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Finishing Our First Program Season

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As Dirt to Dinner Begins

As Dirt to Dinner Begins

I’m cleaning things up around the garden for our final Dirt to Dinner lunch of the Spring session. A lot has changed around here since we started. Here’s what it looked like when all we had growing was the Spring Pea Trial vs. where the kids growing box and the rest of the front garden area are today.

Lots of Growing Changes!

Lots of Growing Changes!

We’ve added additional beds, trellis, arbors and teepee support structures, and, of course, lots of plants. We’ve let the lawn dry up and the mulch and straw take over to the point where I’m starting to wonder if I have 50 feet of defensible space around the house in case the suburb is consumed by wildfire. ;-)

Gourd_corsican_lgTomorrow we are going to put in several different varieties of gourds on an arbor we’ve constructed over the bench. It’s a tad late for gourds since they like such a long season, but we could still get lucky, and we could always try covering them with season extenders. Could be a good challenge for the new crew starting in September. One of the neighbors gets tomatoes until November, so I’m hopeful.

Eternal optimism is very helpful when it comes to experimenting with agriculture.

We’re also going to experiment with various ways of ripening green tomatoes, clean up around the garden a bit to see what we have to add to the compost bins, and we’ll probably tuck in some surprises for the folks who are coming back in the Fall.

Lunch is a Summer picnic theme so we are making tomato basil salad, potato salad, green beans, chopped green salad with veggies and some folks are also bringing a bit of potluck to spice things up. Should be a wonderful time to celebrate what we have accomplished and review the kids suggestions for what to do differently next year.

Food Independence

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Return from 4 sq ft devoted to potatoes

Return from 4 sq ft devoted to potatoes

The Dirt to Dinner project is about creating a little bit of food independence in each of the kids who works with us. Making them aware of what it takes to grow the food they eat, showing them how they can do it, and helping them raise healthy food that goes directly from the ground onto their lunch plates. And, luckily for us, the whole process has been delicious.

Mashed Bounty

Mashed Bounty

Today we pulled some Yukon Gold-style potatoes out of the modest 4 sq ft patch where they had been growing and quickly boiled and mashed them. They hardly needed butter and were immediatly pronounced a success. The flesh of the potatoes is yellower than what I want for tomorrow’s red-white-and-blue potato salad, but it may have to do. Though I guess I could skin the red-skinned potatoes for the white, keep the skins on for the red, and, well, I still have my fingers crossed on the blues, but we haven’t raided any of them yet. Not one peek under all that dirt, compost and mulch. Though I have high hopes, we did plant thirty potato plants! There better be enough blue potatoes for one dish of potato salad tomorrow!

Tomato Season Finally Begins

Tomato Season Finally Begins

One thing I know we will have is tomatoes. They have started ripening in the warm weather and, so far, we have been eating the Principe Borghese drying tomatoes fresh. They are tough to resist. Especially with some of the blue flowering basil growing in the front bed and balsamic vinegar. These guys ended up in a salad bowl so fast they were still warm from the sun as we ate them. But just as soon as there are other tomatoes ripe, I really do plan to get out the drying recipes. I swear!

My bet is that the Costaluto Genovese will be the next to be ready. We’ve had one or two of them already. Some people call them ugly tomaotes because of the deep ridges they develop but they taste great.

The Tomatoes Are Coming!

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From Sun Ripened to Sun Dried

From Sun Ripened to Sun Dried

I’m trying to remember this moment as the calm before the tomato storm. I have a feeling this nice hot weather is about to inundate us with tomato bounty. I have the drying screen, dehydrator and oven drying recipes ready to go. I’m still looking for the perfect catsup. Let us know if you have a recipe you like!

We will have quite a few of the Principe Borghese tomatoes ready to go first. They have been ripening one at a time here and there, but now there are suddenly *lots* of orange ones on the vines and the vines seem less robust, as if all their energy is going into the fruits now.

Shades of Genoa

Shades of Genoa

I am really looking forward to tasting the Costaluto Genovese tomatoes. They look wonderful on the vine with their deep creases and funky shapes.

I tried to count the other day and I think there are at least a dozen varieties of tomatoes growing in the Dirt to Dinner garden; Principe Borghese for drying, Roma for sauce and cooking, three varieties of grape tomato for eating, the Orange German Strawberry tomato my mother-in-law sent over for fun, the Big Beef for burgers and other slicing needs. And the there are what I think must be  the Crimson Carmellos, which grow like monsters! Green-GloryThey are the most robust tomato vines I have ever seen. If you are out late in the evening watering too close to this thing, I swear it might toss one brawny arm over your shoulders and keep you there all night telling you its garden tales as the moon rises.

The fruits are a shiny deep green and I know the label for the plant is hidden down there somewhere, behind the lost shallots that I foolishly thought might actually enjoy a little shade provided by the tomato. Ha! They better be nocturnal to be surviving under there. At least the Edamame beans still get some light from the side.

I am also enjoying the dry farmed tomatoes planted outside the fence in the squash garden. The squash aren’t big enough yet to be much help shading the ground, but the tomato plants still seem happy.

Romas Getting Ready

Romas Getting Ready

Between drying, making pizza sauce, making catsup, whatever the kids will eat in salads and on sandwhiches, I think we’re pretty much set for tomatoes!

And the really interesting thing is the way the tomatillos have taken off! There are both verde and whatever purple is in Spanish varieties out there and they have taken over the corner growing bed to a slightly unhealthy extreme. Yesterday I found some kind of mold growing on one of their leaves. I may need to get out there and pick off the affected parts of the plant. It’s so dense in this patch that the air circulation can’t be good.

Not sure why I didn’t figure out that tomatillo plants got so big and spready when we planted them. They all seem so small and helpless in the beginning! :-)

Tomatillo-Twins

Beans, Squash, Stakes and Sunflowers

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Great Sunflower Project

Great Sunflower Project

Yesterday was a busy day in the Dirt to Dinner garden.  A number of our pollinator flowers got moved into their permanent homes in the front garden area.  The vegetables will now be able to benefit from the attracting powers of Cosmos, nasturtiums, bee balm, blue basil and sunflowers.

And the Lemon Queen Sunflower seeds which recently arrived from The Great Sunflower Project are now planted. Yesterday the Scarlet Runner Beans and Sugar Pie Pumpkins that are part of our two test Three Sisters gardens were tucked into their mounds and are hopefully germinating right now in the heat. If heat is what they want, we certainly picked the perfect day to plant them. It was nearly 100 degrees yesterday and it’s at least 95 today.

Tomatoes at the Stake

Tomatoes at the Stake

 

The peas and the broccoli are unhappy, but the rest of the garden seems to be loving the heat. We’re layering in the mulch wherever we can, to help conserve moisture even though the local watering restrictions excempt food gardens–so far. We also added drip irrigation to the kids’ big growing bed this week, to help make even better use of the water the garden receives. And we are thinning and adding supports in the garden to make more space and also to allow the taller plants to help cool the plants below them who appreciate it on hot, sunny days. These tomatoes offer some much needed shade to lettuces, beets and carrots planted around them.

May Dirt to Dinner Update

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Sprouting and Growing    Sprouting and Growing

There’s no doubt that the garden is starting to fill out nicely. If I hadn’t noticed it myself, the evening parade of dog walkers would have been happy to remind me.

We continue to receive attention and even gifts from neighborhood well-wishers. We now have two new lavender plants, starts from lavender bushes up the road that attract several different types of bees. We have a new moisture meter, which is addicting to use and is a huge help in watering. The small horseradish we were given has turned into an enormous pot of lush leaves and roots. And the seed donation from Seeds of Change has arrived with many interesting varieties we may want to try.

Bauer Lumber in Mountain View has also been very generous with donations of scrap wood that has come in handy several times already and which will be used to complete the potato bed as the hills get higher.

Thanks everybody! It’s wonderful to have your support.

Easter Egg Radishes make delicious pickles

Easter Egg Radishes make delicious pickles

In the kitchen, I have finally perfected my radish pickling brine recipe and can’t wait for everyone to try it out the next time we meet. It’s a mix of mostly sea salt, apple cider vinegar and tamari and it tames the stronger radishes in a way I hope the kids will like. Oh, and did I mention that recipe also uses a pinch or two of suagar and a swirl of honey? That could be part of what’s helping smooth it out. Delicious!

The January planting of shelling peas is just about done producing and we are moving on to pick the February shell peas and the snap peas. I’m sure people walking past the other side of the fence think we are growing the world’s tallest Snap Peas. Little do they know the peas are started in raised beds that are three feet tall. I won’t tell if you won’t.

Eight Foot Tall Snap Peas

Eight Foot Tall Snap Peas

The broccoli is also still producing nice side shoots, but will flower if given half a chance. The Broccoli Raab the kids planted in their individual beds is also prone to flowering. I’m keeping the flowers trimmed to see if it will go back to making more broccoli or not.

Intensive Planting to the Max

Intensive Planting to the Max

Some of the individual planting beds are small jungles at this point. Remind me to go over plant spacing with the kids again. :-)

This one has carrots, radishes, beets and tomato plants–and that’s just in the first two square feet!

Square Foot Patchwork

Square Foot Patchwork

These will be a wonderful experiment since they are all planted differently with more or less attention to the spacing ‘suggestions’ we used at planting time. Here’s one bed that was planted with careful attention to the square foot measures that gives it a visual patchwork look that many of our visitors find appealing.

I wish I could keep the rest of the garden looking that nice and neat!

 

 

Circle of Pollinator Attractors

Circle of Pollinator Attractors

We have added a few more flowers to our pollinator collection, a blue basil, some coreopsis and others. And we have our first potato plant flower bud! I wonder what it will look like? I’m actually not sure at this point which sack of potatoes is which, so I’m not sure which kind of bud this will be. I hope Mackenzie remembers or we may not know until it’s time to pick the potatoes.

The blue potatoes sent up blue sprouts, which I would never have expected.  I didn’t even recognize them as sprouts when they first came up because they looked so dark against the soil and compost. Who knows? Maybe it will have blue flowers as well!

First Spud Bud

First Spud Bud