My favorite fruit from the garden!

Botanically speaking a fruit is the part of a plant that contains the seed. With this definition in mind we could call something from the garden a fruit if we eat the part with the seed. Tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers and green beans would be examples of fruit. Lettuce, celery, radishes and carrots would then be vegetables.

These are not the definitions we use in cooking or when eating however. Luckily this whole mess was cleared up in 1893 when the United States Supreme Court declared the tomato a vegetable instead of a fruit. In that case, they wisely gave us our current definitions of fruits and vegetables. They said a vegetable is something we eat with lunch or dinner and a fruit was something sweet that was generally eaten as dessert.

So with the Supreme Court's definition in mind, the fruits we are growing this year in our garden are strawberries, watermelon and cantaloupe. We also have apple and peach trees and blueberry bushes but none of these are my favorite garden fruits.

My absolute favorite fruit from the garden, by the Supreme Court's definition, is......

Zucchini!

That's right, zucchini. I know zucchini is a squash which is a vegetable, but my dessert last night was sweet and delicious and made from zucchini.

My wife and daughters made the best zucchini bread ever! They used a fantastic Amish recipe. Maybe I can get the recipe from them to share with you in a future post.

For now I will have to tell you how to make it by explaining in great detail what they did and by showing you step by step pictures. Pay close attention now.

First they cut and grated the zucchini:

Then they mixed in some sort of ingredients and put in the zucchini. They proceeded to mix the batter up some more and put it in bread pans:

Then they put the pans in the oven at some temperature for some amount of time.

See? Its easy. If you do it exactly like I have explained it to you, you will have tasty Amish zucchini bread.

When I got home, my wife cut me a big piece and served it on one of our old fashioned Amish plates.

And this is what it looked like after I did my part:

I was happy to pitch in.

So there you have it. My favorite fruit from the garden.

They're Baaaack... Blister Beetles Attack!

For the most part I have been lucky over the years to not have much of a problem with pests in the garden. I have an occasional loss to a deer or some other animal and I have a few minor bouts with insects. None of the pests really make much of a difference in the overall outcome of the harvest - EXCEPT FOR THE BLISTER BEETLES!

Last year they wiped out my Brandywine tomatoes. They are the nastiest of garden insects. I don't even want to go into the details about how awful they are in this post. If you are interested in learning more about the Darth Vaders of the garden you can read about them from one of my previous posts.

In that post, I wrote about how I was going to grow horseradish next to my tomatoes to keep the blister beetles away, which I did. You know, I think it actually works! You see the important thing is not were the beetles are in the garden, its where the are not! I found the beetle in the above picture on my early tomatoes which is on the other side of the garden from the horseradish. The heirloom tomatoes next to the horseradish are doing great, with no signs of insects on them.

So even though this post appeared to be a negative report, it actually is a positive one. I only found (and extinguished) three blister beetles on my Early Girl tomatoes and my Brandywine and Prudens Purple tomatoes that live next to the horseradish are doing well. Having those two kinds of tomatoes together look odd. Both of them have the unique potato-leaf look to them. Here is a leaf from the Prudens Purple:

So at least for now, I guess I'll say thank you to the horseradish. The odd thing is that the horseradish is there to deter insects from the tomatoes but the horseradish itself is taking the worst damage from insects out of all of my plants. There are some new bugs on them that I hadn't seen before. I will be writing a whole post strictly about the new insects. For now though, I will leave you with a picture of my Super Hero Horseradish plants.

Keep up the good work guys!