Bravery Required to Harvest Lettuce....Really?

If I had to hunt and gather all my own food, I guarantee you I'd turn into a full time vegetarian.  Hunting instincts don't normally embody my soul.

My huntress weakness was on full display years ago when my grandmother's husband took me fishing the year Elvis died.  (I have no idea why I remember that).  I had no problem putting the bait on the hook.  Nor did I have any issue with casting.  Yank, yank... The moment I reeled in the poor little fish, I couldn't bear plucking him off the hook and watching him flop in the bucket to his death.  Back in the water he went.

Gentle urban farming is more my thing.  You know the drill, treat the soil and plants well, exercise patience, reap the rewards with great appreciation later.

There is nothing finer than enjoying a crisp salad, fresh out of the yard.  No squeamish issues while plucking a few lettuce leaves out of the garden should happen, right?

Having cut what was left of the lettuce from the garden and stuffing them into bags, I brought the bounty into the kitchen to begin washing, spinning and storing away.  Following Ina Garten's advice of putting the leaves in a tub of water to rehydrate and letting a majority of the dirt float off I was taken aback when an earwig crept off a leaf.

Then an army of them appeared.  You should have heard the squeals emanating from my kitchen.  Somehow, John was doing a good job ignoring me from the other room.  The only good news I could see is they ultimately drown in the water.  Maybe I do have a killer instinct.

On my second bag of harvested lettuce leaves, I couldn't take it anymore.  The darn critters were bigger, fatter and feistier than the first troops.   I had to admit defeat and called in for backup help.  John to the rescue.

Being a bit more experienced at bug killing, he swooped in, grabbed the bag and took it outside.  He flushed every last one of those suckers out, including the free-rider spider.

I may not be any good with my predator abilities, but I do know when to appreciate those who do so on my behalf.

Our Edible Garden, Part Deux

As predictable as a change in the weather, a little time off, an inspiring vacation and a good read -- these things will generate some new project in my world.

Project?  Back Up the Truck!

The books I pick up usually are in some way tied into my vacation destination.  Logical or not, I feel like I'm eeking a little bit more out of my travel experience if I'm taking in someone else's perspective too.

French Dirt, by Richard Goodman, was just that book on this last trip.  Actually, John read it first and couldn't stop talking about what "we" could do to expand our own kitchen garden.  The next thing I knew, a grand plan was being hatched for a chunk of our backyard.  I better get reading!

John's working on our ambitious plans

Goodman and his girlfriend Iggy rented a 200 year old stone house in the South of France for a year.  The town being tiny, Goodman endeavored to connect with the locals.  After multiple attempts to strike up a meaningful conversation and running low on money, he offers to trade his labor on a farm for firewood.  As he begins to mix with the locals, he witnessed every one's very plentiful vegetable gardens.  So inspired by others, he talks one of his new village friends into loaning him a plot of land for a season.  His readers can't help but share in his trials and tribulations with ultimately gratifying results of having a cultivated patch of his own.

I've always loved gardening, and in the last couple of years amped up my gardening focus on edibles.  Some of you may remember what motivated me do so in my post, Supersize Me... My Way.



Our first edible garden...now producing turnips, snow peas, carrots, lettuce
 and garlic

Enjoying our successes and having taken a Permaculture class last year, I already concluded our yard had so much more potential to be productive.  Hey...we could even save a few grocery dollars over the long run if we did more.  It didn't take too much prodding to get me on board for the next generation of kitchen gardening at the Avey homestead.

No time wasted!  Our first free day off together after our vacation we targeted the spot for our new garden, visualized, debated and removed plants which weren't working anyway.  Later that evening John said, "I can't wait to start digging."  Yes, digging!  Anyone who knows John well knows he doesn't like digging.

But Sammi likes to dig

To the man who uttered those words, I asked, "what have you done with my husband?"  A smile with a glimmer in his eye told me enough.  He is a man on a mission.

Both of us are aiming for a bigger and better vegetable plot than the last one we created.  But, like Goodman, we hadn't calculated the potential issues or consequences that laid before us.  Oops, I meant to say "opportunities."

First "opportunity:"  we no longer have a truck to get wood home.  Delivery?  Delivery costs exceeded the cost of the material!  John went to Lowes early one morning to snag the one and only first come first serve rental truck ... only to have it rented out from under him just 5 minutes before.  Grrr.  Lowe's Delivery guys feel John's pain and they give him delivery for the price of the rental truck.  Woo-hoo and a tip o' the hat, Lowes!

Second brain stumper:  should we or should we not dig out the grass where the future plot will lie?
   

No!  We laid down landscape fabric in the bed blocking grass and weeds before dropping dirt in the raised bed.

Water the plot?  How to get water to the area without reworking the whole sprinkler system?

We installed a portable hose to connect to a soaker hose.  A soaker hose is more efficient and less troublesome to plant leaves.

We needed lots and lots of good soil.  But soil is a very expensive proposition if you buy it buy the bag to fill 120 cubic feet.  Neither of us realized we would have to budget over $600 if we had to buy bags...ouch!  No matter what, dirt had to be delivered to us. 

To overcome the pricey bag option, we ended up buying soil in bulk; it came in less than half the cost and no waste.  Overwhelming when delivered?  Oh yeah!

It became even more overwhelming when we had to manually shovel it in a wheel barrel and then dump it in the new bed.  My sore muscles reminded me of just how much dirt we moved.

It's all been worth it though.  Our raised bed is built and ready for planting all those edibles.

Now the fun part for me.

I'm studying my Edible French Garden book a girlfriend gave me several years back.  It's loaded with tips, plants, guides and recipes.

In the meantime, John's at our favorite nursery, Sperling's in Calabasas.

Remember I said there were unanticipated consequences?   John's incessant talk of our new edible garden inspired his work buddies to jointly build one of their own.  And John being the generous guy he is has volunteered "us" to help them build it!  Oh my little arms....

An Heirloom Tomato That Keeps on Giving, With Love

Guest Blogger, Barbara Schwartz

My husband has been telling me for years that in order to be a culinary success, I must cook with love.  It has taken a long time to fully buy into this theory, but alas, he is right.  Use great ingredients and cook from scratch.  That is why there is a large pot on the stove at this moment softly bubbling with precious ingredients of spaghetti sauce, the cooking base of which started from seed.  Literally.  Learning to grow a garden with love occurred long before learning to cook with love.

A year ago I discovered heirloom tomatoes may be grown from seed as the tomatoes grow true, reproducing the exact same fruit, unlike a hybrid variety.  I learned this from watching an employee at Trader Joe's saving tomato seeds on a paper towel as a worker chopped up an heirloom at their cooking station.  So saving seeds from my favorite jumbo red and yellow-red I simply threw them in the garden, wet, fresh out of the tomatoes.  And they grew.  All of them.  Perhaps 50 plants.  Amazing!  I put them in large planter pots away from the garden, where the squirrels would hopefully not discover them.  Tomatoes are autogamous plants.  This means pollination of a flower is by its own pollen and cross-pollination is not needed for fruit production.  No bees required!  A gentle shake of the stem will spur pollination.  It turned out to be a good thing having so many plants, as heirlooms have a low yield as well as a long maturation period.

At the end of last summer's growing season I again saved seeds from the fruit, but this time dried them on paper towels and planted them this past spring, thus arriving at today's pot on the stove of some 50-plus heirloom tomatoes stewing away with all of the ingredients of Italian spaghetti sauce.  Tomorrow will be pasta-making day, a lesson learned from good friends Sylvia and John who showed my husband and me the wonders of fabulous homemade pasta.  And I shall make Italian bread.  Nothing compares to fresh bread, straight out of the oven.  The sauce will mellow overnight and be better in 24 hours' time.

Oh, one more note about the heirloom tomato plants.  Having given my sister approximately 25 of the thrown-in-the-garden tomato plants in spring of 2010, she re-potted them into an enormous planter pot and then never rid herself of the remaining plants when the fruit season concluded.  As a result my sister had tomatoes in mid-spring this year, having started the growing season with mature plants.  She was basking in tomatoes as I was still watching my second-season-from-seed plants mature, months away from bearing fruit.  Lesson learned.  I can save the plants!

Designing a Kitchen Garden, An Alternative Way of Thinking

Welcome to my newly designed blog.  What gave me inspiration to change it up?  A class I attended at the LA Arboretum.

My normal weekend companion (my husband) had an unusually heavy travel schedule for work this summer.  Taking advantage of my new free time I ended up taking weekend cooking classes.  Many, many cooking classes.  I think I overdosed on cooking classes!  I needed something different; I needed a new twist. 

On a whim and suggestion from an acquaintance a couple of months back, I looked up horticultural classes since gardening is also a passion of mine.  Our local arboretum offered an introductory class on Permaculture.  I had never heard the term before.  The outline described learning how to create a sustainable food forest in my own backyard, identifying why growing my own vegetables can be so difficult, and learning how to work with nature, not against it.  Class cost:  $25.  Sold!

I have written before about preconceived notions.  Here I go down the rabbit hole again!  The class I walked into was not a "how to" gardening course.  It was something completely different and absolutely fascinating.  In fact, it wasn't really about gardening at all but rather a study in connecting with your house, community and natural areas as it relates to designing a perennial food garden.

So what is the definition of Permaculture?  According to Bill Mollison, a researcher, scientist, teacher, naturalist and father/co-developer of Permaculture:

Permaculture is a philosophy of working with, rather than against nature; of protracted & thoughtful observation rather than protracted and thoughtless labor; and of looking at plants and animals in all of their functions, rather than treating any area as a single-product system. 

If you think about it, fruits and vegetables don't naturally grow in neat rows.  Think of a forest or jungle!




Diagram courtesy: Graham Burnett



The design approach Bill and his partner David Homgren developed in the mid 1970's was an outcome of analyzing the growing dependence on industrial-agriculture methods resulting in the poisoning of land and water while removing topsoil from previously fertile land due to the reduction of biodiversity.  Their solution was published in their book "Permaculture One" in 1978.  Since then, the concept broadened from agricultural design to designing sustainable human habits.  There are even Permaculture Design Courses (PDC).

Design starts with examining one's normal, everyday patterns.  When you go home, do you pull into the driveway and walk straight to the front door?  Or do you daily linger through all parts of the front yard?  My guess is it's likely you make a bee-line to the front door.  Does that mean you hardly ever visit the far reaches of your backyard where most people plant their vegetable gardens?  How likely is it you'll care for your vegetable patch if it isn't under your nose?  Why not plant an herb garden in the flower beds along the walk way instead?  You'll smell them every time you brush by.  This is just one example of rethinking where you plant your annual vegies.  And why does it need to be in neat rows?  Get creative!



Courtesy: Lyons, CO Permaculture Design Course


To take the concept further, there is an emphasis in perennial edibles (trees, bushes, vines, etc.), native to the area while analyzing where the perennial should be placed for maximum benefit and synergy.  By going native, there is less labor involved.  I love that idea!

Being a complete newbie to this idea, I encourage you to Google "permaculture" for further understanding.  In the meantime, what has this meant to me?


Tangerine Tree

I look at my existing yard and realize I am already lucky in that we inherited a lovely, heavy producing tangerine tree when we bought our house.  With our abundance, we can barter our fruit with our neighbor who has an over producing lemon tree.  And now, when I think about what else I can grow for ourselves, I aim for a perennial such as the starter Blackberry bushes I purchased last weekend.  Come May, we should have enough to cover us through July.


Young Blackberry Bush

 Conceptually, this has caused me to reexamine other things in my life that may need redesigning.  This blog was one of them.  The template I had been using was okay, but wasn't necessarily me or user friendly.  This one I designed from the ground up.  I hope you find it a nice place to visit as much as I enjoy playing in it.