garden greens a-go-go

the garden is now churning out a steady supply of greens (including 4 types of lettuce, crown daisy, kale and herbs) and it's just about more salad than frederik and i can handle. we've already started gifting bags of it.








anyway, i know that I'M enjoying the heck out of pounding a humongous bowl of salad every day, tossed up w/ fresh dressings laced with plenty of garlic, ginger, lemon thyme, dijon mustard, dill, basil, balsamic vinegar, etc, etc. oh yeah!

also, our baby spinach seeds had become full grown plants in 5 weeks, so we harvested it all last weekend. the little spinach patch made a brimming sink-load full! we decided, since we are already up to our ears in greens, it would be best to freeze the spinach for later use (read spinach dip and spinach-ricotta gnocchi). however, after the tedious process of rinsing, de-stemming and then blanching, the final product to enter the freezer was pretty meager .... but oh so precious. green gold! :)

the new garden!

one of most attractive reasons for me staying in seoul for a second year was my community garden plot. HOWEVER, one day early last month, i found out (with enormous despair) that my community garden was being turned into a high-rise apt building. [!!!]

alas, with a little effort, i found another garden (YAY!).. and it's actually a bit better than the last one! it's pretty much the same distance from my house (30min bike ride) but now i just bike the opposite way along the lovely yangjae stream. perfect!

this community garden (daewon farm) is uber organized... on opening day (last weekend), they handed out gloves, hand-hoes, a tray of lettuce seedlings and a few other types of seeds. they also have a PA system (which i think they use just to make announcements about the 2 foreigners, ha).


...and, perhaps the BEST thing about this place, is that they have a little restaurant on site where they serve up noodle soup, savory veggie pancakes and plenty of makgeoli. and the people couldn't be any friendlier. happy joy & rainbows.


i was so stoked when i found my own personalized little plot. my friend, frederik, went in halves w/ me, though, so we updated the sign. :)



thus far, we've planted 4 types of lettuce (seedlings) and then some spinach, radish, crown daisy (they make nice chop suey greens), basil and mint. this coming weekend we're gonna plant some beets, cilantro, spring onions, peppers, and anything else we can make room for.

growing food gets me excited. the garden pics will be greener next time, i promise. :)

the kinder garden

with the arrival of spring, we took the kids outside to plant our little school garden. last year, my class planted strawberries; this year it's lettuce. too bad most of the kids hate salad. hehe.

they recently doused the weak, sandy soil w/ a layer of fresh manure so, hopefully, the lettuce fares better this year. the kids loved the smell, anyways. ha.

elliot sure was excited about something. ;)

harvest; tuber time

it's been mighty nippy outside these days. well, it's actually been o.k. this past week... you know, mild autumn weather.. a nice sweater and a thin jacket.. maybe a scarf. but there were a couple of days that were just FREEZING. and i thought i was gonna die. anyway, we decided we should head out to the garden one last time to harvest what was left; what survived the freeze anyway.
daylight is growing shorter w/ each day, so we had to book it to the garden on our bikes straight after school. we knew that we'd only have a couple of hours, at most, before dark. when we got there, it was a bit sad. it was obvious that the gardening season was over. folks were harvesting their cabbage to make enough kimchi to last god knows how long and they wouldn't be planting anything else. our little garden was barely hanging on. all of the basil was dead; wet, brown drooping leaves. we were just a couple of days late. so we started uprooting all the tubers (beets, radishes and carrots) and harvesting huge piles of herbs and greens. getting it all home on our bikes was a bit of a challenge but we made it.
so then i had all that stuff to deal w/. just washing it all took forever. now i have enough greens to have huge, amazing salads for dinner this week. as for the other stuff, i found some good recipes for daikon radish and beets and i set aside one whole evening for that magic. the outcome was daikon kimchi, do chua (vietnamese pickled vegetables) and, my new favorite, daikon cakes. YUM. as for the other stuff, the herbs are drying & i'm gonna make some herbed radish butter and i'll roast some of the beets (but i mostly like them fresh on salads). damn, having a garden has been good. :)

update from the cabbage patch

notes from the garden last week: new lettuce seeds have sprouted! ... our pal william's plot that we rescued is full of luscious greens! ... lots of dirty, ripe cherry tomatoes on the vine! ... the eggplants that we relocated (because they were being taken over by our monster tomato bush / mess) are alive again! ... the radish seeds we planted have taken off! ... our herbies are getting too big for their britches (namely the mint) ... and i snatched a couple shots of some jungle wildlife: spidey & mantis.

the garden never sleeps...

man...jonna and i left our garden plot alone for one full week, and what a surprise when we finally made it back out there... our lettuces are becoming trees! everything has a stalk growing out of it and is going to seed. aaah! the head lettuces got completely grown over and they started disintegrating back into the soil to feed the taller, more dominant plants. so much culling, pruning, weeding and EATING to do! among the many happy discoveries that day were oodles of green baby tomatoes, the first little eggplant fruit, gobs of peas, huge beets bursting from the soil, celery going crazy, cilantro and bell peppers finally sprouted, and the tiny herb cuttings that i planted are living large. we have two varieties of mint, lemon thyme, rosemary, chives and french lavender. our tomato and pea plants definitely need some love, as they are now too laden w/ fruit to stay up w/ the support of our current, shoddy staking system.... and we can't eat our greens fast enough! we've had some requests to buy lettuce, so we've now started selling bags of it & we are putting the money toward a garden dinner party....complete w/ juleps &/or mojitos! can't wait!

gardening at night

my friend, jonna, and i have a plot in a community garden, which is just a few stops away by metro. it's amazing how much green space just appears out of nowhere here in this massive city. i mean, out where our garden is, it feels rural. there are some 500 plots around ours.
so we went out there after school the other day, just as the sun was setting, to set up a compost bin*, plant a few more seedlings and give the plants a nice drink of cool water. (*we had been storing our kitchen scraps in bags in our freezers, which were full to the brim. so we set up a bin by the garden to throw our scraps and cover w/ dirt. hopefully we'll find some red wriggler worms to throw into the party and speed things up a bit.) in our garden, the edamame had started to climb and our leafy greens were just going off. the woman who manages the garden came over while we were working to tell us (in her 99-miles-per-minute korean) that our greens were ready to eat. so before we left, in the dark, we picked a variety of every leafy plant in the garden. it wasn't until i got them home, under some lighting, that i saw just how healthy and gorgeous these greens were. vibrant shades of green and purple. mmmmmmmmmmmm......... nothing better than eating something that you put in the ground and nursed to maturity.