DryStoneGarden

All those online petitions do sometimes work. The White House is going to take out 1,000 square feet of lawn and plant a vegetable garden. I remember when people were criticizing the San Francisco victory garden as a photo op, my thought was, well, maybe, but it’s exactly the kind of photo op we need. It will be great to see photos of the U.S. president weeding the White House vegi garden.

Here’s a link to Michael Pollen’s long NY Times Letter to the Next Farmer in Chief from last October, which includes a call for the next president to make a vegetable garden.

ryan 3/20

mache, corn salad

Tiny little mâche. The plant in the photo is approaching harvest size, and it’s still dwarfed by the trowel. I added the trowel for scale, but it reminds me of Spinal Tap, “Our Stonehenge monument was in danger of being trampled by DWARVES!”

I find mâche is really easy (although slow) to grow and a pain in the neck to harvest and totally worth it. You have to pick and clean a bunch of little plants to make one single salad, but it has the best flavor of any single green, it’s supposed to be really healthy, and the ease of growing it completely makes up for the effort of harvesting. Our plants are all volunteers from the first batch I grew a few years ago, the only effort with growing them has actually been to keep them properly thinned so they can reach a decent size; I’ve thinned ours at least four times this year. They can apparently be a bit invasive–one of the common names, corn salad, comes from it’s tendency to naturalize in agricultural fields–though I don’t think they are a problem in the Bay Area.

Last Christmas, the organic market near our house was selling 4 ounce packages for $13. That was early in the season and unusually high, but even at half that price, it’s gonna be on the list of things I have to grow for myself. It kind of fascinates me to think that someone could charge so much money for something that is so easy to grow.

FromSeedToTable has a post about golden corn salad, which I’ve never grown, but sounds worth trying.

ryan 3/14

black mulberry female flower

We bought a bare-root black mulberry for a client last week, but then wimped out and decided to hang onto it. We’d never planted one, they seem somewhat unknown in the Bay Area. The fruit doesn’t keep well, so it doesn’t show up in stores, and the trees need a good amount of space to spread their limbs and drop their fruit, more space than many people have in their yard, and more space, we decided, than our current client. The problem is that the fruit will stain anything it touches, so you have to plant them away from decks and patios and so forth, and the trees get big, thirty feet tall and wide usually, so picking the fruit isn’t always easy. The foliage is unspectacular, and the bloom is sort of interesting but un-showy. You plant them for the fruit, and hope they don’t end up ruining the carpet. 

But, the fruit, ahhhhh…the fruit. It’s like a sweet, musky, delicious blackberry. We once got paid to move a 24″ box mulberry for a client, because it was dropping fruit on the deck, and we had to pick (and eat) all of the fruit before we moved it. After tasting the first one, our eyes all got wide and we looked at each other, “We need one of these!” So we’re happy enough to keep one in a pot for a while.

Wildmanstevebrill.com has an entertaining website with info on the fruit and a number of other “wild” foods, some of which I’d never eat. Two different nurseries have told me they are selling a ton of bare-root fruit trees this year and it seems like there is a ton of online interest in edibles, so it seems, anecdotally at least, that the economy has people turning to the victory garden concept. I’m all in favor.

ryan 3/3

We grow a lot of basil for pesto, freezing large batches using the ice cube tray method (a revelation when I heard about it: ice cube trays to make the perfect serving size, leave out the cheese, store the cubes in ziplocks, then defrost a cube at a time and serve, preferably on a baguette with a poached egg and cheese), but we like parsley pesto just as well or even better than the basil stuff and we’re able to have it fresh year-round. I used to deride the parsley batches (2 cups parsley, 1 cup olive oil, 1/3 cup walnuts, 2 cloves of garlic, salt, pepper in a blender) as poor-man’s-pesto, but it tastes really fresh and green, and it’s much easier for us to grow, not caring about our weak summer heat. Last year’s parsley plants are starting to bolt, so I planted the next batch this past week, six plants. With any luck we can keep production going without any significant lag.

ryan 2/13

Our garden is smack in the middle of the Bay Area fog belt, so we are marginal for every heat-loving plant. We don’t even try to grow bell peppers, but we get good harvests of poblanos every year. We grow it with an ugly blue plastic bag and bottles of water around it to give it as much heat as possible. I’m not sure how much it helps, but we harvested a fistful of small peppers on New Year’s Day, so I’ll be putting the bag and bottles out next year too.

ryan 1/2