The Left Side

It’s been a good long while since I’ve done a complete overall look at the garden, so let’s do it! Like before, I’ll start with the left side. This poor left side is in a bad state of transition. It’s going from it’s beautiful spring bounty to a sad state of waiting for the winter squash and peppers to grow in. But grow in they will and soon it will look just as lush as the rest of the yard. The broccoli, romanesco broccoli, peas, cilantro, and radiccio are all gone and have been replaced by peppers.

and more peppers.

We’re going to have a serious pepper profusion soon, because these are only a fraction of a our pepper crop this year. Watch out!
We’ve also put in some winter squash and as you can tell, I’m slightly in love with photographing this Potimarron squash plant. It’s just so lovely growing against our ‘weedy’ amaranth.

And it’s such a beautiful and tasty squash. I love to have winter squash all around the house in autumn and bake them up into our dinners.

We’re also trying a new winter squash called Buttercup. I’ll keep you informed as to how the come along.

As with every year in our tomato growing, Scott always says, “we’re only growing four this year” and each year we end up with….oh, how many do we have this year? Right around 11 or 12. We’ve tried to grow all sorts of things in this spot and they’ve all died, but so far these tomatoes seem happy.

That’s about it for the left side. We’ll move on over to the center plot next!

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?

When life gives you cherry plums…

…make cherry plum jam!

We have these cherry plum trees all over town. They grow almost like weeds around here and I don’t think anyone really pays attention to the fruit. The plums just fall on the ground and make a great big, icky, sticky mess. And I’ll admit, I was completely one of those people. Then my ‘crazy’ husband went outside a few years ago, collected a few and made jam out them. I thought he had gone bananas. But then I tasted the jam. It was so good! Tart and sweet and the brightest shade of magenta you’ve ever seen. It’s now my favorite jam of all.

So far we’ve made 8 jars this season and as I type we have another big pot of jam boiling on the stove. Our exact as science recipe? A pot full of plums and a few handfuls of sugar. Simmer and smash them. Strain them and simmer some more. Then put up into jars. Enjoy on toast. Give away to friends.

Kale for Sale has a great post on wasted fruit, check it out. Also GreenBean has a good comment on that post…if you belong to a group in your town, such as a mom’s group, or maybe your local freecycle, send out an e-mail asking if anyone has any fruit they won’t use. You might end up with bags of free fruit that you can use for freezing, making tarts, jam or fruit rollups.

For a more exact tutorial on how we make Cherry Plum Jam, read here.

Weeds and Why They Grow

Here’s an unusual read for Green Bean’s Bookworm Challenge.

I bet you never thought that weeds are really an indication of the nutrients in your soil. I never did. I just thought certain weeds grew where they grew because they just kept sprouting from the year before. But by changing the nutrient content of your soil can actually allow new weeds to grow and stop the growth of weeds you currently have. Interesting, isn’t it? I never would have thought. We learned this all in a book that Scott ordered called, “Weeds and why they grow” by Jay McCamen from Moses (Midwest Organic and Sustainable Education Service, Inc.)

The root systems of some weeds, especially perennials, can penetrate deep into the subsoil to loosen it. Some weed roots can go down into the soil as much as twenty feet, breaking up the soil and improving drainage and aeration. They also bring up minerals and make it possible for the root systems of other plants, such as vegetables, to use those minerals and natural aeration.

As I mentioned, you can identify problems in your soil by what weeds are growing in it. There is a detailed chart that lists almost every weed out there and the soil nutients that allow that weed to proser. Through reading this book and looking in our yard, we found that the prolific srouting of purslane, amaranth, dandelions and some others that we have a calcium deficiency. That would also explain our yearly battle with blossom end rot on our San Marzanos. So off to the nursery we went, and back we came with liquid calcium which the man working there said is the best way to apply calcium at this stage in the growing cycle.

So once we get our calcium problem fixed, will the purslane, amaranth and dandelions leave? Quite possibly. And in its place maybe red clover will arrive. How will it get there? Well weed seeds can lie dormant and viable in the soil for as long as 30, 50, even 70 years! They are just waiting for a spec of light and for their proper soil conditions to sprout. (I’m serious about that spec of light, a fraction of a second of sunlight will do to get it growing, which is why he recommends tilling at night.)

Another thing I learned is that a garden that is free from weeds is actually a very unhealthy garden. When very little weeds grow it means the soil is actually extremely unhealthy. So it’s a good thing if you have weeds. Healthy weeds mean a healthy soil.

It’s not plain old cauliflower at all!

Come look! Remember a while back I posted a picture of my dreamy cauliflower? Well, look how its coming along.

Its Romanesco Broccoli! Pretty isn’t it? We were expecting just regular old cauliflower, so this was a nice surprise.

We did a little research as to if you can eat the leaves of cauliflower and broccoli and you can. You can eat the stems (the stems are our favorite parts actually) and leaves, but as the plant matures you will want to peel the stems of their heavy outer coating. And may want to think twice about eating the leaves. When they are young the leaves are tender and good for eating, but as the plant matures they can get rather bitter, tough and not so tasty. Good to know!

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. 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?

Dandelion Goodness

So by now, my regular readers are rolling their eyes saying, “Another weed post, Kendra? Give it up already, let’s talk about real vegetables.” Well, I can’t seem to give my weed obsession up. And I found another place to cater to it. You may have noticed it on my sidebar, but I have a link now to Learning Herbs. It’s a pretty neat place where they teach you all about how to make herbal goodies out of things you have growing in your own yard, medicines, teas, food recipes, etc.

The owners, John and Kimberly, has compiled an ebook which you can get for free if you sign up for their newsletter and its pretty interesting. It’s all about how to make home remedies. They even have good uses for lavender which is my all time favorite fragrance and flower, and it just happens to be blooming right now.

Their first newsletter has a recipe for how to make dandelion lemonade with dandelion flowers. Our flowers are all gone by now, but I’m going to save this for next year. They say, “dandelion blossoms steeped as tea can help relieve headaches, menstrual cramps, backaches, stomach aches and even depression.” Cool stuff isn’t it?

7 Things to Improve Your Soil

We’ve been thinking a lot about dirt lately. Or, rather ‘soil’ as we gardeners like to say. We’ve been thinking about weeds and learning about how you can tell a lot about your soil by what weeds grow in it. We’re just starting to learn about this so we’ll keep you posted. But it’s gotten me to think about how as gardeners we are truly stewards of the soil. Any organic gardener knows that your plants are only as healthy as your soil, so its important to take excellent care of it. The best way to ensure your soils health is to add plenty of organic matter. Sure, we know that the three big soil nutrients are nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium, but macro and micro nutrients are also critical because those are are what break down the organic matter to release the nutrients to your plants. Here’s a list of things you can easily do to improve your soils health.

1. For new garden beds, mix one inch of compost or 3 inches of grass clippings into the top 6 inches of soil.

2. Mulch around plants with 2 inches of grass clippings, coffee ground or compost which will slowly add nutrients to the soil and encourage earthworms and other soil organisms

3. Apply a spray of compost tea. Compost tea is low in nutrients but high in micronutrients

4. Plant a living mulch this summer such as oats or white dutch clover around your vegetables. Their roots will loosen compacted soil and concentrate nutrients for your vegetables to feed on.

5. Dry out eggshells and crumble them into the soil for a boost of calcium and micronutrients. (via katrina)

6. Start a compost pile, bin or vermiculture box.

7. Double dig your soil about 2 feet deep, blending in compost as you go. The benefits will last indefinately. This will improve drainage, aeration, improve root growth, encourage earthworms and allow nutrients to be evenly spread through the root zone.

All these ideas are pretty easy things that you can do this weekend. I hope you try a few!

my house is gone

Oh my dear blogging friends, my dream house sold yesterday. I knew it would happen someday, but I was hoping beforehand that the 1.3 million dollars I’d need to buy it would magically appear in my lap. Alas, it didn’t, so someone else will get to enjoy my little piece of paradise.

It’s a good thing I lost the recipe for these cherry revel bars that I made last week with the last of our cherries. Because if I had them, I’d pull out the frozen cherries and make it all over again and eat away my disappointment. See? It’s cookies like this that mess up my ‘eat mostly plants‘ philosophy. Because all I want to do is ‘eat mostly cookies.’

Melinda has a great post on 10 Steps to Living Locally today. Check it out if you have a moment.

What are you doing to eat more plants?

So what are you doing to eat more plants? We all know we need to eat more of them, we’ve read about it and seen it. But how do you actually incorporate it into your everyday life? More salads, more stir fries? Have you ever tried a green smoothie?

We go through phases. A week or so where we’ll do really good at incorporating plants into our day and we’ll feel good. Lighter, healthier, a bit more bounce in our step. Then we are tempted to have on teeny, tiny bite of chocolate chip cookie, and then another, and next thing you know we’ve eaten that as well as the rest of the dozen and we’re back on the pasta, meat, and sweets train and we go back to feeling heavy and slow.

Luckily the bounty of this late spring garden is helping us. How can you not eat all of this wonderful mustard, lettuce, radishes, broccoli and collard greens? That’s one good thing about having a garden. No excuses not to eat the healthy stuff, it’s right outside your backdoor. And if you leave it go to bolt then you feel like a heel for not eating it in time.

So how do you eat more plants?