How does your garden grow?
A few years ago, when we ripped out the quince trees that we had planted too close to the front of the house, we replaced them with four rose bushes of three different varieties, and put in wild strawberries (Fragaria virginiana) as a ground cover. Two rose varieties are doing reasonably well, while remaining rose variety and the strawberries are trying to take over the world. Anyway, a week ago we noticed that berries were getting ripe, so we picked about half a cup: they weren't the "violent red" of the best commercial strawberries, but tasty. On Thursday we picked another pint, and yesterday I turned them into ice cream, using a simple, minimalistic recipe: macerate the strawberries in sugar (3/4 cup for a pint of berries) and a tablespoon of vodka for an hour, add heavy cream (equal by mass to the strawberries), blend, chill, then freeze in an ice cream freezer. No boiled simple-syrup, no egg-yolk custard base, no cooking at all. We tasted the results after dinner last night, and it was delicious!
Meanwhile, this happened in the back yard:
Only one ripe so far, but in past years we've gotten 1-2 cups of berries a day at the height of the season. And we still have at least a pint in the freezer from last year, so we'd better get started making things with raspberries.
Meanwhile, I picked one (1) green bean from the struggling bush-bean plants in the front yard. The Thai chili plants are blooming, two of the four holy-basil plants I transplanted from the egg-carton seed-starting incubator seem to have survived the transfer, but none of the six Thai-basil plants I transplanted at the same time survived, so![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
shalmestere mail-ordered a couple of Thai-basil plants.
Meanwhile, the toad-lilies in the circular bed in the center of the front yard are thriving, to the extent that they've drowned out the climbing vines we had planted in the same bed; need to thin the toad-lilies and see whether anything survives of the climbing vines.shalmestere planted a few more dahlias last week. The shamrocks are doing well, the five or six colors of violets are trying to take over the world, the clover I've seeded to replace lawn-grass is doing well in some places and not in others....
Meanwhile, this happened in the back yard:
Only one ripe so far, but in past years we've gotten 1-2 cups of berries a day at the height of the season. And we still have at least a pint in the freezer from last year, so we'd better get started making things with raspberries.
Meanwhile, I picked one (1) green bean from the struggling bush-bean plants in the front yard. The Thai chili plants are blooming, two of the four holy-basil plants I transplanted from the egg-carton seed-starting incubator seem to have survived the transfer, but none of the six Thai-basil plants I transplanted at the same time survived, so
shalmestere mail-ordered a couple of Thai-basil plants.Meanwhile, the toad-lilies in the circular bed in the center of the front yard are thriving, to the extent that they've drowned out the climbing vines we had planted in the same bed; need to thin the toad-lilies and see whether anything survives of the climbing vines.
shalmestere planted a few more dahlias last week. The shamrocks are doing well, the five or six colors of violets are trying to take over the world, the clover I've seeded to replace lawn-grass is doing well in some places and not in others....