A Thinking Stomach

Getting the Party Started

2012-01-09T18:42:00.000-08:00

This is my sixth year starting eggplants, peppers, tomatillos, groundcherries, and tomatoes (oh, tomatoes, I'll always love you best) from seed, and that doesn't make me an expert. Nope. Not by a long shot. But, it has given me some valuable learning experiences that may or may not be helpful as you set out to try growing members of the nightshade family from seed.

I've learned that though I can follow the same basic principles for tomatoes, groundcherries, and tomatilloes, I have to use a different approach for the eggplants and peppers. In short, I start peppers and eggplants in a folded paper towel, dampened with chamomile tea (see rationale below), and place them in sealed plastic bags on a heat mat until they sprout. It can take some species of peppers and eggplants weeks to germinate. Once most are showing roots and the first glimpse of leaves, I carefully plant the sprouted seeds in scrubbed-clean six-pack pots and grow them inside, under lights. Peppers and eggplants need a lot of fertilizer, much more than tomatoes, so I begin fertilizing the seedlings with a very dilute fish emulsion every time I water them until they go in the ground, when it is reliably warm.

A great description of this approach with helpful photos is available here, but I do a couple things differently: I don't have coffee filters around, so I use paper towels, and I carefully cut the paper around the seedlings to remove them, rather than trying to lift them off and break their roots.

My tomato (tomatillo and groundcherry, as well) method requires a lot less special equipment, and reliably gives very good results. I have based it on the information I learned from wintersown.org, a helpful, free resource as well as a place to get free open-pollinated tomato seeds! Tomatoes and their close kin need less heat and less fertilizer than peppers and eggplant to get strong; they can handle more fluctuations in temperature, and in fact, seem to benefit from them. The makeshift greenhouses wintersown.org teaches how to make are a perfect fit for tomatoes.

I start with a large batch of chamomile tea. Drinking chamomile tea gives me a headache, and handling it makes my skin itch like mad, but chamomile works exactly the way I need it to here. It is a natural fungicide, and therefore helps to prevent the dreaded "damping off," when fungus attacks a just sprouted seedling, toppling it over like a felled log.

I use this batch of tea to dampen potting soil in a large bucket. I've tried using potting soil made just for seed starting, and I've found it a wasted expense. I had no more success with specialized seed starting soil than I do with a high quality, fine textured soil.

Here comes the fun part. I start making mini-greenhouses with plastic bottles I've scavenged from work and home. Using an awl, I punch holes in the bottom, and with a sharp bread knife, I cut the midsection of the bottle most of the way through, leaving a hinge.

I lightly tap the tea-dampened soil into the bottom of the greenhouse. I don't want it to be too dense, as there needs to be plenty of air and room for the roots to fill. Before I gently slide the seeds just under the surface of the soil with the end of the awl, I place a few of them on the surface of the soil, spaced about an inch apart.

Finally, I flip the top part back over, screw the lid back on the bottle, and tape the greenhouses shut with their labels. Outside they go, where they live on the patio where they get morning sun but not blazing hot afternoon sun.

Once most the seeds sprout, I remove the screwtop to allow ventilation, as the seeds don't need to be quite so warm once they've gotten going. I monitor moisture, spraying water through the top opening if needed. When the first true leaves grow, I slice carefully through the tape closure to allow the greenhouses to prop themselves open a bit. After there are two sets of true leaves on most of the seedlings—that may vary by variety and some varieties will be ready to pot up before others—I use a utility knife to slice the top completely off; then I slide the knife down the side of the base pot and gently release the seedlings. Each healthy seedling I pot up in its own 4" pot.

As the days get warmer, I move the seedlings to spots and that are gradually more exposed with more sunlight and more temperature fluctuations, until they finally are living in a spot similar to where they'll reach adulthood.

Come spring, there are seedlings to plant and spares to share. I can't wait for that green tomato-leaf smell.

The Orchard Report 2012

2012-01-05T11:41:00.000-08:00

It's time to prune deciduous trees, so it means it is time for me to write about my trees again. In planning my annual progress report on my deciduous fruit trees, I had fun looking back at what I've written already about them. E and I moved here in the fall of 2008. That winter, I planted a row of bananas and an Owari Satsuma. In the early part of 2009, I planted an Elephant Heart Plum and a Bavay's Green Gage. I dug and dug and dug in 2010. That year, I planted three peaches: Eva's Pride, Mid Pride, and what was supposed to be a white nectarine but turned out to be a peach, White Tiger. I also planted two nectarines, Arctic Star and Desert Delight. Two low-chill cherries, Minnie Royal and Royal Lee, two apricots, Blenheim and Gold Kist, and another plum, Howard Miracle, joined their brethren in the front orchard. In the back, where most of the subtropicals live, I planted a Cara Cara orange, a strawberry guava, a Black Jack fig and a Kadota fig, and a Meiwa kumquat. In 2011, I took it easy: I removed the Bavay's Green Gage and replaced it with a Mariposa plum, added a third apple, a Lady Williams, and in the back, put in a Gold Nugget mandarin and a Nezemetz feijoa. Also, in 2011, I began sheet mulching under the front orchard, a process we continued late in the year. Whew.

So, now we're caught up. That brings us to examine how things are currently growing, and where I'd like to grow from here.

All of the cherries, peaches, nectarines, and apricots were single sticks in 2010. Here they are now.

Minnie Royal (front) and Royal Lee cherries.

Mid Pride (front) and White Tiger peaches.

Desert Delight (front) and Arctic Star nectarines.

Desert Delight is blooming already!

Eva's Pride peach.

Gold Kist (left) and Blenheim apricots.

Of the nine trees above, I received fruit this past year from five of them. The cherries need to cross pollinate, but only Royal Lee bloomed last year, so no cherries. Desert Delight nectarine bloomed beautifully last year, but the frost came and took all its baby fruit away. Gold Kist apricot didn't bloom.

But, I had a few deliciously jammy Blenheim apricots, a few sugary-tutti-fruity Arctic Star nectarines, a handful of juicy but too mild White Tigers, and one mediocre Mid Pride peach. (I'd like to graft varieties that I enjoy more on the White Tiger and the Mid Pride.) The stand-out winner was Eva's Pride, which tastes like what you'd dream a good peach to be: sweet and acidic, juicy, that rich peach funk that doesn't happen in every variety. Yum.

Here is the bed o' plums. They've struggled along in the last few years, and I have yet to receive any fruit from them, but the thick layer of horse manure, cardboard, and mulch, as well as the newly installed drip lines, should strengthen them this year.

Elephant Heart, Mariposa, and Howard Miracle plums.

The two established apples, Wickson and Golden Russet, fruited very well for me in 2011. Wickson ripened in early October, and each little fruit was a flavor bomb of an apple, sweet-sour and snappy. Golden Russet ripened mid-November, and once ripe, the fruit were spicy and dense, a great mix of sweet and mystery. The youngest tree, Lady Williams, went in as a benchgraft last year, so it has a year or two to go before fruiting. Each tree needs its bed enlarged this year, along with another thick layer of mulch.

Golden Russet apple.

Wickson apple.

Lady Williams, with weighted clothespins to direct its young branches.

This summer I made ceramic name tags for every tree variety, every graft I've put on a tree, and each tree's rootstock. I haven't attached them yet, as I'm still deciding the perfect medium by which to do so. It must be sturdy enough for the elements, but not damaging to the bark. Suggestions?

I'll be pruning in the next couple days and getting ready for the local CRFG chapter's scionwood exchange. The best resource I've found in guiding my pruning decisions is R. Sanford Martin's tiny yet extremely helpful book, How to Prune Fruit Trees. Though I am growing a high-density orchard and some of my trees need to be pruned a little differently because of that, this book still gives me so much valuable advice every time I pick it up.

Among the subtropicals in the back, the wind and dry weather have done their worst. The dog hasn't helped much with the smaller trees either; the kumquat has lost a few branches as he's whipped his way through them. The tree most affected by the dry weather right now is my Meyer lemon, a tree I happily inherited when moving into this place. With no rain to wash the buggers off, it has developed a nasty case of citrus scale. I first noticed something wrong when I saw the sooty mold.

Sooty mold on the leaves.

The sooty mold shows up because the "honeydew" the scale releases provides just the right conditions for it to grow. Another clue (though I didn't see any in this case) that a tree is infected with scale is the presence of ants. Just as they do with aphids, ants farm scale in order to consume the honeydew. To combat the scale, which sucks nutrients from the bottom of the leaves, I sprayed the entire tree with Dr. Bronner's Peppermint Soap diluted with water, making sure to completely drench the underside of each leaf. It's a large tree, and it took forever, but the process is worth it. This treatment isn't harmful to bees or other beneficials, yet it melts away the protective wax of the scale, leaving them to dry out or be consumed by predators.

Scale.

After washing the tree down, I gave it a present, in fact, a whole container of presents. Watch out scale. Here comes your doom.

So, what's next in 2012 with the fruit trees? I have a lot more grafting I want to try on the deciduous trees up front. I need to mulch under the subtropicals in the back. And, I have one more tree to plant, a very special one: a Reed avocado. 2012, you're going to be a very fruitful year.

It Took A Few Days

2012-01-02T20:38:00.000-08:00

The day after school let out, E and I hit the road through the desert for two days towards a week of mountain-y winter, complete with clear, endless skies and a very good smelling kitchen.

E's family met us in my parent's town, and all of us shared a northern New Mexico Christmas.

The road back felt so long this time around, and when we crossed El Cajon pass Friday and entered the basin full of smoke from the Hollywood arson fires, we felt like turning around and driving right back out of California. That night, even after we got home, both E and I were depressed and antsy.

Then, the next day, we picked up Indiana, who we had missed terribly and who was so excited to be home he didn't stop flying through the lemon blossom air for at least six hours.

Close friends came over and we spent an evening of firepitting and talking. And this morning, as I was poking around the garden, weeding, watering, and reacquainting myself to status of each plant, I found a fresh green praying mantis on one of the cymbidiums on the front patio. You know how I feel about praying mantids. Right then, I knew I was home. I also knew, that in 2012, no matter what else happens, I have to write, a lot.

All Better Butter

2011-12-17T20:54:00.000-08:00

Slog. That is what it is lately. Slog myself to work, work. Slog myself home, walk and train the dog. Slog myself through the dark winter garden, avoiding dog poop as best as possible. Slog myself to the kitchen, make dinner. I try to get some grading done. I go to bed.

I marvel at parents who can hold full time jobs, at people who have careers and still manage to write every day, and at all the people who can do so much more than I can. I don't know how they do it. Whenever my hands get too full, my glands swell and my nose runs. I get sick with stress. Right now E is down for the count too, sick with pneumonia.

There are things I can do without thinking, though, things that cause me no stress. I've done them enough times that they're automatic, and in their brainlessness, they are comforting. Pie crust is one of those things, and gershdarnit, I make a good pie crust. It's buttery, very flaky, and it is something I can be proud of. When not much else is working the way I'd like it to, at least there is pie crust.

There is nothing unique about these ingredients. To make this crust well, it is all in the process.

All-Butter Pie Crust
This recipe makes enough for a double-crust pie.

You will need:
2 1/2 cups flour
1 cup butter
1/2 teaspoon salt
6-8 teaspoons cold soda water (preferable) or still water

To make the crust:
Chill your bowl. Because it is easy to spin and gets cold quickly, I like to use a metal bowl. Drop ice into your cold water.

Cut the cold butter into 1/2 inch pieces. Use a fork and toss the butter, flour, and salt together in the bowl until each piece of butter is coated with flour. With a pastry cutter, cut the butter into smaller pieces until there are many gravel-sized pieces of flour and some that are smaller. Scrape the cutter off into the bowl, and set aside—you're finished with it.

Using your hands, scoop up the flour mixture, leaving your fingers spaced at least a quarter inch apart. Using your thumbs, push the mixture over your fingers. Much of it will fall through your fingers, and some of the butter chunks will be flattened against your fingers as they roll off your index fingers. Repeat this process eight or so times, until you have about an even mixture of flattened butter chunks and gravelly butter chunks.

Drizzle half the ice cold (soda) water over the flour mixture and use a fork to toss the mixture together. Drizzle the remaining water over the mixture and toss together more. Use your hands again and work to bring the mixture together, scooping the dry parts over the wetter parts and trying to mash them together a bit. The mixture will not hold together as a ball; the parts must be worked into each other. Push the crumbly dough into a loose disk, then fold it over on itself. Flatten and push it into a disk again, and fold it over on itself again. This process will create a very nice flakiness. After eight or so times the seperate ingredients will have incorporated, and you'll see what will become flakes during baking. Break the disk in two, flatten each into a disk again, then place them in a plastic bag or plastic wrap, and put it in the refrigerator for at least three hours. Refrigerating the dough will allow the gluten to relax, preventing a tough crust.

Once the dough has chilled, roll it out for the pie. Fill with whatever is good, and bake, according to whatever recipe you're using for the filling.

Capsicum fantasticum

2011-11-28T20:20:00.000-08:00

Peppers, to me, exude tropical heritage. Those tiny fleshy flowers and deep shiny green leaves shout, "I'm from a warm, wet forest!" I am no expert on peppers, not like my blog-friend Michelle, but I've learned a lot in the past few years I've been saving seed. Since it is important to not only know the variety one is growing when saving seed, but also the species in order to prevent cross-pollination, I picked up a few tricks to identify the four most commonly grown species. I hope someone else may find this information helpful.

Capsicum annuum: C. annuum holds most of the peppers with which we're most familiar. Our sweet bell peppers fall in this species, as do Anaheims and jalapenos, serranos and pasillas. Many people never grow anything other than annuums in their gardens. Annuums have white flowers with yellow or blue stamens and foliage that is usually smooth, though can occasionally be softly downy. The foliage is typically dark green, but there are variegated varieties; in fact, if a plant is variegated, it is likely a C. annuum. There is a huge variety in flavor within this species, from completely sweet to searingly hot. This year, I grew Fish, Chile Rayado, Big Jim, Sweet Cherry, Pimento, Lipstick, and a couple other annuums that weren't as successful as these reliable varieties.

Capsicum baccatum: I am biased. Capsicum baccatum is my favorite pepper species. The plants reliably overwinter for me, get huge (tree-like, folks!), and have bright green leaves and pretty, yellow- or greenish-brown-dotted flowers. I gave a coworker some seeds for Capeau de Frade, she planted one of her seedlings in our school garden, and the plant is three years old now and four feet tall. The three varieties I have growing are all on the milder side, though if you pop the whole thing in your mouth as I have done occasionally while working in the garden, you might find yourself sweating on a cold day. I enjoy the tropical fruit flavor of the baccatums as well as their excellent crunch factor. I have Capeau de Frade, Dedo de Moca, and some kind of orange-form Aji Panca (mislabeled seeds? a happy accident because I love this plant) that are each three years old and still growing mightily in a large pot. I cut them back in late winter so they'll send up nice growth with a dose of sunshine, spring warmth, and liquid seaweed. I am very interested in learning more about this species and exploring more varieties within it.

Capsicum chinense: C. chinense is home to the world's hottest peppers. Ghost pepper, Bhut Jolokia, all the habaneros, and others are C. chinenses. But they're not all hot. Cheiro de Recife and the like have the same citrusy, perfumy flavor without the heat (or at least not as much of it), and are gorgeous fruits, shiny and bright colored. The flowers are small and white, pale yellow, or pale green with blue stamens. The leaves tend to be bright green and slightly savoyed. These peppers are what give Caribbean food its kick. I have a harder time getting this species growing healthily than other other species, but I always grow a couple because the fragrance is impossible to beat. This year, I am growing Roberto's Cuban Seasoning and Cheiro de Recife.

Capsicum pubescens: This is the first year I have grown C. pubescens and I have not yet tasted it. However, despite my lack of familiarity with it, I'd have an easy time identifying it anywhere. Not only does its hairyness live up to its Latin name, but unlike any other species, it has large-ish purple flowers. Purple flowers! And the fruit is thick-fleshed like a mini-bell pepper, but very hot. Also unique to this species are the dark brown to black seeds. I don't know if there is much difference between varieties within this species, but the variety I'm growing is called Red Rocoto.

I'd love to hear about others' favorite peppers. Or, do you have a favorite species I haven't covered here? Spread the spicy knowledge, my friends.

Sweet Tater Tasting Notes

2011-11-25T15:13:00.001-08:00

I am graced with friends who put up with my dorkiness. Wednesday night, with a couple of friends over for dinner, I held a sweet potato tasting. Yup, not a wine tasting, but a sweet potato tasting. I learned several things at this tasting: 1) I am not very good at describing flavors, and 2) Tasting is more fun with friends.

Red Wine Velvet at harvest

Violetta at harvest

Old Kentucky at harvest

Golden Sweet at harvest

Jen, my summer garden intern, holding a very naughty-looking Red Wine Velvet

When I told E, my husband, that I'd like to have a sweet potato tasting just so I could compare my impressions with those of someone else—I do want to be able to write about these yummy critters, after all—he worried that it would be pretentious. Perhaps our discussion would sound a little too much like this: I detect a certain appealing skunkiness . . . maybe a soupcon of delightfully damp newspaper . . . wait a minute, is that a bracing edge of burnt rubber? Don't get me wrong. I love wine. On occasion, I have been known to love wine a little too much, but we all know how ridiculous talking about it can sound. Yet, here I was, really wanting to hold a similar event, just so I could explain the awesomeness of homegrown sweet potatoes.

E played along in the way E will. You will see by his upcoming notes.

I roasted four very small sweet potatoes in their skins for the pre-dinner sweet potato tasting. After roasting, I cut them in quarters, sprinkled them with salt, and placed them in identical order on small plates with a pat of butter. I gave each person a card and we numbered the pieces by their placement on on the plates. I didn't tell the names of the varieties until we finished the tasting.

At the top of the hour, Golden Sweet; at 3, Old Kentucky; at 4, Violetta; and at 9, Red Wine Velvet.

Our notes

The first sweet potato we tasted was Golden Sweet, a golden-skinned, yellow-fleshed potato. It was not very productive—one potato per plant, but it did have lovely, smooth skin and a nice rounded shape. Upon tasting it, Friend #1 wrote, "Butternut squash, banana, tea, sweet but not too sweet." Friend #2 wrote, "Nutty, something like the aftertaste of salami." I wrote, "Smooth, nutty, sweet, mild." E wrote, "Tater." Though we all liked Golden Sweet, it wasn't the favorite of any of us.

The second sweet potato we tasted was Old Kentucky. Old Kentucky produces ugly, white-skinned, white-fleshed potatoes that discolor quickly; I harvested three tubers from each of my two plants. Friend #1 wrote after tasting it, "Candy, milder, not as distinctive a sweet potato flavor." Friend #2 wrote, "Smoother, almost sweeter." I wrote, "Sweeter than the first, yummy skin, gets caramelly tasting with roasting, more pronounced sweet potato flavor." (Fascinating—Friend #1 and I had very different perceptions on this potato.) E wrote, "Salty tater." We all agreed that this was a stand-out sweet potato, and it was E's favorite of the four.

Red Wine Velvet was the third sweet potato we tasted. For me, each plant produces four or five large, orange-fleshed, maroon-skinned potatoes that are shaped like veiny organs. About it, Friend #1 wrote, "Mild, nutty." Friend #2 wrote, "Smoky, earthy." I wrote, "I can taste the beta carotenes! Awesome, moist, smooth texture." E wrote, "Orange tater." This potato wins in the texture category, and it is mighty-fine tasting as well.

And finally, Violetta was the last sweet potato of the tasting. This variety produces large, violet-skinned and creamy-fleshed potatoes, at least three per plant. This was Friend #1's favorite. She wrote, "Creamy, mild, best aftertaste." Friend #2 wrote, "Walnut." I wrote, "Sweetest of the whites, caramelly." E, who loved Violetta last year, must have gotten a spoiled end, because he wrote, "Tater hairs." Despite E's reaction, the rest of us ranked this high.

The entire harvest this September

So, what does this mean? While I want to add another sweet potato to my collection (a purple-fleshed one, oh yes!), I will also likely drop one. Though homegrown Golden Sweet sweet potatoes are much better than anything one can buy in the store, the others are so good that I would rather use the room Golden Sweet would need to grow more of the other varieties.

Mulch Mania

2011-11-23T08:09:00.001-08:00

Last fall, my friend Russ, proprietor of LA Farm Hands, helped me eliminate the grass and create a deep layer of mulch under some of my front high-density orchard. Doing so led to more directed watering with less waste, lots of healthy growth on my peaches and nectarine trees, and less work for me—no mowing or weeding! This year, I wanted to complete the process under all of the stone fruit. I documented the process to share how to turn a lawn into a productive orchard.

Here, you can see the side we completed last year and part of what we would work on this year. If you have been following the development of my orchard, you can see the trees have grown very robustly this year; they're just beginning to color for autumn. The line of native stone divides the cleanly mulched side from the patchy, gopher-riddled grass (I just cannot inspire myself to keep up on lawns).

The only materials we needed to buy were drip attachments to convert inefficient sprayers into drip lines. Other than that, everything was free. We had a tree company drop off free mulch in front of our place; tree care companies often offer free mulch because it is cheaper to give it away than pay to dump it in the landfills. Our friend with horses and mules loaded Russ's truck with hot, not composted, manure. Both Russ and I had been collecting cardboard for the last few months in preparation, and the only tools we needed were standard household items: shovels, rakes, pitchforks, a weed-whacker, and a hose with a sprayer attachment.

Before starting to move any material, we began by mowing and in some places weed-whacking the lawn, capping sprinkler heads that we were abandoning, and setting up boxes for the drip lines. We also cut lines in the turf where we planned to create new edges.

We moved stones from the old edges and set them in place where we wanted them. Then, the smelly work began, spreading the hot manure ("One turd thick," according to Russ) all over the grass we wanted to kill.

Once the manure was spread where we wanted it, we sprayed it down with water, encouraging it to heat up and kill the grass underneath it. After the annoyingly tedious job of removing the tape from our collected boxes, we spread the cardboard all over the two areas and sprayed the cardboard down with water to help it begin its own process of breaking down.

Russ and completed the prepping, manuring, and cardboarding the first day. On the second, we brought in a reinforcement, my friend and summer garden intern, Jen. She shoveled mulch all morning long. We moved barrows of it to the orchard and spread it thickly—at least 4 inches thick, thicker in some places. Though it will compress quickly, the thick layer acts like an insulating blanket, holding the water in the soil and the weeds out.

After we spread the mulch over both areas, Russ ran the drip lines to exactly where we wanted them to go. As the trees grow more, we'll move the drip line to be right at the edge of the canopy of the trees. In other words, if one was looking down on the tree from above, the drip line should be directly under the circumference of the tree's branches. It should be at the actual "drip line." Once they were in place, we covered them in mulch. We sprayed the entire surface one more time. And with that, we were finished.

All Saints Eve Stories Told Very Late

2011-11-07T20:21:00.000-08:00

A friend came over the other day to hang out with E and talk about design and engineering problems that haunt the world and must be solved. Since they are both so inclined to be frustrated with how things—actual things, as in machines—work, and since they are both the type who will spend many hours of unpaid work attempting to solve these problems, they spend a lot of time talking about such things. (Another friend teases my husband with the snack packets one can purchase on long airplane flights: "Why is the cracker a hexagon and the cheese a rectangle? They don't match. How hard is it to make rectangular crackers that fit the cheese? C'mon people.")

Between the solving of one problem and another, E and T took Indiana for a walk. I met them in the front yard when they returned.

Indiana sprawled across E's feet as we talked. Little orange oragami-winged moths flitted over the lantana on the north side of the property.

T pointed to the moths. Then he told me a story.

When I was a kid, we had a whole hedge of lantana across the yard. My brother and I figured out that, if we were gentle and grasped the body carefully, we could catch the orange moths. And because I was curious, I tried placing one of the moths on my tongue. Attracted by the moisture, it stayed there. So I caught more and placed one after the other on my tongue. I closed my mouth.

I found my mom in the kitchen and pulled on her sleeve until she turned around to look at me. I looked at her and yelled, mouth open wide, "MOOOOOOOOOTHS!" As I yelled, they all flew out of my mouth.

He didn't use these words, but I will. He scared the shit out of her.

**********

This year, I tried an experiment. In August, when I started my broccolis, kales, and cabbages from seed in six-pack containers, I also started my rutabagas. In the past, I had always direct seeded rutabagas at the same time I planted out my other brassicas in early October. I would get a good crop, but with the short days of winter, I wouldn't have that crop until early spring. Spring is not when I want rutabagas: deep winter is when I want rutabagas. So far, my new strategy seems to be working. The largest of my rutabagas are already well-swollen and poking their bellies above the soil.

I've read that the first jack-o-lanterns were large, hollowed out turnips and rutabagas. My rutabagas may be growing well, but they're nowhere near jack-o-lantern dimensions yet.

**********

Our first Halloween in Minnesota, it snowed so heavily that our school shut down and sent us home early. I hunkered down in the warm house for the evening, but snow could not hold my brother back. That year, he wore one of my father's old flight suits, a flight helmet, and he tied one of his stunt kites on his back to give himself wings. He strapped on cross-country skis, and took off to trick-or-treat. Needless to say, on a snowy, empty Halloween evening, my brother the determined flying skier, earned his weight in candy.

The Moments In-Between

2011-11-02T21:04:00.000-07:00

My camera is in the closet. It has been there for a while. While I keep thinking that I want to take it out to take pictures of the first Peruvian Apple cactus fruit, of the white shark teeth and tiger claws of the garlic tearing through the earth, and of our beast Indiana-the-dog, it is Indiana himself that keeps the camera in the closet. To him, everything in my hand must be chewed, immediately. So, I haven't been taking pictures, and the gardening I've been doing I've been doing in the dark with a headlamp after the dog has hunkered down for the night in his crate. It's been a busy time, but I'm still trying to fit moments of myself between hours of the dog.

This week, a friend gave me bags of apples and feijoas from her trees. Around here, behind the local Macy's, along the edges of properties, in municipal parking lots, feijoas grow beautifully. They grow in places that pass as hedgerows in our part of the world. This time of year, the feijoa trees drop the dull, pebbly green fruits in piles of egg-shaped beauties under their branches. The fruits release their pineapple-eucalyptus scent even before someone cuts them open to reveal their pear-textured flesh. My mom, who relies heavily on her nose for much of her decision-making, declares these aromatic fruits her favorite.

With piles of the fruit sitting in bags in my house, I set out to find a good way to preserve the fragrance of early autumn in Southern California. Feijoa jam turns out to be perfect; it produces a fruit studded jam that intensifies the fruits' fragrance and tastes fantastic on hot buttered sourdough. It exceeded my expectations.

Thank Indiana for the lack of pictures.

Feijoa Jam
You will need:
2 pounds peeled feijoas, roughly chopped (weigh after peeling!)
A handful of reserved feijoa peels
2 1/2 cups sugar
the finely grated rind of one organic lemon and its juice

To make the jam:
Place the reseved peels in a small saucepan and cover with water. Bring to a boil over medium heat and cook for one minute. Remove from heat.

Place the feijoas, sugar, grated lemon peel and juice, and one quarter cup of strained liquid from the peels. Place over medium-high heat and bring to a boil. Boil the mixture for approximately ten minutes (it happens quickly with all the pectin from the peels and lemon) and check to see if the mixture has jelled. If it has, remove from heat. If not, continue boiling until jelling point.

Pour the mixture into sterilized jars, place new, warmed lids on the jars, and process in a boiling water bath for 15 minutes. If you have any question about how to do this, please spend some time on the USDA home preservation website.

Indiana

2011-10-19T21:02:00.000-07:00

Today, there is no garden to open to you or kitchen to welcome you into because there is a whole new character in my life that wolfs up time and energy.

The rescue said he was a happy-go-lucky family dog who got along with cats. They were wrong. They said he was three years old and a purebred chocolate lab. Yeah, well, not so much.

What we got was a very traumatized, maybe two-year old, anxious lab mix. (Great Dane? German Shorthaired Pointer? Something big and smart and beautiful.) Not anxious in the shy way, he's anxious in the I-think-you-are-messing-with-me-so-I-am-going-to-kill-you-before-you-get-a-chance-to-prove-me-right way. Luckily, he has fallen in love with us. Gorgeous is not too strong a word for him; nor is terrifying.

For the ten days we have had him, through the long nights of cat-protecting patrol and getting used to his large-dog noises—especially the wagging otter tail that rattles his huge crate—E and I may have collectively accumulated one full night of sleep. I've read everything about training dogs I can get my hands on in the little time I have to get my hands on something. Nearly every minute of time away from my job has been working with the dog, talking about the dog, reading about the dog, crying about the dog, rejoicing over the dog's small progresses. Our sleep exhaustion isn't making any of this easier.

I don't know if we're going to be able to give Indiana the help he needs to become the good dog that is under the unhappy experiences of his life before us, but we're giving it the college try. The university try. The PhD try. He deserves nothing less.

Wish us luck.

The Brassica Bed

2011-10-02T17:52:00.000-07:00

Rutabagas: Angela on the left and Joan on the right. This year, I tried planting them in six packs in August to plant out at the end of the September, rather than direct-seeding. I hope this gives me big rutabagas when I want them, in the middle of winter, rather than in the warming spring.


Broccoli: Umpqua. DeCicco kept disappointing me for standard heading non-hybrid broccoli. I'm giving Umpqua a spin this year.

Cabbage: January King, an oldie that I've never grown.

Kale: Lacinato, the only kale I'm growing this year.

Broccoli: Purple Sprouting. My favorite brassica of last year returns to the ranchito to prove itself in a second year. I won't get florets until the spring, but if they're anything like last year, they'll be amazing.

Cabbage: Beira Tronchuda Portuguese Cabbage. Is it kale, is it collards, is it cabbage? Whatever it is, it promises to have large, fleshy, sweet leaves. I look forward to trying it as it matures.

Fall is still falling, but I'm hanging on. Despite my best intentions and a real desire to spend more time writing and cooking, I have neither much to say nor much to share tonight. However, no matter what, the garden still grows on.

Falling

2011-09-18T21:37:00.000-07:00

In the early mornings this time of year, the Peruvian Apple cactus is still blooming from the night before, when it pulled back its red outer petals to reveal the snowy white nectarfest for bats and moths. Now that school is back in session, I don't get to spend much time poking around in the early morning, waiting with my camera for such creatures. I do come home in the evenings, however, to good light and evening creatures.

In our family we have a scientist cat named Reggie who checks every day to make sure that the concept of gravity still holds true. Every day, he jumps up to some elevated surface and finds something to bat at—a fork or pencil, say—until he knocks it off the table or desk or countertop and down to the ground. Once he's satisfied that gravity still applies, he'll jump down and immediately roll over to be petted as a reward for his scientific discoveries.

Lately, I feel like that fork or pencil that Reggie knocked off the table. I fell into the school year this year with a solid and painful splat.

I wrote a whole draft of this post in which I complained about the difficulties, sustained and new, that this year brings. And then I erased it all. My complaints won't get me anywhere. They don't help me feel better, and they don't help anyone else feel good either. I know that Sir Reginald Newton is going to metaphorically knock me off the table every day. Every day.

Yet, in my classes, there is a kid who raises his hand before thinking, and many who think and never raise their hands. There's a girl with teeth too big for her face, and the sweetest little laugh; she's decided she's my shadow and she follows me everywhere. There's the angry boy who is whipsmart and practically growling. The girl who laughs too loud, but man, she's really funny. The kid who comes by every day after school to make sure he's doing his homework correctly. The one who emails me to remind me daily to update my class website because he was looking at it and it was already out of date and he wanted me to know so that no one would fall behind. And the one who needs to be reminded why the dress code exists. Why freshman English matters. Why English matters. Why anything matters.

Each of these kids walks into my room and I love each one of them. I can't help it. I'm hardwired that way.

These kids deserve, and more importantly, need the best out of me whether I can give it or not. So, I'll give it. I'll rally, every day. I'll prove gravity wrong.

Just a warning though: my fist shaking is on the trembly side.

When I'm not rallying for the classroom, I'll be sucking up the peace of the soil, the unclutteredness of the sky, and be comforted by the way neither the soil nor the sky need anything out of me.

Introducing the Peter Pepper

2011-09-06T18:07:00.000-07:00

They're easy to grow. In fact, they grow quite quickly, almost on their own.

In certain weather conditions, shrinkage may occur.

They're hot. Very hot.

Size seems to bear no effect on their potency.

No two are alike.

For the Birds

2011-08-28T07:47:00.000-07:00

I just came in from the morning. It isn't a cool morning, but cooler than it will be in a few hours, and the hummingbirds are out sipping from honeysuckle and cactus blossoms. The wrens and sparrows hop and make morning noises. But it was quieter this morning because there was no laughter.

Our last remaining chicken, Smalls, died yesterday in the heat. I had tried to provide shade and cool water, but it wasn't enough. She had a morning crow like a fat woman laughing, waking up from a hilarious dream. She laid distinctively shaped dark brown eggs almost every day. In the middle of our backyard, her coop and run was a social place; we had parties around it, and everyone who came in my yard stopped to talk to Smalls.

This summer, a blue jay pair built a nest in my big old oak tree. One of the young blue jays was born without a wing, and my husband and I have fallen a little bit in love with him. He's nearly reached maturity, and he can use his one wing to get him up and into trees when there is a threat. By hopping and flapping, he can move from branch to branch. He'll never soar and swoop—fluttering and hopping is his destiny. What else is his destiny remains threateningly up in the air; will it be the hawks who get him, or something more pedestrian, the coyotes or cats? It's dangerous for us to hang our hearts on him, the bird with such a slim chance, but isn't that how it goes?

In fact, isn't that how it goes with any animal? The pain of animal love is that we'll always outlive it.

Guest Post: My Garden Intern Speaks

2011-08-23T13:39:00.000-07:00

This summer, I had the great gift of a garden "intern." When my friend and coworker (Jen is a Biology teacher at my school) asked if she could help me once a week through the summer, I jumped at the opportunity. Help and company in the garden? Yes, please. As the summer has worn to its last little nubbin, today was our last day working together, and I asked Jen to write an end-of-summer recap about her experiences. I assigned her a simple prompt: What did you get out of the garden?

**********
By Jennifer Eggers

For a variety of reasons completely out of my control, I found myself with very little to do this summer. So little, it could be measured in one word, nothing. Friends suggested all sorts of things, but part of my resistance came from the bitterness of having found myself with nothing regularly scheduled. I kept asking, “What do I enjoy that doesn’t involve teaching or education?” I love to go to the Arboretum and gardens but there’s no space for me to have a garden in or around my one bedroom apartment in Los Angeles. Besides, the houseplants I have are already taking over; as my boyfriend points out, they’re starting to cover the television. Then inspiration hit: volunteer in someone’s garden. And who do I know that already has a well-established garden and is very knowledgeable? The rest of the story is history. The pieces just fell into place.

We decided Tuesday mornings would be for gardening. Even if I spent the previous day walking through Disneyland, out late, or enjoying some wine, bright and early I would be out gardening. I don’t tend to be a really happy person in the morning, but even shoveling goat poop and soiled hay was not bad when outside in the midst of plants. My overall health benefited from these grand Tuesday mornings, but I also learned more than I could’ve ever learned about plants in one of my college biology classes. Some tidbits have proven to be helpful, whereas others are just hilarious.

Things I’ve Learned This Summer:

Just because a strawberry is growing between two cracks of cement at the Huntington Gardens doesn’t mean it's not going to be the most amazing strawberry of my life.
Jerusalem crickets are not from this planet.
A wall of ivy is never ending work. Just leave it in a pot.
“Plant surgery” is not as gross as human surgery. Orchid roots just need to be worked with sometimes.
Decomposers are amazing.
Fungicide can be made in a variety of non-smelly ways, including with cinnamon.
Corn grows ridiculously fast.
Performing sexual reproduction for plants is not as weird as it might seem. Each strand coming out of an ear of corn needs pollen in order to produce a single kernel.
Canning tomatoes is a long process and should not be done on hot days.
A screen (like for the windows) can be used as sunscreen for peppers. Good thing too, because I wasn’t ready to slather some SPF 85 on them as well.
Field trips to other gardens are just as exciting as field trips were during elementary school.
“Dead heading” does not hurt the plant. I nearly cried while dead-heading the lavender.
There are lizards everywhere.
There something peaceful about trimming shallots that have just been harvested and throwing the trimmings directly into the compost pile.
Mice can spontaneously appear out of a compost pile while being moved. Turns out Louis Pasteur was wrong; spontaneous generation does happen. (Note to self to change that lesson plan when I get back to school.)
Coming home with a bag of produce after working with all the plants feels amazing.

So today as I pulled what felt like microscopic worms off sprouts, I realized it is okay to be playing in the dirt. It is okay to enjoy the very simplest parts of the world, and more importantly, it is okay to be in love with nature.

That August Glow

2011-08-19T11:41:00.001-07:00

Above me.

Right in my face.

And below too, though sometimes more subtle and peculiar.

Cucurbit Sex

2011-08-11T09:10:00.000-07:00

In the summer garden, the melons, squash, cucumbers are the lookers. They've got sexy tendrils and bright, brassy, bosomy blossoms. They're such vibrant growers that they tumble all over each other and everything else, climbing trellises, walls, the ground, into the lemon tree. Unstoppable. Funny. These plants are the whole package.

If you're as entertained by cucurbits as I am, perhaps you'd like to try your hand at saving seed of your favorite varieties.

Identifying species: If you want to save seeds from your cucumbers, melons, squash, and pumpkins, you must know what species you have growing in your yard. If, among squash, you have only a butternut (a C. moschata cultivar) and a pattypan (a C. pepo cultivar), you should be able to plant seeds from the saved fruit and expect the plants to grow true. But, if you're growing a Hubbard and a Banana squash, both C. maxima cultivars, it is likely that pollen has crossed successfully between them and the seeds will not produce an exact replica of either parent. In short, like any other genus, varieties within the same species easily cross, while those of different species only very rarely do so. So, in order to keep track of what species you have, I've written a brief description of of the more common cucurbit species below.

Cucurbita pepo: All the orange carve-able pumpkins are C. pepo, but so are zucchini and pattypan. The basic identifying key is that the stem where the plant attached to the fruit tends to be very ridged with five distinct ridges. The leaves and stems tend to be very prickly.

C. maxima: The leaves of C. maxima are among the largest and are usually an even green. The fruit-to-stem attachment on C. maxima is easiest to identify: the stem is round (not ridged), it isn't enlarged against the fruit, and it is less strong. C. maxima can be just about any color, but they aren't usually bright. In other words, an orange C. maxima will be a soft, rusty pinkish orange instead of a Halloween C. pepo orange. They can be steely blue, pink, deep green, etc. In the maxima species, I am growing Uncle David's Dakota Dessert and an unidentified variety that I brought back from Argentina.

C. mixta: The fruit of mixtas (aka cushaws) usually aren't terribly tasty, but they have huge seeds with distinct, silvery rims around the seeds. These varieties are often grown for their seed alone. The fruits looks similar to washed out moschatas. I don't grow any mixtas.

C. moschata: The leaves on C. moschata plants often have silvery spots. Also, their fuzz usually is softer and less prickly than either pepo or moschata. The place where the stem meets the fruit is smooth and has five points that flare out against the fruit. The fruits are most often pinky-tan colored, a la its most famous cultivar, Butternut. However, moschata fruits can occasionally be dark green or green and ivory mottled. I grow Seminole, a historic moschata.

Pop quiz: Which two species are in this picture below? Which is which?

Cucumis cucumis: Cucumber! Easy to identify. This year, I'm growing Poona Kheera.

Cucumis melo: All melons (except watermelon) and a couple "cucumbers" (Armenian cucumber and Bari cucumber). This year, I'm growing an old favorite, Boule D'Or, two new-to-me varieties, Eden's Gem and Petit Gris de Rennes, and of course, Armenian cucumber.

Citrullus lanatus: Watermelon! Once again, easy to ID. This year, I'm growing Orangeglo.

Preventing cross pollination: The easiest way to prevent cross pollination is to grow only one of each species. While there are cases of species crossing (the mules of the cucurbit world), those are the exception rather than the rule. If you're like me, it is really hard to contain yourself to just one variety of each species. I know that I will never have a garden with just one kind of melon in it. One kind of melon! That's practically starvation.

If you choose to grow multiple varieties within a species, the most practical means of preventing cross-pollination is mechanical isolation and hand pollination. To do this, walk out to your garden and look at your flowers. Make sure you can identify male and female flowers.

This is a male squash flower. It has no immature fruit at its base, but it does have a pollen-rich anther in the center.

This is a female squash flower. It has a large, irregularly shaped stigma and an immature fruit at its base.

This is a male melon flower; melons, watermelons, and cucumbers have nearly identical flowers. The anthers are low and tucked into the base of the flower.

This is a female melon flower. It has a stigma that can easily collect pollen off the insect pollinators.

Now that you know what you're looking for, find several just-about-to-open female and male flowers of the variety you want to keep from crossing with any other variety. If you can, choose flowers from more than one plant in the same variety because that will help keep a healthy gene pool in your resulting seeds. Tape the flowers shut.

The next morning, when the flowers would open with the sun, cut the male flower off the plant, carefully remove the tape from it, and gently tear the petals off, leaving the anthers exposed. Remove the tape from the female flower, coax the petals open, and insert the male flower into the female flower, shoving the anthers up to the stigma. After you see the stain of pollen on the stigma, cover the female flower with something to protect it from any other creature that may want to crawl around in it. I use poly mesh bags, the kind that some people use for wedding favors.

Once you're sure the young fruit is growing (see below), identify it with a ribbon or stretchy tree tape to remind yourself later that this is a fruit with pure seed.

Protecting fruit: Not every fruit will "take," no matter how carefully you work to pollinate the female flowers. It's easy to determine which of the female flowers are truly pollinated, because they'll take off growing almost immediately. If you have lots of pillbugs and similar in your yard, as I do, protect the growing fruit by placing a plate, brick, or other object underneath it, keeping it off the soil.

This is a female fruit that the plant will abort. Notice that it is yellowing towards the blossom end. The stem is also anemic, telling me that this fruit won't develop further.

Saving seeds: Now that you've worked hard to protect your varieties from cross-pollinating, it is important that you save seeds from mature fruit. It is easy to tell when seeds in a melon or watermelon are mature, because they're ready when the fruits are ready to eat. However, the seeds in a zucchini that you'd eat aren't ready to save; the fruit must stay on the vine until the fruit is bloated, like an oddly shaped pumpkin, and hard, so hard that you can't pierce the skin with your fingernail.

And cucumbers that are ready to collect seed from don't even look like cucumbers anymore. Here is a Poona Kheera cucumber that still isn't ready to harvest for seed; the skin needs to toughen more, to feel like a ripe melon, before I remove it from the vine. Sometimes cucumbers will even split open and reveal their mature seeds.

When you do remove the seeds from a fruit you've saved for seed, scoop the seeds out into a colander, give them a quick rinse, then spread them on a cookie sheet (if you like, you can line it with parchment, but that really isn't necessary) to dry thoroughly. Once completely dry (and I mean completely, totally, very, very dry), store in a cool, dark place.

Cucurbit love. I've got it bad. Maybe you do too?

Fennel

2011-08-03T09:12:00.001-07:00

The swallowtails love it.

But, Wait . . . Am I a Travel Writer?

2011-07-31T03:11:00.000-07:00

Zora, the writer and explorer behind Roving Gastronome and Astoria Ugly, just tagged me in the My 7 Links meme that travel writers are passing around amongst themselves. I don't participate in blog memes very often; in fact the last time I did was just around this time of year in 2007, and the meme was "seven things about me." This time, I am choosing to participate because I've got a string of posts in the works that I just can't seem to finish. Perhaps by looking through my own past writing, I can get myself moving forward.

Here goes:
1) Most beautiful post:
In Harriet, I write and post pictures about my grandmother. I love this post because I loved my grandmother.

2) Most popular post:
Strangely, it's tied between two recipe-only posts Midsummer Jams and Homemade Spiced Rum. That makes me a little sad, as I hoped my writing would get more attention than my recipes; the recipes, I hoped, were frosting.

3) Most controversial post:
Controversial? Hmm, I write about gardening and food and memory, so I don't tend to be terribly controversial. Nevertheless, I've received some emails over my posts (here, here, and here) on small-scale, high-density home orchards, telling me that I'll never be able to grow them organically. As if to throw a middle leaf in the face of these critics, my high-density, organically fertilized (manure, worm tea, and liquid seaweed), heavily mulched trees are cropping and growing healthily. As an added bonus, I use less water on them than I do on lawn. So, take that, disbelievers.

4) Most helpful post:
Hmm, these two, The Rules and Handy Tips for the New Homeowner, are tongue-in-cheek helpful, but the most helpful one for me personally to write was Graduation, Death, and Chickens. Oh, and the people who aren't disagreeing with me about the orchard posts seem to have found them helpful as well.

5) Post whose success surprised me:
Way Way Up got a lot of local attention when I posted it. In fact, people blogged about it. I'm always surprised when someone finds my little blog, and when lots of people find it at one time, I'm very, very surprised.

6) Most underappreciated post:
I really enjoyed researching and writing Psalmanazar, but very few people have read it. It's light on pictures, is only obliquely personal, and contains no recipe, characteristics that lead to light readership at A Thinking Stomach, yet I felt the story was fascinating enough to make up for what it didn't have.

7) Post of which I'm most proud:
This is a toss up. Books and Mantids explains how I got here. The post Survivor hints at what kind of book I'd like to write someday. Both blend personal, natural, and cultural history into the color of light in which I view the world.

**********

Though the meme asks for five new people, I'm only tagging four. I've chosen these four because they each demonstrate unique ways of talking about the world in which they live, they are distinctly different from each other, and I've learned from each of their voices. (To the writers who I am tagging, I understand being hesitant to complete this meme. Do not feel obligated to do it or pass it on; I've completely ignored tags before just because I really didn't want to write the meme. However, I hope tagging you brings you more readers, for I believe each of you should be read by everyone, and if you do choose to complete the meme, I'll be delighted to read what you write. )

Altadena Hiker: A very talented writer, Karin (as another blogger put it so well) is the "master of the micro epic." I would love to see how she reflects on and sifts through her own writing with this meme.

Nourish Me: Lucy and I began blogging at around the same time, and I feel like we grew up in the blogosphere together. I'm lucky to get see how Lucy looks at the world.

Soilman: Soilman is the shizzle. His writing and bitter humor crack me up. Really, who knew gardening could be so funny?

Whole Larder Love: The stories Ro tells with his photos blow me away and make me want to move to Australia right now. Plus, he's funny, and he loves good food, and he hunts. Expect to get hungry reading this site.

Something New and Very Old

2011-07-18T15:04:00.000-07:00

A former student is spending her summer at an architecture program in Spain. She's writing about her experiences and posting pictures of what she sees and learns. Among her adventures was a weekend trip to Portugal, and as I read her memories, I could imagine myself a few years ago in exactly the same spots she described. It has also made me remember the food: the pasteis de natas, the bacalhau, the polvo, those melons that blew my mind, and the way that the Moorish influence wiggled its way into at least part of every meal. Such a nice balance of salt, sweet, and spice—when I found that, I felt like I was tasting Portuguese history.

Tomato Jam
Last week, I canned seven quarts of tomatoes to use in sauces and the like in the winter. I know that jars of my homemade tomato paste will be happening soon, but since I have lots of tomatoes, I wanted to try something that I've never made before. I've had boring tomato jams (tomatoes plus sugar plus pectin) and I've had delicious, complex tomato jams that are as good with cheese as they are on toast as they are with meat. This is one of the latter. In fact, this rocks the latter category. I found the original recipe here on Food52, but I wanted to add lemon, a little heat, twist the acid a bit to up the Iberian inflection. If you can stop eating this directly from the jar with a spoon, try smearing it on a turkey burger. You can thank me later.

The recipe I adapted claimed this made 1 1/2 pints, but with the addition of the lemon (and the added pectin from it, leading to a need for less cooking time), I ended up with a generous 2 pints.

You will need:
1/2 teaspoon whole coriander seed
1/4 teaspoon whole cumin seed
3 1/2 pounds of ripe garden tomatoes, roughly chopped (don't peel or seed the tomatoes since both add pleasant texture and beauty to the finished jam)
1 small onion, finely chopped
1 whole large, ripe Meyer lemon, chopped (discard seeds as you find them)
2 cups sugar
1/2 cup brown sugar
1 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon red chile flakes (my chile flakes are really hot; if yours are just warm, you may consider adding more)
1/4 cup Sherry vinegar

To make the jam:
In a small frying pan, toast the coriander and cumin seeds until fragrant. Remove from heat and crush the seeds in a mortar and pestle. Don't grind to a fine powder, but instead leave the seeds chunky.

Dump the seeds along with all the other ingredients into a large, heavy pot and bring all the ingredients to a boil. Once boiling, reduce the heat and keep at a healthy simmer, stirring occasionally. The recipe I adapted calls for three hours of simmering, but my jam was ready after two. Once the mixture has reached a glossy, jam-liked consistency, you're ready to jar the goodness.

Pour the jam into sterilized jars, wipe the rims clean, lid with new, warmed lids, and screw on the ring until "finger tight." Process in a boiling water bath, fully immersed, for 15 minutes.

On Fresh Salsa

2011-07-10T09:18:00.000-07:00

I went to a magnet elementary school in a city in the San Joaquin Valley that used the local university's field for weekend track practice. I didn't run track, but my brother did. His team, a group of multi-ethnic kids from all over the city, looked the children of a UN convention, but sunburned and sweaty.

In the central valley, it gets hot and the sun is inescapable. The metal bleacher benches burned the bottoms of my thighs as I watched practice with my mom. The kids, during and after practice, would chug lukewarm water, but it just seeped right out of their pores immediately. They were water sieves, drinking and sweating and drinking and sweating.

One of the other kids' mothers would always be at practice too, watching and, more importantly to me, making salsa to share. She'd sit on the bleachers next to us with a cutting board on her lap. As she chopped ripe tomatoes, their red-flecked limpid juices would drip, drip, drip off the corner of the board. She'd chop sweet onion and lots of cilantro and toss them into a large bowl with the tomatoes. With the side of her knife, she'd smash garlic cloves, chop them up a bit, and add to the bowl. She'd mince a chile or two then scrape the fiery bits into the mix. In one quick move, she'd slice a lemon in half, and with her strong hands, she'd squeeze it directly into the bowl. She held the salt shaker well above the bowl and shook it so that salt hailed over the whole mixture, lots of salt. Finally, she'd stir the whole mixture together with her hands.

After practice, the kids would crowd around the bowl, shoving tortilla chips into the soupy salty spicy stuff. They'd double dip. Salsa would drip off their chips and down their wrists, to be licked up later. My mom and I would get in on the action too. After all the bits and pieces of were scooped up, several of the kids would share the leftover juices, tipping heads back and the bowl forward to drink directly from it.

This is how I learned to make salsa.

Summer Lessons

2011-07-04T14:27:00.000-07:00

I have a friend who is coming once a week through the summer to help me in the garden. Last week, she and I went to town on the evil ivy hedge that lines one edge of our property. I hate ivy. It's drought resistant, it grows like a weed in the sun or shade, and it makes a lush bank all year long. Why, then, do I hate it? It sneaks like a cursed wraith into every nook and cranny it can snake its searching vines inside. It suddenly pops up out of the ground three feet from the rest of the plant. It provides a home for rats and skunks and raccoons, and did I mention rats? In a month, it will overtake anything growing near it. And, it is nearly impossible to kill.

So, every six months or so, I attack it with whatever cutting tool I have on hand. I whack it back into temporary submission and pull out as many of its branches as I can. When I'm done, it looks tame for a week or so.

Last week, we started in morning shade shearing, cutting, and pulling up as much as we could of the ivy. My friend, not a curser, began picking up some of my potty mouth as the morning wore on, the shade wore away, and we got more and more dusty, overheated, and exhausted. I worried that my friend might never want to come and help me again after such hard work. After we finished a good section of the hedge, we went on to do the relatively easy and much more enjoyable tasks of planting dent corn and repotting a few indoor orchids.

At the end of our work time last week, I asked my friend what she had learned in the course of the day.

She told me this: "Never, ever plant ivy in the ground."

**********

If I had a summer kitchen intern, one of the first things that I would teach him or her would be how to make frangipane. It is the opposite of trimming the ivy hedge. It takes very little work with a huge payoff. Adding frangipane to a summer fruit tart immediately ups the oooooooh and aaaaaaah factor exponentially, yet it is such a breeze to make. It gives anyone with access to good fruit and an excellent pie crust recipe the guise of accomplishment in the kitchen.

Frangipane
I've made frangipane many, many times, and most recipes are nearly identical: almonds, sugar, butter, egg, a bit of flour for binding, and almond extract to boost the nuts' flavor. A couple years ago, I stopped worrying about using blanched almonds. I like the effect of leaving the skin on; the skins add to the oatmeal color of the paste, they don't detract in any way from the flavor, and whole raw almonds are much cheaper and less fiddly than blanched almonds. Recently, in a Martha Stewart video clip, I noticed that she adds dark rum to her frangipane recipe when she makes pithiviers. I include it in the recipe below because I liked its effect; it definitely deepens the almond flavor. As well, though most recipes don't call for it, I add a healthy pinch of salt to round out the richness of the recipe.

You will need:
2/3 cup whole skin-on almonds, toasted (place in a skillet on medium heat for a couple minutes, tossing them around a bit in the pan until they begin to smell fragrant and get toasted spots)
1/2 cup sugar
6 tablespoons soft butter
1 egg
1 tablespoon dark rum
2 tablespoons flour
1/2 teaspoon almond extract
healthy pinch of salt

To make the frangipane:
The food processor is your friend, here. Drop the almonds and the sugar in a food processor, and whirl until the mixture is finely ground. Add all the rest of the ingredients, and whirl until smooth.

Yes, it is that easy.

Place the mixture in the refrigerator until your crust is rolled out and ready to be spread with frangipane. When I use it in a fruit tart, I make my favorite pie crust recipe, roll the crust out, fold over the edges to make a bit of a pastry plate, smear on the frangipane, add some sliced fruit, sprinkle with sugar, then bake the whole thing for an hour, or until the top edges are browning nicely. You might even consider making a double batch and keeping one of the batches in the freezer, ready to have on hand when you want to build a dessert worthy of the perfect summer peaches and plums.

Anthropomorphic Onions

2011-06-27T21:24:00.000-07:00

People say these onions can walk all on their own.

They do, in a way. The Egyptian Walking Onion sends up a scape heavy with bulbils, and if it is the Catawissa strain of the Egyptian Walking Onion, that head of bulbils may send up another level of scapes. As the bulbils on the flower head grow, the head bends lower and lower until it finally plants itself a few feet away from the mother plant. It has taken a few independent steps.

I've grown the Catawissa strain, or at least what appears to be the Catawissa strain, for a few years, and have now designated a corner of the garden for a permanant patch grown primarily for its bulbils (that I use in the recipe below). I'm not finished harvesting bulbils yet this year, but after getting most of them, I've found that they're larger and more prolific than ever before. This winter, I also planted a separate temporary row of bulbils to pull up and use in the scallion stage through the winter. They were delicious in stirfries, on the grill, and even braised.

Pickled Egyptian Walking Onions
I strayed away from typical pickling spices to create something I wanted to put in a martini. The juniper berry, clearly, was a natural choice, and the Meyer lemon peel adds a sweet, citrusy, almost floral quality. What I learned while creating these is that Meyer lemon and juniper berry go together very, very well. It is a flavor combination I need to play with more (while I'm sipping a martini that has one of these little numbers floating in it.)

You will need:
6 ounces of cleaned, skinned Egyptian Walking Onion bulbils (or pearl onions) weighed AFTER cleaning (I used the largest bulbils here for pickling, reserving the small ones to plant for winter scallions)
1/2 teaspoon salt
water
1 1/2 cups white wine vinegar
1/3 cup sugar
2 1"x3" strips of Meyer lemon zest (peeled off with a veggie peeler, no white pith!)
24 gently crushed juniper berries

To make the pickled onions:
Toss the cleaned, skin-free onions in a small bowl with the salt. Cover it and place the bowl in the refrigerator overnight. The same day you salt the onions, start melding flavors of the pickling liquid. In a medium saucepan, combine the vinegar, sugar, lemon zest, and juniper berries. Bring the mixture to a boil, boil just until the sugar has dissolved into the vinegar, then remove the mixture from heat. Let it cool then pour it into a jar, lid it, and place it in the refrigerator to begin steeping overnight.

The next day, bring a couple cups of water to a boil, drop in the salted onions (do not rinse them!) and boil for one minute, just to get them tender. After one minute of boiling, drain them of the water they boiled in, and divide them among clean canning jars. I used four 1/4 pint (4 oz) jars, which gave me plenty of room to spread them out and include lots of the good pickling liquid. Pour the pickling liquid over the onions in the jars to make sure they're thoroughly covered, but leaving a 1/2" of head room. Wipe off the rim of each jar, place the lid on, and screw on the ring. Process in a boiling water bath for ten minutes. Carefully remove the jars from the hot water bath and let them cool for twelve hours before handling.

These onions will taste best if you store them for a few weeks before opening. This recipe makes one shy pint of pickled onions.

A to Z: Wealthy in Friends, Part 3

2011-06-26T17:33:00.000-07:00

I had never been to Astoria before, and my friend A hadn't spent much time there, either. As we exited the subway stop, I think I heard A's jaw drop all the way to the concrete sidewalk. "A Greek place over there! And wait, is that Estonian? And look at all this basil at this corner store. What kind of basil is this? Smell it!" We crossed the street to the liquor store Z had recommended. It was a huge place, with wines organized by country of origin. California over there, Spain, Argentina, France, the regulars, but a whole lot more, too. I told A I didn't know where to begin.

"Oh, I know exactly where to look," and she marched straight to the wines from Croatia. A is a marcher. She knows where she's going. In situations like this, I'm much more of a flitterer. As A led me through a primer of Croatian wine, I got all glowy-happy, thinking to myself, I get to have dinner with both A and Z, people who I likely wouldn't have known if I had lived in any other time in history but who I am so happy to know now. We chose a white that turned out to be bright and minerally and a red with a donkey on the label that tasted of—you guessed it—donkey, in a very strangely pleasant way. Outside of the shop, we stopped again to make sure we knew where we were going and to smell the fragrant basil one more time.

Z's house has grapevines crawling up the front and a rose at the front stoop. The front entry smelled like mysterious flowers we wanted to eat, but neither A nor I could place the scent immediately. Taking in deep breaths of sweetness, we stood on the stoop for the minute before Z answered the door.

After a hug from Z and an introduction between A and Z, both writers I met through their blogs, who before this night, hadn't met each other, we had to ask: what is that smell? Orange blossom water.

The day before, Z thought she had run out of orange blossom water and ran out to get some. Back home, she tripped on the front step, breaking the bottle. She made a second trip for another bottle. The night we were there for dinner, Z discovered she had plenty of orange blossom water all along, so rather than find another place for another bottle, her husband poured the excess out on the front stoop. Two days of orange blossom water on the front stoop makes for one enticing doorway. It may have been an accident, but if anyone is looking for a way to create instant sensory joy, dumping a bottle of orange blossom water at the entrance isn't a bad way to go.

Z is blessed with giant hospitality, a hospitality that has inflections of every language she's encountered and terrain she's walked. She plied us with drinks right away: milk and white rum whirled with dates and almonds, perfumed with a drizzle of that orange blossom water. A plate of eggplant dip and flatbread emerged. We talked, poked around Z and her husband P's fascinating home, checked out the cookbook collection. We watched Z cook as she told us about her latest travel. A hearty lentil soup warmed on the stove, pasta bubbled in a large pot, and Z sauteed shrimp, calamari, garlic, herbs, and preserved lemon. She drained the pasta and tossed it with the seafood. She stirred in saffron yogurt. I can smell all of this as I am writing it down, and though the dominant scent of the evening was orange blossom, it is the saffron fragrance that is sticking with me and poking up in my culinary imagination since I've been back.

After we loaded food and tableware on the outdoor dumbwaiter P designed to accommodate rooftop dining, A and I nervously watched it rise outside the kitchen window. "Nothing has fallen off yet," said Z. Upstairs, food plants grew in pots and sedums, chives, and alpine strawberries velveted a green roof. We sat at a comfortable table and watched the sun go down over the city while we talked. A's wit kept us all laughing. P was wry and had good stories about his students and publishing experiences. Z listened with an active ear and told stories about her travels, one of which I had heard before but I asked her to tell again because it is that good. As it got even darker and later, we continued to talk about food, our jobs, and we told our quirky tales.

This is not a story with a dramatic arc or any kind of transformation. This is a reflection on food and the web, and how food and the web brought all of us together on June evening on a rooftop in a Astoria. If it weren't for the Internet, we wouldn't have known about each others' food, and if it weren't for each others' food, we wouldn't know each other.

Saffron Stuffed Eggs
I can't call these deviled eggs, for they don't contain any mustard, the ingredient that makes something deviled. What I can say is that these are very good—a classed up version of the summer picnic standard. This is a very loose recipe, one that I made on the fly while I was thinking about the saffron in Z's pasta dish. Unexpected, the saffron reminds the tongue of tagines and paella and all sorts of feasts where deviled eggs might not appear. The olives add complexity and the pickled garlic adds zing and crunch.

You will need:
8 eggs, hardboiled and peeled
6 strong-flavored olives, pitted and minced (kalamatas or nicoise with chile or something of the like)
2 cloves of pickled garlic, minced (if you don't have pickled garlic, a couple minced cornichons and a smidge of fresh garlic will do)
generous pinch of saffron threads
mayonnaise to taste
olive oil to taste
salt and pepper

To make the eggs:
Slice six of the eggs in half for twelve halves. Carefully pop the yolks into a bowl. Set the empty white halves on a platter to assemble later.

In the bowl where you have placed the hardboiled yolks, add the olives, garlic, and saffron threads. Finely chop the remaining two whole eggs, yolks and whites, and add them to the bowl. Begin adding mayo and olive oil, mashing the mixture together, adding until the mixture is as smooth and as rich as you like (adding more mayo makes the mixture fluffier; adding more olive oil makes it smooth and silkier). Add salt if needed and generous grindings of black pepper.

Now comes the messy part. Stuff each of the twelve of the egg whites you set aside earlier with a tablespoon or so of the yolk mixture. I scoop a spoon of the filling and set it as carefully as I can in the center of each white, pushing if off and into the indentation with my finger. However you do it, make sure to save a little of the filling as a treat for yourself smeared on a cracker.

This recipe makes twelve egg halves. Eat on a summer night with friends whose food tells stories.

The Dance and the Drink: Wealthy in Friends, Part 2

2011-06-22T21:50:00.000-07:00

We had come from a salsa club where it was too loud to talk, but if you watched well, you could follow entire conversations in which partners exchanged no words. Near the front, our table offered a view of half of the club, and the people we could see dancing ranged in age from 22 to 72, appeared to be many different ethnicities, and to have come from different economic strata. A woman celebrated her birthday at a table next to us. She wore a belted saffron dress, the swingy kind of dress that a woman who dances should wear because the dress becomes part of the dance.

A man, approaching from the back of the club, slow-moving but confident, asked the woman in the saffron dress to dance. She agreed. And her dance told a story of humor and grace and sweat. She smiled the whole time, sometimes tipping her head back in a deep, full-bodied laugh. Dancers around this woman showed off their moves; they could spin, bend over backwards, and move their bodies to a perfect rhythm. But, the woman in the saffron dress didn't even seem like she was trying or thinking, for she had become music. Her dancing was honest.

Though we could have watched her for hours, I hadn't come to New York just to watch people. I had come to be with people I loved. My friend H nudged me to leave. As we passed the woman in the saffron dress's table, I stopped to tell her it had been a pleasure to watch her dance. She grasped both of my hands with both of hers—both hands!—and thanked me. Sometimes in a short exchange, it seems as a part of each person passes to the other. I hope I carry that contagion of moving joy with me forever.

H and I left, high on beauty, and started walking north. She told me she had a place that was quintessentially, classically, historically, and in many other ways New York. We walked to Grand Central, through Grand Central, out one side, then in again, climbing dark red carpeted stairs. We entered The Campbell Apartment. A young woman in a pearls and a black cocktail dress that defied era greeted us and led us to a banquette next to the fireplace.

At 10pm on a Monday night, the place was quiet in a good way. Other people sat scattered throughout the room, and though I could hear the murmur of voices, the vaulted ceilings and dark wood kept secrets. Zelda Fitzgerald could have raised herself from the dead and walked into the room, and her beads may have caught my eye, but I wouldn't have been surprised. In the corner, H and I talked, each enjoying a drink. Our conversations are always good; we have known each other since we were 16, but our conversations aren't stuck at 16. They have evolved as we have.

She is pretty, my friend H, and as we sat in the light of old chandeliers, her hair sparked gold and her wit bubbled like her pink champagne. She is at home here: the salsa club, the streets of Brooklyn, the old money of The Campbell Apartment, the dark greens in church gardens tucked between brownstones. When I visit her, I get to be home in this grand city as well.

Kentucky Ginger Sorbet
At The Campbell Apartment that night, I ordered a Kentucky Ginger, a drink that in its basic form is ginger ale and bourbon. But, this was no ginger ale, and this was one hell of a bourbon. The drink was strong, spiked with fresh pineapple juice and a house made ginger syrup. The bartender had muddled the mix with a sprig of fresh rosemary. I was in heaven. H had a sip. She said, "This can be a sorbet." Absolutely. A very delicious, fresh, heat-busting sorbet.

You will need:
1 pound fresh pineapple, cut into chunks
1 1/2 cups sugar
1 cup water
4 inch sprig rosemary
1 inch chunk of fresh ginger, peeled and sliced
2 tablespoons bourbon

To make the sorbet:
Pour the sugar and water into a medium saucepan with the rosemary and ginger. Place on medium heat, bring to a boil, boil for a minute or so, turn off heat, and let the mixture steep as it cools. This will be the simple syrup that will both sweeten and add mystery to the final product.

In a food processor, whirl the pineapple chunks until you've created as fine a puree as you can. Pour the cooled simple syrup through a strainer into the food processor. (If you really like ginger, as I do, feel free to add one or two of the slices of ginger.) Pour in the bourbon. (I know you're going to be tempted to add more bourbon, but don't. Hard alcohol isn't going to freeze in your freezer, and if you add even a little too much, the mixture will be perpetual slush rather than sorbet.) Cover the food processor and whirl again.

Pour the mixture into a container, lid it, and place it in the refrigerator for at least three hours to chill. Once chilled, follow the directions of your ice cream maker to turn the mixture to a sorbet.

Eat the sorbet late on a warm night. Enjoy the city.

New York Botanical Gardens: Wealthy in Friends, Part 1

2011-06-19T15:52:00.000-07:00

It's wet. It's green. It's alive.

Lucky, lucky me: I have a talented, funny, remarkably smart friend who works at the New York Botanical Gardens and who spent a day last week showing me around.

Good Goat!

2011-06-06T20:58:00.000-07:00

I married an Argentine. While I call this cajeta, he asks me to call it dulce de leche. When I think of dulce de leche, I think of cow milk, but E says no, this caramelly goat milk confection is dulce de leche. Whatever it is, make it. Then spread it on a banana or on toast, or drizzle it over vanilla ice cream or pound cake, or fill an alfajore with it.

Here is my abbreviated story for the day: I have friends with goats. Goats are good.

Dulce de Leche de Chiva (or what other people call Cajeta)
You will need:
2 quarts fresh goat milk
2 cups sugar
1 tablespoon vanilla extract (that is not an error, yes, use a tablespoon)
1/2 teaspoon baking soda dissolved in 1 tablespoon water
1 tablespoon dark rum

To make the sweet caramelly stuff:
Pour the milk, sugar, and vanilla in a very large pot and bring the mixture to a boil on medium-high heat. Remove from heat as soon as the mixture boils and stir to dissolve the sugar into the milk. Stir in the baking soda dissolved in water. The milk will bubble up, but stir it back down.

Return the pot to the heat and turn the heat on low. Bring the mixture to a low simmer and cook it for what seems like forever. Be careful and don't forget you've got the darned stuff on the stove, but if you're like me, you're going to have to multitask. I cannot sit in the kitchen and watch something boil for hours without losing my mind. Luckily, early in this process the mixture is quite liquid and won't likely stick to the pan. It is only as the cajeta cooks down that distraction becomes a liability.

After an hour or two, depending on how hot you are running your stove, the mixture will begin to thicken noticeably. Stir frequently now, making sure that the sugars don't burn on the bottom of the pan. The mixture will thicken and bubble in that thick way that tells you that a sugar mixture is approaching softball stage.

Carefully pour in the dark rum and immediately stir to combine it well with the rest of the mixture. Once the cajeta reaches softball consistency (when the hot mixture slowly drips off a spoon), remove the pot from the stove.

Place a strainer over a large-mouthed jar (or a strainer over a large-mouthed funnel over a large-mouthed jar) and strain the mixture into the jar. It will slip quickly through the strainer at first, but much slower as it cools and as crystals collect in the holes of the strainer.

Once you've strained the mixture, just try not to lick the strainer clean. Place a clean lid on your jar of goodness and keep it in the refrigerator. This recipe makes just over a pint. It should last for a month or so if you can keep from eating it. Here, it never lasts that long.

(Apparently, I've written about cajeta once before. Argh! The version above is an evolved version of the older recipe; it is how I make it now, with more experience. In other words, the recipe above is mine, not from another source.)

A Quarter

2011-06-05T20:16:00.000-07:00

One more week. That is what I have until I'm out of school.

Yet, I've got these recipes that I want to share even though I don't have time to put the story with the food; I'm not fond of providing food without a story, so I will abbreviate, cut the fat, eliminate any and all excess. Done. Here is the story that goes along with this limpa bread: I am a quarter Swedish.

Californian Limpa
Based on James Beard's recipe in Beard on Bread, I use fennelseed from the yard instead of caraway or anise and fresh orange peel instead of candied. To ensure a nice texture, I cut the flour back a little, and I add a smidge of gluten to make up for rye's lack of it. Because I have one, I use a stand mixer. The result is a brightly-flavored bread that's fantastic toasted with a creamy brie or fresh chevre, even a smear of a buttermilk blue, but this morning I had it for breakfast my favorite way, with lots of good butter and generous ribbons of honey, in this case Jacaranda Honey from Chaparral Mountain Honey Company.

You will need:
2 1/4 teaspoons dry yeast
1 teaspoon sugar
1/4 cup warm water
2 cups ale (here, I like a rich ale, on the red or brown side)
1/3 cup honey
2 tablespoons butter
2 teaspoons salt
1 teaspoon freshly ground cardamom
1 teaspoon fennelseed, crushed
2 tablespoons freshly grated orange peel
2 cups rye flour, plus more as needed
2 1/2 cups unbleached white flour, plus more as needed
1 teaspoon vital wheat gluten flour

To make the bread:
Mix the yeast, sugar, and warm water in the bowl of your stand mixer and set aside to proof while you prepare other ingredients. Pour the beer and honey into a medium saucepan then add the butter and salt. Heat the mixture just until the butter has melted. Add the cardamom, fennelseed, and orange peel. Stir the mixture to dissolve the salt and honey, make sure it truly is lukewarm and not hot (let it cool to lukewarm if it is hot), then pour it into the yeast mixture in the stand mixer. Add 1 1/2 cups of each rye and white flour as well as the gluten flour. Beat well in the mixer for a couple minutes on medium speed. You will end up with a wet, sloppy mess. Good. That's what you want.

Now here I'm revealing one of my kitchen tips: heat a mug of water in the microwave for a minute or two until it is boiling hot. Set that boiling hot mug in the corner of the microwave, cover the bowl of the stand mixer with a barely-damp cloth, and set the bowl inside the microwave. Close the door, and you now have a hot and humid environment, perfect for quick rises. Let the sloppy mixture rise for about an hour.

After an hour, put the bowl back in the stand mixture, add 1 cup white flour and a half cup of rye flour, and turn the mixer to the setting for bread kneading. Knead for five minutes or so. More won't hurt you. You'll end up with a dough that is definitely a dough, though still pretty sticky. Remove the bowl from the mixer, cover it again with the damp cloth, place it back in the Washington-DC-summer microwave, and let the dough rise again for an hour.

Remove the mixer bowl from the microwave and scrape it out onto a very well-floured surface (I mix rye and white to keep the theme going). Flatten the dough out, fold it over on itself, repeat. Repeat this process four or five times, then cut the dough in half with your dough scraper. Form each lump of dough into a ball.

Line a cookie sheet with waxed paper or a silicone sheet and place the balls of dough on the sheet, spaced as far apart as you can without risking the dough rising over the edge of the sheet. Cover the sheet with a dry cloth and place the whole cookie sheet in a refrigerator. Refrigerate for three hours.

When the three hours have passed, begin preheating the oven to 375 degrees Fahrenheit and remove the cookie sheet from the refrigerator. Let the bread on the cookie sheet sit at room temperature until the oven reaches temperature, about ten minutes. Once the oven hits temperature, place the cookie sheet with the bread on it in the oven. Bake for 40 to 45 minutes, until the two loaves are well-browned all over.

Eat it like a Swede, or at least a quarter of one.

Time to Write

2011-05-30T18:22:00.001-07:00

It isn't here yet. But the garlic is.

Shallots and Potato Onions

2011-05-22T17:55:00.000-07:00

I harvested all my shallots and potato onions today. The garden smelled like a stew. It was delicious.

I grew shallots for the first time last year. I grew a variety called Sharon's, which was pretty, but seemed to put all of its energy into trying to flower no matter how vigilant I was at removing flower stalks, leaving me with skinny shallots that were mostly tough, dead, flower stalks. This year, I grew the ubiquitous French Red, and I'm delighted with its performance. I'll keep the best specimens to plant this fall, hopefully encouraging the same kind of microclimate acclimation that occurs in garlic.

Within the same species, Allium cepa var. aggregatum, lives the fascinating potato onion. Larger than a shallot, more standardly onion in flavor, and very long-keeping, the potato onion was the onion of choice for many westward headed settlers. The earliest mention I found online of the potato onion was in a British book dating to 1847 titled Midland Florist and Suburban Agriculturist. This book mentioned the potato onion's propagation and sale in London in 1796.

The potato onion clumps like shallots. When I planted them this fall, I planted small bulbs that grew to be fat (2 1/2 inches) bulbs and large bulbs that divided into many smaller bulbs. That's the general planting strategy: plant a mix of large and small, so you can harvest large ones for a big portion of your harvest and small ones that will become large ones next year. Growing the potato onion requires the future view.

That is what I love about both shallots and potato onions (and garlic and Egyptian Walking Onions): they're perennials. If you find a good strain, keeping it going is as simple as planting its divisions again next year.

Now, piles of shallots and potato onions lay across several drying racks in the garden shed. I'll let them dry a few weeks, remove excess foliage, then divide them for storage. I'll separate the largest, healthiest shallots to plant this fall. I'll choose a few of the largest potato onions and all the tiny ones to plant again in the fall. The rest, I'll hang in net bags in my kitchen, ready to make food taste good. And if all goes well, next year, I'll do it all again. After all, perennial vegetables just keep happening.

It's That Time of Year

2011-04-29T19:17:00.001-07:00

This season, during state testing and just before AP testing, is my busiest, most nerve-wracking time of the year. Like the classroom geek that I am, I spend huge chunks of time just sitting, brainstorming, developing ways to help my kids perform their absolute best during these three weeks of super-pressurized-educational-near-implosion.

So, I haven't been posting much, and I won't until exams are over.

In the meantime, I'll link you up to some of my favorite springtime posts of years past.

How to survive the horrors of a popular plant sale: The Rules
The type of moment I absolutely live for, where science, history, and food collide: Way, Way Up
Gophers really piss me off, but they also make me think (and yes, I have decided to trap and kill them): On Words and Gophers
This one still makes me cry, three years later: Framily
And, trotting out a really old one, but one that captures the flip side of the stress of this time of year: Hope Springs in Purple

See ya after exams.

Late Afternoon Light in the Spring Garden

2011-04-19T18:16:00.000-07:00

The Rebel Yellows

2011-04-13T15:33:00.001-07:00

There's the famous "going rogue," the video game Rogue, the X-Men character Rogue, a creamery, a river, a brewery, and likely hundreds of other institutions and people who have chosen the name because they are attracted to the idea of independence, originality, and naughtiness that follows the word.

But there is no rogue as roguish as disease. Disease is fascinating. Even under conditions that seem so healthy, so free from risk, disease can pop up, a stealthy rebel that distorts even the best plans. When disease strikes us, we have few choices: treat it, deal with it, or some combination of the two.

Last year, I amended my allium-bed-to-be. I added composted leaves and lots of coconut coir; I turned the feral arugula into the soil to serve as a green compost. After I planted my garlic, shallots, and potato onions, I mulched the whole bed with a lush layer of goat bedding from my friends over at Mariposa Creamery. Right now, as I dig my hand into the soil, I can pull up the most perfect, spongiest, devil's food cake soil I've ever produced. It's so beautiful it even smells good.

While the garlic bed seems to be the ideal site for my best crop ever, though I attempt to be as hygenic as possible when storing and planting alliums, and despite the fact that I rotate my crop every year so it takes four years for alliums to return to where they last grew, protecting from disease that accumulates in the soil, a rogue virus struck this year. I'm not sure whether this year's bumper crop of slugs and sowbugs spurred the disease, or whether a winter full of rain allowed more opportunity for the virus to develop. Nor do I know why most of my garlic and shallots appear healthy with only a portion of the crop hit.

Last year, my Shilla looked like this.

This year, I pulled up the diseased plants a month or so from expected harvest date and found tiny plants with dead roots.

It appears to be Yellow Dwarf virus, identifiable by the vertical yellow striping that makes garlic leaves curly and shallot leaves floppy.

Compare those floppy, yellow striped leaves with the good posture found in a healthy stand of shallots.

When I pulled up the sick plants, I found something that at first I thought were dreaded wireworms, but then saw that they had lots and lots of legs, rather than just six; they're millipedes. Since millipedes eat decaying matter, I assume that they're eating the dying roots.

This leads me to one of the ways disease in the garden is different from disease in us. In the garden, we can turn the verb rogue against the noun rogue. "To rogue" means to remove and destroy sick or abnormal plants from the garden to prevent either their sickness from spreading or their defective genes from passing down to further generations. Yesterday, I rogued the rogues.

A suggestion for rogued plants is to burn them. That's exactly what I did, smeared with olive oil and salt on the grill, so the shallots were sweet slips of allium candy rather than sad losses.

Mood Swings

2011-04-04T21:24:00.000-07:00

One day, we're having everything-abloom weather, when the air is syrupy with orange blossoms and every little weed and vegetable springs out in galaxies of flowers.

The next, we're lighting the fireplace, telling ourselves its the last fire of the year, so we better enjoy it. It hasn't been the last fire.

A day goes like this lately. I come home, throw on ripped jeans, sports bra, t-shirt, boots, and my well-worn gloves, and do something difficult in the garden, like turning the fava beans into the soil or rearranging the compost or manually mowing, because that's how it gets done around here. I feel good, my endorphins are up, I've made change. And isn't that one of the great pleasures of the garden, creating that physical change, so tangible? Every day, I can say, "I did that. I made that happen." (That is a pleasure that does not exist in my career, though there are many other joys.)

Then the ugly happens. I bend down to see the damage, and the damage is great. Slugs have hit so hard this year; all the rain this winter must have led to some sweet sluggy loving. The sowbugs are no better. There are armies of these rolly-pollies that curl into their armored bodies whenever I approach. The slugs pull in their antennae and wait out the danger. If I hold still enough, sowbugs and slugs resume duty and start munching again. Every seed, every tender or struggling plant, is consumed; therefore, direct seeding, my preferred means of planting, has become an impossibility.

Just when I work myself nearly to frustration frenzy, something reminds me to look away from the carnage. Perhaps it is a hummingbird buzzing the lemon tree or a dove flapping to a floppy landing, the way they do. And when this happens, I can see what is growing well. While a couple struggling varieties of garlic are slug-eaten nubs, the rest are mighty and growing mightier.

The tomatoes are in the ground. I'm so hungry for tomatoes I could begin munching on the leaves like a tomato worm, so just seeing the plants, being able to smell them as I walk by fills me with that frantic anticipation: tomatoes are coming, tomatoes are coming.

Sitting in little pots on my porch, waiting to go into their own bed, the eggplants and peppers are plugging along. Once they go into the ground next week, they'll go gangbusters.

Already, I can taste summer. I can taste the bruschettas, the grilled eggplant, the roasted sweet peppers, the fresh chiles in everything. So much good is on its way.

And as for all those beans and other sweeties that my enemies are consuming, they're not lost, not really. I've started a second batch of everything in six-packs far away from the battlefield. They're safe for now, and growing far enough along until they've got strength to fight their own war when I put them in the ground.

While there's all this shifting and growing and fighting and starting, there's also ending, and good sweet endings. It's harvest time for sugar snaps and purple sprouting broccoli, and every night, in the early spring window while they last, we eat our generous fill of both.

Overall, things are swinging my way.

**********

To see what others across the planet are harvesting this week, stop by Daphne's Dandelions for Harvest Monday.

Misty and Stewy

2011-03-28T20:35:00.000-07:00

Beef and Bourbon Stew
This is a juicy, meaty stew made hauntingly spicy with the addition of bourbon. The bourbon and orange peel do unexpected magic and make this stew seem ancient, in a misty-coming-in-from-out-of-the-mossy-woods type of way. Serve it to six people with a large hunk of good bread to tear apart and use to slurp up sauce. It is also wonderful over pappardelle.

You will need:
2 pounds of beef, appropriate for stewing (ribmeat, roast, tail, shank, etc) cut into 1-2 inch chunks
Flour
Salt and pepper
Olive oil
2 white lengths of fat Egyptian Walking onions or the white part of a small leek, sliced
6 garlic cloves, peeled and smashed
2 carrots, peeled and chopped
1 pound of cremini mushrooms, quartered
1 tablespoon tomato paste
1/2 cup bourbon
2 cups red wine
1 cup beef broth
1 dried chili de arbol
1 teaspoon minced fresh thyme
1 strip of fresh orange peel, orange part only, 2 inches long
1 quart of canned tomatoes, drained of their juices

To make the stew:
Pat each piece of meat dry, then season them lightly with salt and pepper. Dredge (lightly coat) each piece with flour by tossing them around in a shallow bowl, a few at a time, with enough flour to make each piece look dusty.

In a large Dutch oven, on a medium-high setting, heat a glug of olive oil until it is ripply. Place pieces of the flour-coated meat in the pan, a few at a time, making sure to leave at least an inch of space around each. As the bottom browns, turn each piece. Brown all sides of each piece. Carefully remove each piece with tongs as it finishes browning and add a replacement until all the pieces of meat are browned. Remove all the meat from the pan and set it aside in a bowl for a few minutes.

If the pan is short on hot fat, add another glug of olive oil, then dump in the onion, garlic, carrots, and mushrooms. Cook, stirring frequently, until the edges are browned and the vegetables are beginning to soften. There should be a good collection of browned bits all over the bottom of the pan. Stir in the tomato paste and let it cook briefly, just a few seconds, until fragrant.

Watch out for the hot splatters as you pour in the bourbon, scraping up those good browned bits with a wooden spoon. The bourbon will reduce quickly to a syrup. Pour in the wine, beef broth, and add the chile, thyme, and orange peel. Add the meat and whatever juices have collected in the bowl. Add the drained tomatoes.

Bring the whole mixture to a low boil, then reduce heat to simmer. Place the lid over the pot and let the stew very gently bubble for 3 hours, checking occasionally to make sure the simmer is low and all is good in the pot.

Taste and season as necessary before serving.

Holes

2011-03-20T20:08:00.000-07:00

The wind today headbutts our windows and dervishes the wrong way down the kitchen exhaust fan. It slaps banana leaves against the bedroom walls and blows clouds, sleek racing greyhounds, across the track of mountains. It turns rain into cold bullets. But our house holds. It doesn't have holes.

***********

My mouth, on the other hand, does have holes. Or, it has one big hole where a wisdom tooth and some bone used to be, now replaced with a synthetic bone-like material and loosely sewed over with stitches that scratch the inside of my cheek.

***********

Today's rain stops me from my now-nightly routine. Just before going to bed in the evening, I've slid on the miner's headlamp, grabbed a bottle of beer and a pair of chopsticks, and headed out into the garden. Each night, slowly, poring over every plant, I look for slugs. When I find them, I pluck them with the chopsticks from their slime trail and drop them into a plastic container I have outside for this very purpose. After I find what is out and visible, I tip the container over on the driveway and stomp on the assholes. Then, into two bowls in two different beds, set deep, the top flush with the surface of the soil, I pour the contents of the bottle of beer. In the mornings, I dump the bowls and their slimy drowned prisoners out into the compost pile. (No worries, I only use the cheap stuff; the buggers don't deserve any better.) The slugs have been messing with me this year, leaving holes in everything. Not only have they nibbled down nearly all the historic beans I brought from the Sustainable Mountain Agriculture Center (I've started more in six packs on the patio, safe from slugs but potentially slowed by a future transplant), but they've also been nibbling on my garlic. My garlic! No one messes with my garlic.

**********

I spent this afternoon grading essays and entering scores into the computer. Red gaps where scores should be glared at me; many students aren't turning in their work. In the three sections I have of AP English Language, a composition and rhetoric class, students' grades are nearly entirely dependent upon their essays. If they don't write them, they can't prove to me that they're learning; but, I know very well that student performance is very closely related to teacher performance. The students aren't doing their homework for a reason. There is a hole in my teaching somewhere. Those red gaps are telling me that I'm missing something, for a good teacher's gradebook shouldn't look like a bloodied, gap-toothed grimace.

**********

I am tired of holes.

Day of Dates

2011-03-13T22:14:00.000-07:00

Does thoughtfully organic, water-conscious agriculture happen in the desert? Can it work?

Based on what my friends and I witnessed at Flying Disc Ranch this Saturday, the answer is yesity, yesity, yes.

Curious to learn more about what I had read online describing the ranch, I emailed the owner, Robert Lower, and asked if I could visit. He welcomed me kindly, and when Elizabeth and Sarah and I rolled in Saturday, his son Eric and his WWOOFer Lalo Porto greeted us warmly.

The immediately noticeable aspect of the ranch is the difference from the agriculture that surrounds it. This, across the street from Flying Disc, is an industrial agriculture potato field.

This is Flying Disc.

My friends and I had been a little turned around when we were trying to get to the ranch (this is becoming a trend, apparently), and we found ourselves on a dirt road bouncing through another date farm. In that farm, the rows were perfectly straight, the trees uniform in size, and the soil free of any life. This farm had its own elegance, in an austere, clean way, but it was a far cry from the raucous liveliness of Flying Disc.

Unlike the carefully manicured and uniform date farms around it, Flying Disc shines due to its lack of uniformity. There is not just one kind of date; there are many, including a few quirky seedlings. In fact, there aren't just dates, but the farm echoes the structure of a jungle, with layers of life. The top story is crown of blue-gray fronds and beaded sprays of waxy date flowers. Citrus trees—temple oranges and grapefruit—form the middle story, and the bottom floor is a carpet of compost and grasses.

Other plants live here too, some that don't give a crop, but provide homes. Underneath this old, untended date palm decays a truck, and behind the bench seat of this truck, bees have a built a buzzing hive.

Two owls live in the shaggy skirts of this fan palm.

Near the house, in an area free of palms, the Lowers have a few rows of grape vines and a vegetable garden. Eric listed the grape varieties, six or so, and the one that sticks most in my mind is the Red Muscat. Constantly on the hunt for good muscat grapes, I asked if they sold the grapes at market, as they do the dates and citrus. "We do, a few. We try to eat as many of them as we can because they're so good, and sometimes we only sell one box. Usually one person will buy the whole box."

What makes this farm work is the balance of control and nature. The farm uses a careful drip system, avoiding water waste, and drawing from its own well. Instead of killing weeds and grass under the trees, the farm leaves them to cool the earth, allowing the dates to ripen more slowly. Eric told me that they consistently harvest dates a month later than the farms that surround them. No synthetic fertilizers stain this soil. Yet, the soil is rich and retains water; the Lowers achieve this by composting fronds and farm waste, then mulching the trees with the aged compost, entropy with a watchful eye.

The compost does more than fertilize and retain water, as the Lowers deeply mulch, mounding well above the soil line, trees that they want to reproduce. The pile of mulch gives a place for trees to begin to root from their bases, and they sprout healthy offshoot clones.

They then plant the offshoots where they want them for the long run. They've found that potting the offshoots up to mature, then planting them again into the earth slows the growth of the young tree. Planting the offshoots directly where they will spend their lives allows them to develop a strong root system early, therefore allowing the trees to fruit while younger. And date palms don't reach maturity early as it is; it takes ten years or so for a tree to begin to fruit.

Seeing date palms bloom is like stepping back in time a millennium or two. As Lalo pointed out, "The flowers are Jurassic." And they are. They're white, waxy brooms of either male or female blossoms that split sturdy canoe-shaped pods open as they burst into fecundity.

Eric cut down a female flower spray for me. It smells of vanilla and looks like chains of enoki mushrooms emerging from a longboat. It's beautiful. (Now, as I am home and writing, it sits on my mantle, filling the living room with its gentle fragrance.)

He and Lalo explained how date reproduction worked as he handed me the spray. My friend joked that I looked like I was holding a baby. "She is, hundreds of 'em," Eric said.

To ensure the best pollination, the ranchers hand-pollinate. They climb the trees and harvest the male blossoms, whiter and more fragile looking than the female flowers, just as they begin to bloom. From these blossoms, they collect pollen, then climb back up the trees to pollinate. Lalo keeps his pollen in his work apron and tosses pollen on the flowers; Eric uses a squeeze bottle.

After spending over an hour wandering through the farm and learning, we had the opportunity to taste the ranch's product. Near the house, behind a heavy insulated door hides stacks and stacks of boxes of dates. It was chilly and dark in the cooler, and I can imagine after working through a good portion of an August day, this is where everyone must hide out to cool down and keep from turning into dates themselves. Eric rustled through boxes so we could taste what varieties they had to offer. His favorite is the Deglet Noor. Lalo says he likes them all, and proved it with a pile of date pits.

We left with a large box full of three varieties (and some citrus, for good measure). We purchased Deglet Noors, slightly crunchy, less sweet, nutty, Medjhool, huge and molasses-y, and Barhi, melty and caramelly, my favorite. All are delicious.

Eric and Lalo were generous with their time and information. I tried to thank them as we left for their openness, but probably failed in saying how much gratitude I felt.

This morning, into my cereal, I sliced a few Deglet Noors. The tree that gave this fruit lived a decade before fruiting; it was watered without waste; it may have even been an offspring of an older tree on the ranch. The fruit that I sliced had been monitored by hand its entire life; it was pollinated by someone who had to climb up a ladder and into the branches; it was harvested with the same care and bodily risk.

Thank you, Eric and Lalo.

(Thanks also to Sarah Wallin Wightman for the first picture of the fruit crate and the picture of me holding the flower spray.)

Starting Potatoes

2011-03-05T17:40:00.000-08:00

I've planted not only more, but also a larger variety of potatoes this year than I ever have before. Here is how I do it (a pretty common approach, but sometimes photos help).

Some people cut their potatoes into small pieces with at least two eyes before planting. This year, I chose to leave my potatoes whole. Though I haven't done this before, Pat Welsh, in Southern California Gardening, suggests that they may be more productive this way.

I leave the potatoes out in a warm, bright place so that they can begin to grow. This is called chitting. Developed sprouts, already putting out roots, help the plants grow more quickly as soon as they hit they soil.

Because some varieties, though from my experience not all, produce more potatoes the more they are layered with soil, I grow potatoes in deep, 15 gallon pots. Here is a line of pots along the very edge of our ranchito.

Potatoes grow best in loose, slightly acidic soil. This year, I mixed regular potting soil with leaves and coffee grounds; I added about 6 inches of this soil mixture to each pot, then gently wiggled two potatoes into the soil mixture until they were completely covered with soil.

The potatoes are already growing well. Once the sprouts are about 4 inches tall, I'll add another layer of the soil mixture to the pot. As they continue to grow through the early spring, I will add soil with every 4 inches of growth. This will allow the potatoes that are below the soil to be well-protected, and it will allow the varieties that sprout more potatoes from covered leaf notes to be as productive as possible. Several times through the growing season, I will fertilize with fish emulsion or liquid seaweed.

This year's varieties include Viking Red, Purple Viking, Purple Peruvian, Ozette, and German Butterball.

Market Day

2011-02-21T18:11:00.000-08:00

Sunday morning, we woke up to snow that crept down the mountains and over the foothills. It was in walking distance, albeit a long, steep walk, but close enough to almost smell.

The snow that fell in the mountains came as waves of rain here, leaving everything sparkling clean; the wildflowers responded by beginning to bloom, the peas by reaching and glowing, and the rusty wheelbarrow, forlornly left out again in the rain, by reflecting beauty.

It was the third Sunday of the month, the day for our local market, the Altadena Urban Farmers' Market. Hosted by the owners of the Zane Grey Estate, the market provides a venue for local home-farmers, cooks, and artisans to sell their wares. It is an "underground" market. The concept allows for uncertified farmers and cooks to sell in an unregulated setting because customers sign membership forms at the gates, agreeing to "waive the protection offered by the government regulation of food and food safety and exercise [their] right to make [their] own judgments based on [their] knowledge and direct communication with the grower or cook" (arroyotimebank.org).

The Zane Grey Estate isn't just any old historic home. The owners have been turning it into a working farm. Grape vines twist up the back slope in front of the goat paddock. Hay stacks stay dry in the solarium. It is quirky. The fact that the market is quirky naturally follows.

In the front, arranged around raised beds full of garlic, spigarello, and pink-blossomed tobacco, home farmers and cooks sell their wares. There are fresh eggs and Italian heirloom vegetables, honey from various neighborhood flowers and homemade soup, amazing ginger granola, jams, jellies, cultured sodas, pickles, homecured bacons, sustainably raised fresh chickens and game hens, and more than I can recall right now.

I sell produce from my garden and products I've made with excess produce, heirloom seeds and plants, and homemade bread. This month, I had lacinato kale, purple sprouting broccoli collards, swiss chard, frisee, mache, and arugula. As well, I had homemade bread and, since it is bean-planting time around here, a stack of heirloom bean seeds from types that have grown well for me.

Also in front of the house is a free market and cookbook swap. I always have high hopes for the cookbook swap, but sadly haven't been terribly successful in my pickings. Others seem to have had better luck.

Behind the house, next to the goat paddock, are the craft vendors.

Lily, the goat with the under bite, smiles at everyone who wanders into her neighborhood.

Down here, you'll find hand-tooled belts and cuffs, pottery, clothes and pillows made from reused vintage fabrics, soaps, and herbal salves and tinctures.

On both sides of the house, the front and the back, you'll find happy people. This is a community event, and it draws from many walks. At the sale this weekend, it felt like the event finally found its stride, a good balance of vendor types, drawing from a wider and more diverse crowd, a relaxation that hadn't been there before. A friend and I shared a tent at this weekend's sale, and she said it perfectly, "We're so isolated from each other. But this, this community and relationship building, is very healthy."

I hope to see you at an upcoming market. I'm glad you're part of my community.

Uber-Local Upside Down Meyer Lemon and Poppyseed Cake
This recipe comes from the Los Angeles Times; I've modified it to include poppyseeds and Meyer lemons. I have a Meyer lemon tree that rains fruit and two quarts of poppyseed from last year's harvest. Even the eggs came from the yard: Smalls, our lone but not lonely Marans hen, is back in full production after a winter's rest. The lemons caramelize into a layer of bittersweet, buttery goodness that tops a course-crumbed, rich cake. It's easy, and it looks like a million bucks (much better than I and my poor skills with a flash can capture).

You will need:
4 small Meyer lemons
10 tablespoons of butter
3/4 cup packed brown sugar
3/4 cup sugar
2 eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla extract
1 1/2 cups flour
1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup milk
2 tablespoons poppyseeds

To make the cake:
Heat the oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit.

Slice three of the lemons crosswise into 1/8 inch slices. Grate the peel off the remaining lemon, and set aside the grated peel.

In a 10 inch cast iron skillet, gently melt 4 tablespoons of the butter. Once the butter has melted, brush the butter along the sides to make sure the entire inner surface has a slick of butter. Add the brown sugar to the bottom of the skillets and stir it in the skillet to combine it with the melted puddle of butter. Once the majority of the brown sugar is moistened, you've stirred enough. Spread the moistened sugar as evenly as possible in the pan.

Starting with the center, arrange the lemon slices like overlapping scales over the brown sugar-butter mixture. I arranged in a circular fashion, but that is not necessary.

In a large bowl, beat the remaining butter until smooth. Add the sugar and grated lemon peel and beat until light and fluffy. Beat in one egg at a time, then beat in the vanilla extract.

In a separate, small bowl, stir together the flour, baking powder, and salt. Beat half of the flour mixture into the egg mixture. Beat until well-blended. Add the milk and beat again. Finally, add the poppyseeds and the remaining flour mixture, and beat until blended.

Spread the thick batter over the lemons to cover as evenly as possible. Place the skillet in the oven and allow it to bake 30-35 minutes.

When the cake is done, remove it from the oven and let the skillet cool before inverting it. Give it a good five minutes to cool to a point where burning is not a threat. After five minutes of cooling, gently invert the skillet onto a large, flat plate. The cake tastes best when just warmer that room temperature.

What the Trees Teach

2011-02-12T21:45:00.000-08:00

My sap has returned, my cheeks are blooming, and though I'm still fighting a cough, I'm bursting into spring. I'm no longer in bed, and that is very, very good. I learned this winter, no exaggeration here, how the flu could kill someone. And I am so happy not to be that someone. I also learned that I will never, ever go without a flu shot again.

When February hits Southern California, the fruit trees begin to bloom; thus, when I emerged from sickness, I stepped out of my house to find pink and white bee-buzzing boughs. It's been a year since I've written about the orchard I've been installing since we moved in, and now that the trees are so laden with springtime potential, I figured it would be a good time to reflect on what I've learned about my home orchard this year.

1) An ounce of prevention . . .
Two years ago, when I planted the first trees, I was careful. I whitewashed the trunks to protect them from sunburn, and I built hardware cloth cages to protect the young trees from damage from rabbits and other small animals. I'm glad I did that. I so wish I had done that with all the trees I planted last year. It turns out that rabbits and other critters are minor dangers to my trees; I'm the biggest threat.

This is Howard's Miracle plum. Last year, soon after planting, I dropped a shovel against its trunk, and knocked off a nice slice of cambium. Argh. The wound, likely aggravated by sunburn, became infected and grew. The edges are beginning to look healed now, but I'm not sure I haven't given my own tree a fatal bacterial infection that will become more malignant each year. We'll see. I'll baby the tree along this year with lots of worm tea and compost and hope for the best. If I lose it, I'll start again with another Howard's Miracle because, gershdarndit, I really want that plum.

Had I built the protective cage and whitewashed the tree, I wouldn't have to be worrying over losing it.

2) Graft wisely . . .
So much of me wanted to push luck and nature and grow a green gage plum here in Southern California. The history of green gages is just so deep and fascinating, and they taste like candy, drying so well and so sweet, but I knew I was hoping for fruit that would happen rarely, if at all. The winters here are just too mild. But I tried anyway, and trying even harder to ensure fruit, I grafted a couple scions of my friend's Italian prune on to the gage for cross pollination.

The grafts took beautifully. It's amazing to watch a graft heal and grow into the host tree. It feels like I performed some kind of magic; it feels like something I shouldn't be able to do.

But, though those grafts took off beautifully, they sucked all the vigor from my on-the-edge green gage. The green gage never broke dormancy. This is the tree in July, leafed out and growing happily from the grafts while the main tree is naked and sad. In short, I learned not to graft a much more vigorous tree onto one that is limping along if I ever want the limper to run.

I pulled the tree out this winter and replaced it with a Mariposa, a local heirloom plum. I did try some more grafting this year; for example, I've started two scions of Black Velvet apricot on the host Goldkist apricot. Goldkist is a vigorous, healthy tree, right at home in my yard, so I think this combination will work if the grafts take.

3) Be nice and roll with nature . . .
The majority of my orchard I installed a year ago. This summer, my baby White Tiger Nectarine set fruit. I know, I know, I shouldn't let such a young tree fruit, as it is hard on its development, but it was just two and I was so hungry for success in my orchard that I kept the fruit around. (It is worth pointing out that the tree paid for my choice; it clearly grew less vigorously than its brothers and sisters last summer.) As the fruit matured, however, I started to worry. Look at the picture below. Do you see the problem?

My White Tiger Nectarine had set two peaches. I wanted to grow this nectarine because it is a hard-to-find heirloom, and because it is an heirloom white nectarine that would fruit in my low chill climate. Heirloom + white + nectarine + low chill is an unusual combination. So, I emailed the vendor, the fantastically helpful Trees of Antiquity, with pictures of the tree and fruit.

Within a day, Neil, the owner of Trees of Antiquity responded:

Surprisingly, nectarines (and peaches) will produce a few fruit on occasion which is a peach (or nectarine) since a nectarine is simply a fuzz less peach. That said I’m not confident this is the case. This problem can also develop when collecting the grafting wood from peach and nectarine trees. On an occasion the bud will be the opposite of the dominant fruit on the tree. There are a few options to pursue. We can send out another tree (any tree preferred) next year or simply refund for the tree. This is a variety which is grafted by one of our contracted nurseries which I’m forwarding the e-mail so they can reassure me this tree simply an anomaly. Thank you in advance for your understanding and let us know how you would like us to proceed. Hope you have a nice weekend.

I accepted the offer of the replacement tree, but I hadn't given up home on the fruit of my perhaps misidentified tree. When it ripened at the end of June, I cut it open.

Oh, it was delicious: superbly sweet, yielding, freestone, fragrant. Perhaps it was "throwing" a peach and will, this year, revert to nectarine. I doubt it. It doesn't matter because it is a tree worth keeping, whatever it is. This tree has been nice to me, so I'll return the favor.

4) Layers are probably a good idea . . .
I'm using a high-density planting approach to my orchard because I don't need huge trees, and I want a lot of diversity. Several readers have expressed concerns about this approach; they've worried that it will be too water intensive and too hard on the trees themselves, as they'll compete so fiercely with each other for nutrients.

These are concerns I've considered thoughtfully, and, I turned to other gardeners I know to see how they dealt with these potential problems. I visited some gardens, talked to folks, and read a lot. Looking at all the possibilities in my climate and area, I decided that frequent applications of mulch, sometimes quite rich mulch, will be the best way to deal with both drought and nutrient needs. To see how if this is successful, I set out to convert part of the orchard.

This past November, we dug an edge to the mulched bed and lined with with local stone. To make sure that water goes only to the trees and nowhere else, we switched the sprinklers out to a drip system. Then, in order to burn out the grass and enrich the soil, we covered all the existent grass in the area with hot manure. After spraying down the manure, we covered the entire surface with a double layer of cardboard, sprayed it down again, then a laid down a four inch layer of wood-chip mulch. This is how it looked the day after we completed the project.

This is how it looks this week, after the trees have been pruned and are blooming. In this picture, both the mulch bed and non-mulch bed trees are visible.

If I find the orchard robust this year, I'll finish the project in other parts of the orchard this upcoming fall.

5) Dream big . . .
These pictures tell the tale. I don't need to say any more.

(Royal Lee Cherry)

(Blenheim Apricot)

(Desert Delight Nectarine)

Sickness

2011-01-29T21:24:00.000-08:00

I made dinner tonight even though I was bored and disengaged by every part of the process: the thinking about it beforehand, the preparation of individual ingredients, the putting together of the parts, the not-too-successful attempts to taste, the serving. Never in my life have I cared less about cooking than I did tonight.

It's the first time in weeks that I have cooked, and though my husband has been doing a great job keeping himself and me—when I could eat—fed, logically he deserved a home-cooked meal made for him no matter how little I wanted to make it.

In the last few weeks, I've gone through every stage of an illness.

First, it started with a sore throat and congestion, just like nearly every schoolyear cold. Easy peasy. I could handle that. When that started up, E and I went out to eat with friends of ours. One asked me why I was out when I was clearly ill. "I don't cancel plans," I said. And, I really don't. And I did want to be there, out with them.

The beginning of the week rolled around, the sore throat worsened, and when Thursday came, the day I was supposed to get my wisdom tooth removed, I called the dentist's office. I told the receptionist, "I don't cancel appointments, but I need to know what to do. I have a wicked sore throat." The doctor's office canceled the appointment for me, telling me I was too sick for surgery.

Then, the worst began. Instead of getting better, I got stupider. I'd find myself in a room, head aching beyond belief, and not remember why I was there. I would get stuck, standing somewhere, unsure where I was going. The sweating came in wretched, reeking waves, followed nearly immediately by body-wracking shivers. I slept for hours and hours, and when I would wake, the bed would stink with my sweat and I would feel as if my brain had been working so hard on something. One day, every time my eyes opened for a moment, I knew, I just knew I had figured out every aspect of our healthcare problem in the United States while I slept. I couldn't remember any of it, but that's okay, because I hadn't really figured out anything, as I was sick with stupidity.

Sunday night, my fever spiked and I dragged myself away from the computer, where I was trying to put together some kind of coherent substitute plans, and to the toilet, where my stomach did its best to purge itself of illness. After puking, I laid down on the cold tile. I would never move again.

I don't leave people hanging though, especially my students, so I did move and I did finish the plans. And then my bed, my sweet, stinky bed embraced me again, and I slept for almost 20 hours.

The sleep soothed my fever, and what remained was the kind of headache that blinds and deafens. I was no longer hot, I wasn't puking, but I could hardly see from the pain. Grades were due Tuesday though, so I doped up the following day and went to school. I didn't turn my head all day, but instead turned my whole body to see things beyond my peripheral vision. Everything I ate or drank tasted like metal, so I didn't consume much, other than orange juice. I drank gallons of that.

What's left? A cough. The cough is annoying and disruptive, but it is possible to live with. Something worse remains though, something that would terrify me if I could care enough about it. Apathy. While I cared all the way through the worst of my illness about what strings were left untied while I was checked out of the world, now that I've checked back in, I couldn't care any less.

I don't want to do anything. Friends and family have called, and I haven't called them back. I don't care if I leave them hanging. I have performed a few basic requirements of the gardening season as I could, but only because they are hardwired, no pleasure or frustration, just nothing. I canceled an appointment Friday. Today, I skipped out on events that I cared about in a previous life.

You know what I do care about? My bed, and that's it. So, the current me, an appointment-canceller, an apathetic teacher, and not-real friend. When is this stage going to end?

I'd feel bad, but I'm too busy not caring.

On Having Enough Space

2011-01-17T11:33:00.000-08:00

In my garden, arugula has naturalized. It mingles with the weeds under the lemon tree, it springs up along the edges of the beds, and it even appears in my lawn. Though it grows everywhere on its own, I plant it every year anyway. When arugula grows where I plant it, crowded together in a concentrated space, it yields tender, uniform, pretty green leaves.

Its tender leaves yield it vulnerable to the slugs that hunt in the thick forest its leaves create, yet it is mild and easy to harvest with sharp shears.

But when arugula springs up on its own, somewhere separate from other plants, somewhere with sun all to itself and where the wind can catch each frill on each leaf, it grows completely differently.

The leaves are wildly irregular and wildly beautiful. They are veined with burgundy and speckled with silvery hairs. Wiry and tough, the plants hold up better to garden marauders. I'm less likely to toss them in my salad. I'm more likely to stop and admire them.

**********

If you'd like to see what others across the world are harvesting this week, visit Daphne's Dandelions to see the roundup for Harvest Monday.

Long Nights

2011-01-06T19:43:00.000-08:00

Wendell Berry's Hannah Coulter kept awake with me two nights in a row as the narrator, Hannah herself, told me the story of her life. My husband lay sick and feverish beside me, and I listened to the sound of his breathing as I read all night. Last winter, we spent too many hours in an emergency room when pneumonia struck him. We may be young and therefore seemingly safe, but after sitting with him through the hospital hours, tubes, machines, and every-breath-a-fight, I don't trust those lungs of his. And so, I listen to them.

When I read so late into the night, the book and my life tangle up in dreamy ways that don't necessarily happen in the daytime, when sunlight sets the words firmly on the page. At night, at 3am and 4am, those words seem less tied to the paper and take up a sound and a voice in my head.

Through those two long nights over Christmas, Hannah set out to tell me the story of her life in a soft, even voice with a Kentuckian limestone edge, but I heard the story of her marriages. Twice widowed, once by war and once by age, Hannah knows a thing or two about a partnership, things I'm just learning.

Lessons about marriage sound trite and obvious, but learning them is difficult and beautiful. Nothing belongs to one of us. Illness doesn't belong to one. Joy doesn't belong to one. Memories get jumbled between the two of us. And what one doesn't know about the other, one wants to, just to be able to feel that memory in the brush of an arm.

But more important than what we don't know and what we do know is the work we do together, the life we create that is bigger and more difficult and sadder and more fun than life without the other. The place in the world that Hannah and her second husband Nathan create says goodbye to most who enter it; but as those people leave, they leave better because of Hannah and Nathan's hard work. What a goal for a marriage: to create a metaphorical place that welcomes and loves those who both enter and leave.

After a few days of thermometers and never-changing-out-of-pajamas, my husband was up again and leaning against the wind of everyday life. I finished Hannah Coulter. The Christmas holidays ended, along with the vacation time that surrounds them. My husband and I have come out of this concentrated time of sickness and celebration, freetime and fever, sleep and sleeplessness a little different than when we entered it. We've made our place in the world a little bit better for others, yet we're not even close to done. We've got a lot of placebuilding to go.

Happy New Year

2010-12-31T16:47:00.000-08:00

From "The Country of Marriage," by Wendell Berry.

"Sometimes our life reminds me

of a forest in which there is a graceful clearing

and in that opening a house,

an orchard and garden,

comfortable shades, and flowers

red and yellow in the sun, a pattern

made in the light for the light to return to.

The forest is mostly dark, its ways

to be made anew day after day, the dark

richer than the light and more blessed,

provided we stay brave

enough to keep on going in."

And on to what 2011 brings us. May you and yours be brave with each other and keep on going in.

My Favorite Color

2010-12-20T15:20:00.000-08:00

I took these pictures while running errands in the rain today. What wasn't an errand: finding persimmon trees to photograph.

Around here, persimmon trees wear their own Christmas ornaments. When we do cut the fruits down and out of the tree, we set them artfully around the house, as if each persimmon were a piece of handblown art glass. It's all a sham though. The fruits, though beautiful, are so plentiful some people complain about having a persimmon tree. It rains persimmons here.

The two photos above are of two different unidentified astringent varieties I brought home from a recent California Rare Fruit Growers meeting.

I'm not complaining, for I love persimmons.

The tree that had been on the property when the previous owner moved in, that had never produced for her, and that had only given me six fruit last year, bore heavily for me this year.

A fraction of the tree's harvest, cut down to protect the fruit from the jubilant clouds of marauding parrots. I love the local parrots, but I also really want to be able to eat my tree's fruit.

This tree is a mystery. I have no idea what kind of tree it is, and I've even checked with experts about what it might be. Most people who are familiar with persimmons know the two most commercially available varieties, Hachiya and Fuyu. Hachiya is acorn shaped and astringent; that means it is only edible when it feels like a water balloon in its state of liquidy ripeness. Fuyu is flattened and nonastringent, a pumpkin color, and crunchy and mild. Variations abound on the astringent and nonastringent theme. There are gold-colored and hat shaped and narrow spade-shaped astringent persimmons, and persimmons that are even astringent unless they're fertile and seeded. Among the nonastringent varieties are types that are like pumpkin colored four-leaf clovers, and others that are round around the girth, but flattened from top to bottom.

The fruit from my persimmon tree is definitely nonastringent, edible and delicious when it isn't yet soft-ripe, but excellent even when soft and yielding. It is nearly round and a deep orange. The flesh is juicy and flecked with tiny russet specks.

It's my favorite persimmon, and I had nothing to do with it. I inherited it.

Now I have a wealth of fruit, so I've got to learn how to use it. While I've experimented with many dessert-like persimmon recipes (here and here are two recipes in regular persimmon-season rotation), I've never considered using them in any kind of savory preparation. Until this year, that is. Overwhelmed with more fruit than I can eat fresh, I hit the books for a solution and came up with A Passion for Persimmons: A Collection of 87 Persimmon Recipes with Commentary by the Author. It's a cute book, published by Ojai Valley Library in memory of its author, Ann Crozier. The recipes that I've tried have been hit or miss, but here's a definite hit.

Mainlining Vitamin A Curried Carrot and Persimmon Soup
Adapted from A Passion for Persimmons, by Ann Crozier.

Like a Thai yellow curry, it this soup is rich with coconut milk, an addition that does amazing things to the curry spices. I can picture myself riffing on this recipe in the years to come, spicing it up more, adding lemongrass, maybe some galangal. When I made it this week, I used duck broth made from the carcass of a recently consumed roasted duck, and I was able to toss a few leftover nuggets of duck meat into the soup as well. But chicken meat would work just as well, or no meat at all. If one chooses to use veggie broth, this is a vegan meal, a very, very delicious vegan meal.

You will need:
2 tablespoons vegetable oil
6 large carrots, peeled and roughly chopped
2 nonastringent (Fuyu or similar or whatever the heck my persimmon is) persimmons, peeled and roughly chopped
2 stalks of celery, roughly chopped
1 onion, peeled and chopped
1 thumb of ginger, peeled and minced
3 cloves of garlic, minced
2 heaping teaspoons of curry powder
1 teaspoon salt
1 quart broth
1 13.5 ounce can of coconut milk
a handful of leftover meat (optional)
lemon juice to taste
cilantro for garnish

To make the soup:
Heat the oil in a large, heavy-bottomed pot. Add the carrots, persimmons, celery, onion, ginger, and garlic, and saute for about 10 minutes on medium heat, or until parts of the persimmon begin to caramelize a bit. Add the curry powder and salt, and continue to saute for another minute or so, until the mixture is very fragrant. Pour in the broth, and scrape up the good bits from the bottom of the pan. Let the mixture cook at a high simmer for about a half an hour. Remove from heat.

Working carefully, fully immerse an immersion blender and puree the soup. Pour in the contents of the can of coconut milk and the optional meat, and stir to combine. Return to heat and heat again until just simmering. Add lemon juice to taste.

Serve garnished with fresh cilantro leaves.

And no pictures of the soup, you ask? No reason to have any. It's a puddle of my favorite color.

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If you'd like to see what others are harvesting this time of year, join us at Daphne's Dandelions for Harvest Monday, where gardeners from all over the world share images of their latest harvests.

Survivor

2010-12-02T18:18:00.000-08:00

I love to imagine what they looked like: overgrown amber "pears" hanging from dead trees, large silver-laced leaves twining in and around the brittle wood. The trees were carefully girdled, killed by slicing into the cambium layer around the entire tree. Once the trees died, members of the Seminole tribes would plant squash seeds around the base of the tree, and these vines would climb the tree and fruit in the air. Up there, the fruit was less likely to rot than if setting on the damp soil.

The Seminole pumpkin fascinates me. It's a beautiful fruit, tawny colored like a butternut and similar in flavor, with a deep orange, very smooth flesh. Also like the butternut, it belongs in the C. moschata species, a vigorous species that deals well with heat and even humidity. I grew it this year up trellises, and my only regret is that I didn't plant it earlier in the season, for when I had to pull the vine out for my winter veggies, it still had fruit on it yet to mature. But it's beautiful, and tasty, and grows really, really well here, and there's a lot more to the story behind this pumpkin.

Serving as a primary food source for the Creek, Muskogee, and Calusa peoples (collectively identified as Seminole) for at least five hundred years in Georgia, Alabama, and especially Florida—it is documented by Spanish visitors upon their arrival to Florida—the Seminole community passively bred the pumpkin to be long lasting and hard-skinned. "If they opened one in October and saved the seeds, rodents would have probably gotten them. Or insects or fungus. So they would eat on them throughout the fall and winter, and the longest keeping ones would be the last to be eaten. The best keepers provided the seed by unintentional selection" (Dr. Bradshaw, cited by Freeman). Both the high protein seeds and the flesh served as an important winter food. The Seminoles used the pumpkin in cornbreads, a version of frybread, and dried the flesh to use in throughout the year. The food was so important that, according to some sources, its loss caused devastation:

"When Chief Chekika was tracked down and killed by the U.S. Army after his raid on Indian Key, his body was hung from the trees of a small hammock west of Miami. To add further emphasis to this act, all of the Seminole pumpkins hanging from the trees in the hammock were shot to the ground. More than symbolic, this was a most effective way to cause starvation among these Everglades renegades." (Campbell)

That story caught me and wouldn't let go. And so I continued to explore it, and I haven't found much that I'm sure is reliable. There seems to be discrepancies surrounding the 1840 Indian Key raid and whether or not many claims surrounding it are true. However, all accounts do make some of the same claims, that the raid occurs right in the middle of the Second Seminole Wars, that the government of Florida at the time had a $200 price tag on the head of any dead Seminole, and that in this raid, between seven and thirteen white people and no Native Americans died. I'm no expert in any of this; all I can say is that a lot of fear and anger seems to have fueled everyone involved.

One person who died in the raid was a Dr. Henry Perrine. About him, I can find plenty of solid information. In fact, on Google Books, I even found this:

In this petition, Dr. Perrine seeks to establish a township in southern Florida, where he'll cultivate tropical useful plants to test their suitability for American agriculture. His enthusiasm shines in this paragraph from the text.

Congress granted Perrine his request; however, because of the climate of war, Perrine and his family didn't stay at his township long, but instead attempted to find safety at Indian Key. There, the raiders killed him.

I wonder what Perrine could have accomplished if his history had turned out differently. I wonder what would have happened if Seminole heads didn't have price tags. It's a sad story for everyone.

Except, perhaps the pumpkin. The pumpkin survives.

The History of Appalachia, One Bean at a Time

2010-11-18T20:06:00.000-08:00

We took nearly every wrong turn on the way there; of the four turns it takes to get from the center of Berea to the Sustainable Mountain Agriculture Center, otherwise known as Bill Best's house, three we took were incorrect. What should have been a fifteen minute drive was thirty, but they were hilarious misturns, full of slaphappy laughter and a joyful disregard for time. Being tucked in the rolling hills of Kentucky on a clear gold and blue autumn day makes it hard to feel anything but pleasure.

When we finally got close to Best's home, we could see the mountain at the end of the narrow valley wore a dark forest-smoke top hat. We rolled up to the front of the house anyway, parked the car, and walked toward the front door. While I was the one of the three of us who instigated this mission, I still felt a bit awkward. I was about to knock on the door of someone who I deeply admire and who I'm still surprised I had a chance to meet. But before we got to the door, Bill Best came around the corner, greeted us, and welcomed us into his home.

Who is this guy with whom I'm so enamored? He's the first person to ever receive a PhD in Appalachian studies, and a former professor of Appalachian studies at Berea College. (As a sidenote, Berea College in itself fascinates me. It predates the Civil War, and from its inception, offered equal, integrated education to both black and white students. It's historic motto, "God has made of one blood all peoples of the earth" still informs the decisions the college makes. Having only seen it from the outside, but still able to see the diversity and art this college cultivates, the healthy and happy town this college supports, I know I need to go back there.) He's the author of several books and is writing another on Appalachian beans and tomatoes. Informed by the way his family in mountainous North Carolina grew their own foods, saving seeds of the most productive and flavorful of their crops, he became more and more disgusted by the directions agriculture took in the 1960s. As a result, Best began to explore the seedsaving history of Appalachia, and later, founded the Sustainable Mountain Agriculture Center. At the center, he's collected beans from throughout Appalachia, over 300 varieties so far. He's discovered that every mountain valley has a bean that hails from it, a bean with a history and a heritage. He has theories about the background of greasy beans, the legendary satiny, "fuzzless" varieties found in the rural South—he argues that they stem from a very old Cherokee variety. He also argues that the genetic material so carefully preserved through the history of Appalachia deserves saving. And, at 79, he's still going strong, telling us before we left that he may have to go fight the fire. Yup, he was gearing up to fight a mountain fire.

But when we first arrived, he was in no hurry to leave. As we entered his house, he introduced us to Rimbaud, his black cat that would already be huge even if he weren't fat, but since he was fat, he fit solidly in the class of gargantuan. We sat in his living room, and he told us about his house, a house his wife designed in the 70s and that he and two workmen built. It's a solid yet sky-scraping A-frame with a fireplace that runs up to the tippy-top of the living room ceiling. Building it out of fossil-ridden limestone, Best created the fireplace himself, tucking lucky-find arrowheads into the masonry.

After he let us in, he went to fetch from the freezer—for long-term storage—the seeds I had emailed him about purchasing. He came back with six bags of carefully packaged beans. Here is what I purchased and what I learned about each:

Rose Bean: From the Rose family of Madison County, KY, this bean is a pole bean, good for green or dry, with gorgeous feather-speckled seeds. This is one of the prettiest dry beans I've seen. They even made my husband oooh and aaaah.
Frank Barnett Cut-Short: "A mutant bean from the River Bean of Ed Meece of Somerset, Kentucky, this cut-short is a true breeding deep beige bean. Grown originally by Frank Barnett of Georgetown, Kentucky, this bean is a good producer and a very flavorful and tender bean" (heirlooms.org).
Pink Tip Greasy: "One of many pink tip varieties of beans, this is the only pink tip greasy bean that I know of. From the Bethel area of Haywood County, NC, this white-seeded bean is excellent for many uses" (heirlooms.org).
Striped Hull Greasy Cut-Short: "From Jackson County, Kentucky, this is a tightly packed greasy cut-short with white seeds. Many hulls have light green streaks on them" (heirlooms.org).
Partridge Head Bean: "This bean is widely grown in the South-Central part of Kentucky and in the Cumberland Plateau area of Tennessee. It is used as a green bean, as a canning bean, and as a shelly bean. It is especially popular in Clinton County, KY where almost everyone grows it" (heirlooms.org). To me, the seed looks like a smaller version of a pinto.
Pete Ingram Fall Bean: This, I have to admit, is the one I'm most excited about. It comes from the grouping of "fall beans" that folks in Appalachia have grown for autumn harvest for generations and generations. It's a blood red, round bean, good for dry. About it, Best writes "From Pete Ingram in Indiana but originally from Eastern Kentucky, this fall bean is a deep red color. It is a climbing bean with an excellent flavor" (heirlooms.org). I have a feeling that this will produce well for me with a beginning-of-September planting.

So I bought the bean seeds and a packet of Vinson Watts tomato seeds, my friend bought another package of Vinson Watts seeds, and we sat and chatted for a spell. The smoke plume on the other side of the mountain loomed large though, and Best worried he'd have to protect his farm that reached to the top of the ridge behind the house he built. We left the house, thanking him profusely, leaving Rimbaud very well-petted. I felt rich with history and food and potential.

We couldn't wave as we drove away, for Bill Best was turned away from us, glaring down the fire at the end of the valley. Part of his treasure drove away with me, safe from a Kentucky wildfire; it hopped on a plane and ended up here, ready to bring a bit of Appalachia to Altadena come next planting season.

Seeds. There are no better souvenirs.

Woodford Reserve Distillery in Versailles, Kentucky

2010-11-14T15:38:00.000-08:00

All it takes is corn, rye, malted barley, water from the limestone hills, and years and years in charred oak barrels. While it loses an angels' share in the process of aging, it becomes something miraculous. Bourbon.

Sweet Taters

2010-11-01T19:15:00.001-07:00

When I set out to create this garden, I set out to grow things that my husband and I love to eat, and to provide as much of that food we love as possible. What I have discovered in this process is that we love a lot more foods than we knew we did. I didn't know that there were hundreds of kinds of peppers with a huge range of flavors from citrusy to mellow, sharp to smooth, juicy to cocoa-powdery, nor did I know pepper flowers of different species looked different from each other. I hadn't ever had a salad that was made entirely of mache or nibbled on cucumbery salad burnet. Though I had read about fava greens, I had never had a steaming, slightly charred stir-fried plate full of them. I hadn't tasted garlic scapes, the subtleties in flavor between different varieties of garlic, or the fresh bite of Egyptian Walking onion greens.

I planted sweet potatoes because I love sweet potatoes. I did not know beforehand that the leaves were mighty tasty steamed or sautéed. And, before looking into sweet potatoes to grow, I didn't even know there were so many varieties.

Yesterday, while I was harvesting my first ever crop of sweet potatoes, I kept squealing with surprise and delight as I pulled up plants. One great pleasure of harvesting sweet potatoes is that one has no idea of what one will pull up. Some of the vigorous looking vines had only one normal-sized root hiding beneath; others had large clumps of six to eight meaty roots. E came out to see what I was doing and shot a picture of me with mud, bad hair, beat-up paint stained clothes, and a bunch of large-rooted potatoes.

The two varieties I planted grew differently from each other. The Violetta had lovely vines with bright green leaves and a few regularly-shaped neon violet roots with white flesh. The Red Wine Velvet had purple-tinged purple growth and many (six to eight) irregularly-shaped, burgundy-skinned, orange-fleshed roots.

As tempted as I am, I have not yet tasted either of the varieties. Instead, I have to cure them, a process in which the tender, disease-prone skins of the roots firm up at high humidity and warm temperatures while some of the starches convert to sugars, sweetening up the roots. I wrapped the sweet potatoes in large towel, placed them in a box, then placed the box next to my husband's computer, a place I figured would be warm all the time. There they'll sit for 10 days. I hope that makeshift process, imitating what large farmers do with their harvests, works here. 10 days, I can't wait.

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If you'd like to see what others are harvesting this week in gardens the world over, stop by Daphne's Dandelions and check out Harvest Monday.

Autumnal

2010-10-28T20:03:00.000-07:00

Fall comes around here and chiles follow. I've been busy, too busy for words, but I've got a few recipes to share.

(From top left: Chilhuacle Negro, Dedo de Moca, Chile Rallado, Aji Panca (orange form), Pimento, Bishop's Crown aka Chapeu de Frade)

(Much hotter than I expected: Either Tobago Seasoning or Datil Sweet. I mixed up the tags, so I'm not sure which it is.)

(I purchased this seed from a fellow Seed Savers member who identified it as an orange form of Aji Panca. I'm not sure that is what it is, but I am certain it is a Capsicum baccatum, and it is beautiful, productive, and delicious, so I'm keeping it!)

The chile peppers' names read like a fragrant, tongue tingling poem:

Aji Panca Chapeu de Frade Datil Sweet

Chile Rallado Ancho Rojo Pimento
Pimente de Barcelona Zavory
Dedo
de
Moca
Fish Tobago Seasoning Red Ruffled
Chilhuacle Negro Roberto's Cuban
Peter
Pepper
Tlacololero

Sweet Chile-Garlic Sauce

Many props go to Linda Ziedrich, author of The Joy of Pickling in which this recipe appears, who, when I emailed her about hot-water canning this recipe, replied promptly and helpfully. She actually replied to my email. I'm a fan for life. This is a delicious dipping sauce for eggrolls, grilled meat, and many other good things. A friend emailed me recently with the following suggestion: "You know what Christina's chile-garlic dipping sauce is really good with? In-N-Out fries, that's what!" It's sweet, hot, and very, very garlicky. Yum.

You will need:

1 cup cider vinegar

1 cup water

2 cups organic sugar

2 teaspoons pickling salt

1/4 cup minced garlic

1/4 cup Southest Asian Chile-Garlic Relish (see my post here for the recipe)

To make the sauce:

Bring all ingredients but the last to a boil in a large, heavy pan. Stir to dissolve the sugar and salt crystals. Boil the mixture gently for about 30 minutes, or until it begins to thicken slightly.

Stir in the relish and increase the heat to medium-high to bring it to a rolling boil. Boil the mixture for about 2 minutes, or until it reaches 230 degrees Fahrenheit on a candy thermometer. Remove from the heat.

Pour it into sterilized jars, and this is what Linda Ziedrich wrote in an email to me about hot water bath canning the sauce: "You could certainly can it; it's really like a soft pepper jelly. A five-minute bath in sterilized jars, or 10 minutes in unsterilized jars, should do it. In fact, this sauce should keep for a long time at room temperature even without the hot-water bath."

Makes about 1 1/2 delicious, sticky, garlicky cups.

Sweet Heat Jelly

The Ball Blue Book (not the Blue Balls Book, get your mind out of the gutter, c'mon!) provides a recipe for jalapeno jelly that suggests pureeing the jalapenos and adding green food coloring, but I like little gems of chile suspended in the naturally-colored amber jelly, AND, I prefer the medium heat and complex flavor of the orange Aji Pancas, spiced up just a bit with a very hot Chile Rallado. The proportions of the recipe below are the nearly identical to the Ball Blue Book (minus the food coloring), but the recipe differs in the process. This jelly is fantastic with cream cheese and crackers or toast. A friend recommends it on cornbread.

You will need:

3/4 pound finely minced ripe, medium-hot peppers (I leave a few of the seeds in for flavor and interest, but remove most)

2 cups cider vinegar

6 cups organic sugar

2 three ounce packages of liquid pectin

To make the jelly:

Combine the peppers, vinegar, and sugar, and stir over medium heat until the sugar crystals dissolve. Bring the mixture to a boil and let boil for 10 minutes, stirring frequently. Do not let the sugar brown.

Stir in both packages of liquid pectin, then return to boil, and keep at a hard rolling boil for 1 minute, stirring all the while.

Remove from heat and carefully ladle into sterilized jars. Process for 10 minutes in a hot-water bath.

This recipe makes 2 1/2 pints of spicy, tangy, sweet sunshine-y jelly.

A Weekend: Short on Time, Long on Beauty

2010-10-13T20:43:00.000-07:00

Yup. It's Fall.

2010-10-04T19:47:00.000-07:00

Two two-year-old apple trees are giving me fruit:

1) Golden Russet:

(Please excuse the missing slice. I couldn't wait to taste it before photographing it.)

This apple wears leiderhosen and gold. In summers like ours, when the sun can dry sweet peppers on the plant and turn grapes to raisins in a day, leiderhosen may be what this apple, hailing from New York sometime before 1845, needs. My young tree gave me three beautiful, squat fruit; Emilio and I have eaten two, and one, heavy on its small branch, still hangs on the tree. While the texture of the two we've tried hasn't been perfect, perhaps a bit corky but not at all mushy, the flavor was amazing: spicy, tangy, winey, complex. This isn't a grocery store apple, nor an overly sweet Fuji (though those have their place). This is an apple that tastes like a season.

2) Wickson:

Blushing like a feverish child, Wickson is small, sweet, snapping with juice and intense flavor. Albert Etter, friend and scientific successor to Luther Burbank and student of Edward Wickson, developed this apple, a cross between a Spitzenberg Crab and a Newton Crab, sometime in the 1940s. It's a true California apple, but tastes like it has roots in Maine or Normandy. It is, according to every source I've read about it, the premium apple for a single-variety cider. There are only eight apples on my little tree this year, but I'm already reading up on cider press plans.

I wish I could have known the apple's creator. In the absence of time travel, I'll be satisfied with this gift he's passed down to me through time.

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If you'd like to see what other people across the world are harvesting this time of year, join the Harvest Monday party at Daphne's Dandelions.

100+

2010-09-26T15:11:00.001-07:00

It's over a hundred degrees Fahrenheit outside today, and I can't even think about writing. Isn't there a theory out there that eating spicy-hot foods actually cools you down? Or, is the heat just making me lose my mind?

Whatever. I can't think well. It's hot. My chiles are ripe and hot. I like hot food and want to eat it all year long, so I made myself this:

Yup, "rooster" sauce, or super-spicy-chile-garlic-sauce. And it's easy. And even though it will heat up your food, it won't heat up your kitchen. And finally, it is the base for another recipe that will soon appear on this here little blog o' mine.

Southeast Asian Chile-Garlic Relish
This comes straight out of Linda Ziedrich's amazing book The Joy of Pickling. It's a quick, easy recipe, and it is infinitely usable. It tastes fantastic in dry-fried green beans and stirred into breakfast eggs. It's hot and tangy and garlicky-delicious. I just made my first quart yesterday so I haven't had experience with how well it ages, but due to the high acidity and salt, Ziedrich writes that it "will keep well for as long as a year" in the refrigerator. To make mine, I used ripe chiles from my two plants of Chile Rallado, an heirloom Mexican jalapeño-type chile.

You will need:
1 1/2 pounds ripe hot peppers, stemmed and cut into rough chunks
1 cup cider vinegar
1 tablespoon salt
Peeled cloves of 1 small head garlic

To make the sauce:
Pulse the ingredients together in a food processor until minced but not pureed (the seeds should stay whole). Store in a covered jar in the refrigerator or in airtight containers in the freezer.

That's it.

Seriously.

It's hot.

It Comes in Dribbles

2010-09-20T21:29:00.001-07:00

My early fall harvest, that is.

The peanut harvest is slow in coming. You can see the nodes reaching down from where the flowers had been on the peanut plants. I planted these in April, and just now they're beginning to send down what will become peanuts. This variety is Carolina Black.

Daily, I bring in collections of four or five tomatoes and a few peppers. However, it looks like in a week or so I'll be slammed with peppers. I can't wait. In this picture you can see a couple Zavory peppers and four Black and Brown Boar tomatoes.

I've now finished my winter squash harvest, and the squash are sitting in the shadiest and coolest part of the shed. Here, you can see some of them. The long-stemmed pumpkins are Winter Luxury Pie, the yellow acorns are Gil's Golden Pippin, the large pumpkin is a renegade Winter Luxury Pie (the sole fruit of one vine, perhaps accounting for its size?), the dark green are Uncle David's Dakota Dessert, and the mottled bells in the back are Seminole.

And this, relaxing in an old desk chair on the back porch, is Titan, the mighty sunflower. This week, I harvested two heads this size.

Also this week, I've harvested bunches and bunches of basil and sweet potato greens. Jars of fennelseed and coriander fill a bit more each time I go outside.

If you would like to see what others are harvesting across the spinning blue, stop by Daphne's Dandelions for Harvest Monday.

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Going back to school jolts my consciousness every year, but this year, with two deaths of significant members of the school community within the first few weeks, has been particularly tough. I keep oscillating between reveling in my students and their quirks and sparks, and mourning people who, as a coworker said of them, "loved well." I'm thankful to have known both. Loving well, I'm going to be practicing that as best as I can.

Books and Mantids

2010-09-06T18:05:00.000-07:00

My yard serves as the hunting ground for whole fleets of praying mantids. In fact, this time of year, before the smells begin to change for fall, is when they're most obvious. They've reached near-full size now, and they're beginning to think about mating. The females are sitting on their perches with their fannies curled up in the air, letting the whole mantis world see their goods, while the males are usually hanging out just a few feet away from the females, collecting their guts and gear before they approach the females to mate. Although it doesn't happen as frequently as folklore tells us, sometimes the female will eat the male during mating. That usually only happens when the females are hungry. A warning to all the male mantids out there: make sure your mate is well fed and happy before jumping on.

This morning, I went out to check on the couple that has been hanging out in the bananas and gingers against our bedroom wall. Alert and in full hunting mode, the male greeted me by peeking over his leaf perch and looking straight at me.

Praying mantids, similar to several other insects, have compound eyes that create the illusion of pupils watching me as I move. Along with their two large compound eyes, they have three eyes on the front of their face between the compound eyes, and they have the ability to move their heads nearly completely around to see in all directions, giving them remarkable eyesight. This particular male has reached his final molt, clear to me because he now has wings to help him get to where the girls are. The fact that he's reached maturity is what allows me to easily determine that he's a male; he's longer and more slender than a female, and he has full length wings and long antennae.

After females' final molts, the wings they develop (if they do develop them) are short and ineffective. As well, their abdomens tend to be wider. I think that the other mantis in the ginger is a female, for she has such a wide abdomen and much shorter antennae, but she hasn't reached her final molt yet, so I'm not absolutely sure. When I found her this morning, she was mid-molt, her old skin split across her back and her new body wiggling slowly out of it. I had never watched a mantis molt before. She seemed Zen-like and slow, perhaps not even conscious, completely unresponsive to me sticking the camera right in her face. As she finished, she hung upside down in the sunlight for a while, her new face like a green opal.

Whenever I spend time with praying mantids, I remember the carefully detailed fight scene in Gerald Durrell's memoir My Family and Other Animals. As a child, Durrell filled his room with his discoveries, living and otherwise. One evening, he found Geronimo, the gecko that hunted on his windowsill, and Cecily, his pet praying mantis, engaged in a fight to the death. He reports every blow, every strategic move, every fault in both warriors' fight. Cecily lost. By a tail.

I like the book as a fun read about a young biologist approaching both his family and his surroundings with fascination, but I don't love the book. Luckily for me, this memoir and those that follow it aren't the only types of books Durrell has written. He also wrote a handbook that changed my life.

When I was twelve, my grandmother gave me Gerald and Lee Durell's A Practical Guide for the Amateur Naturalist: What to do in 17 various environments—from your own back yard to beach, meadow, or woods; from feeding an orphan bird to planting a bottle garden, breeding butterflies, and much more. A long title, yes, but it didn't daunt me. I must have read this book twenty times between the year I got it and the year I graduated from high school. When I wasn't reading it, I kept it handy for reference. It followed me from the fields and vegetable gardens of our little ranch in the Central Valley of California to the deciduous woodlands of our hilltop home in Minnesota. I carried the book in my head as I poked in tidal pools and sand dunes on vacations. When my family and I toed our way through the Boundary Waters of the northern reaches of Minnesota, my brother and I found a stand of pitcher plants growing out of a moldering mat of reeds and moss, and because of this book, I had the theory of ecological succession right in the front of my brain.

In college, curious and in love with the possibilities across the disciplines, I took classes in as many fields as I could, leading me eventually to a class called Environmental Geography. The final, focusing on the characteristics of different natural environments, seemed to be lifted straight from the book that had been so important to me in my adolescence. As I took the test, I felt like Val Kilmer's character Chris Knight in Real Genius. I handed in my test with the kind of confidence that if I were more of a bitch would have allowed me scrawl "I aced this" on a scrap of paper and hand it in with the test. I did ace the test. When I got my test back, I could see my professor had written "A+" and "Please see my in my office" across the top. In her office, she told me she had never given an A+ in her teaching career, and though she didn't doubt my honesty, she wanted to know what I did to study. I told her about The Amateur Naturalist, but I'm not sure she understood what that meant. I didn't study in the typical sense. Instead, I'd been studying for that test since I was a kid in every interaction with nature I made. Every walk to class was an opportunity for me to study for that test.

So now, I spend a large portions of my free time watching praying mantids molt, hummingbirds catch gnats over the compost pile, monarch caterpillars munch away the milkweed. I devour books, fiction and nonfiction, because I know that each can change the way I approach the small and even the biggest parts of my life. And I am never bored.

The Great Tomato Review of 2010

2010-09-02T17:34:00.000-07:00

Tomatoes have come in waves around here. One wave hit while we were in Argentina, and our friend Russell was able to harvest and enjoy our tomatoes; we caught the end of that wave upon our return. We've had a steady stream of tomatoes since then, but now we're gearing up for another wallop of ripening tomatoes. Though I've put off canning all summer, I can see that I'll be able to put it off no longer.

It's been a good year with some great tomatoes who stole my heart and my tastebuds. Before I get started, I should say that I took some of these pictures with eggs (courtesy of Blondie and Smalls) so you could have a size reference. Let me introduce you to this year's tomato team, listed in no particular order.

1) Guernsey Island Pink Blush
Here, you can see that Guernsey Island Pink Blush is a small tomato, but larger than many cherry tomatoes. I guess one could categorize it as a "grape" tomato, though better tasting than any grape tomato I've experienced. Slightly elongated, most fruits have a small nipple and are a sexy, deep pink color. They're incredibly sweet with a fantastic eating texture: firm but thin-skinned, balanced perfectly between gel and flesh. The flesh has a slippery, tongue-like texture, which sounds kind of naughty, as if you're French-kissing a tomato when you eat one, but the tomato kisses you back, and who doesn't want such a sweet kiss? The only thing I've done with this tomato so far is pop handfuls of them in my mouth as appetizers or garden snacks, but I'm sure these would be great in salads, topping a fire grilled pizza, or tossed with pasta.

2) Goose Creek
This tomato was a complete disappointment to me. It was way too small for a regular tomato, way too grocery-storish, way too unproductive. Supposedly able to set fruit in heat, it stopped making fruit as soon as it warmed up. It also gets sun burned far too easily for my climate. It was all around lame.

Except for one thing: the tomatoes dried very nicely in one of our heat waves.

Despite this, I will not grow Goose Creek again.

3) Linnie's Oxheart
Oooooooh baby, these are some mothers, some bright red triple Ds of a tomato. On top of their heft, they're delicious. They've got a great, balanced flavor and are just about the meatiest non-paste tomatoes I've ever encountered. Linnie's Oxheart (and Kosovo, below) have solidified my love for oxheart tomatoes. They taste good, they're super-meaty, they're usually large, and they make great sandwiches and canners. That's what I want out of a tomato: everything. Though Linnie's Oxheart and Kosovo are very similar, Linnie's wins by a hair on flavor. To my tongue, Linnie's Oxheart has enough tang to balance the sweet, making the flavor more complex than in Kosovo. The plant has been a steady producer, offering no big glut, but one or two ripe tomatoes at a time, spread out over the season.

Linnie's Oxheart is a winner and will stick around.

4) Kosovo
Kosova wins the blue ribbon this year. The flavor may not be quite as complex as Linnie's, as it sits on the sweeter side of tomatoes, but it is so meaty, so productive, so blemish-free, so early and so late, it has given me nothing to complain about. The first ripe tomato in my garden was not a Guernsey Island Pink Blush; nope, it was a huge, pound-plus Kosovo. And even through the heat, this guy keeps setting fruit. The plant is now easily ten feet high, and it shows no wear-and-tear of disease, heat stress, drought stress, or age that many of the other plants now exhibit. As well, while many oxhearts have wispy leaves that offer too many opportunities for sunburn or bird buffets, Kosovo has regular, sturdy leaves.

The fruits are very deep pink, and the flesh has few seeds. In fact, it has so few seeds that seed saving from this guy is quite a bit of a chore—a very, very worthwhile chore. I'm looking forward to canning a load of Linnie's Oxhearts and Kosovos in the next couple weeks.

5) Black and Brown Boar
Such a pretty tomato, isn't it? I love the way the bronzy-greeny-browny stripes look against the rust red on the flesh. The interior doesn't have the same stripey quality; it looks like a basic "black" tomato on the inside. And the taste? Good. Much better than any grocery store tomato and most farmer's market tomatoes, but it didn't blow my mind. They taste similar to the Japanese Black Trifele that I grew last year, though the flavor of the Japanese Black Trifele didn't fare as well with the heat as Black and Brown Boar's does (by this time year last year, Japanese Black Trifele produced tomatoes that were mushy and way too juicy to enjoy). Black and Brown Boars also fit in a funky middle-ground of size. They're not large enough to use much in meals, and they're too large for cherry/grape tomato uses. I guess I just like my 'maters on the large end or the small end. I have little use for mid-size. Black and Brown Boar, I just want you to swell up for me a bit, okay? If you could do that, I'd grow you again.

6) Brad's Black Heart
By far, this is the best tasting tomato of the year. Daaaaaaaaaaaaang, just thinking about this tomato makes my mouth water. Sweet, smokey, a little salty, meaty . . . hungry yet? I wish this tomato was a better producer. It's semi determinate, but seems to send up new stalks, that, though they get no taller than the small plant, set more fruit. So it didn't stop setting fruit, like a determinate variety, but it did slow way down. I have two of these guys in my garden, and they grow the same way, in spurts and sick-looking. They don't seem to have any real disease, but they've never appeared to thrive either. That won't stop me from growing them again though; this is the tomato to slurp up in simple 'mater salads of garlic, olive oil, basil, salt, and plenty of tomatoes.

7) Green Pineapple
In the picture below, Green Pineapple is in the bottom and Not Wes is on the top.

Green Pineapple has a mostly golden-green skin when ripe, but the flesh is disarmingly green, lime Jell-o green, apple Now And Later green. They're juicy, flattened beefsteaks, and they fit firmly in the sweet end of the tomato flavor spectrum. Despite the expectations their coloring creates, they aren't tangy. They're nice eating in salads, especially with a shot of sherry vinegar to zip them up a bit, and I've enjoyed growing them. While the green-green color is fascinating to add to salsas, and although they're certainly unique, they're not on my must-grow-again list. Of course, I say that now, and who knows? By next year, I may really want to have Green Pineapple again just for the variety.

8) Not Wes
I picked the Not Wes below on the shy end of ripe. They're good that way, but they're great when they turn dark gold. I've written about them before, so I won't beat a dead horse, but I will add that they're a funny tomato in that they seem to love the microclimate of my yard. And who wants to mess with that? I'll keep them around as long as they keep doing they're funky, beautiful thing.

Argentina: Rosario and Ramirez

2010-08-22T19:00:00.000-07:00

If Tucumán is Argentina's Philadelphia, Rosario is Argentina's Chicago. It is a huge city, just edged out of the number two spot by Córdoba. It is a gritty, vertical city on the wide Rio Paraná with a history of industry and agriculture commemorated by a port and empty warehouses along the river. It is a city built of immigrants, filled with large populations of Italians, Germans, and Russians. The architecture is beautiful, and the food, melded of many cultures, is amazing.

This city, perhaps because of its location along the Rio Paraná, also acts as home to not only pigeons and doves, standard city-wildlife in Argentina, but also to colorful birds I couldn't recognize.

Patriotism soars here, quite literally, in the form of the Monument to the Flag. Pride binds the cobblestone, cinderblock, marble, brick, and concrete in this city.

But it has its quirks, too, a sort of punk edge that I didn't feel in Buenos Aires or Tucumán.

The world changes when crossing the 60 kilometer wide Rio Paraná. The city-side of the river is deep and passable; the other long stretch of its width a mesh of islands and swamps.

Victoria, the town immediately opposite the Rosario on the river, is so sleepy during a weekend siesta we didn't see anyone out on the street as we drove through.

And after passing through Victoria, we stuck to blue highways, and finally, a long dirt road that trailed the edges of broad estancias to bring us to Ramirez, the hometown of my mother-in-law.

Rosario has industry, history, achitecture, and pride. Ramirez, on the other hand, embodies community. Almost immediately after we rolled into town and up to my husband's great-uncle's house, the phone rang. ECG's great-aunt answered it, laughed, grabbed her wallet, and encouraged us all to follow her around the corner. Up the street sauntered a firetruck, a tail of good-smelling smoke wagging behind it. E's great-aunt trotted right up to the passenger window and handed over a few pesos in exchange for raffle tickets. My father-in-law followed her and bought a handful of tickets too.

The volunteer fire department was raising money by raffling off a pig roasted on a parilla the firetruck towed. Everyone wanted in on it. None of my family won, but we all got hungry.

About an hour later, after the fireman driving the truck finished his rounds, he let us into the cable service and studio my great-uncle-in-law owns. It turned out that he was not only a volunteer firefighter, he was also my great-uncle-in-law's employee. At the station, our family showed us around the satellites, hookups for broadcasting movies and sports, and the studio for the local access channel.

I hammed it up in the studio.

Later that night, we celebrated my great-uncle-in-law's 80th birthday. We congregated in the town community center, and looking around the room, I could see the individual genes that collect in my husband's body and face. I saw his hairline, his eye color, his legs, his nose, and his dimples. The birthday party extended until breakfast the next morning. Or, I heard it did. I petered out around 2:30am. After a feast of guancia and empanadas, wine and roasted short ribs with papas and batatas, and birthday cake, after Spanish polka (who knew?), a slide show, a tap-dancing show, after a much-less-elegant tango show than earlier in the trip (so much less refined that, unfortunately—yet to the delight of many—a breast fell out of one of the dancer's dresses), after family speeches and everyone hitting the dance floor, I couldn't keep going. But the town could, and ECG and I left a party that was in full swing in the early hours of the morning.

It's hard to take pictures of community. I haven't figured out how to capture this feeling with images, but I can tell you this. Of all the places my husband wishes he had more time, it is in Ramirez. He wishes he spent his summers here growing up. He wishes that he could have learned the ropes at the cable station and absorbed the practical education his great-uncle could have provided. He wishes he learned how to restore a 1926 Chevy. He wishes he could have helped with the animals at his mom's friends' houses, and perhaps taught one of the many friendly dogs a trick or two. He wishes that the woman behind the counter at the grocery recognized the town's dimples in his cheeks and knew him as one of Ramirez's own.