The Slowcook at Spydog Farm The Slowcook at Spydog Farm

What to Do with Dill

June 1st, 2011 · 3 Comments · Posted in garden

Our crop of volunteer dill

One of the cool features of our urban kitchen garden this year is a huge patch of volunteer dill that showed up in one of the vegetable beds. Our luck growing dill intentionally has always been spotty. But wouldn’t you know it: When you’re not trying to grow something, it appears in profusion all on its own.

What this dill represents is one heckuva lot of dill sauce, or perhaps a bumper crop of dill pickles. Except it’s nowhere close to cucumber season yet. In fact, to avoid another infestation of cucumber beetles, I’ve delayed even planting cucumbers and other squashes until June 15. So it looks like I’ll be shopping for pickling cukes either at the farmers market or the local Whole Foods. Looking at all that dill–now developing seed heads–I have a sudden taste for Hungarian sun pickles.

Elsewhere in the garden, the green beans are soaking up the sun and the current heat wave. Temperatures here are in the 90s, and we’re mostly hiding inside with the shutters closed, except the wee hours of the morning when it’s still cool enough to work outside. I spent the last couple of mornings completely weeding a long narrow bed planted with zinnia and cosmos. The bed was overwhelmed with small amaranth plants that seeded themselves last year. We love the lo0k of those bronze amaranth, but they do cast seeds like weeds. Yesterday I planted a row of “Mammoth” sunflower seeds in that bed as well. It should be one impressive flower arrangement in a few weeks.

Our tomato, pepper and eggplant seedlings are thriving under their impromptu row cover enclosure. I’ll probably transplant them into the garden on Friday. It will also be time to erect the trellis for our pole beans as well. Meanwhile, behind the dill, our okra has germinated right on schedule. In fact, I planted a few more seeds in places where the originals had failed to sprout. Okra is pretty reliable, and I’m sure it’s loving all this heat. Have I mentioned that okra is one of our favorite vegetables for the District of Columbia?

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