Garden News

It's taken us 3 weeks, but we've finally got this year's garden planted. I should qualify this. We've finally gotten this year's first round of garden planted because one of my gardening goals this year is to attempt succession planting as we strive toward leading a more sustainable life. There's no reason we can't do it; we live in south Florida. We should be able to have several crops of different vegetables year-round. It will just take some planning and diligence on my part. And some more studying of Tom MacCubbin's south Florida gardening guide, The Edible Landscape, and Eliot Coleman's The Winter Harvest Handbook.

Okra, Eggplant and Spinach seed yet to emerge

So here's what we've got planted so far:

• Green beans, bush (3 varieties)
• Carrots (2 varieties)
• Beets (2 varieties)
• Mustard greens
• Spinach
• Swiss chard (2 varieties)
• Collard greens
• Garlic (first time we've tried it)
• Tomatoes (27 plants, all but 2 heirloom, assorted varieties)
• Bell peppers (yellow and red)
• Eggplant (just 2 plants - we're not big on eggplant in this house)
• Cabbage (2 varieties)
• Brussel sprounts
• Cauliflower
• Okra (a little to early to plant it, but I wanted to finish up an old pack of seeds)
• Rutabagas
• Turnips
• Potatoes (ordered, not yet planted)
• Onions (ordered, not yet planted)

Our First Attempt at Garlic

Swiss Chard (seedlings and seed)

I think we've got a good, albeit late, start this year. I'm trying to incorporate some new gardening techniques (companion and succession planting) in an effort to increase our production and get us closer to our goal of eliminating vegetables from our grocery budget. I planted our first ever "crop" of garlic as a border around our brassica bed. Hopefully, it will reduce the pests that love to munch on cabbage, brussel sprouts and cauliflower. There would be some broccoli in this bed, too, if I could find it. We have such a hard time finding veggie seedlings in this area that it reminds me that I need to learn how to start my own seeds. Another post.

Read more...

Buy Local and Save Money

Have you noticed the new signs for some of the produce in your grocery store? The ones that say, "Locally Grown?" I was at Publix yesterday and for the second time noticed a sign that said just that, and underneath it were green beans, zucchini and yellow squash all grown in Redland, Florida (a well-established farming area in Miami-Dade county), just 1 county south of me, less than 100 miles away.

Buying local really does make sense in a lot of ways. One, you get fresher produce because it didn't have to travel hundreds, if not thousands, of miles to get to you. Two, because it's fresher, it tastes better and it's healthier. Three, you've helped out the environment because you've cut down on the carbon emissions the traveling to market took. And four, you've helped support local businesses--a really good thing, especially in today's economy.

And speaking of today's economy, if you shop at local farmer's markets, you will actually save money. I stopped in at Southwest Ranches Farmer's Market, my local organic farmer's market, and you wouldn't believe the prices--75 cents a pound for big organic onions (the non-organic onions at the grocery store cost between $1.29 and $1.39 a pound); organic sweet potatoes were $1 each (at the grocery store, the non-organic sweet potatoes run $1 a pound); red creamer potatoes and baking potatoes were 59 cents a pound (at the grocery store, they run $1 a pound). Pickings were a little bit slim, but, remember, it's planting season here in south Florida, not harvesting season, and they still had a decent selection--oranges, pears, apples, limes, lemons, stunning scallions, lettuce, onions, potatoes, sweet potatoes, herbs, homemade salsa, zucchini, yellow squash, butternut squash, hubbard squash, cucumbers, the end-of-season tomatoes, etc. The owners of Southwest Ranches Farmer's Market even install edible yards for your home, as well as selling an assortment of vegetable plant seedlings, many of which you can see growing right there on the property.

If you want to find your local farmer's markets and other locally-produced food, take a peek at Local Harvest and Slow Food. Both have extensive listings.

So shop local, save money and eat healthy!

Read more...

Renewal

We had an extremely hot summer. So hot, in fact, that I didn't go out and putz around in the yard. Every time my thoughts drifted toward gardening, self-preservation intervened and my sensible self said "No, Ara. Anything you attempt to grow will burn up in the heat. You will burn up in the heat. There's no point in this." So I didn't.

Even the month of October was unseasonably hot (don't quote me, but I think we had 2 weeks straight that the feels-like temperature stayed in the high 90s/low 100s). It's usually the month south Florida gardeners plant tomatoes, but anyone I know who planted tomatoes in October have tomatoes not doing much because those poor little 'maters were just too hot. So I'm hoping it was a good thing and not just laziness on my part that I waited.

Looking down hill toward front gate in Middleton, Tennessee

Same view, closer - Middleton, Tennessee

Cabin - Middleton, Tennessee

My husband and I just got back from a wonderful 2-week vacation in Middleton, Tennessee at my mother-in-law's 176-acre farm. We got an RV this year to make travel with the puppies easier (just try cramming 3 dachschunds, 2 adults and 2 or 3 suitcases into a Prius for a 2000-mile trip). Not green you might think? Not so. Even though RVs use more gasoline than today's cars (we got 10 miles to the gallon during this trip, which is actually pretty good for RVs), they cut down tremendously on the carbon emmission domino effect that takes place when you drive via car or fly. Think about it. When you stop at a hotel or a restaurant, you set off a flurry of carbon emmission activity. We even successfully avoided using the RV generator. Though I stayed connected to work via my laptop, I was able to utilize this little 2-outlet gizmo for electricity that we got a few years back that plugs into the cigarette lighter. We're hoping in the next couple years to be able to get some solar panels for our electrical source so that we can always avoid using the generator in our RV travels.

Before we left, I was already thinking about what needed to be done to get the garden going again (obsessively watching the 100-Mile Challenge) and hopefully making it more productive than last year on our return. And while in Tennessee, I reconnected via Facebook with Lucy Owsley-Goodman, an old high school friend, who owns Boulder Belt Eco-Farm with her husband, Eugene, in Eaton, Ohio. Together, they have created a wonderfully-productive sustainable farm that provides a CSA farm-share program, a produce market, sustainable farming education, and produce at local farmer's markets. I'm quite sure I've left out a good number of the things they do, so I apologize in advance. If you want to learn more about sustainable living and farming, Lucy's Boulder Belt Blog is required reading. I started at the beginning and am currently somewhere in 2006. Lucy and Eugene have become my new idols; they give meaning to the kabbalistic term "tikkun," the idea that the world is profoundly broken and can be fixed only by human activity.

Boulder Belt Eco-Farm at Farmer's Market

Boulder Belt Eco-Farm

Mickey (hubby) and I were busy all weekend. I made 3 loaves of honey-wheat bread and a batch of chicken stock. Then we made it to Home Depot to pick up PVC to attempt to make some mini-hoop houses (described in the Boulder Belt Blog) which should help make the garden more productive this year (I ordered the row cover material from Gardener's Supply while in Tennessee), bought a new upright freezer to be able to have room to put up some produce, and picked up some organic cedar mulch at Pop's Nursery to start reducing the grass in the back yard in the paths between our raised organic garden beds.

Okay. I'm getting too windy here, so I'll stop for now. More soon. I promise.

Read more...

Lunch Tiffin-Style

I know it's been a while since I last posted. Unfortunately, life and the south Florida heat have gotten in the way of my blogging and gardening. But I recently came across this great new product that I just have to mention. It's called a tiffin and, while a lot of us have never heard of them before, tiffins are nothing more than eco-friendly, sustainable lunch boxes to go. According to Wikipedia, the word "tiffin" means lunch, or any light meal. It originated in British India, and is today found primarily in Indian English. The word originated when Indian custom superseded the British practice of an afternoon dinner, leading to a new word for the afternoon meal. It is derived from the obsolete English slang "tiffing" for "taking a little drink or sip." When used for "lunch," it is not necessarily a light meal. Notably, it is used in the name of Mavalli Tiffin Room.

In South India and in Nepal, the term is generally used for between-meal snacks: dosas, idlis, etc. Outside South India, like Mumbai, the word mostly refers to any packed lunch, often light lunches prepared for working Indian men by their wives after they have left for work, or for schoolchildren by their parents. It is often forwarded to them by dabbawalas, sometimes known as tiffin wallahs, who use a complex system to get thousands of tiffin-boxes to their destinations.

Tiffin often consists of rice, dal, curry, vegetables, chapathis or "spicy meats." In addition, the lunch boxes are themselves called tiffin carriers, tiffin-boxes or sometimes tiffins.

Enough word history. These things are great. Oprah recently featured the To-GoWare Stainless Steel Tiffin on her show, touting it as "a great way to make a waste-free lunch!" So, help our landfills. Practice a sustainable lifestyle. Buy yourself a tiffin.

Read more...

Chicken Stock 101

I put up my first batch of chicken stock yesterday. I tend to use a lot in cooking, so thought I could make a healthier (no salt, no BPA from the can, no additives, sugar or preservatives), less expensive version myself. Not hard at all.

Ingredients:

8 pounds chicken backs
2 medium-large onions, peeled and large diced (save the skins and trimmings for compost pile)
2 large carrots cut into 2-3 inch chunks
6 stalks celery cut into 2-3 inch chunks
16-20 peppercorns
8 sprigs fresh thyme from the garden
12 sprigs fresh parsley from the garden
2 bay leaves

Yield: 4 quarts

Instructions:

In a large stock pot (mine holds 20 quarts), place the chicken backs in cold water to cover. Bring to a boil over medium-high heat and boil for 5 minutes. Pull out the chicken backs, place in a large bowl and dump the water and scum. Clean the stock pot. This process virtually eliminates having to skim any scum later.

Place the chicken back in the stock pot and cover with 8 quarts of cold water. Slowly bring to a boil over medium heat. Simmer uncovered for 30 minutes. Now add the rest of the ingredients and simmer uncovered for 3 hours or until liquid is reduced by half. Strain and let stock cool on stovetop, and then refrigerate.

I poured my stock into 6 ice cube trays for quick freezing and easy use as sometimes I only need a little bit of stock. Then I put the frozen cubes into a freezer bag. Each tray held just a little over 2 cups of stock. The rest I put into a quart Ball canning jar and put into the refrigerator for use this week. I'll skim the layer of fat off the stock in the jar and save that for cooking, too. Anything sauteed in chicken fat is good.

Read more...

My Edible Yard Update

I haven't written a real post (the kind that tells you what's going on in my garden) in a while. I've been busy. In the last 2 or 3 weeks, I've set up two 4' x 16' potato beds. That means my father and I lugged 120+ cinder blocks from the front yard to the back yard and set them up (doesn't include the fact that we had to pick them up first). Exhaustion is not the word for what we felt afterward. And then we lugged 100 cubic feet of soil to fill them. I'm still waiting for the potato seed, but the beds are ready as soon as the seed arrives.

Potato Bed in Process of Being Filled with Soil

Last week, we got new gutters for the house. I didn't have to do anything for that other than write a check, but there was a method to my madness. I had 2 brand spanking new 75-gallon rain barrels I wanted to install and what's the point without gutters that are draining into them? Though they came with a linking kit to have one barrel overflow into the second, I decided to put one in the back of the house and one in the front so I can hook a hose to each for ease of watering since I've planted in both places. We haven't had any rain since they were installed, so I'll give an update when it rains, but I can tell you these things collect dew! Aside from the obvious reduction in our water bills, I'm proud that this will move our home one tiny step forward in our efforts to become more sustainable. I have no doubt that next year we'll end up ordering 2 more barrels because it gets mighty warm in south Florida in the summer and the veggie plants will need extra watering.

Rain Barrel from Gardener's Supply
This leads me to my shopping spree at Gardener's Supply. I considered the stash my Hanukkah presents to myself. I made sure to tell my husband he didn't have to shop for me this year (as if shopping was his favorite thing to do; I think he's been in a mall 4 times in the past 12 years). And everything I ordered was useful, from the tomato cages and pea trellises, all the way down to my new hot pink Daisy Clogs that I got on sale for $12.00 (I couldn't pass them up).

Then there's the garden. Well, there's more good news than bad, but there is bad news. Rats have gotten my entire crop of broccoli, but, for some reason that hasn't yet made itself clear to me, they didn't touch the brussel sprouts or eggplant that are in the same bed. Rats with tastebuds? Got to be something in the broccoli I'm guessing. On the good side, my Meyer lemon tree is blooming profusely, we've eaten a couple salads made with our own lettuce, I've got baby tomatoes beginning to pop out all over, the blueberry bushes are sprouting beautiful tiny pink bloom buds, and the herbs and onions are doing well. I honestly can't complain. Oh I forgot. I can complain about one thing. I had stuck 4 bush snap bean seeds in one of the beds that had some room just for the heck of it and they actually all started to come up, but my eldest child Caleb (a dachschund) decided to push his way through the gates we built to keep him out so he could check out the beans himself. One lonely little bean plant survived. I tried it again today and this time placed cinder blocks against the gate to block him.

Meyer Lemon Blossoms

Yellow Submarine Tomato Babies

Blueberry Blossom Buds
Somewhere in the midst of all this, I baked 6 loaves of a really easy and delicious honey-wheat bread and started a new project to make a bread board/slicer with my dad. Thank goodness for two 4-day weekends in a row. I'll put the recipe in the next post as this one is getting rather lengthy, and post pictures and instructions for the bread slicer.

Read more...

Busy Winter Gardening in South Florida

In most parts of the country, winter is the time for preparing for spring planting. Not so for south Florida gardeners. We're busy planting and planning. I just received my used copy of Tom MacCubbin's The Edible Landscape and here's what he says about what vegetables to plant when in south Florida:

January

• Beets, broccoli, cabbage, carrots, cauliflower, celery, collards, lettuce, mustards, peas, potatoes, radishes and turnips. Fertilize every 3-4 weeks.
• Anise, cardamom, catnip, chives, comfrey, coriander, fennel, horehound, mint, parsley, rosemary, sage and thyme.
• At mid-month, sow cucumber, eggplant, pepper, squash and tomato seeds indoors to have transplants ready by March.
• Plant cold-tolerant fruit trees, shrubs and vines as they become available at garden centers.
• Florida spring begins in February, so start looking through seed catalogs and order.

February

• Make final plantings of cool-season vegetables (January) early in the month.
• By the end of the month, begin planting warm-season crops, i.e. beans, cantaloupes, corn, cucumbers, peppers, squash, tomatoes and watermelons.
• Fill in gaps in the herb garden.
• Start seeds of tomatoes, eggplant and peppers indoors to have transplants ready in 6-8 weeks.
• Plant apples, blackberries, blueberries, figs, grapes, peaches and pears.
• Prune fruit trees.
• Add a 2-3 inch layer of mulch to spring gardens.

March

• Plan for a long, productive season by making early plantings of corn, peppers, tomatoes and watermelons.
• Plant beans, cantaloupes, cucumbers, eggplant, okra, Southern peas and squash.
• Fertilize young plants every 2-3 weeks and those plants nearing harvest every 3-4 weeks.
• Sprout sweet potatoes to serve as transplants later in the spring.
• Plant more herbs.
• Plant papayas.

April

• Plant beans, cantaloupes, cherry tomatoes, cucumbers, eggplant, okra, peppers, squash, Southern peas, sweet potatoes, calabazas, chayotes, yard-long beans and other tropical crops.
• Plant anise, basil, chives, dill, borage, oregano, mint, rosemary, sage, savory, sweet marjoram and thyme.
• Trim banana foliage and fertilize monthly.
• Fertilize trees, shrubs and vines planted earlier.
• Fertilize container gardens weekly.

May

• Plant lima beans, snap beans, collards, and summer spinach. Continue planting heat-tolerant veggies such as calabazas, chayotes, yard-long beans, okra, Southern peas, sweet potatoes, cherry tomatoes and tropical crops.
• Plant basil, chives, dill, sage, savory, sweet marjoram, mint and thyme.
• Cover developing papaya fruit with paper bags to protect from fruit flies.

June

• Plant summer veggies - okra, Southern peas, sweet potatoes and cherry tomatoes.
• Plant boniato, calabaza, dasheen, roselle, sweet cassava, yard-long beans and yautias (what the heck is a yautia?)
• Cut back blueberry bushes. Cut blackberries to the ground after fruiting.

July

• Plant calabaza, cherry tomatoes, okra, pumpkins,Southern peas, sweet potatoes and yard-long beans.
• Plant basil, chives, dill, mint, oregano and sweet marjoram.
• Mid-month, sow eggplant, pepper and tomato seeds to have transplants for late August.
• Harvest early avocados and mangoes.

August

• Sow watermelon seeds by the 10th. Wait until mid-month to plant beans, broccoli, celery, collards, corn, cucumbers, eggplant, onions, peppers, squash and tomatoes.
• Plant basil, chives, dill, mint, oregano and sweet marjoram.
• Pears should be ripening - pick early to avoid rot and browning.
• Harvest winter-chilled pineapples.
• Sow vegetable and herb seeds for fall transplants.

September

• By mid-month, complete plantings of beans, cucumbers, eggplant, peppers, squash and tomatoes.
• At end of month, plant broccoli, cabbage, celery, collards, onions and turnips.
• Start seeds for brussel sprouts, cauliflower, celery, lettuce and onion.
• Plant anise, borage, cilantro, fennel, lavender, rosemary, mint, sage, sweet marjoram and thyme.
• Prepare strawberry beds for planting.
• Fat, plump sweet potatoes should be harvested.
• Persimmons should be ripening and ready for harvest.
• Start more seeds for cool-season planting.

October

• Plant beets, broccoli, cabbage, carrots, cauliflower, collards, kohlrabi, lettuce, mustards, onions, peas, radishes, spinach and turnips.
• Start transplants of brussel sprouts, cabbage, cauliflower, celery, collards, lettuce and onions.
• Plant strawberries.
• Plant anise, borage, chives, coriander, fennel, garlic, lavender, mint, rosemary, sage, sweet marjoram and thyme.
• Harvest papayas, sweet potatoes, chayotes, cocoyams and dasheens. Harvest pecans when when husks begin to open.

November

• After harvesting the end of the warm-season veggies, start planting beets, broccoli, cabbage, carrots, cauliflower, collards, kohlrabi, lettuce, mustards, onions, peas, radishes, rutabagas, spinach, Swiss chard and turnips.
• Plant anise, chives, cilantro, dill, fennel, garlic lavender, rosemary, sage, sweet marjoram and thyme.
• Harvest sweet potatoes, chayotes, cocoyams and dasheens.
• Start picking ripening citrus - pick only what is needed; leave the rest on the tree.
• Sow cool-season veggies and papaya seeds.

December

• Plant beets, broccoli, cabbage, carrots, cauliflower, collards, lettuce, mustards, onions, peas, radishes, spinach and turnips.
• Plant anise, chives, comfrey, cilantro, dill, fennel, garlic parsley, mint, thyme and sage.
• Harvest more citrus.

Whew! I'm thinking we need to relocate up north.

Read more...