Jen’s Patchwork Slaw

“I hate and love.
And if you ask me why,
I have no answer, but I discern,
can feel, my senses rooted in eternal torture.”

- Gaius Valerius Catullus, ca. 60 BC (transl. Horace Gregory)

I hate and love my computer. As I wobbled along in Linux this week, learning about seven new programs just to get this post out, suddenly this old poem came to mind and I had to laugh in spite of myself. (I need you I want you I love you I hate you please don’t leave me!) It was certainly cheaper to laugh than to smash the computer with a balpeen hammer. I can’t even remember if we have a balpeen hammer anyway.

In between love-hate sessions with the computer I made this lovely coleslaw I remembered from last summer. I originally developed it last July for our family reunion. It was a big reunion, and as food assignments were issued I had mixed feelings when I drew “coleslaw.” (Coleslaw? How about something elegant and amazing?) Now, there are hundreds (maybe thousands) of variations of coleslaw, and one of my life goals is trying every one. (I like to aim high.) There are the mayonnaise-y slaws; the hot, horseradish or garlic variations; those leaning toward vinegar and oil; some with delightful Asian influences, like wasabi or sesame oil; some that rely on cabbage and no other veggies ~ and then there are the more colorful ones that incorporate different greens, or even peppers and herbs. I decided to make something a bit more fresh and interesting than the vapid white stuff normally slopped onto the plate next to a deli barbecue sandwich, so I worked this up and it came out tasty and colorful. I used my trusty old duct-taped Cuisinart to finely chop up red and green peppers, and for the seasoning I used lemon pepper and Jane’s Krazy Mixed-up Salt. While I don’t know exactly what herbs Miss Jane puts in her salt, I do know it is fantastic on salads.

Jane’s Krazy Mixed-up Salt: worth the effort to find

I also use fresh parsley and chives from my herb garden; last year I used green onions from the local grocery, and they were delicious too (but I used less, as their flavor is more pungent). You may find the recipe for my Patchwork Coleslaw on the main site, in the recipe section (or by following the link).

If you are looking for something a little different for your summer barbecues, changing up your ’slaw might be just the ticket! Fresh, crispy, cool ~ it doesn’t get any better on a hot afternoon.

Fresh slaw on a hot day

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Bonsai morning glory in the kitchen window

The garden is such a great microcosm of life: it moves ever outward in its own sweet rhythm and flow, and while you can tend it and try to steer it in a particular direction you can never really control it. At some point you just have to either flow with it or explode, and you get so much more out of it when you relax and pay attention to all the glorious weirdness that springs forth each and every day.

What? Long week? Ah yes, it has been a magnificently chaotic time here in Jenotopia. I will not bore you with sad blogger stories of computer failure, but I will simply suffice with saying that I am now a Linux user (at home, anyway). RT is quite a handy chap with the computer ~ for a barbarian.

Computer oddities aside, the garden has put forth plenty of strange and wonderful goodness, and more pops up every day. I know most of you gardeners out there have pots or pans of plants that you just don’t ever get around to planting. Come on, everybody does it! I have all sorts of nooks and crannies full of plants in pots and trays and plastic containers, and I keep telling myself “Oh, I’ll get to this tomorrow.” Well, I had a whole tupperware dish of mixed-color morning glories I started from seeds I collected last year, but I never planted them. They just sat in the window, growing and intertwining. Because they did not have soil or really much room at all, they grew into tiny Bonsai morning glories ~ and they came into bloom this week! They have perfect little heart-shaped leaves and tiny flowers scarcely the size of a quarter.

Some idea of the scale of these tiny beauties

There is plenty of wonderful weirdness going on in the vegetable garden, too. Gardening without pesticides means participating in the cycle of plant life along with the inevitable “pests” ~ and to me successful organic gardening means striking a balance between reasonable yield for me and a meal or two for my insect and animal neighbors. The tomato hornworms have been the most interesting pests so far: big, fat green caterpillars with chubby feet and a prominent horn on their rear ends, these guys remind me of the hooka-smoking caterpillar from Alice in Wonderland. The worms are actually the larval form of two large moths, the Hawkmoth and the Sphinx moth. The moths appear in spring and will lay eggs on the undersides of plant leaves; these eggs hatch in around a week, and the larvae will then feed on your tomatoes or other foliage for around a month before they enter a pupal stage in the soil.

We find hornworms now and again (munching slowly and contentedly on our tomato plants), and this usually means the hens get a nice snack (eesh!). The girls just love snapping up plump hornworms, and if there are only one or two worms a nice game of hen rugby usually ensues ~ most entertaining. Although I appreciate having chicken pest control, I learned through a garden forum that Braconid wasps and Trichogramma wasps will also kill these worms. The Braconid supposedly does this by laying eggs on the worm’s back ~ and the young wasps devour the worm. The Trichogramma wasps parasitize the moth eggs.

This sounds interesting (well, to me), but what was really fascinating was seeing the amazing photos Doug Smith took of the Braconid wasp eggs on a hormworm:

http://www.pbase.com/dougsmit/tomato_hornworm

Wow! And to make things even more weird and wonderful, the day after I saw these photos I walked out to the garden and saw the very same thing happening!

If you look closely, you can see what I believe is an adult Braconid wasp on the worm. (If you look very closely, you can also see that we seem to have mealybugs on that plant.) RT had mixed feelings about leaving an animal to meet a possibly drawn-out and unpleasant demise (he is the one who provides mercifully-quick creature deaths in Jenotopia), but we decided to let nature take its course in its own strange, wild way.

Chamomile sprinkled across the lawn

Meanwhile, in the fenced portion of the back yard I suddenly found chamomile popping up in the lawn. Chamomile? I have not planted chamomile anywhere in years, and when I did it was in the old herb garden . . . where the hens now live. Hmmmm. Near as I can figure, the girls picked up the seeds while pecking around in their run, and then deposited them around the yard: tiny seeds in fresh-made packets of some of the finest fertilizer known. I checked yesterday, and there is now chamomile all over the place! I believe it is German chamomile, but I will dry and split a few flowers to be sure: if I remember correctly, a hollow flower is German, and a solid one is Roman. Either way I should probably move some of it to a nice cultivated area and let it grow to a usable size. Waste not!

There are plenty of other naughty plants popping up in unplanned places and in unplanned ways, and most of the time I try to go with the flow. I stuck a tiny twig of wild grape along our unsightly chain link fence a couple of years ago thinking it would look cute. !! It is now stretching all over the place, and I have probably trimmed half of it away. (Somewhere in California Cathy is laughing right now.) Eeek! I started thinking it might grab us while we sat on the patio. It is now trimmed and pretending to play nicely with the clematis, and somehow a line of catnip plants has sprung up beneath it along the fenceline ~ despite the fact that what I planted was monkey grass.

Catnip and wild grapes wander over a chain link fence

Ah well. For now I will keep trying to go with the flow, and I will relax and enjoy the unplanned weirdness of the garden. After all, I’m just the caretaker ~ I’m certainly not the Boss.
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Full moon by l*u*z*a is back

The months have rolled by so quickly, it’s hard to believe it is midsummer already! I blinked and suddenly the chickens filled out and grew fat and slick, a mountain of roses came and went, Hobie and Manny walked with slower step, gallons of wine flowed through my favorite glass, my oldest niece turned 19, my youngest niece caught her first fish, tomato plants spilled out of their cages, squash and beans popped out of nowhere, and somehow there is no room for me to walk in the new herb garden.

Darned if I know how it all happened.

This year holds a strong midsummer for those of you who mind the signs of nature; the full moon combined with the long day means a great deal of energy affecting us in many ways. I can strongly sense the turning of the year, that moment of trembling balance before the pendulum swings back into the direction of shorter days and colder nights.

In the early-summer evenings when our gardening and animal work is done, we sit outside on the patio and watch as night falls gently across the sky and land. We sit in silence as the beautiful moon rises, golden against the periwinkle sky. The time that usually flies so quickly seems to slow in the still, moist air. Tree frog chirrs from the wall of the house. Toads warm themselves on the driveway, dark lumps against the white pavement. The hens settle themselves on the run perch, huddling down with softly clacking beaks and sleepy eyes as they wait for me to put them to bed. Moths flit by, silent but for the hum of featherlike wings. One by one the stars appear, pinpoints of light in the velvet blue of the sky. The scent of magnolia drifts through the warm air. Whippoorwill begins his night song down by the creek. Owl sends a soft, low call from the far wooded hillside. Some nights we will even hear the coyotes gathering for their own full moon circle, sending wild and plaintive cries that echo through the fields and remind us of what was here before.

There are still remains from many ancient civilizations showing the importance of the solstices in measuring time. Celebrations and rituals once measured out the seasons of the year, and even the moon was an important part of the cycle of the seasons for people. Despite the dim vestiges of ancient holidays that still remain, it seems to me that modern American folk have lost the feel for that type of seasonal rhythm. Whether this is good or bad (or neither) I do not know. I do know that I prefer to celebrate midsummer, the turning of the year ~ and while I may not paint myself with blue woad and dance around a fire, I will drink a toast and take notice of the signs of the season all around me. There will be plenty of other celebrants in the brief night, and if I am very, very quiet I just might catch a glimpse of one or two.

“If we shadows have offended,
Think but this, and all is mended,
That you have but slumber’d here
While these visions did appear.
And this weak and idle theme,
No more yielding but a dream. . .”

- Puck from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream

BD Soupski and Baby Jen: Has it been so long? -And did I really look like Droopy?

Many years have passed since the monsters and I arrived to shake up BD and Miss Pat’s world. There’s been a lot of water under that bridge, and there is far too much to say about it here ~ so I will suffice with a quick virtual “shout” out to Big Daddy Soupski on this Father’s Day.

When I was very young I learned this medieval German song; it was likely a love song sung by troubadours, but somehow I think it suits the sweetness of the photo of me and my Soupski:

Du bist mein, ich bin dein:
Des sollst du gewiß sein.
Du bist beschlossen
in meinem Herzen;
Verloren ist das Schlüsselein.
Du mußt immer drinnen sein!

And my rough translation ~

You are mine, I am yours:
That you should always know.
You are enclosed
in my heart;
Lost is the little key.
You must always remain inside!

I love you, BD! Thank you for everything you have taught me.

Happy Father’s Day.
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Dreaming of tomatoes: 2007 harvest was delicious

Although BD Soupski and Miss Pat used to plant vegetable gardens when I was just a little one, as an adult I have really been more of a flower and herb person. I eventually dabbled in English roses and medicinal herbs, and all this was plenty for me.

For awhile.

In trying to maximize what my suburban yard can provide for the household, I finally decided it was time to bring in the veggies. For a couple of years we grew a few tomatoes, and this year we were ready to expand and do more vegetables. We decided to start with a reasonable plot ~ one-third of the usable full-sun area on the south side of the lot. I didn’t dare share my original drawings, what with the plant curse and all ("How did your [doomed plant because you spoke of it] do this year?"), and I placed my order for seeds on New Year’s Day. And waited. Eventually the time came to bring out the seed trays, and off I went into the frustrating territory of baby-sitting delicate plants.

As I said in my last post, it is easy to fall into the trap of measuring progress by what is not accomplished, what is left to do. It is definitely a different experience raising vegetables than tending an English-style garden, and it is sometimes difficult for me to mark progress in something mulched with straw.

I looked back over a few photos I took to get a better bead on just what has happened in the new vegetable plot. Here we are at the beginning, in March:

March 11: Thaney surveys new garden site

Then came the breaking of sod. It may perhaps be considered a gift to be as clumsy as I am, as it tends to get me out of tasks that involve blades or electricity. Tilling is a case in point ~

April 20: Before the planting comes lots of tilling ~ and tilling, and tilling! (Thanks, RT!)

After a couple of swipes with the tiller, we now have . . . soil!

The new, expanded 30′ x 40′ vegetable garden plot would then be set with drip lines. We had already lain PVC pipes under the yard leading out to this area a couple of years ago, and it just needed a new connector. The garden lines are recycled rubber soaker hoses ~ three 50′ sections did the trick.

Garden on May 4: I always irrigate my Southern gardens so I don’t have to stand outside with a hose in July

After many years of fencing adventures, this year we simply went with a 24″ rabbit fence. The deer are impossible to fence out in my experience, so we will suffice with prayers to the deer gods and hope for the best. Rabbits, though, have been more pernicious opponents, and we knew we would have to have a plan to keep their little nibbling selves out of the delicious treats.

At last, after weeks of seed-sitting, planting, weeding, mulching, weeding, and weeding, we may actually have something. It doesn’t look like a rose-filled English garden, but it just may feed us this summer ~

Garden on June 11: Tomatoes settling in, and field pumpkins on the fringes of the rows

Cantaloupe (far left), tomatoes, and field pumpkins (bottom)

I believe we may actually have some plant survival!

Cantaloupe blossom

Field pumpkins making use of space (and irrigation) on ends of the rows

My lovely tomatoes are coming in ~

The first Roma tomato

I got a little over-excited and collected a few too many tomatoes this year (if that is possible). I think we have something in the range of 30+ plants. Come late July we will be eating gazpacho, tomato sandwiches, tomato pizza, tomato everything! After many iterations of tomato cages over the years, we now make our own and they are much more stable than the store-bought ones.

This year I tried covering some of the unsightly chain link fencing with my young hops plants. I know someone who home brews beer, and I chose varietals he recommended so if they survive he can use them for his specialty beers ~ and I will have learned how to grow hops! I got them bare-root from a local brew supply shop.

Hens and hops ~ I am growing two varieties this year, Fuggle and Willamette (this one is the Willamette)

I have only completely lost one plant so far (pie pumpkins), so I feel reasonably comfortable listing my plants now. Check out the full list at the bottom of this post.

Mangold Witerbi Chard from Seeds of Change

Not only has the new vegetable garden made progress ~ in their own magical way the plants and trees in my yard have begun their comeback from last year’s dreadful late frost and record-breaking drought. Despite the fact that we lost five white pines and two maples, our magnolia tree has somehow recovered from its twig-like state and has not only grown new leaves, it has come into beautiful bloom!

Back from the edge: magnolia tree brings buds

Is there anything finer than the smell of magnolia on a Southern summer night?

Despite my many years of gardening, it is a constant miracle to me that plants grow and change. They grow despite my mistakes, they grow despite conditions that could kill them, they grow and heal the hurts inflicted on the garden, they grow because that is what they were born to do. Every time I walk outside with pruning shears I become a child again, amazed by each new leaf and bloom. There is always progress in the garden, and paying attention to what has unfolded ~ instead of measuring by what hasn’t been trimmed or weeded ~ is more in keeping with what the garden’s energy is about.

“Seek not the depths of your knowledge with staff or sounding line.
. . . The soul walks not upon a line, neither does it grow like a reed.
The soul unfolds itself, like a lotus of countless petals.”

- Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet

Blessings on the garden

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2008 Vegetable Garden

Blue Lake Snap Bush Beans*
Provider Snap Beans*
Edamame Soybeans
Mideast Prolific Cucumbers*
Straight Eight Cucumbers
Acorn Squash
Casserta Zucchini*
Snowy White Eggplant*
Cantaloupe
Field Pumpkins
America Spinach*
Oxheart Carrots*
Mangold Witerbi Chard*
Red Russian Kale* (planting late summer)

Tomatoes ~
German Queen
Roma
Sweet 100 (Cherry)
Wisconsin 55*
Mr. Stripey
Better Boy
Brandywine
Chadwick Cherry*
Lemon Boy
Golden Jubilee

* From Seeds of Change
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