Gardening where I live, part 117: Last night I was reading at the kitchen table when a brown blur crossed my peripheral vision.
A moving brown blur. A really big brown blur.
Turned my head to the left and yep, a cow moose was walking into our yard, followed by a tottery little calf. Right toward our garden full of young quinoa, lettuce, celery, tomatoes, strawberries and other plants.
Tonight’s dinner featured quinoa eaten within 30 feet of where it was grown. Not too many Alaskans – or too many U.S. citizens, actually – can say that.
This was our first year of growing quinoa and it did quite well. It grew tall quickly and never actually flowered, but its colorful seed heads were lovely to look upon.
What we ate was based on a recipe called Chicken Enchilada Quinoa Bake. “Based on” because I nixed the cheese (DF isn’t a fan) and also the green chiles (didn’t have any). The enchilada sauce* was homemade, from the Budget Bytes recipe, because it’s so easy and so cheap to make.
The cheese- and chile-less version was delicious. What made it even more special was how we got the seeds from the stalks. We’d done some by hand, which is a laborious (though oddly contemplative) process. At some point DF suggested we look up quinoa harvesting machines. We found one, too, but the cost was $899.
So we kept looking – and found the Rube Goldberg-esque design of our dreams.
It was 20 degrees this morning. About time, too: This has been a weirdly warm fall, with temperatures in the low 50s as recently as the past weekend. Not that I like shivering when I get up, mind you, but it seems appropriate to the season.
Yet while putting the yard to bed today DF harvested the last of the green and red leaf lettuce. Planted right next to the house, it escaped the freeze. We ate some of the leaves on our suppertime hamburgers.
“The last of the outdoor harvest,” he noted. “Eating lettuce from the yard on October 16…Most years you think you’re lucky to be eating it on September 16.”
As I said: weirdly warm. Yet I felt a pang even as I snapped the crisp lettuce ribs between my teeth. Delicious – and the last. We’ll be blessed if we eat fresh salad again in June.
Our garden is coming along more slowly than last year, probably because the soil was cold. We got something close to normal snowfall this year, for a change.
Within the past week the sugar snap peas have started to take off but the green beans are puzzlingly slow. So are several kinds of squash (spaghetti, blue Hubbard, pink banana), which aren’t anywhere close to dead but have somehow failed to launch.
Gardening is a series of trials and errors. But there’s still time.
Strawberries and raspberries look glorious, albeit still really green; we hope to be picking within two weeks. Carrots, beets, leaf and romaine lettuces, two kinds of Asian greens, potatoes and rhubarb look healthy. The spinach is pretty much spawned-out, so what’s left will probably go into the boiling bag.
The real stars this year? Quinoa.
When I got back from Phoenix the house smelled like dirt. In a good way: While I was gone DF had started dozens of seeds in egg cartons and repurposed pots.
The containers completely cover a table in the utility room and a three-shelf unit that has displaced our dining table. We can eat anywhere, but baby plants need the south sun.
After a week of seeing flowers and orange trees and fully leafed trees, I came home to a typical Alaska breakup: gray skies, brown lawns and bare branches. The scent of soil helps make up for that.
So does the Renee’s Garden media kit, which arrived shortly before I left to visit my daughter. The 2016 New Introductions Sampler kicked off a response most Pavlovian. My mouth actually watered as I looked at things like Five Color Rainbow beets, Italian Pandorino grape tomatoes, Ruby & Emerald mustard, French Mascotte container beans and Harlequin Mix rainbow carrots.
I am growing popcorn. Really. Last spring a company called Boom Chicka Pop offered free popcorn seeds. Knowing full well that you need either a greenhouse or floating row cover to grow corn successfully in Anchorage, I nevertheless requested seeds because hope springs eternal in the spring.
Ten corn plants are now flourishing in the heat sink that is the south side of our cream-colored home. In about a month’s time they’ve gone from sere seeds to six-inch green stems with multiple leaves, even though that month was marked by near-record amounts of rain and some very cool overnight temperatures.
Will they have sufficient heat and time even to set ears, let alone ripen them? Probably not. But I’m getting such a kick out of watching them grow that I don’t much care.