11 kilos = 22 24 lbs.

That's how many ripe tomatoes we picked in the garden in about 15 minutes' time yesterday afternoon. Nearly 25 pounds. The temperature hit 89ºF late in the day, and the dry conditions were perfect. The last two hot days brought a lot of tomatoes to perfect maturity.

This bucket was here when we moved in.
It's perfect for gathering tomatoes.

Most of the fruit we picked consisted little round salad tomatoes, mostly a little smaller than tennis balls. We're not sure what variety they are, or whether they are actually several different kinds. We planted many pieds of many varieties, and then we mixed them all up. And we ended up setting them all out in the garden — 35 or more plants.

Little red salad tomatoes

Then there were a few gigantic tomatoes. One, all by itself, weighed 900 g, which is two pounds. A couple of others were nearly as big. And several were more or less softball-size.

For scale...

Two varieties that are easy to recognize are the little yellow plum tomatoes and the little round purple ones. There is one problem with tomatoes this season in Saint-Aignan: a lot of the plum-shaped ones have a black spot on the bottom of them. It must be some kind of fungus. It seems nearly everybody's tomatoes are showing the symptions. I don't know why the plum tomatoes are especially vulnerable to it. Our little yellow plum variety is not immune.

Some of the bigger specimens

Seeds for Prudens Purple tomatoes, pictured below

The purple ones are immune, apparently, and we're glad of it. They are beautiful clusters of little round berries the size of a pingpong ball or smaller. The ones we planted came from seeds packaged by the company called Pinetree Garden Seeds, located in New Gloucester, Maine, U.S.A. If they were a little smaller, they'd look like grapes.

Prudens purple

Today I'm going to make tomato purée, or at least tomato sauce, using nearly all the tomatoes we picked yesterday. We'll keep out the purple ones for salad. I'm hoping to make a fairly thick purée that I'll run through the moulin à légumes (food mill) with the finest blade to remove all skins and seeds.

Another picture of that behemoth, next to the
little purple tomatoes.

The beginnings of the sauce-making process

I plan to can the purée — put it up in sterilized jars that we can keep in the cellar over the winter. The freezer is still just too full, and we are going to have a lot more tomatoes in August and September, as far as I can tell. We'll also have aubergines and a lot more chard.

This is a tomatillo plant I pulled out
because it had almost no fruit on it.

Tomatillo plants grow wide and leggy, with a single fruit at each "articulation" point. They really need to be planted in their own plot, because among the tomatoes they send out branches that get mingled and tangled up in the tall tomato plants.

Bearing gifts...

People are so nice. They read this blog and then bring or send us things. I'm serious and not trying to be funny. Some of the best gifts we've gotten have been seeds to plant in the garden. And food items. And toys for Callie.

I can't mention all the people who've brought us seeds and plants: CHM, ChrissouP and Tony, Sue and Leon, Carolyn and Ernie, Cheryl, Susan and Simon, Lisa and Alex, Martine... okay, I'm sure I've forgotten somebody. I should've kept a list.

Yesterday we had a visit from Caroline, who lives in England and sometimes comments on this blog. She has family in Saint-Aignan, and she was visiting for a couple of weeks. She saw on the blog that we are growing Swiss chard for the first time this year. She wanted to contribute some chard seeds for next year's garden.

No ordinary chard seeds, these. Look at them. A rainbow.

Caroline's mother (whom we had met a couple of years ago) brought us a bag of scones and a jar of plum jam that she made. Plum jam is my favorite, and her jar of it is really good. I know. I'm having scones and jam for my breakfast.

Carolyn in Pa. gave us the seeds for these pole beans.
I wanted to show how well they are going.

Yesterday was a perfect day, and for once it didn't rain when we planned to spend the evening outdoors in the garden. We set up a table out between the grape vines and the apple trees, in the shade and near the vegetable garden.

A local Touraine Sauvignon from Valérie Forgues in Mareuil

The temperature yesterday hit 29ºC — about 85F — and there was hardly a cloud in the sky all day. There was only the slightest breeze, but there was almost no humidity either. We sat out back in the evening and enjoyed a bottle of local Sauvignon Blanc, with some finger foods Walt and I had prepared.

Our evening spot, between apple trees and grape vines

I really enjoyed meeting and talking with Caroline, and meeting her children Ewan and Phoebe. Caroline is Dutch by birth but has lived in England for many years. Her children are English-born.

A guessing game: what do you think these are?
Hints: our friend Cheryl in California gave us the seeds,
and this is not something you'd expect to see in France.

Walt and I sat out until about 11, watching the full moon rise. I've never seen a brighter moon. Walt keeps saying he can tell summer is winding down. The days are getting slightly shorter. If that wasn't a harvest moon last night, I don't know what it was. Today's plans include harvesting a ton of tomatoes and maybe some aubergines.

Caviar de courgettes

Yesterday it was aubergines. Today it's courgettes. If you're American, you might not know what courgettes are. However, it's a perfectly good word in English — British English, and maybe other varieties. In the U.S., we use the Italian word, zucchini, instead of the French word.

The season is upon us, whether you call these sometimes baseball-bat-size things by foreign names or the good old American name, squash. Summer squash. They come in green or yellow. When I was growing up, we had yellow summer squash but I don't remember green summer squash back then. I think the yellow ones are more delicate, from every point of view.

Bake zucchini halves face down, let them cool,
turn them over, and scrape out the flesh.

But that's not what we have this year. We have the now-standard zucchini, and they're good too. They hide under the big leaves of the plant they grow on and end up enormous before you even notice them. What do you do with those?

One idea is the zucchini equivalent of eggplant caviar, known as caviar d'aubergines in France. "Caviar" in these expressions is a little like the "egg" in "eggplant" — it can be misleading. There are no sturgeon eggs in eggplant or zucchini caviar. What is it? It's a cold dip for chips. Or a spread for toasted bread. It's a purée made with the cooked pulp of a squash or aubergine, some garlic and herbs, and some olive oil. You can can also serve it warm as a side dish.

Zucchini caviar, before the addition of fresh herbs

Here's a French recipe for zucchini caviar, which I've translated and adapted:

Tunisian-style Caviar of Courgettes

4 medium or 2 large summer squash
2 or even 4 cloves of garlic
2 Tbsp. lemon juice
1 tsp. ground cumin
1 teaspoon harissa* or a big pinch of cayenne pepper
½ tsp. ground coriander seed
½ cup chopped parsley (or mint or basil)
¼ cup or more olive oil
Salt and pepper to taste

Cut the squashes in half the long way. Lay them face down on an oiled baking sheet and bake them in the oven at 350ºF about 30 minutes, until they are completely soft and starting to collapse. Take them out and let them cool.

Meanwhile, crush and purée the garlic cloves with a knife or mortar and pestle. Squeeze a fresh lemon. Chop the herbs.

When the squash halves are cool enough to work with, turn them over and scrape the flesh out of the shells with a tablespoon. If the cut surfaces have browned and caramelized a little, so much the better. Mash the pulp and cut through it with a knife to purée it.

Mix the warm squash pulp with the garlic, cumin, coriander, cayenne or harissa, lemon juice, and herbs. Salt and pepper to taste. Finally, beat in the olive oil. Put the dish in the refrigerator, covered, for a couple of hours to cool and to giver the flavors time to blend.

Serve with corn chips as a dip or, as a spread, on lightly toasted bread.

* Harissa is a red-pepper paste used to spice up foods in North Africa and in France.

Weeding the aubergines

Notice that I used the French term for eggplant in my title, as my British friends very sensibly do whenever they talk about these vegetables. They just call them aubergines, without flinching.

What a confusing term eggplant is in American English! The singular "eggplant" is okay to describe the vegetable itself (it's a fruit, really) — it's "an eggplant." But even that's slightly off kilter, because it's not a plant, but just a part of one. It's not an egg either, but you knew that.

Eggplant plants

What do you do with the plural? Is "eggplant" a count noun — "Here are some eggplants." — or it it a collective term — "I'd like three eggplant, please." I really don't know. I'm pretty sure that I'd day: "I bought some eggplant at the store today," using the collective singular.

Fleurs d'aubergines

Click the pictures to enlarge them for a better view.

And then what is the plant itself called? An "eggplant plant"? I feel silly saying that. "I'd like three eggplant plants, please." In French it's easier. For some reason, a plant is called « un pied ». Yes, "a foot."

I just did a Google search on the term pied de tomate and I see that some people pluralize only the word pied when they talk about several tomato plants, or pieds de tomate, but others make both words plural: trois pieds de tomates, for example. Either way, the S's aren't pronounced, so when you say pieds de tomate(s) nobody knows whether you're putting an S on tomate or not. Just don't write it.

In France, then, you might buy "six eggplant feet" to plant in your garden. That's six eggplant plants, and you probably didn't even know eggplant — eggplants? — had feet. I think you have to understand "foot" as the base of the plant — the rootstock. The thing it stands on.

A caterpillar on a rhubarb leaf

At least in French you don't have to say thing like "I'm going to plant some eggplant plants in my garden." And even in the U.K., you are exempt from having to use such a clumsy expression. You'd just plant an aubergine plant. That just rolls off the tongue, doesn't it?

Une punaise on a rhubarb leaf.
The French-English dictionary translates punaise as "bug."

Okay, I got carried away. Yesterday I didn't plant any eggplant plants, but I did weed some aubergine plants. They needed it. First, there was a lot of coriander growing among them, and it had all gone to seed. We are going to save the seeds for future plantings. There was also a lot of crabgrass growing on the ground under everything. I wet the earth well to soften it up sufficiently, and I went at the crabgrass with the weeding tool. It came out of the ground without much resistance.

Rhubarb, the second coming

On a roll, I then weeded the rhubarb patch, which is right next to the aubergine patch. The rhubarb turned out to be surprisingly robust-looking. It was so overgrown we hadn't seen it in a while. We'll have a second rhubarb crop this year. There were quite a few caterpillars, bugs, and big orange slugs on the ground around the pieds de rhubarbe and on the leaves.

Today, I'm going to unleash my fury on the tomato patch. There are way too many nasturtiums growing in there, not to mention serious, natural, hardy, local weeds. Yesterday Walt spied a nearly ripe tomato about the size of a volleyball in the middle of the tomato patch, but you'd need a machete to get in there to pick it. Now where is my machete?