Growing More Food

It must be a case of mistaken expectations but I feel like the garden doesn't produce as much... produce as it should.

Consider this: our garden accounts for fully half of our water consumption, if not more. We have six beds going full blast all year, but we never seem to have that much food. Meals never come out of the garden, but are supplemented by the garden. I don't think that my entire diet should be coming out of my garden, but I do think I should be able to eat a meal strictly from my personal farm. As of now, that never happens. I once made a salad that was pretty close, but it was still just a salad.

This seems to me to be the future challenge: how do we expand the food output of the garden without dramatically increasing the labor and water demands of the garden? To add more clarity to the parameters, I'm fine with working in the garden more and I'm fine with watering more, but what I'm really looking to do is up the input/output ratio, not start my own farm (though that would be pretty dope).

Currently, the garden contains (and I again apologize for my broke ass camera and the corresponding lack of photos):

• Tomatoes
• Peppers (Jalapeno, Habenero, spicy Thai and two others)
• Kale
• Collard Greens
• Chard
• Zucchini
• Squash
• Pumpkin
• Basil

The tomatoes have a handsome input/output ratio, which we are about the reap the benefits of, and while the zucchini are a little late in the game, they too will kick out a lot of food. The squash and pumpkins are small quantities of large foods which take a long time to grow, so I'm kind of writing them off. The greens are easy and constant but not very substantive. Peppers are definitely not a reliable food source. Basil is delicious, but not much else.

The easy calls are the zucchini and tomatoes. Both are tasty and productive, requiring little besides water. Everything else feeling like it could be better, at least in the regards to the amount of food produced. So now comes the research, what else produces great quantities? Maybe potatoes? Then comes the decision about how much tasty I'm willing to give up to have more bulk.

Decision will be made, and written about at great length.

Some Creative Writing From a While Ago

My garden is full of tentacles.

The squash are by far the most tentacled, hundreds of slim digits attaching themselves to anything that let’s them go upward. Guiding them along the wire cylinders we’ve place them in is a Sisyphean task. Every morning I discover they’ve lashed out of their enclosures, searching for new objects to cling to. God forbid I should miss a day, or they’d be choking out my tomatoes.

Sad cousin to the squash, our sole melon vine seems afraid of letting its tentacle flag fly. Depressed by the mild weather or maybe just intimidated by the exploding chard situated next to it, it refuses to grow or to die. It sits there, day after day, healthy but small. I maintain that once the weather turns hot, it’ll turn into a kudzu like monster, growing several feet in a day, but until then I can’t help but feel it’s a waste of potential.

Not all the tentacles are welcome though. In fact, my little canopy jungle is situated squarely in hostile territory, between opposing walls of ivy and bougainvillea. Both are devious plants, sending their soft tendrils underground to breach in the rich soil of our plant beds. Thieving bastards.

While the struggle to contain the squash vines is a labor of love, rooting out these intruders is a war requiring ruthless efficiency and constant vigilance. I’m particularly protective of the tomatoes, because tomatoes are delicious and when the boug’ comes up in their bed I flip my lid. On numerous occasions I’ve swore to all who would listen that I’ll burn down that cursed hedge, but the opportunity has yet to present itself.

On the western front, by the time ivy leaves start showing in the garlic bed a large root base is already established and must be destroyed. Ivy’s white shoots will strangle everything above it, and so it can be shown no mercy. I will bide my time, and let the garlic bulb before I delve into the bed and tear out yards of tender roots. When I do, I’ll leave no trace of this menace, only the sweet irony of more tentacles: the bed needs vetch for cover crop.

So many tentacles.

General Update: GARLIC!

Been too long since I've done the run down, but that's a mistake I won't make again any time soon. My camera is broken so I have no proof of what I'm about to say to you, but I assure you that it is all true.

The garden has exploded. Just gone boom. I've got tomato and squash plants that are taller than I am. We're already getting ripe stupus and all the other tomatoes are covered in green little balls of potential delicious. There are collard greens trees that are pushing four feet tall and show no signs of stopping. There are bushels of chard and kale (which I keep telling Erin I'll give her) just waiting around to be steamed with a little balsamic vinegar and soy sauce and thrown over couscous. The staggering amount of biomass is shocking.

The epic garlic harvest is all out of the ground and drying today, so my dinning room table is unavailable for things like dinning. We have Polish Soft Neck, Fireball, and Bavarian Purple, the later of which came out a little disappointing. It's weighing in light and the flavor isn't, in my opinion, as distinctive as the other two. It's still good, and the other two are outstanding, so I'm not worried.

Josh and I (who are we kidding, just Josh) came up with our strategy for planting garlic next year and it goes a little something like this.

• Plant the biggest cloves. This seems simple and I don't know why it never occurred to us before. Garlic cloves are not seeds in the traditional sense, they're actual plants which is why they sprout if you don't keep them dry. So when planting, you want to select the biggest cloves to get the biggest plants. Flavor is more important than size, a perspective generally overlooked in grocery stores, but it's still nice to get the most bang for your buck.
• Cold treat the cloves. Garlic grows well in very cold climates and generally needs a cold snap to sprout. Oakland is not generally the best provider in this regard, so instead of praying for a freak two days of cold after you plant, you just throw the cloves you're going to plant in the freezer overnight before planting. Theoretically, this makes for faster sprouting and thus more growing. There is apparently a risk of over freezing them, which I'll need to do more research into.
• Try more varieties. Uh, yeah. We want to try more varieties of garlic. So we're going to plant them. Hopefully we'll find something that really likes our climate and soil. No idea what varieties yet, but we don't need to figure that out for another four months.
• Soil testing. Both Josh and I noticed that the garlic planted near our rosemary bush was smaller than the stuff further away. Could have been that they were competing with it for water, or maybe the soil is just weak in that bed. In the next round of planting, we're going to put garlic in all our beds and monitor the difference in sizes. Hopefully, we can find information about good companion plants so we don't need to do this trial and error style.

I'm going to do some reading today about when to clip the stalks on garlic and when I do clip our crop I'll post weights, total and average. We like scientific rigor in this compound and so our garlic must be measured.

The other project that is dwelling in the front of my brain right now is developing our beds. Our old compost bed is home to the squash right now, so the plan is to drop all the tomato and squash plants in that bed at the end of the season and build a box around it. At that point, it should be about read to go as a full fledged growing bed. Our other compost bed probably needs about six months of green inputs before it's ready for prime time, but I'm still excited about it. The last bed that need immediate attention is the garlic bed (which doesn't have garlic in it right now), which need a new box. We discussed expanding it and putting the lavender in the ground there, but I'm worried that having big lavender and rosemary plants in one bed will be too much competition for the plants in the bed. We'll see.

Josh is threatening to get us some bees this summer, an exciting prospect. I'll let him write that up later.