Running Water

Thursday again! My pick up time is now earlier, so I have slightly better light for my photos, although today I’m in kind of a hurry, so my food styling is not up to even its normal poor standard.

Those are raspberries in the little box, and plums and apricots in the bag. I confess that I left a box of berries at the pickup.

This is how the veggies come, in a big plastic box liner. Clockwise from top left we have: carrots, parsley, a bag of spinach, dandelion greens, butter lettuce, nappa cabbage, round zukes, kale and a bag of green beans. There is also a small bunch of arugula that hid behind something.

I still haven’t made my okonomi-yaki; now I’ll do it with more cabbage. The only other exciting thing that springs to mind (after kale chips, of course) is the method for drying zucchini that Hank Shaw blogged about this morning. For me, next to managing the sheer quantity of zucchini, dealing with its high water content is the biggest challenge.

The paper of record has two articles of note. One is a good piece in the Sunday magazine about Will Allen and Growing Power, the amazingly productive urban farm in Milwaukee that is the prime inspiration for Veggielution. My favorite quote:

So no, Growing Power isn’t self-sufficient. But neither is industrial agriculture, which relies on price supports and government subsidies. Moreover, industrial farming incurs costs that are paid by society as a whole: the health costs of eating highly processed foods, for example, or water pollution. Nor can Growing Power be compared to other small farms, because it provides so many intangible social benefits to those it reaches. “It’s not operated as a farm,” said Ian Marvy, executive director of Brooklyn’s Added Value farm, which shares many of Growing Power’s core values but produces less food. “It has a social, ecological and economic bottom line.”

The other is one of those stories that seems to reinforce the fact that the reader is on the outside looking in. It details a dinner in Oakland that brought together the local luminaries of the Oakland food scene, who enjoyed an amazing bounty of locally-grown and (more importantly) locally-preserved and -prepared foods. Maybe if it were written with more recipes or resources, I wouldn’t have got quite such an off-putting vibe. It’s funny, because I actually have been at the periphery of the events described: I attended Slow Food Nation, went to the Meatpaper party at Camino, and, of course, have followed Forage Oakland from afar. I’m also looking forward to the Eat Real Festival, and am very interested in what I read about LiveCulture.

That said, the meal described is the other half of the Veggielution picture for me. At the end of the general meeting yesterday, I gave my feedback that I wanted to see more use of the food, both in people’s taking it home, and in our cooking it and eating it together. The logistics of the Sunday potlucks are difficult; we haven’t had our own plates and utensils, and most volunteers don’t bring any, either. But Lisa reports that she’s got many more plates now, and I want to make more concerted use of the kitchen at Prusch park. I’m going to start by bringing my Coleman stove on Sunday (given me by my mother years ago in an ultimately futile encouragement of camping) and cook up a stir fry with whatever we find. I’ll try to find a thrift-store cast iron pan to donate, as well. Soup would be easy to make but, given the lack of bowls, somewhat more difficult to eat.

When I arrived at Veggielution this afternoon, there were six fire trucks. While mowing the area under the giant flyovers between 101 and 280, someone started a brush fire.

We found peafowl eggs, charred (I think) by the fire.

Walking in that burned space made us want to expand the farm, maybe throwing tomato seed bombs over the fence. It really brought home just how much land is used up by freeways.

More happily, the seeds have shot up in the new plot. The corn, while not as high as an elephant’s eye, is still several inches tall, and the beans germinated so well that we had to thin them.

We harvested some scary huge zukes, and twisty cukes, and watermelons that were nowhere near ripe. The watermelons were fun; they were pure white inside, with white, undeveloped seeds, but still really juicy. They had a cucumberish flavor; it was very clear that they’re all related. Ripe watermelon is better, though.

Then we had a general meeting, and decided to name our newsletter Growing Thymes. I came up with The Crisper Drawer, but it didn’t win the vote. And one of the firemen told us that they have a vegetable garden at Station 2, and he invited us over for coffee and a tour.

This morning we picked apricots in Berryessa, quite a ways away from our usual haunts. This area of East San José is a sea of suburban homes, shading to the monster as one gains elevation, so it was a surprise to turn the corner and see an apricot orchard lining one side of the street. One orchard that had been broken up into several lots; our home was halfway down the block.

We had broken up our team in order also to be able to pick Santa Rosa plums at the Guadalupe Historic Orchard, but this place was so big that we could have used the other team members, as well as the extra places to distribute the fruit. But we had several new volunteers, attracted by out recent press coverage, and they were very enthusiastic pickers who had to be dragged away when we were done.

The homeowner has lived here for 60 years, and never dreamed that his place in the country would some day be swallowed up by San José.

This is the first year that he has not been able to sell his fruit. The big packing houses no longer want to deal with lots of “only” 1,000 lbs of dried apricots; the food contamination issues caused by massive, industrial operations now require the same onerous paperwork for everyone.

We picked almost 1,000 lbs of fresh apricots for distribution, with maybe 200 lbs of culls, and we had to leave 12 trees unpicked when we ran out of time. The homeowner was upset that we couldn’t get to all of the fruit; he asked us several times if we could come back tomorrow, and then had to try to think of how he could put that fruit to good use. It makes me angry that there is no easy way to get all of these beautiful, beautiful apricots into the hands of people in San José that would enjoy them, and that this lovely man is forced to give his fruit away instead of being able to sell it.

But the biggest excitement in all of this was that we were visited by a cockatiel.

It first landed on our shade canopy, chirping cheerfully, then came underneath to visit. It climbed on Bud’s shoulder

and Heather’s hat.

It ate a Sun Chip, and drank some water, and flew into and on top of the truck. It was clearly someone’s pet, and I went to a nearby house to ask whether the occupants knew of a neighbor bird. The woman I talked to said she didn’t know, but she came by with a pet carrier box to take it to a friend who has cockatiels, and promised to look for lost bird fliers.

I left with probably 30 lbs of culls, mostly fruit that was too mushy to distribute. With it, I:

• Froze two cookie sheets of halved fruit
• Filled all four trays of my dehydrator
• Froze 4 cups of puree
• Prepared 17 cups of ultra-squishy fruit for making jam
• Baked two loaves of apricot tea bread
• Froze filling for an apricot pie
• Made a batch of apricot ice cream
• Set aside probably 7 lbs of firmer fruit to take to Amie

I have apricots on my own tree; God only knows what I’ll do with them.

Last week, I checked out Plenty from the library. It’s the memoir of a year of eating very locally in Vancouver, BC and environs, written in alternating chapters by Alisa Smith and James MacKinnon. I had read some of their blog posts, but I was pleasantly surprised by the book itself. The whole enterprise can be taken as a stunt, especially when interpreted as a bunch of rules that do nothing but impose privation. But near the beginning, MacKinnon says

Can I admit, then, that part of me silently questioned my own idea for a year of eating locally? That the essential pointlessness of such a gesture is not lost on me? I am acutely aware that efforts like the 100-mile diet are readily dismissed at “the new earnestness,” which is currently enjoying a very temporary cool, and I am not deluded enough to feel that I’m making a difference or being the change I want to see in the world. Both of these contemporary platitudes contain kernels of truth, but both are also overwhelmed by stark realities. I have travelled these ethical pathways in one way or another for twenty years now, choosing to ride a bicycle in homicidal traffic, to reuse my tinfoil and plastic bags as though I lived in the Depression, to shop little and buy less. It doesn’t make me feel “good.” It makes me feel like an alien. As I pedal through another midwinter rainfall, virtually every indicator of global ecological health continues to worsen, from biodiversity to energy consumption, and my being has done little to change the world. My actions are abstract and absurd, and they are neither saving the rain forests nor feeding the world’s hungry.

So why do it at all? Smith and MacKinnon live in the Pacific Northwest, a region so blessed by nature that the native peoples came up with the potlatch, where “the status of any given family is raised not by who has the most resources, but by who distributes the most resources.” I live in California, which is similarly blessed, growing almost all of the nation’s almonds, artichokes, dates, figs, kiwi, olives, persimmons, pistachios, prunes, raisins, and walnuts. I prefer to see eating locally as a positive celebration of place, rather than an ascetic regimen of denial. I picked apricots on Saturday in an orchard whose owners cannot afford to sell their fruit. It costs too much to pick and pack and distribute. Even though Village Harvest distributes this fruit to grateful recipients, there is something wrong with a food system that brings in apples from over the wide Pacific, while letting fruit fall rotten to the ground in the Santa Cruz mountains.

A very common reaction to eating locally is “But you can only do that if you live in California! It would never work in Minnesota!” And to that, I say, fine. Let it work here in California. I won’t worry about your winter lettuce or your strawberries out in the Midwest. But if, in fact, it cannot work here in California, then we’re all doomed.

But I don’t eat locally because of any sense of doom. I do it because I do live in a land of inconceivable abundance. I do it because I love my home, and I love what it provides for us. Food comes from the ground; plants grow in the soil and animals eat those plants. It matters to me where and how those plants and animals grow.

Today I drove the length of the Salinas Valley. I don’t have any photos, or even anything really coherent to say about it, but I always feel a deep sense of love as I drive through Paso Robles, San Miguel, San Ardo, San Lucas, King City, Greenfield, Soledad, Gonzales, Chualar, Salinas, Prunedale, then cross the Pajaro River into the Santa Clara Valley, and up through Gilroy, San Martin, Morgan Hill and into San José. The fields are such varied colors, the hand-painted signs by John Cerney show such affection for the people and the crops, the billboards unapologetically advertise farm equipment. Where the land isn’t irrigated, or is the least bit hilly (usually the same thing) the landscape is the timeless California scene of golden grass and dark oaks, but the flatlands sport vineyards (more every year) or lettuce or onions or broccoli. Weirdly-shaped trucks and tractors drive by, stacked with boxes, or holding their spraying arms up in the air like wings. School buses filled with farmworkers pull their outhouses along behind, the sides plastered with labor law posters. There are walnuts in Greenfield, cherries in Gilroy. Even the Crown Royal whiskey ads reference the rodeo. The rest stops down by Camp Roberts are being refurbished; where is the money coming from? The historical markers reinforce that this is the route people have been following for centuries: Mission San Miguel, Mission San Antonio de Padua (why did they leave the river valley and veer off by so many miles?), Mission Soledad, Mission San Juan Bautista. The renewed bells of El Camino Real remind me of my childhood way at the south end of the royal road.

Today was my first apricot harvest of the year, a very large orchard in Los Gatos.

One of the most enjoyable benefits of volunteering with Village Harvest is being able to spend time in beautiful places like this.

Beautiful, but hot. There was a snafu with the truck, and, by the time our hero Bud had brought it over, many of the volunteers had had enough tramping around in the orchard. So they sorted apricots, instead.

But the die-hards kept it up, shaking the fruit down on to tarps, since it was too steep to use ladders.

Although we could have used many more volunteers to let us harvest all of the fruit, that which we did harvest totally filled Henry’s truck, so maybe it was for the best.

So many apricots are bruised or nicked that everyone got to take home lots of beautiful, ripe fruit. Joni took the most beautiful ones to show off to the Committee for Green Foothills tour that’s at Veggielution this afternoon.

More apricots to come this week, so I didn’t take any myself.

Here’s what’s happening in my own garden.

The front bed looks nice, although I should weed it, and the squirrels have so far eaten every squash. (But, mysteriously, have not decimated the apricots, as is their wont.) I have a couple pimientos de Padrón:

The Stupice tomato is looking good, although pruning the suckers has given me this tall, skinny plant. I may let it get bushier, now that it’s almost reached the top of it’s cage.

My tomatoes in back look good, although what I thought was an Early Girl is pretty stunted, albeit churning out the early tomatoes.

I’m no longer sure what kind these guys are, but they please me.

The beds with the beans and cucumbers are embarrassingly weedy. I’ll let you know when I get my first cukes.

And strawberry ice cream. That’s what I’m currently making to take to the Veggielution cookout this evening.

But what is in the box this week, you ask? Well, let’s see.

Clockwise from lower left: Eggs, cilantro, dill, kale, romaine, nappa cabbage, carrots, green beans, potatoes, zucchini (round and grey), cucumber, garlic. Red oak leaf lettuce in the middle. The nappa cabbage is new this week. I’ll either make an asian slaw (with carrots and cilantro) or okonomi-yaki, which is a Japanese vegetable pancake with cilantro, too, at least the recipe that I like. Dill will go with the potatoes and beans. Cuke and lettuce in a salad. We’ll see about the zukes.

Not pictured, two baskets of strawberries that have already been made into ice cream.

I have a Cuisinart ice cream maker. It says “fully automatic,” but it doesn’t have a compressor; I have to keep the chilling cylinder in the freezer. But I have two freezers, so that’s not really a problem, and it’s easy to make a quick batch of ice cream this way.

You can extend this method to any fruit; just fill up the blender with fruit, add sugar and half and half, and freeze.

It was hot, hot, hot this afternoon, but that didn’t stop some 25 Veggielution volunteers from coming out to tie up tomatoes, attach drip lines and clean broccoli seeds. When I arrived, the guinea hens were enjoying the water dripping from the sprinklers.

And the pollitos were still in the compost bin with their two mamas clucking protectively around. Presumably they’re getting something to eat and drink, since they’re still alive in this weather.

I helped with tomatoes and planting leftover corn seeds, to fill in any holes in the big field. Desgraciadamente, the drip irrigation parts are still not here, so I’m back to turn on sprinklers again tomorrow morning.

I brought home some basil and a cucumber.