Aspirations...

So an update on the tart I mentioned. It spilled. It spilled because I did not keep it completely flat while transporting it from SF this morning. But behind that root cause is the deeper issue: I didn't include enough gelatin and it did not set firmly enough. I'm crushed for now, but such is baking, and life: all very trial-and-error.

In the meantime, the Obamas are starting to harvest their crops as well. I wonder how well one of my tarts would hold up if transported to Washington DC? Based on a sample set of 1, I'd say not too well.

A Delicious Harvest

 Last night we got brave enough to harvest some of our arugula. The leaves are becoming variegated, and our friend advised to eat them before they lose their flavor. We didn't protest. We could only bring ourselves to pluck a few leaves for the smallest salad, but every bite was worth it. Arugula always tastes peppery, this these leaves were almost like a pepper steak. We just barely dipped them in a mild vinaigrette to let their own flavor shine through. It was the perfect antidote to a very rich potato and asparagus tart.

I also had a delicious tart in the works for a friend who recently lent me his camera to keep Noe Farm Report running after we drenched our camera with water. I wanted to use as much of our own produce as possible, so I imagined up a lemon tart with a sage crust. Apparently Martha Stewart had the same idea, so I used her recipe for the custard. I didn't like the sound of a cornmeal crust, so I used Alice Water's savory tart dough recipe  and added sage from our garden. 

  

Tart dough specked with sage

 

Four Meyer lemons from our tree got to star in this treat, and with that, I think our lemon tree is spent for the season. He's just a little guy, and this was his biggest role to date. 

  

3 Meyer lemons from our dwarf lemon tree

 

The final product, with creme fraiche dollops on top. 

  

The final product, which looks more yellow in person

  

The custard didn't set up as well as I would have liked (I know this because I made one for us, too!) but it's still quite delicious. 

In neighborhood news, apparently we missed a Heineken truck catching on fire yesterday. I assume no one was hurt, and I don't actually care for Heineken that much so I guess it's okay I missed the chance to "save the beer". 

A Neighborhood, What a Concept!

Apologies in advance if I'm a bit gushy in this post -- I'm just reveling in the afterglow of a Really Great Weekend. It began with some gardening/blogging geekery: we had a visit from our friend in Dallas who was into gardening (and raising chickens!) way, way before anyone else we knew. I would go so far as to say that our friend's passion for gardening was a harbinger of what was to come. She's really experienced by now -- she was able to quickly identify almost every plant in our garden without any assistance whatsover, and in the dark. While we were awed by her expertise and her adventurous spirit (she's growing hops in her backyard in Texas!), she was excited about our gardening blog. She started her own (carrying on the "[neighborhood]farmreport" meme) and we'll be linking to it soon.

Saturday was a momentous day for us - we'd been talking about visiting Elizabeth Street Brewery since the day we moved to Noe Valley from over the hill in The Castro 2 years ago. We finally got around to it. A short review: the beer was delicious, and the company and conversation were refreshing. We were particularly excited (dare I say "inspired") by Richard and Ali and the way in which they're creating a neighborhood community and making great headway towards living out their dreams. We hope to go back -- if they'll have us! -- soon, and often. I think Brad's going to talk more about our day at ESB over on Food Crusader.

Back on the farm, we have some exciting developments:

The butternut squash, written off as dead for weeks now, popped up out of nowhere this weekend. That's a minor problem because we planted potatoes very close-by, but I suppose it will all work out. I'm pretty excited since BNS (we actually have an acronym for it, because we eat it so often) is one of my very favorite foods on the planet. It's out of season right now, but the Butternut Squash Ravioli with Brown Butter and Sage at Lupa is the pasta version of crack.

 

Late to the party, but better late than never?

 

The tomatoes outgrew their cage, so we switched to bamboo sticks instead. These guys are planted way too close together, so brace yourself for a disappointment later this season when the tomatoes are few and/or small. For now though, it seems like nothing is stopping them from being all they can be.

 

Carefully removing the cage, which the plants had firmly wrapped themselves around.

 

 

It was a struggle.  I won. 

 

Tomatoes, freed from the constrictive cage and given a clear career path to which they can aspire.

 

 

All taped up and ready to grow.

Finally, while some plants are just getting started, others must now die. The sage has grown to gargantuan proportions, eclipsing many of the other plants from the sunshine and producing sage leaves that are cartoonishly large. It's also produced some beautiful lavender and pink blossoms that look great in a vase. 

 

That's all for now - I think it's time to head out for a check on the garden and a walk through the neighborhood. A neighborhood that is increasingly feeling like it's full of actual, you know, neighbors. 

Beautiful Flowers from Alemany Market

It's spring time and selection of flowers at Alemany Farmer's Market is amazing. I still think that Seattle has the best flower marts I've ever seen, but San Francisco is no chopped liver. 

I used our most recent flower purchases to test the mettle of our new camera. So far I'm pretty pleased.

The ranunculas below were $7 for the 2 bunches (one yellow, one red). I grabbed these just for fun, and short on flower vases I used extra mason jars that are taking the summer off from storing canned fruits and vegetables. I was so pleased with how these turned out that I think we'll be using something similar for our wedding next February:

Post Coming Soon!

I have a post I'm dying to get out to you all. It's a story of community (we're feeling some major Noe Valley love these days), redemption (what are these butternut squash thinking, popping up 7 weeks after planting?!), and achievement (our sage has a bright future in the form of flower bouquets and sage-lemon tarts). But for now, I have to get back to work. Can't wait to tell you all about it...

Progress and continued drama

Spring is in full effect - we've got mad growth up in the Noe Farm!

Sage taking over the world

 

Rose de Berne climbing up 

The tomatoes in our half wine barrel have decided that they're here to stay - our three-day heatwave earlier this week may have provided them encouragement. The tiny tomato cage we set up is quickly being overcome by some very ambitious Rose de Berne plants, so I think we'll be swapping out their training cage soon for a more long-term vertical solution - these little guys are going a little crazy. 

The mysterious nighttime diggings have continued, only slightly abated by the application of cayenne powder. The most recent victim were our radishes - they managed to escape without any permanent damage, but were covered in dirt this morning as part of an inexplicable series of shallow crater-like excavations. We still suspect that the pursuit of grubs is motivating these nocturnal raids. 

In possibly related news, on my way downstairs to pull a few bottles of homebrew from the basement last night, I had a face-to-face encounter with.... a skunk. In Noe Valley. A loud and not-scared-one-bit-thank-you-very-much shout didn't scare him away, and this morning a distinct odor was in the air near our back patio. I've never had occasion to wonder this, but do skunks like radishes?

Were happy to report that the farm has been getting visitors lately. Yesterday, our friend Monica visited as part of a trip to SF from Dallas. Despite the differences between our growing regions, she was able to identify every one of our burgeoning agricultural progeny. An avid backyard farmer herself, Monica's plot of dirt in Texas boasts chickens in addition to bountiful edibles. With luck, we'll see a farm report from her Little Forest Hills neighborhood before too long...

Check out our latest photos (our new camera finally arrived!) here.

Gardening is Blowing Up, Yo

We were introduced to gardenregistry.org earlier this week. It's sort of like Facebook for gardens. It's a cool concept, and this product at least looks really slick. Some of the features I see include posting extra veggies for trade, sharing of photo albums, and it could obviously be a platform for distributing educational content to interested users. It appears that this was built by a a civic or non-profit entity, so I'm curious what the long-term plans entail. It does call itself a "registry" rather than a social network, but I think there is opportunity for the latter.

I was also contacted by an old coworker and friend who has recently started a garden in Oakland. He claims they were inspired by us, and I'll take full credit. But I think there is a bigger movement afoot here, and I am seeing new gardeners like ourselves pop up all around me. Gardening is the new Knitting.

In the meantime, we finally received our Panasonic Lumix FS15. We're checking it out and comparing it to the camera were borrowing right now and will post more photos this weekend.

Also, arugula update: some of it's ready to eat. Yum.

Early Summer Update

We've had amazing weather in the bay area this weekend. We spent nearly the whole weekend in shorts, outdoors. We have sunburns! We should have been more prepared though, since there was actually a heat advisory due to the blistering 80 degree weather. You Texans at home should get a laugh out of this. The precautions include avoiding alcoholic beverages and wearing "loose-fitting clothing". We did neither of those, because we're not wussy Northern Californians. Just kidding, we love Northern Californians, and we're actually real wussies in the Texas heat. Anyway, point is, it was so hot here that it warranted advisories and special weather statements and the like.

This gave our garden a good opportunity to stretch its legs -- the tomatoes grew maybe an inch or more this weekend, and the radishes started exposing a new set of leaves which I can only assume mean we're a few weeks away from some fresh-from-the-garden radish on our tacos. We didn't do much work on the garden this weekend but I did have to remove the basil from the wine barrel. After my friend at SOMAFarmReport attended a gardening class recently and impressed upon me the importance of giving the plants space, I figured we'd just let the dying basil go (of course, we'll eat it) and give the tomatoes a chance to shine.

It was my birthday this weekend, too, and my good friend and amazing photographer Isaac (site: isaach.com) lent me a Canon PowerShot SD800 while my ordered and paid-for Panasonic Lumix languishes in UPS purgatory. We used it to take some shots of the garden, as well as our trip up to Limantour Beach in Point Reyes National Seashore (despite what the Google search results would indicate, it's not actually a nude beach... not that there's anything wrong with that... but well it's not).

Instead, it's an amazing beach with nice soft sand, decent parking, and absolutely freezing water. Even on a 80 degree day, 10 seconds in this water will make you numb. Before the beach though, we had a wonderful lunch at one of my favorite Marin County eateries, Two Bird Cafe. Brad's sandwich had smoked salmon, bacon, and apples. He swallowed it in one bite. After lunch and a few hours on the beach, we headed back to San Francisco. The only problem was that I had developed an insatiable, birthday-irrationality-fueled appetite for pie. Diner-style pie, not some French substitute like a tart. We completely stumbled upon Bubba's, a diner in San Anselmo which offers organic, high-quality diner food. Sounds paradoxical, yes? I had the Zorba the Greek salad (a large, fresh, delicious salad with gyro meat and feta on top), and Brad had sliders and french fries that were really amazing.

We didn't lose sight of our original purpose, however, and followed all of that with a slice of blueberry pie and a slice of lemon custard pie. They were both delicious and totally hit the spot. A wonderful birthday full of sunshine, tasty local food, and a garden photo shoot is complete. See the results below.

See the whole photo set.

Rocky the Raccoon

Drama on the Noe Farm!! Is this the face of our enemy?

 

This morning, on our way out the door to work, we were startled to find that 4 basil plants, in 2 separate locations across the yard from one another, had been uprooted. Not eaten, not even really damaged, but just pulled out of the yard. The Twittersphere was quick to answer our quest for an answer as to "what would do this?!" Thanks to our friends at noevalleysf.blogspot.com for sending over some information about the potential culprit: raccoons! 

We obviously don't want to do anything that would, you know, result in dead mammals in our yard. So we're going to start with some cayenne pepper (a recommendation in the article linked above) and keep a close watch over this garden of ours. Tomorrow, in anticipation of my birthday weekend, I'm going to work from home. I hope I don't have a face-to-face encounter with a feisty, basil-loving raccoon.

A Quick Photo Update

We are still waiting on our new camera, but with the gorgeous weather this weekend and endless sunshine, it's been easy to get a few good shots with the iPhone instead. Before we head out to see what our neighborhood is up to on this beautiful Easter Sunday, we wanted to provide a few photos of the garden's progress.

Beet thinnings:

Arugula:

Radishes:

The thinning of the squash (so traumatic):

Although we started the garden in an effort to eat seasonally and very, very local, I've gone a little crazy with the flowers lately too. 

Evidence that the repotting of the lilies was a success:

Cosmos looking so beautiful that I forget we bought them for a functional purpose, to attract good insects:

An awesome potted succulent arrangement in a white elephant (just like a teapot I bought my mother) - from, can you believe, Home Depot:

Some beautiful spring-like flowers whose name I always forget from the farmer's market:

That's all for now. Time to get out into the day!

Camaraderie Through Gardening

I loved this article in the HuffPo this morning about Michelle Obama and the White House garden. A few weeks back, when the Obamas first began their garden, there was a ton of press coverage about what they were putting into the garden (not beets!) and so on. But one of the things I'm finding so fascinating about gardening is how it's such a conversation starter.

My coworker and new office-mate started SOMA Farm Report around the same time we started this blog, and our shared interest in gardening is a source of a running conversation at work. Another coworker, visting from London when we first planted, came to our house to help put in the arugula ("rocket", to him). A classmate from grad school noticed a few of my status updates and wrote me about the garden he and his wife are planting over in Berkeley. My mother has continued to show me every week that she has the answer to every question I might possibly have (as she always has!) about gardening. Even more interesting, we've become aware of other Noe Valley blogs that we never would have discovered if we hadn't decided to report on our gardening efforts through the blog and Twitter. It's been a lot of fun already, and it's only been a month.

Which brings me back to the article about Michelle - it's incredible to read that she's having a similar experience! Apparently during her European tour for the G20, Prince Charles and other dignitaries and leaders showed an interest in her garden. How funny to think that their conversations are ones that I could have contributed to - maybe the Queen would like to add some photos of our blog to her iPod? Gardening is a common thread amongst people from all over - producing your own food is fundamental to being human. It's also fun and tasty.

Thin is In

The thinning we did on the arugula last week, as I've mentioned, was a huge success. The clusters that were thinned the most are flourishing, with leaves 2 or more inches long emerging. The clusters that were left a bit thicker are still stuck in the microgreen stage. Perhaps A/B testing was invented on the farm.

Note the larger leaves emerging in the top and right bunches, with some leaf stagnation occurring in the more crowded bunches at bottom and left:

The lessons from Project: Thinner Arugula are now being applied to the carrots, beets, and spring onions. Although traumatic to pull these seedlings out, we now realize that we far over-seeded them. A few of the rogue carrot and beet seeds which strayed from the designated rows are growing taller and producing more foliage than the ones in the overcrowded rows, so we felt confident that some thinning would help. The one victim of our thinning that we can eat is spring onion - these baby spring onions could pass for chives and smell delicious.

Baby spring onions, who sacrificed themselves so that other spring onions could be big, tall, and tasty:

More photos to follow - our camera has really bit the dust so the few photos we have today were the exceptions in a 40-photo shoot of mostly overexposed digital waste. I even tried watering the camera (inadvertently) but it didn't seem to help.


We also spent a lot of time today on our ornamentals. Our cosmos and yarrow, purchased to attract friendly insects, have been sitting in a cardboard box all week. Our irises (turns out they are lilies, oops) were crammed into 10" pots like 10 pounds of crap in a 5 pound bag. Today we took the time to brave IKEA and Home Depot to get new pots and some fresh potting soil. You can see the results below, and more photos to follow.

Lilies, given room to be all that they can be as individuals, hanging from our front balcony:

Finally, you won't see much of the gardeners on this blog but after completing most of our major milestones for the garden this spring, we thought we'd show our faces briefly. But we know you're not here to see us, and that's okay.

With new pots, giving some basil a new home:

Looking satisfied at the progress with potted yarrow and cosmos near the beds:

Completely exhausted. This gardening stuff is a real workout! Very happy with how the farm is coming along.

Business as Usual on the Farm

We've been a bit quiet this week, because after all of our hard work last weekend, things are running their course. The strawberry plant is sprouting some new leaves, as predicted by my mom, the squash is now starting to take over the garden*, and the beets are probably ready for some thinning.

One concern is some white substance appearing on one of our cucumber plants. Photos to follow - maybe our readers can help us diagnose and treat the ailment.

We've also enjoyed hearing from a few of our Noe Valley neighbors in the comments and on Twitter. I'm really enjoying the latest neighborhood news (and gossip?) on the Noe Valley SF blog. We're hoping to make it down to the Elizabeth Street Brewery before too much more drama ensues - we've been curious about the place since we moved to the neighborhood almost 2 years ago but still haven't made it over. Maybe in a few months we'll be in a position to trade Noe Valley produce for home brew.

A few photos from this week. We can't wait for our new camera to come in - hopefully Panasonic will start shipping the new models of the Lumix any day.







* Small exaggeration - but we do have 8 squash sprouts coming in. Not bad1