The other half of the kitchen garden

No kitchen garden would be complete without someone waiting in the kitchen to receive the goods. That’s Jan.

Not only is he a good cook, but he’s ambitious. Which is why he’s building a bread oven in our back yard. Oh yes. Roughly three thousand pounds of baking love, right behind our little cottage.

“Where in the world did he get such an idea?”, you might ask. I’m going to suggest that there’s something akin to double-dog-daring going on here. Jan and our friend Ken, also from the hood, both love to bake bread. They share books, compare notes, and chatter like hens when we get together. (They’ll love that description.) Ken now mills his own wheat berries. No, really. I mean, how can you top that kind of devotion to the craft? With a bread oven, apparently.

OK, I’m kidding. It really doesn’t take any sort of rivalry for either one of these men to take things so far. But it sure doesn’t hurt to have someone as nuts as you to come and help mix cement, hm?

It has finally begun, and I’ll be sharing the play-by-play, for your reading enjoyment.

The first step is to dig down a few inches for the foundation slab.

Jan called the city, to ask if there were any zoning issues with building a bread oven in our backyard. Being in a historic district, you never know. They had no idea what he was talking about. “Gas?” None. “Electricity?” Nope. “You’re fine.” They forgot to ask: “Rebar?” “Massive quantities of cement?” “Pallets of bricks?”

Lest you think I’m ungrateful, I am really, really looking forward to the fruits of this labor. Pizza, bread, even Thanksgiving turkeys. Honestly, I can’t wait.

The book he’s been working from is The Bread Builders. He’s been visiting some websites, too, which I’ll share in a later post.

Tomatoes!

Yay! The very first tomatoes of the season ripened up this week. I almost didn’t notice, even though I stalk the garden every evening (and most mornings). The reason I almost didn’t notice is because the first one ready was a tiny White Currant:

I should have gotten a picture of the cluster before I ate them, but I only thought of it while I was popping them into my mouth. But I came back a couple days later and took this picture before I ate that little one at the bottom right of the cluster. Yep. That’s totally ripe. These are my new favorite tomato. Even Jan likes them, because they’re not too sweet, like some of the cherry tomatoes.

It’s an indeterminate plant, so we have a bazillion of these little suckers, and they’re doing really well in our heat.

Weed inventory

By and large, I like my weeds. I prefer to call most of them “volunteers”. In fact, letting some local plants go to flower is one sure way to invite beneficial insects into your garden. But I don’t know what the majority of them are called, and neither do my gardening neighbors. So I thought I’d do a quick inventory, and see if anyone else can help me identify them. I found a couple of local websites that claimed to aid in weed ID, but they were all worthless, for various reasons (most could use an intensive course in user interface design). Do you recognize any of these?

I love this one. It has big, gray leaves, and is very soft.

This one’s a little difficult to pick out of the background. You can enlarge the picture. It has fine leaves, similar to marigolds. My neighbor said it gets tiny white flowers. Very lush.

This might be my favorite. Everyone asks about it. I also saw it at the Heard Sanctuary, but couldn’t find anyone to ask about it. It reminds some of us of a euphorbia, but it’s not really a succulent.

Actually, I know this one, but wanted to include it, in case you don’t. It’s purslane. It is succulent. It’s also edible.

OK, I lied. I know this one, too. It’s a common sunflower. You see why I call these volunteers? They’re lovely! We had a huge one just to the left of this one, but it was blown down in the big wind storms we had last month.

This one’s very delicate and lovely. It gets blue flowers that only come out in the cool of the mornings. It dies back in the winter, but this one came back in the same spot as last year.

These are one of the most common weeds in my garden. I wouldn’t mind them at all, except that they get really scraggly looking. So I usually leave them until they look like they’re on their last leg, then they pull very easily.

Ignore the grassy one, I’m trying to show you the oak-leaf weed. I don’t get too many of these, but they grow right next to the concrete and are hard to pull out. So I mostly don’t.

OK, this is truly a weed in my garden. It’s the most common and most annoying. Nutgrass?

No weed inventory of my yard would be complete without mentioning the grass. I don’t even know what kind of grass we have, but I’m sure you can tell just by looking at the runner creeping toward my hoja santa. I will be so happy when we have dug up the rest of our yard and become truly “no-mow”.

Got any interesting volunteers? Send me a pic; I’ll post it.

Compost Heaven

I’ve had a couple of people ask me about composting, so when my most recent batch of compost was ready to use, I took some pictures. As I was spreading it out in the tomato bed this morning, a woman who was jogging by stopped and asked me how I keep my tomatoes looking so good in this heat. I was flummoxed. “Um, compost?”, I said, and pointed to the wheelbarrow with my shovel. She said their plants have tomatoes, but the plants look all dry and terrible. It’s hard to say, since the differences between gardens are many. But really, I am not very diligent in watering, which I do by hand. So it seems like it must be the black gold.

I got out this morning and finished harvesting the finished compost. We moved into this house last August, and immediately set up our three compost bins in the small east side yard. As I’m a lazy gardener, I use a slow method of composting, sometimes called “cold” composting. It’s made up of three wire bins, approximately 3×3 ft square, side by side. I bought it at gardeners.com:

Into the first bin go all new additions: kitchen waste, weeds without seeds, non-diseased prunings, and extra dry “browns” like leaves or hay. Once this bin fills to the top (which was slower before our garden got going, but can happen pretty quickly during harvest season), the entire contents of the first bin is forked into the 2nd bin. This aerates and mixes the ingredients, and gives you a chance to add more browns, if your pile is too wet and stinky (Which has never, ever, ever happened to me. Ever.). New additions continue to be fed into the first bin, and the 2nd bin is left to cook. I don’t water my compost piles, which is one reason they are slow and “cold”. If I kept the piles moist, and turned them every month, they would get hot in the center and cook, and break down faster. Too much work. Anyway, once the first bin is full again, the 2nd bin gets forked over into the third bin, and the first bin gets forked over into the 2nd bin. By this time, the compost getting turned into the third bin should be pretty much unrecognizable except for eggs shells, corn cobs, coffee filters, and other bits that take a long time to break down. You should also notice a big difference in the soil life. When I turn the first pile over, there are grubs and sometimes ants, earthworms, pill bugs and even maggots, occasionally (eek!). When I turn the 2nd pile over, there are many more earthworms, silverfish, snakes, rarely ants. By the time the last pile is done cooking, the earthworms rule the roost, never ants or grubs or rarely any other big insects.

This first pile in our house took almost a year to make it through this process, mostly because that’s how long it took us to fill the first bin twice. So finally, I’m harvesting my first batch of compost.

This picture is a little deceptive, because there is hay in the middle bin. But the first bin is at the top of the picture, and will be turned into the middle bin later.

Some people just spread the finished compost on the garden as is, with the big chunks still in it. But I screen mine, as ours includes little fruit stickers from our kitchen scraps, and we get leaves from neighbors, which sometimes contains candy wrappers and such. I use a 1/4″ screen to get really fine compost for our potted plants. I use 1/2″ screen to get regular garden bed compost. Since I’m lazy, as I mentioned, I bought both of my screens already made. But they’re really easy to make with materials from Home Depot. Anyway, my 1/2″ screen fits over my wheelbarrow:

I dump a shovel-full of compost onto the screen, then use the shovel to scrape and agitate the finer compost through the holes, all the while trying not to kill the earthworms that are flailing around like fish out of water. The big chunks that are left over are scraped into the bucket at the base of the barrow, and added back to the first bin to continue cooking.

And this is the good stuff; the glorious gold. From one bin, I got about 4 or 5 wheelbarrows-full.

From here on out, we’ll get more compost, faster. Not that the three of us are creating more kitchen scraps, but with the garden becoming more mature, I’ll be feeding the pile more vegetation. Just today, I turned a pile over into the middle bin.

There is now fresh hay in the last bin, and the first bin has a thin layer of hay at the bottom, waiting for new additions to the pile.

Notes for success with composting:

• You need “greens” (nitrogen) and “browns” (carbon) to make the average pile work as generally expected. In my experience, THE most common mistake made in backyard compost piles is too few browns in relation to greens. The result is a wet, slimy, smelly, infested mess. Basically everything that comes out of your kitchen is a green. So you’ll need to feed the pile with dried leaves, hay, or some other dry, brown substance. Shredded paper, shredded cardboard, something. The best input is the one that you have handy, especially if you’re diverting it from the landfill. We usually harass our neighbors into giving us their leaves (they think we’re nutty). But we plowed through a tremendous amount of leaves this year, and had to break down and buy some hay from the feed and seed store downtown.
• The more you turn the pile, the hotter it will cook, the faster it will finish, and the more buff you will become.
• If you’re going for hot, you’ll also need to keep the pile moist, like a squeezed-out sponge. Dry piles can take years to finish (like a dry leaf pile, which takes about three years to turn into leaf mold).
• Bury your kitchen waste in the pile, preferably under a handful of browns. That’s why I like to keep a bag of leaves or something right next to the first bin. If you dump your kitchen scraps, then throw in a handful of leaves, you’re virtually guaranteed to end up with the right combination of greens and browns, as well as discouraging flies and cats. Both of which I consider the most disgusting of visitors to my little homestead.
• Bugs are generally your friends. It’s true that you can get an imbalance of one bug in relation to all of the others. But if you balance your greens and browns, you should be able to step back and let the battle of the bugs play out. They’re the ones doing the magic, so leave them be.

June seed planting list

[See the most current June planting list here.]

I put this list together for some friends of mine who are just starting out with vegetable gardening. (They’re psyched to be eating straight from the garden. It’s so empowering to walk outside and make a meal from your own care and labor; not to mention knowing exactly what is IN the food you’re eating.) Anyway, I thought it might be useful to someone else in our area, too. I’ll put another one up in July.

“There are three reference books I’m using:
Month-by-Month Gardening in Texas, Dale Groom & Dan Gill (he’s in NE TX)
Texas Organic Vegetable Gardening, J. Howard Garrett & C. Malcolm Beck (he’s in Dallas)
Dallas Planting Manual, The Dallas Garden Club of the Dallas Woman’s Club (Dallas, again)

Technically, we’re in a slightly colder zone than Dallas (7b vs 8a), even without the heating effect of major cities. But these planting dates should be very close.

cantaloupe*
collards
eggplant
luffa*
okra*
peanuts
peppers*
pumpkin*
southern peas (black-eyed peas)
squash (Groom says these might be problematic in the heat; Garrett says to wait; but the old ladies in Dallas say go for it!)
sweet potatoes (slips)
swiss chard
watermelons*

The stars are the ones I’m planting. I’m also going to try to direct-seed tomatoes for a fall crop. Wish me luck!

Luffas are apparently edible when young, and they make really cool sponges when the pods have dried out. Ella ordered 3 this morning for her personal use (one for each of two chalkboards in the house, one for the bath). Also, in researching how to combat squash bugs, which took out my zucchini plant yesterday, Garrett says to interplant luffa vines with the cucurbits. I’ll give it a go.

Plant the okra in the space where the onions have been pulled out.”

Lost the battle

They did it. They defeated me THIS time. The squash bugs got all of the remaining pattypan squash plants. We were fighting the good fight until the first batch of eggs hatched. Then it was about a billion of them against just the two of us. (sigh) We pulled out the plants and sealed them in a trash bag and put them in the garbage can. Since we don’t use pesticides, we need to act swiftly and decisively to contain this outbreak. I have pumpkin and watermelon seeds sprouting right now, and I dearly want to keep them safe from these little monsters. Hopefully, by the time these seedlings are big enough to become tempting, the squash bugs will be late enough in their life cycle that they won’t go after them. I keep hearing that planting squash later in the season is best when you have these bugs.

The good news is that I saw LOTS of spiders when I was pulling up the plants. Apparently, spiders prey on these bugs, perhaps in the egg or nymph stage. So maybe by next season, with all of our organic care and compost, we’ll have a healthy enough ecosystem to keep these bugs in check. I did notice that the squash plants that got ANY shade fared worse than the squash in full sun. Duly noted.

Onions, garlic, and historic McKinney

I have only been gardening in McKinney for a few years, and have only recently gotten serious about vegetables. Part of the reason is that Jan and I have moved six times in nine years. That’s right. So it has taken a while for me to believe that we’re staying here. (Which may still be delusional, on my part.) For instance, we just moved a few blocks over last August. Why? Because we’re gypsies. But also because we fell in love with this little twin Japanese-inspired Craftsman bungalow. (I’ll dig up a picture and post it later.)

The historic downtown and adjacent residential area (both listed in the National Register of Historic Places) are the heart and soul and most redeeming features of this city. We know our neighbors (and actually like some of them!). We walk to restaurants and art classes and yoga and community festivals. We sit on porches and drink beer. We accost each other in our front yards and borrow tools and share food. It’s downright peachy.

So, now we’re in this jewel of a house that we adore. And I’m ready to commit to a veggie garden. The back yard is a little too shady and a little too dog-infested for my farming dreams. So we’ve been digging up the front yard, with the help of various neighborhood characters (teenagers, drifters, and the like). I was a little leery of drawing the ire of neighborhood lawn-lovers. But apparently, there are none on this side of highway 75. In fact, one of our neighbors (whose grass-less lawn is glorious) came over and said, “welcome to the no-mow club!” Whew.

So far I have about 250 sf of veggie space in the front. Half of it’s planted in ‘maters (seven varieties). Half is planted with Russian fingerling potatoes, basil, and, until recently, garlic and onions. We’ve been harvesting the onions on a rolling basis as their tops fall over, and the garlic came out last week when the lowest couple of leaves turned brown.

My first harvest in McKinney! Jan is so happy to have food fresh from the garden to cook with. And I feel such a sense of accomplishment providing absolutely fresh, organic food for my family. We had previously perfected our kitchen herb selection, to the point that Jan has cooked the last couple of Thanksgiving dinners using only our garden-fresh herbs (including tarragon, which he uses in his hollandaise sauce). But this is a whole new world of enjoyment for both of us. It also meshes very nicely with everything I’ve been reading and discussing with friends lately (Omnivore’s Dilemma, The Revolution Will Not Be Microwaved).

So many of us are sick of nutritionally-inferior, tasteless, poisoned, infected produce. We want fresh, local, organic, nutritious food for our children and ourselves. Fortunately, I happen to love gardening, and would be doing it regardless of the particular plants under my care. But we also rely on weekly visits to the McKinney Farmer’s Market, and we’re on the waiting list of a local CSA (community supported agriculture, or buying shares of a farm’s produce in advance and picking up weekly), both of which any black-thumb can do.

Back to my first harvest. I left the onions to dry on the shady side porch for about three weeks, until the green leaves had all dried to brown. Today I went out and braided them into strings about a dozen onions each.

They’re really easy to braid. If you’ve ever braided hair or rope, you’ve got it. I kept each braid to similarly sized onions, as the smaller ones need to be used first. The larger, more mature onions apparently keep longer. We grew about seven dozen of these sweet yellow onions from bulblets that we got from Shades of Green. The variety wasn’t labeled, unfortunately. I’m going to try my hand at growing onions from seed this year (planting in fall for next summer’s harvest). My ultimate goal is to save seeds from year to year.

I don’t know what variety our garlic was either. (How’m *I* doing?) One of Jan’s co-workers gave us a couple of heads in the fall, and I just stuck them in a ground.

They grew really well, and are nice and big. Very mild flavor. They’re a hard-neck variety. That’s nice, because you get to eat the scapes. Which we did, in a fantastic frittata (scroll down for the recipe), along with onions and spinach from our garden, and farm-fresh eggs. Heaven. But the hard-necks don’t store very well. So I am keeping a few heads of this garlic to replant in the fall, but I’ll also be planting a soft-neck variety, for longer-term storage.

Squash bugs and progressive Oral Allergy Syndrome

No, I’m not proposing a link between the two. Except in my mind this morning.

I just finished braiding four dozen yellow onions, so they can be hung in the kitchen for Jan to use in his cooking (I’ll post about that later). Then I took a stroll through the garden to see what’s what today, which is my very favoritest thing about gardening. The tomatoes are coming along, and I keep looking for signs of red creeping into the green fruits. And I’m particularly excited about the pattypan squash that our neighbor, Rick, gave us. So I squat down and take a peek:

Ack! Squash bugs (I’ve taken the liberty of circling both the bugs and the squash for you, so you can tell them apart). Grrr. They already took down my zucchini, which I had to pull out prematurely. They will NOT get my pattypan. I’m too squeamish to pick the bugs and smoosh them (and I’ve heard they stink terribly), but I looked under every leaf and found the eggs. I tried flicking them off, but they were stuck too well. So I tore off the part of the leaves that had eggs stuck to them and threw them in the garbage. Not the compost. Diseased and infested garden waste should not be cycled back into your precious compost, to be evenly distributed throughout your lovely garden.

Anyway, I’ll try to corral Jan into catching the bugs when he gets home. I think he’ll do it for the sake of the pattypans.

As I’m walking back to the house, crisis heroically averted, my hands and forearms start itching insanely. (sigh) Every year I come up allergic to something new. I feel like I’m under siege. A few years ago, after moving to McKinney (or perhaps just before?), eating fresh avocados started making my lips and mouth itch. We loooove avocados. This is tragedy territory. A few months later, cantaloupes. Then cucumbers, watermelon, apples, bananas. It doesn’t matter if they’re grown organically or conventionally. That’s the first thing many people think of, is the pesticide residues on fruit. Nope. It turns out it’s something called progressive Oral Allergy Syndrome. Jan researched it after dinner one night, when yet another fruit had made it’s way onto my itch list. “There has got to be a club for people like you”, he said, making his way to the computer and googling “allergy avocado cantaloupe”. Indeed.

OAS is apparently related to Hay Fever. I’m allergic to Ragweed (among other things), and the antibodies to the weed apparently cross-react with the proteins in a particular group of fruits. For someone who loves whole foods, it’s tragic, like I said. A small consolation is that heating these foods denatures the reactive protein(s), and I can then eat them. That’s OK with avocado, but it means that the only way I get melons is as a juice (Hot watermelon, anyone? Ick.). Fortunately, my husband is adept at making aguas frescas (family favorites are watermelon, horchata, and jamaica).

It’s very easy to tell when a new item makes my list. If at any point during a meal you hear me making a sound in the back of my throat that sounds like pig grunting (my mother calls me Felix, as in Unger), count yourself among the lucky few to witness an oral allergy progressing.

Amendments and Wind

Because I’m, well, me, I’m going to kick this thing off with a rant. Gardening, to me, is about shooting from the hip and feeling my way through things. Obviously, it takes some background information to succeed like this (botany, for example). But with the basics in place and some experience under my belt, it works. (I do realize that other people want different things from gardening. There are surely as many reasons as there are people.)

So it has taken me about a decade of gardening to even get to the point where I keep a journal about my efforts, recording varieties purchased, successes, failures, timing. But what has pushed me to the edge today (besides the wind, which I’ll get to) is amendments. I am definitely NOT interested in pulling out a calculator. It is completely antithetical to my entire gardening life. Alas, I spent a good hour (or two?) today measuring beds and calculating inputs. I even have a spreadsheet, for cripe’s sake!

What brought me to this sad state of affairs is chlorosis:

Chlorosis is a yellowing of new growth, owing to a mineral deficiency; generally iron, but possibly magnesium, manganese, etc. The strawberries above are most likely an iron deficiency. See the dark veins?

But my Blue Plumpago is probably short of manganese, since they’re prone to that:

No dark veins (click the pic to enlarge).

My soil here in McKinney is heavy (clay) and alkaline. Most plants like a pH at least a little acidic, some like it very acidic. So having alkaline soil is not conducive to the most efficient uptake of what minerals are present. That would be true even if the full range of minerals were there, which they most likely are not in my new garden. We moved in last August, and both of my big beds were, until quite recently, grass. On top of that, they were most likely subjected to chemical fertilizers and pesticides. So besides adding compost several times a year, I need to amend the soil with organic supplements to bring everything into optimal balance.

Which is why I’ve wasted so much time this week purchasing and planning for applying these amendments:
Garden-Ville 7-2-2 fertilizer (good for the entire lawn and garden)
Nature’s Guide lava sand (for a range of trace minerals and improved soil structure)
Garden-Ville greensand (for iron)
(All purchased at Shades of Green, in Frisco. Excellent, excellent garden center that sells only adapted and native plants, and employs very knowledgeable and committed staff. Not to mention having a spiffy website. Annoying; but spiffy.)

OK, so I’ve made my calculations and I’m finally ready to spread this stuff, in preparation for planting my first batch of fall seeds. I get outside and realize that it is STILL windy. Its’ been more than a week and we’ve had winds between 25 and 50 mph every freakin’ day. What’s worse is that every day the forecast at weather.com says one more day of wind. Then the next day it says one MORE day. Then the next day . . . I’m about to go out of my mind. It blew over our 7 ft high sunflower that JUST bloomed. It blew our shade umbrella over the privacy fence into our neighbors yard; again. It’s been completely dehydrating my poor tomato plants, and has left them all leaning into one side of their cages:

(sob) I’m so over this wind. [You can see my friend the Mockingbird, who likes to hang on the cages, at the top left. The white rectangle behind the tomatoes is a sign promoting the McKinney Farmer's Market, which I heart.]

Now the cursed wind is preventing me from spreading these damned amendments and getting on with my life. Cursed and damned.

Are we relaxed, yet?