New Things

There’s some new things going on here at Poppy Corners, and I think an update is warranted.

First up, my summer class has begun. I’m taking “The History of Environmentalism in the US and California,” and so far, it’s quite interesting, although I’m only in the second week.

Secondly, I have accepted an internship with a non-profit organization in Oakland called Friends of Sausal Creek. My job title is ‘Communications and Community Education Intern,’ and I’ll be working on things as varied as the monthly newsletter, restoration projects, updating the website, and leading school field trips (when they resume). Friends of Sausal Creek works to restore, maintain, and protect a watershed which runs from the hills of Oakland all the way down to the San Francisco Bay. For more information about this excellent organization, visit their website here. The picture above accompanied my introduction in the newsletter.

The summer garden has really taken off in June, with the arrival of some hot weather and warm nights. We’ve even eaten our first hot peppers of the season! I’ve done some succession planting with annual herbs and cucumbers, and will do so with beans, as well, this week. The tomatoes have lots of blossoms, so I’m looking forward to that first end-of-June cherry tomato.

And it’s soft fruit season, with berries coming on every day. It’s delightful to have an assortment with our dinners each night. My raspberries in particular have taken off this year, and have put out runners all over that side of the garden. I’m going to have to figure out how I want to manage them in the future. A thicket, while in theory sounds great, will be hard to maintain easily as raspberries are thorny.

Rin has graduated from high school, and I loved this bit they contributed to the last issue of the school newspaper. It echoes my own feelings about being a student, and the ways in which I best learn. Perhaps you can identify with this as well.

We are very excited for Rin’s matriculation at Savannah College of Art and Design in the fall. It seems the perfect fit for them! We are so proud we could burst.

Adam is home from Cal Poly (for now); he’ll be going back and forth to San Luis Obispo this summer, as he is renting a house with two other students, and they have planted a new garden in the backyard. It’s pretty fun to be sharing gardening knowledge with him. I expect he will soon surpass me, just as he has done with cooking and music.

So Much Promise

Friends, it’s here: If not in the weather forecast, at least in our hearts - Summer! Can you feel it? At the end of last week, I turned in my final papers, presentations, and tests; the next two weeks stretch in front of me like an open road (my summer class begins June 1). Garden, here I come.

And there is so much promise in the garden right now. There’s not much to actually eat (this is the ‘hungry gap’ after all), but all the ingredients are there, and in a month we will be eating like kings.

Our bees swarmed twice in April (one of them was boxed up by my dad and given a new home in his backyard) and during Tom’s last hive check, he decided to take some honey, so at least we have several jars of that!

I dug out all the compost from the chicken pile and added it to the tomatoes, then clipped them to their growing strings. I harvested the garlic, which is now drying in the garage. I cleared the last of the peas and carrots and planted five varieties of winter squash, ten different kinds of basil, and several kinds of cucumbers. Oh yeah, and some pole beans. Gotta have beans.

I’ve been watching the fruit start to flower and form. We’re going to have berries - so many berries! - marionberries, and loganberries, and blackberries, and blueberries. We’re going to have apples - I made sure to prune our tree quite dramatically over the winter - and now we have what looks like a bumper crop on the way.

We’re going to have peppers - several serranos and a couple of bells have already formed nicely. We’re going to have cilantro and dill - volunteer plants have been coming up all over the place. Cosmos has likewise seeded everywhere as well as borage.

The gulf fritillary butterflies are going quite mad, and the passionvine is full of eggs and caterpillars and flowers. My new perennial pollinator garden is doing very well, with the grasses and coral bells flowering next to foothill penstemon and wooly blue curls.

Some of the soil in our raised beds was quite compacted, which I found mysterious as I add compost every year (and those beds produced a great crop of peas!). To improve it, I used the hunks of clover cover crop that I cut out of some other beds, and laid them down on the surface of the questionable soil. Soon we had worms coming up to work on it and simultaneously aerating the soil. Now pumpkin and cucumber seedlings are coming up through the dead and dying clover, and I’m thrilled. This was a good reminder for me to plant clover in ALL the beds, between ALL the veg in the winter. I really noticed a difference in the soil where it was growing.

You may remember the saga of the disastrous winter garden (I planted it up five times. FIVE TIMES! And still I had very little success. Just the aforementioned peas, some carrots, some arugula, and a little kohlrabi - not nearly the bumper crops we usually have over the winter). I was worried that this summer might just continue that trend, and I wondered if maybe my gardening luck had run out.

But so far, the summer garden is chugging along just as it should, so I’m breathing easier.

In other news, during my last week of school, we had a solar system installed. I’ll write in detail about that experience (spoiler alert - we are very happy with the entire process) as soon as I have some hard data to share with you. More soon!

Kitchen Days

These are the kitchen days - days where we turn on the fan, heat up the oven, get out the food processor, the canning rig, the jam pot, the pickling salt.

Every extra moment filled with processing and cooking. Tomatoes into puree, salsa, paste. Peppers roasted and into the freezer.

Basil blended with garlic, walnuts, salt, parmesan, and olive oil. Pesto in little jars, into the freezer.

Cucumbers, picked when small, fermented into half-sour dills, or sliced and canned for bread n’ butter pickles.

Warm squishy berries picked in the hot sun, then cooked down with sugar into jam.

It’s hot work, and it’s persistent work. But our winter selves will thank us for doing it. Our stores are filling up! And tomorrow there will be more to pick….

Local Tomato Sale (plus other veg)

So many folks are looking to start a garden for the first time, and now is a great time to begin. Even if you don’t have a yard, you can grow most fruit and veg in containers. Start with the best potting soil you can find, water thoroughly every other day (probably daily when it gets hot), mulch the soil surface if you can, and feed once a week with an organic, low-nutrient fertilizer like fish emulsion. Grow bags are a great alternative to pots and have a lot of built in benefits such as allowing the roots to air prune, and they are mostly made out of recycled plastic. You’ll need at least a 10 gallon container for each tomato, but you can fit two peppers in that size pot, and many more lettuces.

Seeds are cheap and many things grow better from seed (cucumbers, squash, peas); however I have heard that many seed companies are running low on stock. You can check on my recommendations page for the seed houses buy from each year. You can start almost anything from seed except tomatoes and peppers - it is too late now to start those from seeds, so you’ll need to buy seedlings.

I’ve just learned that the Master Gardeners are selling the 24,000 plants they raised for their sales this year out of Orchard Nursery in Lafayette. All orders are online, with curbside pickup. There’s many different kinds of tomatoes and lots of peppers to choose from. Orchard is also selling many other veg starts as well as herbs and fruit trees/canes/bushes. I can’t speak for the other veg, but the tomatoes and peppers raised by the Master Gardeners will be far superior to anything you can buy at big box or hardware stores. The proceeds from these sales also benefit their local programs for gardeners, which is terrific. You can get your potting soil from Orchard, too - I like the organic Bumper Crop, but have also had good success with Paydirt.

This is a great project to do with kids, and absolutely fulfills science requirements. While inspecting your plants for bugs is a good idea, resist the ‘urge to purge.’ Do not spray your plants with any kind of insecticide. If you notice bugs like aphids or caterpillars, it is totally appropriate to remove them with your hands. First you might enjoy photographing them and posting your photo to iNaturalist, or removing them and studying them and learning about them. Again, this is science! (I recently completed a multiple-intelligences unit for my Psych class, and one of the ways people learn is through nature, so why not incorporate it into your home schooling curriculum?)

Even if you don’t have kids at home, gardening is something that can take you into a State of Flow and out of the State of the World, which is probably a really good thing right now. You might find that it becomes the thing that shapes your day. And you already know that a fresh tomato out of the garden (in season) is better than anything Safeway is going to deliver you. So why not go for it? And if you run into any problems, please contact me and we will work through those problems together. You can do it!

Particularly Now

Lately several people have asked me, are you finding it particularly good to have a garden/homestead right now, with all that’s going on? Its a valid question, as we all try to stay away from crowded places like the grocery store. Even though Farmers’ Markets are outdoors, they are often crowded and many people are touching the produce before selecting what they want (though I’ve heard stories about local markets changing their practices so that doesn’t happen). Our favorite local pastured meat CSAs has had to put a moratorium on new orders for the time being, because so many people want to get their meat delivered. I imagine CSA veg box companies are likewise having a run on subscriptions. (On a side note, I’m so happy that this virus is causing folks to reach out to local farms!)

After the greenhouse dance this morning (moving the seedlings out of the greenhouse in the morning, and back in the greenhouse at night), I spent some time looking around at our crops and determining how I want to play it in the next month of so. An inventory, so to speak: What are we running out of, what will come ripe soon, and what will planting the summer garden do to those crops? I can see that things are going to be lean very soon. We’re reaching that thing called the ‘Hungry Gap,’ which in modern times isn’t the crisis it used to be, since normally we have plenty of everything at the store. But right now, with supply chains the way they are, who knows?

We’re out of broccoli and cauliflower. We are down to the last four cabbages. Nearly all the carrots are gone. We still have plenty of kale, chard, beets, and peas. The garlic and shallots won’t be ready to harvest for a couple of months yet. The parsnips and turnips should ripen in the next couple of weeks, and leeks are on the same schedule. Lettuce seedlings are still quite small, so it’ll be a couple of weeks before we can start eating them.

We’re getting 5-6 eggs a day, which is terrific since every time I go to the grocery I notice that the shelves are empty of eggs. I've been able to share a bunch with friends, family, and neighbors, and soon I will start freezing them (out of the shell, in packages of two) for the times when we are low.

The summer seedlings will be happy to go in the ground in the next few weeks, and it’s a hard thing to determine just when to do that. I usually wait until May 1, but with things the way they are, I might like to get going on that sooner (if only to put it on my ‘to-do’ list which I would love, being low on things to do right now).

Which brings us back to the original question.

Yes! Of course it’s great to have this bounty at our fingertips in times of scarcity; but honestly it’s ALWAYS great. I like to keep up with a homesteader in Tennessee who yesterday posted a video called “NOW the mocking of homesteaders will stop!” I’ve never felt mocked for growing our food, but that’s because even in the sophisticated, tech-rich Bay Area, we’ve always had the back-to-the-landers, and while we often get eye rolls, we are also looked at fondly, as one would look at a slightly ragged pet. I’m imagining right now a lot of people are looking at the practice more favorably. But as I’ve said for years, this is a great thing to do in ANY time and ANY climate. The benefits are huge - for our bodies, for our mental health, and for the earth.

And it’s not hard or expensive to do. You might have a little sunny, protected corner where you could grow a quick crop of radishes and lettuces. It doesn’t have to be an expensive project. Dig some old cardboard out of your recycling bin, make sure it’s free of tape or labels, and cover your patch of ground. Go to the hardware store (still open!) and get a couple of bags of the best dirt you can find - compost based, peat free, fertilizer free (not that brand that puts all kind of synthetic fertilizers in their dirt - you don’t need all that, just a little compost). Spread the dirt 2-6 inches over the cardboard, and put some seeds in it. If you need seeds, let me know - I have a few left and would be happy to mail them to you. Or order a few from a reputable seed house near you (I have several in my recommendations). Or ask your neighbors! If you live in an area that still has cold weather, you could start some things indoors. If you live in my neighborhood, I have several indoor light setups (with heat mats) that aren’t being used right now and I would be happy to lend them to you, if you want to try tomatoes and peppers. I promise we can stay six feet apart while we make the transfer.

Just having a project right now is a healthy thing. Doing this with kids would be even better (science and math included). Getting outdoors is really important for physical and mental health, and having a reason to go outdoors and putter is great. How about planting a little fruit tree in a big pot? How about making a little strawberry patch in a container? How about starting some herb seeds in little pots in your kitchen windowsill? These are all things you could do right now that will increase your joy in life, I guarantee it.

Particularly now, when the virus is ramping up in the states, and several cities seem to be under siege, protecting our mental and physical well-being is very important, and this is one way we can do it. And, if you live near here, and you can’t have a garden of your own, please reach out to me - Poppy Corners can be your refuge, too.