Today, I spent a few hours in the garden weeding (in particular mint and those pesky Jerusalem artichokes that have been taking over the fence area of my plot). I filled two lawn bags with mostly Jerusalem artichokes, yikes! I also planted four basil seedlings that I had rooted from cuttings a couple weeks before and sowed cilantro and two rows of beets (Chiogga and Golden). I had to take out the bush beans as they were completely destroyed by the resident rabbit and planted cilantro in their place. Oh well.
To clarify: The Green Zebra is my first ripe tomato of the year. The others are from a plot neighbor in the community garden whose plot I am watering while they are on vacation :).
Today I processed my garlic. It has been almost three weeks since the harvest, and it has been hot and very humid here in Boston. I had a total of 21 heads of softnecks (Transylvania) and used 16 of them to make the braid above, which is now proudly displayed in my pantry. The remaining 5 heads, which I am keeping as seed garlic, include the largest head I harvested plus four heads that had started to split. Those four were still large heads, and I hope they will store well until October/November when I can get the cloves in the ground. Softnecks store well, so they will be used after all of last year’s harvest and all of this year’s hardnecks have been used up.
I also had harvested 17 heads of hardneck garlic (Red Russian), of which I kept the two largest as seed garlic. I left a longer stem for the rest of them because I noticed that they were not fully cured. For now, I will store them in a single layer in my kitchen so they can continue to cure.
I scaled down my garlic-growing operation for this year, because starting September, I will be an empty-nester. 31 heads will be more than enough to get me through next year.
Cleaned softneck garlic, pre-braidingClean hardneck garlic. I will shorten the stems once they have been fully cured.Hardneck garlic – the messy remains
Not sure what to do with all those zucchini. I donated a few to the Jamaica Plain community fridge a couple of days ago. Might do the same with this batch. I clipped some basil stems in the hope they might re-root so I can plant them for a fall harvest. Fingers crossed.
I love all the flowers on my porch this summer. These here are cosmos Rubenza and Bright Lights. I will definitely move to exclusively herbs and flowers next year. Almost there: For vegetables, I currently only have one Thai pepper and some chard and lettuce growing on my back porch. None of them are doing particularly well. Next year, I will do only spring vegetables (radishes and salad greens) and then only herbs and flowers in the summer and fall.
When life gives you zucchini … My zucchini plant is just starting to set fruit, but I am currently taking care of a friend’s plot, and she has a massive zucchini, so I am harvesting a ton of them these days. Yesterday, I made this super delicious zucchini grilled cheese. It was just for myself, so I halved the zucchini amount in the recipe and used a quarter of all other ingredients. Plus I brushed one slice of bread with my favorite chili garlic mayo instead of butter. Because of the extra zucchini, the filling was quite thick, but it was so good!
