A favorite spring recipe

May 11, 2023 Elizabeth Boegel

Is your herb garden bursting its confines, like mine? Fresh oregano, marjoram, rosemary, thyme, sage, and chives are at their springtime best right now. It’s a wonderful time to cut giant swathes of the stuff, tie with twine, and hang for drying.

It’s also a fine time for cooking with the soft fresh herbs. You can make pesto out of practically anything, or omit the nuts and garlic and make a simple an herb-oil puree to pour over any vegetable or meat. Make compound butters (we especially like garlic and thyme butter on grilled steak) and freeze for later use. Bake a focaccia topped with fresh herbs, or make mint ice tea/lemon verbena tisane. Now is the time to be profligate with herbs, while they are still soft and green, before they become woody and concentrated later on in the summer (when you’ll be inundated with basil, cilantro, and dill anyway).

One of our favorite things to do with young herbs is chop up a selection (today I used oregano, rosemary, chive, and thyme) in the food processor, with about a cup of cornmeal, a liberal amount of salt, and olive oil. This makes a paste that we often spread on pork tenderloin. After baked (in a 425 oven until cooked through), the herbed cornmeal makes a nice crust which adds so much texture and flavor to the not-so-exciting tenderloins. This would also be delicious on a firm white fish like cod, or even on tofu, if you’re a vegetarian.

I’d love to know how you like to use fresh herbs from your garden. Feel free to share a recipe in the comments!

Crop Swap

June 21, 2022 Elizabeth Boegel

My friend Kerstin has started a Crop Swap in Oakland. This will take place from 10 am - 12 pm on the second Sunday of every month, starting July 10th, in Snow Park. Snow Park is located at 19th and Harrison Street, not far from Lakeside Drive and Lake Merritt (why not combine it with a walk around the lake, or a visit to the Lake Merritt gardens?). For more information, you can email Kerstin at cropswap.oakland@gmail.com. You can also reach her @cropswap.oakland on Instagram.

This is a great way to trade something you have too much of (peaches? zucchini? cilantro?) and go home with something you want more of (avocados? peas? sunflowers?). Don’t let that excess produce go to waste!

That Time of Year

April 19, 2022 Elizabeth Boegel

April is distracting, isn’t it? The house finches are plucking coconut coir from my hanging baskets to make their nests, the yellow-faced bumblebees are in the borage, and the clematis ‘Montana’ is a froth of pink. Nature is in the midst of transition.

And so is the garden! This is the time of year when the tomatoes and pepper seedlings have to be taken out of the ‘greenhouse’ every morning, and returned back every night. It’s still too chilly for them to be put into the raised beds, so they need to be babied a bit. Oh, it’s hard to wait.

But they’re still too little, and the soil too cold. However, other things can be planted! I’ve removed the lingering cauliflower, cabbage, chard, broccoli, and beets; in their places I’ve planted potatoes (Yukon Gold, Huckleberry Gold, and German Butterball), pole beans (Rattlesnake, my favorite) and the dry beans from Rancho Gordo. I’ll wait until May to plant cucumbers, basil, and winter squash.

We’re still eating peas, both shelling and snap, nearly every day, along with asparagus (six years after planting the most recent batch of crowns, and we’re finally getting all we can eat). Artichokes are coming on, and the herbs are going crazy - the oregano and marjoram and sorrel just overtaking their beds, and the chives and culinary sages blooming beautifully purple!

And the flowers… well, the flowers are abundant. Borage, and poppies, and phacelia, and heuchera, and columbine, and salvias, and echium…. the list goes on and on, and I haven’t even told you about the fruit trees and bushes yet. Summer is coming!

What’s happening in your garden?

the Garden in March

March 2, 2022 Elizabeth Boegel

South Garden, from the sidewalk, with the pollinator garden in the forefront

As you know, I’m teaching an Urban Agroecology course this Spring at Merritt College. Part of this course is a lecture, where we are learning the theory and ideas behind different kinds of agriculture/methods of growing. Part of it is hands-on, learning these concepts physically in laboratory. For this portion of the course, I decided the students and I would rebuild an abandoned garden on the property of the Environmental Center at the far end of campus. This whole area was neglected for years, but slowly and surely my little team is making an enormous difference in the space. Today was a banner day, as we finally got three cubic yards of soil delivered, and were able to fill all our raised beds and transplant all the seedlings we started back at the beginning of the term.

As we were happily planting (why is planting so much fun? why does it make our hearts so glad? There is a mystical side to gardening which is hard to quantify), some of my students were asking questions about how certain veg grows, particularly heading vegetables. (Some of my students have a lot of gardening experience, and others have none. This diversity of knowledge is one of the strengths of our group.) In the course of our discussion, I promised to take some pictures of my little farm to share; then I realized that I haven’t shared this kind of thing here on the blog in ages, and maybe my readers would also be interested.

Top row, left to right: Fennel growing through the fence, cabbages which we have been shredding and sautéing like greens, cilantro growing everywhere, and rainbow Swiss chard.

Middle row, left to right: The last of the broccoli going to seed, shelling peas, Russian Frills kale, and one of the garlic beds (with cilantro).

Bottom row, left to right: Oregano starting to regrow, rosemary blooming, the artichoke plants getting big, and the carrots nearly ready to harvest.

In the North Garden, where I plant tomatoes every year (it being the sunniest space I have during the hotter months), I decided to have a cover crop over the winter, to improve soil tilth, water-holding capacity, available nutrients, and soil biology. I seeded (in October) a mix of rye and crimson clover. These are going gangbusters, and many other interesting plants have also germinated here - the ubiquitous cilantro, but also blue flax (Linum lewisii), common speedwell (Veronica persica), and borage. Every so often I tear some of this out to give to the chickens, and in a month or so I will chop it all down, taking care not to disturb the roots (letting those rot in place), and use it as mulch for the tomatoes. If it regrows, so much the better, as it will provide a living mulch. I doubt it will last long, though, once the weather gets hot. Tomatoes go in the ground the first weekend of May, so I’ve got time to let it grow yet.

The flowers that are blooming are mostly native, things like ceanothus, ribes, and manzanita. The verbena ‘de la mina’ is getting ready to bloom, too. Bulbs are popping up all over the place, and my pansy ‘wall’ has looked great all winter.

The fruits are starting to wake up. Quince blooms earlier than the other fruit trees, and provides a beautiful and leafy cover for the chickens in their run. Huckleberries and blueberries have put out their bell-shaped blossoms, and remind us that berry season isn’t far away. And this photo of the lemon tree is reminding me to put up juice before the fruit rots on the tree!

I started my pepper seeds late though this light rack has been in use for a while now - first it was warming a batch of peppers for the school garden. Now it’s finally got ours, and as soon as they germinate and get potted up and out in the greenhouse, it’ll be time for tomatoes!

The chickens are doing great, all are laying well, and are providing us at least one dinner a week. Below you can see the makings of tonight’s meal - an egg salad on homemade pita bread.

I’d love to know how your gardens are doing. It finally feels, here in California at least, like spring is well on the way!

So Much Promise

May 17, 2021 Elizabeth Boegel

Friends, it’s here: If not in the weather forecast, at least in our hearts - Summer! Can you feel it? At the end of last week, I turned in my final papers, presentations, and tests; the next two weeks stretch in front of me like an open road (my summer class begins June 1). Garden, here I come.

And there is so much promise in the garden right now. There’s not much to actually eat (this is the ‘hungry gap’ after all), but all the ingredients are there, and in a month we will be eating like kings.

Our bees swarmed twice in April (one of them was boxed up by my dad and given a new home in his backyard) and during Tom’s last hive check, he decided to take some honey, so at least we have several jars of that!

I dug out all the compost from the chicken pile and added it to the tomatoes, then clipped them to their growing strings. I harvested the garlic, which is now drying in the garage. I cleared the last of the peas and carrots and planted five varieties of winter squash, ten different kinds of basil, and several kinds of cucumbers. Oh yeah, and some pole beans. Gotta have beans.

I’ve been watching the fruit start to flower and form. We’re going to have berries - so many berries! - marionberries, and loganberries, and blackberries, and blueberries. We’re going to have apples - I made sure to prune our tree quite dramatically over the winter - and now we have what looks like a bumper crop on the way.

We’re going to have peppers - several serranos and a couple of bells have already formed nicely. We’re going to have cilantro and dill - volunteer plants have been coming up all over the place. Cosmos has likewise seeded everywhere as well as borage.

The gulf fritillary butterflies are going quite mad, and the passionvine is full of eggs and caterpillars and flowers. My new perennial pollinator garden is doing very well, with the grasses and coral bells flowering next to foothill penstemon and wooly blue curls.

Some of the soil in our raised beds was quite compacted, which I found mysterious as I add compost every year (and those beds produced a great crop of peas!). To improve it, I used the hunks of clover cover crop that I cut out of some other beds, and laid them down on the surface of the questionable soil. Soon we had worms coming up to work on it and simultaneously aerating the soil. Now pumpkin and cucumber seedlings are coming up through the dead and dying clover, and I’m thrilled. This was a good reminder for me to plant clover in ALL the beds, between ALL the veg in the winter. I really noticed a difference in the soil where it was growing.

You may remember the saga of the disastrous winter garden (I planted it up five times. FIVE TIMES! And still I had very little success. Just the aforementioned peas, some carrots, some arugula, and a little kohlrabi - not nearly the bumper crops we usually have over the winter). I was worried that this summer might just continue that trend, and I wondered if maybe my gardening luck had run out.

But so far, the summer garden is chugging along just as it should, so I’m breathing easier.

In other news, during my last week of school, we had a solar system installed. I’ll write in detail about that experience (spoiler alert - we are very happy with the entire process) as soon as I have some hard data to share with you. More soon!