Archive for the 'Gardening' Category

Or, I should say, Gardening season began in late January, but we are just getting around to starting our gardening in mid February.

Roger and I planted a bunch of fava beans in our community garden plot a couple of weeks ago. Some are destined to be harvested, but most are simply there to fix nitrogen and be turned into awesome mulch.

When gardening, I generally try to set up the garden such that I can flood irrigate. This lets me leave a hose or three running full blast in one area of the garden while I work / weed some other area.

One of our garden mates has this incredibly cool device to chop up fava bean plants and return them to the soil. It is, effectively, a lawn mower mounted in a rain barrel with a hole in the deck through which you feed the plant matter. Quite the frightening device.

Of course, with flood irrigation, the numerous ant colonies within the garden do get a bit upset when their homes are periodically flooded. Roger likes rescuing the ants wherever possible, though some ants do appear to be able to walk on water.

This was a bit of dead plant matter left behind from last year’s gardening efforts. The ants seemed to use it as a bit of a watch tower. An ant or two would run to the top, have a look around, and then run back to tell their nest mates whatever bits of wisdom they had gleaned from above.

All photos taken with Canon EF 100mm f/2.8 Macro Lens and an Canon MR-14EX Macro Ring Lite. Not that the ring flash was needed for the photo of Roger, it just happened to be on.

Our neighborhood and community garden has been planting and trading Iris for a couple of decades. Every spring, there are clumps of iris of all different color combinations throughout the neighborhood. When the clumps need be divided, people simply place the removed portions of plant on their yard waste piles. Few of these ever get scraped and hauled away, though, as a neighbor will invariably see the potential plants, grab them, and stick ‘em in a hole somewhere around their own house.

This spring has been a particularly spectacular year. And yesterday’s morning rain and intense ambient cloud filtered light made for a perfect opportunity to photograph some of the beautiful flowers throughout the area.

Actually, the abundance of flowers almost made it difficult simply because framing a shot to highlight a particular flower almost always included a neighboring bloom.

This one is one of my favorite colored blossom. It is all pastels from a desert palette like one that O’Keefe might have used.

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The rather long point of this is to point people to this flat out incredible site. Animated knot tying instructions with historical information, application notes, and words of warning about failure modes.

Another excellent knot site.

Did a bit of gardening today. Beyond the typical weeding and planting, I had to make some vertically oriented growing structures for beans and grapes. That is, I needed trellises.

In the past, I have used concrete netting (i.e. wire mesh with 6″ openings) and, when feeling extra lazy, I have used pre-boat trellises (jasmine in our atrium, for example).

Expensive, that. A far less expensive solution which also has the added benefit of being fully customizable is to build trellises myself using posts and twine, rope or wire, depending on how long the trellis needs to last.

You’ll need two critical tools to make this easy. First, you’ll need a post driver. Why the Amazon product link doesn’t show the driver, I don’t know.

Anyway, a post driver is simply a steel tube hollow one one end and weighted on the other with a couple of handles. You slide the post driver over the post you want to drive, lift up, and let it drop (or pull down if you want to drive faster). The post driver does the work of driving the post without the risk of smashing the crap out of your feet.

So, grab your post driver and some posts. I use both wooden and metal posts, depending on what is available. Sometimes, I’ll drive a metal post really deep, then a wooden post a couple of inches deep next to it, and tie the two together with my wire clamp tool to make an extra tall post (as I did for the grape trellis).

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I have long wanted to make meat jerkies and to dry various foods. With the bumper crop of peppers from my own garden and cheap “irregular” fruits available at the farmer’s market, it was time to finally do something about this desire.

I picked up the Nesco GardenMaster food dehydrator from Amazon (pictured/linked at right).

It includes 4 drying trays, a leather drying insert, a “small things” drying insert and can expand to up to 30 trays. At 1,000 watts and with the thermostat on the front, it will maintain drying temperatures between 95 and 155 degrees.

In other words, the Nesco is a fairly industrial strength unit. Well built. Fairly loud.

Loud enough that I would suggest putting it in a room with a door that otherwise has good ventilation. You’ll definitely want the ventilation if you are drying things like garlic or hot peppers. Otherwise, the surrounding room will become quite the little gas chamber. Even with an open sliding door, I managed to fairly seriously pepper spray myself while drying a bunch of habanero peppers!

The unit seems to run about 10 to 15 degrees hotter than the thermostat indicates. As I’m using a probe thermometer, I’m not sure exactly where I should be measuring temperature. As well, since it can stack to 30 trays and I’m only using 3 or 4 at a time, I would bet that the heat will vary as I add more trays.

Nesco, the manufacturer, has a very useful web site which includes recipes, full documentation, and various other information. I submitted a query via their customer support link and was nicely surprised to have a response in my mailbox in a couple of hours. I have since exchanged several emails with Gerry in Nesco’s customer service who is obtaining calibration information from the company’s engineering department.

I’m damned impressed. Good customer service, that!

So… what have I dried with it in the week I have owned it?

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It is tomato season here and I’m starting to reap the rewards of a couple of wonderful heirloom tomato plants. Likewise, our local farmer’s market has a cheese vendor [again -- she went missing for a while] who sells the tastiest cheddars and parmesan-esque cheeses.

Here is a delicious dish made from the two:

• Thin slice one large, very ripe, heirloom or heirloom style tomato
• Lay the slices out, evenly spaced and not touching, on a cookie sheet (Lacking a silpat, oil the pan first).
• Lightly salt and pepper the tomato
• Grate or thinly slice some kind of parmesan or parmesan-like cheese over the top of the tomato slices. I used an artisan cannonball cheese from the local farmer’s market. Something relatively dry and crumbly, but not totally dry.
• Put the oven on hi broil and place the cookie sheet on the highest shelf
• Cook long enough for the cheese to melt and then brown just slightly.

The end result is an explosion of hot juicy tomato with a crunchy cheese shell. Easy and awesome. I would have taken a picture of the result, but it didn’t last long enough to do so! Got pictures of before and after this time.

Update: OK — grated the cheese this time. Much better. And I thought I used more. However, the grated cheese has a lot of volume for very little content. Next time, I’ll about double the amount of cheese used.

And there will be a next time. These were delicious. Even better than last time. And, yes, those are huge slices of tomato.

This morning, the garden was particularly beautiful.

Fortunately, I had my camera in hand.

These were shot with a Canon EF 100mm f/2.8 Macro USM Lens. It is an awesome piece of glass. Serves very well as a macro lens, for taking portraits, and as a general purpose fixed length lens.

Well, when the deformity is on a plant. For some reason, the various gigantic Agapanthus we have growing down one side of the house have deformed buds. Instead of growing straight up — nearly six feet straight up — the buds are growing in zig-zags and, in a couple of cases, have curled around a full 360 degrees.

No idea why. Regardless, the plants will successfully bloom and go to seed.

The full sized images are pretty cool. The one on the right has almost all of an orb style spider web in it.

Our garden plot in the community garden is doing quite well. The pepper plants are taking hold, we have lots of nasturtiums and california poppies, the beans have started to climb, and the tomato plants look like they are about to explode.

I took a bunch of shots of flowers in the community garden.

The entire series is available on Flickr.

Roger loves to spend time in the garden. He destroys snails, slugs, and bad bugs while capturing lady bug larva and other good bugs from “no man’s land” and moving them to our plot. In the picture at left, he is looking for bugs on our neighbor’s ditch lilies.

Unfortunately, this will be the last season that the community garden in my neighborhood exists. Through a series of very shady events, the school system has closed down a couple of schools and decided to move 500 students into an already overflowing school next to the garden. They are going to reclaim the space for temporary buildings.

We are considering legal action because of how the whole thing has been executed. So far, I haven’t talked to anyone that thinks that the school’s move is good for the students or faculty and, worse, there is significant evidence that there are certain members of the school board that have acted in a highly questionable fashion.

As it stands, the students will lose as they are packed even more tightly into the facilities. The teachers and staff lose as they are shuffled into positions with less resources. The community loses both the community garden and by increasing traffic and noise.

So far, I have yet to talk to anyone who thinks the school’s move is either a good idea or an effective way to cut costs.

It is definitely Iris season. I took a walk in the neighborhood with camera in hand and the intent to take a few shots of every different kind of Iris I could find. The blooms are just stunning this year. I created a flickr set and, of course, the implied Flickr slide show.

Roger, Christine and I have been hard at work planting our 2006 garden. We have the community garden plot all prepped and weeded, with carrots, strawberries, gladiolas, and wildflowers already in the ground.

In the garage, I built an indoor mini-greenhouse out of a 3 foot high by 4 foot or so long shelving unit, a couple of florescent lights, a heating pad and some painter’s drop plastics to keep the humidity and head in.

In that, Roger and I have planted cherry tomatoes, heirloom tomatoes, butternut squash, gourds (the birdhouse kind), lemon cucumbers, japanese long beans, “red beans” (climbing beans with beautiful flowers), watermelon seeds (that Roger collected from a yummy farmer’s market watermelon he had last year), Sunzilla (16 foot tall sunflowers), eggplant seeds (more farmer’s market seeds), and a mini-herb garden of parsley, dill and basil.

The bottom shelf, on top of the heating pad, is the collection of peppers seeds. From left to right:

Desert TepÍn

Some count this as the oldest chile species of the four or so species commonly in cultivation (the other species have many sub-species). In any case, it is a very hot and unique flavored chile pepper. Vicious bite, but doesn’t last. Hard as hell to grow — takes a long time to germinate with a low germination rate. I’ll be lucky if any of the seeds germinate.

Red Savina Habanero

This is often counted as the hottest pepper in the world by scoville units (though England has a new pepper that may be hotter). However, the Tepin is counted as hotter by some. In any case, this is a classic habanero. I would rather be growing a Scotch Bonnett, but this’ll do this year.

Serrano

The basic Serrano pepper. A staple in a all kinds of cooking when you simply need some distinct chile heat without being either overwhelming in flavor or hot. I greatly prefer Serrano to Jalapeno.

“Red Devil Pepper”

I have no idea what kind of pepper this really is. The ripe fruit is about 2.5″ long and 3/4″ of an inch in diameter. It is extremely hot with a very distinct flavor. Larger (and hotter) than a Thai Hot. It was left behind in the garden plot that we took over near the end of last year.

Black Pasillo or Ancho Chile

This is an Ancho chile pepper whose seeds my parents collected while we were in Mexico (Baja trip). This particular variety was claimed to be one of the most expensive chiles in Mexico. In any case, it will dry well and make for a wonderful base to home made chile powder.