I’ve read in a bunch of places that you can save space by growing pumpkins and squash on a trellis, but I couldn’t quite visualize how that would work until I saw it in action at the garden:
It is also suggested that when growing a pumpkin on a trellis, you might make sure it doesn’t fall by putting in a sort of sling made out of a women’s nylon stocking. I’m glad this one is hangin’ free. No self-respecting pumpkin should have to live in L’egg’s sandalfoot nude.
I got to hear Brad Lancaster, guru of harvesting rainwater, speak this week.
I was curious about the topic but assumed the presentation would be rather dry (no pun intended) and technical. Wrong– he was the most engaging and inspiring speaker I’ve heard in a long time. He started by modeling the impact of rainwater harvesting, demonstrating with a toy house, some itty bitty toy cisterns, a sponge, and a watering can.
By the end of his talk, he was explaining–using diagrams, numbers, terms like swale, check dam, flow splitter– how you could harvest rainwater, integrate it with your plumbing for household use, recycle it with graywater harvesting techniques that would then put it back out into your yard for irrigation. And this all made sense to me. And he made it all sound like so much fun, not just a virtuous thing that we should be doing for the earth.
This video from his website, for example, shows what I thought was his most inspiring example: making a mini-arboretum on his street that is completely self-sustainable using rainwater irrigation. This in Tucson, where they have an annual average rainfall of 12 inches.
I left completely inspired, ready to be drafted into a water harvesting army.
addenda:
LA Creek Freak was also there, and wrote a more detailed review here.
NPR’s Morning Edition also ran a story on him a couple of days ago on. Link here.
Dead melon
Dead melon and (lower left) undead melon that I can’t let go of.
All that empty space? My fall planting on hold indefinitely because I’m obsessed with that one melon that, while not dead yet, stubbornly refuses to ripen.
Kentucky Wonder beans can’t let go.
I ripped the beans down a week ago, pulling everything up from the ground, I thought, but a few beans still grew. It’s the legume equivalent of the proverbial chicken running around with its head cut off.
Sometimes, I let go too soon.
Reader E.M. left a couple of great comments on my bean rust post. It seems that my Kentucky Wonders might still be producing if I had been more aggressive about containing the bean rust. Poor beans, victims of the soft bean bigotry of my low expectations.
The LA Times has a great article today about neighbors in Altadena who are starting, via yahoo groups, to find ways to share and trade produce from their own backyard gardens.
Some want to reduce their own garden waste, others want a little more variety:
“This group has proven to me the accessibility of localism; one person doesn’t have to grow everything.”
Garden neighbor S was shoveling something in her plot rather laboriously, then cutting flowers. We chatted and she continued her efforts to recruit me to the Tuesday early morning composting group.
“We had a real good session this morning,” she said. “Someone brought bread pudding and someone else baked bread.” I’m guessing to eat afterward, not to compost.
I talked to another garden neighbor whose name I don’t know yet. He’s a grizzled guy with baggy Levi’s and a white ponytail tucked under a fishing hat. He reminds me of my dad somehow, although my dad was more midwestern farm boy/accountant than ponytailed old hippie. “Hi neighbor,” he said, looking up from the path that he was weeding and mulching. This made me happy– people are starting to recognize me! I’m a regular now. I am just puttin’ that “community” into community gardening.
On my way out, I passed him again and he asked me if I wanted some green onions. He was cleaning a bunch of them off in his plot. I happily accepted and asked him how long they took him to grow.
“I dunno,” he said, “I didn’t grow them. I rescued them from the garbage…someone was trying to get rid of them.” He sounded a little indignant on the part of the poor discarded onions. I tried not to let my imagination think of any awful reasons someone might throw out produce.
“I mean, they’re still perfectly good,” he said, somewhat huffily.
they look fine...right?
This was my first harvest of anything, ever:
One cup of arugula. As soon as I planted the seeds, I kept seeing arugula at the farmers market, at Trader Joe’s, cheap, and wondered why I was bothering to grow it. Then I went to Minnesota, where I found a half pound plastic container of kind of pallid leaves of it (shipped to the grocery store from California) for something like $4.99 and understood both why I was growing it and why it’s gotten such a bad rap for being elitist.
It’s funny that it’s become a symbol for the out of touch/eat-fancy-salads crowd, because it grows like the weed it is. It’s the closest thing to instant gratification a beginning gardener can find. After the lame first picking pictured above, it produced and produced and produced before it bolted. (I wasn’t sure I was going to even know what bolting looked like, but when the leaves get all furry looking and something strange shoots up from the center, you know it’s probably done for.)
I’m doing fall planting soon, and am excited to put arugula back in the mix. It’ll probably taste even better than in the spring, sweetened a little by cooler nights.
How I eat it:
chickpeas & arugula: I skip the cumin and sherry and just add a little sea salt. One of my favorite 5 minute meals.
arugula, strawberry, and walnut salad: great for strawberry season, with balsamic vinegar that makes your tongue hurt a little. but in a good way.
Apparently, in Orange County, they don’t need city enforcement to make homeowners have a regularly watered lawn. They have enraged, bermuda grass lovin’ posses instead. Here’s what happened to a homeowner with a native plant, wildlife habitat lawn:
he received a note that mocked the wording of his sign: “HABITAT ELIMINATION IN PROGRESS!! YOUR WEEDS ARE GOING TO DIE!!”
The writer apparently made good on the threat, Robinson said. Despite his success in growing native species elsewhere in his yard, one row of plants, just purchased from the Tree of Life Nursery near San Juan Capistrano, suddenly and mysteriously expired.
“All those plants died,” he said. “Someone sprayed them.”
Looking at the slideshow of his garden on the OC Register site, you think, well, he could probably go in for a slightly more groomed, suburb friendly look, do some of that hardscaping or whatever.
But on the other hand… drought! We’re in a drought, people.
[link from life on the balcony]
The answer for me, so far, is an equivocal “sorta.” Because I don’t have a car and my garden is 2 miles from home, I keep my garden inputs very very simple: seeds, a cheap trowel, even cheaper gloves. I can get compost at the garden and use their wheelbarrows along with KL’s shovel and rake. That’s about as much complexity as I can handle right now (though fancy nozzles for the hoses are strictly BYO and would probably be a useful thing). So while I don’t currently grow enough to notice a drop in my weekly farmers market spending, everything I harvest is practically free.
J.D. and his wife at Get Rich Slowly have been trying to get a more precise answer to the question by documenting every penny that goes into their Oregon kitchen garden and every ounce of food that comes out, as well as hours of labor. Their latest monthly progress report is here. They may not have any definitive conclusions about the cost/produce relationship until October or November, but it’s fun to see their progress, and their berry harvest pictures always make me want to pack up and move north.
Granny Miller has already tallied the chick to freezer costs of raising her own poultry: $2.44/lb. A bargain for chicken meat that she knows for sure is free range (pix of chickens taking over her yard on website!).
Do you save money by growing food? If so, how do you keep track?
The Botanical Interests seeds I’ve been using come with their own little enthusiastic strip tease: “”peel back side and bottom flaps to find additional information on inside packet!” I kept meaning to oblige, but thought there would only be a recipe or two on the inside. Turns out, as Fern at Life on the Balcony also notes, there is an amazing amount of information scrunched into the unfolded 8″ x 6″ packet.
I learned for instance that my pole beans are a large variety. I thought they were Blue Lake beans, like my bush beans are, and had been wondering whether I was picking them too late or they were mutants or something. Turns out, they’re called Kentucky Wonders. Just knowing that they’re supposed to be that big makes them taste much better.
top: Kentucky Wonder; bottom: Blue Lake
I also found out that the spots on my melon plants come from powdery mildew.
I’d try harder to fight it, but the information on the packet leads me to believe that, as KL had warned me, the summer nights are too cool here for melons to really thrive. As my heat weary midwestern mom pointed out, cool summer nights (or what Minnesotans call “good sleeping weather”) are not such a bad problem to have.
The garden pictured here is like one of those images where you can see a vase or two faces in profile, but not both at the same time. Depending on your perspective, this community garden plot is either
a) The most sensible, waterwise crop a Southern Californian can harvest
or
b) totally abandoned
For a long time, I thought it was an abandoned plot (you can’t quite tell from the picture, but the whole plot is covered with prickly pear, nothing else). Rather, I worried that it was an abandoned plot and that it would be released just as my waiting list number was up (I’m at 192 now). I just watched a new garden neighbor hacking away at his recently acquired plot, full of vines, rusty trellises, random poles, and dark, scary corners, and realized that no one but me is going to clear whichever plot I end up with. And by the time a plot is ceded to a newcomer, chances are it’s been awhile since someone has tended to it. So I had a tiny shiver every time I walked past the prickly pear fantasy garden, wondering just how I would hack through them all and are there prick proof gloves, anyway?
KL reassured me, though, that this plot’s owner does maintain it and harvests prickly pear fruit and nopales from it. So it’s not abandoned, it’s just completely low maintenance. Imagine that.
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