It started with salsa

The entire garden started because I wanted to grow what I put in salsa. That was it. That was the whole plan — tomatoes, chillies, onion, coriander, the four things that go in a bowl of Hot Mango Salsa — and then it grew and grew, and now it is most of the heat that goes through this kitchen.

It all goes in raised beds and five-gallon buckets along the fence, because the ground underneath this place is clay and nothing wants to live in it. So we go up instead. Buckets, beds, pots, anything that holds soil and drains.

The tomatoes did not turn out too well. That is the honest version. So I went smaller and got cherry tomatoes, and those do ok — but no yield. Enough for a pan, never enough for a batch. It is why Blistered Cherry Tomato Sauce is a recipe that takes three pounds and I have never once made it entirely out of my own: a couple of cups into Ribeye with Fried Onions, Blistered Tomatoes and a Smashed Potato is about what a good week looks like.

The big winners are the Thai chillies. They are my favourite and you cannot buy those around here. Walk into a shop and ask for forty fresh ones and see what happens — they will sell you eight, in a plastic clamshell, flown in from somewhere and already going soft at the stem. I need forty for a jar of Pounded Fresh Thai Chilli Paste, with the stems still green, because that is the difference between a paste that smells like something and a paste that is only heat. When there are more than I can use, they go on a string — Drying Thai Chillies on a String — and that is the year sorted.

Same thinking with basil. Every recipe here that uses it says the same thing: on at the end, whole, after the heat. That is not a style choice. Basil starts losing what makes it basil within about twenty minutes of being cut, which is why the stuff in the bag at the shop tastes of green and not much else. Six steps from the stove it is a different herb.

And a garden gives you a glut, which is the most underrated thing about it. Nobody plans to spend a Sunday making Cucumber, Pepper and Chilli Dill Pickles. You end up doing it because there are three pounds of cucumbers on the counter and they are not going to wait. Same with Cowboy Candy — Candied Chillies and Onion — two pounds of chillies went red all at once and the only sensible answer was four jars of syrup. Half of everything I preserve exists because a plant did something inconvenient.

The herbs down the fence are the cheapest thing in here and the most used. Rosemary and thyme are perennial, more or less unkillable, and they are the two that lose the most by being dried — a sprig of fresh rosemary on Roasted Sweet Potato Skins with Rosemary, thyme leaves into Baked Brie with Chilli Apple, a whole bunch of it in the cavity of Herb-Stuffed Roast Turkey. Mint stays in a pot and it stays there for a reason. Put mint in a bed and in two years you own a mint bed.

None of this is a homestead. I am not off the grid and I still buy the brisket. But every year the list of things I do not have to go and get gets a little longer, and the food gets better for reasons that have nothing to do with technique.

Every winter I put up a plastic dome that I made. PVC pipes are the bones and I buy the thick greenhouse plastic to go over them, and it works like a greenhouse for the cold months. The Christmas lights go up over the pepper plants and they keep producing right through December, which is Southern California doing most of the work and me taking the credit.

There is a papaya tree in there now that I am trying to grow. Dunno if it will work.