Outstanding in Our Field...

Last summer I learned about a wonderful opportunity to have dinner on a local organic farm on the "field" of the farm cooked by some great culinary chefs. A culinary adventure as they call it... Outstanding in the Field. Unfortunately all of the events in our area were sold out last year when I stumbled upon their site, you have to book early! They have just released their calendar for this year, it is a pricey dinner but I think would be a wonderful experience to celebrate outside with your local farmer and chef. I will be saving my seed money to hopefully attend one but also have taken the idea to incorporate in my own San Jose Urban Field, our backyard. We hope to have many enjoyable dinners with friends at our tiny field.

Our New Plot

A couple of weeks ago I was getting all set to build two 4x8 veggie beds and place over the asphalt area in the back. This was going to be a bit of labor because I would need to chip some holes in the asphalt for drainage and then schlep tons of wood to build the boxes (plus buy the wood). I kept looking for a new location of potential planting and then stumbled upon an area that is about 10x8 right outside our back door! It had landscaping fabric on it and there used to be wood chips on it we moved here. We pulled back the fabric and it was all dirt and good dirt! Dante and I began working the ground, added some compost and now we have a new addition to plant more veggies. So far we have put in 3 different carrot seeds; French Babette, Romeo (round baby) and a Sunshine mix (yellow & orange). Here is a picture of our new plot of land...the potted plants are temporary placed their to deter our puppy Diego out of the bed.

Pushing Sunflower Seeds in the Dirt

Today we planted some sunflower seeds, maybe a little early but we are hoping for lots of sunshine soon. Dante planted some in "his garden" by his tree house, not a very sunny area but he was determined! I decided to put a mixture of Chocolate Cherry, Cinnamon Sun and Valentine seeds along our side fence, all from Renee's Garden. There is about a 3 inch gap of dirt between the fence and the patio... we put three packets covering a length of about 24 feet so hope to have a fence of flowers in early summer.

Parsley Pesto Sauce

The sauce came out great from all of our extra parsley growing, quite yummy and since I don't have any basil growing yet - this will be a repeat recipe. Here is my version, I didn't actually measure ingredients so approximate, just taste!

1 big cup of Italian Parsley
3 cloves of garlic
1/4 cup of pecans
1/4 olive oil
1/2 cup of fresh Parmesan or any hard Italian Cheese
3/4 cup of cream or 1/2 and 1/2
Salt and Pepper to taste

Just put all ingredients in a electric chopper/blender and walla! You have a great pasta sauce or would also be good on chicken.

Today's Harvest

Here is some of our harvest for today that will now be dinner tonight...pasta with broccolini, salad using our spinach, baby butter lettuce and beet leaves. I am also going to attempt making a pesto style pasta sauce but using parsley as the main ingredient. We have an abundance of parsley right now, will post recipe tomorrow if successful!

Peas Please!

After some terrible wind and lots of rain, our pea vines survived and now have some little white flowers. Dante has been measuring himself against the pea vines since they started, he was quite excited when they were getting to be as tall as him - now they are taller then me. Soon we hope to have some yummy crunchy pea pods. As a child I used to pick them straight from my Grandmother's garden and eat them raw from the dirt. Stay tuned for our Spring Peas!

Preparing for our Earth Machine

We found a nice spot that for our new Earth Machine, it will get enough sun and is close enough to the house it will make it easier to drop scraps straight from the kitchen. Dante helped to prep the dirt and level it out with me.