The Urban Ton Project: Beautiful Garlic

Urban Ton Background

When my wife and I moved to St. Paul, MN in 2008 we decided we would focus on planting a primarily edible landscape. Over the past two years we have drastically changed our 0.2 acre lot from a series of overgrown flower beds, bushes, and trees into what is becoming our own urban oasis. As we have discussed, planned, designed, and occasionally even fought over the future of our landscape a question frequently arose: Just how much food could we produce on our urban lot?

From that question The Urban Ton Project was born...

Can we grow 1 ton (that is 2,000 lbs.) of food in a single year from our urban home?

Here are the Rules:

1.) Everything must be harvested from January 1st to

December 31st in the same calender year.

2.) Everything must be grown on our property.

3.) Only organic methods may be used.

4.) Each day any crops harvested will be weighed and

recorded by crop type.

5.) Backyard grazing (eg. eating tomatoes off the vine) of unweighed foods will not count.

6.) Food lost to damage, insects, dogs, chickens (our backyard pets) or any other cause will not be counted.

7.) Inputs will not be counted against the goal but will be

recorded (i.e. chicken feed, purchased compost, seeds etc..).

8.) No single crop can count for more than 20% of the total (no mono-crops here).

This blog will serve to chronicle the ongoing efforts in meeting our Urban Ton goal and developing our edible oasis. We're starting in 2010, and we'll see how far we get...

Living in Saint Paul, MN will add some challenges not faced in other pars of the country. Being in zone 4, our northern cold climate has a short growing season and long cold winters compared to more temperate zones. With that said our hypothesis is that we reach the Urban Ton by 2015 which is when the fruit trees we plan to plant this spring will reach production age.

Monday, July 19, 2010

Beautiful Garlic

We currently grow 22 different cultivars of garlic. Among those cultivars many of them send up scapes or flower stalks. These scapes form umbel capsules at their ends containing tiny flowers and bulbils (which are genetically identical to the plant and, in addition to the cloves, can be planted to produce a new plant).

In all but a few plants we remove the scapes early in their development. As the scapes grow they become woody and fibrous rendering them inedible, but at an early stage the scapes are tender and very tasty (Sunday Supper June 13, Sunday Supper June 27). Besides wanting remove the scapes to eat them removing them also directs the garlic plant to focus its energy on growing larger bulbs.

Each year we do leave a few scapes to fully mature because they are really interesting to look at. Tonight we thought we would share a few photos of the scapes with their umbel capsules, bulbils, and flowers. The photos are from a Asiatic variety of garlic known as: Korean Hot.