1000+ RADISHES!

Have you ever seen 1000 radishes at the same time? Or have you ever eaten radish leaf cakes? (Not the sweet birthday cake kind of cake, but more the style of the potato cakes that we eat in the South) Or how about cilantro cakes? I can now say "yes" to all of the above... in El Salvador!

I guess it has been a long time since I have written anything and even longer since I have written about the beautiful garden we are working on! Most know that after several months of interviewing, visiting, observing, and more, we finally decided that a realistic 1-2 year project and real need and desire of the community was an organic community garden. In November, we started the planning and slowly clearing the space, but it wasn't until January that we really started moving. We hit the road running in January - decided we wanted to plant around half an acre because vegetables are labor intensive and water is scarce. In that first month of work, I can say I saw the power of community and the pure brute force of Salvadorans. 

 We worked 3-4 days a week, working 5 plus hours a day, and worked with everything in us (keep in mind this was all volunteer labor - everyone working had another job or their own land to be taking care of in addition).  We went into the mountains, hiking long distances, to find cut down trees to help form the planting beds and then hauled them back. I, of course, always accompanied and tried to help, but I learned fast that I don't last long in the Salvadoran heat and I haven't grown up doing manual labor... so when everyone else carried 6 or 7 posts (small trees) 

i would carry 2 or 3 and generally drop half on the way back!  Eventually we did completely terrace the whole hillside (the 1/2 acre we were planting happens to be on a fairly steep hillside!) and complete 12 beautiful beds ranging from 10 to 30 meters long. Everyone helped all the way through the process. To be a part of the work with everyone coming out, laughing, arguing, sweating and working together was an inspiring experience. 

On January 28, we had our first planting! We planted seeders of tomato, green pepper, onion, and cabbage, and then planted 2 beds of raddishes - the radishes would be ready to harvest by the time the others were ready to transplant. The plant list was short that first month because it turned out to be extremely difficult to find local, non-hybrid, non- genetically modified seeds! El Salvador has lost most of the farming tradition, and few people have seeds saved from years of cultivating. In fact, most big organizations that work with farming cooperatives go to Nicaragua or Guatemala to bring back seeds. 

At the end of February we had our first harvest - over 1100 radishes!! Everyone that comes to help work in the garden received a dece

nt pile of radishes to take home... of course I realize that radishes aren't everyone's favorite food, but we were pretty excited about our first harvest. PLUS, we got to eat radish leaf cakes! So...when we were harvesting the radishes, I started throwing all the ones that didn't have a bulb out, somebody saw me and stopped me, scolding me for wasting good stuff, saying they were going to use the leaves for something. I was surprised, but decided not to argue, better to just wait and see what the heck they were going to do. I doubt they even knew what they were going to use the leaves for at the time, but I have learned that necessity is the best creative force and there is a lot of that here!

Did you know that radish leaves have more nutrients than the actual radish? I knew it, but I still was never tempted to eat the leaves... until recently. The night of the first harvest, we had a soup with potatoes and radish leaves, which I thought was surprisingly good  - until the grandmother sent over these tortas (cakes) she invented (but I would still recommend trying soup with radish leaves). I was hooked immediately and we made radish cakes the next day! Grandmother made the cakes by finely chopping up the leaves, adding egg and a little bit of tomato and onion and then frying the mixture up in little cakes. Let me just say, you should try them because they are GOOD! Pretty soon everyone heard about these little bites of goodness and everyone was fighting over radish leaves!

So I will just end by saying we planted some more radishes and people are eating a few more greens in Los Naranjos!