Calling all you Betty Crockers and pastry-chef wannabees, or just lovers of chocolate and all things dessert. Bring your best sweet creation to the Gold Star Park and enter to win the first ever SPFC Dessert Throw Down - you could go down in history. A prize worthy of dessert awesomeness will be awarded. The prize is $25 gift certificate to Fante's. Even if you don't win best of show, going home with a belly full of yummy treats is a good consolation prize! We will also have volunteers available to answer your questions about our progress and accept new member-owners (so bring your checkbook). Five people joined up at least week's event. Let's see if we can get five more! For your listening enjoyment Gold Star Park welcomes The Knife & Fork Band (according to their website: Too unpredictable for “folk,” too loud for “acoustic,” too unpretentious for “indie,” too complicated for “punk,” too rough for “chamber-pop,” and more band than “singer-songwriter”). Dessert-judging (and tasting) and the music get started at 7 PM. Remember to stay hydrated!

Join the South Philly Food Co-op for its 1st Annual South Philly Garden Tour! Help us celebrate all the hard work of some of your neighbors, enjoy some the greening efforts in South Philly, AND support the Co-op all at the same time!

1st Annual South Philly Garden Tour Saturday, September 10, 2011 (Raindate September 11, 2011) 11:00am-3:00pm

Check-in begins at 10:30am at Urban Jungle (1526 East Passyunk Avenue) to pick up tour map and details. The Garden Tour will be a self-guided ticketed event, and will feature over 18 public and private gardens throughout South Philadelphia. Participating gardens will have their doors/gates open for the duration of the event, and will have someone available to greet you, show you around, and answer questions.  Local businesses will provide refreshments stops throughout the day. Tickets are $20 in advance or $25 on the day of, and are currently on sale at:

• Urban Jungle, 1526 E. Passyunk Avenue
• Grindcore House, 1515 S. 4th Street
• Ultimo Coffee Bar, 1900 S. 15th Street
• Online

This is one of many fundraisers that will help us raise the funds necessary for conducting a market analysis, and eventually opening a storefront here in South Philly. Help us make it a success - buy tickets for yourself, your friends, and your family! If you need additional information, please email [email protected].

Adam Forbes at the Nationalities Service Center's Refugee Urban Farm Project sent put out a request for donations (of produce) that we are happy to pass along. NSC is setting up a loose gleaning/food distribution network for our refugee families in South Philadelphia. The Growing Home Community Gardens are a great community space and have provided a lot of fresh food to the Bhutanese and Burmese refugees. (To read more about them and to see a picture of the garden at 700 Emily Street in action check out this South Philly Review article from a few weeks ago). Unfortunately, they can only grow so much produce on their small lots and the families are desperate for more produce. If any of you urban farmers or gardeners out there happen to end up with a lot of extra produce that you can't sell or donate - please consider donating it to the Bhutanese and Burmese families! They already gleaned some holey greens, turnips, extra squash and hot peppers from other farms and it has gone very well. Please contact Adam at forbesfarmer (at) yahoo.com if you have any questions or would ever be willing to donate produce that you grew. He could arrange to come pick it up from you. The Growing Home Garden is among the many gardens we are in conversations with to be part of the South Philly Food Co-op 2011 Garden Tour on September 10 (mark your calendar... more info to follow). Please consider supporting them any way you can.

Here we are, in the throes of summer heat! Personally, I love the all the food that comes with summer. Whether you’re talking about a fresh tomato, juicy watermelon, or a grilled piece of meat, I’m all about it. It’s great to be eating and drinking al fresco too, but when the temperatures climb close to 100 degrees, it’s just too hot to do anything, let alone cook in a hot kitchen. But you have to eat, you can’t eat take-out every night, and who has the energy to cook when it’s so stupid hot outside?

This dish is an almost no-cook meal, especially if you buy a grocery store rotisserie chicken. Great for a summer time dinner or to pack for your honey’s lunch. It goes together in a few minutes.

Serve on pumpernickel with some tender butter lettuce or watercress. And some potato chips. What? I love chips.

Apricot Almond Chicken Salad with Lemon Poppy Buttermilk Dressing
Serves 5-6 people

• 1.5 lbs bone-in skin-on chicken breasts (usually 2 breasts, or buy a whole chicken from the deli section of your grocery)
• 1.5 tsp kosher salt
• 1 tbsp canola oil
• fresh ground black pepper

1. Dry brine your chicken breasts by rubbing the salt all over them and resting in the fridge for 3-4 hours. Then dry off the chicken and season with canola oil and pepper.
2. Preheat oven to 400 degrees and roast your chicken for 40 minutes or until it reaches 163 degrees. Don’t worry it’ll keep cooking, and you chicken will be perfect and moist.
3. Chill the chicken. Or if you are using a grocery store chicken...you are here already.
4. Pull the chicken off the bone and large dice. Place in a medium bowl with....

• 10 dried apricots, thinly sliced
• 1/4 cup toasted almonds, sliced or slivered
• 2 green onions, thinly sliced
• 2 tbsp parsley, chopped
• 1/3 cup celery, finely diced

Stir together the following to make the yummy dressing and combine with the chicken and other ingredients:

• 1/2 cup mayonnaise
• 1/4 cup sour cream
• 3 tbsp buttermilk
• 3/4 tsp lemon zest
• 3 tsp poppy seeds
• 1/2 tsp fresh black pepper
• 1/2 tsp kosher salt

That's it. Enjoy!

Let's talk seafood. 

Have you seen Otolith at your farmers market and wondered what it was all about?  We were curious last summer and found out that they are a CSA for seafood - or CSS (Community Sponsored Seafood).  There are several different sustainably harvested fish programs you can participant in such as salmon, sablefish, Dungeness crab, and halibut.  Last year we decided to order salmon and loved every bit of it.  We received 15 lbs of line caught wild salmon from Alaska for $180 - 5 lbs. of Coho, 5 lbs. of King, 3 lbs. of Sockeye and 2 lbs. of Pink. 

Salmon is full of Omega-3 fats and other nutrients lacking in farm-raised "Atlantic" salmon.  One of additional perks is that we pay less than retail price for the best quality. Salmon similar to this would sell for about $18/lb. at a Whole Foods.  The fish is cleaned, portioned out, flash frozen at -40 degrees and arrives to us vacuum sealed at our farmers market.  It's the best!

This year, we decided to get both salmon and sablefish (Black Cod).  We just picked up our first bit of the sablefish and I baked it spanish style with olive oil, lime juice, fresh tomatoes, red onions, and homegrown jalapeno.  It was so delicious that I have a feeling it will be a staple dinner in our house this summer.

For more information about signing up for your own share, please visit Otolith's website.  They also have a store that you can visit by appointment, I promise you won't be disappointed!

After a little setback dealt by Mother Nature last week, the Music in the Park series is a go for tonight at Gold Star Park. The park, located at 6th and Wharton, underwent major transformation this spring and now has a fabulous green space perfect for an evening of food and music! The South Philly Food Co-op is partnering to bring food fun to the well-established summer music series organized by Friends of Gold Star Park. We’ll also have membership applications and volunteers on-hand to answer questions. Bring your checkbook or your credit card and join the co-op on the spot! Every Thursday in July at 7pm join South Philly Food Co-op, Gold Star Park, and your neighbors Music (and Food) in the Park. Tonight features music by The Philadelphia Ukulele Orchestra. Food will be provided by you (and me and all of us). It's a potluck! I already know that Alison and I are bringing along a cold sesame noodle dish and judging from Cassie's latest Facebook pictures there will be some yummy almond blossom cookies. Bring something tasty to share - meet and mingle with your neighbors and like-minded folks interested in food, community, and music.

Our weekly contributor Sarah DeGiorgis emailed me earlier this week to let me know she's on vacation and away from the garden but that she could still put a short post up. What a trooper! I told her to enjoy the week off and that we're looking forward to seeing how her plants do without her around during one of the hottest weeks of the year. (Hope she has someone to water them!)

I agreed to sub in for the week and share some photos of my own adventure in urban backyard gardening. Alison and I have a set-up that is similar to Sarah's with:

A raised bed that's about 3 feet long, 10 feet wide and 18-20 inches deep...

...a wooden box we use for herbs...

...several containers with flowers, herbs or vegetables...

....four Wally Pockets that we invested in to dress up the otherwise blank cinder block wall that separates our neighbor's yard from ours...

...three rectangular containers with trellises for climbing plants, and...

...my little lavender plant in its own little pot.

Some other time I will tell the story of this year's garden (and include pictures) but to set that up, I'll share the abject failure that was Garden 2010.

2011 is our second year doing a garden. The first two summers we were in our house we spent most of the time painting the interior of the house and paid little attention to the outside. Last summer, after painstakingly removing from the bed a huge butterfly bush, a bunch of lamb's ear, some kind of evergreen shrub and more weeds than I would have thought possible, we dug out about 2 feet of dirt and discarded it by taking multiple trips to return the soil to the great outdoors in Fairmount Park. Don't worry... there wasn't any trash in the soil or anything particularly bad. We just did this because of all the things we had read about potential chemicals or other nasty stuff that could be lurking and since we wanted to grow food, figured we'd start from as clean and fertile a base as possible.

In that dirt's place we put a mixture of organic garden soil and compost that we got (for free) from the city's recycling center near Belmont Plateau (that was an interesting trip... a Subaru with ten plastic-lined cardboard boxes early one weekday morning).

Three by ten may not look big but when you need to fill it with about 24 inches of stuff, well... that's a lot of stuff. Our friend Craig helped us out and soon we had a beautiful, pristine bed of dirt and five, pretty ceramic containers. All that was needed was to plant. We got all of our plants from Greensgrow in Fishtown. Our haul included three different tomato varieties, an eggplant, two zucchini, two yellow squash, kale, Swiss chard, collard greens, a green pepper, a cucumber, basil, mint, sage, parsley and oregano. For decoration we planted a trumpet vine some vinca vine, a couple clematis and a susie mix in troughs that we stuck trellises in and put up against the bright white stucco wall of our neighbor's house. We did our planting in mid-May and sat back to wait for our bounty of tomatoes, cucumbers, herbs and the rest.

Fast forward 3 months to the end of summer 2010 and we had learned a few lessons:

1. Too much water isn't a good thing. Early rain and cool weather teamed up to kill the oregano that we had in a small plant. I pruned back the dead stuff a couple times and it rebounded but finally gave up.

2. Too little water is a terrible thing. In the beginning I was Mr. Enthusiastic. I was out there at 6:30 every morning with the hose, dutifully watering around the base of all my plants and being careful not to get too much water on the leaves where the drops would turn into tiny magnifying glasses that burn holes through them. When the temperatures soared and the rains stopped altogether in mid-July through August, not only did my schedule make it tough for me to get out there every morning but the stuff was completely dry from the afternoon sun - especially in the containers. End result: Container-held kale and Swiss chard didn't die but didn't really produce. Container-held Green peppers that did grow (about 4 of them) were the size of golf balls, we got two or three eggplant before that plant died.

And tomatoes, whose plants grew like crazy in the beginning of summer in our new, rich soil, would stop growing until watered and then grow so fast after being watered that they split their skins.

Most of the tomatoes were good for nothing more than frying. The clematis went about three feet up the trellises and died. The trumpet vine did okay but also dried out. Too little water also stresses herbs like basil and mint which causes them to "bolt" or flower since they think their days are numbered and they have to hurry up and reproduce. Once basil bolts it changes the flavor of the leaves so that they are bitter (but they smell great).

3. Bad Bugs suck. There are good bugs - lacewings, lady beetles, bees, butterflies - but we still haven't really figured out how to attract a lot of those (though it's better this year). What we were able to attract last year were big black flies that would land on our cucumber and squash leaves in swarms and just sit there until you shook the plant causing them to rise up like a cloud and buzz around for a while before settling back down. I read somewhere that they were sucking the moisture out of the plant. They were also leaving disgusting droppings on the leaves (and tomatoes). The black flies basically made us not want to be back there. Fly paper caught a few but only made more of a mess and didn't stop the problem.

We also had tiny, tiny white flies that landed on the leafy greens - the kale and chard and collards - and feasted.

The stress of the dry weather rendered the plants less able to fight off these invaders. At the end of the summer, really gross green worms started appearing on the tomatoes and green caterpillars with yellow spots would appear daily on the parsley (which otherwise was growing pretty well). The green worms had white things on them that I thought were part of them but which I learned were the eggs of a certain parasitic wasp that would eventually hatch and burrow into the worms, eating them from the inside while not being a threat to the plants. Considering what the worms and other bugs were doing to my garden, that process was particularly satisfying. Saw a few slugs but last summer was so hot and dry that even they seemed to retreat to moister, cooler places. Eventually we found out about all-natural, plant-based insecticidal oils and soaps which when diluted in water and misted on leaves every couple weeks would kill the white flies and repel the black ones. By then it was too late. The infestation had taken hold. I basically gave up on the kale and chard. Which leads me to lesson four.

4. Kale and chard are bad asses. I may have given up on them but they didn't give up on themselves. Toward the end of summer I stopped watering them and decided to let them go in peace. To my surprise (again... never gardened before) once the temperatures dropped in the fall and the rains came back, so did the kale and chard.

In fact, they kept on going through November and December even as temperatures dropped into the 30s and 40s. The only thing that finally did them in was 20 inches of snow (which nearly did me in too). I had just planted them at the wrong time. Kale and chard like cool weather so should be planted really early in the spring or very late in the summer, especially if you're planting seeds and need two weeks for them to turn into plants. The kale I planted from seed in April this year has already yielded three or four huge bunches that Alison estimated were worth a total of about $60 if purchased at Greensgrow (all for a five-dollar pack of seeds). The chard I planted late but am expecting it to bide its time like last year before taking off in the fall.

5. Squash plants are out of control. On the front row of the bed we planted two zucchini and two yellow squash plants. Behind them were the tomato plants and the cucumber plant. The squash plants quickly spread out with their huge leaves and giant fruit, making it difficult to reach the plants behind them.

They made a mini jungle that I'm sure was populated by mini monkeys, mini pythons and at least one mini lion (judging from the feline droppings that I occasionally found). The lesson was... fewer squash or zucchini plants.

The ones we had yielded a ton of fruit, some as large as bowling pins.

(Other lesson... don't let them grow that large on the plant. They turn woody.) So the yield was great but at the expense of being able to tend to the rest of the bed. I'm probably making a different mistake with the zucchini this year but I'll talk about that in a later post.

6. Don't let those herbs bolt. See above. You can trick the basil into not turning bitter by clipping off the first signs of flowers. Once the plant starts directing its photosynthetic energy towards the flowers, the flavor of the leaves suffers. Snip those flowers right off.

7. Apparently, letting your tomato plants grow like wild isn't good either. At first we were thrilled with out fast and tall and bushy the tomato plants got. You can see them in the photo of the whole bed above. Surely these would yield dozens and dozens of sweet, juicy, delicious fruit. Well, you already read what happens when you water sporadically. We also learned that if you let the plants grow and grow, they feel secure that they will live long happy lives and not feel pressure to make new plants. In other words - less fruit. A least a few different people told us that you should prune the tomato plants and not let them get more than three or four feet high. I'm still not sold on it. I suspect our lack of pollinating insects had something to do with the low yield. But I'm trying it this year anyway. More to follow on how that works. So 2010 tomato plants - nice big plants, very few crappy split-skin tomatoes.

By summer's end I had grown so frustrated that I couldn't wait to uproot many of the plants and send them off to the compost heap. All I wanted was to look out on the pristine 3x10 bed whose rich, black soil would hold the promise of future harvests rather than the stench of a failed season.

I left a few tomato plants in place to die and Alison pulled out the now spent zucchini, eggplant, squash and cucumber plants.

We emptied the small pots that held many of the herbs and the larger pot that contained the mint (which put up a good fight for most of the summer but finally could live with my watering schedule). As I said, I left the chard and kale, mostly because I couldn't be bothered to lift the heavy ceramic containers they lived in. And the clematis seemed so pathetic that I just cut the dead brown strands away from the trellis and didn't bother with the rest of it.

The approach of fall and winter gave me time to step back from the whole experience and think about what I needed to do differently for 2011. In my next post - far shorter, I promise - I'll share what I did in during the winter months. Baseball general managers make trades and sign free agents to make their teams stronger. Gardeners (which I don't consider myself to be yet) also have their off-season acquisitions.

Sarah will be back next week, hopefully with her plants still in tact.

P.S. After growing and dying and growing and dying and then completely disappearing, guess what came back by October of last year:

Pretty tough stuff.

On which committee do you serve?

I am a member of the Outreach committee and most recently became part of the Board of Directors.

What do you do for a living?

I work in training and leadership development for a corporation in Center City.  I specifically work in onboarding, making sure that new hires have the tools, resources, and training they need to be successful in their new roles with the company.

How did you get involved with the food co-op?

My neighbor and partner-in-crime, Marsha Shiflet, knocked on my door and told me about the start up of a co-op in April 2010. I've been involved ever since.

Why do you want a food co-op in South Philly?

I love food! Buying it, cooking it, and eating it. Where I buy my food and what I eat is very important to me. I can't wait until I have a store in my neighborhood that I can have access to everyday to purchase the ingredients that I need and I feel good about who I am supporting.

Why should people join a food co-op?

There are many reasons to join a co-op.  For me, it's about the food. I would encourage people to join SPFC because we will provide the community with a place to purchase organic and local foods and be a place where they can play an integral role in ensuring the quality of the food and products that their hard-earned money goes towards.

What is your favorite meal to cook and why?

I don't have a favorite meal to cook (in fact, I rarely cook the same meal twice) but I love simple and fresh foods and I'm partial to Mediterranean cuisine.  My perfect meal is bread and olive oil, cheese, roasted vegetables, olives, and hummus.

 

This morning, some women from the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society came to judge my garden for the City Gardens contest!  We had a nice time sitting outside discussing plants and they even gave me some tips for my two tomato plants that are not doing as well.

Other than that, I am watching tomatoes turn red, like the little guy in the picture below.

And my Beauty Queen tomatoes are finally showing some progress!  Here is the tallest:

This little monkey is about 4' tall!  I think that this counts as a "leggy" plant since there aren't too many leaves and branches, just that one main stem.  Unless I have no idea what "leggy" means in terms of plants, which is also entirely possible.  But I think that these little ones kind of got lost in the beefsteak forest behind and around them and had to struggle to get enough sun.  I've since moved things around to try to give some of the smaller monkeys more sun and give all the plants a slightly different view and neighbors.  Obviously this is important.  But seriously, I like having things in pots so that I can do that and then I notice things like little weeds to pluck out and dead leaves to clean up and things that I wouldn't notice just from looking at all the plants from one angle.

I've been thinking about this container thing a lot lately.  On the one hand, I like the challenge of growing things in containers and now I have a pretty good grasp of when plants are getting too big for their containers because they don't grow as quickly and dry out very fast.  But it would be so much easier if I could just put all these things in the ground!  In the picture above, the blue pot in the lower right-hand corner is a variety of eggplant called Black Beauty.  Those are pretty good-sized leaves, but there is nothing close to a flower on any of those eggplants.  By contrast I have a friend who has the same variety of eggplant but hers is a few feet taller, filled with lovely purple blooms, and she even has actual eggplant!  That she ate!  (Am I jealous?  Never!)  Anyway, the reason my friend's plant is so much larger than mine is that hers is in the ground and has no container restraining it so it can grow and grow to its heart's content.  Also, plants will overwinter in the ground since a small quantity of dirt in a pot will freeze much faster than the ground does.  All this rambling is just to say that I think I would like a mix:  pots for smaller plants and beds for larger things, like, ahem, tomatoes.

These are the nasturtiums I got in West Philly a few weeks ago.  I have somehow turned into the type of person who buys plants everywhere she goes and then carries them around the city like a crazy person (note:  if you don't necessarily like strangers talking to you you should probably restrain from carrying plants around the city and on public transportation.  Take it from someone who knows.)  I never thought I would grow, let alone buy for a dollar, a nasturtium in my life.  My parents had them when I was growing up and once, upon learning that you could eat the flowers, I stuffed a whole red flower into my mouth and thought it was just about the foulest thing I'd ever tasted.  The taste is so strong and peppery that I could taste it for hours after and for years even the smell of nasturtiums used to make my stomach turn.  But looking out at my garden the other day I decided I needed more flowers and nasturtiums, besides being good companion plants for tomatoes, also love hot, full sun.  And they are bright and cheery!  So I willingly purchased a plant that I vowed as a little girl to never go near again.  Getting older is weird.

Here are some squash blossoms.  I'm sorry for all the squash blossom pictures but they are just so bright and happy-looking.  And here are lots and lots of tomatoes:

I'm looking forward to these guys all turning red.  Tomato harvest!  Friends, get ready to help me eat these!

Sarah DeGiorgis has lived in Philly for five years and is finally starting to feel like a true Philadelphian, though she still detests cheesesteaks.  She enjoys reading, watching bad tv, eating and cooking good food and digging in the dirt. Catch up with her continuing efforts to grow food in South Philly by clicking here.

With the weather forecasters calling for a 100% of rain (really? 100%?), the organizers of the Music in the Park event have decided to postpone. Barring similar rain events, the rest of this month's events will continue as scheduled. When we know when tonight's event will be rescheduled, we will pass the info along.