The Resilient Gardener

Several months ago, I was browsing at Book People, an independent bookstore in Austin, because I had received a gift card for my birthday. I just so happened to run across an autographed copy of Carol Deppe’s second book, The Resilient Gardener: Food Production and Self-Reliance in Uncertain Times. I didn’t even know she had been there recently for a book signing, but I snatched that last autographed copy right up. It was like it was meant to be!

I had been wanting this book for a while since I enjoyed Breed Your Own Vegetable Varieties so much, and it did not disappoint. She touches upon several things in this book that really hit home with me.

People have gardens for different reasons, but one of my main goals for having one is self-reliance. I actually want my garden to allow me to become less dependent on the grocery store, and allow me to save my money for things that I can’t grow myself.

As I may have mentioned before, I’m a victim of the Great Recession (though I agree with Paul Krugman that it should really be called a depression). I graduated with a Master’s degree in 2009 and haven’t had a full time job since. I was on unemployment benefits for 10 months in 2010, and other than that I’ve been doing only temporary and/or part-time work. Currently I am an adjunct professor, and would love to become a full time professor some day, but who knows when that will happen? If my husband were to lose his job, like so many other people have been losing their jobs, we wouldn’t be able to survive on my salary alone, and that is a worrying thought.

These are exactly the kinds of “uncertain times” that Carol Deppe is talking about, and the basic premise of the book is that your garden should help you through the bad times in your life, rather than being yet another responsibility or source of stress.

The first chapter is all about the various reasons why a person would want to become more self-reliant. Economic reasons are covered, which is my main problem. Deppe’s main problem is that she’s gluten intolerant, so she can’t eat a lot of the foods at the grocery store. The garden helps with that as well, so she can grow foods that she can eat on her special diet. She also tells of when she was taking care of her dying mother, and how her garden sustained her during that difficult time. I like that she takes into account the mental and spiritual benefits of gardening as much as the physical. I’m not sure if I really saved a lot of money by having a garden while I was unemployed. It’s not like I would have starved without it, but it sure helped my mental state. I would have been a lot more depressed without it, that’s for sure, and that’s not a trivial thing. Like in her last book, Breed Your Own Vegetable Varieties, Deppe is very practical about things. You don’t need to grow all your own food or be able to live completely off the grid, you should just do what you can and learn as much as you can. You never know when those skills may come in handy.

The second chapter is titled “The Plant-Gardener Covenant”, and really reminded me of Michael Pollan’s The Botany of Desire. Deppe obviously agrees with Pollan that domestication was a two-way street. Humans and our domesticated plants are in a mutualistic symbiotic relationship that benefits both of us. We rely on them for food, while they rely on us to plant them in nice soil, protect them from predators and competitors, and save their seeds from generation to generation.

She also gives “The 33 Golden Rules of Gardening,” and I think some of these are especially important for modern gardeners to remember. Some of the rules should be common knowledge to anyone who’s ever picked up any kind of gardening book, but the more important rules that I think a lot of people have forgotten come first. The first rule is “All Gardening is Local”, and then the next few rules are about how you need to select the species and varieties that will grow where you live. I think in this one-size-fits-all era where uniformity is passed off as being the ultimate goal in agriculture, gardeners really need to remember that you just shouldn’t even TRY to grow the same variety of a crop everywhere. It reminds me of the chapter in The Botany of Desire about how all potato growers grow Russet Burbank because that’s the only potato that McDonald’s will use, even thought RB’s don’t grow as well as some other potato varieties in many areas. They grow RB’s and douse them in chemical fertilizers and pesticides and fungicides instead of just growing a potato variety that will do well there without all the added chemicals.

More than once I’ve had friends and family members tell me they've just given up on having a garden in Texas at all, or given up on growing certain things because “it’s just too hot here” or something like that, even though people have been growing tomatoes and squash here for hundreds of years, and have been growing things in even harsher climates for hundreds of years. So how did our forefathers and foremothers do it successfully? Well, for one thing, they didn’t expect that you grow crops here in Texas the exact same way that they would be grown in New Jersey, or Ohio, or Oregon where Deppe lives. And you shouldn’t expect to be able to grow the same varieties that grow thousands of miles away too. You have to grow varieties that are adapted to this climate. Yes, that takes a little bit more work to track down those varieties, but if it’s the difference between getting a bountiful crop of tomatoes and getting no tomatoes, I think it’s worth it.

It’s all about cultivating a sense of place. Everyone should do that, but it’s especially important for gardeners. Thankfully, I see more and more local Texas gardening information out there all the time.

The next chapter is about adapting to Climate Change, which I think also contains a lot of useful information, but I was a bit disappointed after reading the title and thinking that Deppe was going to treat Anthropogenic Climate Change as the scientific fact it is, but instead she says, "Global warming is happening, however, it's been happening since the glacial maximum 20,000 years ago, so it is nothing new. There is much argument about how fast global warming is happening and how much is caused by people; that's not a subject for this book." I don’t know, maybe she took that stance so she wouldn’t alienate any climate change deniers who might be reading the book, but the evidence that not only is the Earth getting warmer, but that humans burning fossil fuels is the direct cause, is overwhelming. Yes, the climate has changed before for natural reasons, but implying that we don’t know for sure why it’s changing this time is simply not true. At least, the scientists are not the ones arguing about it, just politicians. Not only is it bad to abdicate responsibility for a problem that we have caused, but saying we don’t know why the Earth is warmer amid hundreds of scientists saying they know exactly why is basically saying scientists don’t know what they’re talking about. Why is it ok to believe scientists that invisible viruses cause disease, but not that carbon dioxide emissions cause global warming? It's fair for her to say that the science behind global warming is a bit beyond the scope of this book, but I wish she hadn't implied that this is "nothing new" and given any credibility to people who argue that humans are not to blame.

That said, this chapter does give some very useful information about how a gardener can adapt as weather becomes more and more unpredictable due to global warming. Before the drought started here in Texas, we had one of our wettest summers on record. It happened while I was in graduate school, and it rained literally every day that summer. Global warming isn’t going to just make things warmer, it’s going to make all extreme weather events more extreme, worse droughts AND worse floods. If things were just gradually getting warmer, that would be much easier to adjust to, but climate doesn’t work that way. Also, like many areas of the country, our USDA hardiness zone has recently gone up a notch, from 8 to 9. Who knows? Maybe some day it will get warm enough for me to grow tropical crops like bananas, provided we don't run out of water first.

The next chapter is entitled “Diet and Food Resilience” about how it’s not enough to know how to grow the plants, you have to know how to properly harvest, store, and cook the plants. I think this is also very important. Cooking is a skill that is probably even more important for people to have than gardening. Even if you don’t have a garden, you can go to a farmer’s market, or join a CSA, and even if you don’t do that, you will at least save a lot of money on your grocery bill by knowing how to cook your own food instead of relying on prepared food for all your meals. This is especially important for people like Deppe who have severe dietary restrictions; though that’s becoming less of an issue as gluten-free convenience foods become more common. I've found it also comes in handy during food recalls. I remember when I was in grad school and there was that recall of contaminated spinach, and I just kept getting clean, safe spinach in my CSA. Every food recall makes the modern food system seem more unreliable to me.

This is why I post about cooking on this blog, because I think it ties directly into my gardening (which ties directly into my love of nature, which is why I post about that here as well). When I get a bumper crop of something, or I get a bunch of something from my CSA, or I find some great sale at the grocery store, it’ll do no good if I don’t know how to store, cook, and eat the bounty. I completely agree with Deppe that cooking, like gardening, is another essential survival skill that needs to be revived.

The next three chapters are about labor, watering, and soil fertility. These are all standard gardening topics. Things like whether double-digging a bed is worth the trouble, what tools to use, how to keep up with weeding, how to irrigate your plants, and ways to create and maintain soil fertility. The important contribution Deppe makes is how practical she is about all these topics. Frankly, many gardening books make gardening sound way too difficult. Deppe takes into consideration an audience of people who may have physical limitations so that they can’t do a lot of hard physical labor in the garden, or limited funds for fancy irrigation and buying lots of soil amendments, or people who live in less than ideal climates. These things should not stop you from gardening! Of course what works for her is not always going to work for you, so while she talks about the kinds of strategies she has for her garden, that doesn’t mean you can just copy it for your own garden (unless you live in the Pacific Northwest like she does). For example, she gets a lot more rain than I do, and it’s colder where she lives than I live, so while she doesn’t use mulch or drip irrigation, I think it’s a good idea here. After all, I really don’t have the problem of mulch keeping my soil too cold. Quite the opposite, I use mulch to keep my soil from baking in the summer.

The important part is how she figured out what strategies she should use. It all ties back to having a sense of place, and tailoring your labor, watering, and fertilization strategies to your own situation.

Finally, the next five chapters are about her five staple crops: potatoes, eggs, squash, beans, and corn. She makes a good point that most gardeners don't grow staple crops because they're so cheap at the store, and instead grow only things like greens, tomatoes, and peppers, but to be a true resilient gardener you should at least know how to grow staples, even if you never come anywhere near to growing all you need to eat. Fortunately, I think if you already know how to grow salad vegetables, moving on to things richer in calories and protein isn't too much of a leap. Like the chapters on soil and water, the value in this book for me is not necessarily copying her and growing exactly what she grows, but reading about how she decided to grow what she grows, and then deciding for myself what staple crops would grow well in my garden.

Previously in the diet chapter, she talks about how to choose staple crops, and why she chose the ones she did, and her reasoning makes a lot of sense for her, but she acknowledges that other staples may work better in other areas. For example, in the labor chapter she explains why she doesn’t grow sweet potatoes. She says that winter squash has about the same nutritional and culinary niche as sweet potatoes, and it’s a lot easier to for her to grow, and she doesn’t have to dig up squash, which saves her work.

Obviously she doesn’t have squash vine borers! Here, sweet potatoes are virtually pest-free, while squash gets borers. Sweet potatoes are also more versatile than most people realize. The one sweet orange variety at the grocery store is just one of the dozens of varieties you can get if you look hard enough (Sandhill Preservation Center has a great selection of heirloom sweet potato varieties). They range from sweet moist orange ones to dry, white, starchy ones. Sweet potatoes are an excellent and underrated staple crop for Texas and all of the South.

That said, I am still trying Solanum potatoes, trying different varieties that might be able to take our conditions. Deppe makes some good points about why it's a good crop to grow, especially for their cooking versatility and high protein content. True, they are cheap at the store, but one of my big concerns is how potatoes are one of the most pesticide-laden vegetables you can buy at the store. The chapter on potatoes in The Botany of Desire really got to me. Most of the nutrition of a potato is in its skin, but I often peel store-bought potatoes anyway, thinking of how the skin is soaked in toxins. There are hundreds of varieties of potatoes. There's got to be a couple that can make it here.

The next chapter is about her flock of laying ducks. She explains why she chose ducks over chickens, and of  course a duck would like the cold and rainy Pacific Northwest! I think chickens would do better here than ducks. Again, you have to match the species or variety to your climate, and there are many breeds of chickens to choose from, some adapted to hot climates, and some not. I would love to have some laying hens some day! “Yard eggs” as they’re called here are SO MUCH better than store bought eggs, even the “organic, free range” store bought eggs. Sadly, my CSA has stopped delivering eggs, and I miss them very much.

Next she talks about squash and pumpkins, and starts with the “three squash species”. Um, excuse me? There are four squash species! Yet again, I’m going to have to stick up for the cushaw. She mentions cushaws only in parentheses, saying it “isn’t widely grown, as it requires too much heat for most people in the United States.” Um, actually there are several cushaw varieties native to the United States. Has she never heard of the Tennessee Sweet Potato Cushaw? It’s mentioned in Gary Paul Nabhan’s book, Renewing America’s Food Traditions. She goes on to say that it has poor quality meat, and “In Mexico, however, there are many mixta varieties, which are grown primarily for their edible seeds.” It’s true that Mexicans love their pepitas, but cushaws are used extensively in the southern U.S. as well. She also neglected to mention that Mexicans eat cushaws as summer squash too, making them quite versatile.

Deppe’s favorite winter squash is Sweet Meat, a variety of Cucurbrita maxima. Now, I have nothing against maximas. They’re great for northern gardeners who don’t have squash vine borers! Here, they’re very susceptible to borers, while cushaws can handle them. I’m not forgetting my wheelbarrow full of cushaws from 2010 any time soon (especially since I still have some in my freezer!). I’ve yet to be successful growing maximas. The Jarrahdale I had planted in my garden this year just succumbed to the borers without so much as a single blossom.

Again, it all has to do with your climate, but don't listen to her about the cushaws. I recommend them to any southerner who has a problem with squash vine borers and excessive heat killing all your other squash. The only criticism that people throw at cushaws that I agree with is that the flesh is stringy, but that doesn’t matter in dishes where you puree the squash anyway, like soups or pies. I’ve found them to be quite sweet, but that may be from growing them under dry conditions, which concentrates flavor. Northerners say they're "bland" and "tasteless" and I really wonder if that's a climate thing.

One thing I was surprised that she didn't mention is the use of squash seeds as a food source. I’d like to figure out a way to hull large numbers of seeds. There’s got to be a way. After all, like she mentioned, Mexicans use cushaw squash seeds in lots of dishes They occupy the same culinary niche as nuts and sunflower seeds. Pepitas could end up being a great protein and fat source for us resilient gardeners, and if you grow winter squash, you always end up with plenty of them.

Next we have the chapter on beans and other legumes. Again, a gardener has a wide variety of species and varieties to choose from. In my climate, you can grow peas and fava beans in the winter, and common beans, lima beans, tepary beans, and cowpeas in the summer. I’ve successfully grown peas over the winter for years and am just starting to get into favas. Lots of people grow common beans for green beans, and very few gardeners think dry beans are worth growing. Like potatoes, they’re so cheap at the store, but the ones your grow yourself are so much tastier and healthier for you. I grew a good crop of dry beans once (the variety was Calypso), and I can vouch for how much better those fresher beans cooked up compared to the beans at the store that have been sitting in a warehouse for who knows how long. They were good enough that I'd like to try growing dry beans again some time.

Lima beans and cowpeas (such as black-eyed-peas) love the heat, but I’ve found that runner beans absolutely can’t grow here. They can’t take cold, so you can’t grow them in the winter like peas, but they can’t take heat either, so they die in the summer before you get a crop. They only grow well in areas with both mild winters and mild summers. I've heard they're very popular in England, for example. Fortunately some of the more heat tolerant common beans can fill their culinary niche.

Her last chapter is on corn, a plant I’ve never really grown successfully. I have tried a couple of times to grow hybrid sweet corn, but I don’t think I grew enough for them to pollinate properly, and they always got bad corn earworms. Deppe mostly grows grain corn to make bread and polenta with, especially since she’s gluten intolerant and can’t eat wheat breads. She talks about her efforts to find corn varieties that make good bread without added wheat flour.

Corn is just so important to American culture, going all the way back to the prehistoric native tribes that I just can’t give up on corn. I believe her that, as with beans and potatoes, homegrown cornmeal tastes much better than store-bought and is nutritionally superior, even though I've never had any. I already know that really fresh sweet corn is delicious, so maybe I’ll keep trying with that first, before even trying to grow field corn. Then again, what if field corn is easier to grow? Maybe I haven’t had good luck with growing corn because I haven’t been growing the right varieties. Well, obviously more research and experimenting is needed.

So overall this is a great book. I have a few minor criticisms, but I’ve already read this book over more than once, and it’s given me so much inspiration for my own garden. It also lets me know that I have a lot more work to do before I get to the point Carol Deppe is at, being able to grow most of my own staple crops in my own climate. But it’s certainly a worthy goal to strive towards. Even if I never reach that level of self-sufficiency, I will probably benefit from the effort.

The Botany of Desire

I read Michael Pollan's later book, The Omnivore's Dilemma, a while back, so I snatched this one up when I saw it on display at the city library last time I was there. I was looking forward to reading a history of agriculture and plant domestication, but I was surprised to find out that this is a good book for any gardener to read. Michael Pollan makes it clear from the beginning he is One Of Us, and this book was inspired by his own time in the garden growing the plants he features.

Pollan covers how four plants, a fruit (the apple), a flower (the tulip), an entheogen (cannabis), and a staple crop (the potato) evolved to fulfill our desires for sweetness, beauty, intoxication, and control. He decided on those four to represent each category because they have especially interesting biographies. The main thesis of the book is how our domesticated plants have changed us as much as we've changed them, something I'd heard before with regard to domestic animals. These are the dogs, cats, horses, and cattle of the plant kingdom. He tells the story of how each of these plants were domesticated and have used Homo sapiens to spread their genes over the world, from Johnny Appleseed, to Dutch tulip growers, to Americans growing cannabis under lights in hidden sheds, to Monsanto's genetic engineers.

I am certainly under no illusion that my garden is actually under my control. At best, my plants and I are partners, but believe me, I often feel more like their servant, especially lately toiling under the 100+ degree heat. I don't know, maybe it's because I'm a cat person too. My cats never fail to remind me who exactly domesticated who in this relationship.

There was a lot in this book I hadn't heard of before. I didn't know what an odd character Johnny Appleseed was, having only really known the Disney version of him. I had heard the warnings that marijuana has gotten much stronger in recent years, but Pollan explains how that's because of the escalation of the drug war encouraging recent breeding efforts to make a more compact, efficient plant that can be grown in very confined spaces. The chapter on the modern potato was the most disturbing part of the book for me, and has made me reluctant to eat a conventionally grown potato ever again. Though I'm still afraid that I agree with Pollan that tulips are boring, and still don't really understand the Dutch obsession with them.

The thing that made this book fun to read for me is that Pollan is my kind of gardener. I really liked his story about how he tried grow some marijuana back in the 80's, not because he particularly liked to smoke it, but just to see if he could. He said any gardener reading this should understand, and that does sound like something I would do. I haven't tried to grow marijuana, but I have tried to grow Salvia divinorum twice, which is a not-yet-illegal magic plant. It just sounded like an interesting plant and I wanted to see if I could grow it. My efforts only convinced me that it would be silly to outlaw this plant, because unlike cannabis, S. divinorum is so hard to grow that we need not worry about a bunch of kids growing it in their closets!

Marijuana sounds like it's even more interesting to grow now than it was back in the 80's, with all the new varieties that have been developed, mostly from hybridizing the long-ago domesticated Cannabis sativa with it's cousin Cannabis indica. Modern marijuana growers go on about how such-and such variety is very relaxing to smoke, while such-and-such other variety enhances creativity, and such-and-such other variety is very good a pain relief. It sounds just like diehard heirloom tomato or chile pepper grows talking about which varieties are best for what purpose, this one is good for sauce, while that one is good for drying, etc. It actually sounds to me like modern marijuana varieties aren't more dangerous than the stuff was in the 60's, just more refined. Now we've got marijuana connoisseurs, which makes it seem even stranger that as far as drugs go, marijuana is treated by the law to be on par with cocaine and heroin rather than wine or tobacco. I don't think there are any heroin connoisseurs.

This book also made me regret that apples don't generally grow well in Texas, though after reading Pollan's description of the amazing diversity of wild, seed-grown apple trees, I wonder if people just haven't bothered with trying to breed apple trees for Texas, or even if there used to be varieties that would grow here that have gone extinct. I had no idea what an odd character Johnny Appleseed was, or how most apples grown for seed aren't good for much else than cider, giving a rather different spin on his whole story. Disney makes it sound like he was spreading nutritious, high fiber snacks around, when really he was an American Dionysus helping people get drunk!

Another theme I liked in this book was how plant domestication is a delicate balance between the control and order of Apollo with wild and unpredictable Dionysus. Dionysus is certainly underappreciated in today's modern industrial agriculture, though genetic engineering, it turns out, is a lot more of a crapshoot than I thought it was. They like to give the image of scientists carefully inserting genes precicely into chromosomes, but in turns out that one popular technique is literally shooting DNA-coated bullets into plants with a .22 and hoping some make their way into the chromosomes. Reading this book has only made me more of the opinion that genetic engineering is not that great. I try to keep an open, scientific mind, but it still seems like, at best, genetic engineering isn't that much better than conventional plant breeding. At worst it could have all sorts of unintended ecological consequences. And yeah, I resent Monsanto for basically breeding Bt resistant insects for profit and ruining that relatively safe organic insecticide for the rest of us.

Unfortunately, the description of conventionally grown non-GMO potatoes was just as scary as the story of the NewLeaf potatoes that are considered by the FDA to be an insecticide themselves. One potato farmer told Pollan that he doesn't like to actually eat the potatoes he grows for a living, and instead grows a small plot of organic potatoes for his own use. I wonder if he regrets being that open. It certainly makes me think twice about eating conventional potatoes if the actual farmers growing them are afraid to eat them, and afraid to even step out into the poisoned fields.

After taking a year off of potato growing, this book has inspired me to try again to plant a big crop of them next year. Growing the other crops mentioned in the book isn't feasable for me right now, since I don't have the room for apple trees, I'd rather not be thrown in jail for growing pot, and I'm just not interested in growing useless tulips, so potatoes it is! At least now I know that one of the reasons my potatoes didn't do so well last time is because they need a lot of nitrogen. I'll put plenty of manure in their beds next time around. I even got some actual potato seeds in my last seed trade (not seed potatoes, but potato seeds) that I'd like to experiment with. Like apples, potatoes don't come true from seed, but seed is how you get new genetic combinations for new varieties. Maybe I'll get lucky and get a potato plant that actually likes to grow in Texas! I know, it's a crapshoot, but that's how evolution works.

Renewing America's Food Traditions

The latest issue of Conservation Magazine's cover article is Closed-Source Crops, about the patenting of genetic material in crop plants. Good article, especially in a magazine that's usually about the conservation of endangered wildlife. It seems to me that usually the issue of the loss of biodiversity in food plants is only talked about with a certain subset of the gardening community who do things like join Seed Saver's Exchange and have mason jars of saved squash seeds in the fridge. You know, like me. (Though, technically I haven't joined SSE yet, but I plan to in the future once I get better practice at seed saving.)

I'm a member of The Society for Conservation Biology, since I got my education in ecology and conservation biology (and would like to someday maybe even get a job in that field, though that's proving to be difficult!), and that's why I get this magazine. Now with this article my hobby and professional life have crossed a bit.

The article is well worth reading. The author spent some time with Native Seeds/SEARCH, another organization I'm a fan of. He mentions Gary Paul Nabhan, who is one of the founders of Native Seeds. I wasn't aware of that, actually. It reminded me that I had been intending to review his book, Renewing America's Food Traditions, on this blog, but haven't gotten around to it yet. I guess now is a good time!

This book was one of those lucky finds at Half Price Books that caught my eye, mainly because at the time I had been reading things from a lot of foodies who seem to claim that America doesn't have any food traditions. They claim our food is all cobbled together from various immigrant cuisines taken out of context and made more unhealthy, and this is why we have an obesity epidemic. People seem to think that McDonald's is the best that America has to offer, food-wise, and to get good food you have to look elsewhere, to China or India or the Mediterranean, where they have proper food cultures.

Well, anyone who holds that opinion really needs to read this book. America does have a food culture, several in fact, but they're endangered. Now, I'm all for trying out foreign foods from China or India (as you can see from some of my other foodie posts on this blog), but it would be a shame if people ignored the food traditions we have right here and let them go extinct. What about Texas Chili? What about Jambalaya? What about New England Clam Chowder? There's a lot more to American food than Big Macs.

Nabhan divides the country into no less than thirteen "Food Nations", and the ecologist in me is tickled by how they correspond to the different ecological zones of the continent. He calls them "ecogastronomic zones". That makes a lot of sense in light of how, until recently, most food had to be obtained locally, and what food could be grown locally depended entirely on what ecosystem you live in. Each of Nabhan's culinary ecosystems even has it's own culinary keystone species that each nation is named after.

For example, the modern state of Texas covers four Food Nations. I live in central Texas, which is the southernmost area of Bison Nation that stretches up the Great Plains from here to the Dakotas. This food nation is named after the bison that used to sustain the Plains Indians before the Europeans almost completely wiped them out. Now Bison Nation is ranch land with cattle replacing the bison.

To the west of the Texas plains is the Trans-Pecos region of Texas, and covering there through the Chihuahuan and Sonoran Deserts is Chile Pepper Nation. This is the food nation that Native Seeds/SEARCH focuses on. East Texas, with its wetter climate and Piney Woods, lies in Cornbread Nation, that goes from there to Appalachia. Then along the Gulf Coast of Texas and Louisiana is Gumbo Nation, named after its characteristic dish of okra and seafood.

Each food nation has a chapter in the book, which highlights several crops, livestock, and even wild plants and game animals that the cuisine of that area once depended upon, but are now endangered. For example, my food nation's chapter talks about the bison, of course, and then Arikara Yellow Beans, Hutterite Soup Beans, Osage Red Flint Corn, Sibley Squash, Silver Fox Rabbits, and Hidatsa Sunflowers.

This book shows how America is a tapestry of different groups of people, through the lens of food. There are Native American foods listed in the chapters, but also foods brought here by European immigrants and African slaves. You can see the different layers of the region's history in its food, with the Plains Indians of Bison Nation influencing later cowboy culture, the Hopi and Navajo of Chile Pepper Nation with later Spanish influence, the strong African-American influences of Gumbo Nation, and Cornbread Nation's Cherokee mixing with the descendants of Scots-Irish immigrants who became known as Hillbillies (though I'm not sure if it's PC to call them that, but I don't know of any other word for that particular culture).

But it's not so much of a hodge-podge to make America have no food culture. Other countries, such as India, are also made up of a diverse mixture of various cultures that all brought their own foods. Why does this need to be a bad thing?

Well, I'm already trying to hunt down some of the vegetable crops listed in this book, at least for the ones from the food nations of Texas (assuming that the foods of neighboring food nations will grow OK here as well). It looks like most of them can be obtained from SSE, Native Seeds, or Sandhill Preservation Center. Besides the ones highlighted in the book, there is an Appendix with a list of even more endangered foods from each nation. My I'itois onions from Chile Pepper Nation are listed on there, and they're growing great in my garden right now despite the terrible heat.

Unfortunately, I don't have the means to raise my own livestock, but reading about heirloom breeds of cows, chickens, goats, pigs, etc. is still really interesting. One of the important reasons for preserving these breeds is that a lot of them do better in a free-ranging environment than modern industrial factory-farmed breeds. Your standard Butterball turkey, for example, has been bred to have such huge breasts that it can hardly walk, let alone run around out in a pasture. The same principle applies to other livestock species. If we want to get away from the cruel and ecologically destructive practice of factory farming, we need to have the right breeds of animals for it.

One thing that gives me pause is the mention of wild game animals, fish and seafood, and wild plants that people used to depend on for food but are now endangered. I hope that doesn't cause confusion, because the way to save domestic plants and animals is actually to eat more of them, therefore making it profitable for farmers to raise them, but with wild plants and animals it is exactly the opposite. There are species in here that should never be eaten again, like sea turtles, and even though Nabhan does say that the wildlife listed in this book should not be hunted again until their populations recover, I hope that going on about how tasty they are doesn't send the wrong message. He does end with a passage about the Passenger Pigeon, which was once the most common bird in North America, but was hunted to extinction. I admit that when I think about the Passenger Pigeon, the first thing that comes to mind is not "too bad I'll never be able to eat one", but I guess that's just another thing to add to the long list of why driving species to extinction is a bad thing.

It reminds me of how right after the BP Oil Spill, Slow Food posted an article encouraging people to eat more Gulf seafood to support the fishermen. I'm not sure if that was such a good idea. What makes people think they can't drive fish and other marine life to extinction the same way they did the pigeons? We say there are plenty of fish in the sea, but it used to seem like there were plenty of birds in the sky, and we turned out to be wrong. Now it looks like we're wrong about the fish too, with many fisheries collapsing.

On a less depressing note, I also like how this book has recipes for these foods. Not only are people forgetting about their traditional foods, but they're also forgetting how to cook them, which was mentioned in passing in the "Close-Source Crops" article. Reminds me of how people complain that grass fed beef is tough, and then I find out they're overcooking it. These foods are often different in taste or texture than the industrial versions we're used to now, and therefore you have to cook them differently to get a good result. Of course, in my opinion, you end up with a better result! I haven't tried any of these recipes yet, but some look tasty and interesting. I might have to do a little bit of substituting for some of these ingredients I haven't tracked down yet.

I agree that in this time of global warming and transitioning away from ecologically unsustainable methods of food production, it's very important to look at some of these older breeds of plants and animals and the genetic diversity they contain. Evolutionary adaptation requires genetic diversity as a pre-condition, after all.

Breed Your Own Vegetable Varieties

I got this for Xmas and have already read it cover to cover!

I highly recommend it to anyone who wants to save their own seed or even anyone who wants to be good at trying out and evaluating different varieties, even if you don't plan on saving seed, since these are all necessary activities to do if you breed plants, so they're well-covered in the book.

As Carol Deppe says, seed saving IS plant breeding, because you're always selecting when you do that, whether consciously or not. This makes a lot of sense, since if you were doing the same thing with animals they would call it "breeding" and not "puppy saving" or something like that, even if you are just trying to maintain a breed of animal rather than create a new one. Maintaining the breed or variety uses the same techniques, after all.

I do have a Master's degree in biology, so I could skim over a lot of the stuff about genetics, since I've heard it all many times before. Don't know how easy that would be for someone with no scientific background, but it seemed to be written in pretty plain language. I noticed she talks about experimental design in the chapter on variety trials without using that term or any of the other technical terms for what she was describing.

But even though I already know about genetics and experimental design, I'm glad to have a book that puts it into the practical context of home vegetable growing. I already had Seed to Seed by Suzanne Ashworth, and this book compliments it well. I have the older edition of StS, so I'm not sure what the newer one added, but the version I have is really just a reference book of all the species of plants grown as vegetables with technical information on how to save seed from them.

Deppe's book is a nice compliment to that because it's much more anecdotal, talking about how this information translates to actual, less-than-perfect home breeding situations. I like the stories she tells about her own adventures in plant breeding and that of other people she knows. Ashworth's book is like a list of the rules, and then Deppe tells you how to break the rules if you don't have an ideal situation, with encouraging stories of people who have done that and still succeeded.

I wish there was a little more to Appendix A, which goes into detail on a few selected vegetable species: tomatoes, peas, beans, brassicas, squash, and corn. I wish it also had peppers and melons. I know you're supposed to generalize from there and suppose that plants from the same family as these behave the same way, but I'm not sure that's always true. Might be for squash and melons, but what about tomatoes compared to peppers? As I understand it, other nightshades are a lot more outbreeding than tomatoes.

Oh well, I guess that's what Seed to Seed is supposed to be for. If Appendix A was expanded to include lots of vegetables, it would turn into a whole book in itself.

My head is already swimming with wild ideas and dreams of how I can contribute to plant diversity, so I'm going to have to rein that in a bit and remember that most of that is just dreams and wild ideas.

After all, I only just got a garden again after years of not having one, so not much seed saving has really been going on. And she does make the good point that before you start breeding the next great variety, you should probably grow a bunch of what's already out there to make sure what you want doesn't already exist.

I haven't had time to grow a whole lot of different varieties yet.

Also, now I'm starting to think of the seed saving/breeding projects I've already started since I got a garden again, and wondering if I've been doing them right.

Here's what I've done so far in the world of seed-saving.

Tomatoes
Last year I saved seed from almost all the tomato varieties I planted: Red Brandywine, Mortgage Lifter, Pink Ponderosa, Hawkins Plum, and Black Cherry. I didn't save seed from Yellow Pear because they weren't very tasty, and everyone who grows them seems to agree. I almost didn't save Hawkins Plum, because it had lousy yield, but I'm going to give them another chance.

Tomatoes are very inbreeding, so they're easy to save. They hardly ever cross, and don't suffer from inbreeding depression, so I don't have to worry about either isolation or minimum population sizes. I'm sure the tomato seeds I saved are all fine. There's also so many varieties of tomatoes out there, that I'm not interested in breeding any new ones. My main tomato goal is to trial the varieties that already exist to find ones that work in my climate. It would be nice to find a favorite variety for various purposes, like one for sauce, one for sandwiches, one cherry, etc., but I'm sure I won't be able to limit myself that much.

However, I would like to do a paste tomato trial some time, though probably not next year. I already have seeds for Hawkins Plum, Rio Grande (which I'm growing next year), and Big Month. I could get some more varieties and trial them all together in one year to see which one is the best. That would require devoting a lot of room to just paste tomatoes, but it would let me know if Hawkins Plum was just unlucky last year or if it really isn't that good of a tomato.

Peppers
This year, due to a late frost, the only peppers I ended up with were jalapenos I bought from a nursery at the last minute. I went ahead and saved seeds from them, even though about 30 feet away is a wild chile pequin.

Is that far enough away? I don't know. It's hard to tell with peppers. I can't even remember if the chile pequin was blooming at the same time (the late frost killed it back a bit and we thought it was dead for a while, until it finally regrew). I also had lots of squash growing, which might have distracted the bees enough.

So maybe my seed isn't crossed after all.

Or maybe it is and I should throw it away.

Or maybe it is, but I SHOULDN'T throw it away, because maybe I got something good from the crossing. Deppe does mention some of the advantages of crossing things back with their wild relatives from time to time. And it's not like jalapeno is a rare variety in need of preserving.

It's complicated. I was planning on growing different varieties of peppers this year, but maybe I should grow out my saved jalapenos too and see if they've crossed. It also might be important to know if that chile pequin can cross with my garden peppers, because this year I'm growing three more varieties of that same pepper species that I want to save seeds from (since I got them in trades where I received only a small amount of seed). I don't want them crossing with each other or with the chile pequin, but I really am not looking forward to putting up screens or bags to isolate them.

Collard Greens
I might have messed up my collards, because I saved the seed from only 6 plants (those were all the plants I had), and brassicas exhibit inbreeding depression. Deppe says I should have at least 10 brassica plants to save seed from, and 20+ is better. Maybe I need to get some new collard seeds. This may also be a good opportunity to trial some different collard varieties. The variety I'm growing is Vates, but there are a few others. Luckily there aren't very many, maybe two or three at most in any given seed catalog. Nothing like the tomato situation with thousands of varieties. I could easily trial all the commercially available varieties of collards in one year. Maybe next winter I can try that.

Squash
Squash is a promiscuous plant, so I've decided that I'll grow only one variety of each of the four species each year. That way I don't have to hand-pollinate to get pure seed. None of my immediate neighbors have vegetable gardens (what is wrong with people, anyway?), so I think the possibility of crossing with plants outside my garden is slim.

This past year I grew one variety of each species, and all of them were killed by squash vine borers except the cushaws. So when people said that cushaws were especially SVB-resistant, they were telling the truth. I already showed you my bountiful harvest of Chihuahua Landrace Cushaws. I'm saving seed from them as I eat them, and I'm eating them in order of how ripe they are, which will probably yield good seed.

One thing to take into consideration is this is a "landrace". That means it has more genetic diversity than a standard variety. Strangely, all my squashes ended up cream with green stripes, and only one gave fruit that was a different shape than the others (didn't have necks). I emailed Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds about this, and they thought it was weird too. Their catalog description said they have variable colors, and I grew 9 plants, which should have been enough. They ended up sending me another packet of seed, so now I have the potential for more genetic diversity.

The thing is, I probably can't keep all the genetic diversity of this landrace in my backyard. After reading Deppe's book, I'm sure I don't have the space or resources (or desire) to do that. That would require saving equal numbers of seeds from each of the individuals in the seed packets I received from Baker Creek. No, I'm going to end up selecting them, whether I like it or not. I just need to make sure I select them in a good way, so that they adapt to my growing conditions and yield good fruit. So far the only really obvious difference in the plants I've grown so far is the one plant that had fruits with no necks. Should I save seed from the neckless fruits? Not having a neck might be a bad thing, though. The neck seems to have better meat than the rest of the squash. So I might only save seed from necked squash.

Next time I grow this variety, I will grow a mixture of my saved seed and some of the original seeds from Baker Creek. This is a trick from the Deppe book for keeping your variety genetically diverse, especially if you can't grow dozens of plants at a time. I'll probably do that every time I grow it until I run out of the original seed, so that they all get a chance to contribute some genes to my squash population. Maybe I'll finally get some of those white or orange fruits I was supposed to have had!

Also, I should try some other cushaws, because it's not like Chihuahua is the best, it's just the first one I've tried. I have some seeds for Green Striped Cushaw I haven't tried out yet. Maybe I will in 2011. Maybe one year I'll even plant a whole bunch of different cushaws to compare them. The problem is squash plants are so huge, that it limits what I can do in my backyard. Doing trials is a scientific experiment, after all, so you need an adequete sample size to get meaningful results. An adequete sample size of a plant that takes up only one square foot of space isn't so bad. It's a different story with a plant that grows to ten feet across or more.

I still obviously have much to do and to learn. That's one of the problems with gardening. All the time scales are in months and years. There is NO instant gratification.

660 Curries

One of my Yuletide gifts this year was 660 Curries by Raghavan Iyer. I am woefully deficient in cookbooks, having gotten in the habit of getting most of my recipes online from sites like All Recipes and RecipeZaar and various food blogs. Online databases are convenient, but a good cookbook has a lot of value too, especially one like this, where it’s not only a collection of recipes, but practically a guide to India’s rich and varied culture seen through the lens of its rich and varied cuisine. Westerners have a woefully narrow view of Indian cuisine. The first thing they think of is probably some kind of yellow chicken curry with bottled pre-made curry powder. I know people who claim they can’t stand “curry”, but that’s really unfair since “curry” is not just one dish, but more like a style of cooking. Saying you don’t like curry is like saying you don’t like stir fry or you don’t like casserole.

With 660 recipes in this book, there’s got to be something here that anyone would like! Besides, Iyer seems to take liberty with the definition of “curry” (a vague term already), so really this book is full book on Indian cuisine, with chutneys, raitas, soups, breads, biryanis (something I had never heard before but seems to be the Indian version of “casserole”), appetizers, and fusion dishes. It’s got every Indian dish I’ve ever heard of plus a few hundred more. It’s quite a hefty book with few pictures, just some color plates here and there. The book has gotten some criticism for that, but more pictures would have made the tome even more massive. Besides, I don’t think curries are the most photogenic foods out there. The real beauty is in the aromas of all those spices.

I appreciate the authentic feel of the book. Each recipe has both an English and a Hindi name. The author grew up in India and then immigrated to the United States, so he turns out to be an excellent "interpreter". The recipes look like a nice balance, not too exotic as to be intimidating to a westerner, but not dumbed down either. This is stuff people actually eat in India! Most of the ingredients can be found in grocery stores here. Some things he suggests good substitutes for (like yellow squash instead of bottle gourd or brown sugar instead of jaggery), and there are a few he admits there really is no substitute for (I apparently need to hunt down some curry leaves, though I’m glad I finally found some tamarind). He even made up some recipes with ingredients they don't have in India, but are plentiful in America, like broccoli or salmon, and if Indians did have them, that's probably what they'd do with them.

This book will be very helpful with my goal of eating less meat, since it has a long chapter on legume curries, another on vegetable curries, and a short chapter on paneer curries (which is Indian cheese he says is similar to feta cheese or tofu, and is also easy to make yourself since vinegar is used to curdle the milk). This reflects the large population of vegetarians in India for either religious or financial reasons. I’m also impressed by how many different vegetables are represented. There’s at least one curry for pretty much every vegetable I’ve ever grown. This will come in very handy the next time I have a bumper crop of something from the garden, and is already helping with the tons of mustard greens I keep getting in my CSA delivery every week. However, this book is also an omnivore’s delight with a chapter on poultry curries, another on red meat, and another on seafood. The chicken curries are especially varied and yummy sounding, as chicken is the most popular meat in India. Pick an ingredient and there’s probably a curry for it in this book.

I would like to eventually try all the recipes in this book, though it may take years. I’ve been scribbling notes in the margins on the recipes I have tried so I can keep track. I’m sure if I didn’t do that it would be nearly impossible to remember which ones I’ve tried or not and which one’s I’ve liked or not. It seems like so far I’ve liked most of them. What’s more remarkable is my partner, Daniel, has also liked most of them, and he’s a meat and potatoes kind of guy who doesn’t like his food too fancy. Or so he claims.

Here are the ones I’ve tried so far.

Murghi Ni Curry (ginger chicken with peanuts and coconut): It says this is a Parsi recipe from Mumbai. The Parsis are descended from Zoroastrians who fled from Iran to India to escape religious persecution. See, this is the kind of stuff you learn from the recipes in this book! This curry had an interesting sauce made by blending tomatoes together with toasted unsweetened coconut and peanuts. I should have paid better attention to the warning, “The longer the ingredients sit in the hot skillet, the more they will burn, making them unpalatable,” because I think I burned my peanuts a little while I was toasting them in the skillet. I ended up with black flecks all over the curry. Daniel said it was fine, but I’d better be more careful next time. It was still tasty. It was very nutty and would probably be good with brown rice to accentuate the nuttiness.

Saag Murghi (stewed chicken in a mustard greens-spinach sauce): I figured out that saag means greens and murghi means chicken. He says that this dish is traditionally made with just spinach, but he likes mustard greens so he uses half of each. I’ve been getting big batches of mustard greens from my CSA, so I made it with all mustard greens and no spinach. The sauce for this chicken is mustard greens, spices, and yogurt pureed into a bright green sauce. It’s certainly nothing like what Americans would think of when they think of curry. He recommends eating this with naan to dip in the green sauce. Daniel and I both liked it.

Kadhai Tamatar Murghi (wok-seared chicken breasts with fennel-tomato sauce): The book informs me a kadhai is like an Indian wok. I used my beloved carbon steel Chinese wok instead, even though he says the kadhai is a slightly different shape and usually made of cast iron. In this curry, boneless chicken chunks are seared in a wok and then covered with a rich tomato sauce. It calls for fenugreek leaves and I substituted powdered fenugreek seeds. It was still tasty but that change may have significantly altered the intended flavor of the dish, I’m not sure. Several curries in this book call for fenugreek leaves. I just planted some fenugreek seeds, so maybe by summer I can see what the leaves taste like. The ground seeds are a component in many commercial curry powders, but given how coriander seeds taste a lot different from the leaves, it’s possible that may be the case with fenugreek. Anyway, even with the seeds instead of leaves, this curry was good. We ate it with naan and a potato curry on the side as he suggested.

Bittarai Kirihodi (Sri Lankan style hard-cooked eggs with coconut milk): This was the first curry I made that I didn’t like. I used some leftover hard-cooked eggs that were a little overcooked, which might have made things worse. I was hoping the spicy sauce would cover up the sulfur. The tumeric-yellow, thin coconut milk sauce the eggs floated in was very bland. It calls for mostly whole spices like cinnamon sticks, but you only simmer them in the sauce for a few minutes, so I’m not sure if that’s enough time to get the flavors out. There’s two more egg curries in here I’ll try before I give this one another chance.

Goan Gosht Curry (curried beef stew with potatoes, shallots, and malt vinegar): The description says this is a good gateway curry for people who don’t like curries because it’s basically a beef and potato stew with some Indian spices. He was right. I think this was Daniel’s favorite so far. The Goans are Christian Indians famous for vindaloo, and like vindaloo this curry has a bit of vinegar in it, which tenderizes the meat but keeps the potatoes from falling apart. I didn’t have shallots so I used onion. Whole cinnamon sticks, cardamom pods, and bay leaves simmer in the stew along with coconut milk and tomato. Yum! We ate it with naan and it’s a definite make-again.

Tamatar Jhinga (beginner almond shrimp with tomatoes): This was last night’s dinner and was a delicious dish of shrimp in a creamy tomato sauce served over rice. It reminded me of shrimp alfredo. True to the description, it was a cinch to make too. Not all curries have to simmer for hours. This one took 20 minutes, and that’s because that’s how long the rice took to cook.

Chana Masala (chickpeas with a spicy tomato sauce): Chana masala (chana is the word for chickpeas) is a pretty standard curry that most westerners have heard of (at least those who are into Indian food). The description says this is as pervasive as macaroni and cheese is in America. With already cooked chickpeas it’s super quick and easy to make. I thought it was good and filling (especially for a vegan dish), but kind of boring compared to the other curries in this book. But maybe good old chana masala isn’t supposed to be exciting, just something quick to throw together on a weeknight. I look forward to trying some of the other chana recipes in the book to see if they’re more interesting.

Gatte Saag Ki Subzi (chickpea flour dumplings with spinach): Gatte are chickpea flour dumplings, and saag are greens. Wow, I’m learning Hindi! I used Swiss chard from my garden instead of spinach. The chickpea flour was Bob’s Red Mill brand from the health food section of the grocery store. Now I’m not sure what to do with the rest of the little bag of chickpea flour since this curry was merely ok. There are a couple of other recipes in here that use the same dumplings in different sauces, and some that use the flour for other things, so I should try those. The dumplings were very filling for a vegetarian dish, but also very dense and kind of gummy. Maybe I made them wrong. The greens were good, but greens are always good.

Aloo Aur Sarson Ka Saag (potatoes and mustard greens with ginger and garlic): As suggested in the book, this was served as a side dish to Kadhai Tamatar Murghi, and was good with that, and would probably be good with any meat curries that need some vegetable accompaniment. Having both potatoes (aloo) and greens (saag) gives you both a green vegetable and a starch in one dish. This was another way to use up all the mustard greens I’m getting from my CSA. This might even go well alongside a legume curry for a vegetarian meal. The author admits he’s mad about potatoes and eats some of the potato curries by themselves, deficient in protein it may be. I think he and I would get along well, because potatoes, and potato curries, are yummy. The potatoes soak up the spicy sauce nicely.

Makkai Ki Roti (griddle cooked corn bread with chiles): This is in the last chapter of the book, “Curry Cohorts”, which has things like raitas, relishes, chutneys, rice dishes, and breads. These were good, but were indistinguishable to me from any other homemade corn tortilla. It’s made of masa harina, salt, ginger, and chiles with water to make the dough, then pressed flat and grilled on a cast-iron skillet. So yeah, besides the added spices in the dough, it’s a corn tortilla. Not that that’s bad or anything! Homemade corn tortillas are delicious and different than store bought corn tortillas. But I think in the future I’ll just make a batch of regular corn tortillas from the recipe on the masa harina bag. There’s also a recipe for regular rotis in here that seem to be the Indian version of whole wheat tortillas. He even says that you can use whole wheat tortillas instead. I’m surprised he doesn’t say the same thing about the corn rotis being just like corn tortillas. Anyway, tortillas are in abundance here in Texas, so I probably won’t make my own rotis and just use whole wheat tortillas, which I can get in large packages, freshly made from the grocery store bakery.

Naan (salt-crusted grilled flatbread with ghee): Now, here’s an Indian bread that I think would be worth making. The grocery store sells naan, but it comes only two to a package, one for me and one for Daniel, and is not freshly made in the store. I got the idea I should make myself a big batch and freeze it, since it’s become my favorite starch accompaniment to curries and I was tired of buying more of those little packages of naan all the time. However, I tried Iyer’s recipe, and it was a disaster! Part of it was my fault. I think I made the naan too thin, so when I grilled it, it actually got hard and crunchy in the thinner spots. That’s not supposed to happen. If rotis are Indian tortillas, then naan is Indian pita bread. It’s supposed to be thick and chewy. Except the other weird thing is that I always thought naan was supposed to be a yeast bread. Iyer’s recipe has no yeast, just baking powder and buttermilk to leaven it. I think next time I will try Madhur Jaffrey’s recipe that does use yeast, so the dough is kneaded until stretchy and will probably have some resistance when I roll it out so I won’t end up with crackers. I think it’s supposed to be more like a pizza crust when you roll it out.

Ok, so I’ve made nine curries so far (plus two breads). That means I only have 651 curries to go!