June Cooking: Cherry Tomatoes and Blueberries (and bonus Focaccia video)

Father’s Day, 2019: Wandering around the garden, Dad and I discovered two ripe Sun Gold tomatoes, the first of the season. I suppose we should have brought them back to the house and cut them into six tiny wedges to share with Mom and Tom and the kids, but in the moment we didn’t hesitate to pop ‘em in our mouths. Is there anything as good as the first tomato from the garden?

In honor of cherry tomatoes making their way into our gardens, kitchens, and farmers’ markets, here’s a vegetarian recipe that, with a good bread, makes an excellent and filling dinner.

“Pearl Couscous with Olives and Roasted Tomatoes
(adapted from Smitten Kitchen)

2 pints (1-1/2 lbs) cherry tomatoes
3 large garlic cloves
1/4 - 1/3 cup olive oil, plus more for tomatoes
1/4 - 1/3 cup warm water
1 tsp - 1 Tbsp lemon juice
1 tsp sea salt
black pepper to taste
1-3/4 cups broth (either vegetable or chicken)
2-1/4 cups pearl couscous
1/2 - 2/3 cup chopped Kalamata black olives
1/3 cup chopped parsley
1/3 cup chopped mint
1 - 2 tsp chopped thyme
1/2 cup crumbled feta cheese
greens of your choice

Heat oven to 300. Halve tomatoes through stem ends and arrange, cut side up, in one layer on a baking sheet. Add garlic (peeled but whole) to one corner of the pan. Drizzle all with olive oil and sprinkle with salt. Roast until tomatoes are shriveled around the edges, about an hour. Cool in pan for 15 or so minutes.

Bring broth to a boil and stir in couscous, then simmer uncovered for six minutes. Remove from heat and let stand ten minutes. Either let it cool in pan, or spread out on a cookie sheet to cool (it doesn’t stick as much this way).

When tomatoes are roasted, throw the garlic and 1/2 cup of the tomatoes in a blender. Add 1/4 cup olive oil (or more if you prefer more dressing), the water, the lemon juice (I tend to like the citrus on the heavy side), salt, and pepper. Blend until smooth.

In a large bowl, mix together the couscous, the tomatoes, the olives, the chopped herbs, and the dressing. You can eat at room temperature, or cover and refrigerate, but bring to room temp before eating. To assemble for a meal, serve about a cup of the mixture on top of freshly washed greens. Let your guests sprinkle on their own feta.”

— adapted from Smitten Kitchen

Here’s a blueberry dessert that is totally satisfying and delicious - and EASY. I found this recipe in a 2012 issue of Saveur magazine, which I got from an older lady cleaning out her cooking magazines. It requires a large amount of blueberries, so either save yours up until you have a bunch, or budget for a trip to the farmers market. It’s worth it!

“Blueberry Slump (adapted from Saveur magazine, barely)

2 cups flour
1-3/4 cups sugar
4-1/2 tsp baking powder
1 tsp sea salt
4 Tbsp unsalted butter, cubed and chilled
1-1/4 cups milk
1-1/2 lbs blueberries
1 cup orange juice
1/4 cup lemon juice
vanilla ice cream, for serving

Whisk together flour, 1/4 cup of the sugar, baking powder, and 1/2 tsp salt in a large bowl. Cut in the butter, or use your fingers to rub into the flour mixture until pea-sized crumbles form. Add milk, and stir until just moist. Cover and refrigerate dough until needed.

Heat oven to 400. Put blueberries in a large cast iron skillet. Add remaining sugar, salt, and citrus juices and bring to a boil over high heat, stirring to dissolve sugar. Remove pan from heat, and using two large spoons, portion and form chilled dough into 2-3” oval dumplings, dropping them evenly on top of the blueberry mixture (I make about six). Transfer skillet to oven (might want to put it on top of a cookie sheet or some foil, as it might boil over in the oven a bit). Bake about 25 minutes until biscuits are baked through. Serve with vanilla ice cream.”

— adapted from Saveur Magazine

Adam has been making a focaccia recipe from Samin Nosrat of Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat fame. Click THIS LINK to see the video in which they demonstrate making it. Take it from me, it is the absolute BEST focaccia we have ever had. Adam likes it with oil and vinegar to dip; I like it just warm and plain. SO GOOD.

Happy Cooking!

Wilting Humans, Thriving Garden

Is there anything more boring than talking about the weather? It’s not really news anymore that we’re all experiencing extreme conditions. Some folks have it really bad right now - the heat in India, which is causing livestock die-off, or the persistent flooding in the midwest, which has caused farmers to loose an entire season of grain. It’s not that bad here, but it has been extremely hot for June. We humans are completely wilted; the bees are pretty much permanently bearded on the front of their hive or crowded in a ring around the lip of the water feature; the chickens are firmly planted under the quince tree in deep shade.

But the garden? The garden says, Cheers Mate, Thanks Very Much. Peaches are ripening up, peppers are reaching and blooming, beans are twining and massing, pumpkins are unfurling big leaves, and tomatoes are plumping.

There are some precautions for plants in hot weather. The most important thing is to make sure your irrigation is dialed in. Consistency is more important than volume; daily water is a must when it’s this hot and dry. We Californians don’t have to feel guilty about watering each day because we had plenty of rain and snow this past winter, but in the coming years, that might not be the case. So let’s talk about preserving moisture NOW, so you’re all set when that moment comes.

The amount of organic matter (OM) in your soil is probably the most important thing, acting as a sponge, holding on to moisture. Clay soil already has good water retention and OM can help further. Sandy soil is terrible at holding on to water, so OM will be extremely important in that situation. How to include more OM? Add compost around your plants and on top of your beds each year, mulch the heck out of everything using whatever you can find, and keep a living root in the soil at all times.

Plants pump sugars and carbohydrates (carbon) down into the soil to feed the microorganisms that live there; in turn those organisms provide nutrients to the plant. Plants do not grow well alone - they all do much better with a lot of roots in the ground around them, with a lot of diversity of species. Think of a meadow, crowded with forbs and grasses, or a forest, covered with trees and ferns. Bare space gets colonized. If you don’t want your garden colonized with weeds, be prepared to colonize it yourself.

You can kill two birds with one stone by mulching with living plants. If your cover is complete enough, it will do the job of mulch; that is, shade the soil, suppress weeds, and keep things moist under the canopy. To that end, I’ve begun seeding any possible bare space, even in my veg beds, with a cover crop of some kind. Some of the tomatoes, the ones that didn’t have basil or cilantro growing under them, just got a seven-species cover crop sown beneath them (a warm season mix from Walnut Creek Seeds). I’ve seeded buckwheat in my melons, cosmos in my winter squash, and sunflowers in my pumpkins. You may feel that this would take nutrients and water away from the main crops, but the opposite has been proven true; when there is lots of diversity under the soil (in the rhizosphere, or root zone), MORE nutrients are available.

Of course, this kind of microbial diversity takes time. I find that things get better all the time, as long as I keep as much diversity of planting as possible. Also, with this system, you don’t have to worry quite as much about crop rotation. And, there are lots of other benefits to this besides water retention and greater nutrient availability, like the attraction of predatory insects that will take care of the pests in our gardens.

I encourage you to check out the latest issue of California Agriculture from UC Davis, which has a summation of a recent study about how cover cropping/multi-species cropping can really improve soil (in conjunction with no-till practices, which of course you’re already doing, right?). The bottom line is that there is more fungal hyphae in soils that are cover cropped (and not tilled). That means there are more connections between the plant roots, working in symbiosis. Here’s a little quote, sorry for starting in the middle of a sentence:

“… allowing roots greater access to water and nutrients (in exchange for carbon). Fungi, however, are more sensitive than other microorganisms to physical disturbance. Adopting no-till as a conservation man- agement practice eliminates or greatly reduces both disruption of fungal hyphal networks and redistribution of organisms and nutrients in the soil profile. Use of cover crops, meanwhile, provides more abundant and varied sources of organic carbon.”

So this system in the soil allows for greater uptake of water and nutrients. That should be enough to get you to think about adding many plant roots to one space!

credit: UCANR

One more little thing I learned in class that might help you on these hot days. Transpiration, that is, the exhalation of water vapor through the leaves of the plants out to the atmosphere, is what pulls the water up through the plant. At night, when there is no sunlight, the plants aren’t transpiring, so they aren’t taking water into their roots. Only when sunlight hits the plant does the flow of water start from the roots to the tips of the leaves. That means you want a nice reservoir of water in the soil the moment the sun hits the plants. That’s one of the reasons why it’s best to water early in the morning, just before the sun rises. Set your irrigation for that time and your plants will be quite happy. I also try to water containers in the morning, and on these hot days, they may need water again in the afternoon.

It’s a fallacy to think that a vegetable garden uses less water than a lawn; it uses just as much. So it really is our responsibility to figure out how to keep our soil super-healthy so that it can be resilient in dry times if water isn’t so available. If we start improving it now, we’ll be ready for those times.

Hollyhock

Isn’t this beautiful?

Wild Spaces

I want to encourage you to embrace (or create) wild spaces in your garden. What do I mean by ‘wild space’? Well, the garden above was planted on purpose to be a bit messy and out of control. This is one of my pollinator gardens, in which I have strategically placed perennials (which return every year), but I also incorporate lots of annual seed. About four times a year, I pull out anything dead, and seed more stuff for the coming season.

I just pulled a bunch of borage and phacelia out of this space, but the poppies and echium and lupine are still flowering, and I want them to self-seed for next year; I’ll leave them a bit longer. Meanwhile, I mixed some cosmos, zinnia, and tithonia seeds with some rotted manure and scattered this in the bare spaces between the still-flowering spring plants. While I was working, I saw all kinds of life. Butterflies (mostly gulf fritillaries, but also a swallowtail and a painted lady), birds (towhees, chickadees, finches, sparrows, hummingbirds, and wrens) and lizards galore (Western fence lizards and alligator lizards). None of these creatures would stand still for photography. But I also wondered how many insects I would see in the space of ten minutes, so I timed myself and took as many pictures as I could within that time frame, in this particular garden. Here’s what I saw.

Now, you may have looked at some of these insects and said “I don’t want that one, I don’t want that one, I don’t want THAT one,” and of course some of these are insects we would consider ‘bad’ for the garden or home. But nature doesn’t look at things that way. Nature wants balance. Nature wants diversity. All of these creatures have a purpose and if we have them around, we are better off in the long run.

Messy spaces (or wild spaces, as I like to call them, it sounds so much more deliberate) aren’t just good in the obvious ways. Leaf and bark litter also provide habitat for all kinds of beetles and caterpillars. Bare soil underneath plants provides homes for ground-nesting native bees. Holes in old sticks provide more nests for bees and beetles. Dead flowers decompose on the soil, allowing nutrients to be recycled to the plants. Soil creatures feed on detritus, providing that all-important poop loop in the soil. Fungi creeps in the spaces in soil and in litter, forming connections between plants. The soil is shaded by all the biomass, keeping it moist and cool.

I found a scientific study that encourages wild spaces especially in urban gardens, not only to provide habitat for wildlife, but to help with our health and happiness, too. “When designed with nature in mind, urban gardens can support a high level of plant and animal biodiversity that may lure people back into nature…. more vegetatively complex elements of the environment are more intriguing and challenging to understand than simple ones. As such, complex elements can transport people into a new world, lengthen time spent in the garden interacting with nature, and thereby promote lifelong connections to nature.” I think that’s pretty cool. I know it’s true for me, that I’ll go out to add seeds or pick a bouquet for the house, and I end up standing in the garden for an hour, just watching what’s happening there. I’ll be folding laundry in my bedroom, which looks out on this particular garden, and I’ll see walkers/joggers stop at the pollinator garden and just stare. They’ve completely forgotten their walk. It’s mesmerizing, and it’s all from letting the space get a little wild. Stuff HAPPENS there. Life happens there.

If this interests you, you might check out this article by the Nature Conservancy. It details why a messy (read; wild) garden is a boon to wildlife in any season.

Bird News

Interesting item in our local paper, the San Francisco Chronicle, this morning. There is a new, large-scale chicken facility opening up in Arkansas which specializes in meat chickens being raised in a “carbon-friendly” way. Arkansas, as you probably already know, is a major producer of our nation’s chicken. Most birds live in pretty awful conditions, either in the dark and in cages, or in large ‘barns' which support huge amounts of birds ‘free ranging’ - that is, not in cages. I’ve already expressed how I feel that chicken should be raised - on pasture, free to eat bugs and weeds, with plenty of room to stretch wings and dust bathe. Fortunately we have a lot of farms that raise chickens this way, here in California. The chicken is expensive, upwards of $10 per pound, but meat should be expensive. In my opinion, all animals should be raised humanely, on pasture as much as possible, and butchered close to the farm. We recently re-joined a meat CSA called Tara Firma, and are very happy with the variety of cuts, taste of the different meats (chicken, beef, pork), and the fact that we area supporting a small farm that raises its meat sustainably. Not only sustainably, but also in a way that regenerates the land.

You might be hearing or reading that going vegetarian is the best thing to do for the climate. Eating less meat can certainly help, and our personal choices matter, but at this point, we’ll need some large-scale carbon reductions in order to halt the onward march of climate change. I think we can make the choice to eat meat that improves the land, rather than depletes it. Because that meat is more expensive, we’ll eat less of it; it’s a win all around, with us making better choices, supporting small regenerative farmers, and eating much less of the meat raised in CAFO’s.

Let me here recommend a book called Grass, Soil, Hope, by Courtney White. It details the Marin Carbon Project, which is a local movement to help farmers increase the carbon sequestration in their soil. Farmers can be huge improvers of our atmosphere by following certain steps to improve the carbon footprint of their operations. It would be great if this became a nation-wide movement, and this chicken farm I read about, in Arkansas, is following right in the footsteps of the MCP.

Major poultry producers like Tyson, Cargill, and Pilgrim’s Pride are located in Arkansas. So think what a message it sends when this new farm, Cooks Venture, dedicates its 800 acres to pastured poultry. Not only is this farm going to produce meat using best carbon sequestering practices, but also produce an affordable pastured chicken for mass production. This model can be followed all over the country. They are even working with local farmers to produce grain to feed the chickens, using regenerative practices. This is so fabulous.

Now I still advocate eating locally and it’s best to support the farmers who are doing the right thing near you. But this operation gives me hope that other farmers (who I believe want to make a living AND do the right thing for the planet) will see that it can be done. Another book you might be interested in is Growing a Revolution by David Montgomery. This book details the work of farmers all over the country who are practicing regeneration of soils instead of depletion (which is the conventional way of farming).

image credit: allaboutbirds

In other bird news: Goldfinches. A neighbor asked me over to look at her garden - she had several questions about holes in her leaves and what would be causing them. Now, I’m no expert, but I gotta say, the goldfinches this time of year are simply crazy for leaves, and leaves of all types. I’ve researched this behavior before and not found much in the way of satisfying answers. What most IPM programs tell you is yes, goldfinches strip leaves, and netting is the best way to deter them. But it’s the WHY I’m missing. Why do goldfinches feed on the leaves of certain plants? I notice them in my sunflowers every year, but this year they are also stripping the leaves of yacon, and pumpkins. They are also apparently voracious feeders of chard and beets. Sparrows also will eat seedlings of lettuces. Birds can be a real problem in the vegetable garden.

I found a study done in the 1960’s by Ellen L. Coutlee titled “Maintenance Behavior of the American Goldfinch.” In it, she covers grooming, feeding, locomotion, and posturing. She does mention the tearing of the leaves: “Pecking was always directed to the margin of leaves and small pieces were broken off and swallowed in rapid succession.” She suggests that it is less for nutritional needs and more for the “compulsion to twist, pry, and bite at objects.” But she doesn’t say anymore about it, which is frustrating.

I found a blog by someone who said that their grandmother always called goldfinches ‘salad birds,’ which is charming. Apparently these birds nest in July, much later than most birds who lay eggs in early spring, and this is because seeds are more available in July. Their primary food source is plant seeds. They tend not to eat insects unless they are handy near the seed source, and then they’ll add those to their diet. And, as we all have observed, leaves. Lots and lots of leaves.

Netting IS the best way to deter them, or you can follow my lead and just plant an awful lot of whatever they are eating, so that there’s plenty for both you and them. This is true of almost any pest. If you have a lot of it, and it’s scattered about the garden, chances are you’ll get some of it. Maybe that’s the best we can hope for. :)