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Gardening 
Sun Sep 11, 2011 at 18:21:59 PM PDT
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A while back I wrote about planting sweet potatoes. Well, this week we harvested them!
Just a fraction of our harvest
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Wed May 11, 2011 at 17:58:24 PM PDT
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This week, our family made compost tea. More accurately, we made Actively Aerated Compost Tea (AACT for short). AACT has a number of benefits over regular compost. For one thing, it allows you to expand a small amount of compost to use over a larger area. Second, compost alone can only go in your soil, but compost tea can also coat the foliage of your plants with beneficial organisms. See instructions and photos below.
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Mon May 09, 2011 at 18:44:13 PM PDT
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If you recall, I got a tip from Joan Gussow to grow sweet potatoes to improve my soil. Well, Joan Gussow knows a thing or two about gardening, so I took her advice. Sweet potatoes are a warm weather crop, so here in San Diego we grow them in the spring and summer. You can buy sweet potato starts (called slips) at plant nurseries, or you can grow your own from sweet potatoes. I went the latter route because it's a LOT CHEAPER. Instructions and photos are below.
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Thu Apr 28, 2011 at 11:07:24 AM PDT
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It's early spring planting time up at Dody's in the Northwest corner of Connecticut and we've been putting in lettuces, radishes, peas, carrots and on and on, and piling some lovely aged manure from Jay's cows around the garlic which went in last October and is now about 8" tall. It's work, serious work, and it demands serious experience and skills (which I am do not, unfortunately, yet possess).
Late winter/early spring is also time for seed catalogs, which farmers and gardeners flip through until they are dogeared. They are written to appeal to the senses. Johnny's Selected Seeds of Winslow, ME, has lovingly photographed vegetables that literally make the mouth water.
Fedco, also Maine-based, prints theirs, all 138 pages of it, on newsprint and eschews photographs ("We assume, however, that you will want to spend your money for high quality seeds rather than high quality pictures..."). However, their verbal descriptions are equally sensuous: delicious, firm, luscious, young, tender, deep, yielding, juicy, thick, hard, long, sweet, wild, musky, slender, creamy, &c.
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Sat Apr 23, 2011 at 05:58:06 AM PDT
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( - promoted by Jill Richardson)
By Ed Bruske
aka The Slow Cook
I was invited to lead a workshop on urban farming Friday at my alma mater---American University here in D.C. I was surprised to learn that this all-day "Eating Green" conference was sponsored by the university's philosophy department. But when you think about it, what could be a more existential question than the one that concerns our future survival in a world where fertile soil and water are being rapidly depleted and we've come to depend on an unsustainable supply of fossil fuels to feed the growing multitudes?
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Sun Apr 10, 2011 at 03:58:09 AM PDT
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I've spent the past week immersed in local San Diego goodness. First off, there was the NBC airing of a Victory Gardens San Diego Garden build that I attended and wrote about here a few weeks ago. And on the same day, my city (a suburb east of San Diego) held a meeting where they requested public input on the future of our city, specifically focused on health & sustainability. Food issues where very much on the table in that discussion, so my roommate and I both went. And we both advocated for urban agriculture including legalizing chickens. The meeting, of course, gave me a migraine... but it was worth it if that's what it takes to make change.
The next day, around 11am, I heard a knock at the door. I was still in bed, dealing with that migraine. I got up, in my underwear, without my glasses, and ran to answer it. It was a reporter from the local ABC affiliate, and she wanted to do a story on my chickens. I told her I'd go put pants on. So my little chickees were on TV! The best part of the experience for me was the reporter's reaction to my chickens, because she was surprised how they did not smell at all and there weren't any bugs. I explained that chickens are natural composters and that compost, done right, should not smell bad. She was also impressed that the chickens were part of a larger, very well thought out plan for my garden.
But the big kahuna of local San Diego food activism came this weekend with the Cultivating Food Justice Event. This is a conference held annually that never fails to impress me. I attend food-related conferences around the country, and this one is unique. It's all local attendees, focused on local, national, and international issues. There's a mix between workshops that cover larger issues, like the farm bill, and workshops with immediate hands on applicability, like building solar ovens. In the past, I've attended workshops on backyard chickens and beekeeping.
This time, I went to one on farming in areas of scarce water and I learned some mind-blowing strategies for growing food without much water. For example, give your plants a few deep waterings a week instead of shallow waterings daily to encourage the roots to grow deep. Or direct seed when you can instead of growing or buying starts, because it will make the roots grow deeper, down to where there is moisture. But the craziest was a story about how people in some parts of Africa will trim the leaves and side shoots off of tomato starts until they have a 2-3 foot tall plant with leaves on top. They dig a narrow hole and lower the plant in, back fill it with rich compost, and give it some water to start it off. The result is that the plant is rooted deep enough to reach the moisture in the soil and survive without rain. Amazing!
The event was held in City Heights, a low income area with a large population of immigrants and refugees from all over the world. You can hardly walk a few blocks without seeing a thriving garden there. It's truly inspirational.
A new event this year was gathering into groups of people by their neighborhood in San Diego to make plans for how to improve our own communities. We gathered email lists for each neighborhood, so that activism can continue beyond the conference.
To me, the best part of the conference is its inclusiveness. It's always free, accessible via public transportation, with child care and translation available, and there is usually free food too. The result is that the attendees come from all segments of society, reflecting the diversity of our city. This is crucial, but it's not something that every conference like this achieves.
Saturday night, after the conference, we all gathered at a nearby home for a fundraiser for a new non-profit, Grow Strong. Founded by Amy and Malaki, a couple that is invaluable to our local food justice community, the organization is going to work toward food sovereignty in Malaki's home region in Kenya. The fundraiser included traditional Kenyan foods and locally brewed beer and mead, including an East African style beer made from millet and sorghum that was delicious.
Every year I am so inspired by the amazing people and knowledge of San Diego, which is, by and large, a conservative area where you wouldn't necessarily expect to find such an amazing food justice community. This year is no exception.
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Wed Mar 23, 2011 at 20:16:05 PM PDT
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Victory Gardens San Diego, or VGSD as it's known around here, is a group with a simple mission: to get people gardening! And one of the main ways they do that is by bringing a team of volunteers to someone's house or to a school or community garden site and, all in one day, building a garden from start to finish. I've been an avid gardener for about a year, but most of my training comes from books or trial and error. Thus, I went to the most recent VGSD garden build with 2 goals in mind: first, to help (of course) and second, to learn how the pros go about gardening.
Join me below with a photo diary of how a normal yard sprouted a garden all in one day.
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Thu Feb 24, 2011 at 13:47:16 PM PST
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In case you ever wondered how worms do it, I caught two of them in the act when I opened my worm bin today. They didn't mind posing for the camera:
It's so amazing what you learn once you start gardening!
(On a totally unrelated note, I interviewed Joan Gussow about her new book Growing, Older this morning and I will post the interview as soon as I'm done transcribing it, within the next seven days.)
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Thu Feb 17, 2011 at 01:55:56 AM PST
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I don't have kids of my own, so I am extremely lucky that I've got someone else's children in my life. My roommate has two kids, the younger of whom is four. And, at least some of the time, she likes to garden.
There's something about preschoolers that goes away at some point. I don't know when, but it seems to be before age seven. I can suggest something - anything - to my four year old friend, and because I'm cool, and I said it, my idea is always cool. I can say "Yummy! Daddy makes the best broccoli," and scoop a big bunch of it into my mouth, and Ms. Preschooler, who does not necessarily want to eat her vegetables all the time, will do the same. We'll agree that Daddy is the best chef in the world, and we'll both eat all of our broccoli.
Her much cooler, more knowing older sister would NEVER fall for that one. If I think the broccoli is delicious, well, she knows that actually broccoli is disgusting, and Daddy and his roommate are WEIRD. No way I could get Ms. Cool Pre-pre-teen out into the garden with me (most of the time... once a year or so hell freezes over and she gets interested in it). But the little one's been gardening with me since age two.
So today, when I headed outside to the garden, Ms. Preschooler announced she was coming with me.
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Wed Feb 16, 2011 at 18:13:43 PM PST
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What I've been doing with my garden and thinking about and observing since the terrible cold was invaded by some warmish.
(crosspost from Daily Kos)
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Wed Feb 16, 2011 at 12:52:20 PM PST
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Nature never stops amazing me. Case in point: My enormous lablab bean plant, that is STILL producing:
Maybe "still" isn't the right word, since it didn't start producing when it was "supposed to." Details below.
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Fri Sep 10, 2010 at 20:37:20 PM PDT
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Well, it's September down here in Carlsbad, New Mexico, and it's down to the low 90's in the afternoon. A truly pleasant time of year, one in which an old hippie's thoughts turn to vandalism.
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Mon Sep 06, 2010 at 21:48:47 PM PDT
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Summer has come and gone, with an eventful and often disappointing few months in our garden. We live in a very dry climate and it's been stressful to the plants to survive in such poor soil. This is our first year gardening, and I wasn't willing to pay for too much in the way of soil inputs, so we made due with what we could produce ourselves. We had a little bit of compost, some nitrogen from a cover crop, and that's about it. Despite that, we did get some food from our garden, and we had a lot of fun.
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Sat Jul 24, 2010 at 08:31:27 AM PDT
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A few years ago, one of the plum trees in my yard had boughs that were so heavy with fruit that the they were in danger of breaking, as the photo below illustrates.  But this year, almost nothing, maybe two or three plums on the whole tree. The larger tree to its side was also mostly barren. I don't do anything to care for the plum trees -- no pruning, fertilizing, extra watering, or whatever. The bee population in my neighborhood is pretty good, as far as I can tell, since there isn't much pesticide use, there are a wide variety of flowering plants and probably some backyard beekeepers. So what is going on? Do plum trees go through cycles of fruit production? Do they burst forth with lots of fruit at a certain age, then slow down? Or is weather the critical factor? I suppose that most of the fruit production 'knobs' are outside of my control, but I'm still curious to find out why this year is so terrible. (There is a third tree on the other side of the house that had so-so production; I harvested about 8 pounds of fruit, which I will turn into plum-honey preserves and standard plum jam.)
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