Bean Sprouts

Well, the seedlings are up! We have been watching the beans poke through the soil and unfold over the last 2 days. It is amazing how fast they grow. Little sprouts of marigold, dill, and cosmos are also coming up ... I can't wait! I can't wait!

bean sprout photos taken over a 30-hour time period

Food Fact

Shared by my friend Jax:

"The top 3 commodities with the highest average miles per shipment:
1. Motor vehicles for transport - 1,504 miles
2. Spacecraft - 1,349 miles
3. Fresh fruit (excludes citrus) - 1,337 miles"

Wow. Thanks Jax, for putting the cost of our Chilean raspberries in February into perspective.

Eat in local food in season!

Urban Farmer

This week has marked the dawn of a new era in my professional life. Quite literally, I have been up at dawn this week and headed off to my new job as a farmer. I am working at a local organic urban farm, a 7-acre oasis of green and bird songs and crowing roosters in the midst of the vast and dusty urban jungle. This is the part of my story where I go back to the roots (again literally!) of where our food comes from.

The highlight of my first week was getting rained on while I changed the chickens' water dishes. Part of my farm duties include checking for eggs (got six!) and keeping the chickens in fresh water. These ladies are quite entertaining, and tough too. They are
the sole survivors of a brutal coyote attack on the flock and have since been moved to a more secure pen (i.e. one with a roof on it). They are gracious enough to accept my trespassing with only a minor ruffling of feathers and seem grateful for fresh water.

As I learned today, chickens are homicidal cannibals when the opportunity arises. I found a dead chicken in the coop, being casually pecked at and devoured by passing hens. The Farmer diagnosed the cause of death as group homicide following oviduct prolapse. I won't go into too much detail, but the dead chicken was essentially skin and bones  and feathers with pretty much nothing left inside. We had a moment of silence for the hen, and the corpse was taken out to the compost pile for burial. (Feathers and bones are both excellent as soil amendments when composted.) And then life went on. These things happen on the farm. 

Another exciting moment occurred when I was stacking crates of butternut squash in the walk-in cooler .... and a mouse jumped out! A little gray one, very fast and very intent on hiding in another crate of squash. Between four of us we managed to haul all of the squash back out again, find the mouse, and unceremoniously remove it from the premises.   

Among all of this excitement I also hauled crates of melons, loaded up the refrigerator truck, washed arugula, gently packaged squash blossoms, raked wood chips, got rained on several times, sampled some very spicy chilies, and learned that okra is very itchy to handle if you don't wear gloves. A pretty good start to my career as an urban farmer.   

Patio Farmer

I must admit that I have serious garden envy. Living in the desert, in the middle of a City, in a townhouse, with a north-facing concrete patio no less, my opportunities for growing my own food have been pretty limited. To this point, I have been successful in growing two things: aloe vera and elephant plants. These are the only two green living things that have managed to survive (and thrive!) at my house for any length of time. Of course, I have nurtured random wildflowers in the Spring, occasional sickly lettuce and one gangly looking basil plant, but I have not been able to grow anything truly edible.

Inspired by friends’ gardens, my visit to Maine to work in Mom’s garden heaven, and my dream future as a pioneering urban salad farmer I am embarking on an experimental adventure in patio farming. Aided by the tools and knowledge of my good friend Mike, and the patience and upper body strength of my handsome husband, a raised planter bed has finally been built on my patio.

We used concrete blocks to build the planter walls, and spent a sweaty beer-fueled evening painstakingly laying and mortaring the blocks together. I made several trips back and forth to the local material supply yard trucking river rock and top soil to my house and then carrying it by the bucket-full to fill the planter. The result is about 4” of river rock for drainage, covered by a landscape filter fabric and then about 10” of top soil mixed with compost from our local organic farmer. Since it turns out that “top soil” is really more like fine silty sand, I added a bag of store-bought compost, some organic fertilizer, and coffee grounds and tiny vegetable scraps from the kitchen.

After a week of mixing, watering, amending and raking I am now ready to grow stuff. Luckily for me, the low desert has a fall planting season beginning in late August / early September. So, bright and early this morning I headed to the patio in my night gown with my cup of tea and assumed my new identity as Urban Patio Farmer. Today I planted green beans, wax beans, dill, chives, marigolds and cosmos from seed. Nina and Casey both joined me to witness the ceremonial breaking of ground, and Nina blessed the garden with an extensive roll in the soil. Now I get to wait impatiently for the first seedlings to emerge … cosmos is due in 5 to 7 days with the beans lagging behind at 7 to 14 days. I am so excited!!!

Pool Garden

An impressive local effort towards food independence ... passed along by my buddy Jax.

http://www.treehugger.com/files/2010/08/garden-pool-family-of-four-grows-food-in-swimming-pool-arizona.php

Farewell to My Mother's Garden

It was a bittersweet parting from my mother's garden. After 6 weeks of tending, weeding, harvesting, admiring, documenting, and even sleeping within 100 feet of the garden it was time to leave. Reluctantly.

I laid in the tent for far too long the last morning. It was raining and the wind was blowing and I didn't want to go. There is something so magical about being in a tent while it is raining. Especially seeing through the skylight and watching the trees sway back and forth and the rain drops fall in spatters. The tent was my refuge and my cocoon, immersed in the outdoors with only a whisp of nylon between me and the birds, the bugs, the rain, the coyotes, the grass, intermittent acorns falling on the woodshed roof. The tent is one place where I felt very present in the world and very alive with nature.

Everything was lush and dripping and misty as I made my farewell garden rounds. Pajama farming, I have discovered, is in my blood and making my morning devotion to the greenery is a meditation in wonder and peace and beauty. Moments spent in the bean teepee confessional are cleansing and replenishing to the soul. Sharing time on my knees, hands deep in the soil, beside my mother in her Church of the Garden has been a sacred ritual and a blessing.

Goodbye winter squash growing secretly on the vines under your big leaf umbrellas.

Goodbye teepee beans who I trained to climb in spirals and watched grow from the ground to the sky.

 

Goodbye fuzzy peaches now so ripe and sweet and pink.

Goodbye prolific bush beans.

Goodbye sweet peas, my mom's favorite flower.

Goodbye zucchini plant who provided so much raw data and amazement.

Goodbye green tomatoes ... and hello to the first ripe red one that was so delicious.

Goodbye kale rows waiting patiently until frost in the fall.

Goodbye rutabagas who I never got to taste, but grew so alluringly behind the beets.

Goodbye radishes, my tiny, spicy and adorably cute food that I grew from seed.

Goodbye worms and frogs and beetles and bees and slugs and spiders and ladybugs.

Goodbye squash patch where I weeded and mulched and that evolved and travelled before my eyes. 

Goodbye sunflowers watching over the garden and nodding your heads in agreement.

Goodbye lush lettuce leaves curly and ruffly and crisp.

Goodbye herbs always ready for picking and adding fresh to dinner.

Goodbye zinnias and nasturtiums and cosmos and four o'clocks and ageratum and squash blossoms and bean flowers and twinkle phlox.

Goodbye my friends in the garden. Thank you for growing as I watched, for being unruly and adventuresome, for blossoming as I slept, for surprising me everyday with subtlety and beauty and magic.

The Soyrizo Switch

We headed to Cape Cod with two Very Large Zucchini in our back seat. Mom had mentioned that people in our family didn't really like zucchini, and yet we had two of them and so I considered this a personal challenge. How can I get our family to eat these two zucchini? And LIKE it?!

One of my premises is that people like to eat meat. So if I were to somehow able make the zucchini appear meaty, then maybe people would be willing to try it. And once they tried it, of course they would like it. The other premise is that great big zucchinis are often best stuffed and baked.

To further the challenge to myself and push the limits of zucchini cuisine, I also decided to try something new. Something that I had never tasted or cooked before: Soyrizo. This is a spicy soy sausage that comes in a realistic-looking plastic sheath and is pretty spicy. Now, I am not normally a big fan of "fake meat", but I figured that the whole thing was a gamble anyway. I bought the Soyrizo on the sly, with one Auntie privy to my plan. Everyone who came through the kitchen as I was sautéing and chopping and mixing commented on how good it smelled. "What are you cooking?" they would say. "Sausage" was my response.  

There were about 13 of us for dinner, and it was "salad night" ...  which consisted of a multitude of contributions from the whole family: corn salad, pasta salad, beet salad, green salad, bean salad, etc. And then, as the signature Hot Dish, was Sausage Stuffed Zucchini. It did make quite a nice presentation. The results of my challenge? Everyone tried it ... and liked it! And no one questioned the authenticity of the "meat" at all. It was successful enough that people asked for seconds (and thirds!) and it was eaten all up.

The only downside to the whole experiment was that, upon hearing later that it was Soyrizo, one aunt commented that she wished she had known because she would have eaten more ... as she tries to avoid red meat and sausage. My cousin also commented that he had secretly thought I was a bit hypocritical cooking sausage right after talking about the perils and moral dilemmas of eating meat. So I guess that I really fooled them. 

Soyrizo Stuffed Zucchini

2 large zucchini

1 package soyrizo, removed from casing and crumbled
3 slices wheat bread, crumbled and toasted in a dry pan
2 celery ribs, small dice
1 cup leftover rice
salt & pepper
1 egg
grated Parmesan Reggiano

Slice the zucchini lengthwise and scoop out the seeds to make a trough. Save some of the scoopings and chop finely to make about 3/4 cup. Salt the zucchinis and let drain for a few hours face-down on a baking rack. Cook the Soyrizo in some olive oil over medium-high heat until it is drier and somewhat crumbly. Add the Soyrizo to the bread crumbs. Sauté the celery and zucchini in the same pan to take advantage of the Soyrizo seasonings left over. Add the celery to the stuffing mixture along with the rice and some grated Parmesan and taste. Adjust seasonings to your preference. Add the beaten egg. Spoon the stuffing into the zucchini halves and sprinkle with additional Parmesan. Bake the zucchini in a 400 degree oven for about 30 minutes, or until the zucchini is soft when pierced with a fork and the stuffing is browned. You could add a little water or white wine the the baking dish in the last 15 minutes or so.

Note: garlic and onion would be great sautéed along with the celery. We have a family member who cannot eat them, so they are omitted from the basic recipe.
   

How Fast Does Zucchini Grow?

My Mom always jokes that you have to be sure to lock your car in August, otherwise you may find zucchini in the back seat when you come out of the grocery store.

Zucchini is one of those vegetables that is aptly described by the word prolific. What seems like a good idea in the Spring when planting -- "let's plant a couple of zucchini plants!" -- later becomes a logistical challenge: "what are we going to do with all of these zucchini!?" For this reason, people in Maine have been known to get pretty creative with their zucchini harvest, whether it be sneaking them into friends' cars when they are not looking, bronzing them, or using the really big ones as softball bats at Holy Mackerel games.

One the of the great wonders of zucchini is the speed at which it grows. For this reason, I decided to collect some data on my Mom's zucchinis to see if I could answer the question "how fast does zucchini grow?"

I began a rigorous program of scientific inquiry. Each day I trekked out to the garden with my camera and ruler to chart the progress of my chosen squash. My first one died in two days of blossom end rot, at 3" in length. Undeterred, I began to chart the progress of a new specimen, this one was much hardier than the first. In all, I charted the progress of three zucchini, two from one plant and the third from another plant. I measured length and width with great precision and carefully charted the growth patterns of the squash in order to formulate a scientific theory of zucchini growth. My data is presented below and yielded the following conclusions: 

• the change in length follows a linear progression which accelerates increasingly in the later stages of growth
• on a typical plant there is a tendency toward an Alpha Zucchini, which dominates the resources of the plant
• an average increase in length of 2" per 24-hour period is common for the Alpha Zucchini
• an Alpha Zucchini can cause a severe retardation of growth among the subservient members of its zucchini pack
• as soon as an Alpha Zucchini is harvested, the remaining zucchinis experience a surge of growth and a re-shuffling of squash seniority
• zucchinis tend to experience a more significant increase in width after it rains
• it is very challenging to figure out what to do with an Alpha Zucchini after it has been allowed to grow out of control

My Alpha Zucchini was harvested at 14" in length and 3.25" in width. We served it sliced and broiled with garlic-mint olive oil.