Getting started: What you need to grow vegetables

The following article was on newsday.com today
by Jessica Damiano | Garden Detective

Planting your own vegetable garden can really save money. And that’s not just my opinion; the U.S. Department of Agriculture concurs, estimating that every $100 spent on vegetable gardening yields $1,000 to $1,700 worth of produce.

Expect to harvest about a half-pound of edibles from every square foot of garden, according to the National Gardening Association. That means a 15-by-15- foot garden can produce more than 100 pounds of vegetables.

Supplies: Hoes, rakes, spades, hoses and a fluorescent light kit for indoor seed starting are practically one-time purchases. When spread over their lives, their costs become negligible. Assuming you don’t buy any fancy composting bins, raised-bed kits, greenhouses, cold frames or other high-end gear, growing your own can be quite the miserly endeavor.

A $70 investment in seeds and supplies can yield, on average, a $600 return, assuming a $2-per-pound market price for produce, according to the National Gardening Association. All you really need are seeds and seed-starting mix, containers to start the seeds in (be creative and recycle yogurt containers and egg cartons), fertilizer, compost, water and mulch. It’s late in the season to be starting seeds indoors, so if you haven’t, buy nursery-grown starter plants for this year.

Time: Plan to spend 30 to 40 minutes a week tending every 100 square feet of garden. That’s about 10 minutes a day, plus time for watering.

Sun: When it comes to sun and vegetables, more is better. Locate your garden where it will receive at least six hours of full sun each day, especially if you’re growing the plant for its fruit or root. If you don’t have a site that offers full sun all day, no worries. Just stick to green leafy vegetables like lettuce, collard and mustard greens, Swiss chard, spinach and kale. Broccoli, cauliflower, peas, beans and beets can handle a little shade, too. Herbs require full sun. And always transplant seedlings outdoors on a cloudy day.

Soil: Before you do anything else, dig down 4 to 6 inches into your planting bed and scoop up a cupful of soil for a pH test. You can do this yourself with a store-bought test kit or you can bring a sample to your county Cornell Cooperative Extension office, where they’ll test it and provide specific instructions on raising or lowering the pH and give suggestions for improving the soil. The optimum pH level for vegetables is between 6.2 and 6.8. For herbs, it’s 7.0.

Next, clear the bed of weeds and enrich the soil. Add lime or sulfur if indicated by your pH test results (lime raises alkalinity, sulfur reduces it). Spread 4 inches of compost – the best organic matter available – on top of the soil and till it 6 to 8 inches deep.

If you’re planting in a newly created bed, incorporate 3 pounds of 5-10-5 or 10-10-10 slow-release fertilizer per 100 square feet. If you’re using the same bed you planted in (and fertilized) last year, mix in 2 pounds per 100 square feet. Herbs generally don’t need fertilizer.

Space: Vegetables planted in wide rows perform and produce much better than those that are crowded together. Ideally, rows should run north to south for best sun exposure, but don’t sweat it if that isn’t possible. Transplant starter plants or seedlings exactly as deep as they were growing in their pots. Only tomatoes can, and in fact, should, be planted deeper; they send out roots from the buried portion of their stems that actually make for sturdier plants.

Mulch: Even though it makes the garden look nice and tidy, mulch isn’t purely decorative. Its real purpose is to discourage weeds, maintain even soil temperature and retain moisture. Apply 2-3 inches around plants. Consider shredded bark, wood chips, salt hay or black plastic sheeting.

Water: Most vegetable plants require one inch of water per week. Set an empty tuna or cat-food can into the garden to catch and measure rainfall, and gauge supplemental irrigation accordingly, timed for early mornings to avoid fungal diseases. It’s better to water very deeply once or twice a week than to water just a bit every day, which results in shallow root systems. Use soaker hoses to water the soil, not plants, as sprinklers and overhead watering can lead to fungal diseases.

Happy Earth Day

spinach sprouts

spinach sprouts


I hope everyone is having a great Earth Day and thinking about how great our little planet is and what they can do to help it out. I just bought some Marcal toilet paper, which is recycled. So far so good. Feels good not to flush trees away.

Meanwhile things are sprouting in our garden. I planted a dwarf apple tree, which the squirrels promptly chewed on. I also planted some seeds, which were dug up by the marauding squirrels. I had to take drastic measures and have now put my plants in jail to protect them. My little apple tree is starting to bud, which makes me hopeful that they will survive the damage. How do you stop these delinquent squirrels? I feel sorry for them in a city like this. They are probably just so excited to find some nice, clean soil that they go nuts. I can hardly blame them, but it still aggravates me that they choose my garden to destroy.

So here are some photos of my prison block garden. You can see some of the chomps on the trunk of the little apple tree. Yes that twig sticking out of the planter is a tree. I swear it.

WHY Hunger and the Brooklyn Food Conference

picture-4

My friend Alison who went foraging with me on Saturday works for an organization called World Hunger Year (WHY). She is working to organize a huge event called Brooklyn Food Conference, which takes place on May 2nd. Admission to most of it is free, with a dinner and dance costing $20. Anna Lappé and Raj Patel will be among the speakers. There are events for kids, lunch, etc. It runs from 9am to 6pm. The dinner begins at 6 and the dance at 7pm.

Here’s a really great article on Alison and WHY.

Unfortunately I will be out of town on the 2nd. I will be petting sheep at the Maryland Sheep and Wool Festival.

Foraging with Wildman Steve Brill


On Saturday my friend Alison and I went on a wild edibles foraging tour of Prospect Park in Brooklyn. Wildman Steve Brill was our very funny and knowledgeable guide. We had a big group of about 25-30 people and we raised eyebrows as we all bend down, picked some weedy looking plant and then put it in our mouths. I highly recommend any of Steve’s tours. I learned a lot about plants I’d never really taken notice of before. He shared tips for what part of the plant is edible, how to cook them, what time of the year you are most likely to find them, and their medicinal properties.

Here’s a list of what we found on Saturday. Alison took the notes while I took the photos. There was so much information, it would have been hard to do both!

1. Hedge Mustard
2. Poor Man’s Pepper
     a. good in stews and salads. Prevents cancer cells from developing.
3. Garlic Mustard
     a. very invasive! Eat a lot of it.
     b. Use it in pesto
     c. Root is also edible and tastes like horseradish
     d. Is in season well into May
     e. Flower bud looks like broccoli and the best flavor is when the plant is blossoming.
4. Lesser Celandine
     a. in the buttercup family
     b. eat it before it flowers. It’s toxic after it flowers.
     c. Best cooked w/ rice
5. Gout Weed
     a. Parsley and celery flavor
     b. Use it like parsley.
6. Kentucky Coffee Tree Seeds
     a. Seeds and green pulp are poisonous raw. Roast them about 1.5 hours at 300º. Grind them to       make decaf coffee.
     b. Can be added to hot chocolate and chocolate cake.
7. Star of Bethlehem
     a. Poisonous to eat
     b. Can be confused with field garlic. It has a distinguishing white stripe that field garlic doesn’t.
8. Japanese Knot Weed
     a. Related to rhubarb
     b. Peel the stem and eat it. Don’t eat the leaves.
     c. Makes a nice fruit compote. 1 part knot weed to 10 parts fruit.
     d. Short fat stems are optimal
     e. Has pretty, lacy flowers in the fall
9. Hercules Club (aka Angelica Tree or Devil’s Walking Stick)
     a. Shave the thorns off with a knife and steam the developing shoots like asparagus.
10. Red Bud Blossoms
     a. put them in salad or toss in batter and make fritters
11. Chickweed
     a. Eat leaves, stems and flowers raw or cooked
     b. Tastes like corn
     c. Loads of vitamins
     d. To cook: wash and chop into bite-sized pieces. Cook (steam the wet leaves) in a pot on low          heat until wilted. In a separate pot cook garlic in oil and toss together.
12. Mugwort
     a. It’s in the wormwood family
     b. You can make a tea to help with PMS
13. Field Garlic
14. Daylily
     a. Has tubers that look like potatoes.
     b. The leaves taste like green beans.
     c. You can eat the leaves, stems, tubers or flowers
     d. 1 in 50 people have digestive problems w/ daylilies. Gradually build up to eating them.
15. Sassafras
     a. Branches grow out at 45º angles from trunk
     b. Smells like root beer
     c. Wash the root, simmer for 20 minutes and chill the tea
     d. Can also use the cambium of the root as cinnamon
16. May Apple
     a. Poisonous except for the ripe fruit
17. Violet
     a. Use the leaves in salad
18. Burdock
     a. Delicious root. Cut the root razor thin on the diagonal, simmer it and put it in rice or a stew.
     b. Leaf has silver, hairy underside.

Urban Foraging

wild parsnip

wild parsnip


So I mentioned that while I was on a birdwatching tour of Prospect Park I ran into a friend taking a foraging for wild edibles tour. I keep thinking about it and figured out who was running the tour. The man’s name, appropriately enough, is “Wildman” Steve Brill.

On her tour, my friend found wild parsnips, sassafras and other edible plants. It was pretty amazing because almost nothing is green or blooming yet.

Here’s a schedule of his classes. I think I’m going to the one on April 18th in Prospect Park.

Growing Power

growing-power
Growing Power in an Urban Food Desert
by Roger Bybee

Will Allen is bringing farming and fresh foods back into city neighborhoods.

Will Allen shows some of the 10,000 fish growing in one of Growing Power’s four-foot-deep, 10,000-gallon aquaponics tanks. Waste from the fish feeds greens and tomatoes. The plants purify the water for the fish. The fish eventually go to market.

At the northern outskirts of Milwaukee, in a neighborhood of boxy post-WWII homes near the sprawling Park Lawn housing project, stand 14 greenhouses arrayed on two acres of land. This is Growing Power, the only land within the Milwaukee city limits zoned as farmland.
Founded by MacArthur Foundation “genius” fellow Will Allen, Growing Power is an active farm producing tons of food each year, a food distribution hub, and a training center. It’s also the home base for an expanding network of similar community food centers, including a Chicago branch run by Allen’s daughter, Erika. Growing Power is in what Allen calls a “food desert,” a part of the city devoid of full-service grocery stores but lined with fast-food joints, liquor stores, and convenience stores selling mostly soda and sweets. Growing Power is an oasis in that desert.

Allen’s parents were sharecroppers in South Carolina until they bought the small farm in Rockville, Maryland, where Allen grew up. “My parents were the biggest influence on my life,” says Allen. “We didn’t have a TV and we relied on a wood stove, but we were known as the ‘food family’ because we had so much food. We could feed 30 people for supper.”

He was a high school All-American in basketball, played for the University of Miami, and played pro ball with the American Basketball Association in Europe. At a towering 6 feet 7 inches, with Schwarzenegger-size biceps, and chiseled features, Allen looks ready to step back onto the court.

After stints as an executive for Kentucky Fried Chicken and Proctor and Gamble, he returned to his family roots. “I never wanted a career in the corporate world, but I wanted to be able to afford a good education for my kids,” he explains. “At the right time, the kids were in college and the opportunity to buy the farm and start Growing Power came up,” Allen remembers. “From a spiritual standpoint, it worked out right; it was a natural thing, something I wanted to do.”

Growing Food
Since 1993, Allen has focused on developing Growing Power’s urban agriculture project, which grows vegetables and fruit in its greenhouses, raises goats, ducks, bees, turkeys, and—in an aquaponics system designed by Allen—tilapia and Great Lakes Perch—altogether, 159 varieties of food.

Growing Power also has a 40-acre rural farm in Merton, 45 minutes outside Milwaukee, with five acres devoted to intensive vegetable growing and the balance used for sustainably grown hays, grasses, and legumes which provide food for the urban farm’s livestock.

Allen has taken the knowledge he gained growing up on the farm and supplemented it with the latest in sustainable techniques and his own experimentation.

Growing Power composts more than 6 million pounds of food waste a year, including the farm’s own waste, material from local food distributors, spent grain from a local brewery, and the grounds from a local coffee shop. Allen counts as part of his livestock the red wiggler worms that turn that waste into “Milwaukee Black Gold” worm castings.

Allen seems to take a particular delight in thrusting his steam-shovel-sized hands into a rich mixture of soil and worms in Growing Power’s greenhouses. “You can’t grow anything without good soil,” he preaches to a group touring the project.

Allen designed an aquaponics system, built for just $3,000, a fraction of the $50,000 cost of a commercially-built system. In addition to tilapia, a common fish in aquaculture, Allen also grows yellow perch, a fish once a staple of the Milwaukee diet. Pollution and overfishing killed the Lake Michigan perch fishery; Growing Power will soon make this local favorite available again. The fish are raised in 10,000-gallon tanks where 10,000 fingerlings grow to market size in as little as nine months.

But the fish are only one product of Allen’s aquaponics system. The water from the fish tanks flows into a gravel bed, where the waste breaks down to produce nitrogen in a form plants can use. The gravel bed supports a crop of watercress, which further filters the water. The nutrient-rich water is then pumped to overhead beds to feed crops of tomatoes and salad greens.

The plants extract the nutrients while the worms in the soil consume bacteria from the water, which emerges virtually pristine and flows back into the fish tanks. This vertical growing system multiplies the productivity of the farm’s limited space.

“Growing Power is probably the leading urban agricultural project in the United States,” says Jerry Kaufman, a professor emeritus in urban and regional planning at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. “Growing Power is not just talking about what needs to be changed, it’s accomplishing it.”

Growing Community
Simply growing that much food in a small space is a remarkable achievement. But it’s only the start of Growing Power’s mission. “Low-quality food is resulting in diabetes, obesity, and sickness from processed food,” Allen maintains. “Poor people are not educated about nutrition and don’t have access to stores that sell nutritious food, and they wind up with diabetes and heart disease.”

Growing healthy food is part of a larger transformational project that will create a more just society, as Allen sees it.

He also works on the Growing Food and Justice Initiative, a national network of about 500 people that fights what he calls “food racism,” the structural denial of wholesome food to poor African-American and Latino neighborhoods. “One of our four strategic goals is to dismantle racism in the food system. Just as there is redlining in lending, there is redlining by grocery stores, denying access to people of color by staying out of minority communities.”

The store at Growing Power’s Milwaukee farm is the only place for miles around that carries fresh produce, free-range eggs, grass-fed beef, and homegrown honey. Even in winter, customers find the handmade shelves and aging coolers stocked with fresh-picked salad greens.
Growing Power co-director Karen Parker, who has worked alongside Allen since the project started, says, “It’s a wonderful thing to change people’s lives through changing what they’re eating.” Parker believes her parents would have lived much longer with a healthier diet. She takes a deep pride in providing fresh, healthy food. “Last summer during the salmonella problem with tomatoes, I was able to tell customers, ‘You don’t have to worry. These tomatoes were grown right here.’ I found myself selling out of tomatoes.”

Growing Power supplements its own products with food from the Rainbow Farming Cooperative, which Allen started at the same time as Growing Power. The cooperative is made up of about 300 family farms in Wisconsin, Michigan, Northern Illinois, and the South. The southern farmers, who are primarily African-Americans, make it possible to offer fresh fruits and vegetables year-round. The produce goes into Growing Power’s popular Farm-to-City Market Baskets. A week’s worth of 12-15 varieties of produce costs $16. A $9 “Junior/Senior” basket, with smaller quantities of the same produce, is also available.

Each Friday, Growing Power delivers 275–350 Market Baskets of food to more than 20 agencies, community centers, and other sites around Milwaukee for distribution. Bernita Samson, a retiree in her 60s with eight grandchildren, picked up the Market Basket habit from her brother and late mother. “I get the biggest kick out of what I get in my bag each week,” she says. “At Sunday dinners my grandkids say, ‘Ooh, Grandma this is good!’ They really like what they call the ‘smashed potatoes.’”

For Samson, Growing Power provides not only healthy food but also a vital source of community. “Sometimes it’s so crowded at the [Growing Power] store on Saturdays you can’t even get up in there. Going there gives you a chance to meet people and talk.”

Growing Power is also a source of 35 good-paying jobs in an area of high unemployment. The staff of Growing Power is highly diverse—a mixture of young and old, African-American, white, Asian, Native American, and Latino, with remarkably varied work histories. All live nearby. Co-director Karen Parker, a high-energy African-American woman who radiates warmth whether greeting her 6-year-old granddaughter or welcoming a volunteer, notes that some staff are former professionals who left the high-stress environments of corporations, social work, and other fields. At Growing Power they find a new kind of fulfillment in the blend of hard physical labor and thoughtful planning based on scientific research. Others are former blue-collar workers, farmers, or recent college graduates. All find satisfaction in transforming how Americans eat.

Loretta Mays, 21, who works in the marketing department, was only 14 when Karen Parker recruited her into the Growing Power Youth Corps program. “It’s a good learning experience, and you learn the importance of good food. I never understood how food was grown. Now, its like, ‘Wow, I can grow my own garden.’”

Growing Youth
Four middle and high schools bring students to Growing Power to learn about vermiculture (raising worms) and growing crops, and to eat the food they’ve grown. The impact can change the kids’ lives.

Anthony Jackson started working at Growing Power when he was 14, with half of his earnings going to school clothes and half to a bank account that his church set up. At age 20, he went away to college.

“I learned a good work ethic—that things don’t come easy,” he says of his time at Growing Power. “You’d see Will doing the same things he asked you to do.”

The experience helped to shape the direction of his college education. “Early on, the importance of the healthy food really didn’t hit home,” he says. “But when I got a degree in natural resources, it came to mean a lot more.” Jackson, now 29, still maintains a strong connection, shopping at Growing Power and attending workshops.

Working with the young people in the community is central to Growing Power’s work and its hopes for the future. It provides year-round gardening activities for kids aged 10-18 at its Milwaukee headquarters and offers summertime farming experience on its parcel in Merton, adjacent to the Boys and Girls Club’s Camp Mason. Growing Power recently leased five acres at Milwaukee’s Maple Tree School and built a community garden in partnership with the school. Growing Power also assists school gardens at the Urban Day School and the University School of Milwaukee.

“For kids to make their own soil, grow their own food, and then get to eat it, that’s a very powerful experience,” Will Allen says. “There’s nothing like hands-on experience for kids who are bored with school. They get excited about what they’re learning and then take it back to their classes.”

Growing Power on the Road
Success in Milwaukee isn’t enough for Allen. Growing Power seeks nothing less than, in the words of the organization’s mission statement, “creating a just world, one food-secure community at a time.” To show that the techniques pioneered in Milwaukee can work anywhere, Growing Power is helping set up five projects in impoverished areas across the United States, including training centers in Forest City, Arkansas; Lancaster, Massachusetts; and Shelby and Mound Bayou, Mississippi.

The largest application of Growing Power’s model is in Chicago, where Erika Allen, Will’s daughter, is carrying on the family tradition. The Chicago project started in the Cabrini-Green public housing project, where Growing Power’s techniques helped the Fourth Presbyterian Church transform a basketball court into a flourishing community garden fueled by Will Allen’s beloved red worms. Growing Power also has a half-acre farm in Grant Park, in the heart of downtown Chicago. The Grant Park project focuses on job training for young people, involving them in all aspects of growing the 150 varieties of heirloom vegetables, herbs, and edible flowers the farm sells in Chicago farmers markets and through the Farm-to-City Market Basket program, like the one pioneered in Milwaukee.
After Erika Allen, 39, earned a degree in art therapy, she eventually settled back into her family’s farming tradition, which she believes extends back some 400 years. “I was very much influenced by that tradition, and I got really inspired,” she says. “It was a way of learning to honor my ancestors.”

But she has not turned her back on her artistic impulses. “With my love of art, the Grant Park project is an opportunity to integrate the two—with the colors, design, textures of the plants.”

The most important element, she says, is “to see it inspiring other people. When people in communities like Detroit are really suffering, we can show that we did it in Chicago, with women and a bunch of teenagers.”

The work of involving people in producing and distributing healthy food in Chicago’s food deserts is part of equalizing power in American society, Erika Allen says. “Our work is infused with social justice, fighting racism and oppression.”

The same hunger for justice drives Will Allen’s vision of changing the food system. “How do you take our model and our vision around the world?” Allen asks. “It takes some foot-soldiers who become change agents. We’ve trained an awful lot of people.”

Every year, 10,000 people tour the Growing Power farms. About 3,000 youths and adults from around the world participate in formal training sessions, learning how to build aquaponics systems, construct “hoop houses” (low-cost greenhouses covered by clear plastic), use compost to heat greenhouses, use worms to turn waste into rich fertilizer, and all the other low-tech, high-yield techniques that Growing Power has developed or adapted.

Will Allen takes obvious pleasure in seeing people fed healthy food in great quantities, just as his parents did on their small farm. But he says he derives his deepest satisfaction from a sense of changing the lives of other people harmed by the present food system and the inequities it reflects. “I don’t do things to satisfy myself,” he states firmly. “This is what I’m doing for a bigger pool of people out there.”

Roger Bybee wrote this article as part of Food for Everyone, the Spring 2009 issue of YES! Magazine. Roger is a Milwaukee-based writer and has been a progressive activist for 40 years. His work has appeared in Z, Dollars & Sense, Multinational Monitor, The Progressive, and elsewhere. His website is www.zcommunications.org-/zspace/rogerdbybee.

More backyard chicken eggs

2nd egg

2nd egg

Yesterday I got the second egg from my hen Lulu. In Europe when you go to buy eggs, you don’t find them in the refrigerated section of the grocery store. They sit in big open cartons on the shelf. This makes most Americans squeamish about bacteria, salmonella, and anything else that could make them sick. It’s pretty cold in my apartment, so I think I’m somewhere in the middle of this debate by having them on my kitchen table. I may re-think this in the summer.

I have to admit that I’m having a hard time thinking about eating these eggs. Part of it is the novelty of them. They are pretty, little greenish-gray objects. I hate to admit that I have been so programmed to buy brown or white eggs from a carton in the grocery store, that I’m feeling a little squeamish. Eggs from my backyard? Seems as unlikely as picking fruit off one of my trees. I have been working so hard not to have this cultural programming in my daughter by planting blueberry bushes at her grandparent’s house, going to goat farms, picking wild raspberries and blackberries, eating icicles. She wants me to make her scrambled eggs with these eggs already! I think she will help me get over the preciousness and oddity of homegrown eggs.

Mother Earth News has been testing the nutrients of pastured eggs compared with those of commercial eggs. Pastured eggs meaning that they are eggs from hens that are allowed to roam and supplement their grain-based diet with plants such as grass and insects. Eating plants adds beta carotene to their diet and eating insects benefits almost everyone else.

The pastured eggs contained:
1/3 less cholesterol
1/4 less saturated fat
2/3 more vitamin A
2 times more omega-3 fatty acids
3 times more vitamin E
7 times more beta carotene

That’s pretty impressive. I think I’ll make Lindsay those eggs for breakfast tomorrow!

Shop locally for Thanksgiving

I was just reading World Ark (Heifer Int’l’s magazine) and discovered  the website www.localharvest.org. I just took a peek and it’s a really wonderful resource. You can search for farms, CSAs, farmer’s markets, restaurants and grocery/co-ops (that serve or offer locally grown food) near you. You select which category you are interested in and put in your zip, city or state and they list the resources closest to you. This includes produce and grass-fed meats. And just in time for Thanksgiving, there’s even a separate button for organic heritage turkeys.

They also have an online store to find great things you can’t find locally such as maple syrup, dried fruits and nuts, wool, honey, coffee, etc.