State of the Garden 2016

Picked my first tomato of the year! A 6.5oz Big Beef.

A photo posted by sarah (@braisinhussy) on

I didn’t do a blog-along this year documenting my garden progress, so now, at the end of the growing season, I shall attempt to recount all of it.

February 2016: started 25 seedlings. They are pretty successful.

March 2016: seedlings go in the ground. I leave on a 3-week trip.

April 2016: return to find everything got eaten by snails except for some San Marzano tomato plants and nasturtiums. The survivors are straggly. I buy four tomato plants (Green Zebra, Black from Tula, Sunset Falls, and Big Beef), a six-pack of cherry tomatoes, a six-pack of bell peppers, one chili pepper, and some chives and basil. I make seven hanging baskets and four pots. Two of the tomato plants go in the ground.

June 2016: tomatoes start to have ripe fruit! Basket and pot tomatoes, that is. Ground tomatoes are doing nothing. Peppers being slowpokes. Lydia gives me some shiso seedlings.

July 2016: more tomatoes! Still nothing from the ground. Peppers getting with the program.

August 2016: more tomatoes! Basket peppers are finished. Potted peppers begin going nuts. I start some cucumber seedlings for the hell of it. I rip out the San Marzanos because I am over watching them do NOTHING.

September 2016: the Sunset Falls tomatoes, which were marked “determinate,” start producing more fruit. Cucumber plants start producing flowers. I leave for two weeks.

October 2016: the cucumber plants are going crazy! The peppers are giant! The tomatoes are giving everything they can in a last hurrah!

Gosh I’m looking forward to pickling season! Hopefully the first frost is still a ways off (last year it didn’t come until Thanksgiving) so I have time for more ripe veggies.

So what have I learned this year? Mostly that the soil/sun situation in our backyard is TERRIBLE and if I want to grow anything it’s going to have to be in pots or beds. The baskets are nice, but doing the top+bottom load means that neither one gets enough soil or resources.

I’m thinking about joining the community garden next year. I have a LOT of seeds from the Hudson Valley Seed Library—Lydia and I both bought a ton from their overstock sale, and then we shared them with each other. I have at least ten different kinds of tomatoes as well as a bunch of other stuff. The community garden has a lot more sunlight than my backyard, and hopefully more bees as well. And hey, community! Maybe I’ll make friends.

First #cucumber off my plant! Got another dozen or so on their way. #nationalpicklingcucumber #gardening

A photo posted by sarah (@braisinhussy) on

Dill Pickles

[image: back of an envelope with the recipe scrawled on it]
[image: back of an envelope with the ingredients scrawled on it]

I don’t have a photo of the pickles because we ate them too quickly for me to get them into a nice jar (they were DAMN GOOD). So enjoy this scrawled ingredient list on the back of an envelope. It’s how many of my kitchen antics are recorded.

I’ve made three different kinds of pickles over the last few weeks. My folks had half a head of fennel that they weren’t going to use, so I found this recipe for Pickled Fennel with Orange on Serious Eats. I guess the only change I made was that I used the stalks of fennel as well as the bulb I had, to try and approximate “three small fennel bulbs.” (I wish they’d had a weight measurement instead.) The other thing which was recommended in the comments was to rinse the fennel after salting it.

I wasn’t too sure about it at first, but after like a week of flavor development I really got into it. It was good out of the jar, but my preferred application was on sandwiches. Toasted rye, cheddar cheese, grilled chicken, and fennel/orange pickle.

The second pickle is the dill cucumber pickles, recipe below. These were so good that I’m going to attempt cucumbers this year in my garden. But that is for a different post!

After we hoovered up the cucumber pickles, I decided to reuse the brine on some leftover asparagus spears. Reusing brine is NOT recommended if you’re canning, but it’s fine for refrigerator pickles. Asparagus has to be blanched first before putting into the briny deep. They’ve been in there for 48 hours; I tried a spear today but they weren’t ready yet. I’ll wait a few more days.

1 cup distilled white vinegar
1 cup water
1 Tbsp kosher salt
2 tsp dill seeds
1 tsp whole black peppercorns
4 cloves garlic, peeled and lightly crushed
1/2 tsp red pepper flakes
1 bay leaf
24 cucumber spears (I had 1.5 large cucumbers—sliced in half across, then each half into eighths)

Place the dill seeds, peppercorns, garlic, red pepper flakes, and bay leafs in the bottom of your pickling container of choice (I use cleaned 32-oz. yogurt containers). Wedge the cucumber spears into the container atop the spices.

In a small pot, bring the vinegar, water, and salt to a boil. Carefully pour into the container. Refrigerate for a week before eating. (If you are not using a jar and therefore find that the end of your spears are bobbing over the surface of the brine, rotate them top to bottom every other day.)