Rad. Not rad-ish.

Not surprisingly Radish is once again the first thing ready for the World's Smallest Farmer's Market. They are big and beautiful, and those who have a taste for them tell me they are delicious. I suppose I should cultivate a taste for them. But for now I will settle for just growing them.

Everything else is moving kind of slowly at the moment. Spinach better get with it for instance. I'm going to blame it on the funky Southern California weather, because it couldn't be me. Right?

Winter garden is in. Finally.

So I'm happy to report that I found time to get my ass out of my chair and into the garden. Things have gotten very busy at work, which is good for the wallet but certainly puts things behind in the garden. That said, everything is still well within schedule. The weather is holding up nicely here in Southern California and I have high hopes for a good showing in our boxes. 

This winter planting marks our first full year of the Alcone Garden.  If you've been reading the blog you know summer did not go as well as I had hoped, while last winter went better than expected. So I guess it all evens out, huh?

This year I'm going to make a few adjustments while trying to not mess up the goodness of last year. Spinach went like crazy last time so I'm doubling up and going with a 8 feet of it this time around. Broccoli and cabbage did well but the space that it needed compared to the return wasn't that great so I'm scrapping them. Instead I'm going with things I can give out to people around the office more easily, like onions, leeks and beets. The radishes were very well received so I'm expanding that section as well.

I'm looking forward to seeing what happens out there and hoping I didn't just get lucky. We'll see.

Winner! Winner! Pumpkin dinner!

Congrats to Christina Caluda for winning the Alcone-grown pumpkin.

They seem very happy together.

I've had better summers.

Better in the garden anyway. We had a lot of pollination issues this year and it turns out that sort of thing is pretty important. The best we can figure is we don't have enough bees in the area. I'm going to blame it on the fact that we're in a business park. If I were a bee I'd certainly find another place to do my thing.

Unfortunately I didn't figure out the bee thing until pretty late in the season. So a lot of stuff never came to pass. The cucumbers and squash didn't amount to squat and I only had one monster zucchini. We did have quite a few tomatoes, although I thought there would be more.

I was able to scrape together a pretty sweet pumpkin. And when I say scrape I mean it literally. It turns out when there are no bees around to do their bee thing, you have to do it yourself. I did a little research and figured out that pollinating is nothing more than rubbing flowers together.

I'll leave it at that...

As I said, I figured all this out a bit late and only ended up with two. I'm having a drawing at the office for the big one and keeping the other one for my troubles. Breaks my heart, I could have had a dozen of these beauties had I started earlier. Next year I suppose.

Oh well, live and learn, and on to winter.

Happy home for Monster Zucchini

As I wrote in the previous post, Whitney Lum was the only one in the agency with the moxie to take on the giant zucchini. I'm happy to report she's done us proud. She took it home and fed the whole Lum family at a weekend gathering.

And she was nice enough to get some great photos of the whole process. Thanks, Whitney.

Back to Market

 
It's been a while since we've had a World's Tiniest Farmer's Market, but it's back on. And it's back to earning its moniker after the comparatively giant harvests of late winter. But there's nothing tiny about that zucchini, though. That bad boy is not messing around.

 

I'm curious if it's still going to be delicious at that size. But as Scott Littlejohn says, "Fry that sucker up. That'll make it good." Delicious or not, it's damn funny looking.

Fortunately Whitney got the guts to step up and take it to her family reunion. Warms my heart to see it go to good home. Let us know how it works out, Whitney.

ASSASSINS!!

I've been noticing chunks and chews being taken throughout the garden and now I know why. They are called Tomato Hornworms, but they are actually caterpillars, go figure.

I found a website telling me as an organic gardener I should put in companion plants that would attract a certain type of miniature parasitic wasp. (Click on that, it's pretty awesome.) I'm not sure if there's room for anymore plants, so I'm just going to put a 25¢ bounty on each of them and let Julie Stone's kids make a little extra cash.

Potatoes fulfill their destiny.

And their destiny was delicious. On Friday I dug up and passed out most of the potatoes for people  to enjoy. Not sure what everybody else did with theirs, but mine were damn tasty.

These will not be my last crop of potatoes that's for sure.

This is what 32 Southern California days will get you

We're 32 days into the summer planting effort and it's pretty fair to say things are exploding. I went out of town for a week ( thanks for the coverage Shannon) and came back to a lot of green stuff. It shouldn't be long before there's a lot of red, yellow, and orange stuff to go with it. Stay tuned.

Looks like there's gonna be jack-o-lanterns for the whole office.

The beans are going bonkers. I might should have put in a taller trellis.

The potato confusion is now behind us. You're welcome.

For those of you who have been holding your breath wondering when I should pull the potatoes, you are now free to exhale. I'm going with the wait-for-the-stalk-to-die method over the wait-for-the-flower-to-die route.

This is a potato from a stalk that has dead flowers yet still green. The color looks good and all, but it's pretty dinky compared to...

...a potato from the dead stalk. It's definitely bigger and more ready to be smothered in butter.