Out with the old . . .

. . . and in with the new!



200th post!

Today's lunch

My life is in limbo a bit right now, so we've suspended the CSA box delivery, wah. But here's my own little harvest, straight from the front yard. Locally Grown Lunch. LGL.

The Great Bay Area Garden Tour, part 2 :: Slow Food Nation Victory Garden

After our visit to The Edible Schoolyard in Berkeley, we popped across the Bay Bridge and parked at the Civic Center for our tour of the Slow Food Nation Victory Garden.







Our tour guide was Kelsey, who coincidentally had spent almost ten years working at The Edible Schoolyard! A twofer! He answered all of our questions about both gardens, even after the Pakistani festival next door got so loud he had to shout to be heard.



The garden was part of an event that Slow Food Nation hosted in SF over labor day weekend to raise awareness of local food sources in the Bay Area. I was away during the festival, but so happy to get to see the garden before it was all recycled in September.

The new lettuce and chard transplants below replaced harvested crops that were donated to a food bank a few blocks away. In the middle of the bed are dandelion greens and chicory! How great! Kelsey said that there were several old Italian women who asked if they could harvest some when they visited and they got to take home bunches (to put in delicious soups, no doubt).



The garden was grown with the help of local nurseries, and almost everything was re-purposed for the project. The stage was made of recycled lumber, the burlap-covered berms around each bed were filled with rice straw from local growers, and the soil and compost came from nurseries and farms in the area.

In the photo below you can see that they are letting their Brassicas bolt and flower (the yellow in the middle). I love that. The natural life cycle of crop plants can be beautiful too, there's no need to rip everything out as soon as it's finished producing edible food.



Each bed was a series of concentric circles with little "keyholes" where you could enter and walk around. This was mostly for aesthetics, so the beds could be viewed from all angles. The plants had to be grown in gallon pots in the nurseries before transplanting into the beds because the timeline for the project was so short. Everyone was afraid that the transplants wouldn't take because they were so old, but apparently the "positive energy" surrounding the project really kicked in and the garden was gorgeous!



Again, nice signage in the garden listed each crop in multiple languages. I'm kind of a stickler for signage, and the gardens on this tour really inspired me with their creative signs.

Next up: The Alice Fong Yu Elementary School Garden and a talk with Rachel of the San Francisco Green Schoolyard Alliance!

Orange = Not a Quail

This month at Ash Meadows National Wildlife Refuge we had to wear orange. Why? Because it's hunting season. And what is there to hunt on the refuge? Quail. There wasn't much hunting where I grew up, so the fact that I have to wear orange to prevent being mistaken for a quail is probably the funniest thing ever.



Our trips are getting shorter because fewer plants are flowering and fruiting at this time. But it's still hot enough that we need to take a siesta in the middle of the day to avoid the heat. This means that we start our day at 6am and end it at sunset.



One more trip in October (a short one) and I will be done with Ash Meadows for the field season. What a great job.


Cordylanthus tecopensis - closely related to my study species for my thesis, Cordylanthus palmatus.

Choco-Coco-Creamcheese Cupcakes

Just a little weekend baking. I've made many recipes from this book before ("Birthday Cakes: Recipes and Memories from Celebrated Bakers" by Kathryn Kleinman) but the birthday cupcakes recipe is my favorite (pg. 122). It's basically the same recipe as the "Elvis Cake;" devil's food. In the past I've made these cupcakes with a gooey raspberry jelly center and powdered sugar on top, but this time I used the cream cheese and coconut frosting recipe from page 82. Delicious. And just look at them sitting all pretty on my birthday cake stand from Crystal and Jaja. It's the little things folks, the little things.



Strangely, I baked all of those other cakes at exactly this time last year. Weird. Maybe there's something special about the month of September?

The Great Bay Area Garden Tour, part 1 :: The Edible Schoolyard

This summer I decided that I wanted to see some of the school and community gardens in San Francisco and the East Bay. So I got a group of people together from UC Davis and the Davis community, rented some University vans, arranged some private tours, and we were off! (This is far easier said than done, as you can imagine).



On August 24th, 14 of us met on the campus of UC Davis and started our trip. Our first stop was The Edible Schoolyard in Berkeley!





This garden was started by Alice Waters in 1994 at Martin Luther King Jr. middle school, and includes an outdoor wood stove and a building with a kitchen where the kids take their garden harvest and learn how to cook it into nutritious foodstuffs!





There were so many gorgeous details about this garden. My favorites were the kid-hand-painted signs in the garden, the gorgeous little greenhouse, and the creative trellising.





This garden has two full-time gardeners and several AmeriCorps volunteers, so an effort of this magnitude is not possible in every school. But it is incredibly inspiring to see what can be done with some funding.



Unfortunately they don't give tours on Saturdays, but we were lucky enough to have a tour guide later in the day who had worked at The Edible Schoolyard for ten years! So we had a post hoc tour and got to ask all of our questions.



One of the coolest things we learned is that the garden design is driven by the kids themselves. Fruit bearing trees are trellised so that the fruit is accessible to small people, or weeping varieties are used. The garden meanders and small vistas and views of different beds open up as you wander through, almost like a small maze. And the garden is constantly changing, with much of the work done by the kids, giving them ownership of the space.





Eeee, it was just as beautiful as I expected it to be! Coming up: The Civic Center Victory Garden, San Francisco.

Sala Bowl Garden - Summer Edition

The nights are cooling down here in Davis. Which really only means that we can keep the windows open at night and not suffocate in the heat. Ha!



And the summer edition of the salad bowl garden is in full swing, almost done actually. Back in spring we ripped out the winter crops and planted the six beds with summer crops.



The smallest beds nearest the building were planted with several types of basil and peppers:



We re-used the trellises from the last garden as support for the peppers. Here are the small plots now:



Woah! You can see why we needed to do some pruning/harvesting.

The middle beds were planted with pole beans on trellises, bush beans, cucumbers, and greens.

Then:



Now:



But greens during the summer? How? Mags showed us this great little trellis idea - growing the cucumber vines in an arc to provide shade for cool-season greens!



It worked like a charm:



In the biggest beds (the ones with paths) we planted different kinds of tomatoes. Then:



Now:



The tomatoes are going strong right now, along with the peppers. The beans and basil are almost done though, so another month more and we should be pulling it all out to plant the next crop!

This round we also had to do something to solve the problem of soil runoff into the path. So we got extra funding to buy bender board for the biggest beds. We stained them dark brown and installed them around the edges of the biggest beds:



Some stakes and screws and a few hours of work was all it took, and it looks and works great!

Front yard harvest

One cuke, three tomatoes, and one pepper, all from the container garden in our front yard. There are a bunch of peppers left on the plants, and more tomatoes ripening. AND a cantaloupe is growing. But shhhhh, I don't want to jinx it.

Summer Dinner Party

A delicious meal, cooked by our summer housemate Amy.



I love my housemates, both human and canine (and our here-in-spirit housemate Jaja).

Presto . . . PESTO!

The summer edition of the salad bowl garden is in full swing, and something has to be done about the basil. We planted over five different types of basil back in May and they have been happily bolting for the past few weeks.

The only solution to the problem is to make pesto. Clearly.







So a while back Mags, MWolff, and I spent an evening harvesting and processing the majority of the crop, producing a total of 12 jars of pesto. I'm saving my jar of lemon pesto and freezing it for a winter treat. The others are pretty much gone already. Yuuuuuummmmmmm!