Saturday, October 03, 2009

Garden Bounty

This year has not been a particularly good gardening year. First it rained for 42 weeks, causing the weeds to grow way more vigorously than the vegetables. Then the tomatoes and potatoes got hit by 'The Blight' which seems to be the nicer colored garden variety of the Black Death. My pumpkins had promising flowers, but no pumpkins ever showed up. And even the zucchinis weren't as vigorous as usually.

 


One thing which DID work out was our beans. We had beautiful purple and green beans, enough for a bunch of meals. They were Very Good.

 


Especially when we roasted them with broccoli, olive oil and kosher salt, which is both simple and delicious. I love gardening, even during the years when the garden isn't perfect. (which seems to be most years in my garden ^^)

By the way, notice how the purple beans turned dark green after roasting, which was a surprising result. They tasted pretty much the same as the green ones, as far as I could tell.

2 comments:

mathmom said...

Beans were one of the big successes in our garden this year also. We also did well with peas, lettuce, broccoli, cabbage and cucumbers. It was a cold and wet summer. My eggplant plants have finally set flowers -- a little late now! Also my brussels sprouts plants right next to the very vigorous cabbages just never grew. They just sat there all season. I don't really understand what happened to them! We got the tomato blight too. Do you know if we are supposed to burn the plants? I suppose composting them would be out.

Unknown said...

hmmm, eggplant flowers does seem a bit late indeed ^^

Yes, you are supposed to burn the tomato plants, but mine kind of disappeared in between the weeds and are basically unfindable so I will not burn them and hope for the best. I think the wetness was the biggest reason for the blight, I don't think it would be repeated even if you don't burn the plants. But that is my thinking, not based on actual knowledge. I know some of my friends did end up burning but I thought that was to protect this year's crop (much earlier this summer)

Karen