Lifescapes

Gardening: A Radical Act

Fresh garden greens for dinner tonight: spinach, broccoli leaves, lettuce, carrot tops, chard, kale--in my mom's old aluminum colander. I'll blanch these (3 minutes), cool, and refrigerate. This evening, I'll chop and saute in olive oil with garlic, green onions, and pecans from Bill's trees, with a little balsamic vinegar. If I wanted to freeze the greens instead of serving, I'd pop them into a plastic bag and freeze. A winner both ways, tonight or next November. But the real payoff for me? Everything but the oil and vinegar comes from right here at Meadow Knoll.

Somebody remarked to me recently that it's so much easier and quicker just to buy fresh produce that it really doesn't pay to grow our own. Implicit in her comment was something like, "Haven't you got anything better to do with your time? Go write another book, for heaven's sake!"

Sorry, but I don't agree. Gardening, to my mind, helps me achieve two goals. First is the food itself, naturally. But the second goal is just as important--to men, anyway. Whenever I'm feeding us from the garden, I'm not feeding industrial agriculture, which feeds on oil (petroleum-based fertilizers, diesel-fueled tractors and truck transportation to market). To the extent that Bill and I can eat our own home-grown Irish and sweet potatoes, tomatoes, beans, peas, greens, melons, and more, we have declared at least a measure of independence from the unsustainable global food system.

That's why that batch of greens represents more to me than just the nutritious, tasty food that it is. I still have to depend on industrial agriculture for far too much--we all do. But I'm learning every day to become more self-reliant, and finding more and better ways to practice gardening as a radical act. And if I can encourage you to your own radical act of growing something you can eat, all the better.

Reading note. The opposite of work is play, also an active verb. It could be tennis or birdwatching, so long as it's meditative and makes you feel better afterward. Growing sunflowers and beans is like that, for some of us. Cooking is like that. So is canning tomatoes, and making mozzarella. Doing that with my kids feels like family life in every happy sense. When people see the size of our garden or the stocks in our pantry and shake their heads, saying "What a lot of work," I know what they're really saying. This is the polite construction in our language for "What a dope." They can think so. But they're wrong.--Barbara Kingsolver, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle

Water on my mind

A while back, I wrote a post called "Solar Supplemental," about the solar-powered battery-based backup for our electrical system. That's a work-in-progess: we're discovering that it's good to have a system that's expandable, portable, and useful in a variety of off-grid situations.

Meanwhile, Bill has been working on the first phase of our supplemental water system, a 1500-gallon tank, equipped with a one-horsepower electric motor that we can run off our solar panel (from the panel through a 125-amp deep cycle battery, through a 1000/2000-watt inverter). We can pump 12 gallons a minute, enough to fight a brush fire, if we had to. Or we can water my garden or gravity-feed to Bill's pecan trees, at the rate of about 6 gallons a minute. We can also hook the system (under pressure) to our house plumbing.

Bill filled the tank from the wells, but when the whole arrangement is complete, it will include a catchment system--just in case it rains. Last month was the driest March on record here in Central Texas, and our county is currently in an extreme drought (according to the US Drought Monitor). The lake is dropping daily, and the creek will be dry in a couple of weeks if we don't get some rain. Rain seems to be a lovely and distant hope.

Garden report. Our water comes from two 400-feet-deep wells fed by the Trinity aquifer--and that's what I'm using to water the garden, most days. It's been a hot, windy spring with very low humidity, so the plants need a lot of water. I've installed waterers made of plastic bottles for the tomatoes and peppers--that's something you might try if you want to cut down on watering frequency. I tried something this year I've never done before: I transplanted the thinnings from the sweet corn (read online about people doing this). The corn is interplanted with squash, to get double duty from my limited space. More double-duty planning: I'll dig the Irish potatoes in about 3 weeks, and the sweet potatoes will go into that space, interplanted with okra in one bed and southern peas in another.

Book report. It was a busy week: galley proofs for THE TALE OF CASTLE COTTAGE, a couple of chapters of THE DARLING DAHLIAS AND THE CONFEDERATE ROSE, and a talk at the Popular Culture Association conference in San Antonio yesterday. The drive to SA was lovely--miles of beautiful Texas Hill Country to enjoy. Driving in SA (especially  downtown) is a nightmare. Huge crowds: the sidewalks shoulder-to-shoulder with people eager to see the San Antonio River. Which is no longer a real river, actually. The springs that fed it have dried up. The "river" is a concrete-lined ditch filled with treated effluent. This country girl will be glad when the book travel is finished and she can stay home. (One  more trip: Fort Worth, Dallas/Lewisville.)

Speaking of travel (and speaking of water, as well), when I was in Rockport on book travel last weekend, I read a newspaper article about a lawsuit against the Texas Environmental Commission for allowing so much water to be taken out of the Guadalupe River that the river no longer feeds Aransas Bay and the Aransas National Wildlife Preserve, bay-water salinity is increasing, the blue crabs are dying, and the whooping cranes that feed on the crabs are starving. Already, the river has been named as the 10th most endangered river in the U.S., and with good reason. Too many people upstream, using too much water, leaving too little for the people and wild creatures downstream.

Serious issues, things we all need to think about.

Reading note. The once-mighty Rio Grande is so tapped out it doesn't even reach the Gulf of Mexico anymore. Nine years of drought, a proliferation of choking river weeds and the drawing off of water by farms and municipalities have taken their toll on the nation's second-longest river, which serves as the boundary between Mexico and the United States. Once a navigable waterway that swelled under bridges and made fertile an otherwise dry coastal plain, the river becomes a mere trickle before it gets to the Gulf of Mexico, disappearing about 300 feet short of its destination in a big expanse of sand. --The Associated Press, quoted in the Lawrence Journal World, "Along border, Rio not so Grande" 28 Jun 01 

 

 

Garden peas: In bloom this week

The garden is enjoying the spring weather--except for the wind, which is fierce and very hard on the young plants, and the low humidity. The peas are clinging to their (fence) wire trellis and blooming abundantly, so we're looking forward to a good crop of spring peas in another few weeks.

I'm also growing sweet potato slips in sand, an easy project: I buried several sweet potatoes (left from last fall's crop) in damp sand in a repurposed kitty-litter tray (with holes for drainage). The tubers send up shoots that can be gently snapped off and rooted to create a new plant for this year's crop. In other years, I've started slips from sweet potatoes in a jar of water. The sand method works better for me, and we have sand handy from a construction project. (My mantra: Work with what you have.) By the time the Irish (white) potatoes are ready to dig--around Mother's Day--the slips will be rooted. They'll go into the beds now occupied by the Irish potatoes. Sweet potatoes need a long growing season, which they certainly get here in Texas. They'll stay in the ground until the first frost kills back the vines.

I love the idea that last year's tubers, which were nourished by the soil in these garden beds, will produce more sweet, rich tubers for our table and for the crop the following year. And that the foliage from last year's crop went into the compost that enriches the garden soil--and the lives of we who take our food from it. For me, that's the natural magic of gardening.

Book report. Thanks to China's many friends, Mourning Gloria made the NYT bestseller list last week! They've been celebrating wildly in Pecan Springs (dancing in the streets, popping the bubbly, and who-knows-what-else). China has made the national lists several times before, but it's always a special event.

But enough celebrating: time to buckle down and get started on The Darling Dahlias and the Confederate Rose, the 2012 entry in the Dahlias' series. This one has (naturally) a backstory that takes place in 1861, at the beginning of the War Between the States and features Rose Greenhow, who was a Confederate spy. It also features the Confederate rose, which isn't a rose at all but an hibiscus that comes from China. Go figure. I've started the book and hope to get in some serious writing time this week. Only one book event, a talk at the Popular Culture Association meeting in San Antonio on Thursday. Next open-to-the-public events will be in Fort Worth on April 30 and in Lewisville on May 1. Then I'll have the months of May and June to pay attention to the Confederate Rose.

Reading report. I've just finished reading Life Rules: Why so much is going wrong everywhere at once and how Life teaches us to fix it (isn't that a great title?) by Ellen LaConte. I'll be reviewing it this week and will post the link when it's up. Great book. Also very good: Steven Havill's most recent, Double Prey. I am definitely a Havill fan.

Reading note. For the human necessity is not just to know but also to cherish and protect the things that are known, and to know the things that can be known only by cherishing. If we are to protect the world's multitude of places and creatures, then we must know them not just conceptually but imaginatively as well. They must be pictured in the mind and memory; they must be known with affection, 'by heart,' so that in seeing or remembering them the heart may be said to 'sing,' to make a music peculiar to its recognition of each particular place or creature that it knows well.--Wendell Berry