All winter I sit at the breakfast room table with a pot of tea and a pile of gardening books and seed catalogues dreaming of my garden to be. I envision a cascade of roses over my doorway and shoulder high hollyhocks flanking the front path. I can smell the sweet scent of stock and alyssum mingling with the scant perfume of the sea of daffodils. And oh the color: a wall of sunflowers nodding their giant golden heads, zinnias, geraniums with a sea of nasturtiums at their feet. I can taste the fat fresh tomatoes, hear the zucchini and onions sizzling in the skillet, feel the bite of jalapeños on my tongue and smell the bales of fragrant dill and basal.
Then come April and May and the reality of slugs and snails, cut worms, marauding blue jays, my adobe soil, cats digging in my newly planted seed beds, crabgrass and earwigs. Somehow it doesn’t seem so romantic any more, but for some reason, garden I must. I can’t wait each year to be back mucking about in dirt, even though the results never quite come up to those winter dreams.
One of my favorite and most successful gardens each year is always my salsa garden. Yes, I can buy very nice salsa at the market. Yes, I can make a very good salsa from products purchased at the local farmers market, but I get a rather perverse thrill out of being able to say, “Yes, I made the salsa.” “From scratch,” may guests will say. “Yes,” I will answer, “Absolutely from scratch.”
A good salsa to me is indeed a veritable garden. I standard make a red and a green salsa. My red contains red, ripe tomatoes, garlic, onion, red bell peppers (because I like a lot of pepper taste, even when I don’t want a hot, hot salsa,) cilantro and of course fresh cayenne chilies. My green salsa is made of tomatillos, garlic, green onions, green peppers, cilantro and jalapeños.
Most of these are relatively easy to grow, well, easy if you don’t have to fight adobe soil, earwigs, deer and snails.
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Tomatoes: I advise that you buy bedding plants. It is possible to start them from seed but it is a tedious process. Of course if you want to grow heirlooms, or other obscure varieties you may need to start from seeds. When buying bedding plants, try to find the small plants in six-packs. Avoid buying the individual plants in 4-inch or gallon containers. The larger a plant is when transplanted the greater shock it experiences. Also, these large plants are quite expensive to no great purpose. The small six-pack plants will have caught up with the large ones in about two weeks. My favorite |
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Peppers: Peppers and Chilies are the same species. They are all technically chilies. It is a one-gene difference that determines whether they are hot or sweet. Again, I advise that you buy your pepper or chili plants in the six-packs. Only the most dedicated of gardeners will have the patience to start them from seed. Peppers and chilies have basically the same garden requirements. |
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Onions: Onions are perhaps the most difficult of all the vegetables you want in your salsa garden. Not difficult really, just a bit tedious. You may grow them from sets, seeds or by transplanting. I have even grown them by planting old onions that had begun to sprout. Like any vegetable that develops underground, onions need a relatively loose soil in order to do well. In my heavy adobe soil it is very difficult for me to grow good onions or garlic. |
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Green Onions: Whether you call them green onions, scallions or spring onions, they are the same critter; onions grown primarily for their flavorful green tops. I spent years trying to grow green onions with small success, then I accidentally found a marvelously easy way. When buying green onions at the market, choose ones that have a healthy root end left on. When you get the onions home, cut off the root leaving about a quarter to half inch of the white part of the onion on it. Plant these roots in your garden and within about six weeks you will have a new green onion. It’s the closest thing to perpetual motion you will find because you can keep on doing it. You can save the root from your recycled onions and plant them as well. |
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Garlic: Like with onions, you will need a relatively loose soil in order to grow good garlic. In heavy soil, like my adobe, you will get small, poorly shaped bulbs. I never buy nursery sets of garlic. I find I have excellent success, (when I have the right soil) by just planting the garlic I can buy at the grocery store. Buy nice, big, fat bulbs, break them apart into individual cloves. Do not peel, and just plant directly in the ground as soon as the soil is warm enough to work. Incidentally, with both garlic and onions, any unharvested plants left to go to seed will produce attractive flower heads that are great for dried bouquets. |
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Tomatillos: Tomatillos, or husk tomatoes are essential if you are going to make green salsa or “Salsa Verde.” Unless you live in a community with a large Hispanic population you may have difficulty finding them and will need to grow them yourself. I have almost never found starts for Tomatillos in nurseries, so I grow them from seed. Even the seeds are not all that easy to find so you may need to order them from a seed catalogue. Fortunately, they grow rather well from seeds sewn directly in the grown. Tomatillos are ready to harvest when the paper husk begins to split and show the fruit inside. For use in salsa and other Mexican dishes they are usually used while still green in color, however, if left on their vines until fully ripened, they will achieve a rather grayish purple color and become somewhat sweet and are a nice fruit on their own. |
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Cilantro or Corieander; they are the same plant. Cilantro is the green plant, Corieander is the seed. It is sometimes called Chinese parsley, which is missleading because flavor-wise, they have nothing in common and cannot, dispite what some recipes say, be used interchangaby. Cilantro is very easy to grow from seed. I use a lot of it so I grow a lot. I never buy the espensive little packets of garden seeds. I buy culinary Coriander Seed and plant them. I usually plant it at about three week intervals all spring and summer so that I have a sustained yeald. |
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Lime: Lime juice is an essential ingredient in both red and green salsas. If you have the space, you might consider planting a lime tree. One of the dwarf varieties is an excellent choice for the back yard garden. They seldom get over six feet tall, yet produce full size fruit. If you want a true lime that will produce fruit that can be used in salsa’s and other Mexican foods and in drinks, ask for a Bearss or Bartenders Lime. This is the classic lime, the one you usually fine in grocery stoes. And now that you have all the essentals, let’s make some salsa. The following recipes are some of my favorites.
Fresh Salsa Rojo
Salsa Verde
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