2011 Garden – The Creative Salad

Goals for Next Year’s Garden

As this year’s garden season comes to a close, I find there are several things I hope we do differently next year. Here are our goals for next summer.

Check for ripe produce more regularly. This year so many strawberries rotted on the vine because we didn’t harvest as frequently as we needed to.

Fertilize early in the season and re-fertilize often. Our tomato plants were especially slow to grow until we buried them in a bag of composted manure and then they flourished. Next year I shall do this in June instead of September.

Install an automated watering system, even if it’s just a sprinkler on a timer. Oh, the time we’ll save!

Be more proactive about checking for (and, dare I say it, disposing of!) critters. Remember our tree collard? We knew something was nibbling on it, but it took us two weeks to figure it out. Yesterday we found three very fat caterpillars munching away. Will the kale recover? Oh, how I hope so. Stay tuned.

And, yes, it’s the end of October and we still have strawberry plants flowering, tomatoes growing, and flowers blooming here in Sonoma County. Love California living!

Garden Failures and the Potential For Yet Another

Not everything has been peachy-keen in our garden this year.

There was the Alium Disaster. Remember last fall (above) when we planted dozens of alium and tulip bulbs? Yeah, well none of them sprouted. (Thank you to our neighborhood gophers who I assume are responsible.)

Then we planted hundreds of poppy seeds days before I sprained my ankle and, well, they never got properly watered and didn’t sprout.

The good news is that we have hundreds (thousands?) of poppy seeds remaining, so we may try again next year.

And now we have one more grand garden adventure that I so hope will pan out: tree collards! Given to us by a friend, these evergreen kale plants typically live ten years and grow ten-twenty feet tall, all while continually producing.

Right now it’s a tiny plant in a giant planter (sitting in a giant mound of compost). I’m excited to see how this goes!

At the moment I am not feeling overly optimistic, but perhaps I’m just trying not to get my hopes up after the previous two garden disasters.

We’ll keep you posted!

Fall Garden and Animal Visitors

We’re had all sorts of animals pop up in our garden over the past three years: turkeys, gophers, frogs, snakes — evidently gopher and garter snakes love our garage, lucky us, and now this snail that we caught helping itself to a drink of water from our hose:

The worst part of what I affectionately call the “snail incident” is that I got sidetracked just after taking this photo so the snail escaped and will continue it’s veggie eating rampage in our garden. Epic Garden Fail.

Speaking of Epic Fails, I’ve spent essentially ZERO time gardening this summer thanks to my sprained ankle. Now that I’m moving around better (hooray!), we’re starting to spend more time outside and more time working in the yard.

I’m floored by how our garden has grown since the Spring:

The tomatoes and strawberry plants are still going strong:

Nevertheless it’s time to add some fall veggies to the mix:

kale and chard.

Our daughter picked out two perennials to add to our front flower bed too:

Euphorbia Gloria and Yarrow.

While the garden has changed dramatically, our view remains constant and utterly lovely:

Love the sight from our porch!

Berry Sauce

We’ve been waiting for this moment all summer: our blackberry bushes hang heavy with fruit!

We picked some blackberries and strawberries from our garden to make a simple, tasty berry sauce — a fruit puree, really — from Mollie Katzen’s Moosewood Cookbook.

We pureed the fruit along with several tablespoons of sugar (to taste) and a small squeeze of lemon juice.

After several pulses, we scrapped down the sides of the bowl, adjusted the sugar and pureed the sauce some more.

Then we passed the sauce through a fine sieve to remove the seeds and placed it in a clean mason jar.

The blackberry sauce keeps for a week in the fridge and tastes mighty good on cottage cheese apple pancakes or simply spread on a piece of toast.

I love this delicious sauce straight from our garden!

Copious Amounts of Poppy Seeds

You may be wondering, just how many seeds are in one poppy seed pod?

Let me tell you, plenty!

Behind those adorable little girl fingers, you can see hundreds (!) of seeds from just five (!!!) dried poppy seed pods. Those poppy plants mean serious business.

I don’t know about you, but seeing all those poppy seeds makes me crave a poppy seed bagel. Do they even sell gluten-free poppy seed bagels?! Perhaps I need to make some.

Our other poppy seed posts:
– Poppy Seed Pods (with movie!)
– Poppy Flower Inspired Tissue Paper Art