Gardeners' Holidays 2022: (Half-Full) Cornucopia

Summer is officially here, and the weather certainly got the memo this year. All weekend it's been bright and sunny with highs in the 90s. Combined with New Jersey humidity, that's not exactly pleasant weather for humans, but for the vegetables in the garden it's...well, a mixed bag.

Our asparagus has already stopped producing, not that it ever produced much this year. We got maybe 10 ounces off it all spring, and pretty much all of that was out of the bed on the south side of the house. Brian is considering giving up on the other bed entirely and replacing the asparagus with something else — possibly the garlic, which is also not doing at all well in its current location. About half the plants look like they've been crushed somehow, maybe by groundhogs romping through them. We probably won't even get enough garlic out of the patch to replant next year and will have to buy some more.

The snap peas, which would normally be at their peak now, were also a disappointment. More than half the seeds we planted never even came up, and the ones that did have given us only about six ounces of peas to date. And our new Banana pepper has turned out to be nearly as pathetic as last year's failed Apple pepper. Only one of the seedlings we started got big enough to plant, and once in the ground it stayed tiny and weedy, not really growing and certainly unlikely to produce any peppers.

On the other hand, some crops are doing really well. About half the arugula has already bolted, but the other half is coming in nicely, and we've been getting tons of lettuce — so much that Brian has started planning our meals on the assumption that anything we eat has to go with salad. The basil is also coming up nice and thick, and we're starting to see the first little fingerlings on the zucchini plants and the first little green tomatoes on the vines. And we've already harvested bunches of parsley, enough to make two batches of falafel and one of our favorite quinoa salad (the one that started out as couscous salad and later became kasha salad before taking on its current form). We had leftovers from both dishes for lunch today and discovered that they actually go quite nicely together. (Side note: We learned today on Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me that eating this way defines us as posh, at least to Australians. They supposedly refer to gentrifying neighborhoods as being "behind the quinoa curtain.")

Tonight's dinner, however, does not include much of our actual garden produce. Since it's so hot, Brian decided to grill some eggplant and red pepper to make the roasted veggie sandwiches that were our Recipe of the Month last October. That's one of our favorite dishes, but not a particularly seasonal one, since our peppers are weeks or months away from producing and we can't grow eggplant, full stop. Of course, we'll almost certainly be eating a salad with the sandwiches, but big deal — we're doing that pretty much every day.

So, to celebrate our garden produce in a small way, I used some of our raspberries — which are about midway through their first crop of the year — in a simple mocktail that I made up on the spur of the moment. I put five raspberries in a glass and "muddled" them, crushing them into a pulp with the back of a spoon. Then I topped that with a teaspoon of lime juice and about one and a half teaspoons of the ginger simple syrup that Brian makes for me as a cold remedy. (It may not actually do anything to help the healing process, but a big dollop of it in a cup of hot water or tea, with coconut whipped cream and sometimes a little tot of rum, makes me feel a lot better.) I added ice cubes, topped up the glass with seltzer, and added a dash of Angostura bitters. (Orange bitters would probably be even better, but we didn't have those.)

When it was done, I couldn't really taste the ginger, but it was very refreshing all the same — cold, crisp, fizzy, and fruity, with just a touch of sweetness. I liked it so much that I drank it right down before remembering to take a picture, so of course I had no choice but to immediately mix up another. I'm going to call it a Raspberry Refresher, unless I think of something better. It would probably be nice with a drop of gin, as well, or maybe some of the orangecello that Brian and I sampled at the local liquor store earlier in the afternoon. I abstained from adding any since one drink, or sometimes even half of one, is pretty much my limit, but there's no need for you to feel similarly constrained. Give it a try if you like, and let me know how it came out.