Early September Harvest - 19 pounds in one week

Almost half-way with a 6 pound tromboncino

August gardening... plum tomatoes keep on coming ... another 5 pounds this week.  A few large heirlooms enjoyed in thick slabs in  sandwiches.  Something wonderful about the combination of bread and juicy tomatoes.  A little butter, a little salt - nothing else needed.  Not the 2 pound beefsteaks that my dad used to grow, but as tasty as I remember them to be.  He would have enjoyed them.





A vegetable that grows inches in a day:  tromboncino squash - think trombone.  They are very fun to watch grow - this one was 6 pounds - didn't measure it, but I think about 3 feet.  I broiled 1/4 of it in thick slices, brushed with olive oil.  A flavor which is reminiscent of acorn squash, but a texture more similar to zucchini.  The other 1/4 is in the fridge - maybe will get grated and put into muffins. 



Dancing purple long beans and Styrian pumpkins.  More on those in another posting.

First Fruits



The first eggplant

Trombocino is growing.  This is an amazing summer squash.



One day's harvest - tomatoes to freeze
 



 



Turmeric Sprouts + First Fruits + Wet Blankets

July is an exciting time in the garden.  Within a day, the squash vines have crept along by inches, and the bean vines are wrapping around poles at the blink of an eye.  So much growth.  The first of any fruits are a joy to behold, whether it is the first ripe tomato or a squash flower transformed into a tiny fruit.



An additional joy was noticing that the turmeric root I had potted up a few months back finally sprouted, which means I will transplant it and perhaps it will make more tubers.

Hard to be planning for winter when the temperatures are blazing into 3 digits, but I am following the methods of my wise Community Garden neighbor Jim, who has planted winter carrot seeds this week.  The trick is keeping them moist enough to germinate in this heat.  I covered mine with a discarded cotton blanket which I am soaking with water. When the seeds start to sprout, off comes the blanket.  I've also been germinating fava beans (from the grocery store), which I will soon put in the ground for a fall crop.

12 pounds harvested this week - with the first eggplant, trombocino squash, and tomatillos to look forward to.  Happy Summer.

10 Pounds this Week

Finally!  Something other than lettuce, swiss chard and kale.

Blogging wanes as the garden explodes into production.

Watering... weeding... harvesting... scheming.... 
What will I plant where the garlic was?
A fellow gardener is putting in winter storage carrots.
Maybe a fava bean cover crop... maybe more buckwheat....
....back to weeding... staking... tying... mulching... and more watering.

How fast things grow, with such heat and humidity.
Gotta love the process, including the detective work of examining every stripped down bare leaf of container kale to find the cabbage looper who is eating my breakfast smoothie greens.  Haven't found it - could it be a rabbit?

The 10 pounds were:
The 1st 2 perfect striped zucchini  - 2 pounds
Lots of little plum tomatoes  - 1 pound
Beautiful onions - 1 pound
Rose colored potatoes - 2 pounds
More kale and chard - 1 pound
Garlic - it's gorgeous - 2 pounds
Assorted other things... jalepenyos, amaranth, chamomile, lettuce, basil, shiso- 1 pound

No Slugs in my Lettuce

I became a gardener in the rainy Northwest.  Slugs abound.  Banana slugs, round backed slugs, keel backed slugs, and those tiny little ones that spoil a perfectly good head of lettuce.  Slugs are so ubiquitous in the NW that the UCSanta Cruz mascot is a Banana Slug.  Slugs have been described on the Oregon State slug info site as “basically a stomach on one large foot”.  They are slimy and gross.  It is really hard for me to find anything likeable about them.

Slugs appear during those gray, drizzly days so common in the Northwest spring.  I have spent countless hours building beer traps, placing copper collars, doing death by salt, and hand-picking in the wee hours with a flashlight.  I’ve gone to considerable efforts, just for a head of lettuce without slug damage.  When my son found a tiny baby slug in a salad it put him off garden grown greens for weeks.

Fast forward to life in the Northeast.  With a week of cool, drizzly weather, reminiscent of back home, I noticed a few delicate slugs stretched out on paths as I walked through the arboretum.  Maybe snails venturing from their protective shells?  Suddenly it occurred to me - I’d been harvesting lettuce all week – with NO slugs. This is the Northeast!  My first season here I was so appreciative of those perfect slug free heads of lettuce.  How quickly one forgets and begins to take for granted the simple blessings of daily life.  Another lesson from the garden.

More food for thought – if you had to depend on your garden to put food on the table, how would your gardening change?  Just how much time would you spend on growing food that wasn’t perfectly suited to your climate?  I’m not suggesting monoculture, but the variety would be a little narrower.  No eggplants struggling to ripen in the temperate northwest, spinach bolting in the heat of the south, and artichokes squeaking by in the New England snows.   We’d be planting what grew reliably for our parents, and their parents before them.   But for me, gardening is a hobby. If  my experimental ‘crops’ fail, the market is a quick walk down the road.  So I can experiment, and have the fun of challenges.  For now.

My Kaffir Lime Tree

I’ve received some unusual plants through the USPS – onion starts, seed potatoes, garlic bulbs, but never before a tree, and certainly not a tree with a permit.  My tree came in a cardboard box – about 4 feet long. It arrived in perfect health, with a 3 year warranty, a permit, lots of leaves, and even a few limes.  I had ordered it online from  LemonCitrusTree.com, a company with an astonishing assortment of trees, including Minneola Honeybells and Red Naval Oranges.  They even had 4 kinds of limes: Persian Lime, Key Lime, Kaffir Lime, and a Limequat.  No problem choosing though.  For my first mail order tree I knew what I wanted:  Kaffir Lime.

The hunt for a Kaffir Lime started with Renita Mendonca’s Seasoned and Spiced cooking class.  Renita has culinary expertise which goes way beyond her own native Indian cuisine.  She showed us how to use tamarind,  turmeric root, galangal, lemongrass and Kaffir Lime leaves.  The aroma of Kaffir Lime is heavenly.  The gardener in me went home wanting to grow these exotic herbs.  Why drive all the way to the Indian grocery if you could pluck leaves from a front porch Zone 1 tree?  New England is not Florida, but we do have nice warm summers.  So I bought a few turmeric roots at Whole Foods, put them in potting soil, and went online to find a Kaffir Lime tree.

I will mention that I do have another Lime tree, which has its own special history.  Before ordering the Kaffir Lime, I tore up a couple of leaves from the thorny Lime.  These leaves also seemed to have a heavenly aroma – and to my inexperienced Western nose – indistinguishable from Kaffir.  Renita confirmed that these leaves were definitely not Kaffir lime. 

So the Kaffir tree arrived, I unpacked it, read its permit from the commissioner of the Louisiana Dept of Ag and transplanted it with help from my son. I snipped a leaf and sniffed.  Wow – way different from the other lime, I agree.  I couldn’t wait to use the leaves, so I added some along with ginger for flavoring a chicken broth.  Another exotic dish to come: Beef Rendang. Read more on using Kaffir Lime leaves.

This week’s garden harvest is not abundant, but tasty and fresh.  A pound of mustard, various lettuces, arugula, and other greens.  I’ve been enjoying plenty of smoothies and salads.  I’m learning about seasonal planning.  From my community garden, I see that it is possible to be harvesting plenty of kale, spinach, parsnips, over-wintered lettuce, spring lettuce, and roots.  The trick is to put things in at just the right time in the late summer. There is always more to learn when it comes to growing food.

Oh - and back to that Kaffir Lime tree. I've got plenty of leaves - so if you live in the Boston area, I'm happy to share.

 

Greens from Zone 1

I love green smoothies.  My recipe changes constantly, based on what I find in the freezer and what's abundant in the garden.  My smoothies are hardly the traditional barebones mix of 2/3 vegetables and 1/3 fruit.  I start with a base of frozen fruit - a combination of any of the following:  strawberries, blueberries, banana, pineapple and mango.  In goes either yogurt (a high-protein Greek variety is best) or coconut milk.  Then out to my Zone 1 garden to pick greens for the smoothie.  This week, I've picked beautifully healthy baby mustards, arugula and kale.  No huge yields in this chilly New England spring, but the greens are lovely and undoubtedly packed with calcium and other nutrients.  It's a nice way to start the day.  Here is a link to a green smoothie recipe.

The concept of Planting Zones a permaculture principal which I find so useful.  Zone 1 is the area of the garden which has the easiest access, both for harvesting and for care.   Basically, the idea is that when you are planning your garden, put those plants which you will want to access most frequently closest to your home,  Zone 0.  My Zone 1 is a bunch of containers in a deck off my living room.   I can step out in my slippers and pajamas and quickly snip some vibrant leaves. In seconds they are being whirled up in my blender.  Can't get any fresher than that!

Would I make green smoothies as often if the greens grew in Zone 2 or more?  Probably not.  If I had to walk a few blocks to the community garden, or even just down a flight of stairs to the front yard, harvesting just wouldn't be as simple. 

From Temperate Climate Permaculture: "Bill Mollison once said that if you need some fresh herbs for your morning omelette, and if you go to collect them from your Zone 1 garden and your slippers get wet from the dew, then they were placed too far from the home." Permaculture is fascinating.  Read more about it.

 This week I harvested a scant 8 ounces.  That means 96 pounds to go.   I remember that growth does not happen linearly, but at its own rate, sometimes exponentially, and sometimes not at all.  I was so excited to find beautiful locally grown heirloom tomatoes in a Jamaica Plain block sale, and did some planting before the heavy rains today.  Red Zebras, Paul Robeson, Tommy Toe and more, planted along with the Yukon Golds, and onion sets.  Yes - I think I will get to 100 pounds by the end of the season.  With patience.

Garden Treasures

Working in the garden can often reveal hidden treasures.  With careful attention you can spot the little surprises: colorful bugs as pretty as a painting, or the first delicate sprigs of a carrot seedling.  This spring I found some interesting things in the plot at the community garden.   After a long winter, it is easy to forget what bulbs went in last fall, so it was a delight to find garlic shoots a foot tall, and bright yellow daffodils bordering the plot. Mint shoots were coming up here and there, evidence of a determined underground trek.  So far, it’s not been a problem keeping them in check - the mint makes a fine cup of tea, fresh or dried.  What a treat to find a beautiful carpet of mixed lettuce greens, volunteers from last season’s plants left to self-seed.

As I was turning the soil in one of my beds, I noticed something shiny.  Looking closer, I spotted a lost earring, missing since last fall.  I was so glad that I hadn’t tossed the remaining earring.  A lesson my mother never taught me - if you lose an earring (or sock, glove, or anything else that comes with two) hold on to the remaining one, its match may reappear eventually. 

The harvest continues – the young collard leaves are about done, and now little flower shoots are appearing.  Cousins of broccoli raab, they were worthy of snipping.  A quick saute with garlic and olive oil resulted in a delicious dish.  Thanks Fran for mentioning the kale flowers – very similar.  This 100 pound challenge is changing what I eat.  Were it not for this experiment, my dinner vegetable might have been store bought cauliflower, instead of those tasty collard flowers.  It seemed essential to record at least 1 pound every week, and the leaves were 2 ounces short of that.  Collard flowers, young chives, baby lettuce – it all adds up - and the question becomes not "what do I want to have for dinner?" but "what is available for picking today in my garden?"
 

 

2 Pounds Harvested, 98 to Go

I finally made it down to the Community Garden this weekend. I was greeted by a row of bright daffodils, a welcome site in a relatively bare plot. Flowers in a vegetable garden?  Definitely!  As the season progresses, my plot will be dotted with the bright oranges of calendula and nasturtium, and the delicate white of buckwheat flowers.  Flowers are nice for esthetics, but they also perform an important function: attracting beneficial insects, such as lacewings, ladybugs, and bees.  These insects not only act as pollinators, but feed on other insects which like to eat our crops.  Read more about beneficial insects as a method of organic pest control.

 

Along with the daffodils, I was also delighted to find food ready to harvest. My first harvest of the season resulted in  2 pounds of leeks and collards.  There is a joy in harvesting a crop that survives the New England winter – as the leeks did.  What sturdy plants to remain unharmed by subzero temperatures and harsh winds.  The collards are the star of the garden in spring, unlike last summer when they stood in company of juicy ripe tomatoes and giant swiss chard.  So I harvested, weighed, and hunted for recipes.  In my experience, I’ve found that if produce goes straight into the refrigerator, it is more likely stay there until it is ready to be worm food.  So, as tired as I was from an afternoon gardening, no rest until the harvest was processed.  The leeks were easy – a standard improvised leek and potato soup – with chicken broth, cream and butter – a 5-ingredient recipe with lots of flavor.   For the collards, an interesting recipe with pancetta, mustard and vinegar.  I might just be planting more collards this season.

Each garden season has its gifts and challenges.  Spring is a season that shouts 'Now!'  Timing is everything, and the more we become attuned to the rapid changes in temperature and precipitation, the better conditions we can provide for our seedlings.  Rapid changes affect harvest as well.  One day the collard leaves are perfect to pick, wait 2 days and the plant has bolted, putting energy into a flower head.  No procrastinating on picking once you see those tiny flower heads appearing - unless of course it's broccoli.

It’s been a rough week in Boston – tragic and surreal.  I think that many of us find comfort in the activities which lend a sense of normalcy to our days.  For me, it is in the ordinary acts of tilling the soil and planting seeds.  Early spring harvests are a lovely reminder of what can grow from the tiniest of seeds, given sun, water, and nurturance.  In the midst of this season of hope and possibility, a horrible event occurred in this city.  Let us hope for an end to bombings everywhere.  Let us a hope for a world in which people do not lose their loved ones to such acts of violence.  Let us each do the hard work of cultivating understanding and compassion.

 

April Garden Planning

One of Dad's 2+ pound tomatoes.
Made a delicious sandwich.

2012 Cherokee Tomatoes.
Not large, but full of character.

This blog is about growing food - 100 pounds of it.  I'm not a farmer, but an apartment dweller in a high-density city.  We see plenty of snow - no 3 season gardening here, and mid-April could still bring freezing temperatures. I've got lead in my yard soil, too much to grow food.  But, I am fortunate to have a sunny deck full of containers, and a nice sized plot in a community garden.  Can I grow a hundred pounds of food this summer?  That's the challenge.  The benefits: healthy super-fresh food, interesting varieties, saving money, reducing my carbon footprint, plus of course the intrinsic joy of digging in the soil and those first delicious harvests.

I dedicate this blog to my dear father who passed away on August 1, 2012 at the age of 100. Jay Furman understood the joys of gardening.  He weighed his produce too.  Picture albums contained countless shots of tomatoes on the scale, peaches on the scale, cucumbers... you get it.  He planted grape arbors in his 80’s and grew tomatoes on his retirement home rooftop into his 90’s.  The Beefsteaks I ate as a child were legendary in size and taste.  He bartered surplus tomatoes for Jersey corn from the local truck farm and gave away many juicy gems to grateful friends and relatives.   We ate seasonal and local – hothouse tomatoes never appeared on our table in December.  I am thankful to my dad for helping me to appreciate the joy and wonder of growing my own food.

It’s spring in New England.  Well, almost.  The forecast is for sleet, so once again I dragged my deck pots of baby greens into the living room for the night. In the temperate Northwest, gardeners are snipping chives, and harvesting microgreens.  But here, I am planning, not planting.  So, I am still thinking about what I will grow this year.  How do YOU decide what you to put in your garden?

These are my criteria:

What’s tasty?  Last year my collard plants were ornamental.  I don’t have any great recipes for collards, so I rarely harvested.  This year I’ll be growing more of what I like to eat: swiss chard.

What’s beautiful? Purple! Shiny purple eggplants, striking purple yard long beans, cute purple peas, and maybe even some purple kale.  Shiso too – it’s prolific, colorful, and makes a great pesto.

What’s unusual?  Jamaican Calaloo.  My co-worker sent a recipe – I have to try it.  Oh, and those Styrian pumpkins from COWS orchard– no hulls – can’t wait to try them.  Thanks for the seeds Helen.

What was scarce last year? That one’s easy – Ground Cherries.  Not one ground cherry made it from the garden home last year.  They are just too tasty.  This year, I hope to have at least a dozen plants. I'm starting seeds now.  Two varieties: Pineapple and Aunt Molly's.

And then there are the tomatoes… and onions… and potatoes… and squash… and of course, basil.
Can't decide or new gardener?  Try a preselected Collection from Baker's Creek Heirloom Seeds.

What will you grow this season?  How do you decide?  Want to do your own 100 pound challenge?