urban kitchen garden design & guidance
1. Spinach was bolting – I cut it back and used it in an Indian lentil dish.
2. First sowing of cilantro bolted and I pulled it out.
3. California poppy is blooming.
4. Arugula is flowering – I must pull it out soon.
5. I pulled out the bolting red mustard and sowed basil around the bed edge instead.
6. The borage is blooming, encouraging lots of bees!
Borage blooms a luminous blue.
In another case of “if life gives you lemons”…the too-tall Genovese basil that I couldn’t get hardened off got pruned back to a reasonable size and I made pesto with the clippings.
Genovese basil is my favorite basil to use in the kitchen. The leaves are large enough to roll up and slice into a chiffonade and small enough to use whole in my favorite Thai chickpea curry. Along with mint, basil is one of my quintessential summertime herbs, and, just like mint, I find it easy to grow. I like to do two sowings a season: the first sowing is done indoors in the early spring, about 6-8 weeks before the last average frost date into newspaper pots, and the second sowing is done in the garden after transplanting the first group of basil. I do this kind of succession planting because once the heat hits, basil starts to flower which alters the flavor of the leaves.
I usually plant basil around the edge of beds that contain tomatoes – they combine as well in the garden as they do in the kitchen – and they have the same sun, water, and soil requirements. They both like more than 6 hours of direct sun a day, never let them dry out, and give them a compost-rich, well-draining soil. The basil gets fertilizer when I feed the tomatoes, a couple of times during the season, with a fish and seaweed organic liquid fertilizer. And that’s about it, except for harvesting regularly to prevent flowering and to keep the plant bushy.
Which is why, even though I hadn’t managed to plant them out, I was making pesto in May…
The raw ingredients about to be transformed.
The finished product...now comes the fun part of deciding what to eat it with.
Basil Pesto
Combine basil, pine nuts, and garlic in a food processor or blender; pulse mixture until the basil leaves are a bit chopped up. Add rest of ingredients and process until the mixture is the desired consistency. Can be stored in the fridge, covered, for about a week (the flavors will intensify but the color will darken). It can be frozen but leave out the cheese and blend it in when the pesto is thawed.
I tossed it with some pasta and shredded roast chicken but I also like it drizzled over boiled potatoes and steamed asparagus as a warm salad. It works well as a garnish for tomato-based soups, including minestrone. And my friend, Ilene, introduced me to the fantastic flavor combination of pesto and pretzels.
So my first harvest of the season is one I usually have to wait until mid-summer to appreciate. Here’s to being an impatient gardener who starts her seeds too early!
Over these last couple of weeks I’ve been reminded that surviving an Edmonton winter is nothing compared to surviving an Edmonton spring! A week of warm weather that prompts the pulling off of sweaters and putting on of shorts is abruptly terminated by a week of temperatures barely hovering above the necessity of a parka, and I, along with my tomato, tomatillo, pepper, basil, cucumber, and zucchini plants, are all struggling to adapt.
Zucchini blossoms
Tomatillo blossom
Tomato blossoms
Lemon basil cold damage
I admit, the plants are having a tougher time hardening-off than I am. Because we have yet to create sweaters for basil plants, some have leaves that are slightly blackened in spots (a sign that temperatures have been too cold for them). Two out of the four lemon cucumbers I started informed me, in no uncertain terms, that they were unhappy by quickly wilting and then, just as quickly, by dying (wimps!). The peppers won’t let me know for a while whether they’ve been affected – if they have, they’ll delay blossoming until they feel they’ve met their heat quotient and, if I’m lucky, push out a few fruits before the temperatures drop again. My heart goes out to the tomatoes and the tomatillos though – they’ve been so eagerly growing, pushing out flowers, clearly anticipating their new life out in the garden (in the newly renovated beds we recently constructed). But they’re weathering the disappointment the best of all of them except maybe the zucchini; they’ve started to open up some exuberant, relentlessly cheerful blossoms, optimistically hoping for, I guess, a winged pollinator to stop by – but it’s too cold for even a house fly.
So the hardening-off process will have to start all over again – when the nightime temperatures don’t fall below 10 deg. C. Usually I start hardening-off my plants by putting them outside in a shaded spot for about four hours when the day time temperature is about 15 deg. C. I gradually extend the time the plants spend outside and, by the second week, when I start leaving them outside overnight, I move them into a sunnier spot during the day.
If only I could toughen myself up in a similar way…please let spring arrive soon!