I Heart Produce

It was meant to be more circular but on second viewing it seems to be a heart. Frisee endive, summer squash, new potatoes, beets, bulb fennel, and Italian flat leaf parsley.

As always, see the entire season of CSA boxes from Red Earth Farm on my Flickr page.

Breaking Ground!

Last week we broke ground on The Woodlands Community Garden! Twenty volunteers came out for a potluck and work day to remove weed trees, clean and cut lumber, and dig out plots.

There were a few "volunteer" hackberry trees growing out of the wall on the south side of the garden. Removing them opened up the southwest side of the garden and will allow us to install a few more plots on that end.



The lumber we have was scavenged from a house demolition and was covered in old rusty nails and wires. We removed all of that and cut them to size so we could create 8 foot square plots.



It was starting to get dark when we dug up the grass for two of the plots, removing that living barrier and allowing the plants more roots space in the future.





We dug out two plots and we have lumber for four plots right now. Currently the space will allow eleven 8x8 plots! We plan to share the plots in the first year, so 22 people will be able to garden on 4x8 foot plots.



The perennial plants we put in at The Blue Line Garden are also coming along nicely. We had a few weeks of rain right after we planted them so everything is well established.



A bunch of the plants are blooming too! The echinaceae, verbena, yarrow, and coreopsis were in bloom when we went to check on the site and water it the other day.

Just a little sweet

My dad does not have a sweet tooth (unless we're taking about Entenmann's chocolate donuts or chocolate covered marshmallows at Easter). So it's hard to come up with things to bake for him for holidays. At Christmas I made panettone, an Italian sweet bread that he really likes. It came out a little dry but I will definitely try again next year. And I think I've found another possibility - biscotti.

For Father's Day this year I made the Choco-Cran Biscotti from my "Most Loved Cookies" book by Jean Pare. I've never made biscotti before, but it was a sinch! It's basically just a twice-baked low-sugar cookie.



It wasn't too attractive before I twice-baked it, and it was a little crumbly afterwards, but it's definitely a recipe I will try again.

California, I'm comin' home

Here are some random pics from the trip to CA last week. I think I did a pretty good job packing, considering we were in temperatures ranging from 60 to 105 degrees F.


***The sunflowers are blooming in the fields around Davis!!***


***Tasting a little port at Heitz Cellar, missing Sissy***


***I visited Nicole and got to see the alphabet series in person (and take home "beehive")!!***


***The Full Houses***


***There is a whole collection of shoe planters in Alamo Square, San Francisco***


***I had to take a picture of those incredible balconies***



We ended the week with the wedding of my old roomates, Mike and G. I was living with them in Davis when I started this blog in early 2007. I've officially hit the age when all of my friends are getting married and it's surreal. There were two other weddings on the same day as this one! And as my coworker Rose said, this weekend "Facebook was blowin' up with wedding albums." So true. And so strange.



It was a lovely trip. I got to see many old friends and I dragged M around to a bunch of my favorite places; St. Helena, 826 Valencia, Mitchell's Ice Cream (more on this later), and the yard on F Street where we finished off the week with a BBQ and an evening of wine and mojitos. (Full disclosure - I probably shouldn't be able to drink as many mojitos as I did when I can't even spell the word - my first try went like this: "moquitos." For shame.)

Yummerson

The box, 6/30/09:
Green onions, green leaf lettuce, snap peas, zucchini, kale, eggs!

Botanizing the Pine Barrens

M and I visited the Pine Barrens in Wharton State Forest in Central NJ recently and we saw carnivorous plants! Neither of us had ever actually seen carnivorous plants in the wild before so we spent a long time looking at them and taking pictures.

Here's a sundew growing by the side of a stream:




***Gotcha!***

And a pitcher plant growing about a foot away:



Look at those red veins and downward-pointed hairs. The texture is like the soft down of a baby's head.



There were also a huge number of highbush blueberry, mountain laurel, pines, oaks, wintergreen and teaberry. And ticks. Lots and lots of ticks. The trail we hiked on is called the Batona trail (BAck TO NAture). It's a 50 mile trail through the Pine Barrens and southern New Jersey. It's well marked but very narrow, so narrow that we were brushing past bushes most of the time, hence the ticks. But I definitely plan on going back in July when the blubes are ripe!

Sharing with Katrina

Have I told you about my neighbor Katrina? She has the house on the corner of our block, with a big garden that you can see from the street. I used to walk by and salivate over what was growing in there (and over the house itself, there are 3 day rooms with full length windows!). When I was canvassing our area to gauge interest for the community garden I made sure to ring her doorbell, hoping to just catch a glimpse of the inside of the house. Much to my delight Katrina answered the door and said "Yes, I'm very interested in a new community garden, and won't you come in?" She sat me down and it took about 15 minutes for me to realize that we had a lot in common, despite our 30+ age difference (as we spoke she was cooking sweet and sour pork chops using her homemade sauerkraut, a recipe I had tried a mere week earlier with my own sauerkraut).

Since that meeting we have shared recipes, preserves, plants, and walks to the farmer's market. She shared some empty jars and pectin with me, and I shared some home-made strawberry jam with her. She gave me an extra half-dozen eggs from her CSA box, and I gave her some of the free plants I got for the community garden. It's quite the mutually-beneficial relationship. Most recently, she emailed me to tell me that her sour cherry and ume plum trees needed picking, and would I kindly come over and share the harvest? Yes ma'am, I most certainly will.



The result was about 4 pounds of cherries and 5 pounds of ume plums. I gave the red sour cherries to my coworker, who promptly made them into preserves. I only had a week to process the rest of the fruit before leaving for CA, so I did what Katrina suggested and preserved the sour cherries in simple syrup.



Just combine equal parts sugar and water, bring to a boil, add cherries, boil one minutes, jar and stick in fridge. I don't know how long they will last but probably a few months at least. It's basically like I'm infusing sugar water with cherry flavor so I can probably just boil down the sugar and make cherry syrup after I've finished eating the cherries.



Also acting on Katrina's advice, I made umeshu with the ume plums. They are a Japanese variety that is not used for eating but for making vinegar, syrup, and wine mostly. Umeshu is Japanese plum "wine," but it's really an infused liquor. I tried some of Katrina's that had been aged one year and it was delish.



I used this recipe (how strange is that video?!)





I love my neighborhood.

Feed me, Seymour!

I referred to this sweatshirt a little while back, but wanted to post a picture of it too. My friend Metthea made it for my birthday a year or so ago. Isn't it incredible? Metthea also did the "Work with your hands" sweatshirt. I'm posting it because these sweatshirts have been a source of inspiration for a project I just finished, to be posted soon . . .

Jammin'

I hit up the mulberry and serviceberry trees again to collect 6 more cups of fruit, this time with the aim to make jam. I ran out of pectin, but I'd heard that serviceberries are full of pectin so it's not necessary to add it when you make jam.



I opened M's 1997 edition of Joy and searched for the jam section but came up empty handed! Thankfully, my 1975 edition had a whole section dedicated to jam-making the old fashioned way, sans pectin. They suggest adding other fruits that have a high pectin content, so I grabbed some apples and chopped them up with the mulberries and serviceberries.



I filled six small jars and let them sit for 24 hours before determining that no, the jam didn't "set," or gel up. Poo. I probably didn't boil it for long enough or at high enough temperature. Ah well, it's more like a runny syrup with fruit in it, but it's delicious.





The recipe I used was a combination of recipes from Joy and from the internet. It was about 6 cups fruit, 1 apple, juice from 1 lime, and 4.5 cups sugar. Hmm, maybe I didn't add enough sugar. Well anyway, I'm on a roll with this fruit preservation thing, I'm currently up to my ears in sour cherries and ume plums. Check in later to find out what I'm going to do with them. Also check out this great blog I recently found, Food in Jars, out of Philadelphia!

How does your garden grow?

So pretty.




But lordy, just look at those potatoes! And the marigolds! Those two crops are clearly taking over the south side of the garden plot.





The potatoes are shading the cucumber and squash seedlings that are coming up, I'm not quite sure what to do about that. But the potatoes bloomed! And supposedly the flesh of the potato is the same color as the flower, which is a gorgeous light pink (yay!).



The cucumber transplants are looking healthy and sending out nice little tendrils. They are supposed to be a bush variety, but we'll see. They seem to want to crawl right now.







The north side of the plot is much more organized: Fordhook swiss chard, emerald oak leaf lettuce, oxheart carrots, watermelon radish and golden beets are coming up nicely. On the far north the tomato transplants are happy, and the cilantro and arugula are coming up in their (meager) shade.



The potato flowers apparently close at night and re-open during the day, even when they're cut!

Tomorrow we leave for our trip to CA, see you on the flip side!