Insalata Caprese Overload – Tomatoes and Basil (and Honey!) overload
The spring harvest season has come and gone at the Moon family gardens, Southern division. Due to a little diligence and a little luck (multiple inches of rain in June and July in Austin??), we managed to have a decent bounty from the garden.
Garden in Progress
Our four tomato plants grew quickly – I always got a (very) little ego boost running past some of the neighbors puny little tomato plants while I knew that ours were at least twice or thrice as big back on the farm at home. Since they’ve started producing, we’ve been getting about 3-4 tomatoes a week from the four plants. Not enough to retire on, yet, but it’s a start. We are still getting new fruit every day or two, but the bugs (stink bugs, I believe) have discovered our backyard salad bar and the last few have been decimated by the time they are worth picking.
Bright Reds - Ready for Pickin'
Matched up well (at least on a plate with some olive oil and mozzarella, which is how we ate about 97% of the tomatoes and 100% of the basil), the lemon basil plants just won’t quit. We’ve been pulling off bunches every few days and it just keeps coming back. Being a staunch herb traditionalist, at first I wasn’t sure about any non-standard basil, but the lemon basil is quite tasty. I think we’ll need to keep one or two of these plants even when the backyard garden is transformed into a formal English garden, or goes back to pure wilderness, or xeriscaped desert scene or whatever we decide to do with the mess of weeds back there surrounding our little patch of vegetables and herbs.
Speaking from my vast and profound gardening experience, one of the secrets to producing a good amount of tomatoes is proper pollination. Planning ahead, as we always do, we invited a large colony of honey bees to take up residence in the dead tree near the garden. Since the tree was scheduled for removal, we knew we could get the garden pollinated and enjoy some sweet, smokey(!) honey when we cut the tree down.
Or, we found out that we had a tree full of bees when the guys cutting it down took a look at it. Either way, it worked out that the bees liked our garden and I liked their honey. More on that adventure in a later post.
August 20th, 2010 at 9:53 am
Bees! Huh! That’s why may garden isn’t doing well this year. And you’re getting honey!??! Interesting! Time to start that second garden and time to write more in your blog!
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