My amazing gardener friend Alice gave me 3 seeds for this pole bean this spring. All 3 came up and are now over 12′ tall and covered with tasty purple beans. I was excited to try this variety because it’s supposed to be able to handle wetter, cooler weather than many beans and so could be planted a bit earlier here in the Northwest. It’s a beautiful plant and is very productive. I’m letting the first dozen beans mature so I have seed for next year.. and to share!

Green, yellow and purple beans

Pea pods

Last of the lettuce

Wild arugula

A little Tuscan kale

Red and golden onions

Purple scallions

2 Cherry tomatoes ‘Vilma’ – this is a surprise as this variety said ’95 days to harvest’ on the seed packet. It is the first to ripen. The dwarf plants are adorable and robust.

Herbs: oregano, thyme, basil, chives, parsley

Shiso (Perilla, Japanese Basil)

Unusual greens: Amaranth leaves, Orach leaves

Blueberries

Alpine Strawberries

Last of the red raspberries

Rhubarb

Carrots

Loads of cut flowers: sweet peas, tickseed, angle’s fishing rod, lilies and bells of ireland.

Next week there will be beets, summer squash, cucumbers (yay!) and mouse melons. And maybe a few more little tomatoes from the greenhouse. Bring the Veganaise, it’s sandwich time!

So you grow your own, now what? This is the time of year most annual vegetable gardeners start having over-abundance. Quinotto (Quinoa x Risotto) is a delicious, quick, flexible and protein-rich solution. This is a garden recipe, so all ingredients besides the quinoa are optional.

Quinotto

1 cup white or red Quinoa

1 or 2 ears Corn

1/2 lb. Green beans, wax beans or similar

1 can White beans like Cannellini or Great Northern

1 medium red or gold onion

2 to 4 small to medium zucchini or other summer squash

1 cup cherry tomatoes

1/2 cup grated Parmesan cheese or crumbled feta

Handful of basil leaves, chopped

Handful of parsley, chopped

Olive oil

Salt and pepper to taste

Cook the quinoa as directed. Bob’s Red Mill is a good brand. Sauté onion in olive oil over medium heat until softened, then add zucchini and a little salt and cook for about 5 min. Add corn and green beans, cook 3-5 minutes, then white beans, tomatoes and herbs and cook until heated. Mix with quinoa and 1/2 the cheese. Taste for salt and pepper. Top with remaining cheese to serve.

Shiso

Red onion

Purple onion

Last of the lettuce

The last of the spring veggies ready this week and it’s time to think about fall and winter crops already. Finally there are some blank spots in the beds to plant seeds. The summer crops are just getting going though.. I noticed the first zucchini and pickles forming on the vines and there are green tomatoes out there. Elsewhere in the neighborhood, however, I’ve seen summer squash far ahead of mine. They seem to love the heat of parking strips!

There have been a lot of firsts in the garden this year: first successful bok choy, first time really having nice heads of lettuce, growing celery, growing grains, getting the peas in at the right time.

Here’s the payoff this week:
Kale ‘Tuscan’ – 1 lb.
Lettuce ‘Butterhead Speckles’ – 4 heads This was my favorite lettuce this year. It is so pretty and the heads formed nicely. The leaves were thick and crunchy with a good amount of waviness but not so much that they were hard to wash.
Lettuce ‘Valentine’– 2 heads
Lettuce ‘Grand Rapids’ – 2 lbs.
Swiss Chard ‘Bright Lights’ – a small bunch
Raddichio ‘Palla Rossa’ – 2 heads
Sugar pod pea – 2 lbs.
Fava bean ‘Windsor’ – 3.75 lbs. shelled!
Broccoli – The main heads are done but the side shoots are tasty
Red onions – 8 medium
Parsley
Basil
Blue and lavender sweet peas – 2 large bunches

Fava 'Windsor'

All this fava came from one pack of seeds from Thompson & Morgan’s Kew Urban Garden Collection. They are supposed to be more compact and I suppose 3 feet as opposed to 5 feet does fit that description. After the fava was picked and shelled, we blanched them in boiling water for a minute, ran them under cold water and popped them out of the skin. Then I made a risotto with basil, tomatoes, corn and saffron. Now I think I will freeze the rest. They are kind of fussy to harvest and prepare but they are good and full of protein and iron.

Shelled, blanched fava beans

Since this is more produce than we can eat even now, I shared some with a host mom from the Hahako Network who has a Japanese mother and son coming to stay with her family for a month to take a break from radiation exposure and post-disaster stress. There are 10 mothers coming to Portland so far as part of this great program, coordinated by my friend Camellia. If you’d like to offer support or donations request to join the google group or comment here and I’ll send you contact information.

Pie cherry or sour cherry
Prunus cerasus
ROSACEAE, The Rose family

A nice gleaning session was had when I found a tart cherry tree down the block. The owner said I could have as many as I wanted so I brought my lovely neighbors and we picked as high up as was safe, climbing the tree and using step ladders. I brought home 4.5 lbs. They had some worms but I picked them out as I pitted them and will make a pie and a small batch of cherry jelly. My neighbors will make wine and a tart.

Pie cherries are hard to find. They are at the farmer’s market rarely and for only a short time and u-pick farms almost never have them. Often trees in the neighborhood are too tall to pick safely.

Pie Cherries

This spring I planted a dwarf tart cherry called ‘Montmorency’ in the side yard. It bloomed a few sweet little blossoms and made this one cute cherry.

Cherry 'Montmorency'

It may seem like another bunk year for gardening, but the weather is better than last year. It has been warmer and less wet – but we got measurable rain once it did ‘dry out’. It seemed like the rain stayed through June, but in fact we only received 0.75 inches of rain in last month (it was unusually cloudy and misted some days so it seemed like a lot  more) and have gotten 1.23 inches so far this month. So we are still needing to water frequently to keep veggies happy – some need an inch a week or more. If your lettuce and greens bolted a while ago, that is why.

It seems that the weather each year creates conditions for different types of pests. Last year, with the long, wet spring, was an epic year for slugs. This year the grey aphids on brassicas seem to be thriving.

I’ve seen a lot of leaf miners this year on beets, spinach and chard. The most serious infestations have been in new gardens (unstable systems) or small-space raised bed gardens where opportunities for crop rotation are limited. Here are some strategies to deal with this and other pests with a system approach:

• Break the life cycle by excluding the adult. In this case, a small grey fly comes out when the veggies are seedlings, and lays eggs on the tender first leaves. Using row cover (a thin sheet that lets in rain and sunlight) will prevent this. Unless the flies are hatching from the soil right under your seedlings – this is why crop rotation is key. Plant these three plants in even a slightly different location to give them an edge.
• Be vigilant. Whether you use row cover or not, keep an eye on young plants and remove eggs or infected leaves as soon as possible.
• Follow-up. Continue to pick off eggs and infected leaves as the plants grow. It may seem like you are taking off a lot of leafs but the plant will compensate. And every patchy leaf you cut off means removing a maggot (or 5) that won’t be laying more eggs after hatching into an adult. With a bad infestation, you might considering cutting your losses and tossing the whole crop in the compost heap (chop off roots or let it dry out a bit in the sun first.) With beets, think of it as a gourmet harvest of baby beets and celebrate with a blue cheese and walnut salad.
• Stress is the underlying factor in all insect and disease scenarios. Adequate water (preferably rain water) and soil enriched with organic matter (compost) will give best results.

Cilantro flowers attract beneficial insects. And turn into coriander seed!

• Plant to attract beneficial insects. In permaculture jargon, this is an example of intervening in the right place in the system to get the most effect for the least effort: let the insects do the work for you. To go even further, set it up so you don’t even have to plant them each year. Just let parsley-family plants flower and reseed themselves and edit them if they are in the way. Parsley, angelica, cilantro and all of the small flowered herbs attract lots of tiny wasps and friendly critters that will gobble up pests (or poke a hole in them, lay an egg and let their young eat out their insides – again, stand back and let the beneficials do the work for you, their way.)
  

  Parsley from last year flowers and sets seed among fava and onions.

• Provide habitat. While sparrows nesting in my eaves is not optimal, I have never had a cleaner garden. This year we have at least three nests within 20 feet of the garden, and the concerned parents spend every hour of the day collecting food for their young. In fact, they are gathering it right off the kale and tomato plants. I have watched the female lovingly (my anthropomorphic interpretation) pick each cabbage butterfly larvae off of a kale plant and fly up to the nest. I’ve hardly had to use the badminton racket on the adult butterflies after an initial population control measure where I killed about 20 of them in two days this spring. I felt bad about it, but it was them or all of my brassicas. Last year I couldn’t bear to do it and liked having the butterflies flitting about, but I spent hours picking hundreds of eggs and caterpillars off every cabbage, brussels sprout, kale, broccoli and bok choy plant. Again: intervene at the best leverage point in the system. Let me be clear too, that the cabbage butterfly is not a native animal, and I wouldn’t use chemical controls or kill them all. The sparrows love their juicy thorax and how super easy they are to catch when they get trapped in the greenhouse. As for how to specifically create habitat (aside from punching holes in your eaves), plant layers of shrubs and trees and let them grow bushy. Then create a lot of perches in your garden so small birds can get to the pests easily. A bunch of sticks or stakes placed around does the trick. I discovered this inadvertently when I made a cat deterrent system this spring by arming any bare soil with stakes spaced 8 inches apart. It worked, and the birds took advantage of it.
• Have tolerance. Just as a weed is a plant growing in the ‘wrong’ place, a pest is just an animal that has a different objective than we do as they go about trying to make a living. A few chew marks or lost veggies is just part of the scheme of things.

It’s been an insane year for poppies. Red and purple opium poppies came with our house as a weed and I’ve let them reseed themselves and selected for the brighter colors. This winter I planted another variety of opium poppy in the back garden ‘Antique Shades’. I didn’t know what they looked like but the description sounded beautiful. They are much wilder than I expected. First, they are 5 feet tall. Then, they are crazy shapes. Now they are turning into fat, fancy pods.

I also planted ‘Mother of Pearl’ under the eucalyptus tree which turned out to be a very subtle and pretty combination. The mix has a lot of white in it so I will edit for grey, pink and mauve which I prefer and let them reseed. I first saw this magical flower at Special Plants Nursery near Bath, England and I love it.

Poppies are a little tricky as cut flowers but I pick them anyway. Holding a match to the cut stem or dipping them in boiling water helps them keep longer, but they last a few days tops in a vase and then they explode petals and stamens all over the dining room table. Enough chatting, let’s see these poppies.

I realized today how many kinds of ripe berries there are in the garden and decided to top the tart I was making with some of each: blueberries, strawberries, alpine strawberries, red currants, honeyberries, goumi, red raspberries and black raspberries.

A lot can be grown in a small space by working with microclimates. For instance, the goumi and currant are tucked under a walnut tree, because they are both shade tolerant and okay with the walnut’s chemistry. The blueberries and strawberries are grouped together because they both like acid soil and regular water, plus the strawberries shade the shallow roots of the blueberries.

Some of our berry bushes aren’t mature, so in the future there will also be huckleberries, sour cherries (there is one little cherry this year, I’m hoping a bird doesn’t take it), sweet cherries (there were 4 this year), cranberries and more.

The search for the perfect summer tart is on. I’ve called on Keiko from Ghost House Kitchen blog for help and am looking forward to her ideas.  I have a good tart shell recipe from Deborah Madison’s Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone. So far I’ve been filling in with a no-bake cream from Sunset’s Strawberry Brown Sugar Tart recipe, and topping it with whatever fruit or berries I have on hand. But I would like a more sophisticated filling like a custard. One custard I tried before had quite a bit of corn starch in it which could be tasted in the finished dessert, so a recipe with a small amount or no corn starch would be best.

Keiko suggested I try Clafouti as a easy custard plus fruit dessert. I found recipes in Gourmet, Sunset and my favorite dessert cookbook, Moosewood Restaurant Book of Desserts. So I will try it on the weekend, maybe one with mixed berries and one with stewed, sweetened rhubarb and lemon.