Grow your own salad!

This article was first published in the May 2012 issue of the Mountain Chronicle

Hey folks, glad to be growing full steam ahead. After last years extended winter it is nice to be full swing into the growing season a little bit earlier than usual. While we are not passed the average last frost date it seems that we have passed that threshold. I could be wrong but I’m taking my chances by planting some frost sensitive plants a bit early. Tomatoes, peppers, beans, corn and potatoes just to name a few. It’s a joy to grow your own food and it’s hard to get anything better than what you pick out of your garden.
This month I would like to inspire you all to grow your own salad, or at least part of it. I recently purchased the book Salad Leaves for All Seasons by Charles Dowding to learn a little bit more about growing salad. I’ve grown my own salad mix for several years and over the years I’ve incorporated more and more into them. The beauty of salad is that there are a lot of things that can go into a salad. So this gives you the option of trialing a bunch of different things and growing what you like. Essentially customizing your salad. The flavors we use in salads come in many different forms from mild and sweet, bitter, mustard or spicy and everything in between. With all of the options available you can refine what you grow according to your palette.
Let’s start with some basics. Lettuce is a great place to start. It comes in many different shapes and colors. It is mostly mild and sweet but can become slightly bitter to really bitter depending on if it has started flowering or if the weather becomes too hot. Lettuce does well in milder seasons. When it is hotter out you can use shade cloth or plant it in shadier areas. You can grow whole heads of lettuce but you can also do a cut and come again harvest for younger leaves and an extended harvest. I prefer the latter method. Other good bases include mustard, Swiss chard, kale, spinach and Malabar spinach. While mustard greens can be spicy mustard greens such as mizuna are more sweet than spicy and have a nice succulent crunch in the stems. They can also be harvested as a cut and come again crop. You can keep cutting the flowering stems back as far as they are tender to prolong the harvest. The yellow flowers add nice color to a salad mix. Mustard greens thrive in cool seasons and will even grow well with intermittent frosts. Kale is a close relative to mustard, which has a sweet and sometimes spicy flavor. It prefers similar growing conditions to mustard, and some varieties do very well in the cold while others usually prefer milder seasons. Baby kale often makes it way into a mix, but you can also use full-grown kale. It’s great in a massaged salad. Spinach likes cooler seasons and will bolt, or flower, when it is hotter out. You can try a cut and come again harvest with it or harvest the whole plant when it is small or big. When the heat is too much for your spinach and lettuce Malabar spinach grows tender and deliciously when it is scorching out and is similar in flavor and texture to spinach. There is a lot more to the basics of a salad and you are just getting the basics here.
Briefly I will delve into other additions that can make a salad great. Herbs offer many different flavors to suite your palette. Basil, cilantro, lovage, mints, oregano, and thyme are just a brief mention of what the world of herbs has to offer your salad. Alliums (onion family) of all sorts are delicious in salads. Chop them back and watch them grow back. There are several flowers that will brighten up a mix and impress your guests. Various violets offer a plethora of colors and have a unique sweet flavor. Calendula petals are bright and glorious in the mix.
As the seasons change so will the flavor of your salad. Who gets spring mix in the fall anyways; I prefer to eat my own fall mix. Whether you’re planting some simple additions to a salad mix that you purchase or growing your whole salad mix you will be filled with a sense of accomplishment as you sit down to eat your fresh harvest.

Seasons of Abundance

This article was first published in the April 2012 issue of the Mountain Chronicle.
Spring has sprung and is in full swing. Oh wait just one or two more low elevation snowstorms to make sure we think we had winter. So just when you thought summer would be here early, winter decides to make a tardy appearance. Better late than never perhaps? Well it is better for the snow pack of the Sierra. We are up over 50% of annual snow pack and counting. Maybe there will be a rafting season after all. Morel mushrooms might have ample moisture for fruiting. There should be plenty of agricultural water for the central valley farmers. Fire danger won’t be extremely high all summer long. Whew, it was looking scary for a bit there. Are we back to normal? We’ll I’m not sure about that. At least there will be some familiarity and I plan to keep going like there won’t be much change in the seasonal patterns.
So what about seasonal patterns? There is a rhythm in nature that all life on earth has come accustomed to. Weather it be a moisture pattern, a fruiting pattern, a dry pattern or any other pattern you’ve recognized there is a certain frequency that the entities of nature depend upon. Take for instance our own human sustenance coming from the farms that raise them. There is a season for planting and a season for harvesting and then we are fed upon that seasonal pattern. But what if some of the patterns begin to change? If California summers are no longer dry what will that effect? If the winters are no longer cold what will that effect? Well I noticed this year that there was an unseasonable flush of Manzanitae Boletes (Leccinum manzanitae) that was very LARGE. I picked some in the fall and early winter this last year, which is the usual season, but was surprised that there was another major flush this spring. There is something to say about how the conditions were different this year to create such a flush. Exactly what they were is a mystery but change is evident here.
So what to plant now? If you haven’t started already, it's the season to start gardening with this change of seasons. One thing to note while planning your garden is that zones changed on the USDA Zone Hardiness map by about one zone. With a warming trend over the past several decades the hardiness map had to finally be revised this past year and zones are about one zone higher than they were previously. That means that we are seeing an annual average of low temperatures becoming warmer. So you may be able to plant that citrus tree you’ve always wanted or that fig tree or the avocado. This trend may continue so you may want to anticipate even milder winters and warmer summers by establishing perennials that will thrive if the warming trend continues. This may eventually effect our average last frost date too, so we can expect longer growing seasons on the horizon. As far as the annual garden goes you should start just about all of your summer seeds in greenhouses or cold-frames now if you want to have the wonderful experience of seed to harvest. Some can be started after the chance of frost directly in the ground, such as beans and squash, but others should be planted much sooner for a quality harvest. If you don’t have the option of starting seeds early indoors there are many places to purchase vegetable starts locally. There is still the possibility of a frost that would kill frost sensitive plants such as tomatoes, peppers, squash, melons and several others, they can be planted out but will need protection from the cold to do well or merely survive. However there are several plants that may be planted out sooner than the last frost date that are frost tolerant. I’ve been planting peas since February at 4000 feet in elevation and will continue for about 3 more weeks. All sorts of greens do well with occasional frost. My scallions have been growing profusely in the past couple of weeks even though we keep getting snowed upon at this elevation. Several types of kales and mustard greens are providing fresh mineral rich greens before they flower. Even the florets are edible and they can be continually chopped back to satisfy your appetite. Giving their last hurrah before younger plats get planted to take their place. Fruit trees are waking up to provide nectar for bees as we eagerly await the first fresh fruits of the season. Those of us fungophiles are beginning to see some delectable edible mushrooms pop up in our forests and at our favorite restaurants. A fresh spring mix salad offers an array of textures and flavors that is unique to the season.
We are beginning to see some of the fresh bounty of the coming growing season in our own gardens, at grocers and restaurants. Don’t miss the experience of partaking in this classic dance with seasonal food. When you eat these seasonal treats in their local season the experience is much more meaningful. When you reserve your fresh tomato eating to only those that are vine ripened locally it’s hard to go back. You also become more aware of the seasonal patterns that we are amongst every day. Won’t you take this dance with what this season has to offer?

Winter Plant Profile and Greenhouse Growing

Winter plant profile and Greenhouse Growing

This article was first published in the March 2012 issue of the Mountain Chronicle


Greetings folks! Spring is just around the corner even though winter never really arrived. On the tail end of what they usually call winter I’ll bring you the winter plant profile and I’ll talk about a greenhouse project I recently finished.

Last summer I began offering seasonal plant profiles, highlighting edible perennials that are either planted, grown or are harvested during the current season. The summer plant profile was Sunchokes and the fall plant profile was artichokes. Now I’ll give you the rundown on rhubarb (Rheum x cultorum). Strawberry rhubarb pie is a classic that tastes better with fresh strawberries and rhubarb from your own garden. Rhubarb is also included in many savory dishes and adds a unique flavor. According to Dave Jacke, in his book Edible Forest Gardens vol. II, rhubarb has excellent leaf stalks and is an excellent medicinal which acts as a tonic and also holds antibacterial properties, acts as a purgative, stimulates bile and pancreas secretions and has several other benefits. It’s important to note that the leaves and roots are poisonous due to the high amounts of oxalic acid. Late winter and early spring is the time to plant bare root rhubarb, available at your local nursery. You can also start rhubarb from seed, but don’t expect it to be productive for several years. My rhubarb plants are beginning to emerge and are offering some of the first splashes of color on the landscape. Their beautiful young leaves emerge with yellows, greens and reds and signal the coming of spring and warmer weather. One great benefit to rhubarb is that it is deer resistant. The poisonous leaves won’t get browsed and the plants thrive where others get mowed to the ground. You can plant it in full sun or partial shade and they are happy in moist to somewhat dry soils. Rhubarb can come in variations of colors from green, yellow, red depending on the cultivar. Once rhubarb is established they are very productive. Plants should be divided, as they get older so the crowns don’t crowd each other.


I just recently finished putting a greenhouse together near Angels Camp. There are two purposes. The first is to raise vegetable starts to plant out this spring, summer, and fall. The other is to house about 100 shitake logs. The humidity in California is a little low for outdoor commercial mushroom cultivation. So we thought that if we grew the mushrooms inside of a greenhouse we could create a better environment for them. After looking at several prefabricated hoop frames and other greenhouse kits we decided to put together our own PVC hoop house. So two of us set out to put together this inexpensive and easy to construct greenhouse. With a quick search on the web we saw that there were a lot of people that described their process online. We checked out what we liked and didn’t like about each particular design and went full steam ahead. We squared out a 12’ x 28’ footprint.
Every 4 feet we pounded a 3’ piece of rebar halfway into the ground. For those that want to build one where there is a snow load 2’ spans will work. Once we got both sides finished we stuck 20’ x 1” PVC on the rebar, bending them to slide on the rebar at both ends. We put a purlin on each side to make it one unit and to attach the plastic to. The north side has a baseboard at the bottom to attach to the plastic to. Now we had a tunnel to put some greenhouse plastic on. We created some simple framing to put doors in on each end and the plastic was ready to go. Rather than staple right into the greenhouse plastic we screwed pieces of wood into the purlins, the baseboard, and the framed ends to pin the plastic in place. After all said and done the greenhouse cost less than $500 in parts. A smaller one for a backyard gardener would cost significantly less. A 28-foot long greenhouse is fairly large. There is plenty enough room for starting seedlings to plant out on a small farm. We’re hoping to be able to put the mushroom logs underneath seedling tray tables to save and utilize more space inside.
Greenhouse gardening is fun and productive. Cold and sunny winter days can be hot humid and tropical inside of a greenhouse. I know having three on site at Love Creek Permaculture is a blessing and we are able to accomplish a lot more with them. Without a greenhouse I wouldn’t have tomatoes both fruiting and seedlings just emerging. I wouldn’t be able to have pepper seedlings or giant pepper plants with ripening red fruit on them. I am getting hooked on greenhouse growing and wonder what I could do with a very large greenhouse…. I have some ideas.