Because I put the peppers and eggplants and cucumbers into the garden on Saturday, it is snowing this morning. I covered as much as I could last night — we’ll have to see what lived, and what didn’t.
Ah, spring in Montana …
33 Degrees, Snow …
1
Monthly Archives: May 2007
Putting in the Garden …
If it’s Memorial Day, then it’s time to get the garden put in (I love that phrase, it’s so old-fashioned) — I jumped the gun a little on the tomatoes this year — they were getting so leggy in the cold frames that I had to put them in — and last week’s spate of cold, wet weather didn’t do them any good. It went down to 28 degrees at least twice — although sheets draped over the trellises seem to have kept them from giving up the ghost entirely.
This year I’m experimenting — these are the eggplant seedlings. I’ve never started so many of them (Seeds of Italy, of course, one long skinny eggplant and one round one). In years past I’ve grown two or three eggplant plants — and for some reason I don’t fully understand, I decided to do a whole bunch of them this year. I think they were lonely before. I think they want to be in a crowd. This is an entirely irrational belief on my part, but we’ll see what happens. And since I didn’t really mark them, I’ll just have to wait and see what they produce (or if they produce). The weather folks are predicting a hot dry summer — for the eggplants sake, let’s hope so.
I also planted a peck of peppers — Aci Sivri, a long skinny pepper that I dry in strings and use all winter, Topepo Rosso, Padrone, and Cieliega Piccante (Seeds of Italy doesn’t seem to be carrying this one this year). The peppers are my first real experiment in seed saving — and I may not be entirely accurate on seedling labels — all winter I just dumped seeds into a glass jar when I used a pepper — so even if I’ve got the varieties wrong, I do know that I’m growing the peppers I liked to eat.
I put the peppers in the deep triangular bed because they’re not something I’m going to have to get at very often. It was the one thing I didn’t really think of when I built these beds — it’s too far to reach in the big ones. So I try to plant things that have a longer growing period toward the back of the beds. Today I’m going to do the radicchios along the back of the other deep triangular bed. I built trellises along the back sides of these beds, and that’s where I put the peas and beans and cucumbers. The trellisses also make a nice sort of fence to separate the garden from the rest of the yard.
And then there are the zucchini. I told myself I wasn’t going to do zucchini this year — they take up so much space, and no matter how vigilant one is, they always get out of hand. But I couldn’t help it. I like zucchini. So I planted four of them in the back corner of the yard in a bed that I never know what to do with — there’s rhubarb back there that came with the house, and some iris, and it’s where I’ve been trying to get a raspberry patch going. So here’s my passive-aggressive treatment of the poor zucchini:
Convergance of Food, Ag and Hunger beats …
Swamped with work today, but there’s an interesting piece over at the Columbia Journalism Review on the new direction food reporting is taking:
“The world of food reporting had been divided,” Severson told me recently. “You’d have an agriculture reporter who didn’t understand how a kitchen worked and a reporter covering hunger who might not understand what it took to put food on the table at night,” plus the restaurant critics and the recipe editors. Newspapers today, she adds, “are really bringing all of that together.”
Farmer’s Market vs. Safeway
Sam over at Becks and Posh did a little comparison shopping, and discovered to her surprise that by shopping at the Farmer’s Market last weekend, she saved 29% over what it would have cost her to buy the same items at the supermarket. Considering that she was shopping at Ferry Plaza Market, what’s so exciting about this is that Sam’s also been keeping track of her food expenditures all year — and what she’s finding is that for ordinary produce shopping she’s ahead by going to the market.
I’ve shopped Farmer’s Markets for 20 years (scary, that thought — I’m that old? I’ve had 20 years of adulthood?) starting when I’d spend summers at my Aunt’s house in downtown Chicago. There was a market in a nearby school parking lot and while I originally started shopping there because it was a good bargain — huge bundles of produce for less than the supermarket — I was quickly won over by all the factors that seduce us all about Farmers’ Markets — fresher produce doesn’t spoil in the fridge, it tastes *so* much better, you get to talk to actual farmers, and most of all — it’s fun to shop the Farmer’s Market. It’s festive.
Right out of college, I spent two years in New York, working as an editorial assistant. Now “editorial assistant” is code for cheap labor — it’s a segment of the labor force where they assume you have parents in Scarsdale that will pay at least part of your rent. Since this wasn’t the case, I was jaw-droppingly poor. My main source of entertainment was food shopping and learning to cook (it didn’t hurt that I was working on cookbooks at the time, either). A girl has to eat, right? And I lived about five blocks from the Union Square Greenmarket, where for about 20 bucks I could get enough veggies and fruit to last me through the week, and if I’d shopped really carefully, sometimes I could even get cheese or flowers for a treat. I loved that market. I was stupendously lonely in New York, and Saturday mornings I’d go over to the market where there were people, and life, and I felt like that brief contact with people who lived outside the city and who did something real like farming would keep me going for another week. The greenmarket saved my life that last year, when I was really afraid I was going under.
It was a thrill when I got to California after grad school to be back in a place with Farmer’s Markets. Our little market over in working-class Hayward wasn’t fancy at all, and it’s a good bet that all those Indian and Pakistani grannies were shopping there because the prices were good. There were more vegetables I didn’t recognize than those I did since that part of the Bay Area has large Indian, Afghan and Pakistani populations — but again, it gave me the chance to learn to cook things like tiny white eggplants, bitter melon, and greens — lots of greens. We were there one day when an Asian woman, who looked like she’d been a war bride–her husband was a large white man of that age, and they had the body language of the long-married, I’ll never forget seeing her point to a pile of peppers and burst into tears while telling her husband, “Look honey! I haven’t seen these since I was little in Vietnam.” She picked up a handful of those peppers and just looked at them for a long time.
We have a very tiny Farmer’s Market here in the summer, but it’s still an event. It’s fun to go over to the park on Wednesday evenings and see everyone (it’s a small town, after all). Here you can buy local lamb, and pork and beef from folks who actually raise it. There are veggies from neighbors backyards and from the few local folks who are going into raising vegetables on a more professional level (tough here because of our short growing season — ranching is the traditional ag activity). The Hutterites usually show up with their schoolbus full of veggies. There’s music and people selling soaps and jewelry and a lady who sells homemade pies and jam. It’s not actually cheaper to buy stuff at our local Farmer’s Market than it is at the grocery store — largely because good meat costs so much more than industrial meat, and the economies of scale just aren’t really working yet for vegetables in a place where the season is so short and there aren’t very many people. But the market is growing a little every year, and there are two or three markets over in Bozeman, which is bigger, and there are good folks like the Corporation for the Northern Rockies working to build a local, sustainable food system. And that’s a good thing to be a part of — especially if it helps you avoid travesties like those mutant crunchy peaches I bought at the store the other day. We like our Farmer’s Market — it’s fun. And although right now it’s still not a bargain, as it grows, as people are willing to support it, the hope is that we’ll begin to draw in those folks who shop primarily for price — that we’ll be able to bridge that class gap that is still such a problem for the real food movement.
What was I thinking?
When I bought those peaches in the grocery store the other day? Well, I know what I was thinking — I was thinking that I needed some fruit for breakfast, and since oranges are really going out of season (I know, they’re not local, but it’s not perfection we’re after here at LivingSmall), I thought I’d give the apricots, peaches, and plums that had just come in a shot. I lived in the Central Valley long enough to learn that at least they’re coming into season there, and stone fruit from California seemed less egregious than grapes from Chile, so I bought a mixed sack.
People, peaches are not supposed to be crunchy!
It’s not even that they taste bad — they just taste wrong. The apricots are pretty good — not great, but at least they don’t have a texture that is entirely false to their essential nature, and the plums are okay too, but not great. At least when I buy oranges I can find nice heavy ones, and they fundamentally taste like oranges. These are like Stepford-fruit.
And so, like Michael Ruhlman and his bad chocolate chip cookies, I’m stuck working my way through a bowl of stone fruit that just makes me sad. Looks like I’ll just have to skip fruit with breakfast until the raspberries and cherries start coming down from the Flathead, or at least until the guys with the trucks of fruit start showing up from Washington. That fruit at least tastes like fruit. And maybe, if we’re really lucky, Maryanne will go to Colorado to visit her elderly mother in July and will bring back some of the legendary white peaches of the Grand Junction/Delta valley. Now those are peaches. Peaches of one’s dreams.
Sewing! Skirts!
I made two skirts today and I made them without patterns! I used this great book — I hate patterns. I hate the tissue paper. I hate the fussiness of the directions. But I’ve also gotten very tired of spending fifty or sixty bucks on skirts that seem to have two seams and an elastic waist. Now, I’m by no means a seamstress, but even I can sew a skirt with two seams, an elastic waist, and a hem.
So here’s the deal — I’m short. I’m not skinny. And I like clothes that don’t look like what everyone else is wearing. And I hate shorts — I like skirts. I’ll go hiking in a skirt, fishing in a skirt, gardening in a skirt. Skirts are cool, air circulates, and while I had the kind of childhood where I wore dresses a lot, I was also never told I couldn’t climb the tree or ride the pony because I had a dress on. Summer is nearly here and I’m bored with the clothes I have and I want some new skirts. So I decided to make them — what I’ve been looking for is a method for making skirts that’s something akin to the bread recipe I’ve been looking for — a methodology — something I can do without having to look up the directions — something I just know how to do.
And today I found it. A simple A-line skirt — I did one that was short and one that was longer. The short one was longer to begin with, but when I tried it on, I didn’t like it. So I pinned it up, took a look, and cut two inches off the bottom. Perfect. The second one is longer, but the first version was a little matronly. I revised the side seams, pinned them, tried it on, and altered it. And the alteration worked! I’m so thrilled to have a basic skirt that I can make — inspired as always by my grandmother, who so hated laundry that she quite often sat down in the evening and ran up three new dresses for my mother and two aunts. A childhood friend of my mother’s told me that story. Calista grew up to be a costume designer, and my grandmother was one of her inspirations.
The sewing thing is on the same spectrum as cooking, or gardening, or foraging for mushrooms. I like to think of them as Little House on the Prairie skills. There’s a part of me, I think, that figured that one’s job as a grown up was to be as skilled as the mother was in those books — that if you knew how to feed a family on a barrel of salt pork, and to make clothes out of flour sacks then you’d be okay in the world. A little goofy perhaps, but on days like today, when I’ve made two skirts that I like, that fit and that are cute and goofy and look like me, and not like something from a chain store, then I feel like perhaps having taken the Little House books to heart wasn’t such a dumb idea after all.
Roast Chicken to the Rescue
My next door neighbor and I have not always gotten along very well. We both have dogs, and her George and my Raymond play a particularly annoying game of barking-along-the-fenceline. It’s been a source of some tension, but the last few months at least, thing settled into just cool instead of our previous state of low-level hostility.
Saturday, I was walking back from the hardware store when I ran into Mike, who lives on the far side of S.’s house. Turns out that part of the reason S. has been so cranky lately is that her mother is dying and she’d also just broken up with her boyfriend. I felt awful for her. Like me, she’s a single girl, and Mike told me she’d gone off to Billings and they were expecting her mother to die that day. Mike was keeping an eye on her dogs for her.
Well, I felt awful. I didn’t particularly like the girl but it was Mothers’ Day for goodness sake. Can you think of anything sadder than losing your mother on Mothers’ Day? And she was my next-door neighbor. And this is a small town. And she didn’t really seem to have any people to help her out other than me and Mike. So I went to the store and bought a roasted chicken, and some salad greens, and a brownie mix and a couple of bottles of wine. Call me hopelessly midwestern, but the last thing anyone needs when they come home from the hospital where their mother has just died is to think about dinner. So I made some salad and brownies for her, and packed it all in a box with the chicken and wine and a jar of lilacs from the bushes between our houses and left it on her front porch with a note saying to call if I can do anything.
You know, they teach you this in Sunday School, but sometimes they’re actually right. If you do something nice for someone, especially someone with whom you haven’t always gotten along, well, good things can happen. The next day, when I was taking out the garbage, S. was in her back yard and called over the fence. She was really thankful and we had a nice long chat. You hate to think it takes something like someone’s mother dying to give us both a sense of perspective.
The good news is that her mother seems to be pulling through the crisis, although she’s so riddled with cancer that she’s probably not going to make it through the week. But she’s off the ventilator and has a chance to say goodbye. And my neighbor and I are now freindly, which makes life so much more pleasant all around. Sometimes all it takes is a roasted chicken and a kind gesture, even when your heart isn’t really in it. Like Sister Bremner taught us all those years ago …
Carlo Petrini, Elitism, and Real Food
This morning, the food section of the San Francisco Chronicle covers the conflict between Carlo Petrini and the Ferry Plaza Market farmers. There’s a really interesting conversation going on in the comments over at Steve Sando’s blog — Sando, who runs Rancho Gordo is one of the farmers who sells his stuff at Ferry Plaza, and he’s on the board for the non-profit market. He also is one of the folks who met with Petrini when he was in town last week promoting the upcoming Slow Food Nation event next Spring. Petrini has a book out, and was supposed to do a reading at Ferry Plaza, until the folks who work there read what he’d written about the market in his new book. Apparently he went for a visit with Alice Waters, then slammed the market as a boutique, seriously misrepresented one farmer and seems to have made another up out of whole cloth. His implication is that Ferry Plaza is only for rich people, and that the farmers are dilletantes who have artificially raised their prices so they don’t have to work so much. In the book, just after this dismissive report on the market, he repairs to Chez Panisse with Alice Waters for a nice, egalitarian, price-friendly dinner. (You can read the whole excerpt here.) As you can imagine, folks are pissed.
I left a couple of comments over on Steve’s blog, because while I think the Ferry Plaza is terrific — it’s great fun and the food is fabulous but it is something of a showplace — it’s not what I’d think of as a regular neighborhood farmer’s market (and the high percentage of tourists has caused some vendors to leave. Apparently, they’re losing money because tourists don’t buy, they just look, and eat the samples). Which is not to say that the farmers who sell there are not as dedicated to good food at fair prices as any of the farmers at the smaller markets around the Bay Area (or around the country for that matter). Urban farmers markets are crucial to the sprititual health of cities — I know I would have sunk under my own despair those couple of years I lived in New York without the Union Square market — it felt like my lifeline to real people, people who did things — people who grew food and made cheese and baked bread.
But what does bother me about the whole thing is the same thing that bugged me about Alice Waters and Chez Panisse, there’s a problem in the movement, whatever you want to call it — slow food, real food, old food — and I’m not sure if it’s elitism as much as it is that many people find the evangelical zeal off-putting. For all the folks who walk into someplace like the Bozeman Co-Op and love the educational signage, who love the hipness of the place, there are any number of people who find that same zeal alienating. What worries me is that we lose people like my darling Mighty Hunter, a man who truly loves good food, a man who wooed me on our first date by whipping out of the back of his fridge a container of duck confit that he’d put up himself. The MH is truly from here, he was raised by folks who survived the depression and who never paid more for something than they had to. He gardens. He forages for mushrooms. He hunts and butchers his own wild meat. But he was appalled to find out I’d spent six bucks a pound for organic, local lamb (to my credit, that was butchered and packaged. If I’d bought a carcass it would have been significantly less). Or I think of Apryl Kennedy, whose husband was my dad’s fishing guide. Apryl was one of my idols as a kid — she was a great cook who fended the deer off her garden, put up her own applesauce from the trees in her yard, and cooked all the birds and deer and fish that Ray brought home. She was someone who really lived on authentic local food, and the slices of spongy white store bread that often accompanied a meal at Apryl’s house didn’t negate that.
I think Petrini, an old socialist of the 1968 school, used the Ferry Plaza Market unfairly in order to deflect accusations of elitism that have been aimed at his own organization. But I do think that elitism is something that we in the food movement must address. How do we reach out to all those people in the middle of America who still hunt, and fish, and keep vegetable gardens, and can their own tomatoes in the dead heat of August because it’s a sin to let good food go to waste — but who still shop at the regular supermarket and buy Doritos and white bread and pop? How do we bridge that gulf without coming off as smug evangelists? And how on earth are we going to start educating people about the real cost of food, when so many are already just scraping by?
White Pelicans on Clark Street
Driving across town yesterday, I looked up and saw a small flock of white pelicans, probably ten or twelve of them, doing big slow turns as they rode a thermal. The white pelicans come back every year about this time, and the thrill never diminishes. For one thing, they’re enormous — watching a white pelican come in for a landing is like watching a big bomber plane come in — one is always astonished that something that big, and that body-heavy can be as graceful as it is.
Years before I moved here, when I was doing my PhD work, I relied on Jack Turner’s terrific book The Abstract Wild. And every year, when the pelicans return, I reread “The Song of the White Pelican,” an essay that begins with Turner … lounging on the summit of the Grand Teton surrounded by blocks of quartz and a cobalt sky. It is mid-morning in July — warm, still, and so clear the distant ranges seem etched into the horizon. … … I rest and enjoy the clarity and count shades of blue as the sky pales into the mountains. then I hear a faint noise above me, and my heart says, “Pelicans.”
The sounds are faint, so faint they are sometimes lost — a trace of clacking in the sky. It is even harder to see them. Tiny glints, like slivers of ice, are occasionaly visible, then invisible, then visible again as the sheen of their feathers strikes just the right angle to the sun. With binoculars, we see them clearly: seventeen white pelicans soaring in a tight circle …
The white pelican (Pelacanus erythrorhynchos), one of seven species in the world, is a large bird often weighing twenty pounds, with some individuals reaching thirty pounds. The only other pelican in North America, the brown pelican, is smaller and restricted to the coasts. The white pelican’s wing span reaches nine and a half feet, equal to the California condor’s. Of North American birds, only the trumpeter swan is consistently larger.
…
Some people fear that extending a human vocabulary to wild animals erodes their Otherness. But what is not Other? Are we not all, from one perspective, Other to each and every being in the universe? And at the same time, and from another perspective, do we not all share an elemental wildness that burns forth in each life?
When I see white pelicans riding mountain thermals, I feel their exhaltation, their love of open sky and big clouds. Their fear of lightning is my fear, and I extend to them the sadness of descent. I believe the reasons they are soaring over the Grand Teton are not so different from the reasons we climb mountains, sail gliders into great storms, and stand in rivers with tiny pieces of feathers from a French duck’s butt attached to a barbless hook at the end of sixty feet of sixty-dollar string thrown by a thousand-dollar-wand. Indeed, in love and ecstasy we are closest to the Other, for passion is at the root of all life and shared by all life. In passion, all beings are at their wildest; in passion, we — like pelicans– make strange noises that defy scientific explanation.
One of the things I love most about living here is that while driving down Clark Street, at eleven o’clock on a Wednesday morning I can look up and see something as wild as a flock of white pelicans, wheeling their way upward into the dead-clear blue sky. In the middle of town, in the middle of a weekday, there it is, an eruption of wildness in the sky above me.
Oh Tractor! My Tractor!
Look at my new toy! It’s a tractor! It’s a sprinkler! It moves on it’s own accord — follows the hose — all the way around my house!
I’d never seen one of these until I moved up here and I did really think they were just a goofy gimmick, but this spring my neighbor across the street had his turned on, and when I took the time to watch it, I saw that it seemed to be pretty efficient. It’s low to the ground, so you don’t lose as much water to evaporation as with the back-and-forth sprinkler — and the fact that it creeps around the yard was appealing.
My yard is long and narrow, and while I’m trying to get rid of lawn bit by bit, I do want the lawn I have to actually be green — and after the construction last summer, which coincided exactly with our three-week-spell of 100-degree heat, well the yard is hammered. And I’m bad at watering. Either I forget, or I don’t leave the sprinkler on long enough because I think I’m being profligate with water. Subsequently, nothing ever gets a good soak.
The genius of the tractor sprinkler is that because it creeps along at it’s own slow speed, it’s like having an automatic timer (it even has this clever little ramp that turns it off when it gets to it’s destination). And in the brochure, it assures me that at slow speed, with the arms set at the 30 foot wide setting, it delivers 3/4 inch of water. I now know how much I’m watering — which is a big leap forward.
Although at sixty-nine dollars, the sprinkler tractor is expensive — it’s still cheaper than a sprinkler system — and if it means I don’t have to drag hoses all over my yard and set up sprinklers and reset them — well, maybe I’ll use it, and hence, restore my once-lovely yard to its former glory.
Oh tractor! My Tractor!