Friday, June 29, 2007

Before



Well, we're going away on vacation to Banff for two weeks. So this is what the garden looks like the day before we leave. I can only imagine what it's going to look like when we come back! It's probably going to be a jungle of weeds. I'll post a comparison.
I'm going to miss having fresh salads right out of the garden each day, but then, I guess I can't complain since I'll be in the mountains. I expect that the lettuce will have gone to seed once we're back. If we're lucky, there will still be some yellow beans. We had the first ones for dinner yesterday, stir-fried with some peas and kale. Perhaps also the cherry tomatoes will be ripening and the cucumbers. I'm also going to miss inspecting the garden each morning and being amazed by how much it has grown in just one day. Seeing it two weeks later will be such a big jump.

Thursday, June 21, 2007

scapes, not snakes

So you learn something every day, especially these days when you have the internet. The thing I learned yesterday is that the curly tops of garlic plants are called "scapes" and they are edible. In fact, I already suspected they were edible since I've seen bunches of these curlicues in Chinatown. I just didn't know what they were since we've never grown garlic before.
About a week or so ago we started to notice that our garlic plants were starting to send up central stalks from the leaves. They shot up pretty quickly then started to curl around on themselves. From the internet research, I learnt that to encourage the plants to put all their energies into bulb development, farmers cut these tops off when they have done two full curls. This is done before the plant blooms. Then mostly farmers just compost these. What a waste!
The scapes can be used to make a mild pesto or they can be added to stirfries. So yesterday, we clipped the most curly examples (about 6) and added them to a stir-fry cut up in inch-long pieces. Wow. The texture was a great addition - much like a green bean - and the flavour was a wonderful surprise. Milder than garlic cloves but distinctively garlicky. Plus, the scapes look so lovely. They are my new favourites!

Tuesday, June 19, 2007

Sad Beets

For the past couple years, the beet crop has gotten more and more disappointing. The rows come up very sporadic and they don't grow to a very large size. Last year I thought it was caused by poor seeds, but this year we tried several different varieties and brands and yet they are still a poor showing. All the leafy greens are going really well but both the radishes, carrots and beets, all root-forming, are doing terrible. So Alex and I have concluded that we must be missing something in the soil that encourages root development, but we have yet to determine what that is. Nitrogen is good for leaf production, so we must have lots of that, as can be seen in the previous two postings.
Alex and I will have to research whether we need to add more phosphorus or potassium and how to go about doing it naturally.

Tuesday, June 12, 2007

Bok Choi


Last year we tried bok choi for the first time, with only two plants and were surprisingly pleased. I'd always found bok choi to just be bland and watery any time I've bought it in the store. But boy does it ever taste good fresh from the garden. It's crisp and sweet. The stalks taste a bit like celery but without that bitterness that can sometimes make celery unpleasant. I like to even eat it raw.
So this year we decided to grow a whole row of bok choi. It grows very quickly, but unfortunately something was eating it almost as quickly. I would find little holes in the leaves, which started to become very big holes. I sprayed the bok choi with a garlic-pepper spray, which I made from a "You Grow Girl" recipe. It didn't seem to be having much effect. I though perhaps it was slugs or snails (I've seen a lot of the latter this year) so I was going to put beer out.
Then last Thursday I went to the farmer's market. One of the farmers was selling nice bunches of bok choi. While they also had some holes, there were far fewer than on ours. So I asked him what were the culprits. He said that these type of greens get eaten by a small black beetle that comes out during the heat of mid-day. All he does is cover the bok chois with a white cloth similar to cheesecloth, which keeps out these beetles. So I did some research and discovered that you can get this cloth - called floating row cover - at Lee Valley Tools. Conveniently, I can walk to Lee Valley's downtown store from work so I got a 50' roll of floating row cover on Friday. After only a couple days of the bok choi (as well as the kale, collards and swiss chard) being covered, we've seen a marked difference in the amount of holes in the leaves. The floating row cover lets the sunshine and rain through, but is very finely woven so insects can't get through. We've secured it to the ground by using chopsticks as tent-pegs.
Last night we had our first meal made with bok choi. I made a stir-fry with bok choi, carrots, tofu, thai basil, coriander and peanuts. Yum.

Thursday, June 7, 2007

Super Salads

We're starting to get a few good sized salad greens. These are the greens I picked for last night's dinner.
The purple ones are the red giant mustards and the spiky ones are the Mizuna mustards. The speckled ones - though a little hard to see in the photo - are the forellenschluss, which have an delicate buttery taste contrasting nicely with the sharper mustards.

Since this isn't really enough for a full salad for two, I filled it out with some beautiful leaf lettuce from our local organic farmer's market. The giant verdurous head made me somewhat jealous - you could say I was green with envy! haha - but I must remember that the farmers have green houses and I don't.
I topped the salad with some spicy radish and mustard green sprouts and some local hothouse tomatoes that actually had some flavour. For sprouts, I just thin the radishes and mustards to prevent overcrowding and throw them into the mix. When tiny the sprouts are quite hot, more so than when full grown.

To go with the salad I made my famous (in our house) tuna melts, also with a few elements from the garden.














Here's the recipe:
-finely chopped onion
-finely chopped celery if you have (didn't this time)
-finely chopped radishes
-chives - from the garden
-dill, fennel and caraway fronds also from the garden
-a big spoonful of plain yogurt
-a little spoonful of dijon mustard
-fresh pepper
-sea salt
-can of tuna packed in water

Mix these all together than spread onto fresh bread. This time we had rosemary bread from the farmer's market, but usually I have homemade whole wheat or oatmeal. Bake at 375F for about 8 minutes.
Than put the slices of old cheddar cheese onto the open-face sandwiches. Bake for a couple more minutes, than turn the oven to grill and watch them carefully (500F) to really get the cheese nice and crispy but not burnt. Go turn off the fire alarm because about this point it always goes off needlessly.
Enjoy!