Kale-o-Rama

So it has been Kale City around these parts for the last month and a half. A friend of ours, Laurie, gave me a ton of baby Red Russian Kale starts back in early June -- told me that if I would help her weed them out, I could have them! WEED, I say! It took me 3 tries to get a healthy patch going (the first 2 rounds got eaten and beaten roundly and soundly by the local slug populace -- looked more like I was growing nets than greens). But I guess 3rd time's a charm.

Each time I transplanted new kale babes, I fertilized the soil more and more and more, in the hopes of giving the plants something to eat once they were in. I think the soil was so depleted that the poor little guys just couldn't make it. The photo above is a closeup of a portion of the kale I've planted all along the left side of our house. I'm saving it up in Seal-a-Meal bags in the freezer, and am harvesting about 2 huge armfuls every two weeks. It's just amazing! My goal was to grow 1/3 of our greens for green smoothies, and I've surpassed that by a long shot! In case you didn't know, kale and spinach freeze quite nicely, especially in vacuum-sealed bags like I've been doing. And then you can just bust off a chunk of leaves and reseal the bag and pop it back in the freezer whenever it's smoothie time. The key is to make the smoothies while the kale is still frozen. Don't let it thaw, or it can become a bit of an icky thing to touch.

I've probably already got enough kale in the freezer to last us for 2 or 3 months of smoothies, and once the kale harvesting season ends (which I understand can last well into the winter), I'm hoping to have enough to last us until it comes up again next year.

I'm ADORING having all this organic bounty; about $150 worth if it was store-bought and organic. The way I figure it, I will likely save my family over $800 in greens purchases this year alone -- and that's just for the smoothies! Wait until I start getting lettuce coming up for salads! So far, I've harvested kale on 6/25/09, 7/18/09 and today, 7/26/09.

Below, you can see what the patch looked like before I harvested a ton-o-kale.

Now here is what it looked like after. WOW!

Poor little bald kale patch. But it just comes back like gangbusters every time I harvest, so I don't think I've hurt its feelings too badly. We had thunder, lightening, and a WONDERFUL ozone-scent-filled summer downpour yesterday afternoon and throughout a good portion of the night. I admit that I was getting behind on my garden watering, so the tomatoes, basil, blueberries, strawberries, sweet cicily, kale, cucumbers, zucchini and fruit trees are in hog heaven today. No matter how much I water them with a hose, they are never as happy as when they get nature's water -- rain they could soak up yesterday and warm sunshine most of the day today. You may be able to see the raindrops on the closeup shots of the kale. To the right is a shot of today's harvest. I put the clippers I use to cut the kale from its stems on top of the pile to demonstrate the size of the enormo-pile I picked. Believe it or not, there is a black 12"x12" platter underneath all of that kale! (In the background, flowering oregano, sweet cicily, and strawberries sit in planters.)

After haulin' in all that kale, all I had to do was shake it off to get the excess water off of it. Fortunately, there was so much rain yesterday that there was no need to wash it (actually, there rarely is any need to wash any of my home grown produce). I use something called Thalassa Mix from a place called Grow Greens and it has something like 92 nutrients in it. All my life I've thought that I had a "brown thumb", but now I think that thought I killed the plants with some kind of bad juju, when it was really just me not knowing that I should fertilize the holy living heck out of the soil before I started. I'm not affiliated with this company Grow Greens in any way, but I gotta tell you, whether you are growing something in the ground or hydroponically, this Thalassa Mix is THE way to go. Transplanted babies don't go into shock, harvests are 3 times more bountiful (in my experience), and the plants are so strong that they naturally keep pests off themselves.

Above is the mondo-pile put into a mondo-bag, ready for sealing and freezing.

And here it is after, with all the air sucked out of it.

It truly does amaze me how much air comes out and how much kale one can store in one's freezer. Just look at the picture below. I'm not even using 1/5 of my freezer space for 2-3 months of the healthiest, most local smoothie greens I can get my paws on! Excellent! Last, I just wanted to show how much waste there isn't when growing one's own organic food. Because my garden gets all it needs via the best fertilizer money can buy (in my humble opinion), I don't ever have to spray or douse anything with anything. I will put a little chopped-up hair trail around the base of the kale to keep the snails from crossing and participating in The All-You-Can-Eat Snail Kale Buffet, but that's the extent of my pest control. And with mulching, there's no need for herbicides, because only what I want to sprout up does. (Plus, I eat most of the dandelions, if they get into the garden.) So if you're wondering how many leaves I threw away, how much waste there was, what rotted "on the vine" or what my ratio of harvested to lost kale was, here's your answer:

Yes. That would be one single, sprouted, raw almond on the left side of the photograph. Out of all that kale, THIS is all I had to put into my compost! Not bad for one day's work! :o)