Above: Jody Main (in black shirt) and Team Chicken.

By Margo True, Sunset Food Editor

As we were pondering the menu for our feast, we realized we wanted to get some protein in there. Edamame (soybeans) alone didn’t seem substantial enough. Being not exactly ranching types, we knew we couldn’t actually kill anything (although we all agreed that the most conscientious way to be a meat-eater is to do just that, instead of blithely buying a hunk of steak tidily shrink-wrapped for you at the store). So, face to face with who we are, we decided on chickens. After a few seconds we realized we couldn’t kill a chicken, either. But we would have wonderful, glorious, super-fresh eggs. 

A few weeks ago, we found a coop and had an entertaining and informative coop-placement session with our new Chicken Consultant, Jody Main, who occasionally teaches classes on backyard chicken-raising (more on her later). Then we tackled the preparation of the chicken’s home-to-be. It was an empty koi pond in our test garden, with a tragic history (raccoons ate all the koi--a wee bit worrying for our future chickens, but we resolved to get very good chicken wire). So it lay there, drained but paved with massive, extremely heavy river stones. Our backs hurt just thinking about getting rid of them.

Above: John Fischer of Gilroy hauls  rocks from our chicken site.

Lauren Swezey, our garden special projects editor, had the brilliant idea of posting the stones on craigslist--free rocks to whoever was willing to haul them away. Within three days, a database engineer from Gilroy named John Fischer showed up. “I’m a rock hound, and every rock in here is nice,” he said. He plans to use them to build a retaining wall for a pond at his place. Then he got to work with a hired crew. It took three days, but now our pond is just a shady patch of ground, waiting for its flock.

Above: Ryan plants a tomato

By Margo True, Sunset Food Editor

Our garden team has been out scouring the nurseries and ordering from seed companies (mainly the excellent Renee’s Garden and Vermont Bean Seed (for garbanzos and corn) and finally all of our plants have arrived for this feast we're planning.

Ryan makes planting look like a cinch. For the edamame (soybean) and chickpea seeds, he drags a shallow furrow in his nice loose dirt with a stick, drops the seeds in, and covers them over a little—but leaves the trough there “so you know where you put the seeds.” A handy way to avoid accidentally tromping all over your tender almost-breaking-the-surface seedlings.

Our melons (watermelons, cantaloupes, and the honeyed greenish-orange melon called 'Sharlyn') go in the widest bed, because of the way they’ll eventually sprawl all over the place. The soil is so loose that all Ryan has to do is plunge his hand down into it to make a hole; then he thunks the seedling out of the pot like he’s burping a baby, pops it in the hole, and fills it in with a couple of sweeps of his hand. When you’re doing this with tomatoes, he says, you want to snap the bottom branches off and bury the plant up to the highest fully formed leaves. The hairs along the buried stem will form into roots and make the plant stronger and more stable.

Back to melons. Ryan says he’s going to be nurturing and then stern with them.“We’ll water real heavily to get some good growth. Then when the fruit forms, we’ll wean them off water to sweeten them up.” On his farm in Pescadero, Ryan does a lot of dry-farming, and it really works for certain fruits and vegetables--tomatoes especially. The flesh gets dense and is much sweeter.

Above: a freshly dug trench for potatoes

It’s pretty cool to watch Ryan planting potatoes, which, like everything else, he does in about 30 seconds. With his thumb, he pushes tiny whole Yukon Golds, each with an eye sprouting, into the bottom of a deep trench (the sides of which he’ll mound around the shoot as it grows, so the baby tubers forming just below the soil have something to grow in). Seed potatoes can also be just sprouting hunks of big potatoes. “Plant every 10 inches or so. You want to crowd them a little. Otherwise they grow too big, and get ‘hollow heart.’” I think of all the times I’ve bought potatoes at the grocery store and found pockets of air inside. Well, that’s hollow heart; the farmer who grew them placed his potatoes too far apart.

Above: Ryan holding 'Climbing Trombetta' seeds

The 'Climbing Trombetta' squash seeds look like those dried melon seeds you see in Middle Eastern groceries, sold as a salty snack to have with tea. Ryan makes a furrow and rapidly pokes the seeds down one at a time with his finger. Then he pinches the sides of the trough together, zip zip zip. Presto. I can’t wait till these zucchini form. Lauren Swezey, our garden special projects editor, says they’re extremely flavorful and also have gorgeous twisting shapes that resemble (surprise surprise) trombones.

By Margo True, Sunset Food editor

We settled on our list of crops, and on June 1, we got going in the garden. Ryan Casey, our test garden coordinator (and co-owner of Blue House Farm in Pescadero, CA), turned patches of ground into nice soft, receptive beds for the seeds and seedlings he’ll plant next week. Knowing close to nothing about gardening and eager to learn, I watched him as long as I could. In between the long wide rows, he’d put down chips of Douglas fir bark. This mini-mulch, he explained, will keep the weeds down, and dust too—“So it’s not splashing on your lettuce.” Plus it just feels good to walk on. And it’s pretty. I watched Ryan start on the last bed, shoving the tines of a digging fork down into the soil, then lifting it and breaking it up. “Basically, all I’m doing is fluffing,” he said. When he was finished, the soil was so loose and light it felt like crumbs, down to a depth of about a foot. I guess the little roots are going to just shoot through this like lightning. After the fluffing, he layered on an inch of rich dark compost and then raked it all in. When he was done, it looked comfortable enough to nap on. 

By Margo True, Sunset food editor

A few of the choices for our summer feast.

Over in the Food Department, we're dreaming of what to cook (and plant) for our summer feast. Arugula salads with a rainbow of ripe tomatoes, from yellow to orange to deep red. Fresh corn on the cob. A classic California avocado salad with crisp red onions, olives, and parsley. Warm figs. But with what--maybe honey? Or blue cheese? Almost instantly, we're craving foods that can't be raised from seed or seedling. We're so used to getting what we want, all the time.

Even fruits and vegetables get a reality check once Team Garden steps in to look at our wish list. Arugula, it turns out, withers in the heat of the summer growing season; it does best in spring. Our fig vine was pruned so severely last year that it probably won't bear much fruit in August, not enough to plan on, anyway. Avocados take at least five years to bear fruit. Ah well.

Team Garden is reassuringly full of ideas for what we can grow, though. Tomatoes--no problem, although they'll be on the small side. Corn will work, but we won't get the deep, corny flavor that you do in the Midwest; this just isn't ideal corn country. Ours will be sweet and juicy instead. Chiles might be mild, because our summers are. Potatoes ought to be fine; squashes, too, and a curvaceous zucchini called trombetta (it's on the right in the photo above). Herbs will take off. Lemongrass--who knows? Fresh chickpeas, which you can nibble right from the stalk, could be a complete crapshoot because it's very late to be planting summer crops. (Oops.) We'll just try it and see what happens.

It's becoming clear that this menu is going to be as light as a little summer dress. We're starting to worry that we’ll have to go get pizza afterward, or a steak. So, for substance, we're going to try to raise some chickens, in a spot in the test garden where a koi experiment once took place (they were eaten, I think, by raccoons, and the remnants of their pond are all that's left behind). We already took a vote as to whether we'd cook these chickens, and we won't--we'll use their eggs instead. (Six birds won't last us long, but dozens and dozens of eggs will.)

We'll need cooking fat, too. Peanuts seemed easiest--you just whirl them up in a food processor and wait for the oil to separate--but they won't grow outside a Southern climate. Corn--? Extracting oil from the ears seems impossible and requiring of much intricate equipment. We do have olive trees, but have no idea whether the fruit is edible or how to press it. Time to find out!

What about sugar, for some kind of dessert? Growing sugar beets seems crazy. Sugar cane grows in the south but not here. Honey seems like our best bet. Maybe we'll think about raising some bees.

It's coming together. Before long, we hope we'll have some plants poking up. And some good, fresh food.