After a day in Sebastopol

Tuesday was our oldest son’s fourth birthday. After a weekend of celebration, we spent his actual birthday with the BellaMadris clan in a little orchard in Sebastopol. It was lovely. And beautiful. This orchard, down a long quiet gravel road, is in a No Spray Zone and the owner isn’t a big fruit harvesting guy, so Julie has been given permission to pick all she wants. And this was part of the result of our harvest.

The boys ran wild, fueled by chocolate cupcakes and the prospects of sitting on this shiny red tractor.
A great day was had by all. Thanks Julie for bringing us there!

It made us both think, if we could actually live way out in the country. We (Julie and I) both like the convenience of living in town, not using our cars, but we also have a draw towards living out in a quiet open place in the country too. Melinda chose to give up country life for the city recently. Where do you live? Do you wish you lived closer to a town, or farther from it?

Ali Baba is the Best!

We’ve had a troublesome history with watermelons. It’s like us and watermelons never really jived. We started to think that maybe we just weren’t watermelon-growing kind of people. But this year things have been different. Maybe it’s because we planted two different kinds together. Or maybe the stars are just aligned like one big watermelon this year, but it’s been a good year for us and watermelons.

Sugar baby

We grew Sugar Babies and Ali Babas. The Sugar Babies, they were pretty good. Smallish and roundish with dark skin and a nice red center. But they were only mostly sweet and they were full of countless little black seeds. Which made for a lot of spitting. So much spitting that we barely got to taste the flesh.

Ali Baba

But the Ali Babas…. Now those are our kinds of melons. So sweet that you don’t even know what to do with yourself. So full of flavor. And the seeds are big and not so plentiful, so when you take a bite, it’s an easy ‘patooie’ to spit them out. And did I mention the flavor? Oh, we’re in watermelon heaven. It’s a good thing that it’s so incredible because so far we’ve harvested two and this one here is 14 pounds. The previous one wasn’t far from that weight. We’ve got a lot of melon eating to do.

The story behind these Ali Baba’s is pretty cool too. The seeds were given to Rare Seeds from a man who collected them from Iraq before the war started. Now its virtually impossible to get seeds from that country. “A rare genetic treasure” reads the description.

And look, it’s beautiful growing in the yard. You must all put this melon at the top of your list for growing next year. You won’t be disappointed.

All about our Carrots

I’m quite convinced that everyone needs a few purple haze carrots in their life. Especially sliced thin. So beautiful. This is what I like about growing our own food. We have the option to fill our meals with little works of art like these. They say it’s the small things in life that make you rich. This is one of those small things that we try and fill our days with. Sliced purple haze carrots. And our lives are ever so slightly improved because of them.

We picked (or rather Scott picked) all of the carrots around the tomatoes Saturday. He was inspired after reading the “All About Growing Carrots” article in the new Mother Earth News. They wrote that you shouldn’t leave mature carrots in warm soil any longer than necessary because critters start to find them. And we have started to notice that a few were getting nibbled on.

We also learned that carrots are divided into five types: Nante, Chantenay, Miniature, Imperator and Danvers. our Purple Haze falls into the Imperator category which means that they have long, tapered roots with stocky shoulders and that they store well.

Our little Thumbelinas rightly fall into the Miniature category, who’s notes say that they have a sweet flavor when mature and have only limited storage potential.

So what can we do with this carrot bounty? Well, we can freeze them, eat them raw, can them, pickle them, but I prefer the carrot cake option. Yes, I see a carrot cake in our near future.

One Day’s Harvest

I had great intentions of posting everyday this week, but it looks like our family’s been taken over by an evil summer flu bug. Instead of posting anything of merit, I’ll simply show you a picture of what we picked on Tuesday, before we got sick. Purple Haze and Thumbelina carrots, cantelope and beans.

Have a great weekend! See you next week.

Beans and Cucumbers like each other

After reading Carrots Love Tomatoes, the past two growing seasons we’ve been experimenting with companions planting. We already have our carrots planted with our tomatoes and now we are trying beans and cucumbers together. Beans, as with most legumes (like our winter fava cover crop), draw up nitrogen from down deep in the soil, brings it up and fixes it as little white nitrogen nodules to their roots. You don’t have to fertilize beans, in fact they really don’t like being fertilized, because they can do it themselves.

Cucumbers on the other hand are heavy feeders and like a lot of fertilization. But we’ve read if you plant them along with plenty of beans, the beans fertilize the cucumbers without you having to do a thing. We like that ‘not having to do a thing’ part, a lot! And so far, its worked. We have both more beans and cucumbers than we can eat and both plants look happy and healthy.

The only issue we’ve found with planting these two together is that cucumbers like a little more water and beans like a little less water. We’ve done our best to accommodate both by focusing our water on the cucumbers and it seems to be working.

If you haven’t read Carrots Love Tomatoes you should give it a try. It has really helped us.

Also, A Sonoma Garden is featured in this week’s Home Preserving Blog Carnival. Go see what other home preservers are doing.

Confession

The thing about gardening is that once you figure out a few things and start to think that maybe you’ve got a handle on this whole ‘growing food’ thing, you get humbled. Then you start a blog and make your random musings public and then you find out you’re wrong and you really feel like you have mud on your face. So it’s confessional time.

Let’s start out with the zucchini’s. I was totally wrong. Those little lady flowers do need to be pollenated by bees that have also visited the male flowers. I found this out soon after my posting when I on my ‘useless male’ high horse went out and clipped off all the male flowers for quesadillas. The next day I found a poor shriveled four inch dying zucchini. The thing with these squash are that they grow really fast, so those woman flowers don’t get a chance to open up until the zucchini are already five or so inches long. If it doesn’t get pollenated it shrivels and dies, if it does get pollenated, it keeps getting bigger.

Want to hear about our garlic failure too? Remember all that lovely hardneck garlic we picked? Yep, well, we picked it too early and half of it rotted. That was a very grim discovery. There’s so much moisture in those garlic heads that you really do need to wait until the plant dries up and browns before you pick it, or, it rots.

Next up. Fenugreek. I don’t know what we did wrong with it. It looked great when it first sprouted, lovely green with pink edged leaves. Then it got kind of spindly, then kind of brown. Were we giving it too much water? Too little? Did we plant them too close together? Are they supposed to look spindly? Anyway, somehow it’s unhappy, but there are a handful of big seed pods forming so at least we’ll have a little bit for making Indian food.

So there you go. Just a few garden failures of many I suppose. Scott attended a weed class this past weekend (more on that soon) and the woman teaching was announced as having 22 years of experience. It sounds like a lot, but the teacher said, “Really, it’s not that much experience, it means I’ve only grown tomatoes 22 times.” When you put it that way, it really doesn’t sound like that much. I guess we’re all just learning as we go, really.

Any gardening confessionals you need to make?

If you come to Sonoma…

….be sure to wear Purple Haze carrots in your hair..

You got the song reference, right? Yes, my sense of humor does border on cheesy, or rather is firmly planted in cheese.

Anyway, we’ve taken the Growing Challenge from seed to harvest! They taste good too (the carrots that is). Sweet, but not too sweet.

Since we’re in the kitchen, I opened the fridge door a few minutes ago and saw that Scott had harvested our first zucchinis and blossoms. (oh, note to self: you can easily increase blog traffic by using that little three letter word…and maybe not quite the kind of traffic you want. ooops.) Also our first pesto of the year augmented with spinach which we enjoyed on our leftover gnocchi. A tupperware full of last years defrosted nectarines. And three dozen eggs. Anyone have any good egg recipes?

sore and achey with broccoli

Happy Memorial Day! I write to you all achey, sunburned, sore, calloused and hands full of splinters. I’ve been digging this weekend. Digging post holes for a new fence to go behind my flower garden and in front of the veggies. Post hole digging is a lot of work! Especially in clay soil. But this fence is something I’ve been talking about for years now and I decided this weekend that I was finally going to do something about it. For now it looks like a big mess, but soon I will post pictures of all its hoped for glory.

Last night after hours of digging I picked up a gardening book and read a little blurb that said that 45 minutes of gardening will burn 200-300 calories. I suppose they included that to make you feel better about all that work you just did, but I quickly exclaimed, “That’s it?” That doesn’t even cover the brownie I ate as a mid-dig snack. I think post hole digging really must burn much more than that, don’t you agree?

I plan to post soon with more garden updates and a book review for the Bookworm Challenge, but for now I’ll share a picture of broccoli which we picked a bunch of this weekend. I’ll be back once I let my body rest a bit. I hope you all are having a great long weekend!

radishes

Here are our french breakfast radishes, bug bites and all. Our friend, Doug, told us this weekend that his favorite organic bug control is to mix soy sauce and canola oil and put out a dish of it in the garden. The bugs are attracted to the soy sauce, but once they get the oil on their legs they can’t move. He said he can’t find anything else to compete with it. This might be just the fix for our radish bed.

harvesting cherries & garlic

For all the locals, isn’t this cooler weather nice? That heat wave was too much! Even though it did scorch some plants, it made our tomatoes and peppers very happy. But this weekends cooler weather allowed us to do some spring harvesting. We pulled up lettuce plant after lettuce plant….anyone want to come over for a salad? Dinner’s at 6:30 tonight!

We also harvested the rest of the hardneck garlic (the same garlic that I used a few weeks ago for Orangette’s green garlic & spinach soup). Scott pulled it out of the ground and just let it lay in the sun for a day or two, then yesterday cut off the leaves and put it in a box outside to dry. The hardneck made this garlic too difficult to braid, so we are going for box storage for these guys. We planted the single cloves back in January and we are now blessed with 47 large bulbs. Let’s see how long it takes us to use them up.

I also spent some time up in a ladder this weekend harvesting cherries. Looks like the birds were generous enough to leave us plenty for eating and some for freezing. We didn’t freeze any last year, only canned the jam, but since we have plenty of jam left, I thought I’d go for freezing this year. Being high up in that fifty year old tree, with limbs covered in lichen, the evening sun pouring through the leaves, I felt like a kid reaching for those shiny red jems. One for the basket, two for me. I could harvest cherries all day.