My 100-foot diet
Pesto, roasted vegetables, cucumbers with dill.
Here’s what’s going on with us these days. Work, weeding, some swimming, and lots of great eating.
I don’t have a mega-garden. Really, the only things I put up in any quantity for winter are tomatoes (slow-roasted, canned, frozen, plus chili sauce and tomato conserve), garlic, and easy-keeping winter squash. Otherwise, we eat it up as the summer winds down into fall.
This summer is a little thin, to tell the truth. NO eggplant, no peppers. Tomatoes still green, which is very worrisome given my heavy reliance on them all winter and the fact that they take up about a third of my space. I used space that would be zucchini now for the eggplant, so that corner’s a total bust.
All gone!
The peas were great, but now gone. I actually forgot to plant carrots, but have parsnips and beets doing nicely. Garlic and onions all fine. We’re still eating romaine lettuce and volunteer arugula, as well as a mesclun mix that features some tough-looking and tough-tasting leaves. There’s always lamb’s quarters if we’re short on salad greens. Delicata squash is coming, despite skirmishes with squash bugs. I planted beans late so they wouldn’t be coming in till after vacation in mid-August. I think they’ll be ready when we get back.
And we have great herbs.
Herbs bring me to our fall-back meal: Roasted vegetables, salad and pesto. My definition of pesto is very loose. Last night’s was a small nub of pecorino-romano cheese, some fresh garlic, olive oil and two big handfuls of parsley and basil, with highlights of green coriander seeds (AKA gone-to-seed cilantro) and mint. I skip the nuts entirely. Serve with beets and parsnips (they need thinning), roasted with an onion and some more of the garlic… bon appetit!
I wish we could produce our own olive oil…now THAT would be great.
The eating is mighty fine at our house this time of year and the variety seems endless sometimes. Our gardens have grown so large that we have to subscribe to the 200 foot diet…just to get it all in. Just this evening, I was marvelling at what a food factory it feels like sometimes. The work of bringing it all in and putting it all up takes a significant portion of every day, and it will continue even after Janet goes back to work in September.
Even so, I have expansion on my mind every time I walk out there. There’s another apple, and a row of Bill Mackently’s black raspberries to plant next spring, and I just made a deal to get a dozen big locust poles for the long awaited grape arbor…… and the seed catalogues are still months away.
I watch my neighbors dutifully mowing their grass, and looking like it’s a task forced upon them by an evil overlord. Their only interaction with nature or the outdoors is to mow, and then rake, and then haul it out to the curb to be discarded like so much trash…… Then that crazy Mr. Greer comes along and takes it home for some reason???
It’s nice to see that Martha is a member of the clean plate club too.