Two Feet in the Dirt

Caleb and I took a short break this week, heading down to D.C. to visit my parents. Mike stayed home, so was able to take care of the garden, although with a week of successive heavy rain and thunderstorms, keeping things watered wasn’t much of an issue! At this point in the season, gardens become somewhat like pets, unable to be left alone for long without someone to take care of them. Most summer crops require harvesting multiple times a week to enable the plant to continue producing successfully, as opposed to concentrating its energy on going to seed.

In terms of how often to harvest, here are the general guidelines I follow for summer crops:

• – Tomatoes and cherry tomatoes: 3 times/week
• – Cucumbers: 3 times/week
• – Summer Squash/Zucchini: 3 times/week
• – Beans: 3 times/week preferable; (I find harvesting beans incredibly tedious, so have found that, if harvested very heavily each time, it is possible to reduce harvesting to twice a week.)
• – Peppers: once a week
• – Eggplant: once a week

Once in D.C., focus shifted instead to cooking all of the veggies from the garden that I had brought with me! So far, we’ve enjoyed a green salad each night, my favorite cucumber-avocado salad from the excellent blog Smitten Kitchen, zucchini tacos, and pasta with eggplant-tomato sauce. Additionally, my mom came across my great-great aunt’s cookbook from the 50s, which has been fun to look through. Along with a recipe for rabbit casserole (the first step of which is to “cut up and wash a rabbit”!), there are also some recipes (which I’ll include below) for Chile sauce and refrigerator pickles that I’m planning to try, as well as a list on how to use various herbs (shown above). Although I completely disagree with the first sentence about use of herbs (I always think more is better!), I thought the pairing suggestions worth noting.