What's Growing in that Little Garden

I just want to follow up with a more thorough catalog of what I've planted. I snapped a few more pictures today, but wasn't happy with most of them. So you get a photo of the baby fennel (that's my stepdaughter Annie at the far end of the bed).

It's an impossible garden to photograph, long and narrow as it is. There are 15 boxes total: 10 4' x 8' boxes along a narrow stretch, with a patch of rhubarb, then two more 4' x 8', plus 3 2' x 8' boxes along the edge. Really, the best way to see the layout is from the deck on the third floor. I'll try and patch together a panorama.

Following is a more or less complete list of my future harvest.

In the “cucurbit beds”:

6 Sugar Baby watermelon, 7 each Hokkaido kabocha and Cornell's Bush delicata (both winter squash), 2 Sunburst pattypan squash, and 14 Snow's Fancy Pickling cucumbers.

I've never tried growing watermelon before, but I thought a small variety like Sugar Baby might stand a chance of producing in as short a season as I have here. The winter squash, both kabocha and delicata, are so much more interesting than acorn or butternut that I won't even bother with those last two when I have to buy pre-grown squash. The bush-type delicata are hugely productive without taking up a lot of space, though that's not so much an issue any more. They've got a rich complex flavor and they're sweet as candy...I cook them just by halving them and removing the seeds, then roasting them with a shot of salt and ground pepper. Without fail, everyone at the table resorts to picking up and sucking on the skins to get every last bit of the flesh. And the pattypan squash...well, they're just so much cuter than zucchini. I've grown them before, but in the regular beds, and they nearly took over. The plants grew to more than 5' across and 3' tall and produced more squash than we could keep up with (although I developed a delicious gratin recipe for using the overgrown ones, which I'll share later in the season). The tag in the plants suggested I would need 4 of them for proper pollination. I'm willing to take a chance.

I use the cucumbers to make a hot dog relish, dosed well with jalapeño peppers. I like my hot dogs with relish and mustard, but find that lurid HFCS-spiked crap from the grocery store to be a crime and an abomination. Apparently, my loyal fans agree, since they're willing to shell out $10 for a 9-oz. jar of my relish, and they're jonesing for it bad.

In the other beds, from one end to the other:

12 each Concha jalapeños and San Luis poblanos, 6 each Beatrice and Udmalbet eggplant. (Actually, one of the jalapeño plants was struck dead, so I replaced it with a cute little Thai pepper plant from one of the growers at the farmers' market.)

The Concha jalapeño is promised to be big & meaty & HOT; whoever thought it was a good idea to breed mild jalapeños (I won't mention Texas A&M) is missing the point, no?. I can get panty-waist jalapeños at my grocery store all winter long, but I won't bother. I want to make my own salsas, etc, with some personality, thanks. Poblanos = chiles rellenos (stuffed with whatever sounds good at the time), and rajas y cebollas con crema, and poblano soup (if I can wait that long). Beatrice is a compact short-season high-yield variety – a necessity for the conditions I grow in. Udmalbet is an exotic I got from an Amish grower, and was described as having a “complex flavor, ideal for use in Middle Eastern recipes”. That was good enough for me.

6 Snow Crown cauliflower and 18 Zefa Fino fennel.

Snow Crown is a self-blanching type; last year's whatever-it-was wasn't. The self-blanching types have wide closely-packed leaves that protect the developing head from the sun and prevent its getting spacey and purplish or grey. Will be eaten roasted with ample garlic. The fennel will go into a relish with Vidalia onions.

Here's a head of cauliflower from a few years ago. I don't recall the variety, but my god it was gorgeous:

In the “greens bed”:

A row of cilantro, 6 heads each butterhead and red oakleaf lettuce (plus seedlings for 6 more butterhead and 6 red romaine), then carpet-bombed swaths of mache, mesclun/micro-greens, mixed lettuce, and arugula (all of the these last 4 to be harvested at the near-larval stage); this whole bed is for salad, except for the cilantro – which will be used with abandon in salsas, on eggs, wherever.

Tomatoes, 2 each: Green Zebra, Marmande, Sun Gold, Patio Orange, Jaune Flammée, and De Barrao Black.

The season here is barely long enough for full-sized tomatoes. I've come to eschew the gigantor varieties; more often than not, they get pocked with rot before they ever ripen fully. So Marmande is about the biggest one I grow. It's pinkish and kind of fluted, without a lot of seeds, with great flavor. In fact, all of these were chosen primarily for their flavor and secondarily for their size, except for the Green Zebra: it was a freebee from Baker Creek, so I decided to shoot some crap. Sun Gold is a yellow-orange cherry variety of astonishing deliciousness, which rarely gets harvested – they're generally eaten by the handful straight from the plant and are a delight for visiting toddlers. Jaune Flammée and Patio Orange are both orange and golf-ball to tennis-ball sized; Patio Orange are impressively prolific (and reasonably tasty) and Jaune Flammée, if they are indeed the same thing I grew 7 years ago (it's taken me that long to find seeds), are about the most delicious tomato I've ever had. De Barrao Black are a small egg-shaped tomato, a high-yield Ukranian variety with a flavor described as “spicy, sweet, and rich”. I've never grown them before, but I couldn't resist the description.

I'd like to say that my Spicy Tomato Jam comes from the tomatoes in my garden, but no. Last year, I collected some 40 pounds of beefsteak tomatoes from the Delmarva peninsula and farmland New Jersey while on a road trip for work. The ones I grow get gobbled raw by family and friends (my husband eats them for breakfast, a big bowlful chunked up and tossed with olive oil, raw onion, and S&P; he learned this from his father, a Valencian Spaniard).

In the next 3 beds:

12 plants of large-leaf basil, then 1/2 bed of German Extra-Hardy and one full bed each of Siberian Purple and Marino garlic.

We use entirely too much of all of these, with no good excuse. The anti-microbial properties of garlic appear to serve us well, as we rarely get sick. I think we might have overdone it on quantity this year, so I'm going to try and come up with a garlic marmalade to add to my “product line”. I'm also planning an Aioli party for harvest time; what a great way to use up some vegetables and garlic and to fete some friends at the same time.

The last vegetable bed includes two rows each of Napoli carrots and Early Wonder and Bull's Blood beets. There is a single row of Maxibel filet beans, and I will plant another in two weeks and another three weeks after that.

Napoli carrots are the only ones I grow any more. They're the perfect carrot, brightly sweet and carroty. I believe the hybrid was developed by Eliot Coleman (the organic gardening giant), or else it's just been championed (and wisely so) by him. I ordered Early Wonder beet seeds, thinking I'd be doing some early planting. I didn't, but I planted them anyway and I'll let them race the beautiful deep red Bull's Blood to see who produces first. I somehow neglected to order Nickel filet bean seeds, and couldn't find any locally. They've been my one-and-only green bean for years: they stay small for a long time, and the harvest is concentrated in a short period...so from a few plants, I can get enough to feed everyone in just a few days, instead of a scattering of them maturing over a longer period. With succession planting, I can keep a harvest going for nearly two months. But like I said, I couldn't get seeds this year, so I settled for something called Maxibel. We'll just have to see.

The last two beds are given over to annual flowers for cutting (except for a few rows of cippolini onions): lisianthus (white lisianthus is my favorite flower in the whole wide world), larkspur, snapdragons, batchelor's buttons, cosmos, zinnias, nicotiana, ammi majus, mignonette, gomphrena, african daisies...all densely planted in a wide range of colors. I'm almost more excited by the prospect of flowers than by any of the edibles in the garden.

• • • • • •

I'm picking up 8 flats – that's 64 quarts – of local organic strawberries tomorrow. I'll be turning them into Sun-Cooked Strawberry Conserve, about which I will post at length.

Comments

[jessica]

Hi, I've just put in a search for poblano growing in vermont and your site came up! I love it! I'm new to Vermont and mad about gardening and cooking what I grow, as well. I will be back to visit more of your blogs. ANYWAY: Where did you get poblano plants or seeds in Vermont or from what seed catalog? Please tell!
Merci beaucoup,
Jessica

[GG Mora]

Hi, Jessica...I got my poblano seeds from Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds. It's a great company, with a huge selection of heirloom varieties. I started the seedlings at home in my makeshift greenhouse.