Sand Village Farm's Three-Day Makeover

Jonathan of Backyard Food Gardens built this beautiful new arbor

Back in August, I started looking for someone to help me with rebuilding the arbor that was falling apart. I thought it could be a project for a horticulture student or students. I received a few inquiries through permaculture department at Merritt College but couldn't find a good fit for the job. On the first day of Mushroom Cultivation class at the end of August, one of the new students in the class started a conversation with me. It turned out that he, Josh, runs a landscape business called Backyard Food Gardens. That night I emailed him to find out more about what services he provides. After looking though his website, http://www.backyardfoodgardens.com/, I arranged a time for him to come over and give me an estimate. I decided to give Sand Village Farm a makeover after learning all the options and possibilities

A few days ago, Backyard Food Gardens crew - Josh, Jonathan, Tomas, and Jose arrived with a truckload of tools and started working on getting all the weeds out, putting in an irrigation system, and building a new arbor. On the first day, they set the 4 posts for the new arbor, made wings on the top bars for the arbor, removed all the weeds, ran the tractor all over the hardened soil, and installed the valves for the irrigation system.

On day two, Josh took me to pick out new plants. During the drive to the nursery, I found out that Josh started his landscape business five years ago. When he first started, it was just himself. As the business grew and expanded, he purchased various tools and equipments to work more efficiently. Now he also has a good crew who work well together. Josh became fluent in Spanish from working with his crew everyday, and they study English during their commute to the work sites. As a multi-lingual person, I understand that learning a new language is difficult. I am extremely impressed with these hard working guys.

Sand Village Farm is now covered in mulch

On day three, Josh and Jonathan returned to finish up. Automated irrigation system is a brand new concept for me. Josh gave me a crash course on how to program the time and frequency for different stations.

My propagation table with sprinkler system

This morning, I stood in the rain to admire the work of Backyard Food Gardens.  I can't get over how beautiful it is.  With the automated irrigation system, I won't have to manually water everything or mist my seedlings with a water bottle. I love the new arbor, the propagation table, and all the new plants!

If you are looking for a landscaper, I highly recommend Backyard Food Gardens. Josh can be reached at 510-289-8712 or josh@backyardfoodgardens.com.

My Miniature Honeydew Melon

A few years ago I tried grown cantaloupe melons. I managed to harvest 2 miniature cantaloupe melons. They were the size of oranges but super sweet. I took a break of two years and decided to try growing melons again. I planted both honeydew and cantaloupe during the summer. I saw a lot of flowers but no melon was forming. Master Ken has talked about the type of weather corn and melons love - so hot that it's uncomfortable to fall to sleep at night. They thrive in that kind of weather, and we are definitely not get that here on Sand Village Farm. We hardly even had any summer this year. We had a couple heatwaves, and one came through while I was in New York. When I came back from New York, I was delighted to see a golf ball size honeydew melon.

More than a month went by, and that melon grew to the size of a tennis ball. I could see that it just wasn't going to get any bigger, and it is now fall. It's not going to get any warmer.  Today I cut it up in quarters to eat it. It smelled wonderful and tasted sweet. Would you buy miniture melons? I would because it is like a personal size melon. You can eat it all by yourself. It would be really cute to serve a scoop of gelato in a halve miniature melon. What do you think?

Dive! Living Off America's Waste

I spent my early childhood years in Asia. One of the very first things they teach you in Asia is not to waste food. Grown ups would tell little kids to finish all the food including every single grain of rice in their bowls. Why? Because every grain came from the hard work of farmers and shouldn't be wasted. Kids learn from an early age that food doesn't fall from sky. Everything we eat is the result of blood and sweet of farmers who work the land. Well, unless you go pick wild food that grow by itself.

When I first came to the Bay Area, I was shocked to see kids in school dumping their lunch into the garbage can. Why were they throwing away perfectly good food?! Didn't they know how much work it is involved to make that spaghetti and pizza? Didn't they know that chickens had to be killed in order for us to eat fried chicken? How could they just dump all that into garbage? As I got older, I became more accustomed to people throwing away food even though I do not agree and can't bring myself to do so. Some people think I have an "issue" with food because I eat leftover. A few guys that I went out on dates with thought I was starved as a kid. They thought maybe I was broke. I guess I enjoy my food much more than other girls on dates.

Later on I learned of food banks that hand out food to families that don't have enough money to buy food. I was confused again. I see food being thrown out everyday, so how could there be people without food to eat? Just last month, I saw a few articles on what Americans are putting in their garbage. It turned out a large part, 25%, of the garbage is food. By wasting food, Americans are also wasting energy - the energy that went into growing the food, processing it, packaging it and transporting it to the consumer and then to the landfill. I am well aware that some Americans simply feel it is within their rights (or blessings) to buy food and throw it away as they wish. I think that just means for the people who do care to work even harder. Here is an American who commented on one of the articles mentioned above:

"Mercurus (USA)

One of the blessings of Liberty is the right to dispose of personal property as you choose. What individuals do with their food is their business and no one elses. This article itself is a waste of time to read, and was a waste of energy to produce and publish. Merc"

Hopefully this Merc will never become poor and have no money to buy food. Perhaps only then, he will understand food doesn't always come easy for everybody. Base on his logic, he probably doesn't bother to read the recycle codes on plastic items or recycle electronic waste since they are his personal property.

A few years ago after I became involved with urban farming community, I started to feel less of an alien. Other urban farmers cherish food as much as I do, and it's not so much because we were broke or starved. We share the understanding of knowing where the food came from. Sometimes we work together in community gardens. We are not going to throw away the fruits and vegetables that we spent last five months growing. If a peach is bruised on one side, I can just cut that side off and put it in the compost pile. The compost will help the peach tree grow better. There is very little garbage around here.

Dive! will just be another one of the environmental documentaries, but it's something for the excessive Americans to think about how much we are throwing away while we complain about unemployment, lack of money, and shortage of food as a nation.

Blue Oyster Mushrooms Growing on the Recycled Mushroom Block

Oyster mushroom blocks

When I went to Far West Fungi last month, I brought back a bunch of recycled mushroom blocks. These are the blocks they use on the farm to cultivate various mushrooms. They are made of saw dust inoculated with mushroom spawns, so the blocks are still full of mycilia even though the mushrooms have been harvested. It is not cost effective for the farm to use the blocks again, so they give them out to educational groups and MSSF members during our field trips.

Shiitake mushroom blocks

I have grown mushrooms on recycled blocks before. The first time I got them a few years ago, I had success in growing a lot of them. The second time I brought back a large amount of blocks due to my first success, but the entire batch was contaminated. I didn't get any mushroom to grow during my second attempt. Master Ken gave us some directions on how to get the blocks growing again.

I didn't bother to buy hydrogen peroxide this time since I did that last time, and they all got contaminated anyway.I soaked the blocks in water overnight in the recycling bins and put them inside of the garage. I covered them with large sheets of brown paper to keep the moisture in. I checked on them everyday and sprayed them with water using a spray bottle. When it started raining last week, I took them out in the bins to have them soaked in rain water. I then noticed the shiitake blocks were getting moldy. Bad sign. I took all the moldy ones out and started thinking a different and perhaps better way to store them.

Ideally, I would like to keep them outside so they can get rained on. I also prefer not to have the moldy smell in the garage in the case that they get all moldy again. There isn't a whole lot of shady spots on Sand Village Farm. I have the worm compost bins underneath the Loquat tree. The only other spot is under the peach tree, and I know all the leaves are going to fall off during the winter. Well, it will have to do for now. So I set up two pallets underneath the peach tree, one for oysters and one for shiitake. Ideally you cover them with hay, wood chips, or a burlap bag, but I don't have any of those handy. So I grabbed a bunch of dried palm tree leaves that came from my neighbor's tree and covered the blocks with them. Maybe I could weave these palm leaves? Would this work? I thought it was going to rain more, but I don't see any more rain in the forecast.

For the last few days, I watered the blocks when I watered the other vegetables. This morning as I was leaving the farm to go to the cubicles, I thought I would peek under the palm leaves. Ha! Baby blue oysters! They are growing!

Homemade Karanji for Diwali, Festival of Lights

I was pleasantly surprised when I arrived at my cubicle world this morning. My Indian cubicle mate, who taught me the Indian eggplant dish, handed me a brightly colored box. When I opened it, there were two pieces of pastries inside (I ate one before remembering to take a photo). She told me that they were filled with coconuts. I immediately ran upstairs to get a cup of coffee to go with the pastry. The pastry is not greasy at all. I thought they were baked although they looked like they were fried from the blisters on the shell. The coconut flakes inside were moist, spicy, and sugary. After I finished the first piece, I went over to obtain some information about the delicious morsel.

"Was there ginger in the pastry? It's sweet and spicy!" I asked her.

She was surprised to hear the mention of ginger as there was no ginger in the ingredients. There were just coconuts, sugar, jaggery, cardamon, and saffron." Oh, so it was cardamon not ginger that I was tasting. I couldn't believe how off I was. Must be still half asleep.

"What is jaggery?" I asked her. Jaggery (also translated as jaggeree) is a traditional unrefined non-centrifugal sugar in India. It is a concentrated product of cane juice without separation of the molasses and crystals. It's available in Indian grocery stores in blocks. You shave it from the block to use as a sweetener. It sounds great and tastes excellent. I will have to pick some up to experiment with.

I asked her whether the pastries were baked. It turned out they were fried. I was surprised again! She explained to me that the dough was made with all purpose flour mixed with an Indian flour similar to semolina. She went on to explain how the dough was stretched to make it pliable.

After hearing the process and ingredients in details - saffron, shaved jaggery, fresh coconut flakes and pastry made from scratch, I realized this was no ordinary everyday dessert that I just ate! I asked her if this was for a special holiday? Surely enough, the pastry, called Karanji, is for Diwali, which is a five day Hindu festival, often referred to as the Festival of Lights. She admitted it was a lot of work which normally is a community effort in Indian. A group of women would gather and spend a day making Karanji and socialize. She made karanji with a friend during the weekend to celebrate the holiday.

Wow, I feel incredibly special to have the opportunity to taste this authentic homemade Indian treat and learn more about the culture and history behind it. This is one of the reasons I feel fortunately to live in the Bay Area. You can experience world cuisine and culture without having to fly anywhere.