Anticipation

One of the pleasures of eating locally grown food – whether from the front yard or a nearby farmers market – is the anticipation as one awaits the ripening of each favorite. For me, that anticipation is heightened by daily visits with the apricot and peach trees growing just outside my kitchen and front doors, respectively. There are the prolific flowers, some of the earliest color confirming the arrival of spring and more than enough to rival the more typical landscape ornamentals. But the best is yet to come.

As the flower buds open, the bumblebees arrive, buzzing busily all day from flower to flower, promising pollination.But it is after the flowers fade that the real anticipation begins.  

First the small swellings that hint at which flowers will actually yield fruit, then the dime-sized “knobs,” and soon, small readily identifiable fruit. The apricot tree is still young enough that I count – about 40 apricots this year, only the second that the tree is fruiting. Some of the runts have dropped off, but most of the rest look strong enough to stay on the tree and ripen. The small fruits have withstood the recent thunderstorms, which is more than the tree was able to do last year.

On the way to the peach, I stop at the second apricot tree to check its health and encourage it along. All its leaves blackened last spring and dropped off (we still don’t know why), but a new stem emerged from the base. We’re hoping it will flower and fruit next year. Sometimes you just have to wait.

The peach, now in its third year fruiting, has too many swellings to count, but I’m guessing 75 peaches or so. It remains to be seen how many the still-young tree will support. With each visit, I remember my first taste, two years ago, of a sun-warmed peach eaten seconds after being picked late one summer afternoon. I was skeptical of those who insist that if you haven’t tasted a peach right off the tree, you haven't tasted a peach. But they are right. The peaches from the farmers market come close. Those in the supermarket – picked unripe, then shipped hundreds or, more often, thousands of miles – bear little resemblance beyond how they look. It is doing so well, we will soon plant a second peach tree nearby.

As I make my rounds, I stop at several plum and pear trees. It will be another year or two before these fruit. We put these trees in very young – one-year-old and bare-rooted. At that size, they are only a fraction of the cost of the older trees that many nurseries sell, and they transplant better. Growing fruit trees this way is a lesson in patience, a lesson I am grudgingly learning.  And yet, the fruit is all the more appreciated when it comes. 

People sometimes wonder whether it is limiting to eat peaches, or apricots, or anything else only at certain times of year. My response is that it is exactly the opposite. Rather, it makes everyday eating like a special holiday with its favorite foods – latkes (potato pancakes) at Chanukah, matza brei at Passover, or the equivalents that exist in every culture. You eagerly anticipate that first taste, eat as much as you possibly can in a short period, remember it fondly from year to year, and, as the season approaches, eagerly anticipate it once again. Then you move on to the next favorite food, and then the next, in a predictable, anticipated cycle of the seasons.

Of course, as the trees grow and the harvest increases, some of the apricots and peaches will be frozen, canned, or dried, as we do now with the berries. That will mean more than enough to spark winter memories of long summer days, but not so much as to take them for granted.

Top Photo: Peach tree in bloom. Middle and bottom photos (Dan Hittleman/ drhPHOTO): Apricot tree by kitchen door, four apricots

  

A ruby-throated visitor

Yesterday afternoon, as I was sitting on the deck talking on the phone to my friend Beth, one of the resident hummingbirds stopped to hover directly in front of my face for about 20 seconds. It was the male, with his fiery-red throat and iridescent green back. Richard and I had watched him  one Sunday morning, a few weeks ago, flying back-and-forth in a dramatic pendulum arc above the patch of Solomon Seal. 

The hummingbirds love Solomon Seal's nectar-filled blossoms.
Richard and I harvested our share of the plant in late April, soon after the early shoots emerged from the ground. 

Solomon Seal is an edible perennial vegetable. When the shoots reach about 8 inches in height, before the leaves unfurl, they can be steamed and eaten like asparagus. Granted, it does not have the full flavor that asparagus imparts, and it soon gets too woody to eat. On the other hand, it is far less fussy than asparagus about soil conditions, grows in shade, and spreads as far as you let it. As long as you don't harvest too many shoots, the plant just sends up more to replace those you have taken. That puts it high on my "free food" ranking. It is also a beautiful plant, which is why so many people grow it as an ornamental. 

Back to the Ruby-Throated Hummingbirds. I'm told they mate for life and return to the same piece of land year after year. So I feel an affinity for the pair that daily frequents our garden from spring through fall. This week, the lupines bloomed, another favorite on their menu, and they have been flitting between the Solomon Seal, whose flowers are starting to fade, and the various lupines scattered through the front beds. 

One of the benefits of replacing large swaths of grass with a far more varied array of plant life is an increase in bio-diversity at all levels -- from soil microbes to the animals and birds that this land supports. Another is the opportunity to sit eye-to-eye with a hummingbird for 20 seconds on a Friday afternoon. 

Photos (top to bottom): Solomon Seal shoots, Solomon Seal in flower, lupine with yellow squash seedling at base. 

Welcome

Several rainy days during a vacation week in May offer a good time for a gardener to transplant a blog from her head to the web. So here's the backstory: 

My adventures in edible landscaping and micro-farming began in fall 2003 when my partner, Richard, proposed that we dig up the lawn so we didn't have to mow. Our lawn was minimal, a skirting of green surrounding the house, itself surrounded by about a 6-acre wooded lot that had been left on its own. I wasn't sure about the "no lawn at all" part of the proposal, but I agreed to start. 

The grass on the sunny south side of the house was the first to go. With my usual enthusiasm, I was ready to begin the weekend after we hatched the plan; it was October. Richard insisted on a sketch to scale. I measured and sketched. Winter came, and the ground froze. Spring came, and it thawed.

The first warm day in May, my patience exhausted, I grabbed a shovel and begin to dig. Richard dug. Friends and family helped. By August, we had a sun-shaped patio outside the kitchen door.

The following spring, the grass between the "sun ray" paths was replaced with herb and perennial gardens, extending to encompass the standard "rectangle-shaped patch surrounded by grass" that had served as my vegetable garden.

We moved eastward around the house, and over the next two years, the front lawn with its traditional perennial flower borders gave way to to a network of mixed-use beds anchored by fruit trees and connected by paths of fieldstone gathered from the woods. We planted plums, pears, peaches, cherries and apricots in what had been the front lawn. The wetter areas out toward the road got elderberries and black locust (future fence posts). 

We integrated the beds, mixing vegetable plantings in with the flowers, and flowers in with the vegetable plantings. We learned about perennial vegetables, those plants that come back year after year, and could be eaten. They require less work than starting each spring only with seedlings.

We became more attentive to the flowering plants that attract predatory insects, the bugs that eat the bugs that eat our plants, and those that attract the pollinators.  We learned which flowers we could eat and planted more of those. 

We welcomed the wild bramble fruits (black cap raspberries and blackberries) as they migrated from the woodland edges in search of sun, smothering some of the remaining lawn. And we added blueberries to the woodland edges, grapes to cover an arbor over the deck, and strawberries as a border to the perennial beds. 

By year four, Richard was more actively managing the previously ignored woods, finding and selecting for cherry, black walnut, shag bark hickory, service berry, choke cherry, and beech amid the far more prevalent white pine, elm and ash. We planted hazelnuts in the understory and paw paw trees, the largest native northern U.S. fruit, often described as resembling a mango-banana custard and a prolific food source prior to its near disappearance in the early 20th century.  We began woodland patches of wild leeks and ostrich fern, the primary source for edible "fiddleheads" in early spring, along the stream. 

This is a do-it-ourselves, evolving project with as much "free" material and young plants as possible. We learn as we go, from experimentation, and from some useful books on "forest gardening," perennial agriculture, permaculture, and companion planting. 

In less than five years, in central upstate New York ("zone 5"), we grow most of the vegetables we eat year-round, and over half the fruit. We eat well. Very, very well. I began this adventure hating to cook and caring little about food. But a different kind of relationship with food grows when you raise it yourself. A different kind of understanding too. A different kind of relationship with and understanding of the natural world grows as well. More about all of that to come. 

Year five has brought us to the north side of the house, developing the vegetable and berry beds along the woods edge, just far enough from the house's shadow to get almost a full day of sun. Our blueberries are already much happier moved to the more acid piney soil here, among the filberts (American hazelnut). The remainder of the grass on this side will give way later this summer to a wooden ramp up to the front porch, providing access to the house for people with walkers, wheelchairs, and carts of winter heating wood. 

To the south and west of the house, Richard is creating clearings for a woodland orchard -- more plums, apples, cherries. More nut trees. Native shrubs, and other shrubs originating in Russia, Sweden and the Ukraine that are both ornamental and edible. 

Stay tuned. 

Top photo: Richard Lansdowne; Middle photo: Margo Hittleman; Bottom two photos: Dan Hittleman/ drhPHOTO

Scallions

Today is scallion day, all the more appreciated since we offered almost no labor to produce them. These were seeded two years ago from a forgotten onion -- planted three years ago -- that flowered, went to seed and, left to its own devices, multiplied. Last year, we ate some of the greens, but left the bulbs. Dug them up yesterday to make room for the cucumber seedlings. Tonight, it's fried rice with lots of scallion greens, plus overwintered hot mustard greens, Good King Henry (a perennial spinach), lovage (a perennial celery) and some sorrel greens for a little lemony touch. And a green salad, of course.