Sprout

adam January 2nd, 2009

I love Mary Oliver. Her books are in my bedroom, the bathroom, the kitchen, and the living room. In front of me is her book-length poem, The Leaf and The Cloud. Listen to this line. Look at its image.

The green pea

climbs the stake

on her sugary muscles.

I’ve never seen it so well; that is how a pea climbs a stake: on her sugary muscles! And when my peas are growing next spring, that image will be a part of my imagination, my vision, my perception.

This winter I plan to read two books about nature/gardening: Bringing Nature Home: How Native Plants Sustain Wildlife in Our Gardens by Douglas W. Tallamy and Eating the Sun: How Plants Power the Planet by Oliver Mortem. I expect to learn a lot, but I can’t imagine that knowledge to be as enriching as Oliver’s three lines.

Or, it will have its separate rewards.

When I was in college there was a lot of playful antagonism between me, the English major, and a group of friends, the computer science majors. Another friend, a politics major, once told me, “Shakespeare is smarter than Einstein.” But Einstein himself said imagination is more important than knowledge.

Anyway, why fight? Both kinds of knowledge help us understand and enjoy the world. In fact, my enjoyment of Oliver’s image is helped by my (incredibly rudimentary) knowledge that sugar is a carbohydrate, and that carbs are a basic source of energy for many living things.

Take this in while your peas are climbing the trellis. Then turn around and look at your radishes. You’ll think of Oliver again, the gift she offers right after the image of the green pea:

The rosy comma of the radish

fattens in the soil.

• oh and by the way
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adam December 31st, 2008

The community gardens have been “winterized.” That’s the township’s word, not mine, and I suppose it means they’ve been mowed. (Still, drive by and you can see my green patch of cover crop!)
Maybe two weeks ago my friends were planting garlic in their home garden. I was jealous. Garlic isn’t an option for community gardeners because it has to stay in the ground over winter. And I would love to grow garlic. I’d also love to grow storage onions, but for that the community gardens would have to start earlier in the spring.
And is there a reason they can’t get started earlier? This year I nearly missed peas because the plots weren’t plowed and laid out until midway through April.If the gardens were prepared by March 1, we’d only have to miss three months of gardening, which isn’t bad. In March I could get my seeds in the ground, and as soon as possible have carrots on my dinner table.

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adam December 23rd, 2008

I even like the name of it: “Garden Cart.” This is what I’m wishing for on Christmas, or would be if I had a home garden. I wouldn’t leave such a good and useful thing lying around the community gardens for anyone to take. It is beautiful. And it so perfectly matches my aesthetic vision of what belongs in a garden.
A lot of community gardeners have a version of a cart, such as a wheel barrow or a wagon. My version is a blue bucket with two rope handles. To haul compost and debris, my method is to thread a shovel’s handle through the rope and drag the bucket around. I get by, but imagine how much smoother the job would go if I had some wheels, and how cool it would be.

• Composting
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adam December 18th, 2008

The turnip soup was good but not great. It needed something, and I could have gone a few ways. I initially thought garlic. Then I contemplated herbs. What about cream? I opened the fridge. Right away I saw a jar of blueberry jam. Hm. Maybe the soup needed a little sweetness?
A month or more ago a friend made turnip soup that just knocked me out. A group of friends were having a pre-Thanksgiving potluck dinner, and among a delectable spread, I praised nothing as highly as that turnip soup. It was buttery and sweet and truly captured how a turnip tastes at its best.
I wanted to re-create that soup, so I began improvising. Keep it simple. I sauteed one onion and one carrot in butter. Then I chopped up a few bunches of turnips (my garden’s final offerings) and two small potatoes (to give the soup a little body). I added stock, brought it to a boil, added pepper and pureed the whole thing.
As I said, it was good but not great. As a test I spooned jam into a bowl and poured half a ladle of soup on top of it, which was one of the strangest ideas I’ve pursued in the kitchen. I mixed the two and had a taste. Not bad. Pretty good, actually. But blueberries weren’t quite right for turnips.
Cranberries were more like it. I had a quart of them nearby, so I dumped them in a pot and made a quick cranberry sauce, decreasing the copious amount of sugar the recipe calls for. Once the fruit began to break down, I experimented by mixing it with the soup in a small bowl. I had something here.
The flavor was much more complex: bitter, sweet and peppery. I liked it. I could hardly believe it, but I liked it very much. I began spooning a bit of the cranberry sauce into the soup pot, drizzling streaks of crimson on top of the pale orange soup and then stirring them together.
I felt like an artist. I wasn’t simply cooking; I felt as if I was creating. Here was a supreme culinary moment of my life. I thought of the first time that I asked permission to crack an egg in the pan. From that to this. No recipe, no instruction and no guidance except imagination.

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adam December 16th, 2008

I wore an apron and wiped my hands on it all afternoon. The counter was in full use. The food processor sliced Brussels sprouts, spun a flour mixture, and pureed baked sweet potatoes. A 35-pound turkey roasted in the oven. Though I had ordered a 20-pound bird from a friend whose uncle raises turkeys, I received one nearly twice as large, which caused considerable consternation in the Grybowski household.
The turkey roasted in a borrowed pan, for our pan was not sufficiently large. Nearly half a day it spent in the oven, coming out before 1 p.m. (We eat early.) My father sliced the turkey with an electric knife that shivered through the breast. Arranged on a serving platter, the turkey completed the orchestration, as the roasted vegetables, the mashed sweet potatoes, the Brussels sprouts, the cranberry sauce, the biscuits, the salads - everything was brought to the table, for the family to enjoy.

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adam December 9th, 2008

Slugs. Shell-less and prone to dessication, they produce a mucus that covers their entire body and leaves a trail of slime in their gentle, gentle wake. Dry conditions are perilous to slugs. They’re active after a rainstorm.

I harvested the last bunches of turnips from my garden on Nov. 30, a day of steady rain. I dumped the vegetables in my sink and walked away to change into dry clothes. When I returned to the kitchen, I reached to grab a turnip and nearly grabbed a slug! I jumped, I admit. They are alien-like creatures, and it’s fine with me if they remain beings foreign to my kitchen, and my garden.

My garden has never had a slug problem. Still, they are the problem for which my mom has a home remedy that she has told me countless times. (It is her grandparents’ trick.) Arrange a glass of beer in the garden soil shallow enough so a slug can fall in. They are attracted to beer, apparently, and when they fall in, they drown.

• Growing
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adam December 3rd, 2008

Two weeks ago my nephew and I went to see Twilight, the movie based on Stephanie Meyer’s series of novels about a girl, Bella, in love with a vampire. The theater was packed, mostly with teenage girls, and they whooped and hollered at the opening credits, the first appearance of Edward (the vampire), the kissing scenes. This is a story for teenagers, not a 28 year old. Still, I took quiet delight in one scene. During a field trip, Edward and Bella’s science teacher led them on a tour of a greenhouse. While the vampire and the object of his affection (and maybe blood lust) tussled through the first stage of their attraction, their teacher was praising the benefits of compost. They ignored him.

• oh and by the way
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adam November 26th, 2008

In 2007 the New Oxford American Dictionary named “locavore” as its word of the year. A locavore is someone who eats locally produced food. The word was coined in 2005. I’m sure you’ve heard of it.
And I’m sure you’ve heard about the local food movement and Slow Food and books like Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. I’ve never read it, and I’m not a member of Slow Food, which is not to say I’m against their principles. (In fact, I link to Slow Food on this blog.) I shop at farmers markets and grow food in my garden. I love cooking and eating local, seasonal food. The beets and potatoes and carrots I’m cooking for Thanksgiving are from around here. The turkey, too. Just please don’t call me a locavore.

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• Cooking , Eating , Growing
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adam November 20th, 2008

For 20 years Europe had rules banning the sale of misshapen fruits and vegetables - forked carrots and curvy cucumbers were tossed in favor of offending sensibilities. (Actually, they were first applied to protect families from low-quality food.) Last week the European Commission relaxed some of those standards.

As a gardener, I have seen some strange veggies come out of the ground and off the stalk. Below is an homage to odd and misshapen vegetables. Each sweet potato is from my garden.

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adam November 17th, 2008

What a blunder! Sweet potatoes, four months in the ground, left to rot!
Or so I was fretting a few weeks ago when, after the first frost, the sweet potato vines were transformed into slimy and putrid things. I had no idea what I was doing. I thought they would be safest in the ground, where I would keep them until just before Thanksgiving.

Always harvest sweet potatoes before a frost. Compromised vines equal compromised potatoes. My editor, Ilene Dube, told me this one night before I left work. On my way home I stopped by the garden in the dark and severed the potatoes from their vines.
The following weekend I returned to dig the potatoes. I came home with 42 pounds of them (42 pounds!), which have been “curing” in a big blue bucket in my kitchen. Curing is supposed to occur at a particular temperature for a particular length of time and protect the potatoes against rot. I’m winging it.

Curing is also the period when the potato converts starch into the sugar that gives the potatoes their name. That is, sweet potatoes get better with time, until they don’t. I sorted through the potatoes this weekend and a few ends had already begun to rot. As for all that remains, I have big plans: ravioli, pies, bicscuits, butter.

• Growing
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