The Kitchen Garden

In the Garden

Thyme (Thymus)

Thyme is one of the most-used kitchen herbs. As a shrubby perennial, thyme’s masses of small flowers and scented leaves also make a nice addition to an ornamental garden. Read on>

Harvesting & Preserving Garden Bounty

Preserved Lemons

Preserved Lemons originated in the cuisine of North Africa and add a delightful zing to many dishes. Preserving them is a great way to use up part of the bountiful harvest of your lemon trees.

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Preserving Tomatoes

Quince Paste & Butter
Preserved Lemons
From the Fig
Drying Tomatoes
Drying Herbs
Harvesting and Preserving Dill

Kitchen Garden Tips

May

Sow vegetables such as beans, beets, carrots, chard, corn, lettuce, cucumbers, squash, melons, pumpkins and potatoes. This is the month to transplant TOMATOES into the garden, either those that you started indoors or starts from the nursery.

If you don’t have much room for a summer vegetable garden but you’d like to have fresh delicious melons and cucumbers, try growing them on teepees or verticle screens made of hogwire. You can lean two sheets of hogwire against each other and make a small ‘tent’ and the plants can scramble over the structure. This looks attractive even in the middle of a flower border.

To delay the inevitable bolting, keep your edible greens such as lettuce, chard and spinach evenly watered and put a floating row cover over the plants. Anything you can do to keep the heat off their backs will put a damper on the bolting .process, which is actually controlled by day length, which is why it is inevitable!

Some lettuce varieties are labeled ‘Slow to bolt’. These are the types to be planting now! If you are a salad lover, try planting some slow to bolt varieties such as ‘Summer Bibb’. With some shade, you may find that you can harvest lettuce all summer long!

Take advantage of that compost pile and let it do more work for you! Plant a few tomato plants right at the edge of the pile. Cherry tomatoes are a good choice. You can even encircle the entire pile with tomato plants and let the run-off compost fertilize them all summer long.

Earwigs a problem? Try this: Roll up several thicknesses of dampened newspaper with a little oatmeal, cornmeal, lined along the inside. Place it next to your trouble spots. The next day, discard the newspaper into the trash, or submerge the newspaper rolls into a bucket of hot water. You’ll have to do this every night, which is a pain, but after a week or so, you’ll cut down quite a bit of the population. If you feel you’re losing the war on earwigs, you can take some comfort knowing that they have a beneficial side, too. They like to eat aphids, caterpillars, fruit worms, spider mites, and thrips.

Selected Kitchen Garden Recipes

Dilled Cucumber Soup
Bok Choy Stir-Fry
Pumpkin Recipes
Adobo Recipes
Carciofi alla Romana
Classic French Omelet with Herbs de Provence
Fennel Pollen Update
Fennel-Pollen Crusted Halibut
Grandma's Herbed Triscuit Hors d'oeuvres
Grilled Padron Peppers
Honey Fig Jam
Lemony Rice and Shrimp Salad
Other Fennel Recipes
Stuffed Artichokes
Tabbouleh
Tangerine Marmalade
Tomato Recipes

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