The Winter Garden

The winter garden is lovely in its own way. The flower borders don’t look so great, especially because I’ve been pruning away all the dead stuff, and giving the perennials their annual haircut in hopes of a great spring and summer bloom. But the veg garden - well, it’s abundant, and diverse, and a riot of different shades of green.

Snap peas, broccoli, beets, and kohlrabi are all ready to harvest. Every time I’m out in the garden, I eat a handful of peas or a couple of spears of asparagus or a chard leaf or two. We’ll have broccoli tonight, roasted with garlic, olive oil, and parmesan. We’ll have the beets tomorrow, roasted in foil and peeled, tossed with caramelized shallots, orange slices, and lettuce in a balsamic vinaigrette. I’ll eat kohlrabi plain, peeled and sliced, for a crunchy snack.

It’s going to be above 40 the next couple of nights, as we’re expecting some rain, so I’ve taken off the row covers so the plants can soak up the moisture and sun. It feels good to uncover everything and revel in all the varieties of green. There are no bugs to worry about (a very nice side effect of winter) and it helps me to see where the holes are, and where I can get a quick crop in. I pulled some bolting arugula today and seeded in some rat-tailed radish, which you do not eat for the root, but for the swollen seed pods. I might try to get a quick crop of tennis ball lettuce in before spring. It just depends on the temperatures, and whether we get warm enough to germinate anything.

I’ve seen several native bumblebees on the manzanita, so they are out of hibernation for the most part. The local Bewick’s Wren is building a nest. The peppers have begun to germinate on their heated mat. It’s the time of year where we’re all starting to feel a bit restless, but there’s still a lot of winte left. Ours has been warmer and drier than usual - how about yours?

California Rare Fruit Growers Annual Scion Exchange

My teacher, mentor, and friend Lawrence invited me to go with him to the CRFG scion exchange today, but first, we met at my house and spent some time swapping seeds. This has become a regular event for us; every packet has between 10-100 seeds (depending on the veg/fruit), and no one needs that many, so why not share? This way, everyone gets more variety and everything gets used. Lawrence has quite a collection, some of which are from his personal collection, and some of which are for the classes he teaches at Merritt. You can see the incredible imbalance here, as Lawrence brought three flats whilst I only have one or two little boxes of seed. We have a good time, looking up different varieties, and comparing notes, and our swapping is always capped off by a tour of the garden. Lawrence was particularly impressed with our brassica collection (I’ll share with you in the next week, it’s looking great!) and the alliums. He gives me good advice and we share experiences and I’m so lucky to have developed this friendship with such a learned plantsman (and all-around great guy).

Then we went off to the scion exchange. Holy Moly.

This particular exchange takes place at Diablo Valley College’s horticulture department, in Pleasant Hill. Their greenhouse space is just amazing, and today it was full of scions. This event is sponsored by the California Rare Fruit Growers, who began in 1966 to meet and learn about how to grow fruit in our coastal climate. The way it works is, you pay $5 to enter the event, and then you can pick up as many scions as you need or want, for free. The scions are donated by various growers (and you can bring your own to share), and there is an extremely wide selection.

There were scions from all kinds of fruit trees and canes - there must have been 200 varieties of apple here, and nearly as many of fig, but there were many of every kind of fruit tree you can imagine. The hardest thing about the exchange is figuring out how to mark them so you remember what you brought home. Lawrence spent a good deal of time teaching me how to pick a good scion, which will be helpful for the future.

Do you know what a scion is? It’s a cutting, basically of a young tender branch, which can then be grafted on to an appropriate rootstock and grown out to provide a fruit tree. All fruit trees are created this way; you can see the grafting point between rootstock and cultivar at the base of most of them, about six inches above soil level. This is how you get those monster trees where there are four different kind of apples growing on the same trunk. This can be handy if you have a small space and want a staggered harvest, however, they are difficult to maintain. But also regular fruit trees are grown this way, not from seed. This is why you buy bare-root or potted fruit trees to plant on in your garden. Seed rarely comes true, so they are grafted. This is also called ‘cloning.’

I have not yet learned how to graft, so I didn’t pick up any scions, but I enjoyed being Lawrence’s wing-man, bundling and tagging his choices for his classes. I loved hearing folks sharing information, exchanging ideas on how to grow certain fruits, or which variety was best, or how different varieties grew in different places. All ages filled the greenhouses, from babies in front-carriers to older folks with a lot of experience. It was a real gathering of kindred spirits. Lawrence seems to know everyone, and I even saw several folks I knew from different classes I’ve taken, as well as one of my previous bosses! On this sunny, chilly January day, everyone’s thoughts were tuned hopefully to Spring and Fruit!

Check out the CRFG webpage to see if there is a scion exchange coming up near you. Next year, I’d like to go again, and next time I’ll be more prepared to try out some grafting of my own.

Trying Something New

Despite the fact that I have numerous seed packets in cold storage (leftover from last year, and even the year before that), I still ordered a few more because I like to try new stuff every year, along with my tried-and-trues. The new seeds arrived yesterday. I’m excited to try these new varieties, including a tomato that is good for hanging baskets (‘Silvery Fir Tree’)! I don’t start tomato seedlings until March 1, and usually I start my peppers then, too.

But I recently read a book by Monty Don of Gardener’s World fame (a show on the BBC that we absolutely adore), in which he strongly suggests starting peppers in January, to give them plenty of time to germinate and grow, before they go in the ground in May. This requires a little extra fuss because they’ll probably need potting up twice before then, but because peppers are tricky to get started, this allows you earlier harvests when they do eventually get in the ground. To me this seemed sound advice. My peppers always set fruit later than I would like. Why not try it?

So, I got out my trusty seed table, single light set-up, heating mat, and seed blocker, and got to work planting up peppers. I seeded 50; I expect not all will germinate, but it would be lovely if they do. We always grow plenty of both hot and sweet peppers, as well as paprika peppers, in order to have lots for fresh eating and for preserving and making into spice mixes.

A bright sunny day (though chilly) encouraged us to get outside and get a lot done. The highlight was digging up a Douglas Iris clump that was about four feet in diameter (no small feat with our heavy clay!) and chopping it into about six pieces which then got distributed about the garden. You know it’s time to do this when the greenery forms a ring, with nothing in the center, telling you that the bulbs have increased so much that they have crowded out the middle. Winter is a great time to split native Douglas iris, as the roots are growing like mad and will not even notice that you’ve changed their position.

Starved for Green

We Californians have an interesting climate. Like west coasts on many countries (the west coasts of South Africa, Australia, and Chile; the Mediterranean basin), we have what is called a ‘Mediterranean hot-summer climate’, which features dry summers and mild, wet winters. The influence of the ocean tempers things a lot with regard to temperatures, and we have very low humidity most of the year, which keeps things pleasant for humans. The plants that have evolved to live here are summer-dormant; they shut down in the warm months and burst into bloom in the colder months. For native plants, January is spring, and July is basically winter, to put it in terms anyone else would understand. If you do what I do, which is grow things year-round, you can see that I have to manipulate my environment, which isn’t all that great a thing to do. It requires work and water. The rage ten years ago (and frankly maybe it should still be the rage; it’s certainly the responsible thing to do) is to plant with only shrubs and flowers that would follow this pattern, i.e. native. I do have a lot of native plants in my yard, because I think it’s important from an ecological and historical perspective (I want to support the creatures that evolved with these plants), but I also include things from other places, since I’m watering for the vegetables anyway. This is probably not sustainable in the long run, and it’s something I’m thinking deeply about, and need to find a solution to, with regards to growing food.

However, I didn’t come here today to talk about anything as serious and pressing as climate change. I just wanted to note that the eyes of Californians are simply starved for green by the time January rolls around.

Shell Ridge

Over the holiday break, Tom was great about taking walks every day, and I joined him on several occasions, and have vowed to get in the hills as often as possible before my classes start up again. What we have noticed is how our moods change instantly when we get up to a place where we can fill our eyes with green. Local farmers are grazing their cows there, and I spent an entranced fifteen minutes watching them find the new grass with their lips, tear it out, and chew slowly as they made their way to the next verdant patch. I swear I wished that I could eat the grass, too, somehow get that beautiful green goodness into my body. We Californians have been looking at brown hills (golden, my ass) since May. Some of them were charred black from fires. It’s a cliche, but the green is a rebirth and a promise. I imagine this is how folks in other climates feel when the first crocus pokes its head over the snow. Our promise just happens to come in winter rather than spring. Where others might have eyes hungry for pink or purple or yellow, ours are starved for green.

moss on a shady rock on Acalanes Ridge

We’ve had very little rain this winter, and I’m running the drip system right now as I write. Who knows if we will get a deluge in the next few months? I’m hoping so, but if not, I’m trying to fill my eyes and my soul with green right now, to store up for the dry months.

Misconceptions

Did you ever manage to see The Biggest Little Farm? It’s a lovely movie, filled with beautiful photography and the picturesque processes of building an organic farm in the Southern California foothills. It covers seven years in the life of this particular farm and documents its failures and successes. I loved the film, and have recommended it to many people.

But just the other day, I received the monthly newsletter from Ruby Blume of the Institute for Urban Homesteading; it gave me a different view of the movie. A little history - Ruby was instrumental in starting the urban farm movement in Oakland, and helping others to learn how to grow food, preserve it, keep small livestock and bees, and craft items for the home. In the last few years, urban farming in Oakland and Berkeley has become almost de rigueur, and Ruby herself moved to Oregon a couple of years ago to farm a larger property and raise sheep. The Institute still offers classes, but it’s not nearly the clearinghouse it was before, for many reasons (you can learn on YouTube, there are lots of places that teach this stuff now, Ruby is no longer in the area and rather out of touch with what the ‘scene’ has become), but during its heyday it was a great source of knowledge and information. I still get Ruby’s newsletter because I like to read about what she’s accomplishing on a larger scale in Oregon (and allow myself to dream of something similar), and her most recent newsletter had a paragraph that I felt I should share here, with Ruby’s permission (which she kindly granted). Since I’ve been doing a lot of lecturing at Merritt, and giving a lot of farm tours here on the property, I have a lot of new readers who may have a fairly idealistic view of the whole process. The Biggest Little Farm was a very romantic view of farming, and I certainly don’t want to give anyone a false impression of what farming is truly like. Hence, I’ve copied Ruby’s paragraph here, so that you can get a more realistic picture. (Full disclosure - we’ve been part of the Institute’s Urban Farm Tour in the past, and have taken many classes with Ruby.)

“When I was working on the farm tour, I gathered with the featured farmers and several told me about the recent movie The Biggest Little Farm. “You will LOVE it,” they said. I had my doubts, but one rainy night in December I watched it with my farm partner. We could barely make it through the film. I understand that most people will find this movie inspiring and uplifting, but for me it was infuriatingly idealistic, leaving so many gaps in the story of what farming actually requires. “We had some generous funders.” No doubt. The property alone cost $11M. You read right. Eleven Million Dollars. This is more than 20 times what I had to invest. And how much additional capital did it require to construct barns, sheds, corrals and coops, buy a stable of shiny new farm machines (30-50K each), install miles of fences and irrigation lines, reconstruct a pond, rip out 55 acres of mature orchard, completely terrace and keyline those same acres and plant thousands of fruit trees? How did they pay for the farm, the labor, the commercial scale worm composting and compost tea systems, the livestock and guardian dogs? How long did it take to get marketable crops and what did they live on and pay their farm workers until then? Could they have made it happen without their Hollywood investors? They did not show the backbreaking daily work required or demonstrate that permaculture/biodynamic farming is economically sustainable. We did some math and came up with a conservative estimate of $20 million dollars for their project. What couldn’t any of us do with that much cash in hand? While I agree with the core message of the movie (SOIL is LIFE! ), there is a reason most farmers work on an industrial level: the farmer has to make a living. Farm reality is that we cannot just do whatever we want and farm decisions are almost always dictated by the limitations of budget. Most small-scale farmers also work off the farm in order to pay for the farm. So while it is great that they are now selling 55,000 pounds of fruit a year and employing 60 workers, we greatly doubt they could have done this without that big start-up nut, or that they could pay back that money of they had to. Here on Ferry Road, we struggle to pay our basic bills and to afford the materials to improve our infrastructure. We do not have the luxury of purchasing a single tractor or hiring a single farm hand, let alone a stable of each. We are lucky to be able to defray some of the cost of our farming with what we produce. I am not angry or jealous of the gap. I love the agrarian life, the critters, the manure, the clean air, the quiet nights and the gorgeous food we produce for ourselves with some extra to share. But what I would LOVE to see is a film that promotes organic/holistic farming with a realistic budget and practical solutions for mid-to-low income folks who would like to return to the land. Now THAT would be inspiring.”

— Ruby Blume

We have two new additions at Poppy Corners. One is this bird feeder, attached underneath the chicken coop roof. One of the things I dislike about bird feeders is that the fallen seeds sprout and become a mess to dig up. Attaching it in the chicken run means that the chickens clean up any fallen seed, which solves that problem.

But the bird feeder is solving a bigger problem. Here’s what’s been happening: In the past few months, I’ve noticed that anywhere I’ve put seeds in the North Garden, nothing grows. Well that’s not exactly true. In beds where there is row cover (agribon), the seeds germinate fine and grow fine, except along the edges of the beds where the agribon blows in the wind. Likewise, anywhere uncovered, no germination. Then I started noticing flocks of birds in my beds and borders, eating the seeds. This is something they’ve never done before. Any pea seed I planted, dug up and eaten by birds. Any flower seed, likewise eaten. No plants on the ends of the covered beds where the agribon doesn’t quite cover - seeds eaten. The birds are eating all the seeds. Only in the North Garden where the chicken coop is. So I thought and I thought and I thought - why are birds eating everything, only this year? Why not other years?

Then it hit me. In September, our next-door neighbors (who’ve lived here since the neighborhood was built in the late 40’s) suddenly moved into a retirement home in the Sierra foothills. These neighbors had seven or eight birdfeeders in their yard, just on the other side of the fence, in the big Japanese pine. She also used to put out peanuts for the squirrels and jays. But since she’s been gone, the feeders have been empty. No one has moved in yet, and the caretakers of the house haven’t noticed (or don’t care about) the feeders. All these birds, who for generations had eaten well in Wes and Lavelle’s yard, now had no food. In winter. And I just finally cut down the last of the seed pods on my property. So of course they are eating anything they can find! They are simply desperate for food! I reasoned that if we provide them with that food, they’ll maybe stop eating all my seeds that I want to grow up into big plants. It’s worth a shot anyway!

image credit: Stark Bros

The second new thing is a mulberry tree. In November, I chopped down our old, diseased peach tree with my trusty hatchet and saw. We moved the greenhouse into that space, and then Tom put in a tall post on which to hang our sun sail and some outdoor lights, and then I planted a Pakistan mulberry tree near there. Peaches require a lot of inputs to grow and thrive; mulberries do not. Peaches also require a lot of water; mulberries do not. A Pakistan mulberry specifically is well-suited to heat and drought. Here is the blurb about it on Stark Bros: “An exotic variety with outstanding durability. This vigorous and productive tree yields large and firm, oblong fruit. These ruby red-purple mulberries have sweet, raspberry-like flavor with low acidity that is good for fresh eating or making cobblers. As a bonus, the fruit juice does not stain! Developed in Islamabad, Pakistan, it is very tolerant of heat, humidity, sun, droughts and poor soil. Disease-resistant. Matures to be 30-40' tall. Ripens April through mid-summer. Self-pollinating. Morus alba x M. rubra” I will not let it grow THAT tall, I will keep it under 8 feet, so that picking the fruit is easy. Also, there will be so much of it that I will not miss any of the birds take their share. We’re excited to have another kind of fruit on the homestead, though we will miss our peach tree.