Yummy Kale Chips

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I'm addicted! This is such an easy snack to prepare. And for someone who loves salty, crunchy snacks...satisfying!

Take a whole bunch of Kale and tear it into bite size chunks. Remember that it will shrink when it cooks. Some people like to devein it but I love the veins.

Grab a giant ziploc bag and fill it about two-thirds full with Kale. Add 2 - 4 tbsps of olive oil and shake it up. You want to lightly coat the Kale with the oil. Its the oil that will keep the Kale moist while making it crunchy.

Spread it out on a baking sheet. Ideally, it shouldn't be piled on top of each other.

Sprinkle the Kale with salt and/or any other flavors you'd enjoy. I like to add a little cayenne pepper to mine.

Put in an oven that's been preheated at about 350 degrees. Bake for 10-15 minutes, length depends on how crunchy you want it!

Sun-Drying Tomatoes

We're drowning in tomatoes!  It's that awesome, frantic moment when they all come in at once.  If we were slightly better planners we'd stagger the planting times of our plants so they didn't all come in at once...but we're not!

We planted twelve different varieties of tomatoes this year.  One of them is Principe Borghese, the traditional Italian tomato for sun-drying.  We harvested a nice big bowl (with more to come) and are presently attempting to dry them.

We don't have the patience to actually lay them in the sun so into the oven they went, to roast at 200 degrees for many many hours.   We sliced them lengthwise, laid them out on a tray covered with parchment paper, drizzled a little olive oil on them, and shoved them in the oven.





After 5+ hours of roasting, they're getting nice and dry but could definitely use another hour.

Next post: we'll let you know how they taste!

Neighborhood Food Share

A quick post -- I was talking with a neighbor the other day about starting a bi-weekly fruit & veggie swap in our neighborhood.   I've noticed the abundance of beautiful fruit on trees around the neighborhood that goes mostly uneaten.   In trying to figure out how to organize it, I came across this article by Judith Gerber (@LAfarmgirl) on twitter.  It's loaded with info on food swapping and yard sharing.  Enjoy!

a little bragging

Ate the first tomato (an Early Girl) and the first radish from the garden.  Both thinly sliced & lightly salted.  Used the peppery radish as the "bread" and the tomato as the filling.  Yummmmmmy.

Spring Cleaning

After years of reading Real Simple Magazine's handy tips about organizing, scanning books about clutter, and watching TV shows like Clean House -- we've finally stopped philosophizing and taken action!  The first step was a garage sale in May followed by a small Good Will donation.  But the BIGGEST step (for us anyway) is addressing our enormous CD collection. 

It started with an email from LearnVest.com that tipped me off to ipodmeister.  If you have hundreds of CDs, like we do, you can send them to ipodmeister and, in exchange, they'll send you some nifty gadgets (like ipods & ipads).  This led us to do a deep dive into our CD's.  We wanted to pull out 800 CD's so we could get an iPad.  We got to about 650 with very few hair-pulling decisions.  When we started doing the math, we realized that if we'd stop being lazy we could sell them on eBay and probably make a small fortune!  So that's what we've done. 

For the next four weeks or so we're going to list the 650+ CD's on ebay.  If you're interested in helping us slim our footprint and raise some $$ for our garden...or if you just want to pick up some inexpensive new music, click here! 

The Tomatoes Are In!

And with any luck at all we'll have our first harvest in June!   This is our second attempt to create a summer garden that we can (hopefully) live on.  We did LOTS of off-season research and I placed a special emphasis on tomatoes...because I love them so much.

I'll tell you about the other stuff we've got cooking later.  For now, here are some things I learned in the off-season about tomatoes that plenty of people already knew...

• Plant your seedlings deep.  Leave just the tippy-tops showing and get those roots wayyy down there.  Tomatoes need deep roots!
• Create a deep-root watering system.  Using up-ended Crystal Geyser water bottles (the same ones I used for the home-made cloche)  I buried them deep in the ground next to the seedlings, leaving about the top inch of the bottle showing.  Just fill that empty bottle with water and it will deposit the water deep in the soil, forcing the roots to work for it! 
• How to make a tomato teepee.  I got my directions from a Sunset Magazine Special Edition but here's a great home gardener's blog post with some helpful tips.
• Pull off those early flowers!
• Topsy-Turvy Tomato Planter?  You bet!  I got one for a present so we're giving it a shot.  But if you're more DIY then that you make one! 
• For the most concise rundown on how to grow tomatoes just click here.  If you don't know Margaret Roach's site you should check it out.  She used to be a big-wig at OmniMedia and has spent the past few years building her own little gardening empire.  Even though she's based in upstate NY and on a completely different growing cycle than us I find her info solid and she's available to answer questions, just send her an email.

In another post I'll give a rundown of the 15 varieties of tomatoes we've got in the ground. 

tomatoes!

I was browsing garden websites this morning and discovered it's tomato time in Southern California!! As I clicked around from site to site I learned our last frost was 2/11 which means we can put our tomatoes in the ground! So if your favorite spring / summer harvest is the tomato I'll share with you the best guide I've found for all things tomato. My favorite starting place for garden questions is Margaret Roach's website Away to Garden. She used to be a big cheese at Martha Stewart's OmniMedia and the website has that same practical, handy-dandy, friendly sensibility. In the meantime, I'm going to get some tomato plants in the ground ASAP!

The Big Bust of Fall 2009

Just because we haven't posted doesn't mean we haven't been gardening.

The Fall 2009 garden was a bit of a bust. The area that produced such a prolific spring / summer garden last year seems to completely suck as a home for a fall /winter garden. As you can see in the photo nothing really took off. It all kind of got halfway there. The seeds for the beets & turnips were sooooo slow to sprout. The first batch of beets - planted in the middle of September - are just showing their shoulders. We'll probably pull on in the next few days to see if it's ready. Our broccoli plants have like one bite of broccoli on each stalk. The cauliflower is a decent size but has no flowers. And the brussell sprouts never matured. Our greens - Red Romaine, French Market Mix, Spinach, Iceberg Lettuce -- never thrived. And the mix of seeds I planted to replenish the greens just never sprouted. Seeds for salad greens are supposed to be like weeds. Supposedly, you toss them in the garden, give them a light dusting of dirt and they take care of the rest. Not so for us. Apparently, we have LOTS to learn about lettuces & greens. Perhaps the first lesson is that we should have used the sunny spot in the front of the house that we cleared & prepped.

The one bright spot was our arugula, which we grew from a small plant in a container. It thrived. We've been eating off of that like crazy.

Oh, those plastic Crystal Geyser bottles are not an odd choice for a garden decoration. They're homemade cloches. We read about them in the handy-dandy "You Grow Girl" gardening book we were given for Christmas. We put them over our struggling spinach plants and it actually helped. The bottles create a mini-greenhouse for your plant. Just be sure to remove the bottle cap otherwise you'll suffocate your plant.

Launching the Fall Garden

We've mostly neglected the garden for the last month. The most attention we've paid to our little plot has been to eat everything it harvests and battle unsuccessfully with those danged sow bugs that are ravaging the squash plants. While we've managed to harvest 10 or so squash (a first for us) our track record of being able to kill squash plants remains. We lost 4 seemingly healthy plants, are coaxing the two on life support to flower, and continue to get vegetables from our Early Prolific.

Today is the day that we begin sowing our seeds for the fall garden. According to our CA Garden Calendar here's what our fall garden will look like...assuming the Gods of the Green Thumbs are kind to us...

• arugula
• beets
  
• broccoli
• brussell sprouts
• celery
  
• endive
• leaf lettuces
  
• kale
  
• onions (bunching)
• pak choy
  
• peas
  
• radishes
• rutabagas
  
• spinach
  
• swiss chard
• turnips

My plan to create the Sunset Magazine lettuce garden has morphed and is (at this very moment) being re-envisioned. Hopefully, I will post pretty photos in a few weeks...

Salad Greens - This Weekend's Project

I was browsing through the current issue of Sunset Magazine this morning over coffee and came across a gorgeous picture of a small but prodigious salad garden (above). It inspired me. This weekend, I'm going to use the create the perfect little raised bed in the front yard for our salad greens. And I'm even going to use our first batch of homemade compost!

Everything I've been reading suggests that I can sow the seeds now for our winter greens. I know greens don't do well in the heat and it tends to be very hot in September and October in Los Angeles. I'm concerned I'm launching it all too early but, hey, I learn best from my mistakes!!

Do you have any advice for a novice gardener?

What to Compost?

I came across an article on PlanetGreen.Discovery.com called "75 Things You Can Compost, But Thought You Couldn't". It's a fantastic list. Here are some of the things I didn't know about (and there are alot of them!):

FROM THE KITCHEN:

• Used paper napkins
• Pizza boxes, ripped into smaller pieces
• Paper bags, either ripped or balled up
• Paper towel rolls
• Used paper plates (as long as they don't have a waxy coating)
• Cellophane bags (be sure it's really Cellophane and not just clear plastic—there's a difference.)
• Nut shells (except for walnut shells, which can be toxic to plants)
• Pizza crusts
• Cereal boxes (tear them into smaller pieces first)
• Wine corks
• Moldy cheese
• Melted ice cream
• Old jelly, jam, or preserves
• Stale beer and wine
• Toothpicks
• Bamboo skewers
• Paper cupcake or muffin cups

FROM THE BATHROOM:

• Used facial tissues
• Hair from your hairbrush
• Toilet paper rolls
• Old loofahs
• Nail clippings
• Urine
• 100% Cotton cotton balls
• Cotton swabs made from 100% cotton and cardboard (not plastic) sticks
• Latex condoms
• Cardboard Tampon Applicators

Random Stuff:

• Dryer lint
• Old/stained cotton clothing—rip or cut it into smaller pieces
• Old wool clothing—rip or cut it into smaller pieces
• Pencil shavings
• Sticky notes
• Contents of your vacuum cleaner bag or canister
• Used matches
• Fur from the dog or cat brush
• Droppings and bedding from your rabbit/gerbil/hamsters, etc.
• Newspaper/droppings from the bottom of the bird cage
• Feathers
• Alfalfa hay or pellets (usually fed to rabbits)
• Rawhide dog chews
• Fish food
• Dry dog or cat food

Our pile is going to get so much bigger now!

Pill Bugs - An Update on the War

In an earlier post I talked about our pill bug/ sow bug / rollie-pollie / Charlie bug problem and how to get rid of them without using chemicals. Nearly two months later we are (obviously) through the seedling phase and still at battle with these little buggers. We have managed to find an equitable balance. Or at least I think so. They get to have a squash or two every few weeks and I toss them some tomatoes the birds have left behind.

Here's what helped us significantly reduce their population:

• Reducing the moisture in the garden.
  
• Setting the traps with wet rolled up newspaper and fruit (specifically using half a cantaloupe turned upside down in the garden).
• Protecting the seedlings by cutting the bottom off some plastic pots or old yogurt containers. We put the plastic containers around the seedlings, twisting them into the soil to dig them in. This helped to keep the bugs out.

Also, it seems they've found their way to my compost pile. I don't mind them being over there, happily working turning our old food and yard waste into soil. And I know I have to be prepared because they're over there, amassing, like an army, just waiting for the next planting season. My hope is I can keep them happily working over there, in the compost heap. But if they should get curious and wander over to the garden...I now have some handy tricks to employ!

The Tomatillo - This Year's Great Love

We rarely plant the same tomatoes every year. Despite our promises to ourselves at the end of summer that we will seek out the variety we relished from that year's harvest, by the following Spring we can barely remember our names let alone the tomato we so treasured months before. Every Spring there is an event here in Los Angeles called "Tomato Mania" - it is the Disneyland of tomatoes! There are over 200 varieties! The spectacle of it placates the amnesia and, giddy with the thought of the summer harvest, we end up choosing 7 or 8 random varieties of tomato seedlings.

We love our tomatoes. We relish our tomatoes. But our approach to growing them is a little more scattershot than most. A little more punk rock, if you will. We put them in our organically composted ground. We give them a proper support system. Too much water. And then watch them mature with the same eagerness and enthusiasm as our 6 year old daughters.

On this year's tomato adventure we discovered the Tomatillo. It is a gorgeous plant. It produces hundreds of beautiful green fruit wrapped in delicate husks. You know they are ripe when the husks begin to brown and peel away. The fruit is sweet and delicate and delicious sliced on its own.

But they are commonly and, I would argue, best used to make salsa verde. Here is a very simple recipe that is guaranteed to make you drool and impress your friends:

• Gather all the tomatillos you can and roast them in the broiler for about 5 minutes (until soft). They should be browned but not burnt. Cut large ones in half and place cut side down.
• You can also roast (2) jalepenos along with the tomatillos. Make sure they are stemmed and seeded. If you like it hot, leave in the seeds.
• 1/2 cup of chopped white onion
• Cilantro (maybe 1/2 cup, but you can add more or less)
• Salt to taste
• The juice from (1) small lime

Take all of the ingredients, while they are still hot, and put them in a blender . Pulse until pureed. Salt to taste. Cool in fridge (although I eat it warm out of the blender). After a day, this thickens up quite a bit. The salsa will keep for a week in the fridge, well covered.

How To Get Rid Of Pill Bugs - The Research

Our beautiful raised bed garden has turned into a sea of potato bugs / pill bugs / charlie bugs / rollly-pollies / sow bugs. See that beautiful photo of my beans? They ate that entire row of young bean plants in a night and then started on an Early Prolific Squash. I have never seen these docile cute little bugs swarm before. They are voracious.

Where did they come from? While we certainly have our share of all sorts of bugs we've never had this many sow bugs. As I did my internet research on how to be rid of them I learned they like to feast on decaying matter and young seedlings. I'm guessing they had a very cozy life inside the organic compost I used to start my garden. I don't mind sharing some of our garden with nature but this is nuts!

So, how to be rid of them? Since our goal is to raise vegetables and fruits without chemicals we are looking for a natural, "Little House on the Prairie" solution to this problem. Here's a variety of solutions we've learned thanks to a handy google search.

What you need to know about these fellers is they work at night. During the heat of the day they go dormant. They lounge in the shade of plant leaves, crowded together, hording moisture. At night, when the humidity rises, they go to work.

• Remove them by hand. Pick em up. Smoosh em. Or relocate them. This didn't work for us as there were just too many. At the height of it I could pick up trowels full of them.
  
• Reduce the moisture in the garden by watering in the mornings. These little buggers thrive on moisture. If you water in the mornings the moisture will soak in throughout the day and the top layer of soil will be dry by evening. In theory, without moisture the pill bugs will go elsewhere. This helped but would not have sufficed on its own.
  
• Once your plant is mature, try to raise the vegetation off the ground as they will eat a whole squash!
• Use Sluggo Pellets, which supposedly dissolve and add iron to your soil. I didn't try these as I didn't feel 100% sure about the "naturalness" of this product.
  
• Set a trap using over-ripe fruit. Place fruit in various spots of the garden. The sow bugs will make a meal of the fruit throughout the night. In the morning, pick up the fruit loaded with pill bugs. Toss it. This TOTALLY WORKS!!
  
• Set a trap using newspaper. Take tightly rolled newspaper and soak it with water. Put it in the garden at the end of the day. The rollie-pollies will feast on it all night. In the morning, you should find a paper loaded with pill bugs. Toss it. This TOTALLY WORKS!!
  
• A blogger from Australia says he uses cayenne pepper and/or curry powder as a deterent. He puts a mixture of cayenne pepper and curry powder in the soil around his tomato and potato plants and has found that to be an effective deterrent. I haven't tried this one yet but I have found that cinamon is an effective deterrent for ants...that'll be a whole other post.
  
• Use Diatomaceous Earth. Diatomaceous Earth eliminates the pill bugs by dryingthem out and can be harmful to worms. I love my garden worms so I haven't tried this solution.

Using Gray Water

California is in the midst of a horrible drought and so we've begun using the gray water from the girls' bath to water the garden and lawn. So far, it hasn't killed anything (they use small amounts of soap) and it's fun for us. I suspect our neighbors think we have some serious plumbing problems as they watch the four of us hauling buckets of water out the front door and dump them on the lawn.

I heard an interesting story on NPR today about people who are illegally using gray water from their washing machines to water their gardens. I'm going to investigate further but I wonder -- do you have any advice or experience with using gray water?

Community Gardens In Our Front Yard

There's an interesting article in the Los Angeles Times Food section about a budding network of community gardens. This makes us very happy. In our dream of what it means to grow enough organic veggies and fruit to sustain our family, we realize we will likely need to expand our 14 x 7 foot garden and/or establish some sort of trade network with other gardeners. It appears as though Heart Beet Gardening is leading the charge locally by trying to form its own CSA. I've reached out to them about contributing produce but, according to their website, it appears as though a significant financial contribution is required to participate. Good for them that they are able to build a business! I'm interested in something truly community-based, maybe even neighborhood based. Has anyone started their own CSA? Or perhaps a fruit/vegetable harvest exchange? I'd love to hear about your experience.

Oh, we're drawing up plans on what the front garden would look like. We've heard rumors that because of the drought the city of Los Angeles is considering paying homeowners to remove their lawns! Yep, we're investigating that rumor.

Composting: It's a Process

Our composting has begun but, I must say, it's not the magical experience I've been reading about on blogs.

a) it does smell
b) we have LOTS of flies

I am now realizing that all of the blogging about how great composting is...the nature of it all...reminds me of what we read about breast-feeding. "Oh, the intense bond", "it's natural", "it's healthy", "it's so easy"... Breast-feeding was certainly NOT easy. At least, in the beginning. And I guess once we all figured out what we were doing, it became easy..ish... I'm hoping for the same results with composting!

MY PROBLEMS (and possible solutions):

• a) The Smell. I remembered from what I read, I need a good mix of greens & browns. The pile was mostly appropriate food waste and it just looked like it needed some dry leafy matter. I mixed in some already decomposing leaves, and sort of cut everything up into smaller bits and the smell was gone in a couple of hours.
  


• b) The Flies. After I added the brown matter, mixed the pile, I covered it with a kitchen garbage bag. It's a temporary solution but it worked!



• c) I have no heat from my heap! When I hold my hand close to the pile...nada, nothing, zilch. I believe I need green matter, specifically lawn waste. The coolness of my pile makes complete sense given that I haven't mowed the lawn in three weeks! Oh boy do I have a chore ahead of me tomorrow. I dropped the push mower at the shop to get the blades sharpened so, with any luck, my pile will be nice and hot by Tuesday.

• d) The refuse from my huge clearing! After reading Margaret Roach's column about how she effectively chopped down her HUGE compost pile of sticks, leaves, and branches I'm going to give that a go this weekend as well. I have the space to build a pile dedicated to the batch of stuff. Might as well see what happens.

• (NOTE: This photo shows one of the two piles of refuse I'm going to try to compost. There's plenty of aggressive, strong, down-right mean bouganvillea branches in there. I suspect they won't breakdown at all and will thousands of years from now be harvested as weapons of war. )

Well, If Google Does It...

We've had pretty heated debate about the usefulness of Twitter in our house. But I found this little nugget today, under the hot top GOOGLE RENTS GOATS. I mean, if Google does it perhaps we should consider the goat. The Kids are sold on and it would be pretty great to see Monica milk the thing...

The Map of Our Garden

Here's the "plans" for our garden. I'm pretty sure they're indecipherable to anyone but us. What's fantastic about this document (to me, anyway) is how functional it was. We played with a few different shapes for the garden and ultimately settled on this E-shape.

We put the veggie plants where it seemed logical. We did some research in the incredibly helpful book "The Gardener's A-Z Guide to Growing Organic Food". The info is laid out simply and is easy for either quick reference or a deeper read. It says what food are good or bad to grow together.

We have beans and peas along the back wall. In front of the beans, tomatoes (those are the red blobs). Running the length of the garden, in front of the tomatoes will be our watermelon. One section of the "E" is dedicated to squash. The middle section is strawberries, radishes, and carrots. Lastly, peppers and eggplant.

I'm excited to for mid-July when we'll be able to see how our map compares to the real deal!

Compost: The Beginning

THIS AREA WILL SOON BE HOME TO OUR COMPOST PILE!!!


We're joining the movement!

For the last two years, everyone we know has bragged and sometimes griped about their compost. We've watched as friends worked their way through two or three different compost bins, talked about the joys of "tea", and swore up one side and down the other that "compost doesn't smell". (BTW, we still don't believe that).

Lots of internet research, field research amongst our friends, and questions about the smelliness of compost piles and here's what we've decided:

As wanna-be DIY'ers, we're going to go the fencing and chicken wire route! We're drawing up the very simple plans now for a two-compartment compost heap in the the ridiculously overgrown patch of weeds and God-knows-what-else behind the garage that we have to clear out this weekend.

All I can say about the idea of us & composting...this ought to be good! We may have to post videos!