More garden inspired cooking August 15, 2013

A few weeks ago, I picked a bunch of scarlet runner beans and my daughter and I worked on shelling them. We were delighted to discover such unusual and vibrant colors!

 

I didn’t get around to cooking the beans for several days and they became more of a mauve and indigo as they dried. I found a recipe to use the beans with our kale that’s served over polenta with parmesan. It was really tasty and satisfying! The beans retain some of their purplish quality, but look a bit more ordinary when cooked. The nice thing about the beans being so freshly picked was that I soaked them for a couple hours and they only took about 30 mins. to cook. Here’s the recipe I generally followed: http://www.hivequeen.com/2012/10/scarlet-runner-beans-tomatoes-polenta.html

 

 

Our heirloom tomatoes are just starting to ripen. I used this first bowlful to make a fresh tomato basil and feta pasta based on my old friend Amy’s recipe. (guess I was hungry because I forgot to photograph it!)

 

 

Last night, I finally picked a bunch of our huge collard leaves and cooked them down with onion, chicken broth, and Italian chicken sausage (a great dish with andouille sausage if you like a little more spice). A small stroke of genius led me to make a batch of fried green tomatoes as a side dish using the handful of tomatoes that I’ve accidentally knocked off the plants while pruning. I think my sister Lily and I made a similar dinner while visiting our grandparents in Georgia last year. And I didn’t even need recipes for these dishes to come out nicely!

 

From garden to table July 11, 2013

Perhaps this belongs in a different blog, but I wanted to share some pretty pics of the food we’re growing and the dishes it’s inspired me to make. I harvested all of our peas and a few zucchini this week, had some chard leftover from last week, and picked some parsley. The zucchini, chard, and parsley went into a yummy frittata along with some feta cheese. I love The Joy of Cooking’s frittata recipe because it is easy to make and endlessly adaptable to whatever vegetables, cheeses, or meats you have on hand. My husband said this frittata was awesome, but I think the recipe consistently produces a delicious dish for breakfast or dinner. I briefly boiled the peas and tossed them with a smidge of dressing.

zucchini

peas and frittata

just picked peas

Early Summer Garden Update

Our garden now has a mix of plants that we started in the spring and some summer additions that are coming along well. As things progress, we’re definitely learning what to do differently next year. Here’s our first bed with herbs in front and lettuce and kale toward the back. I pulled out most of the chard that had bolted, but left a small amount which is growing back slowly. As for the pests that invaded the kale and collards: I ended up buying neem oil instead of ladybugs because I was concerned about the ladybugs leaving our garden quickly rather than gobbling up the hundreds of aphids. The neem oil does work, but it’s rather labor intensive to apply enough to every affected leaf. I pretty much finished a large bottle of it and we still have pests on the kale, so yesterday I mixed up some soap and water and started spraying it on the leaves. I applied it again today. We’ll see who wins this battle…

herbs, lettuce, chard and kale

The strawberry plants are sending out lots of new runners now and I think we might see a second crop of strawberries yet.

strawberries

The scarlet runner beans got so heavy and the runners were trying to grow so high that we had to put a second stronger set of trellises behind the original set. And yes, our lettuce started trying to bolt in the last few weeks. But there’s still a lot of good leaves toward the bottom that we’re gradually eating our way through. I harvested three zucchini from the middle of this bed this week, as well as we picked all of the peas and pulled out the plant (a little belatedly, as a few pods had started to dry up). I have a row of carrots in here, but the middle of each carrot is very hard and over-sized… not sure if this is a result of too much sun or not enough water or what exactly.

lettuce, peppers, carrots, arugula, zucchini, and beans

The tomatoes are trying to escape the garden bed on all sides and need some reining in. (And perhaps some pruning which we’ve been a little reluctant to do since the plants look so healthy.) There are at least a couple dozen little green tomatoes hidden in the plants and lots of flowers.

10 varieties of heirloom tomatoes

We got the raspberry wires up and the Tulameens (toward back of photo) are standing taller and giving us a small handful of tasty ripe fruit each week now.

raspberries

I also took a photo of our fruit trees which we planted in early spring.

apple, cherry, bosc and comice pear trees

Here’s a peek at our little lemon cucumber plant which just started putting on blooms this week. The eggplant is also doing well, both in adding height and breadth, as well as flowering. My daughter insisted we plant purple cauliflower so there are a few baby plants in this bed too. I almost forgot this bed contains a young pumpkin plant that isn’t visible in this picture.

lemon cucumber, eggplant, caulifower, collards, and pumpkin

Late Spring Gardening June 18, 2013

My husband built us five 4×8 feet garden beds in our backyard in the early spring. Last year, I did some gardening directly in the ground at our rental house and in prior years, we’ve dabbled in container gardening as well as community gardening. This year is very exciting for us, because we’re in our very own home and we have enough yard to grow some of our favorite fruits, vegetables, and herbs!

In the first bed, I planted two kinds of kale, swiss chard, romaine lettuce, and mint, parsley, and chives. All of these plants grew quite large, especially the Russian kale and romaine lettuce. We’ve recently had an aphid invasion and pulled two of the kale plants out whose baby leaves were being attacked.

The second bed contains Hood and Benton strawberries. Shortly after planting the strawberries, we had a heat wave in late April/early May which caused the plants to try to produce a lot of berries. I should have removed the flowers so that the plants would concentrate on growing foliage and sending out runners, etc. Now it’s mid-June and the plants are really just starting to focus more on growing foliage rather than fruit.

The third bed contains ten kinds of heirloom tomatoes and a basil plant. The tomato plants are thriving and have some buds, but there’s no fruit developing yet. All three of the aforementioned beds were planted with starts.

The fourth bed is a mish-mash of plants. It has a romaine lettuce and two other arugula-type lettuces that already bolted and had to be pulled out. They were from a pack of mixed lettuce starts, so I really don’t know what I was growing exactly, but they went nuts in a short period of time. We also grew and harvested a row of radishes from seed, rainbow carrots, a few true arugula plants that are starting to bolt, and peas and scarlet runner beans, which were all grown from seed. The peas and beans have pretty flowers right now. Additionally, there’s a new-ish zucchini plant in the fourth bed.

The fifth bed has broccoli, most of which has been harvested these past two weeks (due to hot weather), a couple of collard plants, and more recently, a bell pepper, eggplant, and lemon cucumber. I also had dill in the fifth bed which was thriving until it became completely covered in at least two kinds of pests. I pulled it out today. I had yet to pick any of it, which tells me maybe it’s not a must-have in our garden anyway. 😉

We’re planning to buy some lady bugs to help with the aphids and possibly a few more plants to fill in the gaps. We also have a row of raspberry plants, featuring Willamette and Tulameen, plus a few Munger black raspberry plants. They’ve just started to produce a few ripe berries and we need to provide them with some string to guide their growth. We’ve left room to plant a small row of grapes and several blueberry bushes in the fall, after the soil has hopefully adjusted to the appropriate ph for their respective plants.

Columbia Gorge Orchid Sighting May 19, 2013

Today we drove into the Columbia River Gorge, just outside Portland, and hiked up the Wahkeena trail. Near the top, we walked out to a lovely vista of the river and Washington state on the other side. As we were about to head back down, I spotted a coralroot orchid. It was in perfect condition and there were just a few stalks all by themselves. I think this was my first wild orchid sighting in Oregon, so I felt pretty jazzed. 🙂

coralroot

Leach Botanical Garden, Portland, Oregon

A few days ago, me and my daughter went for a walk at Leach Botanical Garden. I was surprised to see a single Cypripedium calceolus blooming on the hillside at the edge of the garden and then later a large cluster planted in an old tree trunk. Next to the big cluster was also a Cypripedium montanum. All of the orchids were in partly shaded areas. We actually had a few weeks of hot weather in late April/early May, so I’m not sure if these blooms were early or right on schedule for this climate.

cypripedium calceolus

cypripedium calceolus

cypripedium montanum

Blooming here and there… June 19, 2011

In the last month or so, we had a few orchids in bloom: our Dendrobium Palpabrae and Encyclia Lancifolia. Also, the violet and gesneriads in my terrarium and around the house have really been going off. In general, the plants in my domed terrarium have at least doubled in size since last year. I would definitely recommend violets and gesneriads for terrariums that will sit in indirect light. My potted gesneriad had seven blooms at one time! Looking back at previous posts, I see that all of these are pretty reliable June/July bloomers.

We hiked the Sawyer Camp Trail along Crystal Springs Lake in San Mateo in early June and spotted one coral root orchid that was still blooming. It’s very late and most of what we found was dried up already.

We also walked around the SF Botanical Garden a few weekends ago. They recently finished some path improvements and re-plantings and things look really good. I saw a blue poppy for the first time – very beautiful! The Epipactis Gigantea (stream orchid) was also in bloom in the California section of the garden, but I couldn’t get into a good position for a photo – plus, our camera’s been broken for awhile, so I’m limited to my camera phone which isn’t great for flower close-ups. (as you can tell below…)

Dendrobium Palpabrae

Encyclia Lancifolia

coral root orchid

poppy

gesneriad

terrarium violet

Blooming Right Now – XXI January 21, 2011

There’s just one orchid blooming at our house right now; a Dendrobium Rigidum. It has two blooms open now and four or more buds. It’s nice to see something in our collection is thriving! Our Pomatocalpa Spicatum is developing a flower stalk too, but I don’t want to get my hopes up since I’m still battling the mealy bugs.

Dendrobium Rigidum

P.S. I took this photo with my HTC Incredible Android phone — pretty decent quality considering the blooms are smaller than my pinky fingernail!

Orchid Pests January 3, 2011

Its been a really long time since I wrote a new post, mainly because we have a 5 month old daughter now and taking care of her is more than a full-time job. Our orchids are getting less attention and unfortunately we’ve lost many.

Back in the springtime, I started finding pests on some of our orchids. In particular, I found scale and mealy bugs. I could take photos to show you, but that’s time consuming and kind of depressing. I physically removed them when I spotted them during watering and/or wiped the affected areas with hydrogen peroxide. These methods ended up being totally insufficient. In the proceeding months, I kept finding pests on more and more of our orchids and continued removing them, but I didn’t use an insecticide. As a result, we lost many orchids, who were weakened by the pest invasion. Maybe three months ago I finally tried using insecticides to get rid of the pests. I guess it was too late for some of our orchids, because the pests continue to spread from plant to plant and more plants have died.

If I could do things over and time wasn’t an issue, I would immediately isolate the pest-ridden plants from the others and spray them with insecticide every few days or perhaps once a week until I could find no further sign of infestation. I think the main lesson is to be vigilant about eliminating pests as soon as they appear. I’m sharing my experience here because its both sad and expensive to lose your orchids. 😦

 

Blooming Right Now – XX July 26, 2010

Dendrobium Palpabrae

Gastrochilus Somai

Schoenorchis Fragrans

Nageliella Purpurea

Since we moved to a new flat a few months ago, most of our orchids seem happier. Quite a few are producing new growth and/or blooms after having laid low for awhile. They’re in our kitchen (again) but it is a little warmer and brighter than the last place. We’ve also lost a few of our orchids that were unfortunately overwhelmed by the extra sunlight. (still learning…)

The Dendrobium Palpabrae put out another spray recently, as well as our Schoenorchis Fragrans, and Gastrochilus Somai. Another orchid, the Nageliella Purpurea, almost bloomed… its been teasing us for years. It produces these skinny shoots from which flowers should emerge, but we’ve never seen any buds until now. We were excited to see a bud develop, but then it refused to open and dried up. 😦 It seems to appreciate the sunnier locale, but I don’t know what else we need to do for it!