DESTRUCTION IN THE GARDEN

Much like the beginning of the summer, Alexandria, Virginia saw days and days and days of rain this past week and weekend. At times it was so torrential i wondered if it was hailing. (My parents in North Carolina did have hail, grape-sized.)

I was kind of glad that the garden was getting watered without me, but when I went out to inspect the weeds that had surely sprung up, i was horrified at what I found.

Here is a photo of a healthy zucchini plant, on or about July 7, 2009, so almost two months ago. (Note, that it has grown much much bigger, but this gives you an idea of what it looks like.)

Now, a week ago, the leaves of this plant were so large that they reached the newspaper on the right side and were equidistantly stretched out all around. With beautiful squash blossoms beaming at me every morning and zucchini growing. Did you know that zucchini blossoms open in orange glory early in the morning and look like tiger lilies, sort of? They don't stay all twirled up all the time - in the morning they are open and glorious. I notice this from my shower window in the morning and I have been meaning to post about it for you.

Well, that is unlikely to happen due to this tragedy:
The leaves have been shredded and beaten into the ground.

Here is the horrifying closeup.

It would be impossible for photosynthesis to occur with these shredded leaves, not only because the leaf area does not exist anymore (mostly) but because the xylem and phloem in the stems has been destroyed. Xylem (zylem) and phloem are the tubes in the stem that carry the and water throughout the plants. I remember this from 7th grade biology, believe it or not. Our teacher made us sing a song about it, a really simple song, and she told us at the time "you feel stupid now, but you will remember this the rest of your life" and she was right. So: xylem carry the water up, phloem carry the food down. (i.e., xylem carry water from the roots up to the leaves, where photosynthesis occurs, and then the food is made there in the cells, and the phloem carry the food down to the roots, etc.)

So, in this plant, the xylem and phloem is pretty much brutally bashed out of commission:

Those are the main stems of Plant 1 and Plant 2. they were beaten open by what I can only imagine was hail and now there are ants taking up residence like it's an open house. I see no evidence of either xylem or phloem.

Then there are such exhibits as this:

Stems such as this have just given up.

After coming to terms with the devastation, I reminisced over times gone by.


Photos like these remind me to Carpe Diem. Look at all the sturdy xylem and phloem.

If you think I am not shedding a tear, I am. Mister Siren and I had words over a lack of sensitivity to the destruction. It was like losing a child. I'm serious, people! I was looking forward to a bountiful harvest of zucchini all summer, and i get - - - - - destruction. I feel like a pioneer in a year of famine or something.

There were other casualties:

My husband tried to repair the damage with scotch tape out of sympathy for me and his own dinner salads.

If the plant does not repair itself, all of these tomatoes will be at stake

Please mourn with me. This is way too sorrowful to mourn by myself.

RIP, zucchini.

Watch my zucchini grow

Remember this big ol baby??


Some new ones are furiously growing in the garden:

That's the main plant, the one that is huge and takes up the expanse of, oh, I don't know, a couch

Here's the other plant, that thus far has produced NOTHING but all of a sudden has produced this beautiful looking zucchini.


Actually, by the looks of it we could pick these buddies now and eat them. But, the last monster zucchini was so bountiful and provided us with so many meals!! So they are growing while I am out of town. I told Mister Siren to pick them if they got too out of control. He's on tomato watch anyway since we caught an EVIL CARDINAL out there pecking away at the tomatoes every day.

For instance, with the zucchini, we grilled it with other vegetables
(by the way, this was only half the monster zucchini, just to let you know)
You may not be able to see it, but I use Emeril Lagasse's trick of inserting toothpicks in the onion slices before putting them on the grill, in order to keep them together better. He suggests putting the toothpicks into your onion before you slice it, and then slicing away, to make it easier. I have found this to be really useful.

Once I grilled up that zucchini and onions, I mixed it with leftover grilled corn
Remember that delicious post? Of course the corn I shaved off the cobb was unadulterated with crazy loco sauce or queso fresca.


So I shaved off the corn, mixed it up with the other veggies and leftover steak from the grill the night before.

At which point I began to make some tostadas. easy! You just cut tortillas into triangles, spray them with Pam, shove them into the oven at 400 degrees for about 4 minutes or something like that. Then put your veggies on your tostadas, sprinkle cheese on top, and pop them back in until the cheese melts.

This is a delicious and easy meal, and really fun to eat. What's more, it's really cheap and great to use leftovers in. But the best thing of all, is that it uses all the summer veggie flavors.

Another thing I love to do with fresh raw veggies (including the rest of my monster zucchini) is just chop them up, sprinkle them with salt and drizzle them with olive oil, and make them part of a fresh snack plate for dinner. We did this with some leftover steak, cherry tomatoes, olives, and cheese and crackers for dinner the next night and it was great.

So I can't wait until my two new little zucchini
give me a reason to come up with several more ways to stretch the bounty!

Monster Zucchini

Skippy's vegetable garden is showing her first zucchini.

I remember way back when when I was asking Maybelline tips for how to grow my own zucchini (she is in Bakersfield and it just seems like food leaps out of the ground onto your plate from her garden . . . she already has so many tomatoes she had to start canning!)

I have my first zucchini, too!

WHOA! WHERE DID THAT COME FROM? it's over a foot long.

Well, it started with the beautiful zucchini squash blossoms. Some people like to fry them up and eat them. It's kind of a pain in the butt so I haven't done that yet. There are a million of them, though, so if i was inclined, i could. Actually it's the most copious thing in the garden.


There are two kinds of squash blossoms, female and male. I posted about this previously, but it bears repeating, especially now that I have so much photographic illustrative evidence. The way you can tell the difference is: the male flowers are on top of skinny long stems, and the female flowers are on top of, well - nubs that are attached to the base of the plant, which will one day, if fertilized, turn into a zucchini.

Who does the fertilizing? Bees, and other insects, i guess. That's why if you are going to eat squash blossoms you need to check inside for bugs.

So, these are all male flowers.
You can tell by their long skinny stems.


And here is a female flower.


You can tell because it is attached to a nub that is close to the base of a plant. Know what that nub is?

It's a zucchini! I was as surprised as you. The flower on the top falls off and it just keeps growing and growing.

It becomes something like this:
Is this not crazy? nature is weird and very cool.

Now, what would happen to female flowers when they are not fertilized? Unfortunately, the nub just withers up and never becomes a zucchini - a wasted chance for the plant to produce a valuable vegetable. Sometimes it takes days for the flower to fall off. It's pretty sad, too. Especially when you are waiting and waiting for your plant to produce another zucchini and you have six or seven male flowers, waiting to fertilize another female flower.

Like this. Argh. Why won't you grow? It's all limp and flexible, and then a day or two after this photo, it was completely withered and dried out.

Well, anyway, this zucchini just kept growing and growing

ANd i didn't really know what I should do - pick it at a certain size, or what? Also, i didn't know how to pick it, which is a stupid question, really, but it's true.

Then one day we came out and this monster was just laying on the ground. It was so huge and heavy it made my husband feel inadequate just looking at it. It probably doesn't even taste good. I HAD to pick it, so i just lifted it up and lightly twisted the base, and it came right off.

Can't wait to grill this sucker up and use it with the leftover grilled corn and steak on some tostadas!

Squash blossoms

I heard about frying squash blossoms before and somewhere I remember that these mythical squash blossoms grow on your zucchini plants . . . so i've been waiting . . . . and watching

and these appeared:
I first noticed these about three days ago (after those heavy rains). They are crusted with dirty in the above photo.

Today, though, they were larger and vibrantly full of color:
It's amazing how fast things grow in this garden! I mean, wow.

I was looking around for the place I read about the fried squash blossom recipe and found this scrumptious one on a blog called Cooking With Anne. But, in addition to her recipe, Anne related some very valuable information - there are male and female blossoms (duh), meaning, some of the blossoms will produce fruit (or vegetables, as is the case here) and need to be left on the plant. These are called the female blossoms. You want to pluck off the male blossoms only, Anne says.

This makes a world of sense. Here is a great informative link describing how to discern between the male and female blossoms, with pictorial illustrations. The easiest way to differentiate is by looking at the bottom of the blossom - is there a green bump, or a long skinny stem? If it's a stem, it's a male flower. If it's the green bump, it's female, and the bump eventually grows into zucchini, as long as that flower is pollinated. Another way you can tell is that the male flowers have nothing but stamen inside, the female flowers . . .. more female looking stuff.

One other tidbit I learned was that if the female flowers are not fertilized, they wither up and die. Hmmmm, reminds me of how a lot of the flowers on the Early Girl plant are looking right now. More on that later.

Anne's recipe is to pipe a mixture of goat cheese and chives into the blossoms, dip into a loose batter and fry in oil until crispy .. . . hers look divine but I don't want to steal the photo. Go to her blog to check it out and hopefully I will have my own to show soon!

The Peas are so Cute

These sugar snaps are so sweet. (not tasting. They aren't producing anything yet or I would have snapped them up and stuffed them in my mouth and then all you would be reading is the equivalent of me munching: nom nom nom . . . ) No, I mean sweet in a heart-warming way.

They have these little tendrils that are sent out every two inches or so along the stem and reeeeeeach for something to cling to, and then twine and twine around it, helping it climb higher and higher. This is how vines work.


I don't know how much higher it needs to climb before it begins to flower.
But it is really starting to lean out and I have had to direct it back to its "trellis". It could probably use a better trellis than a tomato cage, but I don't know, seems to be working ok for now. I planted about twenty more sugar snap pea seeds and hopefully they will start coming up soon!

Now look at the zucchini - it's really getting big and beautiful!
At least this plant is. It also has some smaller inner leaves developing.
Some of the plants have a yellow sickness, though. Why must something always be wrong in this garden?

Take a look at the zucchini plant in the middle:
Some of the leaves are completely yellow and you can see where some of them are yellowing around the edges.

Then there is the one on the end:
All yellowing around the edges. ???? I've found a couple of other people who have had this problem such as this blogger , who seems to have had a split stem in her zucchini plant. We don't seem to have that problem yet, the plants aren't big enough. Other sources say it could be a nitrogen deficiency. Apparently you can correct that with liquid fish fertilizer or with manure. You gotta love the internet, don't you? How would I be finding out all of this without it?

For instance, I learned that when your cilantro looks like this:
It means that it is bolting. Bolting means it is about to stop producing the tasty flat leaves we like to eat and it is about to begin flowering and producing the seeds we like to grind for ground coriander. You can tell by the feathery-type leaves it produces, as you can see up at the top.

I did a lot of research over the past two days and there are several schools of thought on the cilantro. You can either, in the first place, plant the slow-bolting variety. On the other hand, some feel that you can pinch off the feathery leaves when they appear, and this may slow or stop the bolting and coax your plant to continue producing the flat leaves. (This is hotly contested.) Third, you can and should plant rotated crops of cilantro so that when your plants start bolting, you can have the new plants getting ready to produce.

Thankfully for me, a BIG cilantro lover, three of the cilantro seeds I planted are steadily growing:
So pretty soon I will cut off all the cilantro on the above plant and make a big batch of cilantro pesto, freeze it, and save it. It is GREAT on chicken tacos. I'll post the recipe!!