Dragon’s Tongue and Heirlooms a-go-go

Picked up a bag of these beautiful shelling beans at the Pedal, Pick and Grin Tomato Picking Event at Suzie’s Farm CSA last weekend.  They are so delicious, raw right out of the pod, and in season right now.

We are drying out bean pods the next couple of weeks with the intent of planting some of these awesome legumes in our growing year here in the garden.  The flavor is just a little bit spicy and I am excited to steam and salt some to eat up like edamame!  Here is another fun recipe we might try another time, Pickled Dragon Chutney.

As for the tomatoes… Blue roasted up a flat of them yesterday and made into wonderful tomato soup and pasta sauce.  Our home smells DELICIOUS right now! 

After reading up a bit on canning, specifically with tomatoes, I’m a little nervous to embark without more research.  Seems that tomatoes can be a pretty dangerous experiment if not done properly in the preservation process, but here is a deceptively simple explanation of how it is done.  Maybe when there is more time, more money for purchasing all the needed supplies, and not a mountain of tomatoes threatening to bury us in the kitchen by Saturday.

The tomato seeding process is coming along nicely however

… and by nicely I mean the things *outside* or our kitchen smell like a sewer grate on a 110° day in Calcutta.  Blech!  It will all be worth it when we have some of these beautiful varieties of heirlooms growing in our patch though.  For those interested, tomatoes are an interesting fruit to seed.  Did you know that a tomato will not grow from seed unless the fruit has fermented and dissolved a certain enzyme from the seed casing?  Truth!  Here are some instructions for you to seed your own tomatoes, if you find that one beautiful variety you simply *must* have growing at home.  The one that I am desperately seeking is Black Prince.

How *not* to embark on building a garden shed

One of the best things about making public on your plans to return to old fashioned means of obtaining food is the amount of support and camaraderie that comes about.  Sure, there are those who will view this undertaking as a little bit crazy, but for the most part the nostalgia of returning to modest ideals in home farming seems to be a little contagious; tell several friends and suddenly, you might find them asking you for advice in planting their own vegetables… or sending their support of your endeavor.  Such is the case with our friend Larry, who just the other day gave us an item that he no longer needed.  Isn’t providence a wonderful thing?

Larry is on a mission to simplify after some significant life changes at home.  He is moving to a smaller space and is in the zen-like process of “letting go of what no longer holds utility or beauty in order to make room for what does and is yet to come”.  Among those things was a garden shed that he no longer needed.  A few text messages and a week or so later, we arrived to help disassemble this wonderful gift and transport it back home.

We decided to postpone dinner and arrived at Larry’s former home at about 6:00 to help disassemble the snap together frame.  After about an hour or so of work, we had successfully taken apart the shed and loaded it onto my pickup truck along with a couple of bags of mulch and a small potting table.  As best we could, we kept all of the minor pieces together for later reassembly of the structure.  With at least another hour of daylight left, we were feeling optimistic about putting the shed together in the yard while the jigsaw puzzle assembly was still somewhat fresh in our minds (insert part G into part L and so forth).

Men are funny creatures.  Our sense of pride in all things structural and utilitarian sometimes outweighs our common sense.  Pair that with poor memory and going without dinner for a few hours longer than is intelligent and you have a script for mayhem… not that we were using any script mind you, or printed instructions for how to assemble a storage shed, for instance.  Everyone knows that men never ask for directions.

By the time the sun finally went down, we did finally have something resembling a garden shed constructed in the corner of the yard.  Exhausted, blind in the dark, and deaf from pounding tab A into slot B, we finally wandered aimlessly in to the dining room to have dinner and call it a night.  By the time 9:00 had finally arrived, like true hillbillies, we had resorted to using the most primitive of tools to force the structure to stand, at one point even using a log from the woodpile to hammer the roof onto the walls.

When I awoke this morning to survey our handy work, here is the pastoral vision of grace and beauty that greeted me:

One can almost hear the banjos.  And lest you believe that I may have been kidding, witness the redneck tool of choice used to build this awesome temple to the vegetation gods:

Words fail at times like these.  Blue came close though when he looked out onto this vista and uttered “Ugh, Ugh!!!  Throck build shed!  Fire good!”

Luckily, with a meal and a good night’s rest, we remembered that we are living in the 21^st Century and that besides logs and big heavy rocks, we also have the internet as a viable tool.  Within 5 minutes, I had located and downloaded instructions on how to properly build our shed.  And so, it is with joy in our hearts that we announce that the shed has been successfully disassembled once more this morning (practice makes perfect) and that by what can only be described as divine providence, we have a complete set of viable parts with which to build a proper tool shed… sometime later this week… after having eaten a proper dinner.

Getting ready for the New Year

It seems appropriate to start this blog now, during the harvest.  And what more bountiful harvest than tomatoes in a place like San Diego!  The ongoing adventure of being a new home owner is worthy of its own blog, to be sure, but instead of sharing photos of newly painted bedrooms and hardwood floors, it just seems more fun to start here, with the yard... one of the main reasons this place felt absolutely perfect for home.

I will warn you now... do not ever begin picking up titles on Urban Farming and Gardening unless you want the bug.  Furthermore, you may want to eat this blog in small quantities.  It may result in germinating a desire in you to start doing things like planning to rip up 1/3 of your yard to plant rows of beans and corn.  If on the other hand you are of this ilk anyhow, then by all means read on and subscribe to my RSS feed!

This entire idea has been growing for a bit in my mind.  How to feel closer to the cycle of life, growth and fertility.  How to connect on a deeper level with the land.  How to do these things relatively cheaply and at home, rather than once a month on camping and hiking excursions to the nearby wilderness.  Somewhere between farmers markets, friends who have begun supporting or even beginning their own Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) groups, and a few good books at the local public library, the seeds were sown, so to speak.  It all started with a small garden in the backyard with 4 tomato plants, a crook neck yellow squash, a handfull of herbs and a blackberry bramble.  The rest is history.  By harvest time, we were able to bring a small basket of tomatoes to a potluck with friends, place a bowl full of sweet grape tomatoes on the table for a home cooked meal with friends, and make one batch of fresh pasta sauce.  That was pretty much all the convincing needed.

And so, with tomatoes, I both bring this short growing year to a close and open on a project that I hope to share with you in the coming year.  As we attended a tomato festival at Suzie's Farm CSA in Imperial Beach and our local Farmers Market, we picked up a veritable cornucopia of heirloom tomatoes.

Aside from being a delicious addition to our table for dinner last night, and lunch today, we will be busy in the coming weeks with making a time honored recipe in our home for oven roasted tomato soup, seeding every variety of tomato possible for planting in the new growing season, and canning what is left.  And thus, our adventure begins!