Sacramento Valley Summer Garden
A major motivation behind my somewhat bizarre and masochistic decision to stick it out in the Central Valley is that I was really excited about the summertime abundance that flourishes in the intense heat. The previous summer I had spent at the UCSC Farm and Garden Apprenticeship Program in Santa Cruz, where an especially fog-cloaked, gloomy July stunted the warm weather crops, spread disease and kept us from harvesting much besides kale, carrots and lettuce. Those three vegetables are delicious in their own right, but in the summer, I want to eat summer stuff, like peppers, tomatoes, eggplant, watermelon and even some okra. Save the greens for the rest of the year, when I gladly will cook up kale, collards, broccoli raab or any other leafy vegetable and eat it with much gusto. In Santa Cruz, the problem we faced in enjoying the bounty of summer was a lack of heat and an overabundance of cool, damp weather. Out here in the Valley, what I lacked was land where I could tend the mouthwatering hot-weather crops. From an early point onward my need to find space to garden filled me with much anxiety, so I looked and asked around planted where I could.
Thanks to the generosity of friends, I found garden spaces: expert hair sheep ranchers and rare eggplant propagators Katy and Evan and I planted 200 tomatillo plants at their farm just outside Esparto (acclaimed seedsman and poison oak thrasher C. Bryan Stuart gave me over 1000 tomatillo plants). Closer to my residence-at-the-time in Woodland, my neighbor and renowned gordita de buche connoisseur Ethan Grundberg offered his backyard for gardening experiments. We dug beds and amended them with compost from the UC Davis Student Farm one Saturday afternoon in early May; in the following weeks we installed drip irrigation using second-hand tubing with more leaks than the waders I used for rice irrigation (see earlier post). Then we planted: a diversity of hot and mild peppers from Ethan's experiments and UC Davis, cantaloupe, Eel river, Casaba and water melons and sweet potatoes. I was especially excited about sweet potatoes because I had no experience growing them and because they are truly an amazing food: highly nutritious and versatile. Sweet potatoes grow from slips, which are cultured from the tissues of the tubers during the winter months. I searched the internet and eventually called a woman named Debbie who runs a business called Mericlone Labs in Merced County, the heart of California's sweet potato growing region. She was running out of her slips, so I got nervous and ordered way too many of them. They arrived, and I frantically tried to find homes for them. I ended up planting two 15 foot beds of them in Ethan's backyard and the experiment began.
Sweet potato planting happened on a warm evening in early May. The hot weather had just began, a prelude for what I expected to be a scorching summer and hoped would be a good growing conditions for the sweet potatoes. In the good company of a 16 oz can of Mickey's, some chips and salsa, Ethan's cat Sig and the sounds from kids playing the alleyway behind Ethan's house, I planted the sweet potato slips into the soft, recently worked soil and hoped for the best. I also daydreamed of all the ways I planned to prepare the harvest: pies, baked in the oven, boiled and mashed, or added to pancakes, biscuits and even curry.
With the sweet potatoes came a flyer with instructions on how to grow them, which I read many times but only partially absorbed. Since I like to worry about things I cannot control, I constantly checked the weather to see if the night time temperature was supposed to drop below 45, which according to the information from Mericlone Labs might damage their tender tissues. Sweet potatoes are originally from the Caribbean, and are not cold-hardy in the least. To set the record straight, they are different from yams. True yams hail from Africa and the island parts of Southeast Asia. The cannot be not grown in the US except possibly in a greenhouse and can only be found in specialty stores from those parts of the world. I have never seen or eaten a true yam. The 'candied yams' served at holiday dinners are made with sweet potatoes, not yams. There is a lot of confusion because of color, but sweet potatoes come in orange, white and purple and probably other colors as well.
Sweet potato vines in August, Woodland
The sweet potatoes had an inauspicious beginning. The weather that May was far from tropical: cool nights, more rain than average, and daytime temperatures not encouraging to the tomato, pepper and melon crops that local farmers had put in the ground.When Ethan announced that he was moving to Massachusetts in June I worried about what would happen to my nascent garden projects, whose fruits were still months away from enjoyment. I hoped that the new tenants would be amenable to continuing the garden and possibly allow me to harvest some of its' bounty. As is most often the case, it turned out that my worries were in vain: the new tenants were very excited about the garden and taking on its' care. When I returned to Woodland from a two week trip to visit my sister in Idaho (where there are no sweet potatoes growing) the garden had entered its bountiful stage, abundant with peppers and melons. But the sweet potato vines looked sad; I hadn't watered them nearly enough (partly due to leaks in the drip irrigation I didn't fix) and they succumbed to an aphid infestation because of their poor health. Luckily the garden's new stewards nursed them back to health.
Peppers of 4th St, and bermuda grass Aug 2011
Sweet potatoes have a long growing season, especially when the gardener (myself) neglects them at important early stages of their growth. By early November frosts have already arrived here in the Valley and most summer crops are dying out. At Pleasant Grove Farms where I work the rice harvest is nearly complete and out of the other crops, only one 100 acre field of white corn (for tortillas) remains to be cut. But the sweet potatoes are still there just across the river from where I now live in Sacramento, and it's time to head to Woodland and dig them out before the fall rains saturate the ground. Tomorrow at 1 PM myself, Maris and Sacha, the caretakers of the garden, along with a few friends will engage in a great unearthing of what I hope to be a hidden abundance. We've poked around in the soil a little bit but I must say that I have no idea how many tubers will be lurking in that good Yolo County earth. That's the excitement of growing a crop whose edible part hides underground.
The highly acclaimed Churros stand, Woodland Nov 2011
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