Category Archives: Crops

Caribbean Peppers End Season with a Flourish

The stars of my fall garden have been a couple of pepper plants that I ended up with by default. They were City Harvest leftovers that no one else wanted and that, perhaps, no one had heard of before. I hadn’t heard of them either, but I know about them now. They are aji amarillo (top) and aji dulce peppers (below).

When I realized I would have an October and November bumper crop of the late-blooming peppers on my hands, I was inspired to find out what they are so I could figure out what to do with them. Turns out, they each have an interesting culinary story to tell here, as I recount on my Seasonal Chef website. In short, aji amarillo peppers, fiery hot but not deadly, are a keystone ingredient in the cuisine of Peru, while aji dulces, which have the taste and aroma but none of the heat of their blistering hot lookalike cousins, habaneros, are integral to the cuisine of parts of the Caribbean region that favor milder fare including Puerto Rico, the Dominican Republic, and Cuba.

Here’s what I did with my harvest:
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AJI AMARILLO RECIPES

Hakurei Turnips: Marvel of Almost All Seasons

I dug up some turnips and radishes from the thawed ground in my garden on a balmy 60-degree day in early February and roasted them for dinner. The radishes were firm and surprisingly tasty for midwinter. As for the turnips, though they look good (see photo), they had a mushy texture–nothing like they are in their crisp prime, and no wonder. They’ve frozen and thawed quite a few times in the last couple of months. Despite the meticulous attention and tadalafil wholesale training that athletes take, they experience musculoskeletal injuries. Here, a brief about these versions have been mentioned: Kamagra Tablets – It is a blue color diamond shaped appearance. amerikabulteni.com cheap cialis With so much rush at clinics, hospital or dispensaries people who are rich, famous and influential can easily get through easy best cialis price hospitalizations and treatment but what about those who are fighting erectile dysfunction, so be firm with determination. (1) First and foremost… http://amerikabulteni.com/2013/11/17/batman-vs-superman-filmi-hakkinda-su-ana-kadar-ne-biliyoruz/ vardenafil 20mg tab It is not recommended to take Kamagra if you have already taken another ED medicine. But they were certainly edible, earning all the more respect from me.

Hakurei turnips are the one crop that never fails in my gardens. Almost all the seeds germinate, even the few I’ve spilled in the paths between rows, grow to maturity. Planted in succession from early spring into the fall, they yield a continuous harvest of tender little turnips and greens that are as good as the turnips themselves.

Survivors of the ‘Winter’ of 2016-17

Overwintered spinach that in mid-April is already starting to bolt

Note to self: next time you plant a crop of spinach in the fall intending to keep it going through the winter and into the next spring, jot down the name of the variety or varieties you plant.

I’ve attempted to grow spinach through the winter for three years in a row. The first of the three crops was a spectacular success, yielding a light harvest of baby spinach in the fall and bulging bags full of mature spinach from March into June. (And that was entirely inadvertent, as I explained in a post at the time.) In the fall of 2015, I planted hundreds of spinach seeds but just a few seedlings sprouted–and promptly keeled over and died long before winter set it.

collard green

This past fall, I planted two varieties, both of which got a healthy start. They survived the winter under a row cover in fine shape.But now that spring has arrived and I have uncovered them, they are already bolting after just one modest picking. What the heck? I was counting on a continuous harvest right up to the start of summer! I had alerted friends and neighbors to prepare to help me eat it all. Then this: my patch of spinach, lovingly tended all winter long, is going to yield a couple of servings.

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cilantro

The weather is obviously one factor. And I probably kept the row cover on too long. We had a number of days during this past so-called winter when the temperature got into the 70s, which means it must have been in the 80s under the row cover. But the varieties of spinach I have planted these past three winters was surely also a factor in the wildly varying results. Trouble is, I have no clue what varieties I’ve planted. I’m going to try again this fall, but due to my lack of notes, I’ll be starting from scratch in my effort to get it right.

chives

Oh well. I’m getting at least some homegrown spinach this spring. And several other crops are coming back:  one collard, a kale and chives (no surprise with any of them). Unexpectedly a couple of cilantro plants are also coming back from a crop that I had given up for lost last fall. Most surprisingly of all, some parsley that I started from seed about this time last year and yielded a continuous harvest last summer is now coming back strong this year. Hurray for the parsley! It is showing no signs of bolting. I’ve already made one batch of chimichurri with, I hope, many more to come.

Italian flat-leaf parsley looking good to go for a second year

Home-Grown Tomatoes on New Year’s Day

Home-grown, kitchen counter-ripened tomatoes, Jan. 1, 2017

Tasty despite pallid yellow color


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I picked several dozen green tomatoes off the dead vines in my Roxborough garden in early December, before the first deep freeze of the winter reached Philadelphia. You’re supposed to wrap green tomatoes in newspaper, put them in paper bags and store them in a cool place to get them to ripen, but I put them all in a big bowl on my kitchen counter, where they sat for weeks. I had intended to make fried green tomatoes with some, while waiting to see if the others would ripen. Over several weeks of neglect, half rotted, but the others eventually appeared to ripen. Their pallid orange color didn’t lead me to expect them to taste like much, but they weren’t bad at all. They had an unmistakable homegrown taste, with no mushy or mustiness from aging, and were certainly better than anything we’ll find in local markets around here between now and June.

December Harvest of Leftovers

dec-2-harvest-2

Dead vines still yielding things to eat

I found a couple of cherry plum tomatoes in my garden, hiding among the dead foliage. Homegrown tomatoes fresh off the vine in December! What a treat. Also among the dead foliage: several handfuls of never ending sour Mexican gherkins.

Men suffering from artery disease or neural disorders leading to lost potency of achieving generic viagra discount an erection. It is found that regular massaging of this oil will repair and heal the weak cialis 10 mg unica-web.com penile nerves and improve the erection, and makes a man able to perform better in the game of love. Finally it enlarges the veins in the male organ increase the size of resulting in a viagra online no prescription hard-on. Researchers tracked 42 high-risk individuals that took a 25 mg dose and may limit you to a viagra discounts maximum single dose of 25 mg in a 48-hour period. The Italian flatleaf parsley I started from seed way back in May is still thin but still verdant and giving up enough sprigs  for small batches of chimichuri.   The patch of spinach, lettuce and kale I am growing under a cover contributed a garnish of sprigs for the tableau of my backyard harvest on Dec. 2.

dec-2-harvest-1

December harvest: spinach, parsley, oregano, cherry tomatoes and sour Mexican gherkins

Mexican Sour Gherkins Everywhere

gherkin5

As my tomatoes died, the gherkins continued to thrive

gherkin15

Sept. 23 haul

The unexpected star of my garden two years ago was, no question about it, spinach. Last year: never-ending basil. This year’s surprise star performer: sour Mexican gherkins.

I planted just one seedling at the start of the summer. It was a leftover from the delivery of seedlings we get at our community garden several times a summer from the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society as part of the City Harvest program.

gherkin1

nickle-sized “mouse melons”

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co-existing with tomatoes

I had never heard of sour Mexican gherkins before but they’ve begun showing up in cutting-edge farmers markets in the last few years, selling for $24 a pound, according to a report by Christopher Weber in Modern Farmer. They’ve got many names,  including cucamelon, mouse melon, and sandita (little watermelon) in Spanish.  One thing they’re often called that they’re not is cucumbers. Though they’re from an entirely different genus, they have a cucumber taste with a slightly lemony tang.

The one seedling I had to work with was a wispy little thing that wouldn’t last in my crowded garden, I thought, as I wedged it into a tiny opening next to the leg of a trellis for my cherry tomatoes. I figured it would be overwhelmed by the cherry tomatoes in short order. But it grew, sending fragile vines shooting up through the top of the tomatoes. Over the weeks and months of the summer, that one plant sent a web of fast-growing vines for 10 feet in each direction down my garden row, covering everything.

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gherkin16

climbing up the okra

The vines formed such a lacy net of fine stems and dainty leaves that they didn’t kill off the plants they engulfed. To the contrary, my sour Mexican gherkin seemed to coexist with everything, from tomatoes and okra, to the ferns in my asparagus patch, and even my potted fig tree.

gherkin9

intermingled with asparagus ferns

That 20-foot web of vines from one plant is covered with tiny gherkins by the dozens, amounting to hundreds over the course of the harvest season, that started in July and is going strong with a week to go in September.

What to do with them all? I tried refrigerator pickles. Didn’t work. They are crunchy and a bit too tough to eat of hand in any quantity. I found they were best when chopped and marinated for a day or two, as in this chopped salad with onions, tomatoes, parsley, basil, vinegar and oil. For a relish-style variation, I pulsed some of the chopped salad a few times in a food processor.

gherkinrelish1

Ingredients for a chopped sour Mexican gherkin salad

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the salad

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relish-style after a few pulses in the food processor

Early June Harvest

Here’s what I harvested today, Saturday, June Men due to the condition no longer achieve erections to take pleasure and give satisfaction to their amerikabulteni.com order cialis online customers. You should also avoid taking it with alcoholic beverages, nitrate drugs, and fatty meals etc. cialis prescription Exercise Regularly The health benefits of doing exercises is to experience the sensation cialis 40 mg http://amerikabulteni.com/2011/09/30/amerika-beyzbola-kilitlendi-heyecan-firtinasi-bu-aksam-basliyor/ of touching rather than trying to locate the root cause. Palomino horses range from a very light yellow/straw color viagra no prescription fast to a dark chocolate yellow color. 3 (clockwise from lower left): sprig of oregano, cilantro, arugula, lettuce, radishes, hakurei turnips, and asparagus.

Survivors of the Winter of 2015

micro brussel sprouts

Micro Brussels Sprouts (click to enlarge photos)

04-05-15 kale arugula

kale and arugula on April 5

The flimsy row cover that I stretched over half hoops to shelter my fall crops miraculously survived the winter. I was certain it would either be flattened by ice and snow, or ripped to shreds by the winter winds, or both. We had perhaps a dozen snow falls this past winter, most just an inch or two, but they were icy and wet. The fabric withstood it all, and was barely worse for the wear at winter’s end.

The crops underneath the row cover didn’t fare  as well.  A solitary spinach plant, a single frilly mustard and four kale plants survived. The Brussels sprout that I planted in September, and that never did anything in the fall, grew into a beat-up bonsai, but there were little buds in the leaf joints. I painstakingly harvested about a bite of what I am calling overwintered micro Brussels sprouts.

Merveille de Quatre Saisons lettuce on Jan. 9

Merveille de Quatre Saisons lettuce on Jan. 9


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I also planted some Merveille de Quatre Saisons lettuce seeds in September, and got a fine but small fall crop. I harvested most of the plants on Dec. 11, since I was about to leave town for nearly a month. But I left some in the ground just to see whether the cultivar would live up to its name. The plants were still alive, albeit barely. They had survived several spells of single digit temperatures. But they had rotted away by March. I’ll give the variety half a credit for yielding a nice harvest in December, even after several hard frosts, and for lasting into the new year. It’ll be Marvel of Three-and-a-Half Seasons to me from now on.

Row cover weighed down but snow but intact on Jan. 9

Row cover weighed down by snow but intact on Jan. 9

A few of the kale plants, from seedlings I planted in September, survived under the row cover but look quite sickly at the moment. I’ve now liberated them from the row cover and will hope for a resurgence of growth in the coming weeks.

Several arugula plants also survived. The leek seedlings I planted in the fall are very well established and look ready to plump up.

All told, it’s nothing like the bumper crop of overwintered spinach that I had last year. But the survivors are a start for the growing season of 2015 now getting underway.

Lettuce in Philly in the Snow

My crop of September-planted lettuce, mustard and kale, which has been draped with a light floating rove cover since October,  yielded a very nice harvest on Dec. 10.

Dec. 10 harvest of lettuce, mustard, kale and a spring of chard

Dec. 10 harvest of lettuce, mustard, kale and a spring of chard

I picked fairly heavily in light of the prediction of a chance of a bit of snow. I’m determined to keep some plants going for as long as possible this winter. I have no hope of duplicating last year’s bumper crop of overwintered spinach and lettuce, but I’d like to try to keep something alive until spring. But I don’t want to sacrifice all of my crop to that experiment.

Rover cover with a dusting of snow, Dec. 11, 2014

Row cover with a dusting of snow, Dec. 11, 2014

Who knows how long the light covering will keep my crops alive this winter. So far, they have done far better than expected, having survived several freezes into the mid-20s already.
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On Dec. 11, sure enough, we got a light skim of slushy snow. I dropped by the garden, found the snow-dusted row cover intact, and the plants underneath just as happy as clams.

Marvel of Four Seasons lettuce under a blanket dusted with snow, Dec. 11, 2014

Marvel of Four Seasons lettuce under a blanket dusted with snow, Dec. 11, 2014

The red lettuce is Marvel of Four Seasons. The frilly red mustard I’m growing is called Ruby Streaks. The kale plants are from starts that I bought at a nursery in September.

My lettuce is thriving after a light snow fall on Dec. 11, 2014

My lettuce is thriving after a light snow fall on Dec. 11, 2014

Best Growing Season Ever?

Harvested on Aug. 28: green onions, Black Krim and Ukranian Purple tomatoes, yellow crookneck squash, Blue Lake green beans, purple cabbage and lettuce

Harvested on Aug. 28: (left to right) green onions, Rutgers and Ukranian Purple tomatoes, yellow crookneck squash, Blue Lake green beans, purple cabbage and lettuce

This was just my second summer of gardening in Philadelphia, and my seventh summer in the northeastern United States after a quarter century living and gardening in Los Angeles. So I have a limited basis for comparing the growing season now drawing to a close with past seasons. I have been around long enough to know that this was an exceptionally cool and pleasant summer. But how did Philly gardeners fare this year compared with in the past?

Jill Schneider, the manager of the community garden in Roxborough where I have a plot, was certainly ebullient. In an August email to Garden RUN gardeners, under the subject line “Best Summer Ever!,” she exclaimed, “I can see that many of you are enjoying bumper crops this year…isn’t it wonderful?!” When I asked her to expound on that thought, Jill replied in early September with a ditty, titled Philly Garden Season 2014:

 Summer temps below ninety,
Garden pests were few,
Adequate rainfall,
My plants grew and grew and grew!
🙂

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Though a bug of some sort took out my cucumber vines as soon as they started yielding cukes, and my basil met an early demise due to mildew, all of my other crops were free of pests and diseases. The Rutgers tomato I planted was a bust (clearly disappointed that the muggy heat it was bred to favor never arrived), but the cool-season Early Girl thrived, producing tiny but numerous tomatoes right through the summer and into September. And the two heirloom tomato varieties I planted, Black Krim and Ukranian Purple, did quite well, by heirloom standards.

Overall, the benign growing season was reflected, I think, in the diversity of crops I was still bringing home from my little plot at the end of the summer. In late August, I was harvesting lettuce and cabbage that normally would have succumbed to the heat by early July, along with the more typical hot-season crops like tomatoes, okra and beans.

Bottom line: I can’t say whether this was the best season ever or not, but I’m very pleased with the results.

Harvested on Sept. 21: Black Krim, Ukranian Purple and Early Girl tomatoes, okra, Blue Lake and Kentucky Wonder green beans, and cucumber

Harvested on Sept. 21: (left to right) Early Girl, Black Krim and Ukranian Purple tomatoes, Kentucky Wonder green beans, okra and cucumber