Category: Urban Gardening

Heirlooms To the Rescue

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Here’s a review I found of the book The Seed Underground: A Growing Revolution to Save Food by Janisse Ray. A timely topic, since many of us, right now, are gathering seeds and starting plants indoors, looking forward to spring.

If you don’t have time to read yet another book, don’t fret! Do one small thing to help keep heirlooms alive: make it a goal this spring to plant at least one heirloom variety in your garden, windowbox, or flower patch. I have found several seeds that I want to try HERE, and am very excited to get planting. -Andi

Heirlooms To the Rescue

Heirloom Seeds We often think of saving seeds in literal terms: letting flowers and vegetables go to seed, whether edible at that point (squash, tomatoes) or not (lettuce); separating and cleaning the seeds, drying them, and then protecting them until we’re able to plant again. But there’s a larger issue here, one that’s apparent when you consider that 94% of the seed varieties available to farmers and gardeners in 1900 have been lost, never to be grown again. Today, many of us are involved in saving seeds from extinction. To quote an old ecological saying: extinction is forever.

Today’s activists — there’s no better word for them – have taken those extinctions to heart and are on a quest to save as many varieties of seeds as they can. Janisse Ray, author of The Seed Underground: A Growing Revolution to Save Food is one of them. Ray’s book is a sort of manifesto on the practice and importance of seed saving. While she mixes in chapters that discuss the assault on non-corporate, non-patent protected heirloom seed varieties and the dangers of industrial agriculture, most of the book is a collection of intriguing stories about those involved in the seed saving movement. There’s the story of Iowa photographer Dave Cavagnaro who teaches willing gardeners about preserving and raising heirloom squashes; legendary seed saver Will Bonsall of Maine who explains his pollination and seed-saving techniques in terms that everybody can understand — sex. Then there’s the late seed saver and poet Jeff Bickert of Vermont who gave away heirloom seeds and starts for 11 different kinds of beans and 18 varieties of potatoes. All of these people, including the Tomato Man, who offers 312 varieties of heirlooms and open-pollinated tomatoes, and the Sweet Potato Queen, who grows 40 varieties of heirloom sweet potatoes, including some which are purple, are the kinds of characters you won’t easily forget.

People aren’t the only subjects here. Ray digs up the history of the Conch Cowpea, a spreading vine that was drought resistant and adaptable to the kind of sandy soils known in the coastal south. It served as a source of protein in places where northern beans wouldn’t grow as well as providing ground cover and a silage crop for livestock. Then there’s Keener Corn, grown for dry grinding into meal. Keener corn grows a stalk that can be very tall, 10 to 12 feet, but produces only a single ear per stalk. Why bother? It makes the tastiest meal that Ray, or its grower Bill Keener, have ever tasted. Need another reason? It’s been in the Keener family for generations. Letting it go would be like putting great-grandma’s Bible in the trash.

And that’s where author Ray excels. Sure, she talks about how some heirlooms are valuable because they are disease resistant or easily adaptable to certain local conditions. And then there’s flavor. In a world where commercially-grown produce tends to all taste alike, Ray finds the kind of varied flavors that chefs, both home and professional, cherish. But above it all, Ray brings a sense of family and community to the heirloom culture. Growing food — growing unique food — makes for a social camaraderie and a sense of purpose that other social endeavors have a hard time matching. Ray is also expert at personalizing the stories, bringing in her own experiences, sometimes unashamedly so, in a way that will connect with readers. You might not feel like you’re reading a gardening book while going through The Seed Underground, It’s more like a collection of short stories with a central theme. It’s that entertaining. Let’s also say its critical reading for those who want to know where their food comes from and have decided to grow their own. I can’t think of a better way to spend a few of these cold winter nights ahead of spring than reading Ray’s book.

Urban Gardening

Students Grow and Donate Over 100 Pounds of Food

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Students in the Study Garden Club sort and weigh some of their harvest to donate to the local food bank

Winter is firmly here; the sweet memories of warm weather, green grass, and a thriving garden are becoming more distant. Though new excitement comes along with snow (snow angels and subsequent snow ball fights, followed by hot cocoa indoors), the nostalgia of running out to the garden, sans shoes and socks, can hit hard. Especially for kids; a month might as well be a year–a whole winter seems a lifetime!

Will summer ever come back? To keep the memory alive, it’s fun to look back at the previous growing season. Not just our own fun pictures (of which we have hundreds), but also pictures of what other people have grown.

I found this series of pictures on Facebook, and was utterly thrilled. The school, Study Elementary, is in our school system. I’ve driven past Study hundreds of times, but have never visited–though now I’m so fascinated by the work of the Garden Club that I’m pondering: how odd would it be for a stranger to request a visit during the growing-garden months?

The coolest thing about the Study Garden Club is this: The club set a goal to grow and donate 100 pounds of food to our local food bank. When they tallied up their totals, they had surpassed the goal; 114 pounds of fresh produce had made its way to Community Harvest food bank. What an amazing success! I looked and found that a local newspaper noted the donation here, at this link.

Every school should have a garden, and a Garden Club with active membership. Enjoy these pictures of Study Garden Club. My little crew of gardeners and I loved seeing what Study’s students grew, and can’t wait until it’s time to get back out and try some new ideas for ourselves. Perhaps we will even try our hand at growing a cotton plant (as you’ll see in the following pics, Study did just that) this upcoming season!

Some of the fresh tomatoes donated to Community Harvest

Using your Harvest

Nature's Candy

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Want a sweet and tasty snack that your kids might even choose over their dwindling bag of Halloween candy? Dry some apples! You will end up with chewy, unbelievably sweet morsels of happiness. You will put a lot of work into them and they will disappear shockingly quickly. But really, the work is well worth it!

Follow along with me as I dry up a big batch myself!

1). Borrow a food dehydrator. You could always buy one if you have cash laying around, but maybe you have a really nice family member like I do who buys lots of food gadgets, and then lets you use them, sometimes for months on end. 😉 If the weather is perfect (i.e. it’s still mid-summer) and you want to get really rustic, try drying your apples outside on a warm day. Two ideas that intrigue me (and that I may be crazy enough to try with the kids next summer):

*put the fruit on trays on and put them in your car

*lay the fruit out on your trampoline on a hot day, covering it with mesh

Let’s say that you have a food dehydrator handy, though, and electricity. Here’s the one I borrowed:

2). Get your apples ready. I found the most efficient way to get somewhat-uniform apples was this step by step process:

*Cut a big old mess of apples up, using an apple corer-slicer. Put a dark colored towel under your workspace; the sticky juice that oozes every time you use the slicer will stain the towel if it’s white. Trust me, I know. Make a mountian of apples, and don’t worry that some of the apples will have bad spots or mushy yucky parts–you will sort them out as you peel them in the next step. Just keep going, shoving that slicer through the apples like you are on a slicing marathon. Beware: you will get juice everywhere, your hands will get very sticky, and juice will spray into your eyes on multiple occasions.

*Wash your hands of all the stickiness so that you are clean and fresh for the next step. Peel each apple segment with your favorite knife. Depending on the size of the apple it came from, you may need to slice the segment in half. Throw all the segments into a big bowl as you go along. You want all the pieces to be somewhat similar in size, but it’s not even close to rocket science–they will all dry eventually.

*Dump the segments onto the trays of the food dehydrator and spread them around so that no edges are not touching. No need to be perfect. Though if I do say so myself…mine look spread out pretty perfectly. It was my third batch of apples–what can I say, I’m becoming a natural.

*Dry the apples for the time recommended on the dehydrator. I didn’t have a manual to refer to, so I did an internet search, which gave me the very precise time of anywhere between 7 to 24 hours. Since I don’t believe in specific times for anything anyway, I just opened the lid and checked the apples every hour or so. After about 8 hours, my apples had a perfect chew to them. You want to avoid getting them so dry they are brittle, but you definitely want all the moisture out of them so that they will keep on your shelf for months.

*Open the finished product right up on the table around a gaggle of children. For some reason leaving the apples in the dehydrator is more appealing than ever. They will dive in on it, peeling each dried apple off the trays to put right in their mouth, and think you are amazing.

If there are some dried apples left, pack them up in airtight containers.

If not devoured, they will stay good through the winter.

CSA Urban Gardening

Sprouting an Urban Farm

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Hey, Fort Wayne folks! Right here in our neck of the woods, Matt and Ann Merritt are attempting to accomplish exactly what I feel like the future needs for our food production. Kudos to their hard work. I plan to visit their booth at our new year-round farmer’s market that gathers every first Saturday of the month (see details here), and begin to get to know them. I especially like that as they searched for land, they were dedicated to finding a space that would be accessible to urban and suburban areas, even though they could have found a more rural property. When I picture the future of locally grown food, I see this! I’m so very excited to see real people putting into action all of my ideals! -Andi

Photos by Samuel Hoffman | The Journal Gazette

Matt Merritt tours his greenhouse at ATOM Acres. The Merritt family grows vegetables and herbs to sell locally.

Published: November 11, 2012 3:00 a.m.

Sprouting an urban farm

Couple hopes to expand operation with CSA, classes

Rosa Salter Rodriguez | The Journal Gazette

Merritt checks his kale for bugs in the greenhouse.

Merritt carves away the comb to harvest his honey.

Matt Merritt, wife, Ann, and sons Trace and Oliver plant kale in the greenhouse at ATOM Acres.

Matt Merritt is standing inside his kitchen on a recent sunny, if chilly, October morning. A beehive, honey dripping from honeycombs, lies in partial disassembly on and under his family’s round oak table.

Merritt pulls out a shelf and starts scraping the caps off one of the combs. Then he’ll place the rack in a hand-cranked centrifuge to extract the honey – a job, he says, that his blonde-haired 3-year-old son, Oliver, likes to “help” with.

“This is our sugar. Well, we sometimes use regular sugar, but we also use this,” the 30-year-old says. “It’s great stuff, because it smells so great.”

His wife, Ann, 26, smiles, while crocheting on a step nearby while the couple’s second son, Trace, 1, naps in another room. “Matt comments all the time about the smell. He says he likes the job because he smells like honey afterward.”

Yes, to Matt and Ann, this is the sweet life – life on what they hope will become a sustainable urban farm.

They call their nearly 6-acre patch of ground at the corner of Bass and Thomas roads ATOM Acres, an acronym made from the initials of family members’ first names.

From their land – across from a housing development and around the corner and down the street from a major local shopping strip – the Merritts plan to provide year-round vegetables, herbs, flowers and other products to area residents – while educating them about food production and preservation.

“This is everything that I thought that I’d need,” says Matt, who came to farming after a stint as a helper to a personal chef in Chicago made him curious about where the high-quality ingredients he was using came from. “Everything,” he says, “just felt right.”

Nonetheless, the two acknowledge theirs is a long row to hoe.

For now, after being able to purchase the land with the help of Matt’s mom and stepfather, Bobbi and Jerry Suetterlin of Fort Wayne, they’ve started with what growers call a hoop house – a plastic sheeted greenhouse – that Matt found at a public sale.

Inside, rows of beds are sprouting spinach, kale, Swiss chard and several kinds of leaf lettuce ready for harvest. The produce will be sold at the year-round farmers market at Parkview Field that is open the first Saturday of each month.

There are also several kinds of herbs and tiny pea vines that will be planted outdoors in the spring – and a germ chamber for sprouting seeds.

On the grounds, about 2 1/2 acres of which are tillable, Matt has eight beds for other vegetables, including broccoli and cabbage now, and tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers and other produce next year.

His goal, he says, is not just to sell at farmers markets, but to start a community-sponsored agriculture program, or CSA. He’s not quite sure what form it will take – “Winter is a good time for mapping that out,” he says.

But it likely will involve recruiting shareholders who will pay an entry fee and would determine at least in part what foods they’d like to receive.

Still in its earliest stages is converting an existing equipment garage into a facility where produce could be sold – with a kitchen where food could be preserved and classes given.

If all that sounds idealistically lofty, Matt says, well, it is. But he and Ann, who met in a health foods shop when both were living in Hawaii – “I overcharged him for peanut butter one day, so he remembered me,” she says with a smile – also come to the task with a well-suited background.

After working with the chef, Matt went on to study organic farming in a nine-month program at Michigan State University, commuting weekly to East Lansing, Mich., while Ann lived with his parents. There, he learned to manage a hoop house and flower fields, as well the business of structuring and marketing a CSA.

He says with the amount of land he has, and only a slightly larger growing space, the university program supported a 160-member CSA, farmers markets and wholesale sales. “That’s a lot of food,” he says.

Ann grew up on a 400-acre ranch cooperative in Washington, where dairy cows, pigs, goats, chickens, sheep and horses were raised. She says she started gardening, growing “strawberries, potatoes and petunias” at the age of 9.

Later, she lived in Florida and worked for a tree farm and plant nursery while taking botany and related courses at a community college. She says she knew when she met Matt that their goals and experiences meshed.

After leaving Michigan State, Matt tried helping friends raise chickens on a farm for a time. But when his parents said they wanted to help him farm on his own, he started looking for a suitable property.

“We looked everywhere – Waterloo, Syracuse, Bluffton, Avilla. We looked at a place in Leo. We wanted to be within close driving range of markets,” he says. “That’s the problem with famers – they’re not where the people are.”

The land they found was a fluke. It seems as if the land should be within city limits. But it’s actually in Wayne Township and zoned residential/rural agriculture. Other conventional crop lands lie nearby.

By going to farmers’ markets this summer, he’s been building an online newsletter subscription list that he hopes will become a customer base.

“One of our biggest goals,” he adds, “is to have heirloom varieties of vegetables that are beautiful and different,” he says, adding he’d someday like to start another Michigan State idea – “an edible forest” of fruit and nut trees.

“The whole idea is to get back to local food – food that hasn’t sat in a truck for a week and in the store for a week. We need to get out of the industrial revolution mindset when it comes to food that bigger is better. It can be useful in some ways, but maybe it’s not the safest way or the most economical way,” he says.

“Maybe we all need to eat more like farmers eat.”

rsalter@jg.net

Using your Harvest Vegetarian Recipes

3 Sisters Soup

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I’m paying homage to the 3 Sisters Garden with some FABULOUS soup!

Not too long ago I posted about my visit to the beautiful homestead of FutureFarming. While I was there, I immediately recognized one of the gardens as being a ‘3 Sisters Garden‘. I found this great link that explains the legend, and includes some nice diagrams showing how you can implement a 3 sisters garden in your own space:

Please CLICK HERE! Learn about the 3 Sisters Legend!

A 3 sisters garden lends itself perfectly to a pot of warm soup. This recipe is incredibly simple, yet delicious! I kept thinking that I’d have to add something to it, because it was so insanely easy, but it tasted perfect. My family could not get enough of it. I had tried a couple other versions of 3 Sisters Soup before this one; one included zucchini, white beans, and corn–another included acorn squash, corn, and pinto beans.

This particular recipe stood out from the rest to me because it has green beans and potatoes in it–two of the plants that were growing in the 3 sisters garden at the Future Farming homestead. I also like that this recipe includes hominy. Native Americans would soak corn kernels in a lye solution, creating hominy, which stored better than raw corn because it would not sprout. In addition to improved storage, hominy is also said to have an edge over plain corn nutritionally, as the soaking process converts some the vitamins into a form that is more readily accessible to our bodies. Though most of us don’t know how to make hominy, it’s currently readily available, canned, in just about any grocery store. I have found white and golden hominy in cans–I personally think the golden hominy is much more flavorful (white hominy is made from white corn, golden from yellow corn). As a side note, I think learning to make hominy would be a great sustainability project! Click here to see a very simple way to make your own hominy.

Something to keep in mind when making this simple and soul-warming 3 Sister Soup–make sure you use a good, quality vegetable broth–since there are no spices except pepper, you’ll need that good broth to carry the flavor. Of course, you can always add spices and herbs if needed, but I find that the wonderful flavor of this soup in its barest form calls for nothing extra! I have made it three times for the family (I had a monster butternut squash to use up)…and it will be a staple around here during the cold months. Enjoy!

Three Sisters Soup

(adapted from allrecipes.com)

2 c. golden hominy (can use corn instead if desired)

2 c. fresh or frozen green beans (trimmed and snapped if fresh)

2 c. winter squash (i.e. butternut or acorn), peeled and cubed

1 1/2 c. peeled and cubed potatoes

5 c. vegetable broth

2 T. butter

2 T. flour

1/4 t. pepper

Place the hominy, green beans, squash, and potatoes into a pot, and pour in the vegetable broth. Bring to a boil, then reduce heat to low. Simmer until the vegetable are soft. Melt the butter in a bowl and blend the flour into it with a fork, then stir into the soup (I dip the bowl into the soup a few times to get all the buttery goodness out). Increase heat to medium, and cook until the soup thickens. Season with pepper and serve.

Peeling and chopping a squash can be challenging. I find it easiest to cut the squash into small sections that are more easily peeled, then dicing up the flesh of the peeled sections.

Urban Gardening

Growing the Garden Season–Practical Model of a Suburban Garden

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I read this article over a week ago when it was published in my local Sunday paper, and I keep thinking about it, for a few reasons:

1). This guy has come up with some really nice raised garden beds. I love his idea of lining the inside with insulation to keep the beds at a nice temperature–not too hot in summer, not too cold in winter. I would like to try building a couple of beds like his.

2). He has tips for extending the growing season all winter long.

3). Though it’s not stated specifically in the article, the photo of the spacing of his plants demonstrates the biointensive method of planting, which I am very interested in.

4). This is a little more abstract, but I really love the pictures in the article because it shows the gardener’s property pretty well, and it’s obvious he lives in a typical suburban neighborhood. Not a sprawling country acre, but a standard-sized suburban lot. I find this very encouraging. As we face food shortages and the probability that people will have to start growing food, it’s nice to have good models of how it can be done, in every situation and property size.

Photos by Swikar Patel | The Journal Gazette

Seed templates made from old truck tire flaps help Arthur Stahlhut make the most of the planting space at his Fort Wayne home.

Published: October 14, 2012 3:00 a.m.

Growing the garden season

Raised beds, covers help enthusiasts harvest all year

Rosa Salter Rodriguez | The Journal Gazette

Raised beds outfitted with hoop frames can be covered with agricultural cloth and function as mini-greenhouses in Stahlhut’s backyard.

Holes drilled in a diagonal pattern allow the master gardener to space plants four inches or six inches apart.

When most area gardeners are readying their vegetable beds for a long winter’s nap, long-time master gardener Art Stahlhut was out in his garden pointing out his newly sprouting lettuce.
If things go according to plan, say Stahlhut and his gardening partner, Karen Fecher, both of Fort Wayne, the garden will have the same outcome as last year.
“I had the most beautiful fresh lettuce mix for my Thanksgiving table,” Fecher says.
Stahlhut believes in extending the season for vegetable growing – which usually means he harvests something in virtually every month of the year except January.
This year he’ll have tomatoes on the vine well into October and lettuce, spinach, onions and carrots well into November. Last year, with the mild temperatures, he pulled plump red radishes and harvested romaine lettuce the first week in December.
Stahlhut says he doesn’t fight Mother Nature – he just plays to her gentler side so plants get what they need, whatever the calendar says.
His secret, he says, is growing veggies in eight raised beds, which he designed and built himself, and covering them when appropriate with hoop frames to create mini-greenhouses.
He’s refined his techniques over the years, with his most recent beds consisting of a frame made with sturdy two-by-fours to stand about 20 inches tall. There’s no real reason for the exact height, he says, “except I have bad knees.” Twenty inches gives enough room for root development while alleviating the need to have to kneel to cultivate, weed or harvest, he says.
The bottom of each bed is lined with wire mesh with landscape fabric on top of it, “to keep critters out,” Stahlhut says. The sides are filled in with 16-inch-square patio tiles two inches thick.
The sides are then lined with thin foam insulation sheets and then even thinner sheets of metal flashing to keep in warmth. The metal also makes tilling with a small roto-tiller possible without tearing up the insulation, he says.
Beginning in early fall, he adds to some of the beds what gardeners call “hoops” – curved arches made of metal wire or conduit pipe that are covered with translucent agricultural cloth.
Stahlhut, who helped create raised beds for vegetables at the demonstration garden outside the office of the Purdue Extension Service at IPFW, says the raised beds allow him to control the soil composition and temperature.
He uses layers of grass clippings and shredded paper and horse manure for the bottom half, and swears by a mixture of one-third peat, one-third compost and one-third sphagnum for the top. He calls it the “lasagna method” because of the layers.
“Art makes the most wonderful soil mix,” Fecher says. “It’s fluffy and light, and you don’t have to deal with the (northeast Indiana) clay.”
He makes his own compost in one of the raised beds. “We don’t use synthetic fertilizer,” he says, adding that he doesn’t pull out tomato plants at the end of the season, only cuts them down to encourage worm action in the soil.
Another of Stahlhut’s secrets is intensive planting. To get more out of his small spaces, he has made seed templates from, believe it or not, old truck tire flaps into which he’s drilled two sizes of holes for even seed placement. He also occasionally intercrops.
“The rule of thumb is you can feed a family of four from a garden the size of a two-car garage. Well, we only use half that size, but we use every square inch of it,” he says.
As for tools, Stahlhut says a thermometer that reads both high and low temperatures is essential, especially at each end of the growing season.
So is keeping a close eye on the coverings, because the soil can quickly get too warm even in cool weather and “fry the plants,” he says. They’re held to the hoops with giant clothespins, so they’re easily removable.
Fecher says covering crops keep them warmer in the spring and fall and shades them in the summer. She says they saved a lot of lettuce from bolting when the weather turned quickly hot this year. Last week, after temperatures dipped to freezing, the cover raised the ambient temperature to 65 degrees with a couple of hours of sunlight.
Stahlhut doesn’t use plastic to cover his plants but does use a conventional cold frame with plastic sides and top.
The pair has been selling lettuce and other veggies at the Historic Main Street and South Side Farmers Market.
“We want to get more into production. Right now we can’t grow it fast enough. We’d sell out every time,” Fecher says.
Stahlhut says he travels to regional gardening meetings and festivals, reads a lot and watches gardening videos to get ideas and learn new approaches. Two favorites videos are “Develop a Sustainable Vegetable Garden Plan” by Homeplace Earth and “Growing Greens for Love and Money” by Susan Moser.
But mostly he likes to experiment – whether it’s growing different varieties of garlic or planting peanuts in a bed under the lamp post in his front yard.
“It’s always a work in progress,” he says.

rsalter@jg.net

Urban Gardening

It's Pumpkin Time!

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If you caught my blog post from just about a year ago, you might remember that we had a pumpkin patch. It grew from the seeds of a jack-o-lantern, and we ended up with only two pumpkins (I cheated and staged some more pumpkins from the grocery store so that every child could take one home–they never knew!).

Well, this year was a wild success in comparison!

First of all, I have to tell you where the pumpkin seeds came from. Early in the spring, I got a beautiful surprise from one of my former daycare kids, Maggie. Maggie was one of the biggest enthusiasts of the Little Hands Garden as it started to take root. She had a garden at home, and was part of the Garden Club at her preschool, so she had all kinds of tips. I enjoyed her curiosity, her excitement, her quiet observation of the tiny miracles that took place with our projects. Here she is, working with our seedlings last year:

I make a lot of special memories with all the kids in my care. However, the nature of my job as a daycare teacher requires that I say goodbye when the early years pass. I often watch a child from babyhood, through toddlerhood, and then preschool age–and those years are absolutely precious to me. I’ve been lucky that most of my daycare children stay for the ‘long haul’ through all those years…turnover is low. I treasure the time spent with all my little ones, watching them change and grow. It was time for sweet Maggie to enter Kindergarten, and her days spent here would now be spent at school. I’ve been through the goodbyes many times before in the 9 years I’ve been doing this job, and it never gets any easier! Luckily, Maggie’s mom has made the transition so wonderful for us all by bringing her for visits when she has days off school. Her daycare friends and I LOVE her visits! After one such visit, Maggie and her mom decided to bring me a gift. I was so completely touched by the surprise. It was a beautiful collection of seeds, handmade seed markers, seed starter mix, a mini-greenhouse, and adorable little planting pots.

Needless to say, I was speechless at the thoughtfulness of this gift. Of the various wonderful seeds Maggie brought for me and our garden, a packet of pumpkin seeds immediately caught my eye. I knew we were going to have a great little pumpkin patch using them.

We planted the seeds the the late spring (only 6 seeds total–2 small hills got 3 seeds), and watched the pumpkins develop from tiny green bulbs to perfect little orange cuties, just like we did last summer. It is an excitement that never gets old.

This year I definitely did not have to cheat and add in a few store bought pumpkins; our tiny humble patch produced THIRTEEN perfect tiny pumpkins!

The best part about the pumpkin patch is that harvest time occurs when the rest of the summer crops in the garden are gone. It brings us back to the now brown-and-scraggly garden so that we can see the results of the summer’s pumpkin babies. It keeps the garden in our minds–and for me, it gets me thinking of what fall crops we can put in, because I just don’t want the growing to end!

There is just something magical about kids and pumpkins: they adore them, and get more excited to harvest them than any of our other crops. Here we are on our journey our little pumpkin patch this week. We are officially ready for fall!

Originally Posted At Little*Big*Harvest

Urban Gardening

Carbon Sources for Compost

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I thought this was a nice chart showing some easily obtained ‘brown’ (carbon) material for your compost pile. I always seem to have plenty of ‘green’ materials (vegetable scraps, mostly), and I’m trying to focus on adding more carbon to make our compost as balanced as it can be. Though this chart is certainly not exhaustive, it’s a nice start!

Urban Gardening

Tomato Truck

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We got out to the garden a couple of days ago, and on a whim, wheeled one of our yellow dump trucks with us. It made a great container for us to fill up with all the last-minute yellow pear tomatoes we could find. It was like a treasure hunt, peering into the jungle of tomato vines, trying to spot those beautiful golden gems. A few tiny red tomatoes were hiding in there too…which promptly ended up in Noah’s mouth as a juicy snack!

After loading up the tomatoes, we made a big production of driving the dump truck into the house, where we ate most of the harvest with our lunch. Some ended up in a pile on the counter, next to the last of our green peppers and one lone cucumber.

Each day we have been filling up our pockets with any green tomatoes we can find. The kids have found this hilarious: scandalous, even–for all summer long I have emphasized to ONLY pick the yellow or red tomatoes, NOT the green. They think they are getting away with something, plucking the green ones! But alas, all those green tomatoes are coming inside with us, for the warm ripening days are over. Of course tomatoes taste best when ripened on the vine, but we will try to get some more out of our last harvest by placing all the underripe ones into a paper bag with a banana. The ethylene gas released by the banana as it ripens will also help the tomatoes reach their potential. Last year we tried the same technique with an apple, and got pretty good results. I read that bananas release much larger amounts of ethylene than any other fruit (like apples), so we are curious to see if we get better results than we did with the apple.

(Note: Bananas, for all their wonderful qualities, are not a sustainable food source as sold conventionally. Many people who seek sustainable lifestyles and want to lessen harm to earth and their fellow earthlings have given up bananas completely. I have cut back, but have found it very difficult to give these amazing and versatile fruits. Keep an eye out for a discussion here on the blog about bananas and their place in a sustainable diet and world.)

Urban Gardening Using your Harvest

Too many little tomatoes? Roast them.

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We got a little too excited this year when planting our tomatoes. We remembered how much we loved the luscious little yellow pear tomatoes, so we planted 5 of them. That may not sound like a lot, but when each plant keeps producing, and producing, suddenly 5 plants create way too many tomatoes to enjoy.

Big red tomatoes are easier, I think, to deal with in excess. Simply make sauce! I toyed around with the idea of making yellow tomato sauce (and I still may), but then I remembered this idea that I had seen somewhere. Ideally, I’d like to dehydrate the tomatoes in a food dryer, or a homemade solar dryer, to remove all the moisture. I have neither of those options at the moment, so a long slow roast in the oven is the way I went. This is an excellent way to do something different with all those little cherry, grape or pear tomatoes that keep piling up! Here is what I did:

1. Slice the little tomatoes in half and lay them on a baking sheet, cut side up. You can do this with any little tomatoes, of any color. Drizzle with the tiniest bit of olive oil (I find my handy mister perfect for a task like this to get a nice, light even coating). Sprinkle with a tiny bit of salt. I used pepper this time, but next time I won’t–the pepper flavor was a little too much in the end.

2. Place tomatoes in an oven that is preheated to 250 degrees. Then walk away and find a great book to read. Do not clean the house. That’s not fun. Do something FUN and relaxing, but don’t leave the house for 3 hours. That’s how long it will take for the tomatoes to be mostly leathery, with just a bit of moisture left in their centers.

3. Eat a whole bunch of them. Mmmm! Now stuff the rest in a jar and cover with olive oil. If you are little horrified, like I was at first, about dumping a bunch of olive oil into a jar–don’t worry. The oil can still be used for other recipes once your tomatoes have been eaten up. You can keep these in the fridge for a few weeks. Some sources say several months. I really doubt they would last that long without being devoured! Eat them plain from the jar, or put on a salad, or a pizza. Use them like you would sundried tomatoes. If you have a great recipe using sundried tomatoes, or a cool use for these little roasted nuggets of tomato goodness, please post a link to it in our comments!