First, we should start by recognizing that okra is awesome. They grow in heat and drought. They have beautiful palmate leaves and stunning hibiscus-like flowers.

And fried okra! How do I love thee? So much that I wrote this Fried Okra haiku -

Fried Okra is the

absolute best side that I

know of at Lubys

But, alas, how would we give out fresh fried okra on the MLF trucks? And while I eat fresh okra raw, it is generally accepted that I am weird. So we are left with – pickling.

For a long while I thought that pickling was hard. That if done wrong, I would harm the very people I want to help. But it is canning that requires skill and special stuff. It is through canning that I can spread Botulism throughout the city. Not pickling, specifically refrigerator pickles.

So you start with okra -

The trick is, not too large. They get very fibrous. If you are in doubt of the toughness of an okra, cut some off and try it. Like my Mama always told me, “If you can’t chew it raw, pickling ain’t gonna help none, honey.” OK, she never said that or anything like it, but she would have been right if she did.

Rinse them off well and drain the water away. Then pack them in a jar, any clean jar. I use old jam and pickle jars. Add in one clove of garlic.

Then bring the following to a boil -

• 1 cup cider vinegar
• 1/3 cup water
• 1 teaspoon dried hot red pepper flakes
• 1/2 tablespoon dill seeds
• 1/2 tablespoon kosher salt
• 1/2 tablespoon sugar

Pour the boiling mixture into the jar with Okra and garlic.

Put the caps on. Careful, still hot. Duh. Let cool on the counter.Then, when cool enough to hold, put them in the refrigerator overnight. Then, sometime soon, put them in a cooler and haul them to the MLF commissary -        903 South Capital of Texas Highway Austin, Texas 78746. Put them in the walk in cooler (don’t let the door close on you in there, what a way to go!) and let some one know they are there.

There you go. Instant spicy, sweet, okra goodness.

This seems simple, you say, and it is. There are different plants growing in the garden, with different fruits and or vegetables to harvest, so you need to account for that. You will not find potatoes on the branches of potato plants, or tomatoes under ground on the roots of tomato plants. And please, stop pulling up the tomatoes looking for potatoes.

To break it down by our current veg selection -

• Tomatoes – We are in an absolute race with the local “wildlife” to see who can harvest more tomatoes. This is war, and we are losing! Harvest if they are red, orange or even 2/3 orange. You’ll see tomatoes that have burst, have rotted on the end and that we lost the race to and are half eaten by birds or squirrels. Please pull these off and throw any damaged tomatoes into the compost bin. Gently pluck off and keep the good ones – try not to bruise, do not refrigerate.
• Cucumbers – It is the goal of our cucumber plants to hide their cucumbers from us. They consider it a victory if they can hide a cucumber long enough for it to grow larger than Steven Hebbard’s forearm. These plants are very good at this and you can go over the cucumber bed three times in row and still find new cucumbers. Persistence is the key word here. And pain – cucumbers are spiny. You can wear gloves or just toughen up a little bit, for the love. Harvest anything bigger than your index finger. Just grab and gently twist. A pocket knife to cut the stem is even better. Try not to bruise and then do refrigerate.

We will be attempting to make our cucumbers into pickles this weekend! If you know anything about pickling or would like to learn about pickling, please post a comment or email me! This is a cry for help!

• Potatoes – we will harvest them all at one time when the plants have died all the way to the ground. I thought about harvesting them early, but I think Steven Hebbard would have driven over and put me in a choke hold if I’d tried it. So we will wait, I don’t want him choking me. Have you seen his forearms? (they are like really big cucumbers)
• Broccoli – I don’t think we are harvesting any broccoli. They seem determined not to produce florets. I think we got them in too late, or that they are just unhappy about sharing a bed with the potatoes. Hear this broccoli – You have until the potatoes die down to do something, anything; when they go, you go -to the compost pile! Ha! Last laughs on you, broccoli.
• I’m sorry, I’ve always disliked broccoli.

What to do with your harvest?

• You can take it to the Mobile Loaves and Fishes Commissary at St. John Neumman Catholic Church ; Call MLF to make sure someone will be there - (512) 328-7299
• You can bring it to me at Church on Sunday – leave it under the side table in the main hall and I’ll grab it between services – please email or comment to let me know to look for it.
• You may not eat it. You want to eat fresh, garden tomatoes? Two options – grow your own or eat the ones ruined by the birds. If eating bird mongered tomatoes makes you squeamish, you just don’t like garden tomatoes enough to need to eat one.

And so we delve into deep (and contested) botanical waters. While everyone can agree that gardens need water, and compost making is so entrenched in the organic garden ethos that it has moved right past accepted and on to celebrated,  fertilizer can rile up the faithful. Yes, that fertilizer! The one where we evil humans force feed our plants, while simultaneously polluting our ground water and supporting the petrochemical industry. Right? No – there is a better way.

We have many organic options that are made from real dead stuff that is not so long dead as to have been turned into oil. And if used according to the label instructions, it is not going to run off into our streams (remember, even organic is bad if overused). We use a seaweed solution that was given to us by Steven and the gang from Genesis Gardens. A garden just isn’t a garden if it doesn’t smell like the fish counter at a 1970′s Safeway, or maybe that is just me. But hopefully you’ll agree soon.

The step by step -

• Try to fertilize as early in the morning or late in the evening as possible. These events are signified by the sun being lower on one horizon or the other.
• Open the plastic tub onsite and ….
• Get out the 1 gallon pump sprayer
• Get out the one gallon jug of fertilizer
• Do NOT dump the one gallon of fertilizer into the sprayer! Are you crazy?
• Instead, add about two caps of the fertilizer to the sprayer
• Add water up about 3/4 of the way full
• Screw on the lid and start pumping the, well, pumpy thing
• when you hear air hissing, it is fully pressurized and is about to explode, please run for your life (kidding, not about it being fully pressurized, just the explosion)
• Start to spray all the plants and beds. Soak the entire plant and soil around the plants. You will have to re-pump the sprayer several times.
• I find it takes about two sprayers full to get the whole garden, for now. My current hypothesis is that when the plants get bigger, it will take more. Don’t you love science?
• Rinse out the sprayer – don’t waste that water! Throw it on a tomato plant or something, thank you.
• Stand back and smell that stinky air! You did it!

The low down -

• oversimplification - compost is decayed or decaying organic matter and all the micro-organisms that helped do the decaying
• we need compost for the garden. I don’t want to wax too poetic about compost – plenty of garden writers have already – but it is important to feed the soil to feed the plants (I think I do wax a bit later in the post, I couldn’t help myself)
• we have compost bins at the garden to make compost, here is how

1. You make a salad and keep the trimmings, make coffee and keep the grounds, rake up your leaves and bag them or even make eggs and keep the shells. No meat or grease, please – but any vegetable matter besides weeds. They make all kind of cute compost containers but a big bowl in the refrigerator has always been my (but not my wife’s) favorite method. Don’t chill the leaves, of course, they can stay outside.
2. Bring said materials (now called compostables) to the garden
3. Open the top of the designated compost bin – the active bin will be bin #1 – the southern-most (closest to the gate) bin
4. Dump in your compostables
5. Sprinkle with a little (maybe a 1/4 to a 1/2 gallon or less) water from the hose
6. Turn slightly using the garden fork
7. close lid
8. Stand back and
9. let the magic happen – worms and fungi and bacteria will go to town on the stuff you were just too high up on the food chain to eat. They will eat and poop and live and die. The temperature will rise in the pile to 160 degrees – you could, but shouldn’t, cook a steak in there.
10. On some work day when the bin is full we will turn the entire lot over into bin # 2 and start again.
11. Then some fateful day, we will check our compost and it will look not like banana peels, coffee grounds and oak leaves; but instead look like the blackest, freshest, best smelling dirt you ever saw. We will rejoice and mix it into our planting beds.
12. More rejoicing
13. Repeat as needed (both composting and rejoicing)

Gardens need water. Sometimes it falls from the sky, and if that happens often enough, you live in Seattle. But we in Austin must irrigate our gardens. Because Christ Church Garden is hip and cool and conscientious and cheap, we installed drip irrigation and this is how it works -

If no significant rain within 7 days (1 inch of rain or more is significant rain) run the drip system -

1. You notice it hasn’t rained lately (way to go, oh noticer of things!)
2. you check the latest What Up With That post and it’s comments section on the blog and make sure no else has run the drip line within the last 7 days
3. you check one spot in each bed two inches deep with your index finger and find – a) wet all the way down – NO water needed today, b) moist all the way down – 2 hrs of drip, c) moist half way down – 4 hrs of drip, or d) dry as a west Texas county – 6 hrs of drip.
4. You turn on the drip faucet 1/5 turn
5. you set the timer as you deemed necessary above (trust yourself – you’ll know!)
6. when you get back at the end of the day, turn off the faucet, look around for giant puddles or dry areas signifying drip failure – no water wasting allowed.
7. Post a comment that you watered on that week’s What Up With That post, including something witty or thoughtful, please.
8. Bask in your green thumbed garden success.