Creekside Ranch

The tough post on Craigslist, right?

We came a lit­tle late to the game this year with our toma­toes and pep­pers.  We tried to get to mar­ket by late spring, when folks are really gar­den­ing in earnest, but we hit some obsta­cles (weather, hoop­house, insur­ance) and started instead in late June.

Cute lit­tle earnest toma­toes — too late!

So now we're try­ing to fig­ure out how to offload all these sum­mer veg­eta­bles before it gets too late to plant them and still get a good har­vest.  I fig­ure we have about 2 weeks.  When it gets too late, we're just going to plant them our­selves, as we have already done with a few hun­dred Martino's Roma and Chero­kee Pur­ples, which I guess will become some pur­ple tomato sauce this fall :)  (Is that gross?)

Any ideas?  I put an ad on East Bay craigslist, and one in Sacra­mento, and we're putting all our sum­mer veg on clear­ance ($1.50/pot).  I have toyed with the idea of dri­ving the van around to all the com­mu­nity gar­dens, sound sys­tem up loud, sell­ing plants out of the side door.  Evan points out that there are never more than 2 peo­ple in a com­mu­nity gar­den at one time.  Gar­den­ing can be a soli­tary art.

Then I thought about the Under­ground Mar­ket, but then the Under­ground Mar­ket was shut down.  Then I thought about school gar­dens, but peo­ple should really give plants to school gar­dens for free.  We could prob­a­bly sell them all if we went to 6 farm­ers' mar­kets per week, but then we would need more canopies and cars, and if we're buy­ing another car we should prob­a­bly sell some­thing more expen­sive, like I don't know, plants made of gold.

We still have fall to look for­ward to, and we are start­ing a whole bunch of cab­bages, kale, pump­kins, herbs, let­tuce, etc. for the fall sea­son.  But these sum­mer plants have got to go!  And if I plant them all here, then everyone's get­ting a cute pot of zuc­chini mar­malade for Christ­mas this year.  And also for birth­days, and wed­dings, and just-because!  Don't make me do this, peo­ple.  Don't make me become the squash lady.

New!  North Beach Farmer's Mar­ket — Mason Street between Lom­bard and Colum­bus in San Fran­cisco — every Sun­day from 9am to 1:30pm

Jack Lon­don Square Farmer's Mar­ket — every Sun­day from 9am to 2pm in Jack Lon­don Square, Oakland.

New! Laguna Farmer's Mar­ket — Laguna and Big Horn Blvds in Elk Grove — every Sat­ur­day from 8am to 12pm.

But first, let me tell you about the happy tomato.  We drove up to the Full Belly farm stand last Fri­day, and picked through the last few toma­toes, and fished out the per­fect one.  And it was per­fect.  A lit­tle firm, a lit­tle soft, red and acid and meaty and sweet, and no fish genes in it.  This week we have been eat­ing from the gar­den (!) and buy­ing piles of stone fruit, and being grate­ful  — this is more than con­so­la­tion for the triple digit heat last week.

And speak­ing of the weather, all accounts say it is going to rain tomor­row.  What the hell?  Can I say that on the inter­net?  I guess this isn't preschool.  What the hell??  We cov­ered up our small haystack with tarps by flash­light.  Evan could not resist shin­ing a light on the ducks.  They were sleep­ing, Evan, they were sleeping.

Our friend Reed came by today and weeded the 300 tomatil­los he brought over and planted last month.  If you need any tomatil­los, talk to Reed.  They'll be ready in awhile, all mil­lion of them.  He reminded us that we have a plum tree, so we went over and relieved it of the ripest plums.  I am sure that tree was so grateful.

Finally, Evan dug up the first batch of gar­lic today, which we had in our din­ner, with home­grown greens and local pork sausage.  Everything's good.

Except appar­ently, that tomato they put on your sand­wich at Subway/Togo's/anyplace they add toma­toes to sand­wiches in win­ter or spring.  That is not so good.  Accord­ing to this piece on Florida toma­toes (which are all the fresh toma­toes you can buy, in win­ter and spring), Florida grow­ers are dump­ing ridicu­lous amounts of chem­i­cals on the plants, thus ruin­ing the health of their work­ers, some of whom are actual slaves.  (More about that here.)  Now I know it's exhaust­ing to go out and buy eth­i­cal every­thing, but maybe we can start with toma­toes, because (a) out of sea­son toma­toes are gross, and (b) slav­ery.  We're against it.

Yeah!

So the June rain finally aban­doned us to sum­mer sun, and the hoop­house is hot again, and the ground dry enough for a trac­tor.  So I got on the trac­tor today.

This is the same trac­tor as ours, except our seat is ripped in a slightly dif­fer­ent way.

It's been about a year since I've been on the trac­tor, so I had to review the con­trols with Evan, just to make sure I turned all the knobs in the right order.  I mowed the drive and the front of the prop­erty, so as to make it look less aban­doned from the road.  It's fun once you get going.  It's a big toy machine that mows things while you go for a ride.

This sil­hou­ette needs a pigtail.

I feel espe­cially cool while rid­ing a trac­tor because I do not look like a typ­i­cal trac­tor driver.

Here is an arti­cle about cli­mate change and its effect on our food sup­ply.  It's less didac­tic than I just made it sound.  Basi­cally, the deal is, food riots, we need to grow more food to pre­vent food riots, but we need to start grow­ing the food in a way that does not worsen cli­mate change, which is what's caus­ing the food short­ages, which cause the food riots.

Zoot suit riots, how­ever, may pro­ceed apace.  Actu­ally no, avoid those too, we can all just get along.