Salad Days

Note to self: plant salad greens in succession!

How do you lose 20lbs in two months?  Okay, I know, diet and exercise (and caffeine?) is the recommended method, but here's my suggestion: plant waaaay too much lettuce and spinach for one person (or two or five) to possibly be able to eat.  Okay, I'll admit that being a nursing mother doesn't hurt on the weight loss front either, nor does watching what else you are eating besides salad, but it certainly doesn't hurt to eat a head of lettuce every two days.

Early June

So many greens!

The month of June was officially Salad Month on the Haytourowski Farm.  I did my best to keep it interesting, spinach salad with strawberries and nuts, basic "side salads" with chopped veggies and croutons, and my new favorite salad (aka food obsession) is roasted root vegetables and feta on a bed of greens.  Basically, toss your choice of roots (I like beets, carrots and sweet potatoes) in olive oil and sprinkle with salt and crushed rosemary, roast at 375° until soft,  and retain any juices since they will add to the dressing.  Stir in a sweet type vinaigrette (I make my own) and chill.  Serve over fresh salad greens with feta cheese and devour.

Spinach, Strawberries, Walnuts and Parmesan

Lettuces (and yes, I know my finger is in the corner of the photo, I'm just too lazy to crop it out)

Spinach, Oakleaf Lettuce, Red Romaine, Bibb Lettuce and Black Simpson Lettuce

By the Fourth of July, the lettuce was bitter and getting ready to bolt, so lesson learned, next year we sow 4-6 lettuce seeds per week so we don't end up having to compost so much goodness simply because we couldn't eat it all.  Now that the bed is empty, I am going to wait a few weeks and try sowing some broccoli and cauliflower for a fall crop.

 Easy Berry Vinaigrette













1/2 cup Berry Jam (any kind will do, blackberry, raspberry, and marionberry are all nice)
1/2 cup Oil (I like walnut oil since it has lots of yummy omega-3s but any lightly flavored oil will do)
1/2 cup Apple Cider Vinegar
1 tsp Freshly Ground Black Pepper

If your jam has a lot of big fruit pieces, you can run it through a mesh sieve or strainer if you want a smoother dressing.  Combine all ingredients in a jar big enough to leave at least an inch of headroom (make sure you have the lid to the jar).  Shake until combined.  Depending on the acidity of your vinegar and the sweetness of your jam, you may have to add more of one or the other to your taste.  Pour over greens and enjoy! Store any leftovers in the fridge (you will have to shake it before each use).

The Mushroom Kingdom

I don't know about you, but mushrooms always make me think of Super Mario Bros.  It doesn't really matter what kind of mushrooms they are, I usually start humming the Mario theme song when I am cooking with them.  So when my husband decided we should start growing our very own 1-Ups, I was pretty excited!  I will give all the credit for the mushroom growing experiment to Kass.  The little I knew about Mycology was pretty stinky (have you ever been downwind of a commercial mushroom farm?), so it never would have occurred to me to grow our own mushrooms at home.

Once upon a time, when my not-yet-husband was unemployed, he would occasionally work with a friend who had a home remodeling business.  They were working on the home of the owner of Fungi Perfecti which is how he learned about Grow-Your-Own Mushroom Kits.  This was years ago, but he kept the idea rolling around in his head, and when we decided to start growing more of our own food, he decided it was the perfect time.  He ordered an indoor shiitake mushroom kit and a week or so later, what looked like a dirty, styrofoam cake, arrived at the door.

Shiny new mushroom kit.

Kass tenderly cared for his budding mushrooms, spraying them with rainwater and exclaiming over every millimeter of growth.  As forewarned in the instruction booklet, the first harvest was small, and he may have jumped the gun and eaten them a little early, but was overall happy with the product.  After harvesting the mushrooms, we let the cake dry out for a couple weeks, then soaked it overnight in cool rainwater and covered it in plastic (apparently tricking the spores into thinking an entire year has passed and it's spring again).  We subsequently forgot about it until a few days ago when we noticed it was covered in tiny mushrooms!  I guess the TLC wasn't strictly necessary (mushrooms do grow nicely all on their own in nature).

Ready for the harvest.

Usually for breakfast I eat either homemade granola or oatmeal, but this morning Kass and I were both off work with nowhere we had to be, so I decided to make us a hot breakfast as a treat.  I harvested the biggest of the mushrooms, pulled out some fresh eggs from our chickens, a Field Roast sausage and some Dubliner cheese and got to work.

Shiitake Field Roast Scrambled Eggs
Serves 2

Ingredients:
4 large eggs
1 large or 2-3 medium shiitake mushrooms
1 Field Roast smoked apple sage sausage
1 oz. shredded Dubliner cheese
3 second spritz of Cooking Spray

• 2 Tbsp Water
• Pinch Salt
• Ground Black Pepper to Taste

Crumble sausage into pieces and dice mushroom caps into 1/4" pieces. Heat a large skillet over medium-low heat and spray with cooking oil. Cook the sausage and mushrooms until the sausage starts to brown and the mushrooms reduce in size by half.  Meanwhile, scramble the eggs with the water, salt, pepper, and shredded Dubliner (or any hard, aged) cheese. Pour the egg mixture onto the sausage and mushrooms and let cook for 45-60 seconds without stirring. Turn the eggs in the pan a few times until three-fourths of the egg is solid and remove from the heat.  The egg will continue to cook for another minute or so.  Eat alone or paired with grits, toast, fresh fruit, biscuits, you name it!

Nutrition Facts per Serving: Calories 335 Total Fat 18.75g Cholesterol 442.5mg Sodium 677.75mg Carbohydrate 10.33g Fiber 2.17g Sugars 1.5g Protein 29.08g

What the heck is Tagro?

So after the mess of a garden we had last year (we grew a fantastic crop of grass!), we decided to build raised garden beds filled with Tagro, instead of doing all that pesky digging again.  We first laid down landscape fabric to keep the grass from growing between the beds and covered the walkways with wood chips.  When you are using reclaimed pallets for building material, none of the boxes are going to be the same size, so it makes it hard to mow between them.  Kass then went to pick up a couple yards of Tagro, or TAcoma GROw.  Tagro is the Class A biosolids produced from Tacoma's wastewater treatment plant, otherwise known as human manure.  It came highly recommended by Scott, who used it in raised beds in a previous gardening project.

"Old Blue" full of Tagro.

The use of biosolids in vegetable gardening is super controversial.  There are tons of people who swear by it and tons of people who speak against it's use.  We did the research and decided that the treatment process used is safe and tested regularly.  Most of the public outcry is against Class B biosolids being used for farming, which are not as, for lack of a better word, clean.  So getting around the "ick" factor and deciding on an environmentally friendly planting medium seemed like the way to go.

Transplanting strawberries to their new home.

So here's where we made our major mistake.  After getting about 2/3 of our boxes filled and about half of those planted, I took a look at the city's website and realized the sell two different products: Tagro Mix (what we bought) is for use as a fertilizer and Tagro Potting Soil is ready to use.  Oops!  Tagro Mix is a blend of biosolids, sand, and sawdust so it is pretty dense stuff!  So to partially remedy our mistake, in the boxes we hadn't planted yet, we took out some of the Tagro and replaced it with topsoil and added the rest to the remaining unfilled boxes.  For the ones that were already planted we are taking a "wait and see what happens" position.  From what we have read, the major problems could be water retention and too high levels of nutrients, which will mostly fix itself after a few crops pass through.  Hopefully nature will have it's way and it will all be fine, fingers crossed.  Everything is growing so far so good, except the kale, which had a hard time setting up its root structure and only a few seedlings made it past the seed leaves.  I did put in some more kale seeds on Monday so hopefully a few more will take.

So for better or worse, the garden is growing!

Looking better already!

Garden Attempt- Part 1

I like food, a lot.  I like fresh food even better.  I like experimenting with recipes and learning new ways to prepare and preserve food.  I also like growing things and try to do my part to help protect the environment.

So the project is this: we (my husband, Kass, and I) bought a house from my mother-in-law in December of 2009 with a half acre lawn in Parkland, Washington.  Awesome.  I want a garden (and orchard and chickens and beehives) and Kass wants less yard to have to mow.  So far so good.  Scott and Sara (our best friends) also want a garden, but they live in an apartment that doesn't allow buckets of tomatoes growing on the roof (they tried).  So figuring that a start-up garden would require more time and money than Kass and I had to work with, we asked Scott and Sara (the Haytours) to join us (the 'Rowskis) in a cooperative garden effort.

The Backyard before.

We got off to a great start!  January, 2010 was so mild we were able to rent a sod cutter and tiller and cut out a 20x30ish plot.  I also went to Costco and bought some fruit trees (2 apple, 2 cherry, and one of those self-pollinating pears that has more than one variety grafted onto a single trunk) and some blueberry bushes.  We transplanted 3 raspberry bushes from a house that Scott rented with his brother the previous year.  Kass and Scott (the ultimate scavengers) found an old greenhouse frame and a window and door that fit it.  A couple 55 gallon plastic barrels became a composter and a rain barrel.  Things were looking good!

Full of promise....and rocks.

Garden, house, shed, etc.

Greenhouse sans walls.

And then there were rocks, lots and lots of rocks!  We spent at least 3 full days sifting rocks out of the ground using an ingenious contraption built by my husband.

Let's take a brief side trip for a moment.  I love my husband.  He is one of the most creative people I know, and that's saying a lot. He can build a tool, gadget, or machine to accomplish any task, even if making the gadget takes more work than the job it was built to do.  Kass was the kid who made a year's worth of trips to the mailbox trying to build a pulley system so he wouldn't have to go get the mail.  It means he is constantly bringing home spare cords, motors, bike racks, you name it.  That said, the rock sifter was one of the best ideas he has come up with.

The rock sifter was essentially a four-by-four foot box with four legs and wire mesh stretched over the top and a high powered motor with a shaking mechanism attached to the corner.  You dump rocky soil in the top, the soil sifts through and the rocks stay behind.  After three days of back-breaking labor and a giant pile of rocks in the corner of the yard (lovingly named Mount Hodorowski) we had a little over two rows finished.  That was about the point we gave up on the rock sifting. The March rains set in and the soil was too wet to work.  We had plans to finish the sifting when the weather got nicer, and well, it didn't.

Mt. Hodorowski!

Still, we had our seeds started, the greenhouse got plastic sheeting for walls.  We planted a bunch of strawberries, peas, cucumber, zucchini, corn, broccoli, tomatoes, herbs and I think even a melon of some sort.  Then I found out I was pregnant (we had been trying to conceive) and for the first 17 weeks I wasn't allowed to do anything physical due to complications.  Sara had to go to Minnesota for a month for work/ visiting.  The weather went from cold and rain to heat wave and drought.  It was the perfect storm for garden failure. 

All in all, we ended up with enough snap peas for a salad, a few cucumbers, a bunch of zucchini the size of my calf (not quite ready, not quite ready....the next day, monster squash!) and a handful of the most delicious strawberries and raspberries on the planet.  All the fruit trees except the pear survived. The blueberry bushes fell victim to an overzealous lawn mower.  Needless to say, we need a new plan.  We learned a lot of what not to do last year and have started anew.

Things we are doing differently:
1. Raised beds- we bought a roll of landscape fabric and laid it down over the garden plot.  Kass re-purposed the wood from old pallets to build raised beds filled with Tagro.
2. Soaker hoses- we purchased a watering timer and soaker hoses to keep everything properly watered throughout the summer.
3. Moved the greenhouse- The greenhouse has been moved next to the house to make it easier to check on things, water plants, etc.
4. Compost bins- a few of the pallets are now a 3-bin compost system.
5. Chickens- more on them later.

So this blog will serve as a record of Garden Attempt Part 2 + Chickens + Mushrooms + whatever else we try to add to the mix.  I hope to keep track of planting times, yields, recipes, chicken growth and egg production, what worked, what didn't, exciting new taste sensations, and the joys of seeing my baby boy take his first bites of food grown right in his own backyard.

Cheers, and happy growing!