Lettuce In

We still have a garden! I have neglected my garden blogging in lieu of my fascination with the honey-bearing insects in our backyard, but we are spending plenty of time on our garden, too!

We’re growing another mix of heirloom lettuce. The lettuce mixes in our garden this year include the Mesclun Mix from Uprising Organics and the London Springs Mix from Territorial Seeds. I like varied textures, bright colors, and many flavors in my lettuce mix. Last year we grew the Uprising Organics mysterious lettuce mix and I was really pleased with it. It’s hard for me to be displeased with a high quality lettuce mix, you know?

These little guys are just waiting for the perfect spot to open up in one of the big beds.

Is there anything more delicious than old-fashioned organic baby lettuce in your backyard? NO, there is not. It’s just the most simple, perfect food to grow and I encourage everyone to plant some. I prefer the loose-leaf style of lettuce, since I am too impatient to wait for them to form that perfect, classic “head of lettuce.” I know it’s easier to ship a Head of Lettuce than it is to ship a bag of loose leaves, but if you don’t need to ship it, you can grow whatever kind of lettuce your heart desires. You can plant lettuce that’s spicy or sweet, with oak-leaf shapes or frilly ruffled leaves. You can find every color of lettuce from chartreuse to burgundy. Plant a mix of lettuce seeds, and maybe a mesclun mix too. It will be difficult to get bored with salad that comes in so many colors. I believe that a salad of lettuce from your backyard is a both a luxury and a right, and I want nothing but righteous luxury for you.

Here are eleventy hundred reasons why you should grow fancy lettuce:

1. It’s Super Easy.
Lettuce is fast to germinate and quick to start producing. It’s delicious at every stage of its development – unlike all those annoying vegetables that have to ripen, requiring precise water, sun, temperatures and pest protection until the moment the fruit is ready. You can eat lettuce any time before it bolts.

2. It’s, like, so totally and completely simple and easy.
You can grow lettuce just about anywhere. It doesn’t require full sunlight, and actually prefers some shade in the hot summer. They don’t mind window boxes, containers, flower bed edges, or entire beds planted with oceans of lettuce. They have shallow roots, so they are pretty tolerant of absurd planters. You could grow lettuce in a clog.

(photo used with permission from Fion N.)

I don’t want to hear any of that “I don’t have any space to garden” crap. Lettuce will grow just fine in an old yogurt container on a window sill. It grows up so fast, you hardly have time to care for it, just a few weeks of benign neglect, and then it’s gone. Don’t forget to water it once in a while.

3. It’s really cost effective.
Lettuce seeds are tiny and light so you get a huge number of seeds for just a few bucks. (Please choose a quality seed provider, like Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds or another reputable source.) Have you purchased organic baby lettuce at the grocery store or farmers market lately? It costs more than twice as much to buy 1 lb of baby lettuce as it costs to buy 1 package of seeds. The National Sustainable Agriculture Information Service reports:

In fall of 2001, Growing for Market reported “spring mix” greens wholesaling for slightly more than $3.80/lb. (2), which translates to roughly $4.95-$5.35 at the retail level.

I think my seeds cost $2? Maybe $3? This is a no brainer.

The greatest enemies of lettuce are:

1. slugs. i hate them! they love lettuce!
If you have slugs, I hope yours are less smart and resilient than mine. Mine won’t drown, don’t like beer, and hide from me when I go out to hand-pick them. I am considering a flock of ducks, but Krista says ducks are messy (she is right, of course, but I really dislike slugs). I have heard that you can have some success with copper wire, copper tape, sluggo, diatomaceous earth, coffee grounds, and ground-up egg shells. Steve Solomon writes about Fertosan Slug Destroyer in his book Growing Vegetables West of the Cascades but it’s not approved for use in the USA and I can’t find a Swiss person to send me some.
(Depending on your garden, you may also have problems with deer, caterpillars, aphids, various beetles and loopers, but I consider slugs to be the primary target.)

2. heat!
Lettuce is generally a cool-season crop, which means it does well in the Pacific Northwest just about year-round. But if you live some place hot, you can build a little umbrella or shade to cover your lettuce from the hottest sun. Or you can plant it in the shady spots of your yard where nothing else will flourish! Once lettuce plants get hot, they bolt. Once they bolt, the good eating is over. Blech. I do not recommend bolted lettuce! If you live someplace that is hella hot (shout out to all my texan & oklahoman friends and all the lovely people suffering an east coast heat wave), you can plant a fall crop of lettuce just as soon as those temperatures dip back below 70. You can eat fresh lettuce until you have a hard freeze that kills it all. You’ll know you had a hard freeze because all your outside lettuce will turn black. I’ve heard of some people raising baby lettuce in cold frames all winter. It sounds reasonable, so I plan to try it this winter.

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If I have not convinced you to grow your own organic salad by now, it’s time to invite you over for dinner and serve a homegrown salad. And if that doesn’t convince you, I will pack up a bag of potting soil and a pinch of lettuce seeds like a goodie bag to carry home. Don’t test me. I have been known to show up to people’s houses with a bag of soil and planting containers. You will not be the first I’ve converted.

backyard bounty

we’re in the position of eating tomatoes with nearly every meal. a few days ago, levi ate them instead of dessert. (don’t tell him, he might think they are dessert!) this is a bowl of a couple different kinds of tomatoes, maybe a cherokee purple and a mysterious red tomato. we have about 5 different kinds of red tomatoes, and i can’t tell them apart. Moskovitz, Rose, Nepal, Pruden’s Purple, Eva Purple Ball, all kinds of red tomatoes we never stop to identify. in addition, we have black, green, red, orange, and yellow tomatoes. i even found a giant Great White buried in the jungle, but it had some unfortunate rot.

then, the most exciting thing happened today — i saw a wonder light beginning to ripen! the wonder light tomato is yellow and shaped like a lemon. it has a very distinctive look. it’s supposed to be good in salsa. i haven’t seen any green zebras, and i really expected to get some. maybe The Stick that we gave up on back in May was actually the green zebra. the brandywines are starting to ripen, too, thankfully. they are so gigantic and heavy, they are dragging down the entire plant. yes, we caged it, but they often grow over a pound PER TOMATO. completely absurd.

we are starting to get ground cherries, too, finally. we’re growing Aunt Molly’s Ground Cherries (aka Husk Tomatoes) at first i found one ground cherry every other day, but i found 5 or 6 today. maybe tomorrow we’ll get 10. these precious gems are related to the tomatillo, but they’re smaller, about the size of a marble. they taste like a tomato had a baby with a pineapple, with a little bit of vanilla. they are an heirloom – recorded in horticultural literature as early as 1837 in Pennsylvania. you can read more about ground cherries on wikipedia. i’d like to offer to share our harvest, but we have eaten every one of them as soon as they have fallen. we have about 6 of the plants, and i was hoping to get enough to make jam or pie, but the plants can’t even keep up with our snacking needs. we have to grow more next year, no question about it.

State of the Garden: August

We’ve been doing our best to eat something from our garden every day. Some days we fail, but mostly we’re doing alright. It is easy to incorporate something everyday because we tried to plan the garden for things we actually eat – not entirely plants I just wanted to grow for the hell of it, although there are definitely some of those in there. We have had massive crops of basil, and we’ve been eating pesto, tofu pesto spread, basil on our sandwiches, and i don’t know what else. If i were a slightly better person, I might have put some basil or pesto in the freezer for the winter, but alas, I have not.

We have grown some show-stopping carrots in a variety of squiggly shapes. I asked Levi one night if he knew we were eating carrots we grew ourselves, and he said, “Of course. They don’t sell carrots that ugly at the store.” He’s totally right. Produce at the grocery store has to meet a beauty contest standard, or people won’t buy it. When you grow it yourself, you get so much insight into all the diversity of our natural world. Here are some astoudningly ugly (or beautiful, depends on your perspective) carrots. We grew organic Scarlet Nantes carrots this year.

Our heirloom tomatoes are doing absurdly well by Pacific Northwest standards. We did use tomato cages to support them, but they grew much, much larger than the cages. As a result, we have ended up with many broken branches from the weight of the fruit. What do you do with green tomatoes? You can make green tomato relish, which I have never made or eaten. Or you can bread them and fry them. We all love fried green tomatoes. However, it is a RIDICULOUS level of deliciousness to fry green Valencia tomatoes on the cusp of ripening, especially if you use blue cornmeal batter with jalapeños. Yes, we know we are ridiculous.

We have eaten some deliciously ripe mysterious heirloom tomatoes. Some of them have been identifiable (Valencia, Black Prince) and some were more obscure (“Maybe this is a Moskovitch?”)

We’re pretty sure that yellow one is a Valencia. I hope so, because I keep calling it a Valencia. This is the fruit of MONSTRO, one of the tomato plants Krista named.

These are two different kinds of red tomatoes. I can’t remember what varieties we guessed they were, but they were lip-smacking good. Have you ever seen such a beautiful tomato? I didn’t think so. They are like the super models of tomatoes.

We have been harvesting potatoes and eating so many of them. I grew one Yukon Gold, which hasn’t been harvested yet, and a half-dozen Cal Red potatoes. These cal reds are glorious potatoes. They are the best tasting tubers I’ve ever laid my tastebuds on. We have mostly been roasting them, eating them for breakfast or in tacos, or making oven fries out of them. The consistency is perfectly smooth and buttery, and the flavor is so delicate. I would definitely grow these again! We have gotten about 7 lbs of them so far, all from 1 tire. I think dollar/pound, potatoes are one of the cheapest and most rewarding things to grow. I spent about 65 cents on seed potatoes.

We have about 100,000 scarlet runner beans hanging on the vine, but no one has been inclined to eat them, so we haven’t harvested them yet. We did pick off 1 or 2 pods and snack on them while we were working in the garden. They are amazing because the pod is bright green and the beans are pink. It’s very colorful. The scarlet runner beans are the one plant I grew just because I wanted to, not because I knew we would eat them. I might grow them again because they are so pretty, but I am more inclined to try my hand at black, pinto or soy beans next year. Or maybe chickpeas!

The leeks are pretty much victims of tomato sprawl. They don’t look so good. None of our peppers are quite ripe yet, although some of them are starting to turn. The shallots are hanging in there, but not getting too big yet. The ground cherries are getting closer to harvest every day! It’s a very exciting time in the summer garden. I have no idea if/how we are going to pull off a fall/winter garden, since we’re moving smack in the middle of it all.

The state of the garden is strong.

sneak peek

we have a lot of bounty to talk to you about. hopefully tonight we can play catch up! in the meantime, here is a breakfast ingredient from our backyard.

Baby Beans

The beans are starting! We have about a dozen tiny beans growing on our bean plants. I actually took this picture two days ago, and they have doubled in size since then! They are such perfect, tiny little beans, I can’t even believe it. I can be found in the evenings sitting in the backyard just staring at them & marveling at them. These are on the bush beans, var. Provider. My Aunt Lynne suggested that we name them George & Laura. Pretty funny, huh? What a jokester. Only trouble with those names is that I like these bushes and I expect them to produce something good for my family. ba dum chhh

The early spring days of the garden are coming to a close. A radish bolted yesterday, and two of the bok choy plants are right behind it. I’m going to let them bloom & seed, and I’ll try to save some seeds for next year. Don’t worry, I got five books from the library telling me how to save seeds. I am doing my homework.

Future Dinners

I love this picture of our garden because you can see ALL of the growing space. You can see all three raised beds, the tater tires, and even the hanging basket we are growing a zucchini in. i am still not sure if that is a good way to grow a zucchini, but our options are slim so i’m hoping it works out.

Actually, I am doing my best to kill the zucchini (not on purpose… don’t ask, it’s a long story), so it may be irrelevant. I read about some people who grow zucchinis in vertical gardens and they use little hammocks or pieces of pantyhose tied to the trellis or fence. This cradles the growing zucchini’s weight, and allows you to grow vertically. If our zucchini survives to the fruiting point, we might try it.

You can see the bean trellis Krista built with some scraps, twine, and a prayer. I dug around the yard and found the scraps, she did the assembling. It’s pretty sturdy somehow. We have scarlet runners planted on the front and back of that.

Here is a list of other plants you can see in no particular order:

11 kinds of tomatoes
4 kinds of lettuce
an ocean of bok choy
scarlet runner beans
bush beans
six kinds of peppers (i think)
rainbow chard
carrot tops
radish greens
2 kinds of potatoes
basil
shallots
(the leeks, ground cherries & zucchini are just out of the frame)

Of course, it just looks like a sea of green, so don’t be surprised if you can’t pick out more than 4 or 5 of those. We had bok choy for dinner, alongside biscuits & gravy two days ago. The day before that, we ate radishes from our garden in our salad. They are cherry belle radishes, perfectly peppy and spicy and crunchy. Two days before that, i made a bok choy-sweet potato curry. We are getting creative with our bok choy. Our bok choy keeps going and going. Levi has been eating it without a single grumble. I guess it really is his favorite vegetable after all. We have had some problems with caterpillars eating the bok choy, but we’re not stressing about it because we have bok choy to spare.

Krista has been trying to name our 11 tomato plants lately. This guy is Beanpole. He’s the tallest of them, over two feet high. Yes, we know this is not very big for a tomato plant in other regions where it gets hot, but we are gardening in the PNW!

This is Monstro. I trench planted this guy (more info about trench planting here) and he’s gotten a real sturdy stem as a result. The bigger gnome of our garden can usually be found hanging out with Monstro.

The basil I grew from seed is starting to take off finally. It’s been real shrimpy for a long time. I bought some supplemental starts at the farmers market for the front porch herb garden, so I guess we’re just going to have a whole lot of basil.

And of course, what would the garden be without our beloved pets? Clementine posed for Krista to take a picture of her and the lettuce garden. This way, you can get some perspective on how freakin’ huge our lettuce forest is getting. You can also get a special shot of the 11th tomato plant (unnamed) and a bush bean plant. The bush beans are starting to set beans, but that’s a subject for next time.

Our First Harvest

Behold, the incredible bounty of our garden. We have grown 5 radishes. Perhaps all this is not in vain after all.

Garden Update

Things are going pretty well in our garden. I know I should have written about it sooner because now I have way too much to report! We’ve had a couple of hot, sunny weeks lately, which has done tremendous things for the potatoes, tomatoes, and peppers. We adopted a zucchini plant at the Olympia Farmers Market. I have very mixed feelings about the zucchini plant. On one hand, I am suspicious of the zucchini because it seems like such a cliche. You know, the gardener who put in too much zucchini, can’t eat it all, and ends up trying to hand it off to innocent bystanders, family, friends, and coworkers. On the other hand, I am still slightly afraid that our garden will fail to produce. A million things could go wrong. A July snowstorm, torrential flooding, vengeful raiding enemy hordes, or a blistering heat wave. Global warming is very unpredictable. I feel certain that zucchini will be successful despite these innumerable potential disasters. I like the idea that, no matter what, at least we will have zucchini.

I did struggle with the decision “summer squash versus winter squash,” “savory versus sweet,” “cucumbers versus zucchini,” “zucchini versus pumpkin.” We really don’t have the room for so many squash and gourds in our backyards and diets, but it was a difficult decision. Krista & I picked out a really cute zucchini seedling, smooth, green, medium-sized fruit, and we decided that was that. Watermelon, cantaloupe, cucumbers, pumpkins, and all other large vining crops be damned, we are growing zucchini and we will be making zucchini bread.

There’s our little zucchini (bottom right corner), right next to his new siblings, the yukon gold potato, the leeks, and the scallions. We do have 8 red potato plants in our garden already, but I mentioned to Krista that there is room for one more, and she picked a yukon gold. All 9 of our potato plants are doing really well. They’re getting tall and bushy. We’re trying to grow them in the tire method, and they should be ready for their next tire pretty soon! (more info here!!) The leeks & shallots are some of the newest additions to our garden. They are also some of the most thrilling, because we love leeks & shallots!

This is a little bundle of heirloom lettuce. These are three beautiful varieties – a speckled lettuce, a curly red merlot lettuce, and something that looks a lot like deer tongue lettuce. I bought a mixed variety pack from Uprising Organics, so I’m not certain about any of them. Well, I am certain about the merlot. This is a great example of how NOT to sow your lettuce seeds. As you can see, all three types of lettuce are growing very close together. This is making it hard for any of them to reach a critical size. I thinned them a little, but it’s hard to kill so many viable seedlings. I have planticide guilt! So, I’ve slowly been trying to dig up the worst, most strangled clumps & replant them with more space. Lesson learned!

This is one of our flourishing tomato plants. I ordered a dozen mixed heirloom tomato seedlings from Tomato Heirlooms at the beginning of April. They spent six weeks in a windowsill in the dining room, and moved outside three weeks ago. Most of them are doing quite well. One of them (we named it “The Stick,” so much for the power of positive thinking) can be accused of “failure to thrive,” and there’s a pretty good chance we’re going to dig it up and add something new. These tomato plants are very mysterious because we only know that they are a “random assortment,” so we have no idea what the fruits of our labor will be.

This is the sprouted seed of a scarlet runner bean. This picture is a little old, and the seedling has since been transported to our garden. However, this is one of the cutest bean sprouts I’ve ever seen. First of all, the beans have this awesome black and pink fractal pattern. Secondly, doesn’t it look like a little alien monster? We’re growing two kinds of beans – scarlet runner beans and a bush bean variety named Provider. If I had a little more foresight and a little less impatient enthusiasm, I probably would have picked out better soup beans, dry beans (kidney bean, navy bean, pinto bean and black bean), or maybe soy beans. I am so excited about next year’s garden.

We need to work on dinner, but here are some honorable mentions from our garden. These plants are doing quite well, but not so well that I need to tell you stories about them.
basil, radishes, carrots, the bush bean family, the ground cherries, all the peppers, bok choy (that veggie deserves its own entry. Maybe next time!), and rainbow chard. This was quite an exhausting exercise in trying to catch up the blog on our garden foray. That will teach me to go so long between garden updates. Gardens are very exciting, dynamic places. We spend at least part of every day there, so it’s becoming a big part of our lives.

Next time:
our weekend staycation!
our new pets!

A Whole Mountain of Poop

I’ve been having a heck of a time finding a way to get 2 cubic yards of top soil delivered to our house. Can’t do it in a scion or a civic, and most delivery people charge $100 an hour (with their dump trucks that hold 15 yards) or have a minimum of a 5 yard order. I have no use for 5 yards of dirt, so I was stuck!

By some good fortune, Krista and I met one of our neighbors the other day. She’s a lady with an enviable garden and beautiful kale. She gave us the name of her landscaper, and we swapped garden stories for a little while. Today, I called her landscaper to see if he could deliver a shorter load of dirt to me, and what do you know? He said, “Sure, how about this afternoon?!” I told him when Krista would be home from work, and he said he’d be there. (You like how I did that? Schedule delivery for a time when I won’t be home? Yes, I am the luckiest girl in the world.)

Sure enough, he delivered a mountain of compost and dirt to our house with his big truck. I’m so glad we bought an extra shovel this weekend! We borrowed our landlord’s wheel barrow to move the dirt from the mountain to the raised beds. Krista & Levi fell right to work, taking an ice cream cone break after 15 wheel barrows full.

(if you look closely at his forehead you can see actual sweat!)

I got home when they hit wheelbarrow #16, changed out of my biz-cas clothes and got dirty. It started raining at some point, but we managed to hustle hustle hustle and move all the dirt before the sun went down.

(please note, we’re growing more than just plants around here. we’re growing lots of hair, too)

Then we were way too tired to cook so we had to order pizza for dinner. THE TERRIBLE TRIALS OF URBAN FARMING. Levi said “I’m no farmer, I’m a cappuccino-sipping city boy,” but I have a sneaking suspicion that he had a very good time nonetheless. That was really his only complaint for most of the day. I think kids just inherently like dirt.

So we have two 6′x3′ beds filled up, a 3′x3′ bed for the herb garden, and a trio of tires for growing potatoes (we’re going to try to grow the taters in tire stacks this year). We also saved a pile of extra dirt to fill the tires as we stack ‘em. This is a good way to greatly increase your potato yield with a small footprint in case you are short on space in your garden, or just don’t want to deal with sprawling potato plants.

next up: getting the quadrillions of seedlings into the dirt. no idea how much bok choy will survive this transplant, but we have about 300 bok choy seedlings, 45 tomato plants, 70 basil plants, and 80 hundred million carrots. Some have to be sacrificed.

Our Victory Garden

Our backyard is fully in bloom. I had the good fortune of finding some really beautiful raised garden beds for sale at the local co-op for extremely cheap. They are made from reclaimed tongue and groove cedar. I am so excited to fill them with dirt & grow some of our own produce this year.

Our seedlings have been growing indoors for weeks and weeks now. I’ve started dozens of tomato plants (does anyone local need some tomato plants? I have more than we can possibly keep), including several dozen fat red organic heirloom summer slicer tomatoes, and a handful of weird organic heirloom varieties. I bought a mixed package of the varieties, so I guess we won’t know what we’re growing until they start fruiting! We have bok choy seedlings trying to take over our house, radishes, carrots, lettuce, bush beans, peppers, basil, potatoes, and maybe, just maybe, some ground cherries. So far, the bok choy has been the most successful. I think the beans might be doing better if the cats would quit chewing on their tender little leaves. All the seeds are organic, heirloom varieties. I hope to pick up starts of other herbs (probably at the farmer’s market) to get a better herb garden, but I want to wait until it’s warmer and the raised beds are full of dirt. We already have tons of basil and rosemary growing.

What are you growing this year?

Here’s a gratuitous shot from downtown Olympia, Percival Landing boardwalk. We have been walking around downtown a lot lately since the weather has been so beautiful.