SUMMER REWARDS

                  In June my garden looks perfect. Green onions march proudly alongside tufts of lettuce-- chartreuse, purple, and deep green.  Rhubarb bends lazily into a bed of radishes.  Tomato plants have not yet outgrown their cages, and cucumbers are trying valiantly to wrap their little tendrils around the first rung of a trellis.  I step along paths created by mulched leaves, examining stately broccoli, heat-loving eggplant, perky green bean bushes.  Herbs are fragrant but not prolific.
The garden is neat and pleasing to the eye, though not yet very productive except for salad greens and rhubarb. July and August will bring further rewards, but June’s daily treat is a heaping salad of mixed greens; the trick is to vary the dressings. Our very favorite is a simple vinaigrette of olive oil and red wine vinegar. Add a few sliced radishes, chopped green onions, and an herb or two—the rabbits will watch with envy. 
June speaks to me of rhubarb and strawberries.  Although I have failed at raising strawberries--they got lost in my flowers and produced five small berries-- I always have ample rhubarb and love to pick strawberries at a local farm.  “Pick one, eat one,” is my motto, and the farmer smiles knowingly at the red juice on my chin as I head home to make strawberry rhubarb jam and a strawberry rhubarb pie.
Summer garden maintenance includes feeding, mulching, weeding. I feed my vegetables with compost tea or manure tea.  Not to be served with crumpets, this beverage is a home brew which increases beneficial soil microbes and encourages plant growth.  I dump a mound of compost or composted manure into a pail and fill with water, letting it sit for a few days. (I compost all of my vegetable scraps yearlong, along with grass clippings and leaves, using a plastic bin which sits in the corner of my garden.  Composted manure can be purchased at any garden store.) When I am ready to use the tea, I dilute it to an amber “tea” color and pour a pint or so around each plant. Sometimes I give my plants a shot of diluted fish emulsion—smells awful, plants love it. I add so much organic matter to the soil at the beginning of the growing season that my plants stay happy, healthy, and productive.  I try to smother weeds with mulched leaves from last season as well as grass clippings from my own yard, but I still need to walk weed patrol regularly.  Some weeds are actually edible, such as purslane which can be tossed into salads.   
As July heats up, I love to examine the tiny blossoms on tomatoes, cucumbers, beans, and especially the lovely purple eggplant flowers.  Then, miraculously tiny plants emerge and it’s time to find a dozen ways to use green beans and cucumbers. Green beans are wonderful steamed, grilled, sautéed, but after we’ve eaten them five days in a row, I pickle them.  I never tire of cool cucumbers, but love to make refrigerator pickles for a winter treat.  And those huge cucumbers that hide from me until they are as large as footballs?  After peeling, scooping out the seeds, cutting into spears, dousing with vinegar, they make a refreshing July snack. 
Refrigerator pickles, my specialty, are a wonderful way to use cucumbers, beets, and even green beans. Although my mother canned every variety of fruit and vegetable available in the 1950’s, my own number-one canning success is sweet pepper salsa.  To prevent spoilage, it’s important to follow directions for heating and vacuum sealing.  I trust Ball and Kerr for my recipes. My advice to anyone worried about poisoning their families-- try refrigerating and freezing before moving on to the more technical world of canning.  It’s very simple to make an extra batch of pasta sauce as the tomatoes ripen, pour into a quart container and throw it in the freezer for your New Year’s Eve party.  You can also grate the firmer tomato varieties (plum or paste) and freeze the pulp to be used in any tomato-loving recipe. 
The first ripe tomato is plucked ceremoniously, sliced, layered with fresh mozzarella and lots of basil leaves, placed within a section of crusty French bread and drizzled with olive oil.  Nirvana! When the bread becomes day-old stale, bruschetta is on the menu.   Prolific basil is pulsed into pesto and frozen as ice cubes for winter pasta.
In August the real harvest begins!  Tomatoes, peppers, and onions are now reduced to several pints of salsa.  I’ve developed a half-dozen ways to stuff a pepper, and my husband Lou has finally decided he likes eggplant as long as it is buried in eggplant parmesan or grilled with olive oil.  I make my own pasta sauce which I freeze in quart bags and pull out of my freezer throughout the winter.