Eating from the garden

That's part of the harvest from our kitchen garden from yesterday, the first of September. Beginning from the top left, there's a handful of sugar snap peas (peas in September?), some Fort Laramie strawberries, and then two 'green fingers' baby cucumbers. Then the tomatoes, again from left to right, Chianti rose with that yummy pink blush, yellow pear in the center, and persimmon, the two orange globes in front. (Except for the strawberries, all of my garden seeds come from Renee's Garden Seeds, to my mind the best purveyor of seeds for home gardeners who love flavorful varieties that aren't finicky to grow.)

It's a strange year in our garden at 7,000 feet elevation in the southern Rockies when sugar snap peas overlap with cucumbers. But this has truly been a year of unusual weather oscillations: last winter was colder and snowier than any winter in the past few decades, followed by a spring that was windier and drier than any in perhaps a century, and a summer that alternated cold and hot and was constant only in delivering very little rain.

So little rain, in fact, that we're approaching the end of the gardening season having received a total of just 3.82 inches of precipitation since January 1 (snow included). That's less than half of what is "normal" for this time of year, at least according to the last century of record-keeping. Nor is it enough precipitation to grow a bounteous kitchen garden, even with our raised beds, great soil with plenty of organic manure added each year, and varieties that perform well in this chronically arid and high-altitude climate. I've watered the garden almost every day since early June.

And thanks to that watering, in spite of the various vicissitudes of the weather, from wind and the occasional hailstones to days and days without rain, the garden has produced bountifully. It's a treat to go out the kitchen door in the evening, pick whatever is ripe, and come inside to invent dinner from the plants I raised with my own hands.

Tonight it was Tortellini with Garden Vegetables:

1 pkg cheese tortellini
5 medium-sized beets (golden or chiogga are best for their milder flavor)
3 medium-sized summer squash (I used two yellow crookneck and one romanesca)
1 cup sugar-snap peas
3 T olive oil (I used Stonehouse Olive Oil's tangerine-infused olive oil)
1 1/2 T balsamic vinegar
2 oz Manchego or other hard Spanish cheese, grated
fresh-ground black pepper

Quarter the beets (leaving ends and roots on) and steam them in a microwave-safe container for ten minutes. Cool and then cut off ends and roots, and slip off skins. Set aside. (The beets can be cooked in advance and refrigerated.) Cook the tortellini according to package directions. Steam the summer squash until nearly done, then add the peas (whole, with the ends snapped off) and finish steaming. Toss the warm tortellini with the olive oil and balsamic vinegar, then add the vegetables and toss. Cover with the grated Manchego and grate fresh black pepper to taste on top. Serve warm. (Serves four and makes yummy leftovers!)

Two smidgens of rain last week were enough to send the native plants in our restored bunch grass-wildflower front yard into blooming ecstasy, especially the scarlet gilia. Those tubular red blossoms are designed to reward the long, brush-tipped tongues of hummingbirds with sugary nectar if they hover and reach way down into the base of the flower. Our explosion of scarlet gilia came at just the right time to feed the southward migrating hummingbirds.

So as summer winds down here in the southern Rockies, we're still feasting on the garden's bounty, and even in this extraordinarily dry year, the hummingbirds are still getting their sugar rush to fuel them on their long flight south.

Summer in the garden: sunflowers and tomatoes

Summer has finally come to our garden here at 7,000 feet above sea level in the south-central Rockies. By that I mean that the sunflowers in every possible permutation have opened their yellow and rust and brown faces, and the tomatoes are laden with fruit. I always plant a row of sunflowers somewhere in the garden, trying for as many varieties as possible (though I eschew those bred to lack pollen, because that cheats the bees and beetles, who depend on the pollen to feed their young).

Every year sunflowers pop up in different spots around the kitchen garden and yard on their own, and surprise us with their charming variety, their genes a mix of the wild Helianthus annus, the native annual sunflower, and whichever variety the bees crossed them with. Their heads grow heavy with seeds, much to the delight of the goldfinches, those warbling songsters of the yard, and the pine siskens and chickadees too. We even see yellow warblers and other insect-eaters gleaning their hairy stems and rich heads for tasty insects. The sunflowers make better habitat for the birds in our yard than feeders, because they're spread out and the spilled seed never rots or breeds disease organisms. (It's also not concentrated enough to attract the local squirrels, deer or black bears, all "pests" at seed feeders.)

And the tomatoes: all six varieties of tomatoes are finally ripe. The first ones to ripen are always 'Pompei,' a heritage Roma-type tomato, long and narrow and great for cooking because they have a rich flavor and not much juice. (That's them in the left-center of the bowl in the photo.) They're also delicious sliced in a salad of fresh garden greens, especially when they're just-picked and still warm from the sun. We savor the first Pompei in early July.

Next to ripen are the yellow pear tomatoes, thumb-size, pear-shaped as their name and sunny yellow (in the center below), perfect for eating fresh like the fruit that they are. Sometimes we find our friends in the garden, standing next to the raised bed with the tomatoes and eating the yellow pears right off the vines. They are great with crackers and cheese and a glass of wine, or halved on a fruit salad.


This year the chianti rose ripened next, their fat and round and juicy fruits a gorgeous shade of pinkish-red that really does look like wine. (The pink, round tomatoes on the right hand side of the bowl.) Another heritage variety, these may be my favorite for their sweetness and silky texture, and the fact that they seem to have no acid at all. They're not the prettiest tomatoes - their skin is so thin that they always split - but they take the size prize. I harvested one that weighed in at nearly two pounds this summer. Cut into wedges and served with fresh basil and mozzarella cheese drizzled with a little olive oil and balsamic vinegar, they are heaven!

Next to ripen were the cost0luto, which win the prize for looks: these small, somewhat flattened tomatoes are scarlet and ribbed with smooth, slightly shiny skin, as if they've been waxed. (The costolutos are in the lower left quarter of the bowl.) They have the richest, most intensely tomato flavor of any variety we've ever grown. Then came the persimmon, small orange globes as bright as their name and bursting with bright flavor too: they are citrusy and perfect for eating fresh or cooking.

The last of our six heritage varieties of tomatoes to ripen are the perhaps the best: black Krim, a black-russian type tomato, named because their tops stay a dark green shade that looks black, while the lower half of these beefsteak tomatoes ripen to a dark ruby red color. (The two black Krims are in the upper left, the one on the right bottoms-up.) Their flesh is smooth and velvety, and their flavor instense and sweet. And they are huge, almost as big as the Chianti rose tomatoes.

We're only about a month from the first hard frosts, which usually comes in late September. But in that time, I plan to savor the summer tastes of tomatoes eaten fresh from the vine, and the sight of sunflowers in every shape and color pivoting their heads to follow the sun as it moves across the cloudless sky. Here in the mountains, we revel in summer, perhaps because it doesn't last long. Here's to tomatoes and sunflowers!

And thanks, as always, to seedswoman and cook Rene Shepherd of Rene's Garden Seeds for the fabulous varieties of fruits, herbs and vegetables that delight and sustain us from the kitchen garden.

Anticipating spring in the kitchen garden

Another winter blizzard has just blown right over our valley, leaving ten inches of snow at Monarch, our local ski area, but none here in town. We only got the wind, huge blustery gusts lofting dirt and trash into the air as the storm blew down-canyon and out onto the Plains.

No matter the weather, I'm thinking spring. I've ordered seeds for our kitchen garden from my favorite seed purveyor, Rene's Garden Seeds. You can buy cheaper seeds, but if you love the flavors and colors and textures of food, you can't go wrong with Rene's seeds. She's a cook as well as a horticulturist, and she picks her varieties for the table and the garden.

Last year we grew three varieties of tomatoes from Rene's offerings: small, sweet red and yellow pear tomatoes, Romas for cooking, and crimson carmello, a heritage ribbed type with gorgeous crimson flesh that is low in acid and bursts with flavor. At the end of the season (late September here in the Rockies at 7,000 feet elevation), we brought in 72 pounds of tomatoes off of eight plants to ripen in the house. We were eating fresh tomatoes until December. This year I'm going to grow those three varieties again, plus Rene's new "Summer Feast" trio of heirloom tomatoes: 'Black Krim,' 'Sweet Persimmon,' and 'Italian Costoluto.' I'll start the seeds indoors in early March in flats on a heat mat in our bedroom, my defacto greenhouse because it gets the best sun. By late April, those sprouts be ready to go into the garden, each protected inside the insulating cone of its own wall-o-water.

Last year's kitchen garden got a little out of control (that's our Great Dane in last summer's garden above). Besides the tomatoes, we also grew three kinds of basil, tri-color beets, 'City Lights' chard with its neon-bright yellow, orange, pink, and crimson stems, peas, cilantro, four kinds of summer squash, including a buttery pale green hybrid between yellow crookneck and zucchini that was delicious even when the squashes hid from us and grew huge, broccoli, crisp and mild Mediterranean cucumbers, dill, mesculn lettuce blend, spicy stir-fry greens, spinach, pak choy, rhubarb, and strawberries. (We had asparagus and raspberries as well, but neither yielded much last year. It could have been the hot and dry spring followed by an unusually wet late summer.) We ate from the garden every day, savoring the treat of simply walking out the back door and picking our dinner, fresh and fed by the sun. (We don't use pesticides or synthetic fertilizers.)

When people ask me why we go to all the work to grow a kitchen garden, I want to take them outside and pick a sun-warmed yellow pear tomato and hand it to them. "Close your eyes and just taste it," I would say. Then 'd the smile grow on their face as the flavor explodes on their tongue. "That's why." It's not work, anyway. I do it for love: love of the smells and sounds and tastes of the food the garden produces, and of the community of plants and their partners - the swallows, hummingbirds, butterflies, native bees, and even the garter snake that burrows into the cool shade under the raised beds and eats the slugs and earwigs - that bring our garden alive.

I can hardly wait until those seed packets arrive. I can almost smell the tomatoes ripening.