Grow – Cook – Make

With this week’s harvest I don’t remember anymore that we’ve been having a weird summer here in California. Look, just what you would expect in late august, the makings of a nice ratatouille: a basket heavy with tomatoes, eggplant, red peppers and zucchinis.

The tomatoes in the basket are mostly Early Girls, still the most productive variety in my garden, although I was able to harvest a few cherokee purple, green zebras and a lone Brandywine. The long and thin peppers are Jimmy Nardellos and those larger ones to the right, Corno di Toros. A few raven zucchinis are peeking behind the peppers, next to a bouquet of kabocha squash blossoms–there are a couple zucchini flowers in there too. The kabochas are producing a tremendous amount of very fragrant male flowers and very few female ones. I hope the ratio changes soon because as much as I like to add squash blossoms to taquitos and enchiladas, I much rather have a good squash crop.

This gigantic Brown Turkey fig is the first one ready this year. It is about 3 inches across, moist and sweet, but it could have benefited from an extra day or two on the tree. I am picking them slightly under-ripe, hoping to beat the birds that are devastating my orchard. Better under-ripe fruit that no fruit. I need to keep my guard up, though, or I’ll have no more figs.

Another beginning: purple tomatillos. This year I may be able to let them ripen fully on the vine. I am usually in a hurry to pick them before powdery mildew eats away the whole plant. So far, no mildew on my tomatillos. I am keeping my fingers crossed…

I am still getting lettuce, onions, nopales and herbs from the garden, still have a good supply of carrots and garlic in storage. Lemons are also plentiful at the moment. All in all, the garden has finally picked up its pace and is starting to produce beautifully.

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.

We just ate our last peaches. For the last two weeks we’ve had peaches every day from our tree. Today I sliced the last few peaches, lightly sauteed them in butter with a dash of cognac, and served them with shortbread and cream for our afternoon tea. Fantastic!

Actually, make that two, fantastic dessert and fantastic to have been able to make the dessert in the first place. See, last year I had all but given up on ever getting any fruit from this tree. For four consecutive years, some heavy creature that I was never able to see or identify in any way, would take all the fruit as it was getting ripe and break all the tree’s branches in the process. We tried to keep the marauder from the tree and failed miserably. Year after year we were not getting any fruit, we were not even able to taste one peach to figure out if we even liked it, and the poor tree was getting a heavy summer pruning.

How did we get from fruit thief to afternoon tea with peaches?

We enclosed the whole trunk with flashing, so that rodents cannot climb onto the tree. We had used flashing collars in the past, but much smaller. This time we just covered the whole trunk to be sure. We noticed that birds were damaging the fruit from above so we covered the tree with bird netting. And it worked! Something worked, we are not sure what, since we don’t know who was taking the fruit and breaking the tree, but something worked.

At some point the tree will be too large to cover with bird netting, but for the next few years I am counting on this little tree giving me peaches. I have to admit though, that outwitting the mystery peach tree assaulter made the fruit taste a lot sweeter.

Summer is still elusive. Nighttime temperatures are dipping into the lower 50′s, while daytime temperatures stay close to 70. The Frost peach tree is moving ahead anyway, doing its best to ripen its fruit without summer heat.

This is the first year we get any fruit from this tree. So far some peaches have been excellent, others not so good, not as intensely flavored as I was hoping. This is not a good year to be critical, though, too cold. The tree is doing what it can, next year hopefully the weather will be more typical for this area and we will be better able to evaluate the fruit’s flavor. We are mostly eating them fresh but I am seeing a peach cobbler in the next few days.

I have a large pile of shallots drying in the sun. I guess it would be better if I didn’t pile them like this. Too bad, there is no room to dry them in one layer. I’ll leave them there for a day or two and then clean them up and bring them into the crawl space for storage. Shallot vinaigrette with aged sherry vinegar anyone? That’s my number one use for shallot, although I also love to use them as aromatics in all sorts of stews and sauces.

Jimmy Nardello peppers are always the first to turn red in my garden. They are thin walled peppers, sweet and pungent at once, rich. It is easiest to fry or saute them, but they are best grilled if you keep an eye on them and take them out of the fire as soon as the first hint of charring appears. If you get distracted you’ll soon end up with a bunch of carbonized peppers. The reward for attentive grilling is red pepper paradise. The absolutely best tasting pepper I have ever eaten. I have to plant them every year. I just picked these, haven’t gotten around to cook them, so I don’t yet know how this year’s cool temperatures have affected their taste.

I’ve also been picking lettuce and greens, a few not quite ripe tomatoes, eggplants, some zucchinis, lemons, nopales. Enough to eat every day, not enough to preserve for the winter yet.

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.

Look who’s hiding in the melon patch! The first Pacific Treefrog I find this year. While I clean out melon leaves affected by powdery mildew this little Treefrog is very, very still, hoping maybe that I will not take its leaf away.

California Whiptails are my constant companions while I work in the garden. They generally just scatter away as I move about doing my chores. This one, though, is too busy to care about me. Just a quick sideways glance, and back to work.

Digging, um… I think I know now who is poking those little holes all over the garden beds…

That’s how I found them, just like that.

I pulled all the carrots since some of them were starting to bolt and planted a new lettuce bed in their spot. I got a lot of carrots, most of them well behaved a couple of raunchy ones. They are turning out very flavorful and sweeter than they’ve ever been at this time of year. This cool weather is giving me just a trickle of tomatoes but I get to have a basketful of good carrots.

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.