Obtain a Yield

For some reason, this permaculture principle is difficult for me to live with. So I'm writing about it. I know I do obtain a yield, but somehow, I don't know, maybe it's the wording. It sounds like an order. You Must Obtain A Yield. You Must Succeed, Dammit. Do Not Stray From The Path. Is beauty not a yield? Or pleasure, or even exercise? What about failure? Could not failure yield learning, yield determination? Calling it Enjoy Your Harvest might speak to me more. Or Understand Your Yield.
Anyway, I want to acknowledge my yield. It's so small, and so intermittent, and just never seems like much. Maybe in the writing it will appear more substantial.
My primary and most essential yield is visual privacy, here on a city lot surrounded by apartment buildings. And a sense of residing within Nature. But I also have sprecific useful yields.
Starting in the southeast corner, there is the apricot tree. One year it had a wonderful crop of apricots. Mostly I was away that year. This year we got a dozen or two. They were excellent. Is that encouraging or demoralizing? I don't know.
There were iris flowers this year for my vases. A small harvest but I enjoyed it. And I culled some plants, so that was useful.
Even though the squirrels got at least three quarters of my feijoas, I had plenty for the kids and some for myself.
The three peonies that bloomed were repeats from previous years, many have not yet blossomed. They were gorgeous and lasted a while, and the ones I didn't pick have set seed. Which theoretically they don't do, being hybrid (except for the ostii).
Rhubarb, a small quantity. But I don't use it much, so that's fine. And some transplants. I guess new plants are a harvest.
Roses, a few, brilliant. 
Are seedlings a harvest? I dug up several dozen pawpaw and white sapote seedlings to plant out and give away. The harvest was better connection with my community to whom I gave plants and garden tours.
I ate currants, buffalo and clove, and concluded I don't much care for them.
The kids and I ate fuschia berries. They ate the bolivian in quantity, I ate the ornamental, one or two at a time.
The squirrels got all the figs.
The mountain papaya has started dropping papayas. They are boring & when it dies I will not replace it.
The plums are falling in plenty, both eating and brewing quality.
I got a mulberry or two.
I ate burdock greens. They were excellent. Not nearly as bitter as I feared. Nothing to cardoons.
There was plenty of poke, but the only part I needed this year was big leaves for a compress for my daughter, and those were in short but scroungingly-adequate supply.
There were dandelion greens in adequate quantity or more every time I wanted them.
Lemon balm was available as desired.
I got several meals of favas and fava greens.
Last summer I got purple string beans. They were suppposed to be perrennial, but I have not seen them this year. I got a few scarlet runners, and two of them have come back.
I ate nasturtium leaves and concluded they are inappropriate in quantity.
I ate collards. They're supposed to be indestructable, the purple tree collards. But they don't much like it here.
There was chickweed. Yum. Just a little. Never saw it here before.
Got a couple of artichokes.
Got my first local apple.
Tried splitting the bees, but it didn't work. Harvested some honey while the hive was open. Also last year's mead was quite interesting.
Pruned the pine, and got needles for weaving. Sometimes also harvest bermuda grass and iris leaves for basketry.
Looks like there will be a walnut this year.
I never think to harvest the pellitory, it's too far away to notice. I guess I do have zones.
Bay leaves (california, which I prefer, having been raised on it).
Both pear trees that have not borne until now are holding young fruit. The one that bore last year is bare.
Two cherries from three trees.
A few spears of asparagus. I don't think they get enough sun. I try to keep up the water, and it's about the only place I fertilize.
Strawberries! I must be watering better. One or two, every few days, in the summer.
The cardoons are sparse this year, but I don't need much.
Peaches. But I am cutting the tree back. Poor climate for sweetness, and it's crowding the new avocado.
A lime or three at a time for months. Enough to make marmalade for christmas gifts.
Honking big lemons, a few left after the passersby get most.
Plenty of rosemary for the tea I use for colds. Though I have to go steal the lavendar from the neighbors.
Lemon guavas. Sometimes they all disappear, sometimes there are handfuls left for me.
Coupla mandarins. Tiny but sweet.
Coupla white sapotes. Vernon is the only variety that's bearing yet.
Poha, until it died.
Oregano.
Olives. Enough to make a big batch even after sorting out three quarters because of fly larvae. Thinking of using clay spray this year, but probably too lazy.
A few grapes, grape leaves, tendrils.
Mushrooms. Not so much this year, maybe a few oysters, but several meals and jars of dried of wine caps a couple of years back, and turkey tails for immune support.
Maybe that's it. Not quite 50 things. Some with several uses each, that's maybe a dozen or so uses of things per month. Real stuff from my yard twice a week. Significant.

Perennial Favas Continued

Just FYI, they did not come back the next year. I believe they died over the dry season.

Wintering Squash

I'm fairly new to vegetable gardening. I didn't grow up doing it, and don't have a lot of experience. Fruit trees are what I know, and even they would prosper more with more attention. But last spring I planted winter squash.
I figured squash are fairly easy. Everyone knows that zucchini grows like a weed. Why should hard squash be any different? It was April or May. I bought a packet or two of seeds, and started them in random places around the garden. Several came up. A few survived. I had five or six squash vines around the yard, and was waiting to see what kind of squash I would get. (I can never remember what I have planted, and besides, at least one packet was an assortment.)
They grew. They bloomed. They bore male flowers, as squash often do at the beginning of the season. They continued to bloom, sporadically, into the summer, the flowers continuing male.
I did research. Some people say that fertilizer encourages female blooms. Some people say fertilizer suppresses female blooms, what one needs is tough conditions. I figured, all else seeming to be equal, I would continue with my hands-off approach. Some say sunlight helps, but sunlight is not always available. I put up pole tripods and tomato cages for them to climb.
Come September, they still were growing, still blooming, still bearing male flowers exclusively. I went away for a month to be with family.
When I returned in October, there were two little squash. They bloomed! They bore fruit!
One is about an inch or two long when I arrive home from my trip, and over subsequent weeks gets maybe fifteen inches across, round, mostly green. I get compliments on my watermelon.
The other starts out small, you know, squash blossom sized, gets about the size of a softball. 
The first grows into early November, developing white stippling in the green. Then it sits. The other one hangs partway up a tomato cage. They seem inert. There's no use picking them, they clearly will not be sweet. I put a ceramic tile beneath the one sitting on the ground.
The winter rains come, the sourgrass and nasturtium come up, almost hiding the big one. It is late February. There are more female flowers. It looks like they might set fruit, but the fruit fall off after a few days.
The small one from October is near the front door, on the sunny side of the house. I notice it is beginning to turn color. The white stippling is developing a yellow cast.
It's March. The sun is as high as before Halloween, and the day length is quickly heading for half time of the equinox. Even the squash in the shade is turning a shade of cream.
I continue to leave them, waiting for the vines to shrivel, indicating that they are ready to harvest. I wait all summer and into the fall. The vines set more fruit, they get large, but none of them turn any squashlike color, nor do the vines die back. The fruit of the one vine climbing the bamboo tripod gets so heavy the tripod breaks and it falls and cracks. Harvest! I try cooking it. Bland, stringy.
I wait a while and as they continue not to change, I harvest anyway, and cut back the vines.
Still boring. Black seeds. Turns out the only black seeded squash is chilacayote. The immature ones are good as summer squash, but the big ones are useless - they are traditionally candied, but I don't see the point.
But I am happy to have in my yard anything useful that flourishes without care, so they are still here, climbing my fig tree, supplying summer squash and mystifying people.

celebration

winter solstice leaves
fall on peony blossoms
sudden bee flies off

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.