Okra, Tomatoes and Nasty Orange Bugs

Okra is having its heyday in our garden. Every day we pick a couple of handfuls. Except when we skip a day, and then we get this:

Unfortunately, the giant okra is just too tough and fibrous, and the bottom half of these big guys end up in the compost bin.

I love the okra blossoms, that creamy yellow with the velvety burgundy center. You can see that we will continue to get okra for while...look at all those babies.

Okra plants in the garden
about 4 1/2 to 5 feet tall.

That's Spaz , world's most misnamed cat, trying to have a private moment in the shade.

Here are our two first San Marzano tomatoes, a Sicilian paste variety, along with some more reasonably sized okra. When you cut into these tomatoes, there is no juice and jelly like stuff around the seeds, and the walls of the tomato are very thick. They are supposed to be the best for spaghetti sauce, and I hope to get to try that out. Although we only have the one plant, it has 15 or more green tomatoes on it right now, several about to ripen.

San Marzano

The Early Girl bush tomato also has over a dozen tomatoes on it right now, after taking a brief break after it s first blush of prodution, and there are a few green ones on the Black, an heirloom tomato that is sprawling all over the corner of the garden and which I planted from seed. I am really excited; I have never had luck growing tomatoes from seed before.

And here are the nasty bugs that are trying to suck the life out of my tomatoes.

They are the immature, or nymph, form of the stink bug, or a similar variety, called the leaf-footed beetle...or something like that. Since I took this picture on Thursday or Friday, I managed to deal with a few of them by hand (ugh), and the rest morphed into the regular brown stink bugs.

Kitchen Garden

It's hard to believe that June is almost over. The garden is definitely in full summer mode. Edward is watering almost every morning before work. The lettuces and spinach all started going to seed, and I pulled out the spindly remains of the spinach a few days ago. The later developing cauliflower aren't going to do much more than start to flower and will be pulled out soon too. In their places I am planning to seed swiss chard, the young tender leaves can be used in salad and mature ones eaten sauteed and sliced up and added to soups and stews, to replace all the wonderful lettuces and spinach that I hate to see go when the weather gets hot. I will also transplant a couple of the Asian eggplant seedlings that I have started in a protected planter box against the house into the garden.
I have two lush patches of overgrown arugula. They are really too big, that is strong and spicy, to eat raw at this point (alas, we love a simple arugula salad with a lemon and olive oil or red wine vinagrette), but I am going to try to salvage some of it by making arugula pesto. I plan to quickly blanch it first to tone down some of the heat and sharpness. I read about arugula pesto a couple of months ago on In My Kitchen Garden, the alternate blog of Susan of Farmgirl Fare, also a great find for fresh recipes and pictures of very cute baby lambs. Susan raves not only about the yummy pesto but about the instant gratification of growing arugula from seed in your garden. I definitely agree! She also offers a great idea and a scrumptious picture for arugula pesto pizza.

From our front yard garden.
The tomatoes don't last very long in our house,
but I've been saving up these first okra to sautee with cumin.

Edward pulled the first carrot.

Hmm, it's awfully dirty!

Sea World

We spent last weekend tent camping and going to Sea World with our Girl Scout troop.

We braved the heat, walked for miles, got splashed by Shamu (phew), laughed at the sea lions, screamed on the Atlantis, relaxed by the wave pool and shopped for overpriced souvenirs.

The Shamu/orca show was pretty amazing and actually quite moving.

We thoroughly enjoyed it, and I heard rumors on the way home that the girls want to go back next year...but in an RV!

Reaching to pet the dolphins

Fairy swirl face paint

Face paint after the Rio Loco water ride
Now she's ready for Halloween.

Summer Hair Cut

On the first Monday of vacation, R got her summer hair cut.

Hair damp from the shower and ready to go to the salon. The sticker on her shoulder has a line and says, Cut here.

Nine inches later, or lighter.

I think she likes it!

Mosaic Pots

I'm finally getting around to posting pics of the grouted garden pots. The first one was grouted in charcoal. The shiny, white pieces are mirror.

This one in a slate blue:

And then it was time to grout the bigger pot. But what color? I thought about sandstone.


Then I asked for advice and got a lot of ideas. After considering dark green, I settled on terracotta. Unfortunately, the bag of grout I got that was labeled terracotta turned out to be more of a dark, dull brick red, certainly fine for some project...well, I hope I will be able to use it again...but this really needed a warmer, more earth tone.

Baking bread

Last weekend in the midst of kids in tents, visits to area farmers' markets and a surprise water heater emergency (as if there's a such thing as a planned water heater emergency) I decided to bake bread. Not throw the ingredients in the machine and push a button bread, but three different risings and kneading bread. Bread that matured and became more complex and interesting through its longer, cooler rising times and over night stays in the fridge. I started the bread just after noon on Saturday as a half whole wheat and half unbleached white all purpose poolish (a watery starter that sits out and develops), and we ate it at dinner Monday night. Bread is a deceptively simple thing: flour, water, yeast, a little salt (unless you're in Tuscany, but that's a different story, and you can always just throw a few grains on a slice when your host or waiter isn't looking.) Serious bread makers usually have brands and types of flour they prefer, and some recipes very definitely specify bottled or spring water. This time, just by accident (water heater, remember?) I used bottled water in the poolish and in the dough itself. After the first rising of the dough, it was so big I didn't know if it would fit on my pizza stone.

Dough ready to go on hot stone

This is basically the America's Test Kitchen Rustic Country Bread with a little rye flour. The loaf was gorgeous.
Rustic country bread in the oven

However, while the bread was yummy, and made great toast for our artichoke-crab dip later in the week, the crumb was a little dense; it didn't have those big holes I thought it should have. I think I'd add a little more water next time.

To go with the bread...because after 3 days in the making, the bread was really the focus of the meal...I made a very fresh and light lentil and basmati rice soup with diced carrot, cumin and fennel seed, and diced yellow squash, shredded spinach and arugula from the garden. It was even well accepted by the 10 year old, and the cup of it that was left over was even better for lunch the next day.

Lentil spring vegetable soup

And yes, I finally got a hot shower.

Mosaic Garden Pots WIPs

Sunday I started working with thinset as an adhesive for the first time. In addition to being the correct adhesive for outdoor objects, I am enjoying working it for these pots over other glues I've tried for non-flat, non-horizontal surfaces. I am still getting used to it.

One of my biggest problems with something vertical, or 3d, is impatience! In fact, I have been known to try to rush things along, not let the pieces dry long enough before turning the work, mess everything up and get really frustrated....like a million times. So today I solved that problem to some degree. I just worked on two pieces at once.

The larger pot


One pot ready to grout, splotchy with thinset and another sealed and drying.

The pot to the right is now about 1/3 done with blue, lavender and blue, and white and blue tessera, as I alternated between that and the bigger green, black and white pot...much less frustrating to wait out the drying time that way. I worked out on my deck much of the day, in spite of the wasp that began hovering around and around under the table, until a little after two. It was 92 degrees and definitely time to come in. Of course my child hurried through her math this afternoon and ran outside to ride her bike.