When I plan my garden I think of my plate…and my bowl. In regards to the bowl I consider what vegetables I need to grow in order to make hardy winter stews and soups. On my plate I envision one third containing a healthy starch, (one of those tuber crops I discussed in the previous blog.) I think of another third of the plate as holding either a healthy cooked green such as cooked cabbage, spinach, asparagus, etc. or a healthy colored vegetable like tomatoes, corn and so forth. Thus what I want on my plate determines what I plant; I hope to grow two thirds of what goes onto my plate and only buy the meat portion. I’ve tried to keep my garden quite small so that most people could try something similar even if they do not live in the country; a 50’X25’ plot should fit in a suburban back yard or on a vacant city lot. Either that or I kept it small so I could water my whole garden without moving my chair.
I have a terrible sweet tooth and so I feel the small garden should also provide year-round desserts. Not everyone has room to plant fruit trees. The southwest side of my garden is semi-shaded because of an old apple tree. I noticed that raspberries were volunteering under the tree so I planted a 25’ row of raspberries along the fence on that end of the garden along with several thornless blackberries. I stretched hay bale string taut between the fencepost and trained the bramble into it. Behind the raspberries (to keep grasses and weeds out of them and to give me a clear walking/picking path) I laid a three-foot wide piece of old carpet. Volunteer butternut squash also liked the semi-shade and grew to cover most of the carpet then climbed over the raspberries into the garden. Just inside the garden fence I mulched up to the raspberries with cardboard weighted down with leaves. Before I put the cardboard down I dug bushel basket sized hole that I worked my best compost into and planted half a dozen rhubarb plants. So on this one end of the garden I have the makings for berry cobbler in the late spring, rhubarb pie through the summer, and squash pie in the fall and winter.
During the heat of July and August I eat the cantaloupe and early Crenshaw melons that usually grow in front of my sweet corn; we can freeze some of the melon balls for winter consumption. Waltham butternut squash can be grown in every other corn row and still allow room to harvest the sweet corn before the squash spreads to cover the entire patch by late summer. Waltham butternut, unlike other squash and pumpkins, is very bug resistant so that is all I grow for winter storage. It tastes like pumpkin but without the huge seed cavity. Of course the sweet potatoes can be made into sweet potato pie which can taste like pumpkin pie to pecan pie depending on how much butter you put in it.
My main point is that a small garden can serve you up something to satisfy your sweet tooth year round and still have plenty of room for your other vegetables too.
Friday, January 20, 2012
Roots
I’ve been pondering my roots lately…both the ancestral and garden varieties. First the ancestral. I remember one winter as a young lad going down into the basement cellar of my grandparents’ big white two-story old farm house. I discovered in one room down there a huge pile of potatoes, about a pickup truck load, lying on the concrete floor. These were the fruits of my grandmother’s gardening. This was in the early 1950’s when Americans were meat, potatoes and gravy eaters so in the corner of that cellar was a good portion of my grandparents’ and their Sunday visitors’ eating until new potatoes came in the following year. Mashed potatoes and country fried potatoes were a mainstay on grandma’s dining room table. From an early age I was impressed with my grandparent’s self-sufficiency on their small integrated farm.
Fast forward to my own gardening experiences with root crop for this year. Part of my self-sufficiency gardening plan worked and another part did not. The part that did work was that my stored sweet potatoes from last year did last through the winter until early summer when my new white potatoes matured; the white potatoes in turn have lasted until my crop of sweet potatoes have come in for this winter and next spring. So my idea of succession eating of some root crop year round has been a success and I have been able to microwave me a hot potato for buttering any day of the year. This winter my wife will help me to explore the versatility of sweet potatoes in varied recipes. We are most interested in oven baked sweet potato “fries” spiced with red pepper and also with using sweet potatoes in soups, stews and pies.
I dug my sweet potatoes a little early this year and did not leave them in until the approach of the first frost. It was a trade off; I lost a little in the size of the tubers so I could plant my cover crop of annual rye grass before really cold weather stunted its growth. I really appreciate rye grass as a winter cover crop; it puts down so much root growth deep into the garden so easily. Those root systems produced over winter will be the soils organic material for next year’s garden. It is very easy and cheap; $5 worth of ryegrass seed transported in the back seat of the car. Despite digging them a few weeks early, some of the sweet potatoes were still large enough that one tuber could feed four people for a meal.
The part of my plan for root crops that did not work this year was my delusion that I could plant a succession planting of sweet potatoes in ground where white potatoes came out of. The reality was that the white potatoes were harvested in early July and I planted the sweet potatoes in late April. So successive eating worked but successive planting did not. Still I haven’t given up entirely on successive planting of root crops. White potatoes could be followed with beets, carrots and those huge rutabagas for November harvest. Sweet potatoes (which just sit on their mounded rows for a good month before they begin to spread vines) could be preceded by a quick growing spring turnip like Tokyo Cross® or onions in the valleys between the raised rows. My wife did make some borsht soup with the few beets that I did raise this year and I really liked the flavor so that could become a winter staple. Borsht seems to me to be a stew where the potatoes have been replaced with beets. Good cooking in the kitchen and good recipes are what make self-sufficiency vegetable gardening work.
I have mixed emotions about root crops. They produce huge quantities of food in a small area, they are easy to grow, they store well for long periods and they can be made into a variety of delicious recipes. But they are also inexpensive to buy in the grocery and normally I prefer to grow something expensive like watermelon or cantaloupe or sweet corn. With all the craziness that is going on in the world today maybe it just makes me feel a little more secure knowing there are tubers in the back room and beans and rice in the pantry.
Fast forward to my own gardening experiences with root crop for this year. Part of my self-sufficiency gardening plan worked and another part did not. The part that did work was that my stored sweet potatoes from last year did last through the winter until early summer when my new white potatoes matured; the white potatoes in turn have lasted until my crop of sweet potatoes have come in for this winter and next spring. So my idea of succession eating of some root crop year round has been a success and I have been able to microwave me a hot potato for buttering any day of the year. This winter my wife will help me to explore the versatility of sweet potatoes in varied recipes. We are most interested in oven baked sweet potato “fries” spiced with red pepper and also with using sweet potatoes in soups, stews and pies.
I dug my sweet potatoes a little early this year and did not leave them in until the approach of the first frost. It was a trade off; I lost a little in the size of the tubers so I could plant my cover crop of annual rye grass before really cold weather stunted its growth. I really appreciate rye grass as a winter cover crop; it puts down so much root growth deep into the garden so easily. Those root systems produced over winter will be the soils organic material for next year’s garden. It is very easy and cheap; $5 worth of ryegrass seed transported in the back seat of the car. Despite digging them a few weeks early, some of the sweet potatoes were still large enough that one tuber could feed four people for a meal.
The part of my plan for root crops that did not work this year was my delusion that I could plant a succession planting of sweet potatoes in ground where white potatoes came out of. The reality was that the white potatoes were harvested in early July and I planted the sweet potatoes in late April. So successive eating worked but successive planting did not. Still I haven’t given up entirely on successive planting of root crops. White potatoes could be followed with beets, carrots and those huge rutabagas for November harvest. Sweet potatoes (which just sit on their mounded rows for a good month before they begin to spread vines) could be preceded by a quick growing spring turnip like Tokyo Cross® or onions in the valleys between the raised rows. My wife did make some borsht soup with the few beets that I did raise this year and I really liked the flavor so that could become a winter staple. Borsht seems to me to be a stew where the potatoes have been replaced with beets. Good cooking in the kitchen and good recipes are what make self-sufficiency vegetable gardening work.
I have mixed emotions about root crops. They produce huge quantities of food in a small area, they are easy to grow, they store well for long periods and they can be made into a variety of delicious recipes. But they are also inexpensive to buy in the grocery and normally I prefer to grow something expensive like watermelon or cantaloupe or sweet corn. With all the craziness that is going on in the world today maybe it just makes me feel a little more secure knowing there are tubers in the back room and beans and rice in the pantry.
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