lancewig.com

Square Foot Garden III

I had incorrectly planted the pumpkin, squash and zucchini in one single square of SFG II. I think you are supposed to use 9 squares and I used just one. Oops.  With SFG III I once again broke the rules and went with 3 2′ by 2′ beds.  I hope the vegetables will be able to hang over the sides and lay in the rocks and make up for the missing 5 squares. The garden area came out nice and used a lot of junk that was on the lot including old bench legs. The squash struggled all week to recover from the transplant. It was a lot of touch and go.

Close up of zucchini in SFG III

SFG I is a mixture of death and new growth this time of year. Cucumbers are fizzling out. Basil is skyrocketing. Tomatoes are highly successful.  Many squares have been replanted with the mid-summer crop.

SFG II is at that wonderful stage of full bore growth.  I accidently dropped some Swiss chard seeds in the carrots. SFG II gets a lot better light. I will try to grow the peppers and onions here since they failed in SFG I.

Radishes. Another food I hated as a kid. I was very reluctant to plant some. They came up very quick and tasted wonderful. Just add butter, vinegar and salt.

Pumpkins competing with squash. I didn’t follow the directions and use a 3′ by 3′ space. Typical rookie mistake. I think next year I’ll isolate squash and melons to special 2′ by 2′ beds that I’m planning in another location of the yard. They are huge vegetables and the small bed would allow them to overflow into the surrounding grass.

I ripped up the peppers and onions after about 90 days of nothing. I didn’t have them in a truly sunny spot. I put down some beats and snap peas in their place.

Pumpkins on the way.

Watermelon leaves. Huge.

Squash or Zucchini. I still can’t tell. Radish greens.

Dawn has already been picking the green toms for “fried green tomatoes”

In the “by the way” department. I learned a bit too late that once broccoli blooms the yellow flowers, it’s getting too late to eat it. You are actually eating the flowers, so don’t let them bloom.

Sometimes I wonder why I bother chronicling every step of the garden. It gets pretty tedious. Sometimes like today, I don’t really want to add anything. Then I realize that 6 months from now—when we’re miserable, covered in snow—reading the entries will bring me a lot of joy and provide inspiration for the year to come.

Finally, some action from the broccoli. It takes forever to show a floret. You fight cabbage worms all year. Now I know why many people don’t bother with it.

Cucumbers taking a beating. I’m not sure what the issue is, but I loose about 3 to 4 leaves a day. One compete vine is pretty much diseased. Several possible suspects:  I fertilized a week ago; there has been a lot of rain (over watering); there is not enough circulation (problems vines are in the ‘corner’ of the garden next to the snow peas)

I’ve learned more about things “going to seed”. Sometimes it’s best to just re-seed instead of the ‘cut and come again’ process, especially with things like spinach. I now realize how critical it is to use vermiculite when seeding. Those little sprouts really struggle trying to come up. One little twig welded with mud can block the sprout for weeks.

Square Foot Garden II sprouts are now into the second leaf pair. Radishes are leading the race.

Either zucchini or yellow squash as I was too stupid to mark it. I did a square of each. I figured it would be obvious in a week or two but one of the squares failed, so I had to re-seed. Then I didn’t know which to put in.

The square foot . . . square bucket garden. I read in Garden Gate on how to turn a 5 gallon bucket into a “topsy turvey” tomato plant. I have the rope ready on the giant maple in the back. They say to wait a couple of weeks so the seedling can get to about 1 foot in height. After that, hang it upside down from a rope.

Cucumbers like this come off the vine every day. It’s one of the easiest and prolific crops out there.

My first tomato. Somehow this was a spiritual experience for a city slicker. Tomatoes are just so intertwined in American society.

Cucumber Vines Taking Over

Them be Pickles in the making!

Square foot Garden II: 2 blocks is not enough!  I made another in another sunny spot behind the magnolia. My first plot turned out to be a yellow jacket nest. One dip of the shovel into fresh earth brought me a world of pain. I leveled this one ‘above ground’ with rocks so as to no disturb the flying demons below ground.

New Arugula and Mesculin coming up in the new bed. (not to be confused with “mescaline” which is a psychedelic drug.)

We have a super plentiful amount of beets all off one square. It makes a great soup. I put the roots in first and then 10 minutes later, the greens go in.

Tomato plants in bloom. After watching the cucumbers bloom out into ‘little pickles’ I now have a better idea of what is coming here. You can tell we were once city slickers and that we are slowing “getting it” when it comes to plants, flowers and blooms.

The importance of bees. As I took pictures, I had a visitor to the cucumbers. Every now and then you hear about ‘how the bee population is dwindling’ and how it means certain death for humans. A moment like this reminds me of their importance. I am also reminded how careless it is to use chemicals on your plants. The square foot garden is much easier to maintain, by virtue of size and access, so “hand picking” bugs and inspecting plants is much easier and detailed. Spraying loads of pesticides makes no sense at all.

We have a winner!  The cucumbers shot up so fast that we were taking bets on which vine would make it to the top first. This is the sad day where I have to snip the end off in order to bulk-up the lower vines.

Looks familiar. The cucumber plants are one of the most interesting garden items to watch grow. Everything from the huge leaves to the tentacles are amazing. Most people are already harvesting cukes off the vine, but ours are coming late. Our valley here in Hazelwood is usually a lot colder than surrounding areas. It has to do with the lay of the Smokies as they trickle down south into Sylva, Waynesville and Canton.

The garden is growing out of control! The cucumbers have gone about 2 feet up the trellis since building it a week or two ago.  I didn’t get any good cucumber pictures, but they are truly amazing to watch as the ‘grab’ the wire and climb up.

I hated beets as a kid, but now I have a true love for them. They are full of energy.

Tomato plants are shooting up. I had a great fear that I wouldn’t be able to grow tomatoes for some reason.

Gorgeous huge basil. I hate to think about all the times I dropped 2.99 on a pack of fresh basil at the store.

If you are looking for an actual recipe stop now. I’m still in the experimental stage, but I’m getting closer.

We used to live right next door to Ingles in North Asheville so I often went down for a fresh “dollar muffin”. The muffins were pretty tasty, unlike the rest of the gross baked stuff they sell. Flavors included Blueberry, Pistachio and Cranberry.

We’ve since moved away, so I have to rely more on my own cooking skills.

I’ll get right to the point here. The reason that restaurant and bakery food is so damn good is because you don’t see how much grease and salt they put in. It’s like “Of course I knew that!” but you choose to ignore it. Having worked in the food industry most of my life, I’ve seen first hand what goes into the dishes. I worked at an Italian place once and—no joke—the chef put in one stick of butter in the pan for every cream sauce dish. The clientele raved about how fantastic his food was and he was soon able to charge $20 and $30 per dish.

Once you go online for recipes and start cooking on your own, you’ll find “reasonable recipes” like this one that claim to be ‘The Best Ever Muffin Recipe“.  Bull Crap!  I made that recipe and the muffins were like small bales of hay. They were dry and nasty tasting. I’m sure that’s what a muffin used to be, but now with the proliferation of bakery muffins,  we find ourselves trying to match that awesome taste. Old style muffins were dryer because we used to eat as a family in the 1950’s. You would split the muffin in half and spread butter on top as a kind of ritual. Now people like to “grab and go” with baked goods. When you think of if, bakery muffins are marketed as “Butter already added!“.

What happens at home is that people get so caught up in “watching fat” that they do stupid things like using “no fat butter” or “low fat this” or “fat free that” is some lame effort to diet. Even just following “normal” recipes may not be enough fat for the rich taste you desire. If you’re afraid of fat, then your muffins will stink. In a couple of days, you’ll go to the bakery and buy “one of those really good Ingles muffins” anyway. Its the psychology  of “not seeing what goes into the food” that makes us think we can’t cook like a restaurant does.

So for the most beautiful moist and rich muffin in the world, all you do is start with a recipe like this one and then double or triple the fat content. That recipe called for 1/4 cup of oil and I put in 2/3 cup of butter instead. Another trick is to add a small bit of brown sugar. So they call for 3/4 sugar. I put in 1/2 cup sugar and 1/4 cup brown sugar (one of the reasons why Toll House Cookies are so good). Brown sugar or even Molasses naturally adds moisture, but we use them sparingly because the taste is more bitter..

It’s all about the flour to fat ratio.

When you cook baked goods, sooner or later you’ll realize that just about everything is some combination of flour sugar and fat. You’ll also notice that many basic recipes call for around two cups of flour. Use that as a rough ratio. Take a look at the Toll House Cookie recipe and you’ll see a ratio of roughly 2 cups flour to 1 cup fat. That’s the nature of a cookie. They are rich, fatty and low risers. On the other side of the scale, a basic biscuit uses 2 cups of flour to a scant 1/4 cup of fat. The nature of a biscuit is a high riser that is light and flaky. Think of foods you bake as resting somewhere between the richness of a cookie and the flakiness of a biscuit. Ingles muffins really aren’t a muffin at all. They’re a muffin-shaped-cookie!

It seems like a no-brainer for sure, but I see so many people who use things like soy milk and fat free butter and then wonder why their baked goods are so dry. You can’t confuse “moistness” with water. That moist taste is a big gob of fat. Fat free products are just a big bucket of water that has been trapped in a kind of microscopic honeycomb thin film of fat. Once you bake with it, the water evaporates and leaves a hay bale. I actually do use soy milk or almond milk to combat my Asperges, but I always make sure to add more fat to counter the ‘wateriness’ of the product.

Once you understand how fat equals moistness, the rest of a perfect muffin recipe is the art of tossing in small bits of things. I’m still so surprised at how many people are scared to death to variate from a recipe. There is this pent up internal fear of screwing things up. Just start small until you get a feel for things. The batch I made this morning had the extra fat, the shift from white to brown sugar, but then I tossed in 2 squares of crushed Lindt Orange Chocolate, a tablespoon of orange marmalade and a small pealed, diced red apple. Sometimes I’ll toss in a spoon full of peanut butter or even a splash of some kind of liqueur like Kahlúa or Bailies Irish Creme.

———–

Authors Note: If you are a heart surgeon or dairy farmer, please use the donation link as I’m giving you tons of business by writing this.

I spent the whole week doing MVC Joomla web development crap, which is often draining.  Visiting my garden gave me new life again. I’ve found something that can give you back energy after the computer takes it away.

The Harvest Begins!  We’ve been plucking out some of the Green Salad Bowl lettuce and the spinach. It came up in good time. I think the packet said 8 weeks, but we started eating it in 6 weeks. I’m seriously thinking of doing another block just for lettuce and spinach.

My Final Trellis. I went around and around on how to get the trellis up. I had started some insane contraption of copper wire but I abandoned the idea after wondering how much poison and chemicals would leak from the casings into the garden. I finally laid down the $30 bucks for a proper fence and it works quite well. The peas and cucumbers have started their journey upward.

The swiss chard I planted is called “Fordhook Giant” . . . . ummmm, yep that’s accurate. I can’t wait to cook up a big batch.

This is the Parris Island Cos lettuce. I chose one square, but I wish I had done more. It’s a tougher lettuce than the Green Salad Bowl. I favor it more for the hearty texture and the slightly bitter taste.

The cabbage worms and slugs have nearly destroyed my broccoli. This is the first I’ve had to deal with pests. I looked up some resources on how to deal with this. Here’s a good discussion at Yahoo Canada and this blog has some good tips. People try everything from flour to cayenne pepper to beer.  I’ll be trying some of the techniques in the days to come. For now, I go out every couple of hours and smash the little green worms on the leaves. I show no mercy, no matter how cute they look.

I got the idea from another square foot garden blog to keep track of my harvest totals. I’ll keep coming back to this post as the summer wears on:

5/31/10 – 6.75 oz. of lettuce, spinach and basil

6/1/10 – 4.5 oz of lettuce

6/2/10 – .5 oz of Parris lettuce

6/3/10 – 4.5 oz of Green Lettuce

6/7/10 4.5 oz Spinach and Green Lettuce