Do April Tomatoes Bring May Potatoes?

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By Hand in Hand Parenting April 16, 2009

I read the other day that wind exposure can activate plant genes for sturdiness. If that happens in peas, tomatoes and potatoes we are about to have the stockiest plantings of vegetables between here and the Pacific. Yesterday’s wind storm was crazy, and today is calmer, but we’re still have gusts of over 30 mph!

First Fruits

I was just starting to wonder if the Principe Borghese tomatoes were setting fruit while the plants were still way too small and thinking that maybe I should pinch off the first few fruits to let the plant get bigger before energy was going into fruit production. Who ever heard of tomatoes in April? The plants aren’t even two feet tall!

But I’ve never tried this variety. It’s my first time trying tomatoes for drying and my mother-in-law and some long-time gardening neighbors thought it best to leave the fruits on the plants. Hopefully they will still be there when the wind settles down again.

Most of the neighbors are keeping an eye on the Dirt to Dinner garden and like to stop by to see what all we’ve got growing. I’ve learned a lot from them about what grows well in the neighborhood, when they plant things and how various varieties have wintered over in their yards. I’m enjoying chatting over the fence with folks as they ask what’s growing where and share what works in their gardens.

Nursery Cloth Growing Bag for Potatoes

Everyone asks about the potato bags. I can’t wait until they are rolled all the way up and full of soil. They will be about 18″ tall and hold a total of 15 gallons of soil and potato plants. They’re not as tall as the new potato bed we’re going to start putting in tomorrow, but they are fun and should be a lot easier to harvest than the wooden planter will be.

Right now we are trying three varieties of potato in the Dirt to Dinner garden. The kids all got La Ratte fingerling seed potatoes when we visited Full Circle Farm a few weeks ago. The ones we planted here haven’t sprouted yet, but the four I am saving to give our teacher, Mackenzie, have started to form eyes, so I’m still hopeful. The other two are an early yellow much like Yukon Gold and a mid-season variety with a redish purple exterior that we also picked up at Common Ground.

In addition to those three test varieites, we just got word that the 2 1/2 pounds of All Blue seed potatoes we ordered have been shipped from the Seed Savers Exchange. Here’s a link to what they might look like at You Grow Girl.

The New Bed Takes Shape

These guys will get a large (for us anyway!) 4′ x 8′ foot bed that we plan to raise at least two feet tall as we hill the potatoes. We’re starting with a redwood frame, held together by nailing the framing boards to 4″x4″ post pieces cut into 2′ sections. It’s going to take a fair amount of sawing, since most of our wood is lumber yard castoffs or otherwise donated scraps, but there’s something very satisfying for the kids that seems to come out of building something out of “nothing.”

The Gardener’s Code

Compost Resurrection

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By Hand in Hand Parenting April 12, 2009

100 Years of Farming

I spent part of Easter Sunday in the garden, pretty much like I do every day. I cleared the sod that we piled willy-nilly around the compost bins when the kids took the turf up for the Dirt to Dinner bed in the front garden. Once I made my way to the compost bin that’s done cooking, I dug underneath to see what the compost was like. The dog helped. Remind me not to get a digging breed next time. ;-)

The first thing that greeted me under there was a worm. Looked ready to me.

I got a large cement mixing tub and balanced the family heirloom across it to sift the compost. My husband’s family were Italian immigrants who farmed in Santa Cruz for several generations. This frame has come down to us from the family farm and I’m honored to use it. My mother-in-law briefly toyed with the idea of setting it out with the trash last Clean-Up Week, but even though the squirrels have done their worst, it survives as part of the Dirt to Dinner project here with us.

Tomato Variety

I sifted the compost through the frame, relocating the worms and adding whatever didn’t make it through the frame to the compost bin that we are currently building up. Then I took my tubfull of “black gold” over to the tomato bed. One of my recent don’t-know-how-I’d-survive-without-her phone calls to my mother-in-law went something like this, “Can I grow six varieties of tomatoes in the same bed?”

“They won’t mind but you can’t save the seed.”

“Why not?”

“They might not breed true into what you expect them to be next time.”

Just like kids, in other words.

I carefully surrounded my six tomaotes with compost made from the scraps from the food we’ve already eaten, chewed by worms and other unseen helpers, sifted through more than a hundred years of family farming. It felt like a perfect moment in keeping with the resurrection theme of the day.

The best place to seek God is in a garden. You can dig for him there.
~George Bernard Shaw

The Planter is Planted!

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By Hand in Hand Parenting April 12, 2009

Dirt to Dinner Individual Raised Bed
Planting Areas

Hooray! The Dirt to Dinner willow raised bed planter is now home to 14 individual 2×4 planting sections, one for each of the families in the Spring program. And today, April 11th, was finally the day the beds were first planted. The 112′ “L” shaped bed created with willow hurdles from Master Garden Products in Oregon holds about 18″ of soil on disturbed adobe that has been lawn for the last ten+ years, with the sod removed. (We’re still trying to fit it all into the composter in layers–it could be a while!)

The planter now holds different combinations of tomatoes, tomatillos, peppers, chard, beets, carrots, a wide selection of radishes, including one patch with four varieties growing side by side for comparison, lettuce, watermelon, cantaloupe and cosmos, among others!

You'll Be Missed

During the planting of starts and seeds, a square foot of Broccoli Raab starts were transported into the front garden, in hopes of being chosen as residents of the new planting bed. Sadly, one of the broccoli starts did not survive the move. The kids chose to honor the broccoli’s return to the soil with this memorial. ;-)

Not only did we get the planting beds planted today, but we also had lunch on time! (A process it has taken us a while to perfect.) In the kitchen, the kids prepared Strawberry Lemonade, Mashed Sweet Potatoes and Quinoa Confetti Salad with beets, carrots, cabbage, red onion, radishes, celery, fennel and fresh herbs. The sweet potatoes were said to, “smell like a pie!”

Grate Help

The quinoa salad was not as popular with the kids as the kale salad we tried during Class 2 but it was tasty, fresh and welcomed by most of the adults. It made me wonder if there is some more fundamental reason kids tend not to like certain foods. I’ve been reading the new edition of Harold McGee’s classic On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen and in the vegetable section he talks about the chemistry of many of the vegetables we are encouraging the Dirt to Dinner kids to eat, a chemistry which is often a defense mechanism for plants designed to keep things from eating them! What if immature digestive systems are more sensitive to these chemical defenses and there’s a biological reason children turn up their noses at the foods grownups spend a lot of time trying to convince them are good for them? Certainly, feeding them fresh versions right out of the garden gets around any obvious taste or processing-into-tastelessness issues. Just a wild idea. Let me know if you have thoughts better founded in biochemistry than my musings!

Hints of Things to Come

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By Hand in Hand Parenting April 4, 2009

Our First Picolo Provenzale Peas

Friday morning–early–I was sitting in downtown Palo Alto in a Board meeting, in clean clothes with no visible dirt on me. But when someone there asked me what was good with me, I excitedly blurted out to the entire room, “We have peas!” Evidently, you can take the girl out of the garden, but…

These are the only peas that have survived from this year’s Pea Trial, the Pisello Nano Picolo Provenzale. I’ve been hunting for more seed for this variety and finally found it from Seeds from Italy. They are the U.S. distributor for Franchi Sementi spa of Bergamo, Italy, seedsmen since 1783. 1783, wow, I like the sound of that.

My mother-in-law comes from an Italian family and has liked other varieties of their seeds. I got some of the small Picolo Provenzale peas and also some of the Telefono variety which grow to 5-6′.

Italian Winter Squash Sampler

I couldn’t help also ordering their collection of Winter Squash. They send you ten different varieties–and a bottle gourd–so we will be trying Padana, Marina di Chioggia, Quintale, Piena di Napoli, Tromba d’Albenga, Serpente di Sicilia, and four or five others. Just listen to the description for the Marina di Chioggia, “Very old variety from near Venice. 4-5 pound round fruit, grey/green knobby skin with sweet orange flesh. Essential for great soup, gnocci, roasting. Excellent keeper. 105 days.” Ahhh, those Italians!

The Pea Index

But right now the garden is starting to show us a few more hints of things to come. The peas that got me all excited in the first place are growing pretty much flat until they are about the size of my index finger and then they start to round out some as the peas inside develop.

The January planting is roughly a square foot of pea plants that are flowering and developing peas at a rapid pace now that the weather has warmed some. They still have plenty of cool nights, which they supposedly like. I hope so, last night it got down to 39 and there was actually a light frost on the grass this morning when I went out. At this point, before a single pea has been eaten, I have to say that our January planting plan really has ended up getting us ahead of things, even if the peas got eaten by everything and developed very slowly. There are no flowers yet on the February planted patch yet.

Bush Beans Emerging from Flowers

We do have tiny beans growing though. The Bush Beans Roc D’Or Yellow Wax that are growing in a container on the back patio, where it is protected and warm, are flowering and slender beans have started to form.

I had expected two beans to form from each of the flowers but these are forming a single bean, which is still green but will turn a bright yellow as they mature. I love the way they look with the remains of the flower they formed from still stuck to their tips. These plants were also an early test that has turned out to be a good idea. These Bush Beans were sprouted inside under lights and planted as starts alongside seeds of the same variety that were put in at the same time these plants were hardened off. The beans growing from seed are doing well, but they don’t have flowers yet and are clearly behind the beans started indoors.

Even with starting things early, there isn’t much to eat in the garden right now. For lunch I made Pickled Radish salad with some of our delicious celery thrown in for good measure. I sliced the celery as thinly as possible, just like the radish, and pickled them together in the sea salt and sugar. Then I combined the radish tops and celery leaves, chopped them loosely and wilted them with a bit of water before tossing the radish and celery pickles with the dressing and the greens.

Maybe by next week I’ll be able to serve it with some fresh peas!

From Dirt to Dinner

Learning in the Garden

Category Archives: Learning