Harvest Time

It doesn't take many tomato plants to provide for two people... (note to self: one plant of 'Sungold' is plenty for next year). 'Carmello' was first to ripen and has been super-productive. 'Green Zebra' is one of my favorites for taste. 'Rose de Berne' is a delicious pink, but the shoulders have tended to crack this year, for unknown reasons. 'Black Cherry' has not been too productive.

It's been a pleasure to have the two plots at the community garden. I've been surprised at how little time is necessary for maintenance, since we did a good job of weeding and mulching to start the year. Looks like I do need to visit more often to water seed beds, though. The second plantings of cilantro and zinnias were perfect, but beets not so much. And the lettuce didn't germinate at all. We've had a cool August, with many hints of fall, so it's time to order more seeds for greens, for a fall crop of arugula, lettuce, and spinach. The swiss chard has been great -- wish I liked the taste better.

It's Official -- Getting Dirty Makes You Feel Good

You know how you always feel better after working in the garden, even for a few minutes? It's not your imagination -- it's good bacteria in the soil increasing your serotonin levels, says a researcher in England, the land of gardeners. So get out there and get your hands dirty!

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2007-04/uob-gdm033007.php

Plus ça change

So, am I part of a trend, or is the rest of the world catching up with moi? Seriously, it is exciting that vegetable gardening seems to be catching on again.

But I guess we are reflecting changing times. Last year, I grew herbs in just two containers -- one for perennials and one for annuals. Everything else was jammed with colorful annuals. But the expense -- even though I got the plants wholesale -- seemed too extravagant this year. So I expanded the number of pots for herbs, and get to feel virtuous every time I snip a few, instead of buying handfuls every week. A single packet of cilantro seeds will get us through the summer for the price of one bunch. Ditto dill and basil. Even though we have the community garden plots for tomatoes, etc, I wanted herbs closer to the kitchen.

Expanding on the edible theme, we put half a dozen ever-bearing 'Mara des Bois' strawberries from White Flower Farm in a large pot. Incredibly delicious little berries, bigger than alpines, but smaller than most June-bearers. They throw prodigious runners, unlike the usual alpine strawberry. You really could start with three plants and have a colony fast. I've been removing runners weekly, after tucking a few into the center of the pot. Alas, the chipmunks have gotten more berries than we have, so we're going to have to concoct some kind of removable wire cover to foil them. Strawberries need harvesting frequently, so I figured I'd better keep them close to home, too.

... Not that we're doing without flowers out front, but I DID cut back to five large pots and two urns... oh, and, um, the tender bulbs I hadn't grown before (sprekelia and haemanthus and gloriosa lily from EasytoGrowBulbs.com). And some little pots crammed with the overflow because I overbought. I did have enough to fill a concrete planter in Madisonville, near the community garden. And my boss gave me some extras for work for another one, so we're spreading the love.

The first zucchini, the last peas

Despite being a long-distance garden, our community plots are doing fairly well --plenty of mesclun, blackseeded simpson lettuce, arugula, radishes, dill, cilantro. The chard is big enough to harvest now.

It's been several years since I grew anything from seed, and the contents of seed packets seem to have shrunk considerably since then. I got only about 5 feet of a double row of sugar snap peas, undoubtedly planted too late because of all the rainy weekends in May. We got two whole meals worth... So I harvested the last overripe pods Saturday, tore up the vines, and planted beets and more dill and cilantro. The arugula had bolted, so that came out, to be replaced by what Burpee promises is summer lettuce... we'll see. The spinach, alas, definitely went in too late, and went from germination to bolted without a pause. We'll have to try a fall and maybe a winter crop.

The first two Raven zucchini were the size of fat cigars, so I snipped them off, to enjoy with plenty of herbs and olive oil. I also planted more radish seeds (that packet was very generously full) and a few more zucchini. We used to have terrible problems with squash vine borers, so I'm hoping the late sowing will give us plants that yield late.

My inspiration for the replanting is probably my favorite gardening book: In the French Kitchen Garden: The Joys of Cultivating a Potager by Georgeann Brennan. Illustrated with charming water colors, it's partly a how-to, mostly a why-to. So much of our American gardening tradition seems to be of the "plant rows of beans, squash, tomatoes, corn, melons when the weather gets hot." So learning a few years back that it's possible to keep replanting was an eye-opener. That, and doing away with rows, in favor of raised beds makes weeding and bed prep so much more manageable.

Meanwhile, the pole beans are in bloom, and the tomatoes are loaded with fruit. 'Sungold' is usually the first to ripen, but the 'Carmellos' are bulking up beautifully. As usual, I'm tieing the plants up 7ft poles, and pinching out as many suckers as possible. There are some signs of problems -- spotting and yellowing lower leaves -- I snipped off all that were affected and am keeping my fingers crossed that it's not early blight. The tomato bed was fallow last year, but I'm sure had tomatoes the previous year, since that seems to be the most popular crop.

The biggest disappointment of the season? The flower seeds from Renee's Garden. The mesclun, pole beans, beets and herb seeds were great, but we got zero germination from the zinnias, cosmos, and sunflowers. The Burpee zinnias that went in to replace them had poor germination, too, but not zero. There are relatively few wholesale seed growers, so I'm wondering what's up-- is it me, or are there crop issues this year?

A New Garden

After two years without a garden, we're back in the veggie business! I was lucky enough to get two 4' x 8' plots in the Madisonville Community Garden, and in the last couple of weeks we've gone from this ...

to this ...

One of our plots was fallow last year, so it was filled with a wildling version of lamium, and a weed I've encountered before, although I haven't ID'd it properly -- it looks like a non-silvery artemesia, with tenacious stoloniferous roots. It took a couple of hours to dig it all out ... and I'm sure there are bits left, along with some quack grass. The second plot was also weedy, although not as bad. The paths are full of the same weeds, but lamium doesn't seem to like being stomped on, so the paths around our area (and leading to the compost bins) are already looking like paths again.

We started a couple of weeks ago, but rainy weekends delayed our progress. The Civic Garden Center sponsors the garden, and provided those heavy cedar boards to replace the rotted sides of our plots and half a dozen others. Ed and I finished installing the sides Saturday afternoon. On Sunday, he dug in half a dozen bags of mushroom compost and cow manure while I fetched #25 pots of leaves I'd salvaged at work. The leaves went through the giant vac during cleanup last fall, but aren't as finely chopped as I'd like... still beats paying for mulch. The earth worms should be happy with it.

It's too early for tomatoes, but we have finely-engineered stakes ready when White Flower Farm ships our heirloom plants in a few weeks. I'm sorry to miss Tomatomania! there, which is a great event (120-plus varieties of tomato plants plus thousands of veggie gardeners in one place. What's not to love?)

It might be too late, but we planted mesclun, oakleaf lettuce, spinach and Super Sugar Snap peas Sunday, leaving room for tomatoes, basil, pole beans, and a few cukes and summer squash. And hopefully a row or two of zinnias.

Michael Pollan to defend food in Cincinnati

Michael Pollan will visit Joseph-Beth Booksellers in Oakley at 1 p.m. Saturday to discuss and sign In Defense of Food, his "sequel" to the best-selling The Omnivore's Dilemma.


Did you ever get the feeling that it's hard to keep up with nutrition science? That what's healthy yesterday is bad for us today? Well, Pollan basically tells us the nutrition emperor has no clothes ... the whole premise that we can consider foods as merely bundles of nutrients is just plain wrong, and has contributed to the obesity epidemic. And, by the way, they DO keep getting it wrong -- it's not your imagination.


The Omnivore's Dilemma is one of many books that helped spur the "eat-local" movement. I can only hope that eat local is truly taking off everywhere, because there is such a backlash against it. Can the Doughboy (and his big friends) be getting nervous? Isn't that a perfectly wonderful thing?

Pollan's defense of food recommends what most of us know, even if we don't always walk the walk -- shop the outside of the supermarket (or, preferably, farmers' market) and don't bother with the highly processed stuff in the middle of the store. More veggies and fruits, some dairy and meat, but forget the granola bars, low-fat cookies, meals-in-a-box, etc. I'm still working my way through the book, but I must say it's a delight to see lots of industry-sponsored food research get so thoroughly body-slammed, trounced, and stomped on.

A Cooking Rock Star Visits Cincinnati

Christopher Kimball, founder and publisher of Cooks Illustrated, spoke at Joseph-Beth Booksellers this evening, to a full house-- more than 70 fans of the magazine jammed the aisles around the lecture area. He's a hoot -- self-deprecating, great sense of humor, and also very clearly opinionated about food. And publishing. And what passes for cooking on TV.

He shared anecdotes about the magazine, to which 95% of the attendees subscribe, but was ostensibly there to talk about The Best Lost Recipes, the newest CI book. Cooks Country, a sister publication, solicited "lost" recipes from readers and received 3,000 responses. He said most turned out to be much better than you might have expected, including some real gems.

Editing the book made the staff realize that in the 19th century, the country had hundreds of thousands of recipes, because each family had its variant. Then, by the mid-20th century, standardization arrived, in the form of the food industry and publishing, so thousands of those variants were lost.

The staff winnowed the recipes to those with the best stories, as well as the best recipes. The book is very heavy on baked goods, with only a slim chapter on meats/main dishes. It's the way people cooked before Campbell's convinced us that every recipe started with a can of cream of mushroom soup. Many of the recipes are for frugal (but delicious) fare, although some are clearly celebratory cakes.

Which got me thinking about a story The Enquirer ran recently about a food stamp challenge -- feed yourself on the $21 a week per-person folks get in food stamps. The woman they wrote about was hungry all the time. And no wonder, because it doesn't look as though she cooked anything but spagetti and hot dogs, and maybe eggs, and survived mostly on peanut butter or maybe cheese sandwiches.

The only way to live on that tiny little bit of money is... learn to cook. Which takes time and effort. It means rice and beans, with meat as a condiment, not the featured ingredient. Cabbage and potato soup. Bean soups. Lentil soup. Oatmeal instead of cold cereal. It certainly means spending Sunday afternoon cooking for the week, since frugal food takes lots of time to make up for the lack of quick-cooking steaks and chops and burgers.

It's really a shame that everyday home cooking seems to be a lost art... based on what's sold in the end caps at the grocery stores. I'm sorry that home economics has gone the way of the dodo in our schools... if I were queen, I would make sure both boys and girls learn to cook and repair a torn hem and sew on a button, and wield a hammer, screwdriver, saw and drill, and how to check the oil in the car. And everyone needs to know how to balance a checkbook and use a credit card. Our kids are being left behind, in lots of ways.

Christmas Green

Christmas-y weather is finally here. After a month of wildly seesawing temperatures, we seem to be in a pattern of below-freezing temps at night. This week, anyway. On Saturday, we finished putting the big containers into the garage for the winter, earlier than expected, but there's snow in the forecast, so we figured we'd better do it while we can before the pots freeze up. I hated to see the pansies go, since they were so late going in, with the crazy heat in September. The urns are now stuffed with cut greens, local and Oregon-grown. Made me realize how much I miss white pines, which are planted here, but really struggle. The old trees seem to be ok in many older landscapes, but the new ones installed by builders appear to survive maybe 5-10 years, then bite the dust.
I went shopping for greens for a client Friday, and found a nice selection at Burger Farm in Newtown and at Hyde Park Floral, just around the corner. In addition to mixed bunches, Hyde Park had beautiful red-twig dogwood stems, white pine, nice bunches of boxwood, and these stunning huge cones, and I couldn't resist getting one. There were enough trimmings left over for a big and a tiny vase indoors. If I change the water frequently, I can just replenish the red carnations and white mums occasionally. And Kroger had fabulous winterberry stems -- pricy, but a "bunch" (of 2 whole stems) was enough for knockout color in my big green McCoy vase.

Visit The Heirloom Gardener to see more ideas for winter pots -- already covered in snow. Our rain Sunday was snow in the upper Midwest and the Northeast.