Today in Our Summer Garden @birdsblooms #GardenCuizine #butterflies #gardenchat

Today in Our Jersey Summer Garden
August harvest

USDA Zone 7a (formerly zone 6b)

South Jersey caners have been busy canning tomatoes and sauce already. We're about ready to join the fun. Our San Marzano's are beginning to ripen even though they are shaded somewhat beneath passion flower vines.  

Even without the San Marzano's, we finally have enough tomatoes to make our first pot of pasta sauce this weekend! We plan to use some of our heirlooms too: Cherokee Purple and Goldman's. 

Other veggies, herbs, harvests and updates in our garden include:

• Italian Parsley (huge and blooming now too!)
• heirloom Chocolate Cherry tomatoes
• very small, current type, French tomatoes: Leslie's Petit Moineau
• Rutgers Select
• Pattypan Squash - picked one HUGE one so far (shown) - we plan on cooking it tonight
• Oregano (let air dry and store in spice jars)
• no onions this summer!! they were a bust
• didn't see many grapes either this year... have to go look again 
• Cow peas and Franchi Fagiolo Rampicante Anellino giallo climbing yellow French beans are coming along...

Backyard birds and blooms have been spectacular. Hummingbirds are out in force, buzzing about. We have several water sources and native plants that attract lots of wildlife. 

We could use some rain. This morning, chattering catbirds enjoyed cooling off under the garden sprinkler while perching on willow branches.

In our garden, Bronze fennel gets it's own raised bed - just because we like it and so do cool looking caterpillars. They munch on the leaves to provide energy to turn into a chrysalis and then into beautiful butterflies like Black Swallowtails.

Every garden needs a few unusual plants. This summer my favorites have been Fragrant Gladiolas (Peacock Orchid), Passion flower blooms/fruit and blooms on our Peanut Butter shrub in our beloved dog Aspen's memorial garden. The PB shrub has been growing for about 3 years and finally decided to bloom for us this summer!

The PB shrub is really more like a small tree and doesn't look at all like a shrub. I was told the blooms would be a favorite for hummingbirds. And, friends from Dave's Garden were right! I've been watching hummingbirds (and butterflies) loving it. The blooms remind me of an azalea blossom.

Happy Gardening!
Photos and Blog post Copright (C)Wind. All rights reserved.

Today in Our Garden @birdsblooms #NJ #gardenchat Growing food teaches us not to waste food or water

Today in Our Garden

Use it or lose it!
Food Appreciation

Our gardens exhaust us during August. Now is about the time every season when we slack off in the fight against fast growing weeds and make time to enjoy the birds and blooms. We also start collecting seeds for next years plantings and are busy canning and preserving in the kitchen.

As we think about all there is to do... food is ripening at a rapid rate. Use it or lose it!

• Picking and preparing fresh, organic, homegrown foods gives us a total appreciation for our food and our environment.

Vegetable gardening also makes me wonder: Would people eat less if they grew and prepared their own food? We know scientific studies show that people do eat more fruits and veggies when they garden, but would they eat less overall?

Tomatoes
Heirloom tomatoes are ripening faster than we can pick them! Favorites include Chocolate Cherry tomatoes (shown). Harry cooked our first homegrown San Marzano tomatoes and made 5 quarts of pasta sauce so far with more tomatoes cooking down now. We freeze the quarts.

As gardening cooks, we want to savor and not waste what we plant and harvest. Cooking down a stockpot full of homegrown, ripe, plum tomatoes (with added basil, garlic and onion) made us realize that it sure takes a lot of tomatoes to make just one quart of sauce.

Onions
Garden space needed for growing onions has made us appreciate the abundance of onions always available at the market. We picked our first Ailsa Craig onions yesterday. Most green tops died back and the onions easily pulled up from the soil.

We probably should have picked the onions sooner. And, we weren't sure what to do about the dirt on them? We rinsed the dirt off. The onions are now air drying on a table outside. As you can see, their shape is teardrop and not large and round. 

The fun of gardening includes learning from other gardeners. Stay tuned for updates on how to grow bigger and better onions. If you already know - please share.

Grapes
One of our best years! Mom even helped pick the grapes off the stems. We picked 13.5 lbs. from one, established red grapevine, which made 12 pints of organic grape jelly.

Cow Peas
Cool beans: Fagiolo Nano Dolico -dall'occho: Italian black-eyed peas climbed up into our tomato vines this year - another garden first for us. I didn't realize they climbed. The pods hang like green beans and can be eaten green or left on the plants to brown. I've been picking them as they turn brown and plan to make Hoppin John with homegrown black-eyed peas for good luck in the New Year. 

To release the peas, rub your finger along the pod edge. If the bean is dry enough, the edge will split like a zipper and the beans can easily be dumped out.

Acorn Squash
Look what I found this morning! We have acorn squash growing from rotten squash rejects that were tossed in the beds last Fall.

Happy and Healthy Gardening! 

Related Links
Backyard Gardening, Grow Your Own Food, Improve Your Health 
GardenCuizine Recipe Baked Nutty Acorn Squash

Blog post and photos Copyright(C)Wind. All rights reserved.

Today in Our Garden: huge yellow heirloom tomatoes! #GardenCuizine #gardenchat

Today in Our Jersey Garden

Well, I took my eye off our ripening huge heirloom tomatoes for a day and two whoppers got over ripe. Harry sliced into our biggest one before I had a chance to weight it. It may have been 2 pounds! The other shown in the photo above, weighed 1 lb. 8 oz. - wow! This breaks our record of 1.2 lbs. from last year. 

Needless to say we've been enjoying tomatoes on everything you can think of. For lunch today, we ate tomato sandwiches while watching hummingbirds visit Coronado Hyssop* and their feeders. This morning, we enjoyed Harry's heirloom tomato and cheese omelets for breakfast. Last night, we had tomatoes in salad at dinner. Tonight, I'm sure we'll add tomatoes to something, perhaps a simple tomato basil salad or tomato peach salsa. 

Try growing your own organic fruits and veggies for quality nutrition and fresh food, all which make gardening such a worthwhile adventure. We grow all our tomatoes from collected seeds from the largest tomatoes. The huge yellow heirloom shown in the above photo is most likely Yellow Brandywine.

Photos Copyright (C)2014 Wind. All rights reserved.
*LINK TO MY DAVE'S GARDEN ARTICLE: HUMMINGBIRD MAGNET: CORONADO HYSSOP

Today in Our Garden * Grape Jelly time! #GardenCuizine #gardenchat

Today in Our Garden

South Jersey
USDA Zone 7a (formerly zone 6b)

August 9, 2014

Harry picked a colander full of organic red grapes this morning. We plan on making grape jelly. Also, we finally spotted a few more swallowtail butterflies this morning. This year we haven't seen as many butterflies as we usually see - have you?

Hummingbirds are more active at the feeders now, and flowers are blooming all over the place, except for dahlias and goldenrod. We noticed meadows of yellow goldenrod blooming now in the Adirondacks, which is further north. Here at home, even Mom pulled out her cell phone camera to snap a few flower photos this morning.

Some of our NJ blooms include:

• Buddleia (the few we have left after die back from last winter)
• Sunflowers (from bird seed)
• Limelight hydrangea (shown next to Harry in top photo)
• Green-Headed Coneflower, Rudbeckia laciniata (yellow blooms shown)
  
• Coronado hyssop (my new hummingbird favorite! check out my Dave's Garden article Hummingbird favorite: Coronado Hyssop) 

greeter at the garden gate

• Four o'clocks, Zinnias, red Cannas, Cosmos
• Hostas, Hibiscus
• Apple mint, Phlox, Black-eyed Susans
• Salvias (including lady in red, Yvonne's, black and blue)

yesterday's harvest

The veggie garden is full of heirloom tomatoes, basil, potatoes, chia and both sweet and hot peppers. 

We have the BIGGEST TOMATO that I've ever grown or seen ripening on the vine now. It's a gigantic yellow heirloom tomato. An award winner for sure. All our tomatoes were grown from saved seeds from the largest tomatoes of the previous year. Guess it works!

We're looking forward to seeing the actual weight of our largest heirloom tomato ever along with large, dinner plate dahlia blooms - all coming soon.

Hope you are having a happy and healthy summer

Related Links
Homemade Reduced Sugar Grape Jelly
Eastern Tiger Swallowtail
Photos and blog post Copyright (C)2014 Wind. All rights reserved.

Today's Harvest: Lots of Cherry Tomatoes, Swiss Chard, Italian Basil #GardenCuizine

Today's Garden Harvest 
South Jersey

USDA Zone 7a (formerly zone 6b)

August 3, 2012 

At around this time in the gardening season, we start to lose control of our somewhat neat and tidy garden. The heat is oppressive. Asparagus ferns, Chia and tomato plants have gotten tall and seem to be leaning every which way. Weeds, especially morning glory, are all over - even though it seems like we just weeded. 

Despite the slight chaos, nature knows best. Oregano is blooming, along with dahlias marigolds, cannas and other flowers that border our backyard garden. Garlic chives have buds. The show and harvest continues.

We don't remember ever having so many hummingbirds! The attraction must be the growing addition of cannas, salvias and their favorite nectar plants. Today, as the hummers buzzed overhead, we harvested a nutritious bounty of:

 Vitamin C and Lycopene-rich Cherry Tomatoes 

Swiss Chard 

 and a few handfuls of herbs: Italian Basil, Thyme, Shiso Perilla

Now is the time large batches of basil should be harvested. We have basil growing in a few different raised beds and plan to process it into pesto, portion and freeze. Maybe tomorrow...

Photo and blog post copyright (C)2012 Wind. All rights reserved.