Day 25 - Getting ready for More Rain

Today I spent much time at the community garden, and I was able to completely surround one garden with hardware cloth.
I spent the morning coiffuring the fiber animals and washed a couple of hanks of yarn.
For breakfast I had the usual potato, greens cooked in butter, egg, cheese but NO toast, tea from partner Otto. The bread is mostly gone now, though there is a little bit in the freezer.
I snacked on peas in the garden.
For lunch, I had a green drink made with a limequat from partner Colin, celery and kale. I also had a tangerine from partner Earl, half a banana, some fresh peas, granola, dehydrated apple slices, raisins and cake from partner Arlene.
For dinner, I had a large bowl of soup made with turkey from partner Cindy, rice from partner Matthew, carrots from partners Earl and Gaston, a turnip from partner Colin, fresh winter squash, leeks, celery, fennel, kale, beet greens, parsley from the garden, dried garden zucchini, dried garden peas, Jack in the Beanstalk beans, dehydrated vegetables from partner Harvey, pepper from partner Ophelia and salt.
Like day 24, I spent no money on food. I have $5.09 left in the food bank.

Day 2 - Dinner

I did quite a bit of work in the garden today and came in very hungry. For an afternoon snack, I made a potato salad out of my newly-purchased Idaho potatoes, mixed with dressing, olive brine, garden parsley, onion, daikon radish, celery, fresh jalapeno pepper, celery seed and mustard seed. I also had a small amount of yesterday's vegetable stew, topped with garden coriander.
I ate a late dinner, a bean soup made with the finest horticultural beans from partner Richard, carrots from Colin, ham from partner Shary, fresh thyme from partner Tomas, with garlic, celery, leeks and hot pepper from my own gardens. I finished the rice salad, and added lots of shredded garden lettuce. More dried apple slices for dessert, with a warm mug of lemon balm tea.
I don't usually have this much salad, but I am enjoying the salad dressing, knowing that it is expensive to buy and that it will go to waste if I don't use it up quickly.

Salad competition - Locavore potluck redo

Kris posted his salad, but now we need a salad-off. Since I don't have a camera, I'll have to describe what I got to eat this week. I started with spinach from R, freshly plucked from his garden, crispy-tender and very curly. I added my own freckles romaine baby lettuce, and plenty of lettuce that B gave to me. (She was in Ojai this Sunday and went a little hog-wild at the farmer's market.) The varieties look like cos romaine, red oak, lolla rossa and buttercrunch. She also gave me some tender new asparagus, so I steamed it along with the haricot vert string beans and baby broccoli from my garden. I chopped a huge orange sweet tequila sunrise pepper and a small but deadly orange habanero and added it to the mix. The radishes came from M's garden. They were large and pink, with pink markings on the inside. I also slivered my own celery stalks, scallions and baby fennel.
I did have a dressing, made with local olive oil, sea salt, lime juice from La Casa, Italian and lemon basil from my patio, and R's dried marjoram. I topped the salad with sweet pomegranate seeds that P gave to me.

Our last Official Potluck for the year

Now we are into full-scale winter hibernation. There are no more official locavore potlucks for the rest of the year, AND the farmers' market is closing. I stopped by the community garden and almost no one else was there. The majority of gardeners aren't really into winter crops, so they don't come as often.
There is no better way to celebrate a hibernation than to make a big pot of soup. This morning I cooked up a pot of turkey, rice and vegetable broth. To the mix I added my last carrot, a good bit of celery, a leek, more string beans, fennel, broccoli, peppers, chard, kale, Cinderella pumpkin, baby butternut squash, dried and frozen zucchini, dried peas and some dried herbs.

Bean Wars

My late beans are finally in! They seem to take so long this time of year, but well worth the wait. The first of the new crop of haricot verts was in this Monday, and now we are fighting over who gets to eat them all. I have only a few plants, but I am getting about one serving per day.
I had such good luck with this variety in the cold spring that it is here for another round. Hopefully the crop will keep going until the peas are ready. That may be a long time, since the first planting of peas is being trimmed mightily by some hungry animal.

October exceptions

This month's selections: Rice, cinnamon and something else. Not sure yet. Not sure I care anymore. Now that the dry beans are harvested I am perfectly fine with a wide variety of vegetarian foods for now. Perhaps I will choose milk. I can find local milk, but I miss aged cheeses. I fear that if I pick it as my main protein option, cheese is all I will eat all day long. Any suggestions?

Fall is here!

Not according to the weather, only according to what is being planted and harvested in the garden. The tomatoes are finishing up and I am tearing them out to get the soil ready for fall. I have already planted broccoli, onion, parsley, chard and cauliflower seedlings, and direct-planted bush beans, spinach, daikon radish, and several kinds of kale. I am harvesting many leek seeds, the late amaranth, and the last of the dry beans.
I also direct-seeded lettuce seedlings today. This is the earliest I have attempted lettuce. I just got tired of cleaning and winnowing some seed, so I just decided to toss it into some shady nooks and see what happens. Every year I push the seasons just a little but, but this is the first time I have planted the coolest crops when it is near 100 degrees outside.
I also tried to clean out more of the overgrown chard, and I scattered the seedlings all about. I don't even bother to plant that much chard anymore, unless I need a specific color. This fall, I am looking forward to a variety of gold and red volunteers.

International String Bean Day

There is probably a real day named like this somewhere out in the real world, but I am using it today because its the first day I was able to get two whole servings of real summer green beans to the table.
They almost didn't make it to the table. Late spring frost, bugs, gardenside munching all took their toll.
I learned something new this week. Last fall, as soon as I signed up for the local challenge, I started processing and freezing more summer produce. I also started planning my plantings better to ensure a more steady harvest. As it turned out, one very late bean crop did well, and two subsequent pea plantings also turned out to be both productive and uncharacteristically disease-free. I planted many fava plants in the winter, and started a delicate bush bean variety underneath a makeshift cold-frame in early spring. Proper mulching ensured the early return of six pole bean plants. The result? I still have three frozen ziplock bags of beans in storage. I have more fava beans than I care to shell and peel. There are beans served at practically every meal.
I still have one plug of tomato salsa and half a bag of summer squash, but only because I am making an effort to cook them into gobs of soup before all the new crops come in. I figure I'll have my first crowd of tomatoes by mid-June and the first summer squash by next week.
And the beans will keep coming. I have dry beans, heat-loving beans, cool-loving beans, bush beans, climbing beans, tropical beans, and desert beans. And, I learned that planning for food is easier than putting it by.

March exceptions

This month, my exceptions are turkey, rice and oatmeal. We celebrated the end of the month with an extra pot of coffee last evening, which I enjoyed till almost before midnight. I am also giving up commercial beans, hoping to have enough of my stash to get through this month. Some of these beans I have never tasted, so I hope it works out and that this isn't my undoing. If it proves too difficult, I can always run to a faraway farmer's market and get the local beans. I have several servings of Hutterite soup beans which I have found to be very tasty. I have several servings of blue-speckled tepary beans, which have sort of a hauntingly weird taste too reminiscent of lentils for me to want to try them until the end of the month. I have about a pound of Italian horticultural beans, a pound of Kentucky Wonders and a couple of pounds of the Jack in the Beanstalk beans. All of these varieties I have tried in the shelling or green pod stage and some varieties are my favorites. Lastly, I have a large drawstring bag full of fava beans. They aren't my favorite either, but maybe I will make some hummus with my local olive oil and lemons, my homegrown garlic and sunflower seeds. The good news is that I got 100% germination on the fava beans I planted, and have 10 plants going in the gardens, some already over 1 foot tall.

My Exceptional February Exceptions

Turkey, mayocoba beans, coffee. The beans are from Mexico, probably closer to me than most beans grown in the USA. The good news is that I am not sick of anything yet.