First Harvest 2011 - Broccoli

The cool season crops in my kitchen garden have been doing quite well in the extended cool weather.  Several days ago the broccoli was ready for the first harvest.

We used it with asparagus in a stir-fry with black bean sauce.  It was delicious.  Here is my recipe:

Asparagus-Broccoli Stir Fry with Black Bean Sauce

Organic Ingredients:
1 bunch asparagus, sliced into one inch pieces
1 bunch broccoli, chopped into bite size florets and stem pieces
1 cup black beans (soak in water overnight to soften)
4 cloves garlic, chopped
1 medium onion, diced
1 tbsp ginger, finely chopped
Sea salt
1/2 cup Sake
Olive oil
1 tsp sugar
1 tbsp sesame oil
Rice, serve hot (I cook in rice cooker)

Directions:
Heat olive oil in wok.  Saute ginger, garlic and onion until golden.  Add beans and salt liberally; allow beans to cook for several minutes.  Add sake and sugar; mix all ingredients well.  Add asparagus and broccoli and cook until crisp-tender.  Drizzle with sesame oil and serve with hot rice.  Makes four servings.

Summer is FINALLY here!

So now that we are a third of the way through June, summer-like weather has finally started to make an appearance.  The sun is out, and that means it is time for me to get caught up on all the warm crop planting that I had hoped to finish at least a week ago.  No matter; now is the time to investigate which varieties of vegetables have less than ~85 day growing season and stick those in the ground.  I plan to make a trip over to Hungry Mother Organics today to pick up the majority of my plants:  tomatoes, peppers, beans, eggplant, cucumber, etc.; whatever they have in small plant form that I was planning to grow anyway.  I figure this gives me a good start on making up time as opposed to planting everything from seed.

Last weekend I did at least manage to get my onion and potato sets planted.  The potatoes this year are yukon gold, red norland and a purple variety.  The onions are red, white and yellow.

Red Onions

White Onions

Mulched Potatoes & Onions

Potatoes & Onions

My 25 pounds of potatoes and onions are still not in the ground.  I think that is the project for the weekend.  I have decided that they will go in the back garden, so the first thing to do is finish clearing the live weeds and doing a little soil prep.  I did manage to buy some mulch last weekend, so at least I can do some moisture retention once the potatoes and onions are planted.  The big question now is whether to use the "row method" or "mound method" for the potatoes.  The benefit to mounding is that the potatoes lie underneath the mound materials, so can be easily accessed at harvest.  The mound should consist of a little soil, but mostly compost or grass clippings (from pesticide and herbicide and any other chemical-free grass, of course).  So the trick is that as the potatoes grow taller, you have to keep adding compost or grass clippings, which as it breaks down continues to positively amend the soil with nitrogen.  Since right now I only have a front lawn, I'm not sure I have enough clippings to feed both the compost pile and the potatoes.

Decisions, decisions.

Organic Farming...?

Okay, well maybe not farming exactly (yet); but definitely backyard organic gardening on a fairly significant scale.  It is  important to me for my family to eat as locally and organically as possible, due to the unknowns of what is in the food from factory farms as well as the carbon footprint in terms of water usage and wastefulness from food being mass-produced and shipped long distances.  It doesn't get more local than the backyard, and I have complete control over the "organic" piece.  I also am interested in being more self-sufficient with growing our own food to cut the costs of our grocery bills.


None of this is particularly new or earth-shattering stuff.  I'm sure my grandparents would have thought it strange to not have large home gardens, for the quality of food and money savings.  Throughout my gardening experience I am finding out three things they I'm sure they inherently knew:  it's a hell of a lot of work, success is a total crap shoot, and both the journey and the end product of your own fresh food on the table are quite satisfying.


The Kitchen Garden
I currently have two garden areas; the first is a "kitchen garden" just off the back deck that is about 100 square feet, and has an adjacent compost pile.  The intent of the kitchen garden is to grow most of the very early season crops (lettuces, broccoli, chard, broccoflower, cabbage, and one protected tomato), as well as two perennials; asparagus and strawberries.  Once the early season crops are done and the warm weather is here in hopefully June, this garden will be mostly herbs for cooking.


The kitchen garden is fenced to keep the rabbits out, and even though I didn't garden last summer due to my son's birth at the end of June, I did amend the soil and add some bark mulch to keep the weeds down (more on Nevada weeds in a moment).  So the kitchen garden was pretty much ready to go this spring.  I added about six more bags of bark mulch to keep ahead of the weeks, and planted seedlings from Greenhouse Garden Center on April 17th.  I added some Dr. Earth Organic 5™ Tomato, Vegetable & Herb Fertilizer 5-7-3 as I planted.


I still have a few things to do in the kitchen garden in the next few weeks; the garden has a main irrigation line running to it, but I have yet to create the garden drip system so am still hose watering every couple of days.  I also am debating whether to plan some lettuce and cabbage as seeds or transplants before the cool season is done.  The kitchen garden will ideally change with the seasons to best accommodate what is currently needed in the kitchen.

Kitchen Garden with Compost Pile

The Compost Pile
I have wanted to compost for years, but was not able to get a pile going until now.  The pile is adjacent to the kitchen garden so that it is easy to add food scraps and other compostable waste from inside the house.  I am using the alternating green layer - brown layer technique, and am throwing Dr. Earth Compost starter on each of the green layers to try to get things heating up.  My biggest challenge is that we do not have a lot of brown waste (dead leaves, branches, etc.), so I am throwing in some bark mulch for my brown layers to get things going.  I have plenty of green, nitrogen-rich waste in the form of food scraps and grass clippings.

The Back Garden
The "back garden" is out past where our eventually back lawn will be towards the back of the property.  It is fenced in and is a little less than 1000 square feet.  It does have an irrigation system and drip lines in place, although it looks like something chewed through a few of the lines over the winter.  The soil was last amended a year ago, and the area has pretty much sat vacant ever since.  Well... not vacant at such, because the Nevada Weeds moved right on in (cue dramatic scary music).

Nevada Weeds are not like ordinary weeds.  They know that they are not going to get much water, so when it does rain, they put on inches or feet overnight.  It is not unusual for them to to be four feet high and eight feet in diameter.  They are usually very thorny, and like to drop nasty sticker "goat heads" that will invade scratch and irritate your skin as well as stick onto all clothing (and then poke through it).  Gloves are a must for dealing with Nevada Weeds.  Oh, the other thing about Nevada Weeds?  When they dry up they become extremely brittle, yet still firmly rooted to the ground- so when you attempt to pull or dig them out they crumble and spread their seeds everywhere.  To illustrate, here is a picture of what was essentially bare ground a month ago, and what happened after two days of minor rainfall:

Backyard Weeds in April 2011

So I did hack a path out to the back garden to see what I was up against, and here is what it looked like after I cleared the dead weeds in the garden:

Back Garden April 2011 After Dead Weed Removal

As for what was cleared, they are here:

Dead Weeds Cleared from Garden

See, the thing about organic gardening; there is no Roundup or other herbicide allowed, because it puts poison on your food (and Nevada Weeds just laugh and give the finger to RoundUp and keep growing anyway).  So the way to get rid of weeds is to make sure the soil is amended and balanced correctly, and then pull the weeds.  The prep work can be backbreaking but is essential to a productive organic crop.  Once the ground is cleared, I will apply bark mulch similarly to the kitchen garden to keep a weed barrier of sorts in place.

So next steps for the back garden... I have 15 pounds of potatoes that need planting, as well as red, yellow and white onions.  So I will be racing to clear the green weeds so that I can get those root veggies planted, and in about a month (after probable last frost date) I will plant the majority of the warm season crops.  The following image will serve as my official "before" picture for the back garden:

Back Garden "Before" Photo

Time to start digging!