Writing

I ate 5 tomatoes (with salt, pepper, and some bits of swiss cheese) for lunch today.

The anticipated tomato explosion has hit, and last night we picked about 20 tomatoes from the garden.  Surprisingly enough, the early producers are all heirloom varieties, and the vaunted “Early Girl” tomato plants (which were supposed to …duh…produce tomatoes earlier then all of the others) have not produced a single ripe fruit yet.

Actually, we probably should have picked the tomatoes a day or two ago, but as they are all fancy-colored heirloom varieties, we had to guess as to when the color indicated ripeness.  We spent a while waffling between “are they done yet?” and “maybe another day or so?” before actually reaching out and giving the fruits in question a squeeze to see how soft/firm they were.

I think that we were relying a little too much on the pictures on the plant tags to judge the “done-ness” of the fruit, which showed the fruits as being much different then they actually turned out to be.  For example, the picture on the tag for the Black Prince heirloom tomatoes showed the fruits as being a very dark, almost black, purple… when in fact the ripe fruits are closer to a medium burgundy.  Which was a touch disappointing as we had been looking forward to noshing on really strange colored tomatoes.

They were tasty, though.

Black Prince and Lemon Boy tomatoes, ready to be eaten

I have been looking at a lot of cookbooks and cooking sites lately (gotta find a lot of recipes that use tomatoes) and have been once again struck by the beautiful photography available there.  I want to work on that….

The zucchini plants are dead.  Not just dead, but uprooted, disposed of, and the ground where they had been was “salted” with some powerful anti-bug stuff (Sevin-5).

They didn’t have root rot.  They had root borers.  (A quick conversation with a fellow gardener at a fencing practice clued us in as to the precise type of affliction plaguing the zucchinis, and it was on his advise that we took the rather drastic measures that we did.)  Hopefully the measures taken will prevent the infestation from spreading to the rest of the garden.

At least we got a couple of zucchini out of them before they died.

And the rest of the garden is still going strong, despite the overly hot and muggy weather.

The garden is doing really well.

The tomato plants have to be at least 5-and-a-half feet tall, and they are still growning

We have been eating peppers (green, jalapeno, and banana) out of it for a little while now.  We have made fresh pesto, and have been using the herbs in bread (sage and rosemary) and to entice the cats (catnip).

The catnip plant is growing wildly… much more so then the other herbs, but I suppose I shouldn’t be too surprised there as it is in the mint family, and mint does tend to spread.  Maybe I should plant catnip in that “dead” spot in the front flower bed where everything else that I have tried there dies, and see what happens?

There are even a few tomatoes that are starting to blush from green to pink.

future ingredients in a tricolor salad

we are going to have a lot of tomatoes

The zucchini on the other hand…  It started out really strong.  Started growing like crazy, started to take over its corner of the plot and crowd the eggplants and green peppers, bloomed really early, started fruiting early (and started fruiting a lot!), and now… Well, now it has started to go south.  It somehow ended up with mildew all over the leaves, despite the recent hot-and-dry spell, and it looks to me like it is suffering from some kind of root rot as well.  Plus, whenever I go out to give it a look-see, there are ants crawling all over it.  Ants crawling all over it and nothing else in the garden.  Which I have decided to take as kind of a bad sign as far as the long-term prospects for the zucchini go.

Despite the bad omens, there is a truly enormous zucchini on the vine, which we plan on eating for dinner tonight.

It has been raining a lot here lately.  On one hand, that is a good thing, because it means that we have had to turn on the weeper hose to water the vegetable garden exactly once since we planted everything.  And on the other hand, it is annoying because lots of rain has caused high humidity, which in turn has caused us to turn on the a/c a lot earlier and a lot more frequently then I normally like to.

The garden is doing great.  All of the tomato plants have green tomatoes.  (Rather disappointingly, the early girl tomatoes didn’t flower and start to fruit any earlier then the rest of them.)  The bell peppers all have several one-quarter to half-ripe peppers.  The zucchini and eggplants are flowering.  The banana peppers have some just-about-ripe looking peppers.  We have already started to use the fresh herbs.  The cats love the fresh catnip.  And two fresh jalapeno peppers have made their way into a stir fry.

The berry bushes on the other hand look kind of sickly.  And today while I was weeding I spotted just one half-ripe raspberry.  Maybe they just need a year or so to grow bigger and they will produce well next year?  Or maybe they will just all die before next year?  Or maybe it just isn’t even close to berry season yet and I should stop wondering.  Who knows.  Only time will tell.

If you were to watch me working in the gardens in the summer, you will observe that for someone who professes to hate weeding and to prefer “the wild look” (for the flowerbeds at least) that I seem to actually do a lot of weeding.  Well, I do do a lot of weeding, and I do generally dislike it, and tend to not do it as much as possible.  However, there are some things that I will always pull out of the ground:

• dandelions
• those things that look kind of like dandelions but have spiky leaves
• crab grass
• inappropriate grass, which is lawn grass that is not in the lawn
• this kind of fast-growing, low slung yard-creeper stuff that will take over if you let it
• clover (or some kind of clover-like thing)
• anything in the herb/vegetable garden that is not an herb or a vegetable

Usually I just throw the weeds on the middle of the lawn, where they will be chopped up by the lawn mower.

Usually I weed just once a week (or so) for about an hour at a time, so I guess that I can’t complain about it too much.

We spent most of the morning and early afternoon planting the garden, now that we are safely past the frost point.

Since the garden last year did so well, we slightly more then doubled its size for this year.

So, what did we plant?

• Raspberries – 3 bushes
• Blackberries – 2 bushes
• Eggplants – 4 plants
• Green peppers – 4 plants
• Banana peppers – 2 plants
• Jalapeno peppers – 2 plants
• Zucchini – 2 plants
• Tomatoes – we got all heirloom varieties this year
  • “Mr. Stripey” (orange and yellow striped) – 2 plants
  • “Black Prince” (black/purple) – 2 plants
  • “Lemon Boy” (bright yellow) – 2 plants
  • “Pink Brandywine” (fuchsia?) – 2 plants
  • “Early Girl” (early to ripen) – 1 plant
  • “Homestead” (pretty stock, red tomatoes) – 7 plants
• Rosemary – 4 plants
• Basil – 4 plants
• Sage – 4 plants
• Catnip – 1 plant

Yes, that is 16 tomato plants.  We love tomatoes, we love salsa and marinara sauce, and we plan on trying our hand(s) at canning come late summer.

The berry bushes are all along the back of the house.  The tomatoes are in two rows along the long end of the garden.  The herbs are all in the quadrant closest to the patio door.  The zucchini are off in one corner, since I know from my parents’ gardens when I was growing up that they can grow pretty wild and crazy, and I want to be able to easily segregate them from the other plants.

The catnip is for Merlin and Percival.  And I might try brewing some tea out of it at some point as well.

I can’t wait for everything to start growing and blooming and ripening.

I am looking forward to my favorite summer lunch… just-picked tomatoes, sliced thick, with some fresh basil, some fresh mozzarella, a sprinkle of salt, a dash of black pepper, and a drizzle of olive oil.  Perfection.

Also, a day spent grubbing around in the sun and dirt, and having a vegetable and herb garden to show for all of that work at the end of it = a very good day indeed.

My hands smell like bananas because they are covered in new-skin, and they are covered in new-skin because I was out doing yard work this morning.

Today is the first day of spring.  It is also my Dad’s birthday (Happy Birthday, Dad.)

The weather was warm enough and it wasn’t raining like it was all last weekend, so I was finally able to get out and clean out the flower beds.  The cleaning, by the way, is pretty minimal.  I pull out all of the dead stalks from last year (from the hostas, the daisies, and the lilies) and clean up the front walk and porch steps, but I leave most of the rest of last fall’s leaves where they are.  I also gave all of the decorative grasses haircuts.  It can be pretty satisfying and a lot of fun to go in with a pair of hedge clippers and whack, whack, whack away until a stand of grasses that was taller then I am is down to a couple of inches of stubble.

My yard style is more “English country garden” then anything else.  Pretty wild and disorganized and lots of plants and other ground cover.  The flowerbeds get pretty minimal interference from me.  I water them when things get too dry, and every couple of weeks I go through and pull out crabgrass, dandelions, and other obvious weeds, but other then that… eh, not so much.  As a result they are a lot rougher looking then most of the rest on the street.  Of course, most of my neighbors are also retired or semi-retired and have moved to doing full-time yard maintenance in the spring, summer, and fall, and as a result have yards and gardens that are very very orderly and pruned to within an inch of their lives.  Especially the across-the-street neighbors, who have mostly mulch and the occasional well shaped shrub in their flowerbeds.

Anyway, the decorative grasses are why my hands and arms look like they are covered in paper cuts, and why I have new-skin covering some of the larger (including a rather impressive one on my right palm) gashes on my hands.  Those dead grass stalks are like razors.

I filled five yard waste bags with all of those cut-away grasses and dead stalks, which are now stacked in the garage and awaiting trash day.  Unfortunately, they may end up waiting a while, since I seem to recall, now that I think of it, that the garbage men won’t pick up yard waste until after April 1.

Damn.