Today we at Harvest Stewards dropped off our first bundle of produce to a local food pantry, "Action Ministries". The produce in question is six pounds of cucumbers, grown in the container I mentioned in an earlier post.
I know that six pounds of cukes is not the solution to hunger... But consider if, say, 100 people -or even as few as 20 or 30, for that matter- devoted a little bit of time, effort and space to growing some food for others! What a difference that could begin to make! This is but a drop in the bucket, but at least the bucket isn't completely dry.
Monday, June 28, 2010
Thursday, June 24, 2010
Sweet miracles
... well, not miracles per se, but miracle fruits, actually. Admittedly, this is at best tangentially related to the Harvest Stewards mission, but it is at least related to gardening. Sort of.
So: I was about to mention something about the miracle fruit. What, you've never heard of miracle fruits? Well siddown and get your learn on, I'm here to spackle the gaps in your botanical knowledge. (Alternatively, just google "miracle fruit" and wade through a couple hundred million pages' worth of unfiltered data.) The miracle fruit, Synsepalum dulcificum is a shortish evergreen shrub native to somewhere or other in Africa. It is unremarkable in appearance, although you might notice its jellybean-sized berries if you happened to see one in fruit. If you got the notion to eat one of the berries-- always a gamble if you don't know the plant!-- you would note that much of the berry is comprised of the seed, and that the fruit is a little bit sweet. No big deal, you'd think; no "miracle" here, for sure.
But you'd be wrong there. The miracle would become evident when you next tasted anything sour. In fact, it would not be sour at all, but very pleasantly sweet. That's what the miracle fruit does: it makes sour taste sweet. I was a docent at the US Botanic Garden (USBG) in Washington D.C. some years ago, and I would demonstrate this effect by eating a berry off one of the bushes we had there and then procuring a lemon from one of the trees in the Garden Court, slicing it open then taking a big mouthful of the lemon, then watching the tourists' eyes bulge and their lips pucker in vicarious revulsion. But to me, it tasted like wonderfully sweet lemonade. Good stuff! The pomegranates that grow across the street from the USBG were made indescribably delicious by the miracle fruit. The effect lasts... I forget how long, maybe an hour or so, to the best of my recollection. It is worth noting that not everything tastes better when it's sweet, by the way. I remember grabbing some pizza after an afternoon's worth of tours -and one or two miracle fruit stunts- and it was... not good. The psychic shock of the mismatch of expectation and taste was akin to the kind of shock one receives when turning on the faucet to wash one's hands after some nincompoop has been running scalding hot water for the immediately preceding 15 minutes. Yeah, just like that, only in a gustatory way.
Anyway- so what's the deal with my mentioning the miracle fruit anyway? Last year about this time, I got a small specimen of the plant from Logee's Greeenhouse. It's a difficult plant to grow, many specimens failing to thrive in the first year. But my specimen is doing pretty well. So well, in fact, that, if I am not mistaken, it is producing flowers! And of course, flowers mean fruits!! It's early days as yet, and I wouldn't want to jinx it, but, well, just look here and see for yourself:
Those little whitish green nubbins? Yeah, those are what I hope will turn into flowers and then fruits. I rather find it a miracle that I may actually have a handful of these fantastic little fruits by summer's end. I can't wait to try it out on the blackberries that I've been getting in such abundance lately...
Oh, and the putative miracle fruit is not the only "miracle" 'round these parts. It looks like 4 and maybe even 5 of my arhat vines have sprouted. Arhat is a cucurbit, that is, a member of the cucumber family, but unlike most cucumbers, its germination is slow and spotty. And I do mean SLOW. The seeds that I sowed in mid-March are just now starting to sprout! Of the 15 or so seeds I sowed last year, 2 actually sprouted, and both died quite premature deaths, failing to thrive for reasons that are still unknown to me. Arhat, coincidentally, has a sweetening effect, although not of the same sort as that of the miracle fruit. The pulp of the fruit is supersweet, apparently, and it has been added to "low-calorie" soft drinks in lieu of those abominable artificials like acesulfame and sucralose. Yuck, it gives me the shudders just thinking of what those things taste like... I'm very excited to have a few good specimens of this vine reach maturity and provide a few fruits.
Less miraculous is my abundant crop of stevia. Also known as "sweet-leaf", Stevia rebaudiana has gone so mainstream that it is readily obtainable in plant form at places like Home Depot and Kroger. It grows well in a variety of soils, including the clayey morass that is my front-yard herb garden. It's easy to use, too- pluck a few leaves, let'em dry out and then pulverize them in the palm of your hand (if it's well and truly dried out, it'll turn into a powder with little time and effort), then dump it into your tea. Or coffee, if tea is not your, umm, cup of tea. Ah, you know what I mean.
Sweet.
So: I was about to mention something about the miracle fruit. What, you've never heard of miracle fruits? Well siddown and get your learn on, I'm here to spackle the gaps in your botanical knowledge. (Alternatively, just google "miracle fruit" and wade through a couple hundred million pages' worth of unfiltered data.) The miracle fruit, Synsepalum dulcificum is a shortish evergreen shrub native to somewhere or other in Africa. It is unremarkable in appearance, although you might notice its jellybean-sized berries if you happened to see one in fruit. If you got the notion to eat one of the berries-- always a gamble if you don't know the plant!-- you would note that much of the berry is comprised of the seed, and that the fruit is a little bit sweet. No big deal, you'd think; no "miracle" here, for sure.
But you'd be wrong there. The miracle would become evident when you next tasted anything sour. In fact, it would not be sour at all, but very pleasantly sweet. That's what the miracle fruit does: it makes sour taste sweet. I was a docent at the US Botanic Garden (USBG) in Washington D.C. some years ago, and I would demonstrate this effect by eating a berry off one of the bushes we had there and then procuring a lemon from one of the trees in the Garden Court, slicing it open then taking a big mouthful of the lemon, then watching the tourists' eyes bulge and their lips pucker in vicarious revulsion. But to me, it tasted like wonderfully sweet lemonade. Good stuff! The pomegranates that grow across the street from the USBG were made indescribably delicious by the miracle fruit. The effect lasts... I forget how long, maybe an hour or so, to the best of my recollection. It is worth noting that not everything tastes better when it's sweet, by the way. I remember grabbing some pizza after an afternoon's worth of tours -and one or two miracle fruit stunts- and it was... not good. The psychic shock of the mismatch of expectation and taste was akin to the kind of shock one receives when turning on the faucet to wash one's hands after some nincompoop has been running scalding hot water for the immediately preceding 15 minutes. Yeah, just like that, only in a gustatory way.
Anyway- so what's the deal with my mentioning the miracle fruit anyway? Last year about this time, I got a small specimen of the plant from Logee's Greeenhouse. It's a difficult plant to grow, many specimens failing to thrive in the first year. But my specimen is doing pretty well. So well, in fact, that, if I am not mistaken, it is producing flowers! And of course, flowers mean fruits!! It's early days as yet, and I wouldn't want to jinx it, but, well, just look here and see for yourself:
Oh, and the putative miracle fruit is not the only "miracle" 'round these parts. It looks like 4 and maybe even 5 of my arhat vines have sprouted. Arhat is a cucurbit, that is, a member of the cucumber family, but unlike most cucumbers, its germination is slow and spotty. And I do mean SLOW. The seeds that I sowed in mid-March are just now starting to sprout! Of the 15 or so seeds I sowed last year, 2 actually sprouted, and both died quite premature deaths, failing to thrive for reasons that are still unknown to me. Arhat, coincidentally, has a sweetening effect, although not of the same sort as that of the miracle fruit. The pulp of the fruit is supersweet, apparently, and it has been added to "low-calorie" soft drinks in lieu of those abominable artificials like acesulfame and sucralose. Yuck, it gives me the shudders just thinking of what those things taste like... I'm very excited to have a few good specimens of this vine reach maturity and provide a few fruits.
Less miraculous is my abundant crop of stevia. Also known as "sweet-leaf", Stevia rebaudiana has gone so mainstream that it is readily obtainable in plant form at places like Home Depot and Kroger. It grows well in a variety of soils, including the clayey morass that is my front-yard herb garden. It's easy to use, too- pluck a few leaves, let'em dry out and then pulverize them in the palm of your hand (if it's well and truly dried out, it'll turn into a powder with little time and effort), then dump it into your tea. Or coffee, if tea is not your, umm, cup of tea. Ah, you know what I mean.
Sweet.
Thursday, June 17, 2010
EarthTainer: WOW!
A couple of months ago, I came across the website for the "EarthTainer", a DIY container for vegetable gardening. It's fairly straightforward to throw one together, so I thought I'd give it a try. In fact, I built two of them, one just last week. My versions differed in construction slightly from the one on the website, but the principle was the same. The most recently completed one looks like this:
That's got a pepper, a tomato, a cucumber and a luffa gourd vine in it. It's only been planted about a week now, so it doesn't look like much. The one I planted about a month or so ago, however, is a different story:
This one has been planted with cucumbers, and so far we've picked about 5lbs of cukes off of it. It's growing like mad and producing like a real champ. The simplicity and "ease of use" of this type of container is hard to beat. It is just the sort of thing that I'd like to deploy as a part of the HS program. Imagine if, say, a hundred of these were distributed throughout the city... The amount of produce would, I think it is safe to say, would exceed a ton by the end of the growing season.
That's got a pepper, a tomato, a cucumber and a luffa gourd vine in it. It's only been planted about a week now, so it doesn't look like much. The one I planted about a month or so ago, however, is a different story:
Monday, June 7, 2010
Irrigation is ON!
Sorry no pics for this yet, but we've now got the irrigation system in place and running at the LBC garden. This is a big step forward, with summer's heat upon us. I was surprised to see that all the tomatoes and cukes survived last week's heat with no ill effects despite their having been left quite some time without water. Not only did they survive, but a few soybeans popped up too. Go figure. Tonight we dug the trench for the irrigation tubing and planted 2 rows of corn + beans. Good times.
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