Novella Needs Help

I love Novella Carpenter.  I've never met her, I don't know her personally, but after reading her amazing account of turning an abandoned lot in a bad part of Oakland into a thriving little farm in her book, Farm City, I felt like I knew her.

Well, Novella's in trouble.  If you've been following the saga in the blogs, I'll spare you the details, but basically the city of Oakland is slapping her with a fine for unauthorized use of her land and she needs to purchase a $2500 permit in order to sell her produce, or face shutting down the farm.  With about $2500 being the amount that she makes in a year of selling her surplus in a pop-up stand, you can see the conundrum.  You can read the whole story on her blog here, and if you've got a few extra bucks that you can spare via PayPal, I'm sure it would be appreciated.

Novella is a hero to me, and she's been a source of inspiration to countless thousands of others just like me.  If I can help in any way, you can be damn sure that I will.

Farmer of the Day

Wow!  Imagine my surprise this morning to find that I've been voted 'Farmer of the Day' by the online community at Urban Farm magazine.

I recently wrote about my love for Urban Farm, and I'm so thrilled!  Exciting times!

Better Than a Book

My first copy of Urban Farm... the beginning of a love affair

The other day, much to my delight, I discovered that Urban Farm magazine is now available by subscription.  Huzzah!  My friend happened upon this new publication last spring and brought it into the office, then in its' second edition (pictured above).  It was love at first glance!  I thumbed through the pages, drinking them in, and realized that there was no possible way that I could leave it at the office... this was going to have to be an overnighter.  Weeks later, I finally tracked down another copy of the issue - I had to buy it to replace the worn and dog-eared, post-it-note-ridden, overly-read copy that I'd commandeered from my officemate.  

Since then, I've become an avid hunter of Urban Farm... sometimes found with a bit of luck at Chapters, but more commonly discovered while unearthing hidden, scattered copies underneath piles of 'Country Living' and 'Good Housekeeping' at obscure grocery stores.  The search is over!  

Urban Farm is a new breed of gardening mag, focusing on sustainable city living with practical and creative advice from real 'urban farmers' on topics ranging from growing organic vegetables and improving your composting techniques to keeping city chickens, capturing and using rainwater effectively or starting a community garden.  It's seriously bad-ass, and I always recommend it to anyone who is interested in putting their backyard to better use.  The only downfall has been that it's generally pretty difficult to find - but now it will drop safely at my door!  Perfect! 

Now, off to trick my husband into buying me a subscription for Christmas... 

Black Krim - The Queen of the Heirlooms?

Do you suppose it's possible to fall in love with a tomato?  This is the culmination of the gardening/farming season - the moment that growers and eaters of fresh food most anticipate.  Yes, folks, it's officially tomato season, and you'll be hearing much about mine in the coming weeks.  On Monday, I picked and ate my very first 'Black Krim' heirloom tomato, and I'm trying to find a way to describe the experience without sounding absolutely nuts.

I think this tomato just changed my life.

It's bulky and surprisingly heavy for it's size.  It's beautiful in an ugly kind of way.  It's perfect.

There is a very good reason why gardeners and growers so highly covet these prized fruits.  Of all the edibles that you can grow in your backyard, the tomato by far offers the most exceptionally rewarding harvest.  If you've never grown your own tomatoes, I have to insist that you try.  Even just one.

For weeks on end, you watch carefully as the smallest plant begins to grow and change.  You can't help but giggle with excitement  when you glimpse the first, tiny yellow blooms that appear - a hint of the glorious fruits to come.  Finally, little green globes begin to form, and you know you're in the home stretch.  They swell, blush and ripen, twisting on their vines.

You've made tomatoes.  You.  All by yourself.  Congratulations.

It's difficult to explain the first bite of a homegrown tomato.  It's warm in your hands, full of sunshine and sweetness, a miraculous and compact package.  Biting into it, the flavour rushes throughout your mouth, juices running down your chin and arm.  It's impossible not to smile as you savour this reward for your efforts - this remarkably delicious fruit that was alive and breathing just a moment before.  Everything you once thought you knew about a tomato was wrong.  This is what makes life worth living.

My 'Black Krim' became the ultimate toasted tomato sandwich, but only after I ate half of it while standing on the warm deck with the summer sun on my hair.  I'll never again be without this variety.  She's the Queen of the Heirlooms.  But that's just my opinion... what's yours?

On The Wild Side

My garden has gone feral.  In a way it's a relief, but it's an odd realization that all of my planning, preening and care is in many ways completely irrelevant.  Throughout the summer, life gets in the way of my good gardening intentions, and I'm left with little choice but to allow my garden to thrive on neglect.  (Oh... did you think you were the only one?)

With vacations, a busy work schedule and old-fashioned summer laziness taking up my time, I've been able to let the garden just... be.  To my chagrin, it remains lush and productive without my intervention.  Who knew?  Yes, the tomatoes are out of control.  Yes, that IS a bolted, flowering head of lettuce in the middle of the photo.  But that's ok.

Here are some additional pictorial updates.  Summer madness - it's good stuff!  

Carrots, mixed beans and thyme for the dinner table.

A 'Dusty' eggplant.  It was a 'cheater' I planted in mid-July when I realized that my 'Little Fingers' were definitely not going to reach fruiting size this season.  A good score from the garden center saves the day... there's nothing wrong with a back-up plan!  I don't feel guilty!

Another ringer.  'Sweet Cherry Pick' peppers I bought at the same time as the eggplant, just because I couldn't resist.  C'mon, look how cute!

'Bright Lights' swiss chard.  Indeed!

Remember how I planted some watermelon in the space left by the spent lettuce?  It's gone bananas, and I couldn't be happier...

Little 'Malali' watermelon.  More where this one came from, too.  There WILL be home-grown watermelons this season, and by any account I can think of, this officially makes my summer gardening effort a success.

Anatomy of a Local Dinner

It started with a small inspiration.  I was wandering through the garden in the golden hour of the evening, absentmindedly pulling a few weeds, munching a few peas, when I spotted it... the telltale rounded crescent of the top of a Golden Detroit beet, the first of the season, peeking from the surface of the soil.  I crouched down and prodded it with my finger, making sure it was loose enough to pull.  It was.  With a gentle tug, it popped out of the earth, and I literally gasped - it was so pretty!  Bright orange and perfectly round, it demanded to be turned into something special.  The wheels in my head started turning...

I foraged around the rest of the garden, looking for more ingredients that were ripe or big enough to consider harvesting.  I managed a bowl of crisp baby greens, a small handful of carrots, and a giant of a green onion, curved and beautiful.     

After a quick consultation with Jamie, I set to work washing and chopping, seasoning, wrapping, heating, and singing, filled with the simple joy of cooking for myself and my husband with fresh, delicious ingredients that promised to nourish our bodies and delight our palates.  Here is the result:

Fresh, roasted veggies in olive oil with sea salt, pepper, garlic and a splash of balsamic vinegar.

Local chicken from Fenwood Farms, buttered sugar snap peas and roasted peppers, zucchini and mushrooms from Hildreth Farm Market, and Mo Farm baby greens, beets, green onions and carrots.

Good food = good marriage.  The math is simple.

Keepsakes

The time for delicious, crisp, spicy radishes passed quickly this season due to some unseasonably warm weather in May.  My very first harvest of these crunchy wonders is shown in the header photo for my blog, and the pride I felt is clearly apparent.  So, when it became obvious that the plants that hadn't started to swell below the surface were going to miss their biological deadline, I decided to leave them in place so that they could flower and go to seed.  Above is 'Cherry Belle' and below is 'Purple Plum', which surprised me with it's ornamental qualities!  

The ability to save seeds from your plants is one of the most wonderful reasons to grow heirloom varieties!  Hybrid vegetables have their place, and I'm sure I'll eventually grow some, but because they're created by cross-pollination and selective breeding, their seeds never produce a duplicate of the parent plants, usually resulting in less-than-spectacular flavour.  Heirlooms, on the other hand, are plants that are 'open-pollinated' and have been passed for generations through families and friends across time and distance.  Many of them have amazing stories of their origins, while others are ancient and shrouded in mystery.  


I chose to grow heirloom varieties exclusively this season, and I sourced my seed from some very cool companies that are run by some very cool people!  You can check them out to learn more about heirlooms here:
Urban Harvest
The Cottage Gardener
Aimers Organics
Cubits
Baker Creek Heirlooms 

I'll be saving seeds from my radishes, arugula, and likely the peas and beans this season - which means more to share next spring, and naturally, more room in my seed budget for NEW varieties in 2011! 
 

Give Peas a Chance

Ok, so it's a terrible pun, but I swear it's relevant!  

A couple of weeks ago, I was almost ready to consider my peas a write-off.  At the start of the season, I chose to sow them at the edge of the garden beside the shed, which is the darkest, coolest spot available.  I knew that it was a bit of a stretch and that little could thrive there, but I figured if anything had a shot, it was the peas.  For weeks upon weeks, nothing happened... they took ages to germinate, and then languished in the cold dirt.  I did what I could to start coaxing them up onto the bamboo tripods, but held little hope that they would actually ever start to flower.  But wait, oh pessimistic one!  In the heat of the last week, they've suddenly sprung to life - climbing, twining, blooming, and just this morning I discovered that I HAVE PEAS!!  The Mammoth Melting Sugar have begun to come into their own, and I now have sweet, tiny, baby peas.  Miniature green victory!

The rest of the garden is really starting to thrive now as well.  I'm thrilled to see the giant, gaudy yellow-orange blooms of male zucchini flowers starting to poke through the carpet of fuzzy leaves, hinting at the female flowers and fruit soon to follow.  Much of the lettuce has now been harvested, and I've replaced it with eight small watermelon plants, hoping that they'll have time to size up before frost.  I chose my varieties carefully for this reason, planting Malali and Cream of Saskatchewan because of their short maturing time.

I'm most excited about the tomatoes.  They all started off slowly, and I was worried that I hadn't started them early enough indoors this March.  But again, with the heat of June finally starting to kick in now, they've grown substantially in the last week, and have now begun forming flowers.  With a bit of luck, oodles of red, green, orange, yellow, purple, pink and striped tomatoes will be mine for the picking in the weeks and months ahead!  It's officially summer now, and these plants have no excuses.

Between the containers on the deck, the back garden and the front mixed bed, I'm nursing 25 tomato plants this season... I'm guessing I'm going to have to learn how to preserve with canning and sauces this fall.  Here's hoping!

You DO Make Friends With Salad!

The cycles of a garden are amazing. Every action taken leads inevitably to some kind of effect, whether positive or negative... pinching off new growth creates robust, bushy offshoots; the addition of bamboo poles suddenly inspires pea tendrils to start clinging and climbing instead of lolling around in the dirt; and tiny seeds thrust teeny, hopeful cotyledon leaves into the air like micro-solar-panels. If you've never grown anything edible, I highly recommend that you start. It can be a single pot of basil! Absolutely nothing competes with the sense of pride and accomplishment that's gained from taking a small action in soil that results in a real, tangible, reward that bursts with flavour and nourishes the body.

Lettuce is almost too easy. And I've grown WAY too much of it! That, however, is exactly why growing food is also a way to grow human connections. When you've carefully planned, planted and tended a crop, however small, you become intensely connected to the process that brings food from earth to table. To waste it would be unthinkable. So what to do? Well, my friend, it's time to share! The heat of the summer has arrived early, which means my greens are starting to bolt and become bitter instead of sweet, with their energies now focused on flowers instead of delicious and delicate leaves. Friends, neighbours and family will now share in the bounty, and salads are served daily on Mo Farm this week!

I'll keep sowing lettuce throughout the summer to grow in shaded pots and eat as baby greens, but the precious in-ground space that the Buttercrunch and Black-Seeded Simpson had occupied will now become prime real estate for the watermelons. And I might have purchased one more tomato on impulse today... her name is Arkansas Marvel. We'll find out just how marvelous she is!

The 2010 Crop at a Glance

I can't believe it's June. What the heck happened?

Things have been busy, to say the least, and I thought I'd share a glimpse of the crop to date. I painstakingly selected varieties and started sowing this season's crop from seed indoors in March, after weeks of obsessive seed collecting. I really couldn't help myself! I took a trip to Toronto for Seedy Saturday (on a Sunday) and came back with enough seeds to grow food for the entire city, if space permitted. Here's a look at how it went down...

On March 21 I planted these to grow indoors:
Eggplants - Rosa Bianca & Little Fingers
Hot Peppers - Orange Thai, Early Jalapeno, and a cook's mix
Sweet Peppers - Little Bells
Tomatoes - Yellow Pear, Rutgers, Green Zebra, Black Plum, Box Car Willie, Black Krim, Fox Cherry, Tigerella

On April 12 I started direct-sowing in outdoor containers:
Radishes - Purple Plum, Cherry Belle
Lettuce - Heirloom Leaf Mix, cook's blend
Arugula
Evergreen Bunching Onions
Chives
Pansies

While I was outside anyway, I decided to start the back bed too:
Peas - Mammoth Melting Sugar, Thomas Laxton
Beets - Golden Detroit, Chioggia
Lettuce - Buttercrunch, Black-Seeded Simpson
Carrots - Rainbow Mix, Red Atomic
Onion - Mini Purplette
Swiss Chard - Five Colour Silverbeet

As May crept up, miraculously, things started growing. For real! So while the little ones outside started showing signs of life, the indoor plants were thriving and it was time to sow some more!

On May 1 new additions joined the indoor grow-op:
Beans - Dragon Tongue, Littlefields' Special Dry, Lazy Housewife
New Zealand Spinach
Costata Romanesca Zucchini
Cucumbers - Pickling, Muncher, Straight Eight
Watermelon - Malali, Cream of Saskatchewan

On May 14, I ate my first salad of homegrown greens, relishing the sweet, fresh crunch of soft leaves that were still breathing just moments before I put them in my mouth.

On May 16, the first tomatoes, eggplants and peppers were planted into pots on the back deck, nestled between seeds of cilantro, dill, and basil.

Then, finally, on May 23, the entire garden was planted. Thankfully, my partner in crime was easy to convince to lend some assistance...



As the season progresses, I'll share some stories surrounding my plant choices, and I can't wait to tell you how they grow, flower, and TASTE!
Mmmmm - sweet summer!

Little City Girl, Big Country Dreams

Once in a while in my life, I find something that awakens a passion in me that I forgot was there. It happened the day I was invited to try riding a horse after helping to pitch fresh, sweet-smelling straw into the stalls of a barn just outside the city. It happened the first time I saw a band I'd never heard of play live music that plucked strings in my heart and stomach in a small, intimately crowded bar. It happened when I first picked up an SLR camera and managed to capture a candid portrait of a child in soft, beautiful window light. We've all been there. The spark occurs unexpectedly, in seemingly unremarkable circumstances, and perhaps it's because it catches us so completely off guard that it strikes so deeply.

Most recently, passion grabbed hold of me when I was reading a book. In Defence of Food by Michael Pollan had sat, collecting a fine layer of dust, on my bookshelf for months, waiting patiently for me to find the time and desire to pick it up. On the ordinary, unremarkable day that I finally opened the book, I wasn't expecting my life to change. Nor was I expecting to finish the book in the wee hours, after becoming so engrossed in it I was unable (and unwilling) to put it down. I closed the cover and laid back onto by bed with eyes closed and slightly burning, wheels turning in my head, and an itching, restless feeling in my legs. I felt compelled to move. To write. To run. To scream. To ACT. But what to do with all of this new information? What actions could I possibly take to even begin to offset this frantic, sick feeling that was spreading in my stomach?

The book was the first contact I had with a movement that is now growing into a revolution - it's the story of food. Our food, and how we get it. It's something we think so little about, and yet is so important... vital for our survival as a species on this planet! Our industrialized food system is horrifyingly broken, and in becoming aware of this, I found my life forever altered. I dove headlong into a new world, and each new discovery in this world further cemented my suspicion that I was finding the biggest passion of my life. I began reading everything I came across on the subject, each new piece of information adding fire to my belly. Novella Carpenter's Farm City. Thomas F. Pawlick's The End of Food. Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle was the last straw. This brings us to present day, and my realization that I have a new direction in my life that will inevitably lead to new discoveries, great joys, and heart-wrenching disappointments.

And so, dear reader, I invite you to join me in this adventure. I am now a little city girl with big country dreams, living in the suburbs of Southern Ontario. I want to grow food. I want to feel connected to the earth again, and to find a better way of life for myself and my husband. I want to wake up in the morning and relish the thought of living. I'm not sure yet what this means, or even what it looks like, but while I figure that out, I'm going to do the best that I can with what I've got.

This is the birth of Mo Farm.