Some Italian goodies -- garden to kitchen

Our July, the weather historians tell us, was the coldest July since 1958. The tomatoes have been slow to grow, fruit, and ripen, as a result of the cool weather. But now we are getting some some wonderful varieties, and we're making the most of them.

Here we have a cocozelle squash, an Italian variety zucchino that is fleshier, with very few seeds. It marinates wonderfully into a salad, grills, or sautes. Delicious.

The tomatoes, picked today, include the varieties Black from Tula (down the center); Flamme, Moonglow, Sunset's Red Horizon, and Super Marmande (top to bottom on the left); and Sun Gold, Dagmar's Perfection, Hawaiian Pineapple, Pineapple, and Marmande (top to bottom on the right). We'll have some wonderful taste-test comparisons in our caprese salads over the next few days.

Meanwhile, the first San Marzano Redortas have been sliced, layered, and baked into Bella's special lasagna!

Garden tomatoes at last!

To celebrate the arrival of the first summer tomatoes (at the end of July!), we made a nice green salad with orange Moonglow heirlooms and yellow Hartman's Yellow Gooseberry heirlooms. (We've got our first batch of San Marzanos and their little cousin Principe Borghese, also.) We threw in a sliced cucumber from the garden to give the salad a little more crunch.

We accompanied the salad with a dish of sliced cocozelle (one of the Italian varieties of zucchini), chopped basil, toasted pine nuts, and shaved parmesan...tossed with a seasoned dressing of lemon juice, olive oil, and red pepper flakes.

And oh, of course, 6 pizzas...shown here in their pre-rolled, precooked state! Those doughballs were about to become two sausage pizzas, two four-cheese pizzas, and two mushroom pizzas (with a medley of three types of forest mushrooms).

Wonderful!

Lunch with Friends in the Garden

The dahlias are blooming now. They make a lovely view during lunch under the grape arbor -- here with our friends Carol and Art and their daughter Diana.

First beets

Last Saturday night, we had a nice family Italian dinner, with all of Aaron, Nora, and Nathan attending. Our antipasti comprised three types of bruschetta and, on the right, the first garden beets of the season--two types of golden beets.

The last tomato plants

'Tis a sad sad thing to have to discard any of the tomato sproutlings that have been nurtured so assiduously all spring...but we have run out of room to plant. We culled the last 30 plants (~20 varieties) from the remaining sproutlings, and we're looking for a good home for them. The word has gone out to family and a few friends: Would you like some heirlooms for your garden?

And the remaining 100 or so sproutlings that didn't make the cut? Into the compost pile with you!

Greens

May has been a particularly cool month, so we're still enjoying the winter and early-spring greens from the garden. Almost every day we have a lettuce salad with scallions from the garden. Every week we cook up some escarole with pine nuts and golden raisins for a nice Italian side dish, or make some escarole and white bean soup. As we finish off the escarole and spinach from the garden, we're putting in French Emerite pole beans and French Rolande bush beans...which will be thin, delicate, and delicious.

A particularly wonderful product of the garden this year is the never-ending supply of shelling peas (now competing for bed space with the budding dahlias!). While we've grown several varieties, our favorite by far are the French petit pois...tiny pods of tiny peas nestled in close to one another. We eat them in pasta, as a side dish, raw out of the pods, and in a variety of fresh spring pea soups. We've experimented with a variety of recipes, all using homemade chicken stock and either creme fraiche or cream, and liked them all. Our favorite has creme fraiche, and a sprinkling of garden chives and mint sprigs, shown here. Perry's not sure that any of them, however, have achieved the transporting intensity of the little spring pea soup amuse bouche that he had in New York at Picholine many years ago.

Tomatoes, potatoes, and Tess--all growing!

We've now got about 150 tomato plants, representing about 50 different varieties, in the ground and doing well. The potatoes are also flourishing, have been hilled twice, and are just about ready to have some "new" potatoes plucked gingerly from the soil.

Tess, five months and always growing, still likes hanging out in the garden with us. She'll munch a peapod or two, or some escarole leaves, when she gets the chance. She particularly likes the kitchen compost pile next to the potato bed, but Perry keeps trying to keep her out of it by adding more and more fencing. But Tess, being a Border Collie and therefore smarter than both us put together, always finds a way in...when she's motivated to do so!

Tomato plant and seeds, IN! Potatoes, OUT?

On a marvelous day for gardening, Aaron planted a lot of new beets, carrots, lettuce, arugula, and radishes. He created some new sprouting trays for bush beans, pole beans, cantaloupes, and some eggplant. Bella, hard at work adding to the 100+ tomato plants already in the ground, was surprised to discover that Tessie had sneaked into the potato bed, had dug around a bit, and had"prematurely harvested" a recently-planted potato seed!

Tomatoes in the ground...finally!

On a sunny, warm, Sunday, Aaron joined us for a day of planting tomatoes. To get started, we had to clear some nasturtia (in gorgeous bloom already!) and pull some mature pea plants on trellises (carefully picking most of the pods...gee, we've filled the refrigerator with peapods already). Tess helped, chewing on peapods and twigs as we worked. Then, carefully labeling each plant variety that went into the ground, we planted over 100 plants representing over 40 varieties. We're not sure if we'll have enough tomatoes this summer!

First roses of the year

We have been watching the progress of our rose garden for weeks...watching the bushes leaf out, then bud, and finally produce flowers. These are our first roses of the season, and we're anticipating (and seeing in the buds) many more to come!

Potato planting day

Today we planted our potatoes for the season: 4 fingerling varieties (Rose Finn Apple, Russian Banana, LaRatte, and French Fingerling), two yellow-fleshed mashing or roasting potatoes (Red Gold and Red Pontiac), and one white-fleshed mashing potato (Caribe). In total, the planting took 8 rows of about 15 feet each, or about 120 row-feet. We'll water them every so often with soaker hoses that we laid down today along the planting rows. By June 1, we'll be able to start digging and enjoying new potatoes. In mid-June, we'll have full-grown Red Pontiacs and Caribes. In early July, the mid-season potatoes (Rose Finn Apple, Red Gold French Fingerlings, and LaRattes) will be ready. And finally, by the end of July, the "late season" Russian Bananas should be ready. However, all of these should keep nicely in the ground and available for us to enjoy, until early winter.

Spring pea soup

Peas, peas, and more peas maturing in the garden! And it's almost time to clear out the pea plants to make room for the tomatoes. So we picked 130 pods or so today and made a spring pea soup using a simple French preparation method. With a garnish of young pea pods, crostini, and creme fraiche on top, it looked and tasted marvelous.

After this first course, we "finished" with filet mignon, homemade onion rings in a batter that included a lot of chopped arugula from the garden, and asparagus. Now that's dinner!

Pizza time!

Now that we have discovered that our favorite pizza in the world comes right out of our kitchen, we find that we MUST have it every couple of weeks--or more often. Tonight we made three kinds: Margherita (shown, with fresh chopped oregano from the garden for sprinkling on top), sausage and carmelized onion, and (of course, for it's our very favorite) four cheese. There is a little left over, but it won't last past lunch tomorrow, we're sure.

Perry takes inventory

Until now, we've just planted and nurtured tomato seeds, carefully labeling which are which, but without regard to how many we have. Our "eyeball estimates" have led us to think we have 150-175 tomatoes of 35-40 varieties. Well, today Perry did an inventory of the tomatoes, in part to get a more concrete idea of what we've got, and in part to make a determination of what tomatoes we should put in the ground "early" (i.e., this week). It would also be helpful to know how many of what tomato colors and sizes we'll have.

Here's the result. As of today, we have 375 plants representing 58 varieties. And colors? We will have red, orange, yellow, black, green, and all combinations. Perhaps we should think about showing up at Farmers' Markets and selling tomato plants, or, later in the season, tomatoes.

The Ins and Outs of tomatoes

By last approximate count, we have over 150 tomato plants of about 40 varieties growing in small pots. By night, they rest on the ledge in the garage in temperatures around 55 degrees, and catch a couple of hours of warm morning sun through the windows of the garage. Each morning, we carry them out into the garden and let them bask in the direct sunlight for several hours, before bringing them in again in the late afternoon.

There are just three problems with this routine. First, as the tomatoes get repotted again and again into larger and larger pots, they are getting heavier to schlep in and out every day. Second, larger pots means more shelf space required for the nighttime beds, and we're out of shelf space. (We've got some flats of eggplant seeds sprouting in the garage, also.) And finally, some of us (i.e., Perry) can't wait to get some tomatoes into the ground. So today, he put in five plants in the sunniest spot in the garden: a Pineapple (red and yellow, up to 2 pounds), a Hawaiian Pineapple (golden-orange, up to 1.5 pounds), an Earl of Edgecombe (medium-sized, round, orange), a Marizol Red (1-pound large, bright red), and a Chocolate Stripe (3-4 inch, mahogany colored). These are some of the sweetest, best tasting, and best for BLTs and caprese salads...and we have lots of the plants still growing in pots.

Pleased with peas!

Those jumbles of shelling pea plants nestled up against the garden trellises are going wild. They love the end-of-March, beginning-of-April weather we're having: cold nights, sunny days, with intermittent days and nights of rain. And we're starting to harvest daily to enjoy one of the most pleasing and compelling signs of Spring: tender, delicious fresh peas.



Our first gathering of peas wasn't quite enough for a stand-alone bowl of steamed green pearls, so we dressed up the peas with some sauteed onions and proscuitto, and tossed them with farfalle and




parmesan to create a wonderful first course of Farfalle Con Proscuitto e Piselli.

But then, a few days later, we had so many peas that we just had to make an entire bowl of them. Here's how: we picked a scallion from the garden, chopped it and sauteed it in butter, then stirred in the steamed peas with salt and pepper. We served the peas alongside some veal marsala, and a salad of greens just cut from the garden. Fantastico! Bella was quite pleased with the outcome, as you can see!

No rest for the weary

Today we finally took out our packet of seeds for March planting. Besides the annual herbs, such as dill and cilantro, we will start our annual flowers. With our mild spring weather, these seeds can go right in the ground. But we still like to start them in an outdoor nursery, where we can tend the seedlings during their first few weeks of delicate growth and then, when they are good and hardy, transplant them to their summer places.


As usual, we are planting more flowers than we need: 3 varieties of cosmos, 5 varieties of zinnias, 9 varieties of sunflowers, Mexican torch flowers, a mix of butterfly-favorites, and lots of marigolds to companion plant among the tomatoes. Also, we are planting 2 varieties of morning glories -- a weed, but a beautiful weed. And we are planting moonflowers. Do you know about moonflowers? They are morning glories of the evening. They bloom at dusk. Each flower pin-wheels open in beautiful slow motion, while releasing a heavenly scent.

And these are just the annuals. Don't forget the forget-me-nots. And don't forget the hollyhocks, the dahlias, the roses, the gladioli, the lilies, the lavender, ...

But really, can you ever have too many flowers?

When March is wet, seeds will sprout, we bet

Coming from Southern California, 10-week-old Tess was surprised, but not unpleasantly, by our March rain. She also told us that she really likes matching shoes and jackets--Bella's green ones and her own white ones.

The rain has been coaxing all of our recently planted seeds to sprout: second crops of spinach, lettuce, arugula, escarole, bok choi, green onions, and chives, and new crops of fennel, radishes, mint, and two kinds of beets--tri-color and golden beets (which even Rick will eat).

And of course, peas. This year, we went hog-wild with peas. We started with 36 feet of tomato trellises. (The tomatoes will go in after the peas come out.) With 1 vine every 2 inches on both sides of each trellis, that is 432 pea plants and a whole lotta peas. Not content with this, a few later, we put a row of bush-style peas between every pair of trellises, for a total of 180 pea plants and a whole lotta more peas. Still not content, a few weeks after that, we lined the edges of our dahlia boxes with double rows of short vines, for a total of 480 pea plants and a whole lotta more peas. (Actually, we seem to have left about 2 row feet bare... So make that 468 pea plants.) Those
plants are about 3 inches tall now.



Of course, we did not plant just one kind of peas. It's true that, with the exception of a few row feet, they are all shelling peas.
We just love shelling peas. We especially love the French petit pois, which are packed so snugly, shoulder-to-shoulder in their pods. But we also packed a few other varieties of shelling peas that come in earlier than the petit pois.

With our succession plantings, we figure we will have pea shelling parties every 2 weeks during April and May! Of course, we won't be able to eat all of these peas fresh. We'll freeze most of them for next winter. It is easy to freeze peas--just par-boil them and throw them in a freezer box or bag. And they will be wonderful!

There is another reason to fill empty areas of the winter garden with peas. They are nitrogen-fixing plants. That means that, instead of depleting the soil, as most vegetables do, peas actually improve the soil for the tomatoes and other vegetables that will follow them.

Oh, there is one other kind of peas we planted -- sweet peas. Flowers, that is. We put them in a nice new 6-inch tall box that Perry and Aaron planted along our picnic area. We hung a net down the center of the box so that in the spring we will have a wall of delicately scented sweet peas.