How Is Your Garden Growing?
We love seeing so many of you at our Spring Finished Compost Giftback. We appreciate your enthusiasm for circularity, for using the compost you helped create in your own gardens. So, we’re curious to know how your garden is growing. What did you plant? What are you enjoying eating? Have you tried any new recipes as a result of what you planted? Did you give away or trade any of the produce? Can you send us photos or videos of your garden that we can share on social media?
For example, our co-op consumer-owner Tohru Oyasu is growing cherry tomatoes, peach boy tomatoes, eggplants, green beans, peas, lettuce, cucumbers, eggplants, bok choy, shishito peppers, jalapeños, lunchbox peppers and a ton of herbs. All of this in some raised beds and a few pots. They share the abundance with their family and friends. Tohru writes, “Knowing that our food is going full circle makes our tomatoes just a little sweeter and our salads just a little more delicious.” (Here’s a facebook post about his garden.) Tohru, Courtney and their blended family of four teens came out together and volunteered at our giftback this year. That’s them with us in the photo—an after photo for what was a giant pile of finished compost. They were a huge help!
I have just one raised bed, so not a ton of growing space, but that doesn’t diminish the pleasure I derive from it. I love having fresh herbs and I preserve them by making compound butters, basically just chopped herbs folded into softened butter. I even use the original wrapper to package it. I usually freeze it. My favorite is tarragon butter which is delicious on steamed green beans. But I also have thyme, chives and oregano that came back this year. The oregano plant is blooming now and gets so many insect visitors that it’s just fun to sit and watch. BeeTV! The only plants I bought this year were sungold cherry tomatoes and parsley. Picking a handful of cherry tomatoes each morning is so satisfying.
We regrew some celery from the end of one we bought at a grocery store. I love doing that. It feels like a magic trick: food appearing out of thin air. I particularly like to grow celery because I like to add the leaves to salads, and at the grocery store those are usually chopped off. Our neighbors invited us to eat as much swiss chard as we liked while they were on vacation. The stems are a good stand-in for celery. We made colcannon with it. Here’s one recipe for it. We like to use it as a bed for a piece of fish. We still have a box of instant mashed potatoes we are chipping away at as part of our pantry project. (Just a fancy name for eating what has been sitting in the pantry for years.)
We’ve also regrown a lot of scallions. I wonder if any nutritional value is lost when you do this. Probably not if you amend the soil with compost!
I read something earlier this summer that has me paying more attention to the plant diversity that I’m eating. I read it in the print version of AARP’s Bulletin, but you can read it in a fun graphic novel format here on their website. Spoiler alert: the goal is to eat 30 different plants per week for a healthy microbiome. That is one of the reasons that I’m adding greens like celery leaves and herbs to my salads. It’s been a fun challenge to try and get to 30. It helps that you can eat different parts of plants. Growing your own allows you to add in more diversity and not be fenced in by what your grocery store has to offer.
We really would love to see photos of all you gardeners and your food-scrap compost amended gardens. Ah, summer!
