Bad Blogger!

I've been very negligent in my posting lately, apparently being unemployed or underemployed is more conducive to blogging than having an intensive internship. Luckily (or not so luckily) you haven't missed out on much because I've been too busy to do much crafting and the weather is so bad here that not much is going on in the garden either.

There are a few interesting things though. I believe I mentioned earlier that I had bought all kinds of crazy things to start from seed this year and now some of them are actually producing!

Here is a ground cherry in action:


And here is a tomatillo:


Although I knew the ground cherry and tomatillo were fairly closely related (both being husk nightshades) I didn't realize how similar they were. Before they fruited the only really distinguishing characteristic between the two plants was the purple vein running along the stems of the ground cherries.

I'm actually really excited about both of them too. Not only are they are producing heavily (provided nothing happens before they ripen) but they are also really attractive plants (not nearly as random and awkward as a tomato) with pretty little flowers.

I also have jalapenos!


The one thing that concerns me is that after it produced these three it stopped flowering and shows no sign of starting again, possibly due to the bizarre weather we had. If it indeed is done producing those will be expensive peppers ($1 a piece!).

Finally we actually have...tomatoes!


For those of you who are already effected by the nasty late blight that is devastating tomato crops all over the northeast...don't worry these sucked anyway. I mean they were really bad, mealy and flavorless. Again the crappy conditions (cold and wet through all of June and July pretty much) are probably to blame.

I'd rather not end a post on such a sad note as the generally badness of New England tomatoes this year so here is some absolutely professional looking bread that mom made.


Although the word rustic seems to fit I also can't help shaking feeling that the one on the right kind of looks like a toe. Sorry if that puts you off bread for awhile.

Starting to Think About the Garden

So maybe this is a little preemptive but we had a garden planning session this week. It's probably the bout of warm(er) weather but I started to feel anxious that we hadn't ordered any seeds yet. So we ordered...lots of seeds. In all we spent $30 including shipping. This may not sound super frugal but if you figure how many plants we could have bought with this had we waited till spring and bought baby plants it wouldn't have been many.

So here is the run down of what we bought and where:

From Seed Savers Exchange:

1. Ground cherries (a.k.a cape gooseberry): These are totally weirdly awesome fruit/veggie things we discovered at our local farmer's market. They are reminiscent of tomatillos with their papery husk but taste very citrusy, kind of like pineapple. And for those of you with a very good memory I posted about them last summer and even threatened to grow them.

2. Tomatillos: We love salsa verde and tomatillos are just so expensive at the farmer's markets we figured we should just grow our own.

3. Double yield cucumbers: One of the only things we were successful growing last year was cucumbers so we decided to test our luck with this variety that is supposedly "remarkably productive".

4. Dragon carrots: I really don't care for carrots, especially cooked but I can never resist a purple vegetable so we'll give these a go even though our root crops are usually wildly unsuccessful. (Our radishes are generally inedible.)

And from the Bountiful Garden's catalog (website here):

1. Lemon cucumbers: Cucumbers that look like lemons? How could I resist that!? Plus they are supposedly excellent pickles and rust and drought resistant.

2. Pak choi (a.k.a. bok choy): I love bok choy, especially in wonton soup.

3. Southern giant curled mustard greens: We needed some quick greens for the areas of the yard that get good sun early but get too shady in the late summer. This plan might work...in theory. We'll see.

4. Spearmint and peppermint: We are mint fiends. We put it in various Asian foods, I make mojitos with it and we drink unholy amounts of mint tea. We have a little in the yard but we're going all out with a whole bed this year. Mmmmm...mojitos.

We even walked around the yard and planned out what we'd put in existing beds and where we could fit some new beds. There was a lot of discussion so I used my master draftsman skills to draw up a plan so we wouldn't forget our ideas. It may be a little technical for you but it gives you a general idea:


I know that was a lot of information to take in so here is a close up of one corner in case you'd like to copy my technique:


For those of you not familiar with technical abbreviations it says (from top down): all mint bed/early greens, early greens, all cucumber. Don't be intimidated by my skills, you don't need to be so proficient in planning to design your own garden beds.

So now we need to get to work making lots of little pots out of newspaper to start seeds in. Look for a post on that soon!

Ground Cherries

One of my favorite parts of farmer’s markets is the new foods you discover, the things that big industrial farms don’t bother with but a local farmer might try just for the heck of it. A couple years ago one of the farmers at our usual market was giving away samples of ground cherries. Although they look kind of like a tomatillo because of the paper husk they grow in the fruit inside is closer to a cherry tomato. What was so surprising was the flavor: they are actually quite sweet. An apt description I read somewhere is that they are a cross between a tomato and a pineapple.

So now every year when we see them we indulge in one pint just because they are so fun. (And you don’t want to know how much we pay…it’s not very frugal.)

I would love to make jam out of them and I have read that they are great dipped in chocolate but I wouldn’t bother with either of those projects unless I had a larger, cheaper supply. The only way to achieve that might be to grow them myself so you’ll just have to wait until next year to see if I can even find seeds.