Brighten the Day

We spent the last weekend of April at the Jazz & Heritage festival in New Orleans. I spent the early 70’s there in college and have visited many times since, but this was my first trip back since the devastation that came down during Hurricane Katrina. On the quick flight from JFK I made a mental note that I would refrain from asking anybody about “the storm”. I did have a million questions, but hadn’t these people been through enough? I figured that they’d been asked the same questions by every visitor who’d been there since that morning of August 29, 2005.

My resistance to asking questions was moot. No sooner than I had gotten my hand on a cool Albita the talk began. The people of New Orleans want to discuss the devastation. They call it Katrina, The Storm, The Failure of the Levy System, but what ever they call it…they definitely want to talk about it. The gallery owner on Royal Street, told me about the ruined floors in his home but smiled that his gallery was unscathed. My college pal Patricia Schrieber told me about her father’s Lake Ponchatrian home that had been in her family for generations had succumbed to the raging waters. It was Patricia who over dinner at the uptown local eatery Clancey’s explained how the levies failed and eventually the lake (Lake Ponchatrain) flowed into the city. There were countless stories of rotted food, spoiled rare vintages, and lost loved ones; either killed by the waters or whose spirits were killed and abandoned the city that had been there shelter.

Katrina serves as a time line landmark. “Johnny’s first communion, was that before or after the storm.” Vince when were you here last, before or after Katrina.”

As I ate very expensive and very delicious seafood in the French Quarter, Smokie, the chef at Charity hospital, vividly told me about her attempts to keep the food services going at the hospital, feeding the infirmed and staff as the evacuation carried on, and then her airlift by helicopter from the roof of the abandoned institution. As we walked out of the restaurant, Smokie told me about what she found an interesting phenomenon. Sunflowers. Months after the waters receded and the debris was slowly cleared, Sunflowers started popping up all over town. Smokie painted a vivid picture of this sudden, random blooming. The neutral ground where the then temporarily shut down trolley made its downtown to uptown voyage had sunflowers breaking through the barren soil where grass once flourished. Flower boxes that held the remnants of ornamental evergreens sprouted the blooms and in the middle of garden district lawns sunflowers appeared.

Was this divine providence or the hallucinogenic imagination of a woman, who after days of feeding frightened hospital patients, needed to see a bright spot?

Perhaps all of these factors contribute to the sunflowers that are popping up in New Orleans, but I did uncover one definite one. 



Project Sprout an environmental group, recently planted its first test plots of sunflowers in New Orleans, These plots of land were essentially vacant lots which had been turned into dumping ground for all kinds of debris. In addition to all the list of horrific aftermath problems Katrina contributed to, the ph levels of the soils show inordinate amounts of heavy metals. Research has shown it may take as much as a thousand years to actually clean a heavily contaminated plot in New Orleans. But there's also some research that comes out of Dillard University that has shown that in a couple of growing seasons a lot in New Orleans moved from being unsafe according to EPA standards to a safe level for alternative uses. "

Once the plants take out the toxins, they are themselves contaminated, with most of the contamination held in the stalk. When sunflowers are planted in soil with high levels of lead, the stalks need to be treated as a biohazard.

 The sunflower seeds can be used to make biodiesel. Its important to remember that it takes quite a few sunflower seeds to make a tank of fuel for the average automobile, but their heart is in the right place.

I love the idea of cleaning the soil by planting flowers (I understand that the canola plant has the same cleansing effect.), but I also feel that when you pass a mass planting of vibrant sunflowers it makes you happy and gives you a jolt of hope that failed systems and politics just can’t.

Garden Update October 2010

I started out writing a 2010 gardening update…

2010 will go down as the year that didn’t for my gardening efforts. Of the hundreds of Zinnia seeds I sowed in the spring in Toluca Lake, two plants finally emerged. In April I planted amazing tomato varietals seedlings in Carmel Valley. Deer that passed through the garden, also freely munching on roses and rhubarb, ravaged the adolescent plants. The highlights of the 2010 efforts were amazing roses and one very prolific heirloom pineapple tomato plant in Toluca Lake, and a lovely basket of delicate Meyer lemons from Carmel Valley. Not even the great botanist Hans Sloane got every seed to grow and the deer, well its their land really so who is the invader? I am at peace in the garden and pleased to be here.

Then I thought I’d review my 2010 gardening pictures to find a good one to illustrate the doom and gloom. I had forgotten about the volunteer Morning Glory in Toluca Lake, The amazing wildflowers in both Carmel Valley and the San Fernando Valley. The delicious miners lettuce that was the subject of my March posting and the amazing 12 foot tall thistle that took over a hillside of the Carmel property.

I am still at peace in the garden and happy to be here, and with this exercise, satisfied.

Sutter's Mill Salad

At the end of 1848, 20 thousand miners had migrated to the western gold fields surrounding Sutter’s Mill. Not to be left out, New York native, Michael Shea had several options to get his piece of the action. After rejecting the 2,000 mile overland trip that risked disease and Indian attacks, and the 16,000 mile trip around Cape Horn to San Francisco he opted to take the 6,063 mile route to Panama across the Isthmus connecting to a steamer from Panama City to San Francisco. After weeks in a 4x6 foot “cabin”, weeks being transferred up the Chagris River by natives and a very long wait in Panama City for the next steamer he finally arrived in San Francisco and made his way to the action. When Shea arrived at the end of 1849, 100,000 men were in the gold fields and by 1852 that number had more than doubled. The overwhelming population in that relatively small area made healthy nutrition hard to come by. The most debilitating result of this problem was the outbreaks of scurvy. When spots on the skin, spongy gums, and bleeding from the mucous membranes started, not all the gold in California could help. Shea and his newfound friends found the solution to this plague from the local Indians; claytonia perfoliata.

This plant that became known as “miners lettuce” is indigenous to the cooler climates of Northern California’s central coast region. You can imagine my surprise (and embarrassment) when I realized that the pesky, white flowered plant that withers and dies when the spring sun gets strong and that I had been randomly removing from our property in the Carmel Valley has been the delicious, nutritious, Miner’s Lettuce.

Nutritious? How did it save Shea and his fellow miners? Why some 160 years later do the foragers search it out? Vitamin C! We take the supplements, we drink the juice, but few of us know that this wild grower is loaded with Vitamin C. Three ounces (and by the way 3 ounces is a lot of lettuce) had more, much more vitamin C than most fruits and vegetables.

Look at this table:

Good Sources of Vitamin C per 100 g

Red Pepper (raw) 190

Guava 100

Miner’s Lettuce 120

Kiwi 90

Broccoli (raw) 89

Brussell Sprouts (raw) 85

Papaya 60

Strawberry 60

Orange 50

Lemon 40

Cantaloupe 40

Cauliflower 40

Grapefruit 30

Spinach 30

Cabbage 30

By the looks of this chart my Miner’s Lettuce salad has more vitamin c than a fresh fruit salad. With large fleshy leaves, miner's lettuce is a small succulent annual plant. It’s hard to make a mistake in the garden when looking for it. At the top of its slender stalks are saucer-shaped leaves that completely encircle the stems, appearing to be one circular leaf. Small white to pinkish flower clusters appear slightly above the unique leaves. Oblong-shaped leaves grow near the base of the plant. It’s all edible! I pinch it off from the bottom and it has the feel of spinach. Lately I have been using it like any kind of lettuce, spinach, or arugala. The real foragers tell me that if the miner’s lettuce isn’t too close to automobile traffic it shouldn’t be washed at all. I’m not buying into that! I wash it and give it a ride in the salad spinner. I haven’t steamed it yet but I will soon. I am heading back to the valley this week to pick another large bunch. Now that the temperatures are rising, Miner’s Lettuce is getting ready to shrivel up until next year.

What else am I getting rid of in the garden that I could be eating?

Don't Miss Tomatomania

Tomatomania

This is the place to buy your seedlings. And look East coast followers...now in Connecticut!

Simon's Seeds

Its no secret that seeds are propagated in many instances by animals. Seeds that have a sticky exterior (burrs) hitch hike on an animal’s fur and fall off later . This, by the way proved to be the inspiration for the invention of Velcro. Other animals who hunt and hide seeds as a food source sometimes forget their stores and germination takes place. And of course there are the seeds that are eaten and sown around in the animal’s droppings, known by the experts as endozoochory, If you have ever been in the way of a falling bird dropping, you may have discovered as you cleaned the mess from your hair the presence of seeds.

All this leads to the events on a Friday afternoon that have resulted in what appears to be somewhat of a mitzvah. Meet Simon. Simon is an eight-year-old Beagle that my daughters purchased as a puppy and as he reached adult hood they promptly move to the opposite coast. No matter. Simon’s list of annoying “dog things”, that include the usual howling, wanting to walk when it’s cold, raining, or the middle of the night , is topped by Simon’s voracious appetite. I don’t really think he’s hungry, I think he has an obsession for ingesting things. Thankfully food tops the list. A pumpkin pie, a sack of flour, countless loaves of bread that were left just a inch too close to the edge of the kitchen counter, and once easily his own weight in an organic bread dough that was attempting to rise. Disgustingly he has the occasional bout of coprophagia and once he ingested (and eliminated, in perfect condition) a ladies thong underwear. So it was no surprise to me when I discovered that Simon had eaten a pound of wildflower seeds. Because it matters for my story it broke down to eight ounces of California Poppy (Eschscholzia californica), four ounces of Mountain Garland (Clarkia unguiculata), and four ounces of the delicious Farewell to Spring (Clarkia amoena.) As these were special ordered and cost $56.00 Simon was banished to the great outdoors of the garden in Toluca Lake. Bad dog! Later that afternoon, all was forgiven and Simon was allowed back in the house, after several hours of banishment and drinking an inordinate amount of water. As I settled in to attack past issues of The New Yorker, Simon promptly entered the den, stopped, looked at me with his soulful eyes and vomited up a neat pile of the wildflower mix. Bad Dog! Back to the garden.

Now I should mention that this banishing to the garden cannot possibly register as punishment. There’s, squirrels, plenty of water, and it is Southern California. Nevertheless like sending a child to their room, it felt good.

I wanted to hurry back in to clean up the mess in the den so I nearly missed six very neat piles of seeds that Simon had deposited on the pebbles and mulch of the garden. As I hosed the deposits into the earth I thought about animal seed dispersion and realized that Simon had shown me one I hadn’t considered. Via puke.

Now recall that Simon really isn’t hungry, in fact he wants for nothing. He ate the seeds because there were , well, eatable. Animals who regularly ingest seeds and disperse them gain nutritional value from the outer husk of the seed as it travels the fantastic voyage of their digestive tracts. Not Simon, no time for that. Just in the stomach, a quick mix with his stomach juices and out. My findings? Well I must say Simon’s seeds germinated quickly. It usually takes these particular wildflower seeds at least 45 days to start upward. Simon’s germinated in less than a month. Do Simon’s stomach juices (is that bile?) provide some kind of agent that breaks down the outer husk of the tiny seeds, thus making for quicker germination? At this point Simon’s seeds are much more immature than the seeds I dispersed (by hand!) and certainly smaller than one ones that are regular inhabitants of the garden. I will keep a watch on these vigorous shoots and report back if Simon’s seeds out perform the traditional.

The chores

Amanda Everett, the Rosarium Horticulturist at the Decanso garden gave a rose pruning Demo last weekend.

The basic techniques of pruning include; removing diseased and weak canes, shorten the remaining good canes by making 45 degree cuts just above outward facing lateral bus, strip off all the leaves and remove all debris & mulch beneath the bush, reapply mulch leaving the crown open.

It was a good solid refresher and happily I was the youngest person in the crowd. I never realized that pruning prevents plant disease from coming back in the spring. That is why this removal of all debris and mulch is so important to this post holiday chore.