- Gardening adventures, Heirloom Plants, Permaculture and Edible Forest Gardening Adventures, Vegetables, Vegetarian
Fun Vegetables
A small green zebra, not quite ripe In a past post I related how my mother had witnessed a woman staring hands-on-hips at the produce selection in a grocery store and exclaiming, “I wish they’d come up with some new vegetables!” How true is that? How many ways can you cook the limited offerings in your average supermarket produce section without going out of your mind? That’s where a trip to an ethnic grocery store can be a life-saver. Or, plant some fun new varieties in your garden.
Thanks to Baker Creek Heirloom (Organic) Seeds and their fantastic catalog, I was spoiled for choice. I also buy a lot from Botanical Interests , an organic seed company which has packets for sale in stores such as my neighborhood Joe’s Hardware. Their wildflower seed mixtures are highlights of my garden and attract birds, butterflies and other insects. Here are some newbies I tried this year, and the keepers:
Zucchino Rampicante : an heirloom zucchini that grows on a vine. This squash grows curled or straight on long vines that need support. The fresh squash can be used like zucchini, but are firmer and have a mild butternut flavor that goes well with everything. I am completely in love with the taste of these.
Some zucchinos are straight, some follow their own tune PLUS: if you leave the squash on the vine, it grows huge and unlike those monsterous zucchini clubs that are practically inedible and unwanted, zucchino then hardens and you can store it and use it as a winter squash! How marvelous and unwasteful is that! Zucchini without the pressure. No more alienating your neighbors and friends with excess squash.
Zucchino shapes are marvelous Green Zebra Tomato :a large, lime-green striped tomato that develops a slight yellowish tinge between the stripes when ripe. These gorgeous tomatoes are rich and slightly tart, but without heavy acid. Marvelous on a open-faced sandwich or in a caprese salad to show off the color inside.
Green Zebra: beautiful inside Thai #2 Red Seeded Long Bean: The seeds were given to me by the woman who introduced me to Baker Creek Seeds, and who built my chicken and quail coops. I planted the seeds by stakes that turned out to be too short for the vines.
Long beans growing very long. However, these beautiful flowers eventually came, followed by spectacularly long thin green beans two feet long! One bean per person! (Just about, anyway). They are good stir-fried. I haven’t tried to tempura one yet, but its tempting.
Six long beans slice up to a serving for two! Mortgage Lifter Tomato : Now THESE are the ultimate sandwich tomato. These heavy pink-red fruits have mostly meaty insides and have an incredible savory flavor. I have found my favorite red tomato. Beefstake has nothing on this baby. It also has a cool name.
Mortgage Lifter is very meaty and savory 
Rice Blue Bonnet: the jury is still out on this one. This is a dry-land rice. I didn’t thin it when I should have, so it is growing in clumps and hasn’t progressed beyond the thin leaves. My fault. It is growing and would probably be successful if I handle it right.
Basil Custom Blend HEIRLOOM Seeds : I planted a row and have regular and purple basil, lime basil, and cinnamon basil (one of my favorite scents). Today I used the regular and purple chopped over an open-faced tomato sandwich, and my daughter added leaves from the other two to a fruit salad.
Sesame, Light Seeded : Beautifully flowered plants with seed pods full of sesame seeds! How great is that?
Sesame pods. Broad Windsor Fava Bean : I planted a lot of legumes to help build the soil (they set nitrogen), and tried fava beans this year. They grow like crazy, take a lot of neglect, and produce a fantastic protein source in the form of a tasty bean. They are a little trouble to shell, but well worth it. I wrote about favas here.
Blue Potatoes: These I started several years ago from an organic blue potato I bought at a grocery store. Since there are usually some small tubers left in the soil, I have volunteers sprouting every year. These blue potatoes – whatever their true variety is – are a lovely purplish blue outside, with a lovely purple center as well. They aren’t starchy, but are best used like red potatoes. Very fun.
Peeled purple potatoes - Animals, Chickens, Gardening adventures, Heirloom Plants, Herbs, Other Insects, Permaculture and Edible Forest Gardening Adventures, Photos, Ponds, Quail, Vegetables
What’s Happening in the July Garden
A banana squash stealthily growing huge 
An apricot tree with fava beans, squash, herbs, artichokes, and tomatoes 
The withy hide growing beautifully 
Kabocha and delicata squash on the ground, zucchino rampicante on the trellis, Christmas beans, favas, Swiss chard and medicinal plants around a small avocado tree 
Favas: great for the soil, great for the dinnerplate 
Heirloom tomatoes. Why do they all come ripe at the same time? 
Sugar pumpkins are ripe already in the Mediterranean guild. Also figs, paste tomato, dill, fennel, thyme, pickling cucumbers and artichoke. 
Plant guilds of squash, beans, flowers, etc. are flourishing. 
Heirloom green melons hiding from the hot sun. 
By now the wild buckwheat has dried up, which starves the bees. But not here. 
Matilija and Flanders poppies over banana squash 
Monarchs are so plentiful this year that we have to take pains to avoid them. 
Wildflowers host an incredible diversity of insects 
Dill flowers looking like a spectacular firework 
In a balanced wildlife habitat, bunnys do little harm 
All five girls waiting for treats in the Fowl Fortress 
Pumpkins, bananas, bamboo and much more by fescue paths. 
Fresh grape leaves, dill and garlic from the garden for the pickles 
Hot weather? Must be canning season! Pickled cucumbers, zucchino and onions, and peach pit and peel jelly. 
Very large yellow waterlilies 
Native salt heliotrope by the big pond. 
Volunteer tomato in the shade of the Nest, by palm tree bench. 
Wisteria, grapes and zerpheranthum lilies around the Nest 
Blooming banana 
Quail eggs! 
Double heirloom hollyhock 
Egyptian lilies 
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Chicken Rescue
I know its been a long time since I’ve posted. Sorry! Its not that I haven’t been taking lots of photos and planning posts in my head. Its just that there has been no time (especially since loading photos on WordPress takes so long and it does such inexplicable things, it is sometimes three hours to make a post come out correctly!). It has been harvest time. Thank goodness I have help in the form of my collegiate daughter, home for the summer. Peaches, plums, strawberries, a few blackberries, four apricots (stupid trees!), cucumbers and of course, zucchini and tomatoes. I’ll post on some interesting heirloom varieties we’ve been growing at a later date.
We’ve also been trying to avoid the hot and humid afternoon weather and of course participating in all the volunteer work I’ve let myself in for. It is all good and worthwhile, but really, the days need to be longer! Keeping the garden pruned back, staked, vegetables harvested, and taking care of our animals have taken up the days as well. I wake about 6 or earlier and begin the feeding procedures. We have two elderly dogs, one who needed medical attention last week, both of whom are on meds. We also have a sick cat who is on meds, needs to be coaxed into eating (same with the dogs), needs subcutaneous fluids (feline water balloon!), and now has a drain on her head along with a plastic collar. Fun, fun, fun! By the time my daughter and I get to our own dinner, it is about nine p.m. and I don’t even have time to read! Now THAT is busy!
Then yesterday morning I rose early and used the string trimmer for three and a half hours, some of it near the Fowl Fortress. At the end of the hot and humid day, our partially blind hen Madge was perched on top of the Rubbermaid container in which their food is kept, but she was hunched over with her wings a little out. Not a good sign. Probably egg binding brought on by stress from the noise of the weed whipping and the heat. Egg binding can be fatal; we lost a hen to it before we knew anything about the problem, successfully saved the lives of three more hens who had it last year although Lark remained eggless to this day and just gains weight instead.
Immediately we brought her up to the house, filled the kitchen sink with warm water, and put her in. Madge is a Rhode Island Red, a rather large chicken, and to submerge her ‘vent’ I had to hold her wings with both hands and press her farther into the water by laying across her. I also massaged her undersides gently; we had to be very gentle so as not to break the egg inside of her which would be very bad.
No, not just another hard night for Mom. My daughter was kind enough to fold up a dishcloth and put it under my forehead to stop the edge of the sink from hurting my head.
But wait.. what is that? Madge is a sweetheart of a chicken. She is truly grateful for having been rescued and doesn’t mind being picked up.
It looks like a little face…. She was very patient with all of this. Since it was warm and soothing, near bedtime, and because my daughter was singing Nat King Cole tunes softly as she worked in the kitchen, Madge dozed off a little during the 15 minutes we soaked.
“Hello.” We could have gone another five, but the water was cooling and my back was telling me that the chicken dunking was over.
My daughter took the wet hen upstairs to the only room which doesn’t have an animal in it, and which held the warmth of the day, and gently dried her. The now relaxed Madge worked her vent a little, then out came one of her huge eggs right on the towel in Miranda’s lap!
Egg success. The egg was very rough textured with calcium deposits and must have been very painful to lay.
Rough shell with calcium irregularities. Ouch! Madge’s eggs are always very large anyway.
Madge’s egg next to Amelia’s She was a much happier chicken, and I knew we’d saved her life. She had a calm night in a pen in the warm room and this morning I heard the melodic croons of a waking hen.
A wet but relieved Madge deciding to roost on Miranda. Bedtime! Since she laid yesterday morning’s egg in the evening, the next egg had already been forming for today. She laid it, and although the shell was hard you can see the malformation on the shell as it formed next to the other egg. Poor sweet baby!
Malformed egg next to regular egg For the moment, the cats, dogs, tortoise, hens and quail are eating, taking meds and recovering. Next on my list for the afternoon? Clean the 90 gallon fishtank and the hummingbird feeders! That small cave on a remote island sounds mighty good sometimes. Of course, I’d probably end up feeding the bats.
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