Blooming in the Drought--Sustaining Pollinators on a Water Budget

The mall is blooming. You can always tell when 'tis the season for new shoes because the mall has changed out the flower borders. In Southern California we've gone from Christmas red begonias to spring pastel pansies to the first riotous red, orange and pink zinnias of early summer in the beds at the mall. They're so beautiful and trust me, color therapy is a thing I believe in deeply--but when I walk past those gorgeous color-filled beds and hear the sprinklers hissing under their leaves, I can't help but feel a twinge of guilt.

"You thought you could enjoy flowers without paying the price? No. No. You'll pay. Oh, you'll pay."

Even though Southern California has had unseasonable amounts of rain this calendar year and Northern California had a very successful rain year in 2016, helping to raise the water table and address some of the dwindling snowpack in the northern mountains that feeds many of our dwindling aquifiers, California is still deep in a drought that will probably be permanent. Our chaparral and desert climate in California was never meant to sustain the amount of farmland and elaborate landscaping peppering the state. Even a traditional suburban lawn sucks down an average of 2000 gallons of water a week just to keep the grass green, even under water restrictions.

Thaaaaat's a lot. For grass? for essentially a spiky dirt carpet? That's a lot. 

Grass is persona non grata on my urban farm these days since we let the lawn die in favor of vegetable beds and fruit trees. But the question of flowers has always been a tough one for me. Are they worth the water? In an urban garden every non-edible plant has to have a function--I have rue to keep away the Japanese beetles, garlic to keep off the aphids. Even my edible herbs live where they live for a reason--cilantro with peppers, basil with tomatoes, companions to encourage the growth of one another and improve the flavor of the edibles. Are my roses out there pulling their weight?

Further complicating that question is the looming disaster of the rapidly dwindling honeybee populations as Colony Collapse Disorder ravages colonies all over the country, leaving scientists baffled as to the source. The Hawaiian yellow faced honeybee was declared an endangered species this week for the first time, leaving species of vegetables like tomatoes, which can only be pollinated by honeybees, threatened as well. While scientists don't know what is causing Colony Collapse Disorder, a bizarre phenomenon which causes the drones to abandon the hive for no reason and die, the decline in available water sources and the longer and longer journeys that bees must undertake in search of pollen have also contributed to the decline in the bee population. Simply stated, fewer pollen-producing flowers per acre means longer flights for bees, who often die of dehydration or heat exhaustion from having to range so far afield with no fresh water sources to sustain them. 

So flowers, pollen-rich flowers, could do a lot for wild honeybee populations. and luckily there are some drought tolerant flowers that take very little water while providing brightly colored bee-attracting blooms. 

Purple-blue borage: edible leaves, medicinal uses for flowers, and a bee-paradise. 

Borage is one of my favorites. You don't often find it in nurseries already started; I planted my first plants from seed. They're super easy to grow, requiring nothing in terms of maintenance, and are self perpetuating. This patch of borage came up from seeds that fell between beds from last year's crop, and came up like gang-busters just from the winter rains. They are BIG, one plant stretching somewhere around 2-3' and reaching about that height. They are a perfect plant to have next to your vegetable beds as bees love them and they can thrive off the runoff from your vegetable watering. The leaves are big and slightly fuzzy and are edible, though the fuzzy texture makes them a little off-putting for me personally; but I rip off a handful of leaves every morning for my chickens and they love them. The stems are succulent and store a lot of water so this plant can take a lot of abuse.

Nasturtiums, "Alaska" mix; heirloom

These nasturtiums are also a hit with my chickens who go crazy for the leaves and the flowers. Harvesting the seeds from these heirlooms couldn't be easier; they drop from the flower heads as soon as the petals start to fade. Bees go crazy for them, especially with the yellow and orange blooms. They fade in the fall and go dormant, but this batch also came up with no help just from seeds that fell from last year's crop and the winter rains. Birds LOVE them so if you plant from seed, keep the bed covered with netting until they get big enough; and they spread a lot, mounding up quite high. Also good for borders, since they will really take over any bed they share; but they keep the ground shaded while taking up very little root space, so they are a good choice under taller plants like fruit trees. Nasturtiums are also a "trap crop", which means they attract bugs and pests and keep them off of your vegetables. When you start to see them getting infested with aphids or cabbage loopers, pull the infected plant and toss it in the compost heap. While nasturtiums do require a little water, they are by no means water hogs; I just hit them with the hose when they start to look droopy and otherwise they live off of the runoff from the vegetable beds.

Scented geranium, "Tea Rose"

These scented geraniums are probably my favorite water-wise flowering plant in the world. Scented geraniums are similar to regular geraniums but their leaves contain a strongly fragranced oil that makes the leaves scented with anything from chocolate mint to tea roses to citronella. I originally bought and planted these scented geraniums because I had read they were one of the most strongly fragrant plants out there, and I was trying to combat a stinky backyard that smelled horribly of dog from the previous owners. Whenever I had a few extra bucks I would drop by the nursery, pick up another 6" pot of these (sold in the herb section, all leaves and no flowers) and stick it in the ground. They required a bit of water to take hold but otherwise were one of my first successful garden projects. I stated collecting all the different kinds I could find and they were really, beautifully fragrant. It only took a slight breeze for the wind to pick up the scent and fill the backyard with a fresh sweet aroma.

I had never had geraniums before so I was completely unprepared for what happened once they got established. My leafy green pots shot out runners and started growing EVERYWHERE. The "citronella" variation grew straight up in stalks but all the others started sending out their vines and twining all over everything--the retaining wall, the fence, and each other. And then, without warning, they BLOOMED! Pale pink and peach and bright pink and deep fucshia, they exploded into blossom and the bees went straight for them. Once they were established, I never watered them. I went through a period where I was just too overwhelmed to take care of the garden and stopped watering them and they just grew higher. I have several plants that have now grown up over the fence and taken over everything on my back hill, and the bees just go to town. 

The great thing about geraniums is that they are easy to prune, the stalks, no matter how thick, being fairly brittle and easy to clip. They propagate themselves readily, growing to fill any space, and take up very little root space. If you can train them to grow up they look gorgeous against a fence or climbing up a tree. They drop their leaves and make their own thick, crumbly mulch, and the few times we have wanted to clear an area of geraniums they are extremely easy to pull up as their roots are very shallow.

Bottom line, when I'm thinking about what's going to live in my urban garden, I'm looking for flowers that are pollen rich (sunflowers for example, are great, but many strains have been developed to prevent allergies and have are pollen-free) or will repel or trap pests. If they can attract beneficial insects, like Bachelor Buttons attract ladybugs, great. If they're edible, as all three of the plants I've highlighted here are, even better. They need to be low-maintenance, since vegetables require most of my attention in the spring and summer months. The question remains then--with all of these great, water-wise plants, filled with pollen, requiring no care...are my roses worth it? Roses require pruning, dead-heading and weekly water; they attract diseases and take work to keep them free of leaf rot and rust spot and pests like aphids. They're petulant, spoiled princesses: if you leave them alone, they'll grow sickly and wither on their canes. 

Still...today as I was taking a good long look at the ultra fertile soil those roses live in, that beautiful crumbly dark soil filled with banana peels and garlic heads and cocoa mulch that I have cultivated over the years in order to keep those roses healthy, as I was thinking how I could stick an orange tree into that space if I just yanked them all up and it would probably take up less water, as I was asking myself what these roses were doing to earn their keep...

I noticed three honeybees climbing drunkenly into a single white rose, seductively shimmying up and down the inner petals, luxuriating in their soft, silken spa, sliding their legs through the pollen in a bacchanal of hedonism. The wind picked up the scent and carried the honey-sweet fragrance of the roses to caress my face. 

Dammit. 

Fine. But you're sharing the bed with the garlic bulbs.

Sustainably Lux--Better from the (Urban) Farm

Ok, yes, I'm an environmentalist but I admit it--the main reason I want an urban farm is I have expensive tastes. I'd floop around all day in Jimmy Choos from patisserie at Alice Walker's Chez Panisse in Berkeley to a tasting menu at Thomas Keller's French Laundry, picking up artisan candles and soaps along the way, if I could--but sadly, house payments.

Hi. I'm a freeloading slacker that does nothing but provide shelter and keep you from your dreams.

Luckily, urban farming, as in so many other ways, provides. Here are a few of my favorite things that are sustainably lux and so, SO much better from the farm:

Crack Level-Addictive Everyday Sandwich Bread

First of all, can someone PLEASE deconstruct the heavenly orgasm that is the smell of fresh baking bread and bottle it into a candle because I cannot maintain my sanity in a kitchen that is slightly warm and filled with that ambrosial scent of yeasty wheat rising loaves. It's seriously one of the things you're supposed to do to sell your home--have something baking in the oven--and nothing is better and more universally yummy and comforting than the smell of baking bread. I wish I could dab it on behind my ears and go. Gucci "Essenza del Pane". I'm saying.

My recipe for everyday sandwich bread is delicious to smell but even better fresh out of the oven, because I have a little trick of greasing the loaf pans with bacon grease. That's...not the most elegant and luxurious phrase in the world so ...I'm going to rename it Flavor Infused Crisping Oil, because that's exactly what it does. I bake my bacon in the oven on racks over a roasting pan to catch the drippings and then use that as my cooking fat for just about everything, including greasing baking tins. It leaves a faintly salty flavor on the crispy crust of the fresh baked bread, so when you take it out of the pan, it slides right out and tastes like crunchy soft heaven. You cannot get fresh baked bread that is that hot and crispy unless you stand in the bakery and wait for them to hand it to you straight out of the oven. This bread also has no preservatives and you won't need preservatives because in my experience you can't keep a loaf in the house without it being devoured within a day.

Meyer Lemon Curd

Lemon curd is super easy to make; it's essentially zest, juice, egg yolks, butter and sugar whisked together over a double boiler until it thickens. It takes about 15 minutes to juice and zest the fruit and 15 minutes to cook.

Wait, then why does this cost $12.95?

Meyer lemons, full disclaimer, are not one of those super hyped, no delivery fruits that people tack onto the name to make something look "artisanal". Meyer lemons are actually almost a completely different fruit, with an increased sweetness, a finer peel, lower acidity and are somewhere between a Eureka (standard) lemon and a clementine. While you could definitely make a regular lemon curd, it would be much more sour and lemonade-flavored than the delicacy of a meyer lemon curd, which is so delicious and rich you really won't need more than a bite. Perfect for tarts or for a dollop on top of yogurt, it's just one of my favorite things.

There are a ton of lower priced substitutes, but I think Williams-Sonoma is the best curd, lightly sweet and rich, bringing out the flavor of the Meyer lemons. At $12.95 for a jar of what is essentially flavored butter, though? Mmm, that's asking a lot. Luckily, Williams-Sonoma publishes their recipes and you can make your own exactly like theirs. You can find Meyers in the grocery store and at farmer's markets in the spring and summer, and you only need three for this recipe (two if they're particularly big). I get mine from my dwarf Meyer lemon tree that lives in a pot on my patio and produces lemons all year round. My curd is vibrant, sunshiney-lemon yellow with no additives because of the intense color of my backyard chicken eggs--their highly varied diet makes their egg yolks an extra bright yellow. 

On the left, Mrs. Dickinson's (pale and sad) on the right, my brilliant, happy curd. 

Dwarf Meyer lemons are about the easiest thing to keep in your backyard, and they cost about the same as a single jar of WS Meyer Lemon Curd; they're happy in a big pot, just add citrus fertilizer from time to time and you've essentially taken out the most expensive ingredient in the recipe to lemon-y joy.

Meyer Lemon Curd (Source: Williams Sonoma Kitchen)

• 8 egg yolks
• 1 cup sugar
• 1/2 cup Meyer lemon juice
• Grated zest of 2 lemons
• 12 Tbs. (1 1/2 sticks) unsalted butter, cut
    into 1/2-inch pieces
• In the top pan of a double boiler, combine the egg yolks and sugar and whisk vigorously for 1 minute. Add the Meyer lemon juice and lemon zest and whisk for 1 minute more. Set the top pan over but not touching barely simmering water in the bottom pan and cook, stirring constantly, until thickened, 10 to 15 minutes. Add the butter, 1 piece at a time, whisking until melted before adding more.
  
  Remove the pan from the heat. Pour the curd through a fine-mesh sieve set over a bowl, pressing the curd through with a rubber spatula. Cover with plastic wrap, pressing it directly on the surface to prevent a skin from forming. Refrigerate for at least 2 hours or up to 3 days. Makes 2 cups. 

The only problem with this recipe is that you're left with a ton of egg whites. What to do, what to do, what to do with those beautiful egg whites from your backyard chickens?

Lemon Meringue Tarts

I typically freeze extra egg whites in the hopes of not having to waste them, but once I had collected a huge bag full in the course of making a few batches of lemon curd, I had to do something with them. I went looking in my copy of Thomas Kellers "Bouchon Bakery" cookbook, seriously the gold standard of baking from basic French technique all the way up through a completely hedonistic decadence, for things that require egg whites. Meringues were the first thing that popped up, and in conjunction with having just made lemon curd? How could I not make lemon meringue tarts?

With as sweet and rich as the lemon curd was, I chose a tart dough with no sugar, made for savory tarts, called pate brisee. Once the tart shells were cooled I filled them with lemon curd and chilled again, then topped with delicious swiss meringue and bruleed them with a culinary torch. You can also use the swiss meringue recipe to make a pavlova--a baked meringue that tastes like a crispy marshmallow--just spread or pipe it into a circular shape and bake at 350 for a few minutes until it solidifies. You can then use the pavlova as a shell on its own and spread it with lemon curd or any kind of jam for a delicious sweet dessert with no fat.

Swiss Meringue (source: Thomas Keller's "Bouchon Bakery")
Egg whites--100 g/about 3
Sugar--200 g/1 cup

Mix egg whites and sugar into the bowl of a stand mixer set over a double boiler. Whisk and heat to 160 degrees, then put back on the stand mixer and whisk for 5 minutes on medium high or until meringue holds stiff peaks.

Pate Brisee (source: Thomas Keller's "Bouchon Bakery")
All purpose flour, divided--140 g/1 cup
                                            165 g/1cup+3 tablespoons
Kosher salt--3 g/1 tsp
Cold unsalted butter, cut into 1/4" cubes--227 g/8 oz
Ice water--58 g/1/4 cup

Mix the 140 g flour and salt in the bowl of a stand mixer with the paddle attachment. With the mixer running on low, add the butter small handful at a time. When all butter has been added, increase speed to medium low and mix for 1 minute until blended. Scrape down, turn to medium low, and add remaining 165 g flour. Mix just to combine. Add water and mix until incorporated. Dough should feel smooth, not sticky.

Pat into 7-8" disk and wrap in plastic wrap. Chill for 1 hour to overnight.

Roll out between two sheets of plastic wrap to 1/8" thickness and drape to fit individual tart pans (makes 1 dozen). No greasing of pans is required, butter in the dough will not stick when baked.
Blind bake at 350 for 12-16 minutes with tart pans on a cookie sheet, then allow to cool completely on wire racks.

Seriously, what better use for backyard chicken eggs?
Speaking of backyard chickens...

Backyard Chicken Eggs

One of these things is better. You see it. Left, store bought and chalky. Right, backyard deliciousness.

They're just better. Think about a commercial chicken on the worst end of a spectrum, and the battery cage where she lives, stacked under another battery cage with another hen, and so on up to the top of the cement warehouse where they will live out their lives, breathing and eating each other's feces along with the cheap, filler and hormone laden food they're fed to keep them at their most productive. 

A "cage free" hen gets a slightly better life in that she's not under layers and layers of other hens but the FDA doesn't regulate "cage free" eggs as anything beyond literally hens not living in cages. The warehouse with the concrete floor is still there, along with the feces in the air and in the food, being ingested by the chicken who is processing your eggs. Even a "free range" chicken can sometimes live in the same warehouse, with access to the outside via a small channel that most of the hens in the house will never get close enough to experience. 

'Kay. It's gross. 

But a backyard chicken lives with a dirt floor in the open air. Litter in their coop absorbs the worst of their waste; the rest dries and decomposes into the dirt below. Hens have access to clean feed but also an omnivorous diet as is their nature--bugs, worms, snails, grass, leaves, clover, weeds. Pizza sometimes, if I'm honest, but also asparagus, peppers, pumpkin seeds, sage, kale, carrots, almond meal, stale cake--anything unspoiled and edible. My hens eat as well as we do, and they process eggs that are richly, beautifully, perfectly yellow. Side by side with even farmer's market eggs, there's no comparison. They taste gooier, eggier, more intensely flavorful. In comparison store bought eggs start to taste chalky. Backyard eggs are better in EVERYTHING, from scrambled eggs to sugar cookies.

And speaking of sugar cookies...

Homemade Vanilla Extract

Okay, this isn't grown on my urban farm. But it's created on my urban farm, it's flavorful, it's super easy to make and it's a little cheaper than grocery store vanilla--a lot cheaper than Nielson Massey (the gold standard of vanilla extract). I make mine in a pretty glass cruet, extra artisanal-ly delicious. You will need:

1 cup vodka, rum or bourbon (inexpensive is fine)
5 vanilla beans
Glass jar with lid or cork

Fill the jar with your alcohol. Vodka will leave the cleanest flavor; bourbon or rum will leave a little extra flavor behind. Cut the vanilla beans into 1" pieces and slice them open; scrape the vanilla flecks into the jar and then add the beans themselves. Shake to mix, and shake occasionally for the next eight weeks. Once fully diffused, you can add more alcohol as the liquid levels drop with use; if the flavor starts to feel become too diluted, add another bean. Shelf stable, no need to refrigerate.

Sugar cookies with this bourbon vanilla extract taste extra delicious; even the most simple recipes are infused with added flavor. We also use it in our homemade chocolate syrup to bring out the flavor of the cocoa for our almond milk mochas.

Almond Milk Mocha

Yes, this is also not grown on my urban farm but created, and it's so tasty and flavorful that when our espresso machine was out for repair and I had to go back to Starbucks, I ended up taking one sip and just decided to go without until we could make our own again. What makes it so fantastic for me is the fresh almond milk we make ourselves (a hassle, but 100% worth it, one taste of authentic fresh almond milk and you will never be able to go back to the flat, chemical flavor of store bought); homemade chocolate syrup, and fresh ground espresso.

Any coffee drink you'd normally have with cream or milk is fantastic with fresh almond milk. Where milk fades into the background of a coffee drink, almond milk enhances and adds a flavor of its own. Fresh almond milk is foamy, creamy and without any of the cloying sweetness of store bought.
You will need:

6 oz. raw almonds
5 cups water
A cheesecloth or a nut bag

Put the almonds in a small bowl or pyrex measuring cup with enough water to cover, and let soak overnight. Drain and place almonds with 5 cups water into a blender. Blend on high until almonds are liquified. Strain through cheesecloth or nut bag into second container (we repurposed a glass juice jar with a tight fitting lid). Makes 4 cups. Keep refrigerated for no more than two days. Shake before use.

Urban farming satisfies my gourmet tastes on a budget...backyard blueberries with as varied flavor as different varieties of grapes, sun-warmed strawberries, PINEAPPLE strawberries, fresh onions so strong and green and fragrant you can smell them on the breeze, crisp sugar snap peas straight from the vine...ahhh. If only I could grow Louboutins in my raised beds.

Berry-red...close enough. 

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.