Time for Herby Salads!

It is the season for salads and herbs! Here is a great recipe from our friend Molly Stevens that uses basil from the garden and is perfect for all of the greens and cucumbers and tomatoes that summer brings.

This is also your friendly reminder to salt your cucumbers before making a salad with them. They will be extra crunchy, won’t release their water into the dressing and thereby dilute the flavors, and they’ll absorb the herb flavors a little more. Just peel, slice, and toss with salt or herb salt in a colander over a bowl or in the sink. Wait 30 to 60 minutes (even overnight can work), and then taste. If they are much too salty, then rinse and pat dry. If the salt level works for you, toss with your favorite dressing or just lemon juice and olive oil.

Perfect summer side with grilled meats or fish or a sandwich.

Summer Recipes

What to do when it is too hot to cook? Salads and iced teas are the answer along with some simple ideas like these garden to kitchen solutions:

• slice radishes, cherry tomatoes and cucumbers and dip in herb salt

• have a salad bar ready to go at all times - washed greens, a big batch of vinaigrette or other dressing, containers of chopped herbs, peeled and sliced cucumbers, beets (cooked, peeled, sliced), grated carrots, some cheese or cold chicken chopped up

• hard boiled eggs in a bowl in the fridge. Peel, cut in half, sprinkle with herbs and herb salt.

• herbal teas in half gallon mason jars made with sprigs of mint, lemon balm, and/or lemon verbena

• grill up zucchini and summer squash in the cool of the evening and toss with olive oil, herbs, and flaky sea salt. Serve as a room temperature salad with some freshly grated parmesan, lemon zest and a squeeze of lemon.

• pre-salt your vegetables to tenderize them and make them crunchy at the same time. Our herb salts are a great tool for this technique. We suggest about 1/2 tsp of salt for every 4 cups of sliced cucumbers, summer squash, zucchini or cabbage. Slice or julienne or shred the vegetables, toss and gently massage with the herb salt, and let drain in a colander for an hour or so. After this rest period, the vegetables will have a great texture. Taste for saltiness, and rinse if they seem too salty. They are ready to eat in salads dressed simply with herbal flower vinegar or lemon juice, a good olive oil, and a generous shower of herbs such as basil, parsley, dill, cilantro, oregano, marjoram, mint or chives. The flavors will pop!

SUMMER SALADS

We leave behind those tender lettuces that wilt and bolt in the heat and embrace some hardier textures. And maybe you did not replant lettuce to have some nice fresh heads right about now. Have no fear, shame or guilt…other options for summer salads out of the garden are bountiful. Here are a few favorites that all work well at room temperature and hold up reliably for picnics or packed lunches:

Fennel and herbs - using a sharp knife or a mandolin, shave fennel bulbs into thin slices. Toss with a handful of chopped herbs, thin slices of sweet or white onion, and a simple lemon and olive oil dressing. Sprinkle with herb salt generously, and then let the mixture sit for at least an hour before serving. The fennel will soften and become tender and crunchy at the same time.

Summer Squash - follow the same exact instructions as above, but use raw summer squash or zucchini sliced into thin ribbons with a mandolin or vegetable peeler. We love this one with a little garlic in the dressing and marjoram as the herb.

Grilled eggplant and cherry tomatoes - roast or grill 1/2” thick slices of eggplant that have been brushed with olive oil until they are tender. Allow to cool, then cut into wide strips. Toss with halved cherry tomatoes, scallions that are thinly sliced, and torn basil leaves. Dress lightly with olive oil and balsamic and shower with our herb salt or a flaky sea salt.

IT IS THE SEASON OF BEANS

We love green beans, wax beans, and Romano beans for simple, weeknight meals:

Salad - Blanch them in boiling, salted water for a few minutes until tender. Drain and cool down under cold, running water. Dry well on clean kitchen towels, then toss in a big bowl with sliced scallions, halved cherry tomatoes, herbs, and a simple vinaigrette.

Stir fry - If you have more blanched beans than you can eat in one meal, save some for another night to make a quick sauté in olive oil with sweet onions, sweet peppers, and herbs of your choice. This is a great side for roast or grilled chicken.

Roasted - Lay raw beans on a sheet pan, drizzle with sesame oil, finely chopped garlic and/or ginger, hot pepper flakes, soy sauce or tamari, and toss together. Place in a pre-heated 400F oven (or grill if you don’t want to heat your house) for about 20 to 25 minutes, flipping part way through. They should be charred in places, and soft in others.

This blog post was written by Julie Rubaud and Kat Consler.

Plant of the Week (POW)

This week’s plant of the week is actually a whole group of plants. We are offering flowering vines, and if you buy ONE, you will get THREE free! They’re a bit tangled together at this point, but they are healthy and dark green, and with a little patience can be untangled and turned into an almost instant trellised green wall. Or make a teepee out of bamboo and let them climb all over the structure. Cover an old fence, create a privacy screen, pull down the gone-by spring peas and replant with flower vines. You get the picture - there are lots of fun uses for flowering vines. Please note, that this is while supplies last. If we run out of vines, we will switch to something else for our Plant of the Week (POW). The selection includes

• Cypress VIne

• Morning Glories (3 different kinds)

• Hyacinth Bean Vine

• Sweet Peas

• Scarlet Runner Beans

IN THE GARDEN

Maintenance pruning and weeding in the perennial gardens

The rain has been such a blessing this past week. We are now seeing lots of weeds and quick new growth and jungle feeling is real! May I suggest our sickle weeder and our small snips as tools to help you in that endeavor? When the garden is growing so quickly, it becomes harder to get weeds with a hoe, so I turn to my hand tools for a quick cultivation run through when the weeds are small.

If your strawberries have finished producing fruit, it is time to renovate them

1. mow it down (the whole thing, with a line trimmer)

2. rototill the edges of the beds to keep the growth in the center of the bed, and out of the walking paths

3. fertilize the strip of stubble that will remain and become next year’s bed and water it well if we have another dry spell.

Check your garlic. It is ready to harvest when about ⅔ to ¾ of the leaves have turned brown. We will probably harvest ours next week.

Wash and prep your vegetables as soon as you harvest them. Lettuce greens store so much better when they have been washed and dried first. I try to prep everything I harvest as soon as I bring it into the kitchen. Bags of dirty, hot greens just wilt and get ignored, but if I trim, wash, and dry salad greens, I am much more likely to eat a salad with every meal. I have been blanching chard and kale as I bring it home too. I then have an easy cooked green to eat with eggs or add to a taco, or a grain bowl. It makes meal planning a lot easier.

Late June Garden Chores

Plant now for this look later in the summer.

IN THE GARDEN

—> Keeping up with the weeds after the rain is a priority. They will all bounce up and make a carpet in no time. For best results, cultivate when the weeds are young, once the soil has dried out.

—> Fertilize onions, leeks, and shallots because this is when they put on the most growth. I use Compost Plus and water once or twice with fish emulsion during the weeks of late June and early July.

—> Stake and prune tomatoes. Keep the suckers pinched off, and the foliage off the ground. Doing this now will keep the plants disease free for much longer. If you have not yet, I recommend mulching under the plants to keep the soil from splashing up on the leaves since this is one of the ways disease can spread. We will show you how to do this on our July 1st Plant Walk.

—> Now is a great time to put in a strawberry or asparagus patch. We have both available as bare root stock and our retail team can explain how to do it if you are not sure.

—> I have planted all the required staples such as tomatoes, peppers, squash, etc, and now I am ready to plant the electives. This week it is the cut flower garden. I have the following combos planned for different spots in the new display garden (which you can see on our First Thursday Plant Walks).

• -Marble Arch Mix Salvia, Cosmos, Zinnia ‘Benary’s Giant White’

• -Verbena bonariensis, Zinnias ‘Benary’s Giant Mix’ and ‘State Fair Mix’, Rudbeckia hirta

• -Statice, Strawflower, Gomphrena, Celosia, Amaranth (all for drying)

• -Sunflowers - a crazy mix of all of our varieties

Peppers

We grew an abundance of peppers this year. With 35 varieties on our plant list, it is hard to not grow too many. Every variety deserves a chance and some are absolute favorites and I end up planting 6 or more plants of each, but really I am making a giant note to stop this madness next year. Every day, for the past month, I am starring at huge bags of peppers in the fridge and figuring out what to do with them. Not a bad problem to have, especially these days. Here are a few things I have been doing.

Pickled Cherry Bomb and other Hot Peppers

I make a brine that is based on this basic recipe from the cook book 6 Seasons by Joshua McFadden and Martha Holmberg. This amount is about enough for 3 pints.

½ cup rice vinegar

1 tablespoon white wine vinegar

1 ½ cups water

3 tablespoons sugar (original recipe calls for 5 TBS)

1 tablespoon plus 1 teaspoon kosher salt

Bring ingredients to a boil,

Pack washed, stemmed and seeded (optional) peppers into clean glass jars. Add a clove of garlic and a sprig of thyme to each jar.

Pour hot brine over the peppers, filling each jar to the top. Let cool to room temperature and then store in the refrigerator. Please note this brine solution is not acidic enough to preserve the peppers with a hot water bath method of canning. These are refrigerator pickles that will keep for months. I pack big ½ gallon jars of them into the back of the fridge and use them all winter, chopped into tacos, as a topping for sandwiches, stuffed, etc.

You can pickle sweet peppers too, using this method.

Hungarian Hot Wax peppers are perfect for pickling.

I also made this pepper relish recently and really liked it. You can incorporate some hot peppers into the mix if you want it spicy. This is for canning with a hot water bath method. If you have never done this, please make sure to look up a reliable tutorial, like this one.

Pepper Relish

adapted from Well Preserved by Mary Anne Dragan

6 cups of finely chopped sweet peppers, combination of colors. A few hot peppers can be included in the 6 cups for a spicy relish.

2 cups of finely chopped onion

2 cups of cider vinegar

1 cup of sugar (I used ¾)

2 tablespoons of mixed pickling spice (I did not have a pre-made blend, so made my own with coriander seed, bay leaf, a few cloves, a few black peppercorns, 2 dried chilies, and a tsp of mustard seed) in a cheesecloth bundle or a tea ball.

2 teaspoons of dried hot pepper flakes or substitute with fresh hot peppers

2 teaspoons of salt

Combine peppers and onions into a bowl, and pour boiling water over them. Let sit 5 minutes, then drain well.

Combine the remaining ingredients into a large pot, and bring to a boil. Add the vegetables, and stir to combine. Reduce the heat to medium, stirring occasionally for about 30 minutes.

Remove from the heat, take out the spice bag. Spoon the relish into hot sterilized jars, leaving ½ inch of head space. Release the air bubbles, wipe the rims of jars clean, seal according to manufacturer’s directions. Process the jars in a boiling water bath for 10 minutes. Please refer to this process here if you are not familiar with canning.

Other ways to preserve peppers

I freeze them. Just chop up raw peppers, and slide them into a freezer bag. That is it. They can be used in all kinds of stews, soups and braises over the winter.

I make a big pot of sautéed peppers and caramelized onions and freeze that in small bags. In winter, it can be turned into a tasty spread or dip by placing the thawed mixture in a blender with some walnuts, or cheese, or olives or dehydrated tomatoes.

I roast peppers, tomatoes, eggplants, onions and summer squash or zucchini with olive oil, salt, garlic and herbs at 400F for about 45 minutes. I freeze that mixture in freezer bags and then use it as a base for pasta sauces, soups, and a topping for pizza.

Zucchini Days

• It is that time of year, when the zucchini plants needs to get checked every couple of days or you end up with some giant baseball bats in no time. I have unfortunately not followed my own advice, and ignored my plant for 2 weeks straight, only to be confronted with vegetable mayhem. But, in need of some inspiration, I have turned to social media to find out what you all are doing with your big zucchini and here is a round up of the brilliant ideas:

• shredding all the zucchini in 2 cup measurements and freezing it. I make zucchini tots and bread in the winter! Also made a zucchini pie with corn and mushrooms, one for the freezer, one now.

• Bread, cookies, zucchini noodles

• I just made zucchini chocolate chip bread

• Zucchini pizza crust: There’s recipes online but also in the old-school Moosewood cookbook: grate and salt zuke, wring it out, mix with eggs, a small amount of flour, parmesan and mozzarella, bake, dress with toppings and bake again. I’m still tweaking things to make the crust more crusty and less soggy, but it’s really tasty.

• Bread or baked stuffed zucchini .

• Roasted in tomatoes, garlic scapes and butter. Finish with fresh goat cheese

• Among my favorites: grated into fresh spaghetti sauce, roasted w/ olive oil as a side veg, zucchini relish using my Mom’s recipe!

• Walk around Shaw’s and Hannaford’s parking lots and put some in every vehicle with its windows down. 😂 That’s what my grandfather used to do.

• Zucchini lemon bread with apple juice from how to cook everything- Mark Bittman ( fruit and veg bread)-

• Smitten kitchen zucchini fritters!

• obviously you could install an engine into that big guy. take it for a spin.

Thanks for all the suggestions! Here are the two I am making this week:

Chocolate zucchini bread from King Arthur and the zucchini fritters from Smitten Kitchen.