Garden in the Second Half of June, 2020

 

The end of June is not as exciting as high spring in the garden.  The daffodils and tulips are long gone.  Some of the allium is taking off, and there are peonies.  

The annuals are still little things without much drama, so we are grateful for the allium altopurpureum (those are the deep purple ones) and allium nigrum (the white ones - go figure!).  The giant alliums have already gone to seed.

This is the first year for the peonies, and three plants have bloomed, but with only 1-3 blooms.

In the absence of flowers, we take joy where we find it.

Can you guess what these white ones are?

They are mushrooms!

The most exciting crop of June is Strawberries - These are Mara des Bois, a French strawberry with outstanding flavor.  They are not very firm, which means they will not travel well, so they are not grown commercially.  In June, we harvested a total of 9 pints.

Spring is mud season, and lace-up boots are difficult to remove to go in an out.  

This is a handy mud remover.

This boot scraper is made of two industrial stiff pushbrooms, handles removed.  They were cut in half and screwed to boards to scrape bottom and sides of boot at once.  In the garage, it lives under a bookcase, and the string is used to pull it out easily.  Then, when not in use, it is kicked under the bookcase, out of sight.

And it's time to anticipate summer blooms.  This frame will support lots of dahlias, as well as some gladiolus and zinnias.

The Tibetan Prayer Flags make me smile as they send prayers in the wind.

We will enjoy the bench seen in the background all summer!

Other creatures enjoy the garden.  During an afternoon of reading in the screen house, I looked up to see a cardinal perched on the apple tree cage.

His lady appeared right after he left.

It turns out, we had a nest of cardinals in the hedge.  How cool is that!

(These photos were shot through the screen of the screen-house.)

This is a time to get the tomatoes staked.

Tommy just enjoys being out!

D's experiment this year is growing Brugmansia.  This plant is often called Angel's Trumpet for the large, fragrant flowers that hang down to earth.  

(That name is also often given to Datura, a closely related Genus, also in the Family Solanaceae.  Datura flowers usually point up.  Other members of this genus are Deadly Nightshade, tomatoes, eggplant, potato.)

We did not expect them to flower the first year, so this was a wonderful surprise!

At first glance, this looks like a toad - and we do have a resident toad in the tomato garden.

But if you pick it up, you see it is a nut, dropped here by a neighborhood squirrel.

You can see the end of May, 2020, here.

And the first half of June is here.

Experiments with Extracts

A friend made homemade vanilla extract, and I was suitably impressed.  It was delicious and a huge improvement over store-bought pure vanilla.  It's all gone, so I bought some McCormick's.  Disappointing!  And it's the time of year for strawberries and whipped cream - the mara des bois strawberries are yielding one or two cups a day - can't have lousy vanilla for that!  So I googled.  Turns out it's quite simple to make vanilla extract - add vanilla beans to booze and wait weeks to months to years.  I had some bourbon left over from a mint-julep craze a few years ago. . . Let's try that.

  This is five beans cut in half and split.

After I started steeping the vanilla in bourbon, a youtube video suggested using spiced rum!  Won't that be a great experiment for another day.

Well, now that I'm steeping things, what else can I use?  A friend gave me a clump of chives a year or two ago, and we have divided them and scattered them throughout the garden.

I picked some for dry flowers to lend some color for the winter.

Another friend had put chive blossoms in salad, so I knew they had a great peppery taste, but they don't last all summer, and although I had picked some for dry flowers, there still were many that would go to waste.  Again, off to google to see what to do with chive blossoms.  One suggestion was chive vinegar.

Simply steep the blossoms in vinegar.

Such a lovely pink color.  This will be great in salads - vinaigrette, German potato salad, tuna salad.  You won't see the pink color, but it's fun on the counter!

We have some interesting alliums this year, including this allium atropurpureum.

With the chive vinegar for inspiration, I decided to try using the allium atropurpureum in vinegar.

It's making a lovely purple color!

So what else could I put in vinegar????  It's too soon for cucumber pickles, but D likes pickles as a side to the evening snack.  Ahhhh - red onions!  I added black pepper, mustard seed, and star anise to the vinegar.  Very nice!



What's next?

Maybe compound butters?