vegetable gardening Archives - Good Food St. Louis

Homegrown Veggies & Fruit Brighten the Summer

September 9, 2021

My nephew, Bobby, displays a homegrown cantaloupe the size of a bowling ball and sweet as honey!

Veggielicious!

Along about mid-summer, I begin to get cryptic messages from my nephew, Bobby, who lives in Marshfield. “Coming soon: tomatoes . . . green beans . . . corn. . . squash . . . watermelon . . . cantaloupes . . . refrigerator pickles . . . tomato sauce and juice.”

All Aboard the Squash Train

By way of context, let me say he and his wife, Peggy, are both retired Air Force pilots and she’s now a commercial pilot. Having conquered flight, they’ve turned to farming, the latter being the more difficult.

Peggy standing in the squash patch. This green-leafed monster is scary enough to be cast in a sequel to Little Shop of Horrors.

The picture of Bobby’s garden could be the center fold for Fine Gardening. A bug, rabbit, or deer wouldn’t dare trespass!

An Entire Homegrown Meal

This is what you call “living off the fat of the land.” Bobby and Peggy arrived with dinner in a cooler: corn picked that morning, okra, cantaloupe, watermelon, refrigerator pickles. Not shown here: potatoes, onions, zucchini, tomatoes, and beef. All major ingredients in the meal were farm grown. They also brought some canned tomatoes and Super Sauce for another day.

Grandson Austin joins the kitchen cook team. He’s the culinary guru the family looks to these days.

Veggin’ out! We found lots of ways to use up zucchini: Bobby’s Zucchini Boats (center); Zucchini Bread (below); and the New York Times Caramelized Zucchini Pasta (upper right).

Oven-Fried Okra makes it a bit healthier than the Southern fried version. People eat it like popcorn. Just the thing for the serious nibbler.

Ahh. . . tomatoes, let me count the ways. These freshly picked tomatoes made for a great caprese, gazpacho, and sandwich enhancer.

Tomato PIe

Austin put together this Cantaloupe Melon-Tomato Gazpacho. Really good! Though the Spanish soup is traditionally served cold, I like mine room temperature and unstrained.

Austin’s Hasselback Potatoes were crispy on the outside and tender on the inside. The thinly-sliced, whole potatoes are named after the restaurant in Stockholm where the dish was first served.

Peggy’s yummy Blueberry-Peach Cobbler was the only non-garden dish of the meal.

View from the Road

A rafter of wild turkeys crossing our entry road. We’ll have to wait until turkey season before any of these can go on the table.

spacer height=”20px”]

Backyard Gardening is Dirty Business

March 18, 2016

Colorful seed packets draw me into gardening each year.

Each year, along about now, I get the urge to dig in the dirt. To part the soil and toss in a few seeds and insert a couple of plants. But nowadays my condo deck doesn’t get enough sun for me to keep a basil plant alive. I’m not at the farm often enough to do any serious gardening, though I “plant a plot” in my fertile imagination every year just for old time sake. In recent years, I’ve become more of an encourager than an active participant in gardening. Like Blanche DuBois, I must depend on the “kindness” of others.

During an especially ambitious time in my life, I planted an acre of corn and harvested it before the deer and raccoons did. With a bumper crop on hand, family and neighbors joined in helping me shuck, cut, and freeze an entire pickup load of corn. When it was over, my kitchen looked like an explosion had occurred in a packing plant.

Today family and friends send me photos of their tilling escapades. Here are a few of the recent ones. I’m hopeful there will be more to follow. As you can see from the pictures, gardening involves getting “down and dirty.”

Russ and his family are enlarging their backyard garden and using the compost they created during the winter months. (See compost area in upper left corner.)

I have high hopes for my friend, who recently transitioned from a subdivision to a farmette. She and her husband have built cute little wooden boxes to encase vegetables above ground.

Austin and Summer help Russ and Deb prepare their backyard garden site.

Austin and Summer are both AmeriCorps volunteers. She helps supervise several urban garden sites in St. Louis City, producing a variety of vegetables familiar to immigrant families. Here a Burmese woman has prepared for an early planting in her neighborhood.

When I receive these garden activity reports, I’m excited by the prospect of an abundant harvest and a willingness to share. I often submit an annotated list to family and friends, noting the vegetables I prefer, including the varieties. For instance, I like a slicing tomato the size of your hand, one big enough to blanket a BLT and hang off the edges. I’ve tried to encourage my daughter to plant Pink Gourmet and Beefsteak, but her backyard seems to favor only cherry tomatoes.

I’ve put in requests for peppers, too—red and yellows—and zucchini and Japanese eggplant. I start off hopeful and particular. But in the end, I’m happy for whatever’s left on my doorstep by benevolent gardeners. In the interest of your family, friends, and neighbors—and yourself—get out there and start digging. Remember potatoes go in on St. Patrick’s Day, so you’re already a day behind.

Having “sown” a number of vegetable requests this year, surely I will hit “pay dirt” somewhere. If not, there’s always Soulard Market.