You Have to Start Somewhere

And this is where it all starts for us - with our eyes on a tasty, wholesome meal. We try to reflect before breakfast, lunch, and dinner on where our food came from, and today we had one of those excellent meals that, except for a little salt, pepper, baking soda and powder and a pad of butter, came from our own garden. We had black bean soup with black beans, veggie broth, cayenne pepper, onions, green pepper (dried), garlic, leeks, cilantro, and lemon juice (from trees in the greenhouse). Our salad had lettuce, carrots, daikon radish, and flax seeds. The cornbread was made with corn (wachicha flint), barley (jet), thyme, and veggie broth for the moisture. It may seem a simple meal, but the background makes it fascinating as well as nourishing.
Our daily life here involves an intimate relationship with food as well as with weather, soil, wildlife, compost, tools, ingenuity, sweat, and every once in a while a forgotten greenhouse tomato, halfway frozen and consumed by mold.
In this blog I hope to record the goings-on of the Golden Rule Garden for family, friends, neighbors and other interested parties.
Now a little bit about the situation. The Golden Rule Garden has two goals in its scope: to meet some of the food needs of the community here, and to provide experience and a learning environment for Ecology Action interns and apprentices that help out. It has been chemical-free (not card-carrying USDA "organic") for its entire history, tinkered with Biodynamic principles for some time in the 1990's, and is now using the GROW BIOINTENSIVE® system (hereafter generally referred to as biointensive) which is researched and taught by Ecology Action. More on that in future posts.
In ~2001 the Garden Manager (whose name I will add when I get her permission) took part in Ecology Action's summer course, and it is since then that the garden and community have been host to EA interns and apprentices. They live on site and, in exchange for helping the Garden Manager grow food for the community, get a section of the garden to manage on their own, practicing the techniques they learn during the summer course. Currently there are two 3-year apprentices here - Margo and myself. The 6-month summer course begins in April, and that is when the interns will arrive.
As the side bar indicates, the garden is in almost coastal California (which means the extremes we experience are about 5 miles away from moderate). The area is approximately 11,000 square feet (about 1/4 of an acre), and is in the format of beds, between 3.5 and 5 feet wide. We get a lot of rain, but none of it comes in the main growing season.
Temperatures deserve their own paragraph.
It gets below freezing, but not far enough or long enough that we can't grow some things like Fava Beans, rye, wheat, lettuce, and the hardier greens through the winter. It can get very hot, with highs peaking at 115°F for a week or more. The fascinating thing is that nights, even during those hot times, rarely stay above 60°. For the folks in the midwest and south (I guess) this gives you cause to pity us. For those heat-loving crops like tomatoes, corn, beans, peppers, etc. processes really slow down below 60. So you may be used to coming out in the morning and seeing your plants a foot taller than when you left them the night before, but that's not what happens here. They pretty much pout until the sun comes out and warms them again. Then, when it gets hot in the middle of the day, they will shut down again. Corn, for one, does not like temperatures above 95°F, and will close itself up to preserve water. In certain weather, then, we have plants virtually shutting down twice in a 24-hour cycle in the middle of the main growing season. All our beautiful weather has its limitations, agriculturally.
That's the background, and that's where I'll leave the post for today. Many intriguing tidbits are on the way, and I have pictures to prove it. So stay tuned...