I harvested this beautiful bunch of “Easter Egg II” radishes from the garden this morning. Nate and I had our first taste of them earlier in the week, but they are hitting their peak now. I love how they truly come in several colours, making them more interesting and fun to harvest than the average radish.

The smaller radishes are more intense in their peppery flavour, while the larger ones are slightly more mellow. All three colours are equally beautiful, white, pink or purple. In the future I’ll have to remember not to let them get too big, or they will start to crack, as a few of them had begun to do. These were sown on March 21, making them a little bit longer to harvest than the seed packet suggested (although I could have harvested these a little earlier than today). Last year we didn’t have any radishes ready to harvest until mid-June, so I’ll call this a radish success story.

The first vegetable to be harvested from the garden this summer is (drumroll please…) the Zlata Radish!

My friend Gayla shared these yellow radish seeds with me and they were one of the first sets of seeds to be sown this spring. They germinated very well, and I only had to fill in a couple of “gaps” with some French Breakfast Radishes, which are quickly catching up to these beauties.

The Territorial Seed Company describes Zlata:

This flaxen, soft-skinned beauty comes to us from Poland. Zlata is a silky yellow, medium-sized, round to plum shaped radish with a crisp, bright white interior. Its crunchy texture and excellent, mildly spicy flavor will add zing to any relish tray or salad. Great for growing in spring and autumn, and resistant to bolting and splitting.

Radishes are one of those vegetables that I never buy in the grocery store. I only eat them when I grow them, which is most summers. They are so wonderfully peppery when fresh out of the garden, and this bunch was no exception.

I sliced them thinly and tossed them into a pasta salad I made over the weekend.

Nate, however, couldn’t wait until then to taste them.

Oh, dear, it’s been over a MONTH since I posted here! I can’t believe it. My only excuse is that I’ve been busy gestating. Our baby is now officially three days overdue, actually.

There hasn’t been much action out in the garden since early autumn. My husband, Graham, helped me out a lot this year in getting things cleaned up out back. We actually managed to clip back all of the perennials and he helped me pull the finished plants from the vegetable garden after we harvested the tomatoes.

This year we didn’t keep all of our harvest to ourselves, preferring to keep things simple and give a lot of it away to friends and family members. (Although we did, of course, manage to roast several big baskets of tomatoes and froze four large ziplock bags of roasted tomato sauce.) Our next-door-neighbour traded us some nice little potatoes that he grew for some of our tomatoes, too.

Baskets of homegrown tomatoes, peppers and eggplant for our friends and family.

That little veggie trade had me thinking, actually, that since there are three of us now in a row on my street who grow vegetables, we should try to co-ordinate a little bit, and share our harvest.  We could collectively grow more food than we could individually.  I’ll have to give this some thought over the winter!

But now here it is, late November, and it’s been an unseasonably mild autumn this year, for which I’m grateful. Now there is the potential for snow flurries this coming week, the same week our new family member is expected to arrive (we have an induction scheduled for Monday).

I hope that although we’ll be busy with the new baby, I’ll have more time in general to devote to writing online over the coming year. We’ll be sure to post when the baby comes!

I bought several varieties of peppers for the garden this year, and of course when it came time to harvest them, I didn’t remember which ones I planted where. This isn’t usually a problem because although peppers are similar, at maturity they are different enough to be able to identify. However, I think I bought mild AND hot banana peppers which was just silly of me. You know what this means, don’t you? Yes, we had to taste the pepper in order to know which one was ready for harvesting first. I was the guinea pig. And yes, these are hot!

Graham and I threw one on the barbeque to roast it and mellow out its flavours, chopped it up and ate it on some nachos we had for dinner that night.

One of the tasks on my weekend list of garden chores was to harvest the catnip that was doing its best to go to seed in the back yard.  This was one of the things I actually got done, and now there are about a dozen large bunches of the stuff drying in my laundry room.  Suddenly the cats are very interested in the laundry room…

They were also very interested in the plants I cut back on Monday morning.

Rudy stuck around the vegetable patch, where the majority of the catnip plants grow.

Farley stayed close to the deck, where I was bunching and tying the bundles for hanging.

Even the neighbourhood cats wanted in on the action!

All the cats want to party in our yard…

My friend Kelly gave me a cutting from her blackberries and I planted it outside the kitchen door, near the herb garden.  I realize this means that someday soon I’ll have to carry a machete to hack my way through the patch into the kitchen, but with the fruit growing closer to the house, I really think it will be harvested more regularly than oh, say, the raspberries, which are currently at the very back of our yard.

These berries have a much milder taste than the raspberries but are just as lovely.  I simply eat them raw, so far, but I have visions of blackberry wine someday…

As I sit in my living room this early morning drinking my coffee, I can see the vegetable patch out the back windows of our house.  One of the most prominent features of the garden right now are the brightly coloured blooms on the zucchini plants.

I always grow zucchini in my garden as I find it one of the most rewarding vegetable plants to grow.  In a very wet growing season, some plants can be lost to rotting, but generally the plants require little fussing and produce more fruit than I know what to do with.  I’ve made zucchini pickles zucchini soup, stuffed zucchini, zucchini bread and my favourite zucchini recipe so far, zucchini fritters.

Staying on top of the harvest is the trick to keeping my husband (and myself) from getting totally sick of zucchini.  I try to pick the fruit when it is still small and sweet and at its tastiest.  I throw chunks of it into salads, curries, pastas and soups.

What throws a wrench into this plan is that every year around this time, I take an annual trip to meet my blogging friends at the BlogHer conference, which is taking place in Chicago again this year.  This is what I found when I returned from that trip two summers ago:

Lots of big, impressive-looking fruit with very little flavour and not of much use other than as a door stop (or perhaps entering a contest in the county fair).

So this morning, after my coffee is done I’ll be harvesting the zucchini that’s ready to be picked. I’ve had to add “harvest zucchini” to my list of pre-conference tasks so that when I return on Sunday, I won’t be plagued with monster zucchini that I’ll have to pawn off on neighbours and friends!

Whether you prefer to call this time of year “late summer” or “early autumn”, there is no doubt that tomato season is in full swing. Local farmer’s markets, grocery stores and home garden stands are bursting with fresh tomatoes of countless varieties.

One of the easiest ways to preserve the unique flavour of summer vegetables, especially tomatoes, is by making a basic, roasted tomato sauce that can be adapted later on when the winter chill has set in and the tastes of summer have faded from our taste buds. Roasted sauce requires very little effort, and roasting the tomatoes brings out a layer of richness in taste that fresh tomatoes simply do not possess. The sauce can be frozen and enjoyed for months to come.

Roma tomatoes are the ideal variety, since they are a paste tomato containing few seeds, but any variety will work just as well.

For each batch of roasted tomato sauce, you will need :

• Approximately 25 Roma tomatoes. This number will vary with the variety used. Essentially, you will need enough tomatoes, halved, to cover a large baking sheet, cut side down.
• Two cloves of garlic, peeled.
• Half a medium-sized yellow onion.
• Extra virgin olive oil.
• Coarse salt and fresh pepper, to taste.

To make the sauce:

• Pre-heat oven to 375°F.
• Wash and core the tomatoes.
• Using a sharp paring knife, remove the core and stem, if present, from the tomatoes.
• Slice the tomatoes in half and place, cut side down, on a baking sheet or disposable aluminum oven liner.
• Tuck peeled garlic cloves in among the tomatoes.
• Slice the onion in half, peel, and then slice. Separate onion pieces and scatter among tomatoes.
• Drizzle all with olive oil.
• Sprinkle salt and pepper over all.
• Roast in the oven for approximately 40 minutes, or until tomatoes are soft and skins begin to brown.
• Transfer roasted tomatoes in batches to a blender and pulse until the sauce has reached the desired consistency.
• Transfer sauce into Ziploc freezer bags, marked clearly with the date and contents. Freeze bags horizontally on a cookie sheet. Once the bags are frozen, store them in the most convenient way in your freezer.

This sauce can be adopted for use in pasta recipes, Mexican cooking, or simply slathered over a fresh crust of Italian bread, to be enjoyed during a snowstorm. This sauce is exceptionally good when fresh or dried herbs are added before eating.

If you haven’t had the pleasure of cooking with fresh tomatoes this season, head on out to your local farmer’s market to find some before tomato season winds completely down for the year!

Graham and I spent a lovely few hours in the back garden this evening.  We were watching something on television after dinner, and I looked out the window, noticing how nice it was outside.  Since we’ve had so many rain days this year, I felt like I should take advantage of a pleasant night and get out into the garden.  The days are slowly getting shorter.  It’s dark around 8:45 now instead of mid-summer’s 9:30.  It’s a good thing I headed out, because while I tied up the tomatoes and pulled weeds, Graham mowed the lawn.  Then he helped me out by putting down the rest of the straw we had.

I harvested lots of Dragon’s Tongue beans (more on those coming soon), a few currant tomatoes and the first ripe Black Plum tomato, as well as a purple cabbage and a couple of cucumbers.  We’ve been eating fresh vegetables from the back yard garden for several weeks, now.

…

I’ve decided to take a step back from Suite101.com.  The site is wonderful, and writing there has been very rewarding.  I will still be writing for the site, but I’ve demoted myself from Feature Writer to Contributing Writer.  What this means is that I’ll be required to write 10 articles over 3 months, on any topic, while previously I was obligated to write one article and one blog post per week.  I had fallen behind, and with the upcoming start up of a second job, I feel it would be too difficult to stay on top of things.  The material I’ve written to date remains on the site, and you can still get to my articles by clicking on the links in my sidebar here.

I’m looking forward to an increasing my efforts here at Playing in the Dirt from now on.  I’ll let you know if I post a garden-related article at Suite101.com, as usual.

Taken at the communal garden I visited in Marin County, California.