gardening 2011 – part 6

Time for another balcony garden update! We are in the midst of a tomato rush.
We picked all these for sunday night dinner and made a nice easy tomato sauce to go with spaghetti. We even had some left for the freezer.

We sowed and planted four types of heirloom tomatoes: the small red ones, tigerella, green zebra and a yellow type. As you can see, the tiny sweet red ones and the tigerellas have been most productive so for next year I’ll probably be replacing the other two with new types to try. The yellow ones especially haven’t done great and are very soft.

The leaves of the tomato plants are starting to yellow and shrivel and after letting the last of the fruit ripen the plants will be ripped out.
The zucchini plant is on its last leg as is the cucumber. We had three big cucumbers from it though and still need to eat these two biggies.

Apart from these there are still plants just getting started as we head into fall early this year (my, it gets dark early here with all this rainy and cloudy weather). The peppers are growing nicely, some plants only just flowering, some already laden with small peppers.
The herbs are still doing nicely and we have a first baby melon!

I tried brussels sprouts from seed because I like them so much. I read they are hard to grow but so far mine are doing great and I only regret not having two or three pots of these instead of just one.

There is also new lettuce to be had in a few weeks. Two trays of mâche and arugula were eaten by slugs but the others are doing great.
So I’m excited to see the fall plants grow in the next few weeks.

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cooking class with dana: part 2

If you want to check out part 1 first have a look here.
On the menu this time was real winter food. It was the first time I bought brussels sprouts fresh instead of frozen. I love brussels sprouts, maybe I can grow some on my balcony next year…*plop* my plant shopping list just grew longer…happens a lot these days.
Dana brought fresh laurel leaves from her balcony for cooking and also left me two whole branches with leaves for drying and using here!

And we finally used up all of our homegrown zucchini that we had frozen! I don’t think I’ve ever shown these in summer have I? They were beautiful and grew pretty well but we won’t be having them again next year because, well, we hardly ever eat zucchini.


Though they were delicious in our cream of zucchini soup with dried tomatoes…yum!

For main course we had the brussels sprouts with bechamel sauce, chicken leg (not for me though) and a german specialty, that my translator says is bread dumplings in english.

For dessert we made lovely molten chocolate cakes (except that the center wasn’t molten but they were delicious all the same) with my homemade elderberry syrup which went really well with the chocolate.

Any recipe requests, let me know and I’ll translate the recipes we used 😉