Patchwork Farms - A CSA-Style Enterprise in Marin

Stacy and Brian are starting a new endeavor up in Marin, a CSA-like project called Patchwork Farms that sounds absolutely fantastic.

The idea is simple - people in the greater Ross Valley area can sign up to barter and trade their abundance of fruits and veggies with other neighbors in the area. All the information is available on their website (linked above).

If you're up in Marin, sign up today!

Community Gardening

You guys might think that Noah and I are fairly serious urban gardeners. But we're nothing compared to my parents and Stacy and Brian. Not only do both couples have their own (large) home gardens, but they share a community garden plot as well.
Located at the Robson-Harrington House, a public park in San Anselmo, there are about thirty individual plots that can be used for a nominal fee by any resident of San Anselmo. The waiting list is long, but my dad and Brian got their first plot a few years back and last year upgraded to a larger, sunnier spot. These top two pics are from our family friend Caterina's garden. Beautiful blooms!
The plot houses a variety of fruits, vegetables, flowers and trees. The guys do the main gardening, and lemme tell you, they get quite a haul.
You can see tomato trellises mixed in with roses and California poppies. It's really stunning.
This above picture shows some of the many, many tomato cages (I think there are over forty plants) as well as what I think is the climbing fence for pole beans and cucumbers and stuff.
San Anselmo has a great micro-climate. They can get fog in the mornings and hit the 90s by mid-day. You can grow anything from the tropical flowers above to most produce, berries and fruit trees like figs, apricots and apples. I am trying to convince the fam to start growing grapes for wine. I know it's only a matter of time before they give in.
This Tiki was salvaged by my dad from the plot of a former gardener. Nice looking guy to keep you company while you work.
These strawberry plants survived multiple transplants, from the original garden to the new garden to a sunnier spot in the new garden.
And when you just wanna kick back and read a book amidst all the beauty, well they've got that covered, too.
Man, just looking at these pictures is making me jealous. Can't wait to see how everything's growing when we head up for Stacy's 30th birthday in July.

How Does Your Garden Grow?

We're about six weeks into the spring/summer/fall garden and things are growing great. There were some lofty plans to take the space and build a huge raised bed, but time and bad backs got in the way. So we're going ahead with the usual container/wine barrel garden we've had for the past five or six years. And like every spring, we've added a few more containers.

What's growing? Tomatoes (13 and counting, we added a Northern Lights that we discovered at the HFM last weekend), Japanese eggplant, Persian cucumbers (the best for the hundreds of Greek salads we eat during the summer), serrano peppers, Charentrais melons, 4 kinds of beets, swiss chard, silverbeet spinach, spring onions, rainbow carrots, turnips, strawberries (with actually berries, for the first time ever!), 4 kinds of basil, rosemary, 2 kinds of thyme, lemon verbena, oregano, Bob Marley mint (it smells smokey when you rub it, another HFM find), tarragon, sage (the flowers are below) and lavender.
And that's just for now. We're bound to adopt a few more things over the course of the spring/summer. Including, hopefully, a fig tree. To go with the Meyer lemon tree I forgot to mention. As you can imagine, my other career option is farming.

The early mornings would be tough, though.

Winter Mini-Harvest

I picked these beauties today.

Doing a 3-5 day pickle for the beets. The tomato will ripen for a few more days before heading into a salad or something. But the meyer lemon is the one I'm most proud of - we transplanted our tree two years ago and it seemed like it was never going to fruit again. This little fella was the first one to ripen from the current crop (a whopping three lemons).

Any ideas on how best to treat it/eat it?

Rat-tat-too-eee

Hi guys,

Brian and I made rat-tat-too-eee the other night all from ingredients in the garden, (except cheese and pine-nuts). We used thin long slices of zucchini, squash, tomatoes, bell peppers. Brian made a homemade tomato sauce from our tomatoes. We put one layer down of the zucchini, then put down some sauce, then some cheese and spices (parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme (all chop

ped up and from our garden). Then repeated this with each vegetable. We added cheese and spices to the top and pine nuts, then we baked it in the oven for 45 minutes at 325 degrees.

Brian drained a little bit of the juices once it was done, so it didn't get too soggy while it cooled. Then we ate it with our neighbors who invited us over for drinks with whole wheat sourdough bread, and had a cheese plate after this coarse that the neighbor had made.

Yummy,

Stacy and Brian