Saturday Morning

I woke up this morning and it was cold, really nice and cold, for the first time in what passes for Southern California fall. Recent sprinkles of rain have turned my barren, drought-ridden front yard into an oasis of wild grass, and I stood out there for a minute in my bare feet, savoring the icy crisp dew on the cold, sharp little blades and enjoying the pale glitter the morning light casts over all that bright and brilliant green.

It's a Saturday. There's no rush. I let the chickens out into their pen, feed them, look for eggs, and then move their run to the front yard so they can enjoy the new grass too. As I'm hauling their heavy pen I realize there are huge patches of clover here and there. Have I seen these before? I can't remember. In our days of the immaculately tended weed-free lawn? certainly not. But with the lawn abandoned to its own devices, the October rains have brought up soft springy patches of the stuff everywhere. The chickens pounce on it greedily and delicately pluck each individual oval leaf off the stem. I pull in some loofah gourd vines, these crazy seeds that have taken over my winter garden with their sprawling vines and enormous yellow flowers, and let the chickens have an extra treat on this cool morning.

I'm so enchanted with the green this morning I stop waiting for the baby kale I planted to grow into something respectably sized and just pluck the biggest leaf from each plant. I end up with a tiny salad that fits in my hand, too small for a bowl, maybe big enough to throw into a smoothie, but decide on a whim to just eat it raw. It's delicious, still cold with morning dew, mild and almost sweet with a flavor that can only be described as "green". It's fresh, it's alive, it's pulsing with nutrients pulled out of the sun and the soil and utterly unlike the bumpy, bitter leaves I've had from the store. It's not sweet, exactly, but there's something so craveable about it that makes me think maybe I should start my morning this way more often. There's fall broccoli coming up in the kale bed and I notice one of the plants has a little lavender flower hiding under the huge spade-shaped leaves.

I check on the fruit trees, the Gala apples we planted a month ago when it seemed the weather was turning and right before the record heat wave struck with its killing temperatures of over 100. The trees look fine, surprisingly, leaves are bright green and soft, and new leaves are sprouting. I dream about next year when we might be able to harvest enough for apple cider, apple pie, and unlimited snacks from the little trees. Then I glance over at my Meyer lemons, which finally produced this year, but are stubbornly refusing to ripen, branches weighed down with dozens of creamy green fruit that I scrutinize week after week, wondering if my eyes have played tricks on me or if they really have lightened to a more lime-green color? Today there's a truly yellow spot on one fruit and I'm encouraged. Maybe I'll actually get my fresh lemon curd before I die. Maybe.

I finish in the garden and go back in to make some almond milk. I haven't done this by myself before and I'm fascinated and delighted by the cloud of creamy white milk that pours out of the blender once I've put it through the unfortunate but aptly titled Nut Bag. I think about whether I've ever seen almond trees at the local nursery and wonder how long it takes from sapling to harvest. Could we really make milk from the nuts from our own trees? This week we collected our first eggs from our six month old hens and it simultaneously energized me to think about more sustainable living project (Beehives! Tilapia ponds! Hops!) and underlined how long-term these projects are. Blueberry bushes, bought in bloom and two weeks from fruiting, were easy. Nut trees? That might take a while. I decide to mentally table the trees and make myself a pumpkin chai almond milk latte like the Southern California white girl I am. Even though I don't own an infinity scarf, ugg boots or yoga pants, the fresh almond milk and the pumpkin taste amazing.

I've realized that Saturdays are insidious. When there's nothing to do except live in the moment you suddenly realize that living in the moment is pretty amazing. Every taste from my garden makes me want more, makes me think maybe I should make a double batch of the fresh bread that's so good we tear it in pieces and slather it with Kerry butter like we're living in 1952, that I should make sure we go to the Farmer's Market because maybe they'll have fresh arepas at the Venezuelan stand, these creamy, white corn, polenta-like thick tortillas filled with Spanish ham and coteja cheese and saffron. Could I spend the morning responding to the insane growth of weeds in my broccoli beds rather than the inane growth of my email inbox?

Three Myths About Living in California During the Drought

When I excitedly told my urban farming, super environmentalist, gray-water-reclamation-system-having friend that I was putting in a new gutter system with rain barrels I WAS SHOCKED. SHOCKED, I tell you. Because he said,

"I would put one in but it doesn't rain enough here."

I...what? What are you saying? What are you even talking about right now? We live in the same state. Do you really not know?

Oh god you really do not know. Oh, wow. Well, this is embarrassing, because listen:

Myth #1: California does not get enough rain for meaningful water reclamation. 

Okay, yes, GRANTED. This is a picture of California, and it looks bad. We are currently in one of the worst droughts in recorded history. We are in such a bad drought that ARIZONA is going to ship us some water. Arizona. That's the desert out east of Hollywood. I think the national plant might legit be a tumbleweed. You know what they have in Arizona? Signs that say "Turn off air conditioning for next 5 miles" because it's so hot there your car might explode. I'm extrapolating a little bit on that but I'm pretty sure spontaneous combustion is a recorded thing in Arizona. And they are giving us water. That's the kind of (dry) creek we're up right now. The brown areas on the map above bleed into reddish brown areas which are letting you know you may live in a place where trees are more likely to burst into flames that burn down your house than to shade you. It's dry here. Is what I'm saying.

So when the severe water restriction mandates went into effect this spring, I became hyper aware of all the places I might get water or recycle water or just use water more wisely--and then it rained, unexpectedly, a whole half inch. There were some spots along the side of my house where water was dripping, since, like most of the houses on my block, we don't have full roof gutters, just about ten feet protecting the entryway; so I threw some buckets and watering cans under the drips and then an empty trashcan under the biggest downspout. I thought I might collect a gallon or two altogether and get enough to water the tomatoes the next week.

I came back a few hours later and every bucket was overflowing along with my thirty gallon trashcan. 

I started getting excited and ran out to scramble up another empty trashcan. Since we'd let the lawn die and we'd started composting, the green waste trashcan was just sitting there empty. I stuck it under the downspout too. 

Filled to the top. 

WHAT THE HELL.

I watched sadly as the slow storm continued to pour off my roof, unchecked; I'd run out of containers to catch it with. Everything I owned that could hold water was holding water, down to the lids for the trash cans themselves, and still it was spilling out everywhere--all from a half inch of rain.

If I had big enough barrels, how much could I have actually caught?

The formula, says Arizona Waterwise, is the square footage of your roof x the amount of rain in inches x 0.623. So for example, for a 1000 square foot roof, a half inch of rain yields over 300 gallons of rainwater. In 2014-2015, the dry year that led us into this historic drought, San Diego still received around 9 inches of rain. That's over 5400 gallons of rain that could be collected just from one medium sized house even in the midst of a historic drought. To put it into perspective, you could water a 1000 square foot lawn for 9 weeks straight with that much water. If you include the 9 weeks of water your lawn got from being rained on, you end up with 4 and a half months that you don't need to water that lawn.

Now if you have a garden....

Myth #2 A Garden takes more water than a lawn

Are you serious right now? I can't tell if you're serious.

I've mentioned before that my neighbors are awkwardly involved in every thing I do in my garden (and chicken coop, and mini-coop construction shoppe) and one of them recently asked us "How are you managing to keep those vegetables watered when we we're not supposed to water more than once a week?"

You're worried about my garden when your yard looks like this?



While it's true that some parts of the garden have the same water requirements as the lawn (an inch a week) garden plants have some specific advantages over green lawns when it comes to reducing your water consumption.

• First of all, even with six raised beds and five fruit trees I don't even come CLOSE to filling up the entire space my lawn took up. While someday I hope to have expanded into the full lawn space I still won't use every bit of my square footage because of the extra space I have to give up to paths and the unused space between plants. For this year, even with all I have in the garden, I changed my water usage from over 10,000 gallons a week for my lawn to 175 gallons a week for my food garden.That means a single storm that drops even a half inch of water will cover my garden for two weeks, and with the rain itself and what I can collect in my barrels, a drought rainfall of 9" in a year will still cover me for 36 weeks out of the year--in other words, the entire growing season.
• Second, fruiting plants shade themselves. My squash vines grow super densely and they and my bean plants grow spade shaped umbrella leaves perfectly suited to shading their fruits. Tomato plants even when they're staked twine together and shade each other. They keep the ground from getting hot enough to let the water evaporate. 
• Mulching around garden plants retains water that can be released slowly into the ground over time, and reduces evaporation even more. I use cedar chips, pine needles, and dead leaves; anything that can protect the soil and will decompose and add nutrients back into the soil. While you *could* do this with a green lawn by letting the grass clippings fall back down into the lawn, it detracts from the bright green color and makes the lawn look dead--and since curb appeal is a huge reasons for having the lawn in the first place, using a mulch totally defeats the purpose. 

Myth #3 The upcoming El Nino Storm will end the drought

Even though scientists are calling this winter's coming storm a "Godzilla" El Nino, the biggest storm in about fifty years, it still will not be enough to end the drought. Warm waters off the coast may counteract some of the strength of the storms, lessening torrential rains to soaking showers. While that sounds good in terms of reducing the risk of floods, our groundwater reservoirs are so depleted they'd need several deep, heavy rains to even begin replacing the deficit. Because the waters in the Pacific are so warm, scientists also theorize that the storms may be too warm to deliver a good snowpack in the Sierra Mountains; and the warm weather system may push storms down into Southern California rather than the north.. Hooray for sunny San Diego, but most of the important water reservoirs that feed the state are in the north; and the Sierra snowpack is essential for a slow melting water supply that will eventually seep back into the groundwater reservoirs. 

If the warm temperature system doesn't diffuse the effect of El Nino, there's still the problem of getting all the water from the El Nino storms to stay on the ground long enough to soak back into the groundwater reservoirs, rather than flooding out to the sea. Our drought-stricken state hasn't planned for big enough man-made reservoirs and many will overflow in the first rains this winter, letting the water escape back to the sea before a slow release can let the water sink back into the groundwater caverns. This will be the case in the fields and neighborhoods as well if the storms are too strong; torrents will create floods that wash straight down our storm drains rather than seeping slowly back into the ground.

Finally, our historic water use has been robbing our groundwater and reservoirs at a far higher rate than any El Nino could realistically replenish. We are a desert state that inexplicably has bottled water companies robbing our crucial water sources (Nestle was recently found to be pumping water from the San Bernadino National Forest with little to no oversight from the National Forestry Service). The advent of green lawns in America in the 1800s, supplemented with the invention of the lawnmover, the rotary push lawnmover, the garden hose and the availability of grass seeds, finally trickled over to California with the construction of the suburbs in the 1940s; and the American Garden Club convinced new homeowners that it was not just their privilege but their duty to maintain a beautiful, healthy lawn--and no one took that to heart more than Southern California.We poured 10,000 gallons a week every week into those lawns, forgetting to turn off the the sprinklers during the rare rains, forgetting to fix broken sprinkler heads that spurted water or sent it flooding out into the street. We washed our cars every week and took long luxurious baths. Resource stricken countries like China who lack the soil to grow enough feed for their livestock...import it from California, stripping 100 billion gallons of water a year in the form of alfalfa from our own resource pool.

After even one century of flagrant water abuse like this, we'd need back to back to back years of El Nino storms to replenish the lakes and reservoirs and the groundwater. The historic El Nino in the 1950's that this year's storm system is being compared to only brought in about twice the average annual rainfall. (27" El Nino vs 12.5" average annual)

The days of acres of lush green lawns in Southern California are gone, but with properly installed gutters that can help you take advantage of every square foot of your roof and rain barrels that can help you contain as much of that water as possible, rainwater collection can make a food garden with no drought deficit a reality. Especially on El Nino years like this, don't we owe it to ourselves to take every advantage of a rare opportunity to stock up on our most precious resources?

...particularly when rainwater collection is so easy you can do it in heels.

Flavors of the Season

Eating seasonally is amazing! But once you come home from the farmer's market and the U-pick apple orchard...what do you do with all that squash? Here are some of my favorite seasonal recipes. The vegetable recipes are my own modifications from "Practical Paleo" by Diane Sanfilippo and the easy apple crisp comes courtesy of Robert Irvine.

Apple Crisp

Just about any grocery store including the big box carry a little red cardboard box in the fruit section by the apples with "Apple Crisp" on the package. I bought a pack of this a few weeks ago and made it, and although it was delicious, I realized I had essentially paid $2 for a paper packet of a few spoonfuls of sugar. Buy it if you don't have the staples on hand and you just want to slice apples and go. Here's how to make it from scratch:

6 apples, peeled and sliced (choose your sugar content wisely, as the crumb topping will add extra sweetness. Crisp Galas are my favorite and I didn't find them to be too sweet in this, but if you like a tart contrast, choose Granny Smiths. In any case, choose an apple that has a crisp bite, not a soft apple like a Red or Golden Delicious, as they won't stand up to the heat of the baking)

6 tbl white sugar

1/3 c brown sugar

3/4 c flour

1 tsp cinnamon

6 tbl butter, cut into small pieces

Preheat oven to 400. Arrange sliced apples in baking dish. Cut dry ingredients into butter slices with 2 knives or use a pastry blender until a fine crumb forms. Sprinkle topping over sliced apples and bake for 30 minutes. 

I haven't made this with pears but I imagine a sturdy pear like a Bosc or an Anjou would hold up to the heat well, especially mixed with the apples. 

Roasted Carrots

Don't be tempted to use "baby" carrots for this recipe; they're usually carrots from the reject pile that have been shaved down to a miniature size, and typically too woody for cooking. Cut your carrots into as equal of a dimension as possible so that they cook evenly. 

8 large carrots, peeled, cut into 3" matchsticks (split into halves or quarters lengthwise if necessary)

2 tbl melted butter, coconut oil or bacon fat

salt and pepper to taste

Preheat oven to 375. Toss carrots with melted fat and season to taste. Roast for 20-30 minutes. 

Butternut Squash Soup

I hate peeling and chopping butternut squash and I especially hate going through all that work to find out that I haven't got enough squash to make a decent pot of soup. This is one of the few supermarket shortcuts I use--the pre-chopped butternut squash cubes, in clamshells in the produce department. Also, when a recipe calls for fresh herbs, I always buy a pot in the garden section at Whole Foods or Sprouts. Even at Home Depot 3" little herb pots run around $3 or less; in the grocery store clamshells a sprig of fresh herbs is $3.50. Even if I kill the plant in the pot I still spent less, and hopefully I managed to keep it alive at least til the next time I need that herb. 

1 Butternut squash OR 4 cups chopped butternut squash cubes (2 clamshells)

1 yellow onion (chopped)

2 granny smith apples,peeled, and made into matchsticks.

6 cloves garlic (crushed)

16 oz broth (I use vegetable but chicken and beef work just as well)

4 tbl coconut oil or bacon fat (melted, divided)

fresh sage

salt 

pepper

sriracha sauce (optional)

sour cream (optional)

bacon (optional)

Preheat oven to 400. Toss squash with 2 tbl fat and season with salt and pepper. Place on baking dish and roast for 40 minutes or until caramelized. Meanwhile, use a large heavy bottomed pot to saute onions in the rest of the bacon fat until translucent; add the garlic, 1 apple, 1 tsp of salt and 1 tsp of pepper and 6-8 fresh sage leaves. Cook for 2 minutes. Add broth. Once squash is cooked add squash to pot and stir. Allow to cool before putting through a blender in batches (do not fill to top as steam will cause to the top to fly off if the mixture expands too much). Garnish with the second granny smith apple matchsticks, and I like a couple dashes of sriracha, a dollop of sour cream, and a few crumbles of bacon on top. 

Brussels Sprouts with Bacon

The only way I like bacon these days is baked in the oven (350 at 30 minutes on a rack over a roasting pan to catch the drippings). Baked bacon is so melt-in-your-mouth good you won't want anything else and it will ruin you for restaurant fried bacon. It's worth making up a batch to keep in the refrigerator and drain the drippings to use in cooking, but if you don't have a batch of baked bacon on hand, you can cut the slices into 1/2" sections and cook them quickly in a skillet. 

4 cups brussels sprouts, halved, ends trimmed and tough outer leaves removed 

2 granny smith apples, peeled and cubed

2 tbl melted bacon fat, butter or coconut oil

sea salt

pepper

balsamic vinegar

8 slices of bacon, cooked

Preheat oven to 375. Toss the brussels sprouts and cubed apples with fat and season with salt and pepper. Roast for 20 minutes or until crispy and caramelized. Sprinkle with balsamic and crumbled bacon.

Fall Vegetable Garden Soup

Minestrone Alla Romagna (source: Essentials of Italian Cooking, Marcella Hagan)

1 lb fresh zucchini
1/2 c olive oil
3 tbl butter
1 cup thinly sliced onion
1 c diced carrots
1 c diced celery
2 cups peeled diced potatoes
1/4 lb fresh green beans
3 c. Shredded cabbage
1 and 1/2 c canned cannellini beans
6 cups meat broth
Optional: crust from 1-2 lb piece of parmigiano-reggiano cheese
2/3 c canned tomatoes with juice

1. Soak the zucchini in cold water for 20 minutes then rinse clean of grit. Trim on both ends and dice finely.
2. In a large stockpot add oil, butter, and onion and cook on medium low until onion is pale gold in color.
3. Add carrots and cook for 2-3 minutes. Then add celery and cook for 2-3 minutes, then add potatoes and do the same.
4. Snap off both ends of green beans and dice. Add to pot and cook for 2-3 minutes. Add zucchini and do the same. Add cabbage. Cook for 5-6 minutes.
5. Add broth, optional cheese, tomatoes and a sprinkle of salt. Cover pot lower heat and adjust to a steady gentle simmer.
6. Cook for 2.5 hours then add the cannellini beans, stir well and cook for 30 minutes more.
7. Remove the cheese crust, add grated cheese if desired, then taste and correct for salt.

Autumn in Heels--Eating Seasonally, Eating Locally

In Southern California we don't get much of an autumn so we really, I mean REALLY celebrate seasonal flavors like, ON THE FREAKING DOT of September 1st. And by celebrate seasonal flavors I mean go to Starbucks as early as they open so it'll be sort of cool enough to enjoy a hot drink and get a pumpkin spice latte. If you happen to be in luck and it's a slightly overcast day you will definitely wear your brisk Arctic polar fleece Northface zip-up jacket, because really, when are you going to have another chance to wear it and pretend we have seasons. By October the infinity scarves and Ugg boots make their appearance, probably with leggings and the thinnest long sleeved shirt you own, because, again, it's usually in the 80s all the way through the start of November.

The relentless wild Californian Infinity Scarf develops a symbiotic
relationship with its prey before ultimately devouring her.

We hear about this "Autumn" you other states talk about and it sounds awesome. A whole new wardrobe that you only use for those three months! Dressing to match the foliage of trees that somehow change their colors?! That sounds magical. In So-Cal we have cypress trees, palm trees, and lawns. When we go to pumpkin patches they typically are big parking lots that have been covered with stacked bales of hay and a bunch of straw on the ground (which crunches satisfyingly under your Ugg boots and makes you feel all Autumnal-ly) and carnival rides to disguise the fact that you're getting the very same pumpkins you could pick up at the big box grocery stores. They even come in the self-same packing boxes. It's hard for us to find authentic Autumn experiences in the land of eternal summer--so we turn to comfort foods and things flavored with cinnamon and squash. Our myriad local farm-to-table gastropubs will reinvent the butternut squash ravioli and fried squash blossoms and pumpkin cheesecake all over their seasonal menus this month. 

So yes, yes, a thousand times yes on the pumpkin spice latte (I like a nice pumpkin shot in a chai latte, myself). But truly eating seasonally, in a way that's a bit more meaningful than gingerbread cookies and butternut squash soup, is a little more time and thought consuming. 

I first read about the concept of only eating seasonal foods when I read the Barefoot Contessa's book Back to Basics: Fabulous Flavor from Simple Ingredients. In the preface, Ina Garten describes her impossibly glamorous foray to Paris and how difficult it was as an American, being completely used to having any ingredient under the sun eternally available, to come to terms with having to cook only with what was available. In particular, she relates her attempt to cook a traditional American Thanksgiving dinner, when she, Ina Garten of Martha's Vineyard, was used to having access to heirloom veg fed turkeys, seventeen different pumpkins of varying colors, and wild cranberries from what I imagine is her own William's-Sonoma-crafted cranberry bog--only to find out that those things are only sold frozen and in cans in France, if at all. (Because, apparently, not all Parisians enjoy eating the cuisine of English people who were making do with things they found in the woods.) Still, I appreciated her story of gradually giving in to the season and allowing her inspiration for dinner to come from what was fresh and available where she was,of learning to cook in a way that celebrated a vegetable or fruit that was at the height of its flavor. It made me think about the December bing cherries that appear in stores like a breath of summer, shiny and rosy-cheeked and whispering, "Now you can have it all, now you can really have it all..." I remember buying a big two and something pound bag for a whopping $24, trembling with anticipation and not even waiting to get to my car before popping one into my mouth, expecting to be met with a burst of sweet juice. Instead I was met by hard, joyless lies, which eventually gave way to the sour truth--there is nothing, NOTHING, worse than a December cherry. 

Why eat seasonally, when we have access to almost everything almost all the time? It's the pumpkin-spice-latte effect. Starbucks actually sells pumpkin syrup all year round. You can get pumpkin lattes literally. Any. Time. You could have a nice hot pumpkin latte and you could even get them to put a dash of cinnamon or toffee sprinkles on top in the middle of July. The fact that it's on the chalk-menu in burnt orange chalk-pen with curlicues of green like pumpkin vines around it reminds you that you haven't had one since last fall and now you NEED that pumpkin hit like an infinity scarf needs a white girl to go with it. 

If pumpkin syrup, containing zero real pumpkin and mostly made up of corn syrup, can be so good,  how amazing could fall fruits and vegetables, cooked well and at the height of their flavor, be? This table of local fall foods got me thinking about more than just pumpkin and butternut squashes. Broccoli and cauliflower are at their sweetest and least bitter in the fall; roasted carrots (cut into matchsticks, toss with melted butter, salt and pepper, cook at 375 for 30 minutes. Seriously. Stop boiling...); brussells sprouts (Salt & Cleaver in Hillcrest, San Diego has possibly THE most amazing caramelized Brussels Sprouts with bacon, balsamic vinegar, and granny smith apples); grapes (vineyards are one of the only spots for seasonal color for us in California), pears and of course apples. All these things have become mostly season-less in American grocery stores but their flavor is absolutely amazing right now. 

Eating locally goes hand in hand with eating seasonally, and here's the thing. It's very haute to eat locally and visit the farmer's markets (in San Diego, there's a farmer's market or three on every day of the week) during the summer. Nothing, and I mean nothing, can compete with the flavor of a farm stand summer strawberry. The grocery store strawberry has just had to sacrifice too much flavor in favor of the sturdiness that lets them be shipped all over the country; its a cheap truck stop cousin to the ultra sweet, delicate strawberry you can grow in your own backyard. The farm-stand strawberry is the next best thing, and at almost the same price per pound as the monstrous, tasteless version you get at the grocery store, it's ridiculous not to get the farmer's market version. Buying farm-stand strawberries keeps that strain of strawberry alive, because in case you haven't noticed, you literally cannot buy a strawberry that sweet in a plastic clamshell at a big box grocery store. They are selling (and their suppliers are growing) an entirely different product, something you almost can't, really, call a strawberry anymore because its resemblance to a real, hot from the summer sun, strawberry is so remote. Limp, tasteless, and sometimes moldy? (I'm looking at you Vons. I AM LOOKING AT YOU.) or sweet, acidic, and complex? Hurrah for biodiversity!

Except even in California the strawberry goes out of season. The guys at the farmer's market that were selling me corn and summer squash now have kohlrabi and artichokes and brussells sprouts. The orchard people don't have cherries anymore, they have figs and pluots and pears. And while figs may not be as sexy as cherries, they're still sweet and sultry and delicious--and buying that fig from a local farmer keeps them in business till cherry and strawberry season rolls around again. 

This morning I decided to drive out to Julian, the little orchard town in the mountains northeast of San Diego proper. My visit just happened to coincide with the start of the fall u-pick season (labor day weekend) and Apple-Starr Orchards had trees dripping with Bosc, Comice, and Anjou pears before you could even get out to the gala and granny smith apple orchards. I've been to several different "pumpkin patches" all over San Diego and the neighboring areas but most are not true working farms, just patches of land where someone parked a tractor for photo ops and pumpkins laid out in a row not far from the cardboard shipping crates. These orchards were true orchards, with, yes, imperfect fruit, weirdly shaped fruit, some worm and bird damage, some bruises--but these trees also held the sweetest, most bursting-with-flavor pears and crunchy apples I'd ever tasted. We munched as we picked, developing an eye for what colors each kind of apple and pear meant the ripest, sweetest fruit, using a long-handled claw-basket pole to reach the delectable fruits at the top of the tallest branches. Without a bit of cinnamon or sugar these fruits were perfectly, fantastically Autumn. 

Laden down with "peck" bags (12 pounds) we headed into town to Julian Hard Cider, a local brewery that makes cold-press cider with only local apples, champagne yeast from local grapes and seasonal ingredients. Since it was so early in the fall we were lucky enough to find their Black-and-Blue, a blueberry and blackberry hard apple cider, and my favorite, Cherry Bomb, an absolutely explosive cherry and apple hard cider; but they also had Apple Pie and Harvest Apple, rich with cinnamon and nutmeg and all the things we love about fall. The tasting room is small, with a bar made of wood and corrugated steel from local reclaimed barns and chandeliers made from cut-glass cider bottles, and for $1 a taste we sampled everything they had in stock, finishing our hot apple picking September afternoon in a haze of Apple Pie and Razzmatazz Hard Ciders while downing carnitas from the farm stand next door.

Celebrating seasonal flavors, check. I might even have room for some kohlrabi, depending on what that turns out to actually be--after a quick pumpkin chai latte. 

4 Reasons to Plant Sunflowers

Sunflowers for fall? I'm not sure if this is going to work. I mean, of course, there's the whole color palette. Sunflower yellow is really more of a summer color, more suited to gingham and strawberry cotton prints, whereas it's really becoming more of a leggings and Pumpkin Spice Latte moment right now. But in Southern California at least, where winters don't often dip below 50 degrees F (the bottoming out temp for frost tender sunflowers), I have a theory that sunflowers might be a fall option, and I'm planting some now to see if they survive. I've fallen in love with this hardworking flower this spring and summer, so I'll definitely be starting some seedlings in February indoors so they can go out into the garden as early as March, but if I can have a year round dose of these amazing multi-taskers, I'll take it. Here's why sunflowers are my new obsession.

1. Bird Seed. Now I personally like to have birds come swooping into my garden because I like to pretend they are drawn there by my beautiful singing voice and my inherent and visible kindness as a clearly misplaced Disney princess who's been cruelly relocated to the real world. You may enjoy them for the pastoral scene they set when you go out in the morning for your coffee moment and hear them chirping away, or you may just enjoy the sight of brightly colored songbirds with their impossibly brilliant plumage.

This guy, a California oriole, showed up on my fence this year.

For the urban farmer, though, the birds are essential, both as pollinators (especially for large flowers like sunflowers) and for the bugs they eat. Yes, birds can be a nuisance when it comes to tasty little sprouts and berry bushes, but it's worth the hassle of covering certain plants in bird netting to have them present in the garden to eat things like tomato hornworms and cabbage loopers and the general abundance of caterpillars that turn into moths and other pests. Though I don't allow birds to just free range my entire sunflower garden, I do leave one or two sunflowers to go to seed where the birds can easily access them, and I also scatter a handful of seeds on the ground. Particularly in winter food sources can be scarce for birds and protein-rich sunflower seeds and the perfect little pick me up to keep them pecking around in the garden long enough to earn their keep by gobbling up some pests. 

2. Bees. Scientists haven't come up with a definitive answer yet on what is causing the catastrophic Colony Collapse Disorder that has devastated American beehives since 1997. Over ten million beehives have been lost due to CCD, worker bees disappearing from the hive despite an abundance of food and leaving the queen with just a few nurse bees to care for the young. The effects are potentially devastating to us humans as well since most food crops need to be pollinated in some way before they can fruit. It's serious enough that the federal government has enacted a White House Task Force on Pollinator Health to reduce the amount of beehives being lost to CCD and restore and enhance millions of acres of land for pollinators like the honey bee and monarch butterfly. The President has asked all citizens to help by planting pollinator gardens or setting aside land to go wild. Organizations like The Great Sunflower Project are trying to help educate and promote the use of sunflowers for pollinator gardens since sunflowers, by virtue of their bright yellow color, are especially attractive to bees and particularly rich in abundant pollen. Additionally, by letting some of the stems remain standing after the flowers are spent, you can provide hollow tubes for wild bees to lay their eggs. 

Sunflower "Lemon Queen"--particularly attractive to bees (notice pollen all over the leaves) and recommended by the Great Sunflower Project

Any sunflower seed will do as long you check to see that it is not a pollen free varietal (developed for florist arrangements) but The Great Sunflower Project particularly promotes the "Lemon Queen", a relatively small 4"-5" head, 5'-6' feet in height, with more than average pollen production. You can find the seeds right at the checkout counter at Whole Foods or in most nursery seed racks, or find them at Burpee Seeds or my personal favorite, Renee's Garden Seeds.

3. Attracting pollinators. The flowers are gorgeous, of course, and so cheerful, but the petals aren't just decorative and nor is the yellow color coincidental. Not only are sunflowers benefiting the pollinators themselves but the fact that they draw these beneficial insects and birds to the garden helps the entire garden ecosystem. Bees that come for the sunflower pollen will also pause to pollinate your squash blossoms and blueberry flowers. The huge yellow sunflower heads are like a big neon truck-stop beacon shouting "Food, Next Exit!" Not only do bees love the bright yellow color but all kinds of butterflies, including the struggling populations of migratory Monarchs, are attracted as well. I wish I'd put some sunflowers in next to my Butternut squashes this spring; the gourds flowered with some brilliant yellow blossoms but never fruited from lack of pollinating. Blah.

4. The Seeds!

A handful of sunflower seeds thrown into the ground under 1/2" of cover soil yielded about six heads and this bowl of seeds, enough that I have plenty for replanting even after I scattered some to the wild birds, fed handfuls to my chickens, and roasted a batch with salt. Click here for the recipe. Sunflower seeds are delicious but more than that, they just might be the perfect snack for keeping yourself beautiful. Don't believe me? A comparison of sunflower kernels to some other beauty-magazine-lauded nuts and berries (here) lists sunflower seeds as extraordinarily rich in selenium, iron, zinc (all of which combat thyroid problems that lead to lowered metabolisms and hair loss) and vitamin E (keeps your skin healthy and plumped). Did I already mention delicious? They're delicious.

Sunflowers take almost no care except a sunny spot and a bit of water to thrive (nothing like what your lawn full of emotionally manipulative grass, with its empty promises of softly caressing green abundance but in actuality scratchy, itchy blades of lies that would only save you from starvation if they could also give you crippling belly cramps and would just as soon burn your house to the ground as look at you). Each seed that flowers yields hundreds. HUNDREDS. Of seeds. I am kicking myself for not throwing down pounds of the stuff during prime time sunflower planting season in March. Once my sunflowers' petals had started fading and the seeds had formed, I went ahead and snipped off the top 12" of stem and flower head, bagging the heads in brown paper lunch bags and hanging them upside down. They dried in about six weeks and the seeds were easy to just brush off with a fingertip. 

Hopefully my fall sunflower experiment will yield some blossoms for me; but if not, I can't think of a better plant for an early spring container garden and some experiments in succession planting, where you plant a crop of the same seeds every two weeks to end up with flowers throughout the spring and summer. A flower that feeds everything in the garden, as statuesque and slender as a Roman goddess, turning her face to the sun to follow the passage of Helios' flaming chariot across the sky, definitely deserves to be the focus of Farming in Heels.

A Bug's Life (In Heels): One Girlie-Girl's Shuddering Road to Acceptance

Bugs are so gross. You know what's gross? Bugs. You know what's grosser than gross? Probably a bigger bug. You know what's the worst? I don't know, probably a huge freaking insect that just feels entitled to come out and like, check items off its gross little bucket list by dive-bombing a human's face (mine) or crawling up a human's glove (also mine) or just sit there being obscenely huge and gross and scuttling tiny gross legs within reach of a human's patent leather stiletto (also, alas, mine).

I'm sorry, I'm going to need a moment to go and wash out the inside of my brain so I can never remember this shoe. 

I am at odds with bugs.

I was excited to put out cauliflower this year since I'd never tried such an ambitious vegetable. (I'd like to take credit for success with my tomatoes but last year one literally grew in the dirt next to the pot without every having been planted. And produced. So.) I wondered how long it would take for the florets to form from the big healthy green cabbage-looking leaves, and I kept inspecting them, looking for those first telltale signs of white clusters. One morning when I went out there was a pale green cluster; in fact, there were pale green clusters all over all of the sets of leaves. Like nice fat little clusters. I was delighted. How had they grown so fast? I never expected them to come out green but now I was a FARMER and I knew that cauliflower comes out green. How exciting. If they grew that fast overnight they would probably double in size by tomorrow and I'd have ginormous, Whole Foods sized cauliflower heads in a few weeks. Ah, rapture! We'd be knee deep in cauli-rice (cauliflower grated on a cheese grater and cooked with cilantro and salt and pepper). I mentally set up the photo ops of myself in a lovely fitted dress holding a cauliflower head as my bouquet.

I looked closer and realized the little green clusters were looser than I'd originally realized and got really excited. Maybe each one of these little heads were going to grow into a separate floret. And with multiple clusters on each plant maybe there would be multiple heads! I was a cauliflower farmer! Maybe I could start a roadside stand like the end of the Dixie Chicks video "Goodbye Earl" and sell strawberry jam and cauliflower heads in a gingham off the shoulder top with a flattering neckline. I went inside to pull my sleepy husband out to the garden to show him my budding new business.

He peered inside the leaves. "Babe, those are aphids."

I was furious and shocked and suddenly terrified that he was right.

"No they're not," I said bravely.

He bent closer and picked at the green cluster. It came apart in his fingers, with effort, though it was still sticking to the leaf with malicious adhesion. With a cry of dismay I fell on my knees and dug through the cauliflower leaves and picked the center clusters apart. Aphids. I wailed to the heavens and tried stubbornly to pick off the aphids in hope there was something buried inside the clusters of bug bodies. Aphids. Nothing but aphids all the way through to the center. No cauliflower buds. No emerging leaves. Just a crawling, writhing, filthy pile of APHIDS living in sin with no other purpose than to devour my dreams.

Why. Why would you do that. 

I need a moment.

Bottom line, it's not been easy for me to recognize things like beneficial bugs. The very concept of that seems oxymoronic. Following the aphid-pocalypse I bought expensive boxes of ladybugs which I delicately refrigerated and carefully, lovingly, trustingly bedded amid my cauliflower plants. They blackened my plants in impossible numbers with so many many legs, for the first  time in my life I realized a ladybug was not an adorable pet but a foul swarming beetle; and then in the morning they took off, leaving the aphids all but untouched, presumably in search of the next champagne and aphid caviar bender they could hustle their little polka-dotted behinds into. Oh, aren't we SO cute. Betrayal, most foul, ladybugs. You are no lady.

Lady, my ass. 

However...

About a month later, after the sullen and resentful aphid-stunted cauliflower leaves finally withered in on themselves at last and died, I dug up their beds and went to plant peas, and noticed all the nice fat red wiggler earthworms squirming around in the half-compost soil mix I'd made. I definitely didn't want to touch them but I went and got my little poppy-print garden gloves (aha! This is what those are for!) so I could finish turning the soil without having to worry about getting worm on me and finished the job without disturbing them. The peas and bush beans I planted came up like gang busters. When I finally got ready to renovate the bed again this time I fitted the chicken run over the top and let them feast on the spent pea shoots, bean leaves, and all the worms they could dig up. When I went to turn the soil the next day, there were even more red wigglers, even after the chick-pocalypse, than I'd seen before the peas. Hmm.

My husband suddenly got all excited about something he'd read about called black soldier flies, which could supposedly chow through six inches of green compost a day (human food waste, basically) without needing any leaf or wood amendments. He started sending me links with bizarre composting contraptions and videos of what the soldier fly grubs looked like; and then with all the pride he'd had in introducing his first born to people, he announced that we. HAD. SOLDIER FLIES! YES! In our very own backyard, flies. Who could have known that this momentous occasion would strike our simple farm. It's far more than I ever dared to dream.

And they were gross. When I got home from work that day he took me out to show me his exciting discovery and shyly lifted the compost bin lid to expose the writhing heaps of soldier fly larva. Like thick, serrated, fat and stubby worms, they lay wriggling all over each other, cupped inside an orange peel.

"You're disgusting," I told him primly, and turned on my heel to head back inside.

He took a video of his precious grubs and posted it on Facebook.

Then came in sadly to tell me he hadn't gotten even one "like".

I have to admit, over the next few days I became sort of fascinated with the grubs when I realized they really were going through a half foot of waste a day and turning it into beautiful black castings for our garden beds. They were gross. They writhed and crawled over everything in the compost bin. I waited to see the adult flies, but realized I never did. The females just laid their eggs inside the compost bin and settled in to a life cycle near the renewable food source, our trash. Huh. I realized they were eating our peels and pulp and coffee grounds, and decided to stop the tedious but necessary practice of cutting up our organic trash into 1" pieces for the compost bin. Disposing of a pineapple had been hell, but now the little guys in the compost bin cleaned the rind for me completely and turned it into soil. Huh.

I started watching them. There they were, unattractive, unsightly, unassuming, but patiently taking what we would have sent to a landfill and turning into super nutrients for our garden. We'd use the dark soil they made in a bed for carrots and then give them the carrot peels to start the process again. It was...elegant. Once a week, my husband took a handful of the grubs and threw them to the chickens to scratch for, keeping the numbers from getting overwhelming, giving the chickens some extra protein, and saving us on having to buy the chicks supplements.

Yesterday I saw one that had escaped when my husband turned the compost piles and realized when I saw it sitting there that it wasn't gross at all. While it certainly wasn't cute or the kind of bug you'd hold out your hand to hold, it was compact, utilitarian, and functional. Soldier fly was a great name for these guys--they had one job and the did it ad infinitum, impossibly, genetically well. This simple black grub had earned my respect.

I scooped him up and deposited him back into the compost bin where he happily wriggled over to a carrot piece to grimly start his work.

I was surprised to find I didn't shudder at all.

Barnyard Vet in Heels

After an unseasonably cool San Diego August, with temperatures in the high 70s and some sprinkles of rain, we had a hot day today. A very hot day. My first day back teaching school and I alternated between shivering in the blasting air conditioning and dehydrating with the preposterous heat when I stepped outside. When I finally got into the car to head home at 3:30 p.m. the outside temp was 104. I had moved the chicken run this morning to a shadier spot beside the house with more grass for them to nibble, and supplied them with some nice cold pineapple and carrot pulp from my morning juice to help keep them cool during the day.

It wasn't enough.

I pulled up to my house to find three little feathered heaps lying under their angled shelter inside the run. They looked lifeless. I jumped out of my car and ran over to them, clucking to them. The black and white Maran perked up her head and looked at me without getting up; the auburn Rhode Island Red and the brown Welsummer with her pretty gold quail-patterned feathers didn't move at all. When I opened their run the Maran got to her feet but didn't run away (a first for her) and let me pick her up docilely. I put her under one arm and scooped up the Welsummer and the Red into the crook of my other arm. I could feel them panting (they cool themselves like dogs do) and their hearts beating, fast as horses, but they didn't struggle or even do more than lay quietly together in my arm.

Before we even thought about buying chicks I had been like a pregnant mother, reading every single scrap of literature on chicken rearing I could get my hands on. The Storey's Guide to Raising Chickens, A Chicken in Every Yard, the chapters in Little House in the Suburbs and The Backyard Homestead's Guide to Raising Farm Animals. So as I was hurrying the chickens back to the backyard to care for them I didn't think, I just reacted.

• Cool their feet. I set down all three chickens and sprayed down their feet with cool water from the hose to help them lower their body temperatures. The black and white Maran perked up immediately and struggled and flapped to get down. My redhead, the Rhode Island Red,  pepped up a bit and lifted her head so she could sit up in my arms instead of dangling loose. I sprayed her feet for another minute and she clucked indignantly at me. Then I turned to the brown Welsummer. Her feet just dangled lifelessly underneath her, and her mouth was gaping wide and outstretched. I sprayed her feet but they didn't seem to feel any cooler. 
• Get them into the shade. I brought them back to their coop where it was not just shady but completely dark and put them inside. The Maran, already feeling the peppiest of the three, started walking around and fluffing her wings to cool herself. The Rhode Island Red and the Welsummer laid down immediately in the doorway of the coop. 
• Water. Normally the chicks have a nipple waterer (a big five gallon bucket with a metal nipple system underneath that they can click for a drop at a time without getting soaked themselves) but they seemed uninterested in drinking, and I knew they were dehydrated. I brought them a small tub of ice water and dipped my fingers in to coat the tops of the Red and the Welsummer's beaks. The Red almost immediately gulped down the drops, then the next ones I dripped onto her beak, then when I dunked her beak in the tub she got it and started drinking greedily. The Maran, not the brightest of birds under the best of circumstances, came over to investigate, but of course instead of drinking like an intelligent thirsty creature, tilted her head at me curiously. I sighed and dunked her beak, too, and she was like, OMIGOD you did not tell me that this was WATER why have I been drinking from a spigot like some kind of ANIMAL. She went to town on that tub like water was going out of style. 
• Cold fruit. I grabbed some cold peaches from the fridge and cut them up so their cool juicy flesh was exposed and threw them into the coop. Red and Maran immediately went for the fruit and tore open the fleshy center piece peck by peck down to the pit. 

By now Red and Maran were feeling good, clucking and drinking and eating freely and jumping down from the coop to peck for bugs under the coop. But beautiful Welsummer was still not moving. She lay there in a fat pile of pretty feathers, her little sides trembling with her panting, drinking the drops that I tapped onto her beak but otherwise not moving. I watched her with a critical eye, and noticed her golden eyes were dilating and contracting and dilating and contracting. This couldn't be good.

I pulled her out of the coop gently and put her on my lap with a bottle of ice for her feet. I laid her talons over the curve of the frozen water bottle with my bare thighs freezing under the painfully icy cold bottle but her feet still feverishly hot. With one of the peach pieces in hand, I was able to squeeze juice into her open beak. She nibbled the first ten or fifteen drops down but then lost interest, turning her head when I tried to tempt her with the sweet juice. I checked her feet. Still insanely hot, burning to the touch, but after a few minutes her golden eyes had stopped dilating. I switched to an ice water dish, dripping cold water into her beak with the ice bottle on her feet. After another few minutes she struggled to sit up and flapped to get down, so I set her on her feet. She made it a few unsteady steps before staggering like a drunk and falling over. 

Shit. 

Okay. I tried again. I filled a six inch deep tub with water and dunked and held her feet in the cool water, then dripped cool water over the top of her head. I dunked her beak into the water and she came up sputtering but slurped down the drops; I dunked her again and then two more times until she was slurping steadily. She was still unsteady on her feet so I picked her up and flipped her onto her back like I had when she was a baby chick, just two weeks old, and let her feet naturally curl around the ice water bottle as I held her in my lap. Her eyes rolled back in her head and her breathing stilled and she almost immediately fell asleep in my lap. When I touched her feet several minutes later they had finally started to move from oven-hot to her normal humming warmth. She opened her eyes and sat up, then struggled to flip over and sat on my knee. 

She looked up at me. I dripped some water onto her beak. She slurped it greedily then pecked my thumb. Hard. And turned a baleful eye on me. 

I felt a sudden warmth. 

The warmth spread over me like a font. 

It was not my heart, in an outpouring of tenderness, but the Welsummer releasing the last of her feverish heat with a truly alarming quantity of hot, watery chicken poo all over my leg. She shook herself and clucked at me, indignantly. 

Sigh. 

I'll just go inside and change my shoes then.