The Best Laid Plans

Things don't always work out the way you plan, both in life and in the garden. This is something I've been thinking about lately as the stack of seed catalogues grows thick on my desk. Last year at this time I had ordered kale, mustard and sunflower seeds; thrilled by the possibilities of the coming season. With kale, I would have a crop in winter! Ah, leafy greens sauteed with bacon or roughly chopped for soup! I would make my own mustard! Big happy sunflowers would be thriving in August when everything else droops and looks like they had too good of a time at a midsummer party. This was the plan.

Well, it turns out that kale and any member of the cabbage family is not a good idea to eat while breastfeeding. The new digestive system of a baby just doesn't deal well with even the diluted version. In fact most yummy things; milk products, citrus fruit or juice, tomato and anything with a strong flavor can make breastfed babies unhappy. So the kale seeds are waiting quietly in the freezer for another year.

The mustard crop grew beautifully and by July there was a great waving mass of seed pods ripening. I was having trouble telling if it was time to harvest since some pods still had a greenish tinge. One day as I surfed around the Internet looking for mustard recipes I heard a great commotion of birds in the back yard. When I went to check the mustard crop again, there was no crop! The birds decided the seeds were ready and had a little feast.

And the sunflowers? The two that made it from the dozen planted were wonderful, though a little small. A pair of yellow suns rising out of the green, weedy mess of my half tended garden as I fumbled around with our new baby boy. Of course, the birds ate all the seeds.

Serendipity is other side of garden planning, the happier sister of disappointment. I think the nice little surprises that nature gives us are what keeps gardeners out there digging in the dirt. There was parsley that I didn't plant poking out of Christmas snow this past year and that is something that can't be beat.

Goodbye Sweet Peach

Ah, the voluptuous peach, its fuzzy skin so soft and inviting to the touch. Not bright and brassy like the apple, the peach has a warmth to it, a sensuality. Its shape is alluring: a round swell ringed by a delicate crease with a single dimple for the stem at the top. The crease suggests where to run a knife to slice the peach into perfectly mirrored halves of gold, blushing red where where the pit is touched. Each bite is a melting gush, the flesh so full of juice and sweet. A delightful mess to eat, peaches leave me with wet fingers and a sticky dribble on my chin.

This summer has been a glorious stream of peaches, both the warm yellow-orange and the super sweet white. Local peaches first appear in July in Maryland and linger through September. By now most peaches I find are getting a little funny; bruised, overripe and tending to be mealy. The only thing they're good for is some kind of cooking, though I still haven't mastered a good peach pie, cobbler or crumble. Most recipes I come across are tacked on as a variation of an apple recipe which just doesn't seem right to me. The peach has such a mild sweet flavor compared to the tartness of apple and they shouldn't be treated the same. I have high hopes for a peach, brown sugar and ginger combination but nothing concrete yet.

The past couple of months I've been neglecting the garden, mainly because bending over became more difficult the longer I was pregnant. Now I've got a baby boy keeping me busy but we are beginning to go out to clear summer's weeds. The farmers markets have been my source for the garden fresh stuff this season. There is one by my house that had white peaches for awhile in July. What a treat! I've averaged eating at least a peach a day since July and the best thing I made was peach ice cream from a suggestion in Fannie Farmer.

Peach Ice Cream

2 cups sliced fresh peaches
1/2 cup sugar
1 T lemon juice

Mix together and chill for 1 hour. Combine with 1 chilled batch of your favorite vanilla ice cream base (I use the basic one from the ice cream maker book - milk, cream, sugar & vanilla). Pour in ice cream maker per usual instructions.

As a side note, I've had this across the range hood in my kitchen for years, patched together with a magnetic poetry set.

I want to eat

a mean peach

lick honey drool juice

from the cool pink rock

vision of summer sun

must crush.

Spinach

This week I've been trying to tidy up the vegetable garden, picking the cool season crops so I can plant the summer seeds. Yesterday I pulled out all the spinach to make room for green beans and summer squash. Spinach, lettuce and peas are the earliest things I plant, usually sometime in March. Early seeds can be very easy because the regular rain in April and May mean you don't have to do much of anything to them, just keep them clear of weeds. Like lettuce, you can snip off outside leaves when you want them and the rest of the plant keeps growing. Tender spinach leaves have been adding a lovely little tang to my salads for the past month. My favorite way to eat spinach though is wilted and requires many more leaves.

Although spinach is as easy to grow as lettuce, I never seem to be able to grow enough of it for regular cooking in my small garden. Spinach leaves lose an amazing amount of volume when cooked, a pound only yielding a couple servings. My harvest of a dozen or so plants was enough for a generous portion for me at dinner. I place the picked bunches in a container of cold water to rinse then strip off the stems one by one. This may seem tedious but it is worth it to avoid potentially stringy stems although tough stems are more of an issue with store bought spinach that has been sitting around for days or weeks. The rinsed leaves I toss into a pot with a clove of crushed or sliced garlic and a little hot olive oil then cover. Let the spinach cook 3 to 5 minutes, stirring a couple times until the leaves are nicely wilted and a dark, rich green. The garlic lends a nutty flavor to the delicate leaves.

3 Cheers for Chives

Chives are a popular and easy herb to grow in the garden or in containers in your kitchen. The delicate savor of onion in chopped chives is commonly combined with sour cream and cream cheese or sprinkled over dishes as a mild garnish. Garlic or Chinese chives are a more pungent relative with slightly taller, broader leaves and an unmistakable garlic note in their taste. Members of the Allium family, chives are perennials, sprouting new shoots every spring. They are fairly cold hardy; I can usually find my clumps of chives green and thriving from early March until a hard freeze in December. Right now little pinkish purple puffs of flowers are blooming from my chive clump. I like to snip them for small onion scented bouquets leaving a few outside for the bees and for later seed. Garlic chives flower later, taller in loose white fireworks forms.

Chives are best freshly picked. Personally, I love covering a bagel with cream cheese and chives, chopping a bunch to go over boiled potatoes or in potato salad or sprinkling them over a cheesy omelet. Making chive butter to freeze is a great way to store chives or other herbs that don't taste the same dried.

Chive Butter

1 stick butter (8Tbsp)
3-4 Tbsp chopped chives

Let butter sit at room temperature until soft and easy to work. Mix with herbs in a small bowl until well blended. Spoon onto wax paper and remold into a stick shape. Wrap tightly and freeze. Garlic and dill are also fabulous to use for an herb butter!

Add a tablespoon or two of chive butter to the pan before frying fish or to start a simple sauce. A little herbed butter melted and tossed with steamed vegetables is truly delightful.

Baby Lettuce

April's regular rain and milder temperatures have caused an explosion of greens in the garden. It is always such a feast for the eyes in April, colors suddenly popping out on every street. Stunning rainbows of tulips, the sugary pink and white bursts of flowering trees and now the azaleas peeping out from once dreary lawns. All the seeds planted in March have sprouted and are really starting to fill in nicely. The rows of lettuce are looking good and healthy. It will be another week or 2 before salad season officially begins but now it is time for the delights of baby lettuce.

Lettuce is the really most enjoyable crop I grow mainly because it's easy. If you have a little space to spare, you can grow lettuce. It fits in just about anywhere, can be sown directly into your garden or into a free planter. Since lettuce matures so quickly, a month or 2 depending on the variety, you can plant it with other slower growing plants and harvest before they run out of room. It also does not usually suffer much damage from pests. There are many varieties, from sweet to tart, flat greens and frilly reds, a lot more than you will ever find in any market. I love to see a garden well quilted with multicolored heads of lettuce so this year I've planted 4 different varieties of lettuce - Black Seeded Simpson, Matina Sweet Butterhead, Red Oakleaf and Deer Tongue. So much of the Deer Tongue sprouted that I needed to thin the seedlings tonight which meant I got my first salad of baby lettuce!

A little oil and vinegar is all fresh from the garden lettuce needs to accent it's delicate flavor. I tossed in a radish that was ready too. Yum.

The First Asparagus

Nothing quite says spring like the first asparagus - sweet, tangy and bright in flavor as new grass is to the eye. One of the first crops ready for harvest in spring, asparagus has been enjoyed as a delicacy since the time of the ancient Romans. Today these tender green shoots are coveted around the world for their unique flavor which is at its peak early in the season. After watching pale purple tufts slowly emerge and lengthen for the last week I harvested my first handful from the asparagus bed yesterday. Today another dozen were ready to be cut with more to follow tomorrow and through the rest of the week.

Labor and time are the two things that make asparagus an expensive delicacy. Because the spears emerge in waves over several weeks, they don't "ripen" all at once for easy harvesting and must be hand-picked as individual spears reach the right size. Even more labor goes into white asparagus, which is any regular variety only "blanched" or shaded from light. By gradually mounding earth around the extending tips as they grow their asparagus are not exposed to the sun and do not develop the usual green color but become a ghostly shade of cream, highly prized for a sublimely subtle flavor. I keep meaning to try this one year but the shoots grow too tall before I get organized.

Establishing an asparagus bed also takes time, several years before you really get the pay-off. After planting roots, spears from the 1st year must not be picked but allowed to grow out into towering fern-like masses. In the 2nd year, harvesting must be kept to only a couple of weeks and only finger thick spears should be taken. It is not until the 3rd spring that the asparagus dream comes true and you are able to harvest continually for a month or more. My asparagus is now 4 years old and sprouting like mad! It will get to a point where I can't keep up with them and will just let them leaf out after about a month, cutting some side shoots here and there for dinner.

The 2 most important things I've learned about cooking asparagus are: 1)snap off (don't cut) the fibrous end and 2)never cook them too long. If you hold a spear in 2 hands, one on each end, and bend the stalk will naturally snap at the point where tender meets woody. Asparagus should always be bright green and have some crispness to it, never be olive drab, soggy or stringy. This 1st bunch I steamed for just under 5 minutes and ate with my hands as soon as they were cool enough to touch. Although these spears were thicker than my thumb they were so tender, succulent and sweet - oh, a divine rite of spring!

Signs of Spring

Crocuses started appearing last week and now are blooming in greater numbers. I have some yellow, purple and white ones but the purple come back with more relish than the rest. The emergence of the crocuses are the first welcome signs of Spring; the sign for me to unearth my gardening hat, get some gloves on and get to work. This past week I've been clearing out all the dried plant skeletons from last year to make way for new growth. Clearing away the mess of old leaves and twigs reveals the first tender green shoots that have been quietly getting dressed these last dull and drear weeks. New herbs!

I love the surprise the bright surprise of new herb shoots. This year chives, parsley and oregano are the first vivid greens struggling out from the barren brown of the rest of the garden. It will be another month or two before these herbs are big enough to trim for table but like old friends that have been too long absent, it is a joy just to see them out again in their new green coats. They are only the first inkling of what the garden will be this year. Now new seeds have been ordered, the vegetable beds are turned and ready to be sown, and the daffodils will pop out any

day now. It must be Spring!