Salad days of spring

Baby Spice

John and I bought some baby plants at several nurseries on Thursday and, over several comfortably cloudy afternoon hours that day, prepped and planted the big back garden – with help from Anna, home from UNH for a few days before finals.

I am most excited about the pepper plants, genus Capsicum, and can hardly wait for them to flower and grow peppers, in the neatly laid out pepper patch.

Poblano, a variety of Capsicum annuum, in a biodegradable peat pot

Poblanos are mild and when roasted are known as anchos. Poblanos are often used in chiles rellenos. Anchos are ground and used in mole sauces.

We also planted jalapeno, green, red, tabasco, cayenne and banana peppers. And tiny edible ornamental Thai hot peppers in a pot next to the herb garden up by the house.

I'd like to add Scotch bonnet or habanero to complete the collection and have the greatest range of piquancies to pick from on the Scoville scale of pepper hotness.

The big garden

We also planted cabbage (foreground), baby lima beans, basil, soybeans, and big boy, sweet cherry and roma tomatoes. Lettuce, radishes and peas were seeded a few weeks ago and are seedlings now. We have strawberries like crazy, which will ripen in June.

I am puzzling over what to do with the rhubarb, besides the same old strawberry rhubarb pie.

Salad mix

I just thought this lettuce mix was too pretty to pass up, discovered at the most beautiful nursery in the Seacoast, Rolling Green, on Breakfast Hill Road in Greenland, NH.

The expression salad days – meaning a time of youth and inexperience, sometimes construed as better and more innocent – comes from William Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra, when Cleopatra describes and dismisses her early infatuation with Julius Caesar...

My salad days,
When I was green in judgment, cold in blood,
To say as I said then!

William Tecumseh Sherman, on being introduced to chile peppers...

Taking a good mouthful, I felt as though I had taken liquid fire; the tomato was chile colorado, or red pepper, of the purest kind. It nearly killed me, and I saw Gómez’ eyes twinkle for he saw that his share of supper was increased.

More quotes to spice up this post...

Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed.
– Francis Bacon

I never had any other desire so strong, and so like to covetousness, as that one which I have had always, that I might be master at last of a small house and a large Garden.
– Abraham Cowley, The Garden, 1666

My garden will never make me famous,
I'm a horticultural ignoramus.
– Ogden Nash

The world's favorite season is the spring.
All things seem possible in May.
– Edwin Way Teale

A vegetable garden in the beginning looks so promising and then after all little by little it grows nothing but vegetables, nothing, nothing but vegetables.
– Gertrude Stein

A garden is always a series of losses set against a few triumphs, like life itself.
– May Sarton

It is good to be alone in a garden at dawn or dark so that all its shy presences may haunt you and possess you in a reverie of suspended thought.
– James Douglas

I was determined to know beans.
– Thoreau, in Walden

We have descended into the garden and caught three hundred slugs. How I love the mixture of the beautiful and the squalid in gardening. It makes it so lifelike.
– Evelyn Underhill

The world is made of sugar and dirt.
– Alfred Döblin

Comments

[Mouse]

Loved this post!
So full of potential!
Now to find all of those peppers that you mentioned, they would grow nicely in the conservatory I think!

[Marie]

You have the garden I so long for...
Rhubarb? Makes a fantastic relish or chutney.

[Amy]

I was thinking about chutney, strange you should mention it. I've made chutney before and I was the only one who liked it, so should I take that risk again of pleasing only myself? :)

[missanniemac]

amy

that garden looks SO fantastic! you guys really did a lot of work.

may i suggest some heirloom cukes to pickle in the fall?

http://seedsavers.org/products.asp?dept=26

[Amy]

Oh we planted some cukes already too, I just forgot to list them.