Eighth of an Acre Bounty

I figured (more for my own edification than anything) it was about time for a garden update. It helps to have a status record that I can go back to for reference to boot. This’ll be heavy with pictures…

We had a good rain last night and early this morning. Everything needed it and it came just in time. We have had to use the hose a few times now since our rainbarrels were empty and it was pretty parched around here. The crocosmia has taken off, I always look forward to it blooming. I’d really like to get ahold of some of the red variety as well – anybody out there looking to trade? I have a ton of the orange

The lemon cucumbers are coming along nicely, we will have a harvestable one in a few days here. Worth noting – I have not had to water the tomato/cucumber bed at all. Everything seems to be doing well without any of the telltale bedraggled-wilty foliage. It would be great if we could go through this entire season without putting any water on the tomatoes – here’s hoping.

As noted below, the green beans are starting to gear up. There are hundreds of little pods just needing a few sunny days to be pickable. This is pretty exciting as I was concerned the plants were going to grow at all after I put them in. They truly do wait for warm weather, you can plant em in April but they will just sit there at 4 inches tall until the climate agrees with them. If we get a good enough harvest from these I hope to can a good portion of the harvest for winter eating.

We discovered that one of the volunteer tomatoes we allowed to straggle on in the main bed isn’t a cherry. We had assumed that the copious volunteers were all either sungold or sweet million cherries due to the abundance of unharvested fruit from last year. But no, I was thrilled to see that this looks like a volunteer Principe Borghese. I neglected to save any seed from this plant last year and found that it was excellent for drying and canning. This year I won’t make the same mistake – even if it only puts out two fruit, those seeds are being saved.

So far all of the broccoli and cabbage starts have survived the transplant, and the onslaught of White Cabbage Butterfly larvae (visible in the gnawed upon leaves). I mixed up a cayenne and garlic topical spray that was recommended for deterring the butterflys from laying their eggs on the plants, but I am not so convinced of it’s effectiveness. The other recommendation from what I have read is Bt. And although I know it is accepted as part of an organic regimen, I am reluctant to introduce it into a garden that – so far – has had little more than soap spray used as a foreign control agent. So for now i inspect the leaves regularly and crush any eggs or worms I find.

The gladiolus are in full bloom, making it apparent where I missed a bulb when attempting to relocate them at the end of last summer. It is kind of curious though – there is a riot of red and yellow plants in the front yard, and all the overlooked stragglers in the backyard are a variegated variety. Tends to suggest some sort of plant intelligence – or the variegated variety rooted much deeper than the others? Strange in either case.

This is our largest squash plant so far. I neglected to make a note of what variety of squash I planted on which side of the bed, but I am betting that this is one of the winter squash I started from seed this year. Either a Sugar Hubbard or a Pink Jumbo Bananna, due to the density of the stalk and the bulbing of female flowers even before pollination. We have a bit of blossom-end-rot on this plant, I had to clip off the first two fruit as they were toast. We are hoping it has more to do with the inconsistent watering than the soil quality. Hopefully we get something out of this that will store for the winter.

We also have our first summer squash just about ready for the picking. This plant is actually pretty small, but is still trying to do its business (and I appreciate it). I think I will save this for tomorrow to take its place in succotash. My parents are coming over for dinner and I’ve got yin yang beans, green beans, onions a couple ears of corn from the farmers market and this bad boy just dreaming of hopping in the pan.

In other news, our spoiled little girl actually started earning her keep around here this past week. Last summer we had a rat issue. Admittedly I planted the tomatoes rather densely and the rat thought it ShangriLa taking a bite here and a bite there of every variety I planted. The most frustrating thing was our lazy cats. We have three cats, and not a single one of them took an interest in actually mousing.

However, Nin has turned over a new leaf it seems. We noticed her stalking something in the garden about a week ago and soon saw her bounding after a mouse. It got away that time but later, when Gary was mowing the lawn he discovered the remains. Ever since she has been rather diligently settling herself in the garden to monitor. This isn’t that great for my cauliflower and broccoli starts as she inevitably plants her butt right on top of one, but I’ll sacrifice it if she can keep the produce patrolled this year.

Plant Something – No planting this week.

Harvest Something – Butter crunch lettuce (of course!), fennel, Leeks, spring onions, rosemary, basil, had our first meager harvest of pole beans – (pictured above), but they were damn tasty and more to come. Yin Yang beans are ready for fresh eating too.

Preserve Something – Put up 8 half pint jars of KitchenMage’s Blueberry Habanero Chutney using frozen berries from last year. It is blueberry season round here again and I need to make room in the freezer for fresher berries and a highly anticipated end-of -summer salmon delivery.

Prep Something – Not a whole lot on the preparation front, bought more canning lids

Cook Something – Baked two loaves of Skyway Sourdough – one for immediate consumption and one went in the freezer to keep the other loaf company. Cooked up a dinner of Arugula Sundried Tomato and Ricotta ravioli with Tomato sauce from last years garden for dinner with an old friend (super easy). Grilled Oysters from the farmers market with salad from the garden and a poached egg. Steak salad (well, I cooked the steak – that counts). Fried squash blossoms with ricotta, basil and leeks. Gumbo-ish soup with okra, rice, sausage, shrimp, carrots and onions. I used the lefover whey from ricotta making as part of the stock for the soup along with some shrimp and chicken stock. Currently working on some eggplant in the smoker – I am thinking smoked eggplant ravioli…and perhaps some baba ganouj.

Manage your reserves – Put a good dent in the blueberry reserve from the freezer, also consumed the last container of radish green soup leftover from this spring (yum, I think this is one of my new favorites – who knew radish greens could be so tasty). As a side note, the cider has cooled its fermentation and the blue room is tolerable once more. A couple more weeks and I will transfer to smaller containers for refrigeration and storage.

Work on Local Food Systems – Hit the Renton market this week and purchased more eggplant, okra, gypsy peppers, peaches, 2 dozen oysters, and cucumber.

I’ve been having a hell of a time getting my sourdough to rise in a decent amount of time. I am working with 100% wild yeasts, captured from the beautiful Skyway wind or already present in the starter flour. This recipe being my first real attempt at naturally leavened bread, at first I thought this was just the nature of wild yeast versus commercial yeast – they take a bit longer to do their business. But 8-10 hours for a first proof just ain’t gonna work around here, not when there is a second rise before baking and I am not so dedicated as to get up at 2 am to put the bread in the oven.

Along with the time issue I have not been very happy with the structure of the bread itself. It has great crumb, good tang and nice irregular holes. But on the second proof it seems to loose all internal structural integrity and spread out over the pan to resemble a giant bread pancake or pogacha (for those of you familiar with it). The taste is fine, but it is damn hard to make a sandwich with a slice of bread 10 inches long and only 2 inches high. At first I thought this was a water to flour ratio issue. I bumped up the flour in the recipe and gave that a shot with little change. The bread was denser (not necessarily what I was going for) but still slopped all over the place on the second proof. I remedied this somewhat by starting to put the dough in bread pans for the second rise. This give a bit more external structure to the dough so I get a bit of height, but it compromises the crust and that is half the point of sourdough, right?

So I got to thinking that perhaps my long proof time and pancake loaves were connected. Could it be that in the extended proof, the yeast were actually breaking down the glutens so much that structural integrity of the dough was lost? I needed a proof box. The original recipe called for a second proof at 100 degrees with humidity – and in the absence of a bakery’s equipment offered the solution of enclosing the baking pan in a plastic garbage bag, filled with air and closed tightly. They then instruct you to place it somewhere warm in the house between 80-100 degrees. Now I don’t know about you, but my house rarely gets above 70, and that is in the dead of summer.  Our old plaster walls do a great job of regulating the temperature so that it resembles a basement more than a home. Even in the winter with the heat going we have the thermostat set to 68 or 69. The assumption seems to be that all home bread bakers live in California or Florida.

Aside from lacking the space to put it, I am hardly in the financial position to go out and buy a proofing box for my bread experiments. So I started searching on methods for a DIY proofing box. I settled upon a heating pad, a large clear plastic storage container and a bowl of hot water.

And it worked! At least better than before. I placed the heating pad on the counter and put the lid of the box on top. Put the bread bowl and a bowl of boiling water in and covered the whole thing up with the updended container. The first proof still took a long time, but I think that is partly due to the fact that I didn’t realize the heating pad had an automatic off timer after 2 hours. The second proof only took around 1.5 hours – very much improved from previous attempts.

But the dough still slopped, not as bad as before but for the hand formed loaf I still only got a total height of around 2.5 inches. I will continue tweaking, but I don’t think I can reach that 100 degree goal with my little contraption here.

So we have a blue room, or at least we had a blue room. So named for Gary’s OCD tendencies when choosing paint colors this room sports 3 different shades of blue named November Skies, Downpour Blue and First Snowfall (see the theme yet?).  After all the paint was up on the walls I complained that it looked like we were expecting (not something on my list of priorities in this lifetime). Gary’s solution to this was to buy a lightswitch cover replica of Picasso’s Blue Nude, he says it makes all the difference in transforming it to a grown-up room, because look – theres a naked lady!

This is the smallest bedroom in our house and does triple duty holding our upright freezer, overflow bookcases, a queen bed for visitors and all of the other stuff we don’t have a place for elsewhere in the house.  Currently part of that overflow includes a 6.5 gallon bucket full of fermenting Hard Cider. It seemed the logical choice as it is one of the warmest rooms in the house and I wanted to keep the fermentation going. It is also not used so much that we would be tripping over the bucket every day. And it was great, for the first two days or so.

And now, oh god – the smell. It smells like a drunk tank in there, and not a cool, crisp smelling gin drunk – nooo this is a drunk that was earned on cheap malt liquor. This room is right next to my office, I work from home and do believe I am loaded by 10am just from the fumes. I’m a little concerned the smell is going to soak into the spare mattress we have in there, convincing our houseguests that they are sleeping in the hangover lair forever after.

As I mentioned below in my Independence Days challenge post, I have read that one can make a faux caper from Nasturtium seeds. I have grown nasturtiums every year since we got the house and with the abundant growth of this year’s variety I figured I would give it a shot. I worked from the brine recipe here, but I halved the recipe and omitted the celery seeds (because I don’t keep them stocked). After boiling and cooling the brine I put about two cups of nasturtium seeds into a quart jar and stuck it in the back of the fridge to percolate. We will see what the true result is in about 4 weeks. I am going to give them ample time to pickle before passing judgment.

I know next to nothing about making capers but I suspect these will not be anywhere remotely similar. With standard capers, from the taste I suspect it is a much simpler salt and water brine. The copious amounts of white wine vinegar, onion and lemon in this recipe I think are going to turn out a very different product. I already know the texture is going to be pretty far removed from capers, considering capers are immature flowers and these are seeds. Perhaps if I get supermotivated today I will go brave the aphids and pick another harvest of nasturtium seeds to brine in a simpler concoction for a taste testing in September.

Plant Something – No seed planting this week. Transplanted the broccoli and cauliflower starts to the garden. Other than that just monitoring the beets, chard and lima’s I put in last week and obsessing over where I am going to find room to put in the fall spinach, new lettuce, arugula and rutabaga. I got no room! Anyone have a few acres to spare? I promise I’ll take real good care of it and even give you some veg!

Harvest Something – Harvested Kohlrabi, butter crunch lettuce, spring onions, fennel, oregano and chives. I also harvested a pint jar worth of Nasturtium pods/seeds (still green). I have read in numerous places that one can make a “poor mans caper” from these. I put together a brine and plunked em in. This will probably be a post of its own shortly.

Preserve Something – No preserving this week either (except for the nasturtium seeds). I did a bunch of re-referencing a book I bought over the winter in preparation for attempting to try out lactic fermentation on some of the harvest this year. The book is fascinating, if a little short on specifics. It is mostly just a huge compilation of methods and recipes sent in on preserving food without canning or freezing. I recommend it (check back with me when I actually taste some of the experiments).
Preserving Food without Freezing or Canning: Traditional Techniques Using Salt, Oil, Sugar, Alcohol, Vinegar, Drying, Cold Storage, and Lactic Fermentation