Going to Seed

I've been hearing the same refrain several times a day: Where did the summer go? At Markate Estates we're knee-deep in tomatoes, making confit, sauce, ketchup, salsa, gazpacho, and canning like crazy. The Titan sunflowers, which grew to a towering eight feet this year, are already hanging their heavy heads. We're still waiting for the seeds to darken and dry, though, so we can harvest and eat them. A friend told us that the entire sunflower head can be roasted and eaten as a delicacy, but we haven't attempted that yet.

Three cheers for the ground cherries that are finally dropping off their bushes! But I'm still in denial about the pumpkins; a couple of them are already ripe! My brain is unable to make the transition from summer to fall just yet. And we have three more weeks to go till the autumnal equinox. I'm in no hurry for the bounty of summer to trail off, even if processing all these tomatoes is a full-time job.

I took these photos yesterday at dusk, in my favorite light with my favorite lens. Man, I love our garden, even when the overgrowth is trying to swallow me whole.

 

 

The Jungle

As you can see, this is the time of year when the garden starts to take on a life of its own. Eight-foot-tall sunflowers, watermelons as big as basketballs, and a bumper crop of tomatoes on the verge of ripeness. We're steeling ourselves for the weeks of desperate round-the-clock canning. Not that I'm complaining. We just have to keep telling ourselves that it's okay to feel out of control sometimes.

Fortunetelling

I see a number of feathered friends in your near future.

Baked Torta with Spring Greens

Right now our garden is exploding with good things to eat, and after waiting so long for spring to arrive, I can’t bear to waste a single lettuce leaf. Our bi-weekly share of amazing produce from Genesis Farm has also begun, so on occasion I’ll find myself with a fridge full of greens as well as bags full of them littering the kitchen floor. Like today, for example. When this situation arises, I do not panic. Our family can only eat so many salads, so I turn to this trusty recipe for a warm, flavorful torta that uses up to three pounds of spring greens and garlic. Served with a big communal bowl of snap peas that the kids gobbled in minutes flat, it was perfect for today’s cool, rainy weather.

This is a significantly adapted version of Marcella Hazan’s Baked Escarole Torta from her Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking. I don’t often use recipes to cook Italian food, but when I do, Hazan is my guru.

Baked Torta with Escarole and Chard

• 2 2/3 cups unbleached flour
• 1 teaspoon salt
• Freshly ground black pepper
• 1 scant teaspoon active dry yeast, dissolved in 1 cup lukewarm water
• 3 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
• 2 to 3 pounds fresh escarole, chard, kale, or spinach
• 2 tablespoons extra virgin olive oil
• 2 teaspoons chopped garlic (or 4 stalks garlic greens, or 2 heads young garlic, or even 1 cup chopped garlic scapes)
• 3 tablespoons capers
• 10 oil-cured olives, pitted and quartered
• 7 flat anchovy fillets, chopped into 1/2 inch pieces
• 3 tablespoons pine nuts or chopped walnuts

1. Mound the flour in a bowl (or on a work surface, if you’re feeling confident) and make a hollow in its peak. Put the salt, a few grindings of pepper, the dissolved yeast, and the olive oil into its peak. Pull together and knead for about 8 minutes by hand or in a standing mixer.

2. Shape the kneaded dough into a ball and put it into a lightly floured bowl. Cover the bowl with a damp, doubled-up cloth towel and put it in a warm, protected corner until the dough has doubled in bulk, 1 to 1½ hours.

3. Preheat the oven to 375°F and prepare a rack in the uppermost position.

4. While the dough is rising, prepare the filling. Wash the greens and slice thinly into 1-inch pieces. Put the olive oil and garlic in a large sauté pan, turn the heat to medium, and cook the garlic, stirring, until it becomes colored a pale gold. Add the greens, turning once or twice to coat it well. Reduce heat to medium low and cook for 10 minutes, turning from time to time. If the pan juices are watery, turn the heat up and reduce them quickly. Stir the capers, and then the olives, into the escarole. Remove from heat. Stir in the anchovies and nuts. Taste for salt, pour the contents of the pan into a bowl, and set aside to cool.

5. When the dough has doubled in bulk, divide it into 2 unequal parts, one twice the size of the other. Roll out the larger piece of dough into a circular sheet large enough to line the bottom and sides of a 10-inch springform pan. To simplify transferring this to the pan, roll the dough out on a piece of lightly floured wax or parchment paper.

6. Smear the inside of the springform pan with butter. Transfer the large circular sheet of dough to the pan, covering the bottom and letting it come up the sides. Smooth the dough, flattening and evening off any particularly bulky creases with your fingers.

7. Pour all the filling from the bowl into the pan and level it off with a spatula.

8. Roll out the remaining piece of dough until it is large enough to cover the top of the pan. Lay it over the filling, covering it completely. Press the edge of the top sheet of dough against the edge of the sheet lining the pan. Make a tight seal all around, folding any excess dough toward the center.

9. Place on the uppermost rack of the preheated oven and bake until the torta swells slightly and the top becomes colored a pale gold, about 45 minutes. When you take it out of the oven, unlatch the pan’s spring, and remove the hoop. Allow the torta to settle a few minutes before loosening it from the bottom and transferring it to a serving platter. Serve either lukewarm or at room temperature.

Two Hearts That Beet As One

Leaf beets, where have you been all my life?

Mark and I recently had a revelation similar to the one a couple of years ago when we discovered ground cherries. Intrigued by a rave review in the Fedco catalog, we ordered some leaf beet seeds to supplement our spinach crop, which always seems to peter out too early in the season.

Leaf beets are basically beets that don't have an edible root. But the leaves are completely delicious, and I actually like them more than spinach. They don't squeak between your teeth, they're a little more succulent than spinach, and the flavor is unexpectedly savory, almost salty. The whole family chowed down on a big bunch at dinner tonight, and I didn't hear a single complaint from the kids.

Internet wisdom tells me that leaf beets are an ancient vegetable that lost popularity once spinach came on the scene, but I don't get it. Why eat spinach when you can have these tasty, crunchy leaves instead? They're even more heat tolerant than spinach and can grow right through the summer, like chard. And they're prolific as all get-out, not spindly like spinach plants can be.

I'm already brainstorming recipes.

Promises, Promises

I often get impatient in the spring, my mind jumping ahead to harvest time. But it's easy to forget how overwhelming August and September can be: trying to keep the garden under control, canning all that produce, and planting fall crops.

Spring is so full of promise; nothing has gone seriously wrong yet, and I can blithely imagine that the deer won't eat our gooseberries, that beetles won't chew on the eggplants, that the tomatoes won't succumb to end rot and we'll actually have time to pick and process them all instead of leaving some to wither on the vine because we're so frazzled.

In May I can take pictures of flowers and enjoy their winks and whispered innuendos. Consider me seduced.

Chive flowers

First-year strawberries

Little lettuce volunteers from last year's plants that went to seed.

Pea shoots--yum.

My new friend the violet.

Mark's hugelkultur experiment:
growing potatoes in mounds of old wood.
More to come about this soon.

Blueberries: From Alkali to Juicy Pie

Happy blueberry bush in our garden.

What’s that you say? This is supposed to be a gardening blog and you haven’t seen any actual gardening for a while? I’m glad you mentioned it, because it’s not that we haven’t been doing any. Mark has been itching to talk about the extensive array of berries we’ve planted this year, especially the blueberries. He’s also been taking advantage of his new headlamp to stay out in the garden until 9pm. (Hilarious photos to come.)

Blueberries are about as quintessentially “Jersey” as the Turnpike and the Sopranos. When it comes to growing them, the southern part of the state is the perfect environment with its distinctively acidic soil thanks to all those pine needles. While most fruit plants enjoy soil that is neutral to slightly acidic, blueberry bushes prefer to plant their feet in well-drained sandy loam, rich in organic material, with a pH range of about 4-5. This habitat abounds in the evergreen forests of Atlantic, Burlington, and Ocean counties, but not so much in western Morris county. A certain amount of backbreaking toil is required--music to my ears!

At first glance, it’s tempting to lump blueberries in with members of the bramble family (raspberries, blackberries, etc.), mostly because of the similar ways we use the berries. I mean, how hard can they be to grow? Wild raspberries grow like weeds around here, and even the cultivated varieties thrive in less-than-ideal conditions. But the highbush blueberry plant, a member of the heath family, differs in many ways from your garden-variety bramble. In addition to the acidic soil requirements, blueberries grow as individual bushes and take longer to establish than raspberries. That said, once established, blueberry plants can produce for decades, and wild version are every bit as successful as their wineberry counterparts given the right conditions. And that’s the key with blueberries: getting the conditions right.

My first blueberry experiment began 2 years ago with about 8 plants and a new garden space. I read up on planting techniques and made a plan. The biggest challenge was to get the soil pH down from neutral to below 5 if possible. A lot of sources recommend using peat moss and sulfur, so I merrily dug 8 holes in hard-pack, rocky clay and filled them with with some sphagnum moss, sulfur granules, and some native “soil” for good measure. I planted each seedling, watered them once or twice, then dutifully ignored them for the next 24 months; three or four survived but never showed much growth, and the others called it quits altogether. They turned into casualties of an over-ambitious start to an overwhelming new garden. I’m sure it won’t be the last horticultural atrocity I commit.

Flash-forward to Plan B. My latest scheme is influenced an orchardist friend who has actual experience growing blueberries just a few miles from my house. The first step I took was to spread some sulfur, peat moss, and pine needles over the planting area last fall. The idea here is to try to slowly--not instantly--lower the pH of the entire area. Then, instead of digging individual holes for each plant, I excavated a 35’ long trench to a depth of about 12” and filled it with peat moss, sand, some native soil, and a little compost. Importantly, NO sulfur went into the hole. Sulfur is apparently a very slow-acting agent that can take years to activate, and it does not belong in intimate contact with plant roots. Next, I planted the blueberries and dumped lots of compost on top of the filled-in trench and around each plant. I mulched the entire planting area with cardboard [Kate: This lends our garden a delightful hobo je ne sais quoi."] and then dumped straw on top for weed control. The finishing touch is a mound around each blueberry plant made of pine needles and forest litter I dug up from our yard. I’ve even managed to water each plant deeply twice during this hellacious drought we’ve had.

For “fun,” I dug up the surviving stragglers of Blueberries v1.0 and planted them at the end of the new row. I could be imagining things, but I feel like these three old veterans have already perked up noticeably this year at bud-break. Perhaps they’ve been biding their time, waiting to explode with fecundity when conditions turned favorable. Or perhaps I’m delusional and simply enjoy using disgusting adjectives. Only time will tell.