In the Garden

There are new and interesting (to me anyway) things in the Potager this week.
We are continuing our hot days, big rainstorm routine and it is making the garden grow incredibly fast!

The rain gauge doubled as a japanese beetle trap today! That's fine with me!








The Mammoth Sunflowers are living up to their name. They are huge!

When they finally bloom, I'll only be able to see them from the second story window!

I am hoping to collect seeds to eat. I know you have to wrap the seed head in something so the birds don't eat them all.

I'm gonna need a bigger ladder!

Some of the Freckles lettuce has bolted. I am going to try to collect seeds from it.
This was my favorite lettuce this year.
We are still eating the ones that haven't bolted.
I am amazed how heat tolerant this lettuce is.
The leaves seem to be a bit thicker, but they are still tender and tasty.

I have about three spinach plants that I hadn't picked yet. I always seem to notice them after dinner and say, tomorrow, but then eat something else the next day. Poor planning on my part.
I guess ithey're bolting, but instead of getting flowers on the top , it's getting broccoli looking like things up and down the stalk! That's different.

I need to pick these and saute the leaves for dinner.

I've never grown onion before. Are they supposed to form on top of the soil like that?

Look at the size of this Black Krim tomato! And no bottom rot! I can't wait to eat this guy!
No signs of turning red yet.

This looks like it will be my first White Scallop Squash. I've had other little ones, but they all had blossom end rot. This guy looks pretty healthy!

And I love the little curly-cues this plant makes!

If you look past the leaves, you'll see two (there are actually three) Eight-Ball Squash.
These were my favorite new vegetable last year.
They get eaten when small so they are only a few days away from dinner!
Stuffed squash - yummy!

The spaghetti squash plant looks healthy, but there is the tell-tale damage along it's stem that a Squash Vine Borer may have made a home inside the stem. I will clean it out and bury the damaged part. Hopefully the rest of the plant will send down roots and survive the onslaught.

We are eating cucumbers already. They are so wonderful this time of year - a taste of summer. I remember having so many by the end of last summer that I could not keep up with them. But at this time of the season we anxiously watch each one, anticipating being able to harvest a true "summer" vegetable.

Our church has Vacation Bible School this week, so the garden may get ignored a bit. I'll have to make an effort to get up extra early to get the gardening done before work.

Stormy Weather

Every day this week as I get ready to leave work, the skies darken and thunder rumbles. Some nights I make it home before the skies open, and some nights I don't. It was raining tonight as I arrived home, but as the evening wore on it intensified. By 7:30 it was still pouring and the Potager was flooding. I wanted to see how much rain we had gotten, but I couldn't get to the rain gauge! I ran out with an umbrella to get some pictures and got thoroughly soaked. The water on the concrete pad of the back garage was up to my ankles! Keep in mind as you view these - we have sandy soil. Water usually runs right through our soil. (It was getting late, but using the flash only caught the heavy rain, so I apologize for the dark photos.)

That's a lot of rain!

Edited to add these photos from the next day: 

Almost 6 inches of rain

Flooding mess

Foodie Friday - Lemon Thyme Bars

I was watching the food network and during a commercial break Giada De Laurentis showed how to make Lemon Thyme Bars. I had all the ingredients and decided to make it with my Daughter-in-Law.

The recipe can be found here: Lemon Thyme Bars.

First we made a trip to to Perennial Herb Garden to pick Thyme. We separated the leaves from the stems and then chopped. We needed 2 Tablespoons. We had one.
So we repeated the whole thing over again.

I let my daughter-in-law be the hand model. She lives in the city and does not garden, so her hands look nicer than mine.
We combined 1 cup of flour, the thyme and 1/2 tsp. salt.

Then we beat 1 stick of unsalted butter with 1/2 cup powdered sugar until it was light and fluffy.

To that we added 2 Tablespoons of Lemon Juice and 1/2 tsp. vanilla and beat that with the butter and sugar.

We turned the mixture on low and gradually added the flour/thyme mixture.

My daughter-in-law pressed it into a greased and floured dish.
The dish was supposed to be 8 x 8, Mine was 10 x 10. That explains a lot about how these turned out.

After pressing we baked them for about 30 minutes. I say "about" because I forgot to turn on the timer. This was about the time we discovered the Black Widow Spider (featured in my last post).

We baked it until it was golden and looked set.
We don't know how long that was.

It seemed longer than 30 minutes though.

As you can see in this shot, there was too much pan and not enough dough.  And what we ended up with was much thinner than Giada's looked.

But pressing onward, we mixed 2 Tablespoons of lemon juice with 1/2 cup of powdered sugar until smooth and spread it over the Lemon Thyme Bars. Then we let it sit for a half hour to firm up.

In the end, in spite of the mistakes, these were pretty tasty. I never really thought of using an herb like Thyme in a baked good.

We gave them two thumbs up, but will look for an 8 x 8 pan if we decide to make them again!

Along came a Spider

Fourth of July - I find my husband, son and daughter-in-law standing near my rain barrel looking at something. Looking at this:

This is a black widow spider. I know they live around here. I've seen them in the yard before. But never where I live in the yard. Never where I could have just reached down to pull a weed and been bitten by this:

Fact: Black Widow is the most venomous spider in North America. The venom is 15 times more dangerous than rattlesnake venom. (Oh, yeah, we have them around here too. In New Jersey.)
But of course, humans are not on either's food chain and they will only bite you if you do something stupid (like trying to move a rattlesnake off a road) or if you do not see them when reaching into a confined space, like next to a rain barrel.
I suggested we relocate the spider, but hubs said no.  Both hubs and I love spiders. They eat bad insects and are fascinating. I wasn't suggesting killing it, just finding another part of the yard for it to live in. One that I don't ever go in. But I was out voted and the spider stayed.
Fact: Only female black widow spiders are venomous.
I looked for the spider the next day before I watered my flowers with water from the rain barrel. The web was there, the spider wasn't. But then I saw this:

The "this" I was looking at was that round egg sack in the upper left hand side.
Fact: Female black widow spiders lay about 300 to 400 eggs per cocoon.
This is where I draw the line. One black widow by the rain barrel is one thing - but 300 to 400 of her offspring hiding around my patio - no thank you.
I went to get a broom to get rid of the web and the egg sack.
Fact: Black Widow spider silk is one of the strongest spider silks in the world. They are researching using it to make bullet proof vests. 
Nevertheless, a few gentle swipes with the broom and the web and everything in it was knocked down.
I looked at the broom - no egg case. Oh no, did I just push it up into the siding?
I got my Swiffer Duster with the long handle that bends and wrapped a regular floor swiffer cloth around it with a rubber band and jabbed and swished all around the edge of the siding.

That's probably as clean as this area's ever been. But I still saw no egg sack. So it either fell into all that litter down on the ground behind the rain barrel and will hatch hundreds of little spiders, or it got shoved up into the siding further.  I don't know. 
Fact: Contrary to popular belief, the Black Widow Spider usually does not eat the male after mating. The spiderlings, when hatched, will eat each other. 
I got a can of Raid and throughly doused the whole area. Mini venomous cannibals are not desirable.
Ah, but what about the original black widow spider? Why didn't she appear to defend her nest? I was hoping it was like Charlotte's Web - that she laid her eggs and then died.
Fact: Black Widow spiders lay four cocoons a summer. They live 1 1/2 years.
So no, she didn't die (unless the Raid got her). She was just hiding somewhere. I am just hoping she didn't take her egg sack with her when I started attacking her web.
Fact: Black Widow Spiders are nocturnal hunters.

I went out in the dark and snapped this photo with my flash. I don't see any sign of her. But she's there. Somewhere. I'm going to have to be a lot more careful from now on. 
Fact: People rarely die from a Black Widow spider bite.
But one should seek immediate medical treatment if bitten. I think any spider bite that necessitates a trip to the ER at $100.00 minimum is to be avoided.


I'm linking this up to An Oregon Cottage for . Stop in and visit with gardeners from all over the country to see what's growing, including Jami's Romanesco Cauliflower. That's something I've never seen before.

Green Tomatoes and Rain

We are having interesting weather. Hot humid days then big storms. I like having rain water the garden - it always does a better job than me.

But when I say it rains a lot, I mean a lot!

This was just from today. 6 inches in one day is plenty.

Especially when we got 2 inches a few days ago.

I'm not complaining though.

The rain and the lightening are helping the tomatoes. There are so many green tomatoes and they all seem to grow bigger after each storm.

Black Krim

Juliet

Amish Paste

Super Sweet 100

Moreton

Ramapo

A few more weeks, a few more rain storms and we should be in tomato nirvana. Ummm.

Foodie Friday - Rosemary, Thyme and Turnips

I have decided to share  what I'm cooking from the garden on Friday. On the menu today is Lemon-Rosemary Grilled Chicken with Turnip Thyme Puree.
Let's start with the chicken. In full disclosure I used an Ina Garten recipe from the food network. You can get the whole recipe here: Ina Garten's Recipe.

This is my attempt at a butterflied chicken. Ina removed all the bones. First variation. I actually like bones in the chicken. They add flavor. So all I did was remove the backbone and try to make the chicken flat. This chicken wasn't having any of that. It never got really flat. (By the way - this is an organic chicken - happy chickens make happy dinners. )

I chopped up about 1/4 cup rosemary from the garden and kept two sprigs whole, chopped three cloves of garlic, zested 1 tsp. lemon peel and then squeezed out about 1 1/2 tablespoons of lemon juice.

These were added to a small bowl and mixed with salt, pepper and olive oil to make a paste. The paste was rubbed under the skin of the chicken and also on the outside of the skin. (It smelled wonderful!)

The remaining lemon was sliced and put on the non-skin side of the chicken along with the two sprigs of rosemary. The whole thing was wrapped in plastic and put in the refrigerator to marinate for about an hour.

Because it wasn't very flat, I placed my bacon press on top of it hoping to compress it a bit.

While it was marinating I was able to cleanup the kitchen. Nice.

The chicken was placed on the grill, skin side down and hubs took over. (I did have him put the bacon press on the chicken while it cooked to try to flatten it more. )

I went in and prepared the turnips.

These are the last of the turnips from the Potager. They were pretty small. The recipe I am using is a Tyler Florence recipe, also from the Food Network, that can be found here: Tyler Florence's Recipe.
His recipe says 3 large turnips. I had 7 small to really, really small turnips. I figured I did not have as many turnips as he would have had, so I stopped measuring and just eye-balled stuff.

I peeled and chopped the turnips.

I put them in a 2 quart saucepan, added milk to cover (I never have whole milk in the house, but I did have organic 2% milk, so I used that), 1 smashed clove of garlic and added a handful of thyme from the garden.
The instructions were to keep the heat at medium and bring to a gentle simmer until the turnips are tender. But I went outside to look at the garden and the milk was boiling over when I got back in. Oops.

In any case, the turnips were eventually soft enough for a paring knife tip to go through with no resistance, so I drained them into a bowl, removed the thyme, then added the turnips back to the pot with a little bit of milk, salt and pepper and a bit of butter (Tyler Florence's recipe calls for a whole stick of butter. I have arteries to think about. I used about a teaspoon and it was fine.)
Then, using my favorite tool - the immersion blender, I pureed the turnips, adding milk as I felt it was needed from the bowl.

About this time, the chicken was done.

I wish there was a way for you to smell this wonderful chicken. And I wish I knew how to photograph food better, because in spite of what it looks like here, this chicken was beautiful!

The chicken was moist and so flavorful. The rosemary was perfectly balanced by the lemon, without  overpowering the chicken itself. The turnips were really good. Hubs looked at them (I may have added a bit too much milk) and said no thanks, then he tried them and liked them. He thought they would be a good substitute for potatoes. The thyme flavor was in the background, but not overwhelming. It was a good thing they were filling - I could have eaten the whole pot!  I also served leftover carrots and broccoli from the Potager to round out our meal.
These will definitely appear on our dinner table again this summer. A very delicious way to cook both chicken and turnips using fresh herbs from the garden!