Apples of The Earth

It's what the French call them. Potatoes. Earth Apples. Pommes de Terre. 

When it comes time for harvest, you place the potato fork between the mounded row of plants. With a downward motion the fork is gently drawn back towards the body, spilling potatoes out of the ground, like fruit from a basket. The rosy purple skins of this potato, Caribe, make the French name seem even more reasonable. 

Potatoes come in many different colors, both inside and out. There are red, yellow and purple fleshed potatoes. Skins run the gamut from black to white. Shapes vary also. Remember an earlier posting, how I spoke of my potato with three names? I served these fingerlings (Rose Finn Apple) at the BOMB party, roasted with only olive oil and salt and pepper. The crowd went wild! Its hard to think of potatoes as a delicacy, but when fresh from the ground... especially with fingerlings, potatoes are taken to a new level.

This was the first time I have ever grown potatoes.  The first time for onions too, and garlic. All of which surprised me with their ease and their forgiving nature. They really produced without getting much attention. I am determined to do better with all of them next year, to give each more space and more affection. 

I hung more than 20lbs of garlic beneath my porch at the end of July to cure, but that is another story, with its own regrets, successes and failures.

So far, I have harvested 30 lbs. of Caribe, with half a row left in the ground. My estimates for the fingerlings are not so clear. Their yield seems to be somewhat proportionate, in that for every piece I planted, I seemed to harvest about four potatoes. For Caribe that will work out to about a tenfold increase from the four pounds I planted. Each fingerling is so much smaller though, that I find it hard to believe 40 lbs will come from the two rows of Rose Finn I planted. I will get a better sense at my next harvest. So far I have dug only part of a row and not weighed any of it. I planted my Keuka Gold potatoes later, and I didn't cut up the seed as much. I wonder how their yield will compare? I won't know for awhile, they were planted in early June, several weeks after the others and are still green and lush.

  

Bless this food to our service

The whole point of this blog is to keep a careful accounting, which I have failed miserably at. But the reason for the accounting...the reason is... to make an economic argument for something that runs deeper than balance sheets.

As the Veggie Man said to me today, "when my family asks, I try to stay away from the big picture. I don't want them to think I am a conspiracy theorist. I tell them the reason we spend so much effort in the garden is because the food tastes better."

But there is more there. 

He and I both recognize that food, energy and the environment are different parts of the same thing. And that thing is a challenge that cannot be ignored. The time has come to pay the piper. The 20th century was a glorious advance, oblivious of limits. This century we must forge ahead with scarcity as our teacher. 

What we have built uses cheap oil and an undervalued environment as the sand dunes of its foundation. What we must build does not deny the miracle of the 20th century's design, but goes back to the root. Ecosystems are finite. An economy that imagines infinite expansion because our imaginations are limitless, does not credit enough the system that makes our economy possible. What is the value of a soaking rain versus a torrential downpour? What value the small wetland that absorbs the flood?How rich each blade of grass that holds a small clump of soil and keeps it from the sea? The New Testament speaks of an accounting that marks the fall of every sparrow and each hair upon every head. We must marry our wisdom and our technology to that humility. 

Along the lines of this discussion I recommend a book: "The End of Food" by Paul Roberts. There are many points where I disagree with the author, although I sense he may have tamed his argument to reach a broader audience. Nonetheless, it is a broad and compelling argument. The international food system that world economies are based on is in a tenuous position. Looking only at water consumption, or oil use, or the limits of plant and animal chemistry, is enough to prove his point. When political cowardice and basic human incalcatrence ( forgive my spelling, the word I mean implies hardening, an unwillingness to move or change position) are added to his argument, Robert's picture is quite sobering. But here, in a land of deep soil and soaking rains, we need to recognize this crisis as a time of opportunity. We still have relatively compact urban centers surrounded by good farmland. It is time to redevelop our regional agricultural system and begin again to feed ourselves. It's time to turn abandoned land and ignored populations back to the important job of feeding our communities.

I will dispense with the apologies and get right to the listing of my failures! My lack of posting reflects a lack of time spent in the garden. I have not kept accurate records of my harvests, but will try to recreate them in a general sense, by consulting what frail notes I have and the few unposted drafts left in this blog's memory banks.
Roughly speaking I have managed a weekly harvest of greens averaging 4-5 pounds. My friends and neighbors have been thankful since Tiz and I can only eat a couple of pounds a week. My six broccoli plants offered 6 small-to-medium-sized heads over the last half of June. In every case, the side shoots that have followed produced more than I got from the original picking.
Our crazy weather did more than encourage the weeds, it seemed to force the brassicas in an odd way - the 5 Violet Queen cauliflowers went immediately from small head to flower and so were a complete loss. The broccoli would have been a disappointment too, if I had not gotten such production from the side shoots.
My first tomato was harvested on the 11th and shared with friends in a salad we brought to the beach at North South Lake. If I do say so myself, the salad was delicious. It featured Oak leaf, Red Sails and Speckles lettuce; escarole and red orach; fresh young carrots, red onion; herbs and a generous amount of broccoli.
Every year I promise myself I will plant more broccoli and more carrots. Fresh from the garden they become completely different vegetables. I hardly ever cook the broccoli, it is so succulent raw. When cooked it gets just 3 or 4 minutes of steaming and a small amount of butter, nothing more. And the carrots, well they are like eating candy, nothing compared to carrots from the store.
A few weeks back I gave my buddy Terri one of our big heads of Romaine (2-2.5 pounds apiece!) and a collection of herbs greens flowers etc. She also got one of the heads of broccoli. Terri is a vegetarian and a bit of a foodie, so its not like she has no knowledge of veggies, but she was shocked by the broccoli. "I don't even cook it," she said. "It's so good." Terri likes the flowers too, when I dropped off her most recent pile of food on Sunday, she still had flowers on the mantle from two weeks before. She got rid of the old bouquet and replaced it with the new bunch of dianthus and snapdragons.
Every week I have brought home big bouquets, usually one or more gets shared with friends. Last week the first sunflower bouquet went home. They are Tizzy's favorite, except perhaps for her Zinnias. Both will now be common until the end of summer.
A week ago I roasted a big batch of beets on the grill, with garlic scapes, fresh tarragon, olive oil, balsamic vinegar and salt and pepper. I brought them to work for a birthday party, where they were served with local goat cheese on a bed of oak leaf lettuce, surrounded by flowers and individual leaves of Speckles lettuce. People raved. Personally, I thought it was a waste of good goat cheese. I got much more pleasure from the beet greens I had steamed up and served with cider vinegar - both when they were hot and when served cold alongside an omelet.
I just don't love beets. I try, but I fail. The golden beets are better, but their greens are not near as good. What to do? Well I just planted another batch of beets and I plan to pull them up as soon as they begin to make the tiniest of beets. They will be grown strictly for their greens, which I like even more than Swiss Chard, which is saying something!
June was the end of my month from hell. I got back into the garden over the fourth of July weekend and began beating the garden back into shape. The peas were finally finished and their section of the garden was cleared. On 7/13, in that section, I planted beets, radicchio(Carmen), fennel(Firenze), carrots (Royal Chantenay), and Iceburg and Buttercrunch lettuce. I also planted basil and cilantro. I picked my first Kentucky Wonder bean and it was awesome, so tender and delicious. I also planted the last of my Provider bean seeds left from last year. That was one good bean and it sure produced a lot, but I don't recall the flavour being near as good as that of Kentucky Wonder.
There is so much I have left out, the staking of the cucumbers and melons, my first garlic harvests, chatter in the garden - did I ever report on the nematodes? Still I need to move along, if only so I can get on to another post where I will have a chance to rave about the world food economy - neither my tomatoes or my hot peppers, not my cilantro nor tomatillos, are polluted with salmonella - how certain are you that your food isn't?

It's been weeks since my last posting. the real world has interfered with the virtual. Interfered with my real-world gardening as well. I only have been able to get about 2-3 hours in my garden each week. Nonetheless, I cleared more land and planted the last of my potatos (I have pictures). My tomatoes are mostly in, as are melons and cucumbers. I have harvested about 5 pounds of mixed greens in the past two weeks - a guess derived from actually weighing a full bag of spinach on a commercial scale. I have also harvested the first quart of sugar snap peas. they were delicious and worth, by themselves, the space alloted to them. Knowing that many more quarts of peas will follow is a bonus. The tomatoes are mostly planted and my staking system is set up.
Each week brings its own bouquet. Sweet William has remained the star player, although I think other dianthus will start to bloom next week, along with volunteer sunflowers and gloriosa daisy. Spinach has responded poorly to the heat, most of it has bolted or is in the process. Interestingly, my mosty productive patch, the second planting, has managed to hold up the best. I think because I kept it hard cut and well watered during the hottest days.
Everything seems to be leaping up in response to the stifling heat and occasional thundershower. As always, weeds seem to be growing the most. It has made me think I might do a little more mulching this year than in the past.
Back to work.

Someday I will figure this technology out fully. Like putting captions under photos, or leaving room for comments. Yesterday I planted more beans: Black Valentine - what can I say? The name appealed. And yet another flight of carrots (Purple Haze - not just a good name, the best of the purple carrots I tried last year) Tonight I worked on my communal responsibilities. I used a weed whacker to keep control of some paths and the area around the garden shed.Or at least I gave it the old college try. Unfortunately, I ran out of both fuel and string. Technology foiled me there also.

The photos posted earlier showed the flowers already in bloom in the garden : Dianthus barbatus, Anchusa "Loddon Royalist" and Geranium ibericum. I failed to note in the last post that my harvest included a bouquet of Dianthus. Commonly known as Sweet William they are visible in the photo of the table. They are good cut flowers, being of the same family as the carnation. The picture of the harvest is self explanatory, but the lines in the dirt between the pepper plants are where I planted spinach. Oh Yes, yesterday I extended the underplanting beneath the peppers to include oak leaf lettuce.

The pictures of our meal might seem silly, but all of that food (except those eggs - local and free range of course) were courtesy of CDCG. Either it was a product of the garden or bought from The Veggie Mobile. The mushroom/asparagus omelet was flavored with thyme and scallions from the garden and of course the salad was fresh from our plot. I wonder if it is fair to include the value of flowers as an output of the garden? I think I could find a dozen studies that show flowers have a positive effect on a person's health. Just as with my grandfather's melons, it never pays to be too parsimonious about the things that feed you.

A Thousand Words

Harvest

Writing about gardening takes me away from the garden, which I have too little time in as it is. Fortunately, it's raining now and I don't have any other chores that are too pressing. This morning was a big harvest. I have been remiss in noting previous harvests and still have not purchased a scale, so we will have to rely on estimates for my grand total. Unrecorded was the grocery bag full of Mache harvested at the beginning of the month and my first harvest of lettuce and spinach last week. This morning, I filled up two bags with three kinds of lettuce, (mostly Red Sails) spinach, orach and herbs. I'll give one bag to my friend Terri, 'cause I know she has a guest from out of town. I will keep the other bag for Tiz and me.

Over Memorial Day weekend I went to the Troy Farmers Market and the Menands Market in search of flowers for the cutting garden and pepper plants (particularly Poblanos) I didn't find Poblanos until my last stop at the Coop on the way home. The garden was busy when Tiz and I planted the flowers on Sunday. I think we spent twice as much time talking as we did planting. She cut her first bouquet, which consisted of chive blossoms and the flowers from my cover crop of crimson clover! Good deal for a cover crop, it fixes nitrogen in the soil, you can eat it - I added some flowers to the salad, but to be honest, they tasted a bit hay-like - and its beautiful. This fall I will be better prepared and make sure the area to be planted in tomatoes for the following spring will be seeded entirely to clover, so that I have a big patch to leave in bloom and still have time to turn it over before planting. I have started too many tomatoes to fit into this year's patch so I'm at a loss. 

Here is a list of planting that occurred today and over the holiday weekend. Today I planted spinach (Whale) in the spaces between the peppers I planted last weekend. I also planted two types of melon, Prescott Fond Blanc and Eden's Gem. Planting melons is completely wasteful in such a small space, but I will grow them up a trellis. For me they are a tribute to my grandfather, who made them his specialty and sold them at market. Growing melons well in the north is difficult and the space I have allotted to them means I will only harvest a handful of them for all my efforts. Although I promised to keep an accounting of what food came from the garden, I'm not about to turn mercenary about the whole thing, it takes all kinds of nourishment to feed the soul.

Anyways, back to planting. So far, of my many tomato varieties, I have planted: Amish Paste, Health Kick, Cherokee Purple (2), Kellogg's Breakfast, First Lady, Orange Banana and a tomatillo. The peppers planted were: Jalapeno, Hidalgo, Anaheim, Poblano and Early Red, a quick-turning sweet bell pepper. I also planted a six pack of some white cauliflower I picked up along the way, they were planted near the broccoli and romaine lettuce that were put in a few weeks back. I inter planted radicchio Fiero in with the cauliflower. 

My free time is gone now and I must run. I will post more pictures taken today later.