Pole bean & dinner

Sinfonian asked about our pole bean harvest, so I went to take a few more pictures.

Though we play with the idea of keeping track of how much veggies we produce, we decided it isn't practical to do so. We pull a carrot, pick a few sungold tomatos or snack on the peas whenever we walk by the plant. It will be impossible to know exactly how much we grow. (we did count how many heads of garlic we harvested though!)

Since this is our first time to grow pole bean, we are very happy with the result. We don't pick them everyday, but there are enough for the two of us.

So here's the dinner menu (except the fish, everything is picked from the garden):

• Mesclun green with sungold tomato, carrot, cucumber and chives
  
• Steamed pole beans with chili (see chili post), tarragon and butter on bbq
  
• Grilled eggplant
  
• Grilled sardines (bought from the fishmonger down the street)
  
• Homemade ice-cream

(oh, by the way, the ceramic platter is handmade also!)

The foil pouch (on the left of the pic) under the grill is our garden beets. We'll make a beet salad for the next day.

We watched the US Open (tennis) women's final during dinner and having sardines was a bad idea. There were so many bones to pick and I missed watching a lot of the great shots. However, sardines is good for you and I finished them all.

The eggplant on the menu is our first eggplant of the year. It takes much longer to grow than what the label says. The plant is also much shorter than I expected. It gets really bushy and there are a lot of flowers blooming but not many plants producing. Am I supposed to cut off some branches just like a tomato plant? Should I do some trimming? So far, they are a few of about 3 inches long. The mature size is 6 inches. Mark sliced the one that we picked into 4 slices. One slice fell into the grill, and now we got 3 small slices of homegrown eggplant. They surely taste good.

Pole bean

August is the month when we are busy eating the veggies growing in our backyard, thus there is not much blogging going on (what an excuse!). However, I haven't forgotten to document the growth of our urban farm via photographs. So here are a few pictures to capture the growth of our pole bean:

Aug 02, 08 (three plants climbing)

Aug 16, 08 (baby pole beans)

Sept 05, 08
The three plants have climbed to the top of the patio. The plants have formed a pole bean wall. We need to use a ladder to harvest the beans.

Sept 05, 08
Pole bean has climbed up to the top to meet with the hops

And did I mention that they are delicious? Mark wraps the pole beans, fresh tarragon (from our planter) and butter with foil and steams the pouch on the grill. Absolutely fantastic!

Hop harvest

This weekend begins the hop harvest. I picked for a little bit Friday evening ... but the real work starts tomorrow. I have my friend Rob coming over to help. He's the guy that got me in to brewing, so he'll work in exchange for some hops.

Summer look

Our urban farm is full swing! What a big contrast when comparing with the barren winter look.

Leek -- 2nd planting

New spaces are available for more planting after we took down all the shelling pea and snow pea. So we decide to go for some winter crops: purple broccoli (transplanted, started seedlings indoor) and leek (seedlings brought from the local nursery). Pic shows the leeks that I just transplanted today. Some of the leeks that were planted in this late spring are ready to eat. We just had our first 2008 leek yesterday.

The tomato plants are getting a bit bushy now. Among the four roma tomato plants, the one closest to the house is the biggest. A lot of flowers but not many fruits...but they are coming!




Another excitement is to see the Red striped roman. The physical look of the plant is very unhealthy. The branches are soft with no strength. Water nor fertilizer helps to improve the look, and yet the plant keeps growing. We figure that maybe that's the way the plants look. I only saw two tomatoes growing (have to look really hard to find them as they are "hidden" in the middle of the plant), but that's enough to raise my heartbeat.

Just a quick report on the pole bean...the report: see pic ;)

Hop Bracteoles

I should have been posting more often about the hops. Maybe when they reached the railing, twelve feet, or when the reached the arbor, thirty feet ... instead, they waited until today.

They've started to actually create bracteoles. These are the little cone like flowers that are actually used in beer. They will mature for about another month before we harvest them.

Dinner: Beet cucumber feta salad

So today we went to the Pride Parade. It was two o'clock before it was done and we were hungry, so we ate bar food ... it was very bad. I have nothing against bar food, but nowhere good was open, the place we ended up sucked badly. We felt so gross there was no way we were going to cook a nice full dinner.

Yesterday however, we roasted a nice pork rack over charcoal, and as is our habit, we roasted some roots at the same time. Both beets and potatos. The beets were ours, but the potatos were from the farmers market. So for dinner today we cut up the beets, half of one our cucumbers, one of our carrots and some chives. The dressing was a bog standard vinaigrette made from the beet juice, evoo, cider vinegar and white wine vinegar. To finish it, some local "Feta" cheese. Quoted since it's made from cows milk. I like it better than real feta actually. We've done this before with just the beets and cheese, and it's delicious. In the future I won't add carrot, it didn't suit the flavours or textures.