October 2009: Is this what gardening's supposed to be like in normal places?

I'm happy to say we had a very temperate, rainy Fall. I was abundantly pleased with the outcome . . . But with all the rain, you can see the weeds taking control of every square inch that's vulnerable, even the pebble path. This has turned into a real nightmare, and we're at a loss when it comes to salvaging the path.

But let's ignore the weeds . . .

It didn't take long for the lettuces to start coming up alongside the kale and green onions I had transplanted. Too much of the lettuce is frisee, but I have little control over it b/c I think a lot of these are seeds from earlier plantings. I still don't manage germination very well, and usually only a tiny fraction of the lettuce seeds come up, which leads me to believe the rest sit dormant in the soil until future conditions are ripe. . . hence all the frisee this Fall. Also, I think some of my frisee plants went to seed in the Spring, so it could've perpetuated itself.

A ton of baby arugula below. Similar to the proliferation of frisee, I tend to have a very laissez faire gardening philosophy. One of the benefits of this laziness is that I let a lot of my plants re-seed themselves, so sometimes weeds are not weeds at all but pleasant surprises -- things that I didn't plant for the season but I can pull them up and eat them anyway.


Here's some larger arugula from later, along with a lone squash:


We had a healthy crop of gorgeous green beans:


The squash and zucchini were respectable too:


These plants here are a Texas variety of squash (Texas Indian Moschata) that didn't produce fruit until later (I'll have a picture in an upcoming post); the plants looked great and the squash was delicious:

This is one of a few watermelons I got out of the garden this year -- very pleased with that result . . .

Some peppers, of course -- including my gleeful poblanos:


After planting this asparagus in the spring of last year, I can harvest some of it this spring. It has died back in the winter cold now, so when the shoots start sprouting in a couple months, I think I can take as much as 25-33% of them w/o risking future output. (The real harvest isn't supposed to come until next year).

I eventually cooked down a lot of the arugula b/c, strangely enough, Jenny prefers it that way -- I prefer it fresh in salads, but we end up with so much of it, you almost have to cook it down to deplete the supply . . .

I don't really know why, but I also thought a "Cream of Arugula and Cucumber Soup" sounded like a good cold soup (a la Vichysoisse), or even a good warm soup for that matter. Not so. It was bad. It could've been something wrong with my execution, but I'm fairly uncertain about the original concept too. I've still got it in the freezer, though, in hopes that I can save it and make it into a sauce somehow. At the very least, it provides an extra layer of insulation in there -- so I guess it hasn't been totally useless.

The herb bed loved the rain, and all the plants have really filled out their territory, but none more so than the oregano -- it's tyrannical. Overall, the herb bed's looking good, w/ less weed invasion than we've seen elsewhere,

I'm a big fan of the purple basil -- it may seem understated, but since the herb garden is monochromatic for 90% of the year, it's a welcome diversion (I need to be more proactive about introducing some color here):

I was very open-minded when it came to preparing Josephine's first "solid" foods. I thought it would be fun to be creative on her behalf. As it turns out, she was less open-minded. From L-R, two kinds of eggplant, zucchini/squash (I can't remember which), roasted red peppers, a third kind of eggplant, and persimmon. Except for the super-sweet persimmon that she liked pretty well, she hated all the rest of it; however, after much stubborness from her mother (and a little from me too), she's warmed up to a couple of these options.

As for myself, I was so smitten with persimmons this Summer that I tried as many things as I could think of. One of them was a persimmon interpretation of Limoncello (or some similarly fermented fruit concoction). I have to admit that a big part of my motivation was that I found the wordplay irresistible: "Persimmoncello." Why hasn't anyone thought of this yet? Maybe I'll find out once I take it out of my closet and finally try some.

So here's what it involved: I basically cut up a lot of fruit, stuffed it in the jars you see below, and added vodka. Some jars had persimmon only. (From jar to jar, the "form" of the persimmon varied from pureed to diced to just peels.) Other jars were a more traditional limoncello recipe -- lots of lemon peel and then just a little additional persimmon peel to mix it up a tad. (In one or two, I also added lime peel.) And I used varying ratios of vodka to fruit in each jar. There were so many combinations to try that I ended up with about seven different jars, and I could've done more but the vodka ran out. I really know nothing about homemaking this kind of stuff; I just took the amateur Google approach and let it fly. I have to say, the most interesting recipe I found was for Chinese dates that this guy simply suspended in the jar a few inches above the alcohol. So I tried that with a couple persimmons too. I'll report back at some point, I'm sure, but for the time being, I don't even remember what the next step is for any of these and they're just sitting in my office closet.