One Gardener Planting Seeds for the Future

There's a really moving article in the S.F. Chronicle today about a Redwood City gardener named Catalino Tapia, who started a scholarship fund to help struggling college students. The Board of Directors is composed of other gardeners and they've solicited donations from among their clients. Since some national news outlets picked up on the story, more than $137,000 in donations have poured in, all of which will go directly to scholarships (the foundation is seeking grant money to cover administrative costs).

Tapia, who only got as far as the sixth grade, is particularly touched by the donations sent in by children:

"The gestures of these children are going to tear out my heart. They have such goodwill, and they have parents who are teaching them hacer el bien sin ver a quien," said Tapia, quoting an old saying of his native Mexico, which translates roughly, but not as poetically, as "do good, even if you can't see who will benefit."

If you'd like to learn more or make a donation, go to www.bagf.org.

Through the Eyes of Experts

There was a great piece in the San Francisco Chronicle yesterday by columnist Leah Garchik about her experience with having a garden consultant evaluate her garden. It sounded painful-- wrenching, actually--and I can well imagine how I'd feel in hearing a garden "expert" dissect my very imperfect garden. It's one thing to look at your garden yourself and come up with your own long list of problems. It's quite another to have someone come in with the veil of authority, survey your lovingly if erratically tended plot, and see only the disorders and disasters.

We all want to have a beautiful garden. And experts can be very useful--on a problem by problem basis. But I think it's best to see the big picture through our own eyes. Deep down, I know there's nothing wrong with my garden that a ton of compost, several hundred dollars worth of new plants, and a jackhammer couldn't fix. But to get that prescription from some so-called expert would be devastating. Who needs it?

Like Garchik, I think sometimes you need to ignore the experts and just keep gardening.

The Winter Storm Beat-Down

A quick tour of the back yard between storms yesterday afternoon indicated that I'm going to need to do some clean-up of the not-so-lovely effects of all the wind and rain we've been having. The Kangaroo Apple in the back corner, now about 7 feet high or so, is leaning ominously, but fortunately it's leaning away from the fence rather than into it. I'm going to have to cut it back severely as soon as the rain lets up, and I'd be more upset about that if it weren't for the fact that I recently decided to get rid of it altogether. The potted dwarf cherry tree, which is awaiting transplanting into the ground, has managed to stay erect, but most of the smaller plants really took a pounding and seem a little woozy. There's a lot of debris around, including a large piece of trim that blew off of my carport (although I can't figure out from where!), and the only things that seem really happy about so much rain are the weeds. They are having one hell of a party out there!

The 100-Foot Diet Challenge

The good folks at Path to Freedom have launched a fun challenge to anyone who wants to participate. They are calling it the 100-Foot Diet Challenge and the premise is pretty simple: the challenge is to eat at least one meal a week from your own garden.

There has been a lot of talk in the media about the 100-mile diet concept and I've read two books recently about the experiences of some intrepid locavores (Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver, and Plenty by Alisa Smith and J.B. MacKinnon). The 100-foot diet seems to me both simpler and more complex. Simpler because the minimum challenge is just one meal a week. More complex because, in my garden at least, the pickin's are currently slim.

I thought at first that I wouldn't be able to start this challenge for at least a few weeks, until I could get a crop of salad greens going. Then I remembered that I had at least one ingredient already harvested: six small pumpkins that I picked in November and early December were still sitting on my buffet in the dining room. And a walk around the garden this afternoon in between rainstorms brought up another few options, although none of them were looking particularly yummy. I planted some broccoli rabe this fall, but the plants came out spindly and they bolted quickly. I'd be lucky to get a handful out of it that was edible. There was also some kale and some nasturtium leaves that could be used for a salad. I also remembered that I'd harvested a small amount of garlic a few months ago and still had some on hand. Giving my weedy garden one last scan, I realized there was plenty of another edible that I hadn't actually planted--dandelions. Not a feast, to be sure, but enough.

So here was Meal #1 for my 100-Foot Diet Challenge: roasted pumpkin, and rabe and dandelion greens sauteed in garlic and olive oil, followed by roasted pumpkin seeds for a snack. The only purchased ingredients were salt, pepper, and olive oil, and the olive oil was locally produced in the Livermore Valley. The meal was actually pretty tasty, although I wish the broccoli rabe had been a more successful crop--it was delicious but there was only a little bit of it.

I'm feeling inspired now to get more cool vegetable crops going. I have a couple packs of mesclun and spinach seeds to sow, and I may have another go at rabe. I'll have to figure out what else I can start this early.

Whether or not you want to participate in the 100-Foot Diet Challenge, check out the Path to Freedom website. I think they're very inspiring.

Happy New Year

When I said in my last post that I was very behind, I wasn't kidding and things didn't improve all through December. Once Christmas was over with, I kind of hibernated for a week and did almost nothing but nurse a sore back and read. Now I'm ready to get back into the garden, but one hell of a storm has just blown into the bay area and we're expected to get about 3 inches of rain over the next 24 hours. The winds are pretty fierce as well and I expect that I'll have a lot of clean-up to do in the yard when the weather clears. Or maybe the mess will all have blown somewhere else--I'll have to wait and see.

So while I can't be gardening right now, I am thinking about the garden--mostly about what I was able to accomplish last year and what I wasn't, and what I'd like to get done this year.

I did do a major overhaul of the front yard in 2007, getting rid of the lawn and replacing it with three dwarf citrus trees and lots of drought-tolerant plants (details to come soon in a separate post). I successfully grafted two apple trees that will be espaliered against a fence in the back yard. And I learned a lot about propagation--all kinds of propagation.

For this year, I will still need to develop the front yard after I see how things look when they fill in in the spring. I hope to fill in a lot more in the back yard, especially since I moved some plants from the back to the front yard, leaving some conspicuous holes in the back. I'd like to develop more structure in the back and also plant more edibles. I plan to replace the volunteer Kangaroo Apple and its very messy berries, which are edible but not exactly desirable, with some kind of dwarf fruit tree--maybe a plum. I want to expand my fledgling collection of fuchsias on the back deck and try cross-breeding some of them. I'd like to figure out some kind of watering system for the back yard that I can actually afford. And I hope to spend more time sitting back and enjoying my garden this year, not just working it.

So happy new year to all. Here's hoping 2008 is an excellent year in and out of the garden.

I Am So Behind

The last couple months have been so busy with work that in spite of my best intentions (and a long list of topics to write about), I hardly posted here at all. When I wasn't working I was feeling either the pressure or the temptation (depending on my mood) to spend my time actually gardening rather than blogging about gardening. But I seem to have a break in the action over the next few days before more work comes in and I hope to use that time to get some posts done that have been simmering quietly in the dark recess of my mind (you know, like compost). So here are some highlights of a few of the posts that should appear here in the coming week:

• A couple book reviews, plus a round-up of some garden books that I've either recently come across or that have really proved their worth--just in case you have any gardeners on your Christmas list.
• A DVD review.
• A report on the International Plant Propagators conference I attended last month in Salem, Oregon.
• Some notes on how the vegetable harvest has been going in my garden.
• A long overdue post on the almost year-long effort I've been making to re-landscape my front yard.
• Some other miscellaneous ramblings about what's going on in the back yard.

The real posting begins tomorrow. Stay tuned.

Michael Pollan on the Farm Bill

Don't miss Michael Pollan's great op-ed piece in the New York Times on the Farm Bill coming before the Senate. Pollan is better at anyone else at sorting out how American agriculture has gotten so screwed up and how it might, just possibly, be fixed.