Chef Improv

Local Farms!
You can't get much more local than your own backyard! In my case, it was the "front porch farm". The sunny side of our house is a big giant craftsman style porch with river rock columns. I decided to convert it to a farm with some failures and some successes. One success? The hanging sweet orange and red cherry tomatoes. I planted two plants upside down in these tubes hanging from our eves. The plants were funny because they kept fighting gravity and bending their arms right-side-up, growing toward the sun. I ached for their branches which looked so contorted. It didn't make a difference in fruit production. The small container required diligent watering and feeding. The fruit production lasted 3 months at least. Very sweet, sun kissed and delicious. What failed? My pots of squash. I had many varieties of zucchini and yellow squash in pots that grew for the first month to teenage size, then stopped. The fruit formed but shriveled before growing more than an inch or two. At least the cucumbers were a success. We enjoyed many sweet asian and lemon cucumbers all summer long, but my asian yard long beans did not produce. Even the hot south side wasn't enough for them to mature. On the up side, the green broad beans, flat and fat, grew 12 feet and produced for a long long time. Delicious. I had them growing in a giant pot with horse manure from my friends pasture. These were indeed super beans and I thought I could climb them to the sky almost.

My favorite was the nasturtiums. I tried strawberies and sugar snap peas in the hanging tubes and they produced minimally, but one of the tubes had the most prolific apricot striped nasturtiums (2 varieties). They acted as a sail and twirled in the breeze. I have the seeds and perhaps it's not too late to grow them this season.