Tag Archives: Square foot gardening

First Sighting of Tomato Land

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First P. Borghese Tomatoes

Principe Borghese Does It Again

We have tasted the first tomatoes of the season. Briefly, because they were small, but enough to whet our appetites for more. The first tomatoes ripe were Principe Borghese tomatoes again this year. From a plant who has been none too happy about the wet, cold spring and honestly doesn’t look very good. There are five P. Borghese plants in the garden right now and only one of them looks as robust as the ones we grew last year. I also have six more of them started in pots because last year I was wishing I had done a second planting of these guys. They are packaged as determinant plants, but some of them produced a second crop of tomatoes after we had picked the first batch. I’ll have to look up how a semi-determinant plant behaves. Maybe that’s what they really are. I grow them to make sun-dried tomatoes with them but they are delicious in salads or marinated with mozzarella and basil.

Grandma Jill's Ugly Tomato plants

Ugly? Maybe. Delicious? Absolutely!

I was sure this year’s first tomato was going to be a Grandma Jill’s Ugly. And it would have been, but the top contender was rat-napped. It was beautiful, with deep creases like many of the varieties we are trialling this year. It was almost ready, it was blushing beautifully. It needed just one more day on the vine. But the next morning all I found was a small sliver of tomato skin in the mulch beneath the plant! I was heart-broken, as you can imagine, but it looks like the plant is happy enough to try to make up for it in volume. These plants look very close to the Costoluto Genovese variety that won our fresh eating taste tests last year. The Grandma Jill’s Ugly are certainly earlier, and the plant looks sturdier, but I hope the taste will be close to what we get with the Costoluto.

Blondkopfchen Tomato Flowers

Sucker for Blondes

I’m also looking forward to trying a new (for us) yellow cherry tomato called Blonkopfchen. There are three or four of these plants in the garden, well-spaced and not, and they are easy to find because they are making multiple wide sprays of flowers as they set fruit. I’m concerned that some of the fruiting branches may break off if every bud on those sprays produces a tomato, even a small one.

Cherokee Purple Tomatoes

Not Purple Yet

Cherokee Purple Tomatoes are also doing well this year. There are only two plants in our test and they are in similar conditions except one of the plants is crowded (it’s in the Square-Foot bed) and the other has lots of space. We are also hoping to enjoy Speckled Romans and Big Rainbow Striped tomatoes. And my mother-in-law just sent over a Green Zebra which I have read wonderful things about. I’m not sure I quite understand a tomato that is still green when it’s ripe. How will I know when to pick it?  Today I’ll give it a choice spot in one of the raised beds where I can keep an eye on it. If a rat starts nibbling them, I’ll know they are ready for eating!

Square Foot Bed with Tomatoes, Peppers, Celery, Basil and Nasturtiums

"And the little one said, 'Roll over!'"

Dark Days Dinner – A Variation on White Bean and Kale Soup

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Carrots, turnips & herbsOK, by the time I was done with it, my version of this soup was quite nearly a stew, but it was still yummy. Four different recipes for a White Bean & Kale Soup were swirling around in my head when I went into the garden to see what I could find. This one looked especially appealing but unfortunately I didn’t have all the ingredients.

The ‘Dinosaur‘ or ‘Covolo Laciniato Nero Di Toscana Precoce‘ kale was easy. It loves this kind of winter weather and puts out dozens of long, dark green fingers from a tall central spike. My ‘Tokyo Market‘ turnips surprised me with fat white globes sitting atop the soil with nothing but their skinny taproots in the ground. And, this year at least, we finally have carrots! Last year by this time they had all been eaten, but we have 12 square-feet of carrots and parsnips still in the ground waiting for a recipe like this. The rosemary bushes are also content to grow straight through the winter here, so I pulled off a tender branch to flavor my vegetable stash.

Inside I had been soaking the ‘Jacob’s Cattle‘ beans we grew over the summer. They were the closest thing to a white been that I had. This year I plan to grow Cannellini and at least one other White Bean and Kale Soupwhite variety, but for now, we’re making do with what’s on hand. Might need to call this one “Pink Bean & Kale.”

I sautéed an onion in olive oil for a few minutes then added the carrots and turnips. While the vegetables were softening, I stemmed the kale and chopped it fairly fine. I also cut up some nice chicken Italian sausage with the perfect amount of fennel in it that just squeaked over the 100 mile Dark Days Challenge line in time to join us for this meal. I tossed the sausage and kale with the softened vegetables and added the chopped rosemary leaves. As soon as the kale started to brighten and wilt, I added in the now cooked beans and simmered the whole concoction on low for about an hour to marry the flavors some.

Before serving, I added fresh ground pepper and my husband insisted on dusting his bowl with Parmesan as he would with Minestrone. The whole family approved, which was a nice surprise as I had been expecting the little one to turn her nose up at the fenneled Italian sausage. Instead, I caught her scooping some out of my bowl when I wasn’t looking!

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.

Growing Up

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Potato Build-A-Bed

Potato Build-A-Bed

The vertical growing we’re experimenting with in the Dirt to Dinner garden includes lots of different trials. We have a bed of All Blue potatoes that started out in a shallow raised bed in 4″ of soil. We are hammering on new boards and adding more soil until the potatoes are eventually growing through 2′ of soil in a raised bed at least that tall, in hopes of a larger potato harvest.

Bamboo and Bandannas

Bamboo and Bandannas

We have the Three Sisters beds where the corn will grow to support the beans that will climb up the stalks and the squash will, ideally, cover the ground, shade everybody’s roots and help keep the whole thing stable in a headwind. Luckily, the beds are up against the fence.

We are also using several different vertical methods with our tomato crops. The determinate plants, like the Romas and the drying tomatoes, are staked with bamboo poles since they aren’t expected to grow much more than 3′ tall.

And then we have the fancy stuff.

Scared of Heights?

Scared of Heights?

Like the four different varieties of watermelons we are trying to grow on trellising. (Ice Box, Yellow Doll, Tiger Baby and New Orchid) And the cantaloupe and Spaghetti Squash. And the dozen different winter squash from Italy with names none of us can pronounce that we are hoping to train onto netting strung between metal poles.

Some of it sounds crazy, I know. But vertical growing is hard to resist. The kids have 112 square feet in their individual growing boxes. When we add the trellising to the northern sides of the beds, that gives them, more or less, an additional 120 square feet of growing space on the vertical. The peas and the cucumbers will love it, maybe they will take their friends along?

Happy Climbers

Happy Climbers

If nothing else, the green beans will grow up the nets we have set out for them. They won’t be easier to pick this way, but we chose mostly drying beans to grow in this section so we don’t have to mess with them alot. And I did slip in some Kentucky Wonder on the end. I am hoping they will be worth the extra trouble to harvest.

From Grounds to Ground

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Ground from Grounds

Ground from Grounds

I’ve been to a lot of Starbucks’ in the last couple weeks. I’m collecting coffe grounds for an experiment in one of the growing beds. Actually, I was going to compost the grounds along with some leftover sod the neighbor shared with us, and then add lots of compost to the growing bed, months from now or even next year when everything was ready. In the mean time, the dry and fragmented growing bed has some tomatoes and lots of winter squash varieites in it and they were going to need mulch and a lot of water to make it through the Summer.

Half-way through setting up the new compost bin, it struck me that maybe we could use the coffee grounds and the sod *as* the mulch while they were composting themselves into a new and improved growing medium for next year. Now, don’t try this at home yet. This may turn out to be like the time I had the great idea to butter the toast before I put it in the toaster oven hoping for a garlic bread kind of effect and the whole thing caught fire and had to be dropped out the second story window into the snow to save the rest of the apartment. But this seems, at the very least, much less likely to burst into flames if unsuccessful.

I gathered seven Starbucks-worth of coffee grounds. Which is an amazingly small amount at some stores. I’m sorry, but how could you possibly be selling coffee all day in a Starbucks and *not* have coffe grounds? I was turned away cold from store 5920 where they said they didn’t have to save their coffee grounds for customers. But most of the stores were happy to oblige and many of them even insisted on carrying heavy bags loaded with grounds out to my trunk. Thank you, Starbucks!

Caffeinated Tomatoes

Caffeinated Tomatoes

I had six or seven rolls of unwanted sod to go with the grounds. I spread out the grounds around the already planted tomatoes and squash mounds and raked them across the top of the soil we are hoping to improve. Then we covered the grounds with the unrolled sod, grass-side down, and watered the whole thing in. We plan to cover the area with another layer of coffee grounds and a mulch/compost from Kellogg’s called N’Rich. It will add some much needed variety to the soil with it’s bat guano, kelp, chicken manure and worm castings.

Then we’ll let the thing sit and the squash vines can crawl all over it and hopefully the tomatoes will grow in spite of what my grandmother always said about coffee causing stunting in the young. ;-) The idea is that the coffee layer will seep into the existing soil attracting worms who supposedly love coffee grounds. And maybe all that nitrogen will even warm things up enough that the sod layer will break down right there on the ground under the N’Rich and the squash will shade the whole thing and keep it from drying out while it’s magically converted into good growing soil.

We’ll put a shovel in it in the Fall and let you know what we’ve got. And if this year’s pumpkin pie keeps the kids from sleeping, we’ll all know why.