The Fink Farm Dirt

Our great tomato plant -- great in productivity, great in flavor, great in height -- has succumbed to gravity. Fortunately, it appears to have been a gentle collapse of the bamboo supports rather than a stem-snapping disaster. We're still harvesting tomatoes from it. During the week, we harvested enough to make another batch of L.A.  DWP-dried tomatoes. But we also got a great tip from Dorothy Reinhold, the shockingly talented creator of Shockingly Delicious about roasting and preserving tomatoes using a recipe from heartbeetkitchen.com.   Trying that recipe is definitely in our future -- if we can squeeze enough tomatoes out before our prize plant curls up its roots and dies. This weekend harvesting required reaching deep into the dark unknown between the stems. Tomato vines have prickles! And who knows what might be lurking down in there . . . I'm becoming more and more convinced that fences are the best way to go with tomatoes, but obviously they'll have to be w...

With our tomato harvest coming in fast, we were faced with the need to: Cultivate an untiring passion for tomato-centric meals; Distribute the harvest to friends; or Find a preservation method. This usually means canning (or cooking and canning, if you want tomato sauce or stewed tomatoes), which doesn't have a lot of appeal on hot days. Several years ago we did try canning. Tomato canning is a good starting place for a beginner because the acid in the tomatoes helps prevent botulism, so you don't have to worry quite so much about wiping out a dinner party with home-canned tomatoes. As I recall, a neighbor had a bumper crop of San Marzanos. They did their own canning and distributed the overflow to friends.  I loved the name. "San Marzano" just rolls off your tongue -- like, well like Italian with a really good accent.  It's just such a pasta-ready name. Until then, the tomatoes I knew were anonymous as soon as the Magic Marker washed off the ...

One day we were congratulating ourselves on our tomato harvest, and it seemed like the next minute the plants were turning brown and dying. To the best of our ability to discern (with the help of the Google Extension Service) , we have aphids. We noticed some dark colored insects flying around initially.   From Natural Living , I learned that of the more than 4,000 species of aphids, about 250 are a danger to crops. Sometimes called plant lice, these pests pierce the stems of plants to suck out nutrient-rich sap. In the process, they spread viruses and secrete a fluid that attracts sooty molds that can cover a plant's leaves and block the sun. The viruses they carry can kill potatoes, citrus fruits and grains. There was some good news in this article -- and some bad news. There are a number of things you can do to deter or get rid of them -- but some don't work in a water-starved area and others we've tried and we still have an infestation. Here were the suggestions:...

This summer, the mottled umbrella-like leaves of an butternut squash plant have popped up on the west end of Fink Farms. It's interesting since we never planted butternut squash. In fact, we have never had butternut squash in the farm. But we have composted butternut squash remains, and we have had other volunteer plants from using compost. (The ever-helpful Google Extension Service offered up an anecdote about a man who scattered his rich homemade compost over his front yard -- and ended up with butternut squashes shading his St. Augustine grass. True? You tell me . . . ) It's hard to keep a compost pile running hot when you're feeding it out of one and a quarter kitchens. (Karen is the one because she just has to take a short walk from her kitchen to the compost pile; I'm the quarter, because composting for me requires collecting decaying veggies, putting it in my car and driving it over to Karen's. For awhile, it got to be such a problem that I was freez...

When you're saving water, the first step is to get the water where it's needed in the most direct way possible. No sprinkler heads rising like swans in a ballet to spew water 18-inches above the ground, splashing sidewalks and gutters. No sprinklers nodding back and forth sending sprays of water as tall as a child. Nope, it's irrigation dripping directly at the base of a stem or water bubbling at dirt-level. You can't get much more direct than an olla (pronounced oy-ya ). In the irrigation world, an olla is a clay pot, usually with a round bottom and a longish thin neck that is planted in the dirt next to plants that need water.  The dirt is mounded around the pot so that only the end of the neck shows. Water is poured into the opening to fill the buried pot. The clay absorbs water that in turn is absorbed by the dry earth surrounding it.  The plant gets a slow steady supply of water. Because the pot is buried, there's little exposure to the air and evaporatio...