The Quarter-Acre Farm Read online

  I was mean and heartless, whacking away foliage, forcing order, and withholding water. My tomatoes produced as though they thrived on nastiness. I finally had enough tomatoes to freeze, to dry, to render into quarts and quarts of sauce, and of course, to eat. In fact, I weighed most of that second summer’s tomato crop and even without counting the volumes of tomatoes we ate standing in the garden, or the bowls of them we picked to give to neighbors and friends, my plants produced over eight hundred pounds of tomatoes. And they were delicious.

  Recipe

  Roasted Tomato Sauce

  This is the easiest, best recipe ever. Throw a mountain o’ produce (it hardly matters which kinds or how many, just ensure a preponderance of tomatoes) into a roasting pan, toss the roasting pan into a roasting hot oven for a few hours, stir every twenty minutes, cool, then puree with a drizzle of olive oil and some salt and pepper. That’s it.

  This is the typical summer sauce scenario: I have picked a vast mountain of vegetables, most of which are tomatoes. Not only are these vegetables too numerous for our family to eat before they take a turn for the worse, but many of them are split or have bird pecks, strange shapes, or blossom scars that keep me from proudly gifting them to the neighbors. All of this goes into the sauce, which I make at least once a week through the last half of the summer, then freeze in one-meal servings. The ingredients vary wildly depending on what vegetables are in season, but I try to include vegetables from each of three categories: • Body vegetables—tomatoes are the first and most important ingredient, making up at least half to three quarters of the total contents. Any combination of ripe surplus veggies can be used to fill out the rest, including eggplant, zucchini, beets, chard, and spinach.

  • Aromatic vegetables—including onions, peppers (sweet and hot), garlic, and herbs.

  • Sweet produce—to balance out the acidic tomatoes, I’ve used everything from carrots to figs, and even peaches.

  The more tomatoes you use, the redder the sauce will be. A greater percentage of non-red vegetables makes for a browner-hued sauce. Of course, each batch tastes differently, sometimes just barely and sometimes considerably, such as when I use hot peppers rather than sweet peppers. But it is always good and always easy.

  Additional Ingredients: • 1 slosh olive oil

  • salt and pepper to taste

  1. After the sun has gone down and the world has cooled from torrid to merely beastly hot, and I can coax a breeze through the open windows, I set the oven to 475 degrees.

  2. As the oven heats, I wash the vegetables, cut off the blemishes, and chop the bigger vegetables into halves or quarters (it is especially wise to do this with tomatoes to avoid having roasting tomato bombs explode on you when you stir your sauce mid-roast.)

  3. I put these trimmed/chopped vegetables in the roasting pan and try to ensure that the more delicate vegetables, like the spinach and herbs, are buried under the bigger, wetter vegetables so they won’t dry out and burn before the concoction has a chance to get good and sloppy.

  4. I put the whole shebang in the hot oven, set the timer for thirty minutes, then go lay on the couch with the paper and the fan. Setting the timer is the most important direction in this recipe. It has been a long day and it is hot and therefore not inconceivable that a hardworking farmer might fall asleep while contemplating number seventeen across on the New York Times crossword puzzle.

  5. When the timer sounds, I stir the pot, then set the timer again. I repeat the stirring and the setting until the vegetables look like glop. To get the vegetables to glop stage will take anywhere from two to four hours depending on the amount of vegetables you are roasting.

  6. When it looks like glop, I turn off the oven, leaving the roasting pan in there, and then I go to bed.

  7. When I wake up in the morning I use my crazy-powerful 1970s jet engine-loud Vita-Mix blender that can pulverize wood blocks into cream (when I use it, I wear hearing protectors and look like I work on a tarmac, albeit in a ratty bathrobe) and puree the sauce with a slosh of olive oil and a handful of basil leaves. If you don’t have such a blender, you might want to pull the tomato skins from the glop before pureeing, or sieve the sauce afterward. For sauce the consistency of tomato paste, don’t add water. For saucier sauce, add water—which has the added benefit of making the glop easier to puree.

  8. Pour each blender batch of pureed sauce into a large bowl. When all has been pureed, stir to homogenize the flavors, add salt and pepper to taste, then ladle about three cup increments into freezer-safe bags or cups. Label with the dominant flavors (“tomato eggplant,” or “tomato-zucchinifig,” or “spicy tomato hot-pepper”) and freeze.

  This is heavenly good tomato sauce. Heat and use the sauce for lasagna, in stews, over or in polenta, or as pizza sauce. Of course, this sauce is also great with pasta, as is.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  SUGAR GROWS ON TREES

  “A table, a chair, a bowl of fruit. What else does a man need to be happy?”

  —ALBERT EINSTEIN

  If for some unfathomable reason, I was forced to eat an entire whale, I’d lie on the beach afterward, my stomach distended to the size of a Volkswagen, and I’d still ask, “Does anyone have a cookie?”

  A meal needs something sweet at the end, no matter what. Jesse put it best when he was a little guy. Claiming to be too full to finish his dinner, he’d allow that he could, however, eat some cake. He explained that although the stomach itself could be absolutely stuffed, there is an anatomical dessert pocket alongside the stomach that’s ever available for sweets.

  Making sure my own dessert pocket is going to be filled is a constant preoccupation of mine, and I admit to eating a meal just to get to the sugary payoff at the end. Therefore I worried about how eating off the Quarter Acre Farm for a year would affect my predilection toward dessert. We had some fruit trees in the yard, and though they were young, I prayed they would provide enough of a fructose high to sate my voracious sweet tooth.

  I haven’t always thought of fruit as a dessert. When I was a kid complaining of being hungry my mother would say, “Eat a piece of fruit!” She might as well have directed us to eat tennis balls. The fruit I remember from my childhood was horrible. The name “red delicious” apple should have been “mushy tasteless” apple, without a doubt. Other fruit was no better: apricots were sour, oranges dry, and while half of the grapes in the bunch were firm, the other half were deflated and brown. The only good fruit, in my opinion, were maraschino cherries.

  It wasn’t until I was grown up and moved to the East Coast that I realized what truly delicious apples tasted like. We moved to California some years later and there I discovered the delight of sweet tree-ripened apricots and the wonder of fresh figs. I could hardly believe the bright-flavored fruit was what Fig Newton’s were made of.

  What makes fruit even better is that it is so very good for you. Usually, it seems the sweets I’m drawn to are really, really bad for me. Oh for vitamin-enriched Ho Hos, or a cancer-inhibiting custard-filled donut!

  Fruits are the equivalent.

  They are chock-full of antioxidants—nutrients such as vitamins, minerals, and enzymes that assist in chemical reactions that counteract the oxidization that occurs in our tissues. This oxidation is the equivalent of rusting in humans (otherwise known as aging), which means fruit is a pocket-sized fountain of youth! Fruit even plays cleanup to the free radicals zipping through our systems, looking to start a cancer party.

  The caveat is that one must eat whole fruits. It’s not going to work to suck down a carton of orange or apple juice. It is the combination of fruit’s skin, flesh, and juice that gives it the punch; the ole “whole being greater than the sum of its parts” thing. An apple, for instance, has the greatest amount of antioxidants in its peel but has a great deal of soluble fiber via the pectin in its flesh. The good stuff in the peel and the flesh acts synergistically, resulting in a fruit that prevents metabolic disorders, high blood pressure, plaque buildup, and hardening of blood lipids
. Apples inhibit cell proliferation (an anticancer effect) and lower the risk of heart attack and stroke.

  Apple juice, however, has only 3 to 10 percent of the antioxidant activity and zero percent of the tantalizing crunch of whole apples.

  There was no question that fruit would do a fine job providing good sweets; the question was, would I have enough? In fact, I was so worried about sating my sweet tooth, I made a grave gardening error with my little orchard. We had planted a baker’s dozen of fruit trees in the backyard in two staggered rows along the back fence. The first row went as follows: a mission fig, a nectarine, a peach, a pear, an apple pear, a granny smith apple, and a fuyu persimmon. The second row had a green plum, a purple plum, a white fig, a mandarin orange, an apricot, and a cherry. We also had an orange and an olive tree at the north end of the yard, and a lemon and jujube tree at the south.

  We planted most of them bare root, and for a time they remained the size of canes. After a couple of years some of them took off on a growth spurt, including a peach tree that became so prolific the set fruit looked like green pearls strung along the branches.

  It is hard for me to thin fruit. In my mind, every thumbnail piece of fruit I popped off the branch was like throwing away a succulent grapefruit-sized freestone peach. It pained me to do it once, much less hundreds of times. Still, the books said I must clear them so that there was four inches between each piece of fruit. But there was the question: which pieces of fruit? The existing marble-sized fruit or the future full-grown fruit? The difference could mean many fewer bushels of peaches I’d get to harvest. I decided to go four inches between the marble-sized fruit.

  As the fruit enlarged, however, the branches drooped further and further to the ground. I grew worried, but now thinning the fruit would have been a real waste—I’d be tossing out tennis ball-sized peaches, and I just couldn’t bring myself to do that.

  I stared at the tree and decided that I could prop up the branches. I’d get some notched two-by-fours and stick them under the groaning limbs. But even as I came up with that plan, the tree couldn’t stand another minute of holding up the peaches. One of the two main branches cracked and, as I watched, peeled down the entire length of the tree. I screamed, “Nooo!” then the other main branch, weakened by the first branch decamping, cracked off as well. All that remained was a jagged trunk.

  My peach tree had done itself in. I lost not only hundreds of peaches, but also several years of nurturing that went into the little peach tree, and the thousands and thousands and (sob) thousands of sweet, sticky, juicy peaches it would have given me in the years to come. While greed seems to pay off for corporations, it doesn’t set so well with fruit.

  If I wanted to keep my other trees healthy, not only was I going to have to do a better job of thinning the fruit, I would also need to learn how to prune the trees.

  I found a small book at my local hardware store written in 1944 by R. Sanford Martin. In his back-of-the-book photo, Sanford looks like an old-fashioned bank employee who yearns to escape the confines of the institution and grow an orchard. His story, as well as the soulful look on his face, also hints at travails. He developed a process that revolutionized the treatment of gummosis in apricots—but the proceeds went to his employer. He worked with his parents on a citrus orchard until a tractor accident halted his work. Sanford was intrigued with humus production, but his ideas about the treatment of soils were ridiculed by the experts of the day, though eventually they were lauded.

  This was enough to sell me on R. Sanford Martin, even if it turned out that the book was no good.

  The book, however, was wonderful, filled with informative little sketches that Sanford drew indicating what branches to lop off when, and what a well-trained tree looked like. The best thing about the book is that it is specifically geared toward pruning for the home orchard rather than the commercial one, and he succinctly explains each cut that he recommends. “To one who understands how, where, and why a tree bears its fruit, pruning is an extremely simple job.”

  The pages on a peach tree begin, “There are few trees that benefit from heavy pruning as does the peach . . .” He goes on to say, “Do not hesitate to head back tall growth because peach wood is brittle and a tall tree is almost sure to shed otherwise good limbs when they are heavy with fruit.” Oh Sanford, if I had only known.

  Even without the peach tree, we had a calendar of fruit that stretched almost the entire year. The apricot was the first to provide in the spring. It was an exceptionally early-flowering tree. This was wonderful in the years there weren’t late frosts, and a sad thing to lose the crop the years there were. As the apricots finished, cherries became ripe. When the cherries were done, the plums were ready, first purples then greens. Alongside plums came figs that provided throughout most of the summer, followed by pears, Asian pears, and apples in the late summer and early fall. In the late fall we had jujubes and persimmons. Then there was a stretch waiting for the oranges and mandarins to ripen, and another stretch between the last oranges in February and our early apricots, which I hover about, hardly able to bear waiting to taste the ripe fruit.

  It’s the birds that let me know when the fruit is ready. I don’t know how they know but they, unlike me, never seem to start pecking before the produce is ripe. I generally waste an appalling amount of fruit biting hopefully into what isn’t ready for consumption.

  Though I appreciate the birds, I don’t want to pay for their service with an entire tree of fruit, especially since the birds eat the fruit in a really annoying way. A quarter apricot here, a few pecks there, and then they let the rest drop to the ground and rot. If they’d eat the whole thing I might be more magnanimous. Instead I searched for ways to foil the feathered thieves that didn’t require me to sit under the tree with a stick or a shotgun.

  I tried nets, and not only were they ugly and practically impossible for me to get on to the tree, but once on, the tangle of netting also effectively discouraged me from harvesting the fruit. The scarecrow I put up did nothing. I imagine the jays had seen scarier things when I walked around the yard in my bathrobe.

  It was Goosteau who finally inspired a solution to the problem. I was standing in the goose yard, sipping a can of seltzer, when he suddenly attacked me. I know he is just a bird, but a goose attack is terrifying. Heck, a wasp is terrifying. There is something about furious pursuit that is so scary even when you know that when push comes to shove, you’ll come out the winner with a squashed wasp underfoot.

  I shouted, “Goosey, Goosey, GOOSEY!” hoping he’d come to his senses and stop battering me with his wings. Then I realized through the flurry of wings and wild honking that Goosteau was actually trying to save me from the can I held in my hand, which he apparently thought was attacking my lips. I threw the aluminum thing across the yard. Goosteau followed it and pummeled it with his beak until it was in tatters.

  By that time Sam and Louis had come out of the house, and as we watched Goosteau kill the can we all feared he would either have a heart attack in his fury or slit his beak open on the sharp metal. I finally mustered my courage and gathered up the furious gander, tucking his huge wings under my arm as Sam dashed in and took the can away.

  Like many birds, Goosteau is afraid of metallic objects, and he deals with his fear by trying to get rid of the offending item (or person.) Luckily other birds react differently or we’d all feel like Tippi Hedren in Hitchcock’s The Birds every time we stepped out of our cars. Apparently many birds—especially the very intelligent corvids, and our perhaps not so brilliant waterfowl—have both neophilia and neophobia. That is, they are both attracted to and afraid of something new. This makes for a complex but intense reaction to novelty.

  Using what we hoped was something that would engender the fruit-plundering blue jays’ “phobic flight” response to shiny objects, we scrunched long pieces of aluminum foil along the cherry branches when the cherries approached harvest time.

  Even though the aluminum foil was easy to both scrunch on (
and to remove later), getting up to the higher branches was a little terrifying. As I wavered on the ladder fifteen feet up in a tree, contemplating a necksnapping fall, I remembered that coconuts kill fifteen times as many people a year as sharks do. Fruit is dangerous business.

  When I’d finished my scrunching, the aluminum-clad branches did look somewhat like metallic snakes loafing in the cherry tree, and the sunshine winking off the foil gave an illusion of movement. It must have looked that way to the birds, too. It kept the jays away for about two to three weeks—until they habituated to the foil.

  Because they habituated so quickly, it was important to wait until the birds signaled the ready harvest before putting the foil on, and then to be sure to remove it immediately once the harvest was over so that it would work again the next year.

  Most of the time, I didn’t bother to scare critters away, especially if we had a large amount of fruit on the tree. Further, as the trees gained in height, the thought of climbing the trees was even more hair-raising. So while I’d rather the jays and squirrels didn’t take all my fruit, I would certainly allow theft on the upper branches. I figure the birds have a right to some in return for eating bugs, entertaining the humans and the cats of the house, and providing their fruit-testing service.