Advantage: alfalfa.

Even though it's getting to be winter, there's still planting to be done. I'm talking about cover crops. I threw down several handfuls of alfalfa seed just the other day in my own garden as well as the LBC garden. I'm afraid it might be getting too cold for them in the near future. If these fail, I should go with Austrian winter peas. I tried those last year in my own garden and they did quite well, surviving and even thriving in the bitter winter. I guess they don't call'em “winter peas” for no reason. Anyway: cover cropping is an easy way to be a good steward of the land without fouling the runoff with too much artificial fertilizer. Just a note of clarification here- I said “too much” fertilizer; I have no issue with a modicum of the stuff. I'm not one of those people... In fact, I've used it before (*gasp!*) when I tried hay-bale gardening. Thing is, it's comparatively expensive and you have to sign forms and present photo ID if you want the really good stuff. Buying some bulk alfalfa seed at Whole Foods is waaaay cheaper and it probably won't land me on a terrorist watch list. Probably. Apart from cost, the only other difference I see between artificial fertilizers and cover cropping is that you really have to do the cover crop a lot earlier than fertilizer application (I could be wrong about this, though). The upshot of that? Hmmm, it means that I get to garden even in the winter. Advantage: alfalfa.

A nice "thank you" letter

I last wrote about donating the largish squash to the Fairhaven Rescue Mission.  I am very pleased to report having received a lovely letter of thanks from them.  In addition to the letter, they enclosed scores of seeds from those very squash.  I asked them to save me a few, maybe half a dozen or so-- just so I could be sure I had good seeds with which to grow these champs next year.  I think they sent all the seeds! I'm so glad to have a renewed stock of germplasm for this squash; the seeds from which this year's crop grew were 3 years old, and I used up every last one that I had for this year's planting.

But here's the thing: there's no way that I will be able to use all those seeds next year or even over the next several years.  So: if you're interested in growing lovely squash such as the one pictured here -with the proviso that at least some of what you grow goes to the food charity of your choice-email me and we'll make arrangements to get some sent to you.

The "Twins"

Squash. Pumpkin. Calabaza de Castilla. Whatever they are, they're big. And together they add another 46 lbs to this year's total for donations, bringing it up to 156.6 lbs. Giving these away was a little bit of a challenge in that it took a little bit of looking to find a food ministry with a cook on hand who could put it to good use. It's funny how things work out... I got a mass-mailing from Fairhaven Rescue Mission in Covington, KY a few days ago. Long story short, they said they could put it to good and full use, so I dropped off the "twins" this morning. I tell ya', it feels great to be able to help feed hungry folks this way.

2010's goal has been met! (And exceeded)

This morning I dropped off a 13 pound squash at Action Ministries. That brings this season's donations to a little over 110 pounds –ten pounds in excess of our goal! Best yet is that we're not quite done with the gardens.

Also, we're starting a Fall/Winter garden- a new thing for me. I've always thought of Fall- and, especially, Winter- as categorically ungardenable seasons in my present climate zone. But there are cabbages and radishes and kale and lots of other stuff that can be grown in the cold months. I recall that last Fall and Winter, I sowed a cover crop of Austrian Winter Peas in one of my garden beds. They didn't seem to mind one bit the frigid temperatures or heavy coatings of snow inflicted upon it by the Winter. SO: I shouldn't be surprised that a great many other things can survive and indeed thrive in the inter-equinox cold.

Almost there...

As of this morning, we've donated 97.6 pounds of produce! Only 2.4 pounds shy of our seasonal goal of 100 pounds... And although the gardens are mostly worn out, there are a few large squash (and by "large", I mean in the neighborhood of 20-30 pounds) yet on the vine. I found that a smaller squash, weighing in at about 10 pounds, produced enough usable flesh for a dozen pumpkin pies. perhaps I'll be doing a lot of baking in the near future...?

And speaking of squash/pumpkin pies, one of the folks at Action Ministries asked this morning whether the squash I delivered was a "real squash" or a pumpkin. Here's the thing: a pumpkin is a squash, but not every squash is a pumpkin. It's a bit like asking, "Is that an automobile or is it a Volkswagen?" The main upshot of this mini-digression is to make the point that the largish "gourdy" squash that you see in the produce section this time of year are perfectly suitable stand-ins for pumpkins in just about any recipe calling for pumpkins. I have only rarely made actual pumpkin pies-- I've made tons of butternut squash pies, acorn squash pies, banana squash pies, etc.

All this talk of pumpkin pies calls to mind another item to which I would call your attention, namely the needless waste of pumpkin flesh surrounding jack-o-lanterns. No, I don't have anything against those seasonal and often very clever displays. But consider using the cutout pieces of your jack-o-lantern to make a pie -and maybe even consider giving it to a needy someone-or-other. Last year I did this, using the triangular cut out pieces of the eyes and nose to make one pie and the mouth cutouts to make another. It doesn't take all that much pumpkin to make a pie, just about a cup and a half, according to my recipe.

What's that recipe?, you ask? Ok, here it is: First, you've got to cook the pumpkin flesh. Cooking time varies with the amount of flesh you've got to prepare, and I seldom cook up just a cup and a half... But I reckon if you put your jack-o-lantern cut out pieces in a dish half covered in water and microwaved it for about 4 minutes, you'd have it just about ready. You want it to be uniformly soft, such that it squashes easily under the pressure of a fork (maybe this is where the moniker "squash" comes from?). OK: so you've got some pumpkin cooked up; set it aside for a second, then go get 2 eggs, one small can of condensed milk, one of those pre-fab pie crusts and 1 tsp cinnamon, 1/2 tsp nutmeg and 1/8-1/4 tsp cardamom. Mix all that together, and be sure to save the condensed milk can. I use this to measure out how much pumpkin flesh to put in the mix. Throw in the can's worth of pumpkin and mix it up really well. Pour the mix into said pie crust, set the oven to 375°F and cook it for 50 minutes. Bam. There ya go, a darned fine punkin pie. And do consider giving it to someone who otherwise might not have some, okay?

Dog days of summer

These are the dog days of summer, at least here in Northern Kentucky. Blimey, it's been hot and harsh lately. The weather notwithstanding, we're now up to a little more than 70 lbs of produce donated! An increasing proportion of this is coming from the LBC garden, and that is a good sign for future seasons. I just harvested a couple pounds of nice big tomatoes from the LBC plot this morning and there are a few more that will be ready in a day or so.

Although the end of summer is in sight, the end of the garden is not. I just attended a seminar at the Civic Garden Center in Cincinnati about Fall gardening. There is a good number of things that can be planted now and in the weeks to come. The one I look forward to growing is carrots. Root crops, so I'm told, yield the highest nutritional value per square foot of gardening space of all crops. Bearing this in mind, next year we'll be trying potatoes too.

And speaking of next year: if you are interested in doing a little bit of good for hungry folks, drop me a line and we can chat about getting you a grow-box for you to manage next year. It's easy and very rewarding!

A little more

We're now at a little over 46 lbs of produce donated now. The container garden has supplied the bulk of this produce, but as the plants in the LBC garden mature and begin to produce, they'll begin to make a larger proportional contribution. I've set a goal of 100 pounds of produce for this year; I don't know if that is a reasonable goal, but it certainly could be. I've also taken a few things here and there from my own garden -mostly things of which we have plenty and can therefore do without.

And speaking of my garden, here are a few looks at what's growing there. I have to say, the plot is much smaller now than when I started planting it...

I've got an abundance of these little currant tomatoes. I'm not partial to tomatoes generally, but these are quite good. Note their size!

I've harvested many pounds of goldenberries by this time. Wow, these plants are producing so well. It seems like every evening I go out to the garden and find another couple dozen have ripened.

I've taken several dozen and strung them up to dry (and, for some, ripen up completely) in the garage. Fresh or “raisinified”, they're delicious. I took some and dipped them in chocolate; that came out pretty well. I'll have to make a few batches to send off for Christmas gifts.

Here is a look at what we call our “Godiva” gourds- so called because the seeds, having no hard hull, are “naked”.


We let the gourds grow to maturity, then pull out all the seeds (the flesh goes into the compost heap, naturally). Then we clean them, give them a salt bath and roast them. This is an especially welcome treat for our little girl who, owing to a nut allergy, can't otherwise have any kind of nuts at all.

This irksome looking beast is called a “lytchi tomato”.



While it is in the Nightshade family -as are tomatoes- it is no kind of tomato in reality. It's much closer, botany-wise, to the eggplant, its genus being Solanum (species sisymbriifolium). The fruits are small red berries and they have a mildly sweet flavor.

And here is a look at some peppers I have growing.

What's up

The gardens are chugging along. Our total in donations thus far is 42.7 lbs. I set a goal for the year to donate 100 lbs. We're almost halfway there, and I believe we can hit that mark, especially since the large squash haven't yet come into play. Oh yes-- some of the squash I've got growing came from seeds of a largish pumpkin sort of thing that I picked up when I lived in Phoenix. It's called "calabaza de castillo", as best I can determine. The one from which I extracted the seeds was about 17 lbs. And I've got at least half a dozen of them forming on the vine now. They make really great pumpkin pies, and just one of the fruits should probably make 5 or 6 pies.  Plus, the seeds themselves are great toasted in the oven with a little salt.  Good stuff!

Garden help

I came across a couple of links of great interest to me -and, I presume other gardeners as well. The first was from one of my favorite all-purpose sites, Lifehacker. The post in question is a list of ways to foil garden pests without putting a lot of harsh chemicals all over the yard and eventually into the water table. Good stuff. At present, I'm waging a psychological cold war (very soon to go hot!) with a couple of groundhogs, so it caught my eye. I'm going to try some of the tactics mentioned therein.

The second link is to a site called SproutRobot.

"SproutRobot will build a custom planting schedule based on your zip code so you always know what to plant and when.

Plug in your zip code to SproutRobot and it will generate a sample planting guide for the next few months."

Neat. I'm going with the free tier plan; it looks like a good little service.

A drop in the bucket

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.

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.

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. 

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.

A little more progress

Some more plantings in the LBC garden tonight-- tomatoes. We were only able to do this thanks to my good neighbor, Clyde, who was very kind to loan his tiller to our effort. Now the plot has a much better tilth. One can actually insert a shovel and not hit a rock or a tightly compacted agglomeration of the clayey morass we call "soil" in this area. Soon we'll put in the "three sisters": corn, beans and squash. These 3 go together in a special way. The corn grows up tall and straight-- a perfect natural trellis for beans. And the large squash leaves act in such a way as to shade the ground and thus prevent weeds from growing. Rather like mulch on a vine.

This reminds me of an article I just read about gardening in -of all places!- Wired. However, since it's Wired, it has to have a geeky neologistic nomenclature; thus, "domestic terraforming".

Drip, drip, drip.

I mentioned in an earlier post that I wanted to use drip irrigation for HS garden plots. This comes from my having used it when I lived in Phoenix- where water is unspeakably expensive (at least in comparison to what it's like here in KY). I'm still a big fan of it because, if it's done well, it saves a lot of water. We don't have quite the same water issues as they have in the desert, but that's no reason not to be water-wise. My attention is on this matter presently because of the special report I just saw in this week's issue of The Economist. Check it out and see if you're not suddenly interested in saving a little bit of water.

Progress (bit by bit...)

Little bit by little bit, we're making progress on our first garden.  We'd have it done and planted by now if (and what a big if it is!) we had more than an hour at a time to work on the plot.  Piecemeal work notwithstanding, here's where we stand at present:

Those little green dealies are cucumbers, by the way.

Breaking ground

Our first dig is under way!

The plot is a 10'x15' area in the back lot of the church:

Many hands make light work, as they say; that was (more or less) true yesterday evening as the lads of Boy Scout Troop 17 grabbed shovels and got right to work:

The guys also worked on lashing together some bamboo stakes to make a climbing structure for the cucumbers and melons we hope to grow in this space (hard to see in the picture below).  Here's the state of things as of last night:

Sure, it doesn't look like much just yet; but we'll be at it for a while yet before it looks like a proper garden.

It's a go

Appears as if the final "yes" for Harvest Stewards' first garden has arrived. We'll begin digging and planting on Monday (17 May) at Latonia Baptist Church, with the assistance of Boy Scout Troop 17. Pics later.

And speaking of pics, here's a little bit of what I have to get into the ground here at the homestead now that our "last frost date" is upon us:

That's a load of peppers, tomatoes, elderberries and goldenberries.  That last one, Physalis pruinosa is a great little garden berry, related to tomatoes and peppers (family Solanaceae).  It's such a shame that they're not more popular.  I once bought some at a farmer's market in Brisbane (Queensland, Australia), but other than that, I've never seen them for sale anywhere.  You can eat'em right off the plant  or dry them into little raisin-like bits.  Good stuff.

Correction: I have indeed found goldenberries for sale...  At Whole Foods, one may find goldenberry "raisins" from Kopali. 

Still, the raw version of goldenberries, I've never seen sold here in the States.

Here's what we got:

Here's what Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds donated to Harvest Stewards:

• 10 packets of assorted melons
  
• 15 packets of assorted squashes
  
• 10 packets of radishes
  
• 15 packets of okras
  
• 15 packets of assorted greens
  
• 10 packets of cucumbers
  
• 10 packets of carrots
  
• 10 packets of cabbages
  
• 30 packets of assorted beans
  
• 10 packets of onions
  
• 10 packets of Swiss chard
  

It's hard to adequately express my thanks to the folks at Baker Creek for making such an enormously kind (and just flat-out enormous!) donation. In keeping with the ethos of Harvest Stewards, I'm doing my utmost to get every one of those seeds into the ground. Wish me luck!

A big THANKS, and some kudos

First of all, I want to give a big public thank you to Baker Creek Nursery for donating some seed packets to Harvest Stewards. My wife and I have bought seeds from them before and we have only ever been pleased with what we've received. I can't fully express how grateful I am to Baker Creek for such a kind donation.

And next, the kudos: I just received my order from Cross Country Nurseries. Their selection is amazing and I was so pleased to see such healthy big plants with such well-developed roots. Good on ya', guys!

UPDATE [3 May 2010]:
I just received the box of seeds from Baker Creek. It's 5lbs worth of seeds. That is a HUGE quantity of seeds! I haven't been able to go through the lot of them yet- there are SO many. Later on today or tomorrow, I'll have them catalogued, and I'll post the list.

A present and pressing need

Did you see this?

Food prices jumped by 2.4 percent in March, the most since January 1984. Vegetable prices soared by more than 49 percent, the most in 15 years.

Now imagine if Steward gardens popped up all over the place... It wouldn't "fix" the rise in prices, but it would give a helping hand to those least able to accommodate it economically.

Garden #1 (I hope!)

Looks like my own church, Latonia Baptist Church, may be on board for a Harvest Steward garden plot! The church-sponsored Boy Scout Troop 17 will play a major part in the project too.

Step 2: the EIN

Now that tax day has past, I get to spend a little more time dealing with IRS forms. On my plate now is the form SS-4, the application for an employer ID number (EIN). I'm not really an employer, per se, but an EIN is required for a letter of exemption- in other words, it will allow me to accept charitable donations and donors can itemize it on their returns (more on that later). The IRS has made this part of the process almost perfectly painless. I say almost because the website has a way of thinking that I'm telling it that I'm a "health care organization" rather than a... whatever I really am, something more like a social services type of thing. We'll get to the bottom of this soon and then we'll have a lot of fun with form 1023. Cripes, you don't even want to know about form 1023...

Incorporated

Harvest Stewards is officially now Harvest Stewards, LLC. I just did the paperwork with the KY Secretary of State, paid my $40 and, bang, there ya go. Next step is the IRS and getting an EIN and exemption letter. In the meantime, I'm scoping out some potential participants...

The process...

As I mentioned before, harvest Stewards is not yet a 501(c)(3) charitable organization, although I intend it to be. The process of getting there goes a little something like this: first, I will incorporate as a non-profit limited-liability company (LLC), a fairly simple process accomplished through the KY Secretary of State. Then I'll get an employer identification number (EIN) from the IRS, also a reasonably simple process. Last of all, I have to get an "exemption letter" from the IRS... I don't know about this process, but I expect that it will take the most time and patience.

Following all that, Harvest Stewards will be "official". regardless of how long it takes to accomplish the process, I'll still be working on getting gardener commitments etc.

Speaking of which: if you're in the Greater Cincinnati/Northern KY area and would like to participate as a Harvest Steward, please drop me an email. I'd love to include you in this work!

Just to be clear...

I think I ought to clarify something I wrote in an earlier post. I referred to my intended method of setting up gardens as "fire and forget" and likened it to guerilla gardening. Ok, not exactly the most apt and accurate way of describing things. For starters, it's not exactly "fire and forget"-- any garden requires at least some tending, even if it is only ("only"?! hahaha...) weeding and pruning and such. And what's more, guerilla gardening isn't about just throwing in some plants and forgetting them, seedbombs notwithstanding.

Pilot Project

One of the activities the Harvest Stewards program will undertake (I hope!) is the creation of garden plots for those who wish to grow produce for sharing with others but don't have the time, inclination, experience or other sort of wherewithal to have gotten a garden together already. I don't know how feasible this will really be, so I have twisted the arm of a good buddy of mine and he's letting me use him and a little bit of his yard to pilot this project. This experiment will test the feasibility of "fire and forget" garden plotting as well as the scalability of such a project in an economic dimension. I have to think that, in principle, the "fire and forget" path can work, as is evidenced by the fairly recent trend of guerilla gardening.

The economic outlay per plot is, as yet, unrealized, for the obvious reason that I've not yet completed one. But I've begun collecting the stuff I'll need to set it up. First in my basket of stuff to foist upon my friend was a string trellis ($4). I've used these before and they are so quick and easy to hang. The next item reflects the need to strike a balance between ease of use and cost. I want these plantings to be water-wise, so I'll be using drip irrigation; ideally I'd install a really nice dual-outlet timer- so that the gardener doesn't have to worry about watering at all once a suitable program is established- but the cost of such multiplied over only a few garden plantings gets to be prohibitively expensive. So I've gone with something a little less expensive and a little less convenient: one of those mechanical tap timers ($15).

Next on the list are hose, fittings and drip emitters.

What this is all about.

Here's the idea: we get folks to commit to donate a portion of their garden harvest to local food banks, homeless shelters, drop-in centers, etc. Also, we encourage local churches to devote some portion of theire facilities' grounds to a garden whose produce will go to needy folks. The idea springs in part from my love of gardening, but also from Christ's message in the Gospel of Matthew (25:45) wherein he called us to serve "the least of these". How appropriate, then, to share one's own produce, and how appropriate indeed for well-landed churches to strive to be better stewards of some of that with which they have been entrusted- namely the land itself.

At the moment I write this, the Harvest Stewards program, as such, does not exist. It is just an idea as yet. Think of it as an ungerminated seed... It's not yet a legal entity, nor is it yet a 501(c)(3) charitable organization. But in the coming days, weeks and months, I hope for this to change. And, for now anyway, this is where you can see how this seed of an idea grows.