January Arrangement

I’ve decided to start a new monthly series, making an arrangement with whatever interesting things I can find in the garden. I don’t know much about flower arranging, as I usually just make a bouquet as I pick, and then stuff the lot into some sort of vase. I follow a landscape designer and writer in the UK named Dan Pearson (he’s had history with such famed gardeners as Beth Chatto), who is married to a photographer called Huw Morgan. Together they’ve created the most amazing website called Dig Delve, an online magazine of sorts for all things plants. They make great arrangements from what they find on their property, but they also had a guest florist named Flora Starkey over several times this past year, and I was fascinated by the way she looked at the garden, chose plants, and composed art. It made me want to cultivate a better eye where these things are concerned. My feeling is that I can read about it all I want, but I won’t learn unless I actually DO the thing, hence this series.

It’s a lovely thing to go out on a somewhat sunny, breezy winter afternoon and search for materials with which to create. I noticed a new-to-me bird at the fountain, which turned out to be a yellow-rumped warbler, which apparently are rather common here in the winter but whom I’ve never noticed. The bees are busy in the blooming manzanita and narcissus, and the chickens are sunning themselves in dusty corners of the run, looking content. Most of the gardening I’ve been doing lately involves winter cleanup, which isn’t sexy and involves a lot of crawling and bending and huffing and sweating, which is another kind of good; it was doubly nice to just take the trug and the secateurs and stroll around in my flip flops (a perk of living in CA during the winter, at least in the afternoons).

It’s fun how much you can find to make an interesting arrangement (as long as you’re not under five feet of snow!). I’ve often said that I try to have flowers every day of the year (for the pollinators), but November and December are the hardest months to do that. January starts the native plants blooming; this is spring (though still quite chilly, it’s when we have rain) for us, and the manzanitas and ceanothus will respond readily, and also the spring bulbs are beginning to come up.

Have any of you taken a flower arranging class, or read a book about it that you think I’d enjoy? If so, please share information in the comments. Meanwhile, I’ll be trying my hand at this each month and teaching myself what looks right. We’ll see how much I improve over the coming year.

Happy New Year!

PS: Heavens, I forgot to write down which plants I used for this arrangement. That’s kind of the point of this post, isn’t it???? The red berries are Chinese Pistache (tree). The purple spikes are Salvia leucantha. The white flowers are, of course, narcissus. The red flower is Abutilon. There is one fennel stalk with umbel, and the leafy spike at the back is native California huckleberry, Vaccinium ovatum. There is also some manzanita on the far right.

December Cooking: Lemon Curd (and scones)

I’m very fortunate to have a Meyer lemon tree within arm’s length in my next-door neighbor’s garden. I’m also lucky that she lets me have as many lemons as I want. Winter is citrus time here in California, and the tree is loaded at the moment with delicious-smelling fruit. Each winter I try to juice as many as I can (for use in cooking all through the year), preserve some whole lemons with salt, and often I also dry slices for tea or for cooking. And, of course, it’s not winter vacation without some scones, cream, and lemon curd.

Curd is very easy to make, it takes about 15 minutes, and then you have a delicious puckery sweet treat to have for the week with scones, muffins, toast, or to stir into yogurt.

“Lemon Curd, adapted from Food 52
makes about two cups

3 large whole eggs
zest of one lemon
1/2 cup fresh lemon juice (3-4 lemons depending on the size)
1/2 cup sugar
6 Tbsp unsalted butter, cut into chunks

Whisk eggs into a small saucepan (nonreactive). Whisk in juice, sugar, and zest. Add the butter. Heat over medium heat, whisking almost constantly, getting into all the corners. The butter will melt, and soon after the mixture will thicken and begin to simmer around the edges. When it thickens to your liking, whisk about ten seconds longer, then decant into jars or ramekins and chill in fridge before using. It’ll keep for about a week in the fridge. (We never strain our curd because we like the zest; if you don’t, you can strain after cooking. The egg will not scramble as it heats, because the sugar and juice will stabilize it, so there is no need to strain unless you don’t like the zest.)”

We believe lemon curd tastes best on plain, not-too-sweet scones. We also like clotted cream, but that takes days to make, so often we’ll just whip cream (with a little powdered sugar) until it surpasses the soft peaks of whipped cream and moves into a more solid consistency - not quite butter, but ‘harder’ than whipped cream typically is. This gives us the moist creamy thing we like with the sharpness of the custard.

“Authentic British Scones, adapted from Curious Cuisiniere

2 cups AP flour
2 Tbsp sugar
4 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt
3 Tbsp unsalted butter, cut into chunks, cold
2/3 cup milk
1 egg yolk beaten with one Tbsp milk (to glaze)

Preheat oven to 425. In a food processor,* place flour, sugar, baking powder, salt, and chunks of butter. Pulse until the butter resembles small peas or coarse cornmeal. Add in the milk, while pulsing, a little at a time. You may need a bit less or a bit more. The mixture should just come together and be sticky.

Turn out onto a floured board and pat into a circle, about 1” thick. Cut out rounds - I used a 2” circle cutter, but whatever you have will work. It should make about 9-10 scones depending on the size of your circles. Place on a cookie sheet lined with parchment paper and brush with milk/egg glaze. Bake for 12-15 minutes (12 minutes is good for my oven) - scones should be golden brown on top. Let rest for 30 minutes on the sheet, on a cooling rack. For softer scones, place a tea towel over them as they cool.

Serve with butter, or curd, or cream, or jam, or all of the above. Great with afternoon tea!

*If you don’t have a food processor, just use your fingers or a pastry cutter. ”

This concludes my series of monthly seasonal recipes. I’ve enjoyed trying to distill each month into one or two items found in our garden at that time of year, whatever we are craving and most enjoy eating during that season. Part of eating seasonally (and from the garden) is that you eat a lot of what’s available at that time, until you absolutely can’t eat any more of it. Then you miss it until it’s available again. I’m already craving the fresh tomatoes and cucumbers of summer! When you eat this way, you get a varied set of nutrients over the course of a year. Naturally, I couldn’t incorporate every vegetable or fruit that we grow - that would take an entire cookbook. I also left out things like salads and sautéed greens, figuring you can manage those without a recipe. These recipes have just been highlights - there’s plenty more to explore where seasonal cooking is concerned! See my recommendations for a list of cookbooks that I like very much and use often, though I also use several online sites such as Smitten Kitchen and Alexandra Cooks, frequently. Also, I would encourage you to experiment. And then let me know the results, so I can make it and enjoy it too!

Here’s a recap:

January - using up a stored supply of goods

February - the chickens begin to lay again

March - roots and buds

April - baby artichokes

May - summer cake

June - cherry tomatoes and blueberries (and foccacia)

July - fruit desserts, canning, pickling

August - part one - preserved peppers and pimento cheese

August - part two - Tomato Galette

September - delicata sausage casserole

October - more winter squash recipes

November - apple galette and baked spinach

December - lemon curd and scones, above

Happy New Year, all. Thank you for reading my little essays, and I look forward to sharing 2020 with you!

First Day of Winter

Please enjoy this four minute video taken in the garden today on a foggy, drippy morning.

Clearing Out the Pollinator Gardens

My finals are DONE! My semester is FINISHED! I am now free as a bird until the middle of January. It feels so so so good to not sit and study. I was actually getting a particular hip pain because I was sitting so much. That’s never happened before. I would sit at the kitchen table, hip aching, table full of charts and papers and books, and then I’d look outside and see everything that needed doing, and sigh. Well, no more table! Outside time only! Bit by bit, I’m tidying up the garden and planting for spring. Now, when my body hurts, it’s because it’s getting some work done!

The pollinator gardens in our garden are the spaces people comment on the most. Oh, they like the vegetables and the fruit trees, the bees and the chickens, but it’s the flowers that really make people excited. I’ve written extensively about them before, because in order to get this abundance of flowers, it takes a little doing (it’s not hard, though). Three times a year I go out there and scatter wildflower seeds, the kind of seed depending on the season. That’s the easy part. The hard part, or not hard exactly but time consuming and a pretty big chore, is removing all the dead biomass before scattering the seed. If you don’t remove all the dead stuff, the seeds can’t get the light and moisture they need to germinate. And then, for about a month after removing everything, the garden is bare, bare, bare. Which isn’t all that attractive.

Today

I do have some perennials in there to hold down the space, but a lot of those, like dahlias or hollyhocks, are dormant in the winter, or else, like salvias and sages, need to be pruned hard in the winter. So it tends to look rather forlorn, with only borage (a workhorse all year round) and early narcissus blooming. The very first forget-me-nots are starting to bloom too, so that’s good. But on the whole, it’s very sad looking. You’ve got to hang in there, though, because within a few weeks, there will be a haze of green over this entire space, and then not long after that, the poppies will be up. By February things should be in good bloom. This time of year, I sow both California and opium poppies, Chinese Houses, Clarkias of all kinds, Nemophila, Gilia, Phacelia, Tidy tips - mostly natives. They’ll bloom until May when I will go through this whole process again and seed in the late summer flowers. Sometime between February and May, I’ll get a sowing in of early summer flowers, wherever I can find space.

The amount of biomass that accumulates from just one of the pollinator gardens is tremendous. I put as much as I can in the compost, but once the pile reaches above my head, I start to put the rest in the green bin for pickup. This year I made more space for the compost pile to go long, along the fence behind the chicken coop. I want to keep as much material as I can, especially with 10 chickens now to work it over. I’m making compost faster than ever before.

Taking out all the dead plants takes many days for all my pollinator gardens, two days for the south pollinator garden alone (pictured above). I’m actually still not done; I need to prune the passionflower vine hard and build it a new trellis. This will be a two person job and probably won’t get done until Tom’s holiday break. I’ve still got many gardens to go, though. Lots of wildflower seeds yet to get in! What a joy, though, to get out and use my muscles, instead of sitting!

It’s also time, if you live in California, to cut down the asparagus stalks/ferns and dress the bed with compost and mulch. This chore makes me anticipate late winter/early spring, when the spears will be appearing. Yum!

The new chickens (well, not so new anymore I guess) are figuring out the lay of the land. What makes me happy is that they do not run from me quite so quickly anymore - they are starting to realize I come bearing good things, like leftover yogurt or fresh greens. So now they just eye me warily and stay poised to dash. It’s an improvement. One not-so-happy development is that I think one of them might be a rooster. No crowing, just a very suspicious tail.

More than Double

The last time we added hens to our existing flock, we only added two. Two big girls, ready to start laying any day. That was traumatic enough and a real eye-opener for me; I had to learn to dampen my feelings about competition and pecking order. (Can’t we all just get ALONG???)

But this time, with six new chicks joining our current four old gals, it’s been positively a whirlwind. Everything has more than doubled: the noise, the poop, the amount of beat-downs, how fast the food vanishes, the intense jostling for a position on the roosts at night. We desperately need these six young chickens to provide eggs (in a month or two), but it sure has been a chaotic couple of weeks trying to get them settled. I’m scrambling for more carbon (anyone have any dry bags of leaves I can have or old hay or sawdust?) and ordering layer feed at an astonishing rate.

Add this to the start of our rainy season (which means closer quarters), and you can imagine the impact. Tom rigged up a tarp so that there is some outdoor space for the chickens to go without getting soaked, and this has helped tremendously (chickens can handle cold, but cold and wet is difficult). I had to assist the little guys getting in and out of the hen house each night for about two nights; after that I put a stool in the coop (yes, really) and now they climb up that and fly up from there. I still go out to watch bedtime (anytime between 4:30 and 5) because we’ve had a few bad falls as the chickens all jostle for space. One of our older hens, Scrappy, fell three times through the hole with the ladder in it, because the other old hens didn’t like how aggressive she was being and they knocked her off. The little chicks just gambol around like drunks and they tend to make it ok, but they sure get knocked around a lot. They have to find the proper times to approach the food and water, the proper times to have a dust bath, the proper times to root through the compost pile, because the older chickens are keeping them firmly in line. However, they are growing fast, so I think they are getting enough to eat. They were raised in a dark shed with 500 other chicks, so all they have known before this is a dirt floor and the scramble for food of any kind. I imagine this new life is pretty great for them, despite the ‘lessons’ they are learning from the big girls. Bugs, sprouted grains, regular greens, leaf piles to get lost in - all of this must seem like wonderland.

Still, it’s a lot of chickens in a smallish space. Once spring comes and we see who’s really laying, there might be a reckoning.

Speaking of reckoning, I’m about to enter into finals. Chemistry is kind of like my own personal big chicken - knocking me around and teaching me a few life lessons. I’m the little guy, scrambling to keep up. I feel safe and well-fed, and then suddenly a big beak comes at me from behind and bites me in the ass.