Garden Herb Salad

Two weeks ago the lettuce and green onions were just sprouting. Here's a shot of how I've interplanted them.







Here are my arugula sprouts. They have a surprising bite to their flavor. We ate dinner at Soif in downtown Santa Cruz recently and they served a salad of fennel and artichoke hearts topped with arugula sprouts. It was delicious! But I'm saving these sprouts for something larger.


This is our first salad from the garden. We ate it Sunday night. Baby arugula, fresh chives, thyme, chopped basil and Italian parsley, violets and green onions. It was wonderful! The arugula is just the thinnings I took out of the rows. I have about two more salads worth of arugula thinnings, but I don't know. I may eat it all and replant for more baby arugula. I'm not sure that larger arugula leaves are as tasty as the smaller ones.

In the two pics above of the garden sprouts you'll see that they are emerging from rows of vermiculite. My grandfather, Norman Neibel, turned me onto vermiculite for seed germination because it helps keeps the seeds moist for longer periods of time and also doesn't form a crust that makes it difficult for the tiny plants to poke through. Most of my lettuces and other salad greens came up at exactly the time the germination periods indicated on the seed packets, if not before. The vermiculite works well, and you don't have to be too concerned about seed depth.

My babies

I've been nursing these little ones everyday for more than a week now. They are precious!
I'll be planting them Thursday.

Love Apples

I never liked fresh tomatoes when I was growing up. It wasn't until my first trip to Italy in 1996 (I was 30!) that I recognized how delicious these little fruits could be. In Florence, after seeing a very moving organ concerto in a smaller Renaissance-style cathedral with ethereal cherubs on the ceiling and Baroque statues in every corner, Kevin and I went to dinner. I ordered the "Insalata Caprese", having no idea what "Caprese" meant. My salad arrived with sliced tomatoes alternating with buffala mozzerella and basil leaves. I was disappointed to see that my salad was more than 50% tomato, to say the least. But I was determined to eat it, because I was in Italy for the first time in my life and, I couldn't speak enough Italian to say "take it back, I don't like tomatoes!" Can you imagine if I said that? They would have thrown me out of the country! Well, if you ate a bite of tomato with the basil and cheese at the same time it wasn't bad. In fact, with that heavenly soft cheese, it was really good! I started growing tomatoes in my garden on a regular after this. Homegrown tomatoes are far better tasting than anything you can find in a grocery store. The local farmer's market heirloom tomatoes are very good and I take advantage of them when my tomato crop is lacking. I do have to admit though, I still occasionally pull the tomatoes off my sandwiches and push them aside in my salads. I can't stand a mealy tomato.

What tomatoes am I growing this year in my garden?

Celebrity. Last year I lost all three of my Zebras (Red, Green, and Black) to the tomato wilt viruses. It was pathetic. The previous year my two Green Grapes experienced the same thing. So I'm putting in a failsafe hybrid along with my heirlooms. I planted Celebrity many years ago and I remember it as having better flavor than Ace.

Early Girl is my standby. It's a hybrid so it rarely succumbs to leaf wilt or blossom end rot. It is also gives me a decent number of medium-sized tomatoes that have very sweet flavor, given my limited sun of approximately 5 hours per day.
Last year this vine was so heavy with fruit that it tipped over. The next thing I knew there wasn't a tomato on it. The chubby rat you saw in previous posts had enjoyed his share.

Green Grape. This may be an exercise in futility, but I couldn't get Aunt Ruby's Green Cherry from Love Apple Farm this year so I'm determined to try. Even if the vine gets the wilt, maybe I'll score just a few of these nutty green cherries first. This is one of my favorite tomatoes.

Hess. I bought this from Love Apple Farm this year because it was the last tomato Cynthia was selling in a gallon pot. Her gallon pot tomatoes grow so well... it must be the soil she uses. Hess is a German heirloom producing large yellow fruit with red marbling and a mild, sweet, fruity flavor. It's a beefsteak, and larger tomatoes need more sun. We'll see how it does. I planted Hawaiian Pineapple last year and got no fruit.

The remaining varieties are all from Love Apple Farm too. These seedlings were so tiny when I brought them home that I haven't transplanted them yet. Cynthia has a very limited variety this year so I grabbed what I could get my hands on. They are almost ready to plant.

Costoluto Genovese. This is a medium to smallish Italian heirloom with a dark red color and deep ribbing. Sounds good!

Lemon Head. No description for this one. I assume it's yellow.

Purple Russian. Torpedo-shaped fruits with a purplish-black color. Very productive with excellent taste.

Rosie Romanian. Cynthia received seeds from Romania that she claimed grew delicious tomatoes.

Black Krim. I don't have a description for this one, except that I believe it's also a darker variety and I remember having good luck with it a few years ago.

Cerise Red Cherry. Also no description for this one, but it's supposed to be a super-sweet cherry tomato.


Of the Love Apple heirloom varieties I planted last year, here are my picks:

Aunt Ruby's Green Cherry. A prolific, semi-ruffled cherry tomato with a sweet-tart nutty flavor. I couldn't eat them fast enough before they would start to crack on the vine.

Beauty Lotringa. I didn't get many of these, but they were good. It's a pink ruffled tomato. Mine didn't get too big.

Bloody Butcher. Despite the name, this deep red smallish tomato was delicious. It had the best flavor of all that I planted. Unfortunately I only harvested a handful. The tomato wilt virus worked on this one too.

It's funny how some of these heirlooms wilted but others didn't. I guess some varieties are more resistant than others. I have read that tomatoes with more potato-like leaves are supposed to be more resistant. I planted Brandywine in the past and it's never had a problem.

Here are my pans from last year:

Sweet Sue Cherry. This was a mealy, non-sweet cherry. Not even worth eating.

Purple Calabash. Beautiful deep red bicolor and intense flavor. This tomato was so rich ("winey") that I felt nauseous after eating some at dinner. I think I'll pass on this one next time.

Zebras. Red, Green and Black all wilted and produced no fruit. It's too bad too, because they are smaller fruiting varieties, which is better for limited sun. And Love Apple had some different Zebra varieties this year too: Pink Zebra and Hippy Zebra, which I would have loved to try if my luck last year wasn't so poor.

Hawaiian Pineapple. No fruit. But no wilt.... hmmm.

2006 Planting

I finished my planting today (except for the last few tomatoes, which are still too small to put out). Every year I draw up a map of what I've planted in each box.


The top three boxes, the herbs, tomatoes T5 - T7, the basil, and the kids box on the lower right were all planted May 1st. The Alabama beans and bush beans were soaked for two days and planted May 3rd. Now that's a coincidence! May 3rd is my grandfather, Norman's, birthday. He is the one that passed the Alabama bean seeds down to me. He received them from our neighbor 30 years ago, George Royce. I imagine George is still growing the beans too.

On May 6th I poked in the shallots, garlic and green onions between the lettuce rows. Today I planted fennel, sunflowers, snap peas, cukes and a couple of bell peppers from the nursery. I also replanted some spinach that didn't come up (or met with a very hungry sowbug).

The Seed List
Renee's Garden "Dutch Beets, Baby Ball"
Renee's Garden "Jewel-Toned Beets, Red Gold & Candystripe"
Burpee "Beet, Burpee's Golden"
Renee's Garden "Gourmet Ruby Chard, Scarlet Charlotte"
Garlic "ala supermarket"
Hint of Garlic "Dutch Yellow Shallots" from 2005 planting
Botanical Interests "Carrot, Scarlet Nantes"
Burpee "Carrot, Danvers Half Long"
Burpee's Heirlooms "Lettuce, Tom Thumb Butterhead"
Botanical Interests "Lettuce Romaine, Freckles"
Renee's Garden "Heirloom Lettuce, Merveille de Quatre Saisons"
Renee's Garden "Specialty Salads, Gala Mache"
Botanical Interests "Arugula"
Burpee "Spinach, Melody Hybrid"
Renee's Garden "Long-standing Spinach, Summer Perfection"
Renee's Garden "Sugar Snap Peas, Super Sugar Snap"
Renee's Garden "Specialty Sunflowers, The Joker"
Burpee "Cucumber, Sweet Burpless Hybrid"
Seeds of Change "Perfection Fennel"
Renee's Garden "Bush French Filet Beans, Rolande"
Grandpa Norman's (from George Royce) Alabama Pole Beans
Botanical Interests "Squash summer, Baby Round Zucchini"
Botanical Interests "Squash summer, Clarinette Lebanese"

Kids Box - C
Thompson & Morgan "Sunflower, Russian Giant"
Burpee "Pumpkin, Jack-O-Lantern"
Lake Valley Seed "Marvel of Peru, Four O'Clock"
Burpee "Oriental Vegetable, Pea Snowbird"
Burpee "Carrot, Danvers Half Long"

Kids Box - K
Burpee "Sunflower, Chianti Hybrid"
Burpee "Zinnia, Lilliput Mix"
Lake Valley Seed "Snapdragon, Fairy Bouquet Mix"

I'm going to try to review most of these seeds individually as the garden grows and produces, to give an idea of the performance and taste of each variety.

Spring Garlic

Tonight I had the most wonderful pasta sauce. At the season opening of the Felton Farmers Market today I found Spring Garlic. Spring Garlic (also known as Green Garlic) is simply the garlic bulb and green stems picked very early on. It has a wonderful mild, fresh garlicky essence to it. I had just planted some cloves in my garden earlier in the day to hopefully grow this wonderful stuff, but it might be too late in the season for planting it. We'll see. We didn't have any sun until just a few weeks ago.

At any rate, I prepared the green garlic as described by Susie in her Kitchen Garden blog in the Spring Green Garlic post. It was SO GOOD, that I ate all of the sauce before it came out of the pan. Then I made more, and was dipping small slices of parmesan cheese in the sauce and eating it. Oh so good. I really hope my garlic comes up. I bought some fava beans at the market too, but they are just an exercise in masochism. Peel, cook, peel, .... cook, eat. Finally. But they are pretty good too.

This past weekend I finished turning all the garden boxes and raked them all smooth. On Monday I planted about 5 of the boxes. I still have 3 to go. Which reminds me, I need to soak my beans tonight. I post a picture as soon as I can. Most important of the planting was that we planted the kid's box Monday afternoon. C has planted carrots, dwarf snow peas, four o'clocks, pumpkins and Russian Giant sunflowers. K planted violets, strawberries, snapdragons, zinnias and Chianti Sunrise (red) sunflowers (with a couple pumpkin seeds thrown in too). Their box is going to be a jungle! But that's okay. It's fun.