Orach

"Strawberry Spinach"

Purslane

Chard & kale

New Zealand Spinach

Collards

Come summer, growing lettuces and tender greens can be a challenge.     We  do grow a "patch or two" in our movable planter boxes that we move to the northwest side of the house to keep the sun's rays from beating down on the poor things.    Sure, we'll get a few cuttings before they expire; bu twe  rely more on their hardy counterparts for our summer green crop.

Over the last 25 years of growing food in the city, we learned many things - sometimes the hard way.  The main lesson is to  adapt, growing along with the season and not against it.  Trying to coax things to grow out of their season means you just create more work for yourself.

In summer there's a higher turnaround  with the greens, like lettuce and arugula, because of bolting .   In summer, our salad mix has more hardy (less likely to bolt) summer greens like dandelion, purslane, tetragonia, orach, amaranth, mustards, etc.

Don't think your chances have wilted for growing  nutritious greens in the heat of the summer.  Grow out of your comfort zone!  There are  plenty  of different and exciting greens  from which to choose.

What's your favorite "hot weather" greens?

Po-ta-Toes! Boil 'em, mash 'em, stick 'em in a stew?" -

Time to harvest our Po-ta-Toes!

Here in So Cal, where we have a "to be desired" growing season,  I started the potatoes back in December.   Sometimes I have a few little "seed potatoes" leftover; but, each year, I get a couple of pounds of  organic potatoes from the local health food store and sprout them.

I like to plant the potatoes in 15 gallon tubs with an olla (clay pot irrigation).  Seems to be successful.

Digging up the tubs filled with potatoes

Cutting down the potato greens to get to the tubers

Olla and purple potatoes

Pulling out a clump of fingerling taters

Colorful spuds

Potato au gratin

You can tell by the photo line up, it  pretty much sums up what our weather's been like.  Hot, for a couple of days, then cold.

This season, I grew purple, fingerlings, yukon gold and red ones  which all turned into a pretty decent harvest of nearly 100 lbs.

If you never had a homegrown potato before, you are missing a real treat.  We've been enjoying  potato salad with pickled squash and carrots from the pantry.

Back in the old days, seems folks would eat potatoes raw like apples.  Watching the Lark Rise to Candleford series, there's a scene  with Mr Timmins munching on a raw potato.  Hmmm,  I thought, eating raw potatoes are bad for you; well, that's what they tell you.

Not quite sure I'll try raw potatoes anytime soon.  When we roasted potatoes, I'm often reminded of Wilder family in Farmer Boy.

Wacky weather whiplash pattern continues.  Last week it was a scorching 95 degrees; then quicker than you can say  "summer's here?" a  few days later it's cold, overcast and raining (what a BLESSING!).

The poor plants are totally confused and so are we - sweater on, sweater off, on, off?

In the garden, the elephant garlic is just about ready to harvest and we've been digging up pounds and pounds of tasty potatoes!  Just today made a potato salad with home canned pickled carrots and homegrown celery - so yummy!  Can't beat the flavor and texture of homegrown potatoes!

The summer crops are slowly replacing the spring greens and brassicas. Justin informed me that they already spotted the hated (invasive) bagrada bug due to the heat. Bugger!

As head manager of the front porch farm stand, my duties include not only managing the operation, taking orders and such but also  filling them. Think that's my favorite part: to be out in the garden early in the morning harvesting the lovely bouquet of greens.   I do declare that one morning we all picked nearly 30 lbs of greens to fill the orders that morning!  Whew!

Bouquet of greens, indeed.  One of our customers exclaimed, "If I ever got married, this would be my bouquet."  Awwww.

APRIL HARVEST

276 lb produce

Eggs 141 (Duck) 73 (Chicken)

2011 YEAR TO DATE

939 lb produce

Eggs 486 (Duck)  190 (Chicken)

Chopping up the pickles!

Quite colorful and tasty too

Anticipating the time in the future of adding some fish into our diet (see ETHICAL EATING),  we have been adding more tuna to the menu.

Since turning vegetarian in the early 90s, we’ve occasionally eaten fish.  So fish we is what we are  used to,  but it’s been awhile since we went fishing!  Actually, on our 10 acre homestead in Florida, we had a fresh water pond filled with bass.  I used to fish "Huckleberry Finn" style with a simple pole.  Sometimes, I got lucky!    Grandpa loved to fish and  he would take us kids with him on his fishing trips to Tampa Bay.    And Grandma would make a mean snapper dish that was famous far and wide.

We aren't fishing any time soon.   Canned tuna is cheap, so we figured we’d start with that.  We bought a couple cans of "dolphin safe"  from Trader Joes. I know there's probably a better (fresh)  fish selection at Whole Foods (or 'Whole Paycheck' as one of our friend likes to call it) but we've committed not to shop at Whole Foods since it  admitted to selling GMO's

Recently,  I decided I should make an easy peasy tuna pasta salad.  But, of course, my habit is tweaking recipes to fit what we have in our home canned pantry stock.

Opening up the cupboards,  I find sweet zucchini pickles and dilly carrots.   Hmmm, this could work!

PASTA TUNA SALAD
© 2011 Cooks.com - All rights reserved.

1 1/2 c. sm. pasta
1 (10 oz.) pkg. frozen peas, thawed  (substituted a two handfuls of homegrown celery)
1 1/2 c. chopped carrots  (substituted chopped dilly carrots & sweet zucchini pickles)
1/4 c. finely chopped onion  (substituted homegrown green onions)
2/3 c. mayonnaise
2 tbsp. lemon juice
2 tsp. sugar
1 tsp. dill weed   (too early for fresh dill in the garden yet, substituted fennel)
1 tsp. salt  (I used 'celery salt')
1/4 tsp. pepper
1 sm. can tuna

Cook pasta according to package directions; drain well. Cool (rinse with cold water to cool quickly; drain well). Thaw peas completely; drain well. Combine cooled pasta, peas, carrots, onion and tuna in a large bowl; mix well. Combine mayonnaise, lemon juice, sugar, dill weed, salt and pepper in a small bowl; blend well. Pour mayonnaise dressing over macaroni mixture; toss lightly. Chill. Garnish with paprika and serve on lettuce leaves if desired.

Happy to say, everyone enjoyed it!  Even Jordanne, who's not too keen on tuna.

Thank you for coming up and making our first (of hopefully many) "Homestand’s" a positive and successful event (estimated nearly 200 dropped in throughout the day).    Also a big thank you to those who came bearing homemade gifts and complimentary comments.   We appreciate your support!

Like to acknowledge all those who came as far as Redlands, Temecula, Palos Verdes and other surrounding cities!

Justin demos on how to make soil blocks

We know at times it got pretty hectic and swamped to where we couldn’t personally attend to everyone and your lists of questions.  We were so busy, we even didn’t around to doing some of the demo’s/skill share we had planned (canning, chickens, etc)!  Thank you for your understanding & patience as we know many of you wanted to hang around for longer.

Unfortunately, we were so busy (& frazzled at times, running to and fro) we didn't get a chance to snap photos of the even nor did we get around to bringing out the rose petal lemonade - ack!   Jordanne's Chocolate Cake made with ducks eggs sold by the slice was a big hit!   So was the bread, salad and preserves.

Should we do it again NEXT month?  What can we do better?   In fact, we are already working on a list of improvements!  I for one would like to see more foods - perhaps next time we could put a couple tables out with chair?   Ideas, ideas, ideas.

Remember our "Front Porch Farm Stand" is open daily Sun-Fri (10 am - 6 pm) so you can pick up that salad or bread you didn’t get a chance to buy at the stand yesterday.

Thank you for supporting local foods and farms.

:: Resources ::

Soil Block Maker

Misty morning peaches

Salad! Come 'n get at the 'Front Porch Farm Stand'

Snow peas

Apple blossoms

Snow peas are a tasty treat!

Peppers! Yes, that's right - peppers!

Potato pots. Self watering clay pot tubs

Young sprouts

After what appeared to be the start of a cold and wet winter, 2011 has started off pretty darn dry and warm.    So warm that the peach and apple trees are blooming.  Hate to break it to them but we still have ~2 months till the first day of spring.  Is that early or what?  The weirder thing is the apple trees never lost all of their leaves!  Go figure.... Wonder if that means we won't have much of a fruit harvest this year.  Oh yeah, Peppers n February!

What are you planting/harvesting these days?

For those of you who are keeping tabs on the fast and furious Food Issues these days there are some developments of concern:

The Organic Elite Surrenders to Monsanto: What Now?

Care to share what the "Future of Food" looks like?

For the past 3 days, there's been wet stuff falling from the sky! Yep, 'tis raining!  Quite a dramatic change in that it's 40 degrees COOLER than it was just last week!

Today the rain's coming down nice n'heavy at times.   The rain gauge reads at a little more than 3/4" of an inch.  What a blessing the rain is for the garden and the salad greens.  I'm hoping the harlequin bugs drown in the deluge.

After months without any rain, the cats have already gone stir crazy and giving us humans that  "make it stop so we can go outside" look.  The goats and chickens who hate rain are hiding out; the ducks, on the other hand, are lovin' the wet stuff.

Yeah rain!

Definitely more ideal weather for canning!  Still putting up some amazing homegrown goodies.  Made a bunch of pumpkin butter from our gorgeous heirloom pumpkins.   I kinda hated to cut the beauties up but it was time to put 'em up.  And, then, just when I thought I had the canning under control, Farmer Sergio brought us a truck full of pears and some tomatoes!

With those juicy tomatoes and this lovely basil (below) that's growing in our garden, I am  going to be putting up some more tomato sauce for those long winter months.

Fall crop of basil

Mashing pumpkins

Pears!

Can-a-thon

Is the rain over yet?

]]> http://urbanhomestead.org/journal/2010/10/06/falling-from-october-sky/feed/ 9 http://urbanhomestead.org/journal/2010/08/05/real-food-real-simple-urban-homestead-meals-7/ http://urbanhomestead.org/journal/2010/08/05/real-food-real-simple-urban-homestead-meals-7/#comments Thu, 05 Aug 2010 13:57:00 +0000 Anais Dervaes http://urbanhomestead.org/journal/?p=22138 There's so much going on here at the urban homestead, I don't know where to begin.  There's enough stuff to blog about I could sit here all day and not touch 1/2 of the happenings and topics there are to share.

Can't believe last week went by and I only took one, ONLY one, photo of our meals last week.  Sorry to disappoint but I have a list of excuses people! Guess that shows you how busy I am. Going to have to tie that camera around my neck. I'll try to do better next time.

On the food front...

The figs are finally ripe so we devoured our first fig quesadilla of the season. I know, sounds odd but it's soooo delicious!

Harvested another 50 lbs of honey yesterday bringing the harvest honey totals to 130+lbs. There's probably one more honey harvest and then we'll leave the rest to the bees for winter.

In the kitchen, we are putting up peaches, apples, tomatoes, grapes, beans, carrots and more!

In the garden, time to get a jump on fall plantings.  Not too early to kick start the fall garden.

On the web front, Jordanne is working on a program that will allow us to publish our recipes online so stay tuned for that. Not only that but she is working on some other stuff, but for now that's under wraps!

Busy, busy, busy!

Summer's nearly over... my how time flies!

Finally, figs!

Fig quesadillas

WEEK OF EATS AT THE URBAN HOMESTEAD

All food items are homemade/homegrown/home preserved unless otherwise specified

Our Food Pledge

If not from backyard, then locally produced
If not locally produced, then organic.
If not organic, then family farm.
If not family farm, then local business.
If not local business, then fair trade.

SATURDAY

Breakfast - blueberry pancakes with strawberries
Dinner - flour tortillas with spanish rice, topped with sauteed green peppers and red onions

SUNDAY

Breakfast - french toast and honey
Lunch - Saturday dinner leftovers
Dinner - cream of tomato soup with tabbouleh

MONDAY

Breakfast - french toast and honey
Lunch - veggie patty with cucumber and tomato, basil salad
Dinner - leftover tomato soup with homemade bread

TUESDAY

Breakfast - apple crumble
Lunch - veggie patty sandwich with cucumber, tomato and basil salad
Dinner - summer veggie pasta - pickled peppers, tomatoes, peppers and basil

WEDNESDAY

Breakfast -apple crumble
Lunch - veggie patty with rice and cucumber, tomato and basil salad
Dinner - fig quesadillas

THURSDAY

Breakfast - french toast and honey
Lunch - summer veggie pasta - pickled peppers, tomatoes, peppers and basil
Dinner - herb pizza dough topped with tomatoes, basil, peppers, garlic with carrot, raisin citrus dressing salad

FRIDAY

Breakfast - french toast and honey
Lunch - tomato, avocado sandwich with cucumber, tomato and basil salad
Dinner - no knead bread, fresh tomato sauce (tomatoes, onions, peppers, parsley, basil) over spaghetti with salad

What summer time treats/feasts are you enjoying in your neck of the woods? Are you "Eating Closer to Home?"  Then join our food challenge to reduce your FOOD PRINT

On the Food Front

June's been a pretty mild month, thanks to the morning gloom is not too hot nor too cold - just right!

But the first day of July is a HOT one.  Summer is officially here and it will only get HOTTER.

June is the tipping point month were things can either go up hill or downhill ... and fast!  So far, we are holding steady.  Some things are growing well, while others not so much.

No new news hear, we do have a problem with some worms that are randomly cutting round holes in the chard - cheeky buggers.   In the morning I go thru and cull the bad leaves from the green beds - those go to the critters who chow down on box load of leafy greens each day.

We've spotted a few grasshoppers too.   If they are big enough, Justin who's just about as quick on the scissor trigger as Wyatt Earp, cuts them half.    Bye, bye grasshopper.  The ones that are the hardest to combat are the teensy tiny ones that wreak the most havoc in the garden.

A few harlequin bugs are still around but now there are some spider mites on the cucumbers and beans.  Justin sprayed Neem Oil to control them a bit.

We are harvesting another bed of carrots.  Like I said, best carrot year EVER.  Next big harvest will be the beets.  I've fallen in love with roasted beet and apple salad.  Green beans are pouring in - can never have enough of those.

Tomatoes are coming in by the handful, but hopefully not for long.  So too are the cucumbers, peppers and squashes.  Eggplant are not far behind.  If you drop by the urban homestead these days, you'll

On the fruit front:  there's baskets full of apples, blueberries, peaches and pretty soon figs!   Life is good.

Tally Hoe

730 lbs produce (fruits, vegetables, herbs)

Eggs:   32 Ducks /  68 Chickens

Year to Date Tally

2,540 lbs produce

205 Duck Eggs

440 Chicken Eggs

Happy Interdependence Day everyone!

Down on the Urban Farm

Now that the first summer planting flush is over, it's time to get started on the second round of planting. Folks often ask us why is our small garden so productive. One of the main reasons is we have successful succession plantings. When one crop goes out, another one comes in.

It was pretty hot out the other day; but Justin had the right idea. He was in the shade making soil blocks - over 1,ooo of them! He's a pro soil blocker, whipping out dozens in just a few seconds. Thump, thump, thump.

What will Justin be planting in the soil blocks?

Another batch of summer squash, assorted greens and basil (can never have enough basil!).

If you'd like to have some fun in the garden and whip up some of these babies yourself, here's how:

The Tools

Soil Block Maker (buy online)--spring-loaded tool that shapes and ejects four 1-3⁄4-in. cubes of compressed potting mixture. We've had ours for nearly 18 years and it's still cranking out thousands of soil blocks every year - best garden tool investment we've made! Heck, I imagine that thing's made over 50,000 soil blocks (that's a conservative estimate!).

Oh yeah, and you can get the nifty Garden Hat that Justin's wearing on our online store too! We find the this hat very durable and great at keeping the summer sun at bay.

Ok, back to the soil blocks

How To

Using a soil blocker has a lot of advantages - saves money and is eco friendly. For one, it’s a much cheaper way to start seedlings. What’s more, you can prepare your very own compost-based soil block mix - another savings! The savings just don't stop there - no more plastic or peat pots!

Soil

An ideal soil mixture must be fibrous enough to hold together through many waterings - Basic Soil Mix Recipe ( you can definitely modify)

Make a slurry of soil and water, mix well in a large tray (concrete mixing tray works well). Add one part water to every three parts soil mix. Tip: Let the mixture soak overnight.

Punching Out

Now the fun begins. Your mixture should be nice and moist. It’s better for it to be on the wet side; if it’s too dry, your blocks will crumble as they’re punched out. Excess water will be pressed out in the blocking process.

Plunge the blocker into the mixture, twisting down as you push so the blocker will be as full as possible. Pick up the blocker, if the cubes need more soil use your fingers to add more. Make sure each cube is filled tightly by pressing it against the palm of your hand. It is important for the blocker to be firmly packed with soil.

Scrape off any extra soil from the bottom of the blocker, and set the blocker in whatever container you’re using. Now, punch out your blocks. Easey, peasey

Sowing Seeds

We seed all my crops this way except for root crops like turnips, beets and carrots. Root crops don’t do well in soil blocks because of their long roots.

Place the trays and remember to KEEP THE BLOCKS MOIST at all times.

Transplanting

For best results, plant your seedlings outdoors as soon as roots appear. Since the soil blocks retain water better than peat pots or pellets, no special care is needed after planting.

Now that you have the low down on soil blocks, go forth and plant.

Happy sowing, blocking and growing!

:: Supplies ::

Soil Block Maker (buy online)