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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!

Hints of Things to Come

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Our First Picolo Provencal Peas    

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

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

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

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!

Full Circle Farm Visit

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Working on the Farm   Working on the Farm

This morning was our field trip to visit Full Circle Farm, the educational farm in the Santa Clara Unified School District in Sunnyvale.

The volunteer Garden Manager, Melissa, introduced us to the garden and showed the kids the large worm box that supplies part of the nutrients needed by the vegetables growing on the farm.

The farm hopes to soon be able to make all of it’s own compost and to use that as the only soil additives for the produce grown on Full Circle Farm. Part of our group helped turn compost piles that will contribute to this process.

Other members of our class sifted garden soil to make it into potting soil for new plants that are beginning life in the Full Cirlce Farm greenhouse. We need to make some screens like the ones they use at the farm for the Dirt to Dinner garden. They are wonderful for sifting compost and getting the lumpy “uncooked” bits back into the pile for some further decomposing. I’ll check our books for a sample design and take it with me to the hardware store this week.

Planting Fingerling Potatoes

Planting Fingerling Potatoes

Our class planted some small fingerling potatoes on the farm this week. They weren’t cut and developing big ‘eyes’ like the ones we started two weeks ago in the Dirt to Dinner garden, these were very small and planted whole in the soil. Melissa gave us some of these “seed” potatoes so the kids could start their own potato patches at home or in the Dirt to Dinner garden. There are also extra Yukon Gold and Purple potato “seeds” here in case they want to try several varieties and compare the plants and their growth, production or taste.

Wearing a Little Soil

Wearing a Little Soil

It was fun to see what you can do with a garden that covers over half an acre. By comparision, the whole lot that holds the Dirt to Dinner garden is about 1/8th of an acre. The size of the garden beds we currently have under cultivation is ~300 square feet. Because we are using raised beds and biointensive planting and growing techniques along with vertical supports, we can grow a lot more in a small space than if we did that same space in traditional rows the way much of the Full Circle Farm produce is planted, but it was still great to see what’s possible when you really have the room to spread out. I can dream, can’t I?

 

eyeing-the-fields

We Will Have Peas

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90 Days from Seed to Flower   90 Days from Seed to Flower

One way or another, we are determined that we *will* have peas from our garden. Two of the varieties from the Spring pea trial are all but forgotten, but the Picolo Provenzale  are growing in all three different plantings, and the January planting is starting to flower. OK, it’s what? Nearly 90 days out from planting, but hey, it’s flowers!

I’m also amazed that the Sugar Snaps in the back garden that each had their heads snapped off by some marauding varmint are starting to recover! They grew new vines from the roots up and around the bitten ends of the first ones and some of them are starting to put out tendrils like they mean to actually grow.

Sugar Sprints and Carrots

Sugar Sprints and Carrots

Nearby, in a 4′ x 4′ bed, there are Sugar Sprint peas growing, mostly under a burlap covered cage to protect them from everything. They don’t seem to mind the shade. The Picolo Provenzale starts in the front garden didn’t seem bothered by it while they were covered either. I take it off of them in the morning to allow them a few hours of direct sun and they seem fine.

buckets-of-tomatoesAnd we are getting to the stage where we have literally buckets of tomato plants. We have Roma Paste tomatoes for sauce and catsup, we have Principe Borghese for drying, we have Costaluto Genovese for fresh cooking, Big Beef and Crimson Carmello for slicing and eating, we even have a German Orange Strawberry tomato that I can’t wait to try! I’m afraid I may have even ordered some grape tomato plants in fun shapes and colors from Park Seed when it was still cold out and the garden was a limitless imaginary place.

Surviving the Spinach Monster--So Far!

Surviving the Spinach Monster--So Far!

And, happily, the evil Spinach Monster that devours my plants right down to the roots if I leave them outside after dark without a cover does not appear to like Bok Choi. What IS that thing? For a long time I thought it was ravenous snails or slugs because the plants that were up on the hottub cover at night weren’t bothered by it, but earlier this week several six-packs up there were creamed by whatever it is and the chard, tomatoes, peppers, etc. sitting right next to the spinach were fine. Maybe Popeye the Possum? I don’t know.