Tonight's Sumptuous Repast

My Darling B began to bring in the bean crop about a week and a half ago, and the damned plants just won't stop producing beans.

Since it looks as though we'll be eating beans for a while yet, B's always on the lookout for new ways to prepare them, and this is what she came up with tonight: chicken, potatoes and beans in a lemon sauce.

There's no recipe, sorry. Or, rather, there were several recipes, from which B took what she needed and relied in inspiration to supply the rest. There's a little basil and garlic in there ("Not enough garlic," My Darling B mused as she ate) and I don't know what else.

And there was plenty left over for lunch!

This just in ...

My Darling B planted an eggplant plant just because she liked the way the fruit looks. When she brought this fruit in today, though, she had big plans for it.

First, she marinaded it in a honey sauce, and then she cooked it on the Weber grill while I was flipping burgers.

It turned out to be very tasty, really. Grilled eggplant. Who would've thunk it?

Dedication

She will brave swarms of mosquitoes to make sure her tomato plants are properly cared for.

This just in ...

We're coming to the end of this year's pea crop, sad to say. It's been a very good year.

B steamed this batch and we ate them on a bed of rice with spicy sauce.

This just in ...

We have a tree in our back yard that is heavy with mulberries ... which makes it a mulberry tree, I guess. I always thought mulberries came from bushes, but ours is very unequivocally a tree.

For the past two years we have let the squirrels and birds hog the mulberries all to themselves, but this year we made up our minds to harvest some of them and make a jam or jelly or wine or something, we haven't yet decided.

Tonight's pickings amounted to a little over two pounds, much more than I thought it might be. A couple more nights of this and we'll have plenty of mulberry jelly to spread on morning toast.

Lend me your ears

Someone I know once told me that just one ear of corn grows on each stalk. Well, here's a stalk on which two ears are very clearly growing, and there might even be a third at the bottom.

Hmmmm...

It's Time for Toms

Here's one more sign I'm turning into my dad: I'm looking forward to fresh tomatoes. I haven't advanced far enough into the transformation to slice them up and eat them in chunks the way he did, but I do love me some fresh tomatoes on my sandwich, and My Darling B makes tomato soup that I would sit up and beg for.

This just in ...

My Darling B tells me (and I believe everything she tells me) that carrots were not always orange. Once upon a time most of them were white and purple, until at some time in the distant past the Dutch bred them to be orange, and that's the color most have been ever since.

But she's not into conventional veggies. B loves "heritage" varieties and plants them whenever she can get them. Here is a selection of the carrots she harvested yesterday from the garden and prepared for dinner. I have to admit I was more than a little surprised when I stuck a chunk of the white one in my mouth and it tasted just like any orange carrot.

Plump, fresh pots

We had potatoes with our dinner last Thursday, and here's where we got them: The garden plot in our back yard, so lovingly tended by My Darling B.

Potatoes grow like weeds; there's one literally growing like a weed in our compost heap. But you have to tend to them by heaping dirt or, in our case, straw up around the base of the stalk if you want to eat the potatoes.

Then, when you want to bring some in to eat, all you have to do is root around in the straw at the base of the stalk until you find a couple nice, big ones, pluck them out, as B has done in the photo, and cover the plant up with straw again so the little ones can grow up to be dinner!

This just in ...

One of our next door neighbors has the most amazing raspberry patch. We've looked on it with envy for years, and were delighted when a few of the plants nearest our yard migrated over the lot line and began to grow in our garden. This summer they even produced berries for the first time. B would bring them in a cup at a time, happily snacking on them.

And then last weekend our neighbor invited us to wade into her patch and pick as many as we liked. "I'm tired of picking them," she said. So tonight B hung a basket around her neck, braved the mosquitoes for the better part of an hour, and brought this bounty back to the kitchen. She's soaking them for a while to encourage the little bugs to quit the scene. Sometime, maybe next weekend, these could become raspberry jam. Or a tart.

A weekend in the garden

B's been working happily in her garden nearly every daylight hour this weekend.

Would you like to see what she hath wrought?

Not quite as high as an elephant's eye

On the right, corn in the foreground, dill in the middle and garlic in the background.

On the left, onions in the foreground, potatoes in the background. I'm not sure what's in the middle.

You say poe tah toe

B brought in a pretty impressive crop of potatoes last year, and this year her garden gives every indication of a coming potato-y abundance once again. She's trying the straw method of hilling the plants this year, partly because that's what other gardeners swear by, but mostly because there's wasn't enough dirt in these rows to properly hill the plants.

Sun glowing through the pea pods growing along the fence line. B just loves peas! She was snacking on them on her lunch hour at her office desk when a coworker came by to ask her a question. Confronted by the sight of someone snacking on whole pea pods she staggered back and asked, "Just what are you eating?" Maybe if they came in a foil bag and were deep-fried they wouldn't seem so weird.

My Darling B's Garden

Peas marching along the fence line of My Darling B's garden.

She planted them some weeks ago and already some (not in this photo) are beginning to blossom, which makes B squeal with delight in anticipation of fresh peas for the kitchen.

A Weekend Made For Gardening

Even with the rain we've had, it's been just about the perfect weekend for gardening.

My Darling B's been out in it all day today, weeding, planting, tilling and watering, to say nothing of how much mud she's tracked into the house.

This photo unfortunately can't show you much. You'll simply have to take my word for it that there are legions of onions, tomatoes, peas, lettuce and broccoli marching across these fields. To the left, just in front of B, you can make out a small portion of this year's crop of garlic, almost as high as B's waist and growing higher every day.

Weekend visit to the farmer's market

My Darling B hasn't even begun to plant tomatoes in her garden, but there are plenty to be had at the Dane County Farmer's Market.

Flowers around the yard

We have wood violets in our lawn. Not sure how they got there; like the Creeping Charlie and the Begonias, we inherited them when we bought the house. They only last for a week or so in the spring but they sure are pretty.

Sign of Spring: B's in the garden

My Darling B finally got some time to take her roto-tiller into the garden after work today and get almost half the plot turned over, while the dandelions looked on and trembled.

Bringing in the potatoes

My Darling B went through the potato patch with her trusty fork, hoping to find the last of the big baking potatoes to put up for the winter. There were precious few to be found. Most were teensy-tiny and covered in malformed knobs, and a few had been in the ground far too long; they went straight to the compost heap.

Then we spent the afternoon scraping paint off the siding. I even slapped some primer on the corner, so I wouldn't lie awake tonight thinking of how rotten the wood panels would get after soaking all day in rain that's predicted for tomorrow.

If the browned corn stalks in the background don't say autumn, I don't know what does.