Welcome, People Readers

If you've arrived at this site from People magazine, you probably have an interest in starting a food garden or learning more about how to grow your own food. You may also be wondering what's behind the name "Slow Cook."

I guess you could say I am part of a growing movement in this country that rejects industrialized food in favor of food that is produced more sustainably. That encompasses a lot. It means favoring foods that are grown locally without pesticides and chemical fertilizers and without traveling long distances at the expense of enormous amounts of fossil fuels and carbon emissions. It just so happens that the sustainable foods we prefer--grown in a planet-friendly manner and prepared with loving care--are also tastier and more nutritious. And if you grow them yourself, they're a whole lot cheaper as well.

That makes our approach the opposite of "fast food." And that makes us slow.

Food gardening can be as easy or as difficult as you want to make it. If you are just starting, I suggest you take the easy approach. Don't try to do too much at first. Don't go overboard with many different varieties of things. Stick with the fruits and vegetables your family likes to eat most and learn how to grow those. You can always add things later. Gardening is a never ending learning process, even for people who've been doing it for years. If you have children, you will be creating wonderful memories--and good eating habits--that will last a lifetime.

To get you started, I've assembled links to several other web sites that I think will be helpful. At those sites, you may very well find yet more links. In today's world, gardeners spend quite a lot of time cruising around the internet for ideas and information. We also have a wonderful and vast community of fellow gardeners and cooks to share with. (Who knows? You may end up starting your own blog to memorialize your gardening efforts.) And do feel free to cruise around this website and use the search feature.

If you don't have your own yard to garden in, don't despair. You can grow many things in pots even on an apartment balcony. Perhaps there is a community garden in your area, or maybe you would like to start one. Check with your local parks and recreation authority. With more and more people seeking to join community gardens there are often waiting lists. Some erstwhile gardeners are seeking out vacant lots. Others are enlisting the back yards of neighbors to form communal arrangements. And there is a growing movement to establish gardens in schools, where we can connect kids to nature and teach them the benefits of growing our own food.

You might begin by watching this series of short film clips on how to start a garden. Some other good internet sources include Kitchen Gardeners International, Revive the Victory Garden and Vegetable Gardener. There are also several worthwhile gardening forums at Garden Web where you can pose questions to other gardeners who are only to glad to help.

I've also asked some of my fellow food gardening bloggers to share their thoughts on starting a new garden. Take a look at what Sylvie's doing at Rappahanock Cook & Kitch Gardener, or El at Fast Grow the Weeds, Emily at Eat Close to Home, or Michele at Garden Rant.

There are also many excellent books on the market for gardeners of all levels. In fact, your local librarian may be one of your best sources on the subject. And by all means take a look around your neighborhood for the gardener who quietly grows prize-winning tomatoes. She'll gladly talk your ear off if you introduce yourself. And even if you can't get a plot at the local community garden this year, there's nothing to say you can't hang out there and ask questions.

And for all you established kitchen gardeners and urban farmers and homesteaders with blogs, write up your thoughts on starting a garden and send me an e-mail with a link. I post all the links here for the next week.

Good luck, and happy gardening!

Read more great stories about how were are taking back our food system at Fight Back Fridays.

Watch Slow Cook on Television

This must be the week when the news media wake up to spring and want to interview The Slow Cook in his garden.

We've been interviewed about chickens by WAMU radio, appeared on the Kojo Nnamdi show to talk about food gardening and yesterday we entertained a film crew from FOX News to talk about planting vegetables.

FOX is calling it "recession gardening" and it's supposed to appear today on America's News Channel sometime between 2 and 4 pm, then again at 4:30. That would be one of FOX's cable channels, and unfortunately we no longer take cable (or satellite, in our case). They said channel 32 or 37 here in the Washington area, but who knows if that's correct.

The producer and camerman spent about 45 minutes filming me talking about how easy it is to grow vegetables at home, and how much money you save on grocery bills. They shot me digging into the compost pile and planting potatoes. They even took a shot of our canned goods leftover from last year, and parted with a jar of green tomato mincemeat.

If you do happen to catch a glimpse of it, do let us know. My wife is always concerned that I'm not properly styled....

Don't Wait for a Community Garden Plot!

We don't publish many guest posts here at The Slow Cook (this may be the first). But this story was too good to pass by. Nat West, of Portland, Oregon, got tired of waiting for a community garden plot. So he went to Google's satellite map, located a vacant lot near his home and turned it into his own CSA urban farm.

By Nat West

I live in urban Portland Oregon on an average-sized city lot of 5000 square feet. That's 50 feet by 100 feet. My house takes up almost 1000 square feet, my garage another 750 square feet or so, and an always-shaded driveway about another 500. Throw in a grand old cedar tree on the southern neighbor's property, a nice deck to relax on during summer months, and I find myself happy to have squeezed in about 250 square feet of raised beds.

Now 250 square feet of good dirt produces a heck of a lot of zucchinis, cherry tomatoes, peas and lettuce, provided I plant intensively. But I'm one of the lucky ones because of the orientation of my property, the placement of the house on it, and the surrounding neighbors' structures and trees. Some of the properties on my block could not grow anything more than a few tomatoes in pots, no matter how much grass they gave up.

After a few years of growing on 250 square feet, I decided it was time to expand. I never had the room for voluminous crops like cabbage, winter squash, pumpkins or corn. And I would frequently prune my yellow crookneck squash to a single vine. I've even tried trellising beans, peas and tomatoes, but once I decided to seriously grow food for my family, not just pretty summer fruits, I simply had to expand.

So I did what most urban gardeners do when they find themselves in a similar situation. I found the closest community garden owned by the city and put my name on a waiting list 18 months long.

After mulling it over for a bit, I realized that an "18 month waiting list" is worse than a "twenty minute wait" at a swanky restaurant. The maître d' has no real idea how long it will take to get me seated. She's just guessing that table 22 will get up soon. But unlike eating a meal, gardening never "ends". After all, why would it? There's no forced-eviction after a couple years so everyone gets a chance. You can rent a plot forever, or even sublet it like rent-controlled apartments in New York. The likelihood of getting a plot is even slimmer since, in recent years, many home garden seed suppliers are selling more than they've ever sold before. Those seeds have to go somewhere, and I haven't notice people razing houses and chopping down trees in my neighborhood.

I concluded that I could not wait for a community garden space to open up. I had to find my own garden space.

The first thing I did was to think about my neighbors' yards. Some of my neighbors had patches of relatively unkempt grass. Would they mind if I killed the grass, tilled the dirt and planted vegetables? I would have to share some produce, but they also get out of mowing. And of course I would have to use their water for irrigation. I figured it wouldn't be too hard to put together three or four small parcels, each about the size of my own garden at home.

But as I thought about the daily effort and workload of managing multiple plots, and dealing with multiple people, I realized that it might turn into a lot of work very quickly. What if a neighbor cut me off in mid-season? Or what if a neighbor ate everything, thinking they were entitled? How many sets of hoes, shovels and wheelbarrows would I need to buy? I realized that these issues would have to be dealt with no matter what, but it was in my best interest to have the fewest number of plots as possible. Which meant that I needed to “go big” - find the largest contiguous plots I could.

Other than riding my bike around the neighborhood and keeping my eyes peeled while on walks, I used Google Maps’ satellite view, in high magnification. Starting at my house, I made concentric circles, searching block by block for empty lots or very large back yards. Using this strategy, I was able to quickly identify a number of potential sites that I would not have found had I been searching on foot.

Now that I had a list of nearby large yards and empty lots, I used Portland Maps, an online database of property records. Navigating through the maps, I was able to find the name and address of the owner of each property. The same information could have been found using public records at the county courthouse, but I saved an immense amount of time. In some cases, I also cross-referenced them in the phone book since the address on file with the county is oftentimes not a current address, especially in the case of empty lot owners.

I planned to contact them in person if I could not find the mailing information for a particular lot. I sent an introductory letter to the landowners, explaining who I was, where I lived, and what I wanted to do on their land. I got one response, for a full empty lot directly across the street from my house. 5000 square feet of flat, full-sun dirt, absolutely perfect.

The landowner had recently received a nuisance complaint from the city about the buildup of refuse on the lot. She was elated that I would clean up the lot and turn it into a garden. In exchange for the use of the land, I am providing her with approximately one CSA share of produce for 16 weeks. We drew up an agreement, and she promises to give me as much advance notice as possible should she decide to sell. She also offered me a lot four times the size of this one, about 20 blocks away, which I hope to use next year.

Eventually I came to the realization that my new lot is much better than a community garden plot. I did not have to wait 18 months, or for that matter, 18 years for a small plot. I pay no rent for my 5000 square feet, but I would have to pay rent for a fraction of that size in a community garden. Also, I get to manage crop rotations, soil amending, and pest management holistically.

Community plot gardeners have to either work together or more often than not, grow weaker crops beset by pests because they are surrounded by crops grown using different practices, oftentimes on depleted soils. Working to encourage more collectivism of community gardens would solve some of these problems, but why wait? I’m sure there are usable, empty lots around your neighborhood.

For another ingenious approach, read about Murray Hill Row-by-Row, an urban CSA started by a school teacher in Annapolis, Maryland, who got 22 neighbors to share their back yards to grow food. And for even more stories about how the food system is changing, check out "Fight Back Friday."

Hear Slow Cook on the Radio

The Slow Cook is scheduled to talk about urban food gardening on the Kojo Nnamdi show at 1 p.m. Wednesday, March 25 (tomorrow).

Kojo, a popular host on WAMU radio here in the District of Columbia,is located at 88.5 FM locally. You can also listen to him live on the internet here. The program is usually archived as well within an hour or two of broadcast.

News of Michelle Obama breaking ground for a new garden on the White House lawn has sparked all kinds of interest in food gardening. Here in the District the issue is community gardening and, if you cannot get a spot in a community garden, how to grow food in small spaces. Or how to join back yards with neighbors to form your own CSA. The conversation also needs to include getting local government and business involved to set aside large tracts of land for urban agriculture so that city folk have an affordable and reliable source of local food.

To my mind, the White House garden would be the perfect place to start talking about tax credits and other incentives to promote food gardening and urban agriculture around the country. And to think, the District of Columbia has had a law on the books for more than 20 years calling on the mayor to create an urban gardening program--identify vacant lots for gardening, develop food growing programs for school kids--and nothing has ever been done about it.

Family Gardening

I spent most of my Sunday taking advantage of spring-like weather to work in the garden--preparing beds, mulching and planting seeds. Apparently I gave the impression that this was so much fun that daughter, home from a long bike ride with Mom, came running over to join me. "Where I can I plant my garden, Dad?" she wanted to know.

I sent her inside to fetch the seed packets and she carefully searched through the flowers and decided she would plant Sweet William. So we marked off an area in the soon-to-be bean bed and she did all the work herself--reading the instructions on the seed pack, fluffing the soil, making little holes and planting the seeds. Here she is smoothing everything over. She then ran off to fill the watering can.

Only fellow parents will fully appreciate what a turnaround this is for a child who normally would be impossible to dislodge from her seat in front of the computer. Is this just spring fever? Or could it be we have a junior gardener in the family? Dad would be ever so grateful for an extra pair of hands.

Food Lessons for Hard Times

To hear the economists tell it, times may be getting even worse before they get better. Some people have already been forced to tighten their belts. For others, it's time to think about tightening belts even further. Still, there's a silver lining to these austere developments: Less consumption by us humans is better for the planet. It might even prompt people to start thinking of ways they can consume more wisely and tread lighter in the process.

For those of you looking for ways to eat smarter for less, here are some thoughts accumulated over the last two years writing this blog:

* Eat less. Not only will you pay less for food, your body will reward you with better health. With all the different kinds of diets admonishing you to eat that but don't eat that, we lose sight of the fact that the easiest way to lose weight is to cut back on portion size. The latest studies confirm that it's not carbs or proteins so much as the number of calories we consume that influences our waist lines most. Slimming down and keeping the weight off relieves all kinds of stress on vital organs, prolonging life.

*Stop eating processed and refined foods. There are many reasons to reject food from factories. First, they contain all kinds of chemical additives and industrialized oils that previously were never part of the human diet, such as corn and soybean oil. Processed foods also contain too much sodium, which contributes to high blood pressure. Refined grains raise glycemic levels, a cause of diabetes. Despite these health consequences, corporations such as General Mills and Pepsi think of all kinds of ways to persuade you buy their products because the extra money you pay for them earns profits for their shareholders.

* Buy from the bulk section. The previously mentioned processed foods all come in packaging, much of it plastic made from petroleum, that just ends up in the landfill. Even if you recycle paper and cardboard packaging it's still more environmentally friendly to purchase foods that don't have any packaging at all. And you pay extra for the packaging. These are all good reasons to buy your foods from the bulk section whenever possible. If your local store doesn't have a bulk section, talk to the manager and urge her to start one.

* Buy whole foods whenever possible. Unfortunately, the federal government does not subsidize the growing of healthy fruits and vegetables the way it subsidizes the growing of corn and soybeans. That means the most nutritious food at the grocery store is the most expensive, while the foods that are most harmful are the cheapest. Still, the best source of nutrition is food that has not been adulterated in any way, the stuff you find in the produce section. Potatoes and sweet potatoes, broccoli and cabbage, carrots and parsnips--they are all loaded with good nutrition. So are whole grains of all kinds and dried beans. If you can afford it, start buying your produce from the local farmers market. Not only will you know exactly where your food is coming from, you will be helping to support your local agricultural economy, not some giant agribusiness a thousand miles away.

* Eat less protein from animals. Our bodies must have protein, but we've grown too accustomed to getting it from beef cows and pigs and chickens. Feeding these animals in order to deliver them to your dinner plate is expensive and it has environmental consequences. Most animals for consumption are now raised on huge feedlots that produce tons of pollution that ends up in our waters and in our air. They and all the fuels used to feed and transport them contribute mightily to global warming. Try getting more of your protein from eggs--especially the kind produced on pastures instead of giant hen houses. Eggs are still a nutritional bargain, even when they're $4.75 a dozen at the farmers market. Also work more dried beans and whole grains into your diet. Together they make a complete protein and they are much cheaper than meat. The next step up would be chicken. Chickens (look for "pasture raised") are much more efficient producers of protein than cows or pigs.

* Stop buying wild-caught fish. Have you checked the price of tuna or swordfish lately? Prices have gone through the roof because there are fewer and fewer fish to be caught. Humans are rapidly destroying the oceans. If you must buy wild-caught fish, check first with a reputable rating agency such as the Monterey Bay Aquarium's "Seafood Watch program to make sure you are buying only fish that has been sustainably harvested. Otherwise, look for fish raised on farms in the U.S., such as catfish, tilapia, striped bass or shrimp. These have the further advantage of being cheaper than most wild-caught fish. Another excellent protein source is farmed shell fish such as clams, oyster and mussels. For my money, farmed mussels are a great seafood bargain. Just make sure they carry a U.S. or Canada label. If you are pregnant, breast feeding or otherwise concerned about having enough Omega 3 in your diet, be assured that there are other sources besides fish.

* Stop drinking bottled water. Bottled water is outrageously expensive and Americans throw away something on the order of 80 million plastic water bottles every day, to say nothing of all the fuel being used to make the bottles and transport them from factory to store. In most places, ordinary tap water is just as good if not better for you than the bottled variety. If you must drink water out of a bottle, save your last bottle and fill it from the tap.

*Stop drinking soda. Whether it's Coke, Pepsi or Mountain Dew, sodas are loaded with sugar that rots teeth and helps make people (especially children) fat. Americans consume way too much soda. Plus, sodas are a major contributor to our plastic bottle and aluminum can nightmare. Diet sodas are only marginally better, in that you eliminate the sugar. But in the process you consume industrialized chemicals posing as sweeteners. Is it possible we could grow to like water again?

* Don't eat out so much. It may not help your local fast-food restaurant if you start eating more at home. But the fact is food from restaurants and especially fast food joints is not particularly good for you and typically the portions are much bigger than what you need. It just helps put on unhealthy poundage. If you are using whole ingredients and healthy oils such as extra-virgin olive oil or canola oil, just about anything you make at home is bound to be more nutritious and likely cheaper than what you get eating out. Making food at home and sitting down to a meal at the dinner table also teaches valuable lessons to children and helps strengthen the family unit. Get your kids out from in front of the TV and into the kitchen helping you make dinner.

* Start a kitchen garden. You can solve many of your budget and nutritional issues by growing your own food. A package of broccoli seeds costs less than $3 and typically contains 300 hundred or more seeds. That works out to about a penny for every head of broccoli you grow. How does that compare to what you are paying at the store? There is very little in the produce section or at the farmers market that you cannot grow yourself, including all your most expensive favorites: strawberries, blueberries, asparagus, rhubarb, artichokes. There's nothing tricky about growing mounds of your own potatoes or sweet potatoes. Or beans and tomatoes. You can fill your pantry and your freezer with enough food for the whole year. Don't have a yard you can turn into a garden? Join your nearest community garden. And if there isn't a community garden in your area, start one.

Or perhaps you have some other great ideas for shaving the food budget? Feel free to leave a comment....

A Great Big Food Garden Tax Break & Stimulus Package

Warning: The following may contain dangerously subversive thoughts. Young children should probably leave the room....

Although I believe in food gardening, I am also convinced that we will only get so far trying to persuade Americans that there is a healthier way to eat, and that growing your own is a big part of the answer. But I also know there's something else Americans care very much about: money. That's why I am proposing right here and right now a big fat tax break on kitchen gardens that will not only spur our fellow citizens to start digging up their lawns like crazy, but will fit right in with President Obama's economic stimulus efforts by getting everyone busy buying seeds and garden tools.

This proposal has the added benefit of creating a perfect opportunity for the kind of political bi-partisanship that Obama has been yearning for. I am certain that Republicans, who have never seen a tax break they didn't like, will jump at the chance to support one that will provide fresh fruits and vegetables to every man, woman and child in these United States. This is more than a bread and butter issue. This is more than a Mom and apple pie issue. This is a beets and potatoes issue that people of all political stripes can easily sink their teeth into.

Why shouldn't kitchen gardens get a tax break? We give tax breaks for home offices, which encourages workers to stay off the roads. We give tax breaks for mortgage interest, which encourages people to buy homes. We even give tax credits for children, which quite needlessly encourages couples who otherwise would not get along to have more sex. Written as they are into our federal law, these measures are a form of universally accepted social engineering, designed to create healthier, more productive, more satisfying living conditions for our entire society. So I ask you, what could be healthier, more productive, more satisfying than fruits and vegetables we can grow and harvest right outside our door? In fact, we can easily do without a home office, or our own house, or even more children. But we cannot do without food. Living without food would be hard if not nearly impossible. We should be encouraging people to grow more of it.

There is a deeper, more profound reason to use the federal tax code to promote kitchen gardens. As we all know, Congress has been unable to undo the corporate-government love knot that is responsible for so much of the bad food in this country. By that I mean the way our government uses our tax dollars to subsidize the production of a huge glut of corn and soybeans, which then finds its way via a chemical laboratory in New Jersey into nearly everything you see on supermarket shelves. Obesity, diabetes, hypertension, irritability--there's a whole litany of unhealthy repercussions from government-supported agribusiness that we needn't bother to repeat here. Try as it might, Congress hasn't been able to wrap its arms around this problem. So I say let's just put that one to the side. Let's not pull out our hair over it any more. Let's move on and consider tax breaks for healthy alternative foods, the kind you grow in kitchen gardens.

The reason I think our elected representatives in Washington will go for this idea is, first of all, it will get radical food groups off their backs about the cozy relationship they have with agribusiness. Once these tax breaks are passed, Congress can continue to accept those fat contributions from Monsanto and ConAgra and Archer Daniels Midland and nobody will care. That won't be where the action is any more. Everybody in the country will be focused on how to take advantage of the new tax breaks. Secondly, these new tax measures will win wide support because they embody two cherished American values: fairness and competition. Tax breaks for kitchen gardens will help level the playing field where growing food is concerned because up to now all the federal subsidies have been going to corn and soybeans. Nobody subsidizes carrots and broccoli. In fact, nobody even pays to advertise carrots and broccoli the way they do, say, Doritos and Pepsi, two products that just happen to contain a lot of corn. Giving tax breaks to people who grow their own collards and tomatoes will inject a fresh new competitive spirit into the business of producing food. With every family in America growing their own food, we can surely expect agribusiness to respond with a more efficacious high-fructose corn syrup, for instance, even a better tasting fry oil.

This is how it would work: If you are just starting your garden, you will be eligible for a federal tax credit on the land you put into production, up to one acre. I think $1 per square foot is a fair rate, which means that virtually every home owner could probably knock $1,000 right off the top of their tax bill. If you don't pay any federal income taxes, it would mean a $1,000 check from Uncle Sam. Even better, you wouldn't even have to own your own home. You could claim the credit if you rent, even if you are starting a garden on the roof of your apartment building or just planting basil in some window boxes. Starting your new garden will probably also require some tools and a good deal of labor. My plan provides a further tax credit of $500 for the purchase or rental of appropriate garden tools and any help you might have to pay for. The only catch is, you cannot claim tools that use fossil fuels. This conforms with our previously announced scheme to reduce greenhouse gases wherever possible in the gardening realm. Instead, this is what you do: When you go to Home Depot to buy your garden tools, grab a couple of those immigrant guys who are hanging around looking for work and take them home to help dig the garden. You can claim whatever you pay them on your tax credit form, anything within the $500 limit. Just remember to ask for a receipt.

As you might suspect already, this proposal would be a huge stimulus to employment, and not just for the guys hanging around Home Depot. Millions of gardeners will need their soil tested, which will instantly create jobs at state universities and other testing facilities nationwide. There will be a huge demand for shovels and trowels and watering cans: more jobs by the thousands for a nation hungry for employment in the manufacturing sector. Ditto for those factories that create compost and other soil amendments and are now sitting idle. They will be humming with new work. (Note: no deductions for artificial fertilizers or chemical pesticides. This is a sustainable, strictly organic tax program.) And what about seeds? You will certainly need seeds. My plan envisions a $50 credit for seeds, meaning lots of work for seed collectors.

What if you have never gardened before? Won't you need some instruction on how to prepare your garden, what to plant, when to plant it? For that I have a very special feature in mind, something that is sure to take thousands of unemployed horticulturists out of bread lines and put them to work. I call it the "Kitchen Garden Corps," whereby the federal government, as a further stimulus measure, would fund new positions in every single county extension service in the country, people trained and ready to show erstwhile kitchen gardeners how to grow more food and how to cook it for dinner. (And if we need to train the experts first, so much the better. More jobs for trainers.) Additional positions could be created to teach gardening on-line, a boost for the telecommunications and computer industries.

That's all well and good, you are saying to yourself, but what's to prevent cheating? What if somebody digs up their lawn but doesn't plant anything? Do we let garden scofflaws just kick back and collect their checks? I struggled with that one, too. Perhaps we should require some sort of site visit and certification by an extension agent. Or maybe we could require that people claiming the credit provide photos of their garden at appropriate intervals in the growing season. But I think an even better remedy--one that market theorists will like--would be to provide further incentives to grow as much food in the garden as possible, to garden as intensively as soil and local weather conditions permit. Remember what Earl Butz told farmers back in the 70s: "Plant fence row to fence row!" Well, we would be telling home owners to plant from the back of the patio all the way to the wooden fence that separates them from their neighbor on the next street over. The incentive would come in the form of a subsidy check for the produce you grow, very much like the payments the federal government makes to agribusinesses that produce corn that can only be eaten after it's been subjected to a complicated chemical process. You would be paid by the pound for all the organic eggplants and zucchini and butternut squash you grow. But you would need to weigh everything and keep very precise records. The IRS will print a form for this purpose, much like the one you fill out when you are claiming a profit or loss from the sale of your stocks. (The cost of the scale would be tax deductible, of course.)

In subsequent years, the tax credits that helped you start your garden would turn into tax deductions. Hopefully these incentives would be enough to keep you gardening year after year, producing food for your family and possibly even for the fruit and vegetable co-op you form with your neighbors. By then, there will be an enthusiastic response to the idea of further tax breaks for chickens, goats, rabbits and other small, food-producing animals. The entire nation will be healthier and happier, hooked on fresh, local food. That could mean hard times for traditional supermarkets and fast-food restaurants. But surely they will evolve in this competitive new food environment, perhaps even learning to serve healthy foods themselves. Thanks to these new federal tax measures we will be eating most of our food fresh out of the garden, which could lead to much less disease (less demand, hence lower costs, for health care) and much greater longevity (better days for retirement homes and registered nurses).

Which leads me to wonder: Will I still be gardening when I'm 140 years old?

My New Tunnel

I probably neglected to mention that when I came home from a week's vacation in August I found that something had eaten all the seedlings I had started for the fall. Romaine lettuces, cabbages, broccoli, Brussels sprouts, collards. Everything chewed down to the nub. I assume it was birds. I had left the seed trays out front where my wife had been watering them.

Anyway, the sudden demise of my fall seedlings put me in a funk that lasted for at least two months. I didn't do much in the garden. Didn't plant anything. Just recently I started the usual fall cleanup (late) and the new compost pile. I just assumed we wouldn't be planting anything till spring. But then I started a re-read of Eliot Coleman's Four-Season Harvest and experienced a jolt of inspiration when he described a plastic tunnel design he'd come across while traveling in France.


The genius of this French tunnel is the edges aren't buried under the soil in the usual manner, which makes getting into the tunnel very awkward if you need to plant or harvest things. Instead, the plastic is cut at the soil line and held down with a criss-crossing pattern of string over the hoops. Getting inside to plant or harvest is a breeze. You just lift up the plastic and tuck it under the string.

I had the plastic in the garage. I bought some 1/2-inch PVC tubing at the hardware store and planted the hoops. Then I drilled holes and installed these eyelets for the string. Following the illustration in Coleman's book, it still took me a while to figure out the pattern of the string. It's like lacing your shoes--a little.

Here's a detail of the string, crossing over one hoop, then attaching at the bottom of the next hoop. I'm sure I got it wrong, because my pattern ended before I got to the end of the tunnel. Maybe I didn't have enough hoops. I used cinder block to hold the ends down. I'm sure that's not right either.

In any case, according to Coleman the end of November is way too late to be planting anything. "Don't even bother," he admonishes. There's not enough sun to get the seedlings going. But I'm noticing volunteer mustard greens coming up in the other garden beds. Something down there is germinating.

So today I lifted the plastic and planted a whole array of mustards, kales, collards, spinach, arugula, lettuce, tenderleaf greens and other stuff. We'll see what happens. If they don't grow now, I'm betting we'll see them in the spring. As Coleman says, if they can grow these greens in France in winter--actually much farther north than we are--there's plenty of sunlight here for them to grow as well. It's just a matter of protecting them. Not so much from the cold as from the wind.

Minimum soil temperature for brassica germination is said to be 40 degrees, 35 for lettuce and spinach. Stay tuned....

Precision Weeding

Sometimes weeding the vegetable garden can be like pulling teeth--literally.

Weeds are a fact of life for the organic gardener. No one's found a way yet to get rid of them entirely. Sometimes we are a bit careless in the way we make our compost and end up spreading grass seeds around the garden beds. This poses a special problem if, like me, you plant most of your vegetables directly into the ground, rather than starting them in flats elsewhere and transplanting them.

Sometimes the weeds appear in a riot of growth before the vegetables even get a chance to germinate. Or so it seems. In this case, I had planted eggplant seeds in an area that was very quickly taken over by crabgrass. Rather than pull out everything willy-nilly, I got my needlenose pliers to perform some close-in, surgical work.

With the pliers, I can get under the soil surface and take a good grip on the grass stem just above the roots. After a soaking rain, the weeds come out easily. Using the pliers is slow, but that forces me to look closely at everything I am pulling out of the ground. This is much more precise than anything my stubby fingers can do. I'm less likely to destroy my eggplant seedlings.

Yes, this kind of weeding takes patience. But after an hour's work, the entire bed is weed-free. Hopefully, I won't have to do this again any time soon.

Hot on Top

My wife hates to see men with their shirts off.

"Who wants to look at your big, fat, hairy belly?" she grouses.

But when it gets hot, men think nothing of stripping down to their shorts. And not just gardeners. On the running trails all over town, men are huffing and puffing and sweating bare-chested for God and everybody to see. You never hear a peep about it.

Some people eschew gardening altogether because they can't stand the heat. Me, I do most of my summertime gardening very early in the morning. But sometimes you just can't help working outdoors in full sun. Out of deference to my wife, what I do is change shirts frequently. On sunny days, when I'm working up a sweat, it's not unusual to see a long line of my shirts hanging out to dry.

That's okay for guys, it seems. But I've always been curious: what does the female species do to cope with the heat? You rarely see women tearing their tops off to get cool. It hardly seems fare. I hate to think what it must be like under all that clothing. Is this where gardening separates the boys from the girls?

Dark Days: A Buffet for Urban Gardeners

My home is ground zero for our local gardening group, D.C. Urban Gardeners. This is no garden club, but an insurgent conclave committed to greening the District of Columbia.

To entice their attendance at these monthly planning sessions, I lay out some kind of buffet. It gives me a chance to show off the food that comes out of our own urban food garden, about one mile from the White House.

This menu started with sweet potatoes that arrived in last week's CSA box. I added a mix of cooked greens from the CSA and the garden plus some Gorgonzola cheese to make the sweet potato galette I wrote about some weeks back.

Also on the buffet were bowls of our pickled beets and pickled green tomatoes. The green tomatoes are always a sensation. In addition, we still have a surfeit of tomato jam. For that I baked some tall, fluffy buttermilk biscuits.

Finally, to calm the sweet toothes in the crowd, daughter and I made a batch of heart-shaped brownies. We displayed them on a lacy, white ceramic stand, dusted with confectioner's sugar.

We then continued with our insurrection.

Weekend Update

Looks like it will be at least another year before we see any raw milk for sale in Maryland.

State legislators in Annapolis this week gave a thumbs down to unpasteurized milk despite the best lobbying efforts of the Maryland Independent Consumers and Farmers Association. Members of the House of Delegates' Health and Government Operations Committee voted 11-9 against a bill to legalize the sale of raw milk in the state

Supporters of the bill argued that prohibition of raw milk In Maryland merely forces consumers to travel to nearby Pennsylvania, where raw milk sales are legal, and denies Maryland dairy farmers access to the lucrative raw milk market. About two thirds of all states permit some form of raw milk sales at farms, while another eight states allow raw milk to be sold in retail stores.

“In our process of representative government, the officials are elected to enact the will of the people. Sadly, this did not happen this time," Liz Reitzig, president of MICFA said in a statement. "We will continue to work to restore the freedoms of Maryland farmers to engage in direct-to-consumer sales and to give consumers the ability to buy from the producer of their choice.”

*****
This past week was not so much a slow news week for food as more of the same. The wild salmon were still MIA in California and Oregon, where the salmon fishery has been closed for the first time ever. Turning corn and other food crops into fuel for automobiles was a more boneheaded idea than ever. And consumers around the globe were in a state of growing apprehension over the rising costs of all kinds of comestibles.

With gasoline prices now headed toward $4 a gallon here in the U.S. (I know, seems like a bargain to our British friends), more and more people are thinking those drives to the farmers market in the ol' Land Rover might not be such a great idea. There's increasing talk of Victory Gardens and ditching the front lawn in favor of growing food closer to home.

The New York Times devoted an entire design column to ways that architects and designers are incorporating fruit and vegetables into modern living and business arrangements.

If you happen to be in the mood to muck about in the soil and grow your own, this has just come in from Mother Earth News: an on-line seed searching tool. I received an e-mail from the magazine asking me to take a look and possibly write a review.

"The free Finder searches more than 150 garden catalogs – from the big names to small, specialized companies. Our initial emphasis is on sources for vegetables, but we plan to add fruit and nut tree and ornamental catalogs in the near future," the magazine declares.

Type in the name of the seed or plant your looking for, hit the "search" button and Google immediately produces a list of sources. I tried it out a few times, starting with sweet potatoes. I need to put in an order for seedlings, and not everybody sells sweet potato seedlings. This feature eliminates a lot of the extraneous material you'd normally get with a general search, such as bulletins for university extension services, blog posts and recipe recommendations. It takes you right to the seeds.

This is great for harder-to-find varieties, but what we really need is a service that points us to seed sources close to home that have more or less everything we need so we can cut down on shipping seeds and plants across the country. and avoid all those handling charges.

Happy gardening and bon appetit...

Dark Days: Coq au Vin

Throughout the winter CSA season, our farmer friend Brett will occasionally include a chicken with our weekly produce delivery.

This is one of his laying hens. People sometimes tell Brett the chicken is tough. Brett says, cook the chicken longer. By that he does not mean an hour or two. He means three or four hours.

This particular chicken, cooked with red wine, bacon, garlic and beef broth, braised four hours in the pot. Still, it was on the chewy side. But oh, the flavor. Dark and gamey, that's how I like it.

I had also been watching carefully the progress of the turnips in my garden. I had a hard time getting the turnips to germinate this summer. Rutabagas, too. Was it too hot? Did I not water the seeds enough? I don't know the answer. I planted seeds twice and still did not get a full crop. But the turnips that did finally take hold are beauties. I can see their white flesh rising out of the ground all the way from the front stoop.

The two I pulled yesterday were baseball size, perfectly round with rich soil clinging to the roots. These are not the turnips I would normally plant for greens. But I tasted the leaves anyway and they were delicious--sweet. I decided to include them in a braise with the other greens from our weekly package.

So there you have our totally local meal for the week: coq au vin, turnips mashed with blue cheese and braised greens seasoned with apple cider. Homely, yes, but very satisfying. Just the thing for a winter's night.

The turnips came out so well--sweet, with just a hint of horseradish--that I am convinced to plant more and pay better attention to them in the coming year.

On Falling Behind

I may have mentioned before that one of my heroes is Ward Sinclair. Ward was a colleague--on the other side of the newsroom--at The Washington Post back in the 80s. He covered agriculture, but left the paper to buy a small farm in Warfordsburg, PA.

While Ward was busy farming, he also started writing a column in the Post's food section called "Truckpatch." The columns became a small book, and one of the chapters has remained with me ever since. It was called "A Farmer Can't Be Listliss," and in it Ward printed his "to do" list.

The list is too long to re-print here. It is mind boggling. There were fences to mend, cold frames to fix, equipment to paint, coolers to sanitize, greenhouse flats to scrub, irrigation parts to check, potting mix to procure--and on and on. Ward's "to do" list made a profound impression, and shaped my idea of what farming is about.

As I look around my own little urban farm here in the District of Columbia, I see that I am falling further and further behind on my "to do" list. Matters became pressing with the cooler weather, as that brought out a whole new wave of weeds in the vegetable beds. Suddenly my rutabagas and turnips were being overrun with chickweed. I spent the better part of a day on hands and knees digging out the chickweed, and still the job is not completely done.

Then came a weather forecast for temperatures dipping close to freezing. The basil patch, already long in the tooth, would have to be harvested immediately. Turning the basil into pesto and freezing it (shown in picture above) again took another day.

As I look around, I see so many other chores that need tending to. The lima beans were never completely harvested. The dried seed pods call for attention. The trellises for the beans and the cucumbers must be disassembled and returned to the garage. The annual flower bed needs to be cleaned out and turned. There's garlic to plant, bags of old leaves to be shredded and worked into the compost pile. The yard around the vegetable beds has not been mowed in a month (the electric mower broke).

Then a peach tree arrived. Earlier in the year I had planted a dwarf peach in the garden at my daughter's school and it never broke dormancy. I was told to expect a replacement in the fall. Here it was, and it needed to be planted. Which meant a trip to a secret location to fetch soil to fill a container.

I cannot mention the location of this stash of immaculate compost, lest the whole world pounce on it. It's in a place where the U.S. Park Service dumps its truckloads of wood chips, gleaned from its work in ou urban parks and woods. The chips eventually break down in huge piles of compost, leaving this treasure tucked away among the oak trees, just waiting for those few pennywise gardeners willing to spend a few extra calories to haul it away.

I rarely see anyone at the secret compost stash when I pull up with my plastic buckets and hand truck. But this day as I pushed my hand truck down the trail an elderly Russian-speaking couple came into view. They were busy digging into the side of a tall pile of compost, filling big white garden bags with a long-handled spade.

The man was hobbled in one leg and leaned on a cane. It was the woman--his wife, I guessed--who loaded the heavy bags into a rickety old wheel barrow and pushed it back up the trail toward the roadway. As I passed the man he smiled broadly and muttered a few words in Russian, of which I could just make out "xorosho, xorosho," good, good. And since I don't remember enough of my college Russian to ask what he thought was "good, good," I imagined he was perhaps happy to see someone else taking advantage of the compost hidden out here in the woods, or maybe he just liked the looks of the compost, or maybe he was already calculating the great benefit the compost was going to bring to his garden.

I started filling my buckets and trucking them back to my car. The second time I passed the man I smiled and said "xorosho," and he smiled and repeated "xorosho," as if we were sharing some secret. And it gave me great pleasure to know that while the rest of the world was scurrying about in their daily tasks--toiling away at their desks, stuck in meetings, battling traffic--there was still a place where a couple of gardeners could revel in secret compost and spend some time in the labor of shoveling it into bags and buckets as if it were a pirate's bounty.

This, it seems to me, is precisely where modern agriculture has broken down. We handed the business of working the soil over to huge machines, industrial economics, factory-made fertilizers and pesticides, assembly-line animal husbandry--all in the name of efficiency and convenience. What was lost in the deal was any personal involvement, any sense of human scale, in the working of the land.

How do we humans relate to a 1,000-acre filed of corn, a tank of anhydrous amonia? Of course we cannot. The choice of an industrial food system is a bargain with the devil, because we sacrafice part of our soul--the part that needs to be connected to the earth and the affirmation of life that springs from it. Our modern food system feeds us, but it does not sustain us.

There has been nothing invented to replace the feeling of digging in soil, or of feeding compost to the earth, or of watching life emerge where one has toiled. So I am not regretting my long to-do list. As long as it is there,--as long as there is work to be done--I am connected to my little piece of the planet, I am doing good. And that is xorosho.

The Trouble with Urban Farming

Ethicurian gives a qualified thumbs-up to New York magazine's recent take on urban farming. I'm sorry to see that my cohorts at the Garden Rant blog are far less generous. In fact, you could call their response downright nasty.

For some reason, the idea of growing food in the city stirs all kinds of emotions and incites sometimes hyperventilated critique.

For the New York piece, entitled "My Empire of Dirt," freelance writer Manny Howard turned his 800-square-foot backyard in Brooklyn into a working farm he hoped would feed him for the month of August. In the process, he discovered his yard was contaminated with lead and trucked in five-and-a-half tons of top soil from Long Island to replace it. The yard didn't drain, so he built an elaborate drainage system, culminating in a five-foot-deep shaft dug by hand through thick clay. He nearly sawed off a finger building rabbit hutches. Then, just when his vegetables were producing a bounty, the whole enterprise was nearly wrecked by a once-in-a-lifetime, inner-city tornado. And for the $11,000 he spent on the project, Howard was barely on speaking terms with his wife when it ended.

First, having been a struggling freelance writer myself at one time, I have a soft spot for Manny Howard and I have to say that if I were to write a magazine article about becoming an urban farmer, his approach is probably the one I would choose. Second, having started an urban farm of my own here in the District of Columbia (we like to call it an "edible landscape") I can attest that what Howard went through is pretty much exactly how these things actually happen.

To hear the folks at Garden Rant tell it, Howard rates hardly better than an interloping heretic who would have done better to keep the whole experience to himself. Furthermore, he wouldn't have had any of these problems if he'd just asked for their advice.

"The basic idea is, we'll try growing our own food as an experiment. We'll spend more money on the garden than any actual backyard farmer would," writes Michele Owens, one of the four co-ranters on this very popular garden site, and one where I have published some of my own stuff. "We'll pretend to have ambitions no real gardener would go near--mostly involving animals, because there is lots of disgusting comedy there. We'll exaggerate every failure, as if our own inexperience and insincerity of purpose has nothing to do with it. And we'll write about it, cheekily deconstructing one of our culture's new touchstones: it is virtuous to eat locally and even more virtuous to grow your own."

I never saw the part where Howard claimed to be a "real gardener." Twice, by way of immunizing himself against all the self-righteous critics out there, he calls his experiment "a stunt." But where is it written that gardeners lose their membership in the club if they try to feed themselves, or try to raise animals for food? On the contrary, there is a virtuous strain of self-reliance running through the gardening tradition, often including small farm animals for protein to go with the potatoes and string beans.

And I did not detect any cheekiness in Howard's writing. He seems dead-on earnest to me. His first-person narrative device is one of self-deprecation, as in I hope you readers out there can find some humor in all this. (Some obviously don't.) The logical endpoint of locavorism, or eating locally, is to grow it in your own back yard. Does this mean you can't be a "real gardener" if you grow your own vegetables or slaughter your own rabbits or smoke your own sausages--all activities I've known ardent "gardeners" to engage in? What I find most surprising is not that Howard's ambitions extended to raising farm animals in his urban back yard, but that the local ordinances in Brooklyn actually allow it. I only wish we could do that here in the District of Columbia. But then my wife and the neighbors definitely would string me up.


(Yes, killing animals is messy, but somebody's got to do it. Just be glad you're at the top of the food chain.)


As far as the folks at Garden Rant are concerned, though, Howard's experiment violated some kind of sacred gardening code. Though shalt not spoil the idea of gardening as an idyllic, sweat-free pastime.


Cross the line and those gardeners can get downright unpleasant. You are liable to get the back of a trowel.


"Plus, anybody who knows anything knows you're an ass," sputters Owens, as if logic alone were not enough to quash the New York writer's bona fides. "Growing food is easy, even in a Brooklyn yard, if you have enough sun and reasonable soil."


Oh really? I guess all those hours I spent breaking sod and digging rocks for my vegetable beds, the hours turning compost, nursing seedlings, getting down on all fours to pull weeds, building trellises, agonizing over powdery mildew and harlequin beetles and squash borers, searching for potatoes that never materialized, watching tomato plants succumb to wilt, trying to decide what to plant and when, pulling more weeds, dealing with the lead in my soil, hauling huge rolls of reinforcing wire from Home Depot to build tomato cages, digging and disposing of more rocks, collecting neighbors' leaves for my compost, rebuilding trellises after they are blown down in a storm, pulling more weeds--I guess all that was wasted effort, because growing food really is so easy.


I would have done better to just pull up a lawn chair and lose myself in Fine Gardening. Silly me.

Besides which, not all urban plots have "reasonable soil." Heavy metals are a real issue, and Manny Howard's is not the first garden I know of where the soil had to be completely replaced.

Maybe this is where "gardeners" and do-it-yourself locavores part company. The fact is, urban agriculture is catching on, whether or not it qualifies as "gardening." There's plenty of it happening in Detroit, Chicago, New York, Oakland. And having just watched a documentary about Cuba turning itself into one great big urban farm to deal with its own local oil and food crash, I am only emboldened to continue my own urban experiment, even if it means I no longer qualify as a "real gardener."

Manny Howard's only real problem may be that he didn't give himself enough time. In another year or two, he could have called himself a real urban farmer.

I wonder if the magazine reimbursed him for that $11,000...

Garlic Harvest

In the course of weeding one of our garden beds, I forced myself to consider the small garlic patch that had been overrun with crab grass.


"It's all brown and dried out looking," I told my wife. "What do I do now?"


"Sounds like it's ready to harvest. When did you plant it?"


Last fall is when I planted it. But for some reason I was not expecting it to be ready for harvest until this coming fall, or one year later.

As you may have surmised, this is my first experience planting garlic. I just assumed it had given up the ghost after being throttled by all that crab grass.


There was just one thing left to do: Dig!


So out came the crab grass and the garlic. The bulbs were smaller than I'd expected, certainly smaller than what you normally see in the grocery store. (Maybe because of all the weeds?) The garlic sets were a gift from our farmer friend, Mike, so I no longer even know what variety they are, no idea what they are supposed to look like. Duh. Could have taken notes...

I tossed one to my wife.


"That's garlic!" she exclaimed. "They look great!"


Good enough for me. I dug up the rest of the garlic and set it aside. My daughter came out to help weed. Then we spread some of the compost we've been working on since March and turned it into the bed with a stirrup hoe.


The compost is deliciously fine and light and fluffy, like spreading goose down. It has exceded all my expectations, and certainly has been worth all the effort collecting leaves and grass clippings and weeds and kitchen scraps. Not to mention all those mornings turning the pile. (But really, I have no complaints. Turning compost is good for the soul.)


My daughter insisted on hoeing. She wants a vegetable bed of her own. I think we might just put some of our many extra tomato plants here. I planted several dozen, thinking I would sell them at the produce market. They are beautiful seedlings now that certainly will be producing fruit into October. Can't let them go to waste...

Lawns into Vegetable Gardens

Food & Wine magazine this month awards an "Eco-Epicurean" award to architect Fritz Haeg, who has been bringing an artist's eye to transforming front yards into vegetable gardens.

In 2005, the Salina Art Center in Salina, Kansas, asked Lang to contribute to its show on food and society. Lang's response was to turn the front yard of a local family's home into a vegetable garden, complete with corn, okra and herbs. He called it, "Edible Estate."

Since then, Lang has established three more edible estates in Los Angeles, New York and London. The garden in London was commissioned by the Tate Modern.

Haeg places his gardens not among hippies or tree huggers, but in neighborhoods where they are guaranteed to provoke a strong reaction (as where people are obsessed with property values, perhaps?)

The Edible Estates manifesto at Haeg's website states: "Edible Estates is an attack on the American front lawn and everything it has come to represent.
Edible Estates reconciles issues of global food production and urbanized land use with the modest gesture of a domestic garden."

"I want kids to see these gardens and start to ask questions about where their food comes from," Haeg says.

A book about Edible Estates is scheduled for publication next year.

The Slow Cook is starting to feel even more proud of his own front-yard vegetable garden. Could it be that we are simply ahead of the curve?

In Defense of Vegetable Gardening

My earlier meditation on the use of two-stroke engines in landscaping, and whether it is politic to do something on a personal level when one sees global warming in progress on one's home turf, brought out the hate mail.

"You should be ashamed of yourself," writes one local resident, "you grow a garden in your front yard!"

Well, yes. We don't have a back yard.

This is the usual "kill the messenger" stuff, much of it personal and ugly, and much of it centered on our decision to grow vegetables where everyone can see them. So even though The Slow Cook isn't a gardening blog per se, I am posting a previous meditation on our edible-landscape-in-progress that has appeared in Garden Rant, the D.C. Urban Gardeners Blog, and in the regional newsletter of the American Institute of Wine and Food.

Meanwhile, in case you'd like to read other authors on the subject of vegetable gardening in the city, I highly recommend this story of a recent bicycle tour of D.C. community gardens, and this about gardening in a small space, and this about discovering the joys of urban gardening.

****

I am sitting in my kitchen, staring at a bunch of starlings pecking at my vegetable beds. I’m feeling a bit paranoid, because last spring I watched birds very much like these descend on my vegetable beds and attack my emerging bean and cucumber plants.
I went out to the garden to see what the birds were pecking at and found that all my little seedlings had been nibbled down to nubs. What could have possessed the birds to do that? I wondered. Since when do birds eat plants? Were they trying to send me a message?

Well, probably not. This was just my initiation into that fraternity of gardeners and farmers who, through the ages, have railed at the brickbats and insults and sometimes just plain mysterious curve balls that nature dishes up. Drought, hail, locusts and now birds. Welcome to the world of trying to grow your own food!

Mine is an inner-city garden, which makes me an urban farmer, I guess. Three years ago, I wrote an article for the local paper about a young farmer in Southern Maryland who is passionate about growing greens outdoors in winter. He loves nothing better than dressing up in a pair of Carhartt coveralls in the middle of January and picking arugula in the freezing cold.

I was inspired. My wife and I signed up to receive weekly deliveries of the farmer’s winter greens. And I wondered if there was any reason I could not do this in the city. I mean the growing food part, not the dressing up in Carharrts in the middle of winter part.

We live in a big house on a big corner lot in the Columbia Heights neighborhood of Northwest Washington, about a mile from the White House. The neighborhood had fallen on hard times when we bought our house. There was no landscaping in the front yard. I had never given it much thought before. But now, instead of crab grass and dandelions and chickweed, I saw beds of tomatoes and cucumbers and carrots. I saw rows of leafy lettuces and tall, spiraling Brussels sprouts. I saw my own truck farm smack dab in the middle of the city that would feed not only me and my family, but my personal chef clients as well.

One day I picked up a spade and just started digging.

I may have neglected to mention that although there was no landscaping in our yard, my wife had plans for landscaping. Detailed plans.

“What are you doing?” she asked when I started digging.

“Planting vegetables,” I said.

“Where, exactly?” she asked.

“Right here,” I said, pointing to a spot in the front yard.

“Don’t get too attached,” she replied.

We did pretty well that year with my first vegetable bed. We harvested tons of cucumbers and radishes. The Brussels sprouts took forever, but eventually we had enough for a few meals. We had a fair crop of tomatoes, although the tomato plants came down with some kind of awful wilt. We had lettuce.

But I wanted more. So the next year I started digging again, tearing up sod, pulling tons of rocks and broken glass and strange pieces of metal out of the soil.

“What are you doing now?” my wife inquired.

“More vegetables,” I said.

“You can’t plant there,” she said. “That’s where the front walk is going.”

I kept digging. It was a race against time.

It is said that everyone longs to grow things, that we all have a secret dream of becoming a farmer. I think I was just following behind my father, a sort of renegade brush salesman who dug up part of the forest preserve behind our house when I was a kid to plant rhubarb and strawberries and tomatoes.

As my garden grew, I was determined to make it as self-sufficient as possible. Call it enviro-gardening: I started composting. I built a three-bin system to compost yard wastes and grass clippings and kitchen scraps. Pretty soon I was cruising the neighborhood, picking up bags of dried leaves my neighbors left at the curb.

Then I took classes to become a Master Gardener. Then I built a huge container garden at my daughter’s charter school down the hill.

Obviously, I was turning into some kind of gardening nut.

In the summer, I built trellises for the beans and the cucumbers to climb. The okra stood eight feet tall, exceeded only by the sunflowers and the amaranth. Now we also had huge beds of zinnia and marigolds and dill and basil. I had parsley to feed an army. I made dill pickles in August and pickled green tomatoes in October.

I kept waiting for someone to come along and say, “You can’t do that.” But the neighbors love it.

People—strangers--on their way to work stop, lean on the iron fence and chat about the gardens they had when they were growing up. How their grandmother used to plant Lima beans. People—strangers—stop at the red light across the street and shout encouragement out their car windows.

“What’re you planting there?” they shout.

“Oh, just about everything,” I shout back.

This year practically the whole yard is under cultivation. Yep, all except one little spot where my wife put her foot down. She keeps threatening to bring in a crew to start building a retaining wall. She keeps pointing to spots where my vegetables are going to be under a walkway.

I keep planting.

My wife and I have reached an accommodation. We are going to combine my vegetables and her design to make an edible landscape. As for the birds, I am hip to their tricks. This year I bought fabric row cover to keep them off my seedlings. Take that, you birds!

Youth Garden Chef

That's our friend Helen showing baby Hazel some of her garden moves. Apparently, years of team shuffleboard back in West Virginia left Helen with a solid right-hand raking arm...

All kidding aside, Helen and I spent our first "action" morning at the Washington Youth Garden, located in the National Arboretum here in the District of Columbia, tending the soil and planting seeds for our "chef's garden."

I recently recieved an invitation from the good folk at the Youth Garden to join a rather select group of chefs who also grow vegetables. Wait--it gets even better. At some point we will actually be turning our vegetables into meals we can share with some of the families who also are involved with the Youth Garden.

The Youth Garden has a great program reaching out to local elementary school children with its gardening and cooking programs. It also opens its doors each spring to a certain number of families with children (22 this year) who are given their own garden plot to tend.

Then every so often a chef visits the Youth Garden to help prepare a terrific feast with all the vegetables that have been growing there.

This year, I will be one of those chefs, and Helen agreed to help. (Not only that, the Youth Garden found out Helen is an expert vermicomposter and immediately signed her up to talk to the kids about worms. In exchange, Helen gets a garden plot of her own. Today she planted some of her peppers.)

An object of this exercise is to envision a menu and plant vegetables accordingly. For some reason, I chose a Southern theme. My tastes just run in that direction. Plus, I already had a packet of peanut seeds at home. So we started talking about peanut soup, smothered okra, sweet potatoes, succotash...

Before you know it, we were raising a teepee (made of bamboo poles) for the lima beans. We also filled three newly constructed planters with the most excellent soil that the Youth Garden has only been amending for the last 35 years. We thought the planters would be just the thing for root vegetables, so we planted beets, carrots, parsnips, rutabaga, radishes.

I also planted some dill. I think we must pickle some cucumbers at some point.

There is also watermelon and possibly sweet corn in our future.

Oy! Smothered okra, cornbread and watermelon. I think Edna Lewis must be looking down on us and smiling...

P.S., for a great take on chefs working with kids, read Kevin Weeks' post at Seriously Good.

And for more information about programs at the Youth Garden, contact Courtney Rose, Educational Coordinator and Kaifa Anderson-Hall, Program Director at 202-245-2709.

We're in Garden Rant

One of my co-conspirators in the gardening universe is Susan Harris, an irrepressible blogger and gardening coach who also happens to be one of the co-authors of that hugely popular gardening blog, Garden Rant.

Garden Rant has made an impression in this country as well as across the Atlantic with its irreverent style and wide-ranging coverage of all things green and sometimes blooming. So I was completely flattered when Susan asked me to write about the front yard here on a busy corner in the District of Columbia that my wife and I are turning into an edible landscape.

I don't mind saying that my vegetable gardening and composting would not have occurred were it not for the inspiration of our farmer friends Brett Grohsgal and Christine Bergmark. I was blissfully ignorant of the importance of local farming until I met Brett and Christine. This blog, The Slow Cook, stands at that intersection of the soil in which we plant and the food that sustains us.

Susan's invitation to write for Garden Rant became an opportunity to meditate a little on what it means to be an urban farmer. As I've said before, food doesn't just happen. It takes a lot of work. I salute all farmers who work hard to take care of the earth and ensure that we have food on the table.

Go here to read The Making of an Urban Farmer.