Breaking New Ground

So, we have started work on building a greenhouse to effect our plan of harvesting vegetables during the fall and winter. Thought I'd show some in-process photos.

We are technically making a hoophouse, made of bent PVC arches and then greenhouse-gauge plastic sheeting which will go on in the fall. In the meantime, we'll cover the arches with deer netting to keep out the squirrels.

First, we had to remove the wire fence that encircled the main plot, because we're using the timber edging that's in place as the baseboards for the arches. The garden did look quite different than I was used to after the fencing was gone. Here you can see the broccoli, with the garlic further down. The garlic greens are knocked over to let them cure for a week before we harvest the bulbs.

Here's another view, from the other direction. Our hope for this thing is to follow Eliot Colman's advice and use a greenhouse and row covers to extend our growing season into late fall and our harvesting season throughout the winter. And by selecting the right cold-tolerant variety and vegetables, we should be able to do all that without any artificial heat.

Most plans for hoophouse like this call for you to build a big rectangle of 2x10s to attach the bases of the arches to. We decided we would use the timbers that we installed as edging about seven or eight years ago. It's been stable for this long; there doesn't seem to be a strong reason to swap it out for something else. We'll drive 30" long base pipes into the ground next to the timbers where the arch bases will fit, and then go from there. Of course, on the side of the garden near the walk, the soil level is too high to attach anything to the inside of the edging timbers, so it required some digging out:

Got that done all along the edge, and will install the arches soon.

Later note: the dog decided that because the fence was gone she had obviously bee given free rein in the garden, so she trampled by onion and carrot bed pretty severely. We lost the green chive part of 75% of our onions (though the bulbs may still be okay) and the younger carrots may not pull through. [What was the phone number for Animal Control, again?] Milday is now locked in her dog run until a proper fence/barrier is in place once again.

More tomorrow.

My Strange Broccoli

Hey there!

I don't mean to be failblogging two days in a row, but now let's turn our attention to my broccoli. This is my first time trying to grow the stuff, and judging by the height of the plants, it's doing well:

The plants are strong, look healthy, and growing huge. Except for one problem....

There's no broccoli in them.


Again, this is my first time growing them so maybe I don't understand their life cycle correctly, but shouldn't I at least see some nascent broccoli head somewhere in the plant? Here's a shot looking down into the top of the plant:

There's some new leaves growing there at the top of the stalk, but nothing that resembles broccoli. Here's a view from the side:

Nice stout stalk, no broccoli head. I've composted them twice, kept them weeded and watered...any idea what is going on? Am I just being too anxious? Your thoughts/opinions/comments are welcome...

Success and Not So Much

Sorry about the long gap in updating. I've been having a fair amount of garden success so far this year. Above is part of one harvest: onions and cilantro (pictured), along with lettuce and baby spinach. Pretty much, we've stopped buying salad fixin's for the foreseeable future. The lettuce, carrots, onions, spinach, garlic, squash, tomatoes, peppers, herbs, and raspberries seem to be growing great, BUT...

Those are my strawberries. Note the scale. They're tiny and not all that sweet. I don't know if the rain gutter system I devised doesn't allow good root expansion, or if they needed more fertilizer/compost because they used up what's was present in the shallow trough. On the plus side, the squirrels haven't bothered them (probably because they weren't worth the trouble!).

You win some, you lose some.

A New Recipe

I've recently become enamored with a new recipe for hamburger/sandwich buns. The taste is great, they are incredibly soft and have a nice open crumb, and they freeze and thaw really well. I've made them twice now, and they've been easy and a success both times. Here's the recipe:

Ingredients
15 oz. flour
8 oz. water
1 large egg
4T softened butter
2T honey
1/4 c. dry milk
1/4 c. mashed potato
1-1/2 tsp salt
2-1/4 tsp instant yeast

Directions
Mix everything but flour together, then added the flour gradually--you may use all 15 ounces, and you may not. You want the dough a bit "shaggy" and it should be fairly sticky at this point. Once it's mixed pretty well, cover it with a damp towel and let it rest 25 minutes. Then come back and knead a bit to develop the gluten matrix. Again, it may be more sticky than you're used to, but avoid adding too much flour because that will make the dough more dense and tough. Put back in the bowl and cover.

Let the bulk rise go about 1-1/2 to 2 hours, stretching and folding it once or twice during that time. It should double in size. Then, divide into 3-ounce balls and place on a cookie sheet that is either lightly oiled or covered with baking parchment. Let rise until they are the nearly the size you want them. Preheat the oven to 350 degrees.

Humidify the oven by pouring water into a broiler pan or brownie pan in the bottom of the oven. Bake for 20 minutes or until browned nicely. Remove and brush with softened butter.

Yield: about 10 3-ounce rolls

If you try this recipe, let me know!

Progress and Regress

Well, my cantaloupe seedlings are officially gone. RIP, cantaloupes, we hardly knew ye. I don't know if they got too cold in the last couple of weeks (remember the cool weather we used to have), or if there was some other factor, but they are kaput. On Saturday I direct-sowed some seeds in their place; we'll see if they do any better.

I also planted some more butternut and acorn squash seeds, since those plants looked to be struggling too. Don't know what it is with me and squash/melons.

In the win category, I went to turn my compost pile and found it steaming...in 85 degree weather! I used a probe thermometer and found that the pile was holding a steady 140 degrees. That should make some compost pretty fast, eh? Hot composting, indeed...

Chicago May Be Greening

There's been a couple of new developments in the urban farming aspects in the Chicago area, and I'd thought they needed some attention called to them.

The first is the nation's first certified organic rooftop farm, right here on Devon Avenue! Uncommon Ground has built it, and also offers a weekly farmer's market during the summer and is trying to set up community orchards in Logan Square.

The second stride forward is a proposed aquaponics vertical farm in the south loop. Here's a related video.

New Bread Success

I'm a big fan of fresh-baked bread, as should be no secret to any regular reader of this blog. I like fresh bread with dinner, and bread still warm from the oven is so much better than bread that's been sitting around for days. Some of my friends follow the advice of Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day which is a great book that advocates keeping live bread dough in the refrigerator, than pulling out a hunk and quickly shaping it into a loaf. After 30 minutes of resting time and 30 in the oven, you have fresh bread.

That is actually great advice, but the dough bowl takes up a lot of refrigerator space, and we don't have that many dinners per week that suggest a bread side, so I was looking for another shortcut. Enter the brown and serve dinner loaf.

The loaves above were made with my Italian bread recipe, but instead of making two big 2-lb loaves and baking them for 50 minutes at 400 degrees, I made small 8 ounce loaves and baked them for an hour at 275. The result is bread that is fully baked but not browned. I then wrapped the loaves and put them in the freezer.

Tonight, to accompany a lovely white cheddar pasta bake that Melissa made, I pulled one loaf out of the deep freeze, let it thaw briefly on the counter, then popped it into a 375 degree over for 15 minutes, It turned out soft and delicious, and you couldn't tell that it wasn't baked fresh on the spot. The 8-oz size was perfect for a family meal with neither leftovers nor indulging too much.

I look forward to the rest of the loaves waiting in the freezer...

Questions from the Studio Audience

A flower-like romaine lettuce plant.

Wow, I see it's been a full week since my last post. Didn't mean for this to be a Sunday blogging thing; will try to do better next week.

At any rate, I received no less than three questions from friends today who were asking me about various gardening-related questions. Apparently, they have me confused with some kind of knowledgeable person, but I answered two of the questions anyway and have done research on the third. I thought others might be curious about similar things, because you know the teacher's adage: if one kid asks a question, that means two others had the same question but were afraid to raise their hands. So, here's what I was asked:

"The seeds I planted said they were spinach, but the things that sprouted up look nothing like what they're supposed to."

Take heart. Everything is proceeding as normal. The first leaves of a seedling are called cotyledons, and are present in the seed before germination. In fact, they contain the stored food reserves of the seed, and can sometimes stay with the maturing plant for some time, or wither soon after the true leaves appear. The true leaves of many plants do not appear until the post-germination phase (meaning after the seedling has sprouted). Shown on the left is a juvenile spinach seedling with both the cotyledons (the long thin leaves) and the first pair of true leaves. Later, the spinach plant will grow and its true leaves will expand to their more familiar shape, and begin to look like the right-hand picture as the plant matures.



"My compost bin smells awful. Is it supposed to do that?"
Sure, that's what's happening to a lot of things while they decompose...remember that "composting" is little more than a euphemism for "rotting." Want your compost bin to not smell? Make sure you have a good mix of  "greens" and "browns." "Greens," or items high in nitrogen, are things like kitchen scraps (remember to keep any dairy or meat products out of your compost mix), grass clippings, coffee grounds, chicken manure, or weeds you've pulled. "Browns," or high-carbon items, are things like straw, dry leaves, dryer lint, shredded paper (avoid colored paper or paper with colored inks), eggshells, coffee husks, etc. The most common culprit for foul-smelling compost is a mixture too high in nitrogen caused by adding too many kitchen scraps without covering them with some kind of carbon or "browns." Also, remember to keep the pile a bit damp--like a wrung-out sponge but not sopping wet--and occasionally add a shovelful of garden dirt. The dirt will add millions of microbial bacteria that are the prime movers in the composting process. When your mix is right, you will find the pile will heat up, sometimes to as high as 140 degrees or more. Today, for example, my bin was steaming in 60-degree weather! This 'hot composting' means your nitrogen/carbon mix is right, and the only thing you will smell is the lovely scent of fresh earth.

"My potatoes are growing and I know I'm supposed to add dirt to them...but how much, and when do I stop adding it?"
The two main things that potatoes hate are inadequate water and excessive soil heat. Both problems can be solved easily, and there are many viable ways to do it. Perhaps the easiest is mulching. When your seedlings first appear from the ground and get a set of true leaves, mulch around them with an inch of compost and then cover the entire bed with a foot of clean straw. The plants will grow right up through it and the soil will stay cooler and retain moisture longer. This method can even be used at planting time; just set the seed potatoes right on the ground, cover with compost and straw, and water well. What could be simpler? Another way is to use a hoe to mound the soil up around the plants every few weeks. Don't worry about covering up the stem and lower leaves; the plant doesn't seem to mind. I've even heard of people who grow potatoes in raised beds using a "potato collar." This is another wooden frame (without a bottom) that sits on top of the raised bed and, in effect, raises it still further. This second bed is then filled with compost and straw, or just plain dirt, and the potatoes keep right on growing. In short, cover them with something to keep the ground moist and cool, and don't stress too much about the particulars.

Gardening like a Mother

Well, actually, gardening with a mother happened today--not my octogenarian mother, of course, but the mother of my kids. Melissa and I were home together and both healthy on a free day with decent weather; a perfect storm that hasn't happened in quite a while. She worked on building out a new flowerbed along the dog run, while I finished building three other vegetable beds and disassembling my drip irrigation system in preparation for installing the greenhouse. Then, Melissa planted a variety of flower seed (specifically designed to attract butterflies and hummingbirds, apparently) while I transplanted cantaloupe, acorn squash, butternut squash, lettuce seedlings, and planted about 15 more onion sets.

Both of us cleaned and straightened the patio within an inch of its life and reorganized where we stored things to make the backyard look a great deal neater and less cluttered. We marveled at how large our patio seemed after all the stuff around the periphery was stowed in more efficient places.

There are still things to do. I need to direct sow many more rows of carrots, and I need to get topsoil to fill one of the new lettuce beds and the second container for my tomato plants, which will probably be filled next week with my six 8" seedlings that are happily growing in the basement. And then there is the weeding, and many things will soon need composting/fertilizing and mulching.

But, a good day!

Still Think Growing Lettuce is a Hassle?

E-Coli in the Lettuce. Again.

This kind of thing comes up about twice a year. Any wonder why I prefer growing lettuce in the backyard?