The Quarter-Acre Farm Read online

  One of the great pleasures of a garden is sharing the produce. Some people would rather get their produce frozen or plastic wrapped, especially if they object to the odd slug in the lettuce or a chew hole in the basil. That’s okay, but to other people, a garden gift is heaven. And because they appreciate the produce you give them (or the homemade marmalade), they will give you some of what they grow too, or perhaps the oranges with which to make marmalade, or maybe some dirt in order to grow an orange tree, or even the manure to feed it.

  Recipe

  Rough French Tart

  I was on the phone to my father one afternoon while I was peeling apples. I told him I was making a tart and then asked him if he had ever made a rough French tart. There was a pause on the other end of the line and then he said, “No, but I always hoped I’d have the opportunity.”

  Though this tart is rough as they come, I make it for the guys at the spur of the moment, often when calamities strike and we’re in the need of tenderness. A few apples anointed with sugared cinnamon are baked until fragrant and soft on a bed of flaky, buttery crust. It is true comfort food—ready to ease anxieties over deadlines, ennui, or general political outrage.

  I also make this tart when good things happen, like when free apples come around. My friend Lisa has called upon me several times to save her from the deluge of excess Fuji apples she has hanging on her tree, and I am always happy to oblige—just to help a friend out.

  This tart takes virtually no time, just peel a few apples, make a crust, and voila! French tart. (Especially if you’ve got a food processor to help with the crust.)

  Ingredients: • 3 to 4 apples

  • 1/8 cup chopped walnuts

  • ½ cup butter

  • 1½ cups flour

  • 1/8 cup sugar

  • 3 to 4 TB sugar for sprinkling (coarse sanding sugar is extra pretty)

  • 1 tsp salt

  The key to a good crust is to leave chunks of butter in the dough—that is, not to work the dough until the butter and flour are well mixed together—so a few pulses with the processor are all that’s needed. The butter in the pastry melts while baking and the resulting spaces in the pastry are what make the pastry crisp and crumbly. If there are no chunks of butter to leave vacancies in the pastry and instead you’ve got homogenized dough, you’ll end up with tough crust.

  1. Put the flour, sugar, and salt in the processor, whir it a couple of times to make sure it is all mixed, then dump in the cold butter (which I typically cut into roughly half-inch dice).

  2. Pulse the processor a couple of times, then add some water, pulse again, add a bit more and pulse again. I do this until the dough is just holding together, then pull it out and refrigerate it.

  3. When the dough is cold, roll it out into a (rough) circle. Pre-heat the oven to 375 degrees. Slice the apples and arrange them in the circle.

  4. When I’m making the tart, I might then sprinkle some chopped walnuts over the apples next since apple season happens to correspond with the new crop of walnuts that we glean from our friend Joannie’s orchard. (Fruits and vegetables that come ripe at the same time often are the things that taste best together.)

  5. Sprinkle the apples (and walnuts, if you add them) with sugar and cinnamon.

  6. Fold the lip of the pastry over the apples along the edge, then sprinkle a little more sugar on the lipped edge of the crust.

  7. Put the tart in a 375-degree oven and bake until the pastry is lightly browned.

  It won’t fix everything, but it seems to for the time it takes to eat it.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  MUD

  “There is an eagle in me that wants to soar, and there is a hippopotamus that wants to wallow in the mud.”

  —CARL SANDBURG

  With all of the digging and planting, uprooting, flicking, and canning, I was ready for a break. My friend Sally found a spa up the road in Calistoga that wasn’t too pricey. We made a reservation for the mud bath/massage package.

  I had never had a mud bath or a massage. At least not a massage given to me by a stranger. Growing up in Wyoming, “going to a massage parlor” meant something entirely different than getting a backrub. Now that I lived in California, where chair massages are not only offered at the grocery store, but having a massage therapist arrive at the office as a perk for your employees comes as easily as if you were ordering up a bouncehouse for a children’s party, it was time to give the spa life a try.

  However, as soon as Sally made the reservations, I started to worry. Not about the massage. It was the idea of the mud bath that was torturing me. What kind of mud was it in the bath, and more importantly, was it fresh mud? I asked Louis about it incessantly. Although he had about as much knowledge of spa mud as our cats did, I still badgered him into assuring me that of course it would be fresh.

  “Because I wouldn’t want to get in someone’s used mud!” I shuddered. “To think of what could be in there. Skin flakes if you want to hold your imagination in check, but let it go and you could see how there could be . . .”

  “It will be fresh mud!” he said again and again.

  There are many spas in Calistoga, and when Sally and I arrived in town we wandered for some time searching for the one we’d made our reservation at. Eventually, we found the sign in front of a grand Victorian mansion, lawn trimmed to perfection, relaxed people in linen and loafers loafing on the porch. However, when we tried to check in, we were told we were in the wrong place—our spa was around the corner.

  Around the corner was a strip mall, and in that strip mall, sure enough—our spa. Making the best of it, we ducked inside. After checking in, we were directed to our mud baths.

  In my most pleasant reveries, I had envisioned reclining in a clawfooted tub, enrobed in warm silky mud that was much like melted milk chocolate. (Okay, in my most pleasant reveries it actually was chocolate.) It was anything but. Not only did the mud look like a rather chunky slurry of horse manure, but it also smelled like sulfur. Worst of all, it came in two gigantic vats that obviously could only be changed with a crane and a cadre of weightlifters. This was most certainly not new mud.

  Sally and I looked at each other and commenced nervous giggling. Then, under the polite pressure of the spa attendant, we each disrobed and got into our vat. The slurry was so thick we had to energetically wriggle our naked selves into the muck. As soon as the attendant left I began whining, “How many people have been in this mud before us, do you think? The temperature of this mud must be ideal for bacteria . . . and intestinal parasites, come to think of it. Who would ever believe, if it were to happen, that we got an STD in a tub full of dirt?”

  Sally leapt from the vat and into the shower before the attendant showed up with our fizzy water.

  I’ve thought a lot about that mud, about how mud baths are supposed to not only relax a person but also clean out the pores, improve the complexion, relieve joint and muscle pain, and remove toxins. Is there something to it? People all over the world seem to believe so.

  At the 3 Healing Lagoons in Chilca, outside of Lima, Peru, people slather themselves with greenish-colored mud that is said to heal not only skin ailments, acne, rheumatism, and arthritis, but also ailments of the eyes, nerves, and joints; it’s also said to lower blood pressure, increase fertility, cure bone ailments, provide relief from diabetes, and increase the odds that a woman will bear twins. The muds of Techirghiol, Romania, promise more reasonable results: general skin healing and a state of wellbeing and relaxation. Believers of geophagy from many nations say that eating pure, finely milled bentonite clays will pull impurities from your entire system and will bind and eliminate toxins. There are recipes available, such as clay brownies, to make eating the stuff more toothsome. (I myself would eat carpet fluff if it were imbedded in a brownie.)

  Some muds are specialized clay mixtures, others peat moss and volcanic ash. Sapropelic muds are supposed to be especially therapeutic and are composed of decaying matter dredged from the bottom of a body of water
. Just the name, composed from the Greek words “sapros” and “pelos,” meaning “putrefaction” and “earth,” are enough to put me off.

  I take for granted that dirt is going to wreak havoc on my skin rather than heal it. In fact, I thought a friend was giving me a gardener’s viewpoint when she quoted, “My flesh is clothed in the filth of dust, my skin is withered and drawn together.” She gave me one of those kinds of looks then told me it was Job’s lament from the bible, and no, he hadn’t been weeding.

  Most days, millions of other tillers of the soil and I have at least our hands and feet in the mud of farms and gardens, and I am sure we actually ingest a bit of it as we go about our business. But I have trouble with seeing it as a miracle cure. Though spa mud is expected to do wonderful things for a person, no one points out the loveliness of, say, a farmer’s cuticles nor the dewy smoothness of their skin. Further, there are truckloads of gardener’s products available for purchase that are meant to rescue one from the effects of mud on the skin—from cuticle cream and soaps to barrier and healing lotions. As often as the free market sells you on the miracles of mud, it will sell you a cure for it as well.

  Some cures are more necessary than others. Say you find mud immersion to be so fine you want to not only relax in the stuff, but to pitch battle in it as well. You might then consider the sport of mud wrestling. If so, keep this in mind—two hundred participants in a mud festival in South Korea were taken to the hospital because their skin was inflamed. Seven students from the University of Washington who had been wrestling in mud made from soil purchased from a gardening store developed hundreds of red, pus-filled dots afterward. All suffered from a syndrome called dermatitis palaestrae limosae, or dermatitis of muddy wrestling, in which bacteria penetrated their skin through hair follicles. Mud can be dangerous stuff.

  On the other hand, the farmers I know do tend to be pretty upbeat for folks constantly facing down soilborne skin diseases. Considering the amount of work they do, the worries over the weather and the market, and the wretched state of their cuticles, this attitude can be remarkable. But mud, once again, may be part of that sunny persona.

  Neuroscience, Medical News Today and Discover Magazine, to name a few, have all reported on intriguing studies concerning the effects of a soil bacterium called Mycobacterium vaccae. Apparently the bacteria activate serotonin-releasing neurons in the brain (as does Prozac) to elevate mood. Further, inoculation with the soil bacterium can also activate immune cells, improve asthma, and ease allergies.

  The Marquis de Sade, a figure I would not as a matter of course turn to for life instruction, did say, “Miserable creatures, thrown for a moment on the surface of this little pile of mud . . . is it for you to pronounce on what is good and what is evil?” I will submit, in reference to mud among much else, that such pronouncements are not for me. While my fingers suffer hangnails and my skin calluses, I will yet not denigrate mud.

  In fact, all things considered—the aforementioned mood-elevating properties added to the ongoing exercise a farmer is getting, the good food growing, some sunshine, a little meditative weeding—I would say one might consider farming one’s very own spa treatment.

  One ideally followed by a good hot bath and a great massage.

  Recipe

  Mud Truffles

  The idea of mud truffles came to me as I read about seed bombs. What are seed bombs? They are a weapon of mass beauty used by Guerilla Gardeners—which is a movement started by the late Liz Christy to bring debilitated, abandoned (and off limits) land back to verdancy. The Guerilla Gardeners encase wildflower seeds into balls of mud and compost, then lob the balls (or seed bombs) into abandoned lots. With time and rain, the seeds sprout and transform the barren lots into wild-flower-covered oases.

  If you check online, you’ll find hundreds of recipes for seed bombs that include material such as powdered clay, compost, leaf mold, and seeds, which is all mixed with water then formed into balls. Easy as (mud) pie. Why not just throw the seeds? Covering the seeds allows them to become heavy enough to throw and gives the seeds some good dirt to get a start on growing.

  Interestingly, the idea of seed bombs is not only attractive to guerillatype gardeners. Seed companies also make them, but they call their bombs pelletized seeds. The seeds are covered with clay, sometimes fertilizer, sometimes an inoculant. Covering seeds in this way allows farmers to space their seed more effectively, cutting down on crowded, undersized, strangely shaped vegetables as well as eradicating the time it would take for thinning. Pelletized seeds, just like seed “bombs,” offer better targeting and better germination.

  However, big seed companies are not sitting around in tie-dyed T-shirts rolling seeds into mud balls. Most big companies borrowed their seed pelletizing process from candy companies. The seed is covered the same way a Jordan almond is covered in its candy shell—tumbled in a drum in which a sticky substance is blown, followed by a blast of powdered clay (or clay and inoculants/fertilizer, etc.) then more stickiness and more powder until a shell of sufficient thickness is agglomerated.

  This mélange of seeds and mud and candy gave me the idea for what I like to call mud truffles. All that’s needed to make them are seeds, a good potting soil mix, and clay. Because they are going in the garden, (which you have prepared with fluffy rich soil) there is no need to add compost (humus) or fertilizer. I use mostly good garden soil so the mud truffles don’t turn into hard clay prisons for the seeds—they will be porous enough to uptake water, fall apart, and allow the seeds to flourish.

  Ingredients: • 1 cup garden soil

  • 1/8 cup powdered clay

  • seeds (of your choice)

  • water

  1. Mix the garden soil with the powdered clay and mix with a little water until you have some good, damp (not sodden) mud.

  2. Roll into a ball (use a melon scooper for perfect sizing).

  3. Press a seed (carrot, lettuce, bean—practically any of them will work great) into the formed ball, and let it dry.

  That’s it. Of course, it would be much more truffle-like if you also dipped your soil sphere into some white sand or mild granulated organic fertilizer to look prettier. Some mini paper candy cups and a ribboned box to house an assortment of mud truffles, along with instructions to merely lay the truffles on the prepared bed in the correct spacing when the spring rains come, would make a really easy and incredibly charming gift for your garden-averse friends. It may inspire them to start gardening and could also encourage more home-growing food across the planet!

  CHAPTER NINE

  THE MYSTERIOUS UNDERGROUND

  “What I say is that, if a fellow really likes potatoes, he must be a pretty decent sort of fellow.”

  —A.A. MILNE

  When I was a kid, my folks let us stay up as late as we wanted on Friday nights to watch “monster movies.” My sister and I would huddle on the sofa in the basement and have the heck scared out of us by Dracula, the Blob, or Frankenstein. It was at the end of one of those nights, sometime past midnight, my wits already undone by terror, when the local TV station broke a special news story. Some sort of zombie doom coming our way, I figured. Instead, the story was about the failure of the potato crop.

  The newscaster walked somberly through a field of potatoes reporting how few potatoes were growing on the bushes that season. He knelt and pushed aside the leaves to show the pendant potatoes growing two to a stem on the stalk. In good years, he said, there would be at least half a dozen on every branch.

  I stared at the set. Weird, but something didn’t seem right. It wasn’t until the next morning that I thought, “Hey, potatoes don’t grow above ground.” The report had been an April Fool’s prank. I hadn’t realized the prank for what it was, perhaps because I still believed in the sanctity of the news as truth or because it was one o’clock in the morning, but also because potatoes are mysterious. Unlike squash or peas, you don’t get to see potatoes growing. Even carrots and beets allow us at least a glimpse of their shoulders throu
gh the soil as they grow.

  The mystery that surrounds the potato has given it a rather dodgy reputation at times. Until the late 1700s, many French refused to eat them thinking they caused leprosy. Further, in colonial Massachusetts, potatoes were considered the spoor of witches—which makes me laugh, imagining colonists stepping on spuds and complaining, “Ewww, witch poop!”

  I also read that devout Scotch Presbyterians wouldn’t eat potatoes because they weren’t mentioned in the bible—a stance I imagine must have severely constrained their menu.

  No such constraints at our house. When our eldest son, Jesse, was little, “potatoes and eggs” was his favorite meal. Enough potatoes in chicken potpie could make my carnivorous Sam and Louis happy with veggie potpie, and my famous green-chile chili wouldn’t be right without diced potatoes adding their heft to the mix.

  If I was going to win Louis and Sam over to eating out of the garden, I would have to grow potatoes on the Quarter Acre Farm. The good thing was, besides their culinary attraction, potatoes were reported to be easy to grow. Indeed, potatoes are so eager to proliferate, they even sprout in the refrigerator, a place you’re specifically not trying to encourage them to be anything but an inert lump of starch.