The first harvest of basil was huge this year. I used part of it to make this pesto-like spread for toast and with pasta. A purist would say it is wanting in pine nuts and Parmesan cheese and therefore not pesto. In my world, there are not a lot of purists. These two jars went in the freezer while I use up previous year’s jars of pesto for lack of a better name.
Fresh basil pairs nicely with last year’s garlic crop, which needs to be used up before garlic scapes appear this year. Garlic, basil, extra virgin olive oil, and a little salt is all this needs. This batch used two and a half large head of garlic, and four cups of chopped basil. The measurements are flexible.
I made a batch of vegetable broth and this pesto while the ambient temperature outdoors was in the low 90s. It was a fine Saturday afternoon to work in the kitchen.
It’s been a good spring. The cruciferous vegetable patch has been coming along nicely. If it continues, there should be plenty of home grown kale and collards for the coming year until next year’s crop comes in. Hopefully everything else in that plot will mature for harvest.
Cruciferous vegetable plot.
I’ve been able to exercise daily with a brisk walk on the state park trail. I’m moderating what I eat using an app to track calories. I shed 15 pounds of weight this spring. I am eating better food in appropriate quantities. Between the exercise and change in eating habits, I feel better.
The trail goes on forever.
Today I plan to catch up on work around the house and make a trip to the wholesale club. Tomorrow I re-start summer writing. Here’s hoping for a memorable summer.
Don’t forget. Today is Juneteenth! Happy Juneteenth to all who celenrate. That should be every American.
Swiss chard and collards donated to the North Liberty Food Pantry.
After an overnight trip to Chicago to visit family and friends, I’m ready to begin summer writing. Ideas have been percolating all spring. It’s time to get them down and make something of them.
I enjoy the Chicago suburbs of Oak Park, Skokie, and Forest Park where I have been spending more time the last couple of years. It is remarkable how from the ground it looks exactly like you’d expect after seeing it countless times while taking off from and landing at O’Hare and Midway. I stayed with someone who lived his whole life in close proximity to where he was raised in Oak Park.
The main summer writing challenge is determining a schedule. I want to get into the garden early in the day to weed and harvest. I don’t want to spend all my energy there. I plan to shake up my daily outline and routines. The re-engineering process should be fun, and easy to accomplish by Friday.
Tuesday morning I took excess chard and collards to the food pantry. The receiver told me, “Those will go fast.” I always feel good when I donate produce I grew for food insecure people.
There are a lot of positives in the waning days of spring. If we can only take the time to recognize them.
It was 90 degrees Fahrenheit when I finished putting in hot peppers yesterday. With that, the main garden planting is finished. Ahead is maintenance, weeding, and replanting: normal stuff, part of what makes gardening enjoyable.
The next major event is expected to be the appearance of garlic scapes. In the meanwhile, the leafy green vegetable plot has been producing an abundance. I enjoy my afternoon trips to the garden to pick greens for the kitchen.
The portable greenhouse will come down soon. The only things left are a tray of seedlings for the covered row (lettuce, Pak Choi, arugula, herbs), a tray of Milkweed starts, and an experiment in using old onions and leek seeds. It is best to take it down to reduce exposure to high winds in the neighborhood.
I have multiple days of tree maintenance next. The chainsaw service center is relocating due to the City of North Liberty wanting their land. My chainsaw was the next mechanical device to go into the shop, although I am not driving 45 minutes four times to take it there. I may see if Stihl has a reliable electric chainsaw. The home, farm , and auto supply store where I used to work is a Stihl dealer, and remains in the orbit of retailers I visit in person.
Low humidity makes the high temperatures tolerable. From here on out, I expect to spend early morning daylight in the garden and then move to other work. For those who have been following along, I expect to start a daily writing regimen when summer begins next week.
This week I grew more lettuce, Pak Choi and greens than we needed to use fresh in our kitchen. I took the excess to a local food pantry where they don’t get many fresh, leafy green vegetables. We growers and donors are asked to arrive on Monday mornings.
I put a followup on my calendar to time my harvests so excess can go directly to the pantry each week.
Our food pantry is located in the basement of the Methodist Church. Each Monday afternoon, the shelves are open for anyone to come and take what they need. The pantry serves a clientele of about 35 food-insecure people. If fresh goods are left at the end of the day, a local food rescue driver arrives and takes them to another food pantry open the next day. It is an efficient system.
From what I hear, my fresh greens are usually popular. I don’t know the clients, and don’t really need to know them to do what I do.
The needs are similar everywhere there are food pantries. Here is the current want list from ours:
Mandarin oranges
Canned tuna and chicken
Pasta sauces
Ramen noodles
Chunky Soups
Peanut Butter
Canned fruit
Kids cereal
Toilet paper
If readers have the means, I encourage you to help your local food pantry. It is something easy to do whether you are a gardener or not.
As summer arrives on June 20th, I think about beverages I seek at least once each year. I hope to change all that and pick something as my standard beverage. That’s what I say at the beginning of each summer.
Diet Coke When I’m at the convenience store playing Powerball, once a summer I pick up a Coke or Diet Coke and drink it. This year it was Diet Coke because I am watching my caloric intake. It will be a cold day in hell when I try another of those. It has no flavor. Coke is not it. If Diet Coke was invented “just for the taste of it,” I don’t know what taste they are marketing. I won’t be yearning for another one of these.
Yoo-hoo A couple times a year I pick up a Yoo-Hoo chocolate flavored beverage at the convenience store. I probably should not. The beverage is made mostly from water, high-fructose corn syrup, and whey. I associate drinking Yoo-hoo with living in the south, yet that makes no sense. It was invented in Garfield, New Jersey in 1928 and has been owned by multiple international conglomerates. In a moment of weakness, I’ll likely have another. It fills a certain niche.
Iced Tea I buy the cheapest black pekoe tea bags and brew a pot of tea in an old Brown Betty. The first glass is poured hot, directly from the pot over ice. By far, this is the most refreshing beverage of summer. I make it a couple of times per summer for the refreshment and the remembrance of summers past.
Lemonade When I volunteered with the home owners association I bought a large container of lemonade mix for our annual meeting and potluck. I never used much of the container and from time to time I make some for myself. It is basically a sugar fix, something I need to watch. I may try making lemonade with Italian Volcano lemon juice. The flavor is great and I can control the amount of sugar.
Jack Daniel’s Old No. 7 Tennessee Whiskey I had a finger of this whiskey in a bottle I bought maybe ten years ago. I finished it off and decided it’s time to eschew distilled spirits unless I am celebrating with friends. It’s intoxicating effect is too much for this aging frame. The other thing is distilled spirits can be very expensive, even at the wholesale club.
Mass Produced Beer I used to buy a case of beer from the wholesale club each summer. I iced the bottles down in a cooler we got for a wedding present, and enjoyed one or two after a hot sweaty day of working outside. They are wanting $30 or more for the brands I like, so that one is getting sanded off in the woodshed. If I have a beer this summer, it will likely be with friends at the site in town where it was brewed.
Iced Water There is still nothing like a glass of water poured over ice. After all the trips down memory lane with the other beverages, I expect this will be the standby. It should be. Filtered water straight from the refrigerator is simply the best.
Editor’s Note: This post is one in a series of quick, short, fill-in posts while I spend most of my time and energy planting the garden. Things are looking good, yet I’m not there yet.
Someday I hope to visit Buffalo Ridge Orchard in Central City, which is near where my spouse’s family settled in Iowa after the Civil War. Their farm store is opening for the season today and this spring truism appeared in their newsletter, “This week we have all the makings for a wonderful salad and charcuterie board. We are well stocked with lettuce, radishes, salad turnips, Milton Creamery cheese, and Over the Moon salami.” While we don’t do charcuterie, the abundance of my garden overfills my salad bowl daily. Our grocer carries a good selection of organic vegetables like cauliflower and cucumbers to fill out the salad. We are living in the best times.
Back to work in the garden today. Hope you are finding local spring produce available where you live.
Editor’s Note: These short posts are intended to help readers follow along while most of my energy is diverted away from writing. Once the garden is in I’ll be back to normal posting.
2025 rendering of the tomato plot. Total 71 cages this year.
Tomato seedlings were in the ground on Wednesday. Every one of them survived until Thursday. So far I don’t need to use the extras I held in reserve. They need mulching, although I didn’t have the energy for it. Once mulched, I’ll install a tall fence to keep deer from easy access.
I harvested a passel of leafy greens and spent a couple hours in the kitchen cleaning them. Arugula, three kinds of lettuce, Pak Choi, two kinds of kale, and collards. In my early gardening days I didn’t give much thought to greens. Now, after working eight years on a farm, I couldn’t live without them.
In other news, Thursday night I rejoined the county Democratic central committee. No one else will do the work, so I will until I find someone else.
Editor’s Note: I managed to post every day during garden planting season. Some, like this one, are brief. I’m still distracted from writing by the garden.
The Tuesday forecast was for rain… all day. Before it began, I got out in the garden to measure tomato rows and inspect the leafy green vegetables. Little white moths have been busy laying eggs, so once the rain finishes, I’ll apply DiPel to take care of the coming caterpillar hatchlings that love greens as much as I do. Proper application of this naturally occurring pesticide makes a real difference. We need rain.
I picked the first basket of kale before the rain. I reviewed the freezer and there remains plenty of 2023 crop. I’ll take bags that have the largest number of ice crystals and use them in vegetable broth. There are plenty of other bits and pieces in the freezer — broccoli stalks, summer squash, and collards — that will all go into the pot. I bought a big bag of organic celery, seven pounds of organic carrots and a big bag of yellow onions at the wholesale club. Add bay leaves and a little salt and I’ll have a good spring batch of broth for water bath canning.
It looks like 70 tomato cages will fit, with enough space around them to get at them for harvest. Now it’s a question of when the rain will finish. It’s always something.
Editor’s Note: I’m still working with short posts until the garden is planted. Won’t be long.
When the Aug. 10, 2020 derecho blew an oak tree akilter, I had to cut it down. I left a tall stump for a seat from which I took this photo. This will be a plot of tomatoes. The seedlings are getting tall in the trays, which means they need more moisture and roots do not have a place to grow. If I can make it through a long day on Monday, I will get them in the ground. That’s a big “if.”
This plot is smaller than the one I used last year, so I may need more space in another plot. I haven’t measured and counted yet, so no worries until I do. I had hoped to leave one of the large plots fallow, but it may be required for production to fit everything in. This is what happens when a gardener just starts a bunch of seeds without detailed planning. It’s how I have gardened since I began.
So I measured and counted and came up with this planting plan:
Tomato Planting plan plot #4 – 2025.
It will be a bit crowded yet I can deal with that. I may have to take the fencing down to access the two outside rows. Won’t know that until we see how things grow with these indeterminate vines that go all over the place.
Editor’s Note: Still short posting while I work on the garden. About another week to go before the main planting is finished.
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