Much Ado About Beets or It's Fall Planting Time

I noticed in Johnny's Seed catalog last week that they have little graphs for each vegetable variety that show what soil temperatures are best for germinating seeds. I have never seen them before. I do not know if they are new or I am just unobservant.

This is extremely useful information, especially this time of year when seeds for fall crops need to be sown and it is still hotter than the hinges of hell. Take beets. In the past i have sown beets in the ground in mid to late September. I rarely got beets until the following spring because they ran out of warm growing days before the roots formed. Well, Johnny's little graph tells me that they germinate best when the soil temperature is 86º. That is quite warm. I went out a little earlier with my instant read meat thermometer and did some research. Of course i have no idea how accurate my thermometer is so take this with a grain of salt (whatever that is supposed to mean). Bare soil in the sun was about 87º. Soil under wheat straw mulch in the sun was about 82º. Soil under the lima bean trellis where the sun never shines directly was about 77º. Clearly there are differences depending on the environmental conditions. So the conclusion is that I need to plant my beets this week! The seed package says they will be ready in 55 days so i should have beets by mid to late October. Yiippeee! I had planned on planting carrots this week but carrots ideal soil germination temperature is 77º so i will wait a while before planting them.

Today i planted several different brassicas in flats. Broccoli, collards, mustard, kale, napa cabbage. Self-seeded mustard came up in the garden several weeks ago so I know it will germinate fine. According to Johnny's graph, and my personal experience, broccoli likes cooler soil. Collards, napa cabbage and kale like it hot. I set up some shade cloth to provide some shade for the flats. They will germinate in 3 days then i will remove the shade cloth and watch them grow.

2 weeks ago i seeded arugula in the ground. It is up and growing well in a bed partially shaded by other tall plants. Komatsuna 'Summerfest' i seeded last week and it is up and doing well. Tokyo Bekana greens and Tokyo market turnips that is sowed on Sunday germinated last evening. That was quick.

Apparently there is a worldwide shortage of Hakurei Turnip seeds. I cannot find a source now. Johnny's rep told me it would be late this year before they would have any. If anyone knows of a source for it please share with me.
Thanks.

Choosing Varieties that Work in our System

Each year we trial new varieties of crops in the never-ending search for those that produce well for us. We are looking for ones that can withstand the extremes of high temperature, humidity and often low rainfall (drought) that we experience in the summer here in Georgia. Our climatic conditions can put great stress on our crops making them more susceptible to insect and disease pressures. Additionally, night temperatures in the 70's and daytime temperatures in the 90's for days on end cause plants to go into survival mode. They stop producing flowers and fruit.

We grow some hybrid varieties and some open-pollinated varieties. Many hybrids have been bred to withstand disease or insect infestations. Many open-pollinated and heirloom varieties do not have these traits although some do. We take this into consideration when making our choices. We look for varieties that have been grown successfully in our area for a long time. We want varieties that taste good and produce a good yield for a long period of time.

Here are a few examples of how we make those decisions. We will start with zucchini and squash. We stopped growing yellow squash for 2 reasons. The first is that most of the other growers at our markets grow it so we do not need to compete with them. Additionally we have not found a variety that produces well for us. Insects and diseases always take them out early. This year we decided to focus on zucchini. We planted 2 heirloom varieties from Europe. One was ronde de nice, a French variety, and the other was costata romanesco, an Italian variety. Both varieties showed good resistance to disease and insect pests. We only lost a couple of plants to the dreaded squash vine borer. The ronde de nice plants grew well, the fruit was tasty and looked good but produced very little fruit. The costata romanesco grew well and produced great tasting fruit over a long period of time. That variety also produced plentiful male blossoms which we were able to harvest and sell to a restaurant. Guess which variety we will be growing next year. The previous year we had success with an old open pollinated variety called simple long grey. We will be adding it back to the mix next year as well. Delicata is an open pollinated variety that does well for us too.
Next are tomatoes. Our main tomato variety is Big Beef, a hybrid. It consistently produces tasty, good sized fruit and is pretty resistant to the ubiquitous early blight we get every year. We also do well with Tomatoberry, another hybrid introduced by Johnnys Seed a couple of years ago. It produces strawberry sized and shaped fruit that are very tasty. It excels late in the summer when other varieties have given up. We still have one plant that is cranking out lots of fruit in November. Amana Orange is an heirloom variety that is my favorite tomato for flavor. It does not produce a lot of fruit but it is a market favorite so we can get a premium price for it all summer. This year we tried San Marzano. The plants grew strongly at first but were the first to succumb to the blight. We will be looking for another paste type variety next year, probably we will go back to Roma. We also tried Sungold II. It did terribly. Another one we like a lot is Eva Purple Ball, another heirloom variety that does well. Flavorful and crack resistant, it produces well too.
The final example is butterbean. We love them but had not devoted space for them in the past. This year we planted a short row of Violet's Multicolored. Here is the description from Southern Exposure Seed Exchange:

80-90 days [Banks County, GA, saved by 4 generations of Violet Brady Westbrook’s family.] A rainbow of colors – cream, beige, red-brown, and violet-purple, with speckles and swirls. Small seeds have great flavor, good both fresh or dried. 3-5” pods. Semi-bush plants have good disease- and drought-resistance.

They lived up to the description in every way except 1. They were not even close to being semi-bush. The vines grew to be 12' long. It was fortuitous that i did not read the description on the package again before planting so i built a tall trellis for them to grow on. We saved the beautiful seeds for planting next year.

We grew several other crops too. Marketmore cucumbers did great for us. Provider bush green beans have done well in the past but struggled this year with the heat and drought. We have a difficult time with peppers. This season we will continue to hunt for pepper varieties that will do well for us. We will be trying new techniques to protect the eggplants from flea beetles and potato beetles.

I read a research study yesterday about the declining nutritional quality of fruits and vegetables over the last 50 years. The conclusion of the study was that hybrid varieties that were bred to produce a large yield at the expense of nutritional value was a big factor in this trend. We will be taking that into consideration when we are salivating over seed catalogs in the next month or two.

After all we are what we eat!

Fall Organic Gardening Workshop

Our fall intensive organic gardening workshop will start on Sunday September 12th and go for 4 weeks, ending on Sunday October 3rd. It meets from 1-4 p.m. here is what we will cover:

Week 1 - Organic Gardening Foundations - Soil Food Web, composting, worm composting and nutrient cycling
Week 2 - Garden planning- What to plant, When to plant it and How to plant it
Week 3 - Pest control strategies - putting Mother Nature to work to control insects, diseases and weeds.
Week 4 - Incorporating Permaculture Strategies in your garden- Food forests, growing edible mushrooms, edible landscapes, rainwater harvesting

You can register by going here: http://fallorganicgardeningworkshop.eventbrite.com

Space is limited to 10 so don;t delay.

Holiday Cheer & Cupcakes

Our dear and generous friend Robert (aka Hoochman - more about that in a future blog) brought us some beautiful and delicious Asian persimmons he grew, all naturally of course. I decided i wanted to turn them into cupcakes. Being new to cupcake-making i made some mistakes but mostly they turned out to be very tasty and nice looking (some of them anyway). I wanted them to look festive so i made some icing into which i put some ground up red deer tongue lettuce which imparted a green tint to it. After applying the icng to the cakes i drizzled a little pomegranite juice over them to add a little touch of red. Voila, Happy Holidays!

The first mistake i made was filling up the cupcake molds too full. They rose up over the top and spread out over the tin making it hard to get them out. Many of the caps split off from the stumps. Robin told me later that professional bakers have the same problem so they sell the caps as a product. I felt better about my efforts after that. I got 12 whole cupcakes out of 24 potential ones. The lessons learned are to fill the cups only 1/2 full and grease and flour the cups and the top of the pan.

The second mistake was to cook them a little too long. The recipe i adapted was for persimmon loaves. It said to cook them for 1 hour or until a toothpick shoved into the loaf came out clean. I cooked them for 45 minutes and the toothpick came out clean but the bottoms and sided were a little too dark and a bit drier than i would have liked.

The last mistake was due to my impatience. Instead of cooking 2 batches i put 2 pans on the upper rack and 2 pans on the lower rack. Although the ones on the lower rack only cooked fot about 30 minutes the bottoms sides were almost burnt. Since one of the pans on the
bottom was a loaf pan i was able to salvage it by trimming off the sides and bottom.

So applying the lessons learned from my mistakes, here is my recipe for organic Persimmon Cupcakes. Makes 2 dozen cupcakes
Ingredients:
1 cup persimmon pulp (about 3 persimmons)
2 teaspoons baking soda
1 1/2 organic cane sugar
1/2 cup raw agave nectar (very nutritious sweetener)
1 cup organic extra virgin olive oil
4 whole eggs from organically raised pastured hens
1 1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1 1/2 teaspoon nutmeg
2 teaspoons vanilla extract
1 teaspoon sea salt (good source of essential minerals)
2/3 cup water
3 cups organic whole wheat pastry flour

Pre-heat oven to 350º - with rack in the middle of the oven. Grease and flour the cupcake tins including the tops.

Directions:
1. in a small bowl chop up peeled persimmon fruit and mix in the baking soda
2. in a large bowl combine sugar, agave nectar, oil, eggs, cinnamon, nutmeg, vanilla and salt. Blend with a whisk until smooth (you could use an electric mixer but it is a waste of energy and you don't get any exercise so just use a whisk).
3. thoroughly mix in 1/3 of the persimmon pulp, water, and flour.
4. pour into the cupcake tins filling them 1/2 full.
5. bake 30 minutes or until a toothpick inserted into the cupcake comes out clean.
6. cool for 10 minutes before attempting to remove from the tins. It is helpful to run a knife around the edge first. Remember, if they all don't come out whole, eat them anyway. They still taste good.

Holiday Icing:
Ingredients:
3 leaves organic red deer tongue lettuce (or other dark leaf lettuce) (adds green color and nurtients but you don't really taste it)
1/2 cup organic unsalted butter
3-4 tablespoons organic raw whole milk
3 cups organic confectioner's sugar
1 teaspoon organic vanilla extract
1/2 organic pomegranite
Directions:
1.Separate the seeds from the pomegranite and mash in a small bowl to extract about 2 tablespoons of juice
2.put the lettuce into a small food processor and grind into tiny pieces
3. in a small sauce pan melt butter, add milk and heat. It does not need to come to a boil. Remove from heat and blend in sugar and 2 tablespoons ground lettuce. Whisk vigorously (more exercise) until smooth and glossy. If too thick to spread easily add a little bit more milk.
4. Allow to cool for 5-6 minutes then spread over the tops of the cool cupcakes.
5. drizzle a 1/4 teaspoon of pomegranite juice over each cupcake before the icing completely cools to add a splash of red color the the green icing.

Bite into cupcake enjoying the spicy deliciousness as you chew thoroughly. Swallow and repeat until completely consumed.

Puke Power

My adopted son John Henry just im'd a link to an article that talks about a bacteria that turns organic waste into butyric acid that then is converted to butanol which can be used as a biofuel in cars and trucks. I got really excited when i found out that butyric acid is what makes vomit smell like, well, puke. Here's another bodily waste product i might be able to utilize for energy production. Now i'll have a good excuse to drink till i puke more often.
Watch out Earl, i'll be there tonight.

Kitty Loves Zinnas

Our cat, Kitty, loves to eat the zinnias that Robin grows organically in our community garden plot. She stands by her flower vase and howls until one of us comes over and holds a stem so she can rip off the leaves and petals and gobble them up. She's very picky though about her zinnias. The day after she moved to The Funny Farm Robin picked some zinnias for Kitty to eat that the previous owners had growing , hoping that they would make her feel more at home. Well, she would have nothing to do with those zinnias. When we went into the basement we found out why. The former owners stuck us with enough toxic pesticides to qualify us as a superfund toxic waste site.
We are happy to know that our cat upholds our standard of only eating organically grown food.

If only I can train her (kitty) to use the composting toilet....

The Funny Farm

This is the first installment from our new adventure in suburban sustainable living here at the Funny Farm. Robin and I have had a dream since we first got married 34 years ago to have a place where we can practice organic farming, living gently on the planet and teaching others to do the same. About 2 months ago we got a call from our friend girl Charlie who has been keeping her eye out for some land for us. She said her Angels told her to turn left instead of right ( her usual route). She saw a for sale sign had just been put up on the property behind her own. She called us, we came out the next day to look at the property and we new it was the place where we would spend the rest of our days realizing our dream. It has space to grow food and flowers, a large pond for aquaculture, a nice barn for animals, some woods, a full basement where we can grow mushrooms... a perfect set up for a diversified enterprise only 20 minutes from our business and community garden in downtown Atlanta.
We've been here a month now and we couldn't be happier. We've been busy clearing brush, tilling some space for flowers and veggies, making compost and developing a plan to make a living here.
I'll be using this space to chronicle our our efforts to create a model that will demonstrate that it is possible to live gently and sustainably whereever you are be it in the city, in the 'burbs or in the country. It is a matter of desire and commitment. Stay tuned and we'll share our efforts with you.