The Gardeners Anonymous Blog

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!

Nude Carrot Controversy

WARNING: THIS POST CONTAINS FULL FRONTAL VEGETABLE NUDITY.

In my daily quest to combine art and science with my gardening and cooking, I have created this sculpture.

I found the medium at the local Farmer’s market.

I call it Nude Descending Into Pot of Chicken Soup.

 

 

 

 

 

 
NOTE: ALL TUBERS CONTAINED IN THIS POST WERE NOT ONLY HARMED, THEY WERE CHOPPED, BOILED, AND TURNED INTO FABULOUS CHICKEN SOUP.

Stumble It!

Size Does Matter

To a nine-year-old, size does matter—when it comes to strawberries.

I don’t even want to think about what was done to these Jurassic strawberries to get them to this size. I have a hunch they are not organic. I bought them anyway because I was mesmerized by their size.

There were several strawberries in this four-pound container that were the size of my youngest son’s fist.

I realized then that my little boy could fit his fist in his mouth.

Stumble It!

How to Smoke Tomatoes

I know what you’re thinking, “enough with the tomatoes already.”
Believe it or not, it’s December but I still go out every day and pick tomatoes off the vine and eat them. They still taste great.

The skins of my tomatoes started to crack as the weather turned cold and the days became shorter. So I stopped watering them about four weeks ago—and they stopped cracking. I learned this trick from my brandywines.

We had an abundance of large cherry tomatoes. I didn’t feel like making a sauce with all these little tomatoes so my husband and I decided to do what we used to do every year at our old house—smoke them. I know what you’re thinking now: Aren’t they hard to keep lit?

Smoked tomatoes are delicious, but very labor intensive. Trust me though, they are worth it. It’s easy for me to say this because usually my husband does the labor. I just supply the tomatoes.

Colander O’ Plenty

This is my first harvest. All I picked were tomatoes and tomatillos though, which is O.K., because that’s all I planted.

I haven’t done anything with the tomatoes yet. I heard it was best to pick them, turn them upside down and set them on your counter for about three days. Supposedly this brings them to optimum sweetness.

I did make salsa with the tomatillos. I roasted them until they were slightly blackened. I let them cool then I put them in a blender with a small white onion chopped, 5 or 6 sprigs of cilantro and a couple cloves of garlic. I blended them for a few seconds and then added salt to taste.

We laid it over fresh cod, wrapped it in aluminum foil, and threw it on the grill until the fish was just cooked through. Yum.

Oh, by the way, I didn’t take any pictures.

Hey, I’m still getting used to all this blogging stuff.

My First Blog Recipe

This makes the second year in a row I’ve planted fava beans. I originally did it because of my friend Patti. (She likes to be called Patricia but I’ve been calling her Patti for 18 years now and I can’t stop now.) So Patti told me that favas are a good cover crop. They add nitrogen to the soil, which means that right after they’re harvested you can grow another crop of something else right on the top of where they were.

I now grow them because they are so tasty.

I’ve never published a recipe in my blog before. Here is the reason why: I’m not good at that measurement part, I’m not good at remembering where the recipe came from and I’m not good at writing them down.

See my dilemma?

Patti, the one who likes to be called Patricia, also gave me this recipe for fava beans
and it was from some kind of eating light or heart healthy cookbook or something like that. I made it with fresh fava beans from my garden and I liked it. My kids ate it which, of course, is the true test of a recipe at my house.

So I thought I would pass it on.

Patti’s Fantastic Light Fava Bean Pasta

About 1 cup of fava beans--hulled and blanched with the waxy outer shell taken off.
(You need about a third to a half a shopping bag full of fava beans to get one cup you can actually eat. )
About 1 pound of dry pasta like Cappelletti, radiattore or fusilli whatever you have.
About 1 cup of ricotta cheese
About 1 cup of pasta water
About 1 cup of parmegeana
About 1/3 cup of fresh mint chopped
Salt and pepper to taste
Boil the pasta
Drain the water
Reserve 1 cup of pasta water
Mix everything up in the pot and serve
You can grate a little more parmesean and throw it on top if you like.
Serve with Chianti, of course.

I made it with grilled chicken once and it was really good. Don’t tell Patti because she’s a vegetarian.

My friend Patti is reading this right now rolling her eyes, swearing under her breath and saying “This is not the recipe I gave her!”

Thank you, Patti.