tangentalizingly delicious

Friday May 26, 2006

Last weekend Jen and I planted our backyard gardens. We did up the vegetable garden again, and dug out and expanded and existing but mostly fallow garden behind our deck for flowers.

The deck garden is intended to attract butterflies and otherwise look pretty, and I think that was accomplished quite nicely. When it becomes practical to, we also bought some concrete pathway things and a couple of cinder blocks to get the rain barrel off the ground so gravity can help us get water out of it faster.

The vegetable garden this year is a vegetable garden in name only. While we had some fun last year with the few different sorts of plants we tried, we really only got a lot of benefit from the tomatos and the herbs. I’m still not eating zuccini very much as a result of packing back one of those giant monsters from last year weekly for a few months.

We’re also interested in fairly low maintenance stuff, and there’s little that’s lower maintenance than herbs, which are basically just tasty weeds. Heck, some of them even came back after the winter (some parsely, oregano and thyme) which makes it even easier.

So we decided this year to just go with tomatoes and herbs. On the tomato side of things we’ve got Sweet 100s, which are cherry tomatoes which, last year, provided us 10-20 tomatoes almost every day which we just picked, washed and ate. It was great. We’re big on tomatoes for the most part, and have been going through tons this spring anyway. They’re one of the few vegetables that aren’t making digestion uncomfortable for Jen, which is very important.

We’ve also got some beefsteak tomatoes growing away. I don’t think these are the same ones we had last year, so it’s sort of an experiment, but really not all that much of a risk.

On the herb side of things, we’ve got mostly the same selection as last year, the ones that make up my basic repertoire of herbery: basil (sweet and, because it was extra cheap, some purple basil), some italian parsley and the curly stuff from last year that came back, some newly purchased oregano and thyme in the garden and the stuff from last year in pots, a transplant I performed a few weeks back when I turned the garden.

I also bought some coriander/cilantro, because I really enjoy having small amounts of it very occasionally. Whenver I buy some from the grocery store the majority of it ends up going bad, so I figured even if I don’t eat very much a nice big bush of it will be a nice thing to have around. If I get especially industrious I may even harvest the seeds. I still have tons from the spice rack Jen bought in the mid-90s, and despite everything that says they don’t last they’re quite flavourful, so I’m kind of curious what actual freshly harvested and dried coriander seeds actually taste like.

I think that’s mostly it for this year. Oh! Some of the strawberry plants we bought and planted on a whim last year came back too, and when I turned the garden over I replanted them. There are a couple of blossoms starting (or were before the weather turned cool and rainy), so maybe we’ll get a full on berry or too. I didn’t put any straw down though, so they’ll probably rot on the plant.