Urban Gardener
Urban gardening, healthy eating and sustainable living ideas. Copyright © Urban Gardener SLCWhat to do with leftover cucumbers!
I’m getting to the end of the summer produce – dehydrating the remaining tomatoes, and cooking the last bits of summer squash in casseroles. But tonight I found myself with several Armenian cucumbers and luckily, some imitation crab meat as well. So I made this really great crab and cucumber salad – it’s simple and tasty!
Afterwards, I realized that I still had a massive amount of leftover cucumber. So I combined it with a canteloupe that one of my fellow gardeners had shared with me, a bit of fresh mint, some leftover lemon juice from another dish, a hot pepper, a banana, and some sugar. Blended together, it was supposed to be a cold soup but I felt it might be best as a popsicle, so I froze it. It’s fairly tasty, if I say so myself. I based the recipe on this original one, for Cucumber Melon Soup with Mint.
Pesto and summer squash extravaganza!
Well, I’m sorry that I neglected my little journal here, but I intend to start building it again. I had a somewhat difficult gardening summer, with the least successful project being my porch-grown tomatoes. Their foliage was lovely, but did not seem to produce much at all compared to my community garden plot. I did get quite a few Cream Sausage and Black Cherry tomatoes, but the others were sporadic in comparison. The Aunt Ruby’s German Green and Great White tomatoes in my garden were extremely prolific by comparison, although the green ones took literally months to ripen.
Zapotec Pleated, Yellow Brandywine, Cream Sausage, Aunt Ruby's German Green and other heirloom tomatoes
The biggest successes of my summer included my lacinato kale, which was beautiful and stood all summer without bolting – I harvested some practically every week – and the beets, which were tasty and beautiful in salads. I was also pleasantly surprised by the sweet flavor of the “strawberry spinach” (Chenopodium sp.), although the harvest wasn’t very large.
Kale, beets, kohlrabi, strawberry spinach, etc.
Last week, just prior to the killing frost, I pulled up all of my basils – lemon basil, purple basil, and the others – and made huge batches of pesto, combining the spinach with garlic, olive oil and sunflower seeds in the blender. I also made batches with sorrel and parsley – basically, one part parsley to three parts sorrel is the recipe, and it’s delicious. I then froze almost all of the pesto, for a winter of tasty pasta dishes. I also made lemon-basil sorbet, which was scrumptious.
Beautiful beets!
But the biggest success of all was my corn – although, thanks to funky corn genetics, all three varieties basically grew the same! Instead of being Oaxacan Green Dent, Anasazi, and Triple Play corn, all of it came out as one big batch of Triple Play (with an exception here and there of beautiful green cobs of the Oaxacan). Which was fine, because Triple Play is a beautiful yellow and blue fresh eating heirloom sweet corn. It was beautiful and delicious.
Triple Play heirloom sweet corn
Using my corn, patty pan squash, hot peppers and tomatoes, I’ve been cooking tons of colache, and making squash casseroles. I’m drying pears, apples and tomatoes in my dehydrator. I may try to make a green tomato soup. And now, with all of my winter squash, I’m beginning to make lots of baked dishes and soups. Yum.
The key to life is proper soil preparation!
I used to have this neighbor when I was a little girl that would always say to me, “Remember, the most important thing is proper soil preparation!” He was a Vietnam veteran and a recluse, but he had studied horticulture in college and he was a wonderfully talented gardener. I absolutely took his advice to heart and kept it in mind throughout four years of horticultural education and soil science classes; however, over the years it seems that I’ve forgotten this key bit of advice. And this year, it’s been to my detriment. In the east, we just didn’t have clay soil – it was always well-drained and easy to deal with. We did have lots of rocks, but poor drainage or a hard crust forming on the soil was never a problem.
However, in my community garden plot this year, the combination of very clay soil that is poor in nutrients and the heavy rains we had for a few weeks are causing problems for me. I just did not add enough compost or prepare the bed as well as I could have. My plants are slow-growing and I’m sure need more nitrogen.
Next time around I’ll do things better and also try growing a cover crop, but in the meantime I’m hoping that side-dressing with worm castings and a light foliar feeding of fish emulsion will help save the day.
I also have tomatoes coming in my container garden, so all hope is not lost as far as the crops are concerned. So far, Cream Sausage, Nyagous and Tigerella are almost ready for picking, and the others are healthy and vigorous.
Satisfaction!
I harvested maybe 10 lbs of spinach, kale, radishes, beets and sugar snap peas today. It’s just about the end of the season for these veggies, but I wanted to grab them before they were entirely gone. I’m thinking a big soup with the spinach & beet greens, radishes and radish greens in a salad and baked-’till-crispy kale chips.
So very satisfying.
Anyone have tips for eating radishes that are a little too old and spicy? I’m thinking that grating them into the salad would be the easiest solution.
Flower salad
This week, I’ve had visitors from out of town here, and it was wonderful to be able to feed them part of our harvest already. I picked radishes, orach, spinach, chives and pansies from the garden and made a lovely salad. I did note that some of my other radishes are bolting, but the French Breakfast ones are still going strong. The orach, which is a native plant here in the southwest, has a peppery flavor and is excellent for a salad, especially when paired with a light, citrus dressing – we used olive oil, lemon juice and a dash of salt and pepper.
One of my friends is still here until tomorrow, and after that I’ll catch you up on thunderstorms, trellising, transplanting and sowing the entire garden and all the other excitement that you’ve missed!
Tomato problems; lemon cukes
I planted a couple of True Lemon cucumbers today in the community garden. They were in bad shape; the rest of the flat was composted. They’d been left over from an event. I am hoping that they do well. I’ve heard that the soil in my plot is great for cucumbers. That definitely wasn’t the case in my old garden in Massachusetts. For whatever reason, all the cucumbers I grew there had a strange, bitter flavor.
It’s possible that a neighbor of mine in the garden already has tomato russet mites, a pest that apparently is spreading primarily from nurseries on the West Coast. I’m really hoping that this doesn’t spread to my plot. Our garden coordinator is going to take a sample of the plants over the university extension service to determine if we really do have them.
I should say, on a more positive note, that I’ve been reading Rodale’s Vegetable Garden Problem Solver, and I learned that putting coffee grounds around your plants can repel and kill slugs without harming beneficial insects. That’s pretty cool, and being a coffee drinker I’ve got plenty of nice, organic, used coffee grounds around that I can use for this purpose. I’m hoping that this method will enable me to keep my straw mulch on, which conserves water, without causing myself a major slug problem. I’ll keep you posted.
If you’ve experienced a tomato russet mite infestation yourself, have you had any success using organic methods to control it?
The “guerrilla gardener”
I moved a large lovage from one end of my plot to the other today. This was a “volunteer” plant I found growing a few months ago when new life was starting to emerge from the ground in the spring. I found out at that time that lovage is a lovely and useful herb, but I wasn’t told that it also becomes very, very large – too large to occupy the space that it was. I also planted a Great White tomato seedling.
I also harvested a good 14 more radishes, as well as some communal mint again, a bit of the lovage which I cut back to help it avoid transplant shock, and a few volunteer sprigs of orach that have taken residence in my plot. I was planning to grow orach, a native southwestern crop, in my plot, and I probably still will, but I realized that it is a weed throughout the community garden. It’s a beautiful purple color, and is a lovely substitute for spinach that grows throughout the hot, dry, summers.
I also escorted a friendly-but-drunk man from the garden this afternoon who told me between sips of his flask that he is a “guerrilla gardener.”
I realize that this is part of the community gardening experience; sometimes the “community” bit is messy, but where else would I meet a quite intoxicated man and have the patience to see him as a person? I feel that these experiences bring out the best in people, especially myself.
The garden begins to pay off.
Today, we harvested 11 more radishes. Disappointingly, it seems that only the French Breakfast ones are growing well; it seems that the Watermelon variety is bolting instead of developing a nice root; either that, or somehow I’ve ended up growing broccoli instead of radishes. I confess I don’t recall what broccoli looks like in the early stages of growth, so it’s hard to tell, but I pinched out what appeared to be a little broccoli floret on each one.
Tonight, I’m making Romaine, Radish and Mint Salad with Lemon Vinaigrette using those radishes, lettuce from a planter on our porch, mint from the shared section of the community garden and lemons left over from our CSA. It’s gratifying to be able to be harvesting already!
We also planted a Thai Long Green eggplant and a Japanese Black Trifele tomato plant in the community garden.
Disappointingly, I did notice that either someone was quite sloppy harvesting their rhubarb, or else it was stolen. It looked as if it had been hacked off quite roughly, so think someone had taken it in a rush. Either way, it’s a shame it was cut that way – they probably missed about half of each stalk. Maybe the owner can salvage some of it.
Pots without drainage?
I know that conventional wisdom dictates that you cannot have any plants in containers without lots of drainage holes. However, as a 2nd floor tenant I also have an issue with not accidentally watering the heads of people on the porch below me.
I am really considering not poking holes in the pots that don’t have them as an experiment… with careful watering, has this technique worked for any of you container gardeners out there? After all, SLC is a very dry climate.
I have successfully grown greens in a transparent container where you could see the moisture level on the side; but is this too risky a technique for peppers and tomatoes?
