Organic Gardening Info from Peaceful Valley

I know everybody is just coming down from the busy-ness of the Summer gardening season, especially for you hard working people still canning and processing (tomato sauce, apple sauce, pear sauce, whatever sauce), but don’t forget about the wonderful bounty Fall can provide! I’ve been planting onions, garlic cloves, broccoli starts, and seeds of all sorts of greens. It’s so exciting to think about the deliciousness these favorites will provide! Of course, onions and garlic won’t be ready to harvest until July, but the greens and brassicas will be enjoyed through Winter. For anyone who hasn’t had success growing broccoli in the Spring, try now instead. It’s a struggle in the Spring when temperatures warm up rapidly to keep the plants from bolting, but in the Fall, broccoli (and other brassicas-cauliflower, cabbage, brussellsprouts, etc) just gets sweeter as the temperatures get cooler (for those of us who like to know the “why”, it’s because brassicas produce sugar to act as an “antifreeze” to protect their cells from being damaged by cold-cool, huh?).
Happy Fall!

Ingredients:

3 Tablespoons butter

6 large carrots, peeled and sliced

1 medium onion

1 large potato, peeled and diced

4 cups beef or chicken broth or

4 cups water and 4-6 beef or chicken bouillon

1/2 teaspoon sugar

Salt & Pepper to taste

Instructions:

Melt butter.  Add carrots, onions, potato and cook over medium heat until lightly browned about 15 minutes.  Add beef broth, then sugar  and salt and pepper.  Reduce heat and cook until tender, approximately 30 minutes.  Blend in a blender, food processor or with an immersion blender to get a smooth consistency.

Last week I scored a BUNCH of Walla Walla Onion transplants. They were on their last leg and needed to get some TLC soon. So instead, I stuck them in the cooler until Friday, took them home and waited until Sunday to even take a look. What initially looked like a total loss turned out pretty well.

First I dumped the whole sloppy smelly mess into the left hand kitchen sink and cleaned them up, leaving the compostables in the right hand sink. After snipping and rinsing in a tub I laid them out on the counter to breathe. This part of things took the longest but I come from a background in organic produce and it was kind of fun… for a while. Once I’d culled the best ones and counted up 120 healthy, clean and ready to plant transplants, I was happy to chuck what looked like the remaining third in the compost. Yeah!

Alright! On to the bed. One of our 4 X 8 wood sided raised beds was an excellent candidate for the onions because of its deep fluffy loamy fertile soil. As opposed to the other “in the ground” albeit amended beds made with lots of local soil and better for things other than large bulbs.

So this bed grew potatoes which perished, at least above ground during our first frost this fall. First the fun part, harvesting a big ‘ol basket of varietal potatoes, rinsing and scrubbing and making home fries for brunch. Yum! So pretty too.

Next I amended the bed by leveling with a soil rake. (My favorite tool next to the breaker bar) I added some Sierra Foothills Fertilizer Mix we had on hand, sprinkled Nutri-Rich pellets, some Gaia Green and a little Oystershell Lime. No big science here, just what we had on hand, I like all these products.

I busted out the tape measure to make easy work of poking finger holes at six inch spacing in a hexagonal pattern to maximize my numbers. I really did’nt think I’d get them all in. Next I used a (veggie) plastic spoon (another good tool in the garden) to spoon in a little Down To Earth Myco-Inoculant into each hole. Up until this point it seemed like all this prep was taking up too much time and I’d never finish by sundown!

But not to worry, once I started the actual planting, I swear it only took about twenty minutes and wow! Done. Our little four by eight now has 116 transplants which left me with 4 in case any fail or whatever. Again I was impressed with the ease and speed with which the planting process went. So soon this week I’ll mulch heavily with the straw we keep around in bales, and this time next year… onions for days.

Frustrating and gratifying. That is the only way to describe the processing of our organic onion transplant orders.

In the spring we contract with our long term and reliable onion transplant farmer and decide which varieties to plant, advertise and sell in our Fall catalog. If only the rest of the process was that much fun.

We usually always offer several different varieties and, of course, everyone wants to buy a little bit of this and a little bit of that.

Each year Mother Nature wants to be sure that we are not sitting on our laurels. In fact, she wants to make sure that we are working hard and using all of our brain cells, like most mothers do. She decides to speed up the development on some onion varieties, and slow down others……just to make it challenging for us. We want pencil sized transplants and we want them all the same size at the same time……doesn’t Mother understand that?

NO! Frustrating.

If we only had a direct line to Mother Nature, we could anticipate and advertise availability times and separate shipping costs. Instead we have to encourage people to order what they want and tell them that we can’t guarantee they will all ship together, but they might so we can’t really quote ship times and charges.

Come October we take a peek at the onions in the ground to see what can be harvested and what can’t. I don’t think there has ever been a year that we could actually ship all varieties at the same time, even though that is how our customers order them.

Onion transplant time is here! Just want everyone, including Mother, to know that we are REALLY good and not resting on our laurels. We manipulate the orders, the shipping charges, the shipping dates manually, to be able to give the best service and the best onions and not change any of the orders. Most of our customers don’t know that we are doing back-flips around here in October to make it all work perfectly for them.

Then there is the camaraderie of our team when the onions are delivered to our warehouse. These highly perishable, strongly scented, wet, muddy, fresh, green onions just do something to a bunch of strong, efficient, forklift-driving, warehouse people. At first there is fear and then there is confidence and finally, accomplishment and victory as we weigh, package and ship them all out the on the same day they come in. Mother would be proud. And make us shower outside when we come home.

Gratifying.

I belong to a CSA, which means every week I get a box of the freshest veggies possible… from just down the road. Every year I find myself subconsciously competing with my CSA farmer… and I must admit I always lose. He always has tomatoes and peppers sooner, his lettuce and cabbage heads up better than mine, in short his thumb is just plain greener. And this year I’ve decided to be alright with that, I’ve decided to grow all the other things I like to eat that I never get from my CSA. Now this idea may seem elementary, but to me it’s a revelation.

For those of you who are not hip to CSA membership here’s a quick overview; A farmer near you grows a diverse yet practical variety of veggies, usually on a small amount of acreage (1-5 acres). You join the CSA (community supported agriculture) and pay for a box of veggies a week. It’s kind of a subscription to fresh local food. Usually $15-$40 a week paid in advance or in two or three payments. The idea is that by paying in advance you give the farmers the money they need to get off to a good start. In return you not only get the freshest veggies possible, you also get to”know your grower” which is a rare thing these days. For a more detailed explanation of CSA here is what Wikipedia has to say.

So this year I will grow some unusual greens; Double Purple Orach, Purslane, Miners Lettuce, Italienischer and Regal Spinach. Most of which I have no idea what they will taste like. Even though my CSA has tons of tomatoes, I’m still going to grow my own, mostly sauce tomatoes for canning, you can never have too many tomatoes in my opinion. The same goes for onions and garlic, in my house we eat so much of these it’s a surprise our friends can stand our breath. In addition I plan to grow pickling cucumbers, some specialty squashes like flying saucer and portofino. I also acquired a few giant pumpkin seeds from a winning giant pumpkin (800+ lbs) and I can’t wait to see what comes of that! Herbs are still on the plan this year, dill (for the pickles), cilantro, basil and parsley, and thyme. Shelling peas will be a new addition to my garden and so will the beautiful scarlet runner beans I picked up at a seed swap. Also in the plan this year are berries of the straw, blue and rasp varieties. The blueberries will be the only new item on the menu and even though I just put them in the ground yesterday… my mouth waters already.

My garden plan for this year started out as a supplement to my CSA, giving me the veggies I would not see in my weekly box. It quickly became more about exploring new kinds of vegetables. And while I realize that my garden this year will barely scratch the surface of the vast realm of vegetable variety… I’ve got to start somewhere… and my garden seems like the right place.

What’s in your garden this year?