Zucchini Gone Wild

There's a joke on Vashon Island near Seattle that you can't drive on the island in the summertime with your windows down or else someone will throw a zucchini in it. I completely understand. I figure I've harvested about 25lbs of zucchini so far. I've given away many, contributed one for a chocolate-zucchini cake for our neighborhood block party, made five loaves of zucchini bread, one batch of soup, and several kabobs. Sadly, none of these recipes blow my mind. Zucchini is best eaten simply grilled or in the house special (see previous post). I have "eight ball" that looks like a big globe and "black zucchini" which is the traditional kind. The eight ball looks cool but doesn't taste much better than regular. I want to try it halved and stuffed with a bulgar pilaf - that might make it worthwhile.
Next year: two plants tops, of the regular variety.

Oh, and the plants are still kicking so if you drive by my house with your window open, watch out!

Dinner

When I lived with Ali Segal in Chicago in 2002, we used to both make the "house special" at least once a week: pasta, broccoli and red sauce. At some point my tastes changed and the house special became whole wheat pasta, asparagus, olive oil, fresh parm, salt and pepper. Amazing! But when asparagus isn't in season and there are veggies in the backyard, the formula changes.

In mid-July the snap peas were desperate for the picking, the ugly yellow squash just getting fired up, and the first zucchini - skinny and perfect - were ready for harvest. Behold pasta primavera - locavore style:

From 2009 07 July

From 2009 07 July

It was a good spring

I should be banned from the blogosphere for my absence.


I wish I could claim that I was so busy in the garden this spring that I didn't have time to write, but it's not true. Instead I've been having a moral dilemma: each time I get on a train of thought, it's about pests. Weeds, ants, bugs, the thing that is gnawing on my zucchini, oh, and slugs. The famous Pacific Northwest slug. And then I remember that's the point about organic gardening - no pesticides means pests right alongside my veggies. Well, it wasn't all bad this spring: I had a great crop of field greens and green and red leaf lettuces. Snap peas were abundant and flavorful, especially in these last few days as they've gotten really plump. Raspberries were sweet and strawberries were juicy.

The garden put on quite a show when Lindsay and Ali came to visit at the end of June. Lindsay joined a CSA last year in Chicago and it transformed her cooking repertoire. She brought some CSA zucchini that we thoroughly enjoyed on our camping trip, and snap peas that tasted completely different from mine but lovely in their own right. Ali gardens organically at a community garden in Missoula and I give her huge credit for getting on her bike just to water the veggies. Anyway, I was so happy that they were able to snack in my yard - no washing required.

From 2009 06 June

Nature’s Turkey Baster

I’ve been worried about the bees. You know, the fact that, beginning a few years ago, scientists have noticed a dramatic drop in the bee population which has effects not just on honey production but also on farmers who rely on bees to pollinate their crops. I’ve thought about adding plants that attract bees, and have even toyed with the idea of getting my own hive. I’m just worried about them stinging someone (me).

Today, however, I read my favorite weekly garden column by PNW expert Ciscoe. He says:

The most common problem home gardeners have growing zucchini is that the fruit form, then rot on the vine. The cause is lack of pollination. There just aren't enough bees around to get the job done these days.

Solve the problem by being the bee. Take a male flower and use it to pollinate about 5 female blossoms (the female looks like it has a little fruit at the bottom; the male lacks this) by knocking pollen on the pistil that sticks up out of the middle of the bloom. If all goes well, the only job left to do is to keep the area around the plant weeded, and to remember to pick your zucchinis before they become the size of baseball bats!

I didn’t seem to have a problem with too much zucchini rot last year, but I did have baseball bat-sized zucchini! Well, I’m hopeful that the bees (and the birds) will do their thing this year and I won’t have to get involved, but I’ll be sure to let you know if I get in the pollination business.

Attack!

I did not intend to write a blog about weeds. Weeds, while one of my favorite TV shows, are not what I had in mind when I got into gardening. Alas, I am under attack. Here's the current round up (ha ha! Pun intended!):

1) Chickweed - at bay. It was 70 degrees and sunny a few weekends ago and I busted out the big gun - Monsanto's finest - and took care of all of it. For now. My hope is that two or fewer additional applications of this over the course of the summer will keep the chickweed level "weedable" for many years to come. And hopefully I can switch back to vinegar after this bottle is gone. So far, so good.

2) Blackberries - menacing. A couple of months ago I saw bright green leaves growing proudly out of the dead brown winter that was my yard. Like an alien to the mothership (I'm reading my first sci-fi novel, what can I say?) I walked to the yard only to find LARGE THORNS and a JAGGED STEM that could only be exotic blackberry. I did my best to yank it out. Lately I've seen a lot of berry plants popping out of the soil but I can't tell if they're raspberries (controllable) or blackberries (scary).

3) Morning Glory - code red! I had MG in my raspberry corral last summer which didn't bother me until I tasted my first raspberry (AMAZING) and realized that that MG was choking the life out of the raspberry stalks. Daunted by the prickly raspberries and general weediness of the corral, i just pulled the MG from the stems, not the roots. Clearly this wasn't going to solve my problem, and it caused great distruction to the raspberries. Last week I decided to go in, to take the bull by the horns, er, the MG by the roots. I got some good ones, 2' long roots and all, but suspect there's still a lot under there. I need to teach neighbor cat how to dig for morning glory.

Chickweed

I could grow old pulling chickweed. It’s everywhere. In the beds, in the grass, in the rocks, even where I didn’t know I had soil. The best thing about chickweed? “common chickweed can reroot from stem nodes in moist areas.” Great, so if I pull a clump out and a small piece flies away it will re-root. Urg.

90% of what I found online tells me to use something extremely toxic. Here, I started this blog because of my guilt over Round Up, which seems pretty benign compared to Weed-B-Gon. Alas, there is another remedy that my garden mentor suggested last year: a flame weeder. Yes, indeed, this is like a blowtorch and especially recommended for rocky areas. Apparently it doesn’t burn the plant to death, it causes a chemical reaction inside which makes it die. Die, chickweed, die!

No discussion of the death of chickweed goes without the few but whiney chickweed advocates who espouse its health benefits. “Natural anti-inflammatory!” “Makes great pesto!” “Fights cancer!” If they’re so into chickweed, why don’t they come over and clean me out? Perhaps I should post on craigslist: “Free chickweed. U-pick.”