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.

I did, however, get up early and work in the garden, so I guess I wasn’t entirely lazy.  The garden is still stuck in a holding pattern. The beans I planted (bush and pole varieties) are still young. The tomato plants are finally starting to fruit, but not very much, and we haven’t had a single red one yet. Or yellow. One of the plants is supposed to have yellow tomatoes.

Even the zucchini isn’t really doing much this year. Usually we’re overwhelmed with squash. Now I’m lucky to get two or three little ones (4-5 inches long) for dinner.

After lots of weeding, I settled down and got caught up on Google Reader items, which is my version of reading the Sunday paper. And then after lunch I read my book (a Beatles biography) and took a nap!

So, no real challenges today — but I did notice that we’re running low on toilet paper and milk, so I’m planning an Xtracycle trip to the store in the morning.

Can you go car-free for one day? I’m doing FIVE days right now; sign up for one car-free day and I’ll match it by adding one more day to my time.

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?

1. Decluttering the house. We have too much stuff. We’re going to do the Clean Sweep routine and pull everything out onto the lawn to decide what to keep, toss or sell.  We won’t be redecorating, just decluttering and cleaning, one room at a time.  If we don’t get them all done, that’s OK.
2. Clearing garden space. We have a big, weedy, sandy patch in our back yard. We need to clear out the weeds and either get some soil in there or put in more raised beds and some bark dust.  Well, we might be able to at least clear out the weeds. I have a new, organic,  non-toxic spray that seems to work.
3. Planting. We planted some veggies already, and they’ve sprouted a bit. The peas and lettuce are doing well. The fava beans, carrots and green onions only have a few sprouts each. We’ve also got more space in that bed to plant, so we can start more veggie seeds for later.  We could also start some herbs in pots.
4. Reading books. We all love to read. I’m sure we can make time for that. We’ll probably visit the library at least once, too.
5. Watching movies. My husband apparently intends to watch a movie every night. This probably means non-kid-friendly movies.
6. Visiting with friends. I have plans to spend time with friends in town and with some coming from out of town.
7. Playing outside. It should be nice for at least part of the break. Our middle daughter just started playing softball, and we need to get out and throw the ball around with her and the other kids.

Eek! It does start to sound like a lot. I do have ideas for how to handle it, though.

1. If we don’t finish everything, it’s OK.  If we only get two rooms decluttered, and if all we do in the backyard is spray weed-killer, that’s OK.
2. Don’t expect kids to work all day, even with the promise of a reward. Set a reasonable amount of time or a reasonable number of tasks for them to complete.
3. Balance work time and fun time; schedule a bit of both each day or alternate days. And don’t forget that work can be fun.

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

Back in May, I hadn’t planted anything but a few containers: tomatoes, lettuce, basil, parsley. We’d been thinking of moving, plus I just hadn’t had time to plant the plot we’d used last year.

Suddenly, wooden markers appeared around my garden plot. They were marked “driveway.”

You see, our house has two in-law-style apartments attached to it, and they’re occupied by the landlord’s young adult daughters. They’re great neighbors, but they do each have a car, so their dad had decided to put in an extra driveway – right on top of my garden plot. To be fair, I obviously wasn’t using it.

Within a few weeks, we had a brand-new gravel driveway and a new raised-bed garden plot. Our landlord had kindly built a frame and moved the garden soil into it.

Before I could plant anything, however, it began sprouting squash plants.

“Okay,” I thought. “That must be from the zucchini I never harvested last year.”  A tomato plant sprang up, too; obviously from the tomatoes I’d let fall!

The squash plants grew bigger, but no flower or fruits appeared. I was worried, and asked for advice on Twitter. @jeanannvk suggested a dose of fertilizer and a few more days. I sprinkled fertilizer, watered well, and

waited. Sure enough, the first blossoms appeared!

I waited hopefully for fruit, looking forward to a large zucchini harvest, and possibly some zucchini-canning.

Well, the fruits are appearing, and they’re PUMPKINS!  I didn’t know that the landlord had also added the contents of our shared compost bin to the raised bed.  The compost bin had had the remains of our Halloween pumpkin in it, and the seeds hadn’t decomposed.

I keep looking for zucchini, but I haven’t seen anything that even looks like a hybrid. Fortunately, we are still able to enjoy excellent zucchini from our local farmers’ market.  And the kids, of course, are delighted with the pumpkins.

But gardening is part of our family’s food plan, and should be a big part of our society’s food plan.  Some people are calling for the return of the Victory Garden.  Whatever you call it, we need it.

One question often asked is “Is it worth it?”  After all, you can spend a lot of money gardening, not even taking your time into account.  Seeds, tools, raised beds, soil amendments, plant starts, and fertilizer can all cost money.  But really, many of these can be one time or once in a while expenses.  Once you get started, you can save your own seeds, make your own compost, and start your own seedlings in late winter.

And then you’ll spend time digging, planting, weeding, watering, and harvesting.  If you compare it all with grocery store prices, you may decide it’s not worth it.

But what if we value our home-grown and home-preserved food differently?  Here’s what Rick Saenz of Dry Creek Chronicles has to say:

If by that question I mean, “Was it cost effective?”, then the answer is No. Just no. I can buy one hundred eighty quarts of canned tomatoes at Sam’s for about one hundred and eighty dollars, and it would have been much easier and quicker to earn one hundred and eighty dollars than to can those tomatoes.

Oops.  That doesn’t sound very frugal in “time is money” terms.

Many people say that it’s worth it because the food is healthier.  You get better nutrition and fewer pesticides (assuming you garden organically).  You know what you’re feeding your household, because you grew it.  It’s also worth it as a personal achievement.  It feels good to produce something, and to be more self sufficient.

Saenz says it’s more than this.  He says that we need to move from a cash-based economy, where time is money, and we have to earn cash to pay for the things we need, to a subsistence-based economy, in which we can produce the things we need ourselves, either as a family or as a community.

That sounds like a viable future to me.

Even if we can’t grow everything we need at our own house, we can still find ways to be independent of cash.  Maybe I can’t have chickens, but I could grow some broccoli and trade for eggs.  Or maybe I could do some sewing in exchange.  I could even barter copy-writing for things that we need.

Some people don’t have land for growing food.  Community gardens and bartering can help with this, but apartment and condo-dwellers could also make arrangements to share someone else’s land — perhaps planting a garden in someone’s backyard, and in exchange, giving the homeowner a share of the produce (people in the UK are already doing this).

Once again, it’s all about getting local.  What can you do in your community to help these things happen?

No Impact Man wrote about “The Tom Sawyer Approach to Saving the World.”

To change people’s values, so the shrinks say, you change their behavior. You don’t barrage them with ideas and cause information overload. You don’t tell them their existing values are wrong and get their backs up.

What you do is you get them to change their behavior and, once you’ve done that, you let their ideas and values change all by themselves. “What a great idea we’ve come up with,” they’ll say.

Basically, you get them to join you in doing something, and then once they start doing it, they realize the value of it.  So, can you invite someone to join you on a food adventure?  Maybe you could invite just one person to share a meal with you, made from your own garden produce.  And maybe that would evolve into a weekly or monthly shared meal.  And maybe you could give them some of your started plants for their own garden.

And maybe later, you could each invite someone else to join you.  You might even end up with a co-op in your neighborhood!

What can you do?

From the Oregonian:  Sure, you want it, but do you need it? This article profiles several households living simply and buying less — and still sounding like they have great lives.

Renee from Enviromom is making the move to growing food in the front yard!  They’re actually converting part of the lawn for this purpose.

Colin Beavan, AKA No Impact Man, is planning to expand his blog to include other writers.  He’s looking for writers who are “interested in individual and societal approaches to improving our lives and our habitat through novel ideas in the management of trash and materials, food production, transportation and land use, consumption, spiritual and humanist approaches to environmentalism, water use, energy production and efficiency, and offline and virtual activism.”

Crunchy Chicken is starting a new Freeze Yer Buns Challenge for 2008.  Participants are challenged to turn the thermostat down, or to use less fuel to heat their homes.  The Chicken herself is planning to set the thermostat for only 62 during the day and 55 at night.  How low can you go?  I’m not having much luck with this so far.  My husband cannot deal with keeping the thermostat down, and insists it really doesn’t matter.  We do have programmable thermostats, though, so I can at least make sure he doesn’t leave the heat on all day when no one’s here.

If you’re a bus rider, you may want to find out more about the PDX Bus iPhone app over at TriMetiquette.