When the barbarians are at the gate, what will we eat?

It is a truth, universally unrealized, that commercial farmers have no incentive to grow tasty produce for resale. If you get your fruits and vegetable at a local grocery store, you may have noticed this for yourself. The produce is grown in overworked soil, picked and shipped unripe to cut down on damage. It softens and changes color while it's transported, sometimes great distances, but never develops much more flavor separated from its mother plant and the soil. It saddens me to think that many younger people in this country have never tasted a properly grown vegetable in their entire lives and may never appreciate what they've missed.

Leisure has given me opportunity to watch the news with its dire predictions of rising food costs (and watch post-apocolypse zombie movies too). It chaps my hide when I think of paying even more for produce that never has been satisfactory and never will be. As a result, I've been motivated to grow organic vegetables again this year. After all, when civilization collapses and the barbarians (or zombies) are at the gate, what are we going to eat when the Twinkies run out? I want to have food and viable currency available when the new world order emerges.

Beans, peas, tomatoes, potatoes, squash, cabbages, Brussels sprouts, leeks, herbs, edible flowers ....some are easy to grow and some more challenging. Skipping past the hard work of building raised potager style planters in my backyard, I combated Seattle's overly cool La Nina Spring weather by relying on healthy plant starts for many of the longer growing vegetables. I didn't expect or get much encouragement until the weather finally warmed up in August. (I'm not joking.) And then, things started to take off.

It's October now, and I can acknowledge that greed is, on occasion, good, that occasion being when the first ripe Early Girl tomato made its way from the vine to my mouth for a cautious bite. Sweet, but not too, firm, and my taste buds did a happy dance. The undersized tomato quickly disappeared and I looked mournfully at the rest of the green "rocks" on the vine that I would have to wait many weeks for. The new Yukon Gold potatoes I picked just this week have been a revelation too. I know your Mamas told you not to eat dirt; but potatoes grown in rich, well composted garden soil taste strongly of it. It's wonderful, better than butter. I won't even try to describe the green beans except to say that we had guilt free All You Can Eat Bean Night more than once this season.

I learned that some plants are targets for a variety of pests. Aphids, and cabbage butterflies attacked the Brussels sprouts intended for Christmas Dinner. And I have learned that Pak Choi is greatly loved by slugs and flea beetles, and doesn't grow well in planter boxes. Green pest control solutions have had to be draconian and involved, strong jets of water from the hose, nets, rubber gloves and a sturdy rock--good practice for the zombies to come, maybe.

Composting shredded paper in King County

Found this forgotten in the drafts folder. Apologies. Information is still good.
***
I once heard a rumor that the shreds from personal paper shredders are not supposed to go in your curbside recycling bin. The fibers are apparently too short to recycle into higher quality recycled paper, so there's no resale market for them, hence no financial incentive to recycle. Plus including them in your curbside recycling bin renders the rest of your bin unusable. And what happens then? It gets landfilled with the regular trash, wasting both your effort and the resources.

My housemate has been decrapping his personal records, shredding the documents and things like unsolicited credit card offers with a newly purchased cross-cut shredder. The amount of shreds is simply not to be believed, and the thought of all that paper going into a landfill hurt my heart. If it wasn't recylable, surely it was a least compostable. I decided to get to the bottom of it.

King County Solid Waste Division has an interactive guide on its web site that tells you how/where to dispose of specific material:

http://your.kingcounty.gov/solidwaste/index.asp

The guidance for shredded paper was incomplete, and did not mention composting. Fortunately, I'm stubborn. I contacted them with my question by email and received this in reply on November 23, 2010:

"Yes, you can layer your shredded paper, food scraps and food soiled paper and yard debris in your curbside yard waste cart.  If you have a worm bin at home, shredded paper coming from paper which does not have a lot of ink on it, makes a excellent bedding material."

Our region is to be commended for having had the political will to make household recycling available and economically viable. Such programs are by no means universal in the U.S. But it's up to us to make sure that the recyclables are properly sorted, i.e. not degraded by inclusion of non-recylable material. This "Quick'n'Dirty" cheat sheet is available from the City of Seattle. Won't it look good on the refrigerator!

*

WWJD?

When a friend hands you Pak Choi ....make lemonade. No, that doesn't sound right. Braise it? Grill it? Stir fry it? What would Julia do?

My best friends, Rick and Barbara, are gardeners with the mad skills, dedication and the patience it takes to grow vegetables of gem-like beauty, and complex taste. And they're generous too. In seasons past, I've managed to come away from our gatherings with armloads of fresh produce that the local grocery store simply cannot match.

This 4th of July was no exception. We're sitting out in the backyard enjoying the sunny afternoon and Barbara casually reaches over into their "Grow Camp" mini greenhouse, plucks a perfect Pak Choi out of the dirt and presents it to me. Made me feel like I'd just been made Miss America oddly. The pak choi is now glowing palely at me from the sink drainer, and I'm fantasizing about braising it in something low-cal and savory for lunch. (Imagine Homer noises here.)

***
P.S. I think R&B are onto my tomato-deprived act. Looking hungry and pathetic only takes you so far until the suggestion is made, gently, that perhaps you should consider growing tomatoes yourself. (Did I mention that some folks call me "Purple Thumbed Les?") But six plants are currently flowering in the backyard so perhaps there's hope. They are Early Girl (2), Roma (2), Sweet 100 Cherry (1) and Sungold Cherry (1).

Well yes. It has been awhile.

Seems like I've been absent forever, but it's really only been about 6 months. In January, I decided to take advantage of being at home and get my old deck rebuilt into something more satisfactory and structurally competent. As it happens, this became an opportunity to relandscape as well. Blogging? Fuhgeddaboutit. No time.

My goals for the project have been twofold: firstly, to rebuild the deck as a three-season outdoor room, and secondly, to replant the lawn (mostly moss) as an organic urban farm and low maintenance native plant area. The deck with partial roof was completed just a month ago, and the potager garden is laid out, planted and beginning to flourish. There's even the start of an organic compost heap.

Pavement and native plantings are on-hold until my mood realigns with my ambition. On the positive side of the ledger: I've lost some weight and my arms look positively ripped from all the digging. On the negative side, I've got tendonitis in both my wrists and an elbow. S'okay. I can live with a wrist brace and bare earth until Fall. And pavements need to be planned anyway; finally going to make use of all the mismatched paver and tile remnants the former owner stashed around here. It'll be artsy.

Nature is not sleeping meanwhile, though the cool, wet Seattle Spring has set plant growth back as much as 6 weeks according to some. Can I possibly win the race to get the weeds pulled before they go to seed this year? I'm certainly going to try, bad wrists notwithstanding. And if the sun will ever shine for more than a day at a time, I may get the new construction weather sealed too. I think I may be gone awhile some more.

His Lordship cleaned something. I am thrilled!

Princess Andrew can be alot of fun, which is why I keep him around. (Okay, the free tech support is nice too.) But he is for sure a slob with hoarder tendencies. And the condition of his private bath, so heinous that I complained about it a year ago, was so olfactorally worse with this year's return of warm weather that I started closing the door to his suite and hanging masking odor air fresheners in the hallway between our bedrooms. Guess that finally got through to him because he not only admitted it was bad, he decided to do something about it--finally!

After an hour of vigorous scrubbing and mopping, the critters were dead and all was inoffensive once again. It's probably somehow perverse that I'd rather inhale bleach than mildew smells, but I made a point of praising the cloud of disinfectant wafting from his bathroom window. Now that the backlog of crud is gone, will he find his way and continue to wipe things down once in awhile? Stay tuned!

Green Tomatoes: Yes, I Can!

I had to leave them behind. My babies, my jewels, my tomatoes.

Having booked an 8-day, out-of-state vacation back in August, I never dreamed I'd still be waiting for most of my tomatoes to ripen two days before I left in mid-October. Unwilling to leave them to the rapidly cooling Fall temperatures, I cut the tomatoes off of the plants leaving a little bit of the vine attached. The ones that had begun to blush were deposited in a brown paper bag in hopes that they would ripen while I was away. But what to do with the rest--the green "rocks" that were the considerable balance of the crop?

To call them rocks is a bit insulting. They did their best with what we were given, after all. But what to do ....fried green tomatoes? Chutney? No, pickles; firm, crunchy and slightly sweet ice box pickles!

The basic recipe (see below) is hot brine poured over cut up vegetables. I decided to toss in the handful of yellow wax and Jalapeno peppers I'd manage to grow in another Topsy Turvy planter along with some garlic. Mission accomplished, I slid nearly two quarts of green tomato pickles into the refrigerator and finished packing my bags.

Nine days later I returned to find pickles so vinegary that they were practically inedible. But I wasn't yet defeated: I strained out the pickles reserving the liquid, put them back in the jar and diluted the pickling liquid with 1/3 water. They were much better after only a day. Lesson learned: taste the pickling liquid BEFORE you pour it in. It needs to be able to stand alone.

Incidentally, the tomatoes in the brown bag were red and ready to eat by the time I returned from vacation. Though they were not a flavorful as the ones that had time to ripen on the plant, they still tasted considerably better than grocery store tomatoes. And trust me, they didn't last long. Well worth the effort.

So in conclusion, yes, it seems I can can.

BASIC ICE BOX PICKLE RECIPE

2 C white vinegar
2 C water
1/4 C kosher salt
Sugar to taste
2 T pickling spice (Schilling brand, or your choice of whole spices)
4-5 garlic cloves, peeled and crushed slightly with the flat of a knife to release the flavor
Vegetables, cubed, sliced, speared, or whole

Combine vinegar, water, salt, sugar and pickling spice in saucepan, adjusting flavors to your taste. As you bring the liquid to a boil, prepare garlic and vegetables, filling jar(s) nearly to top. Pour boiling pickling liquid over vegetables to top of jar and allow to cool before covering and placing in refrigerator.

Pickles are ready to eat after a few hours refrigeration. They will not keep indefinitely, so plan to eat them within 6 weeks.

Garden Tomatoes: The Jewels in the Crown

When people say that the only way to get good fresh tomatoes is to grow them yourself, believe them. Since I am a notorious houseplant slayer (I actually killed a cactus once), I have shied away from growing any food more complicated than snap peas for years. But having some time on my hands this year, I decided to give in to the tomato hunger and try growing my own Roma and Burpee Big Boy tomatoes from nursery starts.

I may have possibly picked the worst growing season in years to become a novice tomato farmer. After an unseasonably warm February, Seattle settled back into a cold Spring and tardy Summer. So I decided to try out those crazy Topsy Turvy Tomato planters you see on t.v. They're supposed to be foolproof BTW, but that is not actually true: you can over water tomatoes by following the product directions, causing black spots and rot to form on the plants. I learned that it's a far, far better thing to refresh a slightly parched plant than to have to amputate branches to contain the spread of fungus.

The garden, located behind the palace, is semi-shady. Nevertheless, the planters produced their advertised greenhouse effect with the limited sunlight and this helped to compensate for the otherwise cool Summer temperatures. The large "starts" were planted in early June, and flowers and then fruit formed by late August.

I did finally get some true, flavorful Roma tomatoes out of the deal by OCTOBER. (The Big Boy variety just didn't get the time/heat they needed to produce much of a crop though I found a use for the shiny green rocks later.*) The true vine ripe Roma's may have looked like their grocery store relatives and probably cost me about four times more per pound to grow, but they sure tasted different. The good kind of different. Needless to say, I hoarded them like the treasures they were!

*Next time: Green Tomatoes: Yes, I Can!