The Urban Farmer's Almanac

A couple of years ago Dan’s parent gave us some cuttings from their grape vines.  Let me start by saying these grapes are amazing.  They are small champagne grapes and are so sweet and delicious with a flavor like none I’ve found at the store.  They are perfect for kids to watch grow and eat – even our littlest one.  The first year the cuttings were literally just sticks in the ground.  The following year they had grown enough to call it a vine and had sprouted leaves.  Last year I think we may have gotten a couple of grapes even, but this year is the year they really began to bear fruit.

I would love to experiment with grape juice and jelly and I know Dan would love to try his hand at wine, but they get eaten up so quickly there is never enough to preserve.  Our littlest one (who is almost one) does not crawl yet, but scoots around on his bottom.  Whenever he sees someone come in with grapes in their hand goes crazy and scoots over faster than I would think is possible.  We dried one clump in the dehydrator just to see what these taste like as raisins and to be honest I think they lose too much flavor that way.  They are definitely preferable fresh.

The bummer about these vines is that our long term plan for the garden includes a replacement retaining wall and new (non-chain link) fence.  This winter we may try to remove the vines from the fence and create an  arbor that they can live on permanently.

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Robbie and I were out picking raspberries today and he said, “These plants are dead, dad,” referring to the potato buckets we planted earlier this year. He was right. What was lush green leaves a month or two ago had faded to a couple yellowed branches. The dirt looked pretty dry, too. Things on the side of the house don’t get watered much.

I decided to see how the potatoes did this year. The design of the planter makes it really easy to harvest – since they’re sections of a garbage can, you just pull the container up and sift through the dirt pile for treasures. It’s pretty amazing that I was able to plant some mushy, terrifying looking potatoes from the drawer and get these as a result. The harvest was relatively modest but it will be fun to fry up some potatoes for dinner tonight.

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Our strawberry patch is doing MUCH better this year, having been hooked up to the main watering system.  Even with this improvement though there is no way we can grow enough strawberries for the jam we need for the coming year.  Luckily we are close enough to local u-pick fields to make acquiring strawberries not too difficult.  This year Hannah and I went to Harvold farms in Carnation, WA.  This is a no-frills farm that charges $1 a pound.  I was hoping to get 20 pounds, but my co-picker’s steam ran out pretty quickly so I settled for 13.

With this I managed to make 6 batches (30 cups) of Dan’s favorite freezer strawberry jam.  We actually had enough berries for a couple more batches, but we don’t want to run out of freezer space this early in the season.  Besides if we can’t make 30 cups last a year we may need to take our jam consumption down a notch. We’ve already enjoyed crepes with jam for breakfast today and now have plenty to last us a year, plus a gallon of frozen berries and a 4th of July strawberry shortcake to boot.

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I’ve found lettuce and greens to be one of the best crops for beginning gardeners.  It has a quick growing cycle, is not too fussy and its easy to know what to do with it once it comes in. We’ve been enjoying daily salads even though much of the rest of our garden is still getting established. Even our kids can recognize that fresh young lettuce from the garden tastes great.

This Sunday in the paper I was reminded of another reason why its great to grow your own greens – food poisoning.  The recent outbreak of e coli in Europe is just scary – people are dying because they ate a salad.  This article reminded me that every bite of raw food I eat is an act of confidence in the whole food system that brought it to my plate.  But I don’t trust the system.  I know that contamination happens.  Sprouts were mentioned in the article as particularly worrisome and I was happily reminded that my sprouts are safe from this kind of contamination as is my lettuce.  Certainly the food systems that create these kind of issues needs to be fixed (although don’t ask me how – I am just a humble urban gardener) it is nice to know there is a way to avoid this to some extent at least.  Its great to enjoy fresh produce from our garden for many, many reasons but this one was a new reason why I am happy to have a garden.

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Last year was the first time I went morel mushroom hunting, and Jared and I did OK for a first try. Over Memorial Day weekend this year, I decided to head out east to a clearcut off 97 between Cle Elum and Leavenworth (which is as close as you’ll get from me, unless you’re a blood relation, in which case I might tell you which Green Trails map it’s on. And this is for a pretty mediocre patch).

With 2 kids in tow, I was only hoping to find a few and leave it at that. Which is exactly what happened. I found exactly 15 morels. Which I was pretty happy with. The sausage leek mushroom pie was delicious, but maybe not worth all the time and gas it took to track them down.

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