garden

tomato season

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About half the tomatoes we received from the folks we know in Frederick.

This summer we expected to have three sources of tomatoes: our farm share; our own plants; and my partner’s boss, who brings surplus vegetables from his home garden into the office. As expected, we did receive quite a few from the farm share, which I ate sliced onto sandwiches if they were big and my partner took as part of his lunch if they were small. Sadly, our homemade boxes did not really work out. I suspect that we both overwatered and overfertilized them, as the plants turned pretty much completely brown. We ended up getting about a half dozen cherry tomatoes and four regular ones from the seven plants, with a very daring squirrel making off with most of the green tomatoes as they reached a goodly size. We may try again next year, but it’s more likely that we’ll dig a garden into the ground either next summer or in two years, whenever the major work on the foundation and in the yard is completed.

By far the most prolific source of tomatoes, though, was my partner’s boss. He and his spouse have an enormous home garden that includes 40 tomato plants of 25 varieties, and that’s simply more than they’re able to eat and process. We were invited up to the house to see the property and have dinner; they built a house on former farmland that is now wooded and zoned for conservation. After a very nice evening walking in the woods, harvesting in the garden, and sharing a meal, we were sent home with a trunk full of mason jars — this was part of the plan, as they had acquired many more than they now need over the years and were looking to donate them to someone just starting out with canning, which would be me — and a back seat full of beautifully hued heirloom tomatoes. When we got home, I sorted them into baskets by type and promptly gave away about a third of them to neighbors and friends, discovering in the process that heirloom tomatoes are a perfectly valid and welcome contribution to a summer potluck. Even with eating the cherry tomatoes like they were candy, we were still left with about a dozen quarts of tomatoes of varies shapes, sizes, and flavors, which required me to get creative.


Chopped up and headed into sauce.


Chopped up and headed into turkey lentil pilaf.

The first thing I did with the tomatoes was stew them up with onions and the spicy peppers we received from our farm share into a sauce that I served over cornbread. I use the cornbread recipe from Sundays at Moosewood Restaurant, substituting just about everything: I like the recipe because it remains delicious with rice milk, whole wheat flour and egg beaters. We had that meal for a couple of nights, I put three containers of sauce in the freezer, and we were still looking for something to do with the rest of the tomatoes. I turned at that point to my new favorite cookbook, Simply In Season and hit upon turkey lentil pilaf. This recipe not only used a bunch of fresh tomatoes, but had the added advantage of using the two packages of ground turkey that had been in the freezer for nearly a year. It also used up a of couple of containers of chicken broth that I made last winter from the farm share’s stewing chicken and some of the lentils and some of the stockpile of lentils and rice, so it was a good eating-from-the-stores recipe all around. Between making that twice, eating sliced or cherry tomatoes as snacks, and mixing up a couple of large batches of cucumber-tomato-mint salad, we managed to make our way through the tomatoes in about two weeks.

Of course, our farm share tomatoes kept coming: I have about a quart in the kitchen right now and will pick up more tomorrow. The ones in the yard, we decided to just leave for the squirrels.

tomato season

garden log : praying mantises

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Praying mantis on the front porch one evening last week.


Praying mantis on the back wall this afternoon.


Praying mantis on the front window this time last year.

I was delighted to catch sight of mantises of two different colors in our yard this year, although probably both of a single species. The brown color and the lateral stripe, plus the fact that they are enormous, indicate that they are likely Chinese mantises. Mantises are excellent predators, and as I’ve noted in the past, our yard can use all the insect predation help it can get. It’s true that they will eat any kind of insect they can catch, so I’m hoping they’ll focus on the crickets and leave the other predators — cicada killers and ladybugs in particular — alone.

Now that I know what their egg sacs look like (thank you, interweb!), I’ll keep an eye out for it on or around the house and not mistake it for a wasp nest, which I think I’ve done in the past. Plants and insects are not my forte, but I’m learning. Now, if we had some toads to eat the hosta’s slugs, those I would know what to do with!

garden log : praying mantises

garden log : insects

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Male Polyphemus Moth in our backyard.

This has been a great summer for sighting large insects in our backyard! I can’t take too much credit, as they’re attracted to food sources already present that I simply leave alone. The cicada killers love our yard, possibly more so than other sandy-soiled backyards in our town because I don’t use pesticides on our lawn which makes the ground a friendly habitat for them to make their burrows. I imagine they can find cicadas pretty much anywhere, but clean ground is more rare out here in the suburbs. We’ve had several swooping around our backyard these past couple of weeks, and little hills of dirt are starting to pop up. Not to be confused with the mole mounds that are also appearing, although I’m now wondering if some of last year’s hills that I attributed to the mole were actually from the wasps. For the first time this year I also spotted dragonflies in our yard, which tells you how bad the mosquitoes have been around here. Not just in our yard: on a recent walk through the town park, I saw at least a dozen dragonflies and damselflies swooping over the grass.

The most exciting find, however, was something totally new. Yesterday, the contractor who’s repairing our rear wall alerted me to the presence of a male Polyphemus Moth outside on his scaffolding. While I’ve heard all about these giant moths that don’t eat and die shortly after breeding — the Luna Moth being the most celebrated — I’d never seen one before. I can see why people get so excited about them: they are so cool! Besides being as big as my hand, the predator wing-snap reflex is something else. One small twitch of a neighboring leaf as I tried to get a better photo, and BANG out come the wings with the little cat eyes staring right at me.

This is the second insect I’ve seen this year that prefers sassafras for food. We have a small sassafras tree on the south side of our house, and two saplings springing up next to it. Sadly, the sassafras is in the area that might have to go the way of a dead tree if we decide to do exterior waterproofing work around our house. For now, though, it’s apparently providing habitat for not just an enormous moth but the Spicebush Swallowtail, several of which I’ve seen in our yard this year. The moth apparently also enjoys quince leaves, so it’s possible it was hanging out in the small grove of those this summer.

Besides these exciting newcomers, we have a gazillion crickets in the lawn, which means I am constantly startling little flocks of sparrows up out of the grass when I go outside. The odd Jiminy-type cricket makes its way into the basement — by which I mean LARGE — and when that happens we rescue it from the risk of the glue-traps (set out for the completely squicky camel crickets to meet their slow dooms) and toss it back into the lawn for the birds. Speaking of birds, having sprayed for the Eastern Tent Caterpillars this year, the cherry trees were healthy enough to actually set fruit, and we have loads of birds munching away in the heights. All of which assures me that I am providing plentiful food sources even with the discontinuation of my bird feeders following our various rat and cat problems.

garden log : insects

DIY : earth boxes

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One of our homemade ‘earth boxes.’

I’ve never really been a master of DIY projects. There are plenty of things I do for myself or the house, don’t get me wrong. It’s just that I tend to learn to do the things I want to learn to do and leave the things I don’t want to learn to do to other people. Whether I could do it myself doesn’t always factor into it, and I have never really been motivated to undertake projects specifically to see if can or to save money. Again, unless it’s something I like doing myself (like painting). Which is all to say that on my own I would have simply not planted tomatoes before I either (1) spent the money on actual Earth Boxes or (2) learned how to make them myself.

I’m not on my own, though, and the siren call of free tomato plants — started by our neighbor across the street who did spring for Earth Boxes and my partner’s boss’s boss who has an enormous garden on a farm about an hour away — was too much to resist, even before all the hullabaloo about salmonella. For once I was the voice of the wet blanket (‘But you don’t even like tomatoes! But we’ll already be getting tomatoes from our farmer in the summer CSA!’) and he was the not-to-be-deterred optimist (‘We’ll make sauce! We’ll give them away! It’ll be fun!’). With a small passel of wee tomato plants on our porch, and some pepper plants thrown in for good measure, he decided to go the DIY route, relying on the instructions of those who had already tried this at home as guidance.

In the end, the most difficult part of the project was mixing the dehydrated compressed potting mix with water, something I did by hand. I got lazy the second time around and overdid it with the hose, ending up with what could only be described as a big muddy mess in two boxes. To get the dirt back to wet-but-not-sloppy, I transferred mud into the small ceramic pots I was using for herbs and into the fourth box, and then (re)introduced dry mix into all three boxes. This worked in the end, but I ended up doing just as much hard hand-mixing as I would have, so I’d recommend taking it easy with the hose. It also remains to be seen whether I have irretrievably clogged the drainage holes and/or introduced too much soil into the reservoir; it’s not clear this last is possible, but not having read the actual instructions (Not My Project) I don’t know for sure.

Having assembled the boxes and planted the plants, we are now waiting to see whether following the fertilizing recommendations — which seemed a bit extreme to me — will result in lovely big plants or poor wee things with their roots burned to death. So far it looks like we have five plants that are loving it, one plant that’s gone the way of root burn, and two that took a licking and kept on ticking. I planted basil in among the tomatoes and the peppers seem to be happy in their own pot (the first one we assembled, from a larger bin, where the base fits more snugly into the box and the side holes drain better). Now all we have to do is water them every day and wait.

DIY : earth boxes

garden log : what a difference a week makes

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Blooming row of yellow daylilies at the top of the front bed.

We returned from our trip this week to the sight of our yellow daylilies in full riotous bloom. They had started to bloom before we left, but the five days of rain and sun did them good and they are magnificent now. At some point I’m sure they’ll need to be thinned and I might break up the monotony with some other plants, or at least different varieties in various shades of yellow and orange. For now, though, I’m just enjoying the bright swathe of color. There’s really no comparison to how they looked last year; this spring’s rain and the additional year to become established have made them into a veritable wall of flowers.

Our days away have also made it possible to see the impact of the herbicides on the patches of poison ivy that we’re working to eradicate from the yard. Not much, as the case may be: we’re definitely going to need to reapply, possibly several more times through the summer. Ah well. Despite the claims of the label — and the exhortations to phone poison control of any of the spray whatsoever comes into contact with any part of my body — I suspected that our ivy might not be so easily vanquished. No rush, though. If not this year, next year; poison ivy is nasty enough that I won’t be giving up so easily.


Three blooms on the Louise Odier rose.

Sadly, our week away meant we missed the last of the wonderfully fragrant Louise Odier blooms. Perhaps the bush will bloom again later in the season; this will be summer I learn as much as I can about the roses I’ve inherited. I plan to pick the brain of a gardener acquaintance on the verge of retirement, during the three days per week he’ll be at home. Hopefully between his advice and books from the library I’ll be able to develop a strategy for moving the bushes without killing them come autumn. For now, I enjoy the multitude of blooms on the Blaze bushes and work on sketching out plans for my little island bed of herbs.

garden log : what a difference a week makes