Self-sowed Melon

I do gardening with home-made compost.

Compost is composed of decomposed organic materials.
As the materials decompose, heat is generated. Unwanted weed seeds and bacteria are killed with this heat. Theoretically.

Somehow my compost doesn't become hot enough to kill seeds.
Past years, I witnessed plants like potatoes, tomatoes, and even chili pepper emerged from compost which was scattered on the garden.

This year, I found yellow squash look-like plant was growing in my vegetable garden.
I don't have any recollection of throwing yellow squash seed since I eat them all, but I have no objection growing it in my garden, so let it grow.

After a while, it didn't look like yellow squash.

Watermelon...?
I waited more and found out...

It happened to be cantaloupe melon!
I grew melon from a seedling some years ago but never saw it self-sow.

I cut it into half and tried.

Not much meat...and a little sour... but it definitely tasted like melon!

Yuzu

It's been years since I planted a yuzu tree in the back yard.
Probably because I don't know how to trim the tree in a right way, the harvest could be good or disaster depending on the year.

This year, the yuzu tree brought us a good harvest.
The next task is to figure out how to use up all the fruits.

Yuzu cookies.
Flaky ice box cookies with yuzu zest and juice inside.

Preserved Kombu and yuzu
The recipe is from a book "Yuzu" by Shigeko Nakamura.
Re-using leftover kombu after making dashi: cooking them with sake, mirin, shoyu, and yuzu skin and juice.

Yuzu Carbonara.
This recipe is also from the book "Yuzu."
Pasta was boiled with a slice of yuzu.

When the last yuzu becomes ripe, I'm planning to make marmalade but there are still more yuzu than I need for the marmalade, so I used some yuzu for cleaning.

Citrus skin contains some kind of oil which has cleansing ability.
I just cut the fruit into half and scrubbed kitchen sink and bathtub.
The place became not only clean, but also fragrant!   

Preserved lemon

The weather here is suitable to grow citrus trees. We have lemon, yuzu, kumquat and lime trees in our garden.
I always want to have fruit trees which I can eat, but end up with planting citrus trees because they are so easy to grow!

It's lemon season now and our generous tree produced a lot of lemons as it does every year.
It's handy to have lemons and we squeeze lemon juice on top of everything, but lemon is a kind of fruit which you don't consume a lot, and the pile of lemons in a kitchen keeps growing.

I found a recipe of preserved lemon when I was at a loss what to do with the pile of lemons some years ago.
It is to simply marinate lemon in salt.

My version is quite simple: cut lemons into thick slices. Sprinkle salt on the bottom of a glass jar, add one slice of lemon, sprinkle salt on top of it, add another slice of lemon...

You need to measure and use more salt if you want to make it real preserved food, but I keep the amount of salt low and use up within several months.

It's ready when lemons become soft (about 3~4 weeks).
I discard pulp because they are bitter, and use skins.
Skins are chopped small and used for potato salad, tuna salad or salad dressing. It's good to eat with curry too.
JC eats just by itself like pickles. That's why I have to keep this low sodium.

The pile is much smaller now but I still have some lemons left.
Can I freeze them?
Is it possible to freeze the whole lemon and still keep the freshness?
There is only one way to find out...

Recycle gardening

Even if I try to keep things fresh, I sometimes find vegetables which are rotten or moldy in my kitchen.
They become compost but I still feel bad.

Last year, we found moldy garlic and  instead of throwing into a compost bin, planted it in a pot.
We didn't know how to grow garlic or even if it would ever grow, so watered occasionally and just waited.
It started to sprout in spring.
After the plant died down, JC dug out the garlic last week.

It was small, but pungent, real garlic!

We have other recycle vegetable plants in our garden.
I never planted tomato. Some of the tomatoes fall on the ground, and grow back again by themselves every year.

This is potato.
It started to grow in a compost bin, so I replanted to the garden.
This happens often, and they produce small potatoes in autumn.

I planted pumpkin seeds, too.
I didn't know if it was possible to grow pumpkin by just sowing seeds on the ground, but they sprouted and it looked promising; however, one day some unknown bugs annihilated them (therefore I still don't know if I can grow pumpkin this way).

I should be able to produce better result if I google "how to grow" but I kind of like this trial and error gardening. I can afford to make mistakes: this is the good thing about gardening with the recycled stuff.

It's fun to plan meticulously and plant store-bought seedlings, but recycle gardening offers a different kind of pleasure even if it sometimes comes with failure and inferior crops.

Caiparinha with Blackberry from our garden

Blackberries are very vigorous and considered to be weeds around here, but I let them grow at the small corner in my garden because, of course, I want to enjoy the fruit.

I don't really do anything to take care of them. Maybe that's why the fruit tasted good but a little thin by itself.
So JC made them into a cocktail.

Caiparinha with blackberry

Caiparinha is a cocktail from Brazil.
It's made with Cachaça, hard liquor of sugar cane.
Other ingredients are lime, blackberry and raw sugar.
Mint (another weed in the garden) for garnish.

Sweet and sour. Refreshing. And delicious!