Tag Archives: figs

September warmed and sweetened.

food and cooking, my garden, summer, wildflowers, , , , , ,

My worries about September being too cool did not come to pass. We even had a sort of heat wave for two days, and one night when the temperature did not drop below the mid-60’s. As soon as the sun set that evening, we opened the windows and started running the fans. It was cooler the next night, back to our usual marine air, and being able to leave the windows open night and day, and even to let the sun shine in.

It’s warm enough to ripen figs, and we have eaten a few, but something is not right with my tree. Most of the figs turn purple before they get any size, and fall off when they are still small and hard. The ground is littered with them. I have spent a lot of time trying to figure out what the problem is, but I still don’t know.

At least, this year I’m happy about the tomatoes. It’s not often anymore that I have home-grown, vine-ripened “love apples” here, other than cherry tomatoes. I suppose one could make a BLT with those, but it never occurred to me. This summer I have Early Girls, and I wanted to make at least one sandwich using slices of them, lettuce and bacon. I accomplished that goal, and it was well worth the trouble.

And I used a few stems of the abundant tarragon to make the wonderful Tarragon Salsa Verde:

  • leaves from 1 small bunch fresh parsley (approx. 20g / 1 cup)
  • leaves from fresh tarragon (approx. 5g / 1/4 cup)
  • 1 spring onion including green part (roughly chopped)
  • zest of 1 lemon and juice of 1/2 lemon
  • 1 teaspoon sea salt flakes or 1/2 teaspoon pouring salt
  • 6 tablespoons olive oil

Mix all in a food processor and use as a dip, a spread for bread or on baked chicken, or eggs. It’s just wonderful. I even froze a little batch one time and used it later.

It comes to mind just now, that this salsa would probably make a nice addition to a BLT… I might try that before the tomatoes and tarragon have become a memory.

It wasn’t until last week that I got around to bringing flowers into the house, a bouquet of zinnias, with sweet peas and basil. This year I seem to be content to just stare out at the garden, or wander the paths doing little things, and procrastinating on this year’s Fall Reorganizing. Living where the winters are mild makes it possible — and often beneficial — to put off planting or transplanting until October. But extending the season has its down side; I hope next year I won’t have to do any of this moving-plants-around kind of work — but that’s what I’ve said for three years now.

I opened up one dried flower of the Queen Anne’s Lace that had self-sowed next to my driveway, and sprinkled the seeds among the Mexican Evening Primrose that grow in that arid corner. The latter needs a least a little water in the summer, and is always overrun by weeds. The Queen Anne’s Lace grows vigorously all over the place without any summer water. Maybe it will thrive, and crowd out a few of the less beautiful weeds.

On one of those hot days I did loads of laundry, and used the clothesline. The overflowing basket of items that needed special treatment in the sink is now empty! These two pillowcases that are a hundred years old are fresh and clean. I inherited them from my husband’s aunts or grandmother, and they were a little yellow in places. Now I will start using them. I’m not certain about the monogram… I think it might be FLK? If it is, I don’t know which relative that could be.

Now that Bea is living here, my kitchen is getting more use; it’s really fun to have a girl around who likes cooking and produces things for me to taste. Recently she made meringues from aquafaba! I knew that liquid from canned garbanzo beans was a versatile ingredient, but I had no idea it could substitute for egg whites in this way. She used aquafaba, sugar, and vanilla. When I was first eating the cookie, I didn’t realize it wasn’t a regular meringue, because she had made them after I went to bed. They were very nice.

Flowers, cookies, tomatoes and figs — September so far is warm and sweet.

 

From a neglected garden.

food and cooking, my garden, , , , , ,

In spite of my absence for various reasons, the garden continues to carry on valiantly its business of growing and changing by the hour. I love walking around and picking off a few dead flowers, or noticing seeds forming, even when I can’t give it the more thorough care it needs.

A couple of years ago I managed to transplant one of the vigorous Showy Milkweed plants (above) next to where the Narrow-Leaf Milkweeds grow. You can’t see the latter very well in the background, which is a good thing, because their leaves have mostly had the life sucked out of them by aphids and have turned black. But every spring, they come back stronger than ever.

Tatsoi greens and lobelia

The leafy green Tatsoi really took off in this pot where I stuck it in next to lobelia, and is begging to be thrown into a stir-fry a.s.a.p. Those I set out in the planter boxes are languishing; that soil must need amending.

The dwarf pomegrantes are mostly a fun member of the garden in that for most of the year have flowers, often with hummingbirds drinking from them; or foliage bright and beautiful catching one’s attention in spring and fall; and their darling fruits, that don’t get very large, and in this climate don’t get enough heat for their seeds to develop sweetness. But they are so cute right about now. This one is about an inch and a half in diameter.

Every day I pick figs; the evening of my return from the mountains I gathered two dozen, and yesterday nineteen. Soon I hope to make that Autumn Fig Cake I told you about one time. And the Juliet grape tomato plant is prolific. I eat the tomatoes in the garden and in the kitchen, and took enough with me to the cabin that I could eat a few every day for ten days, and they were always sweet.

I harvested all but one of the little butternut squashes I grew this year, and planted some Sugar Ann snap peas in their place. Ideally those will start bearing about February, if the winter isn’t too cold and if I can keep the snails from devouring the plants between now and then.

My native sneezeweed is of the less showy sort, but it welcomed me when I returned from my mountain retreat with a particularly lovely array of blooms, not plain at all.

No doubt about it, my garden loves me, and forgives my neglect.
It makes me want to do better in the future.

Popsicle to fig.

beauty, my garden, summer, work, ,

I took my root beer popsicle outside — the way we often require children to do — and wandered around the garden. On the earth and becoming part of it I spied three plums that must have fallen sometime since the day I thought I had picked the last of them. That makes — ta da!! — a total of 52 plums this summer, way, way more than ever before. It may have something to do with the copper dormant spray I applied last winter. The foliage has been looking healthy ever since it leafed out.

With a popsicle in hand, I couldn’t very well gather up armfuls of pine needles or do much of anything about the overgrown mess the garden has become, so I sat in a chair facing my little carved stone icon of Mary, and my quite large fig tree. A week ago an afternoon windstorm blew down bushels of crisp, russet brown pine and redwood needles all over the garden, even into the little shelf in front of the Theotokos. The lavender I had put there was long ago dried up.

On this side of the garden the invasion of dead plant matter is from the neighbor’s redwood tree; the twigs get caught on everything on their way down and continue hanging on the guava, the salvia, the fig… Below you can see the swellings of baby pineapple guava fruits:

Drying up jumble that it is, to me it is a lovable mess. In the past I would feel overwhelmed with the task of keeping up with it all, but lately I have accepted the reality that it’s too much for me to manage even well, much less perfectly. And anyway, a garden that always looks perfectly orderly is probably not the best kind of pollinator garden, and here where we get no summer rain many things are going to look a bit dried up at this time of year. But the bees don’t notice; they are still after that African Blue Basil that never stops putting out new flowers. I haven’t used it for cooking, though, because it’s too medicinal tasting.

Bee on lambs’ ears.

I’m focusing less on management and more on friendliness with my plants, and appreciation for their unique cultures and seasonal changes. They keep growing even if I don’t do all the tasks at the right time. Week by week it’s always a little sad to clean up “the mess” — such as the acanthus blooms that have turned from fresh green-and-white to tan, and then brown. Here and there a milkweed stem leans over so far it is lying on the ground, and the tall Indigo spires salvia likewise, but many more of them.

I worked hard in the last few weeks to clean up, though. Three weeks in a row I needed to use space in my neighbors’ bins; two of those weeks I completely filled three 96-gallon yard waste containers and wheeled them to the street. I had removed all the superabundant asparagus and several shrubs, thinned out many patches of lambs’ ears, the fig tree, the juniper…. on and on.

I finished my popsicle and my rest, and as I was headed back to the house, something glowing red in the sunlight caught my eye, among the leaves of the fig tree…. and when I looked in there, surprise ! it was a dead ripe fig (actually black) — I picked it and two more that were hiding in the shade inside. Now begins the bountiful fig season; I knew it would be a good year for them, because of our several heat waves, in contrast to last summer being a cool one and me getting zero figs. I better get my dehydrator ready.

Pomegranate flower seen from inside fig tree.

My favorite kind of autumn day.

bread, homemaking, my garden, , , , ,

I am too busy to write here, but I guess the dishes, the laundry, the sweeping and the paperwork will have to wait a little longer, because I am so in love with this November day, I have to write it down. It would take even more time if I were to write a letter to the grandchildren about it, so they will have to wait, too.

The sky and the clouds! It must be that rain in October and November make for a splendid season, and not just because of the lovely damp-but-mild feeling of the air. As I understand, the rain somehow makes the leaf colors brighter. I drove past a vineyard last week that surprised me so — the colors of the leaves were not just the usual red and yellow and orange, but wide-ranging in deep purples and pinks as well. In my garden the pomegranates have not started turning, and the snowball bush barely.

But I have color. My purples are, or should be, my figs. I think this year’s crop is going to be a big loss, because of the relatively cool summer. Yesterday I saw this single fruit ripening. This morning, a meddlesome crow had tasted it and also found it not ready.

A nasturtium is blooming, and the tithonia still going pretty strong. Yesterday I picked more zinnias, again, to replace those that were turning brown in this vase where I’ve been able to just renew the bouquet in part every few days. But this week may truly be the end, unless the rainy weather keeps the frost off. That would be okay with me.

Yesterday evening was when our neighborhood trash cans are set out at the curb to be emptied the next morning. I wanted to cut enough plant material to fill my yard waste bin, so I worked on cutting the asparagus fronds that are turning gold. I had no sooner begun but gentle raindrops began falling on my head, carrying on another autumn tradition.

The milkweed I cut to the ground last month, as it had been wasted by aphids as is its usual late summer fate, has sent up a new and fresh shoot, green and tender and untouched by any hardship. It won’t last long, but in the meantime it cheers my heart and makes food for next summer’s valiant show.

As long as this mild weather continues, I can put off another task of my housework: carrying wood, building fires and dealing with all the mess around the stove. But as soon as that becomes necessary again, I’ll have one more activity that makes me happy. For today, I am happy with my breadmaking, washing dishes, and wandering around the autumn garden.