A long time ago -or at least 18 months ago - I had the idea to grow salad greens for the market. The fresh, beautiful, flower scented salad greens I would buy in Calafornian Farmers' Markets would sustain me all the week, and I was sure we could provide the same pretty bowls of colour and taste down here.
It has been a slow process. With no lettuce and few local options it has been a treasure hunt finding suitable greens. In this last year of trial and error we have found that here in a year round growing cycle, some of our greens are annuals: the cranberry hibiscus dies after flowering in December, the wandering jew goes dormant through December and January, the Malabar spinach gives up in February and March. Our salad mixes change weekly as we watch for flowers on the hibiscus and fret over the gingers. It has been more a year of research and development than one of production.
However it has worked and now we are slowly but steadily increasing our options and our knowledge. We found winged bean seeds in Panama and moringa growing at Punta Mona, a dark purple wandering jew is thriving on the deck off the kitchen and a news article in the national paper turned us on to two local, near forgotten edibles: the zorillo and chinquispil. Slowly it's coming together. the new plants and varieties we've gathered are not at full production yet. It's not like buying a seed packet and sowing them, instead we are given or find one plant or a couple of seeds and have to grow it out ourselves in the nursery until it is ready to produce: all our salad greens are second generation plants each with their own history and path to us. If I count what we have, including those in the nursery the list is impressive:
cranberry hibiscus
katuk
malabar spinach
okinawa spinach
red spinach
winged bean
camote
chayote
moringa
gotu kola
purslane
basil
parsely
culantro
bolivian culantro
vietnamese cilantro
wandering jew
purple wandering jew
sorrel
zorillo
chinquispil
orchid tree
gnetum gnetum
garlic vine
mustard
In another year we should have a really beautiful salad bowl, full of superfoods, brimming with flowers (pansy, ginger, hibiscus, orchid tree, morninga. . .) and just delicious.
Showing posts with label salad greens. Show all posts
Showing posts with label salad greens. Show all posts
Thursday, 8 April 2010
Friday, 9 October 2009
back in the dirt . . . for a moment
Somehow I found myself with time yesterday. It was a wet pleasantly cool day and I took the opportunity to check the pumpkin that's threatening to take over the farm. I had planted 12 seeds back in late July and of the 12, 5 had come up, 2 of which got inadvertently chopped by Sandro on his weed whacking rounds. I was sorely disappointed. However those 3 have done me proud and now I'm out there gingerly lifting the thick hairy vines off the heliconias, and unwrapping tendrils from young citrus. Oh I do love a pumpkin plant.
Still with time on my hands I went to work on our covered raised beds. It was so good to have my hands in the soil again, even if it was full of ants. The smell of the fresh compost and the decaying broccoli that never worked, was just so good. We have such a hard time getting seeds here that we now try everything we can find, just to see what works. At the moment we have a large stack of seed packets from the Asian stores in San Jose - there's not a letter on the packet that I can decipher, so we just try it all. The broccoli didn't work, nor did the one that looks like a radish. The parsley came up and withered after about 3 weeks, the eggplant sprouted and did nothing. What has worked is some variety of bok choy which works well as a salad green, and a flat leafed parsley. We have cherry tomatoes from seed we saved and chili peppers from seed smuggled out of Cuba.
So today I had the pleasant task of pulling up everything that wasn't happening. I say pleasant because so many of the gardening blogs I read are full of fall chores and bemoan the demise of harvests and summer gardens: it was nice to share some of that experience. But I'm not bemoaning because I get to plant again. After pulling the dead and dying I covered the soil with fresh compost, watered a little and left it to settle in - and give the ants an opportunity to disperse. I think we'll plant more of the bok choy and some incredible mustard greens that taste like wasabi. Perhaps tomorrow after the market I'll have another spare moment to get dirty again.
Sunday, 26 July 2009
new greens for salad bowl
In an effort to increase our salad greens we've built two experimental covered raised beds. They're rather fancy. They have a clear plastic roof which is sloped to allow more direst sun in and to allow us to harvest rainwater. The roof is high - again to allow more direct sun to hit the plants, and stands about 8.5 foot at the higher end, about 7.5 foot at the lower end. We plan to make use of this space by using baskets or trellis for vertical growth.
The beds are built on a very slight slope and run across the slope to give the most exposure to sun. We have a lot of big trees on the farm and finding an area which has full sun is no longer a simple matter, hence we plant with the direction the sun takes, in both summer and winter months, in mind.
The roof allows us to control how much water the plants receive: meaning we can try to grow varieties which typically won't stand our rainfall.
The frames are constructed of kasha wood from a tree that fell on the upper farm. It's a beautiful hard wood from a beautiful leguminous forest tree. We put down a thick layer of coconut fiber for drainage. Coconut fiber takes a long time to break down and will help create a decent environment for worms and beneficial microbes. For the lower bed we mixed coarse sand, compost and new earth dug up from beneath a rotting tree trunk. For the upper bed we used a mix of coarse sand and soil made by mixing coconut fiber, compost and aged chicken manure. (This soil came from a local company who also make coconut oil and noni juice, they buy their chicken manure from a friend of ours who raises organic chickens, the compost is made from restaurant food scraps.)We put a fine layer of coarse sand on top and then treated the beds with EM, leaving them to settle in for 5 days or so.
I've been pulling weeds from the lower bed for the last 8 days, it looks like seeds from our own composting: tomato, chili, squash. I've saved some of these seedlings and the others I've composted. The upper bed has been weed free, making us wonder if the soil was sterilized.
We sowed eggplant, broccoli, bok choy and radish. We also have a few tomato starts, some rooted cuttings of mint and purple basil, some purslane, chilis we brought back from Cuba and some cranberry hibiscus sticks.
At the far end of the beds we have a large basin with water hyacinth. This is our mulch material, we currently have some drying out under the roof almost ready to add to the soil. Water hyacinth makes excellent mulch, composts rapidly and is a prolific grower. This one tub will provide us with as much mulch as we'll need for this project. Beside it is a tub with watercress, rooted from cuttings. Actually rooted from some watercress we bought at the farmers' market (the mint and basil also came from stalks we bought at the ferria).
The seeds came up in 5 days and are looking good. I thinned them, transplanting some and harvesting the rest for salad mixes. The tomatoes and chilis look fine, and the mint and basil seem to be rooting out given their colour and vigour. The tomatoes and chilis I expect to do well, they grow here without special attention. The brassicas, well we'll see. The eggplant - would be wonderful, it's my favourite vegetable. I think the mint and basil will make it with a roof, especially if we are careful with not letting them get leggy. We'll continue to use EM to keep molds and fungus at bay. I'm excited. It seems funny having to water in the midst of all this rain, but it's easy enough to do. And it would be so worth it to add to our salad options.
The beds are built on a very slight slope and run across the slope to give the most exposure to sun. We have a lot of big trees on the farm and finding an area which has full sun is no longer a simple matter, hence we plant with the direction the sun takes, in both summer and winter months, in mind.
The roof allows us to control how much water the plants receive: meaning we can try to grow varieties which typically won't stand our rainfall.
The frames are constructed of kasha wood from a tree that fell on the upper farm. It's a beautiful hard wood from a beautiful leguminous forest tree. We put down a thick layer of coconut fiber for drainage. Coconut fiber takes a long time to break down and will help create a decent environment for worms and beneficial microbes. For the lower bed we mixed coarse sand, compost and new earth dug up from beneath a rotting tree trunk. For the upper bed we used a mix of coarse sand and soil made by mixing coconut fiber, compost and aged chicken manure. (This soil came from a local company who also make coconut oil and noni juice, they buy their chicken manure from a friend of ours who raises organic chickens, the compost is made from restaurant food scraps.)We put a fine layer of coarse sand on top and then treated the beds with EM, leaving them to settle in for 5 days or so.
I've been pulling weeds from the lower bed for the last 8 days, it looks like seeds from our own composting: tomato, chili, squash. I've saved some of these seedlings and the others I've composted. The upper bed has been weed free, making us wonder if the soil was sterilized.
We sowed eggplant, broccoli, bok choy and radish. We also have a few tomato starts, some rooted cuttings of mint and purple basil, some purslane, chilis we brought back from Cuba and some cranberry hibiscus sticks.
At the far end of the beds we have a large basin with water hyacinth. This is our mulch material, we currently have some drying out under the roof almost ready to add to the soil. Water hyacinth makes excellent mulch, composts rapidly and is a prolific grower. This one tub will provide us with as much mulch as we'll need for this project. Beside it is a tub with watercress, rooted from cuttings. Actually rooted from some watercress we bought at the farmers' market (the mint and basil also came from stalks we bought at the ferria).
The seeds came up in 5 days and are looking good. I thinned them, transplanting some and harvesting the rest for salad mixes. The tomatoes and chilis look fine, and the mint and basil seem to be rooting out given their colour and vigour. The tomatoes and chilis I expect to do well, they grow here without special attention. The brassicas, well we'll see. The eggplant - would be wonderful, it's my favourite vegetable. I think the mint and basil will make it with a roof, especially if we are careful with not letting them get leggy. We'll continue to use EM to keep molds and fungus at bay. I'm excited. It seems funny having to water in the midst of all this rain, but it's easy enough to do. And it would be so worth it to add to our salad options.
Sunday, 19 July 2009
salad bowl
The area of our farm where most of the edible greens are gathered is called the salad bowl: it sits at the bottom of two gentle slopes with a wall of cycads to one side and a passion flower arbor to the other. The slopes are covered with black pepper plants and fruit trees, pejabaye palms line the edge and form borders throughout as we harvested the heart of palm the same time we planted the salad bowl. The fallen palm trunks have gradually rotted down and are in various states of decay depending on their age when harvested. They have provided us with great mulch and help form mini microclimates, especially at the beginning when we covered the ground with chopped palm fronds and bark. At the moment they are brightly decorated with several mushroom species: pycnoporus sanguineus (good for teas), schizophyllum commune (the world's most common mushroom), and even a fine though small oyster strain, pleurotus ostreatus, and home to numerous colonies of ants and beetles.
We decided to plant the salad bowl in the most natural, least invasive of styles, simply clearing a small patch of mulch, digging a small hole and planting on top of a mix of compost and bat guano harvested from a nearby tree. We then mulched heavily and watered, and on to the next. The plants are not in rows but rather spaced in groups which we think would allow them the most sunlight. We ran tomatoes by an old bean trellis and planted leguminous living stakes (madera negra) by everything we added to the area.
What we have discovered thus far is that Malabar and Okinawa spinach do better in the shade, cranberry hibiscus does not like a lot of rain, cherry tomatoes (local strain) do not like to reseed themselves and everyone enjoys eating camote (sweet potato) leaves.
The salad bowl is an interesting experiment. It's a small area and in total there are probably less than 30 plants, enough to harvest salad greens for ourselves and to sell a few bags at the farmers market, but not nearly enough for any real commercial venture. Our intention was to see what worked and then expand into something we could harvest and sell to local restaurants each week.
We are at the point where we are ready to expand.
We decided to plant the salad bowl in the most natural, least invasive of styles, simply clearing a small patch of mulch, digging a small hole and planting on top of a mix of compost and bat guano harvested from a nearby tree. We then mulched heavily and watered, and on to the next. The plants are not in rows but rather spaced in groups which we think would allow them the most sunlight. We ran tomatoes by an old bean trellis and planted leguminous living stakes (madera negra) by everything we added to the area.
What we have discovered thus far is that Malabar and Okinawa spinach do better in the shade, cranberry hibiscus does not like a lot of rain, cherry tomatoes (local strain) do not like to reseed themselves and everyone enjoys eating camote (sweet potato) leaves.
The salad bowl is an interesting experiment. It's a small area and in total there are probably less than 30 plants, enough to harvest salad greens for ourselves and to sell a few bags at the farmers market, but not nearly enough for any real commercial venture. Our intention was to see what worked and then expand into something we could harvest and sell to local restaurants each week.
We are at the point where we are ready to expand.
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