There used to be a garden here

When I wrote recently about my old garden being torn up to make way for condos, my friend Pattie Baker, author of the Foodshed Planet blog, was so distraught she wrote the developer to plead the case that he ought to offer garden plots to the new condo owners.

In fact, I had suggested the very same thing before we closed on the deal selling our house to Capital City Real Estate, which is turning our former home into six condominiums. The developer, Scott Zimmerman, sounded receptive at the time. And in response to a beautifully worded e-mail from Pattie, he again said he would consider making this proposal to the new buyers.

With would-be gardeners waiting months or years for plots at local community gardens here in D.C., a ready-made garden right outside your condo door would seem to be a great marketing tool, to say nothing of the message of sustainability it sends to the rest of the city.

When we sold the house, we had eight big garden beds established in the yard, all rich with years of compost amendments. That’s all gone now, of course. Much of it has been excavated to make room for parking. And today I had to report to Pattie that a crew of workers armed with shovels and a Bobcat were busy on Saturday re-grading the yard.

The garden area used to sit about four feet above sidewalk level with a large plateau for the vegetable beds, dropping off steeply around the edges toward the curb. That made cutting the grass around the edges a real pain in the butt. But it was perfect for vegetable beds.

What the crew was doing yesterday was sloping the yard from the house toward the curb, removing that flat area that was so convenient for gardening in order to smooth out those steep edges. Add in the new entrances that  have been excavated for two basement apartments and the space available for food gardening is rapidly shrinking.

What the garden looked like, with Pattie

If you want to get an idea of what the garden looked like in July 2010, check out the post Pattie wrote after her visit. She also took some video that you can link to there.

Pattie is one hell of a fighter. While you’re at it, order a copy of the remarkable self-published book she’s written about her life as a sustainability activist, gardener, and mom, Food for My Daughters. If you’re looking for an exquisitely written manual for living more harmoniously with Planet Earth–not a bad Christmas gift, I’d say–this is it.

The Kindle edition is only $1.99.

Where once there was a garden

We sold our big house on the corner last August and the developers wasted no time. The next morning a crew was waiting at the front door to start tearing the place apart. Plans call for turning our former homer–a big brick Victorian built in 1900–into six condominiums.

We figure that’s a good use for the building, making a place for more people to live in the neighborhood. Somehow I had the idea that I would be able to continue gardening on the property at least through the end of the season. But as soon as we moved out, neighbors (and I suppose the construction crew as well) swooped in to loot our tomato and pepper plants. Now, as you can see from the photo above, the garden has completely disappeared. Years of feeding the soil with our home-made compost has vanished under  mounds of clay and construction debris.

Same view, different day

In this photo, you see what the garden used to look like when it was covered with tomato plants, beans and okra.

They put up a parking lot

The other side of the garden–where we started our first vegetable beds–has been entirely trucked away to create parking.  I had suggested to the builder that he might keep our eight garden beds as a selling point for the condos. People are still waiting in line for plots at the local community gardens. But apparently in the world of developers parking and landscaping remain the preferred options.

What it used to look like

And here’s a view of the same area a couple of years ago when we took delivery of a free truckload of compost. You can see the potato hill we built in the background. We used to grow all the salad and greens we could ever eat in this spot.

During our years of vegetable gardening on a busy urban corner we learned how cheaply we could feed ourselves and feel good about eating food we’d grown ourselves, two miles from the White House. Resuming life as consumers, rather than growers, has been quite a shock. It’s also left a huge hole in my life, not having a garden to tend.

But we don’t intend to remain garden-less for long. In fact, we have our eye on bigger and better things, but that will probably involve another move, this time to a place with more acreage. Stay tuned….

If it's July, it must be okra

I planted our garden late this year because we were planning to sell our house and I wasn’t sure we’d have any garden at all. But look at our okra. Barely three feet high, the plant are already making pods like crazy. I had to take a moment from tiling bathrooms to harvest some quick, before they become too tough to eat.

Okra is a standout vegetable for the District of Columbia. It loves heat and humidity and I’ve never known one to fall victim to any pest. They just make pods like crazy. At a certain point, we will be harvesting twice a day. A vegetable gardener could hardly ask for more.

One of our favorite recipes is a “smothered” okra–a stew, really, starting with onions sauteed in bacon grease, then adding sliced okra, corn off fresh off the cob and diced tomatoes. Touring the garden, I noticed some of our peppers had ripened–a Serrano-style pepper, and some banana peppers. I thought these would add a nice bit of heat and flavor to our smothered okra, and they did.

This will be a perfect side for the Texas-style brisket I put on the electric smoker this morning–along with some big chunks of mesquite–and a “free ranger” chicken I picked up last week at Joel Salatin’s farm day,now brining and headed for a date with the charcoal spit.

Meanwhile, I’ve harvested a cooked a big pot lof our favorite Italian style green beans. This promises to be a might fine eating summer.

Beans. greens and flowers this morning

It can finally be told: we are moving. Not far. Just to a building I renovated 24 years ago and have kept as a rental. We’ve sold our house on the big corner lot here in Columbia Heights to a developer who will turn it into six condos. Yes, we’ve really rattled around in this place and making it a multi-family dwelling is a much better use for such a prime location. And while we are creating more places to live for others, we hope this is the first step for us toward an even bigger garden (farm?) in a more northerly latitude.

My wife won’t miss all the work such a big house requires. But we both will miss the huge kitchen garden we made out of our corner lot on a busy residential intersection two miles from the White House. We’ve managed to grow much of our own food, and turn an unimpressive lawn into a showplace for neighbors and food gardening enthusiasts.

In fact, our garden will play prominently in an edible D.C. urban garden tour that’s taking place this Friday, July 15, from 3:00 pm to 8:00 pm. The tour will also be visiting some of the city’s vibrant new school gardens, private enclaves and Common Good City Farm, the same urban food production facility that saw a visit from Prince Charles earlier this year. Go here for more details and to purchase tickets.

Flat beans sauteed with anchovies and garlic

My green breans braised three hours have become world renown. But to my mind, there’s a new contender for best green beans. That would be these Italian-style flat beans harvested in our garden yesterday and sauteed with garlic and anchovies.

They are so meaty and delicious. Heck, they could almost stand in for this rib eye steak. Nothing really compares with food picked fresh in the garden, and beans grown organically–fed only compost, no artificial fertilizers or pesticides–beat store-bought beans hands down. (In fact, I would recommend the store-bought beans for braising, the fresh-picked beans for a lighter treatment.)

These beans are so easy. Simply cook a pound of them in plenty of salted water until just tender. Drain them into a colander and rinse with cold water to stop the cooking process. Meanwhile, in a heavy pan over moderately low heat saute two finely chopped garlic cloves in plenty of extra-virgin olive oil. Season the garlic with salt. When it’s tender, “melt” a can of drained anchovies in the pan. You might want to give the anchovies a poke with a spatula to help break them up.

When the anchovies are completely incorporated, add the beans and toss them well until they are completely coated with the oil, the garlic, the anchovies, and heated through.

Beans soak up the egg yolk just fine

Apparently, the rest of my family are not such big fans of anchovies because I had beans left over. That’s okay with me. I just heat them up in the morning for breakfast, topped with a couple of fried eggs. Anchovy-flavored beans and farm-fresh egg yolks: What could be better?

Hoping to see this soon

I finally got around to planting this year’s cucumbers. Why, you might ask, did I wait so long?

I’m so glad you ask.

Last year we had problems with cucumber beetles killing all of our plants. Actually, it’s not the beetles. They just like to feed on the plants. But they carry a bacteria in their stomachs that attacks the cucumbers and once the plants are infected, they’re done for. The infection cuts off their circulation and they just collapse. Nothing to be done except throw the plant in the trash. (We do not compost diseased plant material.)

Here’s a good rundown on the problem at the University of Maryland Extension Service’s website.

Although other control measures are available, such as encapsulating the plants in row cover, or spaying with insecticide, I chose the simplest method: waiting until June 15, when the beetle’s life cycle has finished.

Adult cucumber bettles overwinter, then emerge in the spring to lay eggs. The larvae feed around the plant roots and emerg as adults to feed on the  young plants. But if there around any cucumber plants to be hand (because they haven’t been planted yet) the adults will leave in search of food elsewhere. Hopefully. The life cycle lasts from four to six weeks, meaning there can be as many as three generations of beetles to worry about per season.

Another problem we had last year was squash vine borers. These like to eat their way through the stems of the squash vines, eventually destroying the plants. One way to approach these is to find the entrance hole into the plant, open it with a knife and remove the borer. Again, there are several other approaches to dealing with them, like wrapping stems with aluminum foil, encapsulating the plants with row cover or spraying. I chose the simplest route: wait till mid-June when the pest’s life cycle has finished.

I once got a request from members of a community garden here in D.C. for ways to remedy cucumber beetles. When I suggested they hold off planting, they howled in protest. “We can’t tell our members when to plant!” they said. Well, if people won’t use accepted methods, there’s not much else to do for them.

I’ve even considered just not planting certain things for a year after they’ve suffered an infestation. Would that really be such a bad thing?

Flowers turn into beans

Right on schedule, we are seeing the tiny blossoms on our bean plants turning into green beans. They grow fast. Some are almost ready to harvest.

These are a flat Italian-style green bean called “Pension” that I planted on April 30. They’re supposed to mature in 53 days. By my count, we still have eight days to go. We love our green beans: they fit our low-carb diet, they grow profusely without hardly any attention, The extras are easy to freeze and we haven’t experienced any pest problems with them at all.

The flat beans are a particular favorite. We like to cook them until just tender in salted water, then toss them with sauteed garlic and anchovies. I can make a whole meal out of that.

I had a visit recently from an English teacher who flew into Washington for a course in “backpack journalism,’ meaning documentary filmmaking by citizen journalists.

Dan Sadicario followed me around for the better part of the day, resulting in a five-minute film about a former newspaper reporter who now grows food in his front yard two miles from the White House and has made dissecting the school lunch program a personal crusade.

Okay, enough drama. I think Dan did a great job with the camera and some snappy editing. He even managed to squeeze in a few humerous moments. Take a look at what he calls “Concrete Tomato.”

An eggplant seedling finds a new home

I was late starting my peppers, eggplants and tomatoes this year. But they’ve been coming along fine in their tiny cells, soaking up sun lately in an improvised hoop house in the front yard. Yesterday I got up at the crack of dawn to move them into their permanent home. I always have more than I think: 28 aubergine, divided between the big “Black Beauty” and the long, skinny Asian variety, “Ping Tung.” There were 35 pepper plants–a mix of bell peppers, jalapenos and hot reds. Altogether, it was enough to fill an entire vegetable bed where I’ve already installed 10 tomato plants with rebar stakes.

My procedure for transplanting is pretty simple. First I use my forked spade to heave the soil a little throughout the bed, then I get down on all fours and remove any weeds. Next I scatter a thin layer of compost over the entire area and work it into the soil with my stirrup hoe. The soil at this point is so friable I don’t even need a tool to dig holes. I simply plunge my hand into a designated spot and push the soil aside to create an opening. I use a spoon to pry an eggplant seedling out of its cell and lower it into the hole.

It’s easy and I like working my hands into the soil. But I can’t help imagining that this would get old if you were working a farm and planting hundreds or thousands of these seedlings instead of just a few dozen.

Our crop of volunteer dill

One of the cool features of our urban kitchen garden this year is a huge patch of volunteer dill that showed up in one of the vegetable beds. Our luck growing dill intentionally has always been spotty. But wouldn’t you know it: When you’re not trying to grow something, it appears in profusion all on its own.

What this dill represents is one heckuva lot of dill sauce, or perhaps a bumper crop of dill pickles. Except it’s nowhere close to cucumber season yet. In fact, to avoid another infestation of cucumber beetles, I’ve delayed even planting cucumbers and other squashes until June 15. So it looks like I’ll be shopping for pickling cukes either at the farmers market or the local Whole Foods. Looking at all that dill–now developing seed heads–I have a sudden taste for Hungarian sun pickles.

Elsewhere in the garden, the green beans are soaking up the sun and the current heat wave. Temperatures here are in the 90s, and we’re mostly hiding inside with the shutters closed, except the wee hours of the morning when it’s still cool enough to work outside. I spent the last couple of mornings completely weeding a long narrow bed planted with zinnia and cosmos. The bed was overwhelmed with small amaranth plants that seeded themselves last year. We love the lo0k of those bronze amaranth, but they do cast seeds like weeds. Yesterday I planted a row of “Mammoth” sunflower seeds in that bed as well. It should be one impressive flower arrangement in a few weeks.

Our tomato, pepper and eggplant seedlings are thriving under their impromptu row cover enclosure. I’ll probably transplant them into the garden on Friday. It will also be time to erect the trellis for our pole beans as well. Meanwhile, behind the dill, our okra has germinated right on schedule. In fact, I planted a few more seeds in places where the originals had failed to sprout. Okra is pretty reliable, and I’m sure it’s loving all this heat. Have I mentioned that okra is one of our favorite vegetables for the District of Columbia?