Tag Archives: growing vegetables

April Garden Tour

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Teacher's Growing Bed

Teacher’s Growing Bed

 

For a tour of some of the Dirt to Dinner garden highlights, you can check out the April Voicethread. You can see the garden’s development so far this Spring, all the individual growing beds the kids have planted, our experiments with four different varieties of potatoes and how all the various pea growing trials are turning out.

Here are some of the thing we are able to eat from the garden right now:
peas, broccoli, celery, parsley, spinach, chard, scallions, bok choi and radishes.

The next crop we expect to come in should be our early green beans, the Yellow Wax beans. They are looking good, but are still small and green. No sign yet of the yellow color that will let us know they are ready for picking. And we are looking forward to snap peas, carrots and planting our corn.

One for Wind, One for Crow

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Edamame-cide   

Edamame-cide

…One to die and one to grow.

Have I ever mentioned that gardening can be a very frustrating hobby? Just look at this poor Edamame soy bean sprout! I forgot to put their little plastic covers back over them last night after I watered and every last beautiful soy bean sprout was slaughtered in the night. Or, most likely, in the very early morning by the crows.

Why do they do this? They don’t eat the sprouts. They just tear them out of the ground and bite them so they can’t grow! Don’t they know the rule in the Dirt to Dinner garden is, “You kill it–you eat it?” (Let me know if you have any good recipes that call for crow. We’ll talk.)

Heart of the Artichoke

Heart of the Artichoke

Not only that, but some time after I took this picture this morning, the artichoke plant these blooms are on fell over, for no apparent reason, into the pea patch next door! I am about to go out there and prop it up with some bamboo poles and a trellis net.

Let me assure you, the plants do not look this way in the gardening catalog! Maybe this is the real reason that people don’t generally grow their vegetable gardens in the front yard. At least when you put the garden in the back and the plants are strung up with bailing wire, no one sees them but you!

Four-Foot Snap Peas?

Four-Foot Snap Peas?

I would just clip off the artichokes and cut the whole plant back to the ground and let it start over next year, but this is a picture of the last plants I ‘gave up’ on.

This is a patch of Sugar Snap peas I planted during a warm spell on January 18th from starts I picked up when I bought the broccoli.

They immediately had all their tops snipped off by some pestilent critter and I thought they were all goners. But they fooled me. They grew back from the roots again! Each plant sent up a new shoot from underground and now they are happily climbing the supports we set out for them.

I’m sure they could have grown a lot faster, had they not had their heads chopped off a week after I planted them, but they are flowering and getting ready to make peas at the same time as the February planting of the Picolo Provenzale peas in the front.

Do April Tomatoes Bring May Potatoes?

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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

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

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

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.”

Compost Resurrection

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100 Years of Farming  

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

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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Dirt to Dinner Individual Raised Bed Planting Areas    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

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

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!