Quick Ginger Pickled Beets

Ruby Red Pickles

Recipe by Recipes from the Root Cellar

Our garden is getting more complicated and time consuming this year. In addition to the new raised beds and the usual containers, I just put in a few winter squash hills and have alpine strawberries and sunflowers to plant. But in spite of all of this springtime effort, we’re  still awaiting the majority of our harvest. Meanwhile we're finishing up our wintery root veggies like beets. Here’s a simple recipe from my new favorite cookbook, Recipes from the Root Cellar. Unlike the Polish-style beets and other hot-dressed beets I’ve blogged about, this recipe is served cool, and is more of a true pickle than a side dish, but with an unexpected pop of ginger.

May Veggies and Recipes

Old English Rose in our Garden

May Flowers Despite Few Showers

May is skipping by, and I’ve not yet posted May’s in-season veggies and favorite recipes. I blame both the balmy weather and the intensive gardening projects that seem happen every May. This year has been particularly hot and dry, perfect for planting tomatoes, peppers, and sunflowers. Longer days make it easier to find time to garden, and easier to become overly ambitious in the number of plants to be added to the garden. With weather so beautiful, though, I’m probably not the only one who’s choosing to putter in the yard rather than plan in the kitchen.

Top 7 Plants for Container Gardens

Classic Container Plant, courtesy FuchsiaMagic.com

Plus 3 Container No-nos

Container gardens are all the rage right now, according to popular garden periodicals from budget-conscious Better Homes and Gardens to spare-no-expense Sunset Magazine. Containers come in all shapes and sizes, and more container-friendly plants are hybridized every year. Containers can provide inexpensive patio décor, and can be moved around during the growing season as temperature and light exposure changes. Container gardens require less soil and less manual labor to get started than larger beds, but they also require more frequent watering and fertilizing during the growing season. Be prepared to check the soil moisture and plant wiltiness every day when it’s hot out. Some plants will need daily watering when the weather is especially toasty.

Here are a few easy-to-grow plants that adapt well to containers, plus a few that I wouldn’t recommend under most circumstances. For other ideas, check your local garden store for new container-friendly varieties. Try chatting up workers and shoppers, if the opportunity presents itself.

Arugula and Strawberry Salad

Arugula, Berries, Cheese, Simple Dressing, That's It!

Recipe by Let’s Cook and Chef Eric Carter

I’ve already blogged two strawberry salads, one with butter lettuce, radicchio, and feta topped with strawberry dressing and another with arugula, spinach, pine nuts and Parmesan. This is the simplest and quickest one yet. Ironically, I learned it at a Succulent Seafood class at Let’s Cook, taught by Eric Carter, culinary program director at Cabrillo College. This was our simple accompaniment to our stewed, seared, baked, and grilled fish and shellfish. Yes, we made four entrees, including bouillabaisse, in less than 3 hours. So Eric and Let’s Cook owner Patricia decided upon a quick salad with just a few ingredients to pair with the seafood. This recipe can be handy for your own cooking-intensive menus, especially during spring and summer when strawberries and fresh arugula abound. And it's delicious. My husband, who formerly said "No more arugula in salads!" had two helpings. The recipe can be doubled, as we did, for larger groups.

Shrimp Braised with Kale and Green Garlic

US White Shrimp: Large and Reasonably Sustainable

Recipe Adapted from Recipes from the Root Cellar

I love shrimp and have noticed that readers do too. However, in years past it’s not been easy to find sustainably produced shrimp. Old school fisheries involve dragging a net along the bottom of the ocean, with a huge amount of bycatch: about 4 lbs. for every 1 lb. of shrimp caught. Many shrimp farms are open to the ocean, leaching antibiotics, commercial fish food, and shrimp waste into the environment. Some shrimp farmers destroy native mangrove ecosystems to build farms. Luckily, the Monterey Bay Aquarium publishes sustainable shrimp guidelines, and they are getting easier to follow. Trending now are hook-and-line caught shrimp and closed-system farms. The rebuilding of the US Gulf of Mexico fisheries after Hurricane Katrina and the pioneering of closed-system farming enterprises in Thailand and Vietnam are both great news for shrimp eaters. And if I’m reading the guidelines right, we can now buy sustainable shrimp at Costco for under $10 per pound.

DIY Square Foot Garden (SFG): Making a Hoop House

Easy, Functional Hoop House

Instructions by Bruce

My last two posts were about making a square foot garden: building the raised beds, and mixing the soil and planting. Today is the final chapter, on what it takes to sustain the garden: water, fertilizing, and temperature control. Making an inexpensive hoop house will allow you to plant earlier and get growing despite nighttime temperature dips. You can also use the hoop house to foil most bugs while providing the diffused lighting that seedlings prefer. I’ve also included a few tips on early-season garden maintenance. So without further ado, let’s get to it.

DIY Square Foot Garden (SFG): Making Soil and Planting Seeds

Bruce in Action

Instructions by Bruce

Once you have a raised bed built for your square foot garden (details in Sunday’s post,) you’re ready to fill it with soil, make the square foot grid sections, and plant your seeds. You can also build a hoop house to protect small plants from cold temperatures; I will give hoop house instructions in my next post. All New Square Foot Gardening, the latest and greatest book by SFG pioneer Mel Bartholomew, recommends soil made from equal parts of peat moss, vermiculite, and organic compost from several sources. Vermiculite holds moisture and reduces the amount of watering necessary. But there is considerable debate about it due to its high cost and sustainability (it’s mined). Bruce reduced the amount of vermiculite in the mix. He noted that a high quality compost mixture also holds substantial water as well as loosening the soil—vermiculite’s other soil-building contribution. Bruce replaced the classic SFG wooden grid with a woven grid of nylon twine secured by wood screws, both of which we had on hand. Without a grid, as Mel Bartholomew points out, it’s not a square foot garden.

DIY Square Foot Garden (SFG): Raised Bed Construction

My Hero of the Raised Beds

Instructions by Bruce

After doing a fair amount of research, hubby Bruce built some raised beds with a protective hoop house over the top.  He’s made a set of raised beds once before, and made some improvements this time. An IT guy by trade, Bruce made the construction sound easy. We were both intrigued by square foot gardening (SFG), a method of dividing the garden into square foot sections and planting one crop per square foot. The space requirement for a SFG is only 20% of that needed for a conventional garden. And you’re less likely to grow more than you can eat. It’s a great method to get food variety in a small space. We’re growing beans, lettuces, chard, squashes, braising greens, dill, and cilantro, despite recent near-freezing temperatures in the yard at night. I’m sharing Bruce's method for building the raised beds and hoop house over the next three posts. I encourage you to build your own too!

Shredded Root Vegetables over Pasta

Cheerful and Healthy Root Veggies

Recipe Adapted from Recipes from the Root Cellar

It’s that time of year when it’s officially spring, yet the temperature in our DIY “hothouse” where we’ve started garden seeds was 34 degrees last night. Looks like it will be a few weeks before we enjoy local spring veggies like snow peas, snap peas, and asparagus. In the meantime, we have winter root veggies like carrots, beets, turnips, and parsnips—and most of us are darned tired of them. Here’s a recipe for those wintry veggies that’s light-textured and sunshine-colored, the perfect antidote for a locavore’s early springtime blues.

Top Ten Reasons to Join a CSA Farm

LEF Strawberries on the Vine

LEF Strawberries in the Basket

Ideas Collected from CSA Subscribers

Springtime is the perfect season to join a CSA farm.  CSA, or Community Supported Agriculture, is an arrangement where consumers subscribe to a local organic farm and receive a “farm share” of produce every week. You get a box of perfectly ripened local fruits and veggies straight from the fields, fresher and more flavorful that from any market. In turn, your CSA subscription gives the farmer resources to purchase seeds, soil amendments, and farm equipment, and assures him or her of recipients for the farm’s produce when crops are booming. Most CSA farms offer several box sizes and a choice of payment options. If you’re in the Santa Cruz/South Bay/Monterey area, I highly recommend Live Earth Farm, which has spaces for a few more subscribers this year. Our first boxes have included lettuce, cilantro, spinach and other greens, young carrots, beets, green garlic, and LEF’s legendary strawberries. I’m not exaggerating…you’ll not find any better strawberries anywhere. Folks from other US locations can find a farm on the CSA map provided by LocalHarvest.org.