FOOD
B Y K E L LY K E N O Y E R
CHEAP EATS
EW’s resident millennial goes on a quest for meals under $10
f you’re anything like me, you’re always looking for a good and relatively cheap place to eat
out for lunch. I’m a millennial — I’ll never afford to buy a house, so I may as well cry about it
over some tasty organic avocado toast.
But because I’m usually broke, that toast better be under $10 — including tip.
One of my favorite lunch spots is Morelos Taqueria — that’s the little taco food cart nestled
in the corner of Kesey Square downtown. It’s a convenient walk from my workplace, and the
authentic cuisine is always fresh and delicious.
I recommend the tacos — they have vegetarian, fish and meat options, all for a couple bucks
each. My preferred meal is a trio of meat tacos for $6. Don’t forget to add a Jarritos to your meal —
there’s nothing like a refreshing fruit-flavored soda to go with authentic Mexican food.
If you’re not feeling Mexican, you could always go for Afghani or German food. You don’t even
need to go to two separate carts if you’re craving a taste of both cuisines: Abdul-Waheed Wahed
runs a food cart that’s the best of both worlds right next door to Morelos Taqueria.
You can get bolani and bratwurst on the same meal ticket at the Afghani Cuisine and German
Sausage Food Cart. Prices range from $2 for snackable bolani to $7.50 for an extremely filling
qabuli “pilaf.” I recommend the currywurst — sliced bratwurst slathered in curry. It’s a great plate
to share with friends at $6.
Kesey Square also hosts two other carts, B-Heavenly and Wrap City, that provide tasty local
bites as well. It’s the perfect location to enjoy nice weather and share a meal with folks who have
different food preferences.
Enjoy, and don’t forget to tip!
I
AFGHANI CUISINE AND
GERMAN SAUSAGE FOOD CART
GARDENING
BY RACHEL FOSTER
CULTIVATING DISCIPLINE
Fall is the time to plan your garden
A
fter months of getting out early to harvest the
garden bounty and water the vegetable beds, fall
is here and I have a little extra time. I’ve used
some of it to think about garden planning.
I think everyone agrees that a successful
vegetable garden requires some planning, especially if
space is limited. But I’m an impulsive gardener who can’t
abide empty ground. I tend to amend and immediately
replant any row or patch that becomes vacant.
This is potentially an efficient use of limited space, but
it can get in the way of good practices such as crop rota-
tion, not to mention simple things like making sure adja-
cent crops have adequate space and light.
Crop rotation helps us maximize efficient use of soil
fertility. It should also help fend off pests and disease. I
know that doesn’t work very well in the average vegetable
garden, where there simply isn’t room to move a crop a
meaningful distance from one year to the next.
But I do make sure not to plant tomatoes (or peppers or
eggplant) in the same area two years in a row, and I try to
follow legume crops with leafy greens. That’s about the
extent of my “rotation.”
Rotation is easiest in an orderly garden. I have a friend
who uses classic, board-sided raised beds. Each year he lets
one bed go fallow. He piles fall leaves on it to rot over the
winter, cutting them in periodically with a bit of manure.
Come spring, that’s the bed where he’ll plant tomatoes.
Steve Solomon (Growing Vegetables West of the
Cascades) has a great chapter on planning in which he
suggests a simple crop rotation system for year-round veg-
etable plots. The garden is divided into two. One half
grows frost-sensitive summer crops like green beans and
tomatoes, while the other grows a spring garden followed
by fall and winter crops. A fall-sown, leguminous cover
crop succeeds the green beans and tomatoes, and that sec-
tion will be ready for the following year’s spring garden.
Solomon’s plan is hard to follow in my yard, where
only about a third of the garden space is well drained and
warms up fast in spring. The remainder holds a lot of water
in the winter, and is really only suitable for summer crops
that are planted after the soil becomes workable. I am
working on a modified version of Solomon’s scheme while
striving to improve the soil texture in the meantime.
Cover crops help, and my favorite is fall-sown fava
beans. In a good year they yield a crop, and if they don’t
they still improve the soil. Solomon uses peas. If he needs
to rip them out to plant something, he will. What he
doesn’t rip out yields peas.
Any meaningful planning requires good recordkeeping,
and I‘ve resolved to do a better job at that. I’ve become
pretty good at recording when I sow and plant things, but
I also tag the rows with crop name and date. Leaving
those tags in the ground is a simple way to remind
myself of what grew there last without referring to a
journal, but the journal holds valuable information
such as how many weeks it took for starts to yield a
harvest and when I can expect that crop to make way
for another one.
This year I sowed pole and bush beans the first
week of June. I picked the first bush beans on July 30
— the same time I picked my first tomatoes and egg-
plant, as it happens.
The first pole beans came in three weeks later.
When the bush beans started bearing, I planted a new
row. I began picking that second round of bush beans by
mid-September, just when the pole beans were winding
down. This timing was accidental, but because I have
seeding records I can try to repeat it next year.
A key part of planning is to determine what your core
crops are, and to decide ahead of time where you will plant
them.
For the past two years, this has been my strategy: In late
winter and again in summer, I make lists of the things I
hope to grow, with their approximate planting dates, from
late February through June and from August through early
October, respectively. Then I pick a location for each
planting. I still put in catch crops in temporary gaps — but
when I know I’ll need a given area for broccoli starts in
August or favas in October, I’ll try to make sure it’s occu-
pied in the meantime by quick turn-over crops like lettuce
and cilantro. ■
Rachel Foster lives and gardens in Eugene. She can be reached at rfoster@
efn.org
eugeneweekly.com • October 26, 2017
35