My garden mini-exploded. I blinked, and all of a sudden a giant cucumber was living under some leaves I’d tied up to a stake.
The next day I shuffled a few more leaves – two more cucumbers! It’s a very strange feeling to “discover” a foot-long cucumber “hiding.”
Peas I’m better at finding with my hands than my eyes. They’re camouflaged in the tendrils of the snaking plants. I hacked my parsley back to almost nothing (I think real gardeners call it “harvesting” or “pruning”…) and a week and a half later it’s like a head of unruly curls getting mad at the humidity. These I usually eat direct from the vines. They don’t make it back to my kitchen. (Yes, you can eat shelling peas raw. They’re sweeter before their sugars have turned to starch off the vine and in the fridge. I never put fresh peas in the fridge, just like peaches.)
Guess I won’t have a winter frozen pea supply. #worthit.
I tore up the rest of sprouting arugula and planted spinach, endive and two kinds of kale – lacinato and red something or other. That’s my first re-planting. The arugula was getting tough and very, VERY pungent. The roots get tough, but it’s fun pulling them up. Much easier than some of the weeds.
I had two strawberries this year. Two. The first I ate when it was bright red. Turned out that it was still a little underripe. So when the second one started turning red I left it a week longer than I wanted to – and it was perfect. I had one perfect strawberry. Take that, Quinn Farm. (Note: I love Quinn Farms, but you generally love your own kids more than someone else’s)
Question on herbs, fellow gardeners: I have tons of basil now, so should I be pruning leaves and freezing them to let more grow? Or just leave it until I need it (presumably, August, when my tomatoes are ready)?
Epazote is the Mexican herb generally cooked with beans to aid digestion. It’s very pungent and often found tried at stores. Fresh is clearly better. If anyone needs some epazote I have lots. It keeps trying to seed and I then cook when the seeds, much like I blend the flowering tops of basil into smoothies. No need to compost them when my stomach does the work. Apparently you can eat it raw, and it loses its pungency when cooked. It can be made into a tea for those same digestion-aiding abilities. And all I have to do is not eat too much of it, as it can be toxic in high doses, says google.
Fenugreek. These little leaves are eaten when small in stir-fried and are world’s apart from the dried versions that are still hard to find at Indian specialty stores. Some say the dried versions are actually more pungent, but I say these are plenty pungent as they are. I added them to a data stir-fry with chicken, garlic, and ginger. More on data later, but it’s a plant that looks like rhubarb but with a tuber at the end and red-green leaves chock full of more potassium than bananas, more Vitamin A than carrots, more iron than spinach, and more Vitamin C than oranges. Next superfood?). Fenugreek leaves pack a nutritive punch and a ton of flavour, like epazote. I think you harvest them young, so I’m just going to keep sprinkling fenugreek seeds over the naked parts of my garden and letting them grow. This worked with cilantro too.
This cucumber appeared on my balcony. It was growing directly on my patio table, having overflowed out from its container. It was sweet and Lebanese.
Look at this rainbow chard. I only harvested the leaves that were getting ridiculous. The stems are so sweet and juicy, and the leaves aren’t too bitter. I’ve been enjoying them in a dill dressing, then a blueberry vinaigrette with chives, and now with a cilantro-lime dressing.
My garden’s not the biggest or the best of the community plots, but it’s clean, and once another man in the garden complimented me on it. I could have cried. He’d been gardening for 12 years, he said. I think I’m doing at least a couple things right. I just need to plastic band my cauliflower and forget about the zucchini transplants that didn’t take. And cross my fingers for endive.
Miraculous things, gardens.
Miraculous.
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