Novella Carpenter Update

We posted yesterday about author and urban farmer Novella Carpenter running afoul of the law in Oakland for "agricultural activities". She has a clarification on her blog and some new, alarming information. She makes clear that she was busted for selling vegetables not growing them. The disturbing news is information she received that the people who reported her may have been animal rights activists upset that she eats her rabbits. Read more on her blog Ghost Town Farm.

Podcasts for the Urban Homesteader

Let's face it, mainstream radio programming, both talk and music, stinks. Podscasting democratizes the medium. Anyone with a microphone and laptop can make and distribute a podcast and, while quality varies, there's a huge amount of excellent, highly specialized programming available. So should be on the iPods of urban homesteaders? I've got a few suggestions:

Survival Podcast
We just appeared on this podcast, which is hosted by Jack Spirko. Jack is extremely knowledgeable when it comes to gardening, permaculture and a host of other topics. His listeners, many of whom now read this blog, also know a lot about the subjects he covers. And, refreshingly, there's no conspiracy theories on the Survival Podcast, no need to get out the tin foil hat. I highly recommend this podcast even to those who would not think of themselves as survivalists.

SALT: Seminars About Long Term Thinking
This is a series of seminars put on by the Long Now Foundation, headed by Whole Earth Catalog founder Stuart Brand. As, I believe, urban homesteading is a kind of long term thinking, the topics of these talks should be of interest to readers of this blog. Make sure to listen to the episodes that feature Nassim Taleb, Wade Davis and Philip K. Howard.

KCRW Good Food
Hosted by chef Evan Kleiman, Good Food explores the diverse food cultures of Los Angeles as well as tackling national issues related to the food system. Kleiman explores these topics with a sense of humor.

A Way To Garden with Margaret Roach
I learned about this podcast from the folks at Garden Rant who pointed out that there are very few gardening related podcasts. Perhaps most good gardeners are allergic to spending time in front of a computer? I enjoy this show, though those of you in places that have "winter" will get more out of it.

The C-Realm Podcast
OK, I'm a bit on the woo-woo side of things, to be honest. The C-Realm podcast is a very professional and thought-provoking show hosted by "KMO" that delves into everything from permaculture to zombies. It's kind of a thinking person's Coast to Coast AM.

The Kunstlercast
Author James Howard Kunstler's weekly rant about the mess we're in. It would be a real drag if Kunstler weren't so damn funny. While most would call Kunstler a "doomer" I'd point out that he offers plenty of solutions--pedestrian oriented design, rebuilding our rail network, etc.

Boot Liquor
A greater danger to the future of our great nation is, I believe, not fossil fuel depletion, but instead the watered down "country" music coming out of Nashville in the past few decades. We should worry more about Miley Cyrus than turbulence int the Middle-East, in my humble opinion. Boot Liquor is an internet radio station not a podcast, but I thought I'd include it since it's the musical soundtrack of the Root Simple compound. Boot Liquor plays real country music, songs about boozing, driving big rig trucks and raising hell (sometimes all in one song). If you've got iTunes you can find Boot Liquor amongst the country music offerings.

At some point we'll get around to creating a Root Simple podcast. In the meantime what podcasts do you listen to?

Novella Carpenter Harassed by City of Oakland

Urban farmer and author Novella Carpenter is getting harassed by city of Oakland employees. From her blog Ghost Town Farm:

Here’s the deal: After getting off the plane from Salt Lake City and making my way home to a cup of tea, I sit down at my kitchen table and I see this guy in a City of Oakland car taking photos of my garden. I go down and he said I’m out of compliance for “agricultural activities”. I’m supposed to get a Conditional Use Permit for growing chard. The annual fee: $2500.

My two cents. Get involved in local politics to change outdated planning codes. We did it in LA with the Food and Flowers Freedom Act. In the meantime let's lend Novella our support and best wishes.

Organic Gardening Magazine Tests Seven Different Potato Growing Methods

Doug Hall, writing for Organic Gardening magazine, did a test of seven different potato growing methods: hilled rows, straw mulch, raised beds, grow bags, garbage bags, wood boxes and wire cylinders. His conclusion? Raised beds worked the best giving the highest yield. Some of the other methods worked well too, though I wonder about black materials, such as grow bags, in our hot climate.

The last time we grew potatoes we used a stack of tires. Results were mixed. I think painting the tires white to reflect heat might have worked better. For most of you reading this, the opposite would probably be true. Black materials such as tires or grow bags would help keep your 'taters warm in cool climates.

Read Hall's article here: "7 Ways to Plant Potatoes"

And let us know how you grow your potatoes . . .

Shiitake Bloom

This is a photo taken on the third day of the second bloom of my shiitake birthday log. The first bloom had two mushrooms, this time it's five so far (that's a tiny one on the left). After I shot this picture I tipped the log back as far as the cloche that covers it would allow so that the caps wouldn't grow up against the log and limit their size like last time.

You've probably never met a soup like this

Mushroom and Fruit Soup. Yep. I don't know if you're going to like this recipe. I did. Erik made it, which shocked me, because he has a general prejudice against savory fruit preparations. In fact, he has a general prejudice against soup, seeing it somehow as being a substandard food form. Nonetheless, he cooked this soup. 

I smelled it first, as it was cooking, and it smelled really good. Then I saw it in the pot, and said, "What the...?" (Imagine an onion and mushroom broth with wrinkly black things floating around in it.)  Then I tasted it. My first impression was that I'd never tasted anything like it, and I needed to adjust to the newness of the flavor combination. It's an Armenian recipe, from Vegetarian Dishes from Across the Middle East by Arto der Haroutunian, but it made me think of Russia. Which makes sense, I guess. There's a lot of cross-pollination between Russia and Armenia. Strangeness aside, the soup was undeniably tasty, and I went back for seconds.

This soup seemed blog-worthy for a couple reasons. The first is that it is really simple, and I like that. Second, those ingredients almost seem like it could be a pantry soup. It calls for fresh mushrooms, but I'm wondering if it wasn't made with dried mushrooms back in the day. It also calls for green onions but we used regular onions to good effect. The other primary ingredient is dried fruit. Dried mushrooms, dried fruit, stored onions: I can imagine this soup being conjured out the pantry on a cold night in the dead of winter.

We used a nice mix of fresh mushrooms. Since there are so few ingredients in this soup, mushrooms are the stars. I'm not sure if it would be as good if it were only made with, say, white salad mushrooms because they aren't super-flavorful. Maybe it would work, though. Anything is worth a try.

If you make it, let us know what you think. Recipe after jump:

Why I Grow Vegetables From Seed

Chard destined for failure

On the last day of a vegetable gardening class that Kelly and I just finished teaching at the Huntington, we needed to demonstrate how to transplant seedlings. The problem was that we didn't have any seedlings at home ready to transplant, so I had to make a trip to a garden center.

That sorry errand reminded me why I grow from seed.

All of the seedlings at the nursery were uninteresting varieties and root-bound--way too big for their pots. And someone tell me what's up with the trend I've noticed recently of selling mature tomato plants in small pots? I suppose novice gardeners probably think they're getting a better value with a large plant, so the nursery has an incentive to sell root-bound stock.

In fact, every last vegetable seedling at the nursery had root systems as congested as the 405 freeway on a Friday afternoon. When roots hit the bottom of a pot you get what John Jeavons calls "premature senility," resulting in stunted growth and plants that go rapidly to seed.

On occasion I'll buy seedlings, as when I failed to get my tomato seeds to germinate last year. In that case, Craig from Winnetka Farms had some on hand. And there's a guy at one of the local farmers' markets that has decent seedlings.

But nothing matches the variety, cost savings and quality of DIY seed propagation.

Newsflash: Thift shop where rich people live

Some newsflash, huh? Los Angeles has plenty of rich people, but many more poor people, and legions of dedicated thrifters. I've pretty much given up hope of finding bargains here. Your chances of happening on a really good find in this city is equivalent to being struck by lightning. But I'm learning that it pays to take little jaunts out of town now and then, to find better hunting grounds.

Case in point, I visited the idyllic town of Ojai with a friend recently. While we admired their copious public parks, clean public bathrooms, and shops filled with a vast selection of sensible shoes and flowing linen outfits for well-heeled ladies of a certain age, we also checked out their thrift stores. In one, I found a baking dish. I needed a new baking dish because I destroyed our Pyrex dish doing experiments for Making It. Yep, I warped a Pyrex. Didn't think it was possible, did you?

This dish I spotted was oval--not ideal, but workable. It also turned out to be a Le Cruset pan. "Le Cruset?" I said to myself. "That there's one of them classy brands I done seen down at the Sur le Table." So I bought it for a few bucks and brought it home. Once home, I looked it up online. It's actually an enameled cast iron "au gratin" dish. Who knew you needed a dedicated pan for cheesy potatoes? Market value? $150. 

Sure, I'd never pay so much for such a pan, and that's a crazy price for a baking pan under any circumstances, so it's sort of a hollow triumph--but still. I got me one helluva fancy pants pan.

Still need something to bake brownies in, though.

Pornographic Parsnip

What the hey. It's Friday. I can't share the image here, because...uh...I just can't. But I gotta say, of all the naughty root vegetables I've seen, this is by far the naughtiest.

Link courtesy of our intrepid friends at BoingBoing

Spigarello: Nature's way of saying that broccoli is so over

Spiga-what-the-who-now? The wavy leaved stuff is the spigarello. The flowers are arugula.

Mrs. Homegrown here:

Spigarello, more properly called Cavolo Broccolo a Getti di Napoli, is a leafy green that tastes a lot like broccoli. But unlike broccoli, you eat the leaves instead of the flowers.

Unlike many of the "exotic" Italian greens we grow, this one is not bitter, and probably will pass muster with those who are fussy about vegetables. To me, it tastes like broccoli, but better. A little like broccoli sprouts. Or a cross between broccoli and kale. Let's just put it this way--I fell in love with it the first time I took a bite of it a Winnetka Farms. The texture of the leaves is sturdy but tender.

It's very easy to grow. If you don't give in to temptation and eat it prematurely, each seedling will grow into a big, sturdy plant. I think of them as broccoli trees. You harvest the leaves as you need them, leaving the plant intact to generate more leaves. Eventually it produces tiny white flowers the bees love.

We've never had any luck growing regular broccoli--I really resent fighting off aphids and cabbage worms for months, all for the privilege of harvesting one lousy head somewhere down the line. For that reason, we've always grown broccoli rabe instead, and I like that too, but rabe has a more aggressive flavor than either broccoli or spigarello, while spigarello has that true broccoli mildness.

We've been growing this as a winter crop in our southern California climate (I believe we planted the seeds back in November, and it's still going strong).  Fundamentally, Spigarello is a cool season vegetable that can take some frost. That means it's suited to be a spring or fall crop in 4-season climates. All in, in deciding how and when and where to plant it, I'd just pretend it was kale.

Our source for seeds was our friends at Winnetka Farms who sell heirloom Italian vegetable seeds at gardenedibles.com. They are out of stock right now, but will have more in the fall.

_________________________________________

• Interesting side note from Mr. Homegrown:  Sources I've come across cite spigarello as a kind of primitive ancestor vegetable of either broccoli or broccoli rabe.

• Translation request: Do any Italian-speaking readers want to help us with the translation of the full Italian name? We're thinking it might be something like "Jetting Cabbage Broccoli from Naples"--but we could be very wrong about the getti.

Countdown

Our new book comes out just about a month--April 26th--and today two super-advance copies came to us by mail. Believe me, it's awfully strange to see something that has existed only as computer files suddenly materialize on your porch!

We realize we haven't given our new book a formal introduction yet, so here goes. 

Making It: Radical Home-Ec for a Post Consumer World is our follow up to The Urban Homestead.

The way we see it, The Urban Homestead was less a how-to book and more a "why should I?" Its purpose was to get people excited about this homesteadish stuff, and see that they could work toward self-reliance, no matter where they lived. Making It is a pure how-to book: Project #1 - #70.  There's no chit-chat or opinionating. Its focus is on making the home an engine of production rather than consumption.

The book is a little eccentric (like us) because it covers a wide range of subjects, everything from lotion to compost bins to beekeeping. So it's not the ultimate resource on any one subject, but it is an excellent place to get started on a wide range of self-reliant activities. Since it's about so many different things, we arranged the projects by difficulty, as well as by how often they must be done, rather than subject matter. This means the fast and easy projects are in the front, and the more complicated, infrastructure-type projects in back.

This book was designed by the very talented Roman Jaster, and illustrated by the amazing Teira Johnson. As a result, it's fresh and modern and easy to use. Our publisher is the esteemed House of Rodale. The whole team did a great job. It's really pretty. And though it's a paperback, it feels solid. Like you're getting something for your money.

Here's a couple of page spreads (excuse the layout marks) to give you an idea of what it looks like inside:

Both Amazon and Barnes & Noble have it available for pre-order. I was shocked to see that though the cover price is $19.99, they're both selling it for $12.14. I'm not sure if this is a pre-order special, or if that's where they'll keep it, but it's a wicked good deal. Not that we don't support indie bookstores!!! Including big ones, like Powells.

Kelly and Erik on The Survival Podcast

Just a note to let you know we'll be featured on The Survival Podcast tomorrow. We really enjoyed talking with the host, Jack Spirko, and got down into some deep plant geekery. You may even hear us burning a batch of beans, if he leaves that part in.

The episode will be archived, so you can catch it later on, too.

Obligatory Cute Chick Post

Look, it's just that time of year. We have to live with it.

We have no chicks this year. Our ladies are not maternal, they have no male companionship, and we've made no chick missions to the feedstore. These pics are from our neighbors' house. Anne and Bill have a menagerie of ridiculously cute small animals. You recall the pea eating Chihuahua?

Among their collection are a pair broody little Silkies, who are old-timers on their micro farm, and a new bantam hen--the tiniest chicken I've ever seen, hands down--who ended up in their yard somehow or another a couple of months ago. She's not in these pictures because she's not a very involved mother (not that I'm judging). After her arrival, this new hen received several brief but scandalous visits (not that I'm judging) from a very small rooster who breached the fence, coming and going like the gigolo he is as he pleased, leaving the World's Tiniest Hen with a pile of tiny, potentially fertilized eggs.

She just sort of left the eggs under some leaves and went about her business, so Neighbor Anne decided to give the eggs to her Silkies, because she knows those gals are rabid incubators. They've incubated kittens. Seriously.

The shock-headed Silkies, who remind me of spinster sisters in Victorian novels, took to their new charges with gusto, bickered over the eggs, scratching them to and fro in the nest, both eager to incubate them to term.

In the end, 3 eggs hatched and I went over there the next day to check out the scene. If you want to see pics from the first night, check out Neighbor Bill's blog.

See, what we've got here is an extreme cuteness overload. What's missing in these pics is scale. Those hens are not full sized hens, and the chick is smaller than regular chicks. Also, Silkies don't have feathers so much as they have downy fluff. Imagine, if you will, the world's tiniest chicks surfing in a sea of marabou feathers, coming up to surface, and then diving deep again.

 

You can fit all three chicks in one hand. I think two will look like their mom, and one like the Mysterious Stranger.

I became a little obsessed with the idea that the stripey ones look like chipmunks. Then I found a cat toy on the floor which was a chipmunk. Imagine my delight: CHICKMUNK!

More On Preventing Plants From Falling Over

Mrs. Homegrown's post on her storm-flattened flax patch reminded me that I had a photo I took while taking John Jeavons' Biointensive workshop earlier this month. In front of Jeavons is a bed of fava beans, also notorious for falling over in the slightest breeze. The randomly strung network of twine will support the fava as it grows.

You can see from my own fava bed below that I could have benefited from this low tech solution:

While I didn't lose any fava in the storm, the plants are sprawling all over the adjacent, narrow path making it difficult to harvest.

As Jeavons says, the expert is the person who has made the most mistakes!

Hippie Heart Horizontal

 

Mrs. Homegrown here:

So I was wrong about the rains in that self-pitying post I wrote a week or two ago. They came again. (But this time, I really do think this is our last spate of rain.) It was a strong, blustery storm and it laid our flax flat. The poor hippie heart.

It had just started to bloom. Those little blue flowers turn to pods. Each pod holds a few seeds. That's where flax seeds come from. As a city girl, I find this very impressive. Even more mind blowing is to look at these stalks and realize linen is made from them.

Flax is notorious for falling over from its own weight if not planted close together or supported. Rosalind Creasy, queen of the attractive edible garden, makes metal grids for her flax to grow through so it stays upright. I'd been trusting the universe. And the universe worked, until the storm. They might fluff up again when they dry. Or I might go out and see if I can encourage them into verticality.

If I can't, I'll harvest the stems, rot them, pound them, learn to spin, learn to weave, and make one square inch of linen.

Mr. Homegrown here: see a low tech solution to this problem.

Germinator Update

Last year my tomato seeds failed to germinate. Why? It was just too cold.

I vowed to build a cold frame and this winter I made good on that promise. I've upgraded the plastic sheeting on the "germinator" to rigid plastic awning material (plastic sheeting over a flat surface doesn't do well in rain . . . duh). If I were to build this thing again I'd construct a sloping top, especially if I lived somewhere with actual weather.

Before--plastic sheeting on a flat surface--a bad idea! What was I thinking?

The automatic vent lifter (available from Peaceful Valley Farm and Garden Supply) works great, popping open the germinator to keep the seedlings from frying during the day (remember this is Southern California).

The sight of my tomato seedlings was a highlight of the week:

If I lived in a colder climate I might consider incorporating a compost bin inside my cold frame to keep seedlings warm, a heat mat, or growing indoors under lights.

Survival Gardening

One of many survival garden pitches.

Listen to AM radio for more than a few minutes and you're bound to hear an ad touting seeds and "one acre survival gardens." The implication is that hordes of foreclosed zombies will soon empty the shelves of the local Walmart and leave us all bartering for gas with our carefully stored heirloom pole bean seeds.

But it does raise the question of how much space you need to grow all your own food. It's been on my mind since attending John Jeavons' three day Grow Biointensive workshop where we spent a fair amount of time, calculator in hand, figuring out how many calories you can squeeze from small spaces.

What gets left out in the "survival garden" sales pitches is that, if you want real self-sufficiency, you've also got to maintain the soil fertility that you deplete by harvesting. To do that you need to grow all your own compost. For this, Jeavons suggests what he calls "carbon and calorie crops" things like corn and wheat where you get both something edible and a lot of biomass for your compost pile. In Jeavons' 4,000 square foot "sustainable one person mini-farm" scheme, 60% of your growing area is devoted to these compost and calorie crops. The remainder is planted in 30% high calorie root crops, such as potatoes, with just 10% of the garden devoted to the usual tomatoes and greens.

The residents of Biosphere 2, using Jeavons' techniques claimed that enough food could be grown for one person on as little as 3,403 square feet. Jeavons has shown that you could use less space, but you better like eating a lot of potatoes.

In reality, there's probably too many variables, such as climate, to get an exact figure on how much space you need to grow enough food for one person. And let us not forget the novice survival gardener's experience (I'm amused at the thought of those one acre survival gardeners busting open that paint can full of seeds for the first time having never gardened before). And if you want livestock, the acreage requirements jump considerably.

But considering that it takes, according to Jeavons, between 15,000 and 30,000 square feet for commercial agriculture to provide the same calories as Jeavons' 4,000 square foot mini-farm, we'd do well to pull out those calculators on occasion. With just 176 square feet of vegetable beds at the Root Simple compound, our goal is self-reliance, not self-sufficiency. Do you think our post-apocalyptic overlords will feed us in exchange for blogging for them?

Concord grape, newborn and amazing

Mrs. Homegrown here:

This lovely thing is a newborn, unfurling Concord grape leaf. I had no idea it would be so beautiful. Why the crazy pink? Why does it look like it was dipped in sugar?

Even more amazing is that this event, though spectacular, is tiny. The Concord grape in question is a presently a 10-inch high stick, newly planted bare root stock, almost invisible. Only the flash of color caught my attention today and drew me to it to inspect. That this stick is suddenly bearing sugary pink wonders seems like a miracle.

Wish us luck with this grape. It is meant to shade our back porch. However, we're beset by the sharpshooters, and the disease they carry (ever wonder why SoCal doesn't grow wine?) which killed the first vine we planted, and then proceeded to kill the second one we planted, even though that one was supposed to be resistant to that blight--leaving us without summer shade on the porch for...how many years now? Fingers crossed that this grape will thrive, and grow from 10 inches high to 10 feet high and spreading.

Juicing Cane

At Camp Ramshackle, the plants that thrive are the ones that don't require too much attention. Our sugar cane, started as a six inch start, is case and point. I harvested a stalk to add to lemonade.

Harvesting and Drying Calendula

Mrs. Homegrown here:

Okay, so in a previous post I talked about growing Calendula. This post I'm going to talk about harvesting and drying it. The next post I'll do on the topic will be about making a skin-healing salve from the dried petals, olive oil and beeswax.

Backwards is the New Forwards

Our beekeeping mentor Kirk Anderson had some words of wisdom on Facebook yesterday,

Hey, the world is going to hell in a hand basket. Better plant that garden get those chickens plant a tree and get some bees. I have spoken.

Got nothing more to add to that. And, about getting those bees, watch Kirk's instructional videos on the website of the Backwards Beekeepers. 

Avocados

Green gold!

We're very lucky that when we purchased our house 13 years ago it came with a mature, and delicious avocado tree. Wanting to know more about how to care for that tree I attended a remarkable lecture at the Huntington given by avocado experts Carl Stucky and Julie Frink. From the Huntington lecture I gleaned the following factoids:

• Avocados varieties are divided into three "races": Mexican, Guatemalan, and West Indian.
• Avocados are extremely frost sensitive, more so than citrus.
• Mulch, mulch, mulch! Avocados like a thick layer (6 to 12 inches) of course mulch. Once you mulch you have to keep mulching because the shallow roots of avocado trees will often grow up into the mulch.
• Avocados like a well drained soil and won't tolerate wet feet. So if you dig a hole and fill it with water and that water sticks around for a day, plant something else.
• Avocados use a lot of zinc and may need supplemental applications of zinc sulfate placed in shallow holes.
• What few pests avocados have can be sprayed off with a hose. 
• Occasional deep waterings flush out chlorides in the soil that can cause leaves to turn brown at the tips and poor fruit production. In fact if the first rain of the season is less than 3 inches, you should irrigate to flush out salts that build up during the dry season.
• Avocados take a long time to ripen on the tree--12 months or more depending on variety.

For additional reading Stucky recommended the following internet resources:

Avocadosource.com
California Avocado Society
California Avocado Commission (The "growers" part of their website)

One thing that I discovered this year is that you can leave avocados on the tree for a very long period. We had at least a six month harvest window. There's actually still a few on the tree.

As for squirrels, Stucky's advice involved extraordinary rendition and water boarding, but we'll spare you the details.

Hugo, humanure and nettles

One of the original illustrations to Les Misérables (1862)

Mrs. Homegrown here:

Anne, our neighbor with the pea-ravaging Chihuahua, brings to our attention the fact that Victor Hugo was a humanure enthusiast, and in fact dedicates long passages of Les Misérables to it.

This is taken from Volume V, Book 2 (The Intestine of the Leviathan), Chapter One, provided by Project Gutenberg:

Paris casts twenty-five millions yearly into the water. And this without metaphor. How, and in what manner? Day and night. With what object? With no object. With what intention? With no intention. Why? For no reason. By means of what organ? By means of its intestine. What is its intestine? The sewer.

Twenty-five millions is the most moderate approximative figure which the valuations of special science have set upon it.

Science, after having long groped about, now knows that the most fecundating and the most efficacious of fertilizers is human manure. The Chinese, let us confess it to our shame, knew it before us. Not a Chinese peasant—it is Eckberg who says this,—goes to town without bringing back with him, at the two extremities of his bamboo pole, two full buckets of what we designate as filth. Thanks to human dung, the earth in China is still as young as in the days of Abraham. Chinese wheat yields a hundred fold of the seed. There is no guano comparable in fertility with the detritus of a capital. A great city is the most mighty of dung-makers. Certain success would attend the experiment of employing the city to manure the plain. If our gold is manure, our manure, on the other hand, is gold.

What is done with this golden manure? It is swept into the abyss. 

Advances in Gardening Series: We're maturing

November--seedlings new planted

January--all the foliage is in

End of February--the flowers really start to pop

Stuff grows. You just gotta remember to plant it!

A quick photo update on progress for the Phan of Pharmacy and the Hippie Heart, mostly for our own record keeping. Maybe it will inspire those of you surrounded by rain or snow with dreams of your own spring planting.

Back in November, I cleared ground and planted the Phan/Fan with medicinal seedlings. See some of that history here. Now we're at the end of February, and the Calendula and chamomile plants are mature. The Calendula (the yellow flowers in the pic) is giving off lots of blossoms, the chamomile--not so much. That's garlic growing on the far right. It's beginning to brown at the tips, but I don't think it's going to be ready until May. The poppies, hidden in the back, are slow, and not near blossoming yet. Note the rogue borage in the foreground.

Meanwhile, the Hippie Heart, planted with flax in the center and lentils around the edges is coming along very well. It waves hi to the police helicopters overhead. The point of the Heart was to have a place where I could experiment with planting seeds, beans and spices right out of the pantry. Soon I'll need to decide if I'm going to let the flax and lentils go to seed, and collect that seed for fun, or if I'll pull it out early in favor of more experimentation with new pantry crops over the summer.

January 22nd

February 25th: I can hardly wait 'til it blooms.

Question for you: Do you like giveaways?

The more we blog, the more offers we get from people willing to provide goods for giveaways that we host--we're talking new books, gardening tools, seeds, that sort of stuff. (Although we have been endlessly spammed by an antique replica sword company who is desperate that we share their information with you. Their marketing focus is obviously rapier sharp.)

We're of two minds on this. We like free stuff, and are happy to be a conduit of free stuff for you. Why not? But then again, we hesitate because we don't necessarily want to be anyone else's marketing tool, nor do we want to subject you to marketing if you'll all find that annoying. Yet....there's all that free stuff. And we'd do our due diligence on the companies, of course, to make sure they pass muster.

What do you think?

Return of Bean Friday: Spicy Mayocoba Beans

Mrs. Homegrown here:

Our neighbor Teresa of Tularosa Farms gave us this recipe. She not only gave us this recipe, but a bag of beans to go with it, and a loaner dutch oven.  How's that for neighborly? I made it a while back and really liked the results. Erik proclaimed it to be the best of all the Bean Friday dishes, though I remain partial to the Bastardized Puerto Rican beans. I'm happy to finally get a moment to share this with you.

Mayocoba beans are pretty yellow beans, the color of old ivory. We'd never had them before, but are glad to have met them, because they are mild in flavor and have a smooth, buttery texture. They're used extensively in Latin American cooking, so you might have to visit a Latin American-flavored grocery store to find them.

The recipe after the break:

The binoculars are always close at hand

A typical breakfast scene: Erik surveys the neighborhood from our "hilltop aerie." What's he looking at? Perhaps a lithesome jogger? Actually, no. When I took this picture he was admiring something poking out of a recycling bin over on Coronado Terrace.

I've never quite got used to my man's propensity to snatch up the binoculars, but I don't really disapprove either. Erik is a peculiar peeping tom. His viewing interests fall into 3 categories:

1) Scavenge opportunities
2) Happily spotting people and/or dogs we know on the street. Sort of as a sport. ("There goes Blackie!")
3) Foiling wrongdoers. Because he's so nosy, he knows who lives here, and has interfered with nefarious activities in the past (casing, tagging, etc.).

Grow Biointensive Videos

I've often threatened that our next book would adapt the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders into a vegetable gardening guide. Obsessive/compulsive? Here's how you plant radishes . . .

Wherever I fall in the diagnostic manual, the vegetable gardening method I've used for the past few years has been based on John Jeavon's "Biointensive" method as described in his book How to Grow More Vegetables. This past weekend I made the pilgrimage to Jeavon's Willits, California headquarters to drink the Kool-Aid at the foot of the master and take a three day Biointensive workshop.

The Biointensive method involves growing compost crops, double digging and tight spacing. Jeavons aims to produce a complete diet in as little space as possible while maintaining soil fertility with few outside inputs. Unlike most garden gurus Jeavons backs up his ideas with meticulous research which draws on his background in workplace efficiency.

He's also generous and "open source" with his techniques. The workshop was reasonably priced for three full days of instruction. Should you not be able to get to Willits, Jeavon's non-profit Ecology Action has produced a well made series of instructional videos that you can view online here. I've created a playlist of the complete set of these videos below:



Now, I'm so fired up from the workshop I've got to get away from this computer and out into the garden!

Our sky, post-storm

I'm just putting this up as a memorial to winter. It's over, and I already miss it. From now on the Southern California skies will be relentlessly azure, unmarred even by clouds, except for a brief period of chronic overcast called "June gloom." We may not see rain again for 9 months.

Borage: It's what's for dinner

image courtesy of wikimedia commons

Our friend Milli (Master Gardener of the Milagro Allegro community garden) stopped by today to pick up some sourdough starter. On seeing our back yard swamped abundant with borage (Borago officinalis), she mentioned that she's been really digging borage tacos lately. This was very exciting news to us, because we'd never eaten our borage leaves--only the flowers.

So tonight I went out and cut a whole mess of stiff, prickly borage leaves. The prickles vanish on cooking. Some sources say only to use small leaves for cooking but I say fie to that. I used leaves of all sizes and after cooking there was no difference between them. Borage is actually rather delicate under all its spikes and cooks down considerably in to a very tender, spinach-like consistency.

Instead of making little tacos with it, we folded it into tortillas with a bit of goat's milk gouda to make yummy green quesadillas--a quick, light and satisfying meal at the end of a busy day.

How did we cook it? -->

Least Favorite Plant: Unkown

This is my first contribution to a regular feature here on Root Simple: the Least Favorite Plant. For me it's a tie for least favorite between Manroot (I'm sure my adversarial obsession with this plant will compel a future post) and this tree that I have yet to identify (please help in the comments if you know what it is).

[update: The Root Simple Community has correctly identified the tree as Osage Orange or Bois d'Arc. Thanks everyone for the comments!]

Poached eggs and greens on toast with wildflowers

 Mrs. Homegrown here:

This is a fancy iteration of one of our springtime go-to dishes: eggs and greens on toast. Today, Erik was inspired (perhaps by the spirit of Spring?) to sprinkle nasturtium blossoms and little arugula flowers over the plate.

It was dee-lish--so much so I had to blog it. I sincerely hope we haven't blogged this before, but it seems like we would have, because we make this dish so often.

Anyway, it's easy to make: