Micro Greens Series: Sunflower Greens Pt.1

Micro greens are at the heart of growing food organically without land. They're really fun to do with kids too, and hey, if you don't eat em, feed em to your pets. They're a powerhouse of nutrition and can add so much to a green salad. We learned how to grow these decades ago--here's my orginal instructions for our first ones, sunflower greens, courtesy of the late Ann Wigmore D.D. of the Hippocrates Institute. Her gold standard for healing has always been wheatgrass, and it's basically grown in the same way. I'll have photos of the process in a future post. Food as medicine. Chlorophyll increases the hemoglobin in the blood which then distributes oxygen to every cell in our body. All the microgreens and green drinks are powerful blood cleansers and blood builders.
$$Tip: These are so cheap to grow, and very expensive to buy, and then not as fresh as just clipping and eating them on the spot, no packaging either, just green green green in your bowl and in your pocket.

These are the instructions I've always used. You can use a baking dish, cafe tray, steel or enamel pan. This time I used a 10" plastic plant saucer that was free.

Big grey stripe organic sunflower seeds in the hull and raw.

Put them in the jar with water--they float at first. Soak 12 hrs.

The soaked seeds now laid on top of nice potting mix (add kelp powder for minerals if you have it), and the wet sheets of paper. I don't like to use newsprint.

Cover everything with a plastic bag to incubate for 2-3 days in a warm place. Part 2 will cover what happens next.

First Sunday in Spring in the City of Roses

Started off right at our Farmers' Market, they continue every other week through the winter, we're so lucky, and here's one of the organic anchor farms, "Gathering Together".

Nice work, "Gathering Together".

Spinach, avo and smoked salmon from Farmers Market for this Sunday meal. Give thanks for the farmers. We have many CSA's in our beautiful city, Community-supported-agriculture, where you can actually buy harvest shares in a local farm or coop, and receive weekly boxes of produce for the duration of the contract. Most go April-October, and it's definitely a good option if you need more food than you can grow. The co-op concept gives members a wider range of foods and harvest times, but most are single farms. It really helps the farmers too, it's a great partnership with both sharing the risk and harvest. It keeps all that food money local too, another healthy advantage to the community.

Downtown, I'm happy to see this ancient tree on board for spring one more time.

Did you know that violets are edible and have a cancer-fighting property in the leaves too? You can add them to a salad; grow as edible landscaping in a pot or in the ground. They smell divine.

Happy Spring!

Saving these seeds really paid off. "Hillbilly" is an heirloom tomato that I grew last year and loved. They were huge and made the best creamy, bright sauce. I put a few seeds from my best tomato in between paper towels and look! Potentially, about a hundred pounds of tomatoes, stay tuned.

Everything has just been sitting, waiting for more warmth, light, spring! These radishes are poised for quick growth, you can harvest in about a month.

I moved the baby pac choi into a bigger pot, still in clumps till they gain strength. Then I'll keep some here and spread some elsewhere.

I bought 6 of these for $2.50, about the price of one head of this gourmet lettuce blend. These will be the first to harvest, yippee.

Ah, the first day of spring...this is the day to stand back and watch and listen how the natural world celebrates this time. A day of balance -- equi + nox, equal night and day. It's a good day to get out there and just give thanks for this beautiful earth, give something back to the earth, make an offering to the earth and all the forces that work in harmony to support all life. Make that connection, even for a minute. We're very lucky, and we have a lot to be thankful for; it's a good day to set our intentions for our gardens, ask the spirits in the natural world to help and bless our efforts-- together we can keep growin that positive vibe.
Nationally and locally, the movement towards eating healthier, local, organic, gardening, edible schoolyards, farm to school programs, we're way beyond gaining momentum to packin a full head of steam! Every day seems there's more good news; today Michelle Obama broke ground with some neighborhood schoolkids for the new OG veg garden on the White House Lawn. Green light!

The "Potato Bag"

A St. Patrick's Day Special--
If you've never eaten fingerling potatoes, try some this year. They're so good they're almost self-buttering, seriously delicious. And this is the year to grow some taters, it's like diggin up gold at the end of the rainbow when it's time to harvest.
Now's the time to plant:
Since I don't have much room, I bought these cool 'Potato Bags' from Gardeners' Supply, and here's how I set them up on 'bare' ground.

I use cardboard as a weed barrier and because I want good drainage on the bottom so I can use it more than one year, no rotting. This is great for any kind of path you want to make, and you can throw it down right on top of the weeds too. Here, I'm covering bare gravelly dirt where some pots had been.

Use a coarse mulch on top that won't break down quickly under foot traffic. Make it twice as deep as you think, it settles; you want all the cardboard covered completely.

Details on the planting bag.

The bag set in place and ready for dirt. I filled it 1/3 full with a nice mix that I mixed up in the wheelbarrow: Planting mix, compost, and mushroom compost, with veg food mixed in too.

Do you have some potatoes like this in the cupboard? These are various organic market spuds that just need to be planted now. Aren't they pretty? A gift from my daughter.

Four purple potatoes and one gold in this bag, in place, before covering with soil. As they grow, I'll continue to add soil. Territorial says you can expect 10 times yield from what you plant for regular potatoes, and 15 to 20 times for fingerlings. Sounds good to me. And they're so easy to plant and care for. You can buy seed potatoes now at the nursery too. Pick up some other starts if you need them, like onions, lettuce, spinach and peas.

Cool Runnings

Check this out:
www.nytimes.com/2009/03/11/dining/11lady.html

Michelle Obama's message: 'Eat fresh food!' “Collect some fruits and vegetables; bring by some good healthy food,” she said. “We can provide this kind of healthy food for communities across the country, and we can do it by each of us lending a hand.” The Times goes on to say: In a speech at the Department of Agriculture last month, Mrs. Obama described herself as “a big believer” in community gardens that provide “fresh fruits and vegetables for so many communities across this nation and world."

March is a true lion. We did get snow 3 days ago, and sleet, hail, rainbows, sunshine, all in one day. Earth Box still tickin....

In other news, the takeout containers win in the germination contest. Tomatoes are up in 4 days.

Cute baby pac choi.

Back at the farm, those peas are finally home, with broccoli in front. Moon waning in Virgo, good for transplanting.

The Macrocosm

We live in a gardeners' paradise here. There are 32 Portland Community Garden sites, containing over 1100 garden plots and approximately 3,500 gardeners. For the past 14 years, the "Produce for People" program has donated fresh produce grown in Portland Community Gardens to emergency food agencies. Produce for People has donated over 21 ½ tons since 2005 alone, all with volunteers, and 10,000 pounds just last year. That's a whole heap o good food. If you don't live where there's a great community garden program, start looking around the neighborhood and see what you can get going for your community. It's fast becoming time for some of that sod in the churchyard, in the schoolyard, in our own yards, to turn a new leaf, and grow some more to share with our neighbors.When you think about all the water and landscaping labor that goes into 'window-dressing' and curb appeal, might as well grow it without poisons and grow something delicious to eat, a good example is blueberries.

Fava bean cover crop in my neighbor's plot. You'll be seeing more from this master gardener, check out his setup. No one maximizes space like this gardener. One thing I love about community gardens is I get to see what others are doing and copy it!

Ah the freedom of a garden....you can go ahead and make a funky trellis if you want to, no building codes and contractors and permits. Speakin of which, keep your eye out for early spring pruning, and use some of those branches for a trellis for peas, they're free too.

A neighboring kohlrabi crop--this was planted in the fall too and is now ready for the kitchen.

A nice crop of garlic, sown in the fall for summer harvest. It's not too late to plant more here.

I could almost take a nap in here, it's so nice and warm and sheltered, wonder what they'll put in here? It's a nice likkle hoop house, they took a raised bed, and stuck the pvc pipe hoops into the ground, then homeland security-grade plastic held onto the pipe with clips. You could start hundreds of plants in here, plus extend the season by a couple months, pretty cool.

My Day Off

My view in the community garden, I'm surprised only a couple people are here. We may get a little snow in a couple days, but things are growing and the sun is shining sweet today.

I filled in by the fence with more garlic (use what's sprouting in the kitchen first), and some shell peas. It's old seed but it's early so I can afford to gamble. I keep adding to the soil with goodies. I expanded down the fenceline and transplanted some broccoli starts that survived the winter here.

This is it, my pride & joy, my 4' x 8' box at the community garden. This beauty can grow some food! It's in resting mode with the mulch blanket for the winter. I pulled over 60 lbs. of tomatoes out of here last year, it was a good year. Plus, peas, beans, leeks, basil, potatoes, onions, lettuce, pak choi and strawberries around the back. Some stuff I did in pots; this year I'll be using Potato Bags, a cool container I found at Gardeners' Supply, nice and big and under $10.

I pulled the mulch off to start warming up the soil, and threw it into the tomato cages to save space and dry it out. Moved around some transplants. I'll keep spreading these out as they grow and eating some too.

The soil is so beautiful, I just put in some compost and limestone and called it good. I don't really till much at this point, don't want to disturb the network of teeming life below the surface. Why do I think this way?

Some early influences: The Secret Life of Plants by Peter Tompkins, The One Straw Revolution by Masanobu Fukuoka, The Magic of Findhorn, Permaculture by Mollison, How to Grow More Veg Than You Ever Thought Possible by Jeavons, and How to Have a Green Thumb without an Aching Back by Ruth Stout. All amazing books that you can probably find in the library.

And soon, a discussion of organic methods...

So Far, So Good

Lots of peas are up now--these were the old seed tests I did. Cool! It's easier to monitor them inside while conditions are iffy and they are vulnerable. They seem happy.

My tomato and pepper starts with leeks, pac choi and others. I put a few seeds in each peat pot, I'll split em up when they get a couple sets of true leaves. Since I'm planting in a fertile sign, I wonder how long they'll take to sprout. Another experiment.

March 4

March 5

Porch is shapin up...

according to di plan...