FarmTina

Food or Seed? Survival Questions For a Farmer

I've been cleaning up after last week's tragic heat wave disaster where I lost quite a few of my plants. The plants I was especially bummed about were my edamame soybeans- I lost 9 out of 14 edamame plants, dried up and brown. They had been growing beans for a few weeks and were just about ready to be harvested when the heat wave hit.

But as I was accepting defeat, cutting and cleaning and getting ready to re-plant in the space where these soybeans once grew, I realized they weren't a total waste... I had accidentally made dried beans!

Beans, such as my edamame, grow in pods. Some bean pods are edible (snow peas!), but some pods are just cases to hold the food. Humans figured out long ago that beans can be stored for long periods of time by pulling them out of the pods and drying them into hard little rocks (the oldest presered soybeans ever found were in Korea, dating back to 1000 BCE). When you want to eat the dried beans, simply soak them in hot water and they are magically rejuvinated! This method of preservation is so simple and smart that we still buy dried beans from grocery stores today.

Aside from being food, beans are also the seeds of the plant. In their natural environment the beans would grow on the plant until the end of the summer season, when the pods and beans would dry out and eventually fall off the plant into the soil. The dried seeds would hibernate there in the soil until warm wet spring, when they will sprout into new plants. The circle of life! AHHH!!

The heatwave did all of this for me. It dried up the nearly-ripe beans into nice preserved little balls, so when I cut down the plant, I had handfulls of dried soybeans. I collected all of the beans. (And PS, you can see in the photo below that I'm wearing my slammin' new Sally Hansen Salon Effects nail strips in the pattern "Girl Flower"!)

Once I had these dried beans, I instantly thought of real life farmers. When something like this happens, they have to make a difficult choice: Do they use these dried beans as food for their family, or do they save them as seed for next year's crop? If I was living only on the food I grew and the heatwave demolished more than half of my soybeans, this would be a life-changing decision. We lost our crop so we don't have enough food to eat-- maybe we should eat these beans? But losing the crop also means we'll have less seed to plant next year-- maybe we should save it to guarantee we won't starve one year from now?

Thankfully I'm not a subsistance farmer, but this is a very real situation for farmers all over the world. Since I have plenty of other food to eat, I'm not hard pressed to make a decision yet and my dried edamame beans are in a ziploc bag in the fridge.

What do you think: Food or seed?

 

 

The 2011 New York City Heat Wave: Not Good For The Garden

You may have heard of, or been affected by, this heat wave that's been moving across the country recently. From what I read, New York City hit 104 degrees last week, and the heat and humidity lasted for so long that the 91-degree day we had this week felt like a cool rest from the heat. But here's the thing: I wasn't in NYC for any of this.

I took an 8-day roadtrip down the Pacific Coast Highway last week, driving from San Francisco to Los Angeles in a fancy new (rental) Mustang convertible, stopping at tiny towns along the way. And yes, it was fantastic, thank you for asking. A good friend offered to care for FarmTina the entire time I was away, and I was grateful for the help and felt a little guilty about leaving her with the daily responsibility. But then my guilt grew when, sometime in the middle of the week, I emerged from a tiny no-cell-service valley town to find texts from her that I had missed while in the dead zone: What special care does the garden need when it's over 100 degrees?

Honestly I had no idea what to tell her. I responded, water the plants multiple times each day, instead of just once. Water early in the morning so that the plants have time to absorb the water before the heat evaporates it away. I thought, move the plants, which are all growing in buckets, into the shade? But that seemed ridiculous, like one of those TSA 8-oz liquid rules that gives the appearance of doing something helpful but it really has no effect on anything.

My kind friend worked very hard to care for my babies, and I am so apologetic that she had to deal with the garden at its worst! Despite all her care and attentiveness, some of the plants didn't make it through the intense heat and sun. You might remember dear readers that this is the second disaster to strike FarmTina in the last year... Brooklyn tornado, anyone?

The wilting plant in the yellow bucket is my edamame, gone beyond repair. Bummer! That bucket is a found & reused Ikea metal trash can, and I'm sure that material contributed to heating up the soil beyond healthy levels. The second edamame plant to the right in a plastic pot is a little brown around the edges but salvageable. The eggplant (the other plastic pot and the black pot) are looking great and are still thriving and blooming!

My poor cucumbers! Before I left they were vining and looking healthy, but now they've totally collapsed. It looks like some cucumbers attempted to ripen during the extreme heat but eventually gave up when their vines died. However, the marigolds growing in the cucumber pots, which act as a natural deterrent to cucumber beetles, are doing fine.

You Still Have Time: Growing Edamame Soybeans

This year I'm growing edamame, an East Asian soybean that is picked immature before it ripens. This was a total experiment and I had no idea what to expect, but they've actually been incredibly easy to grow and are already starting to develop bean pods. Take a look:

These beans have a small root system so I was able to plant them in containers pretty close together. This 14 inch pot is successfully holding 9 healthy plants. For comparison, I'm using the same sized pot to grow ONE eggplant plant. Talk about using your space well!

The edamame plant grows upright and does not need any support like my string beans do. It first developed tiny purple flowers (so tiny that I almost missed the flower blooms!) and then the flowers push out fuzzy green seed pods. I'm really into the fuzziness factor. That's pretty much the best part.

Here's a look at the plant in context of the garden (edamame are in the 2 pots in the bottom right corner of the photo):

I'll harvest the soybeans when the leaves have turned a slightly yellow color and the beans inside the pods are plump. I plan to eat half my harvest fresh and then freeze the rest to use throughout winter. To do so, just blanche them for 2 minutes before putting them in the freezer.

Ok, now here's the good news: you still have time to plant your own edamame! If you plant seeds now (near NYC), you should have a harvest at the end of summer/early fall. Do it, do it! So easy! Fuzzy plants! FUZZY PLANTS!!

If you want to grow edamame, look for seeds labeled Green Soybean, though some seed companies simply label the seeds "edamame" for easy identification. I found my seeds at Whole Foods, but you can also get them online-- check out this seed company specializing in varieties of edamame.