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Come join us there - www.greenblade.org

We have had frost every morning and a little snow but the days are, for the most part, still mild. The mall is full of shoppers. Wegman’s has displayed Christmas decorations in the lobby since mid-October along with a disingeuous disclaimer about some people liking to do their Christmas shopping when it is calm. At every turn we receive messages about getting our shopping done and about the stress of delaying. So I ground myself in the garden, which is still producing.

I bring my hoe, mindful that if I go after those weeds now I will thank myself in April. My primary target is the stinging nettle which I know full well I will never defeat but I would like to keep at bay. My mother used to say that she never got rid of all the dutsbunnies but she “kept them scared.” That’s what I want to do with the stinging nettle - keep it scared. I also go after enormous dandelions with formidable taproots and various other things equally tenacious.

My reward is a basketful of beets, potatoes, and carrots. I got all the potatoes – there weren’t many – but we will last quite a while on the carrots and beets. There is also Swiss chard and kale, parsley and sage.

Michael Pollans writes in Second Nature:
So on those evenings when a full moon dominates a cloudless sky, and the air has a faint metallic tang to it, implying it will give up its heat without a struggle, we make a last-ditch stand on behalf of the annuals. To hold close some remnant of the earth’s warmth, we dress the tomatoes and squashes and cucumbers in old bedsheets and tarps. On silvery nights like these the vegetable garden looks like a congregation of ghosts and the earth feels like it’s lost its blanket; nothing stands between it and outer space. Bedsheets, a tender annual’s spacesuit.

We check the garden every morning now. It is close to the house, fenced and small, so it holds some heat. We’ve pulled up the basil to make the last of the pesto from our garden, anyway. Green tomatoes come in to be ripened in the window or used, crisp and sturdy, as they are.

There is something valiant about the cosmos, bright and brave. “But instead of battening down the hatches, saving something for another day, the annuals throw themselves at the thinning sun, open-armed and ingenuous.”

It is in their nature. It is in ours to know what is coming. To feel the nostalgia of the rustling seed heads, the limp leaves that only a week or so ago appeared immortal.

We retreat indoors; our shelter and warmth is our spacesuit. Buffalo has had two feet of snow.

It was maybe three-quarters through Spike Lee’s When the Levees Broke (HBO last night, but sure to be shown again). I had endured the now-familiar images, replayed my personal events of last year, re-felt the impotent rage. Now I was seeing images I had not seen before - people returning to their homes to see what was left. What they accomplished was like the psychological necessity of seeing the body of the loved one who has died: the brain is forced to accept, to break loose, to grieve.

But the film watches as trumpeter Terence Blanchard brings his mother into her home and she asks “what’s that?” He tells her gently that it is her china cabinet and she cries “That china cabinet got no business being over there!”

Nothing is safe when china cabinets take up new positions without permission. The china cabinets of our lives need to stay where they are so that when we need plates to share the food that will help us through whatever has happened, we can follow a familiar path and the plates will be there, and we can sit at the table and hold hands and cry.

Thousands and thousands of people are learning, because they have no choice, how to navigate a new spiritual landscape as they are daily assaulted with the destruction of the old one. Our support systems are perilously fragile and in some cases dangerously, perhaps criminally, flawed - that much the film makes clear. But one also sees through to the resiliance of the human spirit and the power of community. Where government, FEMA, insurance companies turn away, there are people holding onto each other, guiding one another tenderly, murmuring hope.

We move forward together, righting the china cabinets where we can and putting them back where they belong.

Harvest is happening so quickly now that I hardly have time to take official note. Loads of peaches have been turned into jam and chutney. Berries have been frozen. Yesterday I weeded and planted kale and spinach and a new row of lettuce for fall. The day’s haul looks beautiful:

Nevertheless I spend time being grateful to my neighbors in this region who are growing the produce that appears in the farmers market. My little garden has done well this year and looks quite charming with its scattered bunches of sunflowers growing where the birds planted the seeds.

But I am grateful the family is not depending upon my skills as a gardener. I got only one zucchini (how can you get only one zucchini??), and my eggplants have stayed, stunted, close to the ground. Both of those were hybrids, acquired by various means and from assorted sources. Next year I will try both from the farmers market where I can get heirloom varieties raised in this climate.

In spite of my precautions about where to buy starter plants, two tomatoes have collapsed and wilted. Happily the rest are producing so heavily I will have to harvest some early for fried green tomatoes. Ah, the sacrifices of a gardener. (For a discussion of green tomatoes in the south - with recipes! - see the NPR story, Fried Green Tomatoes: A Taste of Old New Orleans.)

Meanwhile the birds have taken possession of the elderberries and we even have a downey woodpecker family - mom, dad and young male.

Bushes heavy with elderberries by the new clothesline. I have come to believe that hanging clothes is a Zen meditation. And it was while in this trance state that I first saw the woodpeckers.

It wasn’t until today, after the cooling came last night, that I could even think about writing about the heat. Now, though, I can get a little distance on summer and delight in all its gifts that we so miss in winter. So I took the camera out to the garden.

The first of my tomatoes to ripen - lovely little Jaune Flammes, warm in the sun.

Nigella, not yet in bloom - but remember it in a few weeks when the seed pods ripen. I will speak more about nigella. Ruby swiss chard behind it.

This is what the little Riot peppers looked like at the Kingbird Farm booth in June.

This is what they look like now. The plant is hardly bigger than it was in its plastic pot but now there is an explosion of little peppers on its crown.

This is where the home gardener wonders if it is all worthwhile.

But we live for this.

And this.

Prayer from Julian of Norwich -

Be a gardener.
Dig a ditch,
toil and sweat,
and turn the earth upside down
and seek the deepness
and water the plants in time.
Continue this labor
and make sweet floods to run
and noble and abundant fruits
to spring.
Take this food and drink
and carry it to God
as your true worship.

I spent an hour in the garden yesterday weeding. This year’s abundant rain has made the job easy so I had a little more time to think about what I was doing. I pulled lamb’s quarters, dandelions, the dread garlic mustard, ground ivy, cleavers, stinging nettle, and quack grass. Each, left on its own, will soon dominate the garden, choking out anything else I would like to grow there. And what am I trying to grow? Clearly, things that, left on their own, will succumb to the plants I am pulling. So am I working with nature or against it?

I picked some lettuce and zucchini for dinner, roused the cat from her nest under a flowering dill plant so the birds would stop scolding, and went in to consult Michael Pollan.

As author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Michael Pollan is an advocate for local eating and a poser of ethical problems. In his earlier book, Second Nature, he has a chapter called “Weeds Are Us,” a frequently hilarious account of his own struggles with weeds that suggests a way of coming to terms not only with the constant chores of the garden but with our own position as humans walking the earth.

Weeds, he points out, are not a sign of unspoiled nature that we keep at bay with our artifice. Weeds don’t grow where people have not disturbed the surface of the earth. Weeds spread through human intervention and survive by human effort, not in spite of it.

“[The root of bindweed] is as brittle as a fresh snapbean; put a hoe to it and it breaks into a dozen pieces, each of which will sprout an entire new plant. It is as though the bindweed’s evolution took the hoe into account. By attacking it at its roots – the approved strategy for eradicating most weeds – I played right into the insidious bindweed’s strategy for world domination.”

Just as we can adapt to circumstances, so can - and do - plants. When I broke ground for my vegetables, I made a decision to play a role in the genetic survival of tomatoes and lettuce and Swiss chard. Just as there is a case to be made that the cat under the dill plant survives as a species by having selected for “cuddliness” that means humans will take care of her, my vegetables are depending on me to defend them against plants that have developed their own methods for depending upon humans.

That fraught passage in Genesis that has gotten us in so much trouble, “fill the earth and subdue it,” takes on a different meaning. Evidently, there is no escaping the “subduing” part. That’s already done and in a way that there was no possiblity of avoiding. Our challenge is not to attempt to stand apart from nature, but to take responsibility for our lives here. “And we won’t get anywhere until we come to terms with this crucial ambiguity about our role – that we are at once the problem and the only possible solution to the problem.”

I got this e-mail from Mike Ludgate this morning:

“We had been telling folks that the local strawberries were done, the bulk of the end of the crop did get wiped out from all the rain and flooding. But the weather has been nice and cool and dry for the last few days resulting in a last gasp harvest of local berries!”

This is the first lesson of the harvest season. Get those strawberries NOW because after they are gone, the strawberries available - tempting, luring - won’t be local.

If you absolutely must have a strawberry, ask where the store is getting them from. “Local” is, in one sense, obvious. It means more or less what you can get at the Farmer’s Market (or from those farmers). But “local could also mean “the Finger Lakes” or “Central New York” or “New York” or “the northeast” (last year I regularly counted Pennsylvania in order to get peaches, which were unavailable in our area because of frost). The point is, be aware, know what you are doing and why.

But this is also an opportunity to train your body to move with the seasons. If the strawberries are done in the land you walk on, what else is there? What is coming in? The season moves astonishingly quickly at this point, building toward the frenzy of August. Stay with it.

I bought some broccoli rabe at the Farmer’s Market on Sat., and here’s my Aunt Bridgie’s Italian recipe. When she served it, her husband, my Uncle Duke, used to say “Bridge, lock the door. There’s gold on the table.”

A bunch or two of broccoli rabe, rinsed, heavy stems trimmed
A head or two of regular broccoli, cut up
garlic, chopped
olive oil
bacon (optional)
salt and pepper

I like bacon with mine, so I cut it into small pieces, fry till crisp in my largest fry pan, drain most of the fat.

For vegan recipe, start here. Add the rabe and regular broccoli to the pan with several chopped garlic cloves. Pour olive oil over the greens generously. If the rabe was not still wet, add a bit of water for steam. Salt and pepper to taste.

Cover and simmer over low heat until the stems are tender, about 45 minutes. Serve as a side, or on Italian bread as a sub. 

First, think about the taste of a GOOD supermarket strawberry, imported from somewhere in the off season. (I’m not talking about the bad ones - the ones they got to look like a strawberry on the outside but are nothing but a white core when you cut them open.) You can usually get something that tastes good around Easter. They are big and juicy and so welcome after a long winter.

But think about that taste: everyone talks about how “sweet” they are. And that’s just it: they are almost like strawberry-flavored candy. The flavor is exaggerated and the sweetness is overpowering, masking whatever other flavors there should be in a strawberry. In its way it is addictive, but it is the sweetness that is the cause, not the flavor.

Now go to Ludgate’s (or the source wherever you are) and get some local strawberries. Eat them at room temperature, preferably right out of your hand. Taste the difference?

It is possible actually to FORGET what a source flavor should be. We have so many opportunities to taste flavorings that we lose touch with flavor. Happily, correcting this benefits the environment and local farmers and is pure pleasure