What are you eating from your garden today?

hammock gal wrote:

Scorpio Rising wrote:Yum and yum!  So glad for you sanderson!  Garden cukes are the bomb!

They really are the bomb. Don't think I'd ever had a cuke directly from the garden before and I was blown over by the difference. So crispy, so sweet! I'm off to check out Sanderson's Munchers for next year.

YES!!! No bitterness, no thick skin...amazing once you take the "shippability" out of the equation!

More asparagus beans! I don't know if they're really the best beans on the planet or if it's all in my head cuz they're so much fun. (Lousy pic but you get the idea.)

CN, those beans are wild! Do they taste like string beans?

LOOOOOOOOOK what I found today!!! My first zucchini!!! Yes, it's itty bitty, but I had to pick it or risk losing sight of it in the tomato jungle. Maybe this is a sign of more to come? The cherry tomatoes are just unstoppable. I probably eat as many off the vine as ever make it into the house.  Tomorrow is the first of September and I'm already dreading the thought that soon I won't be able to go out the back door and pick veggies to eat from my own garden. I have loved this first year of SF gardening, and I'm looking forward to an even better plan next spring.

 zucchini!!!
They are so hard to grow around here because of SVB!  Maybe the tomato forest helped confuse the moth.  It's worth me thinking about.

hammock gal wrote:CN, those beans are wild! Do they taste like string beans?

Yup. Yummy and no strings when they're young. I'm so in love with these I haven't tried any others, so I can't compare. There are several varieties, sometimes called "yard long" beans, too. I've also let some go to seed and planted the results. That works well, too.

hammock gal wrote:CN, those beans are wild! Do they taste like string beans?

LOOOOOOOOOK what I found today!!! My first zucchini!!! Yes, it's itty bitty, but I had to pick it or risk losing sight of it in the tomato jungle. Maybe this is a sign of more to come? The cherry tomatoes are just unstoppable. I probably eat as many off the vine as ever make it into the house.  Tomorrow is the first of September and I'm already dreading the thought that soon I won't be able to go out the back door and pick veggies to eat from my own garden. I have loved this first year of SF gardening, and I'm looking forward to an even better plan next spring.

Looks to me like your first year has been a great success so far.

brianj555 wrote:

hammock gal wrote:CN, those beans are wild! Do they taste like string beans?

LOOOOOOOOOK what I found today!!! My first zucchini!!! Yes, it's itty bitty, but I had to pick it or risk losing sight of it in the tomato jungle. Maybe this is a sign of more to come? The cherry tomatoes are just unstoppable. I probably eat as many off the vine as ever make it into the house.  Tomorrow is the first of September and I'm already dreading the thought that soon I won't be able to go out the back door and pick veggies to eat from my own garden. I have loved this first year of SF gardening, and I'm looking forward to an even better plan next spring.

Looks to me like your first year has been a great success so far.

There have been more successes than failures. But there have been failures. The first year with a SFG is definitely a learning experience. Mistakes are great teachers!

Yep.  I am beginning to figure out some of the mistakes I have made now.   See my post on growing corn to see one of many  you said you picked the zucchini, so you wouldn't loose it:shock:.  That's got to be one of those good problems.  Do you have any recent pics of your garden you could post?

brianj555 wrote:Yep.  I am beginning to figure out some of the mistakes I have made now.   See my post on growing corn to see one of many  you said you picked the zucchini, so you wouldn't loose it:shock:.  That's got to be one of those good problems.  Do you have any recent pics of your garden you could post?

Wellllll, it's not that great a problem when your SFG is so overgrown that you can't see into the middle of it, to pick what may be there. I feel like an explorer diving into the jungle, parting growth and peering in, trying to see around all the giant leaves and vines. I've missed some tomatoes and they've rotted on the vine. That kills me. So I will do better next year. Here is a pic from about a month ago, it's thicker now. It's almost scary. I'll try to get another pic tomorrow.

I decided it was time to taste some Okra. This was the first time I've grown Okra and I was not sure it would grow in this climate.

I made "Charred Okra with Tomatillos" using a recipe from "myrecipes". It seems that I may have left some of the Okra pods on the plants too long and they became woody. Some of it was quite good and tasty. Will I grow Okra again?  Probably not.

These ingredients for the recipe all came out of the SFG ... the Garlic was harvested in July and the Okra, Tomatillos and Onions were harvested today.

On the okra front;  I only like it in soups. It is slimy. But that adds a nice thickening thing to soups.  It isn't really tasty.  IMHO

Hammock gal!  Great first season to get you hooked!  

Our family ate a bowl full of cherry tomatoes and a couple of small cucumbers from the gardens today. The kids were actually arguing about who got the most toms. Hilarious!

Jalapeños! For some reason I have insane luck with them and can grow them in either pots or in the garden here with minimal maintenance. I make vinaigrettes from them. 

I use the jalapeño vinaigrettes on my salads (which is great timing because this time of year after a lot of salads, I need something to literally add zip to keep me eating them) and as a dressing for some makeshift Buddha-type bowls I make (quinoa topped with whatever fresh veggies I have around that I can chop and add raw). My husband uses the jalapeño vinaigrettes to top his omelettes.

I'm going to try freezing tomatoes for the first time. I already have a lot of frozen basil so I'm looking forward to making some tasty sauce in the dead of winter.

Also am harvesting herbs for drying. Have a bunch of chocolate mint and I read that adding dried chocolate mint leaves to ground coffee = great smell and taste.

Writing all that out, I don't like such a failure at my first year of this garden 

Great job Colleen. Definitely a successful first year for you. 

I like Jalapeno peppers as well. So far I've got one lonely pepper on my Jalapeno plants. We still have frozen tomatoes and pureed tomatoes in the freezer from last year. Good thing since there will not be much of a tomato crop this year.

As usual I am overloaded with cucumbers.  I'm dehydrating some cucumber chips in my very basic, no temperature control, second hand dehydrator.  While I've been preparing the cukes Mrs TD baked two lovely, yummy, zucchini breads.

Cut into the melon. This was taken from a plant grown from seeds that SR sent to me. It was quite tasty but perhaps could have used more time to ripen.

trolleydriver wrote:Cut into the melon.... It was quite tasty but perhaps could have used more time to ripen.

Same as the one I bought at the grocery store two weeks ago and cut into last night. It's still not completely ripe and it was going to start to rot. Maybe it's just not a year for melons in the North.

CapeCoddess wrote:

trolleydriver wrote:Cut into the melon.... It was quite tasty but perhaps could have used more time to ripen.

Same as the one I bought at the grocery store two weeks ago and cut into last night. It's still not completely ripe and it was going to start to rot. Maybe it's just not a year for melons in the North.

I've stopped buying cantaloupes for just that reason. Whenever I buy them, I let them sit to ripen, and it seems no matter how long they sit, they're never ripe enough, still hard and crunchy, and almost starting to rot. I have much better luck with honeydews. But I miss cantaloupes.

For lunch I made Tomatillo Soup (actually Tomatillo and Chicken) from a recipe I found at allrecipes.com.  

https://tinyurl.com/yctb7b9x

The Tomatillos and one Jalapeno Pepper were picked fresh today from the SFG. The Onion and Garlic were harvested previously from the SFG. Other ingredients included two chicken breasts, chicken stock and olive oil. Parsley (fresh from the SFG TT) and sour cream went on at the end.

The result ... very tasty but a little bit too spicy for Mrs TD. 

Here are the ingredients:


After chopping the Tomatillos.



The ingredients (without the chicken) in the saucepan. After bringing to a boil and then simmering for 15 minutes these ingredients were pureed in the Vitamix blender. The pureed mix was then put back into the pot and previously sauteed chicken was shredded and added to the pot.



The final result. This one does not have the sour cream.

Hard to believe it's soup weather already but I've had it in my mind also.

Here are today's munchies - A-1 carrots, pears (1 Bartlett, 1 Anjou), Gergana cuke:.

TD, what were your thoughts on the okra? I saw that you probably won't grow it again. Did you find it slimy?

trolleydriver wrote:Great job Colleen. Definitely a successful first year for you. 

I like Jalapeno peppers as well. So far I've got one lonely pepper on my Jalapeno plants. We still have frozen tomatoes and pureed tomatoes in the freezer from last year. Good thing since there will not be much of a tomato crop this year.

As usual I am overloaded with cucumbers.  I'm dehydrating some cucumber chips in my very basic, no temperature control, second hand dehydrator.  While I've been preparing the cukes Mrs TD baked two lovely, yummy, zucchini breads.

Zucchini Bread???  I'm from the south.  Never heard of it but it looks Fantastic .  Is it sweet or what?

brianj555 wrote:

trolleydriver wrote:...

Zucchini Bread???  I'm from the south.  Never heard of it but it looks Fantastic .  Is it sweet or what?

Brian ... This one is sweet but not overly sweet. There are tons of recipes for zucchini bread on the Internet.

I spent this holiday weekend harvesting and storing my crop. <--- a sentence I didn't think I'd be able to say!    I started harvesting and realized I had way more than I could use right now and so have been learning how to store it, too. I've been having a blast. Here's some of it.



I made the mini eggplants into eggplant pizzas (topped with fresh basil). 



Side note: I ate both platefulls! My husband didn't like them. This turned into a discussion of my telling him I am struggling to figure out what he would like to eat from the garden and that I'm worrying he thinks I'm spending too much time in the garden and him reminding me that he's just not a vegetable guy but that he loves seeing me work in the garden and enjoys how I explain to him everything that's going on in it. Turned into a really good convo but I still want him to eat better! Won't give up on that quite yet ...

I took the tomatoes shown in the above pic, added more from this morning, washed them in vinegar and water (1:3 ratio), cut the stems out, and froze them. Learned a neat trick on YouTube: Put them in a freezer bag and use a straw to create a vacuum pack. Looking forward to fresh sauce and basil when it's snowing this winter! Already asked my husband how he would prefer I prepare the sauce and am looking for recipes to show him. 

The cucumbers get sliced and go into my drinking water and hummus sandwiches all week.

Jalapeños (not pictured but I'm in love with them) get made into vinaigrettes.

And then the herbs: I harvested lemon verbena, chocolate mint, mint, basil, stevia, and oregano and in a fit of initial panic over not being able to choose which method to use to dry them decided to try three methods: oven drying (baking pan), hang drying (colander), refrigerator drying (plate). Here's the chocolate mint demonstrating the prep work:



 The hanging herbs look nice in my kitchen!



The oven-dried herbs will be used in tea concoctions (makes winter coming almost bearable). They're in a rack I got off of Amazon (the bottom row are spices I add to coffee/hot chocolate/oven potpourri). Hoping to get one last harvest from those plants before winter.



And with this task completed, I ended up reorganizing some kitchen cabinets. Who am I?? I like it.

Colleen ... WOW!!!  Absolutely fantastic harvest and well done on storing the excess.  

BTW I have a similar situation in that my wife is not a big veggie eater, especially not raw veggies in salads. So we have been having the conversation about what to grow as well.

trolleydriver wrote:Colleen ... WOW!!!  Absolutely fantastic harvest and well done on storing the excess.  

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