Royer Held from Project Grow is also starting from seed several special Bolivian varieties that he will grow out at the farm.  This collaboration with Royer is a great project to help him maintain his stock of potatoes and a way to help someone in the community, but I gotta tell ya, I’m also excited about it for selfish reasons.  As someone interested in heirloom veggies I get excited about something that has a history dating back maybe a hundred years or so.  But these are UBER heirlooms - spuds from the cradle of potatoes, the food of the Incas, not a 100 year history but thousands of years!  It will be interesting to watch them grow and see what they’re like in September or October when we harvest them.

The area for the potatoes is big, I keep on thinking in terms of a football field.  Its a little shorter and less wide but think of the Big House field covered with potato plants instead of grass and white lines.  The planting process involves making furrows with a plow equipped with metal disks and walking down the rows dropping a seed potato every foot.  Then we change the angle on the disks and run the plow down the rows to bury the potatoes.  This all requires very straight rows so we’re not chopping up the spuds and ruining the crop.  Alex, who has the most tractor driving expertise will likely be tackling this job.  So I’ll let you know next week how we did.

So back to garden details. Its amazing what a little warm weather can do. Crocuses and other spring flowers are popping up and last years chives must have shot up six inches by this Sunday evening. The 500 row feet of garlic planted last October and covered with a good 12 inches of straw is just starting to emerge from the soil underneath this mulch. Over the winter I was worried about how to care for these beds this spring. I read a book written by an organic garlic grower in California, Growing Great Garlic, which was quite informative. The garlic bulb’s first shoot that emerges is apparently specially designed to force it’s way through a mulch layer - its tough and persistent, traits a gardener loves in any plant that’s not a weed. The garlic’s in a bed where we grew squash last summer. These rows were heavily amended with compost and organic fertilizer in preparation for the squash because these big vining plants need lots of nutrients. A benefit for this year as we thought about our plant successions is that a squash bed usually has less weeds the following year. All those huge leaves really shade any weeds underneath them and smother the weeds. So we tilled in the crop residue from the squash in the early fall and applied another good inch of finished compost to the beds prior to planting the garlic. We’ll start foliar spraying them in early May with some good compost tea and continue this every 2-3 weeks until mid-June, up to the summer solstice actually. Then we’ll drastically cut back the irrigation as the bulbs go through the final stage of maturity and sometime in July we’ll see what we have. I’m still a cook at heart so I’m dreaming of some kind of creamy green garlic soup with crusty bread drizzled with a grilled garlic scape infused olive oil. Yum!

The really cool thing about these piles is that they are the result of a recycling composting effort we started last spring at the Roadhouse. One of the restaurant bussers, Sarah, was asked to help implement our program and develop the culture of composting. It basically started with getting everyone to throw coffee grounds and tea leaves in a special bin instead of in the trash. Each night a dishwasher or busser was in charge of emptying these out into some special white 30 and 55 gallon plastic bins marked for composting. Pretty soon we got the cooks involved. Its amazing to see the activity in action now almost a year later. Vegetable scraps are either saved for soup stock or the compost bin. We even use egg shells and fish bones. This caused some anxiety at first being afraid of attracting crazy animals to our compost piles, but making sure those things are buried inside the pile masks their smell pretty good. It ends up being about 1000 pounds of material a week and one less dumpster unloaded at the restaurant per week. Wow - poop, compost and fish scraps - I honestly didn’t intend for this to be the topic when I started typing, but great compost helps make great soil which hopefully grows great veggies so … Cheers !

There’s all sorts of activity inside, though. We’ve been busy for over a month with onion starts, herbs, brassicas ( that’s the veggie family that includes broc, cabbage, kohlrabi etc.) and tomatoes. They’re starting out under grow lights. You might be familiar with starting seedlings under some fluorescent lights in a basement or a sunny windowsill. We have a lot of plants to start, though, so we use a more professional system of grow lights. The lights consist of an overgrown hood fitted for 400 watt metal halide bulbs that are almost as big as a football. The logic is to approach the intensity of natural sunlight. The metal halide bulb emits a light that is very intense in the blue spectrum, which somehow aids in creating a compact seedling which doesn’t get leggy and reach for the light. So much for the science lesson, the point is we want a vigorous and healthy transplant and these are the steps we’re following.

Final thoughts : I don’t know if any poet or writer has ever written about that smell of the ground thawing in the spring or described the scent of newly turned soil, maybe Wendell Berry or Thoreau or some Japanese haiku master. But I’m longing for it like sugar cookies baking at Christmas or lilacs in May or really good BBQ. At least I can get my olfactory BBQ fix at the Roadhouse, everything else will have to wait. So what do you think, any good dirt prose out there?