Finale

Life has been unusually full, with little time to write. But there's always time to stop and enjoy a dramatic show. Richard took this photo yesterday from our deck just before 6:30 pm, when the sun came out after Hurricane Danny's final deluge. Danny, my dad, may have been let down listening to news reports that kept referring to "Danny" as "weak" and "petering out," but I say, "Go Danny!"

Peaches

If I were a painter, perhaps I’d have ready language to describe the colors of the peach compote cooling in the glass jars on my kitchen counter. But all I can say is that I love the translucent shades of orange, the lighter chunks of fruit suspended against the deeper shades of thick liquid nectar.

The anticipation I wrote about earlier this spring -- as I admired the deep pink flowers in early May, counted the swelling buds that became small globes later that month, and saw the growing and ripening fruit time we entered or left our front door -- is over. Now the peaches are ripening all at once, and it's time to eat.

I came home Tuesday evening from five days away to find two or three dozen “drops” that Richard had sitting on the counter. These weren’t in the best shape, so I cut away the spoiled parts and simmered the rest into compote. Most of it went into the freezer to be spooned over vanilla yogurt or ice cream, or eaten as is, some time in late winter when 80 degree days seem a distant memory. Some we ate while it was still warm. The rest went into my breakfast smoothie the next day.

Last night, I picked several dozen more peaches. The best went into a bowl for eating – minus the one eaten right off the tree. It was perfect: sweet, juicy, and still warm from the heat of the day although it was already dusk. The rest of the harvest was simmered down into more compote and frozen. I use only a small amount of water (just enough to cover the bottom of the saucepan) and no additional sugar; tree-ripened peaches are sweet enough. 10-15 minutes of simmering, and it's done.

This process will be repeated over the next several days with the fruit remaining on the tree. By the end of the weekend, the peach tree will probably be empty, we’ll have eaten as many peaches as we could, and 6-8 quarts of peach compote will be waiting on the freezer shelf.

As the tree matures, the yield will increase. And then there’s the second peach tree we plan to plant comes fall. I figure we can never have too many reminders of warm August days to carry us through the long winter. After this year, though, I’ll likely turn to canning the peaches instead. And with the sealed Mason jars readily visible, perhaps I’ll find the language to adequately describe those lovely colors.

Mid-Summer Beauty

Abundance is so apparent in early August. Many flowers. Much food. A lot to do. So it's worth a few moments of just appreciating the beauty all around. Here's what caught my eye this week. 

Help is Everywhere

Ladybug, ladybug, fly away home

Your house is on fire, your children are gone.

I have no idea where this well-known children’s nursery rhyme originated, but we love having ladybugs hanging around our garden. They are voracious eaters of aphids and other soft-bodied insect pests. They lay their eggs in yellow egg masses on the bottom of leaves, and their children (larvae) eat aphids as voraciously as their parents.

This morning, Richard noticed a huge colony of aphids on the tips of the mustard stalks. I had been planning to cut out the mustard anyway. It had gone to seed, so it’s flowers no longer served to attract predator insects, and it was shading the small carrots growing beneath. I quickly grabbed my garden scissors, and tossed the aphid-laden stalks into a weak bleach-and-water solution. Aphids gone.

After doing so, I noticed the two lady bugs sitting on the mint and dill leaves nearby. They, too, had found the aphids. Lady beetles can consume hundreds of aphids per day. This makes them a popular biological control, not only in gardens, but in warm, humid greenhouses where aphids can be a particular problem. Growers who prefer not to continuously spray insecticides often purchase and release lady bugs to keep aphids, mealy bugs, mites and other pests under control. It’s not particularly effective to do that in a home garden; they will likely just fly away. Instead, we leave some flowering “weeds” such as Queen Anne’s Lace (wild carrot), dandelions and yarrow, along with the mint the dill, whose pollen-bearing flowers attract them to visit.

Those two lady beetles probably would have finished off the colony before we got home from work. I was sorry to have destroyed their meal, and I hope there are other aphid colonies that we haven’t yet found to keep them around. It was a good reminder that in a healthy ecosystem (like a healthy social system), help is everywhere, if we but think to notice.

Photos from Wikipedia.

Never too many zucchini

The temperatures finally rose above 80 degrees F, and the summer squash has taken off. This past week, I worked late two evenings and forgot to keep close tabs. The inevitable happened. Thursday evening, I found two 2 lb. zucchinis.

Every food gardener knows the litany of jokes: the gardener who slips out in the dead of night to slip a zucchini or two into the passenger seat of parked cars, the rural town where people lock their houses and cars only during zucchini season. In her wonderful poem, "Attack of the Squash People," Marge Piercy writes, in part:

They're coming, they're on us

the long striped gourds ….

Recite fifty zucchini recipes!

Zucchini tempura; creamed soup;

sauté with olive oil and cumin,

tomatoes, onion; frittata;

casserole of lamb; baked

topped by cheese; marinated; stuffed; stewed; driven

through the heart like a stake. ....

Sneak out before dawn to drop

them in other people's gardens,

in baby buggies at church doors.

Shot, smuggling zucchini into

mailboxes, a federal offense. ....*

The old stand-by, zucchini bread, barely uses a cup of shredded squash, two at most.

Then I found a recipe for yellow squash soup in a magazine, adapted it to zucchini, and my problem was solved. It’s delicious, uses up LOTS of squash, can be served hot or chilled, and best of all, freezes well, without losing its texture or taste. Zucchini, at its summer peak, can lead to choruses of “not again.” Zucchini soup, during the cold, dark winter months, is deeply appreciated. We froze 12 quarts of zucchini soup last year, and it was gone long before the spring thaw, leaving us wishing for more.

Now we never have too many zucchini. That's good, since we have five zucchini plants this year, including a extremely healthy "volunteer" (at right; the zucchini is the bushy plant with the darkest green leaves, growing among the trailing winter squash and the climbing pole beans).

Here’s the recipe. Quantities are approximate as soups are very forgiving. I rarely measure and often substitute ingredients, depending on what I have available. Increase proportionately if you have more than 2 lbs. of zucchini.

Never-too-many zucchini soup

1-2 Tbsp olive oil

1 large onion (or equivalent scallions), chopped

3-4 cloves garlic (or garlic scapes in season), chopped

1 small leek, if available (otherwise omit, and increase onion)

Approx. 2 lbs of zucchini, coarsely chopped

Approx. 3-4 cups chicken broth

Thyme, several fresh sprigs, or 1-2 tsps dry

Lemon balm, handful of leaves, chopped (or some lemon zest)

Salt

Dash of red pepper

2-3 Tbsp lemon juice

Parmesan cheese

Pine nuts (or chopped walnuts)

In a good soup pot, heat the olive oil. Sauté the onions, garlic and leek, stirring, until onions are translucent. Add the zucchini and herbs, and sauté for another 5 minutes or so. Add enough chicken broth to just about cover the zucchini (less if you like your soup thicker, more if you like it thinner. Usually, I start on the side of “less” and add more broth at the end if I need.) Simmer, stirring, for 10-15 minutes, until the zucchini softens.

In a blender (with a tight cover), puree the soup in batches. Add the lemon juice. Add more chicken broth if you want a thinner soup.

If you’re saving the soup for winter, let cool and freeze. (I use plastic containers or 1 qt. zip-lock freezer bags.) Otherwise, reheat after pureeing or refrigerate to serve cold.

When you’re ready to serve, sprinkle about 1-2 Tbsp grated parmesan cheese and some pine nuts or walnuts on top (more or less depending on taste).

This soup is surprising filling. With some fresh bread, corn muffins, or pasta, it makes a light, but satisfying meal. As a main course, this recipe will serve 2-3 people. As a "first course" or side, it should serve 4-6.

The first two quarts of this soup just went into the freezer, leaving just enough for two bowls for lunch. I'm off to partake.

* Note: Marge Piercy's full poem can be found in the collection, The Moon is Always Female (1986).

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.”