It’s Quiet. Too Quiet.

Okay, we realize we’ve been really lax IPB Living bloggers this summer (regular readers of IPB proper shouldn’t be surprised about this), but it’s not our fault. This has been the boringest summer of gardening ever. Here’s what our daily routine as gentlewoman farmers has been like:

1. Wake up.
2. Notice it’s raining.
3. Realize this means we don’t have to water the garden for a few more days.
4. Realize this means we can’t take the camera out in the garden because it’s raining and we don’t want to break the camera (again).
5. Realize it’s actually raining really hard, and it’s too wet out to even want to just walk out and look at the garden without a camera in tow.
6. Read up on Late Blight.
7. Worry about Late Blight.
8. Are those spots on the tomatoes, the ones we can see from the front door where we’re huddled out of the rain, Late Blight?
9. Worry.
10. Read more about Late Blight.
11. Decide those spots aren’t Late Blight.
12. Find something less annoying to think about than the garden.
13. Go to sleep.

That’s been our day, every day, this entire summer. We’ve been lucky in that we’re having a bumper crop of tomatoes in this Summer of the Blight (anyone who’s reading this and thinking about starting a garden next Spring, take our advice: grow from seed), and we’ve had wildly successful onion, garlic, potato, and especially pepper crops this year. Our carrots and beets washed away in a torrential, hours-long downpour that ripped through Maple Hoo the day after we planted them. Our beans are chugging along. And we almost never have to spend any time actually interacting with any of them because there’s been so freakin’ much rain this year. It’s a self-tending garden. On the one hand, that leaves us lots of time to pursue our other hobbies. On the other hand, this must be a lot like what it’s like for parents when their children go off to college. We love the garden, we want to be involved in its life, but it just doesn’t need us anymore.

Winging It, CSA-Style

Okay, so having a share in a CSA is a wonderful thing, but sometimes you find yourself in a bit of a jam, where you have too many vegetables that need immediate attention.

Yesterday was one of those nights for me. I had two cubanelle peppers from last week that I wanted to prepare in a pasta sauce with the ripe Nardello pepper from our garden, and I had visions of it being a pepper-centric treatment. But when I got to the farm and started bagging up my pound of rainbow chard for this week, I remembered that I still had a pound from last week. And finally — FINALLY — there were heirloom tomatoes for us woebegone Monday pick-up drones (I do my PYO-ing on Thursdays and I know that they’ve had heirlooms for the previous two weeks, but I’m trying to be a grown-up and not complain too much about this), so of course some of my five pounds of heirloom tomatoes needed to be eaten right then. I decided to test this theory that things that grow at the same time taste good together, and figured I’d put everything I needed to cook that night into this dish.

There are several things that need to be noted at the outset here, certain mitigating factors to the final appearance of this meal. The first is that I’m a total lazy-ass in general, and I’m even moreso on Monday nights. The second is that we had blackberry syrup that needed to be consumed and a bottle of prosecco to mix with it; in other words, I was drinking. So with that in mind, I decided ahead of time to call this meal “CSA Rustica”, and give everything a coarse and, more importantly, uneven chop. It made it feel less like work that way.

So I started with about a half a pound of sweet Italian sausage, browned that up in olive oil, then tossed in the chopped peppers and garlic. I then realized that my pan was freakily dry, and two of my “these are just on the brink of becoming totally disgusting” slicing tomatoes were a bit mealy. So I chucked the diced tomatoes into the pan essentially just to deglaze it, then piled the chopped chard on top.

Only one of the heirloom tomatoes was at critical mass, and it was one of those wonderful, mild, perfect solid yellow ones. It barely needed to be seeded, because it was so fleshy. The flavor and texture on these are so marvelous and delicate that I hate to cook them, so I just diced the tomato up and figured I’d toss it with the pasta and sauce once everything was cooked. While I chopped, the chard cooked down, and my sauce started to look kind of edible, in a rustic kind of way. So I added some roughly chiffonaded basil, and gave it all a stir.

By this point I was pretty well toasted, so I “assembled” this in layers, eagerly taking pictures all along the way. Me + alcohol + camera = Pookie saying, “Why are there 500 shots of that pan of sausage in the camera?”

The bowl started with those little medium-sized shells, then the sauce was poured over (and lots of blurry pictures taken), then everything was topped with the yellow heirloom.

Then the whole thing got a generous grating of Parmesan cheese, and I tossed it all together.

So how did it turn out? Well, either I was really drunk by the time I got around to eating it, or there’s something to this “things that are in season together are delicious together” thing. Because it was awesome. I arrived home from the farm thinking too many veggies are my cross to bear, and finished up dinner thinking about how lucky I am to have such an embarrassment of freshness at my disposal.

Ice Cream Byproducts, In Cocktail Form

So we’re working on making ice cream this weekend, using the blackberries from the farm (a pint) and the raspberries we’ve picked off our own canes in the last few days (about a half a pint). To ready the berries to be put into ice cream, we stirred them with a bit of sugar, a squeeze of lemon, and a splash of Grand Marnier, let them sit overnight, then strained them.

The berries go into the ice cream, and the remaining syrup? Goes into prosecco.

I’m not going to lie — we were kind of bummed when we went to pick berries on Thursday at the farm and discovered there were no raspberries, only blackberries. After drinking these, we will never complain about blackberries again.

Today’s Garden

So here’s a look at what was going on in the gardens of Maple Hoo this afternoon.

First up, a view of the raspberry bramble out the mud room window in the “basement”.

We went outside with the camera in the early evening, when the sun’s low enough to make watering worthwhile, and also casting long shadows.

We had some fun taking pictures of the urn at the front door, filled with begonias and some kind of little white flower by Boomer.

Inside the garden walls, there were some calypso bean pods that were well and truly dried — time to harvest them!

In the next bed over, the carrots are coming up like gangbusters.

Next to the carrots, the Nardellos, stripped of their early-growing peppers, are finally thriving.

And in the far corner, the radishes are going crazy to seed; they’ve grown in a wave over the side of the bed, and have these gorgeous, delicate pink flowers.

Looking across the bed, the Black Plums and gherkins are looking like they’re getting a bit tired, and have a kind of “leafy arbor” shape to them, like they’re serving as shady hollows for smurfs or something.

And something we’ve learned about gherkins is that if you leave them on the vine too long, they grow insanely huge, and then turn orange.

It was one of those perfectly gorgeous evenings in the garden — warm, dry, with leaf-rustling breezes, and all our plants were happy to get watered after the heat of the day.