Grow – Cook – Make

It is Sunday evening, I am making dinner. I have been checking the beets almost daily for a month, as if my wishing their roots to bulge was enough to actually get them to do it. Today I finally got what I wanted, enough good size roots to prepare a beet dish. I have trimmed the leaves, I have scrubbed them, I am ready to put them in the oven, oops! I need to take a photo… get a nice dish and go find some sunshine out in the rocks. Here you have, a plate full of red and golden Detroit beets–the rounder ones to the right– and Cylindra beets–the elongated ones to the left.

And peas, lots of peas. Finally it worked! All that netting and going after marauding rodents has payed off with a bountiful pea harvest. For over a month I have been harvesting enough shelling and snap peas to eat every day. And I am not tired of peas yet, which is good, since these vines still have more peas in them.

I had to pull out the rest of the carrot patch I planted last fall so I could put some beans in. We’ll be munching on the long ones as a snack throughout the week. They are little fingers, a variety I had almost given up on. I tried them a couple times and they seemed rather flavorless or worse, somewhat bitter. I planted some left over seed on a lazy day last fall, when I didn’t feel like going all the way down to town just to get some carrot seed. Oh, am I glad I did! They turned out to be sweet and intensely flavored. I will plant them again in the fall, since they seem to be more sensitive than other varieties to warm temperatures. The fat ones are Chantenay and I’ll use them for cooking.

My spring lettuce patch is done, this is the last salad I am eating from it. After three or even four passes with the harvesting knife, these lettuces are now a bitter and fibrous mess. Time to go to the compost pile.

All in all a good harvest, still with a spring like character, but abundant and delicious nonetheless. I am happy, my garden is treating me well.

For more delicious pictures and stories of harvests and to add your own, head on over to Daphne’s Dandelions, host of Harvest Monday, and take a look at what other gardeners have been up to this week.

Time to get the garlic out of the ground and clear the bed for the next crop. That’s how I am thinking these days, get one crop out so that the next one can go in. An endlessly interconnected list of seemingly urgent tasks and a disoriented gardener in the middle of it all.

You see, we are having colder weather than usual this year. The spring crops are lingering, lush and productive, beyond what I thought would be their time in the garden, and the summer crops are not quite up to speed, they are just moving slower this year and I am holding them back a bit. It is a delicate timing game, it always is, and this year I am not quite sure how to play it. It seems I should be getting those spring crops out of the garden in a hurry to make room for the heat loving crops that will take their place, but then, it is actually cool. The greens, the roots,  the peas and the favas of spring are still fresh and productive, do I really want to get them out to plant something that won’t be happy in this coolish weather? But any day now the heat will come back to us, and then?

So there I am, hesitant, disoriented, and, oops!

The garlic is ready to pick and I almost missed it!

I have been growing two types of garlic for the last several years, a hardnecked variety, Spanish Roja, and the softnecked Inchelium Red.  I use garlic in all my cooking, but not a lot, so I figure I need about a head per week and a few more for just in case. I put in 30 or 35 plants of each kind at the same time in the fall, but the Spanish Roja is a little faster, ready about a week or two before the Inchelium Red. Today I am harvesting the Spanish Roja.

I carefully loosen the plants making sure that I don’t end up with bulb-less leaves in my hand, shake the soil off and pull out any dry leaves that don’t fall off on their own. I lay them to cure on some metal racks I have rigged up in the crawlspace, a black widow paradise under the guest bedroom. Anybody who sleeps there during the next couple months better like garlic, I am afraid.

They will spend the summer here, the only place away from both sun and rodents in the whole property. Once well cured, I will take the cloves apart, select my planting stock and freeze the rest. Freezing is the only way I can preserve the garlic for a whole year. Frozen garlic is not so good for eating raw, but it is perfect for cooking, which anyway, is how I eat it.

In a week or two I’ll repeat the same operation with the Inchelium Red variety and I’ll have a good supply of garlic for one more year.

A male keeping watch from the top of a boulder. The female is drinking and may be foraging some just underneath, below the fountain. He sees me approach, camera in hand, wearily looks at her, looks at me, looks at her. He doesn’t move. I press the shutter a few times. He doesn’t move. He doesn’t take his eye away from me, but doesn’t move.

I have the wrong lens, I need to get closer. One step forward, a couple of photos, another step towards him. He looks down, he looks at me, he doesn’t move. I get closer, press the shutter. The female suddenly jumps into the cactus out of view. I can feel the relief of the male as he finally can get away from my threatening approach. He flies over the cactus to meet her and both run up the hill, far away, before they start pecking and cooing again.

I have been trying to photograph the resident quail pair for a while now. Somehow I always happen to find myself with the wrong lens when they, always nervous, show up, keeping a consistent distance from me, too long for my lens. Today, maybe because the female was busy around the fountain, maybe because his high perch offered a bit more safety, he let me get close enough to take this picture.

Even though some times they exasperate me with their taste for pea leaves or their penchant for using my salad bed for their dust baths, I rather enjoy their presence in my garden. Soon they’ll show up with their chicks in tow, so funny and sweet. If I manage a good photo, I’ll be sure to post it.

A sticky monkeyflower bush has planted itself in my garden. It has tucked itself between the blue wall and a raised bed. Prominently out of the way, that is, I can see it and enjoy it but I don’t need to walk around it or step on it when I tend the raised bed.

It doesn’t need me to water it, or to groom it, or to take care of it in any way whatsoever. The monkeyflower is at home, here in my chaparral garden. All it needs from me is to refrain from treating it like a weed.

Not to worry. Would you treat such a beautiful flower like a weed? I wouldn’t. I don’t, actually.

The monkeyflower has found some friends all the way across at the other end of the garden.

The chard and the poppies living at the far end on the garden are wearing matchy matchy golden yellow outfits. They are winking back at the monkeyflower with golden blossoms.