Question from the market:  “Do you spray your vegetables, at all, with anything?”

mantis at home among the beanstalks

Thank you for asking!  It’s an easy and straightforward answer:  No!

I began growing my own food partly, as I’ve mentioned before, because of flavor and quality, and pleasure in the process.  But only partly.  The other reason has to do with my beliefs about pesticides, herbicides, and nutritional quality, and what we are doing to our health and our world by poisoning or compromising our food.  I reason that if I grow it, I really know what’s been sprayed on it, and what the soil it grew in looked like.  And I want food with no chemicals, to the extent that this can be achieved in a world contaminated by the drift from other peoples’ chemical applications. My family tree holds an enormous history of cancer.  All four grandparents, a parent, several aunt/uncles, a great grandparent at least. This is a conversation for another post, but the root of the matter is - I do what I can to avoid controllable carcinogenic exposures.  Please read Living Downstream, by Sandra Steingraber, for insight into this issue.

Baby bluejays beside the garden

I am also opposed to harming beneficial insects, and unfortunately, several of the chemical applications deemed acceptable for organic growing methods can do just that.  Neem oil, pyrethrins, insecticidal soaps, rotenone, and Bt, for example, don’t discriminate among which insect to kill, at times, or damage other animals.  Too often, people don’t discriminate among insects either.  This is also another post for another time, but in brief, without insects, we are without many foods.  Most fruit or vegetable parts we eat that contains seeds, and most fruits or vegetables whose propagation involves reproduction by seed, will be damaged in productivity if the pollinating insect population is damaged.  And you can forget about honey.

We also do not “prepare” soil for growing plants by spraying it one season and growing without sprays subsequently.  I have been astonished to hear farmers tell clientele their food is grown without any sprays at all, then describe to other farmers how they are increasing their growing area by spraying with Roundup one year to get the weeds down, then growing food there the next year and saying they didn’t use sprays.  I encourage everyone to ask the deeper questions:  “Do you use any kind of pesticide or herbicide anywhere ever?”  “Have you ever used _____?” “What do you think about pesticide sprays?”

Tree frog guarding the zucchini

None of this should be confused with an opposition to killing individual creatures.  We handpick japanese beetles, potato bugs, tomato hornworms, and various hungry hungry caterpillars, and squish them, drown them, or feed them to the chickens with satisfaction.  Row covers, staggered plantings, crop rotation, and good soil (to grow strong plants that can handle a little damage) are preventive measures.

Today I picked tomatoes in the rain, and a frog hopped out from under the plants swiftly, too swiftly to identify.  A few days ago, I found a green treefrog contentedly nestled against a zucchini leaf, almost perfectly camouflaged. Praying mantises, garden spiders, toads, birds, and predatory wasps are a common sight among the crops.  These creatures tell me something of the health of the microcosm where our food grows.  Hopefully, where they can live, so can we.

I think I overdid it in the heat a bit today.  I wouldn’t usually work out in the hottest part of a hot day, but several sources told me that severe thunderstorms were on the way for the afternoon.  And I so wanted to get the last of the onions in!  It was a perfect moment for harvesting - after some dry days without much rain on them, a very hot dry sunny day.  Onions have to be cured (dried) carefully in order to last into the winter months.  I’m not planning to buy any onions, so I’m pretty invested in curing ours carefully.  Rain on them in the afternoon would have seriously interfered.   So I went and pulled the rest of the onions, laid them out in the sun to dry, and then didn’t stop there, because there was so much else to do, clearing beds, weeding, harvesting…  It’s amazing how fast you can overheat - working fast so you can be done sooner, feeling the sun on your skin and the sweat dripping everywhere feels kindof good, if you keep moving, keep distracted.  Before I knew it, I was pretty tired, headache starting up, face beet red, vague nausea.  It’s taken several hours of fluids and cooling down again to start to feel better.  And then it never did rain - blue sky all day.

But this post is supposed to be about onions.  Onions are one one of those magical things to grow, to me.  When the bulbs start to fatten up, and you can store them and use them months later, it just seems amazing, when I think of them coming from tiny little seeds, and the most impossibly thin frail little stems.  I grow all my onions from seed now, after years of disappointment with the little bulb onion sets.  I never got decent onions from those, and many of them went to seed and made no bulbs at all.  It made a lot more sense after I learned about what impacts onions’ growth in one of my favorite gardening books - The Book of Garden Secrets, by Dorothy Patent and Diane Bilderback.  When you buy the bulbs, you don’t have any idea how they’ve been stored, and it turns out that exposure to certain amounts of light and temperatures will influence whether the onions that grow from the bulbs go to seed, or produce a food onion.  I can be more sure of what happens to them when I grow them myself, and that has resulted in astronomically better onion success.

We grew 3 varieties this year:  Copra, Redwing, and Varsity.  Redwing did beautifully last year when Copra failed; this year is vice-versa.  Varsity is new to me, and I’m very happy with it - huge perfectly round yellow onions that are gorgeous.  The final test will be to see how they store.

To cure onions well for storage, you are supposed to wait until their tops fall over, and stop watering them at this point.  (This is where the unpredictability of rain comes in.)  When they have been in the ground under these conditions for 10 days or so, you pull them, hopefully on a hot dry sunny day.  Lay them out on the ground in the sun to dry, but only for a day or two.  Next, they are brought indoors and laid out on a screen for finishing drying.  When their stems have no wetness left at all, I braid them into onion ropes and hang them for storage.  And that is our onion supply for the year! If we are lucky, they may last into early March, when the first chives and green onions come in, and the cycle starts again.

So, I just had to post our lunch today, or is it dinner.  Our tomatoes have been SO incredibly good.  They’ve also been bursting at the seams, the rains have been so frequent and the humidity high.  Our horizontal tomato bushes (hardly ‘plants’) are going nuts, and it’s way hard to keep up.

BLT w/ S4L in the making

With tomatoes, we’ve had so many split fruit this year that we have only been able to take a small fraction to the Westside Farmers Market.  The best go to market, and the rest stay here for canning and eating.  But today, we made BLT’s from two of the nicest tomatoes we took to market… and nobody bought.  The crazy thing is, these are just incredibly good eating tomatoes, the kind everyone says “Oh, I wish I could find tomatoes like I remember from the garden when I was a kid.  Now THOSE were tomatoes!”  Well that’s what these are.

But the thing is, they don’t look like we remember them.  And I think it’s a problem of implanted memories, like the ones they worry about in criminal trials where witnesses try to remember details of something that happened years ago, but they include details and ideas that they may believe are actual memories, but are really just implanted ideas that have insinuated themselves over the years.

In the case of tomatoes, we’ve become conditioned to believe that these mystical tomatoes are red.  Perfectly red.  Uniformly and gorgeously consistently red.  Because that’s what line we are being fed by the grocery stores.  We can’t help it… Agribusiness has bred red tomatoes with long shelf life for decades now, and that’s what we see in the store shelves.  These tomatoes get red before they’re really ripe, so that they can be picked early when they’re hard and can be transported easily.  They’ve got tough skins so that they hold up to transport from big farm to distributor warehouse and warehouse to big box grocery produce section.  They treat them with ethylene gas to help ripen them up.  And the message is not just in front of us everytime we go to the produce section… and who (besides us) doesn’t go to the produce section?

These damn perfect red hard skinned tasteless bastards of agribusiness are sold to us with every TV commercial touting “Fresh!”.  Pizza commercials, restaurant commercials, pasta commercials, and in countless magazine articles.  Red.  All red, consistently red, inside and out red.

But it’s not where the really good tomatoes are.  It’s not what we grow to eat at Dragonwood, and it’s not what we sell (at least not very much).  We grow the tomatoes we want most to eat, and they’re not very red typically, they’re not very consistent, they’re just not usually “beautiful” to the modern consumer’s eye.  I’m not going to list off all the varieties we grow… and I certainly can’t pick every tomato out of the garden basket and tell you which it is (Mandy can, mostly).  They’re yellow and orange, purple and green, and usually inconsistent.  Some have green shoulders even when they’re perfectly ripe, and some have such deep purple insides that they look a bit rotten from the outside!  But I’ve learned the difference between conventional (red!) beauty and tomatoes prized for their taste.  I can’t tell you how much I’m enjoying this tomato season.  In fact, I want to thank all those customers at the market this week who didn’t pick the best tomatoes so that they could go into my lunch sandwich today.  But I do hope they (some of them) might read this, and at their next market go to the vendors who prize their tomatoes for flavor, who have mostly tomatoes that look funny (less than perfect red), and talk tomato with the growers, and take home a variety of funny looking tomatoes to relish.  Vive la différence!

Oh, I got off topic didn’t I?  We have no (capital L) lettuce these days, so our sandwiches had green bean slaw, which you can see in the photo.  It’s fantastic stuff… beans + non-iodized salt + time, and bingo, what a delish relish.  With a side of tomato wedges, all colors.  Mmmm.

So, mowing our yard is not so much for keeping the neighbors happy at our tidiness (hah!) as it is a harvest.  Our gardening style is, as much as possible, to mulch the place like mad to keep the grasses and other bystanders somewhat at bay.  We just don’t have time for massive and continuous weeding operations, so we try to keep overgrowth at bay by burying it.  It works reasonably well, but takes massive amounts of mulch to do so.

Mulch raking in progress

We have two main sources of mulch.  The first, as seen in the photos above, is yard clippings.  This is my harvest.  I mow the yard in patterns amenable to raking, since I have no mechanized way of picking up the clippings…  I rake by hand.  So it takes several hours to mow the whole place, and several more hours to rake down the rows of clippings (after they sit for a couple days).  In a good mowing I get about 10 full garden carts of clippings (about the amount I can comfortably pull up the grassy hill).  Then I spread it out wherever it’s needed, or make a big pile for use later.

Pumpkins like mulch

In this photo we used it to extend the new pumpkin patch farther out into the yard.  The pumpkins are looking happy to have the extra space, here in this foggy dusky summer evening shot.

Our other main source of mulch is wet hay.  When, over at the family farm, the weather doesn’t cooperate and a pile of hay comes in that’s too wet to store and isn’t immediately needed for the horses or sheep, then a trailer full appears at Dragonwood.  We used that in the new pumpkin/corn/potato/squash patch as we sowed seedlings to make a good base for all the pathways between the plantings.  That particular patch (about 16×100 feet) was well mulched to start and has fewer weeds by far than those garden patches we didn’t manage to mulch so thoroughly.  As in the pumpkin photo above, our use of mulch around the edges has expanded that patch to about 20 some feet wide and 120 feet long now, an easy way to grow the field by mulching down the grass on each side :-)

And if you’ll excuse me now, I have a lot of raking to do.

Home from the offices at 6:30pm, been there all day.  Quick snack, no time for more, gotta use the daylight, when it’s not 90 degrees, or pouring down lightning and rain.  Hurry and gather eggs.  Out to the new garden plot.  Arms are sore from yesterday’s hoeing of heavy wet clayey soil up over the 160-odd feet of potatoes planted.  Carried out 21 more hot pepper plants, and 20 more eggplants.  Hacked holes in the same wet heavy clayey soil, planted the plants.  Mulched, weeded, checked other newly planted plants for bugs, moles, disasters, took stock of what we can sell at market on Thursday.  One branch of a newly planted apple tree is broken in the storms - the tree’s so little, the one branch makes up about 1/3 of it’s mass.  Branch is hanging by a strip of bark, and the leaves not wilted - position it carefully, and wrap it with grafting tape and splint it -it may survive and heal.  On one of the trips to and fro from the house, picked the asparagus and took it in, started pots of lentils and rice on the stove, returned a couple client phone calls.  Pulled up the wires from beds that don’t need row covers anymore, moved them to the other garden to cover the eggplants.  Quickly cut and placed TP tube cardboard collars around each new plant, to protect the little stem from cutworms and rabbit teeth.  Getting dark now, working faster.  P helps place new support wire hoops and cut and stretch and tuck and fasten the rowcover, to keep out the deer and the fleabeetles.  Carry the tools and supplies back to garage.  Run back to house to check on the rice and lentils on the stove.  Grab the salad spinner, hike back out with the scissors to pick lettuce for supper and tomorrow’s lunch.  Notice the slugs returning after the rains, grab the slug-picking container, go from row to row brushing slugs into it.  Now the hips and legs and back are really starting to hurt, end of a long day, kneel, squat, bend, stand, over and over.  Drown the container of slugs in a bucket of water.  Have I mentioned how I hate slugs?  Not as much as I hate chemicals.  P is shutting up the chickens for the night.  Give the lettuce a first washing out in the garden. Grab a fresh young garlic and handful of herbs for the lentils, handful of radishes for the salad.  Pull off the lettuce rowcovers for the night, and the rain.  Run in, check stove, start chopping herbs and radishes.  Was soaking some bean seeds for quick germination that didn’t make it into the ground before dark fell tonight - drain them and pack them to last the night until tomorrow.  Throw together the lentils and herbs and seasoning, a quick salad, pass the asparagus coated in olive oil under the broiler - done, supper by 10pm?

A little-known fresh spring delicacy we love is chive blossoms.  Chives themselves are greeted with great enthusiasm for about a month in the early spring, when we’ve generally run out of onions, gotten sick of dried herbs, and the new onion greens haven’t appeared yet.  Chives find their way into a lot of our cooking and salads in April and May, but by the end of May (especially if it’s been hot like this year) the greens can get a little boring.  And then - the blossoms arrive!

Chive blossoms can be used in any way that regular chopped chives are.  They are subtler on flavor, and beautiful to behold.  They’re especially nice as a garnish on top of salads, noodles, potato or egg salad, sushi, scrambled eggs, etc.

They come as cut flowers, (we’ll have them at Market) and are really easy to use in cooking:  just take the clump of blossoms between thumb and fingers and gently pull them off the stem.  Then scatter over a dish!

Today’s chive blossom recipe for us:

Cold Udon noodles with Baby Greens & Chive Blossoms

Cook the udon in boiling water, drain, and soak briefly in icewater to cool.  Meanwhile, chop green onions, a few radishes, a handful of fresh cilantro, and pull the blossoms off about 5 chive stems.  Make a dressing by combining olive oil, sesame oil, soy sauce, rice wine vinegar, a dash of maple syrup, and a bit of hot pepper oil, if desired.  I never measure - just add and experiment.  Lime juice is good here too.  When the noodles are cooled, drain them well, pour enough dressing over them to coat, and toss with the chopped onion, radish, cilantro, and chive blossom.  Prepare a  bed of greens on the plate, dress it lightly with a stream of the same dressing, and put a helping of the noodles on top.  Today we added an little cold leftover grilled steak and asparagus from last night.  Sprinkle on a few more chive blossoms for garnish, and enjoy!

We are going full tilt with work preparing to attend the market!  We do all the gardening and growing work ourselves, around each of our other jobs, and it’s been really busy.  We’re still tiny tiny tiny producers, but we’re focusing on quality and uniqueness rather than mass production.  We don’t use any kind of chemicals or poisons on the things we grow, ever.  And we don’t sell things we wouldn’t be excited about eating ourselves!

Greens have been excellent this spring!  This heat, however, may change that fast.  I’m hoping the lettuces can hold out a little bit, with the help of mulch, row covers, and interplanting with things like garlic and onions, that give a wee bit of shade. We expect to be back at the market with Dragonwood’s “Wild Baby Greens” mix at the opening next week.  Why “Wild”?  Mostly just a nickname they got last year - there’s often a little bit of the wild and unexpected, and we take full advantage of the self-seeding and regrowth of some of the crucifers and lettuces that we let naturalize, plus the additions of dandelion, lamb’s quarters, purslane, when they are young and tasty.  We had quite the devoted following of the greens last year, and we’re looking forward to seeing you all again.

The mix we’ve got going right now usually includes at least the following:

6-10 kinds of carefully chosen or heirloom lettuces

Baby Chard

3-4 types of baby Kale

Spinach

Arugula

Mache

Mizuna

Endive

We are usually able to accomodate special orders - if someone wants a bag of a certain green here and there, let us know!

See you at the market on Thursday June 3rd!

This is my job today.  Finish it up.  Last week I rototilled the overgrown 15×20′ patch, after strategically removing a few straggling irises.  This week I’ve managed to rake and get down to the deep roots of most of the grasses over half the patch.

Paul with three-prong rake, sheep-based compost and the new potato patch.

Here I am with a barrow of composted sheep-manure plus straw fertilizer/mulch covering the first half of the plot.  Today… the remaining 150 square feet gets derooted and covered.

It truly is lovely filth though.  Very little smell at all, compared to the manure spread on local fields, whether sprayed as a liquid (what liquid is that, exactly?) or thrown from a manure spreader.  I don’t think most farmers really let their manure get composted like this stuff has.  We’re spreading it on thick enough to (hopefully) keep the light out and inhibit the grasses growing back very much until we get potatoes in.

We need new potato patches to help keep the pest population down (those that like to overwinter and be ready to chow down when potatoes come up again).  Anything that helps in this regard is good for me… I take responsibility for much of the potato patch hand pest picking during the growing season.

But that takes me away from this filth.  Lovely filth, from lovely sheep in their lovely barn with their lovely bouncing lambs, who will in turn later this year taste oh so lovely too.  Lovely sheep, lovely compost, lovely vegetables, oh lovely all around.

And now it’s afternoon, and time to end this lovely post and go back to my 150 square feet.  Fortunately, Mandy found me a nicer tool (pictured above, but you can’t really tell) to use, a three-pronged garden weeder with long prongs.  I was using a stiff-pronged garden rake, but it has about a dozen short prongs and is almost impossible to apply with enough force to get deep roots out.  But this three-pronged beauty goes right down and saves me work.  I have high hopes of finishing this bed off by 5pm.

Learning to overwinter greens was one of those lifechanging events for me, when I first started about 6 or 7 years ago.  This year we’ve been eating out of the garden since February, when the hoop tunnels started to yield the first spinach and mache.  A lot of the first salads are as much foraged as cultivated.  In March, our greens featured the spinach & mache, a little overwintered lettuce, violet leaves, a little overwintered kale & chard putting out tiny new leaves, overwintered radiccio, early-emerging sorrel, chervil, parsley, and dandelion greens. A couple planters sown with spindly lettuce and mache, grown on the porch, filled it out.

Dandelions allowed to grow and covered with mulch give blanched tender leaf sprouts with a flavor very similar to Belgian endive, their close relative.  Rather than weed them out, I leave many of them be in the fall, cover them with leaves, and harvest in March and April.

Our banner above, for this season, shows our overwintered “wild baby greens” salad mix.  Lettuce is being planted now, to come in for May and start off at the Westside Farmers Market in June.  :)

Must have done something right with the eggplant seeds this year. I was feeling behind, off to a late start on the seeds I usually start in February. So I soaked the eggplant seeds for a day before planting them. Eggplants need warmth to grow quickly, so their seed trays are also parked on a seed heating mat, and located near the woodstove. It all seemed to make a difference: eggplant seeds that often take 2+weeks to germinate were up in a record 5-7 days!

We’re growing 4 varieties of eggplant: Japanese Long Pickling, Pingtung Long, Rosa Bianca, and Snowy. The Asian varieties are more reliable, earlier fruiting, and perhaps grow a little faster. Snowy is a white eggplant that was one of the few productive survivors of last year’s eggplant debacle. Rosa Bianca is a beautiful eggplant dream I chase…. supposedly requiring too long a season in this area to produce, but the fruit are so delicious and so beautiful that I will try until I have reason to give it up. Last year I ended up with only 3 specimens of Rosa Bianca fruit - but the circumstances were extreme! Hoping for better this year….