This news from the Urban Farm Hub:
Gardening in Planting Strips: The Seattle Department of Transportation removed the requirement to get a costly permit to garden in planting strips (areas that often have good sunlight for growing healthy vegetables).
Good news for everyone looking for a few more square feet (or the first few square feet) for their garden.
We got seed potatoes a month or so ago and they’ve been sitting on the back porch waiting to be planted. The spot we planted potatoes in last year wasn’t great… it didn’t get a lot of sun and was hard to water. We still got a handful of potatoes, but we’re hoping for more this weekend. We took the kids to Barnes and Noble to play at the train table this weekend, and I always grab some reading material to browse while they wreak havoc on Thomas and his friends. I grabbed a gardening book, and one good idea it had was to cut an old garbage can in half and plant potatoes in that. Thus, my project this weekend, topped off with some compost from the batch that just finished up:
Our chickens are back in production mode after a short period of setting (sitting on the eggs to incubate them). Additionally our asparagus patch continues to emerge little by little. This morning we had enough of both of these farm treasures to make a delicious breakfast. When we get our pig we can add some bacon and make it a true farmer’s breakfast.
We recently arranged to purchase half a pig from a local farm. We’ve been wanting to buy meat like this for awhile and finally pulled the trigger (although not literally – we’re paying someone else to do that part). This has necessitated clearing out the basement freezer to make room for a large quantity of meat that will be coming our way next month, We had a couple of bags of rhubarb from last year’s crop that I just chopped and froze. When the rhubarb was ready for harvest we had a lot of jam (grape, strawberry, plum and blueberry), chutney (plum) and pie filling (apple) already processed and in our stockpile of canned goods. Because of this I was at a loss for ideas for the rhubarb, which just ended up being frozen for later use. “Later use” had arrived and I was still at a loss for ideas. I ended up making a simple cobbler. It tasted great, but had a little more green then I would have liked. (Note the similarities between my dessert and slime). I guess that is why strawberries are usually used with rhubarb. It did the trick though and now we are one bag closer to an empty freezer for our coming pig.
These days it’s not hard to run into someone extolling the virtues of eating local, or growing your own food, or getting in touch with your inner omnivorous dilemma. It can get a little old, even for someone who is all for it the ideas at hand. One reason is that it seems like a lot of extra expense or effort just to prove you’re “aware” and achieving your proper balance in the food system. Sometimes, a bag of Doritos just sounds delicious and kale is the last thing I want.
Then yesterday we ate our first salad of the year, thinning out the thick rows of lettuce. And despite the obvious cliché, it was different enough from our typical winter fare of crock pot meals to make us look up and say, “This salad is actually pretty amazing.” It was probably 15 minutes out of the garden, with a lemon-honey-mustard vinaigrette and some pepper, so light and tender that it just about melted in your mouth (in a way that wasn’t weird for a vegetable to do.)
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