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

Up the Bean Pole

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White Emergo Pole Beans

White Emergo Pole Beans

Remember that crazy thing we did this winter with a dozen or more varieties of peas? Well, I think it’s happening again, this time with beans. White beans, black beans, heirlooms, perennials and beans with packaging in languages I can barely understand. Ever wonder what the opposite of monocropping would be? Stop by and I’ll show you.

We like green beans, especially if Chinese sauces are involved. But most of these beans are intended for drying. This winter they will turn into chili and baked beans and hearty soups.

Tarahumara Black Bean Trellis

Sprouting Tarahumara Black Beans

Some of the beans are heirloom black beans traditionally grown by the Tarahumara. We are trying both the bush variety and the pole beans. They are used to a very dry climate and I initially over-watered the bush beans giving them “chlorosis” which is a yellowing of the young leaves that occurs when you give them so much water that you actually wash away some of the nutrients they need for photosynthesis. Oops! I mulched them with some Happy Frog and cut back on the water and they seem much happier now. It helps that it’s not over 90 degrees any more.

Druzba Tomato and Hutterite Soup Beans

Eastern European Cousins

Another interesting variety we have in the garden right now is the Hutterite Soup Bean. Seeds of Change says these beans immigrated to the U.S. in the 1760’s with a religious group from Austria. Which sounds nice and is about all you can fit on the back of a seed pack, but the Hutterite’s have a rich and interesting history. And let’s hope they have some good soup recipes too, because these beans sound delicious so far. In homage to their Eastern European connections the Hutterite Soup beans are interplanted with a Druzba tomato, an heirloom from Bulgaria. They may actually be planted a whole lot too close for comfort. In my research about the Hutterite beans, I came across one site that recommended planting them 18″ apart. I’m lucky if mine are 3″!

Contender Bean Pods

Our First Contender

The first beans planted in the garden this year, Contenders planted on March 30th, no less, were the first ones to give us pods. I’m surprised they didn’t curl up and die from the cold. I know I nearly did! I planted a tiny patch of them, maybe a dozen plants, just to see if it was warm enough to sprout beans yet. I have been cautiously adding different varieties to the garden since mid-April when these came up looking no worse for wear. So far the list includes:

Contender
Calypso
Soldier
White Emergo
‘Christmas‘ Limas
Fagiolo di Spagna ‘Spagna Bianco‘
Bush Black Beans ‘Tarahumara Ejotero Negro‘
Hutterite Soup Bean
Swedish Brown
Pole Black Beans ‘Tarahumara Chokame‘
California Blackeye Pea
Cannelino
And I have some Fin de Bagnol seeds around here ready to slip into a spot where nothing else is growing yet. Why didn’t I get more pole bean seeds? They are so much easier to find room for. Though I think the real question will be, how many beans of a given variety do I need to plant in order to save enough dry beans to cook something from them? I guess we’ll find out.

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.