Rule number 4: Eat leaves with holes in them

I would never be able to be self-sufficient in veggies if I wasn't willing to eat leaves with holes in them.  Lettuce leaves, broccoli leaves, cabbage leaves - all of them will have some bug damage.  Of course they will, I'm completely organic in my production methods.  But just because the leaves have been munched on by something else, doesn't mean you shouldn't munch on them.  They're perfectly fine - as long as you wash off whatever it was that was doing the first munching.  ;-)

I collected some of my spring cabbage today (1 lb of loose leaves) and here's how it looked:

I will make it into coleslaw and no one will be the wiser - except me.

One note on spring cabbage, kale, cauliflower and broccoli: so far I have had very little luck.  No cauliflower at all, and you can see how loose the heads of cabbage are.  I got a 1oz head of broccoli - the largest one I got this spring, woohoo (sarcastic).  I'm fairly frustrated at that, but it means I should plant more spring peas I guess.  I'll plant fall broccoli, cauliflower and cabbage and see how that goes.

Zucchini harvest and "keeper" recipe

This year the zucchini is coming early - two medium ones that weighed almost a pound and a half.  They are Black Beauty - this year the first to mature.  Lungo Bianco and Cocozelle are on the vine, but not near ready to harvest.

OK.  Nice...but what to do with them?  I've been wanting to make some different recipes (grilled zucchini can only take you so far) and our neighbor Lisa found a recipe on pinterest for Zucchini cakes - like crab cakes only with zucchini.  This is what I decided to try.  Lisa came over and we amended the recipe a bit - here's what I did:

The two zucchini above, grated
1 large egg
1 cup cracker crumbs
Chardonnay smoked salt (from our other neighbor Celia) - to taste
7 leaves chopped fresh basil
2 medium garlic cloves, crushed
1 extremely small onion, grated
1/2 cup grated Parmesan cheese

Squish the zucchini in your hands above the sink - getting the excess water/juice out
Mix all ingredients in a bowl
Heat non-stick pan and put tablespoon-full dollops into pan, flattening slightly
Brown and turn over, brown other side
Put on cookie sheets and broil on low for a minute or less - just to make a bit crispier

 After tasting them, we decide that this recipe is "a keeper"!  She thinks her sons will even like them, and took one home for them to taste test.  A great use of fresh zucchini, and it was so fast that it didn't even make the house hot.

Pet-able chipmunk

We spend a lot of time outside.  Our patio is another room during the spring, summer and fall - it is where we spend the majority of our time.  And we enjoy watching the birds, butterflies, bats, rabbits, squirrels and chipmunks as we eat, pay our bills, plant seeds, weigh our produce, etc.  On our patio we started feeding the chipmunks so they would become tame.  Last year we invited chipmunks to come eat sunflower seeds, scattering them near our chairs.  A short-tailed chipmunk took us up on our offer and started coming when she heard our voices.  This is Stumpy.  (So named because she has a short tail.)  She is the bravest, most brazen chipmunk ever.  She lets us pet her.  She is awesome.

This is the second year of feeding and petting Stumpy.  She now comes to the patio when she hears our voices and has even jumped up on our legs.  We think she is letting us know that she wants more sunflower seeds when she does that.  She has avoided cats, fought with other chipmunks, and generally become the ruler of the patio when sunflower seeds are to be gotten.  She is smart and wonderful and so much fun to feed.  How lucky we are to have animal friends!

Peas finally!

I've been wanting to do a blog about my lousy pea harvest this year.  I've been extremely upset at the small amount of peas I've harvested, sure that last year it was much better and these two types of peas must be horrid for the IL garden.  This year I planted Dakota and Serge, while last year I had Lincoln and Knight.  Same amount of space - 16 square feet.  Up to now I'd only gotten a tiny bit of peas - not more than 5oz of shelled peas at most.  For shame!  And the ones still on the vine didn't seem to be plumping up either.

I was intent on letting people know about this year's experiment and how it paled in comparison to last year's.  Ha!  How wrong I was! 

This morning, before blogging about it, I decided I had to harvest and then go back to last year's records in order to check my memory - and get the exact stats on last year's harvest.  This morning I harvested a lot actually:

One pound and 10 oz of peas in the shell, amounting to 10 oz of shelled peas!  Well, guess what, last year by June 25 I had only harvested 7 oz of shelled peas.  This year, by June 22, I had harvested about 15 oz!  Obviously my memory of last year's garden isn't to be relied on.  It's a good thing I keep detailed notes.  That's the value of record keeping - I've found that no matter how sure I am of remembering how good or bad the harvest was, I never really can remember.

Here is my setup: peach tea, scale, and basket of peas waiting to be shelled, with my handy harvest record notebook at the ready...

Last year I was finished with the pea harvest July 11 and I had harvested 1 pound and 5 oz total.  This year, it seems, Serge and Dakota are giving Lincoln and Knight a run for their money...we'll see how it actually turns out, using facts instead of my memory!

Dill experiment

We have so much dill this year.  And it's huge now, and flowering.  But there are no cucumbers yet for pickles, or haricots verts for dilly beans, or even carrots to pickle.  I'm worried the dill will be done by the time I'm ready to can all the year's pickles.  In an effort to avoid this potential disaster I've decided to experiment.  I picked a bunch of dill and am freezing it.  Dried dill doesn't work well in pickles - as my daughter found out, it turns the broth brown.  So this is a potential solution (besides using dill seeds, which I will apparently have plenty of).  I've got my fingers crossed!

Pressure

I don't know about you, but this is the time of year when I start to feel a slight bit of food-related pressure.  Harvest season is about to get into full swing, and I have social occasions planned.  I know this doesn't sound like something that would create stress (hmmm...poor thing, she socializes for goodness sakes!), but I want to be able to do everything.  For example, today I left work early to try to get some wild raspberries harvested before meeting friends for dinner.  When I got home there just wasn't the time to change clothes, water the melons, feed the birds, harvest our own raspberries and still have time to walk down the road for the wild berries before leaving for dinner.  And those berries need to be picked, after all, they provide us with our year's worth of jam. 

Tomorrow I'm going downtown on the train for a work meeting, then meeting more friends for a free concert in the park in Arlington Heights in the evening.  When am I going to get to the berries?  I love spending time with friends and family but there are plants to be checked on, weeding to do, and most importantly - the harvest to be picked.  It's the time of year when it seems like there's just not enough time in the day.  On the other hand, as I sit here typing, I  slowly realize that this pressure is nothing compared to high-tech organizational politics...so I think I'm getting a little too obsessive about all this.  Maybe the friends and family and farming go better together than I realize, it's the work that's getting in the way!  ;-) 

(By the way, if you're a folk music lover and you live in the area, you should come to Arlington Heights tomorrow evening - The Small Potatoes are playing and they are absolutely wonderful!  A bonus: they are our neighbors.) 

The planned garden

This blog is for my colleague and friend's husband, who was interested in my square foot planting method and all the produce I can get from a thoughtfully designed space.  Nate - I hope this is interesting!  While you've seen my garden plan here, I couldn't plant the garden exactly as I planned it.  Close.  But the self-seeded dill took over where I wanted to plant the peppers, and thus I had to move stuff around a bit.  The most important thing was to keep the good companion plants together - and not plant bad companions next to each other.

Here is what the garden looked like before I left for Florida:

On the nearer side of the garden, from right to left I have dill, basil, carrots, then peas, basil again, and onions.  On the far left, outside of the photo are the tomato plants.  On the far side (again right to left) are the haricots verts, next to eggplant, which are next to pepper plants and then the onions again. (Onions don't like legumes and so I needed to keep them away from this year's planting and at the same time I had to make sure they were in soil that I hadn't planted legumes in last year - apparently they really don't like peas and beans.)  And finally, once again, just outside the photo (but a you can see a bit) are the tomatoes on the far left.

Here's a picture of the entire garden (I take pictures from this angle all year long to record how the garden progresses):

In this picture you can see the tomatoes at this curvy end of the garden, along with nasturtiums which are interplanted with them.  They are great companion plants, and the nasturtium flowers make the tomato space look decorative.

This is the key: plant in the square foot style, and only put plants that like each other next to each other.  Generations of farmers have experimented with this for us - Louise Riotte, for example, who wrote "Carrots Love Tomatoes" - and I go by the rules they have come up with.  Why repeat the experiment when we can learn from others?  So far so good.