Stonewell Farm Open Garden Day

Saturday, June 2, 2012  10:00 am – 4:00 pm

 (Rain Date, Sunday, June 3rd)

Location:

Stonewell Farm

39 Beckwith Road, Killingworth, CT 06419

We will be hosting our yearly Garden Open House on Saturday, June 2nd from 10:00 am till 4:00 pm. The rain date is the following day, Sunday, June 3rd, same hours. As always, admission is free.

This year we have the honor of featuring the work of Michael Fogg, an incredibly talented sculptor and craftsman whose work must be seen to be believed.

 Those who have been before, will see some changes. We’ve expanded and combined the Kitchen and Herb garden into one, we’ve added another border or two, moved some shrubs around and have created a fruit garden.  We hope you will drop by.

Gardeners who plant cilantro know something about self-sowing. Cilantro is one of those plants that likes cool weather; early spring or fall. If you try planting it when the heat of summer is on, you will be disappointed with leggy plants that never develop the large, healthy, bright green, robust leaves that you see in the markets. It goes to seed rapidly and the plant becomes so spindly that it’s very easy to miss when weeding. The advantage to this is that, in its seeming invisibility, while you’re dashing around the garden and kitchen trying to deal with the zucchini, green beans, radishes, lettuces, etc…, the cilantro is busy casting it’s seeds about. When the cool temperatures start settling in, so too do the cilantro seeds.

Right now, the garden is replete with robust cilantro plants, and though I long to find a recipe for that wonderful, slightly acidic, slightly sweet, green sauce, cilantro condiment that is served in every Indian restaurant that I’ve ever patronized, (this would, of course, be a ‘canning’ recipe, which seems to be very hard to come by on the web), I’ve yet to find one.

This evening, in an attempt to forestall Andrew’s complaints about the cilantro plants ‘that you (I) never do anything with” I did a websearch and came upon a Cilantro Pesto Recipe. After reviewing several comments and suggestions for alterations, I got the drift and whipped up a giant batch in the cuisinart. I blended it with farfalle pasta and steamed broccoli florets and it was exceptionally delicious. It would be great served with shrimp, adding, perhaps some more lemon or lime juice and a few gratings of rind, and it would make a very nice, quick canape spread on bruschetta. ( I was just eating spoonfuls of it straight from the cuisinart, but this, though tasty and indulgent, is not, perhaps, the most elegant serving suggestion).

Better yet, unlike basil pesto, its retains its bright green color. I’m so enamored of this Eureka recipe that I’m going to freeze a few batches and remind myself of this season in mid-winter!

CILANTRO PESTO RECIPE:

In a blender or food processor add the following:

3 cloves of garlic

1/2 – 3/4 cup of olive oil

4 cups or more of cilantro, stems and all

1 teaspoon salt

2 tablespoons of lemon juice

1/2 cup toasted pine nuts

3/4 cup Parmesan cheese (grated)

Done!!!!

“I want my garden to look like yours”

This will come off as supremely arrogant, but, in fact, we get this comment alot. Of course, it’s flattering and is obviously offered as a high compliment, but, my gut, unarticulated reaction is “Really? You want an unstructured chaotic jumble of plants that can’t decide if they’re a perennial garden or a wildflower meadow? Really?” Don’t you see the weeds? Don’t you notice that there’s too much of one thing in bloom, or not enough foliage color variety, or that the balance of height and growth habit is a bit ‘off’?

Permesso, but, I’ll let you in on a little secret; our own personal gardens ( not ones we create for clients) are so ridiculously labor intensive and weirdly curated that any normal person, learning of our peculiar approach and activities, would conclude that we’re crazy and would back-off. I should add something of a disclaimer here, along the lines of “do as we say, not as we do”. The first shocker is that we mulch our gardens with horse manure, not generally considerd a weed suppressor. Our soil is almost pure sand and soil fertility is what we’re after. Maybe, someday, when the soil grows up, we can mulch the beds with bark mulch, as normal people do and as we do for our clients. Until then, we continue to heap on about 60 tons of partially composted horse manure a year. Of course, weed seeds ecstasize over this quirk of ours and so we spend crazy, inordinate amounts of time weeding. To add to this ‘all-in’ approach to our gardens, I sprinkle the all important ‘chaos’ ingredient, Michelle’s ‘Special Blend Fairy Dust’ throughout the gardens on any bit of open ground (by which I mean bare manure) that I can find. This previously undisclosed special blend combines annual and perennial seeds that I harvest from the plants we grow, so every year the amount of seed increases and I’m compelled to go further afield to spread the fairy dust that results in the chaos that I fundamentally object to. ( I really don’t know what this pathology would be diagnosed as; I welcome suggestions). The ‘Special Blend Fairy Dust’ is mostly a mix of poppy seeds with some other, self-sowing annuals, and a perennial or two, thrown in for good measure; (papaver somniferum, p. rhoeas, Iceland poppies, lychnis coronaria, and, occassionaly, nicotiana sylvestris), and it’s very difficult to weed or mulch around these ‘fairy dust plants’. (add another 60 hr. work-week to the ‘To-Do’ list for this light-hearted, whimsical, poetic flourish). Some seeds take, some don’t, some sow themselves, often in places where we don’t want them so there’s a lot of editing that needs to go on once the seedlings emerge (add about 18 hours for this). Andrew usually groans when he catches me doing my fairy dust thing ( and rightfully so, I now realize) but he’s the first to screech when I pull a pink poppy so it doesn’t clash with an orange rose.

Yes, in the end, in our own personal gardens, we manage to create poetic, impressionistic, cottage gardens that seem to possess romance, casualness, and present a wild, carefree, abundant, free-flowering mood, but these are extremely high maintenance gardens; clearly not for the faint-hearted.

Last weekend, Andrew and I were sitting in the shade, enjoying a drink and resting our backs after a long day of gardening and the conversation turned to what peculiarity or pestilence we might predict for gardening season 2012. While sowing seeds, I’ve noticed a larger than usual population of cutworms, so I’m predicting clear-cutting of seedlings in the vegetable gardens and the flower borders. I’m taking precautions and making sure I have a good supply of paper and aluminum foil collars to put around the base of the plants. I just read that cutworms dislike excessive moisture and will migrate to the surface of the soil seeking higher and drier ground. As I write, it’s pouring out (perfect timing for the all the seeds I’ve just sown) so, if the rain lets up by this evening, I’ll venture out to the garden and police for cutworms. I may even bring along eagle eye, grub and caterpillar gourmande, Benazir, the matriarch hen, as back-up. I’m also predicting a worse than usual Japanese beetle year, as I’ve found more than plenty of the grubs in my digging activities. If you use those beetle traps, stock up on them NOW. Don’t wait till June, when they’re likely to be sold out.

Andrew’s prediction is a greater chipmunk population than last year.That may be so we’ll keep an eye on that. I don’t want to commit an act of hubris, or cast a sort of jinx, so I’ll approach this prediction/observation with delicacy. I’m talking about the pests that I refer to as the Velvet Underground. Have you noticed that there are barely any mole tunnels this year?  My ‘aide memoire’ is that moles are the meateaters and voles, the vegetarian opportunists that use the mole runs to eat the roots of cultivated plants. (Of course they wouldn’t touch a dandelion root or a bit of crabgrass, so common!) It’s quite possible that we may have a bit of reprieve from the Velvet Underground this year. Let me know your thoughts and observations if you are in our New England area.

PS: I just dispatched another cutworm.