Category Archives: Learning

Now That’s Dinner!

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Picnic Shoulder Roast

Smokin' "Picnic"

My apologies to the vegetarians in the crowd, but I just had to include a shot of the Picnic Shoulder Roast from TLC Ranch my husband smoked for our Father’s Day feast last night. I got a “Versatile Cook” box of their pork through our CSA and was glad to learn that Picnic Roast is a good cut to put into the smoker. Now I can spend my time getting versatile with the other cuts they sent. (I am currently thinking of mixing the ground pork with some grass fed ground beef and mixing up some meatballs, but I digress from last night’s meal…)

The Picnic Roast was treated to a rub the night before it was cooked, then it was injected with my husband’s marinade mix and basted while it smoked for several hours. About ten minutes before the roast was due to come out of the smoker, he also added a finishing sauce. Then I endured a torturous, ravenous ten minutes of ‘resting’ (the meat–not me!) while the delicious and complex aroma of all those carefully blended ingredients filled the house before I was allowed to taste it. And oh, it was worth the wait!

Mixed potato varieties ready for cooking

Grab Bag Potato Salad

I could have slapped any old mayonnaise-y side dish down next to this amazing meat, it’s not like anybody was going to notice the side dishes! But I went with Balsamic Potato and Green Bean Salad out of home grown California White, Red-Skinned, All Blue and Rose Gold potatoes, fresh from the garden. I tossed together the first of our Contender green beans, vinegar, a little sugar, olive oil, green onions, chopped thyme and cracked pepper. Not your average potato salad ingredients where I come from, but it makes a very tasty salad and I’m glad I took the time to root around under our potato plants to steal the new potatoes the recipe called for. We also feasted on Zucchini Bake, frittata and something called “Poke Cake” that I had never heard of but my mother-in-law and stepdaughter made it and everyone enjoyed having it around.

Now I just hope there is something leftover for lunch today!

Working for the Underground

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No More Lawn

Food Not Lawn

What’s that old saying about good farmers growing food and great ones growing soil? Well, we make no claims to greatness here at Dirt to Dinner but we are trying to give the soil the great treatment it deserves. The space that now grows food started out as a lawn. If I had to guess, I would say that any original topsoil that remained from earlier days (the area was converted from farms to housing in the 50’s) was stripped off when the house was redone in 2000. We weren’t here yet, so we don’t really know. But the lawn and the adobe below seemed awful close together when we started digging it up.

In the spring of 2009, we removed large sections of the grass and added raised beds. In some places, we didn’t even remove the grass and the raised beds went right on top. Since then we have stopped watering the parts of the lawn that remained. The raised beds now all have well-tended and organically amended soil in them, but they are like tiny, well-provisioned rafts in a sea of wild, dry, mostly neglected ground.

Chipped Fruit Tree Shreds

Mulch Carpet

Or, I should say, they were, until the generous folks at A-1 Tree Service arrived on Thursday with a very large truckload of chipped and shredded summer-pruned fruit tree trimmings.  This is exactly what we needed to improve all the garden soil and connect the soil in the raised beds to a healthy, vibrant network of soil bacteria, underground critters and earthworms.

The chippings have fruit, green leaves, dry leaves and branches all mixed and shredded together, so they are already a combination of the ‘browns’ and ‘greens’ we need for composting. Spread in a layer about 10 inches thick, they will discourage the growth of grass and weeds, hold moisture in the soil around the beds, help moderate temperatures in the garden, and over time, they will break down into a rich layer of compost further encouraging the connections between all the beds and a healthy soil throughout the garden. In a year or two, when we want to add a new bed to the garden, underneath that compost layer will be rich soil just waiting for us to plant.

Dirt to Dinner is a project to help children and other community members get up close and personal with growing food. It wouldn’t be here without the volunteers and sponsors who make it possible to include so many in this nurturing activity. Thanks again to A-1 Tree Service, Bauer Lumber, Naturalyards, Victory Seeds and all of you who contribute time and energy to this project.

Special thanks to Oscar, from A-1 Tree Service for all his help moving the chippings into the garden!

Huge Pile of Chippings

Man vs. Mulch

One Potato, Three Potatoes

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Sack-grown Potatoes

Potatoes Are Ready Droop

Have I ever mentioned how important it is to keep good records of your garden experiments? ‘Cuz I sure wish I had ’em right now. This spring, on some now-unknown date, I planted an unrecorded variety of potatoes, very carefully, in two identical Potato Grow Bags. In one container, I planted a single seed potato. In the other container I planted three seed potatoes of that same variety. Now, the directions call for five seed potatoes in each 15 gallon grow bag, but that seemed crazy based on what we saw with the spacing of the All Blue potato plants last year. If we grew them that way, the potatoes would probably be tiny. But, if we cut back to just three seed potatoes, would that give us a better yield of good sized potatoes, or did we really need to go all the way back to just one seed potato per pot to get the best potatoes? Only one way to find out, so we grew some.

Potato Spacing Yield Test

One Beats Three

The bags were placed side by side and given the same amounts of compost and water. The two grow bags ended up with similar amounts of foliage, though the three-in-one bag flowered first and drooped earlier. I thought the potatoes were Rose Golds, and wanted to save some of them for seed, so I pulled the potatoes when the singleton had just started to droop in earnest.

The three-in-one bag had a dozen nice-sized potatoes and a handful of small ones, too small to save for seed, if I had been planning to save from that bag. This might be a fine harvest from this variety of potato, which I am now thinking is a California White. But I don’t honestly know. The label from the California Whites says, “Cal White is a long white-fleshed potato with brilliant white skin. Produces heavy yields of large potatoes.” Would you call this skin ‘brilliant white’? It’s certainly the whitest one we’ve pulled out of the ground here at Dirt to Dinner.

Potatoes on Scale

One Potato, Seven Potatoes

The singleton bag had seven big potatoes, and one tiny one,  which together weighted 3 and 3/4 pounds, almost a pound more than the dozen potatoes from the three-in-one bag. Now, how many square feet is 15 gallons? The over-wintered potatoes produced just under 1 and 1/4 pounds of potatoes per square foot. The 15-gallon bag has an 18″ diameter…any math geeks out there? Ah, what the heck, even if we call it two square feet, they are doing well. In fact, it should have taken us over 3 square feet to get those 3.75 pounds of potatoes over the winter so I’m calling that bag a success. And the other bag is good too. It all depends on what you want. If you want big fat baking potatoes, or even just all the potato you can get out of a square foot, you might want to give the potatoes more room. If you want lots of small potatoes, you might purposely crowd them into the bed even though it may reduce your yield slightly.

Either way, it’s time for me to make some potato salad.

Fun Stuff in the Garden

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Yacon Start Newly Planted

Yacon Start

We’re developing a few of our own standby’s in the garden, like the Principe Borghese tomatoes for drying, Costoluto Genovese tomatoes for eating fresh and Straight Eight cucumbers for slicing, but we’re also trying some new things this year just for fun. One of them is Bolivian Sunroot, also called yacon. The plant reproduces through a rhizome, but stores energy in sweet, crunchy tubers with a unique taste. They were described to me as something like a yicama-strawberry flavor, which I find hard to imagine but am looking forward to trying. The plants can grow over 6′ tall, so I have this one near a trellis post in case it needs staking later.

Brightest Brilliant Rainbow Starts

Brightest Brilliant Rainbow Starts

Another new friend in the garden this year is quinoa. I’m growing ‘Brightest Brilliant Rainbow‘ quinoa which is supposed to be good not only for the variously-colored seed heads, but for summer greens when the plants are young as well. I don’t grow wheat or corn because of allergies and am looking forward to exploring some of the other grain options that are possible for a home gardener.

Lima beans starting up their trellis

Christmas in June

Lima beans are also new for us this year. I went with the ‘Christmas‘ Lima because I just couldn’t resist them in the catalog. The seeds are big and plump and have deep red striping on them. We grew a few Italian shelling beans last year that were delicious in soup and I think these will be gorgeous in a summer minestrone or on cooked their own. I was planning to pick half the plants and let the other half set seed for dry beans in the winter but as they are beginning to twine their way up the teepee, I’m already wondering how I’m going to do that. Might be time to plant another teepee of them specifically for drying. That would make it easier to deal with.

My family also really enjoys Black Bean Soup so I am trying several different varieties of Black beans this year to see which ones grow well for us. I have both bush and pole versions of a traditional variety grown by the Tarahumara Indians and some Black Turtle Beans to test.

Garlic growing in Straw Mulch

Garlic growing in Straw Mulch

We also have a small test patch of garlic this year, and, if it works well, we’ll have a lot more of this cooking essential planted this fall. There are a lot of meals around here that begin with garlic and olive oil. It would be fun to have our own varieties growing in the garden for when we want them. If I can decide what kinds to grow. The Winter Gardening catalog from Territorial Seed has literally dozens of different kinds of garlic. I may have to order a sampler and see which ones do well here.

I have a feeling the first stems of our test garlic are going to be ready in a day or two, so we’ll have some idea what’s going on down there under the straw mulch. The drying process for onions and garlic sounds really simple and if this hot weather keeps up, we should be prepping some of both this week or next.

First Sighting of Tomato Land

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First P. Borghese Tomatoes

Principe Borghese Does It Again

We have tasted the first tomatoes of the season. Briefly, because they were small, but enough to whet our appetites for more. The first tomatoes ripe were Principe Borghese tomatoes again this year. From a plant who has been none too happy about the wet, cold spring and honestly doesn’t look very good. There are five P. Borghese plants in the garden right now and only one of them looks as robust as the ones we grew last year. I also have six more of them started in pots because last year I was wishing I had done a second planting of these guys. They are packaged as determinant plants, but some of them produced a second crop of tomatoes after we had picked the first batch. I’ll have to look up how a semi-determinant plant behaves. Maybe that’s what they really are. I grow them to make sun-dried tomatoes with them but they are delicious in salads or marinated with mozzarella and basil.

Grandma Jill's Ugly Tomato plants

Ugly? Maybe. Delicious? Absolutely!

I was sure this year’s first tomato was going to be a Grandma Jill’s Ugly. And it would have been, but the top contender was rat-napped. It was beautiful, with deep creases like many of the varieties we are trialling this year. It was almost ready, it was blushing beautifully. It needed just one more day on the vine. But the next morning all I found was a small sliver of tomato skin in the mulch beneath the plant! I was heart-broken, as you can imagine, but it looks like the plant is happy enough to try to make up for it in volume. These plants look very close to the Costoluto Genovese variety that won our fresh eating taste tests last year. The Grandma Jill’s Ugly are certainly earlier, and the plant looks sturdier, but I hope the taste will be close to what we get with the Costoluto.

Blondkopfchen Tomato Flowers

Sucker for Blondes

I’m also looking forward to trying a new (for us) yellow cherry tomato called Blonkopfchen. There are three or four of these plants in the garden, well-spaced and not, and they are easy to find because they are making multiple wide sprays of flowers as they set fruit. I’m concerned that some of the fruiting branches may break off if every bud on those sprays produces a tomato, even a small one.

Cherokee Purple Tomatoes

Not Purple Yet

Cherokee Purple Tomatoes are also doing well this year. There are only two plants in our test and they are in similar conditions except one of the plants is crowded (it’s in the Square-Foot bed) and the other has lots of space. We are also hoping to enjoy Speckled Romans and Big Rainbow Striped tomatoes. And my mother-in-law just sent over a Green Zebra which I have read wonderful things about. I’m not sure I quite understand a tomato that is still green when it’s ripe. How will I know when to pick it?  Today I’ll give it a choice spot in one of the raised beds where I can keep an eye on it. If a rat starts nibbling them, I’ll know they are ready for eating!

Square Foot Bed with Tomatoes, Peppers, Celery, Basil and Nasturtiums

"And the little one said, 'Roll over!'"