Fuck Dat

"Shark Puddle" I said, reading the sign for the bus around the park. Yes, I'm prone to spoonerisms, the best ones surprising me as I hear them jump out of my mouth.

Duck fat is one of my favorite ingredients. The drippings from a good crispy duck go into a jar in the fridge. If there is any waste skin left over from cooking or eating duck, it gets rendered down into yummy cracklings and the iota of fat is added to my jar. When I have enough I make duck confit, which needs to be submerged in fat while it cooks. But it does not absorb much fat while cooking, so usually I soon have enough to make the next batch. 

But this time I made duck rillettes. It just sort of happened. I had bought six duck legs to make for 

dinner, but we ended up going out. Then a couple of days later I was hungry at the farmers' market and bought some olive bread and duck rillettes to have something to eat right away. I thought "I can do that".

So I went home and did a little research on the trusty interwebs and plunked those tasty waterfowl limbs into a pot of fat with a couple of bay leaves. (I know I should have brined them first, but this was a first approximation. I didn't expect to need it to keep over the winter.) When they were well cooked I picked the meat off the bones and ran it through the electric mixer with a fair amount of plum brandy and some salt.

I ended up with quite a bit more than I was going to eat soon, and was worried that it was not salty enough to keep a long time. So I take it to pot lucks and folks ask whether I studied cooking in the South of France.

But between the fat blended in and the fat on top of the jars to seal the rillettes from the air while it aged I had no fat left.

Fuck dat. 

Perennial Favas

I have been growing fava beans for about five years. Other than dandelion greens, which grow themselves after I make a few wishes in my yard, favas are the easiest vegetable to grow that I know about. Around here I plant them in the fall and when the rains come they sprout and grow all winter. I pick the tops and eat the greens until they start flowering. Then I wait for the beans.

After I eat the beans and the weather gets warm so the plants stop making more, I gather any dry ones to plant next year. I have not yet had a big enough harvest to cook with the dry beans. Then I pull the plants up to make room for late-season vegetables, and turn them into mulch.

This year the beans were just getting good. I had eaten a few small meals of the first of them and there were lots more about to be ripe. There were going to be plenty. I was starting to worry that I would not be able to keep up with the harvest, and kept reassuring myself that if there were more than I could eat they would mature into nice dry beans. Then I went out to pick some for lunch and there were no beans. None. They were gone.

I don't think it was the street people. When my strawberries disappear that's who I blame. I may be wrong, it may be slugs, but that doesn't stop me from blaming them. But the strawberries are in the front yard, and the favas are all over. And I doubt that beans are as appealing or as recognizable as berries. Nor the neighbors nor their dog. They may be foodies, but it's easier to just buy beans at the market.

It had to have been the squirrels. Now my expectation is that squirrels would make a mess. One bite out of each bean sort of thing. But no. This was a leave no trace feast. That's what made it hard to believe it was actually squirrels. But I can't come up with any other suspect.

I mourned my beans and figured out what to make instead for lunch. It's still cool, or maybe the summer gloom has come early, so I thought they would set more beans. But I watched for a few days and no flowers appeared on the plants. Then I recalled that when I pick the tops for greens, they don't seem to sprout more from the same stem, but instead send up a new shoot from the roots. So perhaps they had to do that before they will bloom again.

So I decided to cut them all down short and see what happens. When I started cutting, I noticed that many of them had small shoots starting already. And this showed me that pulling them up may not be necessary. Planting them every year may not be necessary. This is now an experiment not only in getting more beans but also in keeping the fava plants alive all year 'round. In growing them as perennials, finding out how long they will live, when they will produce, minimizing disruption of the soil, maximizing biomass, root spread, nitrogen fixing ability. Giving them a head start on life and myself more beans.

I'm excited. We shall see.

The Wrong Cover Crops

When I created my recent hugelculture bed, I had no turf to invert on top and give it a stable layer of soil. So incorporated a couple of cover crops into the mud that I plastered it with: clover and buckwheat. Clover of course fixes nitrogen and buckwheat is known for growing rapidly. They both provide bee forage. They're commonly used and easy to obtain. But they were the wrong choices for my conditions.

My most problematic weed species is oxalis pes-caprae, a practically ineradicable South African bulb known locally as sour grass. Its bulbs remain deep underground, and the leaves and flowers spring up rapidly in the winter, about early February. Being a bulb it has more stored nourishment than the little seeds I plant that take a while to grow their first true leaves. It becomes so abundant that it keeps all the sun off my seedlings, which disappear in the thick leaves of the sourgrass.

It's debatable whether it provides forage for honeybees, I have heard that it doesn't, from someone who ought to know, and read that it does. Beyond its habit of taking off so rapidly in the first warmth of the year, it is a fairly innocuous plant. No stickers, no poison, I like the color. The stems are succulent and the leaves are roundish in clumps of three. It is lovely, bright and cheerful, and smells good. It disappears by summer. But I am tired of it crowding out the what I plant. So I keep pulling it up, hoping eventually to starve the bulbs, at least in my vegetable beds.

Did the description of the leaves sound familiar? How about the stems? What has roundish leaves in clumps of three? Clover. And succulent stems? Buckwheat. It's nearly impossible to weed sour grass when it's surrounded by two plants that look just like it. If I concentrate on the leaves I end up pulling all my clover. If I look at the stems I yank the buckwheat. If I try to leave the cover crops for soil stabilization and to feed the bees, I end up with plenty of sour grass setting new little bulbs to sprout from next spring, when I'd really rather be growing peas and radishes, chicory and beets.

Next time perhaps I'll try vetch.

Mushroom Success

I have been inoculating logs with mushroom spawn to no avail for years & years.

I just don't water enough, I guess. That's not news. And probably it's not shady enough where I put the logs, but I thought it would be.

I had one success several years ago: turkey tails. Now turkey tails are decorative and medicinal and apparently easy to grow, and make a great addition to soup stock, but there is no way they could be described as a culinary mushroom. So even though I don't find them as often as I used to on my hikes, and I'm glad to have access to them, they were kind of a disappointment.

A couple of years ago I inoculated one of my plum stumps. Fruit wood is not renowned as a substrate for mushrooms, but after I took the tree down I had no other way to get rid of the stump. I hoped that since it had roots in the ground, it would stay a little moist through the summer despite being in an exposed location that was far from ideal for growing fungi. Some fungi prefer their logs to be partially buried in order to fruit, and I hoped this would be similar enough - perhaps even the original condition that partially burying the logs emulates.

After a year and no sign of mycelium, I got an idea. A few months ago I piled up woody debris around the base of the stump and converted it into the heart of a hugelculture bed. I put dirt over the entire heap and planted it to favas and clover and buckwheat and radishes and let the soil organisms start turning the wood into humus. The cover crops keep the dirt covering the wood, but occasionally a hole appears in the surface of the bed where there is too much empty space between the buried branches. This morning I found a big hole in the top of the bed behind the stump.

When I find a hole like that I pour dirt down it to fill the gaps between the logs. I got my bucket of dirt and my trowel, and caved in the sides of the hole as best I could, to enlarge the opening and begin filling the cavity. I was standing there holding my bucket, starting to pour dirt into the hole when I saw the side of the central stump exposed a couple of feet down into the hole. And it had fungi growing out of it! Unfortunately, before I could register what I was seeing and stop doing what I was doing, the hole was full of dirt and I was unable to inspect the stump more closely. But two of the fruiting bodies are above dirt level where the stump sticks up a foot or so above the top of the rest of the bed.

They're immature, so I'm not sure what I have. I don't recall what I put in the stump; I figured it would be obvious if it ever fruited. I may have inoculated with more than one kind. I know you're not supposed to, but I suspect I had remainder quantities of several types, and figured the conditions might be support one species better than the rest, so why not try all of them? I know I have seen downed trees with several species of fungi growing out of them, so why not try to replicate that here?

I hope they are maitake. Maybe they're reishi, their texture feels a little hard for maitake. Reishi are good too, again for medicine and soup stocks. But it would be really grand to get a nice chewable edible mushroom.

They're turkey tails.

Backyard Foraging

I'm a forager from way back. Food, medicine, ornamentation, crafting supplies. I love to go for a ramble and come back with a treasure, or munch on something along the path. But these days I live in the city. I don't like driving a long way to take a walk. And if I do, I am often in a park where foraging is prohibited and dogs are abundant. So I have gradually become a gardener.

I started with trees. Trees grown from seeds, then trees from the nursery. Fruit and nut trees. I planted my first tree, an Italian stone pine, about thirty years ago. Visions of pine nuts danced in my head. I ordered the seeds from a mail order seed catalog. About seven came. One seedling came up, and I planted it in the yard at my father's house where I was living at the time. I followed it with two apples from the local nursery.

The apples were killed by my then husband in a fit of rage.

The pine was five or six years old, getting to be about four feet tall, and lush, just beginning to look like a tree, when I had to move away. My brother remodeled the house and tried to transplant the tree, killing it.

Sad but not discouraged, I continued to plant at my next home. Apples again, from the nursery as the seed planting process was so slow. And a sugar maple. My husband got them again, with the weed wacker this time.

I was getting discouraged. I got rid of the husband. It was several years before I again lived in a house with a yard, and by the time I did, I was eager to make up for lost time. I also had a little more money, so a ten dollar investment in a tree no longer seemed prohibitive.

I did have, however, a yard full of weeds and concrete that needed clearing before I could plant.
I mulched the weedy part and put the kids to work tearing out the concrete with a pry bar from the tool library.

I had a three inch tall persimmon seedling from a seed I had found in a fruit and potted up. I put it in the ground, and planted some vegetables around it so I wouldn't step on it or forget to water it. It started to grow and eventually fruit. The fruit were inedible but lovely. My neighbor photographed them and gave me a print.

Encouraged by this success, I gradually planted all the trees I could fit into the yard. Lemons and pears, apples and feijoas, apricots and mulberries. In my imagination I was harvesting fruits of all sorts and all seasons. When I ran out of space for full sized trees I started to infill with smaller plants and vines; babaco, hardy kiwi, passionfruit, tree tomato. Grapes of all sorts, and hops. Roses for rose petal tea. I even brought in dandelion seeds so I could have greens without a trip to the store.

The roses and dandelions were usable the first year, the lemons the second, then apples and pears, passionfruit and tree tomatoes. Soon I was actually able to forage food in my own yard a good portion of the year. I kept planting seeds of all sorts just to see what might grow in our conditions. Some of them actually came up, and a few matured enough to harvest and use. I tried a few vegetables to very little avail, but established a few culinary and medicinal herbs.

A number of years later I moved to a new house. With the experience of my first garden under my belt, I have begun to establish a diverse ecosystem of plants that I enjoy using. Every week I have weeds and garden greens for my Sunday breakfast. Except for asparagus - which I keep planting and then killing - and onions, I have hardly bought a vegetable in months.

I continue to find nooks in which to plant one more perennial green or exotic vine. And the foraging is sustaining me.

Weeding

Weeding has always been difficult for me. That's one of the reasons I have never succeeded with a traditional vegetable garden. Half the time I pull the plants I want by mistake. The rest of the time, I am loathe to pull the weeds since they are edible or useful or shade the soil or fix nitrogen or some other bogus reason. And I'm lazy, so I even when I am willing to take those pesky weeds out and stop letting them crowd my squash, I don't keep up very well, and soon I can't find the plants I planted, they are hidden in the weeds.

When I started building trying to build soil it became another question. The weeds were the first plant cover willing to grow in the sterile clay I was attempting to transform. I saw them as breaking up the clods, adding carbonaceous matter, moving water and minerals, hosting earthworms. I became even more attached to my weeds. I trusted that as the weeds improved the soil, I would gradually be able to plant vegetables successfully. That was nominally true, but I still was not a vegetable gardener. The soil improved, a higher class of weed moved in (vetch), fruit seeds sprouted, and the orchard grew.

At my new house I have a little more room, and I was inspired to create hugel beds and try again on vegetables. As the first hugel began breaking down, I was able to grow beans, kale, mache, some stunted onions and carrots, and a few other things I don't recall. I was pulling both the weeds and the overaged and no longer productive garden plants so as to make more space for later plants and give them more sun. I was mulching with the plants I pulled, and felt good about making it tidy while not exposing too much soil to the sun. And pulling out the weeds showed me spaces in my vegetable bed that had enough room to plant something new, whereas before I cleared the soil it gave the impression of being too crowded for any more plants.

So I have started to love weeding. It gives me something to do with my hands when I am daydreaming in the garden. It gets me close to the ground and all the little things coming from the dirt: mushrooms, bugs, new seedlings that I otherwise would miss.

But then I noticed that pulling them disturbed the soil. Initially I thought that pulling up the roots and thus loosening the soil was good for the remaining plants. But in my hugel the soil didn't need loosening or aeration. The reverse was true. It had been very difficult to get enough soil onto the bed to fill the main cavities between the branches I built it with. There was plenty of air in my bed - so much that the roots of the plants found places they could not go, and the water penetrated unevenly. I started thinking that perhaps the roots of the weeds were part of what held the bed together. Yes, when you start a hugel bed you are supposed to plant it with enough starts and cover crop seeds that there is no room for weeds. I failed at that. I simply never water regularly enough to get plants started, and when I do, the squirrels love eating the little shoots. So I started seeing the weeds as holding together the soil, filling in the gaps under the ground, channeling the water, being available to the soil biota. But they were still crowding my vegetables that I was newly developing some skill at growing, and becoming fond of.

So I had to conceptualize differently, and strategize differently. Visiting my Permie neighbor I asked whether he pulls weeds. He said no. And I saw few weeds in his hugel beds (though lots of unharvested greens). But then I realized he imports his top soil from the composting facility, so his isn't replete with the seeds of every pesky plant that has ever grown on site, as mine is.

So I started looking for a middle ground. I have to evaluate the drawbacks and the utility of each plant, not just think of them as weeds. For example, normally I would pull all grass. Most grasses here are non-native and many make spiny seeds; it's easier to just pull them than to figure out each one. But they have great spreading root systems that hold the soil in place for several inches around each plant. I now leave them until I need to clear a spot to transplant into, or until I see them setting seeds that will stick in my socks or my cat's ears.

At the same time, I still love taking out the plants I don't care about or am finished with, and letting that reveal space for new plants I want.

Sour grass (oxalis pes-caprae) needs to come out. Always. It shades out everything, and sets new bulblets deep underground so it's constantly spreading. It's hopeless trying to control it in the rest of the yard, but in the hugel beds I pull it. Some of the roots came out amazingly easily. They were a yard long, snaking through the hollow spaces between the logs and branches under the dirt.

In the rest of the yard beyond the veggie beds there are weeds too.

Dandelions I leave. Always. I eat them, they have no stickers, the flowers are pretty. In fact, I established them intentionally.

Cuckoo pint and other arums I pull up when it's easy, when they're in my way, when it's glaringly evident that the seeds are ripening. It's all over, so I feel it's sort of hopeless. I can't distinguish between the ones that are boring and the ones with the interesting flowers. And I don't think they spread quite as fast as the sour grass.

Nasturtiums I consider a weed, but they're easy to pull, and lately I've been eating lots of them. It's so much easier to eat them than to intentionally grow plants to eat, planting and watering and weeding them. So I am becoming more accepting of them until I find other plants to fill their niche.

Bur chervil goes. Stickers. Bur clover too, but it's harder to eradicate.

Vetch I enjoy, though I wonder whether maybe it's strangling some of its neighbors. There are native vetches, but the one I have is Eurasian. Oh, well. It's pretty, it fixes nitrogen, I eat it, it shades the ground and probably crowds out bur clover.

Spurge I pull. I don't particularly like anything about it, and it's toxic. But I'm not terribly thorough, I just pull it when I happen to come across it within reach.

I don't like three cornered leek. I used to use it in cooking, but that was just a ploy to get myself to pull it. Its texture when cooked is not good, and I don't like raw onions. So I hate the smell when I step on them. I used to think they were ineradicable, but I seem to be making a good dent. They're pretty easy to get out by the clump when the soil is damp.

Transforming an Urban Forest Garden

When I studied edible forestry, the examples given were always designed and planted from scratch. They were lovely planned ecosystems in which the plants were chosen for their relationships with each other, the terrain and conditions, and the buildings. The typical urban forest garden was the restoration of a brick and rubble filled yard. There was no sense of how to create such an intricate web of useful plants in a place that is already verdant.

When we bought our house, about seven years ago, the back yard was a jungle. We could neither see nor reach the back fence 20 yards away. I had seldom seen such a collection of poisonous and problematic plants.

The soil was wonderful. The woman we bought the place from had been here fifty years, and as far as I could tell had left most of the yard fallow, with volunteer trees dropping leaves undisturbed for decades. I was thrilled by the number and variety of birds. I wanted to plant, which meant clearing, but I didn't want to clear so much or so fast as to disturb the avian inhabitants or dry out the soil.

My first thought was goats, but I was not in a position to begin keeping goats, and I didn't know where to borrow them. So we (largely my daughter) cleared it by hand.

The first things that needed to go were some of the acacias. There were a dozen or so blackwood acacias scattered around, evidently young volunteers. Some of them were growing up under the roof, so the roofers had us bring in gardeners to take the trees down so they could replace the roof. At this first round we left half a dozen of the older ones that were not as close to the house. I like the shade they provide and the year-round privacy. I wanted to leave nesting sites. Acacias fix nitrogen; I was happy to have as much free nitrogenous compost falling from the sky as I could get. And though I hate the scent of some acacia blossoms, I was fortunate that A. melanoxylon smells good to me.

It would have been good to keep the biomass from the acacias in the yard, but I was preoccupied with the restoration of the house itself and did not think of asking the tree removal guys to chip on site and leave a pile of woody debris. Ah, hindsight.

We did have plenty of debris from blackberry and ivy, which mixed with the broken glass from the old windows to make an impenetrable heap of sharp stuff. I guess the workers must have hauled much of it away, or it simply broke down, because there's no sign of it now. But if it broke down, where is all the broken glass? We certainly have some in our soil, but no great concentration.

Once the blackberry and ivy were mostly clear we could get into the yard and see what was there. We rescued an old English Walnut that was covered in ivy and almost dead. It has since been leafing out more fully each successive year, and we have been gradually shaping it so it no longer threatens to fall on the next door neighbors.

There were more than half a dozen good sized myrobalan plum trees - enough to make the whole place a thicket. Their plums were worthless, but needed to be picked up every summer or they would sprout on the newly accessible ground. The sprouts then had to be pulled before they got woody and difficult; it was easier to pick up the plums.

We have since taken down three or four, leaving one as a tall stump in hopes of growing mushrooms or hanging up laundry. It refuses to entirely die, but as the months pass I pull off fewer & fewer leaf clusters. I don't think the mushrooms I inoculated it with have much of a chance, but I keep hoping. And I finally got the idea to plant beans around it. They have just sprouted and their shade might help the mushroom mycelium keep from drying out. I'm contemplating which ones to take out next, and which are actually assets to the garden.

A fatter but shorter inoculated stump has become the center of a hugel bed that is just starting to settle in.

Thanks to the suggestion of a neighbor, two of the remaining plum trees are being topworked, one to gage, one to almond. And one of the trees turned out to have decent plums. We're not big plum eaters, but a few can be enjoyable.