Mendolonium

Although we here in Southern California are not emerging from a winter of cold and snow (more like a winter of cool and damp) I still find myself almost giddy with excitement during these first few weeks of spring.

During the winter I drive home the in dark, looking out onto a seemingly endless sea of too bright headlights and red taillights.  In spring I can drive with sunlight streaming in through the windows and a view of the Hollywood sign.

During the winter I arrive home and stand in front of our door, fumbling for my keys in the dark, hurrying to get inside as if it was already past my bedtime.  In spring I can walk up to the door and go inside with no trouble at all and look forward to the daylight hours left for fun.

During winter the boys are always ensconced in pants, coats, and hats; never seeming to really get dirty.  In spring the boys fling mud, roll in the sand, dig through the dirt, and end up utterly and completely filthy – just as little children should be.

During winter I sigh as I prep dinner, realizing that I need one more carrot or a few sprigs of parsley, and I am loathe to go out in the cold dark backyard to retrieve them. In spring I pause in the middle of my prep to dash outside, not even bothering with shoes, to pull a couple of carrots, snip some green onions, or gather a handful of sage leaves.

During winter Thomas draws at a desk set next to a window.  In spring Thomas runs outside with a stack of paper and a fist full of crayons and draws on a dusty garden table while sitting on an over-turned bucket.

During winter my garden is quiet, a monochromatic green landscape of peas, lettuce, and carrot tops, growing slowly.  In spring my garden explodes into color with a frenzy of white, pink, and magenta apple, peach, and nectarine blossoms, the first exciting yellow tomato flowers, and plants that seem to grow noticeably bigger day by day.

During winter we carry reluctant, sobbing children indoors hours before their bedtimes because the light for playtime has run out.  In spring we carry exhausted, hungry children indoors for a quick dinner and bath in the few minutes between nightfall and bedtime.

This is the fourth spring for our little farm and it holds the most promise yet.  Just before spring arrived I armed myself with a tape measure, a map of the backyard, a pencil, the assistance of my favorite four year old, and plotted out each garden bed down to a six inch square resolution.  I then plotted the results electronically and printed myself a grid representing each garden bed.  The grids went into a binder with a case of colored pencils and now as work through spring planting the entire garden is taking shape in a beautiful rainbow of precision.  The mapping is not only deeply satisfying to my inner nerd but will also truly be invaluable for tracking potential soil borne disease, for crop rotation, and planning a more diverse garden.  When we first began to “farmscape” the backyard we had not a single fruit tree. We now have twelve fruit trees – eight of them new deciduous fruit trees planted in an intensive backyard orchard.  After an initial seedling debacle involving the use of unsterilized compost (which is why one rainy weekend in February found me baking compost in my oven) I have began transplanting tomatoes I started from seed at the end of March.  There are many more tomatoes and an entire flat of peppers, melons, and herbs that will be ready shortly.  This summer we hope to see our dreams of chickens, a wood burning earth oven, and bees turn from a fantasy into a reality.  We spent a wonderful spring weekend outside these past two days, planting dozens of seeds, trellising blackberries, building potato boxes, fighting monsters with the neighbor boys, looking for “icky bugs”, and cleaning up after all the late winter rains.  I never paid all that much attention to the seasons growing up:  winter was cold, summer was hot, fall and spring were neither.  Now I find myself enthralled by the change into spring (and later the change into fall).  I spend far more time outside now as an adult than I did as a child.  And I find that I am happy out in the sunlight, digging in the dirt, running around with my boys.

Is anyone else swooning over spring the way that I am?  What do you enjoy this time of year?

I am a bit ashamed to admit that the first time I ever tasted winter squash, in a form other than pumpkin pie, was sometime in my early 20s.  My father doesn’t like winter squash, my mother never cooked it, and thus, it always seemed foreign to me.  I wish I remembered my first taste squashy goodness, but it is lost in a haze of all the “new “foods I explored in my early 20s.  Since that first encounter I’ve roasted many a butternut squash, pumpkin, and acorn squash and turned them into soups, filled pastas, and pies both savory and sweet.  In restaurants, I gravitate towards dishes made with winter squash.  Most people have a “type” of person that they are attracted to:  perhaps tall, dark, and handsome.  Winter squash is my type of vegetable:  big, orange-fleshed, and keeps forever.

This past summer I took my love affair to the next level and planted a crop of butternut and Burgess buttercup squash on our little farm.  Now, six months after harvesting the squash, we are still enjoying them.  I am particularly impressed with the butternut squash; those that have not yet met their delicious fate have been sitting on the bottom shelf of my pantry since August – perfectly content to wait for their turn at culinary fulfillment.  The Burgess buttercup squash were not apparently up to long-term storage in the ever changing temperature environment of my pantry and had to be cut up into chunks and frozen.  Freezing cubes of squash will result in mushy-textured squash when thawed, but that by no means dooms such squash to the compost pile.

This past Saturday night I made an improvised dish of sauteed squash and vegetables over cous cous.  It was quite good, but Thomas protested mightily.  Given my childhood avoidance of squash, I expected that it was the orange chunks he objected to.  But no, it was, in fact, the cous cous that he was initially turned off by.  He then went on to decry the copious amounts of vegetables.  I vowed to him that we would find a squash dish that he enjoyed.  Thinking of a recipe for  pureed butternut squash as a pasta sauce I had seen long ago I asked Thomas what his favorite cheese was.  He volunteered “cheddar!” and I told him that for our next dinner I would make him cheddar-squash mac & cheese.   The following day I pulled out 20 ounces of frozen Burgess buttercup squash from the freezer, steamed it, and took an immersion blender to it.  I used this recipe, substituting the ricotta cheese for marscapone cheese, omitting the bread crumbs, and topping the dish with Parmesan cheese and served it up for my most demanding critic.  I expected Thomas to like it, but I was bowled over by his reaction.  He took one bite of pasta and declared, “I love it!  This is the best dinner ever.  You will make it again, right?”  I don’t believe in “hiding” vegetables in kids’ food; rather I think that kids should be taught to recognize and love vegetables.  I pointed out how the sauce of the dish was tiny bits of squash mixed in with cheese and when I asked, “Where did this squash come from?” Thomas delighted in answering “Us!”  Theo showed his approval for the dish by plowing through a full bowl in about three minutes and then asking for more.  I can’t say that I ever remember such an enthusiastic dinner response from the kids before.  So thank you, to winter squash; not only is it my type of vegetable it’s great with kids too.

We’ve have had a good haul of homegrown produce during January, normally a slow month, – nearly 20 pounds.  There have been peas, a few herbs, and some carrots.  But most of the credit goes to our little orange tree which produced for the first time along with a one of our neighbor’s orange trees that fortunately (for us) has a branch hanging over into our backyard. I did a rather lazy job of  planning and planting our winter garden this year.  I found myself so mired in canning tomatoes and jam that I neglected to put the peas in as early as I would of liked am now far short my favorite vegetable.  Many of my pea seeds never even stood a chance at full maturity; I planted them in a raised bed under the roof line of our garage and they were pounded into oblivion by rain pouring off of the roof during five days of storms in December.  Most of our greens grew a bit and then mysteriously disappeared; perhaps mowed down by the ubiquitous sow bugs that inhabit our garden?  I planted a crop of late fall potatoes (my experience being that potatoes do not do well in Pasadena during very warm weather) and they were growing beautifully only to have their greens pressed into the ground so hard that they yellowed and began to rot during the aforementioned heavy rains.  I ended up harvesting only slightly more potatoes than I planted in the first place.  I planted too many carrots and neglected to thin them sufficiently so I have been left with a glut of relatively small orange roots that, while tasty, are quite the pain in the ass (or the hands, in my case) to clean and peel.  I had intended to plant cover crops over some fallow land, but somehow forgot to do so until now.

But I think that more than anything else my problem with our winter garden is that it doesn’t feel, at all, like winter. While the weather is certainly cooler than in the summer and we get the occasional light frost we’ve seen most of our winter days with high temperatures in the 70s and days of the low 80s not uncommon.  Such temperatures leave me at a bit of a loss as to what to plant – warm season or cool season?  Do such designators have any functional meaning in an environment where spring, summer, and fall highs top 110 degrees and winter days can climb into the 80s, yet winter frost is always a possibility?   Where rain falls only in the winter and not in terribly predictable amounts nor at predictable or regular intervals?  Specifically I wonder whether this year’s heavy December rains are the most intense we will see this winter and whether or not the danger of frost has passed?  My deciduous fruit trees seem to think that it is spring and have begun to leaf out.  Should I follow their lead and start planting warm season crops (squash, beans, tomatoes, peppers, corn) in the ground?  I don’t want to put in all that effort only to have it washed or frozen away if winter weather returns, however, I would certainly start crops if I trusted that it was safe to do so.  We’ve had April weather where temperatures have been over 100 degrees – I would love to start my crops now so that they are robust when the dry, heat inevitably blasts in.

Rather than demoralizing me, I need to use the unpredictability of the weather to encourage me in my garden.  Even the very small-scale of our yard shows us how fragile our food system really is and how much many of us (including myself) have to learn and adapt to if we are to break our reliance on distantly produced industrial food.  For now, I can afford to buy my organic spinach at the farmer’s market or the grocery store but  given the shit storm of food/land speculation, unpredictable climate, economic decline, and high energy prices brewing I am not so sure that will always be the case.  Our food safety net is slowly eroding.  So last week I started tomatoes inside to plant on the first day of spring and this weekend I will go out and plant a few beans – perhaps the beans will succeed despite the calendar’s insistence that it is winter.  I will dutifully record the planting date and, hopefully, harvest dates in hopes of discovering what a successful winter garden in Pasadena can include.  I will wonder if the climate is stable enough for my results to be meaningful or if the climate is in such flux that this year’s success and  failures bear no relation to next year’s potential.  And I will be glad that, for now, we don’t seem to be short of oranges.

I haven’t been posting my Independence Days updates due to the need to gaze adoringly at a certain grinning baby, but while he sleeps I’ve been busy working in our ridiculous heat.  Since my last update, I’ve:

Planted something or take care something you’ve planted:

• Trellised tomatoes (Jeff gets all the credit for this)

Harvested something:

• Parsley
• Leeks
• Shallots
• Cucumbers
• Carrots
• Potatoes
• Green Beans
• Bell Peppers
• Frying Peppers
• Jalapeno Peppers
• Serrano Pepper (just one!)
• Tomatoes
• Blackberries
• Strawberries

Our total harvest since March 2009:  24.4 kg (53.7 lbs )! – Not including the countless berries that we have consumed before we ever got a chance to weigh them.

Preserved something:

• 20 pints hamburger dill pickles (canned)
• 6 cups sweet cucumber relish (canned)
• 9.5 cups carrots, cut into coins (frozen)
• 6 cups carrots, shredded (frozen)
• 8 cups green beans, blanched (frozen)
• 10 pints strawberries (frozen, for smoothies and sauces) – unfortunately not from our garden, our plants aren’t nearly that prolific yet

Waste Not:

• Brought reusable plates, utensils, etc. on our beach vacation last week

Want Not/Prep:

• Stocked up on 3T – 5T clothes for the boys at Goodwill and on clearance at Gymboree

Build community food systems:

• Does giving away cucumbers and pickles to family and neighbors count?

Eat the Food:

• Found a recipe for Pad Thai and am going to give it a go tomorrow night.

Sadly, peaches aren’t on the list of fruit harvest.  At the beginning of the summer I estimate that we had around five dozen peaches on our tree.  Last week they all disappeared.  I blame squirrels and rats.  Now our tomatoes are starting to vanish – while still green.  Anyone have recommendations for kid-safe and pet-safe ways to get rid of rats?  And when I say “get rid of” I mean kill.  My pacifist, vegetarian values do not extend to vermin eating my food.