Helen Chesnut
It’s high summer, a time of plenty in a year of abundance. Plants seem almost to sense that they’d better get on with things, lest weather conditions turn nasty again.
I’ve been astonished at the extreme productivity of certain plants. A Don Juan rose that I grow against a stout post, “pillar” fashion at a vegetable plot corner, became uncharacteristically loaded with deep red, velvety blooms at mid-June, with followup flowers soon after.
At another plot corner, directly opposite the rose, a globe artichoke plant exploded with the warm weather into an imposing multi-branched bush bearing eight buds. The largest has been steamed tender and consumed with the fleshy ends of the bud segments dipped into a blend of melted butter and fresh lemon juice.
Pea picking began two weeks ago. The two four-metre double rows look as though they may again provide my desired 40 to 50 frozen one-cup packets of sweet green peas, steamblanched briefly over water filled with fresh mint. Opening a packet of the minted peas in winter is like a sensual return to summer. Broad beans. Two short rows of broad (fava) beans, seeded out in the garden on March 2, looked not at all promising throughout the cold, bleak spring, but with the advent of decent weather the plants grew strong and stocky. I’ve been eating from them since late June, starting with ‘Express’ (Chiltern Seeds), a Royal Horticultural Society award winning variety described in the catalogue as “one of the fastest maturing broad bean varieties around.”
Its abundance is amazing — great bunches of bean-filled pods on each plant. The beans are tender morsels, wonderful steamed lightly and served with butter, salt and pepper.
I’ve also been relishing Express in a salad of the steamed broad beans with minced onion, garlic, and red pepper strips tossed in fresh lemon juice, olive oil and Dijon mustard. After using the salad as a warm side vegetable, I refrigerate the rest for eating later.
If you like broad beans but haven’t grown them, local farmers’ markets are a current likely source. Lettuce with a flair. At my local farmers market, I’ve noticed that, each year, more of the growers have added ‘Salanova’ lettuces to their salad items for sale. I began growing them several years ago, when they were introduced by Johnny’s Selected Seeds (JSS), an employee-owned seed company known for its award-winning breeding program.
The Salanovas are pictured and described over a two-page spread in the catalogue. One page features four “incised” lettuces with full, frilly heads, two red and two green. The second page has four “cored” types — butterhead and oakleaf lettuces, both in red and green.
Super-frilly, feathery-edged lettuces are not among my favourites. That’s why I’ve chosen to grow the ‘Salanova Home Garden Mix’ of four butter and oakleaf lettuces. I transplanted the first batch this spring alongsude the pea rows and the second in the light shade of the tomato plants. They are beautiful, like large, densely petal-packed blossoms in green and dark burgundy red. They’d not be out of place in a flower garden.
Each head delivers a satisfying abundance of tasty leaves for salad. and the plants are wonderfully easy to grow. From infancy in a flat, the seedlings form tidy little leaf rosettes that develop into sturdy transplants for easy transition into the open garden. Salanova lettuces can be purchased as individual varieties or in mixtures. Zucchini days. The zucchini plants went into full production early in the month. The young fruits are delicious cut into chunks, steamed lightly and served with butter and salt. For a more tangy, complex taste I slice them in half lengthwise and brown both sides of the slices in butter before drizzling them with fresh lemon juice and sprinkling them with salt to serve.
Most of my zucchini plants are of the ridged Italian “Romanesco” type. These are the zucchinis most commonly sold at the local village markets in Italy. For years my preferred Romanesco zucchini was ‘Portofino’ from William Dam Seeds. It always produced well, but Dam replaced it with an “improved” variety called Cassia, which I’ve found to be superior in plant vigour and productivity.
My newest variety, introduced this year by JSS, is Flaminio, which has produced densely bushy but tidy plants and lovely fruits with the nutty flavour typical of the Romanescos. Flaminio’s flowers are large and especially well suited for stuffing and frying.