I’ve been quiet for the last few days, partly because I’ve not been feeling well, and partly because I’ve been alternately busy and resting. In any case, the garden continues to grow and change and evolve daily.

Our early crop of tomatoes have been beset by what appears to be blossom-end rot, likely caused by either a lack of calcium and/or too much damp weather. We talked to the “veggie guy” at Van Wilgen’s (I like going to a garden center that has a dedicated “veggie guy”), and there doesn’t seem to be much to do at this point other than get rid of the bad fruit and be proactive next year. Which basically means bringing a soil sample to the Agricultural Station to be analyzed and then adding lime before planting to achieve the proper pH levels. In the meantime, we’re just going to hope that the problem will be somewhat self-limiting. The plants are heavy with fruit, all of them, and we’re just waiting for a couple to ripen.

There are a few rotting zucchini on the vine — I’m not surprised, since the ones we lost seem to be lying on the ground, which has been very wet. We’ve been inundated again — lots of rain over the last several days, and the ground is almost always damp, and when the days are cloudy, nothing really has a chance to dry out for a bit.

We’re hoping the peppers will start producing soon. There are lots of blossoms forming on all the pepper plants, and a couple are forming on the eggplant as well. We’ve nearly harvested all the lettuce, and the cut-down plants are beginning to form new leaves. I’m guessing that we’ll be going on to a second lettuce harvest, perhaps into early fall (it likes cool weather).

We’ve learned a few things this summer about prep work (we didn’t do enough) and weather (in spite of one’s best efforts, it’s ultimately the boss).

A couple of weeks ago, Jim decided we should expand our agricultural operation by growing more herbs next year, but not in pots. We’re going to put a four-by-four raised bed — or perhaps a four-by-eight if we think we can fill it with enough stuff — behind the garage and put it not just culinary herbs, but some things that will be good for soapmaking (like lavender). I’ve been meaning to get the soapmaking operation underway again and this might give me a good reason to start.

So here’s what I learned: I have three or four romaine lettuce plants that have been completely harvested, stalks cut almost down to the ground. They are growing new leaves. I have no idea if there’s sufficient time left in their growing season for them to produce more edible crops, but I learned that they’ll re-shoot once they’ve been cut down. So there’s one lesson. The second thing: I took a couple of marigold stems in when I replanted to marigolds we bought for companion plants in the vegetable garden. They had basically broken off the plant when I unpotted it, but they had blooms, so I brought them inside and stuck them in a glass of water. They have since made roots. I didn’t know a plant would do this in my house. Usually they just come in and die. I’m going to throw all caution to the winds and put it in a pot of soil and see what happens.

We’re also wondering what we can plant late in August that will be ready for harvest in mid- to late-autumn. Kale and broccoli seem to be pretty high on the list of possibilities, along with root vegetables. A little more research is in order, but we might see if we can prolong our growing season a bit.

I’ve written before about all the romaine lettuce we’ve been eating (and continue to eat). It’s delicious lettuce, with beautiful, unblemished leaves and a gorgeous spring green color. We’ve enjoyed salads almost every night, and last night I made a good grilled chicken Caesar with a spectacular homemade dressing. But what we were really excited about was the side dish.

Last evening when we came home from work, we harvested our first two zucchini! I can’t even begin to describe how exciting it was. We knew a day or so beforehand that Monday would be the day — one zucchini was certainly ready to be picked, and its cousin on the vine looked to be growing quickly. Several days of very warm weather and sunshine (a real change from what we’ve been experiencing so far) really accelerated everything in the garden this week, and sure enough, by the time we got home from work, we had two zucchini ready for picking.

We discussed how best to prepare them — I think we really wanted to experience them fairly simply just to see if they tasted different from store bought — so we settled on lightly steaming them and adding a bit of butter and a sprinkle of salt and freshly ground pepper. They were sublime. I steamed them for a scant three minutes so they still had a bit of crunch left to them, and wow — they were delicious.

I had no idea a vegetable garden could be this satisfying — as I looked at my very green dinner plate last night and realized we grew most of what was on the dish, I felt a little sense of pride and accomplishment.

In the meantime, more garden plans are afoot.

Life has conspired to keep me from writing much this week, but given that it’s too hot to do much else today [insert pathetic whine about broken AC here], I’m going to make up for lost time. Just a little bit about what we ate this week:

1. Lunches consisted of a very nice chicken salad — mostly poached chicken, a bit of sliced celery, and some mayonnaise and homemade pesto. I’m really looking forward to my basil plant getting on the ball so I can use my own for a change. I served the salad on a bed of arugula and surrounded it with some nice plum tomatoes, sliced in half lengthwise.

2. Made my first turkey burgers this week. They were good, but I learned that ground turkey by itself is fairly bland and depends largely on what you cook it with for flavor. I added some lightly cooked chopped onion to the burgers, along with a handful of chopped parsley. I cooked them on the grill and served them on buns, layered with arugula, sliced tomatoes, and topped with a very tasty chipotle mayonnaise that I made by mixing a bit of mayo with some finely chopped chipotle in adobo. Yum.

3. A really good potato salad made its way to the table Thursday night to accompany some grilled swordfish. I basically made an uncooked version of my fave puttanesca sauce and mixed it with potatoes. More on this later, as I think I’ll post the recipe.

4. There’s much news from the garden, and I’ll post some pics in a bit.

There. I haven’t actually fallen off the earth, I’ve just been busy. And tired.

Okay, we noticed that some of the leaves on the zucchini plant are acquiring a coating of what looks like white powder. After doing a bit of research last night on teh interwebz, I determined that we are suffering from powdery mildew, which is apparently something that thrives on wet, cool weather. And if we could characterize this season thus far, it would be wet and cool. Very wet indeed.

So now that we know what we’ve got, the next step was to figure out how to deal. The answer to this question was surprising. Milk. Diluted 1 part milk to 9 parts water (or 5 parts water, depending on which website you choose to believe), and sprayed directly on the leaves, preferably in the early evening so that it doesn’t evaporate off the plant too quickly. This sounds like some kind of plant voodoo to me, but of course I’m going to give it a shot. There are fungicides on the market, but since the goal is to keep things as organic as possible, we’ll start with the milk.

I’m also going to start keeping a garden journal so that we can keep track of our successes and failures this year.

We tried a noble experiment last week that apparently sounded better on paper than it worked in the execution. Our tomato plants are growing like… well, I guess like tomato plants. They’re huge. Freaking huge. And they’re getting heavy. So Jim rigged up a thing that went across the top of the garden bed, and we figured it made sense to tie the tomatoes up rather than stake them. Well, Jim noticed yesterday morning that the string had managed to cut right through a branch, so it was off to Van Wilgen’s to get more (taller) stakes. I spent a good deal of time last evening re-tying the plants.

While I was working out there, I did notice that a couple of tomatoes do look as though critters (the winged or crawling kind, since four-footers are fenced out) are snacking. It’s time for more Captain Jack’s Deadbug, which I’ll spray this evening after work. I did notice a beetle on one of the plants, and beetles, from what I gather, are not good garden visitors.

The most exciting thing yesterday was the appearance of our first zucchini. It’s not yet the size of my pinky finger, but it looks perfect. This, too, will hopefully live to adulthood and not end up as dinner for some uninvited guest. We are almost certain that we can see tiny baby peppers forming on some of the pepper plants (how many habaneros can we eat?), we’ve been eating Romaine lettuce every single night, and the eggplant is starting to look serious about its business. The potted herbs are mostly healthy — even the basil looks better than it did — and on Thursday I sprinkled some rosemary and some lemon thyme on the potatoes I roasted.

Wish us luck in the bug wars.

I got a huge amount done this weekend, at least cooking-wise.

A new batch of granola was awaiting us this morning for breakfast. This one was pretty simple: dried cranberries, sunflower seeds, just a smidge of cinnamon, sliced almonds, all added to the basic oats/wheat germ brew. I upped the quantity of maple syrup just a tad. It’s delicious.

Having been thwarted by the Cupcake Truck on Friday (they ran out of frosting — frosting, people, the cupcake’s raison d’etre), I vowed to make cupcakes myself this weekend. And so I did. Using a couple of recipes from Cook’s Illustrated, I made a dozen Dark Chocolate Cupcakes and topped them off with Easy Chocolate Buttercream. I hadn’t made buttercream in years — since way before I got my stand mixer — and I will now never buy frosting in a can again. Ever.

Jim made some iced chai tea yesterday and I made up a batch of simple syrup, so last night’s beverage treat was an iced chai — very nice to do at home.

Last but not least, pictured here you can see the nice chicken salad we’re having for lunch this week. I poached 2 lbs of boneless chicken breast in a bit of chicken stock and water, accompanied by a couple of bay leaves. Once cooled and diced, I added three stalks of sliced celery and a bit of mayo and some pesto I had leftover from last week’s pasta pesto salad. The chicken is served on a bed of arugula and accompanied by those lovely, not-from-my-garden-yet tomatoes. It’s quite tasty, if I do say so myself, and there’s a bag of fresh (and on sale!) cherries for dessert.

It’s amazing what a weekend of warm weather and sunny skies will do. We’ve been having an unusually wet spring (22 or so days of rain since June 1!) and the jury’s still out on the long-term effects this is going to have on the vegetables, but when we checked the garden last night, we were absolutely amazed. The tomatoes are suddenly producing fruit like crazy — even the little Romas are getting into the act. The Big Boys and Jet Stars are both producing and it seems like the tomatoes get bigger while you watch. On Monday evening, the tomato plants looked to be in danger of toppling their bamboo stakes over, they’re getting so big. Jim devised a clever way of tying them to an overhead brace, and I’ve got pictures, which I’ll post later on this evening when I have some time.

The eggplant seems to have grown a couple of inches overnight, and I think we can see where the peppers might actually be coming around, too. The zucchini is apparently poised for world domination, and we continue to enjoy harvesting and eating the Romaine lettuce.

The herbs, which are all set out in pots on the edge of the observatory deck now, look as though they’re doing well. I’m going to treat them to a bit of fish-in-a-blender this evening, because really, who wouldn’t love that?

I don’t plan on making a habit of posting non-food-related content here, but this was so breathtaking it needed a place to go.

Last night we had our first tai chi class at Someday Farm. The farm is beautiful and offers a great big view of the sky from a large field adjacent to the house. Anyway, we arrived shortly before 7:30, on the heels of a fast-moving storm. In the sky above the field we caught this spectacular double rainbow:

I can’t remember ever having seen a double one before (the one on the left is quite a bit fainter than the one on the right, which was truly spectacular). It was a nice prelude to an otherwise wonderful evening.

Tonight I’m making Grilled Chipotle-Lime Chicken Breasts. The recipe is from Cook’s Illustrated, so I’m sure it’ll be tasty and fairly easy to prepare. Will probably accompany that with some Mexican rice and either a plain green salad or some steamed zucchini. Since we need to bolt out of the house pretty quickly on Tuesday night, it’s leftover jambalaya accompanied by a quick salad.

Wednesday night is dinner-in-the-oven night — meatloaf, potatoes, roasted asparagus. Thursday night I’m going to try a lighter version of eggplant parmesan — i.e. without frying the eggplant. Friday is Friday, which means takeout or a quick trip to a restaurant or something I thought up at the last minute.

I took one of the leftover chicken enchiladas mole for lunch today. Let’s see if Cuckoo’s Nest can redeem itself.