Tangled Branches: Cultivated
happenings in and around my zone 6b gardens in northern Virginia and in central Virginia
Saturday, July 11, 2009
Harvest: July 10
Left to right: Tavera filet beans, Poona Kheera cucumber, Portofino zucchini, mixed Yin-Yang and Etna beans
We're getting into the high season for vegetables, and I'm still mostly thrilled with the harvest.
I didn't show the garlic I dug up yesterday because that was a disappointment. I had more Silver Rose garlic than any other variety and it appeared to be very healthy, but when I dug it I found most of the bulbs riddled with onion maggots. Not sure what is the best course of action - whether to leave them alone to dry or try to remove the infested parts. Also dug up the French Red shallots. They mostly look OK, with a few starting to rot. More rain expected tomorrow and/or Monday...
Labels: garlic, vegetables
Wednesday, March 11, 2009
Old Books: Vegetable Gardening for Amateurs
OK, I like old gardening books. You may have noticed. And I love Google Books for finding and digitizing them. Once upon a time, you had to have access to a good used bookstore or a library that doesn't discard books just because they're old. And you had to rely on serendipity to find items of interest (although I almost always find items of interest browsing at random). But now you can search the text with a few keystrokes.
Continuing my lettuce quest from the previous post, I found that 'Hanson' - the lettuce in the first excerpt - is still available. Further searching turned up a reference to it in Garden Steps.
I began to read the introduction and it sounded as if it was written yesterday instead of 1917.
Ever heard of the Edible Schoolyard Project? Alice Waters wasn't the first person to think of it.
The book goes on to give good and timeless advice, excepting the part about Sprays and Poisons. One thing I really like is that planting times are frequently given by phenological signs instead of calendar dates.
I'll try to remember that when planting the tomatoes this year.
Labels: books, lettuce, vegetables
Saturday, December 06, 2008
That's a Wrap
I think it's pretty much over until spring.
The vegetable garden, that is. I went out this morning and found that the kale and sorrel had been eaten. The radish foliage has been eaten several times. The carrot foliage is nibbled on. The ground was frozen hard. Wonder if the carrots are still any good? Dunno, because I'm not in the mood to chisel them out of the soil. The weather got so cold so fast this year. I just wasn't prepared.
But, hey, that should be good for the persimmons, right?
Weeellll.....I plucked the one in the lower right hand corner. The pulp was a mushy sticky mess - very sweet, but still had that puckery astringency near the seeds. Maybe I should plant a cultivated variety for myself and leave the wild ones to the wild critters. Speaking of, a rabbit and I startled each other while I was looking at the persimmons, and I blame it and its family for eating the kale and sorrel. The work was too neat and dainty for a deer to have done it.
So, what's left to talk about until spring? Birdwatching, stargazing, garden catalogs, and frosty moss-scapes.
Oh yeah, and complaining about the weather.
Labels: critters, mosses, persimmon, vegetables
Monday, September 01, 2008
Extreme Gardening
Greetings from the last day of my stay-at-home vacation! The weather is beautiful! It rained for 2 and half days and again Saturday night. I'm completely serious when I say this is beautiful weather. The garden looks happier than it has in weeks and I got a chance to catch up on some reading and basically just loll around the house.
As I leafed through a stack of magazines, I found a theme emerging - extreme gardening. I suppose I was primed to look for it. Early in the week we watched a video about competitive growers of giant pumpkins. This video, Lords of the Gourd, is worth seeing even if you don't think you're interested in enormous cucurbits. The focus was on the human drama of competition - the motivations and emotions - wrapped in a humorous package. Even the spouse enjoyed it and he usually has little patience with films that don't feature car chases or espionage.
I picked up the September issue of Saveur and browsed the cover story on watermelon, where I learned that Hope, Arkansas (of all places) is the Giant Watermelon Capital of the World. Some neat old pictures of the festival are here (scroll down). There must be something about cucurbits that inspires competition. But then I discovered that there's an entire forum on GardenWeb devoted to Giant Vegetables, including okra, sweet potatoes, tall amaranths, and I don't know what all else. Doesn't appear to get much traffic though. Probably the growers of giant vegetables are all specialists and only hang out in specialist forums like bigpumpkins.com.
Then there's the chile peppers. You may have noticed the huge interest this year in growing Bhut Jolokia (the spouse says Bhut means ghost in Hindi and Jolokia is the name some use for chile peppers). Bhut Jolokia is the world's hottest pepper as measured by the Chile Pepper Institute at New Mexico State. Dr. Bosland of the Chile Pepper Institute wrote up some tips for growing it in the March 2008 issue of Chile Pepper magazine. If you want to know more about how this pepper became a global sensation, there's a looooong article at fiery-foods.com that covers just about everything. I'm not growing this pepper, but Ki, Layanee, and Miles are. Anybody else?
Well, if I have an extremely long life I should still have plenty of time to grow extreme vegetables. Sunset magazine did a feature in July on California centenarians, and at least some of them attributed their longevity to gardening. The article prompted letters to the editor (published in the September issue) with more anecdotal evidence supporting the theory.
We've been extremely lazy in the garden during our stay-at-home vacation. The most strenuous thing I've done is pick some big tomatoes. I guess I better get back to work if I want to live to be 100.
Labels: magazines, vacation, vegetables
Saturday, August 09, 2008
Midpoint of Summer
My annual post about the beginning of autumn is past due. I started writing this on Thursday, the astronomical halfway point between the summer solstice and the autumnal equinox, and traditionally the start of autumn in Europe and northern Asia. Or is it the midpoint of summer? That's what Wednesday's entry in Baer's Almanac said. I suppose it's a half-empty/half-full sort of judgement.
It's not hard to find signs of autumn, if that's what you're looking for. The black gum (Nyssa sylvatica) trees start to take on their fall colors very early (especially if they're drought-stressed?). 
Goldenrod started blooming several weeks ago, but I notice more and more every day.
There are flower buds visible on my 'Purple Dome' asters.
I saw a huge patch of pale pink Lycoris in somebody's yard in central Virginia last weekend.
A gust of wind brought down a shower of green acorns yesterday.
However, since starting vegetable gardening in earnest last year, what's really on my mind at this season is tomatoes and peppers. Especially peppers.
This year the freezer will be well-stocked with enough chile peppers to last until next August.
Labels: astronomy, autumn, peppers, seasons, vegetables
Wednesday, October 10, 2007
Tasting Notes: Tomatoes
Tomatoes kill brain cells. How else to explain the fact that I started this post at the end of August, and now can't remember most of what I intended to write? We've been eating a lot of tomatoes - that must be it.
So then, this is an abbreviated summary of the tomatoes I grew this year, in order of size:
Ildi - A yellow pear tomato. It was definitely the most prolific tomato I grew. That's probably the nicest thing I can say about it - the skin was unpleasantly tough and the flavor was average. While I was cleaning up the garden, I tossed some of these on the ground and left them there for a few days and they were untouched by any wild critters. What does that tell you? I won't grow this one again.
Black Cherry - A round cherry tomato of middling size, it ripens to those green/red/purple colors that usually mean good flavor (see Black Russian below). That flavor was was I was after when I bought the seeds. Unfortunately, I didn't find that flavor, and I wouldn't grow this one again.
Thai Pink - A small plum tomato, rather firm when ripe, but juicy rather than meaty. I wasn't all that keen on this one until I found a recipe that suited it exactly - Tomatoes in Spicy Yogurt Sauce - which calls for whole peeled tomatoes. I'm not sure what else 'Thai Pink' is good for, but the taste and size are just perfect in that dish. I may grow it again just for that - we really liked the recipe. On the other hand, I think a tomato like 'Juliet' would work just as well. And I've never grown 'Juliet', so I may rotate that one in and 'Thai Pink' out.
Bonito Ojo - A small round tomato (> golf ball, < tennis ball). A huge quantity of fruit ripened simultaneously early in the season. The flavor was very tart, good for salsa, but I don't need/want that many small tomatoes all at once. It was also prone to cracking. I probably won't grow it again.
Eva Purple Ball - Eva is the beauty contest winner - almost no cracking or blemishes; nice sized (> baseball, < softball) with pink skin over red flesh. The flavor is only OK. If you must have perfect-looking tomatoes, this is a good choice. If you want perfect-tasting tomatoes...well, I think there are better ones.
Striped Roman - A long, thick 'Roma' type; very meaty. It has a marvelous sweet-tart flavor tending toward the tart side. This has been a favorite for several years now, and I expect I'll be growing it as long as I'm gardening.
Black Russian - A large green/purple/brown/dark red tomato. This is my favorite for flavor - a deep, dark, almost smoky, essence of tomato flavor. The downside is the disappointment at how many I lost to cracking and rotting. I'll grow this again next year, but if I could find a variety with the same flavor and less cracking, I'd evict 'Black Russian'.
Cherokee Purple - A large pink/purple beefsteak type tomato. The flavor is notably sweet; I was expecting something more like Black Russian, but it's not at all like that - much sweeter. This will probably be invited back next year, but if I end up with too long a list of new ones to try, then maybe not.
Kellogg's Breakfast - This wins the prize for size; the yellow-orange tomatoes are very large, and incidentally, this was the first of the large ones to ripen. The flavor is surprising for a yellow tomato - quite flavorful and sweet; I'm wondering how similar this is to Persimmon, which some other bloggers have written about this year. I'll grow this one again next year.
Updated 5:15 pm with link to recipe for Tomatoes in Spicy Yogurt Sauce.
Labels: potager, tomatoes, vegetables
Sunday, August 05, 2007
Tomatoes!
Need I say more?
Labels: potager, tomatoes, vegetables
Tuesday, July 17, 2007
Cooking from the Garden
Now that the garden is starting to produce some produce, I'm going to try to post a few things on my poor neglected food blog.
Last weekend I harvested the first chile peppers. I was hoping for more heat from the Chile Grandes and the Aci Sivris. I'm counting on the Serranos for salsa and Indian food, but they're just starting to form fruit. If they're not hot, I'll be very disappointed.
Labels: chiles, potager, vegetables
Friday, May 11, 2007
Breaking New Ground
For 20 years I've wanted a vegetable garden, and now that I have space for one, I'm turning it into a potager. Do you think I've been living in DC too long?
When we bought the place in the country, one of the things we wanted from it was a place to grow vegetables. 
We had grand visions of sweet corn, tomatoes, beans, squash, peas, lettuce, carrots, potatoes, eggplant, peppers, okra, onions, garlic, spinach and on and on and on. And we may still do that someday, but for right now, we just don't have the time. I also had grand visions of a long sweep of shrubbery and trees bordered by every flower you can imagine. Well. No, I don't think there's going to be time for that either. So I scaled things back a bit and ended up with this manageable plot.
The idea of the potager seems to be part of the gardening zeitgeist. 129,000 hits on Google for "potager" for pages updated in the last 3 months. Is it no longer good enough to plant a few rows of vegetables out back - now it has to be pretty? Or maybe we're just saying potager instead of vegetable patch because it sounds more upscale? Or has the publishing herd just latched onto a new topic? I don't know. Something to ponder while I plant. And it's ironic, because I've been planting my tomatoes together with ornamentals for a couple of years now, trying to get them into the sun while hiding them from the homeowners' association. Now I don't have to do it and I'm doing it anyway.
So I've got the geometric layout and started my tomatoes, eggplant, herbs, y muchos chiles. Good so far, but where are the ornamentals? They're going to be tucked in here and there in any leftover space. OK, where are the vertical elements? Maybe the deer, munching the whole thing to the gound?
Labels: CeVA, potager, vegetables
