearing the siren, think 'Oh, it's just the the fire siren', and then go back to sleep.

Now they use pagers, but we still see how hard the volunteers work. In California volunteers are required to have as much training as paid fire fighters, so there are drills each week on Thursday nights at the fire station, plus practice going on when volunteers can arrange it during the rest of the week. A few evenings ago I decided to make some plum coffee cake for the volunteers who were on call. It's a recipe I've been wanting to make since February and it seemed like plum season would never get here.

A tender, moist, buttery coffee cake with brown sugar, vanilla and cardmom flavors cradles plum halves. The plums first give up their juice as they cook, and then reclaim it s they cool. The plum halves sort of sink into the dough, so some of the dough gets the juices, too. The tang of the plums goes so well with that rich, delicious dough. Sweetie and I had a piece each, then the rest went next door. The volunteers seemed pretty please with the idea of fresh cake. We're really pleased that they volunteer their time to keep us all safe, particularly since fire season has come early to California.

Take a look at this coffee cake...isn't it pretty?

Andrea at Andrea's Recipes is hosting Grow Your Own and this post certainly qualifies since the plums come from my own tree down the drive. Since it is now a twice a month event, if you are growing your own food, consider joining in.

I changed the recipe a bit, using a combination of white and whole wheat flours instead of just white, using dark brown sugar instead of light brown, using a lot more butter and only a tablespoon of oil, and Meyer lemon flavored olive oil at that. Since I had some from making the Danish Braid, I used vanilla paste instead of vanilla extract. I also found that I didn't need to bake it quite so long as called for in the Greenspan recipe.

Simple Fresh Plum Coffee Cake
Based on Dorie Greenspan’s Dimply Plum Cake in Baking:From my home to yours

1 cup all-purpose flour
½ cup whole wheat flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
¼ teaspoons salt
¼ teaspoon ground cardamom
½ stick (8 tablespoons) butter, softened
3/4 cup (packed) dark brown sugar
2 large eggs
Grated zest of one orange
1 ½ teaspoons pure vanilla extract or the same amount of pure vanilla paste
1 tablespoon olive oil (I used Meyer Lemon flavored olive oil)
8 small to medium red or purple plums (I used fresh off the tree Santa Rosa red plums), halved and pitted, with the skins left on

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees F. Butter and flour a square 8-inch baking pan. Center a rack in the middle of the oven.

On a sheet of waxed paper or in a bowl, whisk together the flour, whole wheat flour, baking powder, salt and cardamom. Set aside.

In a mixing bowl, beat the butter until it is soft and creamy, about 3 minutes at medium mixer speed.

Add the dark brown sugar and beat 2 minutes more. Using a rubber or silicon spatula, scrape the bowl and beaters. Add the eggs one at a time and beat for 1 minute after each addition. Using a rubber or silicon spatula, scrape the bowl and beaters. On medium speed, add the orange zest, vanilla or vanilla paste, and the olive oil and beat to combine completely. Reduce mixer speed to low and blend in the dry ingredient mixture, beating until just combined. Using a rubber or silicon spatula, scrape the bowl and beaters. and mix again briefly if needed to mix in any flour from the sides or bottom of the bowl.

Using a rubber or silicon spatula, scrape the batter into the prepared pan and smooth it out in the pan. Arrange the plums on top of the batter, ( in rows of four usually works), pushing the plums down a bit in the batter.

Bake in the preheated oven for about 40 minutes, or until the cake is golden and puffed around the plums. A thin knife inserted in the center will come out clean.

Place the cake on a rack to cool for 15 minutes, then run a knife around the sides of the pan and unmold the cake. Invert and cool with the plum side up. Serves 8.

Homegrown

Diving around the country roads near my home lately I've come across the following signs: Fresh Apples Next Left, followed a little ways down the road by Pears 69 cents/lb. The former price of $1 a pound had been painted over with the new price. A large billboard announced 4H Chickenque at the Fairgrounds the first weekend in September. Another sign tacked to a telephone pole offered: Stone Free Hay Delivered and a phone #. You can tell that this is still a rural area and it's possible to buy locally grown fruits and nuts and, sometimes, vegetables right in the driveway or front yard of the folks who have grown them.

Turning up my driveway I notice the pink trumpets of the Naked Ladies near the mailbox on the left, the olive tree overgrown with the muscat grape vine on the right. A little way up the drive on the left the pineapple quince are weighing the branches down almost to the ground and turning from fuzzy green to a bright gold. Straight ahead where the driveway turns left I can see the Gravenstein apples thick on the tree.

On Wednesday I hope to make some more applesauce from them. The blackberry vines to the right have almost finished up for the year. Berries now often have an unripe spot somewhere on the berry that looks ripe. Up near the house are the vegetables I have grown from seed: butternut squash in a pale pinkish tan partially hide under heart shaped leaves. The cucumbers have been happy lately and producing round prickly balls that look a lot like lemons when they are ripe. The zucchini which have been feeding us since May are finally slowing down.

But my favorite right this minute are the tomato bushes, which are finally producing ripe tomatoes in yellow, orange, yellow streaked green, bright red and deep brownish red. There is something wonderful about harvesting something that you grew from seed, especially when it is something that you've never grown before.

I bought two packets of heirloom tomato seeds, each a mixture. The Brandwines have not yet ripened, but today I can plate a rainbow of slices of Marvel Stripe which is a beefsteak type and has wonderful red and yellow streaks throughout, of Green Zebra which have small fruits, but look great with yellow stripes under the kelly green stripes when ripe, of the mild flavor and softer texture of the orange Persimmon tomato, of small intensly red Costoluto tomatoes which are deeply lobed and have a full tomato flavor, of strangly colored Black Krim tomatoes...swirled with brownish red, bright red, lime green and dark green on the outside near the stem. They have the best tomato flavor of all and are a wonderful firm, juicy beefsteak size, too.

From tiny seeds, to little seedlings,

to big bushes that sprawl and grow like crazy and produce lots of tomatoes...homegrown tomatoes are something to really enjoy. Check out the Grow Your Own 2007 event at Andrea's Recipes to see more examples of homegrown goodies.

I prepare something this delicious very simply, with just enough added to highlight the flavor. First of all, never put these good tomatoes in the refrigerator. It wrecks havoc with the true tomato flavors.

I slice the tomatoes, fan them on a plate, sprinkle lightly with a good balsamic vinegar and drizzle lightly with a good quality olive oil. A bit of salt and/or freshly ground pepper goes well. Then mince some fresh basil, or cut in a chiffonade, then sprinkle on the tomatoes. Heavenly!

I couldn't choose which tomato photo to post, so here are a bunch. Enjoy!