The Gardeners Anonymous Blog

Poppy Fair Farm

Nurseries are like crack to me.  Throw in some bluegrass music,

cute goats, 

wonderful vending booths with native plants,

great art,

hand made soaps,

specialty plants, home made beauty products and jewelry, beautiful original paintings, and cool crafts then you have Poppy Fair Farm.

 

And Happiness.

My friend Erin, who owns Native Revival Nursery in Aptos, put on her first annual Poppy Fair Farm last Saturday. I went over to be a part of the festivities, and they did not disappoint. There was something for everyone—and their five senses.

The bluegrass music—banjo, mandolin, guitar, and bass fiddle—was particularly good. 

When Erin was asking for information from the lead in the bluegrass band, Jimmy Chickenpants, for the poster, this is what he said: 

"Some people make the mistake of spelling Chickenpants as 2 words. That's just plain wrong"

 

Perfect.

Canker is an ugly word

Fallen apples on the ground, rotting and mocking me

At first it’s really exciting and fun making all those apple pies from your very own apple tree, then, pumpkins come along and bump apples out of the way in the pie department and oops, some of those little apples fall to the ground. 

I run by them on my way back and forth dropping my kids at school, picking up and dropping off dogs, shopping, running, gardening, biking, blah, blah, blah. 

I finally get a moment to myself. I make a delicious cup of coffee and walk to my front porch, take a deep breath of the clean autumn air and look around, awwhhh, it would be perfect if it wasn’t for those damn apples sitting there on the ground in front of me. 

They would still be sitting there too if I hadn’t read about Brown Rot and the evil “canker.” 

A word that anyone in his or her right mind would want to avoid. A canker means necrosis, ulcerous thrush, and inflammatory parasitic infection, open lesion an oozing sore. 

How do you avoid the word canker?

Please, for the love of malignant infection, clean up your rotting apples.

 

This is the End...of the Tomato Season

I mentioned this song, “The End” in my last post.

This is the end
Beautiful friend
This is the end
My only friend, the end

Of our elaborate plans, the end
Of everything that stands, the end
No safety or surprise, the end
I'll never look into your eyes...again

Can you picture what will be
So limitless and free
Desperately in need...of some...stranger's hand
In a...desperate land

Lost in a Roman...wilderness of pain
And all the children are insane
All the children are insane
Waiting for the summer rain, yeah

There's danger on the edge of town
Ride the King's highway, baby
Weird scenes inside the gold mine
Ride the highway west, baby

Ride the snake, ride the snake
To the lake, the ancient lake, baby
The snake is long, seven miles
Ride the snake...he's old, and his skin is cold

The west is the best
The west is the best
Get here, and we'll do the rest

The blue bus is callin' us
The blue bus is callin' us
Driver, where you taken' us

The killer awoke before dawn, he put his boots on
He took a face from the ancient gallery
And he walked on down the hall
He went into the room where his sister lived, and...

Then he paid a visit to his brother, and then he
He walked on down the hall, and
And he came to a door...and he looked inside

~ Jim Morrison

This is not the end of the song but I decided to stop there because it gets a skosh violent.

People end their tomato season in many different ways. I like to end my tomato season by singing “The End” by Jim Morrison and the Doors, harvesting all my viable tomatoes and making a big vat of sauce.

I try to freeze the sauce but I usually end up using it all up before I can.

Now, Jim Morrison originally wrote “The End” about breaking up with his girlfriend, but as he performed the song over and over again he started to add to it and this is what he eventually said about it’s meaning:

“I really don't know. I think it's sufficiently complex and universal in its imagery that it could be almost anything you want it to be."

I like to think it’s a song about the end of my tomato season.

 

Happy Ending For Lunch and Dinner

My friend Ruth asked what finally happened to the roosters, so here’s their story:

Here is the reasons why I couldn’t keep the chickens.

When we first took the roosters in, people asked, “Why can’t you keep them?”

I even had someone tell me to keep them because ‘they’re fun.’ I couldn’t smell alcohol on her breath but then I remembered you can’t smell hallucinogens.

Roosters? Fun? Sure, why not, if you like big birds waking you up at dawn, slashing at you with their spurs, and trying to peck your eyes out, they are a barrel of laughs.

Even if I wanted to keep the merrymaking roosters—I can’t—see?

  My dog stood like that for fifteen minutes straight just waiting for their cage to disappear.

So, as much as I wanted to keep those amusing roosters, a nice man named Richard adopted them. He picked them up two days ago and took them home to be with his family of hens to make pretty babies.

I want to believe that Richard didn’t eat them. The reason I think he didn’t eat them is that when I asked him if I could take a picture for a story I was writing, instead of telling me that he was in the witness protection program, and holding a folded newspaper in front of his face, he agreed and posed happily.

  Note my dog still hoping for lunch and dinner

Before the roosters left, I gave them names. I named the one on the right, Lunch, and the one on the left, Dinner.

Bye-bye, Lunch and Dinner.

Tim the Tomato Salad Recipe: Faster to make than to eat

A friend once said “If it takes longer to make it than it does to eat, it, than I don’t bother to make it.” 

I was talking to my tomato friend Tim, (that’s him with the big nose in the photo) about tomatoes and recipes.

Tim the tomato.

He suggested this very simple salad—one I’ve been making daily, and will probably continue to eat every day until I run out of fresh garden tomatoes:

Ingredients:

Fresh peeled tomatoes, between 2-4 depending on the size (Use whatever you have. They’re all good fresh.)

A quarter cup of goat cheese

1 tablespoon strawberry balsamic vinegar

Coarse salt to taste, (I use about ½ teaspoon)

Directions:

Peel tomatoes and cut into bite-size pieces.

Crumble goat cheese.

Combine all ingredients in bowl.

Eat.

Shortly after I wrote down this recipe, I stabbed Tim, cut him up, skinned him, and ate him with the rest of the above ingredients. That is his nose on the top of the salad.

Tim's nose in the salad.

He was very tasty.

Why I Love Early Girls

O.K., I get it.

Heirloom tomatoes are da bomb. 

Some of this season's heirlooms

Every time I go into grocery stores—or to parties—I’m bombarded with these beautifully colored, interestingly shaped fruit.

The colors of the fruit can be pink, yellow, purple, or black. The fruit comes in so many different colors they look like fruity Easter eggs.

I try to be cool and hip, so I plant hip groovy heirlooms but they are hard to grow, so I end up being the dorky loser gardener. The plants get diseases, and pest infestations. And they don’t seem to produce much fruit. 

Heiloom tomato plant suffering from late season wilt.

Along with the difficult heirloom varieties I also grow the usual suspects like Better Boys, regular cherry tomatoes and my favorite: Early Girls. 

Early girls

Here are the reasons why I love Early Girls:

They are prolific.

They produce early and often.

They are resistant to diseases and pests.

You can’t beat their taste. 

While all my heirloom plants are dead, my Early Girls keep growing and producing.

This tomato is also well suited to dry land farming  or gardening techniques. This means that the tomatoes are not watered after they are planted, so they develop deep roots to seek out moisture. Because the plant receives little water the fruit becomes super flavorful.

Early Girls also do well in coastal gardens where the weather is cool and overcast during the growing season.

I love them. 

Think I’ll go pick some right now.

Fun With Genetics and Pumpkins

I planted seeds from two different pumpkins this year, one was a Galeux d' Eysines (pink warty), and one was a Princess Pumpkin.
Only one or two of the Princess Pumpkin seeds sprouted. Most of the pink warties sprouted but a lot shriveled on the vine.

So almost all, if not every single pumpkin came from pink warty seeds. The variation is impressive. Now I know I don’t have to go out and buy many different seeds or pumpkins to get seeds from.

All I need is one or two.

These two are definitely from the Galeux d’ Eysines.

My Famous Quince Syrup Recipe

Oh, all right.

It was supposed to be jam, and somehow it all went wrong. So now I have 11 ½ jars of chunky quince syrup.

Everyone knows I can’t follow a darn recipe, which is why I don’t have a food blog.

I have a gardening blog.

And I have to say that even though things didn’t quite go the way I wanted, the chunky syrup is really pretty.

Here is how I made my famous quince syrup. It would be best if you did not try duplicate this unless you would like some pretty pink chunky syrup of your own.

You were suppose to grate the quince with a cheese grater. I injured my shoulder in a freak yoga accident, so I matchsticked them with a very sharp knife then cut the other direction.

I had such high hope at this point.

 
I boiled the quince about twice as long as you were suppose to and it still didn't thicken up.

Aren't they pretty? And so good on waffles.

The recipe came from Simply Recipes. I'm sure it's a great recipe for someone who has way more brain cells than I.

Waste Not Want Not. Yes, Mother.

 
I was walking through the forbidden ranch the other day, and I saw strange yellow bumpy fruit dangling from a gnarled old tree.

They looked—sort of—like lemons. Upon closer inspection, I noticed the fruit was covered with fuzz. Were they furry lemons? No, but they looked just like large fuzzy apple-lemons. I was pretty sure there was no such thing as fuzzy apple-lemons and yet something was so darn familiar about them. I knew what they were. I had to do a little traveling down my (now dusty) memory lane.

Then I remembered they are quince.

My mom used to make quince jam. I think it was jam, at any rate, if I remembered correctly, quince really wasn’t edible and that you had to make something like jelly or jam out of them before you could actually ingest them—and even then it was sketchy.

I don’t know if it was the way the sun hit the tree or the fact that I was in one of my favorite places in the world or it could have been my mother’s voice echoing in my ear. “You can’t let all those perfectly good fuzzy apple-lemons go to waste, there’s a recession going on. You should pick them and make quince jam like I used to do.”

Mothers can guilt you into anything, even when they no longer inhabit this earth.

Damn it.

Stumble It!

The Best Tomatillo Salsa Recipe Ever

It’s harvest time in my tomatillo garden. We have piles of the beautiful green fruit with the papery skin. Our favorite thing to make with them is salsa. The recipe is incredibly easy and when I make it fresh for friends they say that it is the best salsa they ever had.

My Tomatillo Salsa recipe:

3 pounds of fresh ripe tomatillos peeled and rinsed
1 teaspoon +1 tablespoon kosher salt
2 tablespoons olive oil
1 small or ½ large onion
2 cloves garlic
1 handful cilantro

Spread the tomatillos on a cookie sheet with sides, or a shallow baking pan. Pour olive oil and teaspoon of salt over tomatillos and use your hands to toss, coating the tomatillos.

Roast at 350 degrees until the tops are brown—about 25 minutes.

Take them out of the oven and let cool.

In a blender or food processor, pour tomatillos along with their  juice, onion, cilantro and salt. Blend until you get your desired texture.

I like it a little chunky.

Eat.

You can also roast a jalapeno or your favorite type of hot pepper and throw that in if you like it spicy. If I make it spicy, my kids wont eat it.

Stumble It!