New Ground: Making a New Garden Bed

To begin with the end, a sunken raised bed, canted to the sun.

 2012 was a rough year in many ways, including gardening, but the world did not come to an end, and so another garden begins. Only a mile north of the last one, and in the same sandy loam glacial outwash soil, it's basically in the same ground. The main difference is that there is less shade, and should work out better for growing food.

With several days of rainlessness and the earth not frozen, I went out and started a new bed. I've explained before why I don't go for raised beds penned in by boards or stone, and attempted to explain why a sunken raised bed works better, but this post dispenses with the arguments and gets to work. Read on to learn how to start a garden bed and harvest some sod in the process.

10 AM. Ignore the row for beans at the right; the new bed is just a few lines cut through the sod at this point.

This yard has the advantage of a solid half day of sun, level ground, and not a bunch of trees or shrubs in the way, but the distribution of lawn is not what I'd like. The best garden spot is covered in grass, and an area where I'd like some grass is bare. So one objective here is to redistribute some sod. I know, redistribution is a dirty word to free market folks, but I am an unrepentant sodcialist. 

To harvest some sod means that just ripping away is not the way to go, and so I adjusted how I start the garden bed to yield pieces a bit over a foot wide, with enough roots to survive. The diagram below gives an idea of the sequence. 

The bed may expand later, but for now it's 25 feet long and 3 wide, and this image is looking end-on. First, I take the shovel and cut four lines down the length of the bed, as deep as the blade will go. Then, I take a pickax and peel back sod from the center section, cutting mats of sod about 18 inches square. If you want more, skip the middle two cuts and peel off the entire surface. Take the time to yank dandelions free as you harvest the sod; this job will never be easier.

As the green peels away, shake free some of the topsoil and earthworms (grass does not need them the way your garden does). I also chunk out some fo the soil beneath with the pickax to loosen it up, but because the soil is not too clayey and I hate cutting worms to pieces, I don't work too hard at it and this middle section is not cultivated as deeply as the side sections will be.

Speaking of which, the digging on the sides is done, and after you've skinned whatever sod you want, the work consists of shaking soil (and more worms!) free of the grass. I try and keep dirt toward the center of the bed. The grass will go in a heap in a shady part of the yard to slowly rot, or become a berm, or whatever. I am a miser when it comes to organic material, and will not put it, weedy as it may be, in a city greenwaste bin. In my old yard, I piled years' worth of grass by the fence, and eventually it became a berm where I planted berries.

2 PM. Done, with a side of sod.

At this point, all that's left is to go through with a garden rake. Lap after lap, I work up one side and down the other. First, the aim is to break up clumps of soil and remove roots and grass. Then, the job is sculpting the earth. I keep a bit of ditch on either side, and slope the bed surface down to the south to gain a few degrees advantage in soaking up sun. 

Blessed with nice easy soil, no rocks, and no freeze, the whole process took no more than 4 hours. The result is a bed the length of one soaker hose, amenable to making a hoop house (how? look here), and ready for planting. I'll probably toss in some early greens just to make use of the ground, but later in the spring, I'm pretty sure this will be the tomato bed. It may get wider to accomodate carrots or somethign else that doesn't need hoop house cover, or it may just stay the way it is. That's the beauty of working with this soil and not boxing myself in with a raised bed.

Recycled Christmas Tree Post

Every year before Christmas, newsrooms in cruise mode revive the great Real Tree vs Plastic Tree debate. Every year as Hannukah kicks off, my college room-mate attempts to understand why so many goy insist on killing a fir tree every year. After all, Jesus only killed a fig tree (Matthew 21:18-22), and didn't do it again every year.

In terms of appeal, fake trees win only among the extremely fastidious and the lazy, for whom cleaning up a few needles is too much of an imposition, so the articles in recent years have often focused on the environmental aspect of the debate. Initially, the ersatz Tannenaum contingent had the upper hand, asserting that cutting a tree down every year damaged forests, whereas plastic trees last forever. 

But nearly all live (then dead) trees now come from farms like this one, just outside of Olympia. People like me come and cut trees, and the farmer plants more. A recent study shows that if the tree farmers don't kill the groundcover plants between trees, such farms are good for carbon sequestration--not as good as a forest, but still significantly better than fields of annual crops or pasture lands (and bonus: no cattle farts), which is what most Christmas tree farms were previously.

In my case--recognizing that this will not be true in all parts of the country--there's the added benefit that the round trip to get the tree consumed less than a gallon of gas. Plus, I'm supporting the local economy, helping a farmer make ends meet, and helping forestall the loss of farmland to development. Because this is an ongoing operation, new trees replacing old every year, it's a relatively stable habitat for birds, deer, and other critters that like something between grassland and forest. No, it's not pristine, but it has some ecological value, and it beats the hell out of a lot of the alternatives.

Meanwhile, fake trees are made of petrochemicals and metal ripped from the earth, processed in factories that consume more oil and create toxic waste, packaged in cardboard boxes (killing trees! the horror) and more plastic, and shipped from China the trucked to your locality. The carbon footprint is large, and the sequestration value zero. If these trees lasted forever, the footprint might be amortized, but fake trees make their way into landfills, not from generation to generation. 

[A Digression: The same goes for ornaments on the tree. If you are stingy and nostalgic like I was this year, then you have ornaments that have somehow stayed out of landfills for decades. A bunch are made from Christmas cards and chicken pot pie tins recycled when I was in second grade, waylaid from the waste stream for twoscore years.] 

All this should be famliar to those of you who reard or read reports on the Real vs Fake theme before Christmas, but what about after? Fake ones go back in a box or into the garbage, so making them less environmentally harmful is a matter of holding on for as long as possible before trashing them.

For real trees, the environmental impact can vary a lot depending on what you do after the holidays. At one end of the spectrum, you  could burn it. Torching a dry fir can be a great show, but it exhales the carbon it breathed in from the atmosphere for years right back into the air in a few minutes. You could douse the flame before it consumes the wood and bury the charcoal, in which case the carbon could stick around for tens of thousands of years. 

Many counties and municipalities have programs to mulch Christmas trees. Olympia even comes around to pick them up. The chipped trees become mulch in parks and in some cases may be sold or given to citizens; this extends the useful life of the tree, provides a local source of mulch with a lower cost and fuel use, and ends up in the soil. Sequestration time varies depending on conditions and from needle to branch to bole, but again something is better than nothing, and the breakdown feeds soil microbes, fungi, arthropods, and so on--it is carbon recycling, not emission. 

I'm stingy with biomass, and would no sooner give the city my tree than I would my compost. At some point in January, I take the tree outside, stand and all. This being the maritime Northwest, it can stay there looking green and alive until April or May, and in years past I have placed to to seem like part of the landscaping. Some years, as Spring comes round, I cut off the boughs and lay them among the blueberries as a nice acidic mulch; I may come back the next year and toss the skeletal branches aside. The trunk gets tossed in back for the native blackberries to clamber over, and eventually to return to the soil. Other years, I remove the stand and toss the whole tree in back. Birds hide in it, berries climb through, and the soil beneath gets better year by year. 

I rationalize habitually, but in this case I really do think that my choice of tree and my treatment of it after the holidays is as good a way to go environmentally as most of the alternatives. A live tree, planted out after Christmas, would be better, but I don't own any ground to plant in, and I don't know many people who have the space to do that year after year. No tree at all could be better, maybe, but it sounds like no fun. Besides, I want my local tree farm to stay in business.

Garlic Winter

If you tuned into the Garlic Calendar, then you know that the cloves sense the Winter Solstice, and commence to sprouting, threatening your year's supply of homegrown flavor. But I'm such a procrastinator that I cannot follow my own advice, and it was only in the new year that I got around to peeling and storing the dozens of cloves that were sitting in the garage. Just these couple of weeks had the garlic doing this:

Hot hot garlic porn, or just reproduction?

While they're starting on the new cycle that would birth a new plant, the cloves are not yet too far gone (besides, I kinda like the look of slices with the green circle in the center). But before the sprouts get as long as the cloves from which they spring, before the flesh gets soft, before pungent aroma becomes putrid regret, I need to somehow stop the process. In years past, this has been a matter of dropping peeled cloves into a jar and drowning them in olive oil. I did that again, but this time I'm trying a couple of other methods.

Salt and the earth.

Here's experiment #1. Good old fashioned salting. Pour pickling salt into a jar, put in a layer of peeled cloves, then bury them in salt, then more garlic, more salt,...you get the picture. The cloves are firm, and I did not irrigate, so I don't expect osmosis to create a saline slush, but it's an experiment. For reference, the majority of the cloves in the first photo and a bunch of salt filled a pint jar. I'll check back in later to let you know if this is a fail, but I suspect that what will happen is that the cloves stay intact, and I get a batch of garlic salt.

Experiment #2 is yet to be done. I had a bunch of large-cloved heads of garlic this year; some are elephant garlic, but not necessarily all. The plan is to roast them, smoosh the result, spread it out on parchment paper, and dehydrate it. I'm aiming for something like fruit leather, a hide of garlicky goodness that I can snip into strips or drop into the pot whole whenever I want that twice-roasted garlic flava.

And then there's this, the old standby: cloves in oil. Chopped or pureed garlic tastes harsh and goes bad quicker. Drowning while cloves in oil and keeping them out of direct sunlight seems to halt the sprouting process. I'll remove the rubber gasket from the jar above so that the occasional fermentation fart can escape. In time, the cloves will soak up the oil and become beautifully translucent, edible amber. 

There are other ways to preserve garlic, but I don't like them (pickling? I just throw some in the cuke pickles I make, and that's plenty for my taste), or I don't know them. If you want to write in with others, I'll listen.

So if you have not yet dealt with your garlic, do it now!

The Year According to Garlic

Sitting down to peel some of the 2012 harvest, 2013's cloves in the ground, I have time to think about garlichronology. Like its pungent Allium kin, it's ideally planted in the Fall, not too long after harvest. Add to that the need to cure the crop to get the best out of it, and the garlic cycle tales a year.

This will be my 5th year of garlic growing near the southern tip of the Salish Sea, and I feel like I'm getting the hang of it. At least on a forgiving glacial sandy loam at 200 feet above sea level. In this 5th year, I feel like I get the rhythm and finally can write about it without being a (complete) fool.

The goal is to write the garlic-centric year, and to post in time to be useful, instead of my usual procrastinatory irrelevance. Today, I'm posting a calendar, beginning with October planting. As the garlic cycle rolls on, I'll post with more detail. 

 

777 Marmalade

Last Winter, I made marmalade and wrote about it. The marmalade was great, the recipe acceptable, and the writing kinda bad. 

Last week, I made another batch, because Cara Cara oranges were on sale for 88 cents a pound. A lucky double-eight smiles on fate in many cultures, so I took it as a sign that I should fill a couple bags and get to cooking. Even without mystical callings to make jam, cheapskates like me know that 88 cents is about half the usual sale price, and that it's a good bet the citrus is dead ripe and they're in a hurry to move it. Deal lapse and fruit rots, but every once in a whole fate smiles and if you're alert you can capture it in jars, preserving it til you need it.

With enough for a couple of batches, I had opportunity to improve on last year's operation. So here I am again, reporting, but this time not burdened with writerly pretensions.

It's called 7 7 7 Marmalade because there are 7 pounds of oranges, 7 cups of sugar, and it makes 7 pints. The amount of water isn't 7, but I'm gonna ignore that. Here's the recipe.

7 7 7 Marmalade

Get 7 pounds of oranges, (Cara Cara is what I use, but the main thing is to get something with an aromatic skin.)

Peel the zest from 3 oranges, and then halve and slice the whole batch. Make the first cut from naval to where the stem was, and the slices should be a half centimeter thick. (That's a skinny quarter inch, Americans.) Cut up the zest however you want. I go for a random chop that yields everything from slivers to uncut pinky-sized pieces (That's over 5 cm, everyone else in the world; in the US, "pinky" is your small finger, and is an acceptable unit of measure.) Put the zest aside.

If you're smart, lazy, or both, you'll be sliding the orange slices directly into a 12 quart stock pot, which will be about full when you finish.

Pour 4 cups of water into the pot and start cooking.

I start at the low end of Medium High on the stove, and once the boil begins, start to inch it up to high Medium High. (That's, uh, nobody really knows what temperature stove knob units correlate to. Sorry, citizens of earth.) Let some of the water evaporate, but the goal is not to boil off the liquid; go for a long low boil that dissolves the pulp and a lot of the pith. The end result will remain liquidy and most un-jamlike.

After the first boil.

Now, let it sit til the next day. It gives you a break, and I think it helps maximize the natural pectin. Yeah, that's right, don't add pectin to marmalade. It makes its own. 

When it's time, get your canning set-up in order, and be sure you're ready to stand at the stove and stir for a while. Put on "Blowout Comb" by Digable Planets, or some other hour-long album, and then put the pot back on a low Medium High stove. 

Add 7 cups of sugar and the zest and stir them in well. I also experimented by grating half a nutmeg into one batch at this point, and about an inch of ginger root into the other; not sure if I really taste it.  Watch and adjust the temp as necessary until you have a hearty simmer. No lid this time, because you do want to cook it down. At first, no need to stir constantly, but by about Track 7 (titled "Dial 7," see why this CD fits this recipe?), you should see the marmalade beginning to emerge. I've been using a large metal spatula for the stirring, because it's long handle keeps my hands away from the sugary lava, and it's good for scraping the bottom so nothing sticks. 

There are all sorts of recipes that say the jam must reach specific temperatures, or recommend tests like dropping some jam on a cold plate to see if it is thick enough. But the risk of burning yourself to get thermometer readings or the hassle of another dish to wash are not necessary. Here's how you know it's ready:

• You see the jam getting darker, and that more of it is sticking to the side of the pot.
• You hear the boil change from simmer to thick ploppy bubbles, and finally to a rumble bubble that explodes each time you stir.
• You feel your arm muscles burning as you stir through thickening glop.

Cut the heat and get the jars ready. Make sure your canner water is boiling before you put anything in the jars. I usually start that at the same time as the marmalade boil, dialing down once it reaches its own boil, and then crank it up again along with a smaller pot of water to sterilize the lids when the marmalade is ready.

Leave a centimeter or a skinny half inch of headspace as you fill half or whole pint jars. (I put a spoonful of bourbon in the bottom of two pints, but will wait a while to sample those.) Screw on the lids loosely and process for, you guess it, 7 minutes. 

For those of you who cannot abide stream-of-consciousness recipe format, here's the listy version:

Ingredients

• 7 pounds oranges, sliced thin after removing the zest of three oranges.
• 4 cups water
• 7 cups sugar

Directions
 
Boil 1: oranges and water until pulp dissolves and skins soften
Wait overnight
Boil 2: and sugar and zest to the mix and slowly return to a boil, stirring increasinly often
Use your sense and the done-ness list above to know when to stop.
Boil 3: process half or one-pint jars in boiling water canner for 7 minutes.  

Yields 7 pints.





 

Tidal Beds

Low Tide

Back in March, I briefly referenced sunken garden beds, and just the other day I railed against the false wisdom of raised beds. The more I think about it, the more it seems like the garden wisdom takes a while to play out, and favors an oscillation, an ebb and flow, rather than zealous favoring of one level or another.

If you read the raised bed rant, you may have figured out that many of the problems stem from inflexibility: the unchanging, unyielding perimeter with a static elevation. Horizontal extent of a garden bed may be constrained by your available space, but still the bed (or at least the weeded portion thereof) should be able to grow over the summer, and perhaps retreat during winter.

Rising Tide

You can play around with elevation a lot more, though. Some plants like to be in mounds to begin with. You've heard of a 'hill of beans," right? My cukes start out in ringed hills worthy of Celtic chieftans. Then of course there are the potatoes and other plants that benefit from having more and more soil piled up around them as the season progresses. Meanwhile, blueberries and mints like the low wet ground, sopping up whatever water runs from the hills. Within a given bed, highs and lows occur across space and through time.

This attitude is especially well suited to my local soil, which is a fairly sandy loam borne of glacial retreat. It's easy to work. I dig out lawn and sculpt to the levels I want. Or give the bed a tilt. Banking a bed high to the north and low to the south creates a small advantage to crops in northern climes, bringing the ground a bit closer to perpendicular to the lines of photons coming from the sun, fooling seeds and starts into thinking they're a few weeks closer to summer. The same aspect that makes Washington's Columbia wines more famous than Oregon's--a southerly slope to the river--can be replicated on a small scale in my yard with just a shovel and garden rake.

The plants themselves add to the effect, and so planning is important. Put the raspberries and pole beans to the north, and work your way down to the ground-huggers at the south. A big plant at the south snags the photons, relegating anything north to a dank dark pit. Fine if you want ginseng and miners lettuce, but not so good for your garden variety plants. Knowing how early and how fast things grow matters, too; you can plant greens that rise early or late in the shadow of a mid-summer monster, since the don't much care for solstitial high noons anyway. Knowing when and how quickly each plant will grow and fade allows a gardener to overlap to a degree, getting more out of every inch of garden space.

Any one variety of plant ebbs and flows, and likes to be high and drained or low and sodden. Your whole bed may start small and grow over summer, flooding south, toward that that photosynthetic sunbilical, only to retreat again. I use this knowledge to be a little lazier, dispensing first with those heavy, labor intensive (and pestiferous, don't forget) walls. I may be still digging bigger well after the solstice if some plant or transplant could use the ground; no need to cram a Summer's worth of work in March. Go with the flow.

And don't fight the flow. Why would you want boards or bricks or railroad ties blocking your garden's roots? A single-level bed works fine for a monoculture, but not much more. Roto-tilling a big bed for a few tiny starts and seeds invites a flood of weeds. A rectangle of introduced 'soil' intensively cultivated, watered, and fertilized year after year is great, if your aim is to create pest habitat.


Summer's tide pulls high only once a year. Long northern days feed photons aplenty to the plants that ride this one big wave. Growth crests, and drops off when the clouds show up or the days just get too short. It's a good ride, and sooner than you'd like you slide into Winter, where there's time to reflect and maybe even think ahead.

Riposte Repost, or A Lamentation about Consumeration*

The new groups are not concerned
With what there is to be learned
They got Burton suits, ha you think it's funny
Turning rebellion into money

from "White Man in the Hammersmith Palais" by Joe Strummer

The clogged blogosphere of foodies, locavores, urban homesteaders, DIYers, and OTHers** renders my offerings invisible. I could try to gain a wider audience by joining the pinterested, or by linking to one of the other sites that aggregates such blogs, but I am too lazy and egotistical, not to mention dis-inclined. The ramps to fame, or at least garnering large numbers of eyeballs, prove too steep for my shiftless self. Make a logo, develop a not-off-the-shelf design, pay for a domain, suck up to corporations so they'll give me some swag to review or re-gift, and most dangerous of all, fall into the pond of self-deception, in which this platform can somehow become a revenue generator or a stepping stone to a book contract. 

Among my bookmarks is one such site, where people turn in their recipes, DIY tips, and so on. There's actually some useful stuff there, and I do check it out fairly regularly. The name of it is "Punk Domestics," which appealed to me before I really began to understand what it is. The name, which rings oxymoronic to begin with in my book (I grew up in a time and place where "domestics" were servants, usually darker than the, uh, dare I say, masters?), also fails to live up to anything like the spirit of punks, much less the "hardcore" ethos their blurb claims they embody. 

For starters, to submit anything, you're supposed to log in, get your ID, join the queue. And yes, submission is the name of the game, oddly enough, for any posting must comply with a list of rules. You are then encouraged to get a Punk Domestics "badge" to display on your blog, so you can funnel eyeballs to their site, which has a lot of ads, including irritating pop-ups that you have to click out of the way.

And it's not just ads. Entire blog posts are plugs. Like the William Sonomas give-away. A post waxes eloquent about how this upscale purveyor is embracing the DIY movement with darling canning jars and such, marketed as the "Agrarian" line. [Clever name, I will admit, harkening to a simpler time, a garden-ey feeling, and of course for the  baby boomers with fuzzy memories and their kids with vague historical understandings, it evokes the rhyming Aquarian age.] All you have to do to win it is drive up the site's numbers with comments, or post something on twitter or pinterest, whatever it takes to increase revenue at Punk Domestics, which just happens to admit that they've "done some copywriting for Williams-Sonoma, including for the Agrarian line." If you can stomach it, visit the offending link 

About 200 people fell in line to enter, and two won. I'd rather wallow in non-commercial, self-righteous, obscurity. Even if the readership consists mostly of myself, trying to recall how I made that meal or canned those things, it feels better than shilling for a company catering to privileged dilettantes. Those who have people to cook for them, and mostly only take it upon themselves when it will create a show. I'm more interested in food, basically.

* This post originally appeared at Mocavore.

** Other Things Homespun-ers