Eat The Yard

As we prepare for the spring planting this month, throughout our yard there are several spots and beds still devoted to cold-season holdovers.  And some — like the broccoli, carrots, and beets — have a few weeks yet to go before the first round of harvesting.  I could intersperse warm-season crops here and there between [...]

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With the end of January we reached the middle of our effort in terms of days, but certainly not in terms of calories.  The 7,568 calories we have managed to grow and eat from our yard since August 1 of last year represent .5 percent of our annual count, or about two days worth of [...]

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During a respite in the week-long storm that’s projected to drop 8-20 inches throughout San Diego County, I wandered our near-fifth acre, harvesting a few things for a dinner salad and surveying the damage.  The winds have been gusting hard and regular, battering our fruit trees and tilting the giant Silk Oak that tends to [...]

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Sunday we decided to finally do something with a few of the Delicata Squash that have been ripening in a bowl on our counter for about four weeks.  I have been extremely skeptical of how edible they’d turn out to be because they were grown way out of season, and for the last few weeks [...]

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Despite winter’s rep as a food-less time of year, a season during which many home growers and their yards hibernate, waiting for warm weather and the common edibles that come with it — we’ve been having a good growing experience.  Our cold season crop has been a windfall compared to the pest-devastated warmer months earlier [...]

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We have been saving snow peas for three or four weeks, dutifully blanching and freezing them until a combination of preserved peas and fresh-picked measured out to two cups.  We got there this past Sunday and made vegetarian split pea soup with our harvest.  Our friends Paul and Amy, who are always game for a [...]

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I could have planted 125 square feet of Calabrese Broccoli.  And 30 square feet of Jiu Cai Garlic Chives.  And 25 square feet each of Correnta Spinach, Marvel of Four Seasons Butterhead Lettuce, and Q’s Special Medley Mesclun.
Put another way, I could have grown 400 White Lisbon Bunching Onions, 300 Yellow Sweet Spanish Onions, and [...]

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When I wrote a few weeks ago about the preponderance of male flowers in my winter squash as the culprit behind the failure my cucurbits to fruit, I had also spent some time researching another symptom that had been plaguing those plants.  The fruitlessness is the result of insufficient pollination, as I previously indicated.  The [...]

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The Butternut, Pink Banana, and Table Queen Acorn Squash has had several weeks of robust growth.  Vines burst through the netting that covers my raised beds, climbing and unfurling 15-inch-wide leaves of deep green, the vines healthy with flowering female fruit.
But the squash that grew rapidly to the size of a sneaker have all but [...]

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A few days ago we picked and ate our last Gala apple.  I left it hanging on the tree a while longer than I should have, sacrificing the flavor, because I knew that not only would it be the last apple of the season, but it would be the last anything.  We have no harvest-ready [...]

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