Plants I'm Growing: Garden produce

The garden is finally starting to produce. We got a late start this year because I was away in Japan in April – just when we normally set out starts and plant seeds – and this has been an extraordinarily cool summer so far. Something I read suggested  Northern California has been having its coolest summer since some time in the 1980s. Normally, the grapes have fully taken on color by now, but veraison has barely started. Harvest will be late.  

However, we're still getting lettuce and spinach, and we're now getting green beans, arugula, mustard greens, zucchini, other squash, poblano peppers, Fresno peppers, and green peppers. The first tomatoes have been a small variety called "Jaune Flamme" (or "yellow flame") that I've not grown before. It's not a cherry tomato but it's not a full-sized tomato either. It's one of those hat has fruit about the size of a golf ball. It's meaty and very flavorful. I'll look for it again in the future. 

Food I'm Eating: Creamy zucchini soup for summer

 If you find yourself with an oversized zucchini that somehow got missed when picking fruits and vegetables from your summer garden, or even if you simply have too many normal-sized zucchini or other summer squash, here's a good alternative to zucchini bread as an excess zucchini mop (adapted from Tamar Adler's excellent "The Everlasting Meal Cookbook," which I recommend – it's a cookbook you'll actually use.

Ingredients (in my version) are: zucchini, an onion, king trumpet (or other) mushrooms, a peeled potato, olive oil and/or butter, vegetable stock, finely chopped fresh dill, salt, and half and half. 

In an appropriately sized soup pot, heat the oil/butter (I like to use a little of each) and add the onion, chopped with a little salt. Stir as the onion cooks until it is tender and beginning to show a hint of color (about 10 minutes). At the same time, in a separate pan, sauté the mushrooms until golden. Next add the zucchini and potato, chopped, but not too finely, to the soup pot, add the cooked mushrooms, and then add the vegetable stock (about a quart, more or less, depending on how much zucchini, potato, and mushroom you have). Bring to a boil and then reduce the heat to a simmer and cook until the vegetables are tender (another 15-20 minutes). Turn off the heat and let the pot rest until the liquid has cooled a little. Add the dill. At this stage, the soup can be put in a blender to smooth into a puree, but I like it just as it is with the coarsely chopped vegetable and the mushrooms in pieces. Add the half and half (about half a cup; the original recipe calls for heavy cream, but half and half makes it plenty creamy in my experience). Adjust salt to taste. Enjoy hot – or enjoy it cold later. It's delicious either way. 

Plants I'm Growing: Summer vegetables

Things are beginning to pick up in the garden. Recently harvested zucchini, yellow squash, Japanese cucumbers, slicing cucumbers, lemon cucumbers, lettuce, and garlic. Soon tomatoes will start coming and eggplants are coming along, too.

Food I'm Eating: Zucchini

It's that time of year--when you remember that even one or two zucchini plants would have been enough to supply yourselves and several neighbors with squash for the summer. You planted six seeds. You meant to thin them out after they sprouted, but they looked so green and vigorous when they came up that you couldn't bear to pluck even one and ended up transplanting the extras and now the zucchini come in waves, one after another, like a parade of tropical storms. Picking them young and small helps, but somehow a few always get missed and one morning you find one the size of your arm. One afternoon, under a low leaf, you uncover a zucchini  that's been swelling there silently for weeks and now looks like a green zeppelin....

The trick really is to pick them small. That's when they are at their tastiest and picking them small, you don't end up with so much fruit that you become sick of seeing it. 

Another important tool for summer zucchini disposal is good recipes. I first encountered this simple dish at the  Moose Café (now defunct) in Mendocino. It's now a regular in my household. 

Try slicing raw Zucchini very, very thin and sprinkling the slices with grated Gorgonzola, crushed walnuts, and black pepper before drizzling them with a high-quality olive oil. Makes a quick, easy, delicious summer salad. And it uses up zucchini--at least a little bit of zucchini. 

Organic Fertilizer Bounty

Thanks to an amazing homemade organic fertilizer I learned about from a neighbor (who attributes it to a farmer in Wyoming with a YouTube video), our garden this year is producing an overwhelming amount of food. Summer squash, zucchini, Japanese turnips, green beans, bell peppers, jalapeño peppers, cayenne peppers, Fresno peppers, Italian horn peppers, lemon cucumbers, peaches..... Soon eggplant and tomatoes will start coming as well.

Very easy to make this fertilizer, which has only three ingredients: Alfalfa pellets, blackstrap molasses, and fish emulsion. Feed stores generally have the pellets. A big bag will last all year. Any good garden store will have the fish emulsion (should be marked 5-1-1 or very close to that). The molasses (unsulphured) is available online. The one-gallon jug of the molasses and the fish emulsion I bought are not even half empty and I started this regimen in April.

Put one pound of the pellets in the bottom of a five-gallon bucket (I've found that a one-liter measure filled to the brim with pellets is about a pound). Put about a gallon of water in and let the pellets soak up the water and swell up. There should be enough water that you're left with a soupy mixture with liquid, not mush. After a few hours, or overnight, add 150ml each of the fish emulsion and the blackstrap molasses (about 2l3 of a cup maybe. Measurements don't have to be exact). Stir well and let sit for a couple of hours.

This I dilute again for use, putting one gallon of the mixture into a five-gallon watering can--so, diluting 1:4. It sounds more complicated than it is. Once you've done it a couple of times, it's quite easy. Apply once or twice a week. As plants start to flower and produce fruit, I add an organic guano-based 0-4-3 fertilizer to the mix called HDK (25ml/five gallons) easily available from the cannabis hydroponics stores if you live in a cannabis-legal state. This all-organic mixture works wonders!