June 21, 2009 Harvest

Potato, onion, varegated land cress.
Howard Langon Garden in SOMA

Spiritual Salad

Amazing how you can start with an empty bowl and end with a feast. Unfortunately our annual garden party was postponed due to yesterday's rain, but luckily the few gardeners and guests that came anyways weren't deterred. With a little creativity we put together a spiritual salad (in the tradition of stone soup) made with veggies from the garden and offerings from our guests. The romaine, butterhead and red leaf lettuce went first, followed by grated carrots, baby red onions, peas, tomato, celery and cucumber.

It's comforting to know that, with all the challenges we face as urban gardeners, we can still come together and nourish both body and soul. Many thanks to everyone at the table yesterday for your contributions to the pot.

First Strawberries

The first strawberries of the year. All the kinds are producing ripe
fruit now. We have Albion, aroma and chandler.

Cowgirl Creamery Tour

Cowgirl Creamery Tour:

Founded by cowgirls Sue Conley (pictured) and Peggy Smith in 1997, the artisan cheese company has come a long way since first opening in 1997. After much success in their small barn in Point Reyes Station, Cowgirl Creamery has expended to a new location in Petaluma's Foundry Wharf. Cowgirl makes a small selection of organic aged and fresh cheeses using milk from neighbor Straus Family Creamery.

Co-founder Sue Conley shares the story of Cowgirl's beginnings.

Here you can see the pasteurization tanks in the Petaluma facility. The stacked forms on the left are cheese molds.

Cheeses soaked in brine for several hours

Stacks of cheese during the aging process

Eric Patterson, who manages the aging of the cheese, allows us to taste cheese at various ages, as well as Cowgirl's different vatieties.

Lady Bugs Go!

So our community garden has bugs. Our poor center planter has thrips
on the artichokes and our roses have aphids. To help prevent future
aphids we just released 1500 ladybugs. They will eat the aphids,
thrips and other insects and let the plants live. For one week these
guys will spread out throughout the garden and procreate. Hopefully
our ladybug population stays steady, we need all the help we can get
to fight these bugs.

Orange Irises

Beet Down

Harvested for dinner salad yesterday this perfect beet was red on the
outside and white inside. The only beet that survived one of our
periodic rat swarms.

Russett Tater Starts

Another potato tower is in the future. These delicious local organic
russett potatoes should produce a fine fall garlic mash potatoes. You
only want to use organic potato starts since many conventionals are
treated not to spout and can be disease haborers.

Today's Harvest

The last of our winter carrots and a dozen eggs

Bees!

Potato Rainbow

Red, White and Blue. Ready to plant.

April 10 Harvest

A few simple carrots and some rosemary for tonights dinner. We tend to
harvest as needed rather than all at once.

Steve's Orchid

In full bloom now!

Hidden Bird of Paradise

Another beauty from our community garden

Yellow Iris in Bloom

Today's new blooms are up. 2 years in the works our iris's smell so
great.

Potato Tower #1

We finally planted one of our potato towers. This one is done via the lasagna method where we have created 4 layers of potatoes in hopes they will grow out the side of our the chicken wire. Since potatoes love green compost we have layered this with compostable products from around the garden and home.


For this tower we have used coffee grounds, spent yerbe matte tea, newspapers, wood shavings from the chicken coop, a pile of dried leaves and green waste from some ripped up nasturtiums. This is all mixed in layers with some dirt to make a sort of "lasagna". No high tech strategy was used. We just kind of piled on different layers of material between each layer of potatoes. To top it off we put a cherry tomato plant on the top. Now that is un-researched and we have no idea what is going happen. Experiments galore this season.

Tulips & Fava Beans

Fava beans have been a popular cover crop in the garden this winter. Here you will see some of the first tulips and last fava beans growing together. There have been no beans produced so far from the favas which is most likely due to lack of bee activity with all the rains the past month.

Garden Plot - March 19, 2009

This is a view of our community garden plot at Howard Langton Garden. It looks pretty tidy now but things are starting to grow much fast now as the light increases. In the direct front is a small start greenhouse and a few tomato starts. Flowers line the front of the box and on the left are 2 rows of carrots ready to harvest and little gem lettuce. On the right is some celery, kohlrabi and some starts. In the back is the start of a potato tower and a trellis where peas, beans and hops grow. In the hanging planters we grow lettuce above where the mice and rats can get them.

Egret Snackbreak

Egret stops by the garden to enjoy our koi.

Compost tower

First layers of compost in the potato tower