a morning at the CSA farm, part 2

Some closeup shots below of the CSA farm veggies, via Bonnie. The deep red lettuce is a stunningly beautiful variety called 'Merlot' - I'm sure we can Google a seed source because I can't recall where Pat said she got her seeds. She is careful to buy her seeds from organic sources.
We're only on week 2 of our 20-week season. Hard to believe, when the solstice is already past we are only just beginning to enjoy the harvest, but that's how it is in Michigan.
We just ate the last of our Michigan strawberries - full flavored, sweet and red all the way through, as only a fully ripe strawberry can be. Ripe berries don't travel well, and folks who buy strawberries in the grocery store probably think strawberries really taste like juicy cardboard.
The tart cherries are beginning to come in, and my tree didn't produce this year, so I'll have to find a local orchard in the newspaper and make a visit.

soon, salad

The cold frame is the place for my baby lettuces, and a couple of overwintered spinaches and one big head of lettuce. To keep cats and rabbits and other rascals out of them, we exclude them with a pair of screens made of wire fencing.


This big juicy butter head lettuce that overwintered has been feeding us salad already. Pat told me I can let it flower and seed, because lettuces are open pollinated and the seeds should be true to the parent. I think that's what she told me, I should look it up, too.


And hardening off the basils, peppers, celosias, and some various other herbs.

Another Rainy Day

And I had a day off to play outside in my own garden, shoot!
Yes, I say "shoot", I wonder where that came from?
Shoots are good things in the garden, unless they're weeds.

Anyway, it's another rainy day, and I shouldn't whine. The weather bureau says our through-April cumulative snowfall for the winter was 2 tenths of an inch short of a record which was good. The ground and the trees need recharging.
But here with my tuna can measure I've accumulated under half an inch of rain this past several weeks when we should normally have collected at least a good inch a week.
The spring flowers have been tremendous, but the leaves of the trees could use a good rainy boost right now while they're expanding.
By the way, we had our first hearty salad meal last night, the few lettuces that overwintered in my cold frame are huge, sweet and succulent, and it felt so good to bring in a bowlful of home-grown leaves! And the baby lettuces are growing so prettily for summer salads.

So I'm indoors and maybe this would be a good time to talk a little about the Home Street garden project, of which I'm a volunteer gardener along with my gardening friend Sharron, some Master Gardeners, some Applewood volunteers, and some Land Bank people.

A few weeks ago four of us canvassed the neighborhood - I think we passed out seventy or so invitations - going door to door to reintroduce ourselves to the neighbors. Unfortunately the people we talked to the longest were unable to come to our meeting for health and scheduling reasons. But we did have some good conversations. Seven of us met at the church on the corner, the minister there is welcoming and willing to work with bringing out some of his people. If all goes as discussed, we will have a foothold in the community now.

We made a calendar, but Sharron and I showed up last week to pull weeds for a couple of hours before our first scheduled work day which was yesterday. We noted that the dead tree has toppled during the winter - part of it hit the roof of the vacant house next door. Someone needs to take care of that tree!

Yesterday five of us pulled most of the straw off of the beds and did some weeding and edging and cleaning up. We have a full lawn bag with winter accumulated trash - bottles, glass, food wrappers and so on. The used straw was going in the composting corner - somebody needs to build some bins!

I had to talk to convince Phil to keep the straw on a bed a la Ruth Stout. I read her "How To Have A Green Thumb Without Having An Aching Back" and all that straw on the compost beds being piled in the corner for future composting could just as easily be left in place for mulch to supress weeds and keep the moisture from disappearing. Only weeders and waterers would choose 'beauty' over utility, and for my gardener's eye, a well mulched garden looks healthy and beautiful.

Sharron had the idea to make a new straw-only bed near the Home Street sidewalk and plant sweet potatoes in it, which is a flash of inspiration. Why didn't we have sweet potatoes in the plan! Our new trainee volunteer, Nickie, was telling us about all the mouthwatering ways she uses sweet potatoes, and for me they are the embodiment of comfort food.

And our little depressed urban neighborhood surely needs some comfort. We hear gunfire occasionally while we're working, but I'm learning the folks there live with that as background noise, like the sound of cars and buses and smells of cooking.
A man was killed by gunfire on our block in early April, and while we were standing outside of the church after that first meeting, we had our first taste of immediate gun violence, a man on a truck was firing a handgun up the street while driving north on MLK Boulevard.
Bam, bam, bam, bam, bam, bam. What is this Beirut?
No, it is a depressed, forgotten neighborhood in the middle of the United States of America, a neighborhood with good people living there who tend their own yards and talk to us strangers, and who don't deserve these abandoned houses, and slum landlord owned rental properties, and the community decay that comes with powerlessness.
But I digress.

So we are ready for another truck load of compost to be dumped and wheelbarrowed in a couple of weeks.

from Kitchen Gardeners International

Hey, ya!
Just a little happy pick me up on an icy gray winter day.
Hope, Michiganders.
Spring, and salads from the garden, will return.
Plant it and salad will come.
Speaking of salads, on Saturday I read The Greens Book by Susan Belsinger and Carolyn Dille. A lot of great recipes, but the part that I really appreciated is a good useful discussion of the cultivation of particular greens.
I will use this book, already did last night, as a matter of fact.
Following not a particular recipe, but rather the spirit of adding greens to everything, I added a half a bag of Cut and Clean EuroGreens (Swiss Chard, Mustard, Turnip and Kale) to chicken ravioli, along with pesto and frozen Roma and cherry tomatoes. Yum.

Back to the video, here is a little hint on washing greens I picked up from the book... add about a tablespoon of vinegar to your water (up to a quarter cup for a half a sinkful) and swish and soak 5-10 minutes. Carefully remove the leaves without disturbing the water too much. The authors claim this eliminates 90 percent of second washings (and we know vinegar is a mild disinfectant and environmentally responsible).

another reason to grow your own lettuce

I'm really gung-ho about growing our own lettuce in the cold frame. But, we still haven't fine-tuned the technique for getting a steady supply. Sometimes a seed failure or inattention of one kind or another causes a gap in the production. But we do like a salad with dinner.
I really like the convenience of bagged salad greens to fill in the gaps, but here is a frightening bit of information: after ground beef, most e-coli infections are caused by tainted bagged lettuce.

Over the last five years or so, food safety experts have noticed a real increase in the number of outbreaks that were traced back to fresh produce. Outbreaks of E. coli 0H157 are always a serious public health issue. E.coli can debilitate, it can kill.

The Food and Drug administration says there have been at least 19 food borne illness outbreaks linked to leafy greens, including raw spinach, since 1995 — 425 people have become seriously ill, and two have died.

E.coli comes from animal or, sometimes, human feces and is usually associated with undercooked ground beef. E.coli in beef is usually killed by thorough cooking, but if fresh lettuce is contaminated by E. coli, the person eating it is likely to get very sick.

Finding how E.coli is contaminating lettuce is a lot like trying to find a needle in a haystack. There are millions of acres of lettuce, and thousands of workers, processors and shippers involved in bringing salads to American tables.

Because unlike ground beef or unlike some other products, there is no heating step, so there are opportunities for contamination all the way from before the product is even planted, right up unto the consumer’s table. It could be something as simple as a deer walking through the field that contaminated a few heads or it could be from a flooding. Or it could have been an ill food worker.

How to protect yourself from E. coli in purchased lettuce

— Be sure you wash your hands before handling lettuce or any raw produce...especially if you have been in contact with any raw meat.
— Even though most of these bag salads are pre-washed and labeled “Ready to eat,” experts say it doesn’t hurt to wash it again.
— Keep that salad refrigerated.
— Check the expiration date before you eat it. Even if the lettuce looks good, you should know E.coli can grow quickly in greens that are deteriorating.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12536902