Meet Our Garden

Mark Twain famously said, “The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco.” It’s true—the summers are foooogggy, and the tourists all look miserable on their double-decker buses. But the fall is glorious. This week it has been around 75 degrees and sunny every day.

This weather is thrilling because about a month ago I decided to do a second planting of vegetables in our garden, hoping to harvest by early November. We planted radishes, turnips, butter lettuce, red leaf lettuce, kale, spinach, and more carrots.

Last time we planted seedlings I unwittingly confused many of the sprouts for weeds and yanked them. So this time I drew a garden map for our plot, which is about 4 by 15 feet.

The turnips and butter lettuce are coming up rapidly, as is the kale. Stay tuned to see how those turn out. Tonight Dean made homemade mint chip ice cream (his specialty) with mint from our garden. We will eat it this weekend when we have friends over to enjoy it with us.

Giant chard! Though we are not huge chard fans we have figured out how to make chard & sausage fritatta,

halibut fillets wrapped in chard, and chard risotto.

Dean really wanted to try growing corn. All in all, the stalks produced two very sweet ears of corn.

Yummy, but not a big yield in the foggy Inner Richmond.

Our baby kale is sprouting! Notice the summer broccoli behind it, which has been picked and sauteed

already, with some red pepper flakes and olive oil.

-Andi

Our First Harvest

So, we've mentioned before that we have a plot in a local community garden. We inherited a ton of spices in our plot--sorrel, oregano, tarragon, chives, rosemary, thyme, spearmint, and an enormous sage plant--and an inordinate amount of chard. And we don't really like chard, especially inordinate amounts.

We've also planted our own veggies since we acquired the plot in May. We planted various lettuces, corn, carrots, broccoli, cauliflower, basil, and cucumber. Some of the veggies didn't take and some are thriving. And some needed picking. Badly.

Below are pics of our first major harvest beyond the occasional pickings of herbs for dinner and such. (And by "our first harvest" I mean "Andi's first harvest" since she does 90% of the gardening.)

Our haul from left to right: chard, spearmint (flowering in back), mini apples from the community orchard,

carrots, arugula.

The first truck load of chard.

Arugula.

The carrots. They're not long, but they have girth.

We are very new at this gardening thing so we purchased a book that was recommended to us by a friend: Golden Gate Gardening: The Complete Guide to Year-Round Food Gardening in the San Francisco Bay Area and Coastal California. It's been extremely helpful such that it tells us what plants thrive in the crappy summer weather of San Francisco, it spells out planting schedules, and it helps us identify weeds (although, another community gardener gave us an even better way of identifying weeds: if you don't want it in your garden, it's a weed.)

If anyone has any advice on how to grow big and tasty veggies in our garden, please feel free to comment!

Dean