Tag: Kitchen Garden

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Kitchen Garden

Spring Abundance

Plot #3 with seeds planted in the margins between sheets of ground cover.

Rain relented long enough to start planting. May 15 is the normal last frost, and it is Katy bar the door as far as getting things in the ground goes. Plot #1 was garlic planted last year with a strip for a covered row. Plot #2 was potatoes and onions. Plot #3 is radishes, green beans, turnips, Sugar Snap Peas and Snow Peas, along with whatever else I decide to put there from the greenhouse. If the weather holds, I should make fast work of the rest of planting.

This year I’m harvesting more than I can use from what over wintered. Collards, kale, spring garlic, green onions, and cilantro are abundant. Salad greens came from this year’s planting in trays. I haven’t been able to get them in the ground, so I just picked and washed them. Having so much early produce changes the dynamic of a kitchen garden.

For one thing, the season is extended. I enjoy fresh cilantro in my breakfast tacos and I’ve had it for more than a month. Fresh leafy green vegetables are always better than frozen, and we use them in everything. I’ve been using last year’s crop from the freezer to make vegetable broth and plenty remains. Having fresh from the garden vegetables in March and April is a definite treat resulting from just leaving the garden alone last fall.

In Plot #3 I laid down plastic ground cover and planted seeds around the edges. This technique enables me to get a bigger, more diverse crop out of the plot, in addition to easier spacing of crops. Last year this plot was in cruciferous vegetables and I’d like to rotate out of that. Once I inventory the greenhouse, I’ll know to what extent that is possible. For sure, I will place tomatillos, celery, and other types of seedlings. I’ll likely be left with a single row of kale, collards and chard just to fill out the plot. Wherever I plant broccoli and cauliflower in plot #4, I’ll plant more leafy greens. I like to keep cruciferous vegetables in as few spots as possible so I can monitor the little white butterflies and their progeny who like living with them.

Wednesday I got some things done while working up a sweat. My sense of where we are is that it will be a great growing year with healthy plants and an abundance for the kitchen. It’s why we garden.

Categories
Home Life

Is the Drought Over?

Trail walking between rain showers on May 9, 2024.

While walking past the boat docks between rain showers, a neighbor hailed me and asked, “Is the drought over?” I replied, “With the rain we’ve had in the last ten days, I hope so.” Because I was on the association board for so long, many know me by name, although I have to ask them theirs. I don’t mind asking.

I took this photograph during my Thursday trail walk. I’ve been trying to take a decent photo of this barn for 30 years. This one isn’t it. I’ll try again.

I turned on my bird identification app and in 30 seconds, it identified eight different birds. Halfway into spring that seems about right. Fish continue to spawn near the foot bridge. Joggers, dog-walkers, bicyclists, and walkers were out on the trail in the couple hour period between morning rain and afternoon showers. I’m glad to have made it outdoors when I could.

While my vegan spouse has been away I’m fixing dinners she can’t eat. Tonight it is lasagna with home grown spring onions and ricotta cheese. I’ve been thinking about this dish for a week. It is baking while I write.

I counted seedlings in the portable greenhouse. There are 750. It seems like a lot, and if I had to buy them at the store it would be a substantial investment. I check on them multiple times a day.

My idea of a garden is to grow as much as I can for the kitchen and give the rest away. The food bank always needs donations. Neighbors welcome fresh vegetables in season. If the rain would let up, I could start transplanting more to the garden. Thursday was a bust day for gardening. Friday is looking better.

We should know when my spouse is returning home today. I hope it is soon.

Categories
Kitchen Garden

Plot Three Develops

Bee in the collards.

On May 8th I’m way behind in getting the garden in. The first plot is mostly garlic planted in October. I’ll finish that plot off with herbs, lettuce, bok choy, and spinach under row cover. The second is onions and potatoes which will soon need weeding. I don’t know what will go in plot three but I have to get cabbage and kale in the ground before they get root bound. So I guess that will be part of it. I also need to get peas in, so maybe I’ll plant those next to the fencing so they have a support system. This is more hodge-podge than I care to be.

Wednesday was taking down last year’s fencing and pulling up the ground fabric. I was on my knees most of the time while working. There are two large collard plants in full bloom with abundant pollinators. The buzzing didn’t bother me while I worked around them, and took photos. Just being in the garden is affirming.

I asked the neighbor about cutting back the overhanging branches from their wild wooded area adjacent to our property. I did that, and left the branches to dry before piling them up for burning on Thursday. It was getting so thick, I couldn’t get the mower through without knocking my cap off my head.

The last of the volunteer garlic was ready to pick as spring garlic. It looked like a head developed and I missed picking it last year.I trimmed it and brought it to wash in the kitchen. While the spring garlic dried on the counter, the aroma filled the space. It was wonderful.

On Tuesday afternoon I drove the 6 or 7 miles to the Ely creamery. They have a retail store with products they make, including cheese, fluid milk, ice cream, and more. I like the cheese curds particularly. When I was riding my bicycle during the pandemic, I would ride the trail to Ely and stop there as a turn-around point. Their prices are a bit high, yet it is good to support a local business.

I don’t work in the garden as long as I did. I have to stop after an hour or so and take a short break. If I keep at it, I can likely get everything in the ground by Memorial Day. At least that’s what I’m hoping.

Categories
Kitchen Garden

Garden Enchiladas

Enchiladas, Spanish rice, and sauteed corn and bell pepper.

It seems early for a kitchen garden post yet here we are. The combination of a mild winter and plentiful plantings last year brought a Saturday vegetable harvest. There were collards, kale, cilantro, and spring onions growing in last year’s planting areas. Volunteer garlic came up where I plan tomatoes this year. After harvest, I cleaned the produce and made dinner with it. We had enchiladas, Spanish rice, and corn sauteed with bell pepper. I also used preserved guajillo chili sauce from last year. My recipe for enchiladas is here.

This meal has a lot of steps yet is worth the effort. The point I make today is while I enjoy plate photos like the one above, the sought end result is fleeting creativity in the kitchen, set in time, as I use ingredients picked an hour or two before. It is of such fleeting essences our lives are made.

During my time I viewed many television cooking shows, and lately, short-form videos about cooking. Rarely does any one of them stand out. Some are formulaic, some a brief distraction. There were so many of them, all the recipes and processes began to look alike. I mean, we know the combination of onion, carrot and celery with bay leaves makes a delicious soup base. We should know the Louisiana “holy trinity” is onions, bell peppers, and celery. How many times do we need to hear it? I imagine most of us have heard it enough.

It is possible to be a creative person. Creativity has some end goal in mind, with cooking, perhaps a plate photo or making a memory of a specific meal. Yet it is the process for which we live. I would never have put collard greens in the filling of an enchilada, except that’s what I found in the garden that day. I found fresh cilantro and that unplanned addition characterized the dish. While I often have recipes in mind, they are little more than a suggestion when cooking. The best of what we eat is often the result of a process that had no recipe in mind at the beginning. At least, it can be.

Grocers have a problem with my kind of food creativity. A grocer in a big box store must stock thousands of items while waiting for some customer to come along seeking one. They rely upon an item’s popularity to cover overhead and make a profit. Popular as they are, I can’t imagine many circumstances when I would buy fresh cilantro or spring onions at the grocer, even though they stock them all year. Therein lies the difference between my kitchen garden and cooking. There is something magical about a kitchen garden that can’t be replaced by commodities from the grocer.

Enchiladas are a well-liked meal in the United States and elsewhere. Our small community has two Mexican restaurants that sell them. If I wanted a Mexican-style dinner, I could just buy take out. That would be missing the point of time in the kitchen garden.

Categories
Kitchen Garden

Peppers and Tomatoes

Seeding peppers on March 30, 2024

Saturday was the first day I worked up a sweat in the spring garden. I moved storage items around and contemplated where I should bury the potato containers. The fence around the southwest plot needs to come down, and ground cover taken up. The layout will be changed to accommodate six potato containers, mowing around the apple tree, and placing the large compost bin made of old pallets. There will be space leftover. It will be an awkwardly shaped space.

Potatoes do better when there is a fence around them to keep deer away. If I can find mulch to put around them, they won’t need much besides water and pulling a few weeds. I must remain vigilant to see if the Colorado Potato Beetle arrives. The insect hasn’t been around the last few years.

I moved chard, collards, and fennel seedlings into larger pots to allow them to grow. I also thinned the bok choy family of seedlings to one sprout per block. One never knows how older seeds will perform so I doubled up. About half the celery seeds germinated. I’m not sure if twelve plants will be enough and I may plant more.

How many varieties of pepper seedlings should be planted? I cut back. Using the remaining bell pepper seeds from last year, I may not attempt to grow them again. With nice bell peppers available year-around at the wholesale warehouse, I am less worried about my failure to grow good bell peppers. The rest of the peppers are Serrano, Jalapeno, and a variety of long, red hot peppers for drying and converting into red pepper flakes. Reducing the variety aligns with how I use them. If I want a specialty pepper, I can likely get them at the farmers’ market.

The most important annual crop is tomatoes and I cut back the number of varieties this year. I’m a bit nervous about that with three varieties of plum, three slicers, and five cherries. For fresh eating, we tend to consume more cherry tomatoes than slicers. Both are reasons to grow a summer garden. The plums are mostly for canning whole or as sauce. There can never be enough of those.

I collected fallen branches and twigs from the yard and started a burn pile. I’m running behind on that, yet there is not a lot to burn. All the same, spring gardening has begun. It will be a constant activity from now until Memorial Day.

Categories
Kitchen Garden

Fertilizer Day

Marker for the now defunct Dillon’s Furrow.

Back when Iowa was a territory, a fellow named Lyman Dillon plowed a furrow from Iowa City to Dubuque so travelers could find their way from one city to the other. Iowa City was designated the territorial capitol in 1839, and Dubuque was a center of commerce, notably for fur trading, lumber, and lead mining. I stopped at the only marker I know and took this photo while enroute along the former Dillon’s Furrow. I went to Monticello to buy garden fertilizer.

Midwestern BioAg distributes bagged, composted chicken manure which many friends use in organic farming operations. I bought 150 pounds for $57.78. It should last through the growing season. I don’t know their process, but this stuff is the best in terms of ease of handling and results.

Farmers have been out in gigantic fields preparing the ground for row crops. Monticello is in Jones County where my spouse’s ancestors farmed after the Civil War. A family cemetery is within spitting distance of Highway 151 near Langworthy. It is a small farm community cemetery where cattle had gotten inside the fence and knocked down some of the grave markers.

If I plant potatoes on Good Friday (today), I’ll need the fertilizer. I’m ready to start digging soil. We’ll see if frost is out of the ground later today.

Categories
Kitchen Garden

Early Spring Chills

Black bean and kale taco filling.

With ambient temperatures in the twenties and thirties it has been a chilly early spring, of a kind that has me lingering indoors to find things to do. It is what it is. I hope to plant potatoes on Friday, yet if it’s too cold, I will delay. In the life cycle of Midwestern gardening, the growing season is extended by a warming climate and a few days doesn’t matter that much.

I plant potatoes in containers so the soil is less accessible to rodents. I move them each year, using the soil dug to bury them plus some soil mix and compost all blended with a cup or so of fertilizer in each tub. So far no critters dug their way into the tubs to eat the tubers.

A company in Monticello sells composted chicken manure, which is used by a lot of organic growers. I need to get over there and buy this year’s supply which is 150 pounds. There will likely be the annual discussion of which sales person gets credit for my sale. A few years ago we established that mine is a “house account” which means no sales person gets credit as I just walk into the office to buy it. Since beginning to use fertilizer, garden yields have improved.

Based on last year’s experience, I delayed planting peppers last weekend. Timing of seeding to planting time is more important for peppers and tomatoes. Any more, I don’t see an advantage of germinating early. I am cutting back on peppers and tomatoes this year with fewer varieties. For peppers to be successful in this climate, I need to install drip irrigation. I have been unwilling to do so, and there is an abundance of peppers when they come in around the county. I do plan to plant the varieties that grow well with my sparing watering.

I inspected the garlic and it is looking quite good. Taking time to loosen the straw mulch compacted over winter facilitated growth. It looks to be another great harvest.

When the weather finally breaks, there will be a lot of outdoors work to do. I am ready for it, even if there is plenty of indoors work to keep me busy.

Categories
Kitchen Garden

Not Gardening Weather

About 200 cell blocks with broccoli, kale, chard, collards, celery, herbs and more on March 2, 2024.

Yesterday a large flock of pelicans arrived on the lake. It’s a sign spring is coming.

While checking the mail, someone I’ve known since we moved here in 1993 was walking their dog. We had a discussion about the weather and about my garden which is one of the largest in the area. Our consensus of two was it is going to freeze again. It is too early to start digging garden plots.

In my fourth week of indoor seed planting, things seem to be going well. Most seeds have sprouted on schedule, and despite growing indoors, are developing in a way that will make for sound seedlings. Soon it will be time to assemble the portable greenhouse and move some outside.

There was a Red Flag Warning on Sunday, which means a risk of wildfires. I will delay brush burning until the warning ends.

I got these on Saturday at the Solon Public Library Annual Used Book Sale for a free will donation.

On Saturday I went to the public library and bought three books at their used book sale. I began reading the Pete Souza book as soon as I got home and couldn’t put it down until I turned all the pages. It is incomprehensible we went from Obama as depicted in these photos to Trump. I began to tear up a couple times while reading it. I am usually more reserved.

This led me to thinking about the presidents during my lifetime and this brief rating:

  • Truman: Don’t recall as president.
  • Eisenhower: Okay for a Republican/Interstate Highway System
  • Kennedy: Favorable
  • LBJ: Vietnam/Voting rights/Medicare
  • Nixon: OMG!
  • Ford: Not Nixon
  • Carter: Malaise/Camp Davis Accords
  • Reagan: JFC!
  • George Bush: Reagan-lite
  • Clinton: +/- Neocon
  • George W. Bush: Bad, very bad
  • Obama: My president
  • Trump: Nightmare/insurrectionist
  • Biden: What I expect from a Democrat

Spring is two weeks away and the days tick by much faster than I’d like. By my count, I can expect 14 more springs during my lifetime. I plan to find enjoyment in each of them. Hopefully pelicans will be a part of them.

Categories
Writing

Weekly Journal 2024-03-03

Morning coffee.

The week started with days where the ambient temperature reached a high in the 70s, dipped on Wednesday to the teens, then rose again the rest of the week. The expectation for first week in March is highs in the 30s and 40s, so it seems unseasonably warm.

Creamed crumbles on toast

I don’t have many meals derived from Mother’s cooking. As important as cooking has become to me, I can count on one hand the number of dishes I now make that she did, too. One of those is variously called chipped beef on toast or creamed beef on toast. Mother made this for Father as a reminiscence of Southern cooking in which he came up. I don’t use beef in our kitchen, yet I made this for breakfast one day. I use vegetarian recipe crumbles as a meat substitute.

Saute half cup of finely diced onions in two tablespoons of butter and add one finely chopped clove of garlic. Season with salt and pepper. Add dried home made hot pepper powder. Add a cup of recipe crumbles and cook until thawed from the freezer. Add two tablespoons of all purpose flour and combine everything while on medium low heat. Add one cup of milk (cow milk or oat milk, whatever is the kitchen standard) and combine. Lower the heat and cook until the mixture thickens. Toast and cut into 3/4-inch squares two slices of bread. Pour the creamed crumble mixture evenly over the toast and enjoy.

Tracking writing

I edited the first ten chapters of my book. I created a spreadsheet to track what I did and how the daily word count changed. The fact that I am now including numbered chapters is a revelation. It helps organize topics in a way I hadn’t considered. I now gather topics from different places in the narrative over a span of years under a single header. It helps reduce the amount of duplication that plagued me from the cut and paste method of composition with which I began. I am satisfied I made progress last week.

Email rabbit hole

I have email files beginning in 1999. There are hundreds of thousands of stored emails and I don’t plan to read them all. When I begin a session of email reading, I become lost for hours in a rabbit hole of forking paths. For example, the emails I wrote and received about updating the county plan for dealing with a contagious disease epidemic seem prescient in light of the coronavirus pandemic ten years later. This research will yield a paragraph, maybe two in my chapter about the coronavirus pandemic which closes the book.

What I seek the most is emails from friends and family to use in other parts of the narrative. Facts are recorded with dates attached to them and they help evoke memories of that time. The trouble I see is advancing technology may render some of those files obsolete. For now, the current version of Microsoft Outlook opens all the saved files, yet I’m anxious to go through them even if it would be better to wait until I’m writing those parts of the narrative.

Publication

I decided to publish Part I of the autobiography first. The narrative goes through finishing graduate school and taking work at the university where my spouse and I met. I was 30 years old on our wedding day: a clean breaking point for the narrative. The second part of the book will be more difficult to write because there is so much material to condense. I delay that challenge by deciding to finish part I this year, God willing.

Summary

It was a good week. Hopefully increased garden tasks can be added to my life without compromising the writing. March brings the pressure of spring and I am ready for it. On Friday, March 1, we saw the first Robin in our yard, along with another flock of smaller birds. Spring is definitely coming.

Categories
Kitchen Garden

Getting Soil Mix

First Soil Blocks at the CSA

It was time to get soil mix for seed starting. The amount leftover from last year wasn’t enough to get through this weekend’s planting of herbs, cauliflower and broccoli. I emailed the dirt company (yes, we have those in Iowa) to make sure they had what I needed and drove over near Tipton yesterday to get it. The sun was so bright I had to wear sunglasses.

I enjoy that drive. When I was a paid political campaign consultant I got to know Cedar County quite well, both cities and rural areas. I could name the owners of some of the farms as I passed. The direct route to the dirt company is over gravel roads. While the car needs a wash when I finish the trip, I feel comfortable in that geography without a map. I have driven those roads so much I don’t need one.

It was also a great day to be outdoors driving along massive fields coming out of winter. There were a few pieces of farm equipment on the roads, yet most of the fields haven’t been touched this year. Corn stubble left from the 2023 harvest was everywhere. The Cedar River seemed lower than usual, likely a result of continuing drought conditions. It seemed like the end of winter, although with spring not far away.

It has been more than ten years since I had a pickup truck. I miss those days. To get the soil mix to fit in our subcompact, I had to remove the shelf in the back window and flip down the seats. I laid a couple of towels over everything so it wouldn’t get dirty. The subcompact held to the roads pretty well as I am an experienced rural driver.

I figure there are 14 more gardens in me before I get too old to grow them. Back in the day when we first married I just stuck tomato plants in the ground and hoped they produced. I added some skills in the 41 years since those first plantings. It helped to work on a vegetable farm for eight years.

The new portable greenhouse arrived, my fourth since I began using them. One was damaged in a straight line wind storm, the next by the August 2020 derecho, and last year the zipper tore loose. With a new one, this year should be fine. I’d prefer a permanent greenhouse yet even with the replacements it has been much cheaper to use the portable ones. We have plenty of uses for any extra cash, so the savings is welcome.

The kale seedlings are sprouting their third leaves so it’s time to put them in a bigger container before planting. With new soil mix in the garage, I’m ready.