farm with a view

(Bright Lights Swiss chard leaves the size of my head)

Along with four sugar snap peas:

(Gah. Horribly fuzzy iPhone photo.)

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We harvested and ate our windowsill micro lettuce. It didn’t grow as robustly as we hoped, but we got a decent single-serving side salad out of it, dressed with a touch of olive oil/dijon vinaigrette, and it was pretty tasty and very lettuce-y.

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I have no good excuse for not posting anything in nearly a month. Except that the holidays came and went, and then things got super busy at work for both of us.

Here’s how our plot is lookin’ these days. Fava beans on the upper left, peas on the upper right, Tuscan kale below them and Swiss chard along the bottom:

(Compare with this Dec. 23 farm update)

(Sugar snap peas, about three inches tall)

(Munched Swiss chard)

The bites on this chard plant indicate a snail/slug problem. And the crushed eggshells I’ve scattered don’t seem to be working so well. I think they’re doing some damage in our mini pea patch, too – I can see their shimmery trails all over the leaves. Ugh. What to do. (more…)

Six consecutive days of rain. Can’t remember the last time that happened here in L.A. By day three I was getting a little worried about the kale and chard seedlings we’d just transplanted the weekend before the storms. The most inconvenient thing about having a community garden plot is – duh – having to go out of your way to check on it. As in having to drive to get there. And since Angelenos are notoriously bad at driving when the tiniest sprinkle falls from the sky, we decided it wasn’t worth risking our lives to drive more than what was absolutely necessary and left the plants in the hands of the garden and weather gods.

Today – the first clear day – I finally stopped by the garden. I was fearing the worst after reading this ReadyMade post about rain and drowned seedlings; it basically says they should be OK as long as they’re in raised beds. Of which ours are not. I envisioned being welcomed by dead, flattened plants.

Thankfully, they are still upright:

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Now that we’ve been lording over this community garden plot for about a year, I thought it would be good to get an idea of how much money we’ve spent during our first year of vegetable gardening. Start-up costs, if you will. (more…)