Summer homecoming

From More toast on Culinate by Lalena Dolby

July 30, 2009

As a child, I took my share of family road trips every summer. The six of us, four under 18 (with the occasional additional kid- friend), would pile into our Dodge Caravan and set out for the open road for weeks at a time. Vacation.

Summers were hot, and the caravan, without air conditioning. We were a sticky, somewhat smelly bunch. Our kitchen was a bright yellow cooler, from which we’d eat peanut butter and jelly or cheese and mustard sandwiches. Our dining room, rest areas or the car. I’m sure no family member will argue with me when I say that our trip soundtrack was a chaotic one: The hum of the tires on the road punctuated by the now and then rattling of something loose on the caravan; Dad commanding my brothers to sit on their hands, rendering them incapable of pestering my little sister with them; and on top of all this, the sweet sound of Lionel Richie or Kool and the Gang blasting through the not so super car speakers.

These trips were memorable for different reasons. Some were better than others of course, and I’m not sure they counted at all as vacation for my parents. One thing was for certain on each trip; if dad was with us (sometimes he stayed home to work on the farm) he was always looking forward to the day when the caravan would pull onto our dusty gravel road, returning him to his land. At the time, I figured he was worried about the farm. Worried that there had been a break in the irrigation line, that deer had munched on the rootstock, or that the crew hadn’t shown up. And while all of that may have been true, I realize now, after being away on my second vacation of the summer, that it was also perhaps love that made him long for home.

My garden welcomed me back to Portland like a porch light in the night. The bush beans had exploded; tomatillos hung like hundreds of tiny lanterns on the bushy vine; on the lowest branches of the Stupice vine I found my first tomatoes, which inspired unparalleled excitement even after years of growing tomatoes; and cucumbers lazed around like giant sea lions on a dock.

Overwhelmed by the abundance, I tried to focus on the task of harvesting as my mind bounced here and there thinking of what I might do first. Make salsa, dilly beans, pickles? In the end, I couldn’t decide, and so I did it all, practically at the same time. On my first day home I baked two loaves of bread, made a big bowl of garden fresh salsa, cleaned up the garlic for storage, made my favorite pickle from the Zuni Cafe cookbook, froze a half flat of blueberries picked on the way home, made fresh pasta and tossed it with dried chili pepper, lemon zest, cream and just-picked figs from a friend’s tree, and made currant preserves (Bar le Duc).

Tom and I did okay on our trip eating out of the bright yellow cooler. But much like my dad, I think I’ll always love coming home to places that greet me, and feed me, like this one.

For all the wrong reasons

From More toast on Culinate by Lalena Dolby

July 14, 2009

I love the idea of jam. Last year I made half pint after half pint not because I loved jam, but because I loved the idea of jam. I told myself that although jam had never played much of a role in my adult life (I don’t know that I’ve ever purchased it in the grocery store), that surely I would eat jam if it was in the pantry, and homemade. But, by Christmas I had given most of it away as gifts.

Last year I loved the idea of jam so much that I froze peaches that didn’t immediately make it into jam so that I could be free to make jam any time I pleased throughout the year. Now, nearly one year later, several quarts of peaches stare at me from the back of the freezer. Determined to be rid of these before the next round of peaches arrive, and against my better judgement, I decided to turn some of them into jam last week. When the jam failed to set and I was left with a few pints of peach sauce, I decided to try my hand at peach butter. As it turns out, I love peach butter. Not just the idea of it, but the actual food. I like the deeper flavor it takes on after cooking for so long. I like the way it coats a piece of toast.

So I begin this season of putting food by with clarity. I will not try to make myself love something I don’t just because I can make it myself and think it romantic. I will not use the freezer as a tool for prolonging the life of something that I plan to preserve in some other fashion at a much later date.

I’ll make the things I love. Because homemade might make it better, but it might not be good enough to make me want to eat it.

The long haul

From More toast on Culinate by Lalena Dolby

June 6, 2009

I arrived at Joan’s shaded four square home just after 9:30am on Saturday. Joan had been ill and hadn’t been to the community garden for some time, but she had herbs she wanted to donate to the Colonel Summers Community Garden Herb Project, and I was there to pick them up. She gave me a tour of her backyard where I received useful advice about which herbs to plant directly into the earth and where, and which ones were so greedy that they’d need to spend their lives confined to pots. After gathering the sage, oregano and parsley starts for the garden, I began to say thank you and good bye, when she grabbed her sun hat and a basket of tools. Only then did I notice the streaks of white sunscreen lining the edges of her silvery eyebrows. She wasn’t going to miss this. Joan was coming back to the garden. I later learned that the herb garden was her idea—one she’d been wanting to bring to fruition for years.

Joan was the first to break ground, digging deeply and ruthlessly at the thickly rooted comfrey which had all but taken over the garden. She was also quick to point out the myriad invasive grasses with contorted roots that spread far and wide to the root zone of a beautiful pink peony and through the wire of the garden’s chain link fence. This all had to go. Not a speck of weed root could be left or our work would never be done—we’d be forever haunted by these garden bullies. And so, we, the somewhat lazy modern gardeners, persevered. We fought powerful and collective urges to hastily pull what we could of the weed tops, to leave much of the root unscathed, to cover up the evidence of our shortcuts with a bit of dirt so Joan wouldn’t notice.

And for as much as we tried, our efforts still fell short of Joan’s. We really did give it our best, but there was no getting around the fact that we simply lacked a lifetime of experience. Joan has something many of us don’t. She grew up on the land, in rural Hillsboro, Oregon at a time when the town proper contained a mere 3,000 people. The landscape was rural and untainted by the countless strip malls and chain stores that now blemish its surface. Joan was one of five children, and she wouldn’t have eaten were it not for the garden.

Perhaps because of this, Joan gardens from a different time and perspective. From a time when a three-way soil blend couldn’t be bought by the yard and delivered. From a time when, for the average gardener, the path to good soil was longer than it is today. Soil was built over the span of years, not in an afternoon. It was built through steady work, cover crops, crop rotation and the addition of inputs from the family homestead, often in the form of manure from livestock, decomposing plant matter and kitchen scraps. Joan gardens with frugality and resourcefulness as her guides. But as frugal as she is with her external inputs, she is equally generous with her hard work, time, attention, and genuine love for growing food.

Slow gardening won’t produce extraordinarily high yields right off the bat. It likely won’t make you the envy of your neighbors. It might not win you the giant tomato contest at the state fair. But it probably will help you develop an honest-to-goodness relationship with the land and an understanding of life—of a plant’s, the soil’s, an insect’s and perhaps best of all, your own. Kind of appealing, isn’t it?

Straw Bale Garden

From More toast on Culinate by Lalena Dolby

May 21, 2009

Tonight, I took a straw bale gardening class out at Luscher Farm through Oregon Tilth, and can’t wait to try it out. It seems great in many ways, except for the fact that the contraption tends to dry out, so will require more water. Hm. A trade off for all the benefits of intensive gardening? Some participants recommended wrapping the bales in black plastic. I’d rather die than look at that. Others suggested planting strawberries or cucumbers around the edges to hold in moisture. That seems more civilized.

It was a beautiful, warm and breezy night on the farm, with chickens clucking away in the distance, and excited eaters picking up their first CSA shares of the season. The sun began its slow descent as we finished watering in the new straw bale garden and potted up some cucumber seeds in hand rolled newspaper pots to take home.

The woman I’d like to be

From More toast on Culinate by Lalena Dolby

May 20, 2009

Lives and farms on Marsh Road, a dead end on the edge of Verboort, Oregon. She is in her 60s. Large oval tinted glasses rest low on her nose as she ambles along from the greenhouse to greet me in her aquamarine gardening apron, which gently cascades over her plump center.

She asks what she can do for this young lady, and twenty minutes later, I’ve admired her twelve chickens, toured her herb nursery, and met the farm dog, Dutchess, whom her husband used to call Suzie but for some reason started calling Dutchess some time ago. I say I’d like some eggs and she says, “12 for 2 or 18 for 3?” This is when I know I’m dealing with the type of rural person I grew up with, and love. She is practical and resourceful, and beats to her own drum. No $7-a-dozen-eggs-because-the-market-will-bear-it on this farm. Barbara simply sells the extra eggs she and her husband can’t eat. She’s washed them, she says, but can’t guarantee them against salmonella. I take my chances. They are the most perfect eggs I’ve laid my eyes on in a while.

I ask about the tomato starts, which she propagates herself. One in particular caught my eye, ‘Bonny Best’. I ask her about it and she tells me that when she first moved to this land in 1973 there was an old man in Verboort growing this one. She loved it and has grown it ever since.

When all was said and done, I’d been set back $9 and had a truck full of diverse farm treasures— a fuzzy leaved peppermint scented geranium, eighteen beautiful multicolored eggs, ‘Bonny Best’, and a sprouting garlic bulb and three stalks of lovage that she threw in, because I liked them, and she is generous. But best of all, she gave me wise words. When I expressed my appreciation for her green thumb, she said: “When we are children, we start with just a tiny sprout in a window sill. And when we are old, we might have a small potted geranium on the table in the retirement home. And, in between, well, we get to do this.”

This weekend, I lived up the in-between. Life is short and growing is long, and so I went a little crazy in my barely 400 square foot plot of land. Here is what I planted:

Big Leaf Cilantro, Carrots, Asparagus Bean (Dow Gauk-Yard Long Bean), Mideast Prolific Cucumber, Blue Lake and Treviso bush beans, Jalepeño Pepper, Sweet Marconi Pepper, Demon Hot Thai Pepper, that garlic bulb Barbara gave me, onion sets that I found on the community table at the garden, Italian shell beans given to me by a friend that are rumored to be the same ones that Ayers Creek grows, an insectory mix by Wild Garden Seed, and of course, old man Verboort’s ‘Bonny Best’.