dirty treats!

Garlic Harvest and Honey Bees

2009-07-11T13:58:00.006-04:00

Honey bees, yes, we have honey bees. Our friend Ashley needed to move her hive and had been searching for a house to host them. We agreed to let her keep the bees here, and it's been going great so far. Ashley knows a lot about urban bee-keeping, so we're trusting her to keep those bees happy. I was a little concerned at first because the hive was placed just outside my window, but the bees haven't come anywhere near my window. They seem to stay to the front of the hive. I feel good about the bees being there and I'm excited for honey.

Shaun and Ashley are on the roof now trying to find out why there are 60+ dead bees in our backyard and on our roof. We're thinking that maybe some died from the stress of moving, but maybe others are dead robber bees that our resident bees killed.

We had a BBQ/Bee-hoisting party to celebrate the arrival of the bees. Here are some friends in funny suits moving them onto their new roof:

In other news, Shaun and I just picked our garlic! Shaun planted the garlic last year. The garlic (we grew 23 of 'em) is hanging out on our dining room table for now, drying out before we start braiding it. I'm going to do a separate post on garlic braiding, but for now, here are some pictures of the garlic as well as a few good recent ones from the garden.

Look at all that garlic! The house smells so good. Here is a great picture Shaun took of our first cucumber:

Shaun and I planted onions early in the spring. It was both of our first times planting onions. I'm really excited about these. They'll be ready for pickin' in about a month:

Take it easy bro.. it's just oregano

2009-06-02T15:33:00.006-04:00

When I look at the garden, I get overwhelmed by the amount of plants growing and how much I don't know about them. Aside from weeding, planting seeds, and eating from the garden, I don't know very much about the plants themselves - how they grow, when the best time to harvest them is, and what kind of benefits other than being very tasty the plants might have.

I'm going to dedicate each new post to my study of a new plant. I'll try to do this once a week, and if I'm feeling ambitious, maybe twice. We have a few books here at the house, and the internet has a ton of information of course.

Since our oregano plant is huge and super-delicious right now, I'll start with that.

OREGANO

I'm not sure which species of oregano we have, but I fried it up today with some potatoes and it had such a great, strong flavor. Oregano is native to the Mediterranean region and a perennial, meaning that it comes back for more than two years every spring and summer from it's root stock.

Here's a picture of the oregano in our garden:

You can sow oregano indoors or outdoors, but if you want to start your oregano before the last frost it's best to sow indoors at a temperature around 70 degrees with nothing covering it. Oregano, if sown outside, needs to be planted in the spring once the soil is warm and there is no danger of frost.

As far as soil goes, Oregano does fine in regular garden soil but really likes well-drained, sandy loam soil (loam soil is composed of sand, silt, and clay). The pH of the soil should be above 6.0. When Stuart and Shaun tested the pH last summer, they found the soil to be basic - Stuart thinks the soil tested around 7.4. They didn't do anything special to the soil (like adding lime to make the soil basic) when Shaun transferred the oregano from his old house to our garden, so our soil must be at a good pH for it - the plant is huge! Oregano also likes living in containers! Proper drainage is key.

Oregano likes full sun. We have our oregano in a sunny spot, near the famed potato box and Stuart's rose bushes. Oregano doesn't like high wind, but Pittsburgh doesn't get too much wind so we shouldn't have a problem.

You can propagate oregano by seed, divisions, or cuttings. Our oregano self-propagates by simply getting a bigger root system each year, which produces more plants. It must really dig the spot it's in. A few resources online say that you're supposed to trim the plant six weeks after planting to ensure that it gets big and mightly. I'm not sure if Shaun did that after he re-planted it, but Stuart says it gets trimmed back in the winter for sure.

As far as harvesting goes, you can harvest oregano anytime if you're eating it fresh. If you want to dry it, it's best to harvest it just before it flowers in the summer. Right now, our plant has some dried-up purplish flowers on it, but a few new yellow buds too. There aren't very many buds. I'm guessing the oregano hasn't flowered full-on yet, so I still have some time if I want to dry some of it during its time of maximum flavor! Oregano plants are usually 18 inches wide and 6-18 inches tall, but ours is a monster. I didn't measure, but it's wayyyy bigger than 18 inches wide. That means one thing - oregano in EVERYTHING! The same could be said about our green onions too. I've been trying to put them in everything I cook since we have so many.

As far as taste goes, oregano is affected more by the soil composition, the climate, and the season than by the specific species. I thought out oregano tasted great today, which leads me to believe that Bloomfield is Pittsburgh's center of oregano deliciousness. After all, Bloomfield is the Little Italy of Pittsburgh. Apparently, your oregano is good if it numbs your tongue when you eat it fresh. I tested our oregano just now and I feel about ready to get my tooth pulled. That's some good oregano!

Pests and diseases: Whitefly, spider mites, and powdery mildew all like to hang out on oregano. I saw a ton of little red spider mites on the brick near the oregano today. Spider mites don't like humidity, so I hope it rains enough in Pittsburgh to keep them at bay. The oregano plant doesn't seem to have any problems so far.

Lastly, I checked my sources to see what benefits oregano has aside from tasting good. Oregano is an antioxidant and is good at fighting food-borne pathogens. Oregano is often taken to fight the flu, colds, sore throats, fevers, fungal infections, upset stomachs, indigestion, enteric parasites (I'm not sure what those are), and painful menstuation (yep, know about that one). Apparently if you injest too much oregano it can really sedate you, but if you want to have a nice sleep, drinking some oregano tea should help. Oregano has been recently found to be really effective against MRSA. It's supposed to be even more effective than 18 of the drugs currently being used in MRSA treatment. Hah.

Other things you can do with oregano:

You can make a mouthwash out of unsweetened oregano tea!
You can pound oregano with warm water, tea, or oatmeal to make a paste to put on sores, swelling, and aching muscles!
You can relax in oregano tea water if your tired bones and muscles are bothering you!
You can make an oil from oregano to drop on aching teeth!
Aid your diguestion by stimulating your flow of bile (that phrase makes me want to barf) with.. you guessed it.. oregano!
Add it to your snuff if you're a true Englishman!

SOME WORDS ABOUT PH

Just a refresher for those of us, like me, who can't remember anything about pH: pH is measured by the activity of hydrogen ions, to determine if something is acidic or basic. Soil above 7.0 is basic, so soil below 7.0 is acidic. Acidity or basicity is an either/or sorta thing - you can't have a soil that is "relatively basic" or "slightly acidic" - it's just one or the other.

I learned all of this from:

- "The Big Book of Gardening Skills" by the editors of Garden Way Publishing
- "Success with Seed" by Karen Park Jennings
- Stuart
- The Internet
- Observation!

May Garden: Strawberries, Trellises, and more!

2009-05-24T17:09:00.010-04:00

In the last few days the garden has exploded again: now we have tons of roses, a big plant with purple flowers (pictured above - what is it?), and a whole patch of strawberries (well, almost!). The potato box is doing great - just about all of our potato plants grew above the surface of that original layer of hay. Shaun and I did some "mulch thievery" and collected some discarded hay from under a bridge in Oakland. It was pretty damp and grimey but we put it on top of our potatoes anyway. The hay dried quickly in the sun.

Yesterday on Facebook I saw that a friend's garden had yielded it's first strawberries and my first though was - "where are ours? Does that mean ours will be coming in soon?" I ran out to the garden to see, and found hundreds of little green strawberries. Even the small strawberry plant I bought at Home Depot was yielding soon-to-be ripe strawberries in it's shady spot.

The strawberry patch is divided into two sections - one section, near the stairs down to our backyard gets a ton of sun, whereas the other section gets less sun, as it's shaded under the big purple-flowered bush. Both sections have tons of strawberries, and Shaun says that we have about three times the number of strawberries we did last year.

Today, Shaun came up to my room while I was reading with ripe strawberries. A few of them turned ripe overnight, and were really tasty. That's my little Home Depot plant:

Hooray for sunflowers, rose bushes, onions, and a simple trellis:

I love this little sage bush. Everytime I walk by (and remember it's there) I take a little leaf of sage with me. It's so tasty:

Surprise cilantro. More cilantro means more excuses to make stir-fry in the wok with peanut butter and endless amounts of cilantro:

Our onions seem to be doing well:

A pink rose after today's rainstorm:

The backyard:

The Potato Box is complete!

2009-04-27T20:54:00.001-04:00

Shaun and I completed our potato box last week and I'm quite proud of it. We got our seed potatoes and a big bag of tiny onions a few weeks ago from Moose Tubers. The potatoes got planted in the potato box of course. Here's how we did it:

We had already made the 2ft x 6ft box out of wood from CJ. We lined the box with scrappy cardboard and paper in lieu of landscaping cloth. We bought some inexpensive topsoil and compost/manure from Home Depot (about 10 or 11 bags total) and mixed those bags with some sand we had at the house, filling the potato box to the top.

We laid the potatoes on the soil, spacing them about 6-8 inches apart. One of our house gardening books recommends way more space between potatoes, but our box is only so big. I hope that the potatoes will be able to grow despite not leaving the recommended amount of space between them!I had already attached four sticks using plastic "select-a-size" brackets to each corner of the box. We attached 2-foot high chicken wire (which takes a "country minute," in Shaun's words, to cut into the size you want) to the top of the box, all the way around, securing it to the sticks with twine. We filled the chicken wire with as much hay as Shaun picked up from our friends' backyard. We'll need about double the amount we have now. We threw some topsoil on top of the hay to weigh it down a bit.

Finishing the potato box made me feel great for having completed an entire project. Well, I guess the project is only truly complete once the potatoes grow and they go into my belly in the form of french fries. Like most of my pals, I tend to have a lot of good ideas for projects but can't find the drive or time to actually do them (though some of my friends have super-human powers when it comes to getting things done), so getting to see this idea Shaun and I had come to life was awesome. Now I have to figure out how much I need to water this thing and cross my fingers!

And now, a picture of planting onions! The onions got planted in two separate single-rows which wind around the brick walls of our raised beds. I really, really hope they grow. I want endless onions.

Just for fun, here's a picture of last night's veggie taco night buffet next to the garden. We cooked the tacos over our fire barrel.

Spring Flowers

2009-04-17T17:53:00.000-04:00

It's been raining here in Pittsburgh a lot, and between rain showers, work, and a ton of other things, my roommates and I haven't had much time to tend to the garden. The garden however, has been really busy making things grow. But first, check out Stuart's indoor light set-up:

Here are some pictures I snapped in the garden. I'm so amazed by the
tulips (or daffodils?), which look like they are able to burst open. I noticed the white hyacinth today.

The Potato Box and the Wood Cradle

2009-03-28T20:02:00.000-04:00

Last week, Edmond Street headed to Construction Junction to find some second-hand wood. Shaun and I found some chestnut (we're pretty sure) and Stuart found materials for his own backyard project, the wood cradle. Construction Junction is amazing and cheap!

Shaun and I cut two 6-foot pieces of wood and two 2-foot pieces of wood and drilled them together to create a rectangle. The potato box needs to be about a foot in depth, and luckily the wood we found is about a foot wide. We made a base for it, leaving lots of room between the boards for water to seep through. A few days later, we grabbed some 2x4 bits and made three "legs" for our box to elevate it off the ground. Conveniently, there's a drain right below where we're keeping the potato box, so water can drain straight through!

Stuart has been working on cutting his wood and making notches so that he can attach his wood pieces without any screws! The wood cradle is looking great so far.

My next plan for the potato box is to line it with newspaper and attach four sticks to the corners of the inside of the box. The sticks, which I found in Allegheny Cemetery near our house, will hold the chicken-wire upright. Shaun and I bought some twine and plastic stripping with holes in it which you can cut to whatever length you need. We'll use the stripping to fasten the sticks to the box, and then use twine to tie the chicken wire to the sticks. I wanted to build up this part of the box today, but it's been rainy for the past few days!

Today, a robin was hopping around the garden, picking at the dirt. It's breezy. I feel spring!

Here are some majestic green onions in the dark. Shaun and I used some of these in a really great four-onion soup the other day.

Here's a picture of the backyard at night. The camera is letting in way more light than there actually is - I don't understand cameras so I don't know how this works, but it looks very cool. I'm creepin' in the garden.

Next, I'll post about Stuart's awesome indoor sprouting set-up!

Uncovering the Mystery-Garden

2009-03-17T11:01:00.000-04:00

A few days ago when it was warm out, Stuart and Shaun cleared out most of the dead plants from the garden, revealing crocuses, green onions, garlic, rhubarb, chives, sage, and a few other plants I can't remember. The crocuses are so beautiful - we have yellow, purple, dark purple, and these amazing white ones that have a slight tint of purple when you look at them a certain way. I like going out back to look at them in the evening, when they're almost all the way closed up. It's a very smart thing to do, getting cozy and warm before the nighttime cold. The internet told me that you get saffron from the stigmas of crocus sativus, which blooms in the fall. Hmmm... I wonder if my roommates have ever grown the world's most expensive spice?

Shaun went around with me and pointed out what plants were - suddenly, green stems became green onions, a leafy bush became sage, and bright green and red curly leaves became the poisonous leaves of rhubarb. Just learning what some of the plants were made the garden much less of a mystery. I want to make a breakfast egg with green onions chopped on top.. mhmmm.

We burned the dead plants in the barrel. When plants burn, they produce dense olive green smoke which is kind of pretty in a post-apocalyptic way. So much ash was left from doing that and we weren't sure at first what to do with it. Shaun ended up sprinkling it on the garden, and we're not sure if it's going to help things at all - wood ash increases soil Ph but I wonder if plant ash works the same way? Anyway, I went to my new job orientation smelling like campfire.. very relaxing.

Stuart has been working on trimming the rose bushes in some new "mathetematical" way he claims to have found on the internet. It has something to do with trimming certain stems on the inside of the bush, which I think is sort of a no-brainer when it comes to trimming but he made his method sound special. We shall see what happens. I have no doubt that Stuarts methods will produce Auspicious Roses of Mathematics.

Our seeds haven't come yet - Heirloom Seeds in West Finley, PA is backed up with orders and will probably send the majority of our seeds to us in April. We're also waiting on onion and potato seeds from Fedco. I'm particularly excited about these because I got to pick them out, and this will be the first year that anyone in the house has tried to grow potatoes in a wooden container. How are we going to do this? Read on, read on...

Yesterday, I did a little bit of research in some of our gardening books and on the internet to figure out the best way to grow potatoes in a wooden box. Based on what I read, I'd like to build a 12-inch high wooden box (probably 2-ft wide and however long we want it) with holes on the bottom for drainage. The box will be filled to the top with soil, compost, and leaves. The seed potatoes will be planted on top. We have chicken wire in our basement, so I'll use that to build a 2-ft high cage over the wooden box. The cage will get filled with hay. To compress the hay, I'll put some soil on top and water it. Theoretically, the hay will eliminate having to tend to the potatoes (this is called the "lazy way" to do it) and will provide enough ventilation so that the potatoes don't rot, yet enough support so that they can grow up and over the sides of the cage. I read that when you use hay to grow potatoes you need to water them a little more than you would if they were in the ground, though I'm not yet sure how much. I'm really excited to build this box - this weekend is supposed to be sunny, so it might be a perfect time to head to Construction Junction for some wood that's safe to use and start building a potato box. I can't wait to post pictures of it!

Here is Shaun clearing out dead leaves from coltsfoot growing out of our wall.

Here are some more garden pictures I took that day. If you click them, you can make them bigger. In order, from left to right: green onions, rhubarb, crocuses, garlic, and chives.

the cold is almost gone..

2009-03-06T11:53:00.000-05:00

..and it's almost growing-time.

I don't know how to garden. I know you're supposed to put things in the dirt, give the earth some love and cross your fingers, but other than that I have no idea what it really means to grow your own food. It sounds hard but I guess people do it, and have been doing it for a really long time, so I guess it's possible for me to do it too. I don't have a lot of preconceptions about gardening or what it means, you know, like in the whoo-hoo-good-for-your-soul-sense. All I really know is that it takes a lot of work, it's fun, you get free food, and it's supposed to make you feel more connected to your little piece of earth - in this case, my little sliver of Pittsburgh.

Nowadays (and it didn't used to be this way), I tend to be totally scared of anything that needs a lot of work put into it, which is a fancier way of saying I don't get anything done. But now that I am at the ripe old age of almost-25 I feel like I should probably get serious and actually work towards something. My new roommates, Shaun and Stuart know how to garden, and they are going to teach me this spring, so here - TADA! - is my first-ever blog. Guess what it's about?
It's warm in early March now, but back when it was cold (well, before it got really cold in late February) I took a few photos of the garden in my new backyard. Shaun, Stuart, and Johnny (the ex-roommate who I replaced after he moved to Eugene, Oregon to go to herbal medicine school, go figure) grew flowers, food, and fun in the garden for a few years. In the winter, the garden looked dead to me because I don't know any better, but I'm pretty sure Shaun is still pulling rosemary from somewhere (wouldn't know it if I saw it). Anyway, the garden looked frigid and quiet when I took these pictures, even though I know there's life brewing in the dirt. I can't wait to look back at these chilly pictures of the garden once it's all green and pretty!

Right now, white snow drops nod off, crocuses reportedly are busting up soon, and Shaun says there's garlic popping up all over the place. Stuart got antsy and bought some seeds from the co-op (our seed company is taking a while to send us seeds). He's going to put those in some water under lights. I think that's called sprouting. It's supposed to be nice this week so I'll do some exploring and take more pictures.