Welcome rainy Day

portakal patlıcan - Turkish for orange eggplant. Google is often more helpful if you translate things into the language of their origin. I was looking for recipes specific to Turkish orange eggplants and found "I keep looking for recipes for this weird eggplant but can't find any." posted over and over again! By googling the translation I found some pretty interesting results, none that I have found so far refer directly to orange eggplant, but some really interesting Turkish recipes for eggplant in general. The translations left much to be desired but I got the gist. If I use one with my interpretation and good results I will post.

These plants are growing in the pot with the turkish eggplant. I have lemon gem marigold and some basil.

It's a rainy day and the hops are growing. This is a small sample of the cones swelling up.

You know it id hard for me to resist the cats. Abe is being demanding here. It's hard to say exactly what he wants but he is used to being spoiled by me. Sometimes I love the distortion of my canon powershot. One of these days I'll get something fancy but really, this camera is just so easy and pretty good even with its limitations.

Turkish Orange Eggplant

These little babies are starting to ripen. We'll see how they taste. They are mostly larger than golf balls but smaller than apples.

Just a quick post here.

Green Fruit

My turkish eggplants are pleasing me even though I have yet to truly sample them. This is a unique growing experience. I suppose that I should use google to figure out how to best use these. These are not yet ripe. I have found numerous images of shiny orange eggplants.

These sungold are staring to ripen. Sungold are delicious as well as pretty. I suppose supersweet might rank slightly higher, that is if I only have room for one tomato it I might choose supersweet, but I think that these should be more common. Cherry tomatoes are necessary for me because they do ripen early. I can't stand waiting around for SOMETHING to ripen. Cherry tomatoes let me bid my time for the big'uns.

Speaking of of big'uns, here is a green carbon tomato. Last year a groundhog sealed his fate by gnawing the stalk of my carbon tomato. There were perhaps a dozen green tomatoes on it many as big as this one that I lost. I feel safe from groundhogs this year. If there were one around he wouldn't get to this one as it is growing in my tomato box.

This is simply a view of the left side of my front yard showing many edible plants flourishiing. An incomplete list is ghostbuster eggeplant, royal purple beans, sungold tomatoes, alaska nasturtium, strawberries, lemongrass, he shou wu... you get the idea.

I am so glad that yesterday was a traditionally cloudy Pittsburgh day. I like my photographs better.

Lacinato Kale etc... and Twitter

I am glad I have given this lacinato kale its own large pot. It is a very graceful vegetable. I should however being eating more of it. Lately it's been mostly beet greens. I should freeze some.

I've decided to not do posts with 4 different photos that don't relate directly to each other. I am influenced by twitter. Twitter seems more useful to me as the people I follow often share information with others via links to all sorts of things and I may pick and choose as I skim through the various tweets and click on those that catch my interest. I was initially wary of posting more than once a day but so many people tweet 20 times or more and I still get useful information from them.

I am slightly saddened when I remember growing up with a paper delivered to my front door every morning by a local teenager. I used to read the whole newspaper and absorbed all sorts of information without all the distractions that exist in the way that we get information today. It was in a way more limited in that as I read, if I had a question about something I could not just google it on the spot like I do everyday. Anyway I am on twitter mostly tweeting my blog posts and I am looking for more people to follow.

Artichoke Bloom, Eggplants, and my Sidewalk Crack

Yesterday my artichoke started to bloom. I had forgotten how long it takes to open. It is only beginning to open.

Today I harvested 2 ichiban eggplants. This one is shown still on the vine. Under the ichiban I have siam queen basil, leeks, and lemon gem marigolds growing. These underplants are one reason why I have pruned the extra leaves and offshoots.

I believe that in most browsers that these Turkish eggplants below are shown slightly larger than life. I cannot wait until I can harvest one. When will I know that these are ready? They are starting to show green stripes. They are supposed to turn orange. I've never seen an orange eggplant. What will it taste like? I know that white eggplants are sweeter than purple ones.

I have offered a couple nice neighbors that walk by eggplants in the future in anticipation of an eggplant overload. Really, the 1st year I grew them I both came to appreciate them much more than I ever had because homegrown eggplants really are much, much better than store bought, but I also got tired of them. One neighbor seemed scared by the prospect of eating a non-large purple egglant.

I will assure anyone out there that if you like regular large eggplant you will LOVE ichiban. I think today I might do eggplant Parmesan. I think I will try many eggplant recipes this summer. Hopefully I will find recipes that correspond with the variety I am growing. Any good Turkish eggplant recipes out there?

My test recipe for new eggplants is to simply slice, salt, and fry in olive oil which has some onions and garlic browned in it. Last year my eggplants were not as productive but this year looks much better.

These 2 planters already look very productive. I have them rigged to be self-watering. I consulted How To Make A Self-Watering Container from video jug. If you go to that link you'll see that I had a comment. Nobody there addressed my questions, ahem! Uh, anyway, I ended up doing things a little bit differently. The watering tube is unnecessary and if your pot is outdoors you need a drainage hole that sits where the reservoir meets the soil, or perhaps slightly below that line. In the United States we don't call things 'LECA', I found 'hydroton' though I suppose that plain pebbles or sand might do instead and cost considerably less. I used hydroton though it took some research to find it and to even find out what I was looking for.

That is a problem with international things. Even if you are speaking the same language, some things are not the same and I do strive to be understood by everyone speaking English. If you have any questions feel free to ask and I will try to answer them. Anyway, I think self-watering containers work well with eggplant.

As long as I am going off on tangents I feel I oughta mention a website that helped guide me in my eggplant pruning. AVRDC Extension Materials has a lot of growing information for vegetables I have never heard of. Like I never knew that cleome was eaten in any way.

Here is my next sidewalk plant, love lies bleeding. Last year many passersby loved this plant. I am glad that purchasing seeds has been unnecessary.

Some Eggplants, Cats and Bolting Lettuce

I think I will have too many eggplants soon. Here I am holding a spent ichiban bloom next to a orange Turkish eggplant. You can see that the Turk is much smaller. The Turkish eggplant will become about the size of an egg, though it looks as though it may produce bunches of eggplants like grapes. I am very curious about how they'll taste.

Here's the actual plants. Both ichiban and Turkish orange(or is it orange Turkish?) are fairly large for eggplants. I guess 4 feet is typical so I have short stakes for them. I also have pruned them to have fairly bare stems at least up to a point as I have interplanted many things below them that need the light. I also limit their branching out. They don't get as overgrown as tomatoes but it does make it easier for me to see what's going on and in theory their fruit should be more consistent, especially the ichiban.

My latest poll is closed. The results are as follows

• Cats-5 (55%)
• Flowers-6 (66%)
• Tomatoes-6 (66%)
• Bugs-4 (44%)
• Birds-5 (55%)
• Greens-8 (88%)
• Weeds-7 (77%)
• Compost-8 (88%)
• Disease-6 (66%)
• Death-3 (33%)
• Bokashi, come on, BOKASHI!-5 (55%)
• Ummmmmmm-4 (44%)

There was a total of 9 votes. Given that small sample I can only conclude that I will blog about whatever I feel as usual. I chose my topics at random anyway. Now I know that I do not have a large following but based on my analytics, I DO have more than 9 regulars and I do want their opinions.

Anyway, given the randomness I will do more posts about cats, because they amuse me and they are a secret joy to people. Why do we have LOLCATs? because people like them even if they are tired of them. So LOOK AT THESE CATS!

You'll also be hearing more about bokashi. I have noticed that my bokashi tomatoes look better than my non-bokashi tomatoes. I am also finding it cheaper and less complicated than as described by others. More on that later.

My final picture for this post shows a red lettuce bolting. This is not highly recommended. It looks kinda nice right now though. I am letting a number of my lettuces bolt. I probably should just pull most, if not all of them up but I do have guilty feeling when I perform herbicide on my domesticated plants. The pluses of letting this bolt is that later I may collect seeds for future plantings. The blooms will attract beneficial insects and if I really let it go, I will have no need to sow any lettuce seeds. My permaculture tendencies are showing.

No Eggplant is Better than one from your Garden

This morning I am craving what I had last Friday, eggplant, quite simply sliced, salted, then fried in olive oil with onions(in this case a small red onion from my yard) and wilted basil(here it's thai)on a cracker. As the 1st eggplant, I couldn't make a full meal out of it, just 12 crackers.

I am certain, I hope, to have more eggplants than I can use soon. Here's my green striped orange turkish plant, slightly battered from that bad storm. I pinched off its lowest branches to make it grow taller but now I intend to let it branch out and set fruit. I wonder how they'll taste. The different varieties do taste a little different from each other. I've never had an orange eggplant so I am pretty curious. These are supposed to be pretty small, egg sized I think.

Here's the ichiban looking glorious but not growing fast enough for my craving today. "GROW, GROW," I keep repeating in my head whenever I look at it. I might end up harvesting a small eggplant earlier than I have intended just to satisfy myself.

Do I deserve this? Perhaps I do. Things always taste better in small quantities. I'd better eat something now, maybe just some toast.