The Smell of Summertime

As much as I love all herbs (some of the easiest and most rewarding edibles to grow), basil, for me, is the smell of summer—and I like it best in fresh green pesto sauce. With pesto in mind, I've grown basil for years—in pots on apartment terraces, in a weedy field below a cabin in Topanga Canyon, and most recently, in the Los Angeles vegetable garden my husband and I built a few months before our son left for college.

Some people fill the empty nest by learning yoga or adopting a puppy. We hammered out an old skateboard court and used the broken concrete to construct four raised beds with gravel paths in between. It’s not a large garden, but it’s productive, since we invested in good soil and a pair of compost tumblers, and we tend it like… well…doting parents. Nearly every morning, we’re out there prowling around to see what’s happened in it while we’ve slept. Sometimes, under the cover of darkness, seeds germinate, vines start creeping up poles and buds open—or a tiny speck will balloon into a tomato.

We planted the garden in early 2008, so our first crops were mostly leafy greens that appreciate some cold: Swiss chard, arugula, black kale, choggia beets. In one bed, I went carrot-crazy, pouring seeds into knife-edge furrows that erupted in a dense green fringe that I had to thin painstakingly for weeks. Lesson learned: Over-zealous seeding, especially of root crops, leads to crowding and competition, not increased production.

Success Secret: Basil thrives in a pot or a bed with little care beyond routine watering. Pinching it back, at a point just above a pair of leaves, stimulates growth, so the very act of using it helps keep it going.

Mutiny, Then Bounty

By March, though, as spring arrived in the city, we had devoured some edible garden bibles—John Jeavons' How to Grow More Vegetables, Eliot Coleman's Four Season Harvest—and we began to get the hang of things. Almost every day, our mailman delivered seeds we had ordered; we also bought seedlings at farmers markets. We rowed out yards of multi-colored leaf lettuce—which is more content than carrots in a crowd, and which we’d learned from our reading to cut back young. This gave us salads of baby greens and spurred the lettuce to sprout again, perpetuating the process. Then there were the teepees and screens we built for beans and cucumbers to climb, and the extra lettuce we tucked protectively in their shade as the days got hot. (Lettuce 'bolts'—or sends up a bitter, elongated seed stalk—in the heat.) Our tomatoes went in against a sunny wall, with basil all around their feet, and an urban farmer friend showed us how to steep compost in water to make a foliage spray that both wards off pests and boosts the sugar content of the fruit.

Before long, we were hauling in food—crisp 'Chelsea Pride' cucumbers, white 'Asian Bride' eggplant, pear tomatoes, French beans and billowing armloads of basil. Our son, still living at home then—though appearing mostly to change clothes between his summer job and his social life—showed surprise at the sudden bounty in the kitchen. He sometimes ventured out to see it growing, and to eat beans and cherry tomatoes off the vine.

We soon had other children here too, little ones, who belonged to friends eager to show them where their food came from. On Sunday afternoons, we would all congregate in the garden with picking baskets—and eventually, move to a table beneath a wisteria arbor for cold soup, tomato salad and pasta with pesto sauce.

Boon Companions: In the garden and on the plate, tomatoes and basil go together. Under-planting tomatoes with basil wards off certain tomato pests, may boost growth, and, some say, intensifies tomato flavor.

Seductive Sauce

A Northern Italian concoction traditionally ground and mixed with a mortar and pestle, pesto is, according to food diva and author Marcella Hazan, “the most seductive of all sauces for pasta.” The native Genoa version (which appears in her book, The Essentials of Classic Italian Cooking) combines Genovese basil, a particularly flavorful variety that's easy to find, with fresh garlic, extravirgin olive oil, pine nuts, parmigianoreggiano and romano cheeses and softened butter.

My simpler version skips the butter, halves the garlic and varies further according to my mood and what’s happening in the garden. Sometimes, to give my sauce a peppery edge, I'll swap in fresh arugula for some of the basil, or I'll throw in mint sprigs to enhance the basil’s natural mintiness. Snipped parsley is another good flavor compliment, as is a squeeze of fresh lemon. To lighten both the calorie and fat content of the sauce, you can use less olive oil, add a few cherry tomatoes, and/or substitute dry-roasted, unsalted almonds for the pine nuts.

With apologies to traditionalists, I load all my pesto ingredients into the food processor, tasting and adding as I go until I’m happy. If the sauce is too thick, I'll mix in a couple of spoonfuls of the hot pasta water before tossing it with the pasta. And here's one more seductive aspect of this sauce: It freezes beautifully, so that when chilly November rolls around, you can easily reprise the sweetness of your summer.