Laura’s Garden Notes

Laura Young
ECB Publishing, Inc.

Many famous folks have had something to say about “too much of a good thing” – from Aesop to Shakespeare, from Mae West to Jerry Garcia and more. Not-so-famous folks also weigh in on this topic from time to time, myself and yourself included, I expect. Can you have too much of a good thing?
Sometimes yes, sometimes no, especially where the garden is concerned. An excess of produce can feel bountiful – something to share with friends, inspire a feast and fill the freezer. Excessive rain, however, makes the tomatoes split. Too much sun for too many days stresses out the plants, which means more work to irrigate. Over the past month in my garden, I've been confronted with “too much” of many good things, and it's gotten my creative juices flowing, whether to figure out how to make the most of the bounty or how to tackle a problem.
What We're Eatin' in July: While the tomatoes are slowing down, we're harvesting a nice bit of eggplant, banana peppers, tropical spinach, green onions, oregano, sage and countertop bean sprouts. Mostly though, we're eating zucchini, and lots of it! Too much zucchini definitely falls into the bountiful side of excess. I've given away zucchini bread and muffins to friends, stuffed bags of the sliced squash into every nook of the freezer and had a many-weeks-long feast of zucchini nearly every day. We've had it in fritters, mixed into a corn casserole, grated into Sunday pancakes, tossed into a stir fry, stewed into ratatouille and pulverized into Cream of Green Summer soup. We even had it in chocolate cookies and something akin to a soufflé. And the list goes on.
One cookbook I've had for decades really helps me out in times like this: Too Many Tomatoes, Squash, Beans, and Other Good Things: A Cookbook for When Your Garden Explodes by Lois M. Landau and Laura G. Myers. The book's zucchini section alone includes no less than 15 recipes! Sure, I can Google “recipes for zucchini” and get a big list of possibilities, but when I browse a bound cookbook from my kitchen shelf, I don't have to dodge flashing ads, or scroll through the endless chatter that makes room for all the ads, just to find one actual recipe. In a real book, the whole thing is right there in one glance on the paper page, with no distractions.
I did conduct an internet search for “benefits of zucchini,” and I learned there's more to it than good taste and versatility. It's high in antioxidants, rich in nutrients, helpful for digestion (because its moist and fibrous) and may even help moderate blood sugar. There's certainly no such thing as too much zucchini in my garden. Bring it on!
What's Coming Along: Sweet potatoes continue to thrive, and the tropical “spinach” is going crazy, having sent runners up and down and all around a six-foot trellis many times. I might say the bean patch is looking great, except that after too many days of blistering sun, my irrigated garden patch was like a glistening beacon for some critter foraging in the drying landscape around it. In just one night, it nipped every single bean plant down to the dirt, plus munched out one third of my eggplant crop. I've enlisted tomato cages to protect the remaining eggplants, which are enjoying the heat as they will and continue to put out many lovely lavender-colored blooms. Recent plantings of lemongrass and pineapple sage also are doing well alongside the established oregano and sage in the herb patch. My experiment with bean sprouts on the counter has been a success, and we're on our third or fourth jar of them now. I think it might actually be possible to watch these grow. Much like zucchini, they are overnight wonders.
What to Plant This Month: July for the North Florida garden is pretty much a test of endurance. There's not much new to start, and attention goes toward nudging the existing squash, tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers and such toward harvest time without them burning up. A brave soul could still transplant some peppers, tomatoes, tropical spinaches, squash and pumpkins, but conditions make it tough for plants to transition from the pot to the ground and thrive. Theoretically, you also can still plant seeds of cucumbers, southern peas and pumpkin, but again, keeping the soil moist enough to get them going could require some strategizing.
What's Tempting Me: I've been meaning to invest in some of those gauzy, floating row covers, and this just might be the time to do it. There's no avoiding “too much sun” right now, and these could provide some shade for a re-planting of the stolen beans. Then, once they sprout, they could protect them from those wild nibblers in the night. The sales pitch for row covers says they can extend the season for all sorts of garden stars, including tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, summer and winter squash, cucumber, pumpkin, melons, beans, greens, radish, broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage, kale, collards, chard, beets, potatoes and strawberries. That could definitely mean more good things to eat this summer, and in the seasons to come. Even if using row covers causes “more” to turn into “too much,” that doesn't worry me. That's what freezers, feasts and friends are for.