We Have a Cavoli Fiori

This morning I went out into the garden to pick some more broccoli. If you continue to harvest the broccoli before it flowers (at which point it is considered inedible...I'm not convinced that is true but have yet to taste the yellow flowers) the plant will keep producing the broccoli heads until the weather gets too hot. About every 4 days I'm able to gather enough for Dave and I to justify eating. The florets on our plants are very small; likely because I planted them too late in the year so the plants did most of their growing after the coldest part of winter, rather than before. Ideally they'll do most of their growing (at least above ground) in the fall while it is still warm, then they'll just "limp" along through winter, finally producing their bounty as the weather warms up. Mine didn't get this advantage because I was so busy canning all those tomatoes back in September rather than planting my winter garden. Better luck next time!

I showed the broccoli bouquet to the pooches, who immediately wanted to eat it. You can see Ruby's nose is checking out the cut stems where all the sugary juices are. They know what's good for them...veggies included.
I noticed that we have our first cauliflower!!! This is so exciting, but I'm not sure why. I guess I just didn't expect the cauliflower to work out, but it did! This is a fun crop to grow because you wait, and you wait, and nothing seems to be happening except for healthy leaves...and then suddenly, there it is! This flower head is very small, but pretty perfect looking. I looked up the etymology of "cauliflower" and discovered that it is either a "Latinization" of cavoli fiori in Italian, translated directly as "flowered cabbage" or the "cauli" comes from the Latin word for "stem". Wherever the name comes from doesn't matter, I suppose, as much as how it tastes. I haven't picked it yet because I want to show it off to Davie first.


My greens are officially out of control; it is definitely time to harvest them and throw what we can't eat into the deep freeze for summer consumption.

Greens gone wild (sorry boys, this is not a picture of 'girls gone wild'):
My head cabbages are coming along, although I'm not sure the weather will stay cool enough for them to grow large enough to be harvested. It got too warm for the Chinese cabbage that I planted next to them, apparently, because they all bolted weeks ago. The flowers sure are pretty, though! I've been bringing some of the flowers inside these last few weeks to put in vases. They don't smell good or bad, but they do hold their petals for a good long time.

Cabbage patch:
Bolted Chinese cabbage:
Another piece of very exciting news (if you're easily excitable, like me) is that my tomato seeds have germinated! It took about 9 days for them to germinate. I kept checking them several times a day, and I was getting worried that they'd all rotted. They say that a watched pot never boils, and sure enough, the seeds all germinated while we were gone for the weekend when I wasn't around to stare at them every few hours. Yippee! I'm hoping that enough of them will survive to ground-planting size so that I can plant at least 2 of each in our yard and be able to give some to my daddy (and perhaps a few can go on the airplane with me when I go back to NY to see Edward and Allison in May).

For those of you who follow Allison's blog (see "My Friends" at the upper left of the blog for the link; she's my brother's girlfriend, also from California), she's starting a container garden of herbs and flowers. Last summer my mom and I drove all the way to NY from Davis (!!) to take a load of furniture to them. Among the furniture and mini-deep freeze we were able to stuff in two 40 pound bags of my daddy's wonderful compost. If I can manage to bring Allison a tomato plant I'm sure we can use that compost to grow a mighty healthy tomato tree. No kidding about having a tomato tree--every time I've grown tomatoes with my dad's compost I've ended up with plants that are more than 6 feet tall. It is a little shocking for people to see who are used to dinky 2 foot plants adequately supported by those aluminum tomato cages they sell at garden centers. To support our tomato trees my dad had to construct 5 foot tall, 2 foot wide cages of heavy gauge mesh (more like jail cells for rowdy tomatoes). Using those smaller cages is just not an option. That being said, tomatoes can grow nicely in containers; like a gold fish they'll grow as big as their environment (and nutrients) allow them to. I'll just have to find a large (but not too expensive) container for Allison's deck-dwelling tomato.