Bountiful Boxes

Photo by Jonathan Eckstein via AllPrinceton

Garden educator Dorothy Mullen is leading Lawn-to-Food tours and workshops on the second Saturday of every month from until October. Each session will start at 9:30 a.m. at Riverside Elementary School. The workshops are free, but participants are required to register in advance by emailing Dorothy. The next workshop is on Saturday, May 12:

Dig up some herbs to take home.  Start seeds for warm weather crops like basil.  Learn to set up container gardens and learn to manage a compost pile. Take home raspberry bushes.

And the upcoming schedule is:

June 9
Healthy Children, Healthy Planet Fair (I’ll be at this one with a display of Bountiful Boxes beds)

July 14
Learn to cut and dry herbs, share herb recipes, and take home some herbs to make tea or ice cream: sage, mints, stevia, lemon balm, pineapple sage, rose geranium and lemon verbena.

August 11
Bug tour.  Examine them with bug boxes and hand lenses.  Are they friends or foe?  Release lady beetles with us and explore the compost pile for insect treasures.  Hunt for butterfly eggs.  Learn more about managing a compost pile.

September 8
Reduce, re-use, recycle.  Learn ways to turn your recycling into compost and save money at the same time.  Try layer gardening, make seedling cups for spring use from newsprint, and use cardboard as free weed barriers.

October 13
Harvest greens and make soup at Dorothy’s house.  Schedule this day will be tour, work and harvesting, cooking and eating.

Tamara Dujovne and Matias Zaldarriaga of Princeton have a new garden, thanks to the Princeton School Gardens Cooperative. The Cooperative had a booth at the recent Communiversity festival in Princeton and gave away a Bountiful Boxes bed. I brought the bed to their house on Saturday and helped assemble the kit. I say “helped” because there were plenty of able workers in the two delightful girls and their enthusiastic father.

Matias, a physicist at the Institute for Advanced Study, was particularly happy to be the unexpected recipient of a free raised bed because the in-ground garden plot he created last year wasn’t terribly successful. As Dorothy Mullen pointed out in a recent post, the great thing about a raised bed is that you get to start immediately with terrific soil.

He said he’s looking forward to tomatoes in the new bed. I evangelized for green beans.

We lined up the 4′ boards across the corner posts (matching the numbers written on the end of each board to the numbers written on the corner posts), and the girls placed the screws in the holes.

Then Matias (left) and the girls got to work driving in the screws, while I (right) lent a hand. It was good to see the kit go together easily. The oak corner posts have pilot holes that are custom-matched to the boards, which makes the work of driving in the screws truly child’s play!

We finished the construction in their yard near where they’ll place the bed. Belle Mead Coop donated the soil that will fill the bed. When they’ve loaded up the bed, they’ll mulch around it so it’s not necessary to mow right up to the wood.

After I left, Matias got down to the real work and fun – here is a picture that Tamara sent:

Note that they’re using the square-foot gardening technique, a system for simplifying and maximizing the use of a garden bed. I’m looking forward to seeing more pictures as their garden grows.

How about your garden? Please send pictures and we’ll post a gallery!

Master gardener and educator Dorothy Mullen wanted to know the moment I was finished setting up the  bed at Whole Earth Center so she could get started putting in seeds – given all the queues of an early spring, a gardener can hold on only so long. Well, here’s a note from Dorothy about her first planting:

I planted edible pod peas.  In New Jersey we usually say to plant peas around St. Patrick’s Day.  It’s been so warm I did it a little ahead of time.  Peas are a cold weather crop and should not be planted well into April, although you can do a second planting in the fall.  What’s nice abouat these peas is that the whole plant is edible.  The tender leaves can be harvested and eaten in salad or stir fries.

Next up: a row of climbing peas by the trellis.

Dorothy will be contributing gardening tips throughout the season, so pull out your trowel and stayed tuned.

This is our demonstration garden bed at the Whole Earth Center - showing off our new white oak boards.

The puzzle and wonderment of our mild winter is giving way, among the gardeners I know, to sheer excitement about the imminent growing season. That means: Bountiful Boxes is opening for business!

This year, I’m excited to introduce a new material for the garden beds. I’ve found a source of locally and sustainably harvested white oak. White oak is a very dense, rot-resistant, insect resistant wood. We’ve gotten great life out of the cedar and fir beds we’ve sold in past years, but I’m expecting even greater longevity from this oak. The boards are still 1-inch thick, but they’re “rough cut” which means they literally have a somewhat rough appearance that I think looks quite nice in the garden. Also it is a lot less wasteful than planing fatter lumber down to a finish-quality board.

Want to see it?! Stop by the Whole Earth Center in Princeton and see our demonstration bed. We’ll soon be planting it with sugar snap peas, pushing ahead of the traditional March 17 planting date.

Also new: We’re now set up to take orders right here on this website. We’ll still have order forms over at Whole Earth Center, but the simplest way is to click the Buy Now button at the right or send me an email.

Happy spring!

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?