The apricots are ripe!

I came home late from work last night, around 8 pm, weary after a long day, and found that the apricots had ripened. Richard had picked three, and they were sitting on the kitchen counter. I wrote earlier this spring about anticipation. Now came the time of tasting.

There's a certain excitement the first time a new fruit or vegetable is ready to eat for the first time. That's especially true for tree fruit that requires 3-5 years of patient (or impatient) waiting for the first harvest. Last year was the first we had apricots, and we had only a few that made it to maturity. So I didn't remember just where they fit in the summer cycle. Each day, for a couple of weeks now, I've been out there checking. I picked two late last week, but they they weren't quite ripe yet.

These were perfect. Out of the forty or so fruit that formed from pollinated flowers in the spring, only about twenty will ripen. The others dropped -- probably because the tree was still too young to support that many. But my handy reference, The Backyard Orchardist, tells me that, if all goes well, we should eventually get 50 to 100 pounds of fruit from the tree.

Interestingly, although apricots look like small peaches enough that their "family" relationship is obvious, they are also closely related botanically to plums. My reference book tells me that some interesting crosses of the two -- called apriums and pluots -- are now becoming available.

Fruit trees -- carefully chosen for varieties suited to one's climate and least likely to have major pest or disease problems -- are a relatively low-maintenance way to begin to build an edible landscape. And there's a long, albeit no longer common, tradition of planting fruit trees in a home's yard. Down the road from me is an old, hand-dug and stone-lined foundation from an old farmhouse. A friend, on a walk one day, recognized its presence from the apple trees (and lilacs and day lilies) that still grow there. All were regularly planted in the yard.

This past weekend, my great-aunt Rita told me that her father grew fruit trees (pears, and others that she didn't remember) in their small, urban yard in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Like their neighbors, many of whom were also immigrants from rural Russia, they raised chickens and garden vegetables as well. A butcher by profession, my great-grandfather was a good gardener, she said.

In recent decades, fruiting trees have been supplanted by sterile "flowering" varieties in most home landscapes. There seemed to be some appeal to not having to "clean up" the dropped fruit from the yard, or sort through those that have been too damaged by insects to eat. And, of course, unsprayed fruit at home, while tastier than anything found in the store, does not have the blemish-free appearance that most U.S. consumers expect. Nor is it available year round. But as our "taste test" last night confirmed, a return to growing fruit in the yard -- and eating it fresh off the tree -- more than makes up for that.

An unexpected experiment

I was surprised, earlier this spring, to notice that the “volunteer” squash – those growing from seeds remaining in the compost we added to the soil – were not only larger and greener than the squash I had transplanted, but, unlike their neighboring transplants, they had almost no yellow-and-black squash beetles crawling on them.

Impatient as I am, I have always bought transplants, believing I would get food sooner. This year, for the first time, I started my own seeds in small pots in our kitchen in late March. Mistake number one: squash grow quickly, and I started them far too early. By late-April, they were healthy and ready for transplant – a month before the weather outside would allow me to do so. By mid-May, they were “leggy,” turning yellow, and we were tripping over them. So I began again. Most of the second round of transplants (pumpkin, acorn squash, butternut squash, yellow squash, zucchini, and an heirloom Hopi squash) were ready when the last frost date rolled around (Memorial Day weekend here). I added a few Delicota transplants from a nearby nursery. I covered everything with a fabric row cover to give them some extra warmth and a “pest-free” head start. 

I covered and left three of the “mystery” volunteers as well. Hence, the unexpected experiment. Within a few weeks, the small volunteers had outgrown the transplants; they were larger and their leaves were a deeper green (a sign of health). That wasn’t altogether surprising. Transplanting stresses plants, and, I later read, squash are particularly vulnerable to transplant stress. Over time, the volunteers (which turned out to be both pumpkin and zucchini) continued to outgrow the transplants.

But the real surprise came as I made my daily rounds to pick the squash beetles off the plants. While I picked dozens of beetles from the transplanted squash, I rarely found even one on the volunteer plants.  I knew that stronger, healthier plants are better able to withstand the onslaught of pests and disease. But I had no idea that somehow (chemical changes leading to a difference in smell or taste?), they were less attractive to the pests as well. I’ve never seen mention of this in any of the organic pest control books I’ve read. 

Growing food is a science, as well as an art, requiring close, constant observation and ongoing experimentation. As soon as I say “science,” many people think immediately of professional researchers, working in labs or “test fields,” conducting carefully designed, controlled experiments and putting out authoritative reports. But the most successful farmers – whether running commercial operations or just feeding their families – have always been scientists, developing a deep base of knowledge about the particular plants, environmental conditions, and micro-climates where they live.

Some of that knowledge has been passed down, like the Native American realization that corn, squash and beans – which they called the “Three Sisters – grown together will yield more food than any one of those crops grown separately. (Academic scientists, seeking to verify that knowledge, have concluded that the sugars in the corn roots nourish the specialized bacteria on the bean roots, which in turn, fix nitrogen that the heavy-feeding squash require. Finally, the squash, growing as a broad “ground cover” like the pumpkin below, shades out weeds that would otherwise compete with the taller beans and corn.) 

Unfortunately much hard-won “local” knowledge has been dismissed, and then lost, by our society’s bias toward “professional” science. Personally, I like the definition of “science” used by a former teacher of mine, Davydd Greenwood, and his colleague, Morton Levin. “Scientific research,” they wrote, is "an investigative activity capable of discovering the world is or is not organized as our preconceptions lead us to expect and suggesting grounded ways of understanding and acting on it."

Growing food – like most other human endeavors – lends itself to that kind of science. There are the organized “experiments,” growing different varieties of a particular crop, for example, to see which do best in the soil and micro-climates in one’s field or yard. (Below, for example, is a rare heirloom Hopi squash that we are experimenting with to see how it fares in our gardens. It will turn a deep orange-red when mature and is reported to store well through the winter). 

There are the careful observations of what is already growing and how it fares. We noticed, for example, that the daffodils near our home’s southern wall bloomed two to three weeks earlier than the daffodils in the bed 50 feet away, and that the last frost date close to the house was almost a month earlier in the spring (and a month later in the fall) than in other places in our yard. That led us to plant the vulnerable apricot tree right along the house's southern wall, in a micro-climate that is closer to “zone 6” than to our area’s general climate ranking as “zone 5.”

Finally, there are numerous unplanned experiments – like with my squash – that arise day-to-day. I don’t yet know why the squash beetles chose the transplants over the volunteers. Nor do I know what the beetles would do if no transplants were available. But I plan to keep close watch and compare notes with other growers. And next year, I’ll be poking squash seeds in the ground before the last freeze, experimenting with growing them like “volunteers.”  

Midsummer

We harvested the first yellow squash, zucchini, beans and cucumbers this week. They begin as a trickle, but soon comes the deluge. The monarda (also known as bee balm or bergamont, a flavoring for tea), black-eyed Susans, echinacea (purple cone flower) and potatoes are in bloom, and the Grassroots Festival of Music and Dance in nearby Trumansburg pulls us from the garden into the dance tent. It's mid-summer.

Photos (top by bottom): Black-eyed Susan, potatoes in flower, mid-summer harvest, Echinacea, Bee Balm

Pest control

During the recent spell of rain, a leopard frog moved into our vegetable gardens. I was glad to see it, in part because I had never seen one before, and also because I knew it was dining on the ants, beetles, flies and other insects we want to keep under control. The frog hasn’t appeared since the return of hot, sunny days, but I assume it is still nearby.

I’ve since learned that leopard frogs are considered an “indicator species,” one that reflects the health (or lack of health) of the environment around it. Once quite common in North America, they began declining in the 1970s, most likely because of acid rain and other pollutants, and they have not yet recovered. So that makes me even happier to have seen it in our gardens.

Since we replaced the expanses of lawn with mixed plantings that more closely resemble the diversity of a meadow, the diversity of the animals, birds, reptiles and insects has also dramatically increased. That’s great for wildlife watching: working in the garden or sitting on the deck, I see 4-5 different kinds of butterflies on any given day. More importantly, it’s a spectacularly effective pest control strategy. In natural areas, no one species balloons in numbers (unless it’s an “exotic” introduction) because natural predators keep their prey under control. But large expanses of a single crop (including grass) don’t offer shelter, camouflage or breeding sites for the predators. Hence the need for repeated applications of chemical insecticides. Instead, we keep some broken clay pots half-buried in the gardens to provide hiding places for frogs, and we have a half-dug small pool that, even unfinished, seems to be drawing them closer. We call it a “muddle,” short for “mud-puddle.”

The leopard frog is joined by several garden snakes who make regular appearances. A particularly large one living under the shed spends a fair amount of time in the squash patch, hiding under the large leaves, and another who appears to be living in a cavity made by a warped board in one of the raised beds. They, too, eat insects and slugs, along with a variety of other prey (including frogs), and every so often, we find a recently shed snake skin to admire.   

Tiny parasitic wasps, damsel flies, soldier beetles and other pest-eating insects are drawn to the gardens by the nectar available in the umbrella-like flowers we plant or leave. Queen Anne’s Lace (wild carrot), a “weed” we selectively leave; cilantro; dill, borage and the mustard are among their favorites. Except the first, all have edible flowers, and they all self-seed liberally so we leave many scattered throughout the garden after weeding out those we don't want. The number of spiders building webs in the garden has increased as well, and daddy-long-legs are everywhere, looking to me like silent sentinels patrolling among the snap pea, squash and bean leaves. There’s one particularly beautiful black-and-white-patterned daddy-long-legs that frequents the squash plants this summer.

Finally, we help the small predators, handpicking slugs, snails, and squash beetles often enough to give the plants a fighting start. Last year we bought ourselves an insect guide to learn to recognize the difference between the soldier beetles, which we want, and the squash vine borers, cucumber beetles and other squash bugs that that we don’t. Earlier this week, we managed to identify and kill two squash vine borers for the first time, hopefully before they had laid their eggs.

For the larger pests, we have Kat, who adopted us the summer we began this project. We had seen her in hiding in the woods for some months until she finally became too weak to hunt. Hunger overcame her fear of humans, and she cautiously ate the food we provided before running off again. Each time we came to the door with food, she flinched as if expecting a kick, but gradually she has relaxed, jumping on a lap to be petted and groomed whether invited or not. When Kat arrived, mouse were living in the attic and walls, rabbits had moved their warrens into the gardens, and voles were tunneling everywhere. It didn’t take long before those inhabitants were gone, and future ones discouraged or killed.  It even seemed that Kat discouraged the deer for the first couple years. My friend, Beth, an environmental educator, says that’s quite possible, since bobcats, a natural predator of deer, are not much larger than Kat.

This entry wouldn’t be complete with a further comment on those voracious, uninvited eaters, since the most frequent question I’m asked by human visitors to the garden is, “How do you keep deer out?”  The answer, like many others we give, is “by using diverse approaches simultaneously.” Until a few weeks ago, we combined Kat patrolling at night with caging for young fruit trees and shrubs and selectively sprinkling DeerScram (a very effective organic powder of ground-up deer parts that elicits an instinctive fear response) sprinkled around their favorite entries to the garden and their favorite plants at the times they most like eating them. Finally, we planted enough to “share” parts of the crop, no matter how frustrating that was. The “timing factor” seemed to work this spring, as the flowering pea plants (apparently a particularly tasty item for deer) remained untouched.

With our gardens expanding, however, it seemed more cost-effective to erect a deer fence. So this year, we invested in a 7.5’ high, plastic mesh fence, and Richard hung it on trees through the woods, encircling a little over an acre around the house and gardens.

Photo credits: Southern Leopard Frog, similar to its Northern cousin, and Garden Snake from Wikipedia. Cilantro in flower and Kat by Margo HIttleman

Hand-me-downs

Some of my favorite plants are those that came to me from the gardens of family and friends. They make a walk through my gardens a walk among friends, reminding me of those treasured connections and the stories that go with them.

Most prominent because they are now in bloom, are the day lilies, from my mother’s suburban flower border on Long Island, and before that, from her parents’ postage stamp yard in Queens. In addition to adorning the yard, the edible flower petals make lovely additions to salads and stir fries.

The fall-bearing raspberries, irises and lily of the valley all came from the western Massachusetts gardens of my cousin Norman. The garlic had its start there too, some “garlic generations” back. It was in Norman and Eva’s house as a child, waking in my sleeping bag on the living room floor and looking at the Berkshire hills out their living room window, that I got my first taste of small town life. And each year, during their annual October “Ciderfest,” I get to visit and view the season’s remains of Norman’s labors.

The cheery sundrops, here hiding among the firepokers, were dug from my friend Randall’s  fabulous gardens while he was living in nearby Danby, along with the lemon balm (whose leaves make a wonderful tea and salad addition) some unusual hostas, and a purple globe allium I have never found in a garden store. Randall -- now in London with, I’m sure, equally fabulous gardens that I have yet to see -- showed me how to use a chain saw and pointed out the chokecherries growing at the edge of our woods, sharing stories of the jam his mother used to make from them.

When I look at the sweet woodruff and pulmonaria (lungwart) growing along the gardens’ back edge and into the woods, I think of Betsy who passed away some years ago. The plants she dug for me from her gardens thrive, continuing to spread.

The Jerusalem artichokes, with their edible tubers and October-blooming flowers came from Frank’s family’s former farm, still his home, near Skaneateles Lake; the perennial sunflowers from Mary Kay’s yard in Ithaca (and before that, from her parents’ farm), and the pink rugosa rose, with its large rosehips for tea, from Margot’s extensive gardens on Ithaca’s West Hill.  

Each of these plants has now been handed-down from my gardens to others, in some cases, many others. My mother has some of Randall’s lemon balm, allium and sun drops in her foundation beds on Long Island; my friend Neisha, some of my mother’s and grandfather’s day lilies at her new home in nearby Groton. My cousin Michael planted some of Frank’s Jerusalem artichokes at his western Massachusetts home. Thus, the links, and hopefully, some part of the stories, continue on. 

Photo credit: Garlic by Dan Hittleman. 

An ode to soil

I never used to pay much attention to soil. Dirt was ... well, dirt. Whatever the gardening books said about the importance of improving the soil, I just made do with what was there. My plants grew, but slowly.

Now, nothing makes me happier than to find a huge pile of fully composted wood chips at the Town Barns, free for the taking. We were there Monday evening with Josue and Amarina; they had kindly offered to help us out with their pick-up truck. The decayed wood chips in the center of a mountainous pile, towering far above us, was charred black from the heat generated in the composting process, and still warm to the touch. Richard climbed up, and began digging into the pile, knocking it down. Josue and I stood below, shoveling it into the back of his pick-up truck. We only had three shovels, so Amarina cheered us on. When we got home and unloaded it, my ecstasy was so apparent, they offered to make a second trip.

I read somewhere that scientists have documented a connection between micro-organisms in soil and the release of neurotransmitters in human brains. Digging in the soil, they concluded, really does make people happier.

Lots of organic matter in the soil also makes plants happier. I can see, from the year to year, the difference in the plants growing in the beds where the most composted material was most recently added.

So in appreciation to the soil, today I post some recent pictures from the garden. From downed tree limbs, to soil, to green plants to food. Amazing.

Photos (top to bottom): Yellow squash; Winter squash; Wild blackcap raspberries; Unripe peaches; Zucchini and cilantro; Dill flowers; Garlic scapes; Cucumber;  Arugula in bloom; Early morning asparagus fronds;

Cooking Seasonally and Predictably

At the public library last week, I stumbled across cookbook by a well-known chef whose promise of “fabulous flavor from simple ingredients” caught my eye. Since we started growing a lot of food, I’m always looking for new ways to prepare our harvest. I took it home. 

Sure enough, there were some wonderful-sounding recipes, especially the maple-roasted butternut squash and curried roasted butternut squash soup that I look forward to trying in the fall. But I was also surprised by a comment in the introduction. The author was writing about her time in France, where, she notes, cooking seasonally is not only the norm, but “the only option.” While extolling the flavor and quality of seasonal ingredients, she went on to say that “coming from the U.S., I found this kind of spontaneous menu planning hard….”

I wasn’t surprised that changing how one thinks about menu planning can be challenging, but the juxtaposition of cooking seasonally and “spontaneously” surprised me. In fact, seasonal cooking is nothing if not predictable. Just as crocuses in March are followed by daffodils in April, tulips in May, and peonies in June, so too are early spring’s salad greens and radishes followed by snap peas, strawberries and chard in late spring, and raspberries, beets, garlic scapes, and carrots in early summer. From that perspective, menu-planning that involves anything you want, any time you want it (what author Barbara Kingsolver has called the U.S.’s “promiscuous food culture”) is what seems spontaneous to me.

But as my new friend, Amarina, reminded me as we were preparing dinner last night, as a nation, we’re so disconnected from where our food comes from. Even when, she added, speaking of herself, you’re only a generation or two removed from people who farmed.  

I have to stop and remember that it wasn’t so long ago that I, too, might have found cooking seasonally to be “spontaneous”; growing food, the sequence and timing of various foods quickly becomes second nature. Certainly, one year there are more snap peas than I know what to do with; the next year, there may be few peas, but lots of something else. And depending on the weather, the first harvest of any given vegetable may vary by a week or so. But each food ripens at its prescribed time, in a regular sequence. And you see it coming. That’s why my 3-ringed notebook of collected recipes is organized by month, not by meal categories. The butternut squash recipes will go in the “November/December” section. 

Here’s a sample of this week’s “predictable” early-summer menu here in central New York State:

Breakfasts

Omelets with garlic scapes, herbs, feta cheese and some baby summer squash

Yogurt smoothies with strawberries or raspberries

 

Lunch

Tabouli with lots of parsley, spearmint, garlic scapes, radish and early carrots (plus chick peas and feta cheese)

Snap peas with mint, in a vinaigrette

Green salad, with chick peas and feta cheese, topped with olive oil and an herbal vinaigrette

Snap peas right off the vine!

 

Dinner

Stir-fried rice with garlic scapes, scallions, spicy mustard greens, chard stems, carrots, and snap peas (plus scrambled eggs and tofu)

Roasted beets

Beet greens with vinegar

Pasta with spearmint pesto

Grape leaves stuffed with rice and chopped beef

Quinoa risotto with arugula and carrots

More snap peas right off the vine!

 

Dessert

Strawberries and/or raspberries – on their own, in yogurt, over vanilla ice cream, or topped with whipped heavy cream

Wild black cherries     

Lemon balm, spearmint and/or peppermint tea

 

And coming soon: bush (string) beans

Life is a Bowl of Cherries

“All the really ripe ones are just out of reach,” complained Richard, from half-way up the smallest of the mature black cherry trees at the edge of our woods. 

We love “found” food – those native plants that we harvest with little or no work required. We didn’t plant them. Some we tend minimally. More commonly, we simply cheer them on and eat the gleanings with gratitude for the world’s abundance.  Most notable in this category are the wild black cap raspberries, just starting to ripen. Wild grape leaves, too, for stuffing with seasoned rice and meat, and on my “to do” list for the next week or two.

But there’s nothing quite like a perfectly ripe cherry. Unfortunately for us, the trees are 50-60 feet tall, the cherries far from reach.  Growing as they did in a crowded woods, most have no lower branches.

Usually, we resign ourselves to watching enviously as a multitude of birds feasted on the sweet black spheres. I joke about cutting down the trees to harvest the tantalizing crop. Last year, Richard tried hitting the branches of the smallest tree -- the only one with branches low enough -- with a long pole to knock the fruit to the ground. It didn’t work. He was able to reach three or four cherries with a ladder. But that simply whet our appetite for more.

Yesterday, Richard was determined to have some.

Out came the step ladder. It barely reached the one low-hanging branch. Out came the more serious ladder. He was on the top of that when he called that most of the ripe cherries were still out of reach.

I thought about Icarus and his determined creation of a set of wax wings. Richard is more practical. He decided to duct-tape a large-tonged serving fork to a very long pole. With a little practice – and a lot of patience – he coaxed a small bowlful of black fruit from the tree.

The taste was sublime.

This morning, we woke to a raucous symphony of chirps, and cheeps, and squawks and caws. The local avian population had found the cherries, and the message was traveling far and wide. With my binoculars, I could see hundreds of shiny ripe cherries filling the tallest of the trees. 

For the next three days, there will be a non-stop pilgrimage of birds as they pick the tree clean. Some come in noisy flocks. Others arrive on their own. Envious as I might be, I think we’ll have to simply enjoy the show. But then, after Richard took his turn with the binoculars, I heard him murmur something about climbing trees.