Port Potager

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...

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 kitchen renovation that made it so difficult to take care of canning  and cooking this fall did have an upside for the garden (you know, in addition to looking so much better ): We replaced our exterior kitchen door with a much better one, which leaves the old storm door available for cold frame duty. While it’s not a perfect fit, it’s pretty close. It’s also a major upgrade, since it’s so much heavier than the old windows we had been using (as is the old window on the far end, which is also from the kitchen reno). This thing holds in much more heat, and it’s not about to be blown away by the wind anytime soon.   And because it’s so much better insulated now, we still  have cilantro. This photo isn’t great because it’s reflecting the sky above, but you can see lots of green cilantro in there. This gave Jonas some fresh ingredients for a very carefully crafted tray of nachos: Since it’s supposed to snow again tomorrow, it may be a whil...

Another section of the garden plan for spring is the quadrant near the workshop and chicken coop: The right-hand bed of this section is under a small maple tree, which we keep around because it shades the chickens nicely in the summer. It definitely limits our options in that bed, though — no full sun to be had. We've found that salad greens (spinach, arugula, mesclun lettuces, beet greens) started in a cold frame do well here, since they get sun until the tree leafs out in May. If they're reasonably sized, the shade then works to our advantage to keep them from bolting. Weedy cilantro and dill also do well here, so we amend with lots of compost and just have the herbs and greens switch places each year, and it seems to work well. Along the top are still perennial grapes and herbs, which will remain in place (give or take a few small shake-ups of the herb garden that I'm mulling over). On the left at the top is a section for potatoes, though we'll als...

So there's no more fuss and there's no more scenes and my garden thrives! (You should see my nectarine.) But I'm telling you the same I tell Kings and Queens don't ever ever ever mess around with my greens! ~ from Into the Woods , by Stephen Sondheim We're still slogging through our kitchen renovation , and it's sucking up a lot of time that we would ordinarily be spending on preserving the last of our summer fruits — not mention cooking delicious meals using all that garden produce. An embarrassing amount of apples, pears, and tomatoes have been fed to the chickens due to our inability to eat them in a timely fashion. One thing that's doing well and can be stored in place outside  are the cool-weather greens. Though the back half of the summer was a dry one, we had a fair amount of rain early this month to get us back on track. The moisture and the cooler temperatures mean happy greens: Cilantro, because it's related to carro...

After a month of late nights and less-than-healthful eating choices, it feels sooooo good to be back to grocery shopping in the garden. One big success this season has been our head lettuce: This is one beautiful head of Buttercrunch lettuce, and we put it to good use in some lettuce wraps: This is a great way to eat stir fry on a hot day because it's lighter to have lettuce than all that rice. It's also nice when you're in a hurry and don't feel like waiting 45 minutes for brown rice to cook. Kirk made the filling by marinating chicken in soy sauce, ginger, and garlic. He then fried up the chicken with a mixture of cashews, pineapple, shitake mushrooms, and a spoonful of peanut butter for extra richness. Once the stir fry was almost done, he added some fresh cilantro at the last minute. Yum! The things we have in the garden right now  lend themselves well to Asian dishes, so we had a proper stir fry last night as well: This one featured chic...

This Sunday we enjoyed some football food while we watched the AFC Championship game: sliders! Our mini-burgers were topped with bacon and cheddar, plus caramelized red onions, bread and butter pickles , and homemade ketchup from the garden. Well, pickles and ketchup don't come directly from the garden, but their ingredients do. We also had purple and yellow French fries and a light slaw. Our storage cabbage is still doing well in the basement, and Kirk made a new winter slaw with shredded cabbage and carrot, plus a couple of thawed cilantro cubes , salt and pepper. The dressing is a light vinaigrette of olive oil and vinagre de banano (banana vinegar) from Costa Rica . It's a really delicious vinegar that tastes like a fruity, caramel-y malt vinegar. I've never seen it in around here before, and if I can't find any, I may have to try to make some when we run out. Anyway, it's just the thing for this crispy winter salad. And to drink? Chocolate mi...

At long last, we have broccoli! And not just any broccoli, either. This is the biggest, best broccoli we've ever grown — and we did it from seed!  It may be hard for me to express just how excited we are by this crop, but I'll try to explain. We haven't had much luck with broccoli since we moved here four years ago. Our first fall attempt never amounted to much because we started it too late, and in the summers it was demolished by turkeys , skunks , and groundhogs before we could harvest it for ourselves.  So this year we smartened up and put chicken wire fencing around the cole plots immediately after setting out the transplants . And you know what? It worked. Appropriate predator protection plus a long, cool, wet spring worked together to produce some excellent brassica crops this year.  Now that we're into a sudden stretch of summer heat, we are working to protect our broccoli in a different way: Hot weather can cause broccoli to open ...

I liked our homemade sriracha sauce so much that as soon as it was finished, I immediately filled up a new jar to make more. This time I thought I'd go for a fermented green chile sauce, since we still had lots of cayenne peppers left that still hadn't turned red on the counter: So I grabbed a bunch of green cayenne peppers, plus a handful of green jalapeños and cilantro (which ended up being about 1 pound of material), gave them a very rough chop, and tossed them in the food processor: After a thorough pureeing, I added 4 cloves of garlic, a tablespoon of kosher salt, and about 1/4 cup of honey: After a final blitz, I put it in the jar with a tablespoon of starter brine from a jar of lacto-fermented chard in the fridge. You can skip this, or add a little whey from some yogurt if you want. Once the jar is capped, it sits on the counter for a week or so: My jar wasn't full, so releasing the pent-up gases from the fermentation never was much o...

Remember how we  went to Mexico back in April? Half the fun was in the eating, and the other night we recreated our favorite dish: This is a shrimp ceviche that Kirk made with some of our last tomatoes ( all those green ones we brought in before frost  are turning red little by little, which has extended our tomato season by a good month or so). This is pretty much exactly  like the ceviche we had in Tulum , and it was really easy to do. Like,  really  easy. All you need is 1 1/2 pounds of shrimp (peeled but uncooked), a half dozen limes, and an afternoon. Put the shrimp in a bowl and juice all the limes into the bowl. Give it a stir and let it sit for 3-4 hours.  Just before serving, drain the shrimp (which will now look pink), and add to a bowl with diced tomatoes, onion, and cilantro (and avocado, if you like) and stir.  The end. The thing with ceviche is that it "cooks" the shrimp with a chemical reaction between ...

Yesterday I walked through the garden and realized that we have more to harvest now than just salad greens and rhubarb. Those things are great and all, but look what I found: Chamomile flowers are ready be picked. These should last all summer long, and eventually I should have another nice, big jar of them to use for tea and some cosmetic purposes. Our first few strawberries are just another sunny day away from being ready to eat. This one is a little pink on the bottom, and still a little too firm — but we're close to having fruit! I am most excited of all that some of our peas are ready. The ones here in the photo are a couple days away from being ready to pick — the pods are are still flat on one end. I was able to pick a bowl full of fully ripe pea pods, though, which I shelled. They made a nice, surprise addition to dinner: Kirk made a curry with Swiss chard, chicken, and the peas. There is also cilantro on top — another herb that's big en...

Some of our Spanish Rosa garlic has sprouted an alien life form! Not really — these are garlic scapes. Instead of a flower, sometimes garlic will sprout a scape, which is like an extra little bulblet on a stem. You could let that continue to grow and become tiny garlic cloves (this is how a garlic plant can go to seed), but if the plant puts its energy into the scape, the garlic bulb in the ground won't get very big. And that's really the goal. So we cut a few of our garlic scapes last night for dinner: These scapes are alongside a green onion and the leaves of some bok choy that has bolted (the leaves still taste fine, but there's no nice cabbage head like last fall ). We also pulled our earliest carrots and chopped up a couple of overgrown radishes for this stir fry: There's also cilantro in here from the garden. The ingredients not grown by us are the rice and pork (although the pork is from a nearby farm ). This is almost a totally Made i...

We are finally finished dumping dirt into our raised beds! This is the last quadrant, and we wasted no time getting seeds into those beds once we were done filling them. This weekend marks our frost-free date, so it was time to get cracking on our planting and sowing. In the center "C" you can see our bamboo tepees (made by pulling apart an extra section of bamboo fencing we used for privacy at the Red House — glad to put them to good use!). Around each tepee are planted Cherokee Trail of Tears, an heirloom black bean that will climb those poles. In the squared off ends of the "C" are zucchini and nasturtium seeds as well. In the foreground of this bed are also mustard seedlings (too tiny to see, but they are in the rectangular section that is dark from having been watered). Our tomatillos are just off frame. Other seeds that went into the ground this weekend, now that we're pretty sure nothing will freeze: sunflowers, chamomile, and borage, plus...

Did I mention that we had absolutely gorgeous weather last week during April vacation? One thing I love to do is to stroll around nurseries looking at all the plants they have, and it was a lovely week to do it. We don't need many flowers (although I still like to look), but I was on the hunt for the perennial herbs we have planned for the back row with the grapes . Although I was sad to find that my heretofore favorite nursery is shutting down, I found a great new (to me) nursery in Haverhill that might be my new first stop on future plant hunts. Cottage Gardens  is a great little family-run place on the Haverhill/Merrimac line, and you should definitely check it out if you live in the area. They had lots of flowers, a solid culinary herb selection, and their prices are great . I quickly filled up a flat of four-inch pots, including …  The basil and cilantro I mentioned before . These will give us something to munch on while we wait for the seeds to pop up and beco...

When we cleaned up the garden for the winter , we left a row of broccoli plants under a greenhouse hoop to see if their small heads and side shoots would plump up at all. When we tucked them under the plastic, they looked really great: A few weeks ago I had harvested some nice, green shoots for a salad  — they were tender and tasty, if a bit on the small side. At that time, when I cut the center head, there were lots of side shoots to be had: Ah, but then the winds blew. There was no blizzard, no storm--not really even any rain. But the wind gusted up around 40-45 mph, and that was enough to uncover our remaining broccoli: We could hear the plastic flapping loose before we went to bed, but no one was about to step out into the dark of night and wind chills of 5 degrees Fahrenheit to try to fix it. As you can see, the broccoli plants didn't like that one bit, and froze up.  All that's left to do is see what can be salvaged from the dead (or dyi...

It is, at last, getting very cold. Last night I went out and picked what I'm pretty certain was one of the last salads of the year for us. Our greenhouse hoops with carrots, lettuce, and the cilantro is on its last legs: the cilantro has started to succumb to the cold, and there's not much lettuce left in there to pick. In preparation for some really cold (low 20s) nights this weekend, I picked a lot of unprotected greens, carrots, and herbs. Here's what I ended up with: The mixed greens included arugula, spinach, beet greens, mache, mesclun, and a bit of romaine I found growing back on a stem we had cut months ago. I also added some mint, cilantro, and chives that were hanging on through the cold.  The carrots, by the way, are true baby carrots. "Baby carrots" from the grocery store are usually actually regular carrots that are whittled down to standard sizes and shapes. (I don't even want to think about what happens to the wasted carrot shavings....

This week has been strange, weather-wise. It started out weirdly warm for December with temperatures in the 60s, and (according to our humidifier) inside the house the humidity level has been hovering in the 60s as well. That is incredibly unusual for the winter — we have very dry heat in our house, and usually it's a struggle to keep the humidity level in the 40s with the humidifier running all day. It hasn't been on at all this week. We opened up all the the cold frames and greenhouse tunnels while it was warm to get some fresh air circulating and to let in the rain of the last two days. They are closed up again now, though, because the temps are falling steadily, and there might be a little snow by morning. As strange as the weather this fall has been, it is apparently perfect for cilantro. The plants we grew from seed sown back in August are enormous now — bushy and probably about three feet high. Their stems are very thick. The best part, though, is that they haven...