Henny Penny Farmette

It’s winter. The nights are cold and the early mornings even colder. But here on the farmette, daytime temps are still unseasonably warm for this time of year in Northern California. That makes doing all the winter cleanup and spring preparation chores not only tolerable, but enjoyable.

Rose cuttings will render new bushes on the farmette

We’ve pruned all the roses and taken cuttings for propagation of new bushes that we’ll plant around our property. We’ve divided the irises and planted the babies in new beds.  Finally, we tackled pruning the fruit trees and imagine how shocked we were to find our Desert Gold peach trees with buds ready to open. The reason must be the warm weather.

The honeybees are searching for blossoms and finding none, they’re exploring the papaperwhite narcissus on my patio table

The honeybees are searching for flowers in bloom. They’ve flown to the citrus trees that I’ve covered against nighttime freezing temps and are wandering about on the blankets. The French perfume lavender still has some blooms but the bees seem also interested in the paperwhite narcissus blooms that I forced in water between Christmas and New Years Day.

We’ve moved the strawberries to a newly prepared bed in two planter boxes and are revitalizing the soil in the old boxes. Bare root season is around the corner and my husband and I are feeling the pressure to get the garden ready for a new growing season. The days are lengthening and we don’t want an early spring to catch us unprepared. Technically, winter has only just begun but the birds and bees and buds on the trees are suggesting it could be a short winter.

Red onions, grown from sets laid onto prepared beds of soil and barely covered with dirt, produced bulbs all summer

As I prepare and amend planting beds to sow some cool season crops, I am also reviewing my summer garden. I will be the first to admit it was less than a stellar year for my vegetables, except for the peppers, eggplants, summer squash,  cherry tomatoes and the sweet French pumpkins for pie, Rouge Vif d’Etampes.

Some of our heirloom tomatoes produced lots of tasty fruit, but others didn’t

We bought seedlings of heirloom tomatoes and also grew some plants from seed (captured and preserved from last year). The paste tomatoes produced abundantly, but I didn’t get many slicing tomatoes and the cantaloupe and Armenian cucumber plants performed dismally for me. Last summer, those two were star performers in my garden.

The German heirloom Riesentraube (the name means “giant bunch of grapes”) will produce sweet, red 1-ounce fruits, if they ever ripen. The plant’s vines have spread like a wild weed all over the garden and are covered in blooms. The plant is a heavy producer but the fruit is still green. To be fair, I planted this one later than the other heirloom tomatoes, so it may yet surprise me.

Of the blue-black tomatoes we planted, the most notable are Blue Beauty and Indigo Apple. I loved the taste and the thin skin of Blue Beauty but Indigo Apple’s small fruit, despite being described as sunburn and crack resistant, suffered from both in my summer garden.

Our sweet corn suffered an aphid infestation that rapidly spread throughout the patch

My patch of sweet summer corn produced lots of ears but quickly became infested with corn aphids that I had difficulty controlling. Finally, I ripped out the whole patch.

We had an abundance of raspberries and strawberries this year. Although we picked strawberries every morning from early May throughout the summer, those strawberries kept on blooming and producing. The blackberries produced lots of vines, but few berries. My blueberry bush went into the compost pile–the soil is too clay and alkaline. I’ll try growing one next year in a wine barrel with acid soil, maybe adding some pine needles, sulfur powder, peat moss, and sawdust mulch.

Our White Genoa fig tree is loaded with ripening figs and the Fuji apple, a few feet away, has branches needing support for the low-hanging, heavy apples. We picked and ate all the sweet summer-ripening Bartlett pears. Now, while we await the fall pears ripening, we’ll keep an eye on the blood oranges from which I hope to make marmalade in late winter when the fruit on the citrus trees ripens.

So, in review, this summer’s garden wasn’t the best. But gardeners, myself included, are eternal optimists, ever dreaming of the next plant, the next season. As English writer and gardener Vita Sackville-West astutely observed, “The most noteworthy thing about gardeners is that they are always optimistic . . . always look forward to doing something better than they have ever done before.”

Homemade ice cream using fresh strawberries is the perfect summer treat

With fruit so abundant this time of year, the opportunities for making homemade treats are seemingly endless. I like to pick a quart or more of strawberries when they’ve ripened to make ice cream. Strawberry ice cream is a perfect treat for a Father’s Day picnic or barbecue.

This STRAWBERRY ICE CREAM recipe is simple to follow and only requires a few ingredients and a little time.

Ingredients:

1 to 2 quarts ripe strawberries

2 cups sugar

3 pints cream

pinch of salt

2 Tablespoons vanilla

Directions:

Pick, wash, and hull the strawberries.

Pass them through a course sieive, mashing and pressing the berries through the holes into a bowl.

Mix with 1 cup of sugar and set aside for one hour.

Scald the cream in a double boiler.

Add 1 cup sugar and pinch of salt to the cream to make the custard.

Remove from heat, and let cool.

Stir vanilla into the cream custard.

Fold the strawberry mixture into the custard and freeze.