Not as local as the backyard, but still eating locally

It's November 1st and my garden has given up the ghost. With the exception of a few very fine looking onions, I've got fallow land on my hands.

In all honesty, this first attempt at growing my own food was a bit of a bust. The reason, as determined by me and as verified by reliable resources (my mom, other gardening friends), is that I just didn't have enough dirt in my raised bed. Sometime before I plant again in the spring I'm going to add another several inches to the sides of the garden bed and fill it in with my Mel's Mix. According to my friend Pat, broccoli won't even consider growing without about a foot of dirt. So... now I know what my goal is. Also, I'm installing drip irrigation in my garden. My zucchini never had a chance against the powdery mildew. Next year I will prevent it from even thinking about touching my squash.

In the meantime I've taken up the next best thing to having a personal garden: I've joined a local organic CSA (Community Supported Agriculture). Because we live in Los Angeles, there are actually a fair number of these CSA's in the area. Basically, an interested person can "subscribe" to a CSA, paying either a weekly, monthly or annual fee. Depending on the CSA and on your household needs, you can pick up a box of fresh, seasonal produce from a drop off location (often a farmers' market, though sometimes from a private residence) once a week or twice a month.

The CSA I've joined is the South Central Farmers' Cooperative. The farmers in this co-op used to farm a large community garden in downtown LA that was eventually bulldozed by the city and inspired the documentary, The Garden. Now they have a larger piece of land that is funded in part by the CSA.

This week's box included several kinds of kale, collard greens, two eggplants, cilantro, spaghetti squash, green tomatoes, zucchini, sunburst and scallop squash, and purple pole beans. To add to my local mix, I also visited the farmers market for organic apples (Red Winesap and Pink Lady), California olives, and fresh vanilla bean quark. Here's the menu for the week so far. I'm providing links when I can find them--so many recipes that I have in my cook books are also available online:

Halloween Night (yesterday):
Pumpkin Soup (local pumpkin from a family farm)
Melting Greens (I used up all the green leafy veggies from the CSA box)
Crusty bread with Parmesan

Sunday Morning:
Pumpkin Waffles
Organic free-range scrambled eggs
Vanilla Bean Quark
Local blackberries and raspberries

Monday:
Helen's Polenta with Eggplant (pg 287 in Laurel's Kitchen)
Purple Pole Beans with a cheesy, lemony, garlicky topping

Wednesday:
Pancetta Pasta with sundried tomato cream sauce
Zucchini Squash

Thursday:
Still seeking a good recipe for spaghetti squash--any suggestions?
Fried green tomatoes
Starburst squash
Maybe I'll do something with cilantro too

New Stuff, Lotsa Stuff

My new strategy with my garden is to cram it full of plants. I think I started a little too conservatively, so I've now planted seeds in every free bit of space. This includes corn, pumpkins, other kinds of squash, new tomato plants, purple pole beans- you name it!

I have another theory in play as well, and I guess it will all depend on how this latest bunch of seedlings thrives. The theory I'm nursing is that I may need to double the depth of the soil in my raised beds. A friend of mine who has an amazing garden pointed out that I'll never get broccoli to grow unless it has a foot of soil beneath it. Huh. But then another resource said that tomato plants will grow as far down into the soil as they grow up.... and with 6 foot tall tomato plants I'm sure that can't be the case! Anyway, once it gets too cold here (come December or January) I'll add another layer of Mel's mix (that's the perfect potting soil mix) and we'll see how next year's garden fares.

Looks weird, tastes great!

How to know when it's time to get new lettuce.

Cucumber Nugget

I decided to go ahead and harvest one of the weird curly cucumbers. The cucumber was half engorged and half completely underdeveloped and spiny. I cut off the spiny part leaving a "nugget" about the size of an egg. I peeled it and ate it. Inside the seeds all looked squished together, unlike in a regular cucumber where they're spread evenly throughout the fruit. It tasted good though- just like a cucumber!

There are a couple other quasi-cucumbers available for harvest, but in the meantime I've planted a different variety of cuke. We'll see how these fare. They've already sprouted so I'm hoping for a quick growth to harvest time.

Recently I've given up on labeling all the plants in the garden. After all, even if I forget what they are while they're growing, I'll know what they turn out to be at the end. I've planted more butternut squash in a less sunny part of the garden. A different variety of watermelon. More pole beans (I should be giving them away by the bucket this time of summer, but since I'm not I've planted a bunch more). More zucchini. New yellow squash. More onions. Garlic. More everything! I want my garden to be busting open at the seams! I'll let you know if that happens.

Road bumps and weird growth!

Okay, I knew there'd be issues eventually. First of all, I have a bit of a powdery mold problem on my zucchini plants. I cut away the very damaged leaves, and I'm trying only water the plants at the base. The mold forms because of moisture on the leaves and it can kill the plant. It can also spread to other kinds of squash, gourds, melon etc. So that's a poopy problem for an organic garden. I'll just have to keep trying to contain it.

My second issue is that thus far, most of the tomatoes harvested have been mealy. I read that this happens when the temperature drops below 50 degrees. I don't remember the weather getting that cold after the tomatoes had started growing, but I guess it's possible. The only tomatoes that haven't been mealy have been kind of deformed (see the picture of the yellow tomatoes below). Their deformity probably has to do with how consistently I've been watering. Maybe sometimes they got too much and other times not enough. But they tasted good anyway! Had to cut around all the weird parts, but that's no crime.

Finally, the cucumbers are looking WEIRD. They're curling as they grow, and this one is half developed (see picture). I have no idea what this means. None at all. Any ideas?

Powdery mold.

Cucumber weirdness...

Tomato weirdness. And some critter took a bite out of the one on the left.

Beautiful, but mealy.

How to ketchup!

Get it? It's a pun... catch up, ketchup...

Anyway, I know it's been a couple of weeks. In brief we've now:

Harvested our first green beans

Eaten the majority of our first crop of carrots

Harvested our first zucchini (yum!)

Harvested our first two tomatoes, though dealing with mealy texture

Am trying to figure out how to organically combat white powdery mold

Here are some pictures. More soon!

Hard to tell, but my thumb is actually green in this picture (from trimming back the tomatoes).

Baby cucumber. Weird looking!

I had no idea that this is what zucchini looked like on the plant. It grows from what looks like the stem at the base of the flower. I thought it would grow from the flower itself.

BEANS!

This one looks almost ready.

C is for Carrot!

I was watering the garden last week, thinking about how to tell when root vegetables are ready to be harvested. I had just come to the conclusion that I probably should research this question on the web when the water from my hose showed me the orange top of one of my carrots.

With trepidation I grasped the carrot top and pulled.... and out popped our first carrot! Since then I've gotten a little more daring, and I've learned a valuable lesson: plant the carrots farther apart. I just sewed a few more carrot seeds with that lesson in mind. In the pictures you'll see a carrot that was planted far enough away from its fellow carrots, and a bunch of carrots that were planted too close. It's like a mutant carrot monster... Still tasted good though!

Tomatoes are getting so big, but when will they ripen?

Climb beanstalk, climb!

I love carrots whole bunches.

A proper looking carrot.

Mutant carrots. Call Professor X!

An Intriguing Development

About a week ago, Brandon and I spread our homemade (or should I say worm-made?) compost throughout the garden. The plants responded quickly and voraciously, and what with the warmer summer days and the new food, we had a lot of stunning growth. 

Then I started noticing little sprouts... all over the garden. But specifically right near the base of each plant, where we'd spread the compost. I suspect that there must have been seeds of some sort in the compost, though I have no idea from what. There's part of me that wouldn't mind letting a few of the sprouts keep growing to see what they turn into! I'm not in the practice of putting seeds into my compost box, so it had to be from old strawberries or tomatoes... something where the seeds are small. The kind of seeds I assumed my worms would eat. Well, now I know better!

The other development of the last week is that my salad greens have gone bitter. As they get old, the flavor changes pretty drastically. We decided it was time for a fresh sweep, so we now have baby lettuce in place of the old, gone to seed, lettuce. This time we'll start eating it sooner. The first time around I didn't realize how quickly the lettuce would grow new leaves and it was hard to keep up with so much growth. This time we'll start eating salads earlier and hopefully we'll get to enjoy more out of those plants' lifetimes. Adding to our earlier salad mix, we now have an Italian blend, and an heirloom blend. Should be delicious. 

Here comes a cantaloupe blossom!

Zucchini is just a few weeks away.

The old lettuce was getting out of hand. Notice the really tall green leaf lettuce right next to the tomato plants. Needless to say, the leaves were no longer sweet tasting.

After planting our new lettuce blend. It's hard to believe that the first batch was just as small when we planted them just a few months ago.

Hang on, little tomato!

Tomatoes Ahoy!

I have now counted four beautiful fat little heirloom tomatoes growing on one of the Rainbow Mix tomato plants. Also, the Red Currant tomatoes are turning, you guessed it, red! Check it out. 

What's at stake?

Tomatoes! Our tomato plants are growing by leaps and bounds. They started outmaybe 3 inches tall and are now 3 FEET tall! A couple of them had started tipping over. I had already taken time to tie the Red Currant tomato to its trellis, but new shoots were starting to sprawl into the rest of the garden. I ended up tying even more of that plant to the trellis. I wonder what it would look like if I didn't take the time to do that... my guess is that it would probably take over a good third of my garden plot!

The heirloom Rainbow Mix tomatoes each needed their own stake. We employed the "reuse" part of "Reduce, reuse, recycle" and chopped up an old trellis to create stakes. Brandon hammered them into the ground and then I tied each tomato plant up. It not only was good for the tomatoes, but it looks cute too. And I discovered the first baby tomatoes on those plants! 

The rest of the garden is growing very quickly as well. I can't get over how huge the zucchini plants are already. Apparently we're "in trouble" with five zucchini plants and will end up having to pay people to take extra zucchini off our hands. 

We also sprinkled fresh compost and worm castings from my worm box. It was the first time I finally had enough compost to use in any practical way. I think the plants really like it too. The pea shoots grew about an inch over night, as did the broccoli... don't even get me started on how much bigger the zucchini are after the compost! 

Baby Acorn Squash, thriving now that's it's been transplanted

Holy Moly- look at that zucchini!

First time using our homemade compost. Yum!

Baby heirloom tomatoes

Everything in the garden is growing and growing!

Garden Explosion

No time to write today, just wanted to post some amazing pictures. Garden EXPLOSION!

Giant Plants!

I've decided not to blog at the end of the week on the dot anymore, so no more "week one" etc titles. 

It's been a little over a week since the last blog and my plants have grown about a foot! When we got back from our trip, a few seedlings had kicked the bucket. But I replanted and have been taking very good care of my garden and now we have seedlings once again. The romaine lettuce seedlings are back, and we have three zucchini sprouts as well as 3 or 4 cantaloupe sprouts! Here are just a few pictures. Amazing differences. 

And have I mentioned how tasty the salad straight from the garden is? I also appreciate that I'm wasting less produce now because I'm not buying a whole bag of lettuce and then only using half. And there's no plastic bag! Yay.... making an impact feels good.

Baby zucchini 

Lettuce close-ups 

Oooh, that romaine is so sexy!

Go tomatoes go!

Adorable little cantaloupe

Week Three

What a difference a week makes! We got back in town yesterday to discover some delightful and some less-than-delightful changes to the garden. First off, only one baby pea shoot has survived so far. The baby romaine also kicked the bucket after dealing with temperatures in the 90's this week. However, the rest of the garden is thriving. 

Here's a picture of the garden after week one, just to show the difference in plant size. 

Aside from what's growing in my garden bed, we have a tree that's bearing some sort of mystery fruit. Could it be apricots? 

The baby basil is coming in strong, as is the first acorn squash shoot. The carrot tops are taking on a more "carrot-y" appearance, and we have four bean sprouts pushing out of the dirt. We also have baby cantaloupe! The most exciting development is the first itty-bitty tomatoes. Hooray! 

Baby Basil

Acorn Squash

Carrot tops

Looking green-beany

Cantaloupe- yum

The itty-bitty tomato committee!