How Does My Garden Grow?

This year my garden is shaping up to be the best one yet. After three and a half years of composting and amending the soil, growing green cover crops, and mulching, the soil bears no resemblance to what it looked like when I bought my house in 2005. Now, I have raised beds of pretty loamy, rich, dark soil that turns easily and is loaded with wriggling worms. It's a far cry from the hard-packed concrete-like clay substance that passed for topsoil in my yard before. This corner of Alameda County is known for this type of poorly draining, alkaline clay soil. With patience, though, I have made this soil fertile and productive.

My task over the last several weeks has been planting seeds to sprout indoors on my mini-greenhouse windowsill. A few days ago, I planted heirloom Italian broccoli seedlings, as well as endive, escarole, and Romaine lettuce seedlings. I also planted fava beans, snap peas, and I have more leek seedlings and parsley to set out soon. I made sure to encase the greens in a swaddle of bird netting since my first foray into sprouting seeds ending in disaster a few weeks ago when the birds discovered my tasty sprouts and gobbled them all up. The bird netting will keep that from happening again.

I got some of my seeds from a seed swap a couple months back in which I traded heirloom cabbage seeds from my own garden for a wide variety of seeds from the other attendees at the swap. I bought my bird netting and my copper tape to thwart slug attacks from the Berkeley Horticultural Nursery, in the Northbrae neighborhood of Berkeley. The "Hort" as it is called is noticeably pricier than a lot of other nurseries, but for someone who loves gardening and plants, like me, it's a little like going to Disneyland. They have a dizzying variety of plants, veggie seedlings, rose bushes, citrus trees, and beautiful planters, supplies, and more. I could spend hours! In addition, I can pop into Gioia Pizzeria for an incredible slice of thin-crust pizza made with love. You can also grab a cup of joe at Cafe Roma and pick up some veggies at Monterey Market. There is also a cheese shop, fish shop, Chinese restaurant, and other purveyors of gourmet but staple food items all within a two-block radius.

Now I just have to keep my seedlings watered, and sprout the next generation. That way, I will never run out of fresh, leafy greens from my own garden!

Holiday Gifts, Free From Nature

This Christmas, I'm giving a unique gift that won't hurt the environment, wasn't made in China, and may even help reduce global warming on a infinitesimal level. What is more, this gift won't cost me a penny, and when I give it away, I can replace it pretty much immediately. "Wow," you say, "What is this gift, and how do I get in on it?" Well, this gift is a junior jade plant. And in my case, it's dozens of junior jade plants, all the offspring of the 50-year-old jade plant that lives in my garden. Each year, the giant, succulent "tree" (plant isn't a robust enough word to describe it) drops small pieces of its branches on the ground. Once they have touched down, the little stubs put out roots, and pretty soon, they are independent chips off the old block, so to speak.

This year, I collected dozens of the little green sprouts and repotted them with some basic potting soil in some of the standard clay and plastic pots I always seem to accumulate from numerous trips to the garden center. With a little regular watering, and some nice California sunshine, the sprouts put on some weight and height. Now they are ready for gift-giving.

I am wrapping each pot in aluminum foil, then covering the foil with festive holiday paper and some ribbon. I plan on giving them out as hostess gifts at parties, to my clients, and to friends who have everything but who would love to receive a living thing. Each jade plant is so low maintenance, requiring only occasional watering and should be allowed to dry out between.

When jade plants are happy, they send out tiny, white clusters of flowers in the winter. Back home in Pittsburgh, when I was growing up, we had a jade plant that would sometimes flower just like this in the winter. The jolly green giant in my backyard is flowering like crazy right now. And it has already dropped a ton of little offspring to the ground to replace the ones I kidnapped earlier in the year.

Plant propagation is a great skill to learn. There are more plants that can be propagated than you may imagine. They include lots of flowers and many herbs. Why pay for them when you can make more yourself? To learn more about propagation, I recommend Crockett's Indoor Garden, the book that was the companion volume to the old PBS series of the same name. Jim Crockett was the host of Crockett's Victory Garden, which you may remember from way back when. In fact, the show lives on today as the PBS show The Victory Garden. Jim Crockett includes numerous tips on how to divide, air-root, and use leaf cuttings to make more of the plants you love. The urban homesteader is resourceful. And this is another way you can make the most of the tools and resources you already have on hand.

Rabbits Fertilize My Food

On Thanksgiving weekend last year, I decided to go for a walk around the neighborhood to enjoy the beautiful fall weather and preemptively burn off some calories that would soon be injected directly into my thighs by a gut-busting turkey dinner. As I passed the bus stop a couple blocks from my home, I skidded to a dead stop. "Did I just see a rabbit?" I said to myself. "I did! I did! I did saw a rabbit!" In fact, it was sitting up slope from the bus stop, posed for all the world just like a classic chocolate Easter bunny. Except it was snowy white instead of chocolate brown. I realized that there was no reason for a domesticated rabbit to be out and about on a fall afternoon. So I decided I had better snatch it.

After catching this rather docile bunny and bringing it home, I put a sign up in the neighborhood: "Found Rabbit" and gave my phone number. I got calls all right. But not from anybody claiming this rabbit. The calls were from people telling me of other loose rabbits running around the neighborhood.

Armed with a humane trap, my husband and I went off to try to capture one of the floppy-eared vagrants, but his owner drove by and claimed him as we were about to stuff him in the trap. "Can't you keep him in the house?" I thought to myself.

Another rabbit kept appearing like a white speckled phantom by a neighbor's outdoor trellis. We set our trap out and hoped to capture it. One morning, my husband and I went to check the trap and found the little varmint grooming itself behind the trellis (but not in the trap). Each taking one side of the trellis, we flushed it into the trap, and off to the vet's. We discovered both rabbits were females -- unspayed females for God's sake! -- that must have been somebody's Easter bunnies until they got too big and too much trouble to care for. That's when they were unceremoniously dumped outside to fend for themselves and most likely end up gutted by a cat, raccoon, or the buses plying the street right where I found them hanging out. For more information about how to properly surrender a rabbit you no longer wish to own, please visit the House Rabbit Society website. They are the experts on all things rabbit. And if you feel like you might want to adopt, they can also tell you how.

Now, Lily (the big, white, puffy marshmallow of a couch-bunny) and Poppy (the fireball, neurotic, PTSD bunny) are a permanent part of our urban homestead, joining the guinea pigs Chester and Ziggy in providing rich manure to aid our composting efforts. The guinea pigs, weighing two pounds each, produce a certain amount of poop each day, but it is our friends the rabbits who are the champion nitrogen queens. Lily in particular is like a little white pony, both in her personality but also in the quantity of waste she generates weekly. When her offerings are added to our compost bin, the red worms utter tiny hosannas of joy. That is good eatin'! Herbivore manure is like the magic catalyst for the home compost pile, that secret ingredient that creates the richest, loamiest compost you will ever see.

The free bunnies have become star players on our little urban farm. And when you contribute to the web of life, you know somebunny loves you.

Book Recommend: The Herbal Medicine-Maker's Handbook

The urban homesteader should be equipped with general knowledge about herbs and herbal medicine. While it is important to consult a doctor for serious conditions, there is quite a bit that you can do yourself when you have both the plants and the know-how for using them on your side.

One book that should be on every urban homesteader's bookshelf is James Green's The Herbal Medicine-Maker's Handbook: A Home Manual, published by Ten Speed Press. Written in a whimsical, old-fashioned style that seems Elizabethan at times (think Shakespearean garden), The Herbal Medicine-Maker's Handbook sets out to convey the processes for putting herbs into useful form for self-treatment. Mr. Green, director of the California School of Herbal Studies, provides a list of 30 must-have herbs for your medicine bag, including such familiar faces as dandelion, cayenne, and peppermint as well as more "exotic" types such as pipsissewa (good for the kidneys!), gumweed, and vitex.

The heart of the book, however, is Mr. Green's instructions on making different herbal preparations. He includes chapters on creating decoctions, flower essences, ointments, salves, lotions, infusions, and more. He even gives instructions on administering the old-fashioned "sitz bath." Groovy! Consider this a "cookbook" of herbal medicines. The book is delightfully illustrated with strange, beautiful, luminous illustrations in a Victorian, storybook, mythical style by Mr. Green's daughter, Ajana Green.

Add The Herbal Medicine-Maker's Handbook to your personal library, and you are prepared to add cottage medicine-making to your list of personal skills.

The Ten-Year-Old Homesteader

My love of gardening, food, and self-sufficiency began when I was ten years old. I had been born on the South Side of Pittsburgh and lived the first five years of my life in a row house just two blocks away from the Jones & Laughlin Steel mill. I can still remember how the night sky would light up with the flaming tips of the smoke stacks of the mill. I played on the side walk in front of the house, cars driving by, no trees in sight. And by the time I came inside, I would be covered with fine, black, metallic dust from the steel mill. Today, where the mill used to stand is a mall and condos. Mill to mall. Progress?

My family moved to the suburbs when I was five, and for the first time, I had a yard with grass, flowers, trees. I still fondly remember the lilacs, the orange-blossom bushes, the snow-ball bushes, the baby's breath bush, and the violets I used to dig up and move into clusters in the garden.

When I was ten, I received a book that I continue to own and prize today. That book is 12 Months Harvest, published in 1975 by Ortho Books, a division of Chevron. The irony of an oil company publishing a book about gardening and food preservation is not lost on me. At the time, I was in love with this book, because it opened up a whole world of independence and food preservation to me. The book features the Dewey family of Gilroy, CA, then an exotic location to my young Pittsburgher mind, now a familiar place not far from my home in Oakland, CA. This book can be found used in various imprints on Amazon and Alibris, and if you can ever find a copy in a used book store, I recommend that you snap it up fast!

The book includes chapters on planting, canning, freezing, drying and smoking, using a fruit press, grinding grains, foraging for wild foods, and more. I used one of their six sourdough bread starter recipes and experienced the fun of capturing wild yeast and putting them to work. I can't say the bread turned out just right, but it was the best bread I ever tasted, because I made it myself.

Here is the starter recipe I tried out in 1975 for your enjoyment (from 12 Months Harvest copyright 1975 Chevron Chemical Company):

12 Months Harvest Sourdough Starter Recipe

"Mix four cups flour, 2 tablespoons sugar, 1 tablespoon vinegar. Add enough water to make a light batter, and cover lightly with something porous like cheesecloth and let stand in a warm place until it begins to bubble and work, giving off a pleasant odor. The ingredients pick up or attract wild yeasts in the air. Occasionally the original starter will get a bad start and begin to have an awful odor; just throw it out and begin again.

"The basic batter or sponge is usually made the night before. Mix 2 cups warm water and 2 1/2 cups flour with 1 cup starter. Let is stand overnight in a warm place. Cover with a clean cloth. In the morning remove a cup of the sponge, before you add anything else to it, to save as your starter. Refrigerate between uses."

Grandma's Nut Grinder

One of my fondest childhood memories is of my grandmother making her delicious nut bread. She was the daughter of Croatian immigrants, and the nutbread is a traditional holiday dessert from Croatia. Always popular, the bread is, however, very labor intensive. As she got older, Grandma made the bread less and less frequently until one year she announced that she was done making it.

I helped her a few times, and I can attest that the bread was indeed a laborious process. Grandma would lay a clean, white bed sheet down on her kitchen table to use for rolling out the tender, yeasted dough that required kneading and rising beforehand. And I would help grind the walnuts into an unctuous meal that would be mixed with butter and sugar to form the spead that lined the pillowy white sheets of dough. Then Grandma would carefully lift one end of the bread and roll the entire sheet into one large log. She would pat the end under to seal, then baste it all with melted butter and make pricks in the surface with the tines of a fork for steam vents. Once the bread was baked and cooled, it would be sliced into oval medallions that we would gorge ourselves on. She never made one loaf. It was always a dozen. If you're going to all that trouble, you might as well make a bunch!

When my Grandma passed away at the age of 91 in December 2005, I asked for her nut grinder. Today, it is one of my most prized possessions, and I've used it again for the occasional nut-grinding chore. To be honest, this bread is not something I might decide to make on a whim, but I plan to give it a shot this holiday season and surprise all the relatives with a special care package.

Grandma never wrote any of her family recipes down, so I have had to rely upon my memory and some research to recreate the recipe. Here is it:

Croatian Nut Bread
(“Potica,” pronounced paw-TEE-zah)
(Makes one four-pound loaf)

Dough:

1 cup milk 

1/2 cup plus 1 teaspoon sugar 

1 teaspoon salt 

1/4 cup butter
1/4 cup warm water (105° F) 

2 tablespoons dry yeast

2 eggs

4 1/2 cups all-purpose flour 

2 tablespoons butter, melted



Filling:

3 eggs, beaten 

4 cups finely ground walnuts 

1 cup packed light brown sugar 

1/3 cup butter, melted 

1 1/2 teaspoons cinnamon

1 teaspoon vanilla extract


Directions:
For the dough: Heat the milk in a saucepan. Stir in 1/2 cup sugar, salt, and butter. Add warm water to a large mixing bowl with 1 teaspoon sugar and yeast. Allow to rise for 10 minutes. Stir in milk mixture.
Add eggs and 2 1/2 cups flour. Beat with a wooden spoon, gradually beating in the remaining 2 cups of flour. Knead until the dough is stiff enough to leave the side of the mixing bowl. Place dough in greased bowl. Cover with towel and let rise in a warm place free from drafts until double in bulk. For the filling: put beaten eggs in a medium-size mixing bowl. Add nuts, brown sugar, 
butter, cinnamon, and vanilla. Stir to thoroughly mix. Set aside.
To assemble: punch down dough. On lightly floured surface turn out dough. Cover and let rise for 10 minutes. Roll out to a 30 x 20" rectangle. Spread with filling to about 1-inch from edge. Roll up tightly into a log-shaped loaf. Place log on greased baking sheet. Let rise in warm place covered with a towel, free from drafts, until double in bulk. 
Preheat oven to 350° and brush the roll with the melted butter. Prick with fork all over. Bake 35 to 40 minutes until golden. Cool on wire rack. Slice crosswise ¼ inch thick.

As a modern-day homesteader, I aim to keep the old traditions alive and continue to use the old tools, which still work fine and which don't cost a dime. I'll let you know how my bread turns out in a posting this December.

Free, Fresh Wild Blackberries

Have you ever foraged for food? Free food is everywhere, if you know where to look. An urban homesteader always keeps her eyes open for free gifts from nature, and puts them to good use in her kitchen.

A few months back, while walking in my neighborhood, just off of Highway 580 in Oakland near the zoo, I discovered a secret path with a street sign of its very own. This magical byway, "Mayfield Path," is just a few hundred yards of partially paved and partially unpaved alley linking Sunkist Street and 73rd Avenue. The 73rd Avenue side is a bit gritty, with pitbulls lunging at the rare pedestrian walking by the dried-out lawns and half-decayed fences along the street. The Sunkist side is much prettier, with landscaped yards full of exotic plants.

The day I discovered Mayfield Path, I was out on a walk. I decided to duck down the alley and see where it led. Mostly, I saw the backs of fences of houses that faced Sunkist. Part way down, I found that there were two houses that fronted the path. The owners had created a magnificent, forest-like hideaway. I wasn't sure where they parked since the path seems too narrow for cars, but I did see at least one house had a driveway. At the bottom of the path where it disgorges onto 73rd Avenue, traffic was whizzing by, but I watched a flock of cedar waxwings eating bright red berries from an untrimmed bush. It was urban, but it was also a natural oasis.

A few weeks ago, I decided to take a turn down Mayfield Path once more, and I discovered a patch of wild blackberries growing on the side of the path. They were big, juicy, dark black specimens. I picked a good quart of them, brought them home, and whipped up a blackberry pie. Who says you have to pay an arm and a leg at the store for good, fresh blackberries? Mine were free. And I just read that new studies have shown that wild berries have much higher levels of beneficial antioxidants than domesticated varieties. See? Natural is better.

Here is the recipe for my pie. Find a patch of berries near you, and give this a try. Sheer delight!

Holly's Wild Blackberry Pie

Ingredients
1 1/4 cups whole wheat flour
8 tablespoons grapeseed oil
1 teaspoon salt
ice-cold water
1 quart fresh-picked wild blacberries
1 cup turbinado sugar
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1 teaspoon nutmeg
1 teaspoon grated lemon peel
1 tablespoon corn starch or small-pearl tapioca

Directions
Add flour and salt to large bowl. Slowly sprinkle in grapeseed oil as you mix with a pastry-cutter or fork. When flour and oil begin to form pea-sized beads, sprinkle in ice-water, a little at a time, while continuing to cut with pastry-cutter. You're done when dough holds its shape as a ball. Oil a glass pie dish and press the dough gently into the dish and up the sides with your fingertips. In a bowl, add well-washed blackberries, sugar, cinnamon, nutmeg, lemon peel, and corn starch or tapioca. Mix thoroughly. Fill crust. Bake for 30 to 40 minutes at 350 degrees Fahrenheit or until crust is browned and filling is bubbling hot. Allow to cool for fifteen minutes before serving.