it's going to be a lemon!

My meyer lemon tree is officially beginning to produce lemons. This is the first blossom!

my first tomatoes

The veggies in the garden have been growing like crazy lately! I moved the containers have been moved from the back of the house (which was becoming mostly shaded due to the position of the sun and the gigantic oak tree that lives behind our house) - they now reside on the side of the house where they get full sunshine all afternoon. Here's what's in the garden currently:

   

What you see above is Early Girl tomatoes, Sweet 100 tomatoes, eggplant (I think that's the Rosa Bianca in the picture; I also have a Japanese), and my newest dahlia. Sadly, the first cherry tomato ripened this past week while I was on vacation (that's it starting to blush above), but JR was here to consume it. There were three ripe ones this morning to greet me on my return from Seattle, which I ate straight off the plant. There is little that's better than a fresh tomato warmed by the sunshine. Soon, we will be overrun with them - I can hardly wait!

the garden is growing!

My container garden is officially made up of more than one container.

First, a bit of catch up (it's been awhile since I've posted about my garden) - I planted the seedlings from the salad class last weekend - this means the wine barrel's yields will soon include butter lettuce, spinach, Jodie's lettuce (Jodie was the class instructor - the impending lettuce in my garden is from seeds from her lettuce crop last year, we're not sure what kind), nasturtium (creamsicle flowers with edible petals!), and cilantro.

Today, three new containers became part of my garden. In them, I planted early girl tomatoes, cherry tomatoes, and basil. I also ripped out my oregano plant from last year (it was getting really woody) and planted some new starts from one of the sprigs. 

On impulse, I grabbed a pack of strawberry seeds when I was at the nursery. I had been wanting strawberry plants, but didn't find any. According to the package, I should have planted them earlier and keep them inside until they sprout, but I decided instead to sow the seeds directly into the wine barrel. We'll see what happens!

i heart california

It's sunny. It's warm. The flowers are blooming. And I'm planting my next round of seedlings in the garden tomorrow! Ah, beautiful weekend.

arugula harvest

It's been 2 weeks since I've written about the container garden (which equates to 2 weeks since I've spent much time with it) and WOW has it grown! The spinach went from puny to petite. The kale is growing tall. And as a result of all of the sunshine and heat lately, the arugula has bolted (and flowered, as shown above). Which means it's time to pull it up. Perfect timing, as that will allow me to spread out some of the smaller lettuces so they can grow to be big lettuces.

 

Today, I pulled up 3 bunches of arugula, one beautiful bunch of green lettuce (the first!) and 2 big leaves of kale. At dinnertime, I turned them into one very tasty salad (with bosc pear, chopped dried figs, and basalmic vinaigrette). I rolled up the kale leaves, sliced them thinly, and sprinkled them over our cauliflower curry.

Stay tuned for an update on the seeds planted a couple of weeks ago that are beginning to sprout! 

how to grow a salad garden

Steph and I went to a great class yesterday at Common Grounds. It was called "How to Grow a Salad Garden." Perfect timing, given that I'm about 4 weeks into my first container garden of leafy greens. The class was taught in a small kitchen in the back of the store by Jodie Main. Jodie is a local food and garden writer who specializes in edible landscape design. Every one of the twenty-five or so chairs was occupied. I worried at first that two hours on a folding chair in a packed room was going to get uncomfortable, but the time flew by and I learned a lot.

The class began with Jodie talking through the various greens she had brought with her from her own garden: green leaf lettuce, ruby red chard, miners lettuce, nasturtium, cutting celery, spearmint, onion chives, garlic chives, french thyme, lavender; this is just a sampling -  the list went on and on. As she talked about each item, she handed it off to a volunteer from the class, who tore everything into pieces onto a giant platter. Over the course of the first hour or so, the growing platter of greens was turning into the most diverse salad that I had ever seen. 

After the first couple items, Jodie paused to make the dressing. She smashed a few cloves of garlic, sprinkled it with a generous amount of kosher salt and chopped it. Then she mashed it into a paste with the back of a fork, added the paste to a small bowl, and whisked it with extra virgin olive oil and basalmic vinegar. Then she turned back to the greens and edible blossoms and continued to talk us through the items. As she did, the room filled with the most delicious aroma. This was going to be one fantastic salad!

In the second half of the class (as we munched on the salad, which was fantastic indeed), Jodie talked about various ways to plant seeds and starts. I learned that I should be fertilizing my container every other week with fish emulsion (I bought some after the class and applied it to the garden this morning) to feed my greens. Leafy greens are cold weather crops, meaning that they like sun in the winter and shade once it starts to get warm out. You can plant salad crops twice per year - once in late October and again around this time of year - to have fresh salads all winter and spring. In June, it will get too warm for the greens and they will bolt - stalks will shoot upwards and eventually flower (though before that happens, I plan to replace the greens in the container with some tomatoes and other warmer weather fruits and veggies).

We learned a couple of different ways both to plant and harvest the greens. The most common planting method is to make a hole in the dirt that's about 3x as deep as the seeds you plan to plant, put a couple of seeds in each hole, cover with dirt, and pack the dirt down. When you plant this way, once the crop grows you can harvest by pulling up the whole bunch (roots and all), cutting at the base, or you can cut outer leaves and allow the center to continue to grow. Another method of planting is broadcasting - you sprinkle seeds over an area fairly densely, then rake the area and top with more dirt. This lends itself well to the "cut and come again" method: the greens will grow very densely and once they get 4-5 inches high, you can grab a handful and cut about 1" above the dirt. The greens will continue to grow so you can harvest again once they again reach 4-5 inches tall. This works best with greens that grow upright.

I learned a couple of good ideas for battling the squirrels that have been digging in the container: apparently they really hate spearmint. Which is handy, because we actually have some growing behind our house (pictured). Jodie recommended putting a handful of leaves in the blender with water and spraying this on the garden. Or she thought you might even be able to put leaves or branches of leaves in the container. I chose this method - this morning, I tore up mint leaves and sprinkled them over the container. Hopefully this will deter the "fuzzy tailed rodents" (as JR likes to call them). I will report back on whether this successfully ends my battle with the neighborhood squirrels.

Probably the most interesting thing I learned during the two hour class had to do with making cuts from a plant to create new starts. This can be done with any woody herb (sage, thyme, basil). The demonstration used a sprig of italian oregano. Here's how it went:

The growing nodes, when they are planted in dirt and cease to get any light, somehow know that they should grow as roots instead of leaves. Isn't that amazing?

At the end of the class, we planted seeds to take home with us. These will stay in the house in a sunny window until they are big enough to plant outside. It is perfect timing: by the time my seeds turn into starts big enough to plant, there should be space in the container (created by the greens we will eat in the meantime). My sampling includes: creamsicle nasturtium, butter lettuce, cilantro, spinach, and Jodie's lettuce (she didn't remember exactly what kind it was, but we learned how to take the seeds from the flowers that had bolted from her crop last year).

Here's how the garden looks this week:

Stay tuned for more updates!

greens from the garden

This morning, I picked the first greens for consumption from the container garden! My mini harvest included a couple of handfuls of arugula and a few large kale leaves.

The bad news is that some small creature has been digging in the container, exposing the roots of some of my leafy greens. I think the culprit is one of the neighborhood squirrels. For now I'm going to keep an eye on it - if it continues I may need to look into putting some mesh wire or other deterrent over the top of the container to keep the digging critters out.

Outside of the digging, things are going well for the most part:

The kale is getting taller.

The arugula is growing like crazy.

The spinach is still small, but is growing. In another few weeks, I think there will be enough for a baby spinach salad.

The lettuce is also still on the small side. Two of the bunches look really good; the others are a little puny. I rotated the container around to allow them to get more direct light without being shaded by the kale and arugula. We'll see if that helps.

Stephanie and I are going to a Growing a Salad Garden class next Saturday. Hopefully I'll learn what I need to do to increase the happiness of my spinach and lettuce. Stay tuned for a recap of the learnings from that session! 

By the way, here's what I made with the first bit of arugula from my garden - a simple salad of arugula, apples, figs, and toasted pecans, drizzled with walnut oil:

it's spring!

Suddenly, over the past week, Burlingame has transformed from windy, rainy winter to bright, blooming Spring. Flowers are everywhere: the ornamental cherry and plum trees are in full bloom, the daffodils are out, and the tulips are singing songs of Spring.

 

Speaking of tulips, I actually planted some today. My brother brought wooden shoes filled with tulip bulbs back from a recent trip to Holland. I learned from the insert that they should have been in the ground by late December. My mother says that they should still bloom - they'll just be later than normal. Which means that in 8-10 weeks, we should hopefully have some bright blooms in front of our house! (The second pic is from a neighbor's yard down the street; I'll be thrilled if mine turn out half as beautiful!)

 

A quick check on the container garden confirms that it's doing well (Romeo was my helper today). The arugula remains the happiest of the bunch and is nearly big enough to start pinching leaves from for salads. The spinach and lettuce are still on the small side, but are definitely growing. The forecast is showing sun every day this week, so there should be some good growth in the coming 7 days. I'm looking forward to some tasty salads the not too distant future!

rain, rain, rain

It was raining when I initially planted the container garden last weekend. And it's pretty much been raining everyday since. Here's what the garden looks like after the first week:

Starting from the top, the big leaves are kale. The next row out from that is the arugula (which looks to be the happiest of all so far), followed by spinach. Finally, the mixed lettuce is around the lower outer edge (the very tiniest one on the right is looking pretty puny - it may not make it). The lettuce and I are both hoping for some sunny days soon.

I tried an arugula leaf straight from the plan - it was peppery and delicious. I'm excited for them to grow a little more so I can start using them in salads!

playing in the dirt

I've been thinking about planting a container garden since last summer (when I originally had the idea, but thought it was too late in the year to start). I recently discovered Common Grounds, an organic nursery in Palo Alto. When JR's dad, Joe, was in town a couple of weeks ago, we made our first trip there to check it out. 

Joe has had a vegetable garden for many years in eastern Washington. He gets most passionate when talking about the various pepper varieties he grows, in particular, the hot ones. Joe makes salsas, pickled vegetables, oils, and spices from the peppers (Joe's Cosmic Chile Good Stuff spice has been featured in a number of my kitchen adventures). A favorite story of ours involving Joe's peppers was from the rehearsal dinner the night before JR and I were married - the snacks included chips and salsa, the latter made from Joe's peppers. At first taste, it was tangy and sweet. So you'd have another chip with some more salsa. And then maybe another. By about 30 seconds in, you'd be in search of the nearest drink because your mouth would be on fire. All evening long, Joe kept talking people into trying his special salsa! Our friends still talk about it today.

I figured it would be good to bring an expert along on my first trip to the nursery. My goal was to browse and get some idea of what I'd want to plant and when. I was happy to find that Common Grounds had the wine barrels I was envisioning. They also plenty of leafy lettuce starts that I was immediately drawn to. I decided my initial adventure container gardening would focus on leafy greens (possibly followed by some tomatoes once the weather warms up a bit).

The following week, I attended a lecture at Stanford with Stephanie, given by Joel Saladin of Polyface Farms. The talk was focused on the practices at Polyface farm and was both fantastic and inspiring. The farmers at Polyface choreograph a mimicry of nature, focusing on allowing animals to express themselves as they would in nature and on symbiotic relationships. The chickens express their "chickenness" when they follow behind the cows, picking the bugs from their droppings in a natural "pasture sanitation program." Moving cows daily to a new part of the pasture was modeled after bison in Batswana; this practice is both good for the cows and also makes the pasture of grassland look postcard beautiful.

Polyface builds relationships between humans and animals and between animals and the earth. One of Joel's basic philosophies is that you should be connected to what you eat. He sited studies that have shown that when you know the story of your food, you actually metabolize it better (I'm in the process of tracking these studies down and will post links here when I do). I love the weekly letter from farmer Thaddeus that comes with each of our FFTY deliveries. Perhaps I'm absorbing more nutrients from the meals made with this food since I know some back story. Joel Saladin's talk left me even more inspired to start making my own food stories through my impending container garden.

Fast forward to today. JR and I made another visit to Common Grounds yesterday and came away with a wine barrel, 4 bags of organic soil, and a tray of leafy green starts. Today I turned all of those ingredients into my first garden. Here's what I planted:

Bronze Arrowhead Lettuce: Bronze Medal Winner 1947. Easy and quick to grow. One of the most colorful & delicious leaf lettuce! Moist soil. Sun or part sun.

Rustic Italian Arugula: Finely cut tangy leaves and flowers. Holds much longer than French arugula. Moist soil is best. Plan in sun or partial sun. Water weekly during dry spells.

Walking Stick Kale: Edible, useful & unique! Grows to 7', producing cabbage-like leaves. After harvest dry for 1 year for a walking stick! Very easy to grow! (OK, so apparently I didn't read this one well enough - it's going to grow to 7 feet?)

Bloomsdale Spinach: American heirloom. Thick textured, sweet tasting, crinkled leaves. Heavy yields. Slow to bolt. Plant in full sun. Water weekly during dry spells.

Stay tuned for updates!