CSA Wednesday, Week 9

Theeey're Heeere... There are many things that come to mind when thinking of summer produce, but the top two that pop into my head are always tomatoes and peppers. We've received peppers in two of our shares, but today we have our first tomatoes. Being a new tomato eater, I'm proud to say I'm quite excited!

In this week's share...
1.5 lbs white peaches
1.5 lbs nectarines
1.5 lbs heirloom tomatoes
1 bag snow peas (in July? Nice...)
1 (large) head Romaine lettuce
1 bunch savory
1 bunch chard or kale (I chose kale)
1.5 lbs summer squash (I chose zucchini)
1 lb cucumbers
Ratatouille focaccia bread

Occasionally there is a bonus box, and this week it was a very large cooler full of a few overripe/damaged tomatoes, and loads of sweet peppers and eggplant. We were encouraged to take what we wanted. Not wanting to be overly greedy, I took this small bowl of yum yums.

The tomato weighed in at 1 lb 5oz. It's pretty ripe, and slightly bruised on the under side, but I doubt that will hurt the sauce I plan on putting it in!

Today I picked up 8 lbs of super fresh Driscoll strawberries from Costco that I'm going to try hiding long enough to preserve (I already gave in to DH's demands of testing out our new blender by making strawberry smoothies). The strawberries are so beautiful, I couldn't help myself! Plus, after two years of living in CA, I still can't get over the fact that I've been eating Driscoll's berries for forever while living in VA, and now I live within driving distance of where they're grown! What was my point in telling you that? Oh, yes... I'm hoping to find a small batch canning recipe to use the nectarines and/or peaches in, and hopefully one that includes some strawberries. I need to warm up my newbie canning skills before taking on canning tomatoes (crossing fingers).

Hmm... Ratatouille focaccia bread... The bread was... different, but amazing, as has been the case from this particular bakery. I know, I say it every week we get their bread, but I love it. It's topped with the farm's peppers, eggplant and squash, and cheese.

Challenges: There was some spoilage the past two weeks, mostly due to my lack of stamina and non-willingness to get down and dirty with my pots and pans, but I'm feeling more "normal," (whatever that is) and with pretty standard fare this week, there shouldn't be any spoilage.

I'm not a big fan of snow peas, but hey. I said that about tomatoes and onions, and now I can't seem to get enough of them!

Last week's meal highlights...
As I said, there was some spoilage. I never got around to that bok choi from week 7. DH got burnt out on dinner salads really quick (I could eat them every day), and so last week's lettuce spoiled, along with some of week 7's lettuce. I'm certainly not blaming him, but there's a lot of prep work involved in dinner salads, and I wasn't going to go through the trouble if he wasn't going to enjoy participating in the consumption of my hard work! I let him know we received Romaine lettuce this week, and there will be salads, and he has requested Caesar dressing. Hmm... I'm more of a vinaigrette gal these days so I'll have to think about it. ;-)

Oh yes. Last week's food... Sidetrack central over here tonight!

We tried eggplant for the first time. I marinated it in a parsley and basil marinade (minus the oregano, and used white balsamic) along with onion and crookneck squash before removing and marinating chicken in the mix, then grilling it all...

The onion and squash tasted great, although crookneck squash isn't the best grilling squash, I've learned. The eggplant? DH and I took one bite of it and both agreed under our breaths that we wouldn't make the boys eat more than a taste of it. Blegh! None of us liked it. It was cooked well, but the flavor of it! Yuck!

Oh, the delicious, creamy fingerling potatoes... I quartered, coated in olive oil and kosher salt, roasted, then garnished with chopped parsley. So simple. So tasty. I love potatoes...

These were served with grilled Magda squash and tilapia that were both marinated in that Spicy-Lime-Cilantro Sauce I keep mentioning. Can you tell we love the stuff? I've used it on squash, steak, chicken, shrimp, tilapia, as a salad dressing, and veggie "dip."

It dawned on me yesterday that it's been a really long time since we've had tacos or ground beef for that matter, so I defrosted two pounds of ground beef I purchased through our CSA (I don't think I shared that with y'all, but our farm purchased two grass-fed cows from a client, and they were butchered to sell to CSA recipients), and cooked it up with onions and peppers, and divided in half. I made half of it into tacos, and the rest will be made into sloppy joes for Friday's dinner because there's celery floating around somewhere in my fridge that needs to be used.

Sorry the picture isn't very appealing. It's imperative that tacos be eaten while the meat is hot, cheese unmelted, and lettuce crisp (not that that ever happens with children around, lol).

Hey, if you have a good small batch canning recipe involving any combination of peaches, nectarines, and strawberries, please share it in the comment section. My peaches and nectarines are white-flesh, in case that matters.

I'm off to bed!

Harest Monday

This week was a fun harvest for me because I was able to get a few small harvests over a couple of days. Having such a small garden means my harvests are going to look mostly the same for the rest of the season, just more of everything as the peak draws nearer...

Here is what I picked on Tuesday...

Then again on Friday...

This was the first of the Siam Queen Thai Basil...

All of the purple beans were from the set that's growing in front of the melons. These plants are huge! I swear there is some symbiotic relationship going on between the melons and beans, because the beans growing in their own bed are half this size, and scraggly. Maybe it's that they're soaked in the sun all day vs the other bed of beans only gets afternoon sun. Who knows...

These were picked this morning...
See the new tomatoes in the middle? Those are my first Pearson tomatoes, with the red coming in at half a pound! The red one was way in the middle and barely visible, and I accidentally pulled the green one off with it.

Does anyone know why the top of the tomato has cracked around the stem? Is it still good to use?

Some of the basil and a couple tomatoes have been used on personal pizzas, and the rest are in the freezer. I have a quart sized ziploc almost bursting with basil leaves now.

I try to make my own breads and pizza crusts as often as possible, but seeing "5 minutes," had me suckered into trying these crusts. They're pretty good for ready-made crusts...

This week's harvest total...

Bush Slicer Cucumber:  4 lb, 5oz

Bush Beans:  3oz

Basil: 1.8oz

Baby Belle Peppers: .5oz

Viva Italia tomatoes: 2 lb

Pearson tomatoes: 10oz

There are three more cucumbers growing, but where I was complaining of only female flowers showing up before, now I only have male flowers. Doh! Next year I think I'll start the plants 2-3 weeks apart to help with this.

I don't know how long it'll take for the Charentais melons to ripen, but they're starting to look really yummy!

There is also a new one, so it will be nice having a staggered harvest.

I didn't think this would ever happen... My White Habanero's are finally starting to fruit!

Each week Daphne over at Daphne's Dandelions hosts Harvest Monday. Check out her page to see what other's have been munchin' and crunchin' on this week.

CSA Wednesday, Week 8

Boy, I knew I lived a sheltered vegetable life, but it's not until I bring new items home in my CSA share, and wonder, "How the heck am I suposed to cook this," that I realize how limited my vegetable consuming experience really is.

In this week's share... Please forgive the lack of quantity. I've forgotten what half of them are, and don't have *any* desire to re-weigh them...
Yellow peaches and white nectarines
French fingerling potatoes
Speckled lettuce
Summer squash
Mixed "specialty" eggplant
Sweet and mild peppers
Parsley
Mixed cucumbers
Honey wheat bread

Not in the group photo above is the honey wheat bread. I stopped by the farm after picking Boy Wonder up from chess camp, and he was drooling-at-the-mouth-hungry for lunch. I took a quick picture before he shoved me out of the way to devour his favorite; warm open-faced PB & honey...

The sweet onions in the picture weren't a part of the share. I needed some onions, and bought them from the farm since they had them available, and for only $1.50/lb. I believe the grocery store sells non-organic sweet onions for $1.69/lb.

When DH got home from work, he took a look at the table, and said, "It's amazing how the variety of vegetables is changing as the season goes on." Why yes, dear (slightly sarcastic), I noticed that too... The peppers are beginning to come in, as are the cucumbers, and we have our first eggplants!

Challenges: Playing catch-up from last week is this week's challenge, lol... The cucumbers will be hard to consume, simply because I have several more that are almost ready to harvest. I may need to make more refrigerator pickles to keep up. Oh, and eggplants are another first for me. I've eaten eggplant parmesan once or twice, but that's it. Never cooked with it!

Now onto last week's meal highlights...
Well, I have to admit, I don't really have any "highlights" per se, but I do have food to share. It was a rough week for me, you know, one of those weeks where new foods just seems impossible, and leftovers and "easy" are the name of the meal game?

The cilantro was turned into a double batch of the Spicy-Lime-Cilantro Sauce I mentioned last week (and I am in love with). I froze half the batch, marinated chicken in some, and coated the Magda squash in a little, and grilled. I actually finished the leftover chicken and squash with dinner tonight. Sometimes cooked veggies don't really work well as leftovers, but these squash are wonderful. And so, I've picked another one for the third week in a row, and plan on grilling it too!

Today's Magda

When I was putting this week's share in the fridge, I noticed last week's carrots, and decided to try a Quick-Glazed Carrot recipe from How to Cook Everything Vegetarian. One variation was to cook the carrots in balsamic vinegar instead of water with lots of garlic. We didn't like it.

The one new food from last week was the cheddar cauliflower.

I was torn between using it in a gratin and making mashed cauliflower "potatoes." At the last minute I went from the gratin to the mashed cauliflower (Literally. I pulled it out after steaming for the gratin, then put it back in to cook it to "mushy").  Less steps to make? Fiine...

The problem I ran into with making the mashed cauliflower came when I misread the ingredients, and put an extra cup of milk in... It didn't even dawn on my over-tired brain until after I'd mashed the cauliflower, and it was still runny. It tasted amazing, and DH said it'd make a great alfredo, so I threw it in the fridge and put some cold veggies on the dinner plates instead.

So, when is mashed cauliflower "potatoes" not mashed cauliflower "potatoes?" When you turn it into macaroni and cheese! Say wha-huh?

It was an alright dish. A little heavy on the Parmesan cheese, but definitely a doable dish with the cauliflower.  We didn't save the leftovers.

Most of the lettuce is still in the fridge. If it's good or not is to be seen. I haven't touched the bok choi either. It's looking a little limp, but will have to wait until Friday to be used. I have kickboxing tomorrow, and have learned the hard way not to do Asian, spicy, or heavy meals before working out, hehehe.

Oye! It's 11pm, and I'm way tired. Goodnight!

Don't Kill It 'Til You Know It!

This entire growing season, I've been having problems with thrips on my flowers. From my Meyer lemon blooms, to the "weeds" suffocating my lawn (hmm, I should pull those)... I don't know if they've done any significant damage, but I left them alone because I would have done damage by either removing the flowers or spraying the flowers with a chemical or water, thus reducing pollination and bee visits, or worse, killing the beneficial insects.

Then I noticed these very pretty, tiny bugs all over my plants and flowers...

Now, I'm not one to go squishing and squashing every bug I see. I know there are good guys and bad guys working hard out there, but I didn't have time to sit down and go through my awesome bug book, which is only quickly helpful if you have an idea of what the bug eats, or what kind of bug family it may be a part of. My initial thought was that they were an adult form of thrips, so I went with that and started smooshing them.

Then the other day I was looking through the February/March issue of Organic Gardening during a moment of... peace... (ie I was in the bathroom, because that's about the only time us mom's get "moments of peace," and so that's where I keep my magazines, lol), and it hit me! It was the briefest of mentions in the "Good Bug, Bad Bug" section of the mag... The minute pirate bug is a predatory bug. I ran to my awesome bug book (see that link above--seriously), and there it was!

Arrrg! I'd been killing a predatory bug. One that eats those annoying thrips! And wouldn't you know it? I checked my charentais blossoms this morning, and no thrips! Lots of pirates hanging about, but no thrips!

So please, gardeners, before you kill it, identify it! Learning to heed my own advice, here is a post from last year on bug identification.

One more site I've found that can be used through means of the plant that is affected, University of CA IPM Program.

Anyone know what this strange looking bug might be, LOL?

Harvest Monday

Today's Harvest Monday has me feeling like my hard work is finally beginning to pay off. It's the largest harvest I've had at one time--probably in the two seasons I've been attempting this gardening thing. I mean, look at what I harvested around this time last year! I have to laugh at that post. I really had no idea what I was doing--not that I claim knowledge now either LOL...

Just say, "Heck yeah" to variety! Two new firsts for the season are the Bush Slicer cucumber, and Baby Belle peppers.

Although I'm not a big fan of green peppers (I really like 'em red), I decided to remove a few of them to encourage the plant to continue flowering. The day after I harvested the green peppers, I removed these orange peppers...

Beautiful and tasty Viva's!

There are a few more that could come off the vine, but since my goal is to do some canning, I'm going to try leaving them on as long as I can--otherwise I'll end up eating them, lol.

What did the Momma Viva Italia tomato say to all the baby Pearson tomatoes when they were lagging behind? Catch up! Har. Har.

Bush beans are nice because of the small plants, but I haven't been able to harvest enough to serve at once to the family yet. I may be switching to vine/runner beans next season. I've read Scarlet Runner beans like a little cooler weather, so I may even try a few of them at the end of the season...

I laid out all the basil leaves and froze for later use (1 of 2 batches)...

I didn't take a picture of it because it wasn't very pretty, but I sautéed the beans and tomatoes with garlic, and served over whole-wheat spaghetti for DH and I. I've been slicing the cucumbers as sides for lunches, and the peppers will go into salads tomorrow night.

This week's harvest total...
Bush Slicer Cucumber: 11 oz
Bush Beans: 3.8 oz
Basil: 2 oz
Baby Belle Peppers: 2 oz
Viva Italia tomatoes: 6.2 oz

Each week Daphne over at Daphne's Dandelions hosts Harvest Monday. Check out her page to see what other's have been munchin' and crunchin' on this week.

What's Growin' On

I just realized I'm a day behind when I said I'd provide you some detailed pictures to go along with my video garden tour... Oops!

With the heat consistently hitting the 90's the past few weeks, production is really starting to pick up. I can't wait to share my largest summer harvest so far with you--but that's not until Monday. ;-) For now, here are a few close ups of what's growin' on...

My lone Isabella Charantais melon so far from three in-ground plants...

7/13

7/17

Below Three Isabella's in the 18 gallon SWP. Production and plant growth are far better in the SWP. I plan on making another one next year, and will skip growing them in-ground.

7/13

The two on the left...

7/13

7/17

Below One of three Baby Belle plants growing in SWPs. They're a lot smaller than Renee's Garden shows them. I wonder if it's because of the small containers (3 gallons of soil), or if it's because I started too early. The third plant was started a few weeks after the first two, and is taller, less leafy, and just now starting to flower. I'm looking forward to comparing the production results.

7/13

A pepper at the top of the above plant, yesterday.

...and this morning...

Below Bush Slicer Cukes in 2 SWP's. The plant growth has been great, but the plants are having problems with producing both male and female flowers at the same time. Since I'm using a paint brush to hand pollinate, I've been collecting as much pollen as I can, and trying to distribute two or three days later when the female flowers appear. I'm losing more females than I'm able to pollinate at this point.

7/13

7/16

Below A lot of the green green beans in the raised bed with only beans are curling, and the non-curling beans are slow to produce. I had this problem growing green green beans last year, so I will probably stick with yellow and purple beans next year...

I've pulled most of the green green bean plants growing in the very front of the bed due to small size and low to no production, and reseeded with Purple Queen. The pulled plants were started in newspaper pots and placed in-ground in the pots, and had very little root growth outside the pots.

Below I have about 12 Purple Queen plants in front of my in-ground melons, and they all look like this. Well, actually, one of them is a green green bean plant (how'd that happen? lol)--see it behind the Purple Queen? It's producing ok too...

Below Here are the two Bush King acorn squash. Notice the size difference between the two?The plant on the left has a squash already, but it's just stalled in growth and flower output. I really don't know what's wrong with it since I'm treating both of them the same. Could it be because of the squash growing on it?

The plant on the right will have it's first female bloom in the next few days.

Since I'm having the same issues with male and female flowers not showing themselves at the same time, I already have pollen collected...

Hope you enjoyed! If anyone has any ideas on what may be wrong with my acorn squash, please let me know! I'm heading over to GardenWeb to see if someone can help me...