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There was a beautiful Eastern Black Swallowtail in the fennel patch yesterday. This morning, the herb’s tender green shoots were peppered with tiny butterfly eggs. The little orbs are pale yellow now, but they will turn black just before they hatch into small caterpillars. In several stages, these fast-growing creatures will pass through increasingly vivid color patterns — all the while steadily consuming an impressive quantity of fennel, parsley and dill. Individuals lucky enough to avoid hungry wasps will eventually transform into a chrysalis and, finally, something that looks a lot like this:
(c)2009 Val Webb
Meanwhile, we have defaulted to our usual steamy south Alabama late-summer gardening schedule. Manual labor is now limited to really, really early in the morning. We’re prepping beds for fall planting, checking our saved seed and picking those die-hard eggplant and peppers… and some scrumptious ambrosia canteloupe that the Perfect Man incorporated into an experiment in edible landscaping.
Summer is also canning time. Last week, it was green tomato chow-chow… and this week, it was blueberry jam. The hardest part is not opening the jars immediately and devouring the carefully preserved contents. It’s a treat to live with a man who has impressive food preservation skills! (Here’s a tip for any guys out there who might be contemplating an online dating service: just be sure your profile includes the fact that you’re inordinately fond of Mason jars and pressure cookers, and then stand back.)
When it comes to scary subject matter — the stuff you try not to think about when you wake unexpectedly at 2 a.m. — Stephen King can’t hold a candle to Poisonous Plants of the Southern United States. If you’ve ever wondered what would happen to you within 48 hours of, say, nibbling a little lantana from your curbside landscaping, this handy guide from West Virginia University will tell you in excrutiating detail. (Don’t read the lantana section if you are about to have lunch. You’ve been warned.)
Eeeeeeeeek!
As the grandmother of two toddler girls who love to pick flowers, I’m all for nontoxic landscaping. Better yet, edible landscaping. So this year, while our regular backyard garden is doing its usual exuberant summer thing…
… some food crops have replaced traditional landscape plants on the “public” side of the fence. Five itty-bitty Bush Pickle cucumber plants, tucked next to a privacy fence and around the foot of an antique urn, have produced several dozen fat seven-inch cukes and show no signs of slowing. No sign of wilt or insect infestation, either — which, here in the coastal subtropics, is cause for rejoicing.
We tried a ten-foot row of Greasyback Cornstalk beans, a wonderful heirloom that was my great-grandmother’s garden favorite, against a section of privacy fence. A strip of plastic bird netting is tacked to the fence posts to give the beanstalks something to grab. I’m watering them with a dipper from our algae-rich fish pond, and they’re producing lots of characteristically knobby, slightly shiny green beans. Some catnip and St. Francis finish off the little bed.
There’s something very satisfying about landscaping with table fare. Our lawn crops over the past two years have expanded to include citrus, blueberries and culinary ginger, and we want to keep moving in that direction. Eating the yard isn’t for everyone — there are a lot of folks living in suburban housing developments with restrictive covenants, for example, and inner-city gardeners whose street gardens are fraught with unforeseen hazards.
But, personally, I love the idea of yanking out a poisonous invasive and replacing it with something the grandbabies can happily harvest. Hey, lantana! Let’s see you do this:
This gardener took a break from tending his rattlesnake beans and tomatoes, and gave us a quick tour.
It was Saturday, and we were rambling around Pensacola’s first New Urbanism neighborhood — a whimsical 20-acre community called Aragon. We turned a corner and there it was: a lovely community garden, divided into individual family plots and hemmed all around with a white picket fence. Each family has a rectangular plot in the public space, and about two-thirds are currently under cultivation. The garden appears to be designed to encourage its use as a gathering place, with porch swings on one side and a big playground on the other. Brick walkways and trellises of sweet-smelling Carolina jasmine bisect the garden property (our friendly gardener pointed out that the jasmine probably wasn’t the best choice for this location, though, since its big woody roots keep snaking into the vegetables).
Some Florence fennel and a big ol’ rosemary.
Florida summers are hot, hot hot. The community garden at Aragon has a sprinkler system that comes on automatically, three times each week.
They sat there on our potato plants in the early-morning fog, tiny coffee cups raised high, waiting for The Perfect Man to drench them all in their favorite new breakfast beverage. Unlike the slugs in that Hawaii study (the one where coffee was toxic to the slimy little potato-plant-munching devils) apparently Alabama slugs LOVE caffeine. I’m pretty sure I heard one of them request extra froth.
It seems that everyone has their own favorite anti-slug strategy. Sympathetic gardening friends left suggestions on my Facebook wall: cayenne pepper and garlic oil sprinkled around the base of the nibbled foliage; nifty copper tape that mysteriously repels the slimy marauders. Or, if you have the culinary fortitude, you can even cook them up and eat them just like Tim Pearce.
Pearce, the assistant curator of Mollusks at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, shares handy slug recipe tips in a strikingly unappetizing post on Tribe.net. It’s a pretty good bet you won’t ever hear Rachael Ray exhorting the importance of slitting open your future lunch to peel back the translucent skin and pull out the “foul-smelling digestive gland” located in its posterior. And, if that tidbit of advice isn’t enough to inspire spontaneous vegetarianism, there’s more. “It is a very good idea to cook land mollusks before eating them,” Pearce advises, “as they are good vectors for human parasites.” Yum.
Vertical bed of lettuces, flowers and herbs at the 2009 Festival of Flowers.
Take heart, all you northern gardeners. Even though your vegetable beds may be slumbering under six inches of fresh snow this week, those sweet spring days are just around the corner.
Here in south Alabama, we flirt with winter but the relationship never lasts. We’re already well into our growing season, with pea vines waving overhead and tomato plants racing to put on some size before the arrival of the rowdy insect hordes who show up to party all summer. We know that by July, when the mercury rarely dips below 90 degrees, gardening will be bearable only before sunrise or during a steady rain. But in April, anything is possible.
I try to attend the Festival of Flowers every spring, to soak up some gardening inspiration. The event provides a sprawling patchwork of blooms from around the world – plus locally grown orchids, landscape architecture installations, a whimsical tablescape competition, a gardening vendors’ marketplace and a slate of expert speakers and demonstrations. Fun!
Among the usual ikebana arrangements and displays of backyard reflecting pools, this year’s exhibit tent was populated with a surprising number of edible landscape elements. There were hedges incorporating kumquat trees and rabbiteye blueberries. Windowboxes were artfully arranged with herbs and edible flowers. One local company advertised a 4×4 foot raised bed (the finished product, all dark stained wood and spindles, looked almost like a piece of furniture) installed and planted with your favorite seasonal veggies.
The advice booth, staffed by members of Master Gardeners, was all about the kitchen garden this year:
And I couldn’t help lusting after this beautiful 1955 Ford pickup, all covered in locally grown food crops. (Sigh.)
At the container gardening display, a repurposed kitchen sink becomes a home for lettuces and garlic chives:
And the usual displays — the ones that dealt with flowers or landscape design — were as beautiful as always. So here, for all my snowbound gardening friends, is a little bit of spring. Enjoy!
I’m not afraid to admit it. I love compost. There’s an irresistible alchemy involved when you can start with garbage and end up with a wildly nutrient-rich substance that has been likened to Ghiradelli chocolate for earthworms.
We alternate our layers of leaves, chopped garden vegetation and coffee grounds — plus kitchen peelings and parings — between two large compost bins made of recycled construction lumber. The two of us, prodigious vegetable peelers and coffee drinkers, produce enough compostible material allow us an inch of top dressing on most of the garden, twice each year. I keep an eye on the pile as it cooks itself into readiness — it gets turned once, and then is periodically poked with a sharpened tomato stake to introduce air deep into the heap. It seems to progress best when it’s slightly damp.
Our parfait of decay includes: exhausted garden plants and weeds, hedge and grass clippings, piles of leaves collected from our neighbors, fruit and veggie peels, eggshells (rinsed and crushed up), dryer lint, coffee grounds, and a handful of garden soil now and then for a bacterial boost.
We don’t compost woody plant material or the thick stems of broccoli, synthetic fabric or its lint, meat or any cooked food scraps, plants with seed heads or plants that show signs of disease.
Our warm, humid climate helps speed the rate of decomposition. I have been assured that urinating on one’s compost pile is the ultimate accelerator, but — being an urban gardener — I lack the courage to use that technique.
What are your favorite compost recipes?
With apologies to Titian.
Last night, I dreamed about apples – tart, juicy Granny Smiths; shiny Macintoshes; Golden Delicious with the mellow taste of autumn beneath their skins. I dreamed of glistening chunks of apple piled on a plate, just waiting to be speared with my fork. They looked delicious. And then…and then…
I woke up. It was Day 6 of the 2008 Eat Local Challenge, and if there are apples grown within my 200-mile range northward from the Gulf coastline, I haven’t found them. Nor bananas. Nor rice. What I HAVE found in generous abundance are sweet potatoes. I got out of bed and had a plump, baked sweet potato for breakfast.
As a longtime vegetarian with a big organic garden, I didn’t realize how dramatically my diet would change with the onset of the October challenge month. Before last week, the major part of my daily food intake consisted of fresh fruits and vegetables, grains and soy. I occasionally ate bread, and my moderate dairy consumption came mostly in the form of homemade yogurt and cheese. I drank lots of juices.
Now, under the 200-mile rule, most of those fruits and vegetables are off limits. It’s planting time in our subtropical gardening zone, so all our winter greens and cole crops are mere seedlings this month. Kale, bless its fast-growing heart, will be ready to start eating next week. But the rest — four types of lettuces, three types of cabbage, the broccoli, cauliflower, collards, field peas and butternut squash – are weeks and weeks away from harvest. So, I’m eating LOTS of whole-grain bread and LOTS of our homemade dairy, which has been an unpleasant surprise to my fruit-and-veggie-based digestive tract.
Suddenly, shopping for vegetables has taken on a treasure hunt aspect. My Saturday trek to the weekly grower’s market was disappointing (plenty of candles, flowers, handmade soaps and honey, few edibles) until we spotted a table selling eggpant. Yay! And a pint jar of blueberry preserves from a neighboring county. Yesssss! I found some leathery-looking Alabama green beans in a neighborhood market this weekend, and — hallelujah! — some fresh squash from a grower in Lucedale, Mississippi (50 miles from home). I discovered on Saturday night that tiny red potatoes, roasted in the oven, taste even better when they’re seasoned with thankfulness that the soil they were pulled from lies only a little way down US Highway 98. Like pieces in a culinary jigsaw puzzle, we fit together a half-dozen zucchini here and a handful of green tomatoes there, as we find them. I’m learning that practically every item in the average grocery store – roughly 50,000 different items — has been hauled here from somewhere far away. I’m learning to be flexible. I’m learning a deep appreciation for simple meals.
But man, oh, man. An apple sure would taste good.
I confess: I’m guilty of wanton lust. It happened in the aisle of our neighborhood Fresh Market this afternoon, when I was suddenly confronted with a display piled high with gorgeous imported chocolates. Here I was, on the very first day of the 2008 Eat Local Challenge – an entire month pledged to consuming only foods grown and produced within 200 miles of my front door — and I had wandered smack into the valley of the shadow of Godiva… my favorite luxury.
But I was headed for the produce department, and I was on a quest. The Fresh Market is a wonderful and eclectic grocery, a feast for the senses where classical music wafts overhead through air scented with exotic spices, and I knew it had the most impressive vegetables in town. Even better, every item is labeled with the area of origin. I live in a mostly rural state, in a city surrounded by agriculture: vast cotton and soybean fields lie just beyond the suburbs; I’ve seen sweet potatoes growing out there, and Silver Queen corn. So I naturally assumed that our local grocery stores would be well stocked with South Alabama produce, right?
Well, not exactly. Fresh from South America…Product of Mexico..Washington State…Carmel Valley, California. Feeling deflated, I spoke with a representative of the store’s produce section. He was kind and sympathetic, but he couldn’t help.
“Within 200 miles?” he repeated thoughtfully. “No, we don’t have a single thing. We had some local okra a while back, but we don’t have any now.” Suddenly, I felt the circle drawn on my map start to shrink.
My next stop was the organic produce counter at a spacious new health food market. I was surprised and disappointed to strike out again. The beautiful winter squash, broccoli crowns, tomatoes and onions, piled up in tantalizing pyramids, all wore cheerful stickers attesting to the fact that they had traveled more than 1,000 miles from farms in Mexico. (Amazingly, that’s still considerably less than the 1,500 miles an average food product travels in the US… a practice that gobbles up 100 billion gallons of oil every year. Check out the journey from the farm to your fridge with video artist Molly Scwartz in Watch Your Foodometer.)
“I’m so sorry,” said the young woman at the cash register in the health food market. “We’re working on getting a contract for some local produce. I don’t know if it will be this month.”
So, it’s going to be a skimpy menu at my table for a couple of days, until the first Farmer’s Market of the fall season kicks off downtown. We lost the contents of our freezer (including some of our summer garden bounty) last month when the door failed to close properly. But I won’t starve — outside, the tender baby kale is ready to be thinned. Our homemade yogurt qualifies for the Challenge, because it’s made from milk produced inside my map circle. Likewise the block of homemade mozzarella cheese, which I sliced at lunchtime and enjoyed with a big dollop of the green tomato chow-chow that The Perfect Man created from our summer harvest. Tomorrow evening, when I’m caught up on illustration work, I plan to do a little bread baking. It will be simple fare until Saturday, and then I’ll plot a course for next week.
Last year, high in the mountains of central Mexico, we saw coffee plants growing wild along the roadside. Looking at the skinny branches loaded with clusters of coffee cherries (the fruit that contains the coffee bean) I thought wistfully how nice it would be to have a homegrown supply of my favorite drink.
After reading that the FDA has recalled seven coffee products sold in the US because they may be contaminated with melamine, that private coffee garden sounds better than ever! In the interest of accuracy, I should point out that the FDA warning is for a line of instant coffee products… not old-fashioned coffee or coffee beans. Whew.
A more positive reason to brew your own cup of coffee before leaving home: Good Earth Coffee’s Brew at Home Pledge. I have to admit that I was not initially impressed with this idea — I thought the simplest way to reduce the 28 billion disposable coffee cups thrown away each year would be to take your own mug to the coffee shop. Right? But a little research revealed that about 70 percent of coffee shop customers fail to do that. I know I’m one of those people.
My favorite reason for coffee at home: You can use the leftovers as a deliciously aromatic watercolor. I am always surprised at the differences in the colors different coffees produce… Kenyan is a robust dark brown, while some of the Central American blends are a lovely rusty red. This coffee angel is painted with three coffee blends (Kenyan, Costa Rican and Hawaiian) and it’s easy to pick out the three separate shades of brown. I simmer a little leftover coffee (1/2 cup is plenty) in a saucepan for five minutes to concentrate the color strength. Then you can use it just like traditional watercolors.
Coffee is the engine that propels us out the door each morning to squeeze in an hour or two of gardening before the workday begins. Today’s task was preparation of the largest bed for the remainder of 54 young broccoli plants. The Perfect Man has finished planting the leaf lettuce. Another week of early mornings, and our winter vegetables will all be under way. This is the nicest season for gardening in the Deep South; already the insect populations are dropping off. With no squash borers or cabbage moths to contend with through the cooler months, gardening life is good.
