Port Potager

Last spring we spent a week traveling across Pennsylvania , visiting some parts of Amish country. While we were there, we purchased several seed packets of heirloom fruits to try. But since we had already started our seeds for the year, they had to wait until the next growing season. Fast forward to today, when we finally get to see what a German Gold tomato actually looks like: These are enormous heirloom tomato from Germany. They are a gold variety with bright red streaks along the sides, making them very colorful (though we picked the first ones way too soon, not realizing that they would redden up).  The flavor is really good — mild, juicy and well-balanced. And since they’re so big, they’re perfect for stuffing: This one practically took up my whole salad plate and was filled with chicken salad. It was a perfectly filling meal! I’m also thinking these tomatoes could make a pretty salsa, too, but mostly we’ve just been slicing them for sandwiches and ea...

Last weekend was a fairly big planting time for us, and just about all of it happened in the central "C" of the workshop quadrant: In this central bed we have Swiss chard, early and late carrots, cilantro, mesclun lettuce, head lettuce and spinach. Most of this bed is really only in partial sun once a nearby maple tree leafs out, but that usually works for leafy salad greens to keep them from bolting in the heat. I also used some onion sets as dividers between these plantings to mark the rows. Across the top of this quadrant are still perennial grapes and herbs. The right side and bottom are largely empty. We have a few repairs to do in these sections, and after that we’ll plant a cover crop of clover to give these beds a rest for the season. That leaves the left side, which is a much-reduced tomato section. Because the area is so much smaller, we’re not planning to do much tomato canning this year, but we should have enough for plenty of fresh eating and froze...

Earlier this week we had a frost advisory. I didn’t think we’d actually have a frost — and I was right — but it’s still a good idea to bring in the last of the tender crops just in case. This meant bringing in several ripe eggplants, along with the remaining bell peppers, jalapeños, and anchos. We also ended up pulling out the last broccoli and cauliflower plants this week, since they are completely spent and have succumbed to aphids (ditto on our Brussels sprouts, which is total bummer — we didn’t get any). We also brought in what was left of our tomatoes, which are in varying stages of ripening. We may just wait for them to turn red, or we could make a green tomato pie . It seems a little silly to bake anything with 20 pounds of a trick-or-treat candy haul lying around, but you never know.  We also covered over our green for winter though those tunnels are open again now. It was actually quite warm for the rest of the week, and we had a pretty visitor: ...

Zucchini is almost always a sure-fire garden vegetable, often to the point of ridiculous returns on the investment of a few seeds. We even planted ours in semi-shade this year to slow it down, and we’ve still managed to pick more than we can typically eat as a side dish. In addition to baking and freezing our favorite zucchini bread for the winter, we’ve had plenty of zucchini pizzas on the grill , along with zucchini salads and sides.  There’s still always more to eat, so Kirk dug into one of our favorite summer reference books, the  Moosewood Cookbook . This is full of excellent vegetarian recipes, and Kirk decided to try making a zucchini-crusted pizza. This is basically a grated zucchini fritter held together with egg and cheese, but you make it big enough to use as the crust of a pizza. You can find the recipe here . Kirk tweaked the recipe by making it on a flat pizza pan with browning holes instead of in a pie plate, which made it much crispier.  Instead...

The final planting quadrant is also the smallest, because it lacks the center C that the others have in favor of a patio area for picnicking. It also has a full bed of strawberries along with existing perennial plantings of roses, rhubarb and lavender, so there aren’t many areas left to fill. Across the top row is garlic that was planted back in October. When this is harvested in July, it will be replanted with winter green like arugula, bok choy and turnips. The remaining section has Paisano paste tomatoes.  Along the right side is a short trellis of snap peas, which will shade a patch of mesclun and other spring greens. Right now this is the site of our winter cold frame of mache and spinach, so our plan is simply to interplant the mesclun with these plants in early spring and gradually remove and replace things they bolt throughout the season. There are also both winter and summer carrots close to the house, where they can handle the shade that creeps in during th...

The section of the garden near the swings is always on the easiest to plan. It’s reliably sunny, but two large swathes are already spoken for, with asparagus along the left side and grapes and herbs across the top.  To the right will be Brussels sprouts and a row of fennel bulbs, along with a large bed of leeks, which hopefully do better this year. Along the bottom is a trellis of peas and a row of Amish paste tomatoes for saucing.  In the center C are beets, chard, okra, and potatoes.  And that’s it! This section is full of big plants, or big patches of some of our favorites, so it’s just not very complicated — which is a nice change of pace.

It’s been slow going for our tomato plants this year. The cold, cloudy spring and dry summer have basically put our plants on pause. Still, they are growing — albeit at a glacial pace — and producing. They’re just several weeks behind schedule. When we lost most of our vining tomato seedlings, we replaced them with transplants. To cheer ourselves up, we took advantage of the opportunity to sample several new-to-us varieties. Here’s our first basket: Not pictured: our Amish paste and Paisano tomatoes, which are all still green on the vine. We also planted a new variety called “Mexico,” but the one reddish one wasn’t quite ready to be picked yet. Below is one of everything except Early Girl (the small red one in the 10 o’clock position above), which is a perfectly okay tomato if you like the grocery store kind. Above we have the more interesting ones for tasting. Top row, from the left: Black Krim, Rose, Red Brandywine. Bottom row: Yellow Pear, Sungold, Green Zebra....

From our very cold, slow-to-start spring and  current drought  to the loss of pollinators and groundhog raids , it’s been a really rough go of it this year. Though we were beginning to despair of ever having food to eat this summer, a bit of rain this morning and some successes have us feeling more optimistic. Here’s what’s going right this week:   Remember the beet leafminers that nearly defoliated all of our beets and chard? Thanks to a regimen of removing affected leaves and twice-per-week applications of neem oil, both beets (above) and the Swiss chard (below) have bounced back quite nicely, and we’re now able to harvest both at will. The cold, cloudy winter and spring made it hard to get our tomato seedlings started indoors, and many didn’t make it when transplanted because they were so puny. Then came the drought, and though we have some blossom-end rot due to those conditions, we also have plenty of tomatoes headed our way. They’re a couple weeks...

If you’ve been reading this blog for even a little bit, you’ve probably noticed how much we love tomatoes . One of the purest joys of summer is a nearly endless stream of fresh tomatoes, eaten warm from the vine with little to no preparation. Our favorite food is in jeopardy. We always start our tomatoes from seed during the winter, and we usually end up repotting them to give them more room to grow before setting them out in the garden. This year, however, our seedlings remained teeny-tiny for weeks. They sprouted quickly but then appeared to be stunted. This is actually one of the biggest  ones Kirk set out last weekend: If you’re thinking that’s too tiny to transplant, you’re probably right, but we did it anyway because they were just wasting away in the seed flats . Our hope was that some would begin to thrive in the richer soil of the actual garden. This looks to be true for the one above and for a handful of others (notably the Paisanos), but we lost a whole ...

We often don’t have a killing frost here the first couple times it’s predicted, protected as we are by the ocean, which acts as a big heat source and keeps our temperatures slightly warmer in the winter and cooler in the summer. In the game of protecting tender plants, those few degrees in either direction are crucial. This year, though, there was no flirting with 33 degree nights. The temperature dropped right down to 30 last night, and that did in the last of the summer fruits. We prepared to protect our leafy greens , and yesterday I also went through the garden to pick anything that looked big enough to be worth saving:  As a general rule of thumb, fruits will not survive a frost, but root vegetables will be just fine until a hard freeze, thanks to the insulating power of the earth. Leafy vegetables are a toss up: Basil gave up long ago and green beans are out, but arugula, cabbage, and kale are fine. Broccoli is also usually pretty tough, but we were planning on ...

It's shaping up to be a gorgeous holiday weekend here, and we took a little time out from building kitchen cabinets to enjoy the fresh air and sunshine. The leaves here are just starting to flush with color, and there are lots of pops of red and orange in the garden as well. Our calendula was nibbled back a few times by a bunny or groundhog, so it's not as full as in years past. Good thing I still have plenty of it dried and stored from last year to make soap . The blooms we do have are lovely, though.  Tough the vines have called it a day, the rose tomatoes are still ripening in the sun.  The okra has also slowed way down in the cooler temperatures, but they're still blooming. The bees love these flowers, so I imagine they'll be all over this once it unfurls. These plants are easily eight feet high now, so the blue sky is always the backdrop when you look up to see them. These tiny red petunias really took off this summer, and they're...

This weekend, as always, we had a lot of picking to do. Our harvest is spreading across several tables and counters now. From the orchard we have lots of apples and pears: And from the kitchen garden we have an assortment of other (technical) fruits, including tomatoes, bell peppers. cucumbers, zucchini, and eggplant: The past two years we made and canned a delicious peach and zucchini chutney at the height of summer to preserve those outsized harvests. It's one of my all-time favorite foods, and I love it with some cheese, crackers, and pickles for a winter lunch.  This year we will not have any, so when our last jars are gone, we'll be out of that particular chutney for a few years, until a new peach tree begins to bear .  So we went back to the drawing board to find a new chutney recipe with ingredients that we actually have. Mid-September tomatoes and apples? Check. The Ball Book has a tomato apple chutney recipe , as does River Cottage . ...

It's been a very hard week here in the garden. For one thing, we're dealing with quite an onslaught of winter moths . Have you seen lots of little inchworms hanging from silk threads this spring? They love maples, and are eating their way through the small red Norway maple in the back yard. I haven't noticed a big issue with the sugar maple or fruit trees out front, but it's probably just a matter of time.  They've been dive bombing out of the evergreen in the back yard also, presumably in search of greener pastures: And they've found what they're looking for: That used to be a young cabbage transplant, and almost all of them look like this now. I'd been stumped about what was eating them for a couple weeks: It's not loopers , and the damage to the stems isn't clean like a cutworm . Well, now I know. If we had known this was coming, we'd have put down the row cover as soon as we planted them. By now it might be too late....

Our Christmas dinner is not a tradition that rises from the garden, but rather is a reminder of our (admittedly relative) poverty when we first lived together in North Carolina.  That first year that we lived together, while I was finishing college and student teaching and Kirk was learning some very useful farm skills as an interpreter at the living history museum at Old Salem , we lived on very little money. We did the grocery shopping at the local Kroger with a carefully planned list in one hand and a calculator in the other. If I'm not mistaken, our budget was $25 for the week, and if we went over the limit, we took things out of the cart and put them back. Some weeks we had enough for everything plus pickles ; other weeks we did not.  This budget led to a careful exploration of pasta and stir fry dishes, and we learned just how far a single cut of meat can be stretched. We regularly split a chicken breast in half to share for dinner. So for our first Ch...

November always strikes me as the end of something. The World Series is over and baseball is done for the year, despite my best efforts to hang on to summer. Halloween and its accompanying burst of creativity is past. Daylight Saving Time has finally ended, thrusting us headlong into the dark days. Temperatures have dipped below freezing, ending the active growing season and leaving us casting about for something to do in the garden besides peeking under the tunnels and raking up leaves. Although we haven't technically had a frost, we did have some snow yesterday, so our remaining summer fruits are dead and gone. This was our last harvest basket: Tonight we ate the very last fresh tomato (in salsa form). There are no more cucumbers, and the supply of peppers and jalapeños is dwindling. We still have some eggplant, but Saturday's eggplant parm luncheon had some bitter bites, and we had so much of it this year that I think we might just compost the last few on the c...

A couple weekends ago we had brunch with a good friend in Boston. This friend is an excellent cook and hostess, so it is sometimes hard to know what to bring to the table. The solution? Our kit for home-grown Bloody Marys: Turns out that this is the time of year that the ingredients for Bloody Marys are perfectly in season. Well, vodka is always in season, but tomatoes, celery, and horseradish are ready for harvest at the end of summer and into the fall. To make our kit, we used a box from a set of Mason jars, which still had its handy dividers intact. I suppose a more market-minded farmer would make nice wooden divided boxes, but we were mostly concerned with portability. Anyway, the compartments are stuffed with a bottle of vodka, four quarts of fresh tomato juice (made by running newly-picked tomatoes through the food mill ), a whole bunch of celery, some lemons, a bottle of Worcestershire sauce (from the store, but I have designs on making our own some day), a sm...

I know I won't feel this way in February, but I have to admit: A teensy part of me is looking forward to frost. You know, the part of me that is tired of picking tomatoes. The part of me that doesn't really need more than 36 quarts of tomato sauce put up for winter. The part of me that just can  not  chop any more salsa ingredients.  The part of me that is sick to death of fruit flies hovering around all those tomatoes. I know, I know. I'll miss them when they're gone (the tomatoes, not the fruit flies — they can go to hell). It's a long winter without fresh tomatoes, and by May I'll deeply regret having maligned their abundance in this post.  But for now, what to do? There are just so many .  Enter ketchup. We've been looking for something else to make, now that we are fully stocked with salsa , pasta sauce , ratatouille, jam , and soup . We first thought of giving ketchup a try last year, but it only occurred to us after  frost k...

September is the most beautiful month here in New England, and we had a stunning day today. In addition to puttering around the garden and taking care of some basic chores, we took time to climb up to the top of the Plum Island lighthouse . It's not always open to visitors, so we were happy to take advantage of this once-in-a-while view of the Merrimac making its way to the ocean: Not only does September offer the best weather of the year, but it is also the month during which our garden is at its absolute peak of production. We still have all the fruits of high summer (tomatoes, peppers, eggplant), but we also have available just about anything we want from the fall garden as well (sweet potatoes, pumpkins, cabbage, kale). From now until frost (usually mid-October for us), we can have our pick of almost everything we grow.  For example, tonight's supper is a combination of summer and fall produce on one plate: We had very summery charcoal-grilled burgers ...