Ever Green
By Craig T. Kojima, Star-Bulletin
Shirley Head harvests lettuce at the Urban
Garden Center in Pearl City.
Living off the fat
of the landUrban Garden Center's Summer
Garden Fair and Plant SaleEGGPLANT is a fruit, a carrots is a vegetable, broccoli is a flower. The definition of what's a fruit and what's a vegetable is about as scientific as etiquette with aliens from outer space. The rough distinction is that 'fruit' is the botanical term for the part of a plant that contains the seeds, as an orange or a mango or a tomato or an eggplant, and just about anything else grown in the ground for human food is a vegetable.Where: 962 Second Street, Pearl City. (Take Kamehameha Highway to Lehua Street, which is the makai extension of Lunalilo Home Road. Turn makai at Lehua, and the third block is Second Street. Turn right on a rough road into the property.)
Sometimes we eat the leaves, as with lettuce and spinach. Sometimes we eat the roots, as with carrots and beets. Other times we eat the seeds inside the fruit, as with corn and peas, and sometimes we eat the stems, as with celery and rhubarb.
But however you classify them, vegetables and fruit are grown by more than half the families in the United States. The motivation is not only to save money, but to eat well. What you grow in your garden today is likely to taste much better than something picked a week ago, 3,000 miles away.
To give Oahu residents a taste of truly fresh produce, volunteers at the Urban Garden Center are presenting a Summer Garden Fair a week from tomorrow at its farm in Pearl City.
The center is part of the University of Hawaii's College of Tropical Agriculture and Human Resources, and it stretches its budget, more like an allowance, by the work of its 45 faithful volunteers.
The fair will feature a sale of fresh vegetables that buyers will pick from the field. Prices will be below supermarket levels. Bags will be provided.
"We've been growing the new Manoa lettuce developed by the university, with heads that are smaller and more compact than the older form," said Shirley Head, chairman of the event.
"It takes less space to grow in the garden. We have a new sweet basil that is more disease tolerant. There's a new bush bean, a string bean that grows on a low bush and is easy to harvest." These will be available for the picking, and there will also be seeds of these and other vegetables developed by the university.
"We want to show people that they can grow these vegetables at home," said Dale Sato, who manages the Urban Garden Center. 'This new Manoa lettuce is more heat tolerant than the earlier variety, and can be grown year round. From seed to table is 40 to 45 days, and if you stagger your planting, you will continually have fresh lettuce."
All you have to do is figure out how much lettuce your family consumes in three weeks, and plant just that much every 21 days. This seems obvious, but it is the basis of all successful home vegetable cultivation. Grow only what your family enjoys eating and in quantities that can be consumed by them and friends and neighbors.
When you start bundling up zucchini or green peppers and leaving sacks on doorsteps, like Victorian babies at the orphanage, you aren't doing this right.
Other crowd pleasers are the university's two new varieties of sweet corn, Supersweet No. 10 and Supersweet Silver, and the new Rainbow papaya that appears to be resistant to the ring spot virus. The fruit will be available for sampling, but seeds and seedlings of the new papaya are restricted to those who have attended a class in its cultivation at the Manoa campus. It is now being grown commercially and is showing up at supermarkets.
For a long time, tomatoes were intentionally hybridized to have leathery skins and be as close to cube-shaped as possible for easy shipping and stacking. The only negative side effect in the process was these tomatoes began to taste like tennis balls. Growers are beginning to come around to the idea that this isn't grabbing consumers, and are returning to tastier varieties.
But while store-bought tomatoes are improving in flavor, especially the ones with the stems still on, they cost a lot more than the ones grown at home. Sato recommends the Healani variety, and said condo growers can successfully grow them in pots.
Sato and his volunteers will give advice on how to cultivate vegetables from seeds, and there will be free compost available.
"Soil preparation is very important to growing healthy vegetables," he said. He recommends working compost into your soil before planting because healthy plants don't have pest problems.
There will be arts and crafts projects for kids, and tours of the garden as well.
Gardening Calendar in Do It Electric!
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