Shamefully, I’ve never thought about any people who might be living nearby, or about whether there was anything more to Kettleman City.

Kettleman City proper is about two miles north of the freeway exit. About 1500 people live within the Kettleman City area (it doesn’t have city limits; it’s just a census-designated place). According to the 2000 census, over 90 percent of the residents are Hispanic/Latino, and speak Spanish at home.  Median household income in 2000 was $22,409.

Some residents work in the businesses at the freeway stop. More than half are farm workers. There’s also a Waste Management faciility nearby, and it’s not just a garbage dump — it’s a hazardous waste facility.

Why am I finding out about this now? I read an article today from Mother Jones Journal: What’s Killing the Babies of Kettleman City?

Yep. “Of 25 births over a 14-month period, five babies were born with cleft palates and other serious birth defects. Three of the five babies died.”  20 percent of the babies born in that time period were born with serious birth defects.

There are between 30 and 64 births each year in Kettleman City. In 15 of the 22 years since California’s public health department began tracking birth defects, all babies in the town were healthy, and in five other years, only one birth defect occurred. But in the last two years and 10 months, residents say, at least 11 babies have been born with serious birth defects.

There are a number of possible contributing causes: chemically-contaminated well water, diesel fumes and automobile exhaust from the freeway, chemicals from the hazardous waste dump, poverty, poor nutrition, and lack of health care.

One additional source of contamination caught my eye: pesticides used on farm fields.

More than half of Kettleman City’s labor force consists of farmworkers who are routinely exposed to toxic pesticides, and residents can smell the chemicals sprayed on the fields that border the town on three sides.

This reminded me of an often-forgotten reason for buying organic. It’s not just to protect ourselves and our children from those chemicals, it’s to protect the farm workers as well.  When I’m at the grocery store, wondering whether I really need to pay twice as much for local and/or organic tomatoes, I often don’t consider the human cost of the cheaper produce.  Am I getting tomatoes at 99 cents per pound or 59 cents per can because somebody’s husband, wife, brother, or sister picked them from a pesticide-contaminated field?

Once again, this makes a good case for knowing where your food comes from. Ask the farmer at the farmer’s market about pesticide use on his or her farm. Or buy the organic, so that you know the grower has followed certain standards.

I’ve got these tomato plants outside still, so obviously we know where our tomatoes are coming from right now. Cooking with and eating the fresh tomatoes has been great, but it doesn’t look like we’ll have enough for canning. If we rely on canned tomatoes from the store, I’ll have to either buy organic (expensive) or use cheap ones that may have come from contaminated fields. And then there’s the whole BPA issue with canned tomatoes. The commercial cans are lined with bisphenol-A, which is even more likely to leach into tomatoes because of their acidity.

So what I’d like to do is buy tomatoes to can, or get some pick-your-own tomatoes. Labor-intensive, but I think it will be worth it.

We’re now getting a handful of cherry tomatoes every day. But the really exciting news is that the canning tomatoes are starting to ripen! They’re just beginning to turn yellow.

These are Heinz 2653, specially bred for canning. I have frozen tomatoes before, but have never canned them, so I’m looking forward to it.

Post created on my Motorola Cliq.

Let’s take a look at the back, then, shall we? The previous residents had a swing set in the back yard. They took the swing set and left a large sandy area. I built a four by four square raised bed a few years ago, and tried square foot gardening, but I never got around to putting anything else back there. The square foot garden and the sand eventually become overgrown with weeds.

Earlier this summer, I cleared out the weeds. A neighbor gave us some strawberry plants, which we put into the old square foot garden. I would have liked to get a truckload of soil and/or compost to fill in the rest of the sandy area for gardening, but that wasn’t in the budget.

Then, I heard about this book in a Mother Earth News newsletter: Starter Vegetable Gardens: 24 No-Fail Plans for Small Organic Gardens. I found it in the library catalog and placed a hold. It came in fairly quickly, and I immediately skimmed through it. The Easy-Care Bag Garden especially caught my eye. For this garden, you start by buying several bags of soil, cutting them open, and planting directly into the bags. No truckloads of soil, digging, tilling, etc. (here is an article by the same author which details a similar plan)

The garden plan in the book calls for eleven 40-pound bags (40 lbs=1 cu. ft.) of soil to start with. I decided to start smaller — I got two double-size bags instead. I also got several bags of medium bark to make paths. We already had weed cloth to go under the paths.

I started by laying weed cloth directly on top of the sand. The sand has gotten pretty well packed down over the years, so it doesn’t shift too much any more. I put rocks along the edge to hold the weed cloth down and to provide a barrier to keep the bark inside the paths. Then I filled in the path areas with bark mulch.

I put my two bags of soil just across the path from the strawberry bed, end to end. I poked several holes in the underside of each bag for drainage, and then cut the top side open for planting. If you try this, don’t cut too much! You have to leave enough bag there to hold in the soil.

I decided to plant peas, lettuce and kale, all of which are good fall crops. Yes, it’s still summer. You have to start fall crops in the summer, or they won’t mature before the first frost.

I put a makeshift trellis in one bag for the peas. It’s just some old bamboo sticks lashed together with some twine woven between them. The peas are bush peas, so they won’t climb too much, but they do need a little support.

Then I planted — a row of pea seeds along each side of the trellis, and then in the other bag, four short rows of lettuce and kale.

I do water these more often, as if they were container plants. The soil dries out faster because it’s aboveground. But they’re growing just fine; in fact, the peas are doing better than they did in the front yard.

I also started a compost area next to the bag beds. I’m following a method learned from my friend Dan — it’s almost-sheet-composting. We dig a shallow, one-foot-deep pit each day, put the day’s food scraps in it (just fruit and veg scraps, eggshells, coffee grounds), chop them up a bit, and bury them while simultaneously digging the next day’s hole. The scraps apparently decompose within a couple of weeks (I dug up the first hole, and all I found was a bit of onion skin with a sticker on it). In Dan’s yard, they also attract a large number of worms, but I’m sure that will take a while for us. We’re also mixing the sand with the soil underneath as we do this, and gradually building up the soil for next year.

There’s more open space to fill up next year, too — this is only about half the space I really wanted to use. The only problem is that planting more space means more time spent caring for the garden!

The garden is finally bursting forth! The tomatoes are fruiting and outgrowing their cages. The zucchini are finally getting bigger than 4-5 inches. The bean plants are growing new sets of leaves.

I dug a few carrots for dinner tonight. I didn’t realize digging carrots would be so hard! The soil around them has gotten pretty well compacted, so they didn’t want to come out. Next time, I’m making sure they’re in nice, loose soil.

I’ve decided that yes, I am going to match Shetha’s five car-free days, even though she didn’t ask me to. That will take me through Wednesday, August 4 (11 days total).

I’m still not matching Family on Bikes’s eight months. But I am pondering why I can’t or won’t, and will write about that later, maybe at the end of the challenge.

But of course they’re absolutely right. If I want fresh veggies in fall and maybe winter (I’m not too sure about this winter business), I have to start the seeds early.

And I never did plant broccoli this year, so maybe that would be a good thing to try. Hmmmm….

Thank you to Cooking Up a Story — a great resource for people interested in food!

But now the tomato plants are doing well, although there’s still no fruit.

And we should be eating zucchini within a day or two.

The carrots and green onions are finally getting big enough to eat. I put in some Walla Walla onion starts, too. Our neighbor had too many, so she gave me a bunch. I planted some individually, which will hopefully turn into real Walla Walla onions. We’re just using the tops of the rest.

We also harvested all of the remaining lettuce! We’ve been taking leaves as needed, but with hot weather here I decided to just pull the rest before it bolted.  There was at least four or five gallons of lettuce, so we gave some to neighbors. I’ll be replanting the lettuce area with carrots and bush beans.

The fava beans and peas are now gone, too.  I harvested three big bowls of fava beans before pulling the plants…which came out to about two cups once they were shelled. The favas did make a good cover crop; they do keep out the weeds, and supposedly they put nitrogen in the soil too. But it wasn’t a very efficient method of growing food.  The peas didn’t do very well, probably because of the weather, but we did eat fresh peas with a couple of meals.

The strawberries are about done, so I don’t have anything to preserve at the moment, but I did buy a water bath canning kettle for later. I did the strawberry jam in my big stock pot, which worked fine, but it doesn’t hold many jars and doesn’t have a proper rack. So now we have a kettle for doing applesauce and tomatoes when the time comes.  I’m thinking about peaches and blueberries, too.

In my last garden update, I didn’t have specific gardening goals. I’ve decided on a couple over time. My current goals are to grow enough tomatoes both for eating and canning, and to have enough enough zucchini to eat at least twice a week.  I now have four tomato plants intended for canning (Heinz 2653 variety) and four intended for eating (with the option to can), and the zucchini plants, as you saw, are beginning to produce.  If I don’t end up with enough tomatoes, I’ll buy some, possibly via pick-your-own.

How is your garden coming along? Is it coming along? I know we’re not the only ones with weird weather.

So here are the peas. I planted them AGES ago, at the end of February, but they’ve been very slow to grow, and some of them never came up at all. The seeds are a couple of years old, so that’s not surprising. We put more seeds into the blank spaces this past weekend, even though it’s late. The plants are still so small, maybe they’ll be able to catch up!

Next are the fava beans, planted at the same time as the peas.  They’re over 2 feet tall and flowering, so hopefully we’ll have beans soon! The original idea was to plant tomatoes here after the favas were done, but I don’t know whether the timing will be quite right.

Here we have a few carrots at the front, baby onions right next to them, and then all the lettuce behind that.  This past weekend, we put in more carrot seeds and lettuce seeds, and today I thinned the lettuces and brought some young lettuces in for eating.  There’s plenty more in the bed, too, so we’ll be eating salads now!

You’ll notice, also, that about one-third of this bed is overrun with weeds.  I’d cleared out the entire bed, but didn’t get the whole thing planted, so the weeds took over. I’m clearing out and replanting one section at a time, because if I waited until I had the whole thing cleared, I’d never plant anything.

I thought raised beds were supposed to help prevent weed growth, but grass grows everywhere around here if you don’t keep pulling it out and/or killing it. It’s a menace.

Finally, I’ve just put in one lonely tomato plant. I’m planning to grow more; this is just one that someone happened to give me.  I created this bed from a dirt/gravel area next to the raised bed, which was starting to become overgrown with the above menace, grass. I broke up the dirt, pulling out the bigger clumps of grass, and then dumped a bag of compost over it and spread it out.  I made three hills, dampening the compost to make it hold its shape, and then dumped a bag of bark mulch on the bed and spread it around the hills.

The other two hills are for zucchini. My kids like zucchini.

Now, where is all this leading? I know I want my garden to be more productive this year, and I want to really be eating from it, but I haven’t set a measurable goal. Any ideas? What’s your goal for your garden?

Then, this past week I saw a suggestion from the local Master Gardeners’ twitter account:

Cover crop that feeds nitrogen to your soil? Plant fava beans now for spring eats, plant tomatoes when they’re done. Bam! Bam!

That sounded good. I Googled “how to grow fava beans” and found Harvest to Table, which told me that fava beans are a perfect cool-weather crop.  The site also told me how to plant and grow the beans, how many to plant per person in the family, and that they can be eaten fresh or can be frozen, canned or dried. I already knew that fava beans could be used to make both hummus and falafel, which are favorites of mine.

I didn’t, however, click the link for how to prepare and cook broad beans and fava beans. It didn’t worry me. I’ve cooked beans before.  So we planted them on Saturday. But on Sunday, my sister asked me “Have you ever actually cooked fava beans before?”

“Um, no,” I answered. “What?”

“Aren’t those the ones you have to shell twice?” my mother interjected cheerfully.

“Yes,” Wendy answered, explaining that while you’re supposed to be able to just eat them unshelled when they’re young, with mature fava beans “you have to shell them and then cook them and then shell each one individually.”

Uh oh.  We didn’t say any more about fava beans.  I looked it up later on Harvest to Table, and it’s true. Mature fava beans have to be removed from the outer pod, just like shelling peas, but then you have to cook them and “skin” them before eating.

That will be time-consuming. Perhaps we can just pre-cook them all and have a skinning party!

I’m still pleased to be gardening again.  And it’s not just fava beans. We’ve got an 8 X 8 raised bed (it’s the one that had pumpkins last year), and this time I’ve divided it down the middle with a small footpath, and then into squares à la Square Foot Gardening with twine.  My youngest helped me set up the squares; she handed me nails and cut the twine with scissors.

One row of squares is all fava beans, planted four seeds to a square.  There’s also a square each of carrots, lettuce and scallions. We planted these with some old-ish seeds to see if the seeds are still good. If they are, we’ll plant more (and if they’re not, we’ll open a less old-ish packet).  And we planted peas along the wire trellis.

In addition, the daffodils are blooming! I don’t do flowers in a big way, but I do like to have something blooming, and the daffodils are super-easy (as in, I do nothing whatsoever with them except deadheading).

I know some of you probably live in the land of still-frozen ground (I’m in zone 8, by the way), but is anyone else planting or starting seeds now?

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Photo credit:  http://www.flickr.com/photos/foodista/ / CC BY 2.0