Zucchini Fritters

It's that time of year when a zucchini grower gets desperate to find new ways to make zucchini appetizing. Here is a recipe that is very popular with the entire family. It's quick and easy - fried zucchini fritters. I wouldn't call it overly healthy since it does involve frying the fritters in oil so we try not to do it more than once a week.
This is a rather loose recipe. A little more or less cheese can be used. Onion can replace garlic. It can be fun to play with and try new things.

Ingredients:
2 cups grated zucchini
1/2 tablespoon minced garlic
2 eggs
1 cup flour
1 cup grated cheddar cheese
Oil - I use olive oil


Mix all the ingredients thoroughly. Put enough oil in the fry pan to be at least 1/4 inch deep. Heat the oil on medium high and then drop the batter by generous tablespoon fulls in the batter, flattening the fritter a bit with the spoon. Brown on both sides. Remove, let drain a bit on a paper towel and serve.

Golden Berry

Last year somebody handed these out at a gathering for everyone to try. They were sweet and tasted like pineapple. Unfortunately I didn't catch what they were called.
I'd never seen them before so I did a search and came up with Physalis peruviana also known as Golden Berry,  Cape Goodeberry and Ground Cherry.
It's an annual with a long growing season, but I decided to try them anyway. I found seeds - very few seeds at an expensive price!
The plants grew surprisingly well.

 

The flowers are tiny little things.

And the fruit is encased in a husk, very much like a tomatillo. Golden berries are closely related to tomatillos.

Once the husk turns from green to yellow and starts to dry out, it is ripe and easily falls from the plant.

I picked a handful of them. At the moment they are quite productive. I'll save some seeds from this year's crop and try them again next year.

Mid Summer Garden Pasta Salad

It's the middle of summer and the garden is full of things that need to be picked and eaten. It's also hot out so something cool sounds nice. So, I decided to make my basic pasta salad, leave out the store bought olives and such and instead put in as many things out of the garden I could think of. I had lots of ripe cherry tomatoes, plenty of large sweet onions, the Corno di Toro peppers were starting to turn red, and the broccoli needed picking.  I put it all together and it turned out quite well!

This recipe makes enough for about 6 people.

1 13 oz box of shell pasta (Barilla Whole Wheat)
1/4 cup sweet pickle relish (home made)
1  cup mayonase
30 cherry tomatoes whole or cut in half
1/4 sweet onion minced
1 small or 1/2 large head of broccoli cut into small pieces
2 sweet peppers cut into small chunks
salt and pepper to taste

Cook the pasta until tender and drain. Let cool. Mix everything together. Put in the refrigerator for a few hours to get nice and cold.

Beans!

The purple bush beans are Royal Burgundy and the green pole beans are Romano. The bush beans are almost over for the season and the pole beans are just getting started.

Sweet Corn!

We just had our first sweet corn out of the garden. This is Bodacious, which is the early corn. Later we'll have Kandy Korn corn.

Broccoli!

It's that time of year when we have more broccoli that we know what to do with. This head will last for several meals for three people.

After growing different varieties over the years, we've settled on Belstar for the nice heads it produces.

Peponapis pruinosa Probably Pollinated the Pilgrim's Pie Pumpkins Perfectly

I'd always heard that honey bees were necessary for pollination for many of the plants we eat. That is quite true, but there are some plants that are pollinated quite well by our native pollinators.
This is especially true for New World plants - plants that originated in our hemisphere. Pumpkins are native to North America, so they have been pollinated by North American pollinators for a very long time. One such pollinator, and probably the most important pumpkin pollinator is the squash bee.
The pumpkin bloom is a short live bloom that doesn't even last an entire day, the squash bee rises early in the morning, before the honey bee, to visit the pumpkin flowers and the blooms of other cucurbits. In my garden, the pumpkins and squash blooms are full of the squash bee Peponapis pruinosa from early in the morning until the blooms close up. Sometimes I see a honey bee try to get into the flower but she often gives up when she sees it already full of these other, honey bee sized, long horned bees.
Peponapis pruinosa is a solitary bee that nests in the ground. They dig holes for their nests near the pumpkins and squash that they pollinate. This may explain some of the holes I see in the ground near the garden.
The most common view I have of them is of their butts sticking up out of the flowers.

Rabbit Proofing the Garden

Rabbit in front of the garden

This year we have an abundance of bunnies. Actually, we always have an abundance of rabbits here in Jefferson Country, Colorado, but this year is worse than ever. I've heard complaints all over the metro Denver area about so many rabbits eating folk's gardens. Yet our veggie garden is safe.
Wire fencing  can keep rabbits out of the garden until they get determined enough to dig under the fence to get inside. One way to insure they don't dig under is to electrify the fence. In our case, we electrified the chicken wire we already had around the garden using a charger meant to keep horses in an area.  It supplies a pretty good shock, but not enough to kill rabbits or cats or anything as far as I can tell. Mice and toads still get in the garden. The rabbits are often seen munching the grass outside of the garden.

Rabbit and Garden

 It may seem like overkill to electrify the fence surrounded our vegetables to protect against rabbits, but in truth, rabbits were just an afterthought. The real varmint problem was raccoons, which would not be kept out with a regular fence. Raccoons can do incredible damage, particularly to corn. Once they found our garden, they would come back every year just as the corn was ripening and wreak total devastation on it. The electric fence has completely kept them out.
The electric fence doesn't use much electricity either. As long as it doesn't touch anything, it doesn't discharge its charge.

Dried Tomatoes

Here it is the middle of October, weeks after a hard freeze, and I'm still drying tomatoes. The tomato crop was large again this year, with a good crop from about 16 tomato plants. Since I have so many tomatoes ripe at the same time, I have to find a way to store them for use later, and having already so many jars of canned tomatoes, I now dry them.

We use a lot of dried tomatoes - they are great on salads, thrown into stews, or just eaten right out of the bag. Since I don't use any preservatives, I freeze them once I dry them, just to be sure they don't go bad from any residual moisture left in them.




This year we grew Better boys, Amish Paste, Sun Golds, Jet Sonic, Sweet 100's, and two varieties from Bulgaria.


The Bulgarian Tomatoes were from seeds brought back by a relative. They germinated well and grew vigorously. The fruit from these were huge, one being a pinkish red and the other a true tomato red. Both were gorgeous tomatoes, but we thought they were rather bland compared to the Better Boys. I probably won't grow them again, although I may save some seeds.




The Sungolds and Sweet 100s are cherry tomatoes that taste great, produce well and dry fantastic. These are on my "always grow" list, along with Better Boys and Amish Paste.

The Jet Sonic tomatoes were great producers of perfect looking fruit, but I found them rather bland. I won't be growing them again.

Drying Tomatoes in the Dehydrator

Every year I get a large surplus of tomatoes and a lot ripen around the same time. Often I can them, but this year I still have many jars of canned tomatoes, chili, tomato mince meat, etc. Another way to store excess tomatoes is to dry them. This reduces the volume greatly and the result can be stored in the freezer taking up much less space than undried tomatoes would. I might even be able to store them in the pantry, but since there are no preservatives, I prefer to play it safe and freeze them. Once dried, they keep for a very long time. When I want to use them, I try to remember to put a bag of them in the refrigerator ahead of time to thaw. They're really good in salads, in stews, or straight out of the bag.

Here's my last crop of tomatoes from the garden.


Here they are cut up and put in the dehydrator. It takes at least 10 hours, to dry them.


And here they are, ready for the freezer, or to eat like chips. The cherry tomatoes are incredibly sweet.