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By feral, on October 23rd, 2011%
On Friday we were due for our bi-weekly garden visitation. However, James had to travel to California; so, I drove upstate by myself. With several How Stuff Works podcasts entertaining my curious mind and with the Taconic wowing my weary eyes with foliage landscapes at every turn, it turned out to be a lovely drive.
With green rapidly fading from the scene, the garden still had a couple of green surprises for me: the last batch of green tomatoes, string beans, the relentless shishito peppers, 2 radishes and even 3 cucumbers! (Which brings the total number of cucumbers I harvested this year to 5. Ok, maybe to 10…)
 I spent some time on Friday afternoon cleaning up in the garden. It gets dark around 6 now, so I didn’t have that much time. The dusk’s sudden advance interrupted my activities; I raised my eyes from wilted tomato plants I was pulling out of the ground and suddenly saw a gleaming beam of red light shooting out from the woods. It looked almost like the tail of a meteor — but, in fact, it was the tail of a rainbow. . . . CONTINUE READING → Out with the green!
By feral, on October 8th, 2011%
It is that magical time of the year when everything turns orange. The air itself must be tinted — just look at this photo. We don’t get to observe the setting sun directly from our windows but its bright orange reflected light provides some truly dramatic lighting for Midtown skyscrapers in the fall.
Where have all the flowers gone? – you might ask this New York’s leading florist… Well, obviously, they have all turned into pumpkins.
 Last year I, too, planted some pumpkins and was very excited about cooking all kinds of stuff with them. They grew big and pretty but turned out to be completely inedible. So, this year I decided not to plant any; yet, this one somehow grew on its own!
 And I’m very happy it did. First of all, it proves that my feral gardening method works. And secondly, even though it isn’t large enough to turn into a carriage or round enough to be carved into a jack-o-lantern, it . . . CONTINUE READING → Orange, orange everywhere!
By feral, on September 26th, 2011%
I planted them kind of late (mid-July) and kind of ferally (just a few seeds here and there on an undeveloped part of the slope), and still they grew!
They aren’t gigantic, these butternut squashes of mine — some are rather petite, to be honest. But I’m still pretty impressed with the harvest. I picked almost all of them, except for the tiniest/greenest ones, because it’s getting too rainy and they will otherwise rot. Or get eaten by one of my furry competitors.
Lined up on the counter, they looked very cute, sort of like Russian nesting dolls that haven’t been painted yet… A new Halloween tradition, perhaps? — Instead of carving pumpkins, make some Matryoshkas out of butternut squash?
The photo below came out overexposed and i really liked the effect, so I’m posting it too. Although the first one is true to color.
Favorite butternut squash recipes, please?
By feral, on September 24th, 2011%
 As Persephone (or Proserpina, as she is known to the Romans) made her upsetting but carefully negotiated (six pomegranate seeds and all) return to Hades today, following the Autumnal Equinox and accompanied by the pouring-rain tears of her mother Demeter (who cried a lot in New York today), I made my return to the garden, after another two-week-long absence.
Main item on the agenda — harvesting the rest of the potatoes — proved unattainable today due to heavy precipitation, and therefore I took to the internets to celebrate the Atumnal Equinox and embrace the spirit of the Eleusinian Mysteries in a less muddy fashion.
Before retreating to cyberspace, I only had a few rain-free minutes to quickly inspect the garden. What I found (in addition to a few more tomatoes and quite a few butternut squashes) was a really disturbing crime scene!!! Someone ate half of my rainbow chard and sorrel! But wait, the most mysterious discovery was waiting for me at the bottom of the garden: a medium-size beet, pulled out of the ground, dragged downhill a few yards from its original location and left for . . . CONTINUE READING → Autumnal Equinox and a Not-So-Eleusinian Mystery
By feral, on September 11th, 2011%
Helen and Russel visited us for lunch today and we fed them pizza. 2 pizzas, to be exact, James and I designing a pie each. (There was also some leftover tuna casserole involved, served as a semi-cold appetizer, but we don’t speak of it.)
Anyway, the purpose of this post is to log the pizza crust technique — because it was a success! (Helen even asked me to email her the recipe but I said she’d have to look it up on FG, so there…) Here’s the dough recipe I used (twice now), loved it, and am adding it to my list of notable recipes. It’s pretty fast — took about 20-30 minutes to make and 1 hour to rise – light, tasty, and soft. To bake, I preheated the oven to 475F with the pizza stone inside, for about 20 minutes, arranged the pies on parchment paper dusted lightly with cornmeal, slid them onto the pizza stone, one at a time, and baked each for 15 minutes.
And now on to the artistic part. James’ idea was to use squash flowers that are still blossoming in abundance, and so we did! He picked some (butternut squash, I . . . CONTINUE READING → Feral Pizza — it’s all in the dough
By feral, on September 10th, 2011%
Oh hello.
Sorry to keep everyone in the dark about the results of the last photo quiz. It was a tough one — and radically different on the scale of scientific magnitude as well as photographic magnification.
 Congratulations to Anna who figured out the mystery! The image in question is a tomato seed under the microscope. The photo comes from The International Science & Engineering Visualization Challenge 2010 via my biologist friend Kapa (who originally came up with this quiz). The outer, translucent, sphere of the seed is filled with a special gel that contains a substance which, according to Kapa, “we will all probably be consuming in large amounts 20 years from now.”
Discovered by British scientists and patented as Fruitflow, this substance “can help maintain a healthy blood circulation by preventing blood from clotting, according to clinical trials.” (Source: Tomato seeds are the healthy alternative to aspirin)
So, I’ve always thought that the seedy slimy core of a tomato is its most delicious part and, therefore, have always been skeptical of any recipes instructing you to discard the seeds (I have no objections . . . CONTINUE READING → A tomato seed a day…
By feral, on August 30th, 2011%
 The time has arrived to reveal the vegetable behind the flower of our penultimate photo quiz from a few weeks ago. It was an eggplant, a Japanese Choryoku hybrid, to be exact. Here it is again, photographed flirting with a different bug, our old friend Agapostemon.
It was correctly identified as a member of the nightshade (or potato or Solanaceae) family that also includes Mandragora (mandrake), belladonna (deadly nightshade), Lycium barbarum (Wolfberry), Physalis philadelphica (Tomatillo) , Physalis peruviana (Cape gooseberry flower), Capsicum (paprika, chili pepper), Solanum (potato, tomato, eggplant), Nicotiana (tobacco), and Petunia. Just like any normal family, a healthy balance of pretty, functional and toxic…
However, nobody recognized it as an eggplant, so there is no official winner this time around. Ironically, the plant itself did not produce winning results either… Something ate all of its leaves, leaving it looking rather sad. . . . CONTINUE READING → Dream Caused by the Flight of a Bee Around a Japanese Eggplant Flower
By feral, on August 25th, 2011%
I was away from the garden for long three weeks. Finally, we escaped the city, shaken up by yesterday’s seismic tremors, and safely arrived in Canaan late last night. (Although the earthquake was most noticeable in the neighborhoods of Twitter and Facebook, I did feel it in Soho and James, who was at home, says that 5.8 magnitude translates into quite an unnerving sensation on the 37th floor…) And if Manhattan, fortunately, did not sustain any damages, in the garden this morning I witnessed scenes of devastation.
The tallest sunflowers collapsed.
Tomato plants fell to they ground, many with their support structures.
 None of these catastrophic damages, however, were due to tectonic shifts. The sunflowers grew too tall for their own good and tomatoes too heavy, although I do take partial responsibility for a somewhat faulty deficient job staking the latter. In any case, it won’t hurt to get more earthquake-resistant varieties next year.
But it only looked dramatic. The was almost no real damage. Quite the opposite, actually — I spent the rest of the day . . . CONTINUE READING → Back in the garden – harvest time!
By feral, on August 9th, 2011%
I’m happy to announce that Tomato Race 2011 has a winner! Two Black Plum tomatoes ripened and were picked on Sunday, August 7, thus officially opening the feral tomato season.
The first and the second runners-up are Black Krim (below, on the right) and Cuore di Bue (“ox heart” in Italian). They were picked white (tomatoes generally turn a lighter shade of green before they become red), and are now slowly but surely catching up on our kitchen counter.
 The Fest of the First Ripe Tomato is probably the most anticipated event of the entire garden season. Last year the joyous day arrived at least two weeks earlier. And so, when Mark Bittman said a few days ago that “tomato season isn’t even halfway over,” I felt a bit embarrassed, as well as hopeful and desperate at the same time… Hopeful, because we still have quite a few days of summer ahead of us, and desperate because I won’t be in the garden for the next several weeks: we’re . . . CONTINUE READING → Tomatoes!
By feral, on July 19th, 2011%
You’re probably thinking: isn’t it always bragtime on FG??? I’ll pretend I haven’t heard that…
The harvest still comes primarily in unicolor but it has significantly increased in volume. Yesterday, for instance, I gathered quite a few basketfuls of stuff before heading back to the city. Here are some photos of the loot.
Peas — a critical supply to have, especially following the President’s recent directive.
 Some of them can still be eaten raw, and some I used for an improvised pasta primavera tonight, alongside some chard and mint. However, a large portion already needs to be shelled and preserved — frozen, most likely.
Some sorrel, arugula, mizuna and lettuce. Some people have been asking me what sorrel looks like — it occupies the lower right quadrant of this photo.
Brassicas du jour: kale and kohlrabi. Last year we had some green UFOs (a.k.a. pattypan squash), and this year it’s miniature green sputniks (a.k.a. kohlrabi). It is such a pretty vegetable to grow and immediately gives your harvest basket a highly sophisticated appearance.
![]() . . . CONTINUE READING → Bragtime!
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