As always, Joel’s work is copyrighted…enough said.

I should say that we have plans to get the soil in that part of the yard tested to make sure there isn’t any lead contamination (we do live in an urban environment after all) and if the area is “clean” we are going to plant 2 fruit trees in that spot — a Gravenstein apple tree & a Santa Rosa plum tree. We’ve been dying to have 2 of our favorite fruit trees in the yard that will actually work for the cooler West Berkeley climate (example: On August 23rd it was a “balmy” 74 degrees & it was our first hint of summer this season!). Both of the fruit trees we are planning to put in will work well in that climate, unfortunately my absolute favorite fruit tree (Pomegranate) isn’t an option since they need warmer temps to produce.

The point is that this tree was planted around 25 years ago and had gotten damned big for my tiny little yard. We deliberated over the fate of the tree for about 4 years. As the thing grew larger and started to put 2 raised beds in perpetual shade, I decided it had to go. I had mixed emotions about cutting down something that large, but I’m committed to growing food and we’ve put sufficient permanent plants in this yard to make up for the carbon sink of that large and out of place tree. RIP Monterrey Pine, you will be remembered but not missed. Here are some photos of the tree and of the Professional Tree Care Company workers taking it out.

My wife told a co-worker & talented cartoonist Joel Hodge about the tree removal and he quickly summed up the situation by condensing our behaviors and personalities into this sharp and witty cartoon titled “The New Backyard.”

NOTE — this cartoon is copyrighted. If you want to reach the cartoonist, I will put you in touch with him.

In case you are wondering, to the horror of my neighbors, I do garden in my bathrobe (they are lucky I don’t garden in my birthday suit, after all this is Berkeley!), too much sun does give my wife headaches, and she is always saying I need to keep the garden clean and orderly. She can’t help it, it’s an Austrian thing…vee must haalf ordah in ze gaaten schatzi! I have a feeling I’m going to pay for that smart ass comment, but I can’t help myself sometimes.

2010 was the first year that I grew Georgian Fire garlic and I was impressed with the flavor & the size of the bulbs as well as the size of the individual cloves. They are great for cooking with because don’t have to struggle trying to take the skin off of tiny little cloves that you get with many different types of garlic.

Georgian Fire garlic comes from the Republic of Georgia (as in the former Soviet Republic of Georgia…not the state of Georgia) and it is a porcelain garlic which means it is not only one of the healthier garlics, it is also one that stores pretty well into the spring. In fact, we had garlic from our 2010 summer harvest all the way into May 2011 before we had to purchase garlic from the store while we waited for the 2011 harvest.

My success last year made me too complacent this year and I failed to get out in the spring and give the garlic a good helping of organic fertilizer…and I paid for that complacency with smaller bulbs this season than what I harvest last season — live and learn. I did however get plenty of garlic scrapes, which are the flower spikes that you cut off the plant so the garlic will put more energy into developing the bulb than in developing seeds. Then you can use the scrapes in stir frys or even chop them up and use them to spice burgers you put on the grill.

I planted 42 cloves in November of 2010 and in June 2011 I harvested the crop, hung it to dry in the garden shed for 3 weeks and ended up with 5.75 lbs. The interesting thing about porcelain garlic is that you won’t find them as often at the store or farmers market because they have larger and fewer cloves, which means that growers have to save more of the harvest for next year’s seed. It also means that porcelain garlic tends to command higher prices.

They arrived on June 22nd — 3 touchnflow wands of the same design as the ones that failed, and 1 colormark wand with a ball valve to shut off the water. Based on Jeff’s explanation of galvanic corrosion in his comment to my original post on Dramm & his follow-up email to me, I don’t expect the 3 touchnflow wands to make it through a full season of normal use (currently we are only using one of the new touchnflow wands).

I’m predicting that the colormark wand with the ball valve to be the superior product that will last multiple seasons. I haven’t had the time to give Jeff a call, but I have his business card and am thinking about calling him to ask why Dramm Corporation manufactures the touchnflow wand design when the company knows it is prone to fail. From my perspective it seems analogous to manufacturing a product with an intentionally engineered lifespan that keeps the consumers buying new product each season…until they get irritated and buy a Chinese-made watering wand to see how it holds up compared to an American-made Dramm (like I have done).

It’s unfortunate, but this country has collectively forgotten what engineering high quality made-to-last products means (here’s a hint — customer loyalty, larger market share, and being able to charge a price premium). Instead this country has become a nation that expects short product lifespans, that is content to throw everything away and buy something new at the drop of a hat, all the while, never asking why a $30 watering wand didn’t last.

I had grandparents that lived through the Great Depression and my European in-laws lived through the economic devastation caused by WWII, so in my family there is a deep familial understanding of taking care of things and buying products that last. I wonder if there is anyone at Dramm that had an upbringing that put a similar value on high quality built to last products? If there is, why aren’t these the people running the company and proactively eliminating product lines that have been proven to quickly fail with normal use?

We may not be in an economic depression now, but one thing is clear — the fallout from the 2008/09 recession has a lot more Americans thinking about the issue of manufacturing quality and how to more carefully spend their limited financial resources. I hope that Dramm Corporation sees the proverbial writing on the wall and chooses to pull substandard products from the market before more of their customers vote with their wallets and buy a product from another company.

Due to my interest in urban “farming,” I decided to take a tour of an urban farm when the IUH was offering tours on 5 different farms in the SF East Bay this month. I was surprised to find out that aside from the animals and the bee hives, my garden is just as diverse and plentiful as the one that I toured.

The key difference between my garden and the urban farm I toured centered around the way the plants were arranged. Whereas my garden is structured and organized (more European as my European spouse describes it), the urban farm garden area was more free flowing with curving paths and a bit of controlled chaos that added some interesting character.

It was good to have a benchmark to compare what I’ve been doing for 3 years and realize that I’ve been on the right path as a result of reading the right books.Since I’m on the topic of books, the ones that I’ve read that have helped the most in my gardening endeavors are:

1. Golden Gate Gardening
2. Plants & Landscapes for Summer-Dry Climates of the San Francisco Bay Region
3. Seed to Seed: Seed Saving and Growing Techniques for Vegetable Gardeners

If you start with those books and follow them up with some good cookbooks that focus on Farmers Market produce, you’ll be on your way to eating well from your own backyard without taking classes (unless you want to!).

My favorite cookbooks for the urban gardener

1. Eating Well In Season: The Farmers Market Cookbook
2. Local Flavors: Cooking and Eating From America’s Farmers’ Markets

These wands were 30″ long offered the ability to water at the base of plants with minimal effort for the gardener and they came in a rainbow of really nice colors. I bought one for $30 and loved it…until micro-holes appeared along the 1/3 section of the wand closest to the water nozzle. Since I’ve never dragged the wand on the ground, I had to conclude that the holes were the result of the metal wand touching some rose thorns when I watered. I used silicon sealant to repair the leak and things were looking good until the handle of the wand started to leak and I couldn’t find any way to repair what was obviously a manufacturing problem.

I kept the wand around for the rest of the season looking wistfully at it and wishing I could figure out a way to repair it since it cost me $30. It finally made its way to the landfill when my wife protested that I was keeping a useless piece of trash that was cluttering up the garden.

The next year, I decided to give Dramm the benefit of the doubt and bought a new yellow wand (at this point my investment in Dramm added up to $60). The wand worked like a dream and then my wife asked me to buy one for the hose on her side of the garden. I hesitated buying another $30 wand, so I went to OSH and got her a 30″ wand, manufactured in China. It wasn’t a pretty color like the Dramm and she thought I was getting the good stuff for me and being frugal over what I bought for her (a bad position for me to be in ). So, I returned the Chinese-made wand and bought my wife a pretty red Dramm wand (which increased my Dramm investment to $90).

Before the end of the summer (2010), both Dramm wands had failed. My yellow one was once again leaking from the handle onto my shoes and the red one would no longer close off the flow of water.

I bought Dramm because of the design, the color choices, and because it is an American-made product. Supporting American-made products is important to me because that creates jobs! Unfortunately my economic patriotism cost me a total of $90 over three purchases and all I have to show for it are faulty watering wands. Judging by my experience with faulty Dramm products, I’d have to compare Dramm product quality to 1970′s era Detroit manufactured automobiles that gave us no-quality products including the explosively popular (pun intended) Ford Pinto and the Chevy Vega.

All joking aside, Dramm Corporation has serious manufacturing quality issues that cause its products to reliably fail. If you are looking for a watering wand and don’t want to be bent over a barrel to purchase an expensive and faulty product, save yourself the headache and (God I hate to say this), go to the hardware store and buy yourself a Chinese-made wand at less than 50% the cost of a Dramm. At least if the Chinese-made wand has a manufacturing problem it won’t harm your gardening budget as much as a Dramm will.

I hand water my entire garden and I need wands that will work now that summer is here. So, I’ve notified Dramm of my displeasure and I’m ready to vote with my wallet by laying down some American greenbacks to buy two Chinese-made watering wands at OSH. Unfortunately due to Dramm’s lack of product quality and the lack of other American-made products in the stores, I’ll also contribute to the trade deficit we have with China. My act of protest won’t single-handedly contribute to the loss of American jobs, but if Dramm continues down the path of poor product quality, it most certainly will play a part in lost American jobs.

There are 2 types of chamomile that are generally grown for herbal tea / medicinal use – German Chamomile and Roman Chamomile. In my garden we’ve chosen the more common German Chamomile since it is the type that goes into the chamomile tea we are familiar with, it’s what my wife grew up with Europe, and it has the flavor and medicinal properties we want from the plant.

If you’ve never grown and harvested your own chamomile to make tea with, there are a few things you’ll want to know.

1. One German Chamomile plant can get really big if it is in an ideal location (approximately 18-24 inches tall and 2-3 feet in diameter, which is what mine did this year). You should only grow it in a sunny spot where you have room to let it get big so that you can maximize your harvest.
2. You want to pick the flowers in the morning & only after the petals have opened fully and are starting to stretch downward towards the ground. This is the time when the essential oils are at their peak. If it isn’t windy when you are picking your chamomile, you’ll probably detect a faint, but wonderful aroma of freshly cut apples.
3. Dry your chamomile in a warm, dark place spread in a thin layer across newspaper or cardboard. You don’t want the flowers to have a hard time drying out, otherwise mold will ruin them.
4. During the drying process, check on them 1x/day to make sure they are drying out and haven’t been attacked by mold. If you have sufficiently spread out the chamomile, mold should never be a problem & drying shouldn’t take longer than 1 week even when temperatures in your garden shed are in the low 60′s during the day.
5. When they are thoroughly dried, bring them inside and store them in a cool, dry, and dark location. If you want to preserve the essential oils for as long as possible you can also store them in airtight containers.
6. Don’t store your herbs in jars sitting in a sunny window like I saw in a cafe in Reno, NV around 2006/07. The heat and sunlight will break down the essential oils and flavor (and it still horrifies me that the proprietor didn’t know better since he had been in the food business since the mid-1980′s)

After all of that you’ll have your own “bulk” organic chamomile tea which is a nice tea just for drinking, but also has calming effects on the person drinking it. That is why it is used as a natural remedy for nervousness & insomnia (provided the person isn’t jacked up on caffeine & sugar from too much coffee, tea, or soft drinks).

Don’t forget that you can also mix and match other herbal teas from your garden with the chamomile if the mood strikes you. One of my wife’s favorite garden herbal tea mixes is Spearmint & German Chamomile.

Learning the history of heirloom vegetables seems to be 1 part truth, 1 part legend, and 1 part marketing hype, which makes getting the provenance details a difficult task. From what I’ve been able to piece together, the Scarlet Nantes carrot originated in France in the 1850′s (source:Seed Savers Exchange). The carrot was developed by the French seed company Vilmorin, a 265 year old seed company (in 2011) that has grown into one of the largest seed companies in the world.

The description of this carrot states that it is an open pollinated variety that is deep orange, with a very small core, and sweet, crisp flesh. From what we can tell, that description is 100% accurate. For the past 2 years I’ve been asked by my wife to grow her as many carrots as I can. So I planted more in 2011 than in the previous 2 years combined.

So far this season, I’ve harvested 68 carrots to the delight of my wife, who keeps asking for more after each successive harvest. I’m confident that I can’t keep up with her level of carrot eating and still grow other things in the garden.

(Side note #1 – that means she’ll have to cope with never having enough or she’ll have to improve her luck playing the California Lottery so she can buy me a neighboring property to expand the garden)

These carrots are supposed to have a 65 day cycle from planting to harvest, but I planted early (February 13), which is possible in this part of California. Planting that early, means a good Spring harvest, but it also means that the plants will grow more slowly, which is why I had my first harvest of Scarlet Nantes 13 weeks after planting (91 days — an additional 26 days of growing time). In the first harvest we got 23 carrots. In the second harvest 2 weeks later we got an additional 45 carrots (from the same February 13 planting).

To ensure a continuing supply, there have been additional plantings to ensure continued harvest after the Feb. 13th planting is exhausted.

Since I am doing a page on this blog about gardening economics, my wife suggested it would be helpful to document the ways we’ve been using the harvest of each of the vegetables. I thought that was a great idea after reading a ridiculous comment on the topic of gardening economics at the IDigMyGarden Forum.

Someone there said “the choice of food purchased or planted would not be the same…It’s intriguing that by having a home garden, some foodies may be driving up their grocery bills (if only on a per-item basis) because they’re hankering for something more exotic than what’s at home…”

(Side note #2 – insert an audible groan from me to accompany my rolling eyes )

Fortunately my household is more sophisticated than the person that made that comment and we plant what we actually want to use for a variety of recipes in the kitchen. This is a household strategy that we refer to as “common sense.” For those that aren’t familiar with common sense, my grandmother had a saying that explained it well:

– Common sense is the sense without which all other sense would be nonsense.

We are using are carrot harvest for:

1. Raw carrot eating
2. Stir frys
3. An ingredient in different soups