My D'anjou Pear Tree

It's harvest time for my pear tree! I finally figured out what kind of pear it is - D'anjou. It's a hard pear that is picked in September before they're ripe, but still "mature" or when the pear is tilted sideways and comes off the tree easily. The total harvest this year is three bushels, one of which was compost. One bushel has been shared. I just picked the second bushel this evening, with my neighbor's fruit picker. The pears seem better than last year. I don't know if it's because they're actually better than last year, or because I know what they are this year. It's probably a little of both, and a good illustration of the permaculture principle on yield, stating that the yield of a system is only limited by the information and imagination of the designer.

I have figured out two successful recipes for the pears.

Pear Sauce
Slice 8 pears and boil them for 30 minutes. Drain. Puree in a food processor. Stir in ½ cup orange juice concentrate and some grated nutmeg.

Pear Crisp
Slice pears fairly thin, enough to fill a pan.
Pour a little water or pear juice or orange juice over them, so that there’s about ½ inch in the bottom of the pan.
Sprinkle with sugar and nutmeg, and a little flour.
Bake til bubbly, about 30 minutes.
Meanwhile, mix the crisp topping up with your hands: 1 softened stick butter, some oats, flour, sugar and cinnamon. You want the topping to be kinda crumbly, sticking together in marble sized bits.
Take the pears out of the oven and sprinkle on the topping.
Bake until topping is golden brown.

I'm going to try Jana's pear chutney this weekend, and maybe do a little more canning.

Still, I'm going to have to be really creative, industrious AND generous to make sure these pears maximize their potential. Does anyone want some pears?



The rest of the garden is happy too. Two of my Sweet 100 Cherry Tomato plants are over six feet high (tied to the ladder), and producing delicious little gems. My green bean plant is about done, and yielded me about five quarts of beans over the last two months. The basil, sage, cilantro and parsley. Hopefully, I can keep the cilantro from bolting so quickly this time. I have peas sprouting. I've planted winter kale, asian greens, chard and some other spinach type edible. We're still getting a few strawberries.


The long pole leaning on the fence is the fruit picker.

Eating with the Seasons

Finding Local Food in San Francisco

My book club just finished Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver, one of my favorite authors. The book is about her family's journey into local foods - either grown by them or grown in their region. They live in Virginia, where they have seasons, so the book is a month by month tour of what happens on a farm. Some sections made me downright homesick. Others were inspirational. The story is peppered with bits about the industrial food system, that in turn evoked anger, sadness, desperation and hope. One major take-a-way for me was how important it is to support local, organic farmers, and eat what the seasons bring. I new this before, and now I understand the theory and practice behind it more concretely. Here's a quick list of reasons to eat local.

Over the course of reading the book, I began exploring more local food options for us, specifically what we can get in grain and meat. Along the way, I found many other wonderful CSAs (community supported agriculture). Here are some of my findings.

Let's toast to protein!
Meat CSAs in the Bay Area This is the best guide that I found for pasture finished meat CSAs.
Frazier lane organics has organic beef and pork that can be ordered.
Places to buy Hertiage Turkeys in San Francisco Bay Area
Mary's Turkeys is actually close to SF, relatively. I'll get one of her turkeys for Thanksgiving this year. She also raises ducks and chickens.
Wise Food Ways has another listing of local meats.

Grains
It was a bit harder to find local grains. Eatwell Farm sells wheat berries at local farmer's markets and you can use their mill to make flour.

Windborne Farm is in far north California, which isn't exactly local (closer than Nebraska though), and they have a CSA that has a delivery in Berkeley. She offers a wide variety of dried beans, legumes and grains. Many of the varieties are not commonly available to the consumer; a majority of them will be grown out from a few seeds saved by grass-roots seed banks. The grain shares are delivered to your drop site monthly, not weekly. To sign up for the grain shares, contact Jennifer Green at: (530) 468-4340, 4932 Scott River Rd, Fort Jones, CA 96032. I've signed up.

Produce
Vegetables and fruit CSAs are definitely the easiest to come by here. In fact, there are so many of them sometimes it's hard to choose. I've been a member of Eating with the Seasons for about five years now. They have the best strawberries ever! Besides the veggies and produce, I can also get eggs, chicken (occasionally), local olive oil, and fair trade coffee. Plus, they deliver to work.

Om Organics has the most comprehensive list of CSAs I've seen.
Live Power Community Farm delivers to the Presidio. They have a lot of partnerships with other farms, and you can also sign up for meat, grain, fruit, and rice.
Eat Well Farm has deliveries in San Francisco and the East Bay, but many drop off locations have a waiting list.
Full Belly Farm has a lot of Berkeley deliveries.
Terra Firma Farm
Farm Fresh to You has home deliveries.
The Berkeley Ecology Center has a pretty good list of CSAs too.
Wise Food Ways has another list of local CSAs.

So, what is permaculture anyway?

I took an urban gardening class today through the Solar Living Institute based on permaculture concepts. It was very interesting and inspiring. After a day of information intake, I'm usually overwhelmed, but today I'm not. I'm excited about all that there is to learn, and thrilled to notice that I have a solid foundation.

So, what is permaculture anyway? It's a holistic approach to working with nature that integrates consideration of the earth, consideration of people and being fair socially, economically and to future generations. This is very similar to the Blue Movement, but is more concrete in how it can be applied. Unlike many other fields, permaculture has a set of guiding principles that helps you think about the project at hand.

One major principle is efficiency, which manifests in many ways, including:
-No til gardening by heavy mulching and composting
-Plant selection for your climate, which for us is drought tolerant for less watering
-Planting edible perennials so that each year your garden feeds you more with less work

Basically, putting a little thought and effort into the planning and creation of your garden so that only a little maintenance is required.

Another concept is creating ecosystems in your garden. This is done by planting many different plants together that get along - tall and short, shade and light, plants that repel each other pest's, plants that pull up nutrients from the deep soil for other plants to use. This ties into efficiency.

There's a lot more to this, and there are lots of resources to learn more. That was one of the great things about the class. The teacher cited many, many books, websites and organizations that are available in the bay area. It makes me really glad to be here now.

Here's a list of the resources from my notes.

BOOKS
Gaia's Garden
Build Your Own Earth Oven by Kiko Denzer
The Soil Food Web
The Earth Moved
Ann LoveJoy's Organic Garden Design School
Food Not Lawns
Guerrilla Gardening
Rainwater Harvesting for Drylands
Author Ruth Stout
Cornacopia
Golden Gate Gardening - a great book for gardening in San Francisco (Ynnej, can I have it back now?)

ORGANIZATIONS
Back Yard Orchard Culture
Village Harvest
GreenCollarJobs.com
Alemany Farm is the largest urban farm. It happens to be about a mile from my house.
Ploughshares Nursery in Alameda
StopWaste.org
Urban Permaculture Guild
Solar Living Institute


Other resources I've found:
Occidental Arts and Ecology Center
Valley of Heart's Delight run by a good friend of ours Susan Stansbury. They focus on reconnecting to local, seasonal, organic food on the Peninsula.
Urban Sprouts is an organization in San Francisco that brings gardens to schools, classrooms and plates.
Hidden Villa is a beautiful organic farm in Los Altos on the peninsula. They have a CSA program and a summer camp for urban youth and a hostel in the winter.
The Global Warming Diet written by a good friend of ours and a fabulous chef!
Ecology Center - does many, many cool projects, including farmers markets, an eco-house and demonstration garden in Berkeley
Slow Food Nation is a week long slow food extravaganza here in SF - all the information, food, and parties you could ever want. It's hosted by the US Chapter of Slow Food International. Slow Food is a non-profit, eco-gastronomic member-supported organization that was founded in 1989 to counteract fast food and fast life, the disappearance of local food traditions and people’s dwindling interest in the food they eat, where it comes from, how it tastes and how our food choices affect the rest of the world.
Three Stone Hearth is a worker-owned cooperative, offering
nutrient dense foods to homes and families around the San Francisco Bay Area. You subscribe, they make healthy food, you pick the food you want from the menu for the week, you pick up or they deliver (which costs more of course). Yum!
Food Declaration - Declaration for Healthy Food and Agriculture which will call for healthy food, farms, and communities will be read aloud in a ceremony at Slow Food Nation on August 28th, in the Rotunda of San Francisco’s City Hall. Roots of Change will be working with Slow Food and other NGOs for the next nine months to collect hundreds of thousands more signatures using face-to-face meetings and the World Wide Web. These signatures will be delivered, along with a set of policy recommendations to policy makers in Washington in the Fall of 2009.
RSF Social Finance provides socially responsible investors, donors, for-benefit organizations, and social enterprises innovative investing, lending, and philanthropic services to promote environmental, social, and economic sustainability.
UpStream21 puts financial resources into small, successful, eco-friendly, privately owned companies, such as small farms and timber companies
The American Food System - A Commonwealth Club panel
Local Harvest helps you find farmers markets in your area no matter where you are in the US.

And because I could do this all night, here's one last place where you can go to find all kinds of organizations of all varieties - WiserEarth with WISER standing for World Index of Social and Environmental Responsibility, is the first online database of all issues and organizations doing good work and it can be edited by the community.

Some Tips and Ideas from the class:
Duck eat slugs
Call local tree trimmers and ask for their wood chips. They're often happy to give them to you for mulch because otherwise they often have to pay to dispose of them.
Consider turning your swimming pool into a swimming pond. There's a company doing this in LA.
Remineralize your soil with rock dust.
Comfrey and Nettle are nutrient rich plants.
Mushrooms clean water and can act as natural filtration systems and give you yummy food!
Throw seed balls into vacant lots to encourage plants.
Prune the top 1/3 of your fruiting trees in the summer, after the tree is done bearing fruit, for fruit trees that have grown too tall to harvest by hand.
Try nasturium leaf pesto.
Make a potato column.
Mine the group genius.



Whew.
Ok. I'm a little overwhelmed now. Still excited, but maybe just a little tired.
When I feel like there's so much to learn and do that I don't know where to start, I remember that I'll start where I'm at with what I have and who I'm with.
That makes it doable.

Please let me know your favorite gardening and permaculture resources.

I'm going to pick the raw food recipes I'm going to make tomorrow. More on that later...

Canning with April - part deax

April and I did our summer canning last Sunday. In total, we put up:
-Applesauce - 4 quarts and 8 pints
-Tomatoes - 3 quarts
-Strawberry Jam - 5 pints (we ran out of half-pints) and two half-pints
-Blackberry Jam - 8 half-pints
-Peach marmalade - 10 half-pints
This is about twice what we put up last year.

With the little prep I did on Saturday, we spent five hours and 10 pounds of sugar on the production. It was fun. The house smelled like a candy factory.

What's for dinner

Every time I experience a period during which I can't cook, such as before, during and after a vacation, or during the few weeks before the annual meeting, immediately following said period, I do an immense bit of cooking. We just got back from vacation on Monday, so here's my last 24 hours or so.

Thursday evening
Massive grocery shopping trip

Friday after work
Make dinner - pork chops, sauteed zucchini, and corn on the cob
Put dishes away
Put laundry in the dryer
Make 3 quarts* (six servings) of fruit smoothies for next week, complete with green algae and protein powder, three bananas, most of one cantelope, a pound of blueberries, and 1 apple.
Make a better than pumpkin (butternut squash) pie
Make carrot cupcakes
Wash the dishes
Pet the cat
Soak beans*
Soak rice*
Soak nuts*

Saturday
Try my smoothie, adding flax seed, cod liver oil and multi-vitamin powder*
Slow roast nuts*
Cook beans in crock pot with a dried chili pepper
Roast beets
Bake bacon
Talk to Grandma
Talk to Dad
Fold laundry
Type up recipes for library cook book
Make burger patties to freeze
Make cream cheese icing
Whip cream
Make hot cereal for lunch
Make kale chips*
Make kale salad*
Ice cupcakes
Put laundry away
Cat Nap with cat
Harvest potatoes - 1 gallon!
Pick green beans - a handful
Dig up garlic - six heads
Pick lettace - a big bowl full
Trim garden
Pick and compost plums (They're ornamental.)
Shower
Have a cup of tea
Eat some sliced turkey
Make rice
Hard Boil a dozen eggs*
Have beans, rice, eggs and kale salad for dinner
Read two magazines
Make a cup of cocoa (from my own mix)
Watch Babette's Feast, a movie starring food
Enjoy a piece of pie with whipped cream
Post on blog.
Pet the cat.

It's now 9pm, and I'm sure I'll be in bed by 10.

Tomorrow I'm going to put a beef roast and potatoes in the crock pot, make salsa, and maybe sew. Oh, and I still need to unpack.

You may wonder why I made so much food. Well, I like to eat, and I like to eat good food, and I eat a lot. I also like to make dinner when I get home for work during the week, which is way easier, when I have a base of supplies in the fridge to start with.

*I went to see a nutritionist this week. She gave me some good suggestions for eating better (more protein), some cooking tips, and some yummy recipes.

Soaking nuts and grains helps dissolve an outer layer of something that makes them easier to digest.
The smoothie was actually quite good and filling.

Kale Chips
Surprisingly good
Cut up a bunch of kale into small strips.
Bake for 30 minutes at 300 degrees F.
They turn into crispy little things that even Mark will eat.

Kale Salad
Cut up a bunch of kale into small strips.
Toss with two cloves chopped garlic and 1-3 tbsp each of olive oil, bragg's amino acids (tastes like soy sauce but better for you), and rice vinegar.
The longer it marinates, the better it tastes.

How My Garden Grows

My garden is very happy. The peas, cilantro and chard are delicious. Next up is lettuce and tomatoes. The poppies are blooming like crazy. We have a crop of other wildflowers, nasturiums and potatoes coming up too. We've planted a few vines to start leafing out the fence. Mark keeps the patio and walk tidy. And we finally got a little table and stable chairs for somewhere to rest our drinks!

I had no idea how much I would love fresh cilantro. I made salsa a few days ago with it.

Salsa Fresca Tradicional Recipe
Finely chop:
2-3 ripe, local farm grown, heirloom tomatoes
1/4 onion
2-3 sprigs cilantro (use scissors)

Sprinkle 2-3 pinches of salt.
Squeeze on 1/4 lime.
Add 1 tbs sugar if needed. (I didn't need it, because the tomatoes were sweet enough.)
Stir.

I used to HATE cilantro and anything that went along with it - ie mexican food. I'm really glad taste buds get refreshed every seven years, because now I enjoy mexican one-two times a week - either at home or out.

The diseased australian tree has finished dropping it really sticky pollen for this year, so we will no longer have a cat with filthy paws coming in all the time.


Orson is still loving the garden. He goes out all day and then comes is and sleeps and sleeps and sleeps. Except when he's on crack - or maybe that's the cat nip. I planted cat nip out in the yard a few weeks ago, it was lush and about eight inches high. I checked yesterday and it was a nub. If Orson ate it, it's the first time he's ever been interested in cat nip. We've put it out for him multiple times with no effect.

Here's a couple of pictures of a tired kitty!

A year in the Garden

Mark and I moved to Precita Avenue a year ago. In the last year, ten months actually because I didn't get out in to the garden until June, I've spent many happy hours digging in the back yard and turning it in to a garden. It's come a loooonnngg way. Here's a post from the beginning.

Two weekends ago I tackled and conqured the fig tree! It certainly left it's mark on me too. It turns out I'm allergic to fig tree sap, so all of the scraps from the pruning turned into ugly blisters. I'm just about healed.


Last weekend, I pruned part of the plum tree. In this picture you can see some I've pruned on the left, and what I hadn't yet on the right.


These are the same branches after I've pruned the ones on the right too. I still have about a third of the tree to get to. It's the highest and hardest to reach by ladder. It's also where the aphids are hanging out. Last year, they were all over the tree. This year they're just on the parts I haven't pruned yet.


Mark helps in the garden too. He does mostly detail work and the watering, both things that I'm lackluster at.


I took out the last of the fava beans. This is the harvest. I still haven't gotten around to cooking them yet.


I'm not doing any garden work this weekend though because I had my wisdom teeth pulled Friday and I'm supposed to "take it easy." It's been really nice here the last two days, so I've been lounging outside and enjoying watching my garden grow.

The Garden Experiment

I'm attempting to start seedlings. So far, more have died than appear viable. If it doesn't work, I figure it's a worthy experiment. As insurance, I'm stocking my garden with seedlings from the half off area of the garden store. So far, I've picked up spinach, several kinds of lettace, broccoli, parsley, cilantro, and cauliflower. I've put two tomato plants in, but I paid full price for those. I figured the 69 cents might be worth it later.

The chard is doing quite well. I put it in late last fall.



Isn't it pretty? There are about a dozen blooming.



To the right of the ladder are some of my fava beans. It's an eight foot tall ladder. The beans are having a good time. Orson has a little nest in the middle of them.




Oh, and I planted some more strawberries!

The Great Easter Slug Massacre

I had a lovely weekend. I made two loaves of sourdough bread (with a bread machine), one pumpkin pie, a roasted chicken, matzoh ball soup, and many s'mores...made with Peeps roasted over an open fire. On Saturday, to celebrate the coming of spring, we had a fire in our fire pit in the back yard, for which several friends and neighbors joined us. At Walgreens on Thursday, I had the sick and brilliant idea to roast Peeps for s'mores. I have to say it worked really well. The sugar caramelized leaving a crispy outside and a melty, hot inside, perfect for sticking a piece of chocolate in before smushing (this is a technical term) the top graham cracker on. I'm not a huge Peeps fan, but for this they work really well. I hope to make this a tradition.

On Sunday, I worked in the garden all morning. I'd gone to the garden store the day before to pick up a few seedlings - strawberries, spinach and lettace. (The spinach and lettace seeds I planted last month didn't sprout. So now, I'm starting them in a seed bed. Wish me luck!) I prepared the bed for the strawberries and in doing so I discovered a veritable slug farm. The slugs were very happy under the oxalis. I started collecting them in a large glass vase. I admit it. I'm a wuss (another technical term). I can't squish slugs. A while later I found a few slugs under a brick I'd knocked over. So, I started checking the other bricks. Slugs love the undersides of bricks. Before long, I'd pulled up every carefully laid brick in the garden and had a disturbingly large number of slugs in the glass vase. They started crawling out so I filled the vase with water, hoping they'd drown. That didn't work. That simply made it easier for them to get to the top. Reaching desparation, I poured a bunch of table salt in the vase. No more slugs made it out. Now I have a very disgusting vase of slimey salt water. Any takers?

Otherwise, the garden looks great. There are some fava beans that are taller than me. The plum tree has leafed out. The pear tree is blossoming. My daffodils have started blooming. The chard is yummy. The plants we put in last summer are huge and beautiful.

This is a picture from a month ago. Everything's at least 6-10 inches taller and the bed next to the fence is full of daffodils getting ready to bloom.

Garden Update

Here's the fava beans two weeks after planting - October 26.

Another two weeks - November 2. There are lots of little fava beans coming up.

I put this ladder in the yard by this tree for some reason. I don't remember now. But it's now a favorite perching spot for Orson AND me. I love it! In the afternoon, it's the best way to get some sun on my back. It's like my own miniature tree house.

This is the garden on December 30. The lettace has grown quite a bit. I only lost two plants. We've eaten about half of it by now. It makes a great salad! The fava beans have grown quite a bit. You can see a rouge potatoe plant and the lovely oxalis patch in the corner. Around here, oxalis is a very pervasive weed, with cute little yellow flowers. You can't pull it up because that helps the bulbs for next year. This oxalis is covering up some of Mark's favorite little white flowers, so he took the scissors to the oxalis.

From this weekend. The recent storms only brought down one branch (that I wanted down anyway) and one hanging plant (the pot didn't break).

This weekend, I'm having someone come look at my trees. I'm realizing (as I hang out in my ladder tree house) that it's probably not a good idea for me to try pruning these trees on my own. The ground's uneven, we don't have a tall enough ladder, they haven't been pruned in a decade and I've never done it before. Minor details. I'm going to look at these as lessons. I'm also in the process (read that - daydreaming stage) of garden planning for the spring.

Mark and Velma's CSA*

The garden on Saturday morning October 14

A month ago we harvested the potatoes. The ones in the back that didn't get water or much sun, didn't do much, just lots of marble sized potatos with a couple of golf ball sized. The potato plant by the tomatoes, that got plenty of water and sun, made us about a dozen fist sized potatoes. (Mark took the pictures. Maybe, if we're lucky, he'll post them sometime or email them to me to post.)

The potato harvest inspired an interest in me in vegetable gardening. When we moved in, my upstairs neighbor asked if I was planning to plant any veggies. I told her that I was only interested in native plants and flowers. The "only native plants" thing went out the window with first trip to a nursery. Oh well. Mark wants alpine strawberries, Mark get alpine strawberries. I mean, really, who can say no to strawberries?

To get ready for my future vegetable garden, I gave in to testing the soil for nitrogen, phosphorous and potassium. I've had the test kit for five months at least, but never felt like actually using it. Turns out the soil is low in nitrogen, low in phosphorous and high in potasssium. The ph of the soil is 6.5, which is actually good. This means the soil needs lots of manure and bonemeal.

The Soil Test Results

Then, I went to the libary and checked out 8 or so gardening books, to actually learn what vegetable gardening is actually about. You'd think that since I grew up on a farm, I'd know all of this already. But, we moved to town before I was witness to garden planning and prep. I was just used for harvest help. I got really good at picking corn and carrying watermelons. I also did pick up a fondness for dirt and getting dirty. That comes in very handy for gardening.

Two of the books proved really informative. I'd already decided that I wanted to try intensive gardening, since we have such a small space with enough sun. One of the books gave a really clear description of what to do. The next day we went to the garden store and we got manure, more mulch, bone meal and plenty of seedlings in desperate need of some dirt. The seedlings included lots of lettace, chard, peas, some last season annuals, an ornanmental cabbage and some ground cover plants. I also bought a pound of fava bean seeds, as winter ground cover for most of the garden, that also fixes nitrogen in the soil.

That afternoon, Mark took another branch out of the fig tree, and cleaned out the dead wood from the pear tree. I worked on double digging the bed between the pear tree and the plum tree. Mark's mom came up and was stripping the leaves off the fig tree for me to dig under. In 2-3 hours I can double dig a bed that's about 7 feet by 4 feet.

This is the harvest from Saturday. The figs aren't very sweet because it doesn't get very hot here. The tomatos are VERY mild. And the pears, surprisingly, are good!

On Sunday morning, before Mark got up, I started double digging the sunniest bed, which is the one we planted first, the one with the sorrel and flowers, i.e. Mark's favorite. I had to do this before he got up so I wouldn't have to listen to him moan as I killed "his plants." I did concede and NOT dig up the corner with the impatiens and the exceptionally prolific ground cover with little white flowers. Everything else will live on by feeding the next generation of plants as they decompose. I went ahead with planting the lettace, chard and snow peas. I spread the rest of the manure around the yard and then planted the fava beans everywhere. (More on fava beans in a later post.) Mark "single" dug the area around the stepping stones and planted more ground cover.

Mark's handiwork.


This is a picture of the garden at the end of the weekend.

Soon, I'll post a picture of the progress.


*CSA stands for Community Supported Agriculture. We definitely get a lot of support for our "agriculture" from our neighbors. Nearly everytime we're out there, someone stops and comments about how great it looks. Last weekend, someone even asked if I was a professional gardener! Ha!

Harvest

The plums are ripe. Thankfully, they're not all ripe at once. I made chutney out of a gallon of them on Sunday. Technically, I made lazy plum chutney, because I didn't pit them. They're pretty small, about the size of hulled walnut. This picture is of just some that fell over the weekend. We had to compost about three gallons of them because they're bottoms split or they're rotten. Pretty, but rotten!



In other garden news, we've planted about a dozen more plants. The potatoes and strawberries LOVE it here. The tomatoes are doing Ok. The marigolds were a birthday present from my mother-in-law (along with a shovel and rake!) Overall, the plants are doing great. Only two have died.



On the home front, Mark is extremely pleased with his new bookshelves. Besides looking cool, they're able to hold most of what was still in boxes. Of course they're all full now.

Precita Garden

The back yard is coming along very nicely. I've been in it at least four hours every weekend for the last month.

When we moved in, the backyard was covered in knee deep ivy. It was 10 feet up in the trees. It obscured every detail of the ground. Before we signed the lease, the landlord agreed to have the ivy vines taken out. It took two men two days to rip it all out. In the picture below, you can see the mound of black garbage bags by the back door. Those are all full of ivy.



This was when we discovered we had a brick patio and sidewalk!

The first day we were in the yard, we worked on getting the rest of the ivy out of the trees. Mark took on the rhodedendron in the back corner. I spent an hour up in the plum tree. Once I got up there, I started knocking out the dead branches. The poor plum tree was once well pruned.

Most of my time in the yard thus far has been spent digging up the ivy roots. Here's an example of invasion we were dealing with.



In this picture you can see the yard after I've done most of the digging. The green container on the sidewalk is our compost bin, the city picks it up weekly. I've filled it at least three times with ivy roots. The good news is that in digging up the roots, we discovered that the dirt is pretty healthy. It's full of worms and little grubs. Once upon a time, the yard was a nice garden. According to neighbors, the backyard has been neglected for at least a decade. In fact, the neighbors have been VERY supportive of our work in the yard. Loaning us tools and sometimes their compost bins, to help us get the work done.



In this picture you can also see a small pile of fig branches under the window. There's a wild crazy fig tree in one of the back corners. We took out about a third of it. We barely notice. Before we're done, we'll probably take out another two or three branches.

You can also see a pile of sticks and lumber behind the stairs to the upstairs flat. Most of it is from the fig tree (stuff to big for the bin). The lumber was rotted and no longer holding up any of the terraces. They have now been replaced.

This is a picture from Sunday afternoon. You can see the pear tree (with curley leaf disease), the overgrown fig tree and the rhodendron bush. Between the fig and the pear tree, there was once a concrete platform, probably for a garden shed. The dirt up there is massively compacted and mostly clay. Behind me (taking this picture) is a small concrete patio (which we also didn't know was there) that I excavated at least 8 boxes of mulch from. I put some of the mulch around the plants, and the rest went up to the clay area.



We finally planted some living things! So far we've got: Sun Cups (CA native), Johnny Forget-me-nots (CA native), alpine strawberries, fairy fan flower, pink geranium, and garlic, onion and potatoes that sprouted in the kitchen.

I'd cleaned up the patio and the sidewalk and put out some mismatched old wood chairs. (Table coming soon!) Two of the plants were gifts from Miles (the fairy fan flower and the geranium), the 5-year old neighbor boy, who befriended me on Saturday and has now become my official garden helper. He's good at moving bricks, watering plants, shoveling, throwing figs, playing with roly pollies, and putting a plant in the ground.

Oh, and most importantly, all of this work was supervised by Site Inspector Orson, almost entirely from his perch on the landing of the stairs to the upstairs flat.



He hasn't made it out in to the yard much yet. The neighbor dog barks most of the time if he ventures from the stairs, he had an encounter with a neighborhood cat who sometimes comes in the yard, and he's not so sure he likes dirt very much. He even shakes off his paws when he goes back in the house. He may not realize he's a cat yet, but at least he's clean!

Viva la Moutholucion!

Tonight for dinner, I made butternut squash coconut curry soup, lentil and rice pilaf with leeks, and organic spinach salad. All of the veggies were from Eating with the Seasons.

By working directly with local farmers and producers, Eating With The Seasons offers a convenient way to get fresh, local and organic produce at a reasonable price. They deliver to our office and, after their taking a winter break, today was the first delivery since mid-December.

I can't believe how much I missed it! I've gotten so spoiled by it. Even when I did go grocery shopping this last month, I couldn't bring myself to buy veggies or fruit -- too many choices, what's in season?, not enough time to cook (traveling), it wasn't local, not organic, just not as good. I think I bought four bananas. So, I'm glad it's on again. I was getting really frustrated with the lack of fresh foods in my diet. Eating out is good, but eating with the seasons is better.

Then, tonight in my email was a note from our friend Morgan. He shot a new short for Freerange Studios, producers of the Store Wars. It is awesome!

Please take four minutes to watch The Mouth Revolution. It's related to this post, I swear. And it's funny.

Gardens

A couple of weeks ago, after a visit to the San Jose Museum of Art, I talked Mark and Jason into visiting Ulistac Natural Area. I hadn't been there for several years. When I first moved to California, I had the good fortune to canvass Chris and Jeanne. They told me about their restoration work, turning the old golf course into a native butterfly garden and oak woodlands. I then went on to spend most of my Saturdays for the next year there. Between Scott and I, we probably planted a third of the plants in that garden. On one of Dad's first visits to California to see me, we took him to the garden, where he taught the city-slickers how to use a shovel.

The garden is now approaching its sixth year. It's beautiful! So lush and full. I have a picture from the garden to post, but blogger's not working, so you'll just have to imagine something pretty.

As far as my current square of dirt, the seeds haven't come up. The bulbs are up, but it looks like something is eating off the tops of the sprouts...

Homesick

A couple of days ago now, I had a huge bit of homesickness, stemming from several things.
- a desire to have someone take care of me because I had a stomach bug.
- a desire for a garden or even just dirt and trees in my near proximity.
- a dream of living on a farm again.

That morning, I was reading "Leaning into the Wind," a collection of stories written by women of the West that I purchased in the Grand Tetons. It is full of stories where the central theme is their connection to, love of and respect for the land. Granted, mid-Missouri land is friendlier than a lot of the West (we're talking Montana and Wyoming and prairies, here, folks), but the feelings for the land are universal. So, it reminds me of Missouri and the relationship my family has to the land, and then the homesickness sets in.

I realize what I'm missing. I was always the smart one, the one who would go to college, have a fancy job and live in the city. And because of that, at least partially, I was never taught how to raise a garden or to shoot a gun. I was never given a shot at being any sort of farmer and connecting with that land was never supposed to be that important. It's something I've continually had to seek out. "Hey, can I help in the garden? Can I spread the manure? May I help?" People look at my quizzically, but they generally agree.

So, what do I do? Right now, I need to find a garden. I think I'll sign up for a garden class in the spring. And, in a few years, move to a place that has dirt outside and try my luck. Maybe, eventually, I'll get back to the farm and see what happens.

My Father's Daughter

Today I could really tell that I was a Gentzsch, my father's daughter and my grandparents' granddaughter. The Gentzsch's LOVE good dirt. No, I'm not talking about gossip, though Grandma could give any Mrs. Grundy a run for her money, I'm sure. But really dirt filled with detritus, worms and various creepy crawlies.

When I was talking with Natalia about coming to visit, she mentioned how much yard work she's been doing this year. Because I love dirt, I asked if she had any big projects that I could help her with. So, this afternoon we went to the nursery to get a few bulbs, The nurseries here are wonderful. The first one we went to had complimentary coffee and oatmeal chocolate chip cookies, both excellent. That won me over right then. The second one we went to was big enough to get lost in. (There are nurseries here that are nurseries AND coffee shops! No kidding. I swear this was designed with my dad in mind.) Natalia picked out some crocuses, hyacinths, and ranunculus to go with the daffodil bulbs she already had.

We came back and did the "grunt work" first, including raking, trimming and putting greens into bins. The best part, though, was digging up the arum, a nasty invasive. I got to get my hands really deep into the dirt (and it's great dirt!) and get really dirty. (I know, Mark, you can't take me anywhere! ;) We haven't actually gotten to the bulbs yet, but there's still tomorrow.

I know some of you are thinking, "You're in Portland!! Why aren't you going to Powell's or the art museum or ..." Well, I visited Natalia a few years ago for a week and we did a lot of that then. And, for where I am most of the time right now (SF), getting into dirt is rarer than an art museum. Plus, Mark is going to come up here in two weekends and I'm sure we'll spend at LEAST a whole afternoon at Powells...