I have found yet another reason I really like the Bolger Center as my preferred hotel when traveling to the Potomac, Bethesda, Rockledge area – "Garden Fresh" food.

The Bolger Center has taken a chapter from Michelle Obama. They have taken a small part of the well manicured lawn and planted a vegetable garden. It’s not huge but it has enough of two very common foods that the kitchen uses and vegetables that are best when they are fresh, fresh, fresh. They planted tomatoes and various sweet and hot peppers.

I looking forward to any travel that brings me back to the Bolger Center when the garden bares fruit !

No excitement here. Just a few honey-do items getting checked off and a few surprises – some good and some not.

I bid mother safe travels as she headed back home after a short and relaxing visit to the farm. I made “American Shepherd’s Pie” (known to the Britts as Cottage Pie) for dinner last night. I sent some home with mom. Along with a few quick-meal ideas.

After sketching out a few ideas for the home office and messing with ideas for the layout of my computer monitors, I decided I had better get to the list.

First up was the new herb garden. I repurposed an old half whiskey barrel and liner from a water garden. A few blocks and some bark mulch is all it needed to settle in and look like it belonged. Then it was over to the dirt pile. I thought 75/25 would be a good dirt / sand mix. Turns out we’ve had such a drought the the dirt is now dust so I had to go 50/50 on the top layer so there was a chance water would drain and not form one big adobe brickt. I seeded basil, chives, cilentro, parsley, and thyme.

After the herbs, I decided I should give the new fig trees some water. (Again, with the drought and all.) while puting the hose away, I was surprised to find the very dead fig given to me as a house warming by S&A was somehow still alive. So I decided it deserved a second or third chance at life. I pruned the really dead limbs. Note to all, don’t prune with a utility knife – especially one with a new blade. Silly carpenter mistake. Bandage, anti-bacterial goo, and painter’s tape and I’m back in business. I dug out a new hole near the other figs. Shook out the root ball into my wheel barrow. Mixed the dirt from the hole and planted the little guy. After some water, I covered the area with some remaining bark mulch.

All this gardening stuff has me worried. I have the brownest of thumbs. My fear is if most of what I’m trying to cultivate actually grows, it’s a pact with the devil. If you start seeing green thumbs dropping off people left and right, you know the cause.

Now Zen and I are in the front yard hunting for the elusive combination of sun and not too much wind in hopes of baking the 65 degrees seem warmer. I’m faking it with a mango, banana, Malibu smoothie!

Life’s good .. Then it’s Monday.

There are times when a picture tells the story better than words …. this is one of those times

It starts with a few ripe tomatoes …. well, more than a few …. well, A WHOLE DARN TRASH CAN OF THEM !

Now that the tomatoes are ripening faster than anyone could pick them and the commercial growers are only interested in the green ones (so they can gas them, ship them, and they’ll arrive un-bruised and ready for sale), it’s time for me to work on my tomato sauce / spaghetti sauce / tomato pesto recipe.

It starts with 6-8 plastic grocery bags that I stuff in my pocket before taking Zen for the morning walk. Once we arrive at the end of the field, Zen hangs out for about 15 minutes while I pick out just the best of the ripe red tomatoes. to be honest, if I were a little less picky (bad pun) the whole ordeal would last no more than 5 minutes because there are THAT MANY tomatoes passed over by the commercial pickers. One the bags are over flowing, I set them at the end of a row or off to the side and Zen and I head back. Later, I take the lawn mower over with a kitchen waste basket and fill it to the brim and then stuff the rest of the bags anywhere I can. Note: I made the mistake on the first day of filling two kitchen bins and it took me forever to process them all. I vowed, "never again". Now I am more critical of the tomatoes I choose to the point that i pass over literally hundreds of "left to rot" fruit.

Once back at the farmhouse, the labor begins. I wash all of the tomatoes in the sink – they just fit. Then I cut out the core, quarter them and run them through a food processer on batches; making tomato puree. This gets bagged in 1 gallon bags and frozen for later this fall and winter when I have time.

I’ve taken two of the 1-gallon purees and started to create my recipes. The first batch was turned into a lemon – tomato – basil pesto. It is amazing and crisp and refreshing. It will go great over linguine (al dente of course). The second batch was a more traditional tomato pesto with onion, garlic, basil, and course ground white and black pepper. I balance the tomatoes with a combination of raw cane sugar and sea salt to adjust for any variation in the concentration of tomato flavor. As you can see in the last frames, I cook the sauce down until it is so thick you push it around in the pan and it stays.

The cooking down process is simplified greatly with the chuck wagon sized cast iron pan. This one is 15" across and the combination of 360 cubic inches of volume and 175 square inches of surface area allows me to turn the heat to high for the first 30 minutes with very little attention on my part. The last 30 minutes requires less heat and more attention as the liquid evaporates and the sauce thickens quickly.

There are tomato fields adjacent my farm and Zen and I did a little math recently. WE attempted to calculate how many plants there were. Here is what we came up with …

• there are approximately 45 acres
• the crops are divided into zones and there are 7 zones
• each zone is divided into "banks" and there are 10 banks in each zone
• each bank contains 6 rows
• each row is approximately 500 feet long
• plants are approximately 18-20 inches apart (my estimate is very close to 20 inches)

By these calculations, there are approximately 125,000 tomato plants and these plants are commercial grade generating as many as 15-20 large full tomatoes. That’s a lot of tomatoes ! (And this is just one field.)