Square Foot Gardening

For this week's Real Food Wednesday blog carnival I'll tell you a bit about my gardening experiment. I've been wanting to garden for years but the school/seasonal job year happens to perfectly bisect the growing season year. It's hard to get excited to plant stuff in April and May when you know you are going to be moving in June or July. Luckily for my gardening aspirations I have a "real" adult job this year and no plans of moving anywhere! I am actually going to be planting two gardens this year, one in the little yard at my duplex and a bigger one in my parents' backyard up the street.

Last fall I bought a copy of Mel Bartholomew's All New Square Foot Garden and have been reading it voraciously. Square foot gardening is an intensive planting method using prepared soil (instead of native garden soil and amendments) that is designed for people who want the joy of gardening without the hassle of huge harvests or the hard work of tilling and weeding. As I do more reading about it I see some draw backs, but for the first year of my garden experiment I am willing to give it a try. The basics of square foot gardening include the square foot grid that you plant within and Mel's Mix soil. Both take a little work up front, but I think they will repay serious dividends over the course of the year.

My garden at my parent's house is a 4x6 foot plot that had tiger lilies in it for the last few years. If you ever want to do some hard work, dig out overgrown lilies. I'm afraid I won't enjoy the blooms this year :) I dug the bulbs out and laid in a couple layers of mulch and peat moss and then covered it with about 5 inches of Mel's Mix from the book.

Mel's Mix is a 1:1:1 ratio mixture of vermiculite, peat moss and mixed compost. At first I was put off by the "buy stuff" nature of the Mel's Mix but I decided to go for it. I tried container gardening in a mixture of wood compost, top soil and native garden soil last summer and all my plants starved to death. I was willing to put out some expense to get usable vegetables this year :) I was able to purchase all three of these ingredients with minimal hassle or expense. I purchased a 4 cubic foot bale of compressed peat moss for 10 dollars, 3 one cubic foot bags of compost (steer, chicken and mushroom) for 5 dollars a piece and the 3 cubic foot bag of vermiculite for 50 dollars. The vermiculite is clearly the expensive part of the formula but it provides good structure and air pockets to the soil and really should be a one time investment. In the future I will have a compost system set up so I won't have to buy compost, and that looks like the only thing you have to add in the future anyway.

Over the Mel's Mix I laid my grid. Mel recommends wood lath to form the grid but I happened to have a bunch of broken venetian blinds laying around so made my grid out of that. The square foot gardening method calls for planting a proscribed number of plants in each square foot, alternating what plants are in each square. It's a block planting system instead of a row planting system, but the plants have the same room around them in the end. For instance, you plant 4 lettuce plants in a square which is equivalent to the "thin to 6 inches" instructions on the back of the seed packet.

The other really amazing part of the square foot gardening book is the time tables in the back for when to plant. He lays out a planting schedule based on weeks before or after your local last frost date so you can use the system almost anywhere. Here in Portland, OR our last frost date is in the second week of April so I am already planting some hardy spring plants. I have already planted snow peas, lettuce, turnips, mustard, radishes and onions, and will plant some chard, bok choy, more onions and lettuce, and kale or broccoli before the spring is too much further along.

Later in the summer I will plant tomatoes, cucumbers and zucchini but haven't decided exactly how to fit those into my gardening plans. Mel Batholomew claims you can plant all of those plants in the square foot garden with trellises, but I'm thinking I may use the plot at my house for a less structured garden with more room for each of those big plants.

My next big challenge is protecting the garden. First and foremost I need to protect it from the two big black dogs that share the backyard with my garden. My dad's dog particularly likes to dig but both will tromple right through it given half a chance. Right now I have chicken wire laid over the soil but once things start sprouting I am going to need to change that a bit. I've got some ideas floating around in my head, but we'll see how any of it actually works out :)

I'm dreaming of lettuces and radishes out of the garden, tomatoes warm from the vine and cucumbers plumping in the sun. Spring, however, is wet and long here in the pacific northwest and it will be quite a few months before there are any backyard barbecues featuring garden fresh onions and zucchini. Ya know what though, the rain doesn't seem to bother me quite as much when I know it is watering my garden for me :)

I'll Fritter Anything

I just got home from a 9 hour day. I don't want to cook. I don't even want to think. I know if I eat pizza, though, both my wallet and my body will be sad. What's a girl to do? There are plenty of options out there for getting some real food into your body pretty quickly but it's best if you've done a little work first Most "quick" recipes actually require some prep work, and all quick recipes require you to have at least thought about them beforehand. And then there's zucchini fritters - but more on that later.

My two main go-to meals when I've got no time are quesadillas and soup. Soup is filling, warming, nutritious and ever so forgiving. Kelly the Kitchen Kop blogged about the nutritional wonders of bone broth as well as gave us directions for making stock, and Carrie over at the Thrifty Oreganic wrote up some great "recipes" for throw together soup. I like to sautee up some onions and spices, throw the meat and broth on top and let that simmer while I change my clothes or take the dog for a walk. Then I'm a little more relaxed when it's time for dinner. With leftover rice, canned beans and decent tortillas in the fridge quesadillas take only minutes. I especially like both soup or quesadillas topped with sour cream and homemade sauerkraut.

Today, though, I want to share with you a brilliant fast food dish - zucchini fritters. I originally got the idea from the Joy of Cooking and have been making it for years. The great thing about this recipe is that really all of it, except the egg and the cast iron skillet, are optional.


Zucchini Fritters
* Necessary:
Grated zucchini
Sliced or grated onion
Egg
Flour (white or whole wheat)
Salt and pepper
* Good to have, but optional:
Cooked brown rice and/or bread crumbs and/or crumbled crackers
Crumbled feta cheese or some other crumbled or grated cheese.
* Even more optional:
Dried green herbs (try herbs de provance or thyme)
Chopped fresh green herbs or green onions.

*Grate zucchini and toss with onion. Add in rice or cracker crumbs and salt, pepper and and any other add ins like cheese or herbs. Crack an egg in the bowl and mix around real good. How much egg you need depends on how big your zucchini is (and how big your egg is) - I would say one 1 cup of zucchini to 1 egg, but that is a very rough guestimate.

*When the veggies are all incorporated in the egg then add a tablespoon of flour. Mix around until thats incorporated and then maybe add another. I would guess I usually add 3 tablespoons of flour to one egg, but again, rough guestimate. If you don't add enough flour the fritter doesn't hold together as well, but it's still totally edible.

*Heat up your cast iron skillet (what? you don't have a cast iron skillet?? Then get off the computer and go buy one. At a thrift store. Seriously.) and melt some fat in it. I like bacon grease, or coconut oil. We're not deep frying here, just lubing up the pan.

*When the skillet is good and hot dollop the batter into the hot fat. When the bottom is nicely browned and the top starting to look dry flip it. Cook till the bottom is browned. Serve with ketchup, ranch, mustard, chutney or ice cream. Not really, but maybe... :)

These guys really take just a few minutes, and just a few ingredients. The eggs and zucchini are real food with real nutrition as is cheese if you use it. Brown rice, especially if cooked with bone broth, and the onions are also nutritious. Using white flour is probably actually nutritionally preferable in this case because we aren't doing anything to neutralize the phytates. It's only a couple tablespoons split up between the fritters so I don't worry too much about it. And we here at Real Food, My Way love frying things in good fats like bacon grease and coconut oil. We know we're getting a good nutrition boost when we cook food that way.

Remember - this "recipe" is really, really loose. Don't have zucchini but do have lots of leftover rice? Make rice fritters. Have leftover cooked greens? Greens fritters. Mashed potatoes? Mashed potato fritters! Don't forget to add the bacon to those ones! Tuna or canned salmon? Call them "cakes" instead of "fritters". No food in the house except frozen corn and an egg? Sounds like corn fritters to me.