FarmTina

How Do I Know When My Eggplant Is Ready?

I am growing eggplant for the first time ever, and it looks beautiful! The plant has large leaves and big purple flowers, and the fruit looks like deep purple marbles before it really takes shape. I know that often times the food I grow in my own garden doesn't look exactly like what we're used to seeing in a grocery store-- the food I grow has imperfect shapes and coloring and minor bruises, but I expect that because I'm not using standardized growing systems and chemical treatments. So herein lies my problem: if I don't know what it's supposed to look like, how do I know when my eggplant is ready to pick?

If I wait for it to look like a long, smooth, perfectly plump purple droplet, I might lose my chance to pick a ripe eggplant. But having never grown this vegetable before, I have nothing to compare it to other than past eggplants I've purchased. Here's what my eggplant plant looks like right now, with one especially large ripening fruit:

(Yes, I know I had a caterpiller problem, but I squashed those little suckers early and you'll see that the newer leaves are perfectly intact!)

I'm pretty sure those tiny little eggplant dudes aren't ready yet, but what about that big guy? He seems to be growing out and wide instead of down and long. Is this a trait of the eggplant breed I planted? Is this normal for home-grown eggplants? Will it start to lengthen out soon and end up looking normal?

Strawberries Today!

I picked strawberries today! This is my first official harvested food of the 2011 planting season. I used them to make strawberry-cream-cheese-stuffed french toast.

Growing Corn: Oh, The Mistakes I've Made!

I'd like to tell you a tale about corn, namely, the 10 corn plants that were once growing in a little place in Brooklyn called FarmTina.

Corn growing in FarmTina, June 2010. Photo by Josh Roxas

I originally wanted to grow corn in my garden because it just looks so darn cool. It's pretty impressive to have giant cornstalks towering over my backyard fence, and since I'm a visual person, it was really important that my garden be growing on every visual plane between one and ten feet. It was also important that when people visited FarmTina, they said, "Ooh, wow!".

Apparently, I need to get my priorities straight. Growing corn was not such a good idea for me... Here is my saga:

Using Up My Tomato Yield

Well, I'm back home from vacation and I'm glad to report that the The Self-Sufficient 8-Day Garden Machine experiment was a success!

I made that watering set up to take care of my garden while I was away on a week-long romance vacation in Montreal. In the great Frenchie Canadian city, I discovered a food that I can't believe I've never eaten before: Sweet Tomato Jam. Holy crap, sweet tomato jam!

Photo from Flickr by FotoosVanRobin // Used under Creative Commons License

We stayed at a bed and breakfast called A L'Adresse Du Centre-Ville that went above and beyond expectations each morning preparing a 3-course breakfast for a full house of guests. The hostess served pancakes with strawberry rhubarb sauce, fruit and nut bread puddings, and a balsamic scramble with salsa, among other things. Her specialty was an assortment of fresh homemade jams with new flavors each morning, including carrot-orange, tomato-walnut, and citrus. But the jam that really blew me away was a sweet tomato-lemon!

As soon as I got home, I searched online and found a similar recipe from my fave dude Mark Bittman. It calls for tomatoes and chili peppers, which is perfect: those are the two veggies that are filling up my garden at the moment. But even though it has spicy and savory ingredients, the recipe also calls for sugar, cinnamon, and ginger, which should be interesting.

Here's the super-easy recipe I used, taken from the NY Times:

The Late Gardener

Think you missed your window of opportunity to grow your own food this season? Well guess what... you still have options! Here is a list of seeds you can plant in your yard or planter boxes and still have a food harvest in the fall.

Harvesting My Snow Peas and Feelin' Fine

Today I began harvesting my Sugar Pod Snow Peas. These dudes are SERIOUS: they were the first of my plants to sprout, the first to flower, and the first to produce food for me to put in my belly.

Snow Peas just picked from the garden.
(Yes, my dinner plates are heart shaped. The 4-year olds love me)