Hello

I love this song.

To all of you who have been a part of our lives through this blog, we miss you. 

To all of you who leave advertisements on our comments, you're assholes.

<3

poem from the garden

tan lines

left home

without 

a watch today

remembered

a sandwich

ham and swiss

on pumpernickel

with mustard

and mesclun greens

a patch of purples 

and greens in

a postage stamp garden

planted at the end of summer

when the sun still sings 

on necks and arms

kelly r. allen

CSA

As I had mentioned forever ago, in our quest to be urban-dwelling-locavores we accumulate food from three primary sources: our community garden plot, our backyard garden, and from a CSA. I suppose that there should be a forth source, which is our farmer's market, but that input is pretty small (I'll still try to post about it).

Photoed above is what our CSA pick up looks like. We currently only get a half share, which runs us ~$400.00 a season; and a season is every week from the end of May to the end of October. This box looks a little light, because it doesn't have the abundance of squash and potatoes that we've been getting lately, but as tomatoes come into full swing it will start bulking up again.

We think of our CSA as the food producer for standard veggies that we could grow in our backyard, but by obtaining them this way it allows us to use our limited space for other veggie necessities.

Little Chores

Jude is over 19 months old and his curiosities in the garden are becoming less destructive. Earlier in the season he could dig and fling dirt and that was about it. Now his fine motor skills are becoming more complex, which is allowing him to help with things like cleaning garlic. The 15-20 minutes we spent on this chore was an absolute joy. Granted, his attention span didn't allow for the full hour we needed to complete the job, but that only meant we had something to do together the next morning, and the next.

Garlic Harvest

I finally got around to pulling the garlic. It's been sitting on this screen door for a few days and the plan is to let it stay there a few more. After about a week I'll cut the stems and trim the roots and then probably let it sit a little more. In the past, our garlic seemed to get a little funky unusually early. Hardneck garlic should at  least keep until the next planting, but ours did not. My guess is that we never let it dry long enough, so this year I plan to let it sit a little longer. It's been incredibly dry and hot around here, so the conditions are perfect for this little chore.

The variety we got is called German Extra Hardy. Some of the bulbs got enormous. My plan is keep half for eating and then plant the rest. If time allows I may also get a second variety to diversify the crop a bit. We'll see.

Full-metal trellis

If I needed to attach an adjective to this trellis, it would be industrial. Other than a few short pieces of rope, the entire structure is made entirely of metal. As I said in a previous post, our community plot is designed to be low maintenance; which for us means build everything heavy-duty once and leave it be.

These trellises are for our shelling beans. The idea is to just let them climb, die, dry, and get harvested. Pretty simple.

The Blueberry Blues

 Jude (aka Blueberry) just figured out the harmonica. He now plays for not only us, but also out the office window for all our neighbors to enjoy.

First look at our community garden plot

The video is a little shaky (take Dramamine before viewing).
 

Glorious Complications

We need to re-rethink our city garden philosophy. This year the intensive companion planting got way out of control. Our approach, knowing that we would have oodles of farmers' markets and a CSA to rely on, was to focus our efforts on the diversity of our flowers and veggies, as opposed to looking for food storage sized production. In one of our smaller beds (4'x16') we managed to squeeze in 20+ varieties just in the first planting alone. Needless to say, things got a bit crowded and then spilled over into out of control.

We're still learning how to eat locally and sustainably in a city/town. This year our food has primarily come from four sources: half of a CSA share, with a fruit and egg share; our garden; our community garden plot; and the occasional farmers' market visit. The key to this kind of food consumption (is that the word I'm looking for) is knowing your inventory at every stage of the season. Now when I say "at every stage of the season" that makes it sound more complicated than it really is. Well no, scratch that, it is complicated; however the complications aren't because we're having to check our inventory often, it's because we need to plan really far in advance and calculate into our quantities food that we're not growing. Here's an example:

Our CSA starts in June. One of the first items we received were greens and lot of them. However, on our garden production end we can produce greens much sooner (and dammit, if we can have it, we want it). The tricky part, we discovered, is that once the CSA greens start coming in, and our garden is still churning them out, we end up having far more than we could possibly consume. I think at one point I was eating three to four salads a day. Now I love salads just as much as the next gardener, but holy hell that gets to be a bit much.

Now that we know this, our solution for next year may be to start a cooperative community plot, grow and share our greens there, and once the CSA kicks in, we can surrender the excess plot greens to our partners.

We're also going to redesign the way we use our backyard and community garden plots. The approach will be based on time spent in the garden. We can obviously get to our backyard space every day; so our plans are to grow items that we would want to access frequently or would need daily care (peas, beans, cherry tomatoes, etc.). The community garden plot we want to use for low maintenance, space hogging plants (paste tomatoes, winter squash, soup beans, and so on)

I'm guessing that we may have this system down in another season or two. In the meantime we'll keep taking notes, cussing (and laughing) at our mistakes, and hoping for solid weather.

Cool Resource

I was searching for some cold frame plans today and came across this great site. Its a giant list of agricultural building plans, all in pdf format.