Sunday, October 12, 2014

The Reason

It's been quiet here on A Thinking Stomach, and there's a reason for it:

This summer, we learned that E may win a great job; in September, he won it; last week, he moved north to start it.

Ever since the possibility of the move came up I was certain it would happen, so I stopped planning for a fall or winter garden, and started planning on shutting things down. Every step outside to work in the yard now is an effort to clean up, clear out, erase. I'll be here in Southern California for two more months, shutting the ranchito down and selling it, cleaning up our rental property and selling that, closing up my chapter at my school, and in general, transitioning. It's a lot. But, I am enough. 

I'm not ready to write about what the ranchito has taught me in our years here, or to reflect on two decades at my school, but I did want to give you a glimpse of what's going on so you know the reason for the silence. 

It's not an unhappy silence—I'm so excited for the new possibilities the Bay Area will provide the two of us, the new growing climate to learn, the new places to explore—and it's only a temporary silence. A Thinking Stomach is not a place, but a part of me, and it goes where I go. 

This morning, a quiet fog settled over the garden and the canyon. I worked cleaning out a vegetable bed, and dug up the ginger that had grown from the single piece I planted this spring. After pulling it up and handling it's pearly newest shoots, my fingers smelled like candy. This life, even in the midst of change and anxiety, sleeplessness and hard, hard work, is sweet.

Tuesday, September 16, 2014

Portraits in a Garden: Christopher Lee

Loretta Allison, Spade and Seeds, and Christina Wenger, A Thinking Stomach, have set out to find gardeners who can teach us how to live better in our outdoor spaces. Home gardeners who have designed their own spaces—large or small—in ways that feed their homes and their spirits draw us to them. We figure we’re hungry to learn from them, so you might be also. Join us in our occasional series as we explore their spaces.

Text by Christina Wenger
Photography by David Kiang
Art Direction by Loretta Allison

A peaceful man with an easy smile, Christopher Lee has been playing with plants since he was a kid. Somewhere along the way, he got distracted and ended up earning his masters in health administration. After just a few months in an office, he realized he had made a mistake, and left to return to plants. He’s been working as a freelance flower designer ever since, and in the past five years, he’s also been piecing together his own personal paradise.

Christopher has turned blank apartmentlandia into a beautiful, food-producing, fish- and chicken-inhabited, manicured jungle. Before visiting Christopher’s home, I didn’t know jungles could be manicured. I learned the beautiful way.

From the street, the apartment complex does not look like anything could be hiding behind it. But, as I walk into the center parking area, I notice concrete cut out of the parking spots, replaced with trees and spider plants. Between two young trees sits an old bathtub, planted with trailing herbs. And then, wait a minute, in front of the door of the bottom floor apartment is a large colony of dendrobium orchids in peak bloom, an Asian ceramic crock housing a mini-pond and water lettuce, pots of elegant succulents. The deeper into the complex, the more interesting it becomes. 

Christopher leads me through a gate and into his side yard, where spider plants never looked so good. They grow thick and lush under newly planted shade trees acquired from LA’s free tree giveaway. One tree will grow to shade a seating area Christopher has built out of a succulent wall garden and mid-century modern chairs his neighbor discarded. The turquoise caning of the chairs plays off the glaucous grays, lavenders, and lime greens of the succulents. Behind us, cuttings of succulents Christopher salvages from jobs, neighbors, and friends relax on a table, waiting for him to arrange them into the living sculptures that populate his garden. I hear the sound of water running.

Just beyond us is another bathtub, this one full of small koi and water plants. I laugh. I didn’t expect a koi pond here, and certainly not one built out of an 80s-era bathtub, but it’s beautiful, and it works. The fishes’ tails write loopy poems of peace along the surface of the water. Beyond the koi tub, the garden opens up into a small backyard, where foliage creates layers of texture and color. The far edge is a carefully maintained bamboo forest, where Christopher cuts out any unwanted stalks and trims off the lower branches. He has tied the stalks with transparent fishing line to keep them at their most balanced angles. Below the lacey canopy of bamboo leaves are ferns, elephant ears, cymbidium orchids, and variegated spider plants. Green, green, green. Quiet.

A gray wooden fence surrounds the yard, and Christopher built a slightly raised deck—painted the same color—out of big-box store fencing; he painted both from brown to gray. The gray softens the space, greening the greens and playing with the muted palette of potted succulents. He has more of his turquoise-caned chairs and a small table on the deck. Strings of white Christmas lights create a transparent ceiling that must provide a lightning bug glow in the evenings. Nearby, another large Asian ceramic pot houses a still pond of duckweed and guppies.

But amidst the calm, there are more surprises. While I’m squatting to check out the bed closest to the back of the building, a shady, damp place full of food plants that I’m just beginning to parse out, Christopher, who has stepped away for a moment, returns carrying a bantam Brahma hen with a corresponding rooster scurrying behind him. The chickens live inside, but relax outside with Christopher in the backyard, where they scratch in the herb bed. He sets them down, and they walk confidently past me, right into the greens. The hen chuckles; the rooster looks alert.

While I watch them dig and peck, Christopher explains what’s in the bed. He shows me the Asian greens he’s grown from a seed mix, and the mint, Vietnamese coriander, and Vietnamese fish mint that trail throughout, all grown easily from cuttings. These herbs are all very invasive, but as they live in this bed, surrounded by concrete, they can sprawl without becoming a threat. Large-leafed oxalis sends up its trios of emerald hearts. Red-stemmed chard quilts with color. Bronze fennel and an overwintered tomato provide floppy, filigreed height. The bed is a beautiful mess.



Overall, hard work, discards, freebies, and a distinct and careful design sense have created this space. Christopher rescued many of his plants from his work and received cuttings of many others from friends. The bathtubs in the front and back are discards from the apartment building’s remodel; the outdoor furniture, the neighbor’s trash with a new slick of paint. Yet, there’s nothing cheap here—it’s all elegance.



I could stay here in this peaceful place for hours, but I have other commitments, so go I must. My heart rate has slowed here; I’m refreshed. I’ve been graced by the calm of green, the presence of a joyful, generous gardener, and surprise.

On that sunny, breezy day, I leave Christopher’s house with ideas and Vietnamese coriander cuttings.

Takeaways From Christopher’s Garden:
Ask your gardener friends for pass-along plants: Succulents, spider plants, Vietnamese coriander, mint, and fish mint grow easily from cuttings. Watch out though—mint and fish mint are invasive and unless they’ll be very contained, you may want to grow them only in a pot.
Use what others won’t or can’t: Rescue from the side of the street objects that could be beautiful with a little elbow grease—tubs, pots, furniture.
 Gray is good: Have you ever noticed how green everything looks on a rainy day? It isn’t just because of the water, but also the color. A backdrop of soft gray opens the space and plays well with both lush greens and glaucous succulents.
Get your water fix by building a pond in a pot. Set water lettuce in it and a few guppies or mosquito fish; keep it in a shady spot so it doesn’t overheat, and monitor water levels.

Friday, July 25, 2014

Eggplant Love: Saving Seeds

My favorite eggplant is Rosita. It's gorgeous. I'll show you pictures when my fruit that are currently swelling and coloring are harvested. But despite how special it is and how well it grows in my yard's climate, some years, it's nearly impossible to find commercial sources of seed for it. That's just one of the many reasons it's important for me to save my own seed.

My friend Loretta at Spade and Seeds gave me a Thai Long Green eggplant seedling this year, now growing in the same bed as my Rositas. It's a nice eggplant, too: productive, pretty, and mild. The seedling she gave me blossomed well before my Rositas, the only other eggplant variety in my yard (or on the block, for that matter), so I knew the first fruit it set was isolated and would produce true-to-type seed. I decided to save seed from that fruit to give to her as a thank you for the seedling.

So, I let it grow. And grow. And then it became firm and turned from its lovely soft green to a vibrant gold. The mature fruit means that the seed is now mature as well.


Once I picked it, I brought it inside my shed to work. Though you could do it this way, it'd likely be very tedious to dissect an eggplant, using tweezers to dig out every small seed. So, I tried to be more efficient. Using a box grater, I grated the bottom third of the fruit into a large bowl. Grating the flesh loosens it up enough for the flesh to separate from the seeds. Checking to make sure I had grated all the flesh that held seeds, I poked around in the flesh above the bottom third of the fruit, but the only seeds to be found were in the bottom.


I added some water the bowl to help separate the flesh and the seeds even more. The flesh floats in water, while healthy seeds sink, so the two fall away from each other. Here, my summer intern is holding the bowl up to the shed's ceiling so you can see how the seeds have settled on the bottom of the bowl.


We used our bare hands and scooped up most of the floating flesh. Some still remained, so I added water, swirled the mixture together, and while swirling, carefully poured off the water and the floating flesh. That left us with almost-clean seeds.


After another couple swirl-and-pours, the seeds were completely free of residual flesh.


We plopped the seeds on a labeled sheet of parchment paper (the seeds won't stick to it as they dry). 


When they're completely dry, I'll package them up and give them to Loretta. She'll be able to grow quite a few children of her gift to me next year. Later this summer, I'll repeat the process for an isolated Rosita fruit. Never will I be unable to find seed for my favorite eggplant.

Thursday, July 24, 2014

Tomato Love: Saving Seeds

When you find a tomato variety you just have to grow again because it is so delicious, or when you find an individual tomato plant that stands out above its sisters in health and productivity, you can save seeds to keep this plant's true-to-type children in your garden for years to come.

Here's how you do it:

Early in the season, when the flower buds are strong but not yet blooming, place a poly "wedding favor bag" around a flower bunch prevent any cross pollination. If a flower sets fruit inside the bag—remember, tomatoes are perfect flowers and can fertilize themselves—remove the bag and place a twist tie or similar on the stem. That is the fruit you'll save seeds from, as you know it will be pure, without any crossing with any other variety.

Once the fruit ripens to dead-, soft-, almost-exploding-all-over-itself-ripe, remove it from the plant and bring it somewhere you can work. Cut the fruit open and slip the pockets of seed and gel into a small bowl or mug, scooping out as many seeds as you can. Feel free to slurp up any remaining tongues of flesh you have left over after scooping out seeds.

Add a splash of water to the small bowl of seeds and gel so you have at least a quarter cup of liquid. Set the bowl somewhere warm but not in the sun—in an unused part of your kitchen (yeah, right), or perhaps in a shed or shady, protected place. Let the bowl set and grow mold. Depending on the temperature and time of year, that floating layer of mold can take anywhere from a day to three. If it's hot, like it is here in the summers, add water if it looks like the bowl is drying out before mold forms. Why the heck do you need to do this? Each seed in a fresh tomato sits in a tiny purse of its own gel that contains a hormone preventing the tomato from germinating inside the warm, wet fruit while it's still on the plant. However, after falling to the ground, a tomato rots, and that rotting process frees the seed from it's protective pillow, allowing it to germinate when the weather, moisture, and warmth are right. When we save seeds ourselves, we've got to emulate the rotting process by using very ripe fruit, collecting seed, and letting it mold over.


Once a thin layer of mold forms over the surface of the tomato-seed liquid, add a little more water to make it easier to work with, then carefully pour off most of the liquid. You'll have a collection of healthy seeds on the bottom of the bowl, where they've sunk. Add some more water to the bowl and swirl it around, then dump the contents of the bowl into a small, fine mesh strainer. Rinse the seeds under running water, agitating the seeds as necessary to free any clinging clumps of flesh. After the seeds are free of debris and drained, gently dump them on a piece of parchment paper.


Use pencil to label the variety name on the parchment paper, and place the paper somewhere inside your house to dry. A couple times a day, stir and break apart any clumps of seeds that form. The seeds are like velcro, and they'll want to stick to each other.

If you live somewhere warm and dry, like we do, the seeds will be thoroughly dry in a week or ten days; somewhere else, you may need to wait longer for the seeds to completely dry.

Once dry, place them in a labeled container that works for you (small sealing ziplock bags, little snapping boxes screws come in, tiny jars), and place that container somewhere even-temperatured and dark, where the seeds can survive with decent viability for seven years.

Tuesday, July 22, 2014

Gone Missing

I'm here.

I'm having a busy, exciting, delicious summer.


I'll be back soon.

Monday, June 30, 2014

Planting Calendar

On several occasions, people have asked what to plant when. But here's the thing—what to plant when is very dependent upon the climate of an individual garden. I can plant my onions out in January when people in other parts of the world are wondering if they'll ever see the soil under the snow again. That's an extreme example, so here's one closer to home. I pass gardens on my way to work all the time during the schoolyear. My school is about 25 miles away and 850 feet in elevation lower than where I live. One my favorite gardens I see on the way to work has corn sprouting each year in February. February! At my house, in the beginning of February, we still get light frosts. Other people nearby may have more shade than I do, or heavier soil, or be tucked between two hills.

The essential lesson of gardening is experimentation. That demands rule-breaking, curiosity, and a willingness to occasionally bet on the wrong horse. Every seed packet and book in the world will tell you that direct seeding in mounds ("hills") is the best option for cucurbits (melons, squash, etc), but I struggle to keep mounded soil moist enough in the warm months I plant them. This year, I planted in used six packs, and as soon as the little buggers had true leaves, planted them out in even, not mounded soil. My cucurbits had a better start this year than ever. (Of course, now, they're suffering because I haven't been watering enough. Shame on me. Note to self, melons and squash need lots and lots of water.) I'm sharing what usually works for me based on lots of failures. If your climate is identical in every way to mine—which, come on, you know it isn't—this may work for you. If not, please note that this calendar doesn't look like others you'd find in a book. In other words, throw the rules out, think about your soil, your sun, your water, and other factors, and take chances on when to plant. Keep in mind, the difference between year to year can through a wrench in garden planning, too. Be ready to fail; winning will be all the sweeter.

Glossary
Chitting: Letting potatoes develop sprouts by exposing them to light.
Direct seed: Plant by seed directly into the garden soil.
Heat and light: Plant in either a makeshift or actual greenhouse that is powered by the sun or electricity.
Plant out: Plant seedlings into the garden soil.
Six packs: Small six-cell plastic containers used to sell six seedlings at a time; I wash used six packs and reuse them over and over.
Slips: Shoots that grow off of sweet potatoes that will eventually become the plants you plant out in the garden.

January
Direct seed:
Peas
Salad greens (arugula, mache, lettuces)

With heat and light:
Eggplants
Peppers
Tomatoes

Plant out:
Onion seedlings (I purchase these)

Other:
Start sweet potatoes with a toes in glasses of water on windowsills

February
Direct seed:
Salad greens (arugula, mache, lettuces, endives, and chicories)
Cooking greens (chard and mustard)
Pole beans
Cilantro

With heat and light:
Tomatillos



March
Direct seed:
Pole beans
Carrots
Beets
Cooking greens (amaranth, chard, mustard)
Cilantro

In six packs:
Squash, melons, and cucumbers

Plant out:
Tomatoes

April
Direct seed:
Corn
Okra
Cilantro

In six packs:
Squash and melons

Plant out:
Sweet potato slips
Tomato seedlings
Eggplant seedlings
Pepper seedlings
Tomatillo seedlings
Squash, melon, and cucumber seedlings






May
Direct seed:
Asian long beans
Corn
Lima beans

Plant out:
Sweet potato slips
Squash and melon seedlings










June
Direct seed:
Asian long beans
Corn
Lima beans

















July
There's a lot to eat this month, but not much to plant. Planting, for me, starts next month again.








August
In six packs:
Broccoli
Rutabagas
Kale
Cabbage








September
Direct seed:
Pole beans
Endives and chicories
Carrots

In six packs:
Broccoli
Cabbage

Other:
Place planting potatoes somewhere bright to begin chitting






October
Direct seed:
Endives and chicories
Salad greens
Turnips
Peas
Fava beans

Plant out:
Garlic
Broccoli seedlings
Rutabaga seedlings
Kale seedlings
Cabbage seedlings
Potatoes







November
Plant out:
Broccoli seedlings
Cabbage seedlings

December
Sit back and enjoy the harvests. This, for me at least, is the easiest garden month.

Tuesday, June 17, 2014

Walnuts and Time

This is the third year I've made nocino, and as long as I have access to my friend's tree full of green—immature—walnuts, I imagine I'll make it every year. The first year I made it, I followed to a T the directions a friend gave me. Months later, when I tasted the result, first I fell in love, and second I realized it had more citrus than necessary and it didn't need the cinnamon (blasphemy according to some Italians). So, last year, I tweaked the recipe a bit, cutting back the citrus, removing the cinnamon entirely, deepening with a few coffee beans and a whole vanilla bean. I was happy with the result and am making it the same way this year. But, who knows? Maybe next year I'll replace some of the vodka with brandy and the cloves with allspice. The tannic solidity of a green walnut invites curiosity.

My friend who says to me, "Name your price for nocino," also says, "It tastes like Christmas." Another friend made a double batch last year to use in his version of Black Manhattans—his double batch didn't make it through a year.

Nocino fits in the category of Italian digestifs called Amaro, which means "bitter." And it is bitter, but it's also silky, and rich, sweet, and oaky. It tastes like what Ents would drink at a party. I love it.

To make nocino the way I did this year, you will need:

6 coffee beans
7 whole cloves
1 whole vanilla bean
3 1"x2" strips of orange or Meyer lemon rind, colored part only (use a peeler)
2 1/2 cups organic sugar
1 liter vodka
30 green, smaller than golf-ball walnuts

Additionally, you'll need a very large jar, gloves, a sharp knife, and a cutting board you can stain without feeling bad about it.

In your large jar, swirl together the first six ingredients.

Wear those gloves, and working on the old cutting board, quarter the green skinned walnuts. You'll find the nutmeat inside is completely translucent, like an invisible, watery brain, and what will become the shell is pale and chalk-like. As you cut the walnuts, drop them into the vodka mixture. Once finished, swirl the ingredients together one more time, then seal the jar.

Place the jar in your "experiment closet," which you probably have, because you're making this recipe in the first place. (Mine is a closet in our bedroom that contains many things for its small size, but mostly large jars in various stages of steeping sweet, aromatic, or both sweet and aromatic ingredients in alcohol bases.) Leave the jar there for eight or ten weeks, swirling it when you remember to do so. Over time, the sugar will dissolve and the tannins in the green walnuts will stain the liqueur deep brown-black.

After the eight or ten weeks have passed, carefully strain the liqueur, first through a colander for the big chunks, then through clean fabric or a coffee filter to remove any other grit. Pour the strained mixture into a clean jar or bottle, and let it age in the "experiment closet" for another few months. Try it around Thanksgiving. Keep trying it at different ages.

My goal is to keep a small bottle of each year for as long as I can, so when I sample the year's batch in the late fall, I can taste it in a flight of years, to see how age changes the product. I'm sure from year to year, I'll play with various aromatic ingredients, yet none of those tinkerings will weaken the dark, mysterious soul of this liqueur, a soul that centers on only two ingredients: green walnuts and time.


Friday, June 13, 2014

Summer Begins

Yesterday was the last day I had to be at work for the 2013-2014 school year. Now, summer sits ahead of me, ripe and fragrant and full of possibility.

I celebrated the beginning of my freedom yesterday by heading straight from work to The Huntington.





While walking through my familiar corners of the garden, I found myself under a Rose Apple in blossom with fruit hanging on it too, in various degrees of ripeness. Though I've read about this fruit, I've never tried it. Something named a Rose Apple must be tasted, right? I looked around to check for garden staff; seeing none, I pulled a ripe looking fruit—they appear nearly identical to guavas—off the tree, smelled it, then bit right in.




Ha! A fruit that tastes identical to rose-scented Turkish Delight.

It's going to be a great summer.

Saturday, May 31, 2014

Nasty Testes

The nasturtiums under the crepe myrtle are still pumping out sweet orange blossoms, though the heat is maing the plants more and more raggedy. Now, each time I have a few minutes to scramble through the radish-scented vines, I collect a handful of nasturtium seeds.

In years past, I've tried a variety of ways to pickle the seeds because I've read that once pickled, they're a good stand-in for capers, and I've killed more caper plants than I have fingers. (My blog friend Michelle, however, is the Caper Queen.) But each strategy I tried gave me a product I wasn't very happy with.

What I've learned what trying various pickled nasturtium seeds recipes:

  • I don't have cups of seeds to work with at a time; instead, I have handfuls.
  • I like onion and vinegar flavoring the seeds, not any other spices. 
  • The seeds need a few changes of brine to calm the horseradishy bite.

This year, I've figured out how to make pickled nasturtium seeds the way I like them. Here's how I do it.

I take handful of rinsed, still greenish nasturium seeds and put them in a jar. I heat a cup of water, add a tablespoon of sea salt, then pour the brine over the seeds and let the jar sit out on the counter overnight. It stinks. The next day, I drain the seeds, and add another cup of the salt water brine. On the third day, I repeat the process the third and final time.

On the fourth day, I drain the capers and place them in clean jar with a fat slice of onion. I pour good quality white wine vinegar over until they're covered, then lid the jar and keep it in the refrigerator. By that time, I'm ready to collect another handful of seeds, which I put through the brining process, then add to the jar of pickled seeds, topping off with more vinegar as needed. As they're in pure vinegar, they'll keep indefinitely in the refrigerator.

Already this year, I've used this a few ways. The other day, I minced a few tablespoons of them, minced some sweet onion, and added both to a can of smoked tuna with a dollop each of mayo and yogurt. Man, that was the tastiest tuna salad sandwich I'd had for a while.

But, I believe that a single pickled nasturtium seed has a divine function in life: to sit in a juicy, raw oyster like a green, anatomically-suggestive pearl.




Tuesday, May 27, 2014

Portraits in a Garden: The Kubos

Loretta Allison, Spade and Seeds, and Christina Wenger, A Thinking Stomach, have set out to find gardeners who can teach us how to live better in our outdoor spaces. Home gardeners who have designed their own spaces—large or small—in ways that feed their homes and their spirits draw us to them. We figure we’re hungry to learn from them, so you might be also. Join us in our occasional series as we explore their spaces.

Text by Christina Wenger
Photography by Paul Delmont
Art direction by Loretta Allison

Raised beds hold garlic, onions, burdock, tree collards, carrots, and strawberries. 
In February, as I step out of Janice Kubo’s back door, I encounter a series of raised beds where once had been a concrete-paved driveway turn-around. A quick scan of the garden tells me this place is beautiful, and it’s full of food. Right now, midwinter, these beds near the sliding door are lush with chard, lettuce, garlic, and bok choy, all in elegant rows.

Janice is showing me around her yard, and for a moment, her mother steps out to join us. We haven’t made it far out the back door, because I have lots of questions, but her mom stops near us and shows me how in the evening she pulls weeds from the beds and lays them in a small pile for pill bugs and slugs to hide in. In the morning, she takes the weeds, pests and all, and tosses them, away from where they can cause any more damage to the garden.

Janice and Tim Kubo and Janice's mother, Yoshie Mitsuhashi, in front
of their kumquat and orange trees.
This garden is a team effort, directed by Janice and her mother, supported by the labor of Tim, Janice’s husband, and driven and inspired by the need for healthy, organic food to help counteract the many food allergies Tim and Janice’s son experiences. Though the focus of the garden is food and herbal medicines, the garden is beautiful and clearly influenced by the family’s Japanese heritage. Janice tells me she’s proud of how her family has rallied together to build this garden, and that each of them “gets it,” how they’re working together for each other and the planet. She tells me “growing food is a joy” and “it’s fun to harvest what you grow, put it on a table, and eat it.” More than she expected, she’s happy to have inspired her friends and neighbors to grow more of their own food.

One bed in this area is taller than the others, and when Janice waves her arm around the garden as a whole, I can see a few others are taller as well. These beds are raised higher than the others because the family is experimenting with hugelkultur, a permaculture strategy in which a bed covers a pile of wood and brush debris. As the wood decomposes under the soil, it works as both fertilizer and a means of water-retention in our dry climate.

 Edible Saxifraga stolonifera serves
as an attractive ground cover under 
perennial tree collards.
A garden pathway passes
under a loquat to where a food-providing
pond will eventually be.





















As we move around the satsuma tree to another part of the garden, Janice shows me more beds and fruit trees. One hugelkultur bed is full of fava beans tumbling over its edges. In full bloom, the black and white fava blossoms smell sweet and buzz with bees. Another bed has a multistory crop of tree collards with red-veined, crystalline-haired, strawberry geraniums (Saxifraga stolonifera)—commonly found as a houseplant, but in Japan used as a food plant—embroidering the deep shade of the collards. Along the side edge is a bed inhabited by a lone chayote vine, small now after winter die-back, but waiting impatiently to twist and pull itself up its trellis, covering the whole garden wall during the growing season. Two-gallon pots form the edge of this bed; each pot holds strawberry plants that will fruit in the spring. In this back corner is an old, unknown-variety fig tree that predates the family’s tenure here. With branches weeping like a trained bonsai, the tree naturally dwarfed tree produces loads of large, black fruit at the end of short-noded branches each year. Also along the back wall are a kumquat, a lemon, and a navel orange.

Ficoide glacial, aka Ice Lettuce, started from a 
cutting Janice took at a restaurant.
We’ve reached the graceful center of the garden, where a pond used to be, now filled in with a bed of garlic and lettuce. The spot is still, and though no water reflects the large paper-lantern-like oranges hanging above, it somehow maintains the peaceful sense that water features add to gardens. Janice and her family are currently studying acquaculture, with the plan to rebuild the pond here and stock it with carp or bluegill, edible fish that succeed in our warm summers and cool winters. Around the edges of the smallest puddle of lawn are large, low pots that hold perennial medicinal plants, mint, mugwort, and dokudami, all of which could be invasive if planted in the ground. In pots, the plants are safe from taking over the rest of the yard and provide visual interest. Branches naturally mosaic-ed in brown, bone, and bronze, a white guava tree grows behind us.

Janice grafted a scion from my Golden Russet apple
to a tree in her front yard; the scion has "taken" and
is leafing out healthily.


Janice and her family keep this food garden lush with lots of work—when Janice isn’t at her job, she spends at least six hours a day in the garden—and with composted waste materials from their kitchen and garden. Though the back yard is the most productive and most beautiful part of the garden, the family is working to convert the front yard too, where more fruit trees (an avocado, a persimmon, an apple, and a couple peaches), a few fruiting bushes and vines, and perennial vegetable and herb crops grow in several beds that frame the lawn that is left.

Readily reseeding red orach grows in the
front yard, providing the salad bowl and
the neighbors a pop of color.










The lot is a fifth of an acre, houses a 1,900 square feet house, and grows so much food already, with the potential for much more. Janice tells me she hopes one day the whole lot is food-producing: “food everywhere, with just stepping stones or small paths to move around on.” The Kubo family is already well on the way towards this goal. And if beauty is food for the soul, they’re creating plenty of that, too.



Takeaways From The Kubo’s Garden:
  • Chayote is a trouble-free, vining perennial crop that matures in the autumn and can be used similarly to zucchini, or, as Janice does, in a tasty, tasty chayote kimchi. 
  • If you want to start with an easy-to-grow crop that requires little effort on the part of a beginning gardener, grow green onions.
  • Fava beans—a perfect crop for our mild Southern California winters—once dried, can be soaked, their skins removed, and cooked and sweetened to make a paste similar to red bean paste for use in mochi.
  • Don’t avoid growing quickly spreading perennial plants that may be hard to remove from your yard; instead, grow them in large, pretty pots that will contain them, but also add to the garden’s beauty. 
  • Some fruit trees are architecturally and texturally interesting, and can serve as focal points in a food producing yard: a fig tree and a guava tree do this in the Kubo's yard.

Saturday, May 03, 2014

Hot Cherries

It was 94F Thursday, far too hot for this time of year. The forest fires have already begun after our dry winter, and staring down the smoky, oppressive summer and fall hurts my head. In the hottest parts of the day, my dog and I sought out shade and cool water. It was another day in another season of drought.


Those of us who grow fruit in warm climates are familiar with the term "chill hours." Chill hours refer to the number of hours between 32F and 45F in the fall, winter, and spring that stimulate the trees to release their leaves, go dormant, then break dormancy. Stone fruits and apples are particularly picky about chill hours, and some varieties are impossible to grow for fruit in our warm climates.  

This winter was hardly a winter: so little rain, only a few frosts, far too many warm days. The lack of chill hours shows in my orchard this spring. The apples, apricots, and one of my plums are struggling to break dormancy. The apricots started to break dormancy at their regular time, but have slowly woken up a branch at a time—some branches are still bare while others are loaded with fruit and leaves, and others have sparse blooms right now. While it isn't the most attractive look for a tree, it may end up leading to a nice crop, a few fruit ripening each day rather than the whole tree needing to be harvested at once.

Cherry trees have been, for most of their history, resistant to warm winters. Until recently, breeders hadn't found quality cherry trees that would produce reliably in a warm winter climate like my own. In 2002, breeders patented a pair of low-chill cherries, Royal Lee and Minnie Royal, that bloom even after the mildest, wonkiest winters. I planted this pairing four years ago, and each year, I've gotten a few fruit. The first year they bloomed at such different times, only a couple flowers had a chance to cross pollinate (necessary since neither are self-fertile) and set fruit. But each year, the flowering of the two trees overlaps more and more, and this year was the pair's best year yet.

In order to keep the trees' vertical growth habit in check and to encourage development of flowering spurs, I prune the trees hard in the winter and cut back vigorous branches during the early summer growing period. I haven't encountered any disease or pest pressure yet on these trees, other than the birds when the fruit is ripe, and I solve that by covering the trees with bird netting. Deep mulch surrounds the trees and a drip line gives them a soak once a week, but in the late summer, these trees, unlike the rest of my orchard, suffer if they don't get a little additional water.

Minnie Royal begins blooming profusely first; it's also a more vigorous grower and fruiter of the two trees. The fruits hang, dark red, on long, elegant stems, and they are intensely flavored, sweet, and a little wild. Royal Lee starts ripening about a week after Minnie Royal, and the fruits are smaller and shorter stemmed. They're intensely sweet and firm-fleshed, almost crunchy. Most venders describe Royal Lee as the better tasting of the two, but I prefer Minnie Royal and its forest-edged bite. When there is a bowl of either in front of me, I can't stop eating them.


I don't know how many pounds my trees produced this year, but since April 17th, I have picked a bowl full of cherries, just like this one, every day. Thursday, the hottest day of the year so far, gave us this, our last bowl for the season.



Friday, April 25, 2014

Portraits in a Garden: Rosa Leon and Blaise Delacroix

Loretta Allison, Spade and Seeds, and Christina Wenger, A Thinking Stomach, have set out to find gardeners who can teach us how to live better in our outdoor spaces. Home gardeners who have designed their own spaces—large or small—in ways that feed their homes and their spirits draw us to them. We figure we’re hungry to learn from them, so you might be also. Join us in our occasional series as we explore their spaces.

Text by Christina Wenger
Photography by Paul Delmont
Art Direction by Loretta Allison

Slender Blaise leans back, correcting Rosa. “No, I didn’t think I liked eggplant back then. But, I was trying to impress you, and when you asked me if I wanted us to start seeing more of each other, I told you, ‘I already planted the eggplant.’” Rosa grins. That version of their story works for her. Their garden is their story; their garden is the two of them.

It’s hidden behind an unkempt hedge, their garden. From the street, a passerby can see the pointed corners of an old house spying over the bushes, but not much else. Blaise Delacroix and Rosa Leon have a magical world behind that hedge.

The house itself was built in 1904, but even before the house, the original owners of the quarter acre property built in 1895 a foundation-less cabin to live in while the house went up. The old buildings carry a presence with them that old buildings everywhere do—a whisper of stories, a creak of wisdom. Being there feels like being somewhere I’ve read about in a place far away. Little snippets of Capote’s Other Voices, Other Rooms echo in the pecan tree branches; the sloping views down the hills evoke descriptions of Rome from James’s Portrait of a Lady. But this isn’t a garden built solely for beauty, in which it is rich, but it is the source of scent, of flavor, of food, of income.

“It all started with an attempt to recycle,” Rosa tells me. She had lost her job as a chemist at a large, local scientific company, and was looking for something to do to earn money. Blaise had come home from working on a special effects film project with gallons of almost pristine soybean oil that he had used to create a moody, darkly reflective set. Yet, now this oil had lost its use for film, and no one wanted to eat huge vats of used soybean oil; the waste inspired Rosa—soap! Her first soaps used up that oil, along with scents, colors, and textures from her extensive herb gardens. Nowadays, Rosa avoids soy oil, and bases her soaps on more local ingredients—goat milk and beer, to name a few—but still relies on her garden to provide much of what makes her products special. She also blends homegrown herbal teas and various other cosmetics. At local farmers markets and soon online, Rosa and Blaise sell what they grow and create under the name Pine Street Products.

Skirting around the front steps of the old house are winter-bare rose canes, fluffed up with crinolines of herbs of all sorts: thymes, Syrian oregano, Egyptian walking onions, nettles. There’s rosemary everywhere. Later in the spring, the yard must buzz with flowers and bees. Throughout the front yard, in no recognizable pattern, grow citrus trees and vegetables in raised beds. Along the side of the house lives a cast of plant-characters: the too-tall pecan tree, fava beans falling drunkenly all over themselves, sharp-elbowed peach trees, and silver-shouldered Calimyrna figs.

In the back are more raised vegetable beds. The couple’s two small dogs mill around our feet and between the beds. One of them, a veggie lover, will crawl into a bed when the carrots mature and start snacking away, if Rosa and Blaise aren’t vigilant. Planted among the vegetables are more herbs for the soaps and teas: feverfew, woad, nasturtiums, and lots of calendulas. Blaise says he’s started seeds for a special variety of calendula, “High either in the calen or in the dula, whatever it is that makes calendula do its thing.” When the flowers bloom, Rosa collects the petals, dries them, and steeps them in olive or almond oil to create massage oils.

While we stand in the sunny backyard, several monarchs flutter through, reflecting the orange of the loaded Minneola tree. We talk about gardens and food. Blaise tells me about the chayote—which he calls mirliton—that grew in his hometown New Orleans. “If someone grows a mirliton on either end of the block and you live in the middle, you don’t need your
own vines—they’ll come to you.” He grew up eating them steamed and sliced sideways, the inside scooped out and mixed with onion, garlic, green peppers, crab meat, and shrimp, the mixture of which was then stuffed back into the shell. Rosa tries to keep to a vegan diet though, so now they’ll stuff them with saffron rice. Or, they’ll substitute young fruit for green papaya in a Thai salad, a recipe they both love. Their current vine grows in the summer over a patio, through a bay leaf tree, and in the peak of its growing season, along an elevated trellis across the yard.

“Every season has a joy,” says Rosa, when I ask what their garden favorites are. Blaise adds, “The star of the season is never what you plan on. It’s always a surprise.” But, then both get specific. “Tomatoes,” says Blaise; “Artichokes,” Rosa. Evidence of her love for artichokes is all over the yard, for the seafoam ballgowns of the thistle relative tower in various corners, ready to make moues at each other behind silver-leafed fans later in the spring. Rosa divides suckers—clones of the parent plant—off the artichoke plants that perform best, and plants them wherever there’s space.  

The couple invites me inside for a slice of Blaise’s king cake, spattered the traditional Mardi Gras colors with berry puree, candied orange peels, and mint leaves. One slice becomes two as we talk at the dining table. Behind me, a large cabinet is full of jars stuffed with herbs, dried chayote leaves, dried citrus rounds, calendula petals, all the homegrown ingredients of soaps, oils, and teas. If a laptop weren’t sitting in a nearby corner, I could be sitting in the house a hundred years ago.

Rosa tells me that Blaise has changed his mind about eggplant. Now, she serves it stuffed with equal amounts of white miso paste and minced fresh ginger, with an added touch of sesame oil, then broiled until a little caramelized. Says Blaise, “It’s really good.”

Takeaways From Rosa and Blaise’s Garden:
  • Pay attention to your irrigation and plan it thoughtfully. Mistakes in your irrigation can cost money and lost plants. Additionally, consider what you can and should spend on water and don’t plant what will require more than you can afford.
  • Use creeping edible herbs as groundcovers among your ornamentals. Tangle up your food and beauty.
  • Don’t bite off more work than you can chew; think carefully about how much time you really have and are willing to spend on maintaining the garden. The garden isn’t a one-shot deal, but needs constant work.
  • Plant by seed—it’s more cost efficient and allows for interesting diversity—but choose local seeds or seeds from climates similar to our own.