The Effect of Rain

March 11, 2019 Elizabeth Boegel

Well, rain yes, but also warming temperatures. This is how the golden hills of California look after a good water year. Like a green velvet carpet. Isn’t it just gorgeous? This is a fleeting event here, as usually by May, everything is brown again. But boy it’s spectacular when we’ve got it.

This picture and the next were taken at a State Park called Black Diamond Mines. This area is east of Mt. Diablo and by the delta, where the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers meet in the furthest reaches of the San Francisco Bay. We used to live out here, by the water, but it added 45 minutes to Tom’s commute and the schools weren’t fabulous, which is why we moved closer to the Bay Area proper. However this park is really wonderful and celebrates the miners who lived here in the 1800’s. They mined both coal and sand here. This picture was taken at the graveyard, full of history, which is up high on one hill surrounding this valley, looking across towards the mines (which were on the right under those trees). I was here for a Geology field trip. A couple of times of year you can go into the mines, where down at the bottom, you can stand inside an active fault!

This was the hill above the cemetery, where a local farmer was grazing sheep (a win-win situation - good food for the sheep, fire control for the rest of us). Aren’t those colors glorious? No filters on that picture. It was a perfect day for a walk, albeit a muddy one.

Some sun sure feels good after all the gloomy skies and precipitation. And in the garden, I’ve noticed lots of things waking up. So I thought I”d post some pictures of what’s blooming these very late days of winter.

true geranium - get a load of the pollen on those stamens!

Our roof is being redone today, and it’s crazy and loud and chaotic, but we’re happy it’s getting done, as we had lots of rot. The funny thing is that I signed up for this job back at Christmas. It’s taken this long to get to it, with nearly every day being rainy! So it’s a testimony to some clearer weather. I spent some time outdoors transplanting some precocious tomatoes into bigger soil blocks - once they germinate, they don’t need as much heat or water, so they can move out to the greenhouse which is quite warm at night after absorbing a lot of insolation during the day. The bees are extremely busy bringing in pollen, which means babies are being rapidly born in the hive, increasing the work force for the spring flowers to come. We’ve added room in the hive and will add more this weekend, plus maybe take a bar of honey.

What’s blooming in your garden?

March cooking: Roots and Buds

March 6, 2019 Elizabeth Boegel

We’ve been eating leaves all winter - spinach, kale, chard, and lettuce - and now our appetites turn to the parts of the plants that take longer to form. Leeks, potatoes, parsnips, carrots - we love all those roots under the earth. And broccoli, cauliflower, cabbage - we love the flower buds (and in cabbage’s case, the rosette of leaves that forms right before the flower stalk). I truly believe that there is no better way to cook these roots and buds than roasting them.

So that is precisely what I’m doing today, and this tray of veg will become a base for many meals.

Just having the opportunity to go out on a rainy day and prise these roots from the earth, watching the earthworms wriggle away, and smelling that good organic matter smell - well, it’s a privilege to break up the monotony of writing reports and studying for exams with a mosey in the garden. I love watching the flower buds, like broccoli and cauliflower, emerge from the center of the leaves. The garden is beautiful this time of year.

It’s also a joy to wash the veg outside and watch the dark earth run away with the water, not having to worry about wasting resources (we’ve had so much rain this year!). Taking the green tops from the roots and giving them to the chickens, taking the chopped-off ends of the veg to the worm bin. Nothing goes to waste.

Cutting the roots into fat coins and mixing everything together on an oiled tray. Showering them with salt, sliding them into a hot oven (400-425 ish depending on your oven), and smelling them roasting for the next half hour. Taking them out to toss them a bit, roasting them a few minutes longer (5-15 minutes depending on your oven). There is no better way to taste early spring. Your farmers’ markets will have all of these vegetables in abundance, even in colder areas, as all of these overwinter very well and take some frost, or live in greenhouses or under hoop houses in the snow. Go buy a bunch today if you don’t grow them yourself. Roast them, and use them as a base for your meals: As a side dish with roasted meat, as a bed for fried eggs with runny yolks, as a cold condiment on a sandwich, with greens and a simple yogurt-lemon sauce as a salad, mixed with hot rice or quinoa and a vinaigrette. Endless choices.

Soon, the garden will yield garlic scapes, and new peas, and spring onions. Until then, let’s eat our fill of the hearty roots and buds.

Let's Go

March 3, 2019 Elizabeth Boegel

This has been a big weekend for the garden. Well, honestly the garden itself hasn’t changed much, but a lot of work went in to preparing it for spring and summer. Since it looks like we will no longer be dipping into the 30’s at night, I took off all the row cover and the PVC hoops. It feels great to get all of that gear put away, and leave the beds open to the elements.

Everything I planted last October is being eaten now (except garlic and shallots, those won’t be ready for another 2-3 months). Some things, like the Asian and mustard greens, and the Lacinato kale, are starting to form flower heads. I’ll let them bloom for the bees, and also maybe collect some seed. The broccoli and cauliflower just keep producing, there’s leeks and carrots and parsnips, peas and favas and chard. It’s fabulous.

But now it’s time to start thinking about the summer garden! And in that vein, I sowed all my tomatoes and peppers today. I’m planning for about 40 plants of each, but planted twice as much (insurance against something failing) and if I have extras, I’ll give them to friends. One of Adam’s friends has decided to start a small backyard garden and she’s already asked me for a few! That makes me happy, that a young person is getting into growing food.

Tom made me a bunch of tiny seed blocks, so I was able to fit several hundred seeds within one seed tray and that limits the amount of heating pads/grow lights/space we need indoors, which is terrific. In about 2-3 weeks, I’ll pot those plugs up into larger seed blocks, and I can avoid using compostable cups (which have their limitations) and I can put them straight into gallons after that. My goal is to get them in the ground in very late April or the first weekend of May.

I have mostly seeded old favorites, but I have quite a few new varieties to try as well, many that were given to me by friends. Here’s what I planted. Click on the name to link you to where to purchase (or just to drool at the pictures).

Cherry/Grape/Saladette tomatoes: Sun Gold (Johnny’s, hybrid), Red Calabash (Baker Creek, heirloom), Principe Borghese (Seed Savers, heirloom), Pink Boar (Wild Boar Seeds, hybrid), Zebrino (Paramount Seeds, hybrid), Chadwick Cherry (Seeds of Change, heirloom), Blue Gold Berries (Wild Boar Farms, hybrid), Sasha Altai (Tomato Fest, heirloom), Rosalita (Tomato Fest, heirloom), Black and Brown Boar (Wild Boar Farms, hybrid), Brad’s Atomic Grape (Wild Boar Farms, hybrid), Indigo Apple (Wild Boar Farms, hybrid), Orange Peach (Southern Exposure, heirloom), Goluboy Les (Delectation of Tomatoes, heirloom), Austin’s Red Pear (Seed Savers Exchange, heirloom), Beam’s Yellow Pear (Seed Savers Exchange, heirloom), Black Vernissage (Totally Tomatoes, heirloom), Black Cherry (Baker Creek, heirloom)

Beefsteak/Slicer tomatoes: Vorlon (Renaissance Farms, heirloom), German Pink (Seed Savers, heirloom), Terra Cotta (Baker Creek, heirloom), Crnkovic Yugoslavian (Seed Savers, heirloom), Black from Tula (Seed Savers, heirloom), Kolb (Seed Savers, heirloom), Kellogg’s Breakfast (Baker Creek, heirloom), Dr. Wyche’s Yellow (Baker Creek, heirloom), Dester (Seed Savers, heirloom), Cherokee Purple (Baker Creek, heirloom), Black Krim (Baker Creek, heirloom), Carbon (Baker Creek, heirloom), Lucid Gem (Wild Boar Farms, hybrid), Arkansas Traveler (Totally Tomatoes, heirloom), Pork Chop (Wild Boar Farms, hybrid)

Paste/Plum tomatoes: Italian Heirloom (Seed Savers, heirloom) , Gezahnte (Baker Creek, heirloom), Hungarian Heart (Baker Creek, heirloom) , Amish Paste (Seed Savers, heirloom), Ukrainian Purple (Seed Savers, heirloom), Pozzano (Johnny’s, hybrid), Opalka (Seed Savers, heirloom)

And here’s the pepper list:

Hot peppers: Jalapeno Traveler’s Strain (Seed Savers, heirloom) , Joe’s Long Cayenne (Seed Savers, heirloom), Thai (Seed Savers, heirloom), Highlander (Johnny’s, hybrid), Red Ember (Johnny’s, hybrid), Hot Rod (Johnny’s, hybrid), Tampequino Serrano (Baker Creek, heirloom), Hot Portugal (Seed Savers, heirloom), Ethiopian Brown (Baker Creek, heirloom)

Sweet peppers: Tolli’s Sweet Italian (Seed Savers, heirloom), CA Wonder (Baker Creek, heirloom), Lipstick (Baker Creek, heirloom), Yankee Bell (Johnny’s, heirloom), Milena (Johnny’s, hybrid), Red Knight (Johnny’s, hybrid), Shishito (Baker Creek, heirloom), Ruby King (Seed Savers, heirloom), Etiuda (Baker Creek, heirloom), Jupiter (Baker Creek, heirloom), Jimmy Nardello (Seed Savers, heirloom), Chervena Chushka (Seed Savers, heirloom), Buran (Seed Savers, heirloom), Ajvarski (Baker Creek, heirloom), Sheepnose Pimento (Baker Creek, heirloom)

Paprika peppers: Round of Hungary (Johnny’s, heirloom), Leutschauer (Baker Creek, heirloom), Magyar (Renee’s Garden, heirloom), Alma (Seed Savers, heirloom)

More spring news:

I get a newsletter from a farm in upstate New York, called Essex Farm. They provide everything a family needs at their farm - you pay a fee for the year, and you get all your meat, veg, grains, fruit, and value-added products from them. I admire them, and their systems, greatly. If I lived anywhere within an hour of them, I’d be a member. But alas, I have to satisfy myself with reading their weekly member newsletter. (The owner, Kristin Kimball, also wrote a great book called ‘The Dirty Life,’ about meeting her husband Mark and buying the farm. A new book is coming soon, I can’t wait.)

This week’s newsletter (also written by Kristin) had two interesting things I wanted to share. Here’s the first, a very ‘spring’ thing: “A truck just pulled in and dumped twenty yards of potting soil from Vermont Compost onto a tarp north of the greenhouses. Zohar is out there now, making flats with the soil blocker. By the end of the day we’ll have 80 flats of onion seeds in the germination chamber. And so now (as Anne likes to say at this time of year, and despite the low of zero this morning) let the wild rumpus start! The sun is out and soon the greenhouse will be full and we will be listening for the spring peepers, looking for the day the soil in the field is warm and dry enough to work.” Isn’t that great?! And here’s the other one that made me smile: “It’s love season in the pig herd. We bought a boar named Ham Solo just before Valentine’s Day, and turned him in with nine nubile gilts. He seemed overwhelmed at first, but he’s in the zone now. May the force be with you, Ham.”

The spring feeling of ‘something’s coming’ makes me smile. Now, I just have to get through midterms, and I’ll be a much happier person. :)

The Cedar Waxwing Invasion

February 25, 2019 Elizabeth Boegel

image credit: Evan Lipton/Macaulay library

Oh my goodness, what a day. Upon finishing my homework, I went back to my room to grab my iPad. A flurry of activity out the south-facing window where the Catalpa tree is located caught my attention. Birds. Tons of birds. Larger birds. All of them in the Catalpa, flying in and around and resting on the branches. I spotted half a dozen Robins and smiled, because they haven’t been around lately. But there were other birds I didn’t recognize. Then one of them rested on a branch nearer to the window, and I could see a stripe of yellow at the base of its tail. Could they be Cedar Waxwings? I’ve never see them in our yard before and couldn’t believe it. I grabbed my camera and headed outside.

The activity and noise were just tremendous. Big groups of waxwings and robins flying all around the tree and also perching. I couldn’t get any good pictures but you can just see the crested head of a waxwing in the photo above. It was hard to make sense of all the activity - what was going on? Robins eat invertebrates, and it just started raining again, so that would explain why they were perched and ready for action. But the waxwings - I couldn’t understand what was happening. I looked down for a moment and that’s when I saw huge splotches of black bird poo everywhere, dotting the ground and the plants.

Things started to get clearer. Waxwings eat berries, but there aren’t any berries in my yard right now except for some yellow Toyon berries and they weren’t in the toyon. A pattern started to emerge - the waxwings would rest in my tree, then fly across the street to a huge group of trees across the street. Upon closer inspection, I realized those trees were Privet. The waxwings came to eat the huge supply of privet berries. And now they were pooping them out all over my yard.

Here’s what I read in Audubon:

“With thin, lisping cries, flocks of Cedar Waxwings descend on berry-laden trees and hedges, to flutter among the branches as they feast. These birds are sociable at all seasons, and it is rare to see just one waxwing. Occasionally a line of waxwings perched on a branch will pass a berry back and forth, from bill to bill, until one of them swallows it. “

Get this - a group of Cedar Waxwings is called a ‘museum’ or ‘ear-full’ of waxwings. They are loud.

Hazard Zones

February 20, 2019 Elizabeth Boegel

In my Geology class, we are studying hazards. Actually, let me back up. What’s kind of fun is that I have the same teacher for both Geography and Geology, and she gives each student an amount of “money” between 350 k and 2 million, and with that “money” you have to “buy” a house in the Bay Area. Then, you study Geography and Geology by looking at “your” house and its location. Most of the students are around 18 years old, so for them this is a fantasy experience and helps them prepare for the adult world. For me, I’m enjoying taking all of these things we’re learning (i.e. what color should you paint your house based on insolation, albedo, absorption, to keep it cool in summer? what happens if you live west of the freeway on the east side of the bay, pollution-wise with the sea breeze? etc) and applying them not only to my pretend house, but to our real house in Walnut Creek. (Just for the record, my pretend house for Geography is in Richmond, and my pretend house for Geology is in Vallejo, I got $350 k for each of them, so that’s why they are in those locations. For those of you who don’t live in the Bay Area, those are two of the least desirable locations. To live, say, even in Oakland, you need to have a good $750 k, and if you want to live in Berkeley, a cool million or more, depending on views. Yes, this reminds me to say that we are studying the housing crisis here in my Political Science class, and it is enlightening.)

Hence my post a while back about the rocks underneath your property and how to figure out the age and formation of those rocks. But, at the moment, we are looking at hazard zones. The information I’m going to give here is Bay Area specific; if you live elsewhere, I’m sure you can find a local government website that can give you this, but you might need to do some digging. For those who live in the area, hopefully this will help you prepare. The website I’m going to share is new to me, I don’t know if it was around when we bought this house 15 years ago, but if it was, I never heard of it. Of course we had the hazards given to us in our mortgage agreement, and we knew that we were in a flood zone and had to pay for flood insurance as a condition of our mortgage, but that’s about all I remember. It was in the middle of our first leukemia year with Adam, he was 2 and Kate was 1 and there were other things on our mind. Sometimes I wonder how we ever managed a move at all. Anyway….

If you live here, there is a website dedicated to the local governments. It is called, fittingly enough, Bay Area Association of Governments. From here I got to their ‘Resilience’ program, which you can find HERE. My address is what’s inputted for this exercise, but you’ll want to put in your address to find out your hazards. Meanwhile let’s look at my house and the hazards I found here.

Let’s look at Earthquakes first, since that’s the first thing everyone thinks about when they think about California.

So if you go to the left of the picture, and click on ‘Shaking Scenarios,’ you can choose your fault and see what’s up. After the colors come up, go to the left again and click on ‘Legend.’ That will tell you what the colors mean. I’m going to click on ‘Mt. Diablo’ for the fault, since that’s closest to us, and let’s see what the shaking scenario is.

Yikes! All that red can’t be good. And indeed it’s not. This, according to the legend, is a very strong shaking event. Well, what does that mean? Let’s look at this chart from the USGS (United States Geologic Survey):

“Some thrown forcibly to the ground.” “Damage considerable in some buildings designed to be resistant” (!) “Buildings shift off foundations if not bolted to them.” Guess what I’m going to check about our house, ASAP???

However, if I take off Mt Diablo fault and add Hayward Fault (the second closest fault to us), I get this:

Phew. Strong, but better. Damage could be bad in old buildings that aren’t prepared. All of this makes me think we should be buying earthquake insurance, though some folks think it’s not any better than just your homeowner’s. I’ll let you do your own research on that.

Ok, let’s move on to flooding. I said that we have flood insurance already because we were told our home was in a flood zone. It’s hard to see, because we get so very little water here, but in moments like last week when I watched our back yard become a lake, it gets a little easier to imagine. Flood insurance is expensive, and many of our neighbors have had engineers come out and determine that they didn’t need to pay it anymore; they fill out a form and send it in to FEMA and that’s that. We have not done that, and are still paying the insurance, and after seeing this map, I’m glad. One thing that’s not so evident in real life is the system of creeks that carry water from Mt Diablo down to our neighborhood. On this map, that’s what’s happening when there is a big flood. Here’s how I got there - unclick any fault information in shaking, and go to ‘Flooding.’ Then click FEMA map. Here’s what I get:

So now I go to the legend, and I see we’re in dark blue which is “AO” or “AH,” I can’t tell, but what do those mean anyway? Let’s take a look:

This is directly from FEMA. Whether it’s AO or AH it doesn’t really matter, it means we have an annual chance, albeit a low one, of flooding. Glad we have that insurance.

This makes me think of liquefaction. Liquefaction is what happens when you live in a watery place and an earthquake causes the ground to become like a big, shaking waterbed. Think landfill, like the edges of San Francisco, a good portion of Alameda, Emeryville, etc. If we have so much water in our area, if the water table is so high, does that mean we’re at risk for that, even though we’re not on landfill? Well, let’s check. Unclick the FEMA thing, and go to ‘Other Earthquake.’ Then click on ‘Liquefaction Susceptibility.’

Oh dear. At this point, I don’t like to see any color at all. Well, what’s the legend say? “Moderate Susceptibility.” Hm. I guess I feel moderately about that. Not exactly reassured.

Ok, let’s look at the thing that scares me the most, Wildfire. Unclick all the Liquefaction stuff and go to “Wildfire.” Then click on “Urban-Wildlife Interface.” (This is the area I think I want to study in grad school or work in eventually.)

Legend: “Wildland Urban Interface Fire Threat.” Well, crap.

Ok ok, let’s just go all in, let’s look at landslides. We’re under Mt. Diablo, and have foothills surrounding us on three sides, so it’s possible I guess. Unclick all the fire stuff and click on “Landslide.” Let’s look at “Rainfall induced landslide” first.

Hooray, we’re in the clear!

Let’s look at “Earthquake induced landslide” next. Will it also be good news???

Hm… legend? “Area Not Yet Evaluated.” Well ok, let’s see the existing landslide distribution, then - maybe that will help.

OOOO, close, but it just misses us. Hallelujah. That’s one thing I don’t have to worry about!

So you see how this could be a valuable tool for preparing your home for a local hazard event. There are several things we can do, right away, to make this home more safe.

I hope this helps you plan for hazards in your areas, too. If nothing else, it’s fun to go and click around on the map. Go ahead, take a look at San Francisco, and see what it’ll be like for folks living in the Millennium Tower.