We started with no ability to grow during the winter. Then we started using row cover. Then we built cold frames. A year or two later we actually started using the cold frames. Then we created hoops and threw plastic over them to create a tunnel. It’s a step-wise process toward our ultimate goal of feeding ourselves as much as possible, as often as possible.

Our current winter protection system is not as quite as effective or attractive as I’d like. For now, though, it’s good enough.

“Good enough” is a hard lesson to learn as a perfectionist, but both tearing our house apart and trying to grow our own food has forced me to reconcile myself with not being able to get everything as perfect as I’d like the first time. I’m learning that if I can get it functional the first time, it’s easier to make improvements in future iterations. I have my whole lifetime ahead of me to get it just the way I want it. For now, just make it work.

I am extremely (excessively?) pragmatic regarding what we grow, and in past years have grown edibles exclusively, gradually moving towards edibles plus flowers that attract pollinators.

This year my goal is to make the whole infrastructure system of our garden more attractive – including flowers and ornamental ground covers – which is a major change in philosophy for me. I want it to be gorgeous and buzzing with bees, butterflies and birds right away. But I have to remind myself that it’s going to take time to get it the way I want it, and even that will require first figuring out what works and what doesn’t.

We’ve lived in our house for only 4 years, and I have to remind myself that I think we really  have accomplished a lot in those 4 years. What will our garden look like in 20 years? How much food will we be producing by then? Dreaming about that helps me feel less anxious about doing everything I’ve ever wanted to do NOW NOW NOW!

Small, slow, baby steps.

The results of our 2012 Harvest Tally are in!

Some background:
Each year we keep obsessive weight records of everything we grow. As soon as something is harvested, it gets weighed and recorded. At the end of the year I enter all the records into a spreadsheet and (with much anxious anticipation) add up the total.

Here’s how we’ve done in past years:

2009: 70 pounds
1 raised bed

2010: 112 pounds
3 raised beds

2011: 254 pounds
4 raised beds

Between each of these past years we’ve installed new raised beds, substantially increasing our growing space. A big part of the exponential curve in growth, though – beyond just sheer growing space – is our increase in experience and knowledge of how to grow the plants and maximize our space. I thought we did okay for our space in 2011, but knew there was still a lot of room for increases in efficiency. We didn’t add any raised beds in 2012, so this was our opportunity to increase production solely through increasing efficiency, rather than increasing space.

So! 2012. 4 raised beds.

The total is………

305 pounds!

This makes me very happy – mostly because this is 51 pounds more than 2011 in the exact same space. And even in 2012, we had several crop failures (the melons were almost entirely wiped out, the winter squash didn’t do well, etc.), so I know we can still improve our yield in this existing space.

If you’re interested in the data data data (“I cannot make bricks without clay!”), feel free to mine our fully detailed spreadsheet.

I grouped the production records into plant groups so it’s easier to have an idea of what major types of plants contributed to our total.

• Alliums: 34 pounds
• Cucurbit fruits: 3 pounds
• Cucurbit vegetables: 37 pounds
• Fruits: 2 pounds
• Greens: 43 pounds
• Root vegetables: 56 pounds
• Tomatoes: 115 pounds
• “Orphans” (asparagus, beans, corn, okra): 14 pounds

So our biggest yielders: tomatoes, root vegetables and greens. MAN. Considering greens weigh almost nothing, I think that is an accomplishment. I felt like we ate a ton of greens last year, but this is the proof. And that’s exactly why we keep records.

So, how about you? How’d you do in 2012?

—————–

What started as a repeat of last year’s non-winter has suddenly and unexpectedly turned into a quasi-normal Missouri winter (if there is such a thing) – complete with snow.

I had the cold frames in place and row cover over the greens and fall-planted onions when the weather started to get cool. The row cover seems to be sufficient for temperatures hovering around frost. Lower temperatures require more protection, though, and that means plastic.

When the first substantially cold nights came, I had to hastily throw plastic sheeting over the low tunnels. I don’t really have a good system in place yet for holding the plastic down in the wind and ensuring that it doesn’t collapse under the weight of rain or snow. Right now I’m just holding it down with bricks, which is neither especially a) effective or b) attractive. Eliot Coleman describes a twine tensioning system in Four-Season Harvest, and I plan to get that in place as soon as I have a day warm enough to thaw the soil so I can get the stakes in the ground.

The good news, though, is that even this hastily and not especially well thought out system is working. The cold frames are working beautifully, and are keeping the baby mesclun greens actively growing, not just surviving. And just a couple days ago I harvested about a pound of Lacinato kale, curly kale and Swiss chard from inside the plastic-protected low tunnel.

We are still feeding ourselves (and with fresh foods, even!) in January. It’s WORKING!!!

We grew 320 heads of garlic this year. After cleaning, sorting and sizing all of them, we saved the big ones for planting for next year’s crop, and reserved most of the smaller or less pretty ones for ourselves to eat over the next year.

That left around 175 presentable heads to give away to friends and family as we gear up to start selling our garlic next year. I labelled each head of garlic with its variety name and wrapped them in bundles with a loop so the bundle can be hung.

Today we’re giving away one of the bundles. In this bundle there are 4 heads each of Russian Red, Duganski, German Extra-Hardy and Inchelium Red.

To enter the giveaway, just leave a comment explaining what type of posts you’d like to see more of on this blog.

One winner will be selected by random number generation. The last time to enter will be midnight at the end of Wednesday, November 21. The winner will be announced on Thanksgiving, Thursday, November 22.

Have a thankful Thanksgiving!

I know it sounds overdramatic, but I really think it’s true.

A couple years ago I took a long, hard look at our monthly expenses. We had been going out to eat and buying lunch more than I knew was a good idea, and I wanted to put a dollar sign on the gut feeling I had that we were spending too much.

What I found was astounding. Not only were our grocery expenses moderately high (which I am mostly okay with, because I have high standards for good food), but our expenses for restaurant foods were 2 to 3 times our total grocery bill. This was completely unacceptable and unsustainable.

On top of the financial drain, I often found myself stressed at the end of the day because I didn’t know what to make for dinner. The cycle was:

1. Arrive home
2. Procrastinate because I didn’t know what to make
3. Scour cookbooks and recipe sites for meal ideas for 30-45 minutes
4. Decide what I would make
5. Start cooking and get to the middle of the recipe and realize I didn’t some major ingredient
6. Frantically try to either a) make the recipe work without the ingredient (generally a bad idea) or b) send Charlie out on an emergency grocery store run to buy the missing item
7. Eat a very late, anxiety-ridden meal

I had heard of this thing called “meal planning” but had never attempted to do it. I called up my friend Amanda whom I knew was religious about meal planning to keep costs down. I also gathered suggestions from family on how to minimize food costs while still maintaining a high quality diet. With their tips and encouragement, and the motivation that I could save the equivalent of $15-20/day just by taking 15 minutes to make our lunches in the morning ($60-80/hour ain’t a bad wage), I determined to start meal planning.

Two years later, I think I’ve got this meal planning thing down. I don’t do anything fancy for lunches (mostly sandwiches and easy salads that we can bring to work), so I primarily meal plan for dinners. I use a Moleskine calendar to record everything by date.

Here’s my strategy:

1. Assess and make a list of what I already have on hand. This includes what’s ready to be harvested in the garden, leftovers from the previous week, anything that needs to be used up soon, foods in the freezer and in storage. I organize the items primarily into groups of vegetables and proteins.
2. Write down any events or commitments we have that week. This helps me know when I will have more time to cook, and when I should plan to have something easy on hand.
3. Find recipes that mostly match what foods I already have on hand. (We do usually have quite a bit of food on hand, so this helps us make the most use of it and prevents waste. If we didn’t have much, though, I would move to the next step.) I cook out of Vegetarian Cooking for Everyone about 90% of the time, so I always start here. But if I’ve found a recipe online that looks good, I will save it for a week when we have most of the ingredients or I think it would work well in the week’s overall menu. I occasionally do Google cooking as well, but not surprisingly the recipes aren’t usually as good.
4. Balance meal selections by their protein content. We don’t eat much meat, so I try to have a variety of protein sources over the course of the week. Each day would ideally have a different protein. I allow myself about one non-protein heavy meal (like a vegetarian pasta or rice dish) a week. This could look like:
   • Meat (beef, chicken, fish)
   • Eggs
   • Quinoa
   • Beans/lentils
   • Nuts
   • Pasta/rice
5. Choose which day to prepare each meal based on our schedule and write it in the calendar. If we have something going on, I don’t try to do something fancy. Instead I’ll plan on easy meals or using leftovers. I plan to cook meals on 4 weeknights, with one night designated as leftovers night. We often make pizza on Saturday night, and I try to plan something easy for Sunday night because I’m usually worn out from working in the garden all day.
6. Make notes in the calendar on days that I need to take something out of the freezer to let it thaw for the next night, or pre-cook something, like beans or rice.
7. Make a list of what foods I need to buy for the week.

I usually meal plan on Saturday nights. It takes me 30 minutes to an hour, depending on how complicated I want to make the meals and how long it takes me to find what I want. I usually buy groceries right afterwards (the stores are totally dead on Saturday nights), so our meal cycle begins on Sunday.

Now that I meal plan, there’s no stress at the end of the day. I know exactly what I’m going to make, and I know that I have all the ingredients. We don’t eat as late in the night because I can get started on cooking as soon as I get home. Our food waste has gone to basically zero, because each week I reassess what needs to be used up.

Having lived this method for the past two years, now I can’t imagine not meal planning. What, you just go to the grocery store, buy a bunch of random stuff and hope it all works out? No wonder I never had everything that I needed.

Do you meal plan? What’s your strategy?

I set the cold frames over the mesclun and a few less-hardy lettuces and other greens. I have tall hoops over the kale, Swiss chard and Brussels sprouts, so I covered them with row cover. Overall they’re pretty hardy anyway, so I wasn’t too worried about them. And I threw row cover over the onions and escarole.

I went out to check on everything the next morning, and initially I was afraid I might have made some miscalculations. Everything was frozen solid. All the greens were frozen, the leek leaves were frozen solid and even the row cover was frozen into a hard sheet. I’d never seen this before, so I started to worry. The leeks especially got me, because I know I’ve harvested them out of the snow on much colder days than a night that dipped into the 20s.

Then I remembered the rain. It had rained all day before it got cold, so everything was covered in a layer of water when the temperature dropped.

When I checked on everything later in the day, they had thawed out and were completely fine. The escarole got burned in a few places around the edges where the row cover had blown off and it was exposed, but even that damage was very very minimal. So – success! We can successfully weather a freeze.

I’ll probably keep the row cover and cold frames on for the indefinite future, unless the temperature is really going to warm up. I’ll have to regularly vent the cold frames in the mornings, though, so I don’t end up with fried greens like I did to my carrots and beets in the spring.

So here we are, in mid-November, still harvesting fresh foods out of the garden. I set a goal at the beginning of the year to work towards feeding ourselves from the garden from April through November, and we have already achieved that just with our fresh foods. On top of that we have storage crops like sweet potatoes and butternut squash, and preserved foods like canned tomato sauces and frozen shredded summer squash.

I think we are doing well.

(Not really.)

It’s starting to feel that way, though. Last year I visited Dehillerin in Paris and bought bannetons. This year I just happened to be in the neighbourhood (no, really), so I stopped by for a few coveted items.

1) A lame (pronounced lahm). A lame is the traditional tool for slashing artisanal bread. It is essentially a glorified razor blade on a stick (if I can be so irreverent), but from what I have read it makes a big difference in your ability to make the scores look nice.

The lames at Dehillerin were the disposable kind and cheap (just over 2 euros), so I picked up three. If I like them I will probably invest in a non-disposable variety with changeable blades.

2) A crêpe spreader. I saw one of these babies in action in Burlington, Vermont at the Skinny Pancake (if you’re in the area, you MUST go!), and was so impressed by the simplicity of the technique that I wanted to have one. In Vermont I saw the T-shaped variety, while the one I picked up in Paris was more of the squeegee-shaped kind. I’m anxious to try it out. Now I just need a crêpe pan…

One of the interesting features of this variety (and maybe chard in general) is the changes in colour it displays over time. I think it’s mostly due to the leaves’ age, but temperature may also be a factor.

The leaves always start out bright green, with red or pinkish stems. As the leaves age, though, they darken, turning a dark red colour, and finally become a colour closer to purple. The texture of the leaves changes, too, becoming less soft and more fragile or brittle over time.

We’ve learned to love Swiss chard. We use it generously in Deborah Madison’s Chard and Onion Omelet (Trouchia) recipe, which has become a favourite. It’s fairly rare for me to repeat recipes, but I have made this trouchia many, many times.

And beyond tasting good, Swiss chard is so easy to grow. It’s a miracle vegetable.

While I don’t think we’ll ever grow thousands of heads in our relatively tiny urban backyard (we’ll leave that to the pros), it is such a reliable and enjoyable crop that we are exploring scaling up our production to the point that we can:

1. Produce enough for ourselves to eat all year.
2. Save enough back for planting stock for the next year.
3. Have enough left over to sell some.

We won’t ever become wealthy selling a couple hundred heads of garlic, but I do like the idea of learning about the intricacies of gourmet garlic and being able to share that information and enjoyment with others locally.

I’m already making plans to improve our curing environment and my garlic cleaning skills. This was the first year that I really sat down and sorted, graded and cleaned (literally with a toothbrush) all of our garlic at one time. (I remember all too well those 5 hours spent on the front porch, developing sore hands and garlic wrapper slivers.) Now the garlic is pretty, clean and ready to use without having to worry about getting soil on my cutting board. In the process, though, I learned that I was a little overzealous in cleaning and probably pulled off a few too many wrappers, which could shorten the bulbs’ storage life. So I know where I can make some improvements next year.

We already have 200 cloves in the soil, and we’ll probably get the last 200 in over the weekend. We’re growing 100 heads each of:

• German Extra-Hardy (originally planted in 2009 and grown from our own stock ever since)
• Russian Red (originally planted in 2010)
• Inchelium Red (replanted with Chert Hollow’s 2011 stock after I mixed up our own varieties)
• Duganski (planted for the first time in 2011)

For me, planting garlic is the official acknowledgement that fall has come. It’s also a celebration that we’ve learned how to grow at least a small portion of our own food. And that small portion is growing each year.

It’s easy to damage sweet potatoes by digging them up with tools. Since I have mine planted in a relatively small area (about 32 square feet), I just dig them up with my hands. Our soil is nice and loose, so it’s fairly easy to dig all the way to the bottom of the raised beds.

(At least so I told myself until the day after the harvest, when the muscles in my hands became extremely sore from all of the digging. Sore hand muscles is a new experience for me.)

This is the third year that we’ve grown sweet potatoes, and the second year that we’ve grown them from our own stock. It’s pretty exciting to me to be able to produce substantial amounts of food from our own supplies without having to purchase seeds or slips again every year.

For us sweet potatoes are an almost exclusively pest-free crop. The only minor damage we’ve ever seen is a few holes in the potatoes here and there. Can anyone explain this? Is it a growing issue or a pest issue?

Because of the drought we were entirely reliant on our irrigation, and it showed in the sweet potato yields. One side of the bed was watered better than the other because of inconsistencies in the soaker hoses we were using. Not surprisingly, the side that received more water had much larger sweet potatoes than the other side.

So the big question is… how much did we produce?

Drumroll, please!

…..

30 POUNDS!

Hooray! This is the most we’ve ever produced, and way more than the sad 15 pounds we produced last year because I got the slips in late. I think this is a good yield. Based on the average yield per acre that commercial growers should expect, when converted to square feet and scaled down to our growing area of 32 square feet, we would expect to produce around 15 pounds. So we produced two times the average yield. Not bad.

The sweet potatoes will cure for a couple weeks, then will become part of our “to eat this winter” food stores.

So now that we have them, what should we do with them? What are your favorite recipes and ways to prepare sweet potatoes?