The Honest Plate

Before and after.

Before.
A few weeks ago, our ambitious vegetable garden was doing quite well.  The beds were rich with natural fertilizer (from the horse farm next door), the young plants were put in the ground, and we set up irrigation.  Knowing this was an "experimental" year, we went all out -- 15 different varieties of heirloom tomato, leeks, eggplant, zucchini, 3 kinds of beans, 3 kinds of peppers, radishes, beets, fennel -- I'm sure there are some that I'm forgetting.

But the weeds (aka, "plants out of place") took over almost immediately.  It seems that they can easily navigate through 2 ft high coated steel rabbit fencing (half of which runs under ground), and 6 1/2 ft high plastic deer fencing.  Don't know how I didn't see 'em coming.

 

After.
Two weekends' worth of hard, sweaty, blister-inducing work, of removing weeds, laying down landscape fabric around the beds, and keeping the bugs at bay, and our garden is rockin'.  We're already starting to wonder what to do with all the zucchini.

Nature is just plain amazing.

 

Rookie mistake.

I am by no means an expert gardener, and our vegetable garden reminds me of this every day.

For example, the French Breakfast Radishes we're growing.  Probably the easiest thing to cultivate, in fact, it's such a beginner vegetable, it's often recommended for young children.  They require little care or special preparation, and grow very, very fast.   Almost too fast. 

The problem is that if you leave them in the ground too long, it increases their pungency.  Hot weather (of which we've had a lot) has the same effect.  And now the beautiful, subtle radishes we enjoyed last week have morphed into face-melting fire balls.  Soaking them in water fixes the problem (a little), and it makes them crisper too.

By the way, the best way to enjoy radishes by far:  slice radish very thin, place slices on buttered (unsalted) baguette, sprinkle with coarse salt.  Sounds lame, but it tastes incredible.

Ps:  click on the picture and you'll get a full-size view of the tiny weeds sprouting all over our garden.  Fun!