Pickles and Pickled Okra

Our bumper crop of cucumbers continues. The okra has also become very productive, possibly due to the extreme heat. Okra is from West Africa. It's also a member of the hibiscus family, which accounts for its stunning tropical flowers (see photo at left).

We decided to try to pickle some of the vegetables. We bought some quart-size mason jars and I looked up a simple recipe involving vinegar, water, garlic, hot peppers, and dill seed. Surrounded by the strong aroma of vinegar, we sealed up a jar of small cucumbers and a jar of okra. In six weeks, we'll know how it went.

In the meantime, the garlic in the pickling jars has started to turn blue. At first, I was somewhat alarmed. Luckily, a quick search showed that this is nothing to worry about.

Fingers crossed.

"How Do You Get 'Em Off?"

We had some friends come over last night for a barbecue, and they admired our prolific cucumber patch. I showed them the thorns, and they confirmed that they hadn't known about this phenomenon, either. But then, this exchange took place, as one friend asked about thorn removal.

Friend: How do you get 'em off?
Me: You go like this. [I cup my right hand, turn it sideways, and stroke it up and down in the air over an imaginary cucumber. Then my jaw drops as I realize what I'm doing.]

Now there's an exchange that could be taken out of context.

Vicious Cucumbers

We're harvesting a bumper crop of cucumbers in our tiny townhouse backyard. Apparently this tropical vegetable does very well in the steamy heat of a DC summer.

Did you know cucumbers have thorns? It's their natural protection. I had no idea. You never see them because they get pulled off before they go to the grocery store. Check it out.

More Crops!

We harvested one of our potato plants today. This crop turned out much better than our ill-fated first attempt. We reaped 8 potatoes of moderate size, 2 small ones, and about 20 tiny ones, which made us wonder how many potatoes we could have gotten out of this plant. A normal harvest, according to our Burpee book, is 8-12 normal-sized potatoes, so we probably did fine. They're a little bit pink, and the potato we planted was red ... we aren't sure what that's all about.

This plant is about a month ahead of the rest of them, but the remaining plants took forever to sprout. We just learned that some potatoes from the grocery store are sprayed with a "growth inhibitor" to limit sprouting -- we think that's what happened with the laggards. We also found out there are actually special seed potatoes you can buy. Lesson learned for next time.

The latest crop of potatoes is now "curing" in the kitchen. We'll cook them up later this week.

At left, you can see the potatoes measured against a nickel for scale.

What Do You Do With a Mustard Plant?

Seriously.

We have this herb garden that is finally doing well now that it's outside in the sun and balmy weather. It did poorly when it was inside well into the April freeze. We tried to keep turning it around to get even sun but then the herb stems just grew in circles.

Mustard seeds were among those in the seed kit, so we planted them along with the others. Now we've got this big spicy-smelling mustard flower (left), and it has occurred to us that we have no idea what to do with it. I mean, it's the mustard seeds you want, right? So are we supposed to be harvesting seeds out of this thing? Where are the seeds? Will they be sticky or gross in some way? And how many should there be? We clearly have a lot to learn.

So I looked on the ever-useful Web and found this on Looksmart, from Flower and Garden Magazine. Of particular interest:

By midsummer, the plants will be 3 feet high and covered with brilliant yellow flowers. As the flowers fade, seed pods start to form and by August the mature seed pods will be ready for harvest. The pods have an explosive nature when fully ripe and easily burst and scatter seed. To avoid losing valuable seed, harvest when the plants begin to yellow but before the pods become too brittle.

I have been known to eat half a jar of Grey Poupon with my burger and fries, so I am no joke re: the mustard. I have five varieties in the fridge right now. I guess as long as we pay attention and snag the pods before they explode, I could actually make my own. That would rock.

Meanwhile, the second potato plant experiment seems to be going much better than the first. This plant (right) has purple flowers! Very promising. We may end up with some potatoes this year after all. We've also got about 10 red potatoes planted in the dirt in the back yard, but that topsoil was mixed with clay, so it might not be as fertile.

We'll just have to see what happens.

Goose Eggs for Breakfast

Steve considered breaking out the ostrich egg this weekend, but we decided to wait until next weekend, Memorial Day weekend, when he'll have three days to eat all the eggs. (He decided scrambling is the way to go.)

Instead, this weekend he ate the goose eggs. Each one seems to contain as much egg as maybe three large chicken eggs.

On Saturday morning, he fried one and ate it on a bagel sandwich (left, prior to placing on the bagel). The yolk was almost as wide and deep as the bagel itself.

On Sunday, he made a scrambled goose egg with spinach and cheese. Look at that thing (right)! It's just one egg!

He reports that the yolk is very rich.

We also mused on the shape of the goose egg, also slang for a zero on an assignment, and wondered if the more oblong oval simply looked more like a zero than a chicken egg, or if people ate a lot of goose eggs back in the day so it seemed only natural.

You never hear anyone threaten kids with a chicken egg on a test or paper.

Finally, Steve harvested our first crop yesterday -- eight tiny red potatoes. It appears they were pulled too early. See photo at left with a penny included to the far right for perspective. The potato volume of the yield appears to be smaller than the volume of the single potato we planted. Lessons learned: plant deeper, pull later. We have another one growing in another pot that we planted deeper, so we're keeping our fingers crossed for that one.

Today we planted some cucumbers, okra, eggplants, tomatoes, peppers, and collards in the new plantar and some nearby pots. My gardener aunt told us last summer that her (evil) father, my grandfather, used to plant seeds and say, "well, grow if you're gonna." I never liked him, but that seems like a wise perspective for gardening. So there's one redeeming thing about him, anyway.