Fruitless Pursuits

My tomato plants are freeloading slackers.

I'm Italian. Tomatoes are supposed to emerge effortlessly from the ground at my feet when I pass, sprawling with bushels of fruit for the slow-cooked sauce I'd conceivably make in my tasteful yet flattering, Sofia Loren-inspired outfit.

I would look really good in this recipe. 

Instead I struggle every single time! It feels like a personal ethnic failure, a betrayal of my heritage, especially when there are entire books devoted to how easy tomatoes are to grow and what a perfect first food gardening project they make since they're basically foolproof. Except they're not proof against this fool.

I bought a Topsy-Turvy tomato planter in the days before my raised beds, excited about the smart use of space and the graphic with tomatoes pouring out of the bottom of the bag. As seen on TV, you guys. That's supposed to be an American promise that MEANS something! Yeah. It didn't flower. When I went to look up why, this was my favorite explanation: 'If your Topsy Turvy hangs under an awning or overhang that blocks the sun, it may not receive enough sunlight to flower normally." If my...wait, so you invented a planter for a full sun vegetable that--by DESIGN--must hang, from something that is built to hang over. An "over hang", if you will. A ceiling structure of some sort, because that is what you hang things from, traditionally; ceilings and roofs being the type of structure that on the most basic level have a single purpose--to provide shelter, if not from the rain and the elements, FROM. THE SUN. You built a planter for a full sun vegetable that must hang from something that blocks the sun. 

And I bought two of them. 

Got it. Full sun.

I planted tomatoes in raised beds; but I had gotten so excited about having the raised beds and all the lovely space that I ran around the nursery like a crack-addled tomato addict and bought way too many six packs. I crowded them into the bed with giddy disregard for the spacing requirements (TWO FEET OF SPACE, LADY) because after all, plenty of them fit into the bed and they were small. I had a plan for an elaborate staking method using twine between the rows so I decided they basically just needed a square foot each.

Yeah, no. No tomatoes. Turns out space is a thing for tomatoes. Okay. Full sun, correct space.

I planted tomatoes in raised beds with space between them, and watched with delight as they set flowers, so many flowers, flowers everywhere and all over the big beautiful foliage. They were monsters, amazonian monsters, fed in their desire to take over the world by manure from my chickens and fresh compost. I shook them a little every day since I'd read that was helpful to pollination especially in bee deprived Southern California; but I watched in dismay as the yellow flowers dropped off without fruiting after a July heat wave.

Single tomato visible in extreme left of picture. Also possible that this is the toe of one of my red stilettos. Or a child's toy. Or a drop of my blood, which seems to be what this tomato garden wants. Or, really, anything except a tomato. 

Ok. Full sun, correct space, not too much heat.

I planted tomatoes in raised beds earlier in the season. They set fruit, hurrah! Which the hornworms and the aphids ate before I could get any. Verticillium wilt, a soil-borne fungal disease tomatoes can catch through their roots, set in not long after, wilting, yellowing, and curling the leaves. I'd planted strawberries (especially susceptible to the disease) in the same soil and had tomatoes there for a few years now, which meant the soil was likely infested with verticillium. I pulled out the infected tomato plants and couldn't even compost them, as they would infect the compost for future verticillium-prone plants. Also, tomatoes leaves and plants are toxic to chickens so I couldn't even feed the plants to the chickens, I literally had to just throw them away. Knife in the heart of my drive for sustainable closed-ecological-loop.

Alright. Full sun. Not too much heat. Spread them around the garden so the bugs get confused. Plant in new fresh soil that hasn't had tomatoes in it yet. Plant with companion plants (I used nasturtiums, marigolds, and onions to keep the pests away, and basil and carrots to encourage the tomato plants). Bird netting to keep the birds away. Cages to keep the tomatoes off the ground. And...with all these fail-safes in place, I got cocky. This was the year, I decided. This was the moment when I was going to fully come into my own as an Italian princess and realize my genetic legacy as the kind of tomato-growing, sauce-making, sexy-in-an-earthy-way Sofia Loren movies have been telling me my whole life I could be. I planned on sun-dried tomatoes, tomato paste, tomato sauce, and tomato-scented candles. I could not fail this time. But....just one little thing, I'd been watering all my tomatoes the previous year a gallon of water per plant per day, because that was what I had read, but other people were saying that, like maybe that was too much, and it was a drought, so maybe I didn't really NEED to water a gallon of water per plant per day, because that was, sort of wasteful and so maybe I could fudge it a little and still get, like, a LOT of tomatoes instead of maybe the TON of tomatoes I thought I was going to get.

Two of my plants (which, I must admit, I didn't even stake, but allowed to sprawl as an experiment) produced copious quantities of tomatoes. The rest, caged proudly, well fertilized, chicken manured, full sunned and bird netted, burst forth with one tomato each. ONE. TOMATO. On a plant the size of a small child and with the same water requirements.

Okay. I mentally write one hundred times "I will follow directions and not make up my own rules. I will follow directions and not make up my own rules. I will follow directions..."

Full sun. Correct space. Not too much heat. Not too many in one place. Companion planting with beneficial plants (onions, basil, peppers). Keeping away from verticillium-carrying plants (potatoes, peppers, strawberries). Not too much nitrogen. Water.

From my two plants that produced, I took about five pounds of beautiful Roma tomatoes, which I salted and dried in the oven (slice lengthwise, scoop out seeds, lay flat on baking sheet, salt to taste, 200 degrees for a few hours or until dried to preferred doneness). I idly started reading sauce recipes using fresh tomatoes instead of canned and the one that made my mouth water called for a full twenty five pounds of tomatoes to make two gallons of sauce.

Hmm.

I might just make a quick run to the nursery and see if they have just, like, one more six pack laying around.

Pesto Pilgrim's Progress and the Pine Cone Park

I've been stalking this park for three days, since I realized that the entire quarter mile loop of paved walking path was studded with pine trees. So what, you say? So PINE NUTS. See, once upon a time I went to buy some pesto, and lo, that shiz was expensive. Verily, said I, hell no. I'll make my own. And if it's expensive because of the ingredients (basil and pine nuts) I'll grow my own. Turns out you can grow your own pine nuts, because they grow on pine trees. Inside pine cones. Who knew? (Not me, that's for sure. I thought they might grow on bushes like peanuts.)

Originally I had no idea where to find pine trees, since in my neighborhood I've never seen anything but acacia trees, carrotwood, jacaranda and eucalyptus--largely, the ornamental one tree per lot the developers of my suburb threw in when they clear cut the native plants and scraped all the topsoil off our lots. Once I had it in my head to look for pine trees with closed brown pine cones though (green cones haven't developed their seeds yet and open cones have mostly had their seeds stolen by squirrels and birds) I started seeing them everywhere. Along the side of the road. In canyons between the streets. In the undeveloped land between the neighborhoods. And here, in a nice community park where I happened to start walking last week. Since pine trees are native to California I realized they were the remnants of the native plants that must have been here long before the developers got it into their heads to build tract homes here. In fact, for thousands of years the native cultures of the southwest--the Shosone, Paiute, Washo and Ute peoples--subsisted through the winter with the high caloric density (over 3000 calories per pound!) of pine nuts gathered from native pine trees in California, Montana, Idaho, Wyoming, Nevada, Utah and Arizona. Two thousand years ago a family might gather around 1,200 pounds of pine nuts in the fall, which would feed a family of four for about four months. The men would either use simple poles to beat the tree branches to make the cones fall (did they wear helmets? This seems precarious when you're underneath) or a more complex tool with a forked hook at the end to pop the cones off their branches. The women would gather the cones and heat them on the fire until the cones broke open; then the cones would be put into bags to be beaten until the seeds shook loose. Finally the seeds themselves were heated to crack and release them from their shells and finally get at the pine nut itself.

I don't have a complex stick with a forked hook. I literally have a two foot long stick I found on the ground, one I am ready to discard at a moment's notice should I attract the attention of the other denizens of the park so I can blend into perfect suburban blandness and disappear unnoticed. If I only had a maxi dress on and had straightened my hair! I'd be practically invisible.

There's a pack of Fit Moms (Memes?) barking at each other in a Baby Boot Camp Walk Run Circuit Training Station Class at the other end of the park. They're unpredictable--despite their coordinated-but-not-matchy-matchy cropped capri workout pants-tops-cross trainer combos and perfectly straightened sleek blonde ponytails, their state of the art military grade running strollers mean they're ready to be on the move and running short laps around random points at any moment. At the moment, they're doing squats. Hmm. Circuit Training. I'm doing Circuit Training. I flex my legs experimentally before aiming a jump at the low-hanging branch with my stick. The cone I had my eye on pops off and lands at my feet. Huh.

I pause not far from Zen Chick, who is meditating silently, eyes closed, legs tucked under her in the grass, her ipod speakers softly playing Chinese flute music. There are three cones hanging temptingly from a long hanging branch, again, just out of my reach, but I don't want to knock them out with my stick for fear I'll disturb her. I can just reach some of the drooping needles and from there I can catch hold of a stick, then a thicker branch, then I can finally pull the whole bough down low enough to get all three cones. I congratulate myself for my cat-like reflexes and my plus to move silently right before the pine cones, too big for my one-handed grip, pop out of my hand and fall with a loud clatter to the sidewalk. "Sorry!" I whisper urgently and hurry on. I almost run headlong into Pokemon Teen, flip-flopped and phone-handed. Staring at his screen he stops short right in front of me and backs up before quickly changing direction, muttering "Vaporeon." When he pauses at a random spot in the grass and flicks his thumb upwards across his screen I know I've escaped his notice for now. I hear him quietly swearing behind me; hopefully he has enough pokeballs to keep trying to catch whatever he's found before he looks up and notices me, since I've now abandoned dignity and have jumped up to swat at the branches where a particularly plummy cone is hanging. There are needles and crumbly bits of decayed cones caught in my curly hair.  My hands are black and sticky with crusted sap; I have to make a physical effort to restrain myself from wiping the super-gluey goo on my shorts. I wipe a dangling pine needle from where it hangs down in my face and I can feel the swipe of sticky sap across my cheek.

I arrive back at the car with my cloth grocery bag full of pine cones, still feeling itchy that someone might be watching me and waiting to take back my bounty for--what? Do pine trees need the cones to sprout new needles? Are there endangered native squirrel populations that depend on the nuts for survival? I'm suddenly certain I've heard that you're never supposed to remove pine cones from public parks under penalty of law and equally certain that the maintenance truck with City of San Diego that stops right in front of me is filled with Park Cops waiting to tackle me to the ground and wrestle away my cones. The driver adjusts his City of San Diego ball cap further onto his face and I'm bracing myself to answer back with all the indignity I can muster while readying myself to run to the car, relying on my keyless entry for a quick getaway, but he just gets out, tips his hat to me like an old-timey sheriff and starts adjusting a broken sprinkler.

This is ridiculous. I feel like I've just gone through the Pesto Pilgrims Progress. The task before me, the baking and shelling, is daunting, according to Penniless Parenting, who says in her blog about harvesting pine nuts both "Now I know why these things are so friggin expensive" and "Don't try this if you want to keep your sanity."

Instead of putting the cones into the fire, Shoshone style, I put them into a 350 oven (with tinfoil to catch any sap) until the scales popped open--I set the oven for an hour, then let the cones cool in the oven. The house smelled pleasantly ("like getting smacked in the face with a dry cedar sauna", said my grinning husband) like pine.

Both air freshener and spa facial in one. 

The cones popped open and a ton of the tiny seeds just shook loose, looking like the whirly birds or helicopter seeds I used to see as a kid under some kind of tree that grew near my grandparents' house in Wisconsin.

Most of the seeds shook loose but I could see them inside the cones and didn't want to waste the ones that were still in there; so I went whole hog and smashed them with a hammer, Shosone style.

This cone is nice and open and you can see the seeds tucked in at the base of the scales. The cones in the top picture going into the oven are tight and closed like dragon eggs. 

Energy invested so far: enough to hatch five separate Pokemon eggs or, alternately, walk the Rock and Roll Marathon (for foraging) plus Cross Fit with Shake-weights (for hammer smashing). Penniless says you can gather the nuts themselves under the pine trees in September and October as they shake loose from the cones as they open naturally; but the lack of cones on the lower branches and the number of squirrels and rabbits and birds I saw in the park makes me think it'll be a daily pilgrimage to root around in the pine needles and avoid suburbanites to get enough pine nuts for a decent batch of pesto.

For the final step, cracking open the seeds and getting to the pine nuts, Native Americans "parched" the seeds over coals and then cracked them; Penniless used her teeth to shell them like sunflower seeds. I took a look at my bowl of blackened, hard seeds and thought about how proud I was of my dental work, then went and got a pair of pliers. The first shell I opened was empty. So was the second. And the fifteenth. There was a nice, pleasant nutty smell of roasted pine nuts but the shells were completely dry inside. I realized in my desire to make sure all the cones opened enough to shake out the seeds, I'd parched the living hell out of my pine nuts too, and basically rendered the fat completely out of those lovely, fatty kernels. I was able to find one pine nut, intact, and all the rest, I'd desiccated into dust.

Yay. Success. I can now make a thimble-ful of pesto for one noodle. 

If I was depending on my foraging prowess to feed myself I would literally be dead.

Well, Pilgrim's Progress is all about the journey--right? Win on finding cones, on shaking open seeds, and on shucking the kernels, I just roasted them too long. Would I do it again? Maybe. It was fun looking for pine cones when I was out walking anyway; fun smashing them open; I enjoyed the nice piney smell of them roasting in the kitchen. It might be worth a second try--note to self, roast ONLY UNTIL CONES OPEN. In the meantime, though, as much as I like to be sustainable and local, I think I might just bite the bullet and buy the pine nuts.
Basic Pesto Recipe
2 cups packed basil leaves
1/2 cup grated parmesan
2 cloves garlic
1/4 cup pine nuts
2/3 cup olive oil
kosher salt, fresh ground black pepper
Combine basil, garlic and nuts in food processor. Add oil and pulse until smooth, season with salt and pepper, and stir in cheese.

My Love-Hate Affair

I have a sick obsession with sunflowers...they disgust me and yet...I just can't stay away.

When I was a teenager searching for identity I went through a phase where I identified as a sunflower. I had just seen my first bottle of Estee Lauder Sunflowers perfume, probably in a Walmart, considering the availability of department stores to my non-driving self growing up in California's rural central coast, and I was hooked. It smelled like nothing I'd ever experienced before, sort of warm and salty and sweet, evoking a perfect summer's day eating buttered sweet corn on the cob, like the coconut-tropical sun oil so iconic to the 90s mixed with the fine salty sweat that springs from laying contentedly in the sun. The bright, cheerful yellow packaging pleased and soothed my eye and seemed perfectly, entirely right with the world. I thought about sunflowers a lot, how they turned their dancing heads to the sun and lifted their faces in smiling worship. There was a serenity there that I sought and a beauty, so I took to sitting in sunny spots wherever I could find them, my legs curled under me and my face lifted to the sun, soaking in the warmth, experiencing rare moments of absolute presence.

I didn't actually write this book. My exploits as a half-teenaged girl, half-sun worshipping flower became the stuff of legend.

Sunflowers were my summer romance when I was a teenager. My adult sunflower garden is, as all faerie tales must be, a little more mired in the mundane.

I first planted sunflowers in my garden after a trip to the beautiful Carlsbad flower fields. There as part of a sustainability class we potted tiny sunflower seeds, a kindergarten primer on the joy of growing from seed. Sunflowers come up quick and grow like gangbusters and this little pot of seeds was no exception, pushing up through the soil in less than a week and spreading out strong leaves from its sturdy little stalk. Inspired, I grabbed a packet of random sunflower seeds from the racks at my nursery and carelessly threw them out in an empty patch of bare soil I'd just cultivated. They exploded out of the soil like the fireworks they so resemble, quickly growing to five feet high and unfurling their goldenrod petals like a crown around chocolate-brown centers bursting with seeds. Just like when I was a girl, they thrilled me with their size and their brilliance and their cheerful presence. They became the first place I brought people on my little garden tours.

Hello, my prince.

"Aren't they beautiful?" I gushed to my brother-in-law, inhaling the ambrosial scent of the tomato leaves, hot in the sun, and soaking in the same warmth my flowers were industriously converting into selenium-rich seeds.

"Beautiful," he agreed. "Hope you get some of the seeds. I planted those all over the ranch last year and the birds got every last seed before I could harvest a single one."

What now?

I hadn't thought about the birds. Honestly I hadn't really thought about the seeds, I'd just liked the thought of having sunflowers but suddenly I was determined that no wretched little bastard birds were going to steal my freaking sunflower seeds. I had no idea how to harvest the seeds but if birds could do it I felt sure it couldn't be that hard...like anything about urban farming, how hard could it be?

Sure, professor. Tell me again about the coconut powered tractor slash television slash nuclear reactor we're building. HOW HARD COULD IT BE. 

 A quick web search told me I'd have to wait until the seeds ripened on the heads and the heads dried up enough to easily release the seeds. I went out to my sunflowers. A few of them had nice stripey seeds but they weren't releasing the seeds. A brightly colored yellow finch flew down while I was checking and malevolently watched me from my fence, taunting me with its grinning, tweeting song, a horrible inversion of my Snow White fantasies where the sweetly singing bird companion was actually biding its time to inflict its dark will upon me.

We want. THOSE SEEDS.

Okay, no problem. I'd have to keep the sunflowers on the heads for a few more days, and just...keep the birds away somehow. I draped the flower patch with black bird netting; now my flowers looked like they were getting reading for a Victorian funeral, their cheerful petals were crushed, but at least the seeds were safe. It was just for a few more days. Weeks. Whatever. The leaves, huge and lushly green one day, started browning and dying on the stalk as the seeds ripened, but refused to fall. They hung on the stalks like wrinkled bats dangling in clusters. The petals fell until nothing was left but the seed center, that I'd once idealistically compared to chocolate, to velvet, to the warmth of summer garden soil--now just ugly, dried, and dead. With mounting concern I ran my fingers over the seed heads daily, checking to see if they'd release the seeds. The flowers steadily decayed, no more handsome dancing princes but haggard, hideous crones and still those seed heads refused to give up their bounty.

The birds watched. And waited.

Fear us. We come.

I finally got to the point where I couldn't stand the daily suspense and cut down some of the heads that were mostly ripened as a gardener friend suggested. I bagged the heads in brown grocery bags so the air could still circulate and the heads wouldn't mold while they dried out, and weeks later, the heat in my garage had finally finished drying them to the point that I could shake the heads into the bags and get my seeds.

Once I had the seeds I completely forgot about all the stress of waiting for the seeds to ripen and how ugly the stalks became and the daily stalking by seed-seeking pterodactyls and planted more. 

Damn you, sunflowers. 

This year I added to the seeds I'd propagated from last year to plant sunflowers from The Great Sunflower Project, an organization dedicated to "identifying where pollinators need help, and helping!" I planted "Birds and Bees sunflowers", an heirloom variety with extra pollen for increasingly endangered pollinators like honey bees (and, uncomfortably, for my nemesis, the backyard vultures. Finches. Whatever) and rich, super oily kernels with soft shells. Ignoring completely how I'd hated how ugly the sunflowers got in the backyard I planted them in a raised bed in the front yard; I decided if I planted them thickly they'd support each other's stems and stay looking nice for longer. I put down a thick layer of fresh compost and chicken manure and planted the seeds by the handfuls.

What came up were enormous, gargantuan, monstrous sunflowers. "Birds and Bees" were supposed to grow between 6-8'; the stalks shot up to 8' and kept on going, some reaching 9 and 10 feet. The stalks were thick, several inches in diameter, and the heads were 8" across. They blossomed in extravagant yellow, unfurling their petals like a lady shyly spreading her skirts, first one then the others in quick succession, a procession of blithe and bright-eyed dancers, buoyant in the sun. Every morning I'd find honeybees crawling all over the huge heads, three or four per flower, rare in these bee-starved times. I also saw literal flocks of finches, sparrows and songbirds flying out of the sunflowers every time I went out to water, but I didn't want to cover the heads with unsightly bird netting since they were in the front yard unless I absolutely had to. I tried to tell myself the birds wouldn't get everything and if it started to look like we were losing too many seeds I'd cut the heads like before. The stalks started to die back and look terrible again and since they were ten feet high there was extra room for them to look completely horrible, the most enormous weeds in a giant's abandoned lot. I worried what the neighbors thought. 

"At least we're not the worst yard in the neighborhood," my neighbor the hoarder told me brightly while walking his one-eyed dog. The ancient cocker spaniel leaked goo from her one good eye as they walked back to the dead yard next to the open garage filled to the top with boxes and precariously piled assorted cobwebby junk. 

I can't fault his observations.

Still, I want those seeds. Seed packets are $3 for a handful of seeds, a fraction of what even one seed head can produce. At the end of each sunflower season we have plenty to eat (here's a recipe for roasting salted seeds) and to share with the chickens for feed, with tons left over for replanting. So it's a daily struggle between wanting to cut them all down to keep the yard from looking so gross, and just giving in to absolute chaos and netting and brown bagging the heads right on the stalk. I've taken to pulling the hanging-bat dead leaves off the stems to reduce the amount of brown and mulching them into the beds and trying to just keep the flowers looking somewhat tidy, but the seeds stubbornly remain pure, unripened white even as the stalks deteriorate daily. Every morning I think, well, at least the flowers provided a ton of pollen to sustain the declining honeybee population, maybe that's enough. Maybe I should just take them down today.

Except one of the seed heads turned stripey. I ran my finger over the seed head and the seeds fell gently into my palm, perfectly formed, ready to eat. I cracked one open with my teeth and ate it right there, and threw a handful to my backyard hens. They descended upon the seeds and gobbled them up like gumdrops. I noticed there were some little sunflowers sprouting at the base of the huge stalks, opening their baby yellow cheeks to the sun filtering through the amazon forest of legs.

Hmm. Maybe the neighbors can wait. 

The Perils of the Front Yard Food Forest

Someone ate my tomatoes last night. The very first, just ripening from orange to red, roma tomatoes from my garden, MY GARDEN, from my tomato plants that I water with a bucket I use to catch the shower water as it warms up and afterwards haul down the stairs to the garden which is, if I haven't mentioned, MY. GARDEN.

Wait, but what?

The worst part is that I can't complain to my husband. Because he told me so.

I don't like it. 

Urban food gardening is hard. You have to find soil space, first of all and just as importantly you have to find sunlight. Some food plants work in shade but not tomatoes, basil and fruit, which is what my spoiled Mediterranean palate leans toward; so when, in my first forays into food gardening, I realized I had exactly two raised beds worth of sunny space in my backyard, I planted one of tomatoes and one of strawberries. Neither produced well (I realized with more research that they inhibit each other) and even after I switched to only planting one or the other, the plants still struggled to produce no matter how much homemade compost and chicken manure I added to the beds. Plants like tomatoes and strawberries pull a lot of specific nutrients from the soil and over a few years neither does well being planted in the same soil--so I had to go look for new places for my tomatoes.

Cue the battle for the front yard food forest.

Before the California drought hit critical levels my husband was adamantly opposed to food in the front yard. His beautiful carpet of suburban green grass was a point of pride. We watered three times a week to the tune of 2000 gallons of water and fertilized and yes, fed and killed crabgrass and dandelions with Roundup Weed and Feed. We didn't know how bad Roundup was then but we definitely knew we didn't want food growing where pesticides and herbicides had been sprayed. 

He had another problem with the front yard food forest, though--what if people walked by and took apples from our apple trees? Our backyard is fenced in, the front yard is not. While I laughed at the thought of a cheerful, barefooted Tom Sawyer-ian apple thief shimmying up our trees (which were at that point the height of my waist and had four buds on two branches) he reminded me of how freaked out I was when a few years ago a strange woman with a stroller had taken to picnicking on our lawn with her baby. I would back out of the garage and see her spreading her blanket out on our (then) green lawn in the shade of our carrotwood trees, taking her baby out of the stroller and eating a snack herself. When she caught me staring at her in disbelief she would gaze back at me eerily with dead, empty eyes while she ate her pudding pack. 

What care I for lands and titles. Forsooth, this choco-vanilla swirl is the bomb.  

"You want scary mommy stopping by to pick kale? Maybe she'll bring her juicer and plug into our power grid while she's here." 

Ugh. Point taken. 

But at this point I had read about "Farm City" by Novella Carpenter and was fascinated by the idea that she had not just tried to address the fresh food desert in her neighborhood of urban Oakland with a food truck or accessibility to fresh fruits and vegetables in stores but that she had created a food forest in an abandoned lot, and left the gates open to anyone who wandered by and wanted to pull a carrot or a handful of greens. It was beautiful, seductive, the idea of an urban Garden of Eden that could feed and nourish the nutrient-starved masses that abutted its flowering borders. It was like the food forest playgrounds of Portland where everyone was welcome, where everyone could forage as we once had, where the land could provide in abundance and we could once more be connected to the gospel of soil. I had visions of my children climbing the apple trees like Scout and Huck Finn and the Boxcar Children, the neighborhood kids picking blackberries as they walked by and finding themselves less hungry for refined sugar, the adults coming for armfuls of squash and a pumpkin at Halloween. 

Tell me more. Is there a chocolate waterfall in this fantasy?

More to the point I have always been aware of a population of immigrants that wander our neighborhood, knocking politely on the door or calling to us when we were working outside, "Trabajo?" I would see them wandering the aisles of Target with their dusty backpacks on hot days, looking without interest at shelves of cheap toys and rubber flip flops, just looking for the relief of air conditioning and trying not to draw negative attention to themselves. I would see them gathered at the corner of our grocery store plaza, with their hands shoved into their pockets, waiting endlessly for the chance at working as day laborers. They looked so weary, so worn out. Where did they sleep at night? What did they eat when they didn't find work that day? What if an apple from my yard might give them a moment of comfort?

Wow, it sounds so benevolent, doesn't it? Until I found those tomatoes missing this morning and partially lost my mind. 

See, San Diego is starting to become more sustainable and urban garden-friendly, but not having the water resources of Portland and northern California, yards around here are more likely to hold drought tolerant plants, fake plastic grass, or rock gardens. Although the drought has made people more tolerant of each other's landscaping choices, I still feel self-conscious about our front yard. Our dead grass apocalypse-landscape lawn was one of many last year, when the drought was in the news every day, but now I've started to see lush green lawns again, despite the fact that this year's El Nino storms had almost no effect on reducing drought conditions in San Diego and 2016 promises a La Nina storm system, which will bring drier than normal conditions. Now that the neighborhood has started to perk up, our food forest is an eyesore. The sunflowers I planted for the pollinators (Seen a Bee Lately?), massive, with heads 18" across and standing about 12' high, are wilting as they set their seeds--and I want those seeds for next year's planting and for the chickens. Trouble is, they have to sit in the sun and finish ripening on the stalk, with their droopy brown leaves dangling from their amazonian stalks and the petals curled and dried out around the heads. The pumpkin vines started fading as the pumpkin crop ripened on the vine; the huge leaves and sprawling green vines quickly turned from gorgeous expanse of verdant abundance to dead and dry and brown forest of death--which has to stay while the last of the pumpkins finish turning orange. The lettuce has bolted and turned to huge brown obelisks as the seeds set. It's the end of the season and I can't wait to rip everything out. I feel like everyone's watching me water and thinking, "This is what she's making out of all those gallons of water? Basically an abandoned lot?"

And you came in the night and stole my tomatoes. 

Why not the tomatillos? I have more tomatillos and serrano peppers than I could ever eat or turn into salsa. There's kale in abundance and butter lettuce literally growing in the lawn. There's green onions! Why the tomatoes. I haven't even HAD a tomato this year yet. Yesterday I went to the grocery store, saw the roma tomatoes on the display and thought to myself smugly, nope. Not buying any of those because I have my own and they'll be ready any day now. 

Dammit. 

Sigh.

I was such a benevolent person before I had to put in any work for my imaginary food forest. No one else came and tilled the ground by hand or saved every scrap of compostable garbage for months to make compost or bought organic vegetable fertilizer. No one else got up early every morning to help me water or hauled buckets of conserved shower water down to the garden to feed those tomatoes. No one else picked bugs off by hand, or wrestled with ethical questions: I have chickens to provide manure for my garden--when they stop laying eggs is that manure worth what I feed them or do I cull them to make room for new ones? No one else lives with the eyesore in the hopes that what they're doing is making a difference...oh. 

Once I actually read Novella Carpenter's "Farm City" I found out her benevolence was taxed too, when she waited for months for a prized heirloom varietal of watermelon she'd been nurturing to ripen. She woke one morning, looking forward to checking to see if her baby was ready, and found it had been picked during the night. She railed angrily and was furious with her neighbors or whatever wandering stranger had decided to come into her garden and take the very best thing available, the one thing she'd wanted only for herself.

Ultimately Novella made peace with the watermelon thief. How could she not? She'd mentally declared the garden open to all the happy strangers who wandered in to take carrots, onions, and plums. She couldn't in good conscience say to herself "you're welcome to everything here, but only after I've gone through and taken what I want". 

I don't know if I'm there yet.

Ugh. GOD. We all love each other. I GET IT. 

The book "The $64 Tomato" really addresses the struggle we food gardeners have to address--food you grow yourself is not free. If you add up the cost of water (did I mention? State water authorities in California suddenly realized last year that with consumers doing the responsible thing and cutting back on their water by 25% to defray the water shortages in the state, they also were going to be losing 25% of their business--so they raised prices to compensate. Now we pay the same or more for using 25% less water), vegetable fertilizer (do you live in perfectly fertile farm land that's been wandered by free range cattle for decades, dropping manure like little gold patties all over the place just waiting for tomato plants to sprout? Please call me. That's incredibly sexy), seeds/plants, and compost to build the soil back up for the next season, backyard tomatoes are not free. If you plant things like blueberries that really don't survive and flourish except in an acidic soil, and you have to amend your soil with store-bought amendments (I don't have elemental sulfate in my medicine cabinet) constantly, those costs go up even further. I will never again take for granted those bags of vegetables or citrus fruits people leave on the table in the break room.

Double sigh.

The truth is my tomato plants are covered in nice sized fruit and I will have plenty of tomatoes once they start ripening. I can spare three tomatoes, whether they were the first of the harvest or the last on the vine. Do I wish I had been able to have the thrill of picking the first red tomatoes, after having watched them eagerly for weeks for signs of ripening? Of course. Do I really hope that the person who did get to pick those tomatoes was hungry and in need? OF COURSE! Do I not want to think about the fact that it could be the teenagers that wander our neighborhood grafitti-ing stop signs and toilet papering trees didn't take them to, like, throw at people? Yeah. Obvs. I wish I hadn't mentioned it because now I'm, like positive that happened. 

But would I give up my front yard foot forest, with the sun and the space, the birds that are nesting in my giant sunflowers, the Monarch butterflies I keep finding on my nasturtiums, the abundant basil patch that cost me three bucks instead of $15, the fresh onions and kale and tomatillos and the strings of serrano peppers hanging in my kitchen? And really, would I give up the chance to share fresh tomatillos and amazingly flavorful berries and tomatoes that taste like fresh warm sunshine, even with people who didn't ask for permission first?

Nope, never. And someday I'll have my chocolate waterfall too.

Narciso's Drunken Garden

I've been obsessed with Narciso's drunken garden ever since I discovered it while reading aloud to my English class. Our school, not in the urban barrio exactly, but barrio adjacent, is set in the midst of concrete and blacktop. Helicopters fly overhead often enough that we don't really hear them anymore. Our part of the city is starved for green. It exists in astroturf and paint and precious spots, all-to-small spots where ground cover jasmine is allowed to grow. The day I first read Narciso's garden to my class, construction was happening at the school; jackhammers were tearing up the access road that ran behind our building and there was a constant din of roofing hammers as men nailed down asphalt shingles right above us. By the time Cico and Tony reached Narciso's garden, I was shouting to be heard over the din; my teenaged students were gigging uncomfortably as both my frustration and my determination to continue the lesson rose. I stopped short and dialed the main office on my room phone; someone must have said hello on the other end but the noise was so cacophonous I couldn't hear it. "I. CAN'T. TEACH. LIKE THIS!" I shouted furiously into the phone, held the receiver out the door, where a construction worker helpfully bit his jackhammer into a particularly stubborn chunk of rock in a fantastic explosion of sound. Over it all was the ping ping ping of the metal hammers on the roof and the sounds of the men shouting instructions to each other. I noticed the line had gone dead in my hand and came back into the classroom to redial but before I could, the noise outside stopped. The silence assaulted our ears with a shock like a cymbal crash. My students were all sitting up absolutely straight and wide-eyed. There was perfect quiet in the room. With shaking hands I closed the door and redialed the office. "Thank you." My voice was hoarse from shouting. "Certainly." The school secretary's crisp voice sounded strange, distorted after so much noise. I replaced the phone on its hook, turned back to my class, and opened to page 110.

"We drew closer and peered through the dense curtain of green which surrounded the small adobe hut. I could not take my eyes from the garden. Every kind of fruit and vegetable I knew seemed to grow in the garden. Even the air was sweet to smell. I was bewildered. Everywhere I looked there were fruit-laden trees and rows and rows of vegetables. The ground was soft to walk on. The fragrance of the sun-dazzling flowers was deep, and soft, and beautiful. He pulled some carrots from the soft, dark earth and we sat down to eat. I had never eaten anything sweeter or juicier in my life. 'In the spring, Narciso gets drunk. He stays drunk until the bad blood of spring is washed away. Then the moon of planting comes over the elm trees and shines on the horde of last year's seeds--It is then that he gathers the seeds and plants. He dances as he plants, and he sings. He scatters the seeds by moonlight, and they fall and grow--The garden is like Narciso. It is drunk.'"--Rudolfo Anaya, Bless Me, Ultima

My students were silent. No heads were laid on arms on their desks. Some were sitting back, hands wrapped behind their heads, in a posture of relaxation. Some had their eyes closed, with half smiles across their faces. They were happy, thinking of it, and at the same time sad. I could see some of them were thinking about how they had never seen a place that could be described in that way: abundance. In the silence it bloomed, that green place, that place where carrots could be pulled out of the ground and not out of plastic bags, where a root could be juicy, where something could be eaten straight from the soil. In that place, "drunk" wasn't something hard and cold and sick; it could mean dancing and music and spilling over with life. For just one moment the scent of pouring tar from outside faded and I could taste it, that cool, sweet, fragrant air; and I could see that my teenagers, hoodied and tired, jaded and disillusioned already at 15, surrounded by the sensory grime of the city, could taste it too, and were revived, if only for an instant.

It haunts me, that garden. It's a magic place.

See, what Narciso inherently knew is no different from the legend of the Three Sisters planting that Native Americans were supposed to have used in their farming--some plants can inspire each other to greatness. The Three Sisters planting method uses mounds of earth in which are planted a kernel of corn, a squash seed, and a bean. The corn provides a natural pole for the beans to climb; the beans stabilize the corn stalks and fix nitrogen into the soil with their roots; and the shallow rooted squash provides a natural mulch with their huge leaves that shade weeds from growing and keeps the water in the soil from evaporating. At the end of the season the husks, squash vines and leaves, and bean plants can be turned back into the soil to build up the organic structure leaving you, miraculously, with better soil than you started with.

I started companion planting this year in an effort to capture the magic. I had already tried planting garlic cloves at the roots of my rose plants to great effect--I haven't had a single aphid since, and to my surprise, even though I just used old, sprouting cloves from my crisper drawer, the garlic sprouted and formed new bulbs, giving me an inexhaustible supply of super pungent "spring" or "new" garlic, like bulbous green onions and even more flavorful. Encouraged by my success, I turned to my books (The Complete Guide to Companion Planting; Carrots Love Tomatoes; and Groundbreaking Food Gardens) for inspiration and set out to make sure that every thing I planted this year had a friend in the garden.

Blue-purple borage plants attract bees.
Healthy strawberry plants set runners
alongside chocolate mint, that creeps
throughout. 

Having struggled with slugs getting into my strawberry beds I arranged the new bare root plants around a central chocolate mint plant (any mint will do, I just happen to like the complex scent of the chocolate mint in the air and in my tea). Slugs supposedly hate the smell of mint, so I had the option to either mulch with the mint leaves or plant the mint in the bed directly. One of the main problems with mint is its abundant runners, but I decided to try an experiment and see whether I could train the runners where I wanted them to go (between the new strawberry plants) and by cutting it back when it got out of hand, keep it under control. The mint did grow like gangbusters; but by pulling up its runners and setting them between the strawberry plants (and out of the way of the new strawberry plant runners as they emerged), and regular cutting for tea and bouquets in the house (I really liked the freshness of a handful of rough mint stems and leaves in a jelly jar in each bathroom), so far the mint hasn't overwhelmed the strawberries. For pollination, I planted borage seeds in each corner of the bed and along the midsection of each side, as borage is supposed to be a huge bee attractor. I was not expecting the enormous three foot high plants with their amazonian leaves (like nettle-textured lettuce leaves but the size of my arm!) to come exploding into my strawberry beds! The bees definitely go crazy for the star-shaped bright blue flowers--at any time of the day, despite the dearth of bees in California in general, I can always find bees working the borage flowers--but their huge leaves were crowding out my strawberries. I was able to transplant several of the mature plants to other beds successfully, though the seed packet doesn't recommend transplantation, and the rest I thinned out a few handfuls of leaves at a time, feeding the succulent leaves to my chickens and putting them down as a mulch for weeds. No slugs, lots of bees, and a very healthy strawberry bed.

A lot of borage. Probably too much borage. An embarrassment.  Of borage.

A blue borage flower pokes into the tomatillo
vines, which are already setting round,
husked fruit. Hot Serrano peppers,
with white flowers and dark green fruit
like tiny eggplants, mingle with grassy
stalks from Walla Walla onions. Roma tomato
vines bear delicate yellow flowers, hiding
fat pear-shaped fruits under the leaves. Basil
sprouts straight up from amid the cacophony.

I turned to my tomato beds. One of the biggest mistakes I made in bad companions was in my early years of mainly tomato and strawberry gardening, by placing them together. Tomatoes and strawberries are susceptible to verticillium, a soil-bourne fungal disease that can stay in the soil for as long as five years; so they should never be planted where either has grown within that time frame. Once I straightened myself and my garden out, separating the tomato plants from the strawberries, I also moved them into all of the other beds, to keep the aphids from descending upon them. I had used marigolds the year before to some success but this year I decided to add nasturtiums, a "trap" plant that attracts the aphids and can be uprooted and discarded when it becomes infested, keeping the aphid colonies away from the precious tomatoes. Basil went into the center of the beds where the tomatoes were, supposedly improving the growth and the flavor of the tomatoes while benefitting from the tomatoes with more flavorful leaves itself, as well as repelling flies and mosquitoes. Borage went into the corners of these beds too, a deterrent to tomato worms, and said to also improve the tomatoes flavor and growth. The bee activity from the borage also means that my tomatoes are fruiting months earlier than I've ever seen them; typically I have a very late crop, and in past years I've had no crop at all unless I shake the vines to pollinate the flowers. Onions tucked in between the plants fight disease. Bush beans in some of the tomato beds were a good succession planting crop: they fixed nitrogen into the soil and by the time the beans were done for the season and uprooted for mulch, the tomatoes were just starting to spread out into the spaces they left behind.

"Alaska Mix" nasturtiums, poppy red, climb up the outside
of roma tomato cages while Walla Walla onions send up
strong grassy stalks in the corners of the bed. "Spookie"
pumpkins vine around the beds, shading the soil and keeping
moisture in. 

I put marigolds around my apple and cherry trees and the aphids magically disappeared. My peppers, both hot and sweet, went into the tomatillo beds with basil and a tomato plant or two. I thought of it like a salsa bed where, by the end of the summer I'd be harvesting everything I needed to go into a perfect jar of spicy, flavorful deliciousness.

Finally, a "drunk" experiment. I have one bed where despite the full sun, the well-drained, well-amended soil, the alpaca and chicken manure and the abundant worm castings, nothing would grow all winter, not even lettuce, a great cool weather crop for California that grew in my other beds October through February. I tried seeds, I tried seedlings, I tried bird netting, but nothing would grow there but weeds. Finally, in desperation, I took the sack of sunflower seeds I'd harvested from last year's sunflowers and a packet of zinnia seeds I'd gotten in a card and anything I had in my seed box that looked like it was about to be expired. At least I could, I don't know. Fertilize the ground with them or something. Feed the birds if nothing else. As February started to warm up into true spring, I scattered the seeds in mixed handfuls and covered them with a layer of compost, expecting nothing.

Certainly not expecting seven foot sunflower stalks. 

I had a few pumpkin seedlings so I put those in there as well. We'll just see what lives. It was a challenge. Would flowers live? Would lettuce seeds live? Could gourds, notoriously short-lived and unfruitful in my garden, live in the Death Bed? Here. How about some poppy seeds. I started to channel the drunken ecstasy I imagined Narcisso finding as he danced and sang the magic songs in his moonlight garden. Here. Live! Live! I threw in seeds with abandon. Ten seeds weren't enough? Try this! Here's a thousand seeds. Grow and shade each other and cover each other from the birds. Maybe some of you will live. Maybe some of you will grow fruitful. It became an exercise in possibility.

And astonishingly, it bore fruit. Sunflowers came up first, strong and solid, their stems thickening up quickly, the ones that survived the birds pushing up past the bitten-down corpses of their brethren. Zinnias and poppies came up between them, shorter and crooked, the poppies tentatively shaking out delicate ferny skirts and the zinnias stubbornly poking up chubby round flower heads, the first signs of yellow and orange to draw the bees back to my garden. The birds gobbled up poppies and zinnias seeds and while they were sitting on the edges of the raised beds eating baby sunflower sprouts, distributed the seeds into the grass around the beds, so that the flowers bloomed and spread all over the edges of the garden, spilling out in crazy, messy abundance. The pumpkins stretched their legs and twined up the sunflower stalks, sending out spiraling brilliant green tendrils to pull themselves up the sturdy poles and burst into insane fireworks with explosive yellow blooms and pollen so thick it fell in piles into the petals. I found bees sleeping inside the flowers every morning, drunk from gorging themselves on the golden ambrosia. Pumpkins swelled and bloomed as the vines climbed out of the bed, spreading between the other beds in the garden, curling around the other plants protectively, shading the soil with enormous deep green leaves a foot across, hiding the pregnant female flowers as they filled out in glorious, round-bellied curves.

I haven't found anything in any companion planting books about drunken planting, or how zinnias and poppies and sunflowers and pumpkins make each other happy, but somehow where that sullen patch of dirt had been glowering in the sun, a garden grows. The Death Bed became my Drunken Garden, a little corner of that magic place I'd only read about, orange and gold and vermillion and crimson and blooming and fruiting and dancing. I'll always companion plant by the book, but I think I'll always save one little corner for a Drunken Garden, where I can wade among pumpkin leaves up to my knees, shaded from the summer sun by the sunflowers growing far above my head, seduced by the fragrant mixed perfume of flowers and tomato leaves and the droning hum of the bees. The abundance curls its tendrils around me and climbs irrevocably inside. 

Mean Girls 2

The reign of terror continues in my backyard. Of course it does. Chicks thrive on drama.

Left to right: Maran, Rhode Island Red, and two Buff Orpingtons.

It's been two weeks since I integrated my ten week old pullets with my existing flock of one year old laying hens, and I first understood with drastic certainty what exactly the term "Pecking Order" meant. As with popular teenage girls there was absolutely no maternal instinct from the Queen Bees to the Wannabes; my redhead, a gorgeous, slender Rhode Island Red that had previously been my favorite chick quickly transformed herself into my most despised as she showed her true, vile colors, snatching one of the new girls bald headed and leaving her in a bloody heap.

You think you can sleep on my roost and just walk into my coop like you own this piece? This is MY HOUSE! MY HOUSE!

I had read extensively about techniques to integrate new pullets into an existing flock (see chapter one of the Mean Girls Saga) but I was utterly unprepared for exactly how vicious the Queen Bees were going to be, and how committed they were going to be to continuing their enduring reign of terror. For the first weekend I kept my newly integrated flock (a black and white Maran, Rhode Island Red, and brown and gold Welsummer, with two blonde Buff Orpington pullets) in a large fenced off portion of the back yard, probably three times the amount of space they had access to in their range, with plenty of greens and flowers from the garden, sunflower seeds, extra food and scratch, and all the caterpillars I could find. Even with all this entertainment to keep them busy--a virtual ASB smorgasbord of spirit week activities!--the Queen Bees continued to torment the new girls mercilessly. The pullets huddled miserably in corners around the yard behind potted plants and between fence posts, anywhere they could squeeze themselves in that the other hens couldn't get to them. The smaller of the two Orp pullets took to just squawking in despair, digging herself a belly hole and hiding her head.

I can't see you, you're not there, this is my happy place. THIS IS MY HAPPY PLACE!

The bigger of the two teenagers every once in a while would go for some food or water and one or the other of the big chicks would peck her mercilessly back into her corner and peck at her head while she shrieked in terror.

Yeah. It was a little disconcerting. 

Worse was night time. The big chicks refused to allow the littles onto the roosts and drove them, screaming into the space under the feeder. For the entire weekend I woke up in a cold sweat at 5 a.m., hurrying down to the coop to try to beat the sun and the chickens' internal alarm clock to the next installment of "Saw VII--Feathers and Blood". If I was slow I'd come down to the coop shaking off its supports as the big hens kicked the living crap out of the little ones. I'd let the big ones out of the coop into the yard. The Rhode Island Red would linger inside the coop, violently teaching the little ones painful lessons, about, you know. Living, or breathing the same air, moving, continuing to exist...

Did I SAY she could drink out of the waterer that I. DRINK FROM? 

The littles took to hiding in the relative safety of the nest box, where they would continually be brutalized by the older hens but at least they could stay out of sight and mind for most of the day. When I went to check on them on the third day both of the littles had free bleeding wounds on the back of their heads and over their beaks and the bigger of the two baby chicks was missing huge patches of her feathers. When the littles did emerge from the coop it was because one of my three formerly beautiful, gentle, beloved cooing adult hens would transform into a brutal, cruel and merciless sadist, sauntering up into the coop to drive the littles out where the other two were waiting in a horrifying gauntlet. The ringleader, almost always the Rhode Island Red, would drive the baby chicks down the line and the other two would viciously peck her until she made it past them into a corner; but with them blocking her exit, she'd have no choice but to run past them again into the abattoir, where the Redhead was waiting to turn her around and make her run back in again under the knife-sharp beaks. When the little chicks weren't out the big ones LITERALLY SHARPENED THEIR BEAKS on the concrete.

Not only was the Rode Island Red asserting her dominance over the little chicks, she had taken to letting us know that she was the boss over EVERYTHING, including me. When I broke up one of their gang fights she stalked over to me aggressively and angrily pecked at me. I reached down to thump her on the head but she dodged and pecked my foot hard enough to draw blood. 

You just did what?! Oh, no, sweetie. It just got a whole lot easier to talk about culling. 

I knew there was a pecking order being reset and the birds had to figure it out; but it was only as I started another day listening to the bone-chilling Screaming of the Chicks that realized just how little information there was in the books I'd read about chicken care on integrating new pullets into an existing flock--all variations on the same theme. "Little chicks will have a hard time of it, there's no way around it." Uh...ok. But how many days do I have to listen to them screaming? Two? Twenty? The rest of my life? WHEN? The books were silent on the timeline. 

My books failing me, I remembered a friend who also had chickens, and who I recalled had put down one hen for (killing?) another in the flock; it occurred to me it might have been during flock integration. He had a ton of great suggestions including something cool called a Flock Block, basically a suet cake filled with seeds and treats to keep the big chicks busy; but I had already spent a week throwing out everything I could think of into the chicken yard and it hadn't stopped the Queen Bees from thrashing the little guys into quivering messes. He did say though that if the little chicks were bleeding, the other chickens would respond to the color red and wouldn't be able to resist pecking at it; and he suggested trying to isolate the ringleader to see if that would force her to have to get back into the pecking order herself. 

It was hard to isolate the little chicks, knowing they'd have to start their horrors all over again once I integrated them again, but time to heal and grow bigger seemed like an okay temporary plan. In the morning I let the big hens out of the coop and then closed the coop door behind them, sealing the little chicks safely inside. That night I let them all out to free range but isolated the Rhode Island Red. She was frantic, running back and forth inside her enclosure furiously pecking at the wire and squawking indignantly. Her little pal the black and white Maran immediately took up the mantle of the Queeniest Bee and started harassing the little chicks on her behalf, going so far as to lunge at me while I was locking the run. I knocked her out of the way with a nudge and she looked up at me balefully, but backed off. In her little isolation box the Rhode Island Red watched it all with malevolent intelligence, plotting and planning, watching and waiting. That night, we waited for full dark before letting the hens into their coop (chickens have a powerful roosting instinct that drives them toward high shelter when dusk falls and become frantic when they're denied it), and when we finally did let them inside, they went in quietly . We only heard a single alarmed squawk from one of the littles and then everything was still except for their sweet cooing. 

Could it be that easy? Isolate the ringleader and take away her power? God. They should make a movie out of this...

Well, it wasn't quite that easy. It took almost two weeks for the little guys to fully heal their open wounds, and the feathers are just starting to come back on the little girl that was snatched bald, leaving her head looking a little scabrous. But this week for the first time, although the little chicks still took care to stay well out of the way of the big ones, the little chicks actually ventured out into the main area; partook of some of the greens I'd thrown down for the whole flock; walked around in the sunshine; generally lived with some semblance of normalcy. The Rhode Island Red is still the boss bitch but she's reclaimed a healthy respect for humans and after being ungently disciplined for her naughty pecking behaviors she stays out of our way; while the other two adult hens are even more submissive to us, dropping down into a squatting position and spreading their wings when we approach. For the most part they ignore the littles and bedtime is a quiet affair, no more knock down, drag out chick fights. We even managed, finally, to get the big hens to stay on the roosts when we set the little ones up there with them. If you're keeping track, that was one week of failure, two weeks of recuperation, and one week of growing pains to a sort of uneasy truce. No one's bleeding, and I only occasionally have to close my windows because they're screaming at each other. 

Yay, success. No one's dead. 

Level One Pumpkin Latte

What is it about pumpkins that makes us personify and yet mutilate them, dress up as them, fill our perfectly good lattes with their guts? What is the strange hold they maintain over autumn-crazed white girls that allowed Big Pumpkin to make this kind of madness possible?

Every year, the Great Pumpkin rises out of the pumpkin patch that he thinks is the most sincere and allows himself to be transformed into these convenient pocket packs.

Like all white girls in season-starved Southern California, I admit I go a little crazy for the orange chalkboard penned menus in Starbucks around October. Add in the little green vining curlicues and something primal inside me rises up to order a pumpkin latte.  If I can get it in the last week of September I feel smug that I've beaten the system and have stolen a tiny bit of the perfect ambrosial flavor of the autumn they get to have for free in--I don't know. Maine? 

It's all SOOOOO easy when you have deciduous trees and a temperate continental climate, isn't it. Smug.

Pumpkins were one of the first things I tried to grow in my urban farm. I had visions of fields of curling pumpkin vines, the likes of which I had always hoped to see at the so-called pumpkin farms that dot San Diego county but which are typically parking lots covered in straw bales and cardboard crates of the same pumpkins you can now just pick up at Vons. Even the mythical "Big Max" pumpkins, those huge monsters that grow to a whopping 50-100 pounds and you could conceivably sit inside (not that I was entertaining ideas of making myself a fairy tale carriage...really...) now wait patiently in piles right outside the local big box grocery store. The mystery of the growing pumpkin is stolen from us. I want to pick my pumpkin off the vine, not off the shelf. 

The other thing that increasingly troubles me with pumpkins is that even the fresh from the farm pun'kins are bred specifically for carving and not for food anymore. Open up a typical "Jack o'Lantern" pumpkin and you'll find specially selected innards that are stringy, not goopy, and easy to remove; almost no seeds, and nothing inside that you could make into a pie.

Or into Pringles. 

Pumpkins have become kind of like turkeys. Over the last century we decided that we didn't need turkeys to taste good, particularly, we just need them to be big. Selective breeding gave us turkeys that gained weight quickly, even if it does sometimes outpace the ability of the bird to support that weight. Since turkeys don't need to brood their eggs, and a brooding turkey hen actually has a lower laying rate, no one bred for maternal instinct and for the most part it has disappeared from commercial turkeys. The new shape and size of that turkey, with its heavy and muscled frame, make it almost impossible for adult turkeys to complete the mating act, and as a result the fertility of commercial turkeys is so low that most turkey farmers use artificial insemination to fertilize their eggs. What we're left with is a commodity that has been so uniquely bred for its singular purpose that what remains is little more than a cheap corn-to-protein engine.

Pumpkins are no different--a holiday novelty used far more often in decorative piles stacked up by the doorstep in the Barefoot Contessa's flawless Martha's Vineyard colonial, or carved up into dizzying Pinterest-inspired monuments to insanity before ultimately being smashed on the streets of the suburbs, than they are ever as a food source. Pumpkins were crucial for the pilgrims, man! This was the gourd that kept Native Americans fed through the winter and eventually kept the British colonists from starving during their lean times. Given our propensity for pumpki-fying everything in sight (I admit it, I had a pumpkin-spice facial at a spa in Palm Desert), shouldn't we at least know what a pumpkin seedling looks like, and show people who carved pumpkins after 1997 what a goopy pumpkin that you could potentially make a pumpkin latte out of looks like?

Pumpkin latte, step 1. 

Pumpkin seeds are super easy to sprout indoors; a fresh packet of seeds will pop up strong, waxy leaves with satisfying reliability, cracking through the seed shell from the inside and bursting into life. The seedlings, started in February or March, grow slowly at first, but then explode into gargantuan leaves of amazonian proportions and myriad brilliant yellow starburst flowers by May. The vines start creeping over the sides of raised beds, tiny crazy curlicues corkscrewing up retaining walls and rocky slopes and fences. Mine mingle among the sunflowers and climb the sturdy stalks, blossoming under the canopy of the sunflower seed heads.

In my early attempts, like so many things with urban farming, I assumed that because the seeds were so easy to sprout, pumpkin growing would be easy. I mean, in Laura Ingalls Wilder's book "Farmer Boy" Almanzo is, I don't know. seven? And manages to use some kind of milk-feeding technique to grow a prize-winning monster pumpkin that beats all the adult farmers at the fair. I guess I thought if a little kid could do it, how hard could it be? I conveniently glossed over the fact that at seven Almanzo cut ice, dug potato vines, drove a team of his own oxen, and broke a colt, having come from one of the most prosperous gentleman farming families in the East. This is a kid who comes from a farming community where the teacher literally, LITERALLY used a bullwhip to discipline the hard kids.

"I SAID, 'I' before 'E' except AFTER 'C'!"

Sure. That kid's experience was basically the exact same as mine, since I did drive to the fancy nursery and pick through the prettily illustrated seed packets and buy one.

Pumpkins were one of the first things that I actually researched before planting, although not enough to realize that I didn't need to sprout the entire packet of "Big Max" seeds. I ended up with twenty seedlings that all needed to be set out at crazy distances from each other in full sun and quickly realized I had spent weeks nurturing pumpkin-lets I was now going to have to kill, always a hard pill for me to swallow. But I dutifully selected the toughest seedlings with the strongest true leaves and planted them in holes along the side of a sunny slope like the seed packet suggested, with a scoop of compost in the hole. They grew quickly and expanded into vines of about a foot and then suddenly, sullenly refused to grow any further.

Shoot. Back to the web. Aha--squashes, and pumpkins in particular, are notoriously greedy feeders. I followed a recipe to make compost tea and started feeding my little vines regularly. Soon after they sprouted a handful of flowers, and about three of the ten developed into little yellow pumpkin babies.

The humble start of my pumpkin farming empire. 

The flowers kept coming but the pumpkins didn't, and even though I fed the vines with increasing frenetic regularity, the pumpkins didn't reach anything close to their promised size of 50-100 pounds. The seed packet promised that some record holding pumpkins had reached 300 pounds! Mine were about 5 pounds. Still--they did turn orange and it was fun to watch the vines climb up my rocky hill.

The next year I found a few pumpkin seeds in the bottom of the seed packet and threw them in my sprouting pods with the rest of my spring starts. Only one popped, so I figured I'd still get at least one nice pumpkin. I fed it better this time, planting it in a nice compost/garden soil mixture to begin with and adding vegetable fertilizer on top of the compost tea. I'd also read that when bees are scarce squash and pumpkins can be artificially inseminated (shades of the noble turkey!) so I watched to see when the female flowers appeared so I could pollinate them from the males. 

Alas, my pumpkin vine that year was an all-boys club. Even though I watched it like the hawks that circle my chicken coop, no female flowers ever sprouted. Boy flowers, in abundance. They had a full parade of sassy male flowers, showing off their gaudily dressed pollen sticks. But no girls showed up. I suspect they may have realized what I read, too late, that pumpkins aren't self-fertile, so even if the female flowers HAD sprouted, I wouldn't have been able to use the male flowers from that one lonely unicorn of a vine to make little incestuous pumpkin babies.

A story about a pumpkin vine that didn't know it was related to itself. 

Failure again. I tried for the third time this spring with "Spookie", a food and carving pumpkin that is supposed to have great flavor for pies as well as a strong shell for carving. Though I did discover all new ways to fail (putting seedlings into sunny but newly energy efficient windows that filter out UV light isn't a super successful strategy) I did use my past failures for good instead evil (plant more than one, plant in a good compost/manure/soil mix, fertilize fertilize fertilize through the flowering season) and to my delight, I got the chance to swallow my pride and artificially inseminate some pumpkins this year because the girls came out to play!

All the single ladies, all the single ladies...

Hey gurl, how YOU doin?

Female flowers have a little clearly evident circular ova, as in the top picture, while male flowers have a very prominent stamen they like to show off. The stamens are abundant with huge almost cartoonish pollen grains; it was quick and easy to play bee and use a cotton swab to gather quite a lot from the stamens, and from there do a little match making.

Cue the slow saxophone music. 

The female flowers start with little swollen round bellies under the petals to start with, about the size of a walnut, but once they've been pollinated they immediately start to grow like crazy sci-fi pregnancies. This little alien baby is only a few days old.

My pumpkin patch isn't the typical one, I suppose. Huge volunteer sunflowers came up from the compost I planted my pumpkin seedlings in, and since I like things a little out of control and overgrown, I let the sunflowers grow up above my head and shade the soil in a forest of stems and amazonian leaves; bachelor buttons are coming up at their roots with more bright yellow blossoms to attract the bees. The pumpkin vines twine up the thick sunflower stalks, creep up my fences and anything the iconic curlicues can grab onto, popping out flowers like fireworks at every height, and spill out over the sides of the raised beds; and this year since I fertilized and composted well enough the vines are growing in every direction with enormous spade sized leaves. "Spookie" comes out with a striped green rind a little like a watermelon and quickly grows from walnut to apple to a thick, dense grapefruit size within just a few weeks; and it's small, only about 6 pounds and probably more suited to the nutrition I can reasonably supply using my own homemade compost and chicken manure, without adding a lot of expensive packaged fertilizers.

Depending on your zone, "Spookie" can be planted between April and June and ripens fast, only around three months total, which can seem early; but once the pumpkins are totally orange and resist fingernail pressure (and the vines die back), cutting the pumpkins and letting them cure in the sun for ten days or so will make sure they last for the months we have to wait until reasonably indulging in pumpkin flavored Listerine. I always wondered how the fakey-fake pumpkin farms kept their pumpkins in huge piles sitting in parking lots or in cardboard boxes without them rotting--because one of the reasons they were truly the perfect food for both the Native Americans and the early colonial settlers was their perfect suitability to long-term storage. I can't wait until mine start to orange-up and start on the pie-making and the latte syrup and, obviously, come up with my own artisanal recipe for hand-baked pumpkin Pringles.