A Gardener's Retreat

This recipe is inspired by the those French pureed soups you see in gourmet magazines as well as by the delicate but still way spicy greens growing in our garden this year.  I’ve taken a lot of liberties with the ingredients and you can too.

Ingredients:

• 3-4 large handfuls of mesclun greens, coarsely chopped (any combination will do including lettuces, baby kale, arugula, baby mustards, spinach, sorrel, parsley, chives and the like)
• 1 medium Vidalia onion, chopped
• 1 medium potato, diced
• 1 tbsp. olive oil
• 1 tbsp. butter
• 1 can of broth or equivalent homemade
• 1/2 cup cream or light cream
• Sour cream or yogurt as garnish

Heat the oil and butter in a medium soup pan and saute the onion for 5-8 minutes until translucent.  Add the coarsely chopped greens and stir around a couple minutes in the butter and oil until slightly wilted.   Add the diced potato and then the broth. Simmer for  15 minutes or so until the potato is tender.

Get out your puree stick and whirl your soup until it is as smooth as you like it.  (Alternatively, puree the soup in batches in the blender).  When it is nicely pureed, add your cream and reheat for five or ten minutes.  

Serve in bowls with a dollop of yogurt or sour cream and freshly ground pepper.

Serves 4 as a starter.

So Memorial Day is come and gone and so is the last frost date.  But wouldn’t you know, they’re forecasting widespread frost tonight.  That didn’t stop us from planting a whole lot more seeds but it did prevent us from putting in tomato and basil.  We’ve decided to wait until the next astrologically auspicious planting days — June 5 and 6 — to put in the warm season starts like tomatoes and peppers.

That said, we put in a bit of a marathon this weekend with two or three hours each weekend day.  On Saturday, Chris cleared weeds and scythed grass while I prepped and seeded.  I put in cucumbers where the peas didn’t happen, and pattypan squashes in the long bed, nearby the other Sugar Ann snap peas which are the only ones that came up.  We figure by the time the squash are in need of space, the snap peas will be done.  We can just cut the tops to the ground, leave the roots in as fertilizer and let the pattypan take over.

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First Radish

It’s radish time!  we are officially harvesting food from our garden.  The radishes have done pretty well this year — especially the Easter Egg mix which we get every year. There’s something nice about having radishes of many colors and with this mix, they’re good sized as well (half inch radishes hardly seem worth it….)

The other early crop is the spicy mesclun mix which is now at the “harvest every day” stage.  There are about six varieties of spicy greens and boy are they delicious.  That said, our lettuce seeds barely sprouted and we’re going to have to plant them all again.  Same for the sorrel which did nothing — fortunately, the wild sorrel grew in right next to it so we weren’t deprived.

Everything else is muddling along.  The peas are not as big as I’d hoped but I think we’ll get some eventually.  About half the carrots came up and another bunch didn’t.  This is my fault for planting old seeds.  It looks like we’re going to have to replant there too but I’m ok with that.  

And now that Memorial Day is out of the way, it’s suddenly time to plant everything else.  It’s going to be busy for the next few weeks as we put in tomatoes, hot peppers, corn, cucumbers, pattypan squashes, basil and of course, green beans.  The sooner they’re in the ground, the sooner we can start to eat them and that’s what it’s all about, right?

We went over to the Community Garden today to take advantage of the weather and plant some seeds and starts. I had on my calendar to plant cabbage, kale and arugula around this time, and since there’s rain in the forecast, it seemed perfect.

We got our starts out at Walkers over the weekend – 6 cabbages, 6 parsley and a thyme plant.  I also had a bunch of kale seeds left over from last year, a Russian Red as I recall, and some more of that wild arugula.  

Once out at the garden, we realized that there was a lot to access.  Although at first glance, most plants seemed small, there was more action than we expected.  We have a full bed of peas, with seedlings around 4 inches high on average.  The lettuces, which seemed non-existent, are just small. I planted more red romaine to supplement.

On the more robust side, the spicy mesclun are doing great (planted more of them too) and the radishes getting appreciably bigger.  In between, there’s a nice carrot crop coming up, a lot more than I expected.  We’ll still have to replant a few patches but overall it’s looking good. 

Chris did a lot of work on the B&J plot north of us and it’s all over but the sifting for grass roots.  The turf is out.  This is great timing because we want to plant it in two weeks.  I guess we’ll be out there this weekend, weeding and prepping.

A final word on our herb bed which has been going for several years.  Although the echinacea are not as vigorous as I’d like, the chives are huge, and it looks like the lavender and sage are growing in really well after having been cut back almost to the ground last fall.  The thyme plant, which is small but tall, will keep them company.  Meanwhile, the chamomile Nancy gave us is starting to look comfortable — I hope it does well.  It makes the sweetest tea.

Here in early May, we’re in a bit of a gardening lull.  We planted lots of seeds a few weeks ago, and now we’re just watching our seedlings grow and waiting  for it to be warm enough to plant the next set of crops.  Meanwhile, the weather has been cooperative and our garden has gotten enough rain to keep  it happy.    

Some things are doing better than others of course.  Our radishes are all up and there are lots of them.  They now have second leaves. 

The peas were a mixed bag (not literally but figuratively).  Some of our Sugar Ann Snap Peas came up and others did not.  In fact, only the ones planted in earliest April came up as they should have.  The others gave us less than 50% germination.  My theory is that the soil got too warm too fast.

Additionally, we planted lettuce a while back and so far, it has done very little.  Too early?  Not true of the spicy mesclun greens which seem to have all sprouted and are almost ready to sample.  The mustards seem also to like it plenty cool.

Of the many sorrel seeds I planted, it appears that only one came up.  That said, I have plenty of wild sorrel if I want it.  But I was kind of hoping for the fancy French kind.  I guess more research is required.

Interestingly, the volunteer arugula is looking much better this year than it did last.  Much larger leafier rosette have come up apparently from the seeds of last year’s plants.  Very spicy and delicious — I’ll have to harvest it soon.

We’re ready to go on our mid May planting and just waiting for the latest cold snap to pass.  Over the weekend, we manured the bed where we plan to put cabbages and kale.  Later this week, we’ll plant it.  We bought our red cabbage starts from Walker’s and will plant kale from seed.  We’ll also put in more arugula to keep the other ones company (the seed package says mid Spring) and replant our sorry lettuces.  It’s not summer without buttercrunch!

Today we dug and weeded.  Our neighbors — at the garden as well as at home — are sharing their plot with us in return for clearing, so for the last couple weeks Chris has been digging out blocks of turf and turning them over in preparation for later sorting.  Today, we sorted, pulling lots of grass and grass roots out of the dirt.  It was excellent exercise and got me so jazzed that I spent another half hour or so digging weeds out of the herb garden too.

In our main plot, there has been lots of tiny action.  The carrots are up, in rows between the radishes, and over in the lettuce bed, I’m starting to see sprouts. I’m guessing they’ve been in there about two weeks so I was starting to wonder.  Much more action in the spicy mesclun bed which is mostly mustard varieties, notoriously fast.  And that’s about it for seedlings.  We’re starting to think about the next round which is arugula, kale and more lettuce, sometime in the next two weeks.

Also, I have solved the mystery of the sorrel.  As you may remember, I was surprised to find much further along sorrel growing next door to my cultivated sorrel patch.  It was clearly sorrel to look and taste but it was too big to be my seedlings.  I pondered and could come to no good conclusion until I happened to be walking by an abandoned plot just yesterday where I noticed more of the same sorrel. When I got home, I looked it up in my favorite reference book Weeds Of The Northeast and found that it is in fact, sheep sorrel, a very close relative of cultivated sorrel and one of the ingredients in the Ojibwe anti-cancer remedy Essiac.  I was impressed and transplanted a clump to my own herb corner so I can keep an eye on it. 

No pictures this time.  Everything is too tiny to be interesting at this point, and we were busy weeding anyway.

Assorted short and tall members of the community garden assembled for another “workday” on April 30 to put up the deer fence. Fortunately, the call for tall gardeners was heeded and there were plenty of people of sufficient height to staple deer fencing to the poles. Work commenced at 4pm and was finished by shortly after 5. Which was good because just about then it started to rain.

There were so many gardeners on hand that some of us were freed up to do other things. Dora and Carole enlarged the rhubarb plot and transplanted two healthy specimens from an empty plot. The new rhubarbs are huge so hopefully they’ll like being with the others in their new location.

Joe got out his trusty human-powered push mower and mowed more of the perimeter. We expect to get a lawn mower this season so gardeners will be able to mow whenever the mood strikes them.

Over in the herb garden, me and new gardener Ian weeded out grass. We found that grass likes to throw out roots close to the surface making it relatively easy to weed. That said, we only managed to clear about 15 square feet of garden so the project will continue. New plants are welcome but respect old plants. Hopefully, the weeding process will make it more apparent where the old plants are.

So there you have it. A lot of work was accomplished in a short time, and everyone seemed to enjoy the camaraderie of being there, working together toward a common goal. Meanwhile, the garden is the better for it.