The Fall Garden

As you can see from the various pictures, Farmville is still alive and kicking. It's been awhile since the last post and I can understand why you might come to the conclusion that everything was finished for the season. The truth of the matter is wine making has taken up a great deal of time, so posting updates fell a little behind. In between the batches of wine, I did manage to get a few things planted for the Fall garden. These were planted mostly in mid-September:

• Celery
• Broccoli
• Cauliflower
• Cabbage
• Lettuce
• Beets
• Radishes
• Peas
• Bok Choy
• Romanesco
• Chard

These are all great things to have in the garden because they can be used in so many ways. Broccoli, cauliflower, and Romanesco can be steamed and served as a vegetable side dish with just about anything. They are also very good for soups and casseroles as well. Most of these vegetables can be used raw in salads or on vegetable platters or cooked with meats and starches. Those with the good fortune to have access to very fresh picked vegetables for salads know how much this adds to the dish. I find that using very fresh picked vegetables in cooked dishes also makes a big difference. The freshness contributes more concentrated flavor when compared to something picked a few days before, so you can go very light on seasoning and enjoy the true taste of the vegetables. Another advantage to having a garden full of vegetables to pick dinner ingredients from is you can customize according to what dish is being prepared. For instance, the small, secondary sprouts of broccoli are the best for stir frying. You can use a larger head cut up into smaller pieces, but being able to pick the small side shoots takes things to a higher level. I planted the beets for nostalgic reasons. They are very good when simply boiled and eaten fresh versus the canned version we are familiar with. Back in 1983, I was living in a small house on our headquarter farm. Next door to me (for context, next door was about a half a mile away) lived an old guy named Andy. He was very colorful and had a lot of good stories about the area. He had grown up there and remembered when this area of West Sacramento had not even been cleared of brush to plant crops. He was in his mid-eighties at that time, so was born just before the turn of the century. That particular fall, he decided to plant beets behind his house. He didn't like the beets at the grocery store and being on a fixed income, he always planted a big garden to feed his wife and him. For some reason, the beets flourished. Every single row he planted came up and grew like weeds. He and his wife could only eat so many beets and I think he gave so many to his friends and family that they got tired of eating them too. Every day when he saw me drive down my driveway, he would flag me down and ask if I needed some more beets. I always said yes and told him how great they tasted. That was the truth too. They were very good. I think he would actually pull a handful up when he saw me coming, and I would usually wash and cook them within an hour or so. When they're fresh like this, they don't need much seasoning. Just a pinch of salt and pepper. Be careful though, the juice leftover from boiling them will stain everything bright red. Years ago, beet juice was the red dye of choice for many things.

The other pictures show how some of the summer planted stuff looks in the fall. The peppers have all just about turned red. The jalapenos are actually milder when red. The tomatoes are much smaller in size and what green ones are left, take almost forever to ripen up. Good thing I have a freezer and pantry full of tomato products from last summer. The sunflowers are drying out but I think the birds will get more of the seeds than I will. That's OK. The pumpkins and winter squash have all ripened up and are ready to be picked.

It's been a very good year for Farmville. Just about everything cooked for dinner the past few months has had something from the garden as the key ingredient. When fruits and vegetables are the foundation of the meal, it tends to be healthier for you. Not 100% of the time (I do use things like bacon to flavor up dishes), but for the most part. That's all I shoot for anyway. As the fall planted vegetables mature, I'll get better about posting updates.

Are We Tired of Squash Yet?

Before we wander too deep into a philosophical discussion about squash, I'll answer the question from my perspective. Nope, not yet. As I poked around yesterday to see how things were doing in the heat wave, I found a yellow zucchini. This was a nice little treasure because that side of the garden hasn't been watered in a few weeks. Everything around this squash plant has been finished for the season, so it didn't make sense to drag the hose over there to water it. It is showing just how tough and strong it is by not only surviving this man-made drought, but also producing more of its kind. I "celebrated" this discovery by seasoning with salt, pepper, oregeno and olive oil. A few minutes on the grill and it was a very tasty partner to the nice NY steak known as "last night's dinner".

I'm seriously considering a new cause to champion and that is to educate the masses about the benefits of growing squash in their gardens. They are very easy to grow and produce an insane amount of food compared to how little effort the gardner needs to do for them. I know people get tired of eating squash a few weeks into the summer, but the solution is to mix up how it is prepared. Here is a list of some the ways zucchini was used this past summer here at Farmville.

• Baked into cookies with walnuts and dried fruit


• Grilled with light seasonings


• Fried Tempura style


• Stuffed with meat and cheese


• Diced and sauteed with garlic


• Raw with ranch dressing


• Tossed with pasta, garlic, tomatoes and basil

As you can see, if you arm yourself with a handful of recipes, you can enjoy summer squash for as long as your plant keeps its end of the deal.

The other type of squash we planted was the hard shell or winter types. We planted acorn, butternut, and delicata (not to be confused with Delicato Winery where I bought grape juice this past weekend to make into wine, but that will be another post). Also, closely related are the pumpkins. They are in the same plant family and can be used in the same recipes as most of the other winter squashes. Much like the zucchini plants, the pumpkins and winter squash will take care of themselves for the most part. You just need to make sure they are well watered early on so their roots spread out and grow deep.

The winter squash and pumpkins are ready to start harvesting now, but will also keep for a few weeks longer outside in the garden. By Halloween, the plan is to have them all picked and stored in a cool, dry location inside. If luck is on our side, they should keep until late Winter.

In anticipation of the mega-squash harvest, I fould two cookbooks devoted entirely to squash recipes. These are going to come in handy because the assistant winemaker at Farmville is very fond of home cooked dishes from the garden. The next couple of weeks will be pretty busy with crushing grapes and her help will be most appeciated in getting some grapes picked in the Sierra Foothills in early October. Her reward for this manual labor will be a dinner made up of various squash recipes. Some of the ideas so far are:

• Butternut squash soup with pesto


• Roasted acorn squash with pistachios


• Pumpkin and beef stew


• Pumkin pie


• Winter squash rissotto


• Pumpkin stuffed raviolis

I think when you take the time to search out and try different recipes, you can enjoy the bounty a squash garden produces almost all year. Considering how easy it is to grow and how healthy it is in your diet, one has to wonder why more folks aren't growing it.

Transitions

As the title suggests, Farmville is in the midst of transition. Transition in this context means the classical sense, moving from one phase to another. These days, the word transition is thrown out there each and every time change takes place, but my opinion is this is not entirely accurate. Change just means it's different than it was, say five minutes ago. Transition means it changed, but the change is part of moving forward toward a place that signifies progress. In Farmville, transition includes many things: the end of summer, the beginning of a new school year, a new vintage for those that measure a year in terms of how the wine turned out.

I realize the week after Labor Day is not officially the end of summer, but there are many who feel this is the most prominent weekend to define that dividing line. I happen to be one of those. It has become a last hurrah for summer activities and in most years, the long hot days we identify summer with are gone after this point in time. This year was a bit out of the ordinary because the Labor Day weekend gave us some of the hottest days this season and a few weeks ago, you could swear it was fall already. But this year has hardly been ordinary for many reasons.

The beginning of a new school year represents a big transition for just about everyone. For the kids, starting a brand new grade level, and sometimes a brand new school, transition can seem like an understatement. It's definitely progress, but the perceived change is very dramatic. The same can be said for the many parents that have kids going through this. I'm sure there are many out there who can easily identify with both of these vantage points. One group that probably contributes more toward making this transition happen smoothly are teachers. If you think about it, teachers help kids and parents navigate this transition seamlessly, and in a lot of cases, they have their own kids to shepherd through this journey as well. I had the good fortune to spend the summer with a teacher that exemplifies this and the children she will teach this year are very lucky. They will learn much.

The final transition topic of this post is vintage. In wine terms, it simply means the year the grapes were harvested. Since every year has its own nuances as far as weather, a vintage can indicate quite a bit about what one might expect from the wine made that year. Overly hot years can mean high sugar levels and subsequently, high alcohol levels. Very cool years yield wine with lower alcohol and higher acidity. Because consistency is considered one of the most important attributes in mass marketing and most wine is mass marketed, various techniques are used to "smooth" the impact that Mother Nature has on each vintage. Since this year has been very cool, most vineyards are doing all kinds of things to try and make the grapes ripen the same as they do every year. They are under-irrigating, pulling leaves, repositioning the fruit, and many other things to get the sun to pay attention to the beloved grapes. Since Farmville has a wine making unit, we follow this madness. Mostly for the entertainment value though. Since our wine making is strictly for our own consumption, we need only satisfy our own taste and truth be told, inconsistency is what makes it all interesting. Because each year is so different and that difference is captured in the character of the wine made that year, my vote is to accept it and appreciate the diversity it provides. This will insure your palate will never get bored and your cooking style will always be versatile enough to make good use of this. Let's hold our glasses up and toast everyone that runs as fast as they can from consistency and celebrate individuality. Cheers.

After all of that soap box rhetoric, here is your reward. The following link is to the Photobucket page where we will post the 2010 wine making pictures. I can almost guarantee if you follow the blog and use the pictures as visual aids, by 2011, you too can make your own wine.

http://s1210.photobucket.com/albums/cc418/kevin756/2010%20Pinot%20Noir%20Winemaking/

More Comparison Pictures

This one shows how much changed from when the tomatoes were planted til they were being picked. We will be picking tomatoes for the next couple of months. The other pictures show the pumpkins and winter squash when first planted and later, when the vines started spreading out. The one with the combine harvesting the wheat behind Farmville doesn't really show anything in the garden, but I thought it was cool anyway. It captures that this is part of a "real" farm. What's funny is if I had a better camera, I could capture the tract houses a few hundred yards away from us. They're close but because of how everything is situated, we really are pretty far removed from their world. I'm betting they're glad we're removed from their world as well.

Grown Up Farmville

The topic of this post is as the title states. We are now at the almost very end of August and just about everything in Farmville has "grown-up". The only things left that are still working their way through their journey to the table are the pumpkins, winter squash, and sunflowers. Very shortly, we will add some more to the list, but those will be the newly planted Fall vegetables and they will have their own post to explain their story. The pictures with this post are all about the corn. The main reason is I'm not very skilled at using this blog software and making pictures conform to the text has been tough. I'll put some more posts up with comparison pictures of the other crops we grew this summer and rely on everyone's ability to make sense of it. If any of it's confusing, feel free to ask questions via the comments feature. The corn is the absolute poster child for showing how dramatically things change in just three or four months time. The early picture shows them just coming up and then the later pictures show them at almost nine feet tall. That's a lot of change. When they were first coming up, it was hard to imagine they would grow to where they are at now. I remember watching the non-stop wind blow them sideways and wondering if I would come out one day and find them gone. Luckily they hung in there and, despite the unusually cool season, did very well. Looking back over the season, we harvested quite a bit of corn. We even froze some. At this stage, I'm cutting the stalks to use for decorating the pumpkin patch. One of my many children swears she is going to make the dead tree in the back the scariest thing known at Halloween. I think we have everything we need to do that. We'll post pictures later if we pull this off.

Our other crops that grew up this summer in Farmville also provided a very bountiful harvest. They included watermelons, cantaloupes, crenshaw melons, tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, zucchini, basil, dill, and various other herbs. The melons attracted some gophers and we ended up having to share some of the harvest with them. Those that know me well understand how much that bothers me. In the end, I made the painful but mature decision to not do battle with them. I had some pretty wicked tactics lined up to use in getting rid of them but more than likely, it would have led to the complete destruction of Farmville. I guess splitting the harvest with them is a small price to pay for having my garden not look like a nuclear battlefield on a distant planet.

The take away message from this post is that the grown up version of a garden is a good thing. It means the harvest has provided a summer full of produce for the table as well as a well stocked freezer and pantry. As the garden chores lessen due to this grown up stage we are in, it affords the time to work on other projects. One of the projects we in Farmville are moving into is making grown up beverages. More specifically, wine. We'll save that discussion for a future post where we can do proper justice to the winemaking process. The next post or two (not sure how difficult posting a bunch of pictures will be just yet) will be devoted to comparison pictures of the various things we grew this past spring and summer. Enjoy.

Endless Summer

OK, before everyone starts thinking I'm crazy, I'll acknowledge we haven't had summer yet in 2010, at least in northern California. I hope I don't burst any bubbles out there, but it pretty much looks like we won't get one either. That being said, I still had a bunch of summer produce to make use of before it spoiled, so the decision was made to freeze it. The two things we had way more than we need for the next thousand or so meals was basil and tomatoes. Fortunately for us, both of these freeze very well with a small amount of prep work. I say small amount because once I describe the prep work, it doesn't sound like much, but in reality, it did take a fair amount of time to get all of this done. Luckily, the two main grunt workers in Farmville these days have a long history of knuckling down and getting this type of work done without complaining. It's actually pretty fun because once you establish a rhythm and pace, the discussion can range from favorite movies to anything else worthy of the attention of two people with a mountain of produce in front of them that needs something done to it.

First, we'll talk about the basil. The picture of the wicker basket full of basil stalks came from three of the eight to ten basil plants growing in Farmville. It's amazing how much basil can come from just a few plants. I encourage everyone to have at least one or two basil plants in their gardens. They are more than worth it. The basic process for freezing pesto is to cut a bunch of basil branches and strip the leaves from them. This part is time consuming but if you tackle it with at least one other team member, it's pretty easy. Once the leaves are stripped, they need to be washed several times in cold water and drained. A colander works well, but a salad spinner would probably be better. Our recipe used garlic, pine nuts, olive oil and the basil leaves. We used a food processor to puree everything to the consistency of a thick paste. Most pesto recipes also call for Parmesan cheese, but since this is going into the freezer, leave the cheese out for now. Once you thaw and use later, just add the grated cheese then. We spooned the finished pesto (the picture with the white bowl) into small Dixie cups to freeze. This makes it easier to use a vacuum sealer, but if you're using zip lock bags, it makes sense to portion into the bags and force the air out before zipping shut, and then throw into the freezer. Doesn't get much easier to have great tasting pesto to use during the winter months. Pesto truly is the "taste of Summer".

The tomatoes were not complicated to process, but like the basil, the amount of work was a bit more than what it sounds like when you write about. The basic process was to cut an "X" on the blossom end and drop in boiling water for thirty seconds to help remove the skin. Immediately upon removing from the boiling water, you cool them in ice water for a minute or so. After this, the skins are easy to peel off. We cut the tomatoes in half and squeezed the seeds out. Some might not want to go to this much effort and I'm not sure it makes a huge difference. The recipe I was following said to do this step and I'm not one to "swim against the current". The biggest hassle with the tomatoes was the amount of liquid pulled out when applying the vacuum to pack them in the bags. I saw a post on bulletin board later that said it's better to oven dry tomatoes and then vacuum pack to avoid this nuisance. The plan in a couple weeks is to oven dry some, so a later post will talk about that.

Regardless of how you preserve tomatoes, basil, or any other summer produce, you capture the true essence of a vine ripe product to use later in the year when a taste of summer is sorely needed. Even as the non-summer of 2010 is a distant memory, having a summertime dish on the dinner table in December, for example, is a nice experience. Let's all do what we can to preserve the bounty of Summer.

PS- I didn't feel like fighting with making the pictures correspond with the sequence of the text, so unitl I do that, please know the order of the pictures is out of whack.

The Bounty of Farmville

So far, the posts about the Farmville Reality Project have focused on different things being planted or taken care of. Last week, we were able to move in a different direction with the post about making pickles. This week, due to many circumstances, it just seemed the right time to start talking about the "bounty" that comes from working hard to plant and take care of the many vegetables we've talked about the past few months. As much as I enjoy the work out in the project, there is an equal amount of satisfaction in moving into the kitchen and using all of this to create meals. We have been doing this daily for the past couple of weeks. Before we dive into the many ingredients for our great meals this project has provided, indulge me on other aspects of the project that are as important. The Farmville Reality Project has many aspects to it, and the people involved with making these many "moving parts" work is truly an accomplishment. The crew here bring things together in a way that is both unique and very productive. This crew will serve as the foundation for this project for many years to come. We tie together the many experiences of our past with a future that is exciting. Doesn't get much better if you ask me. The ages of this crew range from mid-teens to those of us a bit older than that. We are all in agreement in our passion about this project.

The first and most important thing that comes to mind is how a productive garden captures people's attention. I'm not implying this project is any more well known than it is, but we have quite a few folks keeping track of its progress and asking questions about how things are coming along. Many of these questions come from people doing something similar and the opportunity to swap information that might help all of us successfully raise things from our gardens is priceless. We may be idealistic here, but the more we can engage people in what it takes to produce a good meal, the better we position our society to solve many health related issues that plague too many of us. It seems the more people think about their meals, the healthier aspects of the meal choice takes on greater importance. A productive garden fits into this in so many ways. The other really cool thing from this has been the interest from a younger crowd, way beyond what I had thought possible. Both of my kids were raised smack in the middle of vegetable production and because of this, they are very familiar with how to use the many vegetables that were always sitting on the counter. Since this project started, their friends have taken an interest in how things are progressing and even comment on how much certain crops have grown since the last time they stopped by. One of the crew (I have to bust you out RJ) has even planted his own garden and uses Farmville as a "school" of sorts to learn more about raising your own food. It's been good to demonstrate how a weed patch that was formerly a parking lot for construction equipment can be quickly transformed into a project that feeds an army.

This leads into another area I believe many people that operate large scale gardens should think about. No matter how many hungry kids and other relatives you have, most gardens begin to out produce their demand curve by about August of each year. Not sure why, but I suspect it's the convergence of plant biology, human physiology, and half-ass resource economics all thrown together in a way that sane people call "Uncle" and realize they can't eat everything the garden produces. In the old days (I won't even get controversial and throw time frames out there), people would get started canning or drying the production to carry them through the winter months. Now days, this doesn't happen as much as it needs to and the potential for things to simply go bad "on the vine" is very real. What we are going to do here in Farmville if this starts to happen is to pick the vegetables and take to the local food bank. I have read numerous articles about how food banks are always short on fresh fruits and vegetables. I have also heard many anecdotal accounts on home gardeners having more produce than they can use or give away to neighbors. Seems to me, this could work out perfectly. We'll post later on if we are able to do this and how the logistics work out. First glance cries out "win-win" though.

Now, lets move into quantifying the "bounty" known as Farmville. The picture with this post was taken tonight, so the methodology was simply to walk through and pick different things. Only the onions, garlic, and potatoes came from an earlier harvest, but that's what we do do with those. Keep them in a cool, dry place and use as the meal dictates. The following is a list of what was picked from a ten minute walk through Farmville this evening. I truly hope it inspires people to plant more next year so they can fully appreciate this "bounty".

• Yellow Zucchini
• Cucumbers
• White Onions
• Torpedo Onions
• Garlic
• Yellow Finnish Potatoes
• Dill
• Basil
• Garlic Chives
• Chives
• Chocolate Mint
• Spearmint
• Serrano Peppers
• Jalapeno Peppers
• Anaheim Peppers
• Thyme
• Roma Tomatoes
• Slicing Tomatoes
• Yellow Roma Tomatoes
• Sage
• Rosemary
• Sweet Corn
• Asian Melon

As you can see, we have a very large variety of ingredients to use when preparing meals here in Farmville. None of this required anything too complicated and we will likely have more than enough to share with those less fortunate. We at Farmville hope this helps those that might have come late to our community better understand what we're doing here. More importantly, the hope is to get even more on board with how we approach things. Our approach is to make sure to make improvements where ever possible and be open minded enough to know how to accomplish this. Not an easy task, but the Farmville crew is a very unique crew, so I think we will get there. Wish us luck.

Pickles

It was a fairly quiet weekend in Farmville. The heat is making things grow like crazy, but it also means I have to stay on top of the watering. Some of the cucumbers were ready yesterday, so I picked them and did not have anything specific in mind to do with them. I made a salad from one last night, along with tomato, onion and mint. It was very refreshing in this heat. After cleaning up the kitchen this morning, I took a count and decided there were more cucumbers than what would be used in salads the next couple of days. Part of the Farmville crew is out of town at the moment and other crew members eat more fast food than they should, so the big decision was made to throw together a batch of refrigerator pickles to use them up. Another factor in this decision is that RJ has big plans to make pickles from his own garden this summer. I figured this could be a test run to fine tune things so when he is ready to make pickles, I can give him some "true life" perspective.

The concept for refrigerator pickles is pretty simple. You soak them in an acidic brine that preserves them. Since they are not canned in the proper sense, they have to be kept in the refrigerator and will only keep a few months. My research shows you can use this method with many other garden vegetables as well. If we get real ambitous around here, we might try this with squash, peppers, onions, and green tomatoes too. Every dinner table should have a nice assortment of pickles to go with the meal. These pickles will have all Farmville produced stuff in them. The only store bought ingredients are the vinegar and salt.

The picture of the ingredients on the white tray shows how simple the recipe is. There are cucumbers, garlic, onion, and dill. I cut the cucumbers into spears since that's how I prefer to eat pickles. The garlic was coarsely chopped and the onion was quartered. Dill, garlic, and onion are put into the bottom of the jars and then the cucumbers spears go in. Then you put the same amount of garlic, onion, and dill on top of the cucumbers, fill each jar with a solution of water, vinegar and kosher salt; cover and put in the refrigerator for a few days; then start eating them. Pretty easy, if you ask me. As the Farmville harvest picks up momentum, the plan is to post about the way the produce is utilized. Hopefully this gets people thinking about how best to make use of all the stuff we will no doubt be awash in very shortly. If there are suggestions, please let me know. One of the fun things about this is the possibility to expand my horizons and learn new ways to make great things from this project.

Harvest Time, Finally

It's been over a couple of weeks since the last post, but that doesn't mean things have been slow. Farmville has required watering twice a week lately because the warm weather finally arrived. That coupled with the almost nonstop wind out our way has made for some thirsty plants. While I water, I've been harvesting the earlier planted stuff like onions, garlic and potatoes. The top picture is garlic and it's not Elephant garlic, though the bulb size would make you think it is. I have no issue with Elephant garlic other than it's too mild for my taste buds. Also, as someone who has historically had issues with vampires and werewolves, weak garlic could let those two groups of evil-doers get the upper hand and then Farmville chores would really fall behind this summer. I put a quarter in the picture for reference. The white onions in the next picture are also much larger than I expected. I usually plant onions and garlic in November and harvest around this time of year. These were planted his past February, so I was expecting very few large sizes since they missed a couple months of growing time. I think the long, cool spring weather helped with the large bulb sizes. I put an older picture in here so you can see the progress.




The next set of pictures are the tomatoes, including the planting picture. Some of the varieties are almost five feet tall now and have double rebar stakes to keep them from falling over. The first ones picked were an heirloom yellow roma. The fruit (and the plant) are very small but still loaded with tomatoes. Some of the red varieties are beginning to ripen too and I will be fortunate to have vine-ripened tomatoes every day. Believe it or not, I never get tired of having them daily and have had quite a few others tell me they are on the same page too. Since the lateness of the tomatoes has more than likely contributed to me not being able to think of any good stories to write about on this blog update, I'll just ramble about a few random things that come to mind about tomatoes and call it good for now.

• One of the best treats after working in the hot sun all day is to eat a fully ripe tomato washed down with an ice cold beer. Makes all the hard work worth it.
• Speaking of treats, the first BLTs I make with these tomatoes will have home cured bacon I made from a whole pork belly last December. The producer is right here in Yolo county and sells at local farmers' markets. Should be a great combination.
• My brother and I used to make BLTs with cherry tomatoes. It was a lot of work cutting 20 or so in half and arranging on the sandwich, but well worth it. Plus, cherry tomatoes were what we had and as kids, you don't look at that as a reason to have something else for lunch, especially if the other thing you have is bacon.
• In medieval times, tomatoes were thought to be poisonous. Some say this is because the lead from the pewter plates in use at that time was leached out by the acidic tomatoes and poisoned people. Others say it's because tomatoes are in the nightshade family, which includes plants with poisonous fruit.
• The first tomatoes to ripen in Farmville were actually consumed over four hundred miles away. We'll have to work on keeping our "customer base" closer to the project (for many reasons) but there were special circumstances this time.
• This year, I might get around to an experiment I've been meaning to do for a few decades now. That is to use tomato hornworms for fishing bait. They are big and colorful, so the fish would have no problem seeing them. Also, not many fish are able to freely wander around tomato plants, so they have probably always wondered what these big, ugly worms taste like. I might just discover the next big thing in sport fishing.

OK, that's about all I can think of to torture the readers with for this post. There are a few other things starting to ripen as well. We have picked yellow zucchini, cucumbers, and basil too. The sweet corn is probably less than two weeks away and maybe a couple of melons will be ready right after the corn starts. Before we know it, there will be enough produce around here to feed an army. Since I have a small army of kids that seem to like my cooking, it's getting close to the "Meal of Epic Proportion" time. Might even have to do a few of them to use all these things up. Stay tuned...

The Birds and the Bees...

Well. the theme of this post could cause many to question what the point is. The point is that agriculture, for the most part, is about reproducing. Most crops produce something that is valuable to someone. More times than not, this is a result of a plant producing an offspring. Here at Farmville, we are in harmony with that concept and it's exciting when the plants have cooperated. The various pictures show the "children" that will become the fruit of all of the labor here at Farmville. Most people never get to see what this looks like.

The first and fourth pictures are small melons. The first is a watermelon and the fourth is an Ambrosia melon. Melons, as well as the squash and cucumbers rely on honeybees to pollinate them. As the bees forage for nectar from the blossoms, pollen grains stick to their legs. Because they visit each blossom, male and female, eventually the pollen finds its way to the right place and the fruit will form. Even seedless watermelons need to be pollinated. They are a special type of hybrid called a triploid, which means something to those who speak genetics talk. I don't, so I'll give you the farmer version. Triploids are self-sterile and can't reproduce. There are no male flowers on their vines. Pollen from the neighboring non-seedless vines provide the needed pollen for fruit to set, but because they are self-sterile, the fruit have no seeds. I know that wasn't much of an explanation and I probably should have just said seedless watermelons are a direct result of magic. That's the depth of my understanding on what goes on in their family planning world.

Those are Yellow Finnish potatoes in the second picture. These were the result of two shovel scoops. I was pleasantly surprised to find this many and they were a very nice size. They were growing fine until about a month ago and the vines looked like they had some kind of disease. I'm a terrible "potato father" and I neglected to have a potato doctor look at them to see what might be wrong. I figured I would just wait until the vines completely died back and see how many potatoes came from them. So far, it looks very promising. I even sliced one up and fried it for dinner. The only seasoning was salt, pepper, onion and garlic. The onion and garlic were from Farmville also. The garlic was a young bulb I pulled the other day and had not formed complete cloves yet. They are pretty good this way, you just slice and dice them like an onion. Dinner was rounded out by yellow squash from Farmville and a tomato from the store. Because this year has been so cold, the Farmville tomatoes are still a good two to three weeks away from being ripe. I drifted a bit off topic there, so back to reproduction. Potatoes are one of two ways the plant reproduces. Each potato has a few "eyes", which I'm sure everyone has had sprout on them when they don't use them up right away. If you cut the potatoes into pieces with at least one "eye" on each piece, the sprout will become a plant. That's dependent on putting that piece in the ground though. That's how these potatoes were planted. I bought seed potatoes at the nursery and cut them up and planted. The above ground part of a potato plant will also form flowers that produce seeds. These seeds can be planted as well. I have never grown potatoes from "true seed" as they call it. Some day, I'll have to give it try just say I did it.

The third picture is what an ear of corn looks like in the beginning. Nothing more than a small leaf cluster. As the main stalk grows, the very top will have tassels with pollen. The pollen needs to find its way to these ears when the silks are growing from the tips of the ears. Each silk strand goes to a kernel on the ear of corn. If the pollen does not make it there, the kernel will never form. When you have an ear of corn with "blanks" instead of fully formed kernels, its due to poor pollination. Corn does not rely on the bees to move the pollen from the tassels to the ears. It relies on gravity and wind. The wind shakes the pollen loose and gravity lets it fall down to where its needed. That's the reason you shouldn't plant corn in long narrow strips. Most of the pollen will be blown off target and the ears will have a ton of "blanks". At Farmville, each of the plantings were pretty much in the shape of a square, so the ears should be perfectly formed.

Hopefully everyone learned something about how these plants try and do what everything else tries to do, make more of their kind. Guess it's a good thing Farmville hasn't moved into animal agriculture yet. I'll need some time to figure out how to tactfully describe some of those reproductive processes. I might have to apply for a "PG-13" rating when we get to that fork in the road, especially if pictures are involved. We'll worry about that later.

Pumpkins and Winter Squash

The final two rows have been planted. I know the picture has three rows, but the one in the middle will be split to make the two outside ones wider. Keeping them narrow for now helps get the water closer to the plants when they are small. The mounds you see are directly over where the seeds are planted. The soil is moist enough to sprout the seeds as long as its covered by five or six inches of dirt. The top one to two inches dries up pretty quickly so the mound over them keeps it from getting too dry. On Thursday evening, I'll rake the mounds flat and if my timing is right, the seeds will have sprouted and be emerging just underneath the original ground level. By next week at this time, they should all be up and growing. Now that the warm weather finally arrived, things get going quickly.

Pumpkins are fun to grow because they are so easy. The only thing that hurts them is powdery mildew and in most years around here, it doesn't get too bad until September and by that time I won't care if the vines die back. The sun is not too intense and very few pumpkins ever get sunburned from lack of vine cover. If any die hard pumpkin farmers are reading this, don't get offended and think I'm capping on your farming skills. But they really are pretty easy to grow. I've probably jinxed this now and all kinds of problems I never imagined will hit the pumpkins this year. We'll keep our fingers crossed. There are four varieties planted; a standard jack-o-lantern type, a small baking type; a white colored one; and a ginormous one that is supposed to get up to three hundred pounds. In this day and age, probably ninety nine percent of pumpkins grown do not end up being eaten. That's kind of sad since they grow so easy and are very nutritious. My personal favorite dish is the good old traditional pumpkin pie. We first cooked a pumpkin and used it for a pie sometime back around 1977. I still consider that the best pumpkin pie I ever had. If you do this, you'll never want to cook with canned pumpkin again. The easiest way to cook them is to cut into wedges, scrape the seeds out, put on a cookie sheet and bake until soft. After they have cooled down, scrape the flesh away from the rind and mash it up with a potato masher. Since pumpkins tend to yield quite a bit, both in size and numbers, my plan is to research other recipes to use them. I've heard they make good soup also.

The super large variety should be interesting to grow. There are many people who grow these to try and win contests for the largest pumpkin. Some of the really giant ones I've seen don't even look like pumpkins. They are more pink than orange and they don't grow in the shape of a pumpkin. They look lopsided to me. This variety I found is described as looking like a traditional pumpkin and the picture on the package looked pretty cool. We'll see how it turns out. I might have to carve them with the chainsaw and use a few pieces of firewood instead of a candle.

Winter squash are always good to plant if you think famine might be in your future. Once they are fully mature, they keep for months without deteriorating. This lack of perishability is what first roped me into growing them commercially back in the Eighties. Everything else we grew was very perishable and if they weren't harvested, packed and sold within a couple of days of peak maturity, their value dropped off the face of the cliff. These types of squash could be picked into bins and packed as sales were made. It was a great way to keep crews busy on slow sales days because they could pack ahead of time, within reason. I say within reason, because like most life lessons I've had to learn, reason can be a hard target to hit sometimes. In 1984, we planted a few acres of acorn, butternut, and spaghetti squash. Being a little too excited about the lack of perishability with these squashes, we came up with the grand idea of maximizing the efficiency of dedicating a crew to harvesting and field packing these. We put around forty people on this job and in about a week, we had over twelve thousand cases packed. We stacked them on pallets and hauled back to the main ranch. One shop was cleared out and served as warehouse for all of these. Double stacked pallets of packed squash filled this building. At this point in time, all we could see were pallets stacked up waiting for orders. For the first few weeks, it was easy money. When an order came in, just jump on a forklift and load on to the truck. Naturally things can't be this easy for too long. It turns out these squash do deteriorate, just not quickly. Not at the same rate either. We started to notice a few cases with one or two broken down squash in them. This meant we needed to unstack each pallet as we pulled them out to fill orders and check each case to make sure they were all of good quality. By the time we got to the last couple thousand cases left to sell, we had to repack into brand new boxes because some of the breakdown had damaged the box to the point of it not being usable. We were lucky the prices were not too bad that year and it still made sense to do all of this repacking. We did learn in subsequent years to be patient and keep the unpacked squash in bins and just pack a few days ahead. Not as efficient as the previous method initially, but more so in long run. For the Farmville Reality Project, there is just acorn and butternut squash planted. Acorn squash are great just baked with light seasoning. They as well as the butternut are also good baked and mashed with saltine crackers. Butternut is actually a really good substitute for pumpkin in pie recipes. Its bright orange flesh makes for better color than straight pumpkin, which can be a little pale sometimes. All in all, if you can include pumpkins and winter squash in your lineup, you will not be disappointed.

Dawn of a New Journey...

Yes, the title does sound a bit melodramatic, but when you think about it, each new journey has a "sunrise". I feel fortunate to have spent countless sunrises outside, walking through fields of crops. No matter how many times you do this, you find yourself excited at the promise of what all of this will produce farther down the road. Being out here this morning made me realize how many things in life are journeys and they all have the promise of producing way beyond what you might imagine at the dawn of each one. You just have to keep moving forward and help everything grow at a pace that matches what each day brings. Considering how unusual each day the previous month was, this pace can be a bit elusive at times. I know some are probably wondering where this post was going and how it relates to the project. It relates to many things, this project being one of those things. The other things are potential material for another blog somewhere down the road. Being out early on a morning such as this is the perfect time to contemplate it all though.

It's been almost two weeks since the last update and if this were any other year, I would be describing growth of the various crops using terms like "amazing". But this is 2010, and in our area, May came and went without topping the ninety degree mark. That is not the usual scenario most years. We even had greater than normal rainfall with all of the limited sunshine that comes with those condidtions. Needless to say, everything is a little bit behind schedule.

The pictures in this post were taken this morning. It really doesn't capture just how things look early in the morning when the sun has only been up a short time. I get the benefit of this view with a cup of coffee in my hand because it's less than thirty steps out my back door. The angle of light is very low so the plants have a certain "glow" about them that only happens at that time. Later in the day, the light is more directly up above and the leaves appear more solid in color. Later, at sunset, the angle is again low, but usually the light appears to have more shadows than in the morning, and the "glow" is spotty at best. When we would check fields in the morning to assess how they were progressing, if we came across one with no "glow", that was a trigger to actually get out of the truck and look a little closer. I realize you're supposed to get out of the truck anyway, but sometimes you get busy and have to cut corners. When a field full of plants lacks the "glow" early in the morning, it means the leaves are limp and possibly unhealthy. It could mean the field is too dry or there may be pest or disease pressures keeping the plants from being at their best at this time of day. At any rate, if they look awful in the morning, when afternoon hits, it doesn't get better. That's why you get out and have a closer look to see what you need to do and if the situation means shifting priorities for the daily work schedule, that's what would happen. Lucky for the Farmville Reality Project, the scale allows me to stay right on top of this and, so far, everything has the "glow" when I check it each morning.

You may not be able to tell from the picture, but the sweet corn has three different planting dates spaced two weeks apart between each one. The taller ones have been suckered, which means the suckers that grow up from the base of the plant have been removed. This helps keep the water and nutrient flow maximized from the roots up to the main stalk, where the ears are formed. If you let the suckers grow unchecked, the ears on the main stalk might be smaller than they should because too many parts of the plant are competing with a root system that can only do so much. The perfect situation with this level of attention is to get two ears from each plant. I haven't yet counted how many plants are in each of the plantings (I know there are a few of you who think I'm not being truthful right now), I'll just accept however many ears of corn we end up getting out of this. One thing I know, they will all taste great.

Regarding the picture of the row of melons, they look pretty small and they are. However, they are on the brink of really taking off. All we need is a few hot days and me to not forget to keep them watered. Because of the fairly cool weather, their leaves are small. They are at the five to six leaf stage, which means the runners for the vines are beginning to form. It's just that the leaves being small, they are very compact compared to what they should look like. If this week brings us some more normal temperatures, then the next update will show this area covered in vines and maybe even small flowers that will become the melons.

All in all, June is shaping up to be a pretty good month for the Farmville Reality Project. It has been interesting though. Truth be told, probably the single most interesting month in my "too many years to count" life, but in a good way. Somehow, that will make everything I harvest even that much better.

Almost Memorial Day Weekend, No Really, It Is

As you can see by the title of this post, things are not as they should be in Farmville. It is almost Memorial Day weekend and we have unsettled weather with a chance of hail tomorrow. If this is going to be the new normal for Sacramento, we might as well rename this place "The North Pole" and let Santa set up a satellite operation here. By now, we should have at least had a couple days with ninety degree highs and many more in the eighties. The upside to this unseasonably cool weather is the broccoli did very well. As you can see in the picture, nice and large without trying to form flowers. The cool weather has also been kind to the sugar peas, potatoes, onions, and garlic. Sometimes the first heat wave in May freaks these guys out and they struggle. The tomatoes, corn, melons, peppers, and cucumbers are growing super slow and my fear is they are not acclimating well for when the heat does decide to visit us. One thing I learned a long time ago while farming is since you can't control Mother Nature, you might as well get completely stressed out and get hammered on cheap beer worrying about it all. Just kidding. You have to just keep an eye on things and be prepared to take care of what may come with a sudden upswing in temperatures. Usually this means keeping the plants well watered when the hot weather arrives but another aspect is keeping the bad bugs controlled. Insects' entire existence is temperature driven, so when it warms up, their populations can explode within a couple of days.

The patience with the crooked rows of corn paid off. The picture above gives the complete illusion of straight rows that had to have been planted with some sort of laser-guided system. What really happened is they grew enough and I learned to take pictures far enough away to make it look this way. Those four rows have been divided into one third blocks, with each block planted two weeks apart. Hopefully this results in a very long harvest window so we can enjoy corn all summer long. I won't waste time repeating what has already been discussed under the previous sweet corn post, but know there is no better treat than to have fresh picked corn for dinner every night, if that's what sounds good. No hassle with going to the store, just go back there and pick a few ears.

Since Memorial Day weekend means crowds everywhere, the plan is to get a lot of things done with the project. I figure that the more I get done this weekend, when I don't want to be part of the big crowds enjoying the great outdoors, the more time I'll have during the upcoming weekends. Then I'll be able to do things without the crowds. The word is the shad running up the American River are unusually big this year. Some have been catching four and five pounders. Once it quits snowing in the mountains, the water in the creeks might warm up enough for the trout to realize they are very hungry. All of this could lead to some pretty good fishing during June and July. I'll try my best to not let the Farmville Reality Project become an orphan to the fishing, but no guarantees.

Progress Report...

Unfortunately, this will be a weekly update with no pictures to share. Things have been so busy, I haven't been able to get out there and snap some pictures. Everything is coming along as planned, for the most part. The project has encountered one small set back, but nothing earth shattering. The herb garden had to be abandoned. Long story short, the septic system has some issues and it looks like a contractor might need to dig a few trenches smack in the middle of there. Since everything planted was fairly small, I told my landlord it would be no problem replanting everything over in the main site. I was able to salvage a few of the plants but for most of the other stuff planted there, it made sense to head to the nursery and get new plants. As of this evening, all has been replanted or replaced and none of my future meals should have anything significant missing.

One of the biggest reasons for being so busy these past few days is Kevin Jr's transmission repair and replace. I know everyone is hoping I report the truck is screaming up some dirt road right now as I type this update. The reality is we spent the past few evenings after both of us finished work putting things back together. Today was when we got the super-humanly, oversize transfer case mated up to the transmission and then connected all of the other stuff necessary to get the truck moving. After all of this, it sat there and did nothing. Needless to say, we were both extremely disappointed. I'm not well versed in the type of transfer case in this truck but I think it might have a busted chain. If it has to come back out, it just might destroy both of us mentally. We beat ourselves silly the past couple of evenings putting it in. It weighs about five hundred pounds and the weight is not balanced very well due to the odd shape. Oh well, we'll work on it tomorrow after work and see where that leads us.

The one thing that is unique about the growing season this year is how cool it's been. This weekend, the third one of the month of May, had high temperatures in the sixties with rain. Not exactly the best thing to get corn, melons, and tomatoes convinced that this is their time to flourish. As I was rototilling late Saturday afternoon, you could see the unsettled weather coming in from the West. In a matter of a half an hour, the sky turned dark gray and the rain beat down for thirty minutes. At this point, I don't know if anyone is sure we are going to get any Spring like weather or not. My hope is Summer doesn't drop on us very hard. So far, all of these plants think a high temperature of seventy five degrees is as warm as it ever gets. If we get the Summer thrown at us full bore in early June with hundred plus degree days, they are in for a rude awakening.

I will try to get out in the evenings this upcoming week and snap a few update photos to post.

Farm Trucks

As you can see in the pictures, we have no shortage of trucks around the Farmville Reality Project. Problem is, only one of them actually runs (the white one with the camper on it, for those keeping score). Technically, the 1972 Ford will run, but outside of going to get the mail, I personally wouldn't take it very far right now. When you get right down to it, the perfect farm truck has only one requirement, it starts and runs without stranding you out in the middle of no where. We are going to make it a priority to get these to that status, but it will take some work.

The 1977 Chevy is the most recent "stray" my son has brought home. It has decent tread on the tires and the lift hasn't put it in the completely ridicules place of tipping over when going around a corner at twenty five miles per hour. It's close though. Thirty five and ten bales of hay on the back, this thing's going to be laying on its side. The reason you see jacks and tools all around it is it is in need of major repair. The second or third day he had it, the transmission gave out and he had to drive it back here in reverse. We live off of a state highway and he said most of the people he inconvenienced while driving back in were good sports. Traffic out there is used to going along at fifty five or more, so being stuck behind him going five MPH facing backwards had to have caused more than a few to consider taking up road rage. He told me he just kept smiling and waving at the people passing him. At least he could see them coming without using the mirrors. Yesterday was deemed the day to take the transmission out of this truck. With it being a furlough Friday, I made good use of the time and got quite a bit done as far as taking care of the many things planted in the project. While I did this, my son and one of his friends worked on disconnecting the many things necessary to pull the transmission out. By the time it got dark, they were at a place where it looked like it might be able to come out. A few more friends had shown up to either help out or just witness this crazy event. I decided to crawl under and give them a hand, mostly to make sure no one got crushed to death by a falling transmission with the transfer case still attached. Crazy event is probably being too kind of a description here, for the record. We had a legitimate transmission jack under the transmission, but it was missing two of the upright support pieces. There was a good old fashioned floor jack under the back of the transfer case and for good measure, we used a ratcheting nylon strap to hold the whole assembly to the support plate on the transmission jack. With some careful maneuvering and some cussing, we drug this whole assembly out from underneath the truck a little after nine thirty that night. Needless to say, we were all pretty tired and beat up a bit by that point. The really scary thing is that in a few days, when it comes back from the shop, we have to put it back in. That should be another interesting adventure.

The 1972 Ford is the official ranch truck right now. Mostly because it sits in the perfect position so you can sit in the driver's side seat and look out at most everything planted. Even without moving an inch, it is sitting in the perfect place to do this. It will run though if you use jumper cables on the battery and pour some gas in the carburetor to prime it. Beside those small nuances, it also needs a new vacuum booster and rear brakes. The engine is fine, the son and I put a remanufactered long block in it a couple of years ago. With just a few more things taken care of, this one might end up seeing some serious duty in the near future. My grandfather bought this pickup brand new back in 1972 and after various family members drove it, I ended up with it. It had close to two hundred thousand miles on it by that time. I kept it to use as a project for Kevin Jr. and I to work on and he even used it as his senior project in high school. One of these days when all the other chores are caught up, the plan is to get working on this one and get it road ready. We'll see when this actually happens. I hope it does sometime before I retire in 2020 or else it will then become an official retirement project. It doesn't matter when it gets finished though. How cool is it to have your grandfather's pickup to drive around, or in Kevin Jr's case, his great-grandfather's? That is priceless.

Updates

If there is such a thing as a "Holiday Weekend" when it comes to projects like this, I used my credit this weekend. Before anyone jumps to any conclusions about if I'm losing momentum or just plain getting lazy, note that I spent today, Mothers' Day, building and planting a raised planter bed at my mom's house. I even braved the sporadic down pours and planted cucumbers, peppers, lettuce, tomoatoes, spinach, and radishes for her garden. With that said, I did not plant anything new in the Farmville Reality Project this weekend. I did buy a few more plants that will get planted this week. All in all, this is probably a good thing. Sometimes in the spring, even when you space plantings a week apart, they all become ripe at the the same time in the summer. When we grew vegetables for the local wholesale markets, we would calculate the planting intervals carefully so when one field was finishing up harvest, the next one in line would be just reaching the optimum level of maturity. This is very easy to do on paper but when applied out in the field, it can be a very different story. We found that in the spring, if the plantings were seven to ten days apart, in the summer, we would be able harvest at optimum maturity around six to eight days apart. As you moved through summer and into fall, we would have to plant two to three days apart to end up with six to eight day intervals between fields the following fall season. Goes to show you how Mother Nature missed the memo on using perfectly linear progression when it comes to how plants should grow. This did add to the challenge and truth be told, the fun of trying to plan planting schedules. There are so many moving parts when it comes to planting schedules, it becomes mind boggling at times. Most of the ground preparation is done in stages at just the right soil moisture conditions, so you couldn't work too far ahead for the sake of convenience. If you did get too far ahead and conditions dried out, the price you paid was to have to work in a quick irrigation on the field to get it back to the desirable moisture level. Most of the time, that would ultimately result in "stutter steps" in the planting schedule because things wouldn't dry down as fast as we thought they would.

Anyway, back to this week's updates. As you can see, the broccoli is starting to form heads. Spring broccoli in this area is always a risk for early flowering. If the weather warms real quickly, the heads open into yellow flowers in a matter of days before reaching a good size to be picked. I plan to keep an eye on the forecasts and if ninety degree days are in the cards, it's best to pick the broccoli on the small side while the quality is still good. Another picture shows the Yellow Finnish Potatoes. They have grown like crazy and really seem to like the spot I planted them in. The trick with these is to keep the top parts growing so they can "feed" the potatoes growing just under the surface of the bed. If the we get a blast of hot weather and the tops get stressed, the potatoes underground will stop growing. If this happens a few times, they end up with weird knots and shapes to them. They like to grow on a very steady pace with no starts and stops. The last picture are green onions just starting to emerge. As they grow, I'll pull within the rows to thin out. These small ones thinned out are great in salads. The remaining ones will be able to grow larger and when a bit bigger than a pencil, they can be picked. Even though I slacked a bit this weekend, I hope the updates and information helps everyone visualize all of the great things that lie ahead in this project.

Also, I have added new pictures on some of the earlier posts to show the progress. Please excuse the lame state of the pictures for this post. I have no more patience to try and get all three of them in one row on top of the text. One of these days, I'll have to learn how to work with some of the editing tools for this blog site, but today is not that day.

Sweet Corn

I thought I would post about the sweet corn even though there is no picture to post yet. The main reason is when I planted the first block, a picture of bare dirt isn't exactly interesting to look at. Now that the seedlings are two to three inches tall, another reason for no picture has emerged. The second of the four rows is crooked. To non-farmer types, that may not seem like a big deal, but believe me, in farmer land, crooked rows gets you kicked out of the club. Other farmers drive by your fields and if the rows are crooked, they make it a point to bring it to your attention. My plan is to wait a few more days so they get taller and then use a camera angle that doesn't make it front and center.

The variety I'm planting is called Silver Queen. It was one of the first white varieties to get popular at farm stands back in the 1970s. It was quite a bit sweeter than the yellow varieties at that time. Today, most of the sweet corn in stores and farmers markets are what are known as super sweet types. They have been bred to have a much higher sugar content than the old varieties and the sugar does not turn to starch after harvest as fast as the old ones. The old varieties were notorious for getting starchy after the corn was picked. My dad used to tell my mom to have the water boiling already for when he would get home from my grandfather's farm with fresh-picked sweet corn. He thought this was the best way to enjoy the corn at its peak and not have any starchiness. For those that don't have the luxury to go out and pick a few ears right off the stalk, the best way to make sure it's at its peak is pop one of the kernels with a fingernail. If the juice is milky and the kernel is crisp, it's perfect. If the kernel is soft and the juice is more like toothpaste, it's over the hill. If the kernels are small and shiny, it was picked too immature.

Sweet corn is one of those vegetables that has a lot of folklore about it. When I would sell corn at farmers' markets, many people would insist on white or yellow based on having a good or bad experience in the past. They might have had corn that was terrible and if it was yellow, they would never buy yellow again. The reality is that there are many factors beside color that will determine whether you get corn that is great. The best way, of course, is to grow it yourself so you can go out and pick some while the water is already boiling and in a few minutes, you'll be eating the best corn you ever had.

Melons

Here is the first row of melons planted. I know, boring picture. I put it here for future comparison because if everything goes as planned, in a few weeks I should be posting a picture of an absolute jungle of vines loaded with melons. To the far left is the first row of tomatoes planted last week. The area in between will be filled in with sweet corn. As I move to the right of this first melon row, there will be more melons plus additional tomatoes and probably pumpkins and winter squash. Moving to the right goes toward the old, dead oak tree. I think it will look pretty cool if there are bright orange pumpkins in front of it. That might capture the perfect Halloween shot, but let's get back to melons.

This row has four watermelon varieties, plus Crenshaw, and Ambrosia melons. The watermelon varieties are Congo, Charleston Gray, Georgia Rattlesnake, and a seedless one called Ultra Cool. This is the first time I've seen seedless varieties available through retail stores. I bought these seeds at the local Lowes. Years ago when we were farming, we paid around fifty cents a plant for seedless watermelons. That adds up quick when you put a few acres in. I'm curious to see how this one turns out. Watermelons are something you have grow yourself to fully appreciate how good they are when everything is done right. Most of what you get from commercial channels are the product of many compromises. Most everyone knows how hard it is to tell if a watermelon is ripe. Some tap on it, some knock on it like knocking on a door, and some try to look at the ground spot to see if it is a straw yellow color. Countless newspaper articles try to explain how and why you do these things to up your chances of getting the perfectly ripe watermelon. Fact of the matter is none of it means much if you have inexperienced people picking the watermelons out in the field. The most reliable indicator is when the tendril closest to the stem on the melon is comletely dry. That is what we trained our crews to look for. If that condition was met, then they would look at the color of the ground spot and tap on it to see if it sounded hollow. The most important aspect was the dried tendril though. Unfortunately, you can't see that part when looking through stacks of watermelons at a market. Most of the commercial watermelons satisfy some criteria for probability of being ripe, but being able to watch the progress as they ripen is the best way to figure out when the perfect time is to pick a particular one. You can do that when you grow them yourself. Both of my kids have fond memories of when I grew watermelons commercially. We would plant ten to twenty acre blocks every two weeks until there were five or six staggered plantings. The method for determining when it was the best time to send a crew in to pick a field involved sampling hundreds of watermelons. We would walk a zig zag pattern through the field and cut melons with dried tendrils. We cut them in half lengthwise and sampled the very center, between the two rows of seeds. If the majority of the melons were fully ripe and the taste was very sweet, we would have a crew go through and pick the field the next day. I would have the kids help me with this because believe it or not, you can get tired of sampling watermelon. They had a blast for obvious reasons.

The Crenshaw were a favorite of my grandfather. I doubt he ever made any profit growing these though. He just liked them so he grew them every year. The main reason they could be hard to squeeze a profit out of is they have very thin skin. If the sun hits the melon too much, it sunburns it and make it unmarketable. Starting when the melons are still green, you have to scout the field every few days and any that are too exposed need to have straw placed over them for protection. This adds to the cost of production and coupled with the fact that this variety doesn't yield very well, it can be very hard to turn a profit on them. All of that doesn't take away from the fact that they are one of the best melons to eat. For those of you that can't grow them yourselves or are too far away to realistically talk me out of one, hit the farmers' markets this summer and get one. You won't be disappointed.

Ambrosia was the another melon I planted today. It is for all intents and purposes a cantaloupe. It's just a cantaloupe that is way better than the rest. It has never done well commercially because it's too fragile to ship any distance. It is very good when picked at full slip, which is when cantaloupes should be picked. This means the stem will easily slip away from the melon with minimal effort. That is when they are fully ripe on the vine. I think the melons planted today will all be great. The best melons are the ones that grow in the most warm weather possible. These will grow all during May, June, and July. During August, they will be kept without water so they ripen. This is the absolute best window to grow them. I will probably plant another row in a couple weeks, but that's just to keep the summertime theme going. This row is the "one".

Tomatoes....

The first round of tomatoes are planted. I say first round because I love tomatoes. Because of this, I'm sure I will plant more. This row has close to thirty plants though, so that is a lot of tomatoes. I do plan to to sun dry some the Romas, so I think I can keep up with how ever many they produce. Tomatoes are a big part of my meals, pretty much on a year round basis. Not sure why because I'm not Italian, even though some people think I am. I put them in salads, in pasta, and my favorite, chili con carne. Because of their high lycopene content, this means I will live well past a hundred. Great for me, sucks for those that wish I was dead already. Anyway, time to move on.

Tomatoes have a very personal place for me. Many people I have been close to have shared this passion for tomatoes and that has stuck with me. Some of these folks are not around any longer, but their passion stays with me. I am very lucky in that I had two father figures in my life. My father, Paul will always be my dad, no questions asked. I also had a step-father, Gary. Both helped me better understand the world way better than I could have hoped for on my own. I truly am blessed to have had this in my life. My aunt Liz was another that appreciated a good, vine ripe tomato.

Gary loved tomatoes. That is the best way to describe it. What ever source we had available to us, it didn't matter, fresh vine ripened tomatoes were the goal. He would get such enjoyment from discussing what varieties we were considering planting. His bottom line was to have access to them so he could determine which ones were the best tasting. He would plan meals around tomatoes. We spent countless hours talking about the "perfect tomato". What we came up with was it had to have a nice acidic bite, but balanced with enough sweetness to make you smile after biting into it. A tall order, but I think this project can deliver.

One variety I planted today was Pearson. It's an old variety and I planted it for my dad, he is gone now, but I'm sure he would approve. He remembered it to be very good tasting when he was younger. We talked about it in the context of of varieties that would sell well in our direct market operations. He used to handle that aspect of the farming operation for me and would tell me what customers were inquiring about. People would ask which varieties tasted "old fashioned", and Pearson is what he remembered from back when he was younger. It's great that we can still plant these older varieties.

Another variety planted today was driven by old memories. Lynda's dad, Jim planted many vegetables, tomatoes included. As I looked over the selections at Capital Nursery, one stood out from discussions we had many years ago. To honor that, I planted "Big Boy". Jim planted this when it first came out and it produced great tomatoes. I still remember all of the beautiful tomatoes those plants had that summer. It was a sight to see.

My aunt Liz, this rounds out the story on tomatoes. She would plan her vacation around coming to Sacramento at the right time to get plenty of tomatoes to take back to Arizona. This was very important to her because she liked them so much. She really just liked to visit and the tomatoes were the best reason of all to come out to our farm to pay such a visit. I guess it's not hard to figure out that tomatoes are something I will always grow, wherever I find myself.

The Herb Garden

This area will become the herb garden. It didn't start out this way, but this is how it will end up. This area is just on the other side of the early plantings of garlic, onions, broccoli, romanesco, and potatoes. By the way, no one has asked what romaneso is yet, so I will wait until questions are asked and explain later. It is a great vegetable steamed just like cauliflower. The original plan was to put sweet corn in here. The main reason was the tall stalks would give us a buffer from all the traffic coming down the highway. The north bound traffic sometimes seems like it's heading straight into the side of our house. When this old farm house was built, I don't think they ever could have imagined the volume of cars that travel this stretch daily. One of the many down sides to progress I guess. Since I wanted the corn to have a good eighteen inches of loose soil to establish its root system in, I dug an eighteen inch trench to start things off. This method is called the "Double Dig". You dig a trench and then turn the hard soil next to it, into the existing trench. The soil from the initial trench is moved by wheel barrow to fill in the depression on the opposite side from you started. The idea is that the soil profile is loosened down fairly deep to let deep rooted crops like sweet corn do well. After I had dug back a couple feet from the starting point, I found a pipe from the septic system about fourteen inches below the ground. Not wanting to disturb things that could potentially cause me or my landlord some serious grief, I made the decision to keep this area planted to shallower rooted crops. The plan will be to only loosen to a depth of ten or twelve inches and plant herbs. Herbs for the most part are not deep rooted so this should suit them fine.

One thing I will plant here will be basil. Basil to me is what summer is all about. A few of the smaller leaves sprinkled over fully ripened tomatoes with fresh mozzarella cheese and then drizzled with good olive oil is a treat. One trick to keeping basil around for those that don't have a garden is to clip the ends and put them in a small glass of water. Pretty much like you would keep flowers fresh on your table. Change the water every day or so and the basil sprigs will stay very fresh. Just pull off however many leaves you need for dinner that night. A great memory I have related to basil goes back over ten years ago, back when I was still farming. We were growing basil for a food processor that put basil leaves in with diced tomatoes. We grew the basil and pulled the leaves off and washed them. These washed, whole basil leaves were put in the cans of diced tomatoes right before the lids were fastened. The product was sold as "Italian Style" diced tomatoes. The whole project was a struggle to fine tune and my daughter, Jessica must have listened to me gripe about what a pain it was. She volunteered to go out and help strip leaves off of basil stalks the next day. I'll never forget her sitting there on top of a stack of boxes, patiently pulling every leaf from each stalk of basil and putting into the plastic tote. She was only seven years old but she was willing to work hard to make sure dad's business deal worked out. I'll never forget how focused she was and how important it was to her that this deal work. She was truly an inspiration to the crew I had working on this project.