Snow Pea Snowstorm!

It's amazing what a zig zag fence about 8' long can produce in the way of snow peas!  Oregon Sugar Pod II is an excellent snow pea.  It doesn't get too tall - it's over the top of the 3' fence now, but won't get much taller - and the sturdy vines bear lots of 4" long sweet, crisp pods.  I know from experience that they freeze well, so we have lots of potential for the winter.

I went out yesterday morning and picked half a basket of pods having previously picked just 2 days before.  I'll need to pick again tomorrow!  It's time to start blanching and freezing snow peas again.  I immerse them in boiling water until they turn bright green.  Then I scoop them into a colander and run cold water over them to stop the cooking process.  They are then frozen in meal-sized portions in small zip lock baggies.

I need to find more ways to serve them - I guess I'm just not imaginative enough!  They're lovely raw in salads and we use them in stir fries and as a steamed vegetable.  Recently I tried out a new recipe with great success and we'll definitely be serving them like that again.  Here's what I did.

Snow Peas and Red Peppers

3 cups of snow peas, topped and tailed, strings removed if necessary
1 small red pepper, cut in thin strips
1 garlic clove, minced fine
1 Tbsp oil
salt and pepper to taste
1 Tbsp white wine vinegar

Stir fry the garlic in the oil until fragrant.  Add the snow peas, peppers and seasonings.  Cook until tender-crisp.  Add the vinegar, toss and serve.  4 portions.

Very simple and delicious!

Great Potato Salad

Two nights ago when making dinner, I cooked up a whole batch of potatoes.  The excess potatoes were tucked away in the fridge for potato salad.  I found this recipe a couple of years ago and now it's the only way I make potato salad.  It's a hit at potluck dinners and I always get asked for the recipe.

Today I'm going to a retirement tea for our Island's much-loved teacher.  There won't be time to make dinner when I get home, so a cold meal will be just the ticket.  Along with cold meat and a bean salad (the recipe for which came from a dear friend) we'll be having potato salad.  I always seem to mix it up a bit and tonight's recipe added chopped up green onions to the larger-than-nugget potatoes.  If you haven't got nugget potatoes, make sure the potatoes are of the waxy variety and cut them into bite-sized pieces.

Nugget Potato Salad with Grainy Dijon Mustard

2 lb nugget potatoes, quartered
2 large hard-boiled eggs, chopped
1 celery rib finely chopped
2 Tbsp chopped fresh chives
2/3 cup mayonnaise
2 Tbsp white wine vinegar
2 Tbsp grainy Dijon mustard
salt and freshly cracked pepper to taste

Scrub the potatoes well but do not peel.  Cut them into quarters, cover with cold water and boil until just tender.  Drain well and place in a bowl.

Mix in remaining ingredients.  Cool salad to room temperature.  Cover and chill well before servings.

Other herb options - dill, tarragon.

Dinner from the Garden

Tomorrow is the first day of summer - and today is the first day that most of the fixings came from the garden.  Not the chicken, of course, but the coating contains our own garlic and the herbs were picked from the pots on the deck.

Our first picking of snow peas, cooked tender crisp, and Seiglinde potatoes with just a smear of butter.  Absolutely delicious!

The coating for the chicken is really simple:  Panko crumbs, grated parmesan cheese, finely minced garlic and chopped fresh thyme, rosemary and parsley, all moistened with a little melted butter.  Smear the chicken pieces with Dijon mustard and then press into the coating.  Since the chicken pieces were thigh/leg combinations, I baked them for 45 minutes at 375F.

And to top it all off, Totem strawberries from the garden and vanilla ice cream!  What could be better?

New Potatoes!

Tonight's dinner comes to us from the garden.  Even the chicken is coated with a Panko crust that includes parsley, rosemary and thyme from the herb pots on the deck.

But potatoes - I just couldn't wait any longer.  The Sieglinde potatoes have had flowers for a little while now and I noticed that some of them are starting to drop - well, almost ready to drop, anyway!  I pulled up one of the plants and was quite frankly expecting pretty small babies.  To my surprise I harvested 9 potatoes from the one plant, each between 3 and 4 inches long and nearly a pound and a half in total weight.

One of the potatoes may be the seed potato as it's a little darker than the rest, but it's still in amazingly good shape when I would expect it to be a bit wizened and mushy.  The potatoes look very healthy - no marks or scabs at all. I've been keeping the potato beds well watered so I'm sure there won't be any cavities in the middle either.

So that most of the dinner comes from the garden, I picked a bunch of swiss chard and we'll have a salad with the ranch dressing from May's blog post - "First Homegrown Salad of 2014".  We like this dressing so much that we now always have a container of buttermilk in the fridge!

With the potatoes being such a success, I'm now eyeing the rhubarb bed for the future.  The rhubarb is just not doing well at all.  This bed is in the shelter of a massive Douglas fir tree and tends to be very dry even though I always seem to be watering it.  Rhubarb needs lots of moisture so perhaps this is not the best place for it.  Maybe we'll find another spot for the rhubarb (this will be the 4th move) and plant potatoes here.  Potatoes will still need water, but perhaps not as much as rhubarb.  Given what we now know about how scary non-organic potatoes can be, we'd sure like to produce more of our own.

Peppers

Yesterday I bought 3 more pepper plants bringing the total so far up to 9.  I say "so far" because there's no guarantee there won't be more.  I recently read an article which listed the 12 fruits and vegetables which should always be chosen organic.  It was a sobering read and peppers were on the list because of the frequency they're treated with pesticides.  And, of course, I need lots of peppers for the salsa!

The new peppers were planted at the front of the snow pea bed.  The radishes and gai lan have since been removed and the lettuces won't be long as they're starting to bolt.  I have lots more lettuce elsewhere in the garden to take their places.  Ooh!  Perhaps that'll make room for more peppers!

One of the new peppers - Boldog Hungarian Spice - has flowers well formed already and they're taking shape nicely on the Sweet Havana as well.

It's a good time to list for my own memory exactly what I have in the way of peppers so far so that I can be sure I have enough of what I need for salsa.

MILD - These peppers will mainly be used in salads and stir fries but I do need some for the salsa.  All are between 0 and 1,000 on the Scoville scale
Sweet Havana - cubanelle-type, goes from green to red
Big Daddy - green to yellow
Orange Blaze - green to orange

MEDIUM - The majority of the peppers I'll need for salsa will come from this category.
Boldog Hungarian Spice - red - can be dried and used for making paprika, couldn't find a rating
Garden Salsa - green to red, 1,000 to 5,000 on the Scoville scale
Jalapeño - green to red, 2,500 to 5,000 on the Scoville scale

HOT
Cayenne - red, 30,000 to 50,000 on the Scoville scale.

A word or two about the Scoville scale - it's a measurement of the heat in chiles and was invented by Wilbur Scoville in 1912.  It's a helpful thing for people like me without a lot of experience in the variation of heat in peppers.

Oh, and those 12 foods to eat only if they're organic?  Because of pesticides and herbicides routinely and frequently used on these crops - strawberries, peppers, spinach, cherries, peaches, nectarines, celery, apples, pears, grapes (specifically those from Chile), raspberries and potatoes.

June Adjustments

No garden ever behaves the way you want it to.  It's you that has to make the accommodation.  And my garden is no different.

My potato grow bag experiment was flagging badly.  The spot I'd chosen for them didn't get enough sunshine and the potatoes growth was spindly and very much smaller than potatoes planted in the full sun at the same time.  My husband and I carefully moved the bags to a much sunnier spot in front of the bed that has roses and rhubarb in it.  After only 3 days, I can already see a difference.

No matter how much room I think I have, there's never enough.  I therefore now have a collection of 6 large pots, each of which is home to a pepper plant.  A friend and I exchange plants every year.  I give her tomatoes and she gives me peppers (and this year a Japanese cucumber!)  In addition, I purchased 2 sweet pepper plants.  Unfortunately, I think I've mixed her labels up.  Once they've started bearing, however, there won't be any mystery.  Two are cayenne peppers and 2 are jalapeños.  The Japanese cucumber has been placed beside the pole that holds up our satellite dish and I'll wrap the post with fencing wire so the cucumber can grow vertically instead of horizontally.

Speaking of things containered, the Sweet Million tomato is living up to its name.  Each flower cluster is populated with an enormous number of buds.  I foresee lots of cherry tomatoes for salads!  This plant is in a half-barrel - and very happy, too!

I'm impressed with the rest of the tomatoes as well.  One Health Kick tomato is nicely forming fruit in the classic plum shape.  The plants are very sturdy - in fact all of the tomatoes in that bed are looking very happy.

I've already had a little foray into the Pacific Russet potato bed.  These plants have no flowers on them at all.  I understand that when the flowers start to fall, you have baby potatoes you can rob, but seeing no flowers here I decided to root in the soil and turned up a lovely little potato.  I've decided, however, to leave these spuds alone.  I'll let the tops die down and we'll keep these ones for the winter.

The Sieglinde potatoes, however, have got flowers well formed.  These ones will likely have the honour of gracing our table first.  Potato salads!  Yum!

Yesterday I put plastic netting over the strawberries.  Lovely big fat berries are starting to ripen and with one already falling prey to the birds, I decided I wasn't willing to share!

Thinning Apples

We have a number of fruit trees on our property and most of them are apple trees.  We have one each of Braeburn, Gravenstein and Jonathan, two Liberty and one tree which has 6 grafted varieties on one tree and is espaliered on wire.  Last year was a poor fruit year because of cold wet weather when the blossoms were out.  The blossoms may have been out, but the bees weren't!  This year, everything came together nicely resulting in what looks to be a bumper crop on all the apples except the Gravenstein, which tends to produce well every 2 years.  This is not its year!  Now that the apples have nicely formed, it's time to thin them.

I know that there shouldn't be more than one apple per spur.  In addition, a dear friend who grew up in Washington's apple country advised me to thin to a hand's width between apples.  Today I got a start on thinning.

Above, is a picture of unthinned apples on a Liberty tree.  The Liberty is one of our favourite apples.  They are small, but sweet, tart and crisp.  All in all, delicious!

Now I've gone in with a pair of sharp-pointed pruners and nipped off all the fruit that was small or deformed and left a hand's width between the remainder.  This allows the tree to devote all the nutrition and moisture to the remaining fruit, ensuring that you get the largest fruit possible.  On our stony, shallow soil, that's very important!

Three Sisters - Year 2, Planting Beans

Today has turned out to be a gorgeous hot day - in spite of the weatherman!  We were forecast to be cooler today and indeed, this morning was breezy and cool, but the wind died down and this afternoon it's lovely and warm.  As we're expecting at least a week of nice weather, time to plant the rest of the beans.

This year, I'm not planting nearly as many beans with the corn.  I have the Italian heritage beans planted in two spots elsewhere, but this year I'm planting Fortex beans in with the corn.  This is a bean I've grown every year except last year.  It produces an abundance of filet beans about 10" long which freeze well.  While the vines are vigorous, the leaves aren't nearly as large as on the Italian heritage beans and since I'm only planting 6 beans per bed, there shouldn't be nearly as much strain on the corn.

The corn germination has been quite disappointing.  As noted earlier in this blog, I usually start the corn in the potting shed and transplant it.  A mouse (or mice) destroyed all my Bodacious seedlings so I've had to plant directly outdoors and then didn't have enough corn seed left to completely plant the beds.  A final row was seeded with Peaches and Cream.  I now have 34 Bodacious plants and 15 Peaches and Cream.  As I'm not saving seeds, there should be no problem growing the two varieties together.

Bean seeds protected with a water bottle collar

To plant the beans, I pulled back the Remay cloth and seeded 6 Fortex beans per bed, 3 on each side.  Four of the seeds were protected with water bottle collars and 2 were planted without.  It's an experiment!  As I pushed each seed into the ground I could feel how hot the soil was - perfect! While planting the seeds, I discovered an extra butternut squash plant.  I had seeded 2 seeds per pot when I started them in the potting shed and once they were up, discarded the weaker one.  I guess a seed was late coming up!  One of the beds has a bare spot at a corner, so - waste not want not - I transplanted the little squash there.

Three Sisters beds with the transplanted squash seedling in the closest bed bottom right

Now the Three Sisters beds are complete.  For now it's just wait and watch.  For the next little while, I'll continue to cover the beds with Remay cloth at night and remove it during the day so that the soil can get nice and warm.  Next year these beds will be dismantled as the wood in these old beds is rotting.  We'll replace them with one big concrete raised bed but this time without a bottom as cedar roots don't seem to have reached this far - yet!

Quinoa Salad

Two years ago I grew quinoa (see September 2012) - a wonderful and versatile ancient grain.  It's easy to grow and beautiful as well, but treating it for consumption is another matter!  I discovered that it's extremely time-consuming to winnow out the grain and then process it in water to remove the soapy coating.  It was a great experiment, but one that won't be repeated in my garden.  I'll buy it instead!

Today we had a mountain of ham in the fridge and thought a cold supper would hit the spot on this lovely, warm day.  The potatoes aren't ready to dig up yet so potato salad was off the menu.  A quinoa salad,  however, would be just right.  Tomorrow is shopping day, so there wasn't a lot of stuff in the fridge and the garden is just starting to produce, so I made it with what I had on hand.

I cooked the quinoa up with chicken stock and chopped the vegetables fine.  It was tossed with an Asian dressing.

Easy Quinoa Salad for Two

1/2 cup of quinoa
1 cup water
1 chicken sachet

Bring the liquid to a boil, cover and simmer for 15 minutes.  Then turn off the heat and allow to steam for another 15 minutes.  Cool to room temperature, then add vegetables.  I had on hand:

Carrot, red pepper, spring onions, tomato, parsley - all diced.  Cilantro would be great, but I'm one of those people who don't like cilantro!

Dressing:  1 part each sesame oil, honey, soy sauce, 4 parts rice wine vinegar and a dash of hot sauce.  Shake up in a small jar then pour over salad and mix well.  Cool in the fridge for at least an hour.

Okay - only the parsley and onions came from my garden, but soon I'll be able to go there for everything!  And as for potato salad, I have a great one I'll share when the potatoes are ready to dig.

PS - my husband loved the salad!