Number One, in more ways than one!

Why am I so self-righteous? We'll start with this eggplant. This is the 3rd year I've grown ichiban eggplants, but somehow I only discovered a week or so ago that ichiban means "number one" in Japanese. I can see why. The plant is beautiful. It appeals to my taste for dark things. The fruit is beautiful, the plant very, very productive and delicious. I became an eggplant convert in large part because of this variety of eggplant. And today, it earned the title number one for one more reason, it is the 1st eggplant, and I have 5, that is producing fruit! I should qualify that by admitting that I had to buy a 6 inch pot rather than 2 inch, which is what all my other eggplants started as.

I consider these sunflowers a triumph too. I have not seen any as big as mine right now. In this instance I may thank the birds and the squirrels for spilling birdseed all over the place. These germinated as soon as the ground was warm and moist enough for their taste. I simply transplanted them here and they survived. I might be the 1st to have sunflowers blooming on my block, if not my neighborhood.

All right, this image does not continue the #1 theme. It's the back of my pick-up and it shows my homemade potting mix. I won't get into a specific recipe. I will only say that this batch has these ingredients, compost, which was already in the truck, peat moss, vermiculite, and agricultural lime. I like to do more than a few pots and it's a lot cheaper to mix my own especially when I buy compost by the cubic yard anyway. I just mix it all up in the bed of my truck as needed. Most people that make their own mix it up in a wheelbarrow. This is more or less what potted soil is.

I love red cabbage, not so much to eat, but as a focal point in landscaping. I can directly acknowledge Joy Larkcom as my influence here. Just a few days ago a little boy asked me about this cabbage. "Is that a cabbage?" he asked while gently petting a very grateful Sally (Sally loves children, unlike the other cats)
"Yes it is!"
"Is it edible?"
What a smart child! That was my #1 moment that day.

I hate to shill myself here, but I'd be quite gratified if you readers would take a moment to answer my survey on the right.

How much compost do I need?

Maybe this should be in the sidebar but it is an important consideration. I keep putting off writing about this because it's kinda a basic consideration and for my garden I didn't exactly figure it all out because I developed my garden gradually out of a weedy mess.

The 1st thing you know, if you do things like me is the unit of compost is a cubic yard. To most easily translate that to your garden you need to figure how many square yards of garden needs compost. I like to put 2 or 3 inches of compost on each bed, especially if it's a new bed. Sometimes it's a good idea to cultivate a bed a shovel blade or 2 deep and to amend the soil with some compost. I believe that in most cases ideal soil is 25% organic material.

If you have a rectangular garden this is easy, if not you might need to measure each bed remember of course that 9 square feet is equal to one square yard. I like to have extra compost around for topping off beds, making some potting soil, or just to mix in as I plant something, or maybe it just makes me feel safe.

Potting soil is easy mixed yourself. The general formula is compost, peat moss, vermiculite, perlite and some sort of fertilizer. The idea balance depends on what you're growing but I guess I do about 1 part each except for fertilizer. Even though I have a bit of land I still like to grow some things in containers. I also use potting soil to start seedlings and to root cuttings or just to split things up, maybe to share something with a friend.

One thing to remember is that compost breaks down. In most areas it breaks down at the rate of about an inch a year. If your climate is warmer, and perhaps moister, all things living are more active. So in most places you probably do not need to top your garden with compost every year but...

I suppose I primarily subscribe to the author of The Vegetable Gardener's Bible, Ed Smith's W-O-R-D philosophy of gardening. He recommends WIDE beds, rather than skinny rows. The rule of thumb is just wide enough for easy access, so that's 3 to 4 feet wide. ORGANIC because well, it's just a better method. He also recommends RAISED beds, and that's the point I wanted to get to. Before I do that, just for completion sake, I must say he likes DEEP beds. I won't go into each point here, just read the book or maybe I'll paraphrase him more, though it is all echos of what others have said but he said it well.

OK, I was trying not to paraphrase anyone but that's it. I greatly enjoyed his book. The difference for me is that putting it ALL together takes a lot of W-O-R-K. A conflict I have in this blog is deciding what audience I want to speak to. I am perfectly willing to W-O-R-K for anyone willing to pay me but I also wish to encourage and H-E-L-P anyone less wealthy to realize their own garden. Or maybe you have money but aren't certain exactly what direction you want to go. At any rate I am here to help all of the above.

My personal philosophy towards gardening is a sort of evolution. Nothing is constant. So, a bed needs an average of an inch of compost topping it a year but my garden is evolving into a RAISED bed so I think I'll end up topping my beds with 1-3 inches a year until I either need to build something to contain them or I just let them spill over. I guess I am building little hills, not a flat topped bed. Now my memory banks recall something I read about rounded topped garden beds in Japan(?) perhaps in a Joy Larkcom book, but I digress.

In short 12-18 square yards is 108-162 square feet and may be covered adequately by 1 cubic yard of compost. That's a rectangle that measures 9 X 12 feet to 12 X 14 feet, though I fudged the larger rectangle. Really, the backhoe just dumps a big bucket into the back of my truck which probably is a bit bigger than a cubic yard. I haven't measured but above is a photo of my half-unloaded truck.

Any questions? Please, pick my brain!

Turkey Leek Fennel Wild Rice Soup

So the other week at my local farmer's market they had an extra turkey. I know it's early but I LOVE turkey so I got it, about 11 pounds maybe. I did the standard stuffing, but with some home grown leeks.

Here we have a gratuitous picture of leeks mixed with some other stuff from before the frost. I love leeks. I fell in love with them when I started my kitchen garde research and found Creative Vegetable Gardening: Accenting Your Vegetables With Flowers by Joy Larkcom. One place referenced by Larkcom and others is Villandry. Villandry is a chateau built during the Renaissance that was restored last century including a fabulous potager. Leeks and cabbages are pretty prominent in the squares.

I won't go in depth about it just now, but my aspirations are kinda like it. Visit their website, the design is just amazing if you haven't heard of it. So the leeks there were part of a square design I had that I let go a bit.

Anyhow, when I make turkey, I try to when the 1st meal is over to clean all the meaat off the bones. Then I put the bones in a huge pot of water with all the good stuff you need to make soupstock. Usually for poultry that includes celery and celery seed but in this case I threw in some fennel stalks with a bunch of fennel seeds left on. There's also as you may see some carrots and some parsley(not really visible. Anyway, I hope that that's a good self-portrait. This is simmered overnight which makes the house smell great.

The soup is delicious. If anyone shows an interest I might post my recipe.

My checkered past

So what did I do before this?

Lots of things.

I'll talk about these 2 pictures 1st. These 3 steps shows just some of the seedlings I started with this past May.

Some of these seedlings went to other gardens but I do overplant. Just glancing at this I see a few that perished. Some due to my negligence, others for other reasons.

I had some catmint, a relative to catnip, that perished from a certain orange cat nipping at it. The same neighborhood cat I believe killed a cardinal chick in my tree hydrangea. For some reason my gray cat has befriended 'Orangy' while fighting with just about any other cat in the neighborhood. Orangy also liked to use one of my beds as a litterbox. I had to make a 'tiger trap' with skewers to keep her(?) out. But I digress.

So anyway, the 2nd picture shows a bed planted with red cabbage, lettuce, ocean sorbet pansies, and some tulips. There's also some onions.

Inspiration for this kind of planting comes from Joy Larkcom's book
Creative Vegetable Gardening: Accenting Your Vegetables With Flowers. This book was my introduction to Larkcom. I have since discovered that perhaps she should be as famous as Michael Pollan. Really, she is one of my heroes.

I truly believe that vegetables and flowers need not be separated. There are many reasons for this. Another proponent of this philosophy is Edward C. Smith. I learned a lot from his book
The Vegetable Gardener's Bible, a pretentious title from a non-pretentious man. One observation he made is that often plants that grow well together taste well together.

Didn't I say that I was going to talk about myself? Oh yeah, so here's a picture of me from this past May, shoveling compost from my truck to my garden.

I signed up for google analytics and found that finally somebody searched and hit this blog, which has had about 30 unique visitors. This was somebody in Beverly Hills, California! But they searched on my name!

Oh no! I have 2 guesses as to the identity of said person, but that could reveal my checkered past. I'll let you uninformed readers imagine something more interesting than reality.

I grew up 1 generation removed from a farm in South Dakota, 2 generations from Europe of 3 of my 4 grandparents. My father was a mathematician at the University of Pittsburgh, a bit of a leap from a dirt farm, my mother mostly a housewife, also from a South Dakota farm.

I have been to college but dropped out to work on archaeological digs in the lower 48. I've worked in more than a dozen states, mostly NE, but also New Mexico, California, and Oregon. My work as a field tech (shovel bum) spanned 15 years off and on, perhaps more off than on but it was pretty cool.

For 2 years straight I was a bicycle messenger in Pittsburgh, which included 2 winters. This was a blast but pretty crazy. If you think being a messenger is easy I've got a few bridges here to sell you.

After that, I landscaped for a very small company for some of the wealthiest people in Pittsburgh. I worked for this place for 2 years before I decided I'd be better off striking it out on my own. Plus I also decided that I wanted to try to get people to do something a little different from the standard stuff.

I think it's about time for people to rethink their yards. So there you have it.

Vegetables growing in my front yard

Well, I've managed to put my own picture on top but I need to blur it or something so you may read it better. I sorta want to put a lot of info I have there on a sidebar but I haven't figured that out yet.

If you stumble on this, the picture is from my lovely garden. I want to encourage more people to have gardens like mine. There's some red cabbage, scarlet runner beans and lettuce, all quite lovely.

Above is a picture perhaps taken the same day as my theme picture, I can't remember, but you can see some pansies make it even prettier. There's an onion there too and in the foreground is some sea kale that a groundhog munched on.

To be honest my ideas did not come from thin air. A major inspiration is Joy Larkcom and her book Creative Vegetable Gardening: Accenting Your Vegetables With Flowers(that's an amazon book link) If you go there and see the cover photo, the influence is obvious.

Anyway, this is what I want to see in other FRONT yards, yes, that's my front yard and I haven't shown you a 10th of it.

Well, I've seriously got to get to work. I hope somebody out there finds what I am doing as amazing as I do.