Spinach Bacon Salmon Pizza! Yes I'll have another.

Behold the Spinach Bacon Salmon Pizza!

We have decided that the three food groups of seasonal eating are tacos, stir-fry, and pizza. You can basically make them out of any seasonal vegetable or fruit with basic kitchen staples and few exotic spices. Take tacos for example, all you need to have in your kitchen is corn tortillas and refried beans. When it comes squash and sweet potato season, you will certainly hear more about tacos. Stir-fry is another good one because all you need is rice, vegetables, some meat if you like, olive oil, soy sauce, garlic and ginger.

Lately we've been on a spinach pizza kick - because we are nearly drowning in all of this fantastic spinach (you can find it at Natural Farms or the Blue Jackalope hint hint). Two weeks ago, a friend came over and helped us make about 20 homemade pizza crusts and we froze them. If you don't want to go to that trouble I'm sure you can buy them frozen, or even use a piece of focaccia.

Here's our recipe - it is approximate

Spinach Bacon Salmon Pizza - takes about 30 minutes if the crust is already prepared.

1 Pizza Crust or focaccia
1/2 # Spinach steamed until wilted
3/4 # Salmon filet
1/2 # of chopped asparagus steamed until bright green and tender
3 strips of bacon (Jeff's bacon is great - he salt/sugar cures it himself)
1/4 cup cream cheese
some milk
salt, pepper, and lemon juice to taste


Start the pizza crust baking at 450 F if it is not already cooked while you steam the spinach and asparagus. Cook your bacon and eat one piece, then chop the other two for the pizza. Sear the skin side of the salmon in the smoking hot bacon grease. Don't cook it completely - leave it mostly raw. Drain all but a few tablespoons of the grease, add some milk like you are making gravy. Let it cook down a little and then stir in the cream cheese until it is the consistency of gravy. Once that is done add the steamed asparagus and spinach and stir it up. This is your pizza sauce! When you pizza crust is nearly cooked (or warmed up) pull it out and spread your pizza sauce onto it and then scatter the chopped bacon pieces. Slice the seared salmon into wedges and arrange them how you like them. Put it back in the oven at 450F until the salmon is cooked to the desired doneness.

Presto! Fantabuluous local food pizza in March (yes I know salmon don't grow here). Ours was awsome and I hope yours is better.

I left the farm today right before the rain came, and I shot some photos of the South field where we have already planted an acre. Please marvel at the fairly strait beds from the homemade bedmaker.

-Don

Strawberries and a Warm Spring

Depending on how you look at at it, the weather can be a kind of pleasant surprise or a maddening unknown variable. Last fall it was in the first category. When the forecast said rain it would probably rain. This year it isn't like that. When the forecast says small chance of rain, it doesn't rain. When the forecast says good chance of rain, it doesn't rain. We've found that this spring the weather forecast is no more accurate than the farmer's almanac which isn't saying much since the farmer's almanac was written last year. Good thing we've got the drip system running!


I've had the feeling all fall and winter that this spring and summer are going to be unusually hot and dry. Now I don't consider myself a soothsayer, but when it comes to the weather in Oklahoma it will be extreme so there isn't any need to fence-sit on climate forecasting. Its better to make a prediction and act on it because the weather certainly won't be average.

So that having been said, we've pulled all the frost covers for the strawberries and don't intend to put them back. Good thing too because they started blooming already! They are a bit small for this time of year because we had such a dry winter but at least 90% of them survived our (mis)management.

Continuing on the theme of a warm spring and useless weather forecasts, here I am rushing to put in corn, beans, and squash before the forecasted rain. This was Wednesday night and it was predicted to rain Thursday morning. We used the Planet Jr seeders to plant corn, beans, and squash in the South field that isn't irrigated so I needed to put them in right before a rain. Its two weeks early, but I don't think we are going to have another freeze - you can't win if you don't play! It didn't rain that night. Oh well.

New Irrigation System

Since the furrow irrigation hasn't been working so well to germinate our small seeded crops like carrots and lettuce, we've decided to jump headfirst into drip irrigation. It is expensive, and somewhat more of a hassle but I think in the long run it will actually be less work. I was spending way too much time hauling hoses around to do furrow irrigation.

Drip irrigation consists of small plastic hoses that run the full length of each bed. They have a hole every foot that drips out water very slowly. The advantage is that you get to control the amount of water to each bed since there is a little valve for each bed, and that the water is distributed uniformly and very slowly. We bought all our irrigation components from Irrigation Mart in Ruston, LA. In case you are wondering they also build small systems if you want to try this method on your home garden.

One of the more expensive parts of the system is the filters which we have to have because we pump out of a pond. The dirt would clog up the emitters if we didn't filter it out. If you are going to do this in the city, you don't need the filters because the city water is already clear.

The filter system is built around a swimming pool sand filter. It required a lot of plumbing to hook it all up, but as you can see it works! This is the first test, you can see the water coming out of the open hose. It isn't hooked up to the drip lines yet, I was just making sure that it wouldn't explode.

We haven't had significant rain for about a month so we were getting pretty desperate. The funny thing is that while it has been fairly warm and dry for the last couple of weeks, the day I set up the system it decides to sleet, rain, and snow. There wasn't very much precipitation, just enough to make it a little muddy. The snow sure was beautiful though!

First Irrigation of 2009!

Chelsea and I irrigated our first round of crops for 2009! I planted: Chantenay and Imperator Carrots, Spinach, Purple Top Turnips, Russian Kale, Snow Peas and English Peas. As you can tell the new bedmaker works, but not super well. The beds are really tall now, about 6" but the seedbed is still as coarse as it was in 2008. I'm going to adjust my bedmaker down to about 4" so that it packs a better seedbed and so the irrigation water can wick up to the surface. Within a few days of planting we irrigated the new beds so that the seeds will germinate. We fired up the pump and poured the water down the furrows, as you can see. There was two problems. First, the beds are taller so it is harder for the irrigation water to wick up the the soil surface. Two, when I planted the soil was still a little moist so the tractor tires compacted the silty clay in the wheel tracks. Because the soil is a little compacted, the irrigation water won't infiltrate the furrows and with the higher beds it fails to wick up to the seedbed. That sucked a lot. It isn't a problem for the peas becasause they are planted deep and they are big enough to germinate well with just a little water. The carrots on the other hand are notorious for germinating poorly when the soil surface is dry. We had to figure out a way to get the top of the bed wet for the carrots to germinate.

Here was our plan. Gardeners water with a hose, so why can't we? It's only a three inch hose a weighs about a half a ton. Gardeners have a spray nozzle for wetting the soil surface, so why can't we? It's only a three inch hose. We went to Sutherlands and got a 3" to 1 1/2" adapter and necked that 3" hose down to 1 1/2" so it would spray a distance. Sure enough, you can spray some water with a 3" hose! I played fireman for a couple hours while Chelsea adjusted the throttle on the irrigation pump... lo and behold, with enough commitment and a lot of stupidity you can water a half an acre just like a garden! Too bad it was just above freezing outside and I got soaked with water. Long story short we are reconsidering drip irrigation!