July's Garden Garlic

July 19.

After a massive downpour one day...

...I finally went out to work in the garden on my day off, to finally get the garlic harvested.

After digging up all the garlic, I worked the soil and then smoothed it out.  It's pretty much ready for next year.

I didn't have time to be fancy, so I dumped the garlic bulbs (and the seed heads) onto my front porch and spread them out to dry.

I'll peel and freeze (or ferment) them in two or three weeks once they're dry.


Back to life,
Christine

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May into June -- My Garden

Time to mosey on out to my raised beds with camera in hand to show you what has been happening in my little neck of the woods!

I started right off with my sage, planted last year and growing wonderfully in the rich soil.  They had blossomed once, and are starting to blossom again, so I'd have to trim those back.

Nice and trim!  Can't wait for fried sage leaves!!

I also weeded what I could in the pathway next to the sage.

In the sage bed, the garlic was growing nicely, and four tomato plants looked healthy and strong.  The two on the right are Summer Peach--yielding smaller yellow fruit that is fuzzy like a peach and sweet--and the two on the left are a new variety to me:  Kentucky Traveler.  I'll definitely let you know how these are!

In the back garden, I planted herbs (on the left, one lone tomato plant (given to me and I had nowhere to plant it), then green beans in the back.  The green bean section is a little more shaded (Jacob's tree grows off to the right of this photo), so hopefully they'll do okay there.  Chives also grow in that back right corner.

After noticing the bare spots in my mulched pathway above, I inspected and noted other areas which would need some more mulch.  Time to save some money and cover those areas.

The Alpine strawberry bed also hosts my two rhubarb plants, which I really need to harvest.  With me working four days a week now, I'll have to carve out some time to make both strawberry jam and cinnamon-rhubarb jam, two of my favorites.  Maybe this year, I'll make some strawberry-rhubarb jam, too!

The middle bed hosts garlic (bottom left), tomatoes (middle), then peas and carrots (back).  I planted the peas late, so hopefully they won't mind a little heat as they come up, and hopefully I'll have a harvest to speak of.

Finally, my front bed is definitely a strawberry bed.  They keep shooting out and taking over the walkway, and I let them, harvest the plants, then pull them back.  This year (since I'm posting this a few weeks after these photos were taken), we had Strawberry Mayhem for two weeks, and now (mid-June) I'm back to picking not quite a quart every three days or so.  That'll quickly wind down--but those Alpine strawberries are in full swing and will yield berries all summer long!  They're very small berries, but I've been collecting them, rinsing and freezing them, and I already have enough for a double recipe of strawberry muffins.

Here's proof that I can get my guys to come help in the garden when needed!

My "overhead" view of the garden--which, when we finally take the pool down, I will no longer be able to do as I have year after year.  Boo.

With weeding pretty much every other day, you can build up a pretty good pile.  My guys finally loaded this all up into a yard waste back for curbside pickup.  It's still a pretty photo, though, huh?  I think so, anyway.

That's the tour!  As soon as I hit Publish on this post, I'm back out to the garden to feed the tomatoes and give everything a nice drink of water.  See you soon!


Back to life,
Christine

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Late July in My Garden

Late July, and time to pick some more tomatoes!  They produced late this year, but I was thankful for whatever I could get.

Water drops on sage.

My Garden Peach tomato plants--both of them--produced prolifically, and I have enjoyed searching for the fuzzy yellow heirloom tomatoes on the plants!  I want to try making yellow tomato salsa this year, using only these delicious tomatoes.

After picking tomatoes and waering everything, I took my deck shot.  You can tell it's morning, because the sun cast my shadow onto the strawberry plants.  :)

Time for a bug break.  One of the guys alerted me to the presence of this cicada on our front walk.

The next day, I tackled the garlic.  It had been ready before we left for vacation, but I didn't have any time.  It's hard on my back, to be on my hands and knees digging this stuff up, but boy, is it worth it!  I usually have garlic to last me an entire year.  I couldn't wait to see what this year's crop would look like.

One section dug up.

Fernando lent his assistance in the middle bed, digging things up with a shovel and helping me sift through the dirt for the fragrant bulbs hidden inside.

Two sections dug up.

Time for a tomato break.  I picked a few more, and went over to my "dirt pile" in my special place to see what the few plants my friend Becki had given me were doing.  I harvested several jalapenos and two tomatoes, and left one green pepper on the vine to grow some more.

Then it was back to the garlic bed, where I finished off the year's harvest.  Whew!

All the garlic was laid out in the sun to be cured!  What a great feeling.  As I sit here typing and looking at the picture, I notice that I need new mulch in my walkways...  A gardener's work is never done, it seems, until winter finally covers the beds with a blanket of snow and all is forgotten until spring's melt.


Back to life,
Christine

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Garlic Scape Pesto

Nothing says HELLO SUMMER! like garlic scape pesto!  This beautifully green, aromatic pesto has an incredible taste of garlic, and is incredibly easy to make.  A food processor or blender works perfectly with this recipe.  Since I don't have a blender attachment for my Bosch Universal Mixer, my food processor attachment does the trick.

Above and below, you can see the scapes--the tops of the garlic plant, with their curly stem and bulb head which eventually flower.  And those flowers are a good thing--they contain the seeds for next year's garlic plants!

If you think about it--you have one garlic plant, which produces one flower head, with maybe 8-12 seeds on that head.  Do you know what this means?  You don't need all those seeds for next year's garlic crop, unless you want an incredibly huge crop, that is.  You can use some of the tops--the scapes--before they flower, to make this delicious pesto.

Make sure you choose young tops--there should still be plenty of curl, and the bulb portion should still be white, not like the bulb above which has already started to flower.  June is usually the best time to harvest the curly scapes.

Although this is early July, my garlic plants were numerous enough that I was able to find enough scapes to make pesto.

The first batch I tried making this year was with a recipe that called for 20 fresh basil leaves.  Okay, I thought, as I picked off 20 leaves...  Whoa, was it garlicky!  I fiddled with the recipe a bit and came up with my own version, which still preserves the garlic flavor while evening out the taste of the other ingredients.

We put it on pizza, and also made flatbread (or communion bread, recipe to come) and spread it on that.  Oh, yeah, that was amazing!  Here's my recipe.

Garlic Scape Pesto
Yield:  about two cups, but we were gobbling it up before I measured, so...

1 cup garlic scapes, rinsed
2 cups packed fresh basil leaves (I used Medinette basil)
1/4 cup nuts (I used pine once, and cashews another time--walnuts also work well)
1/2 teaspoon sea salt
freshly ground black pepper to taste
1/2 cup evoo (extra-virgin olive oil)
1/4 cup freshly grated Parmesan cheese

Place the garlic scapes and basil in a food processor; pulse several times to cut everything up.  Add the nuts and pulse a few more times.  Add salt and pepper and pulse again.  Scrape down sides of processor or blender as needed (I use a blender and do it often before adding the oil)  Add evoo in a thin, steady stream to this mixture while blending, until mixture is your desired consistency and oil is fully incorporated.  Empty into a bowl and stir in Parmesan cheese.

Hide this stuff before your family knows you made it!  Because let me tell you--my guys were all over it!  I'd tell you the pesto will last in your fridge in a Mason jar for a week or two, but it really won't because it gets eaten way before that.  I hope you planted lots of basil!

 
Back to life,
Christine

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Early July in my Garden

Friday, July 3, and the beginning of Independence Day weekend, found me in my garden.  Of course, most summer mornings you'll find me in my garden, either walking the rows and checking everything out, or doing a little something here and there.

Here's the quick "before" image, though I was using Annie (camera #2) who didn't have the wide-angle lens on.

The strawberry plants are browning, which has been typical of them over the past several years.  I keep them watered, though, and weeded when needed.  Their strawberry production stopped abruptly at the end of June, but I had a huge harvest this year.

I garden barefoot.  :)

Time to assess the tomatoes.  Here are the four in Bed E (each bed has a letter corresponding to when we built them).  Two plants (in the front) are Summer Peach, and will yield sweet fuzzy yellow tomatoes; I planted these last year and loved them.  The two in the back are a new-to-me variety, Black Brandywine, and (obviously by the name) have a dark color.  I can't wait to try them!

These four are another heirloom variety, Paul Robeson (whoever he is...).  I loved them last year; they were a high yield plant with lots of juicy red medium-sized fruit.  The one plant on the left in the front in the below picture is dying--the leaves are spotted with black and starting to shrivel--and I'm not sure why.  There are some white flies around, but the other three plants are healthy.  I've never had a tomato plant die.

The three plants below are Early Girl, and though there are green tomatoes on them, they're not that early with their fruit.  We'll see how they grow as the days go by.

First, I fertilized all the tomato plants with an organic tomato fertilizer.  I forgot to fertilize in June, and whenever I do that, I go bonkers thinking I've ruined my crop for the year.  Yeah, I end up imagining the worst.  So, I'm trying to be mellow, since there are tons of yellow flowers on all the plants and except for the one dying Paul Robeson, everything seems healthy and thriving.

Below, you can see how tall the plants are getting.  These are indeterminate varieties, meaning they'll grow and grow and vine out and produce.  One trick I read about to halt the height of them is to snip off the tops, which I did today.  This also helps the plant focus its energy on producing fruit.  I'll let you now how it works out.

During my snipping and fertilizing, I heard a peck-peck-peck and a tap-tap-tap nearby.  I immediately knew what that was, and was happy to spot this female downy woodpecker looking for a snack in the partially dead tree on the other side of our back yard fence.

Back to work!  I checked one more time on my garlic; most of the scapes (those curly ends with the heads that will "flower") have matured too much for me to use them in cooking, but I found enough for one more recipe of garlic scape pesto.

Below, you can see one of the garlic scape heads starting to flower.  Once the stems of the garlic turn brown, I'll cut off these heads and save the largest ones, letting them dry in the sun, then breaking them apart into individual seeds.  I'll plant the seeds in late autumn this year for next year's garlic harvest.

Here's my small colander with the young garlic scapes I found for garlic scape pesto!

Once I finished these garden tasks, I watered everything.  I've been trying to work a little bit every day in the garden, so that my back doesn't get overworked and sore.  I'm still not as disciplined as I'd like--my schedule is all over the place this summer--but I'm working on it!

I grabbed Bella (camera #3) with the wide-angle lens to give you the final overview of the day's work, including my shadow.

Next up, garlic scape pesto!


Back to life,
Christine

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