Sustainable living – Page 19

Sprouting season has arrived

When the garden is kaput and stuff in the grocery store starts looking like it’s traveled a long way, it’s time to start sprouting. It’s an old hippy skill that I’ve never abandoned, though often I just forget about the possibility of sprouts.

The best place I know to get sprouting seeds is from the Sprout People in San Francisco. What out for their high shipping costs, though. If you order $60 worth of stuff, shipping is free.

And, of course, don’t forget to add lots of garlic to the dressing. With garlic, sprouts, and lots of tangerine and orange juice, you’ll survive the winter just fine.

P.S. I haven’t yet ordered sprouting seeds or sprouting supplies from Amazon, but they seem to have good stuff and good prices, and much of it is available for free shipping with Prime. I still feel a little guilty ordering stuff from Amazon, but, especially when one lives in the sticks, low prices and fast, free shipping are hard to resist.

Real apples, and the sorrows of orcharding

November apples at Century Farm Orchards

Fatalities in the orchard during the last year include fig trees killed (above ground, at least) by brutally cold weather last winter, and another pear tree lost to the Black Death. Ken also found room for a couple more apple trees. Today I picked up some replacement trees.

I know I’ve harped on this theme before, but happy is the household with an established orchard. Rearing young apple trees is like rearing children in the Dark Ages — lots of them die, plagued with all sorts of pests, hazards, and diseases. The abbey’s orchard is six years old now, and it’s coming along. There was almost no apple yield this year, though, because last winter all the trees got a major pruning. This was probably the most important pruning of the trees’ lives, because it will pretty much determine the shape of the adult apple trees. Pruners say you should prune so that a bird can fly through the tree. That doesn’t leave a lot of buds for producing fruit the following season. But, during the 2015 season, with luck, the abbey should get its first serious apple harvest. That will be the orchard’s seventh year.

One thing I got right: Avoiding low-quality trees from mass-production nurseries, the kind of trees that are sold at box-store garden departments. I had bought a few such trees as replacements, and they just didn’t do well. Almost all the abbey’s trees came from Century Farm Orchards in Caswell County, North Carolina. They specialize in old Southern varieties of apple trees. These trees are very hardy and well-suited to the local climate, though like all young fruit trees they need a lot of care and attention to reach adulthood. Century Farm Orchards is not really a storefront operation. One orders trees early in the year. You get an invoice in October, and you pick up the trees at open house events in November.

Today’s new trees included two mammoth blacktwig apple trees, two kieffer pear trees, a brown turkey fig, and a celeste fig.

Another nice thing about the abbey’s modest-size orchard is that it’s on a fenced slope, nicely turfed, fed on organic fertilizer and lots of chicken droppings. The grass and clover in the orchard are incredibly lush, and of course all that organic nutrition and earthworm activity works down into the soil and benefits the apple trees. We use only natural pesticides. The poor trees pretty much have to fend for themselves, like 9th Century peasant children.

I picked up two new blacktwig trees today.

Beans on a wire

Garden note for next year: The beans love growing on the fence on the lower side of the garden.

Not a spring chicken anymore

Can you tell which egg is the first egg from a spring chicken, now five months old? Spring chickens usually start laying in August. With a little experience and encouragement, they learn to lay larger eggs.

Ragweed and other saints of nature

Ragweed. Note the brown grass behind it. The wildflower patches did poorly this year, but water-frugal species grew valiantly.

One of the good things about living in a place like the abbey is that, instead of fighting with nature, one gradually begins to cooperate with nature and to learn from nature’s experience. This summer has been miserably dry, the driest summer since a La Niña summer a few years ago. I haven’t cut the grass for a month, because the grass isn’t growing, and much of it has turned brown. The clover shriveled up, and rabbits that were young enough to squeeze through the garden fence ate the tops off young sweet potatoes. I forgave them. They have to eat.

Drought is hard on everyone. The day lily bank usually makes an extravagant show. This year, because of the drought, the blooms were scant, and a doe and her fawn ate most of the bloom buds, returning nightly. I put up with it. They have to eat. Last year’s 70 inches of rain produced a huge crop of rabbits and deer. This year, I’m sure, the populations will be way down.

Ragwood is one of the most hated of weeds, not least because its pollen is a powerful allergen. But this year I saw the virtues of ragweed. Where the grass was brown, ragweed sprang up. I would not dare to cut it until we’ve had some good rain and the grass is growing again. Roots in the soil and green leaves in the sun are always a good thing. In a drought, one can’t be choosy.

The chickens had done a lot of damage to the orchard during the winter, scratching bare spots in the grass. With good rain, the grass would have quickly recovered. But this year, it was only ragweed that could step in to defend the soil. The ragweed completely covered the worst of the bare spots. The chickens left it alone. Not only was it roots in the ground, it also was dense enough to shade the soil and keep the soil a little cooler.

Driving around the foothills, one frequently passes plots of land that were timbered during the winter, leaving a Mordor-like plain of barrenness and disruption. But who shows up to hold the soil and get life going again? Weeds, the tried-and-true native species who have had a million years and more to learn their job.

I haven’t been here that long. What do I know? One learns to let things live and seek their own balance — weeds, rabbits, deer, even the snakes. The abbey has a no-kill rule. I wouldn’t have it any other way.

The chicken is standing in a patch of ragweed. A couple of months ago, the area was bare dirt, scratched clean by the chickens during the winter.

More garden pasta

It’s spooky how much tomatoes like cream. This is linguini with fresh tomatoes in a creamy parmesan sauce.

Flash-sautée the tomatoes in a hot skillet (but not hot enough to smoke). Cook the tomatoes for only one to two minutes, just until they’re hot. Put them in a bowl and set them aside. Add some butter to the same skillet. Add cream, salt, pepper, and about a teaspoon of vinegar. Boil gently and stir with a whisk until the sauce thickens. Add grated parmesan and stir with the whisk until the parmesan is melted into the sauce. Add the cooked pasta and the tomatoes and toss it in the skillet until the pasta is covered with the sauce.

I did not peel the tomatoes. The skins curl up when the tomatoes are heated. I skinned the tomatoes at the table, as though I was peeling shrimp.

I still don’t know what I’m going to do with all the tomatoes. I ought be in the garden right now picking yet more more of them instead of sitting here in front of the computer.

Next surplus: tomatoes

For the new gardener, just getting things to grow is a triumph. But an art of gardening that must take a lifetime to refine is stretching out the seasons. That is, not only does one want the earliest possible fresh food in the spring and the latest possible fresh food in the fall, one also wants to stretch out (say) the tomato season for as long as possible, instead of having all the tomatoes come ripe at once.

If the object is canning and freezing, then having everything come ripe at once is not a big deal. But, for a kitchen garden, it’s a different matter.

The abbey tries to stick to old-fashioned ways when the garden is in. If it’s not in the garden, you don’t eat it. And if it’s in the garden, you eat it. In the spring, if the garden is going well, I pretty much stop buying produce except for things like garlic and bananas. In the early spring, we ate so much lettuce that it’s a wonder our hair didn’t turn green. By the time the squash crush arrived, the lettuce was gone. The tomatoes came a couple of weeks behind the squash. Soon there will be corn, though I’ll have to fight the raccoons for it, and the raccoons will almost certainly win.

I had pasta two nights in a row. Tonight’s linguini was made with fresh tomatoes. There’s a lot more where that came from. Maybe the tomatoes will turn my hair red.

Squash: make it a sin

Squash is coming out my ears. I couldn’t bear another bit of it without turning it into something sinful. Solution: pizza.

The sauce is a pesto sauce made from garden basil. The squash is masquerading as pepperoni. It didn’t fool me. There is — no joke — half a cup of garlic in the pesto sauce. At the abbey, garlic is a vegetable, not a seasoning. The crust is homemade, though I have to admit that I have never learnt the knack of making a truly sophisticated pizza crust. I need to study up on that.

Making the most of squash

The abbey garden is cranking out squash faster than the abbey kitchen can handle it. Squash has been on the menu almost every day. Squash can be one of the most boring vegetables in the world, so preparing it is a big challenge.

Everyone’s favorite squash dish, of course, is sliced squash dipped in batter and fried. That’s a great treat, but it’s a bit too high carb and high fat to have too often. Not to mention that it makes a big mess in the kitchen. The healthiest way I know to make good squash is to sear it in a skillet. Done poorly, the squash becomes hopelessly watery. However, if done carefully, the squash can be very appealing. It won’t turn to mush, and browning it adds a lot of flavor.

Use a hot skillet with a little oil. Olive oil can’t take higher heat, so I use sesame oil, sunflower oil, or even grapeseed oil. Salt makes vegetables release their water, so I don’t salt squash while it’s being cooked.

You want the pan to be not quite hot enough to smoke, but hot enough that the squash will brown in only a few minutes. Any water released by the squash (which won’t be much if you give it just a few minutes of high heat) will dry up in the pan.

To make up for the lack of salt, serve the squash with some sort of salty sauce. One of the abbey’s favorite sauces is what I call “cucumber sauce.” That’s a chilled sauce made of about 3/4 sour cream and 1/4 mayonnaise, seasoned with salt and pepper.

Tender is the greens

A serious weapon that every kitchen needs, for wielding against hard-to-cook foods, is a pressure cooker. I wouldn’t know how to cook garbanzo beans without one (and we eat a lot of hummus). Lately I have turned the pressure cooker toward the problem of tender mustard greens.

Tender mustard is a desideratum of every gardener. Picking the greens very young might help. But one can’t waste all those mature greens, can one? Twenty-five minutes in the pressure cooker and the greens are perfect.

Mustard greens