I’ve continued to shoot timelapse video of the various veggies we grow in the garden. Here’s one more from last fall, of some sugar snap peas. They grew so fast I had to shoot twice a day! I was blown away by the origami-like way each pair of leaves unfolds as the vines grow, and the branching tendrils that whip out and grab on to whatever they can find. You might also notice some sudden changes in early September: we had a brutal heat wave that almost killed the plants. Some quick thinking and an old kid-sized umbrella saved them from total destruction. Not all of the plants survived, but the ones that made it produced crunchy pods as sweet as candy. Will definitely grow these again!
The peppers ripen amazingly fast once they get started.
One minor success of our summer garden has been the pepper plants. They haven’t produced a lot of peppers, but the ones they’ve made have been crispy and super sweet. Apologies for the shaky camera – it was hard to keep a steady viewpoint with the phone poised on a head of fast-growing lettuce. (Memo to self: maybe use a monopod next time?)
The first month of our shiso plants. Left: green shiso; right: red shiso.
This season I got a head start on the garden, and also started branching out with some interesting-sounding seed packets from local growers. One herb I absolutely love, but have only ever seen in Japanese food, is shiso leaf. I wanted to see if we could grow it here, and what else we could do with it besides roll it in sushi. So far it’s been a raging success: a ridiculous number of sprouts have come up, seemingly twice as many as the seeds I planted. The leaves are gorgeous and super aromatic. Really looking forward to seeing what we can make out of this later in the year!
It’s also really fantastic on avocado toast. Left: with pepitas, ancho chile flakes, and cilantro from the garden. Right: with sesame and red shiso.
When life gives you gherkins, you make bread-and-butter pickles. At least, that’s what I’ve been doing. I started with this recipe, but as usual, had to modify it based on what we happened to have in our spice rack. I made a few rookie moves, like using the mandoline bare-handed (and let me tell you, that’s a mistake you’ll only make once. Those things are vicious!) But the pickles are so worth it. Sweet and spicy, great with a sandwich, or just straight out of the jar in your pyjamas (not that I’d ever do that, no sir.)
These fresh gherkins have an amazing flavor, almost sweet, even the weird-looking yellow ones.Finally got an excuse to use the zigzag blade on the mandoline!Cinnamon, turmeric, clove, cardamom, mustard seed, white peppercorns, chili flakes.Two 5-inch gherkins, with 1/2 cup of pickling syrup, will just about fill one pint jar.
Our new hand-built garden enclosure seems to be doing its job perfectly: we used wire mesh (or hardware cloth as the pros call it) with 1/2″ holes, too small for rats and mice to crawl through, but still plenty of room for the bees that have been happily pollinating our cucumber flowers.
Vegetable gardening and timelapse photography turn out to be an amazingly good match, because they both seem to make me pay attention to tiny details that would otherwise escape my notice. I never thought much about male and female flowers before, but on this gherkin plant it’s really obvious which ones are which: the males have pointy petals, and the females come equipped with a proto-fruit, ready for seed. Much less obvious is how they behave after pollination: some fruits grow, some shrivel up immediately, and others grow for a while, and then seem to give up halfway and start shrinking again. (I’ve read that this last case is what happens when there are some fertilized seeds, but not enough to fill the entire fruit.)
Here’s that big gherkin from the timelapse above. It was delicious.
I’m blown away by how fast the gherkin plant has grown. In just a few weeks’ time it exploded to ten times its original size, and it hasn’t stopped. On a hot day it can grow 2 inches taller. So far the tree rats have left it alone– our lettuce was not so lucky– but with fruit like this on the vine, I don’t know how long they’ll be able to resist it.
Cassidy Curtis's splendid display of colorful things.
