If you ever go to England, go to Cornwall and spend at least a day at the Lost Gardens of Heligan (http://www.heligan.com/ ). Due to a flat tire we only spent four hours there and we didn’t see even half of the 400 acres of incredible restored gardens. The story is this: a thousand acres on the southern coast of Cornwall has belonged to the Tremayne family for about 400 years. At the end of the 1800’s, one of the Tremaynes had built extensive theme gardens. There were walled gardens, enormous hedges, glass houses, cold frames, a pineapple pit where the only pineapple grown in Cornwall grew warmed by horse manure. Melon houses, leisure gardens, formal flower gardens, woods, kitchen gardens and unbelievably, tropical gardens, filled the estate. Due to Cornwall’s position by the English Channel the climate is such that with care tropicals can be grown there. The estate was fantastic; then came WW I, and almost half the family and staff were killed. The gardens were abandoned. Subsequent wars and taxes took their toll, and the gardens became overgrown. Vines, brambles, trees and weeds ran rampant, breaking through the glass roofs, pulling apart brick walls, upsetting carefully laid pathways and covering every trace of the gardens under a head-high blanket of tangled, thorny brush.
Twenty-one years ago, the Tremayne who inheirited the gardens, asked one of the founders of the neighboring Eden Project ( http://www.edenproject.com/ ) to try and restore the gardens. The task was phenomenal and reads like a mystery. Hacking through the overgrowth they found the walls, the foundations and the clues as to what had been. Since then the gardens have been restored. They are everyone’s dream of a garden combined. There is a mound that was a beacon mound during Nepolianic times, but then discovered dates back to the Armada, and then back to Medieval times! There is a jungle with massive gunnera plants and palm trees, about half an acre of vegetables all grown from seed that dates from the late Victorian time, walled flower gardens, ‘antique’ poultry and cattle, unique sculptures recently added, and a wildlife garden to encourage the existence of so many insects, birds and animals that are disappearing. Even with weeding through photos I came up with so many that I want to share, that I’ll just post them below. Visit the website and read up on the Lost Gardens, voted Britain’s Finest Gardens. They are magical.
Entrance to a magical world.
The Tremayne who built the gardens holding a single Gunnera leaf in front of his famous pineapple pit.
Flavors of ice cream… we didn’t get to have any!
A mysterious mound was uncovered and thought to have been a beacon site in Nepolianic times, and for centuries beyond that.
Stone steps into the ravine
The Italian garden
Ivy coming through the roof, trying to reclaim the building once again.
Hot houses and cold frames
Cold frames for veg.
Espaliered pears of many varieties.
Writing on the wall of the ‘thunder room’, or original composting toilet
All plants and veg grown are from the late Victorian period
Espaliered fruit trees make use of warm wall space
About a quarter acre of mixed greens.
Bee skeps (baskets, pre-movable hives) were kept in boles for winter protection.
A bee skep in a bee bole
History of the Bee Boles
A banana grows in Cornwall!
Melon houses
Potting shed with greenhouses in a walled area. Sigh.
Cold frames in the potting shed
A robin watches, just like in The Secret Garden
The overgrown remains of mud brick walls
A very steep pathway lined with chicken wire to prevent slipping
The Jungle
A wire sculpture of a woman with her arms out… can you see her?
Cucharas served with hot rice and homemade dill pickle.
Cucharas is one of my favorite eggplant dishes. With several huge Black Beauty eggplants ready to eat, it is time to make these treats. There are several steps, but none of them difficult. The eggplant doesn’t need to be salted or oiled, and the result is tasty hot or as leftovers. It doesn’t taste particularly eggplanty, so for those who don’t think they like eggplant, they may want to try this recipe.
Halve, then quarter the eggplant.
The word ‘cuchara’ in Spanish means spoon or scoop. The eggplant ‘flesh’ is cooked then gently stripped away from the skins, which are reserved. The insides are then mashed with yummy ingredients and then plopped back on the skins, then baked. The process is very forgiving, so if the skins tear, it is okay. It all sticks together with filling in the end.
Scoop out the ‘flesh’ from the cooled skin, and save the skins.
If you are using larger eggplants, then when filling the skin, just cut them in half. The cucharas should be either small enough to be picked up and eaten out of hand, or eaten with a fork.
Cucharas make great finger – food as an appetizer.
The original recipe is from Sundays at Moosewood Cookbook.
Author: Diane C Kennedy (From Sundays at Moosewood Cookbook)
Recipe type: Main dish or appetizer
Prep time:
Cook time:
Total time:
Serves: 16 coucharas
Ingredients
2 medium eggplants with smooth skin
3 garlic cloves, minced
3 eggs beaten
2½ cups grated cheddar cheese
½ cup grated Romano cheese
¼ cup matzo meal or bread crumbs
2 Tablespoons olive oil
salt and freshly ground pepper to taste
freshly grated nutmeg
Instructions
Stem the eggplants and cut each in half lengthwise.
Cut each half crosswise into four pieces.
In a covered suacepan, simmer the eggplant chunks in water to cover for 15 minutes until pulp is tender.
Drain the eggplant in a colander and set them aside to cool.
Whjen you can comfortably handle the eggplant, use a teaspoon to separate the pulp from the skins, taking care not to tear the rectangles of skin.
Reserve the skins. Should any tear apart, save them anyway because you can overlap two torn pieced to form a single iece and the filling will hold them together.
In a bowl, vigorously mash the eggplant pulp with the garlic, or use a food processor or blender.
Mix in the remaining ingredients, except for ½ cup cheddar cheese and nutmeg, and combine thoroughly. Add more matzo meal if the mixture seems too thin.
Place a skin, shiny side down, in the palm of your hand.
Mound it with the eggplant mixture about an inch thick.
Place it on a well-oiled baking sheet. Continue until all the skins and mixture are used.
Sprinkle a little of the reserved cheddar and a bit of nutmeg onto each couchara.
Bake 350 degrees F for 20 minutes or until golden brown on top.
The preparation can be done ahead of time and the coucharas baked just before serving.
Are your sunflowers being stripped? Are the leaves acquiring non-snail-like holes and then disappearing altogether? You may be feeding the birds, but not with the seeds!
Lesser goldfinches apparently are nuts over sunflower leaves. They will tear little bits of the leaves off and injest them, and within a day or so there will be nothing but a stem and a flower.
If your goal is to feed the birds, then this is okay. If you have bird problems on your vegetables such as peppers, then you may want to plant sunflowers off to the side to distract them.
Why do they eat sunflower leaves? They must like a little salad with their seeds, and sunflowers are particularly yummy for them. In searching the Internet for suggestions as to why they like sunflower leaves so much, there were many postings about the incidents, and yet most respondents insisted that the birds were after bugs on the leaves, or that snails came in the night and ate the leaves!
This occurrence seems to happen mostly in California, and other than bird nets (which one person said that the lesser goldfinches chewed through!) or planting sunflowers thickly (one for them, one for you), you may as well just enjoy the show. Ours come up from dropped or buried birdseed, and when the plants are growing their flowers, suddenly they are beset by birds who skeletonize the plant. We’re okay with that; it saves a little cost on the very expensive Niger thistle seed! (Oh, and by the way, Niger thistle isn’t thistle seed at all).
Plants have been enjoying the beautiful weather and the constant irrigation from the well, and the garden is flourishing. So, unfortunately, is the Bermuda grass, but that is another tale. Since I see it everyday I don’t notice the change so much, but when I show someone around I am thrilled all over again with the incredible change that has happened on this property. There are so many birds, insects, reptiles and other animals either already here or scouting it out that I know the project is a success. It is a habitat, not just for me and my family, but for native flora and fauna as well. It wasn’t so long ago that I had a cracked, weedy asphalt driveway, a termite-ridden rickety porch that needed pest control, a house with a stinky deteriorating carpet and old splotchy paint, a tile kitchen counter with the grout gone in between and a cleaning nightmare, and a yard full of snails, weeds and Washingtonia palm trees, with the embankment eroding each rainfall. Over the last four years we’ve survived some pretty intense construction projects (none of which were done on time, no matter what they promised!). My house still has some repairs that need to be done but I no longer am embarrassed to have anyone over. The garden is wonderful to walk in and explore. I’ve taken some photos this evening to show you how things are growing:
Bees enjoying purple coneflowers
The luffa squash has mighty asperations.
A luffa squash and bloom. They are edible small and green, but I’ll leave them to dry.
Five eggs today! Each laying hen participated for the first time! The little girls have grown up.
The small lower pond and the palm pathway.
The veggie bed.
Rushes, fleabane, waterlilies and other plants are growing in nicely around the big pond. The boat is still on loan from Aquascape.
A pumpkin tree? This apricot isn’t healthy, but the pumpkins sure are.
These bare areas I’ll fill with plants that will make up guilds, each plant filling a niche to help the others grow.
The entrance to the bee garden.
Native vinegar weed loves a place we left untouched, and so do the bees.
Sugar pumpkins ready a little early for Halloween.
A feral zucchini, still producing at least one a day.
Melons, passionfruit, pitcher plant and many others under the back porch we call the Poop Deck.
Very eager bamboo, sugarcane and hops.
Olive trees tied to painted PVC pipe to make a hut.
The ‘Nest’ beyond the dry stream bed.
A thud and a swish… with no warning the neighbor’s tree fell across the fence.
A green roof for the entranceway, just beginning to show.
The watermelons in the vegetable beds were tiny… these monsters are wild. That one grew on the rock on its own.
Entranceway flower tunnel… with dogs waiting to go inside!
Last year I planted regular cucumbers, and my daughter and I decided to try our hand at making pickles. We tried several recipes, and the results were okay but not fantastic. The pickles were kind of… flabby.
Sterilize jars and lids while simmering brine
This year I planted pickling cucumbers, and they came in last month with the idea to outstrip even the zucchini plant. Trying to find the cucumbers which were cleverly hidden and camouflaged, before they grew too long, became a game. When we had enough, we made pickles. I wanted a recipe that didn’t have too much garlic, and used cider vinegar, which is healthier than white distilled (grain) vinegar. Most recipes called for white wine vinegar, but that was very hard to find and only sold in small expensive bottles. Red wine vinegar, however, I could find in a gallon, but it would have discolored the pickles to an unappetizing greyish red, and just wouldn’t have had the right flavor. Cider vinegar was inexpensive, easy to find and has the ‘mother’ in it, which is that strandy thing that is suspended in the bottle. That is live yeasty stuff that makes the vinegar what it is, and what makes it more healthy. You should use vinegar that has at least 8% acidity, to keep the pickles from spoiling. Also make sure all the cucumbers are covered with brine or they’ll spoil, especially after opening the jar.
Use fresh whenever possible
Pickling cucumbers make all the difference. They are smaller at maturity and don’t have as many seeds, and are more crisp. Recipes wanted the cucumbers to be pickled within 24 hours of being picked. You’d have to have twenty plants to have enough cucumbers to pickle in quantity all at once, and then you’d be pickling twice a week. I kept ours in the refrigerator until we had enough, with some loss of crispness but that couldn’t be avoided. I had planted some dill, but not enough and not early enough for the recipe. It calls for the seed head, but I used dried dill instead since mine weren’t in bloom yet. We also put a grape leaf at the bottom of each jar because the tannin is supposed to help keep the pickles crisp. Many old fashioned recipes call for the addition of alum for that purpose; aluminum has been linked to Alzheimer’s, so finding and adding alum is a personal choice. I learned that you must cut off the blossom end of the cucumber because it has enzymes that will cause the cucumber to rot. That is nature’s way of making sure the seeds are dispersed, but doesn’t help with pickling. Larger cucumbers should be cut into disks or slices and pickled. If the cucumbers are yellowish and seedy, don’t pickle them. They are too old.
Grape leaf, garlic, dill and pickling spice in sterlized, hot jars
Use wide-mouth jars if you have them. I don’t, and stuffing the cucumbers into the jar would have been a lot easier if I had.
The best gadget ever for picking up hot jars
No recipes tell you when you they are done. I read where a ‘freshly’ canned food was put up in the last two years. We tried ours after 5 weeks and they were very good.
Sterilize jars and lids while simmering brine
The origins of this recipe is the Ortho Complete Book of Canning, but I have tweaked it. I hope you like it: many happy pickles to you.
In the August of one of my most successful years of vegetable growing, as the squash vines wither to reveal the graceful shapes of winter stews, and the cabbage moth caterpillers chew collards into lace, I am able to review and make notes on triumphs and things not-as-good-as-one-would-hope. Gardening is as much a practice as medicine, but healthier. What works one year may not work the next; for instance, there are melon years and no-melon years. A gardener can worry about the soil, the water, the sunlight and the bugs, but come to discuss the problem with enough other gardeners and there is sure to be at least one who didn’t have a good melon year either. Whether there is astrological truth in it or not, it matters not except to bring relief from the strain of worrying if there were no melons because of a fault in the gardener.
Here is my list of things that didn’t go as planned, and resolutions to improve next year:
1. Trim back foliage to make sure there isn’t something drinking all the water.
Ginormous Swiss chard root
2. Check for volunteers, especially those hitchhikers from the compost who decide to sprout.
One of three avocado volunteers in the collards
3. Don’t think you’re going to pinch the tomatoes back so that they grow onto a large trellis, especially since you don’t make the trellis. Tomatoes need some light to produce and ripen.
waArkansas Traveler just ripening
4. Warn visitors early about the rubber snakes.
Soybean and rubber snake
5. Count backwards from Halloween the estimated ripen days on the seed packet, and don’t plant too early. That way your pumpkins won’t be ripe in August. Also, plant herbs such as dill and cilantro early and thick long before cucumbers, so that you have the seed heads ready when it is time to make pickles.
Ripe pumpkins in August
6. There only needs to be one zucchini plant.
Monster zucchini
7. Prepare to stake everything. With wire-lined raised beds you can’t plunge a stick down into the soil next to a wobbly plant. You have to attach the stakes to the sides of the bed, or drive them down outside of the bed and make T’s. Whatever the choice, it is best done before the plants are mature.
Quinoa: pretty but floppy
8. Plant lots of kale. It is extremely tasty sauteed, and drying the oiled leaves to make kale chips (see recipe section) makes a nutritious and addicting snack.
Kale is yummy
9. Again, keep volunteers under control. This kabocha squash took over three vegetable beds and two pathways. However, it is producing some mighty fine squash.
Kabocha squash volunteer coming from the bed behind this one, around and into the end bed.
10. Rubber snakes are remarkably effective in preventing crows from eating seeds. However, besides warning visitors, don’t forget where you’ve tossed your rubber snakes if you are reaching into a leafy dark space at twilight!
This recipe I copied from a newspaper when I was a teenager, and embellished on over the years. The dollop of whipped cream on top always appealed to me. It makes a very satisfying tomato soup. It is a good way to use an abundance of tomatoes. The key to the great flavor is to use low-acid tomatoes, and fresh basil and thyme. Of course, you can substitute canned tomatoes and dried herbs as well; if you do that, you can just blend up the cooked soup at the end. I have a lot of yellow tomatoes, which are not high-acid. I had an idea of making a golden tomato soup, but the tomato paste in the recipe turned the soup red, of course. I entertained ideas about making a tomato paste from yellow tomatoes, but I’m not sure I’m that ambitious.
A bowl full of color (those are mangos in the back!)
There are two ways of making this soup from fresh tomatoes, both of which incur a little extra effort. The first is to blanch then peel the tomatoes, and squeeze out the seeds. Then after the soup is cooked you can just puree the soup in a blender. This makes a little thicker soup. The other way is to quarter the whole tomatoes and cook, then at the end turn the soup through a food mill, and strain out the seeds. This soup is a little thinner. You don’t want to blend up the seeds and peel or the soup will be bitter. Both ways make a fresh, tasty soup that can be served hot or cold, and is great with cheesy croutons or sandwiches.
Press through a food mill
The dollop of whipped cream can become a drizzle, or be eliminated. If you’d rather have a cream of tomato soup, then add more milk or cream to the soup and gently heat (but not boil) and then serve.
When I’m in the garden everyday, I find that I forget that only seven months ago, things looked radically different. I’ll post some before and now photos below:
An edible forest garden is a mode of growing that mimicks the relationships between plants in a forest, while substituting food producing plants for humans. To achieve this, you have to examine what plants grow in forests near you. Here in San Diego County, we have chapparal communities, along with some pine and oak forests in the mountains. I cannot replicate a forest such as found in, say, Olympia, because we have completely different climates, soils, and plant interrelationships. Even for people who live in deserts, you can examine what once was there before the area was a desert, or what plants are in a nearby oasis if you have one. I’d substitute plants for more desirable ones, such as lemonade berry for its cousin poison oak. Plants should provide canopy, groundcover, mulch, nitrogen-fixing, and insect attracting. After these plant guilds mature they will provide fertilizer and moisture for themselves.
However, most of us are far away from this type of gardening, or just don’t want to go that far. Integrating your ornamentals with food plants, though, is not radical anymore and entirely practical. Any nook in your yard can be a place for food producing plants. Too many squash or tomatoes? Take them to a local food pantry.
Melons by a dead lime tree trellis
A single Cinderella pumpkin vine under an apricot
Zucchinis make lush bushes
Watermelons suppressing weeds
Tomatoes are a vining plant which will use any upright structure on which to climb.
Can you see the tomato plant? (Its up the palm trunk)
Is your produce sprouting in the house? Try planting it instead of composting. Onions make particularly pretty plants with flowers that attract pollinators and hummingbirds. You may collect the seed from them as well. If the produce doesn’t survive, its okay: you’ve just buried compost.
Plant sprouting produce for ornamentals and to gather seed
Sweet potatoes are perennial plants that produce swollen rhyzomes rather than swollen roots as other potatoes do. Plant them where you can dig up some of the roots but leave the main plant to thrive for years, depending on your climate. Their leaves are beautiful, and the plants are often sold as ornamentals.
Sweet potatoes have beautiful leaves
Herbs in the shrubs, strawberries in the flowers, and melon and squash under the trees all make for a beautiful edible landscape that will provide food, compost, mulch and habitat while you study up for your edible forest garden.
Strawberries with yarrow
Apple mint attracts pollinators and is good on fruit
Passionvines are a host plant for Gulf Fritillary butterflies
Hops are vigorous, tall vines for brewing and sleep pillows
Scarlet runner beans (Phaseolus coccineus) are beautiful plants that are easy to grow, and are often grown just for their red flowers.
Use taller stakes than I did!
A trellis or 8-10′ pole is necessary because the vines wind their way up high.
Eat green beans when small
They produce a broad bean that can be eaten very young when green, or allowed to dry and the seeds harvested for storing and cooking later.
Shell the pods to store in a dark, cool place
The seeds are a spectacular purple and black, making this whole plant ornamental. Cook the seeds before eating them.
Beautiful purple and black seeds
The entire plant is also edible, including the starchy roots. The flowers and young tendrils dress up a salad. Although the vine will die down for the winter, the roots will live on in areas where they won’t receive heavy frost. They are native to many places in South America and have been harvested for hundreds of years. This is a perennial bean which will live about six years with care. It is also a nitrogen-fixer, which is excellent for your soil. How fantastic is that?
