Eats

 Here's a lovely oat flour waffle that Masher makes.

Like a square foot garden, but square inches and not a garden

Children like waffles

The recipe is something like this (vegan alternatives included):
-2 cups any combination of oat and whole wheat flour
-2 cups some kind of milk (coconut, soy, rice, cow)
-2 chicken eggs or Ener-G egg substitute (or replace egg with banana at half a banana per egg); if using duck eggs 1 will do
-3 tbs melted and cooled Earth Balance or butter
-2 tsp baking powder (this is for high altitude)

 Here's my lunch: Sun Gold cherry, Stupice, Cherokee Purple, Golden Jubilee

The big ones are Golden Jubilee, Cherokee Purple and Speckled Roma. The little ones are Stupice and Sun Gold. Golden Jubilee is my favorite to grow and eat, maybe tied with Brandywine. Cherokee Purple is a good producer of large, pretty tomatoes that are sweet and mild but a little more watery and seedy than the Golden ones. Stupice plants produce like crazy and the 2-inch fruits taste decent and are bright red. Speckled Roma will impress your friends with their handsomeness and are tasty raw or cooked. They're my favorite for tomato soup.

Yield

 Here's what I picked this morning:

Lunch

 

 

 I have to pick the tomatoes when they're 80-90% ripe because the second they're perfectly ripe, a lurking grasshopper eats them. It's a very successful method of avoiding loss of what I call my "crops." However, on occasion the bugs score one:

The worm crawls in, the worm crawls out

That little caterpillar didn't do much damage. I've only seen two all summer, and since they weren't in the same room at the same time for all I know they were same one. The Speckled Roma on the left has a little blossom end rot too. I have very little trouble with BER but it seems like all Romas are prone to it and there will be one or two on a vine with BER. I would cut that off and cook the rest of the tomato though. I'm not wasting any part of a stripey Roma. They're good for eating raw or cooked, not like some other Romas I've grown. And even the cut off parts don't get wasted because chickens and goats eat them.

 Here's a dog's eye view of some of the square foot gardens:

peppers, greens and tomatoes

spinach, chard, carrots, onions, marigolds and....tomatoes

Chives, pepper and you know the rest

I highly recommend building trellises as described in Mel Bartholomew's book. The heaviest of tomatoes and cucumbers stay high and dry, and the trellises support them easily.

Stupice and cucumber about 4 feet off the ground

A few ripe tomatoes

Left to right: Golden Jubilee, Speckled Roma, some other Roma, Stupice, and a few pineapple tomatilloes

I ate the Golden  Jubilee. All other tomatoes are green and still getting bigger. I don't believe the seed packets that tell you they're early season, mid season or late season, or that they mature in so many days. I think it depends on the microclimates in your garden. I planted everything from seed indoors in early February, put a few out under cloches in April and the rest out the first weekend in June. I never see more tomatoes than these before September no matter what I do and what variety, although there have been a handful of ripe Stupices here and there since July. The Golden and stripey ones are late season. They taste really good and in my four years of trying to learn to garden they've become a mainstay. The Golden Jubilees can show a little cracking because we've had heavy rains but are mostly plump and, um, meaty. The Speckled Romas get big for Romas and are dense with lots of flavor. Like all Romas they're more vulnerable to BER than others in the same container; the plant these came from doesn't show any, however. They are also the least resistant to fungus. I hope we're past that stage. Everything looks pretty lush and hardy (knocking wood). If you don't violate any of the Tomato Rules (don't plant too close, don't overwater, don't water from overhead, don't plant the same place you had tomatoes last year), the stripey Romas will produce lots of pretty fruit for you.

I wish I would grow tons of food and not have to buy vegetables at all, except the ones I don't want to grow because they take too much space (broccoli, cabbage, cauliflower). Mostly I get a lot of tomatoes and squash. Here's the yield or potential yield so far:

-Tomatoes: 22 remaining plants (I culled one that looked like it was developing some kind of wilt), 19 actually busting out with impressive fruit.
-Eggplant, Japanese: 4 plants and so far only one eggplant big enough to eat.
-Herbs: basils, oregano, dill and chives; plus we made an her spiral out front and bought lavender, lemon thyme, sage and tarragon plants for it.
-Carrots: small and about 40% seed carrots, and they take all spring and summer to grow. Not the big basket of orange carrots for horses and people I was hoping for. Yet. I keep planting them.
-Parsnip/parsley root: see carrots. A few, not that impressive.
-Butternut squash: I can see at least 10 on our only plant. These are awesome. One seed is all you need and they store all winter without taking up space in the fridgelator (EG's pronunciation).
-Pumpkin: EG's pumpkin plant is sprawling and there are a few good specimens on it. It's the jack o' lantern kind, not the kind you grow for pie.
-Beans: Around 10 bean plants give us enough green beans for supper weekly. I like to let the black ones and the white ones keep growing and get dried beans from them, but for it to be enough to write home about you need more than I made room for.
-Greens: Swiss chard is easy to grow and we eat in salad or cooked, plus give some to the chickens and goats at the barn, and still always have some ready to pick. Spinach is doing OK.
-Peas: I never get a lot at one time. They are good either picked young or later with fat peas in the pod. I just wish we'd get a lot instead of 1 every other day.

Evil Genius's recipe

EG was out in the garden with me this morning and picked a cucumber and a carrot. He said he wanted to make soup with it because he wanted me to get out the stick blender. So this is his recipe:

Carrot, steamed, including the water it was steamed with
Cucumber, peeled
Fresh dill
Salt, pepper

I blended it all in the mini food processor because it was too small a batch for the stick blender. It wasn't too bad. I ate some and EG did too. It looked like baby food, a little.

Kind of a crappy pic I took with my phone.  His next suggestion: peanut butter eggs. I don't know how we're going to pull that off.

Unrelated, but I feel like documenting some EG quotes before I forget them. Here are a few lines he uses to charm girls:

To a little girl at Chili's: "I have a fire truck at my house."
To a plumber's daughter: "Hey girl, show me some tools."

Container garden 2011

Last year something that looked like late blight affected our garden bed so we started from scratch this year and built square foot gardens. At first I wasn't crazy about the idea (even though I'm the one who bought the book) because it meant buying stuff to grow in instead of using free dirt. Square foot gardening, if you go by the book, is outdoor container gardening. Here's a photo of the row of SFGs built over what was two long raised beds:

...and here are some tomatoes (Brandywine and Great White) planted deep in big pots:

I started all my seeds indoors on February 7. The ones transplanted into deep, wide containers are much bigger than the others. Still, I'm pretty optimistic about the SFG. I'm not sure I'm joining the cult though.

And here is the first ripe tomato of 2011 on June 26, a Siberia that I bought at Paulino's in Denver. It's one of the few I didn't plant from seed, the others being a Mr. Stripey (my first!), Red Robin and a Sweet Seedless from the farmer's market.

EG and I ate it. I don't think he actually likes raw tomatoes but he wanted to pick it and asked every day if it was red enough yet. I give up trying to rush the tomato harvesting. I experimented with plastic cloches on some pepper and tomato plants that I put out in April while waiting until late May to bring the rest of the seedlings out. The ones brought out early are no bigger than any others. This box has the ones that were camping out with cloches over them at night in mid-April:

The 3 little plants in the southwest squares have been out since mid-April

The cage keeps our dog from swiping vegetables. She will do an entire agility course for a green bean.