Basil Galore

I just harvested literally pounds of basil from my aquaponics garden. It was so big the other plants weren't getting any sun. And what else is there to do with lots of basil besides make pesto








Purple basil pesto on gnocchi. Delicious!

Hopefully I'll find time later this week to turn the green stuff into pesto too.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

One picture

My Dickinson Pumpkin/Squash


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Still no pictures. *sigh* I haven't been home much during daylight hours, but I promise to post pictures this weekend at the latest. Last weekend I dug up the squash bed and planted the first winter vegetables. I cheated and bought starts at OSH and Armstrong. I put in 12 brocolli starts (6 are this fun purple variety!), 6 cauliflower, 6 celery, and 5 purple/red cabbage. Along the fence I put in snap pea seeds. And between the brocolli/cauliflower/celery/cabbage, I planted golden and red beets, Carnival Blend carrots, and Easter Egg radishes. I completely forgot that I've been waiting for this season to finally try growing parsnips. I think I will plant parsnips in a couple weeks after the carrots and radishes sprout and I can fill in the gaps. I LOVE PARSNIPS! I hope I can make them grow.

I pulled three butternut squashes and a very teeny melon out of the garden in the process of cleaning the garden out. I also pulled my Dickinson Squash/Pumpkin out a week or two ago. I am SO looking forward to sharing it with friends in pumpkin pie for Thanksgiving. In the meantime, it is a decoration on my front porch.

Haven't had ANY time to post anything new. I'm still eeking a little bit of produce out of the garden by it's time for a major overhaul so I can put in the winter garden. I managed to plant a few sweet peas in hopes that I'll get some blooms by Thanksgiving. I know it's not likely, but we can hope? I also planted a bunch of new pots in the aquaponic bed....mostly herbs and lettuces. Hopefully those will be ready for Thanksgiving too. Hope to post pictures soon!

Gnocci Craving

Having an odd craving for gnocci, so I thought I'd browse Google. I unexpectedly found this: Swiss Chard Gnocci Recipe. Sadly, I just yanked out all my swiss chard the other day (believe me, it was time....it was all old and gross and mildewy), but when the next batch gets going I will have to try this.

Tomato Season Really Begins

Starting to see a few more tomatoes ripen. The sun gold is really going at it.


The opalka produced its first tomato (albeit a small one!) and the mortgage lifter looks like it will have ripe tomatoes later this week!


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Location:San Diego Fwy,Los Angeles,United States

Peas and Beans

The peas are GONE. I yanked them out and hung the plants up to dry. In a few days I'll go out and remove the pods from the vines and shell the peas. I definitely did not get a lot of pounds out of my peas this year, but it was entirely because I wasn't out there picking them every couple days. I should have been snacking on peas at least once a day. Instead, the peas got too old and now they'll be dried peas that I can put into soups and what not.



In their place, I've planted beans. I was having trouble deciding what kind of beans to plant because I would like to grow a variety that I can use in soups and chilis and what not, in addition to the typical "green bean" varieties. I looked for awhile at buying several packages of bean seeds, but since I only wanted a few of each type of bean, I decided the best option was to just buy a bag of mixed soup beans from the store and grow those!

I soaked them for two nights, by which time they all had little roots sticking out of them. On Wednesday, I took them out and planted them right along the fence where the peas used to be, using 3" spacing and trying to mix up the varieties as much as possible. A couple beans are already starting to show some leaves. It will be very exciting to see how the variety looks as it grows!

Beet Ravioli

I've looked several times at beet ravioli pictures and recipes online, so when I found myself with a couple of beets and nothing in particular to do with them, I thought I'd try it out. I roughly followed Martha Stewart's Recipe and in hind sight I wish I had followed it more closely, because it turned out to be a complete failure.

Here's how it started: I had four beets, one of which was a Chioggia, which is shown below. (Btw I don't think I'll grow these next year...they aren't that fantastic looking and lose what color they have during cooking





I roasted all four beets, 350 F for a bit over an hour. I refrigerated them overnight, then the next day I peeled them and threw them into my mini food processor.


I then added two eggs to the food processor and blended it up.


This liquid went into a couple cups of flour (roughly half all purpose, half semolina)


I then rolled out the dough using my Kitchenaid and because the dough was so soft and kind of mushy, I decided to refrigerate that overnight. The consistancy of the dough should have been my first clue that I'd f***ed up, but instead I refrigerated the pasta sheets, which actually just made it crumbly and tough. Not helpful.

I mixed up a filling with herbed goat cheese, ricotta, and some shredded mozzerella and loaded it all up into my Kitchenaid ravioli maker. Here are most of the results:


Only a few raviolis ended up looking half decent.


However, because I hate to waste my own work and am somewhat clever, all was not lost. I froze the good looking raviolis for another night. With the demented raviolis and the leftover filling, I decided to put together a lasagna! I ran out to the garden and clipped some chard.


Then I layered that onto the ravioli mess.


Then the cheese filling.


And, somewhat to my horror, some Six Cheese Ragu. Don't get me wrong, I have a unreasonable LOVE for jars of store bought red sauce, but pouring it onto my homemade "ravioli", fresh cut chard, and a decadent goat cheese filling was decidedly sacreligious. BUT it was the only sauce I had on hand, so on it went.


I topped that with a bit more retarded ravioli and pasta scraps, another layer of sauce, and shredded mozzarella.





In the end, it actually was pretty delicious. The pasta texture was a little off, but was honestly quite tasty. I think I will probably even make the beet pasta again. Next time I think I'll follow the recipe a little closer, and will probably skip the ravioli making and go for another lasagna. It would be fun to make a lasagna with red pasta sheets and a white sauce, a reverse of the usual colors.

Stay tuned for a few days from now when I use the ravioli that weren't disasters.

Fava Fest

The fava bean plants are starting to look a little sad in this summer weather. I suspicion they lose their ability to fight off bugs and diseases in the heat, because their leaves are droopy and munched. Luckily, there was a pretty good crop of mature beans on them. I had been worried when I planted them that it was too late and I wouldn't get a harvest. I think the heat did cause some blossoms and small beans to drop, but those that were into their development already seem to still be maturing just fine.

I harvested about half of the beans that were on the plants. Any that looked like they could use a bit longer to mature stayed on the plants. I pulled about 3 & 3/4 pounds off the plants. My understanding (from an article about the Santa Monica Farmers Market) is that favas run for about $3/pound, so I definitely recouped my seed costs on this one, especially if a few more pounds are still out there growing.


The sad part about favas is the amount of effort that goes into making them edible. First, you have to shell the favas.


You might think these are edible, but in reality there is a thick, pale skin still on the beans. In order to peel this off, you have to boil them in salt water for ~1min. If you cook them any longer, the beans start to get mushy, so after their brief boil they get put right into an ice bath. This loosens the skin which you can then pierce with a fingernail and squeeze the bean out.


In the end, I ended up with about 1 & 1/4 pounds of edible favas. Boy are they delicious though! I put half into the freezer for later and half into the fridge (after I snacked on a few!) I'm hoping to make something with the ones in the fridge in the next few days.

Blackberry Heaven

I ate a blackberry today. It was right off the vine, and slightly warm on this summer day. It tasted like eating sunshine.

Then I begrudgingly gave one to Elliott. He didn't really want it, thinking it wouldn't taste like anything. But even he said it was excellent, and he isn't typically forthcoming with compliments, so it must have been excellent.

Then I ate one more, and blackberry season was done for us this year. With the summer heat, growth is at a standstill, and there aren't any more flowers or green berries left. My little blackberry vines are in their first year, and so I'm grateful for the three berries we did get. Most blackberry plants won't produce any in their first year. However, it does make me feel like I can't wait for NEXT summer.

Tomato Season

Picked my first tomatoes this week. 4 Sungolds and 3 Black Plums!


The Black Plums were a little bland, but their texture was good: smooth and moist but not overly drippy. The Sungold was strikingly flavorful. It was tart but not too acidic...more sweet than sour.

It will be awhile yet before any other varieties ripen, but I should get a few more Plums and Sungolds in the next week or so.

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Zucchini Bread

I went out to the garden this afternoon to find these:



My only thought was to make some Zucchini bread. My memory of zucchini bread is the recipe from the L.A. Times California Cookbook, but since I haven't got a copy and couldn't find on online, this recipe will have to do.

Peas!

The peas have gone crazy this past week. I harvested some snap peas as a breakfast snack, and there are loads of snow peas on the vines. I'm so glad they are doing so well, since I am beginning to think about how I will have to pull them soon to make room for summer beans. I was worried they were a waste of time and effort for only a couple handfuls of peas. But if they keep producing like this for another week or two, I'll feel like I'm definitely getting my time's worth out though.


Tonight's plan is to make some sort of meat w/ snow peas asian dish to use up some of those snow peas before they get too big and I have to use them as shelling peas.

Beet and Chard Flatbread Pizza

Yesterday I pulled two beautiful beets out of the ground. This got me looking for something interesting to do with them. So today I made a DELICIOUS beet and chard pizza.



Instead of a traditional pizza sauce like pesto or marinara I made a sauce by blending chard, some oil, and some garlic.

The dough recipe I got from this website. If I'm honest, I'm not sure I'll use it again. The dough was very elastic and it took forever to stretch it thin. I had to stretch it and let it rest and stretch it again about 4 times. I even was letting the dough rest stretched over an upside-bowl to try to get gravity to work in my favor.

I roasted the beets yesterday. An hour in foil in a 350 degree oven and they were seriously the tastiest beets I've ever had. It was all I could do to not eat them right then.

Chioggia Beet (sadly, they lost their pink/white stripes in the cooking)

Slices of beets, a few slices of mozzarella, and topped with a little thyme, and then into the oven. I already had a pan preheating (not as good as a pizza stone but oh well!), so I slid it onto the pan and baked it at 450 for 10 mins. The last minute I switched it to broil to brown the cheese a little.

Changes for next time: better quality cheese, different crust recipe, and cook it a little longer to brown the crust more.
- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Chard Recipes to Try

I'm looking for chard recipes that would be good for summer dinners. So far I've found this flatbread pizza that makes a sort of chard puree sauce. I think it would be delicious with a little turkey sausage (which happened to be on sale at Ralphs this week!) in place of the fake bacon. I also found these very pretty chard wraps with polenta, gorgonzola, walnuts, and raisins. Since I'm not really a raisin fan, I might try that second recipe with apricots or craisins. The recipe also calls for pancetta, but I could easily make it without to serve a vegetarian dish. Perhaps I'll try these out as a potential entree for the BBQ I'm holding in a couple weeks.

Blog Update!

I finally figured out how to post photos from my iPhone WITHOUT having them look like crap when you look at them on a computer. From now on you shouldn't have to click on the photos to get an in-focus version. Yay!

Aquaponic Update

Last weekend Elliott helped me clean out the bed of the aquaponics system again and we did an almost complete water change. The old water went out into the garden and the new water came from our Discus tank and the hose. I think weekly cleanings may be mandatory until we strike the right balance of fish, food, and plants.

The styrofoam plant float has been deteriorating since my (suspected) raccoon visit last week, and now has several breaks in it. We've decided we'll try to make a new float out of plywood instead. Hopefully we can get that cut during the evenings this week and put it out in the garden next weekend.

The plants, on the other hand, are doing FANTASTIC. Without the algae to compete with, many of them are doing extremely well. I've had several basils double their size in the last week, and the roots on many of the plants are downright huge! I think once we get a float that works well and get the algae under control, it's going to be very successful. Sadly, many of the plants I originally planted didn't survive the competition with algae and/or the raccoon attack, so I will be replanting lots of pots over the next few days. It looks like the hydroton rocks are going to be the preferred medium because they don't accumulate algae as quickly and they are much more reusable. The basil, however, seems to prefer the rock wool so I want try perlite to see if that provides a good middle ground.

The tilapia seem to be doing quite well. They have good appetites and seem to be growing. We have lost two fingerlings and the smaller of the two tilapia that were still hanging on from last year. This leaves me with 53 fingerlings and one large fish, along with 3 crawdads, 2 guppies, and a pleco in the aquaponics pond.

Assorted Update

Lots of things have happened in the last couple days. Here's the breakdown.

Tomato Bed:
The Hawaiian Currant made the transition back into dirt well and is beginning to put on some height. Given how miserable it looked when I picked it up, broken and wilted, off the ground a few weeks ago, I am shocked that it made such a recovery.

Hawaiian Currant looking good!

Green Zebra is still looking a little sad. I hacked it pretty good to remove a bunch of wilting leaves. The good news is that the brown wilt seems to be gone. The bad news is that there is only one growing tip left (until it grows a few suckers) and its leaves are somewhat curled, as if to protect itself or reserve water. I think it will be fine eventually, but it's not recovering easily.

Green Zebra...not looking good

The other tomatoes all have yellow flowers, and several are working on making tomatoes. Black Plum and Sun Gold both have lots of little green fruits. I'm curious to see who ripens first. Considering how well Black Plum did last year on neglect, and how well it's doing again this year, I suspect it will cement its position as favorite tomato.

Sun Gold tomatoes


Black Plum tomatoes

I put about 1 lb of E.B. Stone’s All-Purpose Fertilizer into the tomato bed. I also sprayed the bed with Neem Oil and sprinkled some Sluggo in the area. The tomato plants don’t seem too bug infested, but my poor pepper plants are just getting munched (except the Dulcettas, which somehow seem immune), I suspect by slugs & snails.

I bought a replacement Cayenne pepper to replace the one that got munched. It came in a 4-pack, so the others will probably go in pots. I also bought an Anaheim pepper. The one in the garden got so munched that I’m not sure it’ll make it, so I thought it best to have a plant on reserve just in case.

Anaheim Pepper might recover if the slugs stay away


Dulcetta Pepper looking awesome


Shallots (and one shallot that is probably not a shallot)


Garlic (Borage in upper left corner)

Legumes:
The pea plants look great. It’s going to break my heart when I have to pull them out in a couple more weeks. I’ve harvested about a dozen peas and there’s at least that many left on the vine for a salad or stir fry this week.

Very tall Pea plants


Peas

The fava beans are also doing well. There are several pods growing, and lots of flowers that should lead to bean pods soon.

Fava plants


Fava Beans

Leafy Greens:
Chard has taken over the garden. I really need to eat more chard. Lettuce looks fantastic. I think I’ll try to nurse it to the end of June for a BBQ on the 26^th, and then I’ll pull it out to give more room to the melon and strawberry plants. The Asian greens have also outgrown their welcome. I think they will become Chinese Chicken Salad this week. Mmmmm.

Red Chard


Asian Greens

Fruit:
A few of the melons have finally taken hold and appear to be growing. The ones closer to the back get much less sun, so they will take longer to get going, but I’m not sure having a delay between the plants will be a bad thing later this summer.

Charentais Melon

I finally got the 4 Chandler strawberry plants in the ground. Two of them already have strawberries trying to grow. Hopefully the others will get going soon.

Chandler Strawberry

Squash:
The zucchini plants are GIANT. I will have to hack it back a bit to get the corn in, but I doubt the plants would even notice. There are a couple zukes on it that will have to get eaten soon before they get huge. The other squash plants are doing well too. There are acorn squashes forming on one plant and the other squashes seem to have finally sunk their roots in and started growing.

Zuchinni growing


Acorn Squash

Other:
Radish seeds have sprouted out in the garden. Hopefully they’ll also be ready for salad for my BBQ in 3 weeks.

Radish sprout

The sunflowers have also grown quickly. I don't think I've mentioned them much in earlier posts, but the tallest is now taller than me.

Sunflower corner

My corn seeds have sprouted (all but one) in their little newspaper pots. When they reach ~6 inches tall, I’ll move them out to the garden.

Corn sprouts