We ate our first bits of the garden. This made a huge cesar salad for Christmas Eve (with Briana's Asiago Cheese Cesar dressing- Delicious) and then we still had a huge bag of leaves to take to my sister's for Christmas. There wasn't anything especially spectacular about the taste, but it was still wonderful because we grew it ourselves. I think we are going to pop over a little later today to see how things are going.

Almost all the plants and veggies just seem very happy this year. I just read in the paper that we have had 7.14 inchs of rain since July which is more than normal. So that is really exciting. We have had a few freezing nights to contend with, but nothing seems to have hurt the plants so far too much. (We did have some spider plants that look sad, but maybe they'll come back.) Keep growing guys!

Peas

Our peas are looking AWESOME!!! I can't wait to eat them. Though really I can't wait until I get to grow a whole bunch of shelling peas in the spring.

shift in focus

So the original intent of this website was for me to document what we are growing in the New Era Community Garden and what I am learning about growing vegetables. In the meantime though I realized that I am just as excited about the various flowers and plants we have been growing around our yard. When we moved into our house 1 1/2 years ago, all we had was a big weedy, dirty piece of ground surrounding our house. It has been very exciting the changes we have been making to our landscape. This process has been going on ever since we moved in and will be ongoing for years. I am jsut as excited about this as the vegetables, so I am expanding the scope of what I will be documenting here.

bamboo

So, our backyard goes right up to an apartment complex. Honestly, it isn't the nicest complex either. All of the bathrooms look down on our yard and the owner just doesn't take the best care of it. It is a very interesting experience. Well about a year or more ago, Jason discovered that bamboo might be just the thing to screen our backyard from the apartments. We have just been kind of putting off buying it because I think it seemed like an overwhelming project.

However, in the paper last weekend there as an artile about a guy up in Rocklin who has a bamboo nursery and was having an open house. We figured we would just go up and check it out and, if nothing else, learn a little more about what type of bamboo would work in our backyard. We had already determined that we wanted clumping instead of running bamboo. With the running bamboo the roots go crazy and grow all over the place and can ruin the foundations of buildings.
Tangent aside, we drove on up to Rocklin and ended up in a residential neighborhood. It seemed an odd place to have a nursery. Well it turns out that it was this guy's house and he was selling bamboo out of his backyard. There really were a lot of people there, most likely due to the newspaper article, so we really didn't get to chat with him much. However, we did end up bringing home our first bamboo to start our screen.
We got an Alphonse Karr bamboo. It is clumping, likes full sun, and should grow to be 20-25 feet. It has a really pretty stripe going up the stalks(?)/shoots(?). So project "screen our backyard from neighbors bathrooms" has begun. Here is a picture.

bulbs

This probably isn't the most exciting thing in the world, but I am just tickled. We put paper white bulbs in the ground last year. They grew nice big green leafy stalk things, but never flowered. I was concerned that maybe they didn't get enough sun, or just didn't like it where I put them. But this year, there are a ton of buds, and....voila, we have flowers!

Growing!

Things are growing. I am including a picture of our romaine, that is just growing like its on steroids and our peas that are getting close to climbing the trellis. Yippee!

Eating

I realize its only been a few weeks since we planted the actual vegetables that are growing. But I am so excited and can’t wait until we actually get to eat food I’ve grown. So in the meantime, I am going to figure out how I plan to use all of the vegetables we are growing. So, the following is a list of things I hope to make this winter with our first vegetables.
1) Stir fry- This has the potential of using broccoli, peas, onions, of course garlic
2) I LOVE Cesar salad, so I can’t wait to make one with our own romaine. I use Brianna’s Asiago Cesar Dressing, it is vegetarian and delicious. Here is my big vegetarian secret: Generally I will get Cesar Salads unless the menu says that it has anchovies. It is one of the two items that I just don’t ask about. The other item is refried beans. Luckily, living in California, people are super health conscious and I think about 50% of the time the beans probably aren’t made with any lard. The other 50% I just like to think are the 50% of Mexican restaurants I don’t eat at. I feel from my days of asking if the Cesar has anchovies, that it is probably more than 50% without (excluding places where the menu specifically calls out anchovies). Is this really something I should publicly fess up to? I just love these things so much. Well regardless of sharing my shameful secret, I do know that the Cesar Salads I make with my home grown romaine will be 100% vegetarian.
3) Broth: We generally make a couple of batches of broth a year. This is because we get so many different winter vegetables in our CSA that we just can’t possibly make it through all of them. So we try and use as much of the greens in particular as possible by making broth. However, I don’t recall that we ever used celery in our vegetable broth, and if we did, it would have been celery from the store. So this will be exciting to be able to use our own celery for this purpose. I really like eating plain celery too. And, can it go in the stir fry above?
4) Borscht: I love beets so much that we always just eat them either plan, or roasted with goat cheese. However, hopefully we will have so many of them that we will need to think of something new to do. I have never made borscht and will be excited to try this.
5) Brussel sprouts: I can’t think of anything to do, but eat them plain. Heidi of 101 cookbooks has a way to cook them that I will probably end up trying.
6) Garlic: garlic goes in everything I have written about above.
I think I must be hungry.

When are things ready to eat?

So now, we have all these plants in the ground that we put in at the beginning of October, the fourth. The question is, when are these veggies ready to harvest? I took a couple of notes at the nursery of how big the different plants are supposed to get and how long they should take. So, for now, I'll write these down and then when the specified amount of time has passed, I'll come back and determine whether or not the time is right. So far, I would say we are at about 23 days.
Celery: it should take 80 days and grow 20" tall (80 days is December 23rd)
Brussel Sprouts: they should take 85-90 days and get 18" tall (85 gets us to December 28th)
Red Torpedo Onions: these should take 120 days (February 1 is 120 days from our planting)
Romaine lettuce: these should take 75-85 days (75 days is December 18th)
Brocolli: this should take 83 days and should be well drained (why 83? everything else appears to be very approximate or gives us a range or a round number, but brocolli? 83) (either way, 83 days is December 26th)
Green Onions: These should take 60-90 days (60 days is December 3rd)

So it looks like we will have veggies to harvest anywhere between December 3rd and February 1! I can't wait.

As to the garlic, the leeks and the snow peas, there weren't any instructions and I'll have to go do some research. Although I think the leeks are done when the stalk is one inch or larger. So I'll just keep an eye on those guys. Also, I did learn that leeks like loose wet soil. As the leeks grow, some folks will add dirt to the base so that more of the stem is buried. Also, it sounds like there is a fungal issue if the leeks get too wet.

Growing!

A little over a week ago we took the plastic off of our plot. I was getting really antsy. We didn't actually have time to plant anything or play in the dirt at all, but I really just wanted to do something. So we hopped over, uncovered our plot, and made a path of rocks down the middle. I just couldn't leave our little piece of land unused any more.

Then this past weekend, we really went to work. Saturday we got 1/2 yard of compost and mixed it into our plot. I thought it was going to be really expensive, but we paid about $13 for a good 5 or 6 wheelbarrow's full. (Plus, we used all the compost we made at home to put our plants and tree in the ground out front, so we were out.) It was harder work than I anticipated. I really gave my arms a work out with the maddox, but it was fun.

Sunday we went and bought our plants and put them in the ground. We now have growing from starter plants: peas, romaine, brocolli, brussel sprouts, red onions, green onions, garlic and something that the container said was leeks. As they look nothing like leeks, we are dubbing them faux leeks. I'll let you know what they turn out to be and whether or not they are tasty. Finally, we put some beet seeds in to grow from scratch. I really hope those take. Not just because I LOVE beets, but because it is cool to be starting something from seed.

Oh, and Jason put together our lovely trellis for the peas. We did a concept like this along the side of our house- just tied together some bamboo with jute, and you have a trellis.

So that's it for now. We have vegetables growing!

Today begins our five weeks of soil cooking. There are a lot of various weeds in our lot, bermuda grass in particular. This lot has been vacant for at least 50 years, so many things have been growing, including random car parts and oil cans. (However, I don't think our soil cooking is intended to kill any car parts that may be buried.) So, we made a trench around the edge of our plot. Then we wet down the top 8 inches of our soil and made a whole bunch of mud. It was actually quite fun. At one point there was a suggestion of taking off our shoes and stirring the mud with our feet, but this was determined to be rather dangerous. So shovels it was. Once we were completely mudded up, we covered the whole plot with 4 mil drop cloth (it was suggested we should use at least 2 mil) and we filled in the trench with dirt, over the cloth, to seal it. Now our soil is just going to sit and cook for 5 weeks. Some folks suggest up to 3 months to really get the weeds cooked and gone. But, I think our whole garden is ready to get growing. So cook baby cook! (disco inferno?)
P.S. Oh and on the drop cloth issue. Another suggestion I was given was to make somethign akin to a double-paned window. You do one drop cloth and then a layer of something (in the scenario I heard it was plastic bottles) and then another drop cloth. Its supposed to cook even better.

Mulch

Today, Martha and I took two pickups and went to SMUD. They have a GINORMOUS pile of mulch that you can take for free. So we loaded up the beds and took it to the garden. I have to say it was quite some work getting all that mulch in the cars. It was also pretty comical, both Martha and I climbing up the mulch pile to scrape it down into the bed.
After the dump off at the garden, I took some home and put it in our garden. When I put it around the agapanthas and potato bush, it really improved the look on the corner. The composition of this mulch isnt' the prettiest I have seen (not like the cedar that our neigbor gave us), but it really set off the green of the plants on that corner in a really appealing way.
Did I mention this was free? YAY SMUD!

Herb Spiral

We went to visit Fremont Community garden last night to take a look at their composting system. It was a really neat experience to see what our garden could end up looking like. Of course, Fremont is a city-owned garden, and they invested something like $100,000 in building raised beds and adding paths and art etc. We obviously don't have those resources.

As soon as we walked in, a gardener picked a HUGE watermelon and cut it up to share with us. I am not a huge watermelon fan due to slight alergies, but I partook of the offering. I forgot the feeling of watermelon juices just running off of your entire hands, and just the crisp feeling of taking a bite into a slice.

After we checked out the compost and got some ideas, we got a quick tour of the garden. Its there that I saw this totally intriguing concept. An herb spiral. Basically it is a way to put a whole bunch of herbs in a small space. The spiral creates height differences that allows for different environments that are suitable for different herb types. For example, at the top, you would have an herb that needs lighter watering, while at the bottom, you may have kind of a bog for herbs that need more constant water. You can also set up the herbs to provide more or less light in different areas of the spiral. I have borrowed the attached picture of an herb spiral from http://gardeningtipsnideas.com/

Inititally we were not going to plant herbs in the New Era Garden because I like having them at home. However, this concept makes me want to create one of these in the garden. Really its just an aesthetic thing. I still don't wish to have my herbs that far from my house, but I just feel like it would add such a nice calming feeling to our plot. We'll see.

To worm or not to worm

So our first bit of compost discussion revolved around whether we should use the brown/green method or vermiculture.
The brown/green concept revolves around using brown materials for carbon and green materials for nitrogen. My first and only experience with compost has been with the brown/green concept in my backyard. We (meaning J) took a plastic trash can and punctured it throughougt to allow air to move through the compost. Since he did this, we have been filling it, slowly, but surely. Mostly we use waste from the kitchen, including coffee filters and grounds, and then some leaves and newspaper. I do have to say that I really enjoy taking the pieces of vegetables we don't cook and leftovers we don't eat, and putting them in the bin. In the future, my uneaten food will be used to grow new food for us to eat. How cool is that concept? (Feel free to sing the Circle of Life from the Lion King now if you so desire.)
Our composting commitee has decided that the New Era garden will start out with this type of compost.
Now, what I know about vermicomposting. Vermiculture uses worms to break down the materials. Baiscally, you just take a bin and line the bottom with worms and let them eat through the food.
I don't really know at this point what the benefits and deteriments are to either type of compost. Although we are going to start out sans worms, we will be discussing what the future benefits might be to moving to the worm-based system later.
So that's really it for now on the composting. I am just trying to learn a lot about the two different types and what materials are best for each system. Next week, we will go tour two community gardens to check out their composting systems. Who would ever think it would be so much fun to talk about and learn about how to use left over food?

New Era Community Garden- beginnings

Until this past year, I have never succeeded much in growing things. I was one of those people who could kill a cactus, which I did my freshman year of college. I started growing some select herbs a few years ago, and that seemed to work. Then, this past year, with the purchase of our home, I began to really plant and grow things. What an awesome experience it has been to see: the sage plant triple in size; the daffodils grow from bulbs; the ajuga spread out and hang in there; and even the one or two sweat peas that took hold. I have to say, I've got the bug to grow things. Although we have a small yard in the back of our house, it gets very little sun, and we don't want to use up all the space on growing vegetables (where would Roscoe play, and what wouldn't Roscoe eat?). This is a common problem in our neigborhood since we have so many trees. But the trees are lovely and keep our part of town cooler than other parts. So the question becomes where to grow?
Lucky for me, I have amazing neighbors. In particular, one neighbor found out about an empty parcel of land right around the corner from our house. For the past three months or so she has worked diligently with a group of our neighbors to start up a community garden. As of today, our group has signed a lease for one parcel of the land, began the process of hooking up water and prepping the land, reserved out all of the plots in the garden and even come up with a name.
I wish I had started this blog earlier so that I could detail all the steps that have gone into starting this community garden in the middle of an urban area. However, I guess I'll have to start here. I am on the compost committee and we are having our first meeting this week. I assume that will be the next exciting step that I have to document. I can't wait to see what the future holds for our community garden.