Month 1 Sunset Magazine's One Block Party contest with Team Found Fruit

We are busy as bees getting our gardens planted and food projects underway. It's exciting to have 4 gardens with all heirloom varieties of veggies growing. Though the snails are continually eating our seedlings, we have planted some exciting varieties like Tigger melons which are small melons with brilliant red and yellow stripes that we're training up a trellis, Black Sea Man tomatoes that are black on the outside and green white and red on the inside, Parisian carrots which are tiny and round, and even peanuts! Kitty has started raising rabbits for our feast, and I have frozen some harvested prickly pears and nopales as well. Our bees swarmed recently but we were still able to harvest some delicious honey. It's all part of learning and perfecting the art of living sustainably.

Pic 1 is of Kitty's vegetable garden. Intensive gardening in a 72 sq feet bed!

photo credit Lori Eanes

Pic 2 is taken in Nola's yard, an oasis of fruit trees.

photo credit Lori Eanes

Pic 3 Kate and Jonah Voyageur in the garden. Just look at those tomatoes!

photo credit Lori Eanes

Pic 4 Oletta enjoying the fruits of her labor. Literally!

photo credit Lori Eanes

Pic 5 Jamie in the hive. We harvested 2 pints of honey recently from our Kenyan Top Bar hive.

Pic 6 Perfectly ripe Prickly pear fruits. We harvested fruits and young paddles or nopales to freeze away for our One Block Feast.

Pic 7 Jonah Voyageur helps water the newly planted peppers and eggplants.

photo credit Lori Eanes

Prickly Pear Cactus and You

In my yard is a fantastic huge prickly pear cactus. If I didn't cut it back it would overtake the house! This spring has been plentiful with fruits and new growth. Spectacular yellow flowers are also in bloom. I decided to take advantage of the harvest and freeze some fruit and paddles away for our upcoming One Block Feast contest with Sunset Magazine.

First I harvested some young paddles to make nopales. When they are about 8 inches is the best time to harvest.

The paddles have less spines than the fruit. Nopales are a commonly used in Mexican cooking. They are often likened to okra because they can be slimy. Proper prepa
ration helps that though. Cutting away the spines is kind of like scaling a fish. Start at the base of the pad and scrape along. It's actually quite easy.

After the spines have been removed slice and dice.

For cooking bring a pot of water to a boil and cook for about 5 minutes. Drain the water then boil more and cook for another 5 minutes. This helps to draw out the sap so they are less slimy. Nopalitos keep well in the fridge and are great with eggs, in salsa, salad, or anything really.

Prickly pear cactus provides delicious fruits called tuna in Spanish as well as the nopale vegetables. It almost needs its own blog post! Said to be a magical elixer there are hundreds of varieties of prickly pears. Made into juice, jam, candy, and ice cream prickly pear is high in vitamins a & c, calcium, magnesium, potassium, taurine, antioxidents, flavenoids, and fiber. It helps lower glucose in diabetics. It's good for brain health with taurine, and heart health by managing cholesterol. Poultices help in healing faster and fighting off infections.

Working with these juicy fruits however can be a challenge. They have hundreds of tiny spines. Some people burn them off on the stove or over a campfire. I carefully cut off the bottom and top and slice them open. The skin then peels away leaving the flesh. I usually juice it because it is quite seedy. The flavor is mellow and slightly sweet, vaguely melon like. Prickly pear cactus provides us with a meal, a dessert, and a flowery bouquet!

"Before" pics Sunset Magazine's One Block Party contest with Team Found Fruit

The first round of pics we sent in were our baselines, to establish the "before" look at our gardens and projects. Meet the team and take a look!

The first group of pictures come from Michele and Jamie's yard. Michele plays in a "green" rock band for kids and is one of the founders of Foundfruit.com, and Jamie is a full time artist who paints with glitter. We're broke bohemians who live in a working class multicultural neighborhood in Oakland and grow the majority of our food so that we can eat the organic local produce we love. There are no grocery stores in our neighborhood, only corner stores with the occasional onion or potatoes. We barter fruits and veggies, jam, and eggs with neighbors, which inspired Kim and Michele to start Found Fruit as a community outreach forum for food sharing and local sustainable living practices. Our backyard is filled with raised beds built with reclaimed wood, a kenyan top bar beehive, rain catchment barrels and citrus trees, and we are in the process of transforming our front yard into an edible oasis. The side yard houses our chicken coop and the girls free range under a massive prickly pear cactus. We drive an old Mercedes that runs on 100% used vegetable oil donated from local restaurants.

Picture 1 The front yard with pear, nectarine, and orange tree. The centerpiece of the yard is an herb spiral which we built using recycled soil and found rock. It's home to 22 different herbs. There are pea and bean towers made of bamboo, blackberry vines growing along the fence and blueberry and huckleberry bushes tucked in among the roses. We're planning to build mounds here for squash and melons.






Picture 2 We spent Sunday clearing the winter garden from our middle raised bed and amending the soil. Jamie planted seeds for cucumbers, beets, carrots, and eggplant.












Picture 3 The chickens enjoying the outer leaves and buggy parts leftover from our harvest.











Picture 4 We gathered up the snails we found while managing the garden. We're feeding them cornmeal for an escargot trial run. Our chihuahua Mini Wolf was perplexed.

Picture 5 The Kenyan Top Bar beehive in full swing of Spring. Taken during our last hive inspection in April.

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Nola Martin, 75years old, retired from the City of Oakland Office of Parks and Recreation, where she worked as Recreation Center Director for 49 years. She implemented fitness programs, gardening, and arts and crafts to underserved areas of Oakland. For the past 50 years Nola has been planting fruit trees at her home in East Oakland.

This jungle of a yard is home to 9 fruit trees! Plum, cherry, grapefruit, loquat, persimmon etc. and blackberries too.

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Kim and Oletta are excited to participate with the One Block Feast as part of Team Found Fruit. They are renting the perfect home in Oakland to grow year round fruit and vegetables. They chose this home for its sizeable blank slate back yard and its potential to be transformed into an urban oasis. Over the past 6 months, they added raised beds, fruit trees, flowers and a half wine barrel pond with a solar powered fountain, aquatic plants and home to 4 goldfish. Even though Kim and Oletta will not occupy their home forever, the fruit trees were planted with a pay it forward philosophy so that the next renters may benefit from the bounty of the trees they added.

Kim is Program Officer for a national nonprofit. She provides grants to preschool facilities for renovation and construction. Her grants include greening children's play yards with gardens and natural materials. She is also a gardener, forager and fisherwoman who grew up on farm in Eastern Pennsylvania where she has fond memories of bartering for food from neighbors. Back then, each neighbor had something to contribute. One produced honey, another apple cider and Kim and her brother sold eggs around the block. Kim believes these same barter networks can happen in urban areas. That is what inspired her to co-create www.foundfruit.com with Michele Senitzer and to enter the One Block Feast contest.

Oletta is an Account Director for a San Francisco advertising agency. She was raised in Charleston, SC and is a self-proclaimed “City Girl” but had the benefit of a grandmother who loved to garden and kept flowers and vegetables in any section of her yard where she could find viable soil. She believes there’s not a more satisfying meal than the one from food you grow in your own yard.

Photo 1 is of the garden before the transformation. This photo was taken in September 2010

Photo 2 and 3 is how the garden looks 5/6/11.

Photo 3 is a before photo of the upper bed as it was getting sheet mulched.

Photo 4 is an after photo of the upper bed with squash, beans and a Donut Peach Tree planted.

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My name is Kitty Sharkey, and I am an urban homesteader. In three years, I’ve transformed a dilapidated foreclosed house into a garden oasis and working farm named Havenscourt Homestead. Although I have a small vegetable garden, as an urban homesteader I chose to focus on meat and dairy production. Goats, chickens, ducks, quail, rabbits, and honeybees all earn their keep producing milk, eggs, meat, and honey while enjoying the freedom to free range and express their true nature. My goal is to produce 75% of my own food year around. Right now, I’m at about 50%. But in the summer when my garden is in full production, that figure is closer to 90%.

The first picture is of my vegetable garden. It’s only 72 sq feet. I practice intensive gardening, so I use every square inch as well as growing vertically. As the summer progresses, vines will make their way up the trellises to produce a wide variety of items that would take up far too much space grown in a traditional manner. My garden is definitely 3-D!

The second picture is of me and some of my critters out in the barnyard. My goats not only provide me with milk, cheese, yogurt, and ice cream, but they also serve as therapy animals. We enjoy going to schools, fairs, and other community events together, spreading the word about urban homesteading and how wonderful goats are. The kids in the neighborhood come over to play with them quite often. I think people around here have finally gotten used to seeing me walk my goats rather than a dog.

photo credit Lori Eanes

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Todd and Kate Voyageur, a carpenter and freelance bookkeeper, live in Oakland with their son Jonah.

Jonah Voyageur holding their chick Harry Potter.

A shot from the garden.

Sunset's One Block Party contest with Team Found Fruit. Experiment 1. Escargot

You may have read about Team Found Fruit getting into Sunset Magazine’s One Block Party Contest. Over the summer we will be growing over 25 different veggies and fruit, and will be taking on food projects like eggs, honey, cheese making, etc. to create a 100% locally grown feast which will happen in early September. The winners get a spread in Sunset magazine and $500 bucks. We are competing with 9 other teams from various parts of California, Washington, and a team from Colorado.Meet the Teams / Meet the Teams part 2.

We are all very excited and have divied up the grow and projects among Found Fruit's 8 team members. To get into this contest we figured we had to pull out all the stops, so we picked some pretty far out food projects, one of which is foraging for garden snails…welcome Team escargot. Needless to say this was not on my top 10 list of delicious foods for our menu…But, since we made it into the contest and have the inevitable end which is our feast, my partner Jamie and I decided to do a preliminary experiment.

First let me say that our garden snails are a culinary delicacy imported from France over 100 years ago. These mollusks are about “15% protein, 3% fat, and the rest water” says Michael Ellis of Bay Nature. They are hermaphodic with no natural predators, which is why they grow in your garden as abundantly as your plants. If, the plants survive that is, with the snails hearty appetites.

First we caught a bunch from the garden and put them in a pot covered with cheesecloth.

Snails must be purged with cornmeal for a week or more to clean out their systems in case they have consumed any poison. Some people even feed them herbs like thyme to pre-flavor, if you will…

Our dog Mini Wolf was perplexed.

1 week later we boiled them changing the water 3 times until is was clear. They were then chopped and sauteed with butter, garlic, and parsley. I expected them to be chewy but they were quite tender and well, they tasted like butter, garlic, and parsley. Not bad!

We may call on Found Fruit members to forage us up a bunch for the feast in September, but all in all I think Team Escargot will fare ok. If you are tired of those pesky snails in your garden and want to eat local food then you may want to consider cashing in on this easy to find delicacy! Bon appetite~

The Edible Landscape

Who needs a front yard? Grass requires so much water and really, can't that space be put to a better use? Second year goals for the Elephant House included sheetmulching the front yard and planting drought tolerant and edible landscape. Here's the before picture:

It started off with the herb spiral. It was made with recycled top soil, cardboard and found rocks.

First we piled the top soil about 2 feet high on top of the cardboard then weeded it. Next, we formed the spiral by pushing in the rocks and mounding the soil.

Planted it up with edible and medicinal herbs and wallah!

Next we moved on to creating 2 sheetmulched beds for edible and drought tolerant plants. We removed old borders, laid compost over the area, and then sheetmulched with burlap around some of the larger plants we had already planted.

More compost and soil was added on top of the burlap along with a layer of mulch. We planted quince, lavender, strawberries, thyme, chives, sage, and lots of edible flowers like yarrow and calendula.

Here's the second bed with an artichoke as the centerpiece, with more lavendar, sage, and several annuals.

We dug in found pavers and planted chamomile in between them to make a path from the walkway and around the herb spiral. Here's the after picture:

Notice the bamboo teepees on each side, these are our pea and bean towers. Next to these we started mounds for melons and squash. There are blueberry bushes planted along with huckleberry off to the right, and blackberry vines along the fence to the left. These will go well with the already established pear, nectarine, and orange tree. All in all there are now almost 30 new edibles growing in a space that before was all bermuda grass and weeds. The hummingbirds and bees will love it too!

Havenscourt Homestead

Unbeknownst to me I have a fellow urban homesteading neighbor. I knew there had to be more of us in the neighborhood. Well, Kitty Sharkey at Havenscourt Homestead is the real deal. From the street you see beautiful edible and drought tolerant landscaping on a sheet mulched front yard. There’s a sign that says fresh eggs in the driveway and a swing overlooking all the flowers. Hardly a clue as to what’s in back… As you come around the house in the narrow side yard there’s a young orchard of 10 or so fruit trees planted about 36” apart to one day be a fruit hedge. On the other is a large raised bed veggie garden and other smaller containers for vegetables and fruit growing. Kitty will love to take you on the tour and talk your ear off about sustainability and her family of feathered, furry, and cloven hoofed friends. She’ll give you the low down on Oakland municipal code and tell you how she put together this farm in just three years.

In the backyard barnyard the tour started off at the clawfoot tub filled with a brackish water with 3 ducks hanging out at it’s rim, quacking a hello. The homestead has a pair of Nigerian Dwarf goats that recently born a couple of kids that were hopping around. These goats are curious and friendly and especially liked eating my keys and shirt. “They like shiny things” Kitty explained. All of her animals also function as therapy animals, and are trained to be taken to hospitals, homes, and to be good with children. There’s quite a number of bunnies at the farm and Kitty will be quick to pop one into your arms. Don’t forget about the dozen or more chickens and bantams clucking around. “Do you eat them too?” I asked. “Yes all of them” Kitty answered “I hope that doesn’t bother you.”

It is astounding to see how this home on a 4000 sq foot lot has been transformed to be an efficiently running farm. It is also self governed. Everyone free ranges. “I don’t need to lock up the coops or goats at night…the raccoons would have to get through the goats to get to the chickens so there’s no problems” Only the bunnies cages remain caged, and even they get their chance to free range. On top of the converted garage are the langstroth hives which happened to have two nearby swarms when we were there. “Now what about the neighbors?” I asked. “Everybody loves me” Kitty says. She explains that on one side lives a retired teacher and on the other is a family with children and cousins many of whom have participated in life on the farm. It’s a lean, green, clean, operation running in the middle of an East Oakland neighborhood. Kitty produces 75% of her meat needs and much of her fruits and veggies. She took Bay Friendly classes and took advantage of programs like EBMUD's cash for ripping up your lawn , from websites like Alameda County’s Stopwaste.org. I highly recommend checking our her website and videos at http://www.havenscourthomestead.com/

Stalking Wild Mustard, aka Rapini

My favorite foraging find yet this season (besides fresh caught Dungeness Crab) has been the delicious, sweet and tender tops of the Wild Mustard plant seen growing all over our East Bay Hills right now.  When "stalking" wild mustard, its important to catch it at the right time, February and March.  Once you see those familiar yellow blooms, it may be too late to collect the unopened flower buds.  I was lucky with this find.  Although mostly a sea of yellow, it was only half in bloom.  I quickly went to work picking the multiple tops of leaves and stalks from each plant. 

Wild Rapini Bouquet

The unopened flower tops of the Wild Mustard plant are similar to Rapini or Broccoli Raab and just as delicious! The leaves, seeds and flower tops from the wild mustard are also edible and delicious.

Also be mindful that another similar plant, Wild Radish sometime grows right next to Wild Mustard.  Wild Radish in CA has purplish white flowers instead of yellow.  Wild radish is also edible, especially the flowers and seed pods but has a stronger taste.

Sea of Wild Mustard in Full Bloom

Mustard Close Up

I go straight for the top sections of leaves and buds.  See the perfect specimen below.  A couple flowers are okay.

Pick this whole part 

There are many ways to cook wild mustard but my favorite is to add a tablespoon or two of olive oil to your pan and heat for a minute.  Add a few crushed garlic cloves and a tablespoon or two of pine nuts and saute for a minute to bring out the flavors and to toast the pine nuts.  Then add the wild mustard tops and saute until they are a bright green color.  Remove from heat and dress with some fresh lemon juice and salt.  These also taste great with a side of fresh avocado.


Into the pan they go





Sauteed with olive oil, garlic and pine nuts - Yum!

So, now can you tell me...How do you "stalk" the Wild Mustard?