So what’s making the difference? Vegetables, of course: we have to buy them now that the December freeze turned my winter garden to mush. Still, “twice what it was” doesn’t tell you much about what you saved by growing your own.

But Nancy Lewis-Williams, Master Gardener and teacher of last year’s popular vegetable-growing class, HAS kept a running tally of what her harvest has been worth to her pocketbook. From June through December first, she weighed all the produce she’d harvested and kept a running tally, in pounds, of 33 different crops, from apples to zucchini. 

“Well, maybe 75% of it—I didn’t count the stuff we ate right off the vine,” she hedged. “And it also doesn’t include all the greens we grew in early spring, before I started this count.”

Her computer went on the fritz the same week I asked for her end-of-harvest totals, so I stepped in and looked up current prices at Thriftway. So here’s another hedge: we didn’t use height-of-season prices (except for the raspberries, which I had recorded for myself in Quicken when I bought a half-flat this summer).

Given all these qualifiers, what did we find? That Nancy had harvested nearly $500′ worth 0f organic vegetables per MONTH from her 2000 s.f. garden. 

The harvest total was worth $1810, using winter Thriftway prices for non-organic produce. If compared to organic prices, the harvest would be worth $2952.

“And I’ve still got a month’s worth out there in leeks, kale, carrots, chard, turnips, rutabagas and spinach,” she said.

The Big Pay-offs

The big pay-off, both in weight and in dollars grown, was from POTATOES. With a pound of seed potatoes for “Rose Finn Apple Fingerlings” from Ronnigers in Colorado (www.ronnigers.com), her return was hundredfold: 110 pounds worth $440 smackaroos. She also planted around 10 lbs of seed potatoes for regular spuds and got 250 lbs in return, worth $250 or $500 at organic prices. 

Leda Langley told me last spring that you get the biggest bang in calories and productivity/acre with potatoes, and here Nancy’s proved her point.

Other seeds with a large return, literally, were: TOMATOES at 109 lbs, worth at least $218 and probably well over $300 organic; 95 pounds of WINTER SQUASH (delicate and butternut) worth $1 per pound; 36 pounds of CUCUMBERS worth $72 or twice that if organic; LEAFY FRY GREENS like kale, chard, and spinach that come bagged at premium prices anywhere from $4-6 per pound. “I didn’t count all the corn: I must have pared kernels off of hundreds of ears.” 

If you’re a fruit-fancier willing to pay for fresh off-season berries, you might want to invest in a few bushes and a freezer. Nancy’s 28 pints of RASPBERRIES were worth at least $65 compared to in-season local berries, or $448 compared to last week’s Chilean winter imports at a Buck an Ounce. 

Other results: HERBS: 13 handfuls worth $65; 15 lbs of LEEKS worth $45; 32 pounds of BEETS worth anywhere from $1.50/lb to $5/lb for organic; 29 pounds of CARROTS worth from $22-30; 15 lbs of CABBAGE worth 50¢ a pound but four times that organically. 

The Investment

My husband, always the skeptic, pointed out that there’s costs involved: water, fertilizer, seed trays, seed. 

“And you HAVE to have a deer-fence,” Nancy added when I asked about her costs. Deer-fencing runs about a dollar a running foot; you could fence a garden her size (2000 sf, equal to a 40′x50′) for  $100 plus the poles and gate materials.

Looking at her records, she estimated she spent $100 on seeds, $30/month on water, and $100 on organic fertilizer and amendments. Given that one doesn’t water in three of the months of her trial, that’s approximately $300 a year to install a 2000 s.f. vegie patch producing $3000 worth of food. That’s a tenfold return for your money.

Now Nancy’s put in a greenhouse last year; with such a large expense, you’re looking at costs close to what the author of “The $64 Tomato” ran up. But you don’t have to spend a lot on gear, as Steve Solomon points out in his latest book, “Gardening When It Counts: Growing Food in Hard Times”: you can direct seed instead of growing or buying transplants, you can start warm-season fruiting plants in a sunny window, you can blend your own fertilizer, and you can restrict your tools to a hoe, a bow rake, a good shovel, a sharp knife, and a hose. 

You may not be able to grow as large a bounty as Nancy did, but most folks DO realize some savings. In a poll done last year by the National Gardening Association, they found that “a well-maintained food garden yields a $500 average return per garden.”  

So save yourself a few or a LOT of bucks: Grow Your Own.

Stories I’m working on:

• A Seed Swap at the Food Summit Meeting: bring some, take some.

• Gates for deer-fencing

If you have ideas for stories or inputs on the above ideas, comment here or write me at karendale@centurytel.net.

Three-plus recipes for dealing with zucchini overload.

SEPT. 29—You have big zucchini?  Bill Green’s are cannonballs.

That’s literally true. A few days ago, I visited the alpaca farm of Bill and Lee Green last Saturday, and they loaded me up with more produce than I could carry. You run that hazard when you visit a gardener at harvest time.

I brought home various peppers—surprising my husband, who wanted to make chile verde but didn’t have peppers at hand—yellow paste tomatoes and a red kuri squash. But the biggest motherlode were these dark green, round zucchinis, nearly big enough to wear their own baseball caps. 

Lee called them “cannonball” zucchini. However, when I’ve google that name on the Internet, all the photos show smaller, paler, summer squashes than what weighs down my kitchen counter. 

These websites say that the round zucchini varieties, like “eight ball”, “one ball” and “ronde de nice”, want to be harvested when from 1-3″ in diameter. Up to 4″, you stuff them. Over 5″, you give them to naive friends who’ll be happy to stagger away loaded with mystery produce, not realizing what’s about to hit them in the kitchen.

Three-plus Recipes for Zucchini Surprise

My first recourse was of course ZUCCHINI BREAD, a triple batch that I fobbed off on visitors who wandered in MY front gate. The recipe I used came my old pal Victoria Kaplan of Seattle, who contributed her recipe to a fund-raising cookbook for the Seattle Institute of Psychoanalysis titled “Fresh, Fast and Fabulous.” Zucchini bread recipes are dead-common, so I won’t include that recipe here.

The second recipe was a ZUCCHINI PANCAKE, SUNNYSIDE UP, which Bill likes to make for breakfast. Taking a younger, (no bigger than 4″) cannonball zuke and cut across it in slices no thicker than 1/3″. In a large skillet, heat about 1-2 tablespoons of olive oil in the skillet, dropping in some diced onion, scallion, sun-dried tomatoes, or diced meat. When the oil’s hot, ease in the zucchini slices so the bottom’s covered. Turn heat down to medium, and cook slowly until the zucchini flesh is starting to become fork-tender. Flip, and pile your savories on top. Add sprinklings of chopped herb like cilantro, basil, or tarragon. Then ease an egg into the pan, either to the side or right on top of the zucchini. Cover and let the egg set. (if your broiler’s on and you’re cooking in an oven-safe skillet, you can finish off the egg under the broiler). Season with salt, pepper and more diced herb. Serve hot.

The third recipe was quite good: ZUCCHINI FRITTERS.  This one’s fast: from grating to eating in half an hour. First, put about 1″ of oil into a frying pan and heat to high. Meanwhile, dice one small onion, grate one carrot, and grate about 2 cups of zucchini (a diced green onion would also be tasty in the mix).  Combine all in a large bowl with one egg and about 1/2 cup of flour, and plenty of salt and pepper, plus a pinch of spice like nutmeg, cumin, maybe cinnamon or garam marsala. Your mixture will be gooey, like a wet muffin batter. The oil should be hot by now, so with a big spoon lift out golf-balls of batter and ease into the hot oil. (I thought I should coat these batter-wads with flour before frying, but actually that deadens the taste). When one side’s golden, turn and fry the other. After a few minutes when the fritters are golden, remove and drain on paper towels. Serve hot. 

And finally, the combo recipe: a ZUCCHINI STACK featuring (from the bottom, up) the zucchini pancake, oven-dried tomatoes, diced onion, and cilantro, a leftover fritter sliced into a thin round and fried with the zuke pancake, all this topped with a farm-fresh egg from Island Meadow Farm, fried on the side then gently lifted onto the stack of zucchini treats. Now THIS is a gourmet way to get rid of zucchini!

And I’ve still got one and a half monsters to go…

Though I’ve been gardening off and on for 25 years, it was the long snows of last winter that drove me absolutely MAD to garden (and maybe you, too?)

During weeks of white and cold, I kept my world green by rereading many of my gardening books. Then, for Christmas, I was given Michael Pollan’s “The Omnivore’s Dilemma,” which has shown countless people how much energy goes needlessly into industrial food production, how much better it is for us and for the world if we could produce our food close to home.  As I nodded “yes YES YES!” all the way through the book, I was also saying to myself:

Maybe something like this happened to you, too. Certainly my growing interest seems in sync with a national trend. Maybe it’s the economy, maybe it’s fuel/food price inflation, maybe it’s just that we want to be healhier, homey, happier. But news on farmers, slow food, the locavore movement seems everywhere, They’re even growing their own vegies at the White House!

It’s growing locally, too: when a class on starting a vegetable garden was announced last spring in the Beachcomber, 60 people showed up. The Food Bank got local funding to start its own vegetable garden. We’ve seen stories on small farms and giant-corn growers, classes on kitchen potagers and food preservation. Just last week, the Beachcomber ran a story about high school kids growing fresh produce for school lunches. Kids, eating their own vegetables!

So that’s why this blog: to learn what the Island has to teach us about planting, growing, harvesting, cooking, and caring for our pieces of the garden that is Vashon. 

We Islanders have wonderful resources for gardening. We have greater access to land than most. We can gather all kinds of natural amendments: leaves, seaweeds, barnyard poo. We can get gravel, stones and concrete cheaply, close by. We have great nurseries, wonderful garden tours, farmers and a farmers’ market, and more than our fair share of Cranks and Originals, those obsessive gardeners who show us what wonders can be produced from our land.

The articles and the blog are a natural offshoot of me tracking down Vashon experts to find out what makes Vashon gardens work. Some of that, you may already have seen in the Beachcomber: my articles on starting seeds, growing tomatoes, sowing a fall/winter garden.

I want to write about Vashon’s particular soils, its weather conditions and patterns, what plants do best in Maury gravel or in north-end blue clay. I want to walk the fields, snoop the gardens, ask the Cranks all the questions I can think of, just so I can learn to grow better vegetables and have a more wonderful garden. And if I’m writing for you as well as me, my information will become more organized, hopefully more amusing, and definitely more complete than some scattered notes scribbled for my personal use.

So watch for interviews from other gardeners, growers and experts. I’ll tell of my own goof-ups, dreams, and small victories, and I hope you will share yours via the Comments section. I’ll trial vegetable varieties in the garden and in the kitchen, and I’ll share photos of tours here and “abroad” off-island.

I hope these articles inspire you AND me to become better gardeners and to know our Island a little better.

Let’s Garden On, Vashon!