Bountiful Boxes

Alex Levine, chef at Princeton's Whole Earth Center, harvests collard greens from the Bountiful Boxes demonstration bed in preparation for serving them today.

Alex Levine, chef at the Whole Earth Center, will be serving up arugula salad and collards from the Bountiful Boxes demonstration bed today from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. Come and get it!

In fact, a general note on produce from the garden: please taste some as you walk by, especially if you have children with you. The peas are starting to come along and make a delicious snack. Just two rules: please pick carefully, using two hands to pick a pea so that you don’t tear the vine; and leave some for others.

I recently added a “super sweet 100” tomato plant — those will be delicious on-the-go snacks too later in the summer.

Enjoy!

I set up a trellis for the peas in the demonstration bed at Whole Earth Center – not a moment too soon because they had tipped over and were trying to climb each other. Despite breaking off a couple tops of the sprouts (which I ate and were delicious), I wound them around their strings and they seem to be happily on an upward course.

There are many ways to make something for peas to climb. Here’s what I did. Materials for one trellis, 5′ wide:

• 2 pointed stakes (I bought a cedar 2×4, ripped it in half and pointed the ends using my chop saw)
• 1 10′ piece of 1/2″ electrical conduit (available at most hardware stores)
• 4 deck screws (not so long that they’ll go all the way through your stakes)
• String (a natural fiber like sisal or jute)

Cut the conduit in half and flatten about 1-3/4″ of the ends, either by squeezing them in a vice or pounding it with a heavy weight hammer against a hard, flat, indestructible surface. Be sure that when you flatten the second end of a length of pipe, you line it up so both flattened pieces are parallel. Drill a hole in the center of each flattened end using a bit big enough for the shaft but not the head of your screws to pass through.

Place the stakes on the ground in front of where you plan to erect the trellis – with the pointed ends right where they’ll go in the ground. Place one section of pipe on the other ends of the stakes (the flat ends, on the end-grain) and drive a screw into into both ends. Place the other pipe across the stakes near the pointed ends, about 14 to 17″ from the points. Drive screws into the ends of that pipe.

Now the trellis is ready to stand up into place. It’s going to be floppy so it would help to have a second person. Use a heavy hammer to pound the stakes into the ground (don’t worry that you’ll be whacking on the screw that holds the pipe to the top of the stake). It might help to alternate between the two sides as you pound them it.

Tie one end of the string to one end of one of the pipes and then run it up and down in a zig-zag pattern about 3″ or 4″ apart until you reach the other end.

Once the peas are tall enough, gently train them to go up the strings by twirling the leaders around the strings.

Arugula sprouting, with peas on the background.

All the seeds we planted in April at the Whole Earth Center are coming up — the arugula was the first to poke up a row bright green dots in dark brown dirt. The chard and kale brought up the rear but are now strongly under way, each about 1/2 or 3/4 inches tall.

The peas are standing tall at a sprightly six inches or so — waiting for me to get to work and give them something to climb. It’s coming! Some evening this week I’ll install a trellis made of two cedar posts connected at the top and bottom by horizontal pieces of metal electrical conduit, on which I’ll strong some twine for the peas to climb. Hard to picture from my description, I know — so stay tuned and I’ll post some pictures when it’s done. I’ll add a bit more detail about how to make them, so you can do it yourself.

Speaking of snow pea shoots, they were the featured vegetable in this month’s Garden State on Your Plate tasting at Community Park and Littlebrook elementary schools. The Princeton School Gardens Cooperative, with funding from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, has been pairing local chefs and local farmers to bring a fresh vegetable into the school cafeterias and talk with the children about where the food comes from and how they prepared it.

Bountiful Boxes recently donated a trellis to the Community Park School garden, so as children were tasting the pea shoots, they could look out the cafeteria window and see some that they planted themselves. The pea shoot salad recipe, created  by Rob Harbison, chef at Princeton University,  will soon be posted on the Princeton School Gardens Cooperative website.

The snow pea sprouts are ready for their trellis. If we had enough of them, we could eat them!

We spent some time yesterday over at Whole Earth Center’s Earth Day celebration, planting seeds and answering questions about the raised beds. Master gardener Dorothy Mullen, who was there making seedling pots out of paper, generously donated the seeds: kale, rainbow swiss chard, onions, arugula, spotted aleppo lettuce and Tom Thumb peas. The sources of the seeds were Seed Saver Exchange and Page’s Seeds.

Now it’s just a matter of patience. Fortunately, the peas we planted last week are poking up, so there’s already something to watch!

What have you planted so far?

Collard greens in the demonstration bed at Whole Earth Center

I’ve just been able to enjoy one of my favorite beginnings: filling a raised garden bed with rich soil and putting in the first plants. Fluffy, dark, weedless, hand-scoopable dirt easily moved aside to accept four young collard plants and a row of sugar snap pea sprouts.

I’m referring to the demonstration bed over at Whole Earth Center where the cedar box is now filled to the top with the #2 top soil/compost mix from Belle Mead Co-op. My younger daughter Ruth and I put down some landscape fabric (so that the whole thing can be removed at the end of the season) and shoveled the dirt out of a pickup truck (thanks to our friend Steve Hiltner at Princeton Nature Notes for use of his truck).

The collards I grabbed on impulse while picking up the dirt at Belle Mead. The peas had been sprouting in a damp paper towel for about five days and had nice tendrils poking out by the time we dropped them into the dirt. They’re the “Super Sugar Snap” variety from Renee’s Garden.

There’s plenty more space to fill: What would you like us to plant next??

Spring is here and we’re open for business!

The Whole Earth Center and Bountiful Boxes are supporting Princeton’s Lawn-to-Food movement by offering wood kits to make raised garden beds. The idea is to encourage more backyard or frontyard gardening. We see four huge benefits:

• Providing an inexpensive source of delicious, fresh vegetables. Some of our favorites — snow peas crisp and sweet and still wet with a cool morning dew; crunchy, tender green beans casually handed to visiting friend; sun-warm heirloom tomatoes —  could not be bought at any price.
• Building community around the joy of gardening — trading bounty, advice, setbacks, triumphs and home-grown meals.
• Lowering our environmental impact by replacing 32 square feet (the size of one of our 4×8 beds) of fertilizer-hogging grass with a piece of sustainable, edible landscaping.
• Supporting garden-based education: Bountiful Boxes is donating 5% of each sale to the Princeton School Gardens Cooperative.

To see the kits we’re offering, look at our boxes page. Currently, all orders for garden beds are being handled by the Whole Earth Center in Princeton — please stop by or call (609-924-7429) to place your order. Or email us with questions.

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