Spring's Bounty

This weekend we had some time to tend to the garden with some weeding and a more extensive photo shoot than we've had time for until now. But before we got to that, we made our weekly trip to the Alemany Farmers' Market (here is a cool review on LocalForage). This farmer's market is part of our weekly routine and it's the real deal, having been in the same location since 1947 and offering really fresh produce and cheap, cheap prices.

For example, this week, we spent around $30, and for that we got: an 8lb bag of oranges ($4), 5 lemons ($1), celery ($1), rainbow chard ($2), 3 pints of strawberries ($8), a bag of salad greens (mesclun if you're curious) ($2.25), some dried lavender for decor ($4), and 2 bouquets of flowers ($3 and $4). We also had a delicious breakfast - Brad went for the Salvadoran pupusa and I went for the Mexican sopa.

We're looking forward to buying less and less throughout the summer as we have our own arugula, onions, carrots, beets, and (hopefully, if they come up!) squash; but in the meantime we're happy to rely upon Alemany to keep us stocked. I'm sure that the same loot would cost $60 at Whole Foods, or $40 at Safeway for much, much lower quality. It's too bad that there aren't farmers' markets like this in every city. Of course, it's also just a reality that Northern California produces some seriously good produce.

Some of our best farmers' market finds from this week:

Very cool red-and-yellow striped flowers ($4). I have no idea what they are:



A small assorted bouquet that was criminally cheap ($3):



Delicious lemons ($1 for 5) which come in handy now that I've learned I'm allergic to yeast, making vinegar-based salad dressings a thing of the past. As you'll see later, we have a bounty of our own lemons growing on the patio but we go through about 1 lemon per day:



Holy moly strawberry season is here! They often have a small amount of strawberries year round, but we only buy them when they are in abundance and cheap. They are back to their summer rate of $8 for 3 pints of these gigantic beauties. We have this great Local Foods Wheel that tells us when foods come into season, and it tells me that strawberries are not in season until May. I'll let the free market win this round though - at $8/3 pints, I'll say they're in season.




Garden Update

Back on the farm, we took some time to weed - we have some aggressive wild mushrooms, oxalis, and other weeds trying to make their way in. We haven't yet seen the basil come up, so we left behind a few potential weeds that might be basil just in case. Here are some better close-ups of our beet and spring onion sprouts.

First, the arugula, which is continuing to flourish:



Itty bitty beets:




Tiny spring onions. Someday these will be as wide as a pencil. And then we will eat them:



Also, let's take a poll: Basil or weed?



Evidence of Northern California's climatic superiority:

Since we're just now coming up on our second full summer in our cottage, we are really starting to appreciate the perfect climate that San Francisco provides for our plants. We have a number of things we planted last summer and completely neglected throughout the winter, only to find them coming back stronger than ever this year. I present to you our Zombie plants:

Sage - more sage than we have any idea what to do with. I just clipped off the flowers yesterday so it should grow even more. If anyone wants some sage, let me know:



What the... we found this one hearty strawberry plant just before we razed the garden for planting. We didn't have a great success with strawberries last year but maybe this year will be different. This is the only 1 of 3 plants that made it through the winter:



I was completely shocked to find that my 2 pots of irises are growing. These essentially flooded and died last year, not long after I planted them. The pots have literally not been touched in months, and for a good part of the winter there was standing water floating at the top. If I weren't so lazy, they would have been dumped out. And now we have at least 4 healthy iris plants growing which may actually require me to re-pot to give them room to grow. Anyone have any tips on irises?




And our trusty lemon tree, Lemony Snicket as we call him, cranking out meyer lemons. The season should be ending soon but it's been pretty impressive how many tasty, tangy lemons have come off of this little tree. We're thinking about planting it but aren't sure if it's big enough, also if we move we'd like to take this with us. But I suppose it can't live in a pot forever?




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