The Dinner Basket

I have collected many baskets over the years. Each of them is used for a different purpose. This small round basket is my meal basket that I keep next to the fridge. This evening I cut some Bloomsdale spinach, broccoli de cicco, and green onion for my noodle soup.

Both spinach and broccoli are my favorite greens. I am happy with the result of growing both vegetables this year. I have totally failed on growing spinach last year, and the broccoli was infested with broccoli worms and aphids. I didn't want to give up on my favorite veggies, so this year I started growing spinach seeds in the green house until they were at least 6 inches tall. Still, they started to look beat up after transplanted outside. I think it had to do with the late summer this year. It's been usually cool and wet this year. It took several weeks for them to adjust and started to thrive. All the spinach plants are flowering now. I will soon be able to collect seeds for next year.


I came upon a posting of 4-inch 6-pack broccoli de cicco for sale on Cragislist.com. I didn't know what broccoli de cicco was until further reading. I was excited since I love the idea of eating all parts of broccoli. I ordered 2 6-packs of broccoli de cicco, and about half of them died off. The other half started to do much better after I transferred them to a different vegetable bed with a different soil mix. I was worried about broccoli worms and aphids. Amazingly, only one small floret was infested with aphids and no worm on any of them. I am not sure why I didn't get the worms this year. A few things I did differently with the broccoli this year are: different location, different variety, further spacing, and I eat the florets early instead of waiting for them to get bigger. Last year I wanted to wait for them to get bigger, and they turned into caterpillar food.

Dusty, our resident beneficial beast

Our resident bunny, Dusty, is a fluffy hair ball. He is a lionhead, one of the newest breeds of domestic bunnies. Dusty was under socialized before I picked him up on Mother's Day in May 2004. He usually hops away to hide in his plastic recycling bin when someone approaches. He does that with me, too, so don't feel bad when he runs away from you. He might come up to you if you have a piece of apple or raisin, but you must be patient. You have to wait for him to go up to you instead of running after him.


Dusty has quite a cushy life as a bunny. He stays inside of the sun room (a.k.a greenhouse #2) most of the time. He gets brushed and manicured every once in a while. He gets to lay around in the yard in a safe enclosed area sometimes. His litter box gets cleaned out regularly. Of course he gets fed everyday. I wouldn't mind having a life like Dusty's.

He contributes to Sand Village Farm by providing high quality fertilizer. The content of his litter box always goes to the compost bin. The compost goes to all the fruit trees and vegetables.

Sweet Basil

I am growing some sweet basil for the first time this year. Basil is not something I use in my cooking frequently. Basically I use it for lasagna, pizza, and pesto sauce. Why is it called "sweet" basil? It's not sweet to me. Out of curiosity, I look it up on Wikipedia to see what Wiki has to say about sweet basil.

"Basil (Ocimum basilicum) (pronounced /ˈbæzəl/ or /ˈbeɪzəl/), of the family Lamiaceae (mints), is a tender low-growing herb. Basil is a culinary herb prominently featured in Italian cuisine, and also plays a major role in the Southeast Asian cuisines of Taiwan, Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. The plant tastes somewhat like anise, with a strong, pungent, sweet smell."

Sweet basil in the Southeast Asian cuisines????! I don't remember ever noticed sweet basil in Asian cuisines. There's Thai basil in Thai dishes, and that's about it. I read a little further down on the Wiki page on other basils.

"Most of the Asian basils have a clove-like flavour that is generally stronger than the Mediterranean basils. The most notable is the holy basil or tulsi, a revered home-grown plant in India and Nepal. In China, the local cultivar is called (traditional Chinese: 九層塔; pinyin: jiǔ-céng-tǎ; literally "nine-level pagoda")..."

"九層塔"! OMG! I remember this name. I was just a kid then and I couldn't stand the smell! When I asked my mother that that smell was, she told me it was 九層塔, and I never forgot that name as something to avoid. There are three herbs that I absolutely can't stand, and this"nine-level pagoda" is one of them. I had not idea that's a type of basil as well.

My pot of sweet basil was getting over crowded, so I divided it into 4 smaller pots. Mmmm, the smell makes me want to make a Margarita pizza.

Cuttings

It's 90 degrees today. This is too hot for me to be out there fighting the weeds but perfect for working in the green house. I clipped some red monkey flowers, Provence lavender, Spanish lavender, rosemary, and Roma tomatoes. I will start with these since I have plenty of them. I purchased 3 pots of monkey flowers 2 years ago, but only one of them survived. The surviving bush is doing really well, so I am going to see if I can expand the monkeys. Master Ken, my mentor, always makes it seem so easy to grow anything. He also makes his cuttings and pruning in an amazing speed. It's all second nature to him. It took me almost an hours just to get these cuttings ready for rooting.


I don't t think any of my peach cuttings had rooted from a couple months ago. I also didn't use rooting hormone on those cuttings. This time I got a bottle of rooting hormone. Since I am trying to keep my cost down, I decided to make my own rooting medium instead of buying perlite. I know it has to be light and airy so the roots can grow easily, so I mixed some potting soil (1/3) with completely dried horse manure mixed with wood shavings (2/3). I misted the mixture with the water bottle.


I dip each cutting into the rooting hormone powder then stick it into the rooting medium. Tomatoes are supposed to root very easily, so I am skipping rooting hormone on them. After every cutting is in place, I mist everything thoroughly. Since I don't have a sprinkler system in this makeshift greenhouse, I will be misting these cuttings several times a day whenever possible. If everything goes well, they should root in 3 to 5 weeks.

Bugs

One of the side effects of becoming an urban farmer is that I became fascinated with bugs.

Bugs used to be something I only noticed when they got inside of the house. Usually I would either kill them or kick/chase them out. Once you start to grow your own food outside, you will start to notice all kinds of bugs. Now you can't kick them outside because they ARE outside. For that reason, I usually don't try to kill them. After all, they are where they are supposed to be - outside. However, in order to protect the result of your hard labor, you will start to observe the bugs. What are they? What are they doing to your fruits (or vegetables)? How to protect your crop from these bugs without using toxic pesticide? My very first tomato had a nasty worm inside. Gross! At the same time, I was so fascinated that I had to keep a picture of it.


You will start to appreciate beneficial bugs such as bees and ladybugs. Not only I appreciate honey bees, I respect these little fuzzy guys for spending their entire lives collecting pollen and help pollination during the process. Without them, we would have no honey and much less fruit to eat. That would be devastating for me. There is nothing like the sweetness of natural golden gooey honey.