Miso zucchini

Last year I was completely, utterly bombarded with zucchini. You know how they say that if you let the zucchini grow too large, the plant stops producing? Not only did the zucchini grow too large, the plants didn't stop producing until the frost killed them. Months of baseball bats. I brought some to work and received an email, "I hear that you have some weapons-grade zucchini on your desk. I would love to take one off your hands." Love.

So this year I did NOT plant ANY zucchini. In a way this is sad. I was always guaranteed a grocery bag of zucchini. But I am using the space for more winter squash, and the patty pan squash I grow is an adorable, round little yellow zucchini. But it's not, you know, ZUCCHINI, stuff of nightmares.

Still, no matter what you do, if you live anywhere near a farm or gardener you're going to end up with someone, um, "gifting" you zucchini. And I just didn't want more stirfried zucchini with garlic, or to put it into a curry. Last year I bought the cookbook Bento Boxes: Japanese Meals on the Go, which I love. The book presents a different way of cooking, combining, presentation than traditional big dish American cookbooks. I've cooked a lot with miso this year, partly due to that cookbook, so I decided to try a miso zucchini.

Miso zucchini

Serves 2

One knob of fresh ginger
Splash of sesame oil (for cooking)
2 tablespoons of miso (the paste, not the powder)
2 tablespoon of Mirin (or a sake/sugar mix)
1 tablespoon of soy sauce
1 smallish zucchini
Sesame seeds

1. Chop the ginger. If you like to chew on ginger, then do a rough chop. If you like the flavor but hate the texture, mince it. 
2. Slice the zucchini into thin rounds. (Gadget alert: If you have a mandoline, this is the sort of thing you should use it for.)
3. Heat a fry pan on medium and add sesame oil. 
4. When the oil is hot, add the ginger.
5. When the ginger has cooked for a couple minutes, add the miso, mirin, and soy sauce. This will form a sort of paste.
6. Add the zucchini and stir to cover with the paste. 
7. Cook, stirring off and on, until the zucchini is floppy, but still holds its shape.
8. Remove from heat.
9. Toss a few sesame seeds on top, give it a quick stir, and serve hot.

It's a sweet and salty side dish that takes about 15 minutes to prep.

Bitter melon and bitter gourd seedlings

A couple weeks ago I posted about growing bitter melons and bitter gourds, but didn't know what the seedlings would look like.  I couldn't find the pictures online, so I'm contributing to the Internet today by posting a few pictures of my germinated seedlings. The gourds and the melons look similar.

Progress

Every year I wander around the community gardens with some jealousy. Why are everyone's tomatoes taller than mine? Well, because I try to start them from seed. Inevitably, some of the seedlings die, and then I replace them with purchased tomatoes from, well, everywhere. Farmer's markets, gifts from friends and coworkers, Wilson Farms, Pemberton Farms.

My garden is taking on a life of its own through its various deaths. I keep replacing and diversifying. A coworker of mine left me a bag of homeless plants, so I popped in a couple eggplant, a tomato, a jalapeno, some basil, and a parsley. Luckily, with the exception of the jalapeno, the plants were new varieties. Why I prefer to have two kinds of basil and parsley instead of one is beyond me, but it seems to appeal to my innate need to have as many options as possible. Or, my innate need to hoard. Spring has sprung; I am decluttering the house and cluttering the garden.

But I had a couple people tell me my garden was off to a good start today, and as I know these folks are well weathered gardeners, I'll accept their opinions with optimism.

The corn is about 8 inches high, and the beans are all popping up out of the ground. I'm willing them to send up tendrils so that I can watch them curl around the corn. Doing the same with my sunflowers. Last year, I rebelled against beans, not a one in the garden. This year, six kinds! Soy, red cranberry, scarlet runner, two green pole varieties, and fava. Can't wait. I think I was just avoiding the classic green bush beans. They grow like mad and then you're stuck eating them. Apparently not everyone shares this opinion, so I started giving them out last time I had a glut.

All my squash are doing beautifully. One of the gardeners suggested that in 5 minutes with a stirrup hoe, I could clean out all the weeds in my three sisters. It was true! I mulched the squash down after the weeding, finally. A nice solution. I have four kinds of winter squash and some patty pan going. Still managing to hold off on the zucchini!

I planted bitter melon and bitter gourd to cook with pork later in the summer. And now I have this conundrum...I don't know what kind of seedlings I'm looking for! In this case, I normally let everything grow, including the weeds. Woe. These seeds looked like weird flowers, not like normal seeds. I have only had the melon in dishes at restaurants, so I've never even played with the fruit before.

Meanwhile, I'm eating a lot of greens, radishes, Hakurei turnips, and scallions. It's going well, but I was sure thankful that some hot peppers are setting. I'll give them another week. Dinner today was kimchi fried rice made with Chestnut Farms hot dogs, greens and turnips from my garden at Codman Farms, and kimchi that I bought at Ebisuya but that is made at Chung Ki Wa.

I visited Chestnut Farms this weekend and we took lovely pictures of all the animals! Hoping to post a few soon.

Heat

We're having a heatwave in Massachusetts. I love the heat! And, sadly, I spend my entire days inside a freezing air-conditioned office. But at 6pm, the worst of the sun is over...though I put on the sunscreen anyway, redhead thing...I'm outside in the fields. I wish I were there every night, because every day there's something to take care of, something to miss. Still mourning some lost peppers, but I put in some transplants from Wilson Farms today to alleviate the loss. It gives me more variety. The plants are at the rootbound stage, the "on sale" stage. I think of being a rescuer here, taking in the lost lambs...

I think I've lost plants mostly due to the deadly combination of sun and little rain. Most of my basil has shriveled. You read gardening books, the step-by-step, the pretty pictures, 1-2 pages of info for all sorts of generic crops, and yet, it has so little to do with reality. Reality says "plant me on a day when it will be cool or wet for a couple days" and yet today is the day you have to plant, and it's going to be hot and sunny for a week. Throw in the fact that the water broke in our corner of the farm, and me carting around my amazing orange watering can still isn't a match for the heat.

But why is it that even though my plants are drying up, the weeds are flourishing? I wandered into my perennial plot today to find...a jungle! Weeds pushing up through the strawberries, plants I'd "moved" popping up everywhere, vines going absolutely nuts. I pulled a few weeds, and lo, the first strawberry! And a second due in a day or so. It was magic. The weeds must've hidden it from curious eyes. This weekend I'll need to go at that plot with a vengeance.

Every day I go to the farm I set out a list of must dos. Today it was to get the plants into the ground, and finally get the okra, 3 varieties of cukes, and Korean and tigger melons into the ground. I managed all of that, plus some weeding and much watering. I'm awaiting the moment that the beans I planted this weekend emerge from the soil, the soy, cranberry, and fava popping up in a green mat, and the pole and runner beans entwining themselves around the corn and sunflowers that so graciously germinated and seem to be giving the weeds a run for their money.

Meanwhile, the peas, radishes, scallions, and greens are flourishing. I picked a plastic grocery bag's worth of the stuff today (the strawberry I just ate right out of the plot), and then made a bacon and greens stirfry, then a bacon, radish, and scallion pizza. I love my Chestnut Farms bacon! This weekend is meet the meat time, so my brother and I are taking the trip out. Hopefully the heat keeps up.

May garden update

And suddenly it's the end of May. My leeks grew up and I've put them in the garden. I also put in a ton of pepper, eggplant, tomato, flower, and other seeds. Most have been popped into the garden at their own peril.

On Thursday I was rushing. It was after work and I got there around 6. I really wanted to put the melons in before the hot summer days coming up over the weekend. And I was so sad for my new little seedlings. It would be unseasonably warm all weekend, with little water, and me, well I was off to Acadia for some camping, fishing, and hiking. (During the drive up, I watched the temperature fall from 86 to 52.) As always, I tried to cram too much into my day...sweet potatoes and tomatoes to transplant, watermelon seeds to plant, everything to water, and my my aren't the weeds getting tall these days?

The mosquitoes had their revenge. They wrote "3" on my left arm...a message that my boyfriend and I have yet to decipher. Though I did get a few bites up in Acadia, it was nothing like my late evening gardening trip.

But it sure paid off. I came back and my corn is now ready for stage 2. I'm trying out the 3 sisters planting...corn, beans, and squash. You plant five hills of corn, with four seeds in each. Then you plant 4 hills of squash, and we picked 4 different kinds. After the corn is 4 inches tall, you plant pole beans that grow up on the corn. And you have this lovely mess of companion planting, tall and short. So far it's quite nice looking, and I'm hoping for productivity.

I'll admit to a bit of jealousy when I look at some of the neat, tidy gardens with careful veggie choices. My garden is focused on getting out as much food as possible in a small space. In my 15x30 plot, I'm hoping for about 50 varieties of veggies. It's pretty easy to do when you only plant one or two square feet of of several veggies. My problem is that it also leads me to buying too many seeds. Johnny's Seeds has been great, and I particularly like their sweet potato sets. But next year I might go for the High Mowing Seeds, since there are less choices and they are all organic. I'm finding that it's a lot easier for me to control my shopping when there are less choices, especially when they're all high quality. Clothes, menu choices, seed catalogs, less is more darling.

The tragedy of the week was that I burnt out some of my peppers and eggplant. I'm thinking that I'll try to replace them with other seedlings from the garden shop. Last year I similarly had problems with both, so I'll need a different strategy in the spring for starting. I figured that my grow light would solve my transplanting needs, but I think I'll need to get everything bigger pots too. I read all the seed packets and try to follow the rules, but so very often it doesn't work out in the soil as it does in black and white. Will keep on truckin'.

Spring in my condo

Massachusetts, along with most of the rest of the country, has been suffering a harsh winter. Weekly or twice weekly snows, followed by cold and ice, and melting snow that freezes to ice. Two-lane roads are now one, and drivers are playing vicious games of chicken on the road. "Why should I yield?" seems a common theme. I'm itching for spring, so I decided to start it in my condo.

My boyfriend bought me a grow light for my birthday, a fairly basic one with a fluorescent bulb from Johnny's Selected Seeds. Even though most of what I'm planting shouldn't be started until March, I decided to start up my leeks, which take forever, and lettuce for winter greens.

Last year I grew everything on the windowsill, to mixed results. I bought the apartment with no appreciation for a south-facing window, and my only windows face North. But even then, my organic farming teacher once said that there's such a thing as "South Window Syndrome." The plants tend to be very spindly in any window, and he suggested a greenhouse or a grow light. It's nice because the plants are, at the very least, growing straight up. They are still very tender, and I'm beginning to understand the need for hardening. I'll have to put in some sort of cold frame this summer.

But ain't it grand to see a bit of green?

Leeks:



Lettuce:


I note that we haven't had a significant snowfall up here since the groundhog failed to see its shadow. Happy melting.

Nourse Farms

There's a nice article in the Boston Globe that's mainly about Nourse Farms in Westborough, MA.

The article discusses how Nourse is one of the oldest farms in the US, but that they've managed to continue by adapting with the times. As a kid, my parents would occasionally bring us to Nourse to pick strawberries (and yes, I was the guilty, curly-haired redhead with suspicious sticky red all over my face).

Now that I've moved out of that area, I don't get over to the farm too often. I heard from friends and directories that they have a CSA now, and my parents decided to sign up.

There's more to choosing a CSA than meets the eye. The CSA that I used to belong to was largely a veggie CSA. We'd get a couple containers of strawberries or raspberries in the season, but never enough. Nourse specializes in berries. My parents gets fresh berries for months and months, in quantity. As few foods seem to make my mom happier than berries, this is a great fit and a way to break up her share with fruit that requires no preparation. In addition, the farm has a nice store full of their jams and jellies and other food for sale. One year they offered three berry pies if you renewed your CSA subscription early. So good!

If you are choosing a CSA, try to find out what sorts of crops they grow, and about how much they had of things the last couple years. 2009 and 2010 were vastly different growing seasons in Massachusetts. I love the surprises in each season, but it's also nice to know what I'll be eating all summer.

(Note: it appears that there's another Nourse Farms in South Deerfield, MA that produces berry plants, but I know little about them.)

Farmshare Fair

There is a Farmshare Fair sponsored by theMove on Thursday, February 3 at Democracy Center in Harvard Sq. Pick out who is going to grow your summer veggies, dream of summer, dream of melting...melting...melting.

NOFA Winter Conference

Last weekend Max and I went to the Northeast Organic Farming Association (NOFA) Winter Conference in Worcester, MA. As a non-farmer, I was a little sheepish about going, but the program included a nice mix of beginner, intermediate, and advanced activities. In fact, there were so many workshops on things I am interested in as a gardener and potential farmer that I had trouble deciding what to attend.

The one-day conference also included a key-note speech by an organic apple farmer, a teacup auction for various farm goodies (neither of us won, but we really wanted the Armsby Abbey gift certificate), a potluck lunch, and a nice vendor selection. At the technology conferences I occasionally attend, you don't get cheese samples, seeds, organic soap, and sips of raspberry wine accompanied by roasted beet spread on crackers.

I went to three workshops, one on raising certified organic poultry, one on finding your own farmland, and one on edible landscaping.

The organic poultry workshop was largely new to me. I was interested in what they do to raise the chickens from the beginning of life, and that warm chickens wander; cold chickens huddle. After they are old enough and can fend off some predators better, they are given lots of outside space. I'm used to chickens in school buses, but they talked up the chickens with the movable cages, which is what Salatin uses. It allows the chickens to add manure to the field while cutting your grass. You move cages twice per day, and add new ones as the chickens grow. You can plant on the field, but harvest must be 90-120 days after the chickens have been there. There was some talk of the changing legislation for organic farming solutions, and how it might be to work with the new Congress. Apparently NOFA sued and lost over the organic standards back in 2002, but many of their changes are under consideration.

In the workshop on acquiring farmland, sponsored by Land for Good, I had a wonderful time talking to people who were in various stages of trying to start their own farm. Some were currently working at local farms and hoping to strike out on their own. Others, like me, had a full-time job outside farming, and were saving money. The big thing I learned is that it's very difficult to get land without a business plan and experience farming. It's also very difficult to get money when you are farming. Everyone noted that you can't readily do both at the same time. But a few had done it, one gave up his software job, another really wanted to raise kids on her farm, and she and her husband saved up and now were "living the dream." It was really interesting to see all the paths and ages in the room, and the Land for Good folks are developing tools and workshops to help you sort out your farming goal. I'm currently reading Salatin's You Can Farm, and he really stresses that this is an entrepreneurial adventure, not an escape from real life. And in this workshop, I received a sheet on budgeting and a worksheet on my own values. I also got a healthy idea of what it means to work this out as a couple, and managed to have conversations with my boyfriend that I just haven't learned to frame in the right light. It's a big thing, figuring out a farm.

The last workshop I went to was about landscaping with wild edibles, run Ethan Roland by AppleSeed Permaculture. One of the first pictures Ethan displayed was a woman standing with banana trees in Holyoke, MA. Wow! It turns out that you can grow the banana leaves up here, though the plants will not fruit. You can use these lives in cooking or as serving dishes. He went on to talk about kiwis and American persimmons and the pawpaw, a fruit that is native to North America and tastes like mango. There's a hardy pawpaw that can grow in Zone 6, which is about where I am. I also learned where pine nuts came from (and why they're so expensive...it's a 20-year start-up period to get the tree growing). He talked about an edible landscaping wiki sponsored by the Apios Institute. It includes information about growing the plants, their uses, what to plant them with, and plans of existing gardens that include these plants.

I left this conference wishing I had a couple acres to play with, but instead I must appease myself with dozens of seed packets that need starting. I learned last year that you can't start leeks too early, so I put 50 seeds in the seed trays from Johnny's Seeds. I added water, and now I wait for spring in my landless, balcony-less condo.

Codman Community Farms

Last year I grew a garden at Codman Community Farms, and I plan to go back this year. The farm is very generous with their plots, so I got only a half plot, and arrived to find it was three times the space I expected! It was a wonderful outlet for stress...no one loves to pitchfork dirt more than me. I grew stuff I loved, sweet potatoes that surprised me with their size and perfectness, tomatoes that took a long time to grow, but were delicious in the end, wild sesame stolen from my boyfriend's sister-in-law, hot peppers, scallions, melons from H-mart, shiso and daikon from Ebisuya and way way way way too much zucchini. I actually had about fifty varieties growing in my garden, because a small garden is great for single plants that you pick up here and there at garden shops or the library book and plant sale.

I'm heading into next year and will try to keep track of spending better, as well as the harvest, hopefully on this blog. I have a gigantic wish list I've generated from Johnny's Selected Seeds. Hopefully I can trim. Last year I spent a lot on transplants and hope to do more from seed this spring. So, on to that project.

Buy No Food month

This month is Buy No Food month. I really love eating, and though I in particular love supporting direct-to-market, local products, I'll eat almost anything. (I even crave Big Macs about twice per year, but really those are travel food and should be treated accordingly. My parents didn't just take us to MacDonalds; it was a treat that you got on the 600-mile trip to Grandma and Grandpa's farm. And we didn't have dessert every day either. Anyway...)

I keep track of all my spending at mint.com. And the fact of the matter is that between groceries and going out, I spend $500-600 on food. Just for me. I mean, I share it with people in my life, but those people usually share back about equally. But still, even though I grew a garden last summer, my food costs did not go down.

I buy a lot of food, because I love food shopping and discovery. But I don't always eat it all, as I might get busy or sick of leftovers or whatever. So the idea this month is to only eat the food at my house, and to not go out for drinks or dinner. It's partly to eat what I have, and partly to get into cooking mode.

It also means saying no a lot. In some parts of the country, like when I lived in a more rural area, it was trivial to stay home each night. But in the Boston area, my boyfriend and I get invited out multiple times per week. We have favorites and rituals. Or I might stop by for a pre-made chicken on the way home, because I'm hungry and tired and worked 50 hours and went to two classes that week and there's just no way I'm going to cook anything. In fact, I'm guessing that this problem extended the garden. If I spent 10 hours per week at the garden, that's 10 hours less time to cook. And digging and wedding takes energy.

It's much easier to buy less food when two people are cooking in the same apartment. I did this with my sister a couple years ago, and she and I had a merry time of it. At the time we had a glut of CSA veggies, and she could process winter squash like no one else. I am not in a veggie CSA right now, but I am allowing myself $5-10 in veggies each week. So far this has been enough.

So experiment experiment. It would be good to drop the food budget significantly, because I love to cook and have other priorities. It's the sort of thing worth feeling guilty about...what happened to special occasions? Why is there one twice per week? It's embarrassing the amount I let the budget go out of whack against what I want in life, so a month of extreme should help me adjust back to moderate.

Somerville Winter Farmer's Market

After a year off, I think I'll dust off the old blog and start posting again. If I post enough, the fact that I took off a year will fade into the past, forgotten, right?

I just finished my courses for my grad degree, but I have my thesis to complete. I'll write a couple posts about my past year and my plans for this year.

In the meantime, you should check out the Somerville Winter Farmer's Market. One interesting thing to note is that changes to MA legislation, you can now buy local wines at farmers markets. My spy tells me that the Turtle Creek wines were very good today. I'm excited that you can go to the market and get fish and meat and wine and chocolate, along with the veggies.