Aspiring to be a dirt farmer

Talking Dirt
The Dirt Diva's Down-to-Earth Guide to Organic Gardening
by Annie Spiegelman

In the section on native plants she lists a European plant that is now considered invasive species in America. Huh?

But ignoring that minor boo-boo, this is an excellent little book of tips and tricks and a goodly number of plant variety suggestions. And this very useful warning, on pruning:

Even though it's tempting, don't prune during PMS or after a long wearisome phone call with or mother or immediately after a divorce. You'll regret your severe slashing and then you'll have more to sob about.  Put away the sharp objects and go get a pint of Ben and Jerry's Chunky Monkey instead.

I believe she's helped me with my quest for high nitrogen fertilizer to add to my compost pile. I was hoping to go pilfer from cow patties but then I got to reading about salmonella.  Apparently alfalfa meal can be obtained from feed stores in bags; soybean or cottonseed meal is better but both may be contaminated with pesticides.  Any of the above would be fine.

Looks like a trip to AgMart is in my near future.  And a recommendation--if you're just starting out in gardening this book will give you confidence and a whole heap of useful information.  And if you've been at it for a while, give it a whirl anyway.

State of the Garden Report, end of June

Before I get to the bugs, I must exclaim--

Pretty pepper! 
I don't know that I've ever seen one get ripe on one side first, but then, I'm not usually patient enough to let them get ripe at all.  As usual, I have no idea what variety it is, and it tastes wonderful.

We had an surprising arrival on Friday night--rain. Rain and plenty of it. For the last few years I've been out watering the little trees by this time--which meant we'd had six weeks or more of high temps and drought.  This year, I've not watered yet.

When I lived in the city and didn't garden, rain was just an idle thought. "Oh, shoot--it's raining." At best it was a break from the monotony of sunny+hot+dry that rules the North Texas summer; hail, thunder and lighting were an especially welcome distraction; fifty-mile-per-hour winds a bit of a scare. But watching the weather was something old people did--not me.

Now I'm not only watching it but I'm anticipating it, gabbing about it, and even writing about it without embarrassment. (Well...not much)  But I doubt that it's my readers' main preoccupation, so I'll drop the subject for now. No more mention of weather until I need to bitch and moan about the summer drought.

So I tried my hand at photographing pests in the garden. Most were on hiatus, but I did get this:






He's really quite gorgeous, isn't he?  Evil, bean-eating beast, but gorgeous.










And this dude who really loves hanging out on my tomatoes.  And not the plants--the fruit. Is he an evil sweet-sucking crop-spoiling fruit bat wannabe, or a helpful ally against some small enemy I can't see? 









He's a friend, best I can tell. I'm guessing some variety of assassin bug. I'm told they give a painful bite if you mess with them, but I'd just as soon not find our for myself.














After The Harvest --
My compost bucket, loaded with beet tops and probably a bug or two, under close scrutiny.  Most of the contents will be scattered over the kitchen floor in a couple of hours.

Lovely little creatures

I read that tarantulas are seldom seen wandering the streets except in fall when the males venture out in search of mates. But that doesn't jibe with my observations, which is that they venture out in spring and early summer about a day after a heavy rain. Did the rain fill up their burrows, forcing them to search for new ones?

This spring, with its infrequent but soaking rains, has driven more tarantulas to the streets than I've ever seen.  And other people have noticed, too.

On a different note, is my garden doomed to depletion because it lacks animal species to crop the vegetation and fertilize the soil?  And eat the parasites--I've heard chickens are especially good at all three of these. But I don't want to keep chickens. We tried guineas a while back, but the owls picked them off one by one.

I guess I'll have to make do with stolen cow manure and lots of grasshoppers.

Shocking reading, even for me

The Dorito Effect:
The Surprising New Truth about Food and Flavor 

by Mark Schatzker

Absolutely required reading for anyone who ever heard their grandparent complain that "food doesn't taste as good as it used to" and wrote it off to aging taste buds.  I was born in 1958 and even I notice that food doesn't taste as good as it used to. It is true that I use more spices and seasonings than my mom did--I was grown up in bland country and only tasted Indian food when I was thirty. But it's not just my changing palate--it's the food.

We're not talking evolution here, guys--we're talking simple selective breeding. If you are one of those people who doubt that it was man who took the wild strawberry (tiny, hard, intensely flavorful) and turned it into the supermarket strawberry (huge, tender, a little sour), then you're just stupid and you won't learn anything from this book. Selective breeding has been going on for millenia, and not just by humans. Any gardener knows how to create a new variety of rose--its simply a matter of labor and patience.

So...what happened to food when man stopped breeding for flavor and started breeding for good looks, fast growth, and durability when shipped long distances?  Plus a few other traits--insect resistance, tolerance for pesticides and herbicides, uniformity of size.  But taste and nutrition? Nope.

Have you ever noticed the intense cultural taboo against eating things on display in a grocery store?  Would you do it? Imagine going up to the stock boy laying out the cartons of cellophane-wrapped strawberries and asking for a sample. Imagine asking the guy behind the fish counter if you can sniff his salmon. Nope--I can't. The only exceptions are (a)Saturday at Sam's club, although the things the aproned people are cooking up and offering in little containers are typically not food*, and (b) any day at the deli counter, where you can usually get a taste of the potato salad before you buy it.

*food -- A consumable part of a plant or animal that provides essential nutrients to the eater.  Look at frozen nacho cheese bites and tell me what plant or animal they are from.

The book isn't nearly as preachy as I am and it's extremely entertaining. He's a good journalist and he didn't just sit in an office and munge this story together from magazine articles. The places he goes and the people he sees are all over the map--and then at the end he gathers them together for a good meal. I hope that wasn't a spoiler. I should have said, more accurately, he tries to gather them together for a good meal--but will the meal cooperate?

But there is one thing I have to get off my chest. After presenting evidence--piles on piles of it--of the harm man did when he tried to outwit nature, at the end he offers up man as the solution to our food problem.  Instead of trying to breed tomatoes for looking pretty after hard travel, all man has to do is to breed tomatoes that look pretty, taste good, and provide nutrition...after hard travel.  Can it be done? Yes, probably.  Will it?  Yes, maybe, but only if there's a profit in it. But in the end, will it provide what our bodies need?

I say no. Man can only select for qualities he can measure. If he does a chemical analysis on heirloom tomatoes and turns up forty distinct compounds, then he can breed for a tomato that provides these same compounds in similar quantities. But what about the trace minerals he doesn't breed for?  And in a highly competitive world of commerce, what if food scientists only bred for the three or four known nutrients or flavor components?  That's good enough, isn't it?

Skilled tasters can measure flavor, sure--but early on in the book he shows us how our taste perceptions can be fooled. With careful manipulation, you can convince people that corn coated in spices and artificial flavors (aka Doritos) tastes awesome.  In nature, good taste usually indicates good nutrition, but in the laboratory?  I dunno.

So while I agree with his general conclusion--mankind got up into this fix and mankind can get us out of it--I'm not sure with his idea that better breeding alone can fix the problem. Instead of trying to figure out how to create a tomato that can withstand hard travel and still taste like an heirloom variety fresh picked from the vine, why not figure out how to sustainably grow the heirloom varieties close to home?

When I was growing up--okay, okay, the world was a lot smaller then--our local A&P supermarket would offer bins of turnip greens, collards and mustard greens in season and purchased from local farms.  Kroger's says they still do that.  If I see the label 'locally grown' on a bag of potatoes, I'll choose it over potatoes from Idaho.  And is it not true that fresh beans start losing their flavor from the moment they're picked from the vine?  You tell me a region in the continental United State where green beans can't be grown. And even in parts of the world that are agriculturally challenged, there are sure to be crops that thrived in ancient times.  Why does mankind have to reinvent the wheel? Why not reinvent the axle, or the drive shaft--wheels can roll but without something to help them stay of course, they won't get much of anywhere.

That's my simple solution. Eat local when you can, and demand it when you can't. Mankind may not be able to produce the perfect tomato, but he can sure as heck produce a tomato in a whole lot of environments. He just needs motivation. ($$$)

State of the garden report, mid-June

This weekend I dug out a water leak and cut down a tree. But more importantly--
I made the best fresh tomato marinara sauce I've ever tasted!  Does everyone have a special food that's so saucy and rich and intense that it makes them want to swoon?  Apparently for me it's tomato sauce.

I made it from my harvest, plus a bit of grocery store onion and garlic. My home grown onions are a little on the small side and I was too lazy to deal with them.

I'm thinking next week's report should concentrate on bugs.  I'll try, but I stink at taking pictures of bugs. The picture below is supposed to be showing grasshoppers' fondness for beans, but you have to use your imagination on that little speck to the far left-hand side.

Aren't these the prettiest okra you ever saw?  But be warned--I haven't tasted them yet. I'm trying to cobble together enough for a fry.


And the flowers are even prettier--












The sole cantaloupe is baseball size, but still trying to hide.

Blogs on paper. Well...Kindle. Close enough.

I just want to pee alone: A Collection of Humorous Essays by Kick Ass Mom Bloggers

by Stacey Hatton 

and a lot of others

It seems like just a few days ago when I was whining about not wanting to read any more collections of short essays by various writers. The writers didn't seem motivated to try very hard and none of the writings were personal, thoughtful, or even very funny.

Then this came along.  It does 'personal' and 'funny' to a delightful degree and there's even a sprinkle of 'thoughtful' on top.  Is there a reason for that?  I dunno, but it could be that these are blog authors--aka aspiring writers--rather than people who make a living at writing.  But I'm not sure. I think these guys were just delighted by a chance to write for publication, so they put their best foot forward and dove in head first.

And funny it was. I listed at least seven 'mom' blogs that I wanted to check out.  But since that's such a subjective list, I'll leave it to you to choose your own.

State of the Garden Report, mid-June

As Barbara Kingsolver says, June is the red month.  Every tomato is getting ripe at once.

For a family of four, this would be a nice little haul. The big one for slicing, cherries for snacking, and the rest for the dinner's pasta sauce or salsa fresca.

But that's a single day's picking...and I'm picking them every single day.  If the beans hadn't stopped producing when the temperature topped 90, I'd be panicked. But the beans have given up for the year and the plants are ready for the compost pile.

Of the 'little gem' varieties, I planted a red cherry, a golden cherry, and a grape.  I will look up the exact varieties and make note of them for future. The red cherries are excellent; golden, darn good, grape, not so much. They're not very sweet and the skin is tough.  But it's a funny, funny world where "not so much" is still a million times better than what you can buy in a store.

See the fuzzy ball?  I think it's a cantaloupe!  Possibly a caterpillar, but I'm hoping cantaloupe.  Grow, fuzzball, grow!











And finally, much anticipated okra flowers are starting to appear. (see the little pod-shaped thing at the bottom-left of the plant--looks like Audrey Two)  I only have about eight plants so I'm not hoping for much. At best I'll get enough to supplement a box at the farmer's market for a crunchy, delicious fry-up  But as a dutiful daughter of my beloved mother, to plant a garden and NOT grow okra in it--
Not an option.

New Food of the Month Report

Okay, I admit I've fallen down on this project. There just don't seem to be any new foods! But here's a new take on an oldie--figs, and golden raisins.

Sure I've eaten a fig newton in my time, but dried figs from the bulk foods bins are nothing like the gooey mush inside a fig newton. The flavor may be similar, but whole figs are a little bundle of delight. As to the raisins, why would I want to eat black things (that aren't chocolate) when I can eat golden
?

Short and forgettable I fear

Woman's Best Friend
Women writers on the dogs in their lives
edited by Megan McMorris

A collection of short epistles on dogs, by women.  Some I liked pretty much, like Running With Trout by Sarah Corbett, on Dog as running partner, motivator and role model.  Leaving our Chains by Susan T. Lennon is a story of how she adopted a dog, left a corporate, high-stress job and learned that just as the dog didn't need collars and chains to be a loyal and happy companion, neither did she.

But in general, I think I'll steer clear of short collections by varied authors in the future. I can't be sure--well, I could probably be sure but I'm too lazy to research--but I think these people were asked to contribute an article for the collection and then their offerings were taken as is, without discernment. It reminded me of Alone In the Kitchen With an Eggplant--short, bland, and quickly digested, like a puffy roll. Tastes great but doesn't stick in the stomach like my mama's Sunday morning biscuits did.

Oldie for these times, but I'm glad I finally found it

The Joy Luck Club
by Amy Tan

Mothers and daughters, oh what an almighty mess they weave!  I thought it was going to be a story of four grown women who gather around a card table to chat about their families and their lives in America.  Not a bit--it was loosely based on that idea, but only for the a briefest of episodes. Critics should have described it like this:

What do you tell the daughter of your long-time friend after her mother has died and she is preparing to journey to China to meet her two lost sisters?  The sisters will want to know about their mother, but what can she tell them?  When does a daughter ever really know her mother?

Daughters think they have a monopoly on secrets, but mothers keep a whole lot more. Sometimes it's things as mundane as disappointment in marriage or loss of a career. Other times it's lost children. Flight from Japanese bombers. Manipulating yourself out of a hopeless marriage. Feelings of inadequacy that never gives up.

So, the three friends of the mother, and the mother herself, end up telling their stories.  But then--surprisingly to me--the daughters do also.  The author uses a clever precept as a background on which she paints a multidimensional portrait of eight people, their past history and present reality, all in a mix.  Overlaying the stories in twisted threads, brightly colored but distinct if you look closely enough.  But don't get me wrong--it's not a jumble.  Each story is coherent and satisfying. Endings aren't always good, and neither are beginnings.  But the journey in between is well worth taking.

Would ten cents buy a cup of coffee?

Ten Cents a Dance
by Christine Fletcher


I think someone else already said "fascinating look at a unique time in history."  I say, "Thank you that times have changed!"  Taxi dancing still exists, I'm told, but it's probably not as innocent--not that it was all that innocent back then. A man was only renting a woman for the duration of one dance and he expected her to be flirty, peppy and flattering only for that brief time--and that's pretty much all he got except for an occasional feel-up on the keister. If he wanted more than a dance, then he bought the girls dinner, drinks, or took them out to clubs...and only then might he start to feel a right to expect more.

What hasn't changed, though, are these things:  girls in first love, blind to the thoughts behind a flattering lover's lips; mothers and daughters who hide things from each other; young women who have to choose between wearing pretty dresses and drudging in a factory; girls growing up.  And hope and fun and lost innocence. For all the messy sadness, it's still an uplifting book.

To be honest, there's a part of the plot resolution that seemed too good to be true. Plus for reasons unknown, I got just a little tired of it about three-quarters through. I'm not sure if was the story or just me.  But those things aside, it's definitely worthwhile...and if you're a teenager, it's a shocking glimpse into your grandmother's world.

State of the Garden report, early June

Wet. After skipping around (and over and up and under) us for weeks, the rain finally settled in for a fine, deep drenching downpour. One of the pepper plants fell over--I'd left the peppers on it, hoping they'd go red, but they were too heavy on one side. I should have taken a picture, but here's four that I harvested to balance things out.




Oh, and the cucumbers pulled a fast one on me. I'd forgotten I planted 'Asian long cucumbers'.  So I got out there poking around and found this! 

I shrieked and cut it off immediately--you have to keep cucumbers picked young or they get old, yellow and bitter. But I was wrong. These are supposed to be long and they won't get bitter. In fact, I probably should have left this one on there a few more days.  But no matter--I have another.

These will make some great spicy Korean cucumber relish--if they survive my salad bowl. But I don't think I'll plant them again. They're awesome to look at but don't have much taste.  I'm going back to my old favorite "Miss Pickler" next time.

I harvested the rest of the onions. Theoretically.  It was too wet to dig up the whole patch so I just pulled out the ones that still had visible tops. I'll guarantee there's more hiding out there.  In fact, even after I dig up the whole bed and replant it with a cover crop, an onion or two will show up this fall. I always miss one.










These guys stop tracking the sun when the flower heads open. So far, these are all pointing to the East. Sun-worshipers!

Another hazard of the country lanes

I don't think he wanted to attack but he sure wanted to be admired.

Longhorns are the least of my concern

I've written before about hazards of suburban jogging--cows that stare at you, wildflowers that beg to be photographed, goats--














But the hazard below is a rare and happy sight...and also the reason why I really, really fear jogging in the dark.

No, not the mailbox.  That little black speck in front of the mailbox. That's about as close as I wanted to get.

I did try to zoom in, best I could do:

If you still can't figure it out, here's a hint:
What's black and white and best enjoyed from a safe distance?

Best book all year

The Invention of Wings
by Sue Monk Kidd

This book is a fictionalized history of Sarah Grimke and her black slave Handful in the years 1792 through 1840 or so. I am so not competent to write a review on this. I can't vouch for the research or the reality of the time and place or the likeliness of her speculations--I can only say it seems correct and her explanations in the afterward seem honest and reasonable. She points out the many places where she deviated from historical facts and she's very honest at admitting which people were imaginary--albeit plausible--and which were somewhat real but not real to the degree she described.

It makes me uneasy, her playing around with the facts so cleverly and a little bit loosely. I'd have felt better if it had been a work of pure fiction, with completely made-up names and places, "inspired by the life of Sarah and Angelina Grimke." Her use of the real-life slave revolt of 1822 was unsettling--the historian in me doesn't like knowing that my understanding of these real-life events has been colored by fiction.  But I have to admit that fiction is the absolute best way to make people feel and smell and breathe historical events. Being there--there's nothing like it. As the cliche goes, "You had to be there."  And while listening to this book, you are.

And, obviously, I loved it.  As much as one can possibly love hearing about a time and place where neither blacks nor women were considered full human beings.  Women were treated like children--weak, foolish immatures who needed to be carefully led through the difficult facts of life. And blacks weren't human at all--they were treated like very clever farm animals, hard to train and easy to spoil and totally dependent on the firm guidance of their masters in the smallest of matters.  What a massive amount of brainwashing must have been required to maintain that attitude!  How could a empathetic person ignore the thought that when slaves acted like men and women, they might actually be men and women?  How could one explain the expressions in their eyes, seemingly so human?  Eyes like humanity's soul, peeping out of a lidded prison?

Easy, I guess.  We stupid white people have no problem explaining all kind of shit we do.

So what to say about a work of art I'm incompetent to say anything about?  This--every single person in it was a real person with motives and blind spots and hopes and dreams. Every single episode had tension and drama.  Even the few unbearably sweet episodes had a faint backdrop of horror--a chance of an ending that might have been horrible.  When the bad endings did break out, they were all the worse for your anticipation; and when they did not, you could pause for a minute and sigh, satisfied; grateful such beauty could occur in the midst of such terrible tragedy.

How's that for an impartial review?