Companion Planting and a Flashy New Trellis

The tomatoes are in. The bed in the photo is 4' by 18'. There are eight tomato plants (a little less than half our stock) in the bed, which I know isn't very many, but they will be sharing the space with four varieties of poling beans, red onions, leeks, and a shit load of basil. Well, maybe not a shit load, but a fare amount none the less.

We're really happy with how well our new trellis turned out. The design is mostly from something Meg found on the internet and in the latest issue of Organic Gardening. However, the modifications are all Future House. It did take us a few hours to build, but it's nothing more than bamboo from our property and salvaged string (the whole thing didn't cost a cent). I'm certain that by the end of this year I'll be able to tie knots like a sailor (which is fitting, because I tend to curse like one).

Backyard Breakfast

This morning I went out back, gathered some eggs, harvested red oak leaf lettuce, picked some sage, and clipped a few leaves of chard. Fifteen minutes later they became breakfast. Other than the olive oil everything came from our garden/coop and it was delicious. This is one of the major reasons why we shop at home.

In Which Our Parsley Returns from Beyond the Grave

Don't you wish all those rocks were in your garden? I do.

We've had a really mild winter—less than ten inches of snow and an average temperature of 40°F—and the garden is loving it. Right now we have parsley, swiss chard, bok choy, kale, and lettuce that have slowly been doing their thing since the fall. Temperatures are supposed to be in the mid-50°s for the next week, so perhaps we'll be eating salads by next weekend.

Dill

Last year, as Meg implied yesterday, the herb garden was allowed to go to shit. There were a lot of herbs we had to go without and needless to say we were not pleased. Aside from some sage and thyme, nothing survived the wave of weeds. This year we plan to plant herbs intensively to reestablish the order of things. We hope to grow enough to dry some out in our new dehydrator (should arrive tomorrow).

The other day some of the dill we planted sprouted. It's interesting to learn what plants can be started indoors and which need to be direct seeded. Apparently dill doesn't transplant well and should be started outdoors, but we are so damn hungry for fresh herbs that we figured we'd take our chances.

Growing Our Own Herbs

As we all know, any part of good cooking is usually accompanied with the use of fresh herbs. I love how a little fresh cilantro can make simple scrambled eggs seem gourmet.

Plans are that this year's harvest will result in a massive canning and freezing frenzy. One of our goals is that very little, if anything, will come from anywhere other than our garden. And with that in mind, I present minor obstacle #1:

I've always been taught that a good bouquet garni for sauces and stocks must have bay leaves as one of the ingredients. Well what do we do if we don't have a sweet bay laurel handy (will they even grow in Pennsylvania?) and we want to stay away from buying any at the market? Is there a substitute, can I omit it, or do I have to suck it up and buy them anyways?

7.5 lbs. of Rosemary

Two of our Christmas gift highlights this year are the rosemary tree and the food scale that my parents got for us. We love fresh herbs and we grow a ton during the summer, but we once again we dropped the ball on starting herbs indoors or preserving herbs to use for the winter. While we occasionally scavenge some thyme from the garden, we usually don't bother running out in the dark at dinner time to find it. We also got a pretty awesome food scale that goes up to 25 pounds–much more convenient than the 2 pound scale we have now. Though we don't have a specific number of pounds in mind as a production goal, we like to keep track of what we grow every year.

Good Day of Pickin'

We drew a nice variety of herbs and produce from the garden this afternoon. Pictured here are carrots, parsnip thinnings, celery, chard, thyme, and sage. I was the most excited about the celery because this was actually our first cutting. We had a good bit going earlier, but the damn deer managed to get in and make a salad bar of things. Luckily the celery bounced back enough to yield a few late stalks.

The Herb Garden's Last Hurrah

Our yard's gigantic herb garden was left to do its own thing this year. We still got some chives and oregano and thyme out of it, but mostly we got weeds. By virtue of being left alone all summer, some of the weeds turned out to be quite nice! Here's some of the stuff that was blooming a couple weeks ago, before the frost got them:

mmm, pesto

As I mentioned yesterday, our tomato sauce looked a little lonely in our big, new freezer. Last night I whipped up some basil pesto to keep it company. Also, our basil patch was growing out of control and we needed to use it up before the cold got it. But mostly I wanted a friend for the tomato sauce.

This year, we planted basil around the bell peppers. They're reportedly good companions for each other and though I don't know the reason for that, I do know that we got awesome peppers and basil.


I pulled basil until I'd filled an empty case of beer...


...and dragged it all up to the kitchen. I pulled off all the good, relatively bug-free basil leaves and put them in this gigantic bowl so I could wash them:


I ended up with two bowls full of basil–and there's about twice as much still out in the garden. Looks like we'll be pesto-ing again before the season is out. And yes, in case you're wondering, we do all our food prep on the kitchen floor.

When all the basil leaves were cleaned and dried and scrunched up, we probably had about four cups. To that, I added maybe a cup and a half or two cups of olive oil, a handful of pine nuts, a small head of garlic, about a quarter of a cup of balsamic vinegar, a tiny bit of salt, and a deliciously obscene amount of grated up Romano and Parmesan cheese. I threw everything into the trusty Magic Bullet (of infomercial fame–thanks, Yolie) and zapped it up.

Pesto in progress:


It's pretty thick, because when we cook with it we'll add a little starchy pasta water to thin it out. I ended up with six cups, which I split into six freezer bags. Yum.