Of things spinach and succession planting

I was carrying on a gardening conversation with my friend Joann via Facebook recently. I mentioned spinach as an early spring crop possibility and she said she'd try it next year. But there's no time like the present and there's no reason to put yourself in a box about only planting once a season in your garden.

It's not too late to plant spinach this year even though you could have started sowing it back in late March. It likes cooler weather better but you can seed short rows (2-4 feet long) of it every week from now until the end of May. This way you get succession crops so when you finish the older stuff, the newer stuff becomes available. Also, once the spinach is up high enough, you can mulch it with straw to help keep the soil cooler and keep it from drying out too fast.

I've also planted spinach much later than the end of May. It's good to experiment and see what works for you. It may bolt but what did you lose if it does? A few minutes of planting and a few feet of your garden for a few weeks? Small price to pay.

A warm/hot weather option is New Zealand spinach which isn't a spinach at all (I think it's part of the onion family) but looks like and tastes like spinach when cooked. It also grows like crazy and only a couple/three plants will keep you in it. You can order it from online organic seed companies like Fedco.

Succession planting is one of the credos of one of my two gardening book mentors: Eliot Coleman (the other is Lee Reich). In his books (I have Four Season Harvest and The New Organic Grower), he recommends that you not relegate planting of a crop to the beginning of the growing season but to think of growing seasons as fluid where sowing and harvesting can overlap and be used to extend the harvest and maintain the freshness of your garden vegetables. In Four Season Harvest, Coleman provides a nice table of recommendations for succession planting summarized here:

Beans Every 2 weeks
Beets Every 2 weeks
Carrots Every 2 weeks
Celery Twice: early spring and three months before fall frost
Cucumbers A 2nd and 3rd planting at monthly intervals to keep quality high
Lettuce/greens Every week or two
Peas Twice: early spring and mid-summer
Radishes Every week
Spinach Every week in spring and late summer.
Squash A 2nd and 3rd planting at monthly intervals to keep quality high

My cousin Chris, the vintner at his family's winery, Lakewood Vineyards, and avid gardener turned me on to Eliot Coleman's books and methods. Coleman advocates low impact, quality yield organic growing methods that anyone can adopt and extend as their own. He farms in coastal Maine so he knows about late springs and early falls and how to adapt to grow and harvest crops all year long. And to prove that Coleman's suggestions work, my cousin Chris showed me his cold frame: the one he was dusting snow off of when he harvested salad greens in February! More on cold frames in a future post ;-)

Last gasp?

Time to cover up! Patchy frost forecast for tonight and probably tomorrow night. According to the Cornell Cooperative Extension, last spring frost date for our area is May 10 so frost appears to be overachieving this year ;-) I'll be covering my beds and some trees with 6 mil plastic tonight and tomorrow night just in case. Hard to believe that we had 4 days of 90 plus weather only a couple of weeks ago and a muggy day of thunderstorms just yesterday.

Raised beds and imported organic soil

Several years ago, when I started my vegetable garden, I settled on using raised beds due to the poor soil quality on our property. Basically, we have clay and rocks for soil so I needed to improve it with various soil amendments like fertilizer and peat moss. Things really took off in my garden when my office mate at work, Charlie, offered me a truckload of several year old horse manure. I mixed the manure with the soil I had and made mounded, raised beds to plant in. The next year, to improve my soil and build more raised beds, I bought an organic mix of topsoil and compost from McEnroe Organic Farm. The soil itself isn't terribly expensive ($41 per cubic yard these days) but add in the trucking fee and each 5 cubic yard truckload ends up costing you nearly $400. So far, I've justified the cost (and my carbon guilt over having organic soil trucked 50 miles to my house) by rationalizing that gardening is my one true hobby and that great soil produces great tasting vegetables. Once I start producing enough compost for my garden on my own, I'll no longer need to buy soil and/or compost and I'll be able to return to my more naturally frugal, greener approach to life.

There are pluses and minuses to growing in raised beds. Hot weather plants (for example, tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers/chiles, melons, squash, and eggplant) can thrive in them because they definitely heat up more quickly than the surrounding soil. But, because of that, they also tend to dry out quicker and so are not the best choice when it comes to water conservation. And, of course, plants that like it cooler (for example, peas and spinach) may require some mulching with straw to cool off the warmer soil in a raised bed. For me, I had the choice of doing a full replace of my rocky, clay soil or building raised beds on top of them. Raised beds saved me some work.

BTW, I found out about McEnroe's Organic Farm through a book Linda had given me as a present: Keith Stewart's It's a Long Road to a Tomato. The book is a collection of Keith's writings for The Valley Table magazine which is a publication dedicated to local food, farms, and cuisine in the Hudson Valley. Keith was in his 40s living in NYC, working as a corporate project manager, when he decided to go back to the land. He purchased a farm in Orange County and over time, became a full-time organic farmer and he currently sells his produce at the Union Square farmer's market in NYC. It's a great read, a great story of a return to the land complete with beautiful drawings (by his partner Flavia Bacarella) and lots of insight and tips for the organic farmer. Every year, Keith trucks in McEnroe's organic compost to start his vegetables in. Check it out!

Bistango, 29th and 3rd, NYC. Great Italian food and optionally gluten-free

A week ago Friday, Linda and I had the wonderful occasion of getting together with some old friends from my bartending days in Albany. We met at Bistango in NYC located on the corner of 29th St and 3rd Ave. I hadn't seen this group of friends for around 20 years: Cool Chris and Caryn were in from London, Mad Mark and Amy drove down from Rockland County, Jumpin Joe lives uptown in the city and he was the one who suggested and arranged our reservation at Bistango.

When we arrived in this soft-lit, sparely decorated yet elegant restaurant, Joe was drinking a dark beer that I hadn't seen before and I asked what it was, he said it was Green's, a Belgian sorghum beer. When I hear sorghum beer, I immediately think of my good buddy Danno who requires a gluten-free diet that avoids all wheat and related grains containing gluten in his food and drink. And, sure enough, Joe, like Danno, practices a gluten-free diet. In fact, he chose Bistango not just for its first-class Italian food, but also for its optional gluten-free menu. Not only does Bistango serve gluten-free food if you request it, they actually have a separate cooking station in the kitchen devoted to gluten-free food preparation so there's no chance of contamination.

On to drinks and the Italian food: Linda had her current standard Tanqueray and tonic with half tonic/half club soda while I settled on a Samuel Smith's Taddy Porter which appeared to be on tap. As Joe is a regular at Bistango, we relied on his recommendations. For an appetizer, Linda and I shared the Melanzane Involtini (Baked eggplant rollatini with ricotta in a tomato sauce). It was excellent, cheesy but delicate and split two-ways, just the right amount before our main course. When I ordered it, I mentioned that we were going to split it and two half-portions arrived at the table. Classy service!

For main courses, Linda had the Filetto di Vitello con Funghi (Veal scallapini with mushrooms) and I had the Filetto di Salmone (grilled organic salmon in a lemon, capers, and white wine sauce). The veal and mushrooms arrived in a well-balanced brown sauce, just rich enough to complement the earthy flavor of the mushrooms. Linda enjoyed her dish with a nice, medium-bodied Montepulciano. My salmon was perfectly cooked and the sauce was yummy, just the right amount of acid to balance the creaminess of the salmon and its reduced sauce. Typically, I'm not a fan of capers but I ate every last one of them.

We passed on the dessert but others at the table indulged and they looked tasty. Of course, coffee, expresso, and capuccino were available as well as an assortment of after dinner drinks. The after dinner drinks were especially generous. Sambuca seemed to be the choice of the evening and each snifter arrived with a minimum two-finger pour. Folks were impressed. We were a big party of 16-18 and Bistango treated us to a complementary round of Italian port to round out the meal. Bravo! Prices are reasonable ($10 for our appetizer and $22 and $20 for our main courses, $60 total per person including tax and tip - how do they do it for that cheap in NYC?). What a night out! Great friends, great food and drink. I'd go again in a minute ;-)

Special gluten-free beer shout out to my good buddies, Danno and Joe:

I found this Green's beer selection review on BNET, originally from the
Oakland Tribune:

"Now there's even a selection of gluten-free Belgian ales. The brand name in the United States is Green's, made by De Proef in Lochristi, Ghent, Belgium. They're being imported by Merchant du Vin, the pioneering Seattle-area importers of beers such as Samuel Smith and Lindemans Framboise. Green's ales are made with a combination of rice, millet, sorghum and buckwheat, none of which contains gluten. The yeast is Belgian; the hops are European, Magnum, spicy Saaz and Hallertau; some of the beers have a dollop of sugar added to boost fermentation. All are bottle-conditioned; a bit of fresh yeast is added to each bottle so fermentation continues slowly in the bottle, an ancient method of preservation. Green's Quest Tripel (***) is a strong, 8.5 percent alcohol by volume blonde beer with a big white head and intriguing, yeasty nose. Taste is unusual; full mouth- feel, but surprisingly light on the tongue. There's this interesting sweetness. Treacle, the word Brits use for molasses, comes to mind. It's the sorghum, a taste that some of us like in beer and some do not. Sorghum beers are extremely popular in Africa. Green's Endeavor Dubbel Ale (***) is a very Belgium dark ale. At 7 percent ABV, it's got a kick. It has a nose much like an English ale: yeast, toffee and caramel notes. Quite tasty, again with the odd treacle note. Green's Discovery (**1/2) is quite drinkable: Medium body, with that distinctive sorghum note. These may not be beers for every palate. But if you're one of the millions of adult celiac suffers[sic] who like beer, they're definitely worth trying."

Early spring planting

This past Monday, April 13th, I did my first plantings of the 2009 gardening season (not counting last fall's garlic planting). I directly seeded lettuce, salad greens, and spinach into some raised bed boxes that I finished building over the weekend.

I'm experimenting with bed boxes this year to contain my raised beds and keep them from their otherwise inexorable crumbling and flattening out into the paths between them. I also hope to use bed boxes as a base for cold frames that will fit over them. The cold frames will protect the early lettuce, salad greens, and spinach from overnight temperatures that are still hovering around freezing in these parts. I should be able to build and install my cold frames this coming weekend. In the meantime, I'll protect my plantings with plastic pulled over the raised bed boxes every night.

My beds are 3 feet wide and 18 feet long. Here's what I planted so far:

Five 4-foot rows (actually 47 inch rows ;-) spaced 6 inches apart of the following (seed company is in parentheses):

Crispino Green Iceburg Lettuce (Fedco)
Winter Density Bibb/Romaine Lettuce (Fedco)
Lollo Rossa Cutting Lettuce (Fedco)
Black Seeded Simpson Lettuce (Fedco)
Buttercrunch Bibb Lettuce (Fedco)

Another five 4-foot rows spaced 6 inches apart of the following:

Arugula (Bonus Pack)
Claytonia (Fedco)
Minutina (Fedco)
Sorrel (Fedco)
Early Mizuna Japanese Mustard (Fedco)

And another two 4-foot rows spaced 6 inches apart of:

Bloomsdale Long-Standing Spinach (Livingston)

All these lettuces, greens, and spinach love the cool early spring weather. I'm actually late in planting them. Friends of mine have had theirs planted for a week or two or more but I waited until I had my bed boxes built before I did my planting. Next year, I'll be that much more ahead of the game. In any case, in 2-3 weeks, if we don't encounter any setbacks, we'll be eating fresh organic greens from the garden. No more store bought, industrially grown, chemically treated salads. We'll be free of that stuff until next fall ;-)

Garlic (and sorrel) rules in green!

Behold the garlic! Nearly all of the nearly 200 cloves of garlic that I planted last fall (between mid-October and late November) are up and thriving as you can see in this photo of one section of my garden. They had been hiding under the snow during our especially cold winter this year and now, freed from their white insulation, they, along with some of last year's sorrel crop (see below), are providing the 1st bits of beautiful greenery to grace this year's garden. They're months away from being harvested (in mid to late July) and even months away from providing wonderfully crunchy scapes (beginning in June) for this summer's salads and stir frys but just looking at them in all their green finery brings me hope and joy for the garden season to come.


And, check out this sorrel! It wintered over under the cover of a clear plastic drop cloth. We had some in our salad a couple of nights ago. Tender, lemony goodness!

Can spring be far behind?

                                   Fig leaf