Tzatziki! It’s a yogurt based sauce served in Greek restaurants that you eat on your food – like souvlaki – or just eat on pita bread. I like it on just about any kind of bread, personally…
The original recipe calls for cucumbers that you peel and take the seeds out of. You shred the cucumber with a grater (or do it in a food processor) and you’re supposed to remove as much of the liquid from the shredded cucumber as possible.
I don’t have the time or the interest in peeling 100 cucamelons, let alone seeding them, so I just chopped them up fine with a food processor and substituted them for the cucumber.
The results are amazing. It’s got a nice sour bite to it and you get bits of cucamelon that still have a nice crunch in the sauce.
Next season I know what I’ll be doing with those cucamelons!
Chopped cucamelons next to whole ones. All ingredients in the bowl before mixing.Mixed Talzatziki ready to serve. Leave it in the refrigerator over night and it will taste even better the next day when the garlic flavor really comes out!
Marigolds are a popular decoration and symbol of Dia de Los Muertos all over the world. This sign was hanging in the window of a small grocery store in New York City when I went up there to visit my cousins in New Jersey this weekend.
Cempasuchil is the Nahuatl word for the flowers we call marigolds. The smell of these flowers was believed to attract the souls of the departed relatives of the Native Mexican people during the time in the fall when they believed their loved ones who had died returned to visit them. In fact what the flowers attracted was the Monarch butterflies and hummingbirds that migrate to Mexico at this time of year. These beautiful insects and birds have always arrived in Mexico at the time when the marigolds are blooming. Since the Monarchs and hummingbirds are hungry after their long migration, it only makes sense that they would take advantage of this source of nectar, so they flock to the marigolds when they arrive.
This Native American belief is the foundation of the holiday we now call Dia de Los Muertos or Day of the Dead which is celebrated in Mexico, Central America and parts of South America.
We have two kinds of Cempasuchil growing in our school garden. One is called Mission Giant. Señor Frank got the seeds for this large yellow marigold from Renaissance Farms in Illinois. Farmer Curtis grows mainly tomatoes there. Curtis sells amazing varieties of tomato – many of which he bred and developed himself, but he sells a few other vegetables and flower seed varieties as well.
The Mission Giants really lived up to their name and produced loads of flowers. That means that they also produced loads of seeds! If you’d like any marigold seeds, just ask. Every flower head has a lot of seeds in it and they are easy to collect and dry for use next year. From the looks of this year’s garden, Señor Frank will have plenty of Mission Giant seeds and many other varieties of marigold seeds for us to plant next spring.
The orange marigolds in the garden are an unknown variety that Señor Frank collected seeds from after he grew plants that were donated to the garden at his old school. The lady who gave him the plants said they had volunteered with plants popping up from seeds that dropped out of the flowers the previous fall in her garden in West Columbia. When Señor Frank got to her house to pick up the plants, the lady had at least 20 of them potted up! There were even seedlings growing in the edge of her lawn in front of her house and along the edge of the storm sewer on her street!
He gave some of the 20 plants to his farmer friends Jason Roland, Greg Brown, and Amanda Jones so they could grow them on their farms and still had plenty for the school garden! Gardeners always like to plant marigolds with their summer vegetables. Insects that attack our plants don’t like their smell and stay away from them and their roots release a chemical into the soil that can kill root knot nematodes, a tiny worm that carries a very destructive tomato disease.
And about a week ago a gardener Señor Frank met on Facebook, Melissa Tooley, donated seeds for another variety of marigold to our school garden. This marigold is called “Bi-color Red Colossus”. They are beautiful and will add another reddish brown/gold and orange flower to our summer and fall garden next year so we will be sure to be ready for Dia de Los Muertos in 2024!
And with Dia de Los Muertos becoming much more popular here in the United States, growing marigolds to sell for decorations this time of year is becoming a good way for farmers to make a little extra money at the end of the summer season. While I was in New Jersey this weekend I found an ad on Facebook Marketplace offering Cempasuchiles for sale from a local farm. The ad was in Spanish and it was targeted at people who wanted the flowers to continue their tradition of remembering their loved ones at this special time of year. I can’t wait to grow more Cempasuchiles in our school garden next year!
Next we were off to remove our summer plantings of okra. It is time to replace the okra plants with our fall/winter brassica family crops of broccoli, cabbage, kohlrabi, kale, mustard greens, turnips, and radishes.
It was a somber occasion and we took a moment to say a few words over our okra plant friends before ripping them out of the ground to send them off to the compost pile to be recycled back into the soil they came from.
We also removed the last of the tomato plants and what was left of the basil.
When we were done all we had left was the paper and straw mulch from summer – all of what hadn’t already decomposed into the soil – and the marigolds. We are hoping the marigolds last for two more weeks so we have them for Dia se los Muertos on November 1st and 2nd. We might have to make an ofrenda to our okra, cucamelon, basil, and tomato plants then and those marigolds are the traditional Flor de Los Muertos (called the Cempasuchil in the Aztec language of Nahuatl). It’s the flower people use to decorate their homes, ofrendas, and gravesites in the cemeteries in Mexico and Central America on this holiday.
Señor Frank stayed later after school to cut up all of the okra plants, stuffing their remains into a large garbage bag to take home to his compost pile. The old straw and paper mulch went home with him too a few days later.
Watch for a post showing how he made his compost tumbler and compost pile at his house and how he adds all of this material to the compost to “cook” it down into the black gold that will feed our plants in the coming season!
This weekend my wife and I are visiting her sister Barb and her husband Andrew. Barb and Andrew live in New Jersey. They both like to run marathons and Andrew likes to fly fish like me. They also believe in eating well so they keep a small garden in their yard where they grow vegetables and berries. Here’s a tour of Barb’s garden and a few of the plants and seeds I hope to “borrow” from her garden so we can plant them at the MGES school garden next summer!
Yesterday my buddy Jason Roland of Organically Roland Farm sent me these pictures.
Hail!
Maybe you guys noticed the little balls of ice falling from the sky yesterday evening. It’s always fun to see hail and play with it when we get it, but if you’re a farmer? Not so much.
Luckily this time the hail wasn’t a problem for the farm. As Jason said, “It was only pea sized so nothing is hurt, but I got hail about 30 minutes ago!”
Farmers have to deal with extreme heat and drought in the summer, freezes in the winter, and sometimes even flooding just about any time of year. Some of these weather conditions can be handled with good planning or adding protection like shade cloth or frost blankets. For some weather events (like hail) there’s nothing you can do, and you just end up losing your crop.
Farming is hard work and it can be risky. Tue next time you meet one, thank a farmer for what they do to grow our food!
And here’s a question for you. In the video Jason says that he’s going to plant again, and if those plants die, he’s going to plant again, and if that dies, he’s going to plant again…. What habit of success is Jason exhibiting when he does this?
We have a LOT of Golden Amaranth and Celosia flowers that are full of seeds. The Golden Amaranth has been harvested and dried and Señor Frank has started separating the dried flower bits from the seed, but there’s a lot more to process. The Celosia is still growing, so it needs to be cut down and dried before we can remove the seeds to save them.
We grew golden and red giant Amaranth this year. You can see both behind the orange zinnias in this picture from the garden on the Kindergarten playground side of the building. An Amaranth flower Señor Frank brought back from his brother, Ranger James’ garden in late July. This plant didn’t grow very big, but it flowered and that’s all that matters. We will collect thousands of seeds from it and be able to grow as many of these as we want in next year’s school garden. This picture shows our golden Amaranth and the pink and red celosia flowers. This was taken before I cut down the Amaranth to dry. The celosia is actually also a type of Amaranth. We can actually also eat the leaves of these plants as a vegetable and use the seeds as grain! The flowers are very attractive to our pollinators and they look great in bouquets. What’s not to like about this plant?
Here’s a video showing our golden Amaranth and celosia back on September 18.
I looked up a video that shows how to separate the Amaranth seeds and flowers and found out that the process is really very simple. It involves a tray of some sort, the crushed up flowers, and your breath blowing across the seed/flower mix. Here’s what I’ve gotten done so far. You can see what’s left to do on the tarp on the floor behind it.
There will be plenty to do at our next garden club meeting! In fact we still have dried Yellow Cabbage Collard seed pods and Rat Tail Radish seed pods in the closet that need to be crushed and processed! So don’t skip our garden club meetings if there’s a rainy day! There is plenty that we need to get done indoors too!
And here’s a post from Facebook from a seed farm showing how they separate their seed for storage and packaging. It looks pretty simple even if it’s done on a larger scale!
Check back on this post since we will be updating it with pictures and video showing how our garden club members process our saved seed from the garden and if you want any of the seeds we mentioned that we are saving, drop us a comment below.
Yesterday I ran down to the Owen’s Field Airport in Columbia to pick up my CSA share from Jason Roland and Greg Brown like I do every Thursday and I had an idea. Greg’s okra caught my eye. It looked familiar. So I asked him where he got the seeds for it…
But as usual, I knew the answer to that question.
It’s a fun little game I play with Mr. Brown. It usually goes something like this:
Me – “Hey farmer Greg. That’s interesting looking Okra you have there…. Where’d you get it?”
Farmer Greg – “I don’t know. I think it was from Sadia. Yeah. She gave me some of these seeds from a seed packet someone gave her.”
Me – “What do the plants look like? Are they short with thick stalks and big fat leaves?”
Greg – “Yeah. They’re only about four feet tall. How did you know?”
This is usually where the game ends when I say…
Me – “I know because I’m the guy who gave those seeds to Sadia!” 😂
Anyway, looking at Greg’s veggies, I thought I should take a picture and make a contest out of seeing if you garden club members could identify it.
So here are the pictures I took. The rules are you get one point for every vegetable you name correctly. Answer in the comments with a numbered list naming the vegetables in each picture. I’ll give you an extra point if you can name the variety of each of the 3 kinds of okra Greg was selling yesterday.
You have until Tuesday to post your answer in a comment. The person who gets the most correct answers wins an amazing, fresh sweet potato that was grown by Jason Roland himself!
Picture 1 (Actually 2 pics to help you figure out the varieties.)
Our hibiscus Roselle plant has done really well this season. It has grown tall and branched out well and now it just seems to keep producing flowers and those deep red calyxes that taste sour and help to lend it the name “Florida Cranberry”.
With its dark red stems and beautiful pink-yellow flowers, our hibiscus Roselle is the centerpiece of the zinnia garden. A delicate hibiscus blossom on a stalk loaded with calyxes. All parts of this plant are edible including the leaves that can add a sour zing to salads.These are some of the largest calyxes I’ve ever seen. We will have to let a few of these mature and dry on the plant so we can collect seeds to plant next year.
Yesterday I noticed a single wasp on this plant as I took pictures of the flowers and calyxes. It was walking around and around each calyx stopping at the little hole on each main petal of the calyx. It seemed to be drinking nectar or juice from each spot before moving on to the next calyx where it repeated the process. It was very close to my hand when I grabbed the stalk it was on and didn’t seem to mind my being so close, so I assume it was intent on feeding on whatever it was getting from those tiny holes in the calyxes.
If you look in the upper left hand corner of this short video, you’ll see our little wasp friend. I didn’t even notice him until I watched the video. (I took the video by mistake thinking I was taking a picture.)
Here is a longer video I made of our wasp friend feeding on the hibiscus Roselle.
I will be posting this video in the social media groups I belong to asking other gardeners and farmers what they think this wasp is doing. I suspect that maybe this plant produces something sweet to attract predator insects like wasps that would also eat pest insects they find on its leaves, but I’m not sure. An internet search has not given me the answer yet. That’s why I’m putting the question out there to other people who might have more experience with this plant in hopes of finding the answer.
In the meantime, here is a really good video I found about hibiscus Roselle that will show you how to collect the calyxes, process them, dry them, and make tea with them that tastes like Kool Aid! We will have to try this!
And here’s our answer! Only 18 minutes after posting this on Facebook…
I got this reply from one of the group administrators…
As I’ve said before, gardening and plant people are usually very generous with their materials, plants, seeds, and knowledge. Thank you, Ryan Merck, for this information. Now we will have to learn more about extrafloral nectaries!
Is it an alien invasion? No! It’s the morning glory flowers opening on our massive vine!
Be sure to check this plant every day when you walk to Spanish class or enter the building from the fifth grade portables. The number of flowers blooming daily is picking up. Pretty soon I expect this plant to be covered with new white, blue, pink, and purple streaked flowers every day!
Here are some pictures of recent flowers that bloomed on the plant. Check back on this post since I’ll be trying to add new pictures every so often.
This one that bloomed on Monday had me seeing stars!Morning glory flowers only bloom for one day, so every day you will see new flowers on the plant. This picture is what the plant looked like on Monday. What an incredible galaxy of colors! It looks like what hyperspace looks like from the cockpit of the Millenium Falcon! (May the Force be with you!)They’re all so different and unique. From all the colors to a simple skinny pink star…This picture is from Tuesday and you can see there are more flowers open on the plant. It’s hard to see in this picture, but there are LOADS of flower buds on this plant, so we will have new flowers every day until the frost kills this plant. And if there are flowers, there will be seeds! Who wants to grow this vine at home?
