The Quarter-Acre Farm Read online

  Ick. I had changed my own babies’ dirty diapers with no problem but gagged at any other child’s. Now I knew I only had tolerance for my own family’s compost as well.

  When our mini kitchen garden can was full, or when it emitted a cloud of stink when we cracked the lid, we emptied it into the larger bin in the yard. Our outdoor compost bin, which we got as part of a city composting project, is a black plastic box about the size of one of those ubiquitous, neon-colored, plastic playhouses for children. We dump not only the kitchen compost into the outside bin, but also the plant trimmings and bedding from the goose kennel. We do nothing more with it, but you could turn it every week for faster results. Some say you should turn it—some say it vehemently. I’ll say it again: composting is serious business. The most impolite exchanges I have ever read on blog threads between gardeners deal with compost and whether to turn or not to turn—and it all hinges on bacteria.

  Thonius Philips van Leeuwenhoek is to blame. He was a Renaissance kind of guy two hundred years after the Renaissance was over. He owned the largest drapery business in the Dutch town of Delft and used very basic microscopes to look at the details of cloth. He also made over five hundred microscopes himself and used them to look at and describe what he called “animalcules,” or amoebas (thereby becoming the “father of microbiology”), and what we would eventually call bacteria. How does he tie in with compost?

  Organic matter breaks down in nature owing largely to the work of fungi and bacteria. Some of those bacteria function best at middle temperatures (mesophylic) and others at high temperatures (thermophylic). Turning the compost introduces oxygen into the pile, which the aerobic bacteria like. The mesophylic bacteria create heat as they do their bacterial work, which raises the temperature inside the compost to the point the thermophylic fellas begin to thrive. Like the friend with the outrageously high metabolism who gets twenty times more done than middling me, the higher temp bacteria work faster than the middle temperature ones. Therefore turning makes for faster compost.

  However, there are those who say turning the compost mixes up the thermophylically active layers of compost with those layers that are already “done,” actually hindering the thermophylic work and messing up the lower layers of composted material for things like earthworms and the aforementioned fungi, which not only break down the tougher material in nature but also further improve the soil.

  What would Thonius say? He is safely out of the picture, leaving us to decide what we will. I won’t weigh in on the science of it. I am lazy, so I simply don’t turn our compost. After dumping the scraps in the composter, we layer leaves or straw or coffee on top of the scraps. This layering seems to keep our system pretty balanced and sweet smelling, and the coffee helps deter pests like raccoons, possums, and rats.

  However, we still get a few pests. Our cat, Tiger, thinks the rats he catches and places in my path so that I step barefoot on their plump bodies are fine by-products of composting. Once, Jesse was in the backyard by the composter at dusk and reached out and petted our white cat, Orion, as she walked along the fence. “Orion” hissed at him and bared a row of dagger-sharp teeth. Jesse is the only person I know who has ever scratched an opossum behind the ears. Experiences like that have made us much more attentive recyclers, especially making sure that no rodent-tempting dairy and meat products find their way into our pile.

  When I find myself in need of dirt, I go to the composter, fork the barely composted stuff and the semi-composted stuff to the side (this is the one time the newer layers do get “turned”), then dig out the pretty well composted stuff and put it in a wheelbarrow. To the barrow I add leaf mold, rabbit manure, and more used coffee grounds. If the mixture seems too heavy, I fork in some straw or dry leaves to fluff it up. (Note: Do not use hay . . . straw is the dry stems of wheat generally used for bedding. Hay is grass, used to feed animals, replete with seeds, which will sprout in your beds and require more weeding, which nobody needs.) This makes lovely, dark, rich dirt, with the occasional uncomposted eggshell or orange peel thrown in. I consider this a mark of authenticity, much as the odd smirch in a glaze adds to a vase’s beauty. As my old pottery instructor used to say, “If you want perfect, go to Kmart.”

  Making dirt isn’t as easy as having dirt dumped into the driveway, but it’s worth it. As they say, a dollar for dirt, a penny for seeds. Especially if you are somewhat of a bumbler like me—forgetting to water or watering too much, unsure what fertilizer to use and how much, growing plants in not quite the right spot, and planting too early or too late in the season—then starting off with good, rich, sweet dirt will make the greatest difference in ameliorating your not-so-green thumb.

  Recipe

  Beet and Chevre Sandwiches

  I had never tasted a fresh beet until my year of living off the Quarter Acre Farm. That first beet wasn’t even one I had grown. My friend John showed up one day with a warty-looking vegetable the size of a softball and gave it to me. I thanked him doubtfully then asked what I was supposed to do with it. He told me to boil it.

  I didn’t want to throw a gift away, so I trimmed the greens, stuck the gnarly thing into a pot of simmering water for about twenty minutes, then let it cool.

  It still didn’t look like anything I’d be willing to put in my mouth. But when I picked it up to peel it, the skin slipped off like a glove. It was like a fairytale, but instead of the toad turning into a hunky prince, the crepuscular root suddenly shone like sunshine. I think I said, “Wow.”

  Since then I’ve grown lots of beets. I love red beets but my favorite is still the golden beet. I don’t care for chioggas. Though their concentric red and white rings look impressive, they taste soapy to me. I’ve heard this is a genetic marker, like being able to roll your tongue.

  One of the many ways I eat beets is in sandwiches. I especially like them in sourdough panini with goat cheese. Both the sour bread and the tart cheese highlight the sweetness of the beets, while the crusty bread and greens give a crunchy counterpoint to the tender beets and the creamy chevre.

  Here’s what you need: • Several small to medium beets—red, golden, or chiogga

  • A loaf of crusty sourdough bread

  • Goat cheese

  • Balsamic vinegar and olive oil

  Cut the beet leaves from the beetroot about an inch from the crown, making sure you don’t cut into the beet itself. Set aside the most tender beet greens. Gently boil the whole beets for 15 to 30 minutes until a fork pierces the root easily (or roast them at 425 degrees for 30 to 45 minutes until they are fork tender).

  When they’ve cooled, the skins will slip off easily. Dice the cooled beet, cut the tender beet greens into chiffonade, then combine and toss the mixture with a splash of balsamic vinegar and olive oil.

  Spread a thick layer of goat cheese between two pieces of bread and grill on the panini press. When the sandwich is hot, remove to a plate, open the sandwich, and spoon the beet mixture on top of the cheese. Season with salt and pepper and place the second piece of bread back on top—or spoon the beet mixture on both halves of the sandwich and serve open-faced.

  CHAPTER THREE

  TOFU OF THE WEST

  “Zucchini’s terrific! Like bunnies prolific!”

  —AUTHOR UNKNOWN

  By late July my zucchini had been productive for some time. Good thing, because the rest of the garden was not exactly living up to my Edenesque expectations—the cucumbers were ratty, the beans slow, and the tomato production practically nonexistent. But I could count on the zucchini. I weighed out, ate, and logged into my book what seemed like truckloads of zukes in just the first month.

  Though I was eating tons of this cucumber-shaped summer squash, I was a little desperate for variety, and that made me cranky and territorial. If I saw Sam with a handful of cherry tomatoes I’d snap, “Where did you get those?” Louis with a plum in hand was subjected to interrogation as well. “Is that mine? Are you sure? Which bowl did you get it out of?” If they wouldn’t take part in t
he Quarter Acre Farm experiment, they could get their food elsewhere.

  Of course, that was fine with them. They’d noticed me gnawing on grilled zucchini day in and day out. I ate grilled zucchini on couscous and grilled zucchini on rice, grilled zucchini with chutney, and grilled zucchini alongside more grilled zucchini. Louis and Sam looked on, certain that they had called this experiment correctly, all the more thrilled with their pork chops.

  But as I approached August, my questionable good fortune of having endless zucchini was threatened. Suddenly the zucchini didn’t look so good either.

  For one thing, the plant had writhed its way onto the pathway. Anyone walking through the garden risked becoming entangled and falling into the abyss of leaves—leaves that made it increasingly difficult to find the vegetables until they were of human scale. (Sam and I found a zucchini so large that we poked holes in it and stuck candles all along the limb-like vegetable. We had a unique candelabra for months—until we noticed a puddle of squash rot seeping along the dining room table.)

  The humans and cats that thrashed their way through the zucchini roadblock eventually left the leaves looking battered. The leaves began turning yellow, were oddly fuzzy, and definitely brittle. Whether it was in protest of being stepped on, exhaustion from having formed too many monster-sized zucchini, or the result of disease that seemed to be galloping through the plant, my zucchini’s fruit production slowed considerably.

  About the time things were looking their worst, a gardening friend said she was stopping by to see the Quarter Acre Farm. Staring at the mess of unsightly vegetation, I decided no leaves would look better than sick leaves, so I trimmed every yellow, brown, and battered leaf off both my zucchini and my cucumber plants. Once I started trimming, I noticed that my bush-type zucchini plants weren’t really bushes. They were vines off of which leaves bushily sprouted. Once noted, I gently coiled the thick stems into a loose circle, much as one would coil a hose or a rope. It worked like a charm. No longer did the zucchini run amok; instead they grew happily ’round in about a three-by-three-foot space.

  The shorn vines did look better for the visit, but the astonishing thing to me was how in the days to come, the trimming gave my zucchini and cucumber plants a new lease on life. The new leaves remained healthy longer, and plants started producing loads of fruit once again.

  I suppose it shouldn’t have hit me as such a miraculous cure. Squash leaves are prone to all sorts of bacterial and fungal diseases, including scab infections, leaf spot, leaf blot, and downy mildew. Trimming away a diseased or infested leaf is going to help keep the problem from migrating to other leaves. It allows for better air circulation through the plant, which also helps curb disease. Finally, trimming a dying leaf frees the plant from supporting foliage that is not likely to be doing much photosynthesis at that point anyway.

  The zucchini began to produce so prolifically that I rescinded my moratorium on Louis and Sam eating food from the garden—zucchini at least. But Louis and Sam said they were already sick of grilled zucchini, just having watched me eat so much of it. If I wanted them to eat zucchini, I would have to expand my repertoire of zucchini culinaria.

  I began asking around, and it was as if zucchini recipes were genetically programmed into humans: the breadth of variety was amazing.

  In painting parlance, pigments are carried by what is known as a “vehicle”—oil paints are pigments carried by the vehicle linseed oil, acrylics are pigments carried by a polymer vehicle, encaustic’s vehicle is wax.

  Zucchini is a cooking vehicle. Possessed of mild taste and texture, it carried whatever flavors I gave it. It was the tofu of the western world.

  A wealth of zucchini recipes at my disposal, I sautéed zucchini with garlic and red pepper and served it over pasta. I stuffed it with breadcrumbs, egg, tomatoes, and spices. I stir fried it and made a zucchini curry. I used my mandolin and cut it into long, fine. julienned “noodles” and tossed it with olive oil and shredded Parmesan.

  I baked little pizza crusts made out of shredded zucchini, egg, and flour, and topped them with tomato and cheese. I stirred up sloppy zucchini joes, panko-crusted zucchini crisps, zucchini filo tart. Zucchini carried the day in soup, quiche, frittata, fritters with fig, cold zucchini spring rolls, zucchini lasagna with zucchini-tomato-eggplant pasta sauce, savory zucchini bread, zucchini parmigiana, zucchini with quinoa, and of course, ratatouille.

  I also made several kinds of sweet zucchini breads, the best being sweetened with fig and homemade plum butter.

  As I delved deeper into the zucchini’s culinary possibilities, I found it wasn’t only the zucchini fruit that was edible. Zucchini was one of those foods that lent itself to a kind of eating the Italians refer to as cucina di recupero, or “recovery food,” in which nothing of a plant goes to waste. You can eat all parts of the zucchini plant, including the leaves. I like them deep fried, and I also blanch them and use them like grape leaves to roll rice or meat within.

  Zucchini flowers, which are difficult not to anthropomorphize, are either male (the flower is larger and on a long stem), or female (the flower is attached to a small round fruit that swells into voluptuousness during the life of the zucchini). The cadmium-colored flowers can be left on the tiny zucchini and the fruit and flower sautéed together, or the flower can be separated from the fruit, chopped, and used in quesadillas or soups, stirred into frittatas, or sprinkled onto salads. I pinched the sepals off the whole flowers and stuffed the delicate blossoms with cheeses and fish, then steamed, sautéed, or fried them.

  Except for the night of the disgusting panko-crusted crisps, which weren’t crisp at all but resembled snot, and the savory zucchini bread that chewed like a slice of parmesan-flecked bike tire, the weeks of zucchini dinners weren’t a nightmare, but ranged from pretty good to out-and-out great, if I do say so myself. Sam and Louis even ate the zucchini meals with me.

  In spite of our daily consumption, I still had excess zucchini. Luckily I found zucchini is a snap to save for later. You don’t have to peel zucchini; in fact, you shouldn’t peel it, as the skins are the most nutritious part—a good source of thiamin, niacin, vitamins A, C, and B6, phosphorus, and manganese. The seeds are soft, edible, and full of fiber.

  I cut the zucchini into one-eighth-inch-thick rounds and put them in the dehydrator to dry, or placed the rounds in a single layer on a cookie sheet and froze them. They required no blanching, no dipping in lemon to retain their color, nothing fancy. Once frozen, I packed the zucchini circles into freezer bags so I could grab a handful to use in soups, lasagnas, and stews.

  I also grated the zucchini, especially the big ones (which had proportionally larger seeds so I halved them lengthwise and scooped out the seeds, giving them a miniature canoe look). I put two cups of the grated zucchini in the potato ricer, squeezed the excess water out, and then plonked what I called the “zucchini puck” onto a cookie sheet. After I had a number of the two-cup pucks, I packed them in bags and froze them.

  In the fall and winter, when the wide leaves of my zucchini plants were all but memories, I could still enjoy the squash. I pulled my pucks of zucchini from the freezer and stirred up some zucchini fritters, or I sautéed zucchini with tomatoes and a hot chili pepper and pureed it into soup.

  At this point I was ready to nominate zucchini as vegetable of the year. Reading up on my new favorite vegetable, I decided we should go a step further and change the phrase “American as apple pie” to “American as zucchini bread.” Neither apples nor apple pie are indigenous to the Americas (think apfelstrudel and tarte tatin), but both zucchini and zucchini bread are.

  All squash are American natives, but the zucchini went to Europe a bitter-fleshed pepo gourd and came back the sweet courgette we know and love. This was not the result of an expensive finishing school, as the courgette’s name would imply, but of a spontaneously occurring mutation called a “sport” or bud variation, the kind that spurred the grapefruit from the pumelo, the pink grapefruit from the grapefruit, and the brussel
s sprout from the common heading cabbage.

  Adding to zucchini’s American nativity is the fact that Thomas Jefferson himself issued the very first U.S. patent for the other crucial element to zucchini bread: baking soda, or at least the precursor to baking soda, pearlash. It is likely that zucchini and pearlash came together in the eighteenth century to become zucchini bread when housewives in America discovered pearlash as a chemical leavening. The chemical reaction of alkaline pearlash mixed with a clabber, such as buttermilk, introduced bubbles into the dough, creating a lighter biscuit. What innovation! How much more patriotic can it get?

  If zucchini bread was named our national dish, then August 8 could be “Leave Zucchini on Your Neighbor’s Porch Day”—a national holiday rather than a gardener’s prank. (Why do people in fill in your state here lock their cars in the summer? To keep them from being filled with zucchini!) This would give August, a month bereft of holidays, a day of celebration.

  That might have been my last word on the wonders of zucchini, but as an unanticipated perk, in the first two months of eating so much zucchini through July and August, I lost ten pounds. Losing ten pounds is not easy for me. In fact, I’ve turned over the idea of offering my body to science to facilitate the study of persistent hips. Suddenly though, and with no effort, I became practically lean. Once again I was surprised by the unsurprising—eating fruits and vegetables as 75 percent of my diet was healthy in many ways.