Sharing the Harvest

Those that know me know that I’m a dreamer. Head in the sky, full of lofty ideas - a true daydream believer. What’s been in my head lately has been this house. This 100 year old farmhouse for sale just outside of town on four and a half acres. A few months ago, on a whim, I decided to go to its open house and completely fell in love. I guess the whole romance begins on the long lavender lined drive up to the front, just that alone lets you know that you are in for something good. As soon as I opened the front door I could just sense that we belonged in that house. Maybe it was the old wide planked wood floor that creaked just so, or the original built ins or the huge country kitchen that demanded daily fried egg breakfasts. But I can’t get this place out of my head.

If we lived in this old house we’d certainly breath a little deeper, speak with a little more thought and walk a bit slower. At least that’s how I see it in my head. The boys rooms would be upstairs. Up creaky steps to pitched roof rooms. With some new windows to open for a breeze and some old windows so they could spend boring rainy days looking out at the world through melted glass.

The property around the house is flat and surrounded by large trees - perfect for a future apple orchard and vegetable garden. I walked out of the backdoor, off the back porch, past the lawn through a gate to the back of the property where a creek runs. Stepping over the hap-hazard stepping stones to the water, I brushed by some wild mustard and onions and it just overwhelmed me with the thought that this is what childhood should smell like. And what it should be made of. Swimming and exploring in that creek, smelling those wild smells and moving about your day with the secret thought that maybe ghost wonder around those old pitched roof rooms of theirs.

So, you’re wondering, why haven’t we bought this dreamy place already? Well, four acres with a dreamy farmhouse in Sonoma doesn’t come cheap. Even in these hard economic times. But, I think I have figured out a way to make it work, thanks to this book I’ve read for Green Bean’s Bookworm Challenge called Sharing the Harvest: A Citizens Guide to Community Supported Agriculture. We are going to start our own CSA. And you are all invited to join! Its going to be just wonderful. This book explains everything you need to know on how to start and operate a CSA and I think, in my dreamy mind, that it would be great fun. We’ll grow acres of fruits and vegetables to shower you with and since there’s already a chicken coop there, we’ll bring our chickens and provide eggs for you too. I’ll bake you all tarts and Scott will make you all jam. You can all come over on the weekends to help and we can have picnics in the orchard and bonefires during harvest parties. And after doing all the math, this will only cost you a cool $1000/month. Hmmm, what’s that? Oh, I guess that is a little pricey. And I suppose running a farm wouldn’t be all fun all the time. But a girl can dream, can’t she?

It makes me feel good though, that even though we can’t afford this place just yet, that it exists. That in this world of shiney homedepot granite and mcmansion newness that there still are small, authentic houses on large pieces of land that are to be had. And someday we’ll own one, but maybe not quite yet.

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!

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.

free fertilizer vs. $16,000 fertilizer

We a seemingly endless amount of weeding and thinning this weekend which gave us a nice amount of amaranth, pursulane, chinese mustard and micro-greens to have for salads. A small reward for all the time spent on our knees.

Scott also mowed our lawn and used the grass clipping in our newest experiment in the broccoli/cauliflower bed. We read a great article in Mother Earth News this weekend that explored the different types of organic fertilizer on the market. As you know, fertilizers must be labeled by their Nitrogen, Phosphorous and Potassium (N-P-K) levels. Being that nitrogen is a likely deficient in many soils, the author compared the fertilizers based on their per pound of nitrogen. She compares 17 different store bought organic fertilizers, the cheapest being SoyBean Meal (7-2-1) at $4/lb of nitrogen and the most expensive being TerraCycle Plant Food (.03-.002-.02) at a whopping $16,987/lb of nitrogen.

Or she says, you can just use ordinary grass clippings which contain anywhere from 2% - 5% of nitrogen. In most areas you can work in about half an inch into your soil, or put a 1-2 inch layer as a mulch on your garden bed and that will provide all the nutrients most crops need for a full season of growth! Not only will it provide nutrients, but the grass clippings as a mulch act as a good weed prevention and as a moisture retainer.

Usually we just put our grass clippings into the compost pile and let them compost. Doing that dilutes the nitrogen power down to about 1%, but the benefit of compost is that it departs its nutrients into the soil over a matter of years rather than in just one growing season.

Either way, obviously, is beneficial. And obviously much, much cheaper than buying organic fertilizer, wouldn’t you say? I don’t know, free vs. $16,987, you make the call.

Chef Celebrity Sighting & The Left Side

Yesterday we made a trip down to Marin to go to the Farmer’s Market, which we try to do at least once a month. (oh and Katrina, even with your notice, we of course arrived without our own bags at Bring Your Own Bag day!) As we were strolling through the middle aisle I realized that Tyler Florence, his wife and young son were walking right towards us! I had heard that he had moved somewhere around here. Anyway, we were trying to play it off very cool, as though, ‘oh yeah, that’s just Tyler Florence shopping at our market, no biggie’. But of course as soon he passed we turned right around like gaping fans and looked as he walked by. Poor guy, just trying to shop with his family and he’s got people like us staring at him. Over the years we’ve watched almost all of his shows but Tyler’s Ultimate is my favorite. My mouth is always watering at the end of the show at whatever he’s just created and I always think, I have to download that recipe. He’s a great food stylist and his lighting guru is a master. And it was nice to see him just walking around with his family taking in a lovely Sunday at the market. His son looked just a bit younger than our youngest and I smiled as I passed him later struggling to keep his son from wiggling out of his stroller….a situation I deal with daily. It made him seem like a real and genuine person. From the look of his website it looks like he’s going to open a place in Mill Valley.

So, onto the garden. I’ve been so overwhelmed with all that has gone on in it. April is always full of crazy growth, and new plantings so it’s hard to keep up. So this week, I’ll be starting from the left and moving, as the week goes, over to the right of the yard. Scott constructed some quickie, pell-mell sort of raised beds to house our cold weather spring crop and they look very happy there.

We are trying collard greens for the first time, planted with some very slow growing peas, cilantro and parsley.

Next to that is a bed of broccoli, cauliflower and raddiccio hidden in the middle, contained by our snail guards. I think a few carrot seeds were sprinkled in there last week, but none have come up yet.

And next to that bed, is this bed of bok choy. It’s our first year growing that too and we are enjoying having it young. You know how fiberous it can be when it’s fully mature—chew, chew chew.

Behind all of those we have a bed of radishes, remember when they were so tiny? Radishes grow quick. In fact at the begining of October of 2006 one of our neighbors who runs the Slow Food Movement in town was running for city council. He stopped by our house campaigning and gave us a package of radish seeds and told me, “plant these today and by the time you are ready to eat them, you’ll remember me and hopefully vote for me on November 7th.” Sorry to report that he didn’t win the election, but I certainly voted for him.

Next to the radishes is our lettuce and raddiccio patch. We’re growing a bunch of different lettuces there and since the chickens have been relegaded to the cottage yard (note to self: chickens love lettuce), they are all growing beautifully.

And to cap off the left side of the garden, our artichokes. We aren’t getting that many this year. In fact it seems like artichoke prices are through the roof this spring. One sign at the farmer’s market this year read ‘$4/artichoke’! Has anyone read anything about the artichoke crop this year?

So that is the state of affairs for the left side of the yard, next up, the center plot.

the weekend in pictures

It was dreadfully windy this weekend which we both decided makes us not want to be outside. So mornings were spent outside while it was only slightly breezy and the afternoons were spent inside cooking.

Scott made another new raised bed. It’s a funky little spot in the yard where nothing ever grew very well. This year it will be home to cucumbers.

We decided that although the thought of ‘wild arugula’ sounded great, in reality, it’s totally dumb. Its completely miniature with each leaf being about an inch and a quarter in length. Good for the garden gnomes I suppose.

We picked another round of favas and used this in both our Saturday and Sunday nights dinners with our homemade pasta: (fyi ~ an excellent way to keep a toddler occupied for half an hour is to have them help shell beans, he was completely captivated)

Our chicken’s eggs made this pasta so yellow:

Saturday we had the noodles and favas as a soup and Sunday they were transformed into pasta with a side of fava bean puree. Both delicious.

I also spruced up the mantle with the latest blooms:

We’ve made a real effort to use up as much of the food we canned and froze last summer to make room for this summers harvest. Many years we just keep adding to the stash instead of completely depleting it before we add more. So we end up with jam from 2001 and frozen squash from who knows when (we aren’t so good at labeling). Yesterday Scott opened up a jar of hot cherry peppers that he canned last year. We didn’t really know what to do with them fresh because they were really hot (even for us!) so he just canned them for a rainy day. Now after mellowing out for 9 months, they are fantastic. Much like pepperoncini, but with a rounder, fuller less hot taste. We enjoyed them today with our locally made tomales. (Tomales being my latest passion).

Oh what a beautiful weekend

What a gorgeous weekend. The sun was out, the light spring breezes were blowing and the tulips were up. We spent the weekend working away outside at every moment we could. And now we feel it. You know how you feel that first weekend you garden in spring? How the next day you feel sore muscles in places were you didn’t know you even had muscles? Scott’s ankle is sore, my elbow is tweeked and my back muscles are reminding me of all the digging that was done yesterday.

It felt good though to have dirt under my nails again, the energy (after four solid years of being pregnant and nursing) to dig up that impossibly hard dirt in our front garden, and to get that patch of fence fixed.

Scott turned our compost pile last at the end of the day yesterday and as I predicted this morning he said, “my left arm hurts, do you think I’m going to have a heart attack?” He says each and every time after he turns that huge pile. It’s a big job, a lot of pitch fork work, but it’s worth it for how incredible it’s made our soil over the years. I’ll write more about our compost soon.

In the meantime, enjoy this beautiful weather, even if it’s snowy, rainy, or sunny because soon enough the first radishes will be ready, lettuce will be asking to be picked, and you won’t know what to do with yet another zucchini.