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Working Like A Dog
The truck came with a dog, but I didn’t know that at first. It was 1976. I was sixteen. I didn’t have a driver’s license yet, but I’d gotten a job on a cattle ranch outside of Montague, California, on the high desert north of Mt. Shasta, and my employers gave me a pick-up to use. They also provided me with a horse, a saddle, as much beef as I could eat, and four hundred dollars a month. The first time I hopped behind the wheel and started off down the dirt road, Sis came tearing out of the barn where she’d been sleeping in the hay and chased after the truck barking, incredulous and offended that I’d forgotten her. Sis never completely trusted me after that, and she always slept where she could keep an eye on her truck.
I worked like a slave on that ranch, and since meat was free I didn’t eat vegetables for months. I was happy. Being a cowboy had been my ambition since childhood, and working on the Montague ranch was my first job away from home. It was a learning experience. As a boy, being a cowboy had been more about shooting Indians than working with cattle or managing rangeland as a renewable resource. Somewhere there’s a black and white photo of me, age three, in my cowboy hat, astride my tricycle with my six shooters, staring down the photographer. I look like I’ve got Mad Cowboy disease. But pictures can’t tell the whole story. My great grandmother gave me an Indian war bonnet of colored chicken feathers for my fourth birthday, so sometimes I’d killed cowboys too. Homicide wasn’t a daily activity on the ranch, and when we weren’t fixing fences, moving the herd, or giving cattle routine vaccinations, irrigating alfalfa for winter hay was a common chore.
The alfalfa fields were large— one of them was a square fifty acres. The fields had been leveled and were divided into long strips by checks, which are long, low, parallel mounds of soil that look like speed bumps and run the length of a field. When the flow of water is directed into the field, these checks act as dams to “check” the water’s lateral flow and guide it over a specific section of ground.
The water was delivered according to a contract with the irrigation district. Every ranch in the district had their allotment fixed on the calendar months in advance, and on the appointed day, the ditch master would come and open a valve that released the water from the district canal into the ranch’s main irrigation ditch. The water continued to flow, non-stop, for two weeks, until the contract ran out, and during that time the ranch was obligated to direct the water in a responsible manner twenty-four hours a day. Wasted water is wasted money, and water flowing where it doesn’t belong is a flood. One rancher in the valley that summer thought to “borrow just a little water” by cutting a small ditch into the levee at night with a backhoe, but the force of the water soon eroded out an ever-widening gully. When the sheriff’s deputies arrived to investigate the source of the flood they saw the fool haplessly pushing dirt into the torrent with a bulldozer.
To channel the water from our main ditch into the fields we used a system of logs, sticks, and heavy canvas tarps. Before the water arrived we set a series of heavy six-inch pine logs perpendicularly across our main irrigation ditches. Next to each big log, we laid out piles of straight sticks, each about five-feet long and two inches thick, and sharpened with a hatchet on one end. When it was time to irrigate, we’d lay a row of these sticks against the log and shove the sharp ends a few inches into the damp earth at the bottom of the ditch. When we had enough sticks set so that the framework of our dam looked like a rib cage, we’d drape a tarp over the ribs on the uphill side. With the point of a shovel blade, we’d force the tarp into the earthen walls and floor of the ditch, and then we’d heap mounds of mud over the edge of the tarp to make a seal.
The water flowed in and rose behind our dam, until it overflowed through a short, shallow lateral notch cut through the rim of the main ditch that allowed the water to run into the alfalfa field. While one section of the field was being irrigated, I’d go down stream in the dry ditch and build the next dam. When the water reached the end of the field it would spill into a tail ditch. To irrigate the next piece of land all I had to do was pull the upper corner of the first tarp down a little to let the water spill back up behind the next tarp. I let the dams fill slowly, rather than jerk the upstream tarp out and release a flood all at once, because it was easy to wash these temporary dams away.
The fields were all different sizes, but I’d try to arrange my irrigation schedule so that I watered the longest runs at night and could get a little sleep. I’d set a series of tarps down the ditch in the afternoon while I kept one eye on the water flowing across the short runs. The last tarp of the day would be pulled at 10pm and I’d go to bed and let the water flow down a big field. I’d be out of bed at 12:01 am for the first move of the morning. I’d go back to bed. I’d get up for the second movement at 2am, then sleep, then get up at 4am, pull a tarp, sleep, and finally get out of bed at 6am to pull my last tarp just before breakfast and the start of a new work day.
My father came and visited me, and when he saw our system of checks, logs, sticks and tarps, he smiled. “There’s a painting on the wall inside the pyramid at Giza,” he said, “that shows Egyptian slaves irrigating their fields with water from the Nile in exactly this way.” I imagine he was confident my experiences on the ranch would convince me to go into law or academia. If so, he miscalculated my contrarian nature. Being able to participate in something so ancient appealed to me. As I stood at the edge of the ditch during the day watching the water spread across the field I’d gaze at Mt. Shasta looming on the horizon to the south. On the evening of the Bicentennial Fourth of July I was irrigating and I watched the fireworks in explode in the sky to the west over Saddleback Butte. Other nights I’d look up and see drifts of stars. It was easy to stare off into the distance and wonder what it must have been like to tend the fields in Egypt or Babylon. Being timeless gets boring. My attention was eventually drawn from the cosmos and the past down to the details of life around me, like the dog that lay panting in the shade of the pick-up truck.
Sis was a medium sized white dog with patches, maybe mostly Border collie, with ears that could perk and flop. I’d never been crazy about dogs, but Sis not an undisciplined, crotch-busting mutt. When we moved the cattle she’d trot along next to the foreman and await his instructions. If he said, “Go get ‘em,” she’d go get ‘em, and she always knew who to get and where to put them. If stray cattle were down in the willows along the Little Shasta River, she’d drive them out to join the rest, then lay off so as not to panic the herd. When I irrigated the alfalfa fields Sis trotted back and forth in front of the advancing water. I noticed she was hunting the gophers brought to the surface by the flood and methodically killing them with a snap of her jaws. I learned to watch her progress down the fields and make an accurate estimation of how far the water had gotten so I no longer needed to walk the fields myself. When I complimented Sis on her work ethic and gave her a pet, her tail would wag, but she stayed focused. We became friends. The ditch water came from a reservoir upstream and sometimes it carried trout. One day Sis caught a rainbow trout and carried it gently in her jaws back to the pick-up truck and deposited it at my feet, still flipping. Fresh fish was a nice change from beef. I was the pup back then, and Sis was an old ranch dog, showing me new tricks.
copyright 2008 Andy Griffin
Note: the photo above is of Blue: Andy’s current working dog. He’s a puppy being trained to guard goats and sheep. Shelley Kadota, our fabulous CSA manager, took the photo in one of Blue’s many lazy moments.
April’s Fools
“The Indians scalped me at Chukchansi,” the bald guy said.
“Try your luck at Table Mountain,” said the other fellow.
We were in line at Coastal Tractor in Gilroy. The clerk was searching in back for a set of spider gears for my cultivating rig. The two men turned to me.
“I don’t gamble in casinos,” I said. “I plant tomatoes in the second week of April.”
It wasn’t a very good joke, but they got it. Farmers in our area that planted tomatoes in the first week of April this year lost them to a hard freeze. Along the Central Coast we figure April 15th marks the frost-free date, and we expect mild temperatures from then on. Of course, the frost free date is not a natural law, like gravity. I’ve planted tomatoes on April 15th and lost them to an “unseasonable” cold snap on the 17th. Plant tomatoes early and there’s a chance your early harvest will fetch higher prices. But if unsettled weather slaps you down and kills your plants, you’re one of April’s fools.
When I worked at Star Route Farm, in Bolinas, in the early eighties, we used to find arrowheads in the fields left behind by the Miwok. Once I found a round piece of clam shell when I was picking lettuce. A visiting archeologist from U.C. Berkeley showed me how the edges of the shell had been filed smooth, and he speculated that the piece was a gambling token, like a poker chip. I don’t like to gamble, but Indian gaming has been going on in California for a long time.
Farming can be risky, but the fun of casino gambling comes from the perceived potential of “winning big.” When I sold my produce in farmers’ markets I learned how many consumers want things early. The first warm day of spring provokes a mass appetite for Caprese salad, and the public swarms the markets looking for tomatoes and basil. But betting the ranch on early tomatoes to satisfy shoppers seems stupid to me now. I’ve tried.
I used to set my plants out in mid March, and cloak the rows with plastic sheeting stretched over hoops of pipe. It was an expensive procedure, and a lot of work. I fretted that my plants would freeze through the plastic. I lost sleep worrying that wind would knock down my hoop houses. I feared the rain because excessive moisture stimulates fungus. And even though the hoops and plastic allowed me to harvest on the early side, I still had to compete for the early sales with tomato growers that farmed in heated green houses or came from Southern California. The risk I ran of losing my early crop wasn’t worth the payback, and I felt lousy about creating a lot of plastic garbage.
Before that, when I was a partner in Happy Boy Farms, we grew winter tomatoes in a heated greenhouse. Our tomatoes were certified organic, and we pioneered the culture of hothouse tomatoes using only organic fertilizers and beneficial insects, instead of the typical conventional greenhouse regimen of chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and fungicides. We planted the seeds in August, turned on the heaters when the nights cold in the fall, and by April we were picking. I was satisfied, even surprised, by the quality of the fruit we grew, and the greenhouse allowed us to keep our crew working throughout the winter. But even then, over ten years ago, energy was expensive. We didn’t make much money. I was unhappy about it at the time, so I quit, but now I’m glad I got out of hothouse tomatoes when I did. Not only is it be hard to pay for fuel now, it’s also difficult to justify the use of so much heating oil to feed the public’s impatience, when tomatoes can be grown outside in the summer using only the sun if we wait.
The cheapest out of season tomatoes usually come from fields in the south, where it’s warm. Right now, most of the early spring fresh tomatoes in our markets come from Mexico. I’ve grown tomatoes in Mexico, too. Before I farmed at Happy Boy Farms, I helped my friend, Greg, set up a tomato farm near Todos Santos on the Pacific Coast in the Mexican state of Baja California Sur. My role in the farm was minimal, but I learned a lot.
It was early winter, 1994, when Greg and I drove south. We didn’t plan on stopping until we saw people picking red ripe fruit. Then we’d looked for a farm he could buy. Going over Pacheco Pass the hills were green and we had the wind shield wipers on. The rain beat down. On I-5, down near Huron, the rain stopped, but the fields were empty and muddy. Outside of San Diego the soil was dry, but the tractors were only just starting to work up beds for tomatoes to be transplanted into. We crossed the line at Tijuana.
In the Valle de San Quintin, south of Ensenada, we saw farm workers staking young tomato plants with crooked sticks cut from the thorny brush in the surrounding desert mountains. South of Molino Viejo Highway One turns away from the coast and we entered the open desert. We didn’t see anything but rocks, brush, and cacti for hundreds of miles. By the time we reached an agricultural zone near Ciudad Constitucion, near Magdalena Bay in the State of Southern Baja, we were so far south there were green tomatoes hanging from bushy vines. But it wasn’t until we got to San Jose Del Cabo at the tip of California, below the Tropic of Cancer, and over a thousand miles south of Watsonville, that we saw red, ripe tomatoes hanging on the vine.
What surprised me most about farming in Mexico was the labor situation. Greg and I thought there would be plenty of locals looking for work. Wrong. There were lots of people working in the tomato fields, but by and large they’d come north from Southern Mexico, from the States of Oaxaca and Puebla, where wages are low. At that time, field workers in Southern Mexico earned the equivalent of five dollars a day. Field hands in the north earned closer to seven dollars for the same day’s work.
I met with Government officials in La Paz to learn the rules of doing business in Mexico. Their employment codes dated from the Revolution and dignified labor by granting to every Mexican worker a fraction of the profits of the business they worked for, above and beyond mere wages. Naturally, the workers’ cut of yearly profits was to be pro-rated, and an employee who’d spent the whole year working for the company was due a larger piece of the profit they’ve helped create than did a newly hired worker. I expressed my amazement about the progressive spirit of this law.
“I’ve just come from a shantytown in a cactus patch where Oaxacan tomato pickers live in shacks made of garbage and share the rusty water that drips from one leaky spigot,” I said. “I don’t see them sharing in the profits of the grower/shippers they work for”
“Of course, some American businessmen may desire the services of a competent lawyer to help them understand our labor code,” said the bureaucrat, and he handed me a business card from a little stack he kept in the top drawer of his desk.
“Off the record,” said the lawyer, “well-intentioned foreign employers that upset the natural equilibrium of life in Mexico by over-paying for labor may find their generosity is misplaced and leads to regrettable consequences.”
I know people make an honorable, honest, and sustainable business out of growing organic tomatoes in Mexico and shipping them north. My friends at Jacobs Farm of Pescadero/ Los Ejidos Del Cabo come to mind. More than anyone, they’re responsible for making organic Sungold cherry tomatoes ubiquitous in upscale U.S. markets throughout the winter months. But growing off-season tomatoes for the U.S. market isn’t for me. Frankly, the way airlines are having problems these days, flying cargoes of tomatoes across the northern hemisphere seems too much of a gamble, anyway. I’m happiest planting tomatoes when the risk of frost is low. I know that if I wait until the soil is warm to plant my tomatoes the sun will probably smile on me, and sometime around the end of June, Mother Nature willing— “ka-ching!”— the tomato patch will come up cherries.
copyright 2008 Andy Griffin
The Chukchansi Tribal Site
The Proof is in the Gratin
“The old gray donkey, Eeyore, stood by himself in a thistly corner of the forest, his front feet well apart, his head on one side, and thought about things. Sometimes he thought sadly to himself, “Why?” and sometimes he thought, “Wherefore?” and sometimes he thought, “Inasmuch as which?”
-A.A.Milne
On September 19th, 1832, biologist Charles Darwin passed through the remote Argentine settlement of Guardia del Monte, and noted that the village marked the southernmost limit of the cardoon infestation on the pampas. Cardoon, or Cynara cardunculus, is a big thistle.
Cardoon is a sister to the artichoke, but instead of eating the immature flower bud, we eat the petiole, or leaf stalk. Cardoons make flower buds that look like small, spiny artichokes, but you’d have to be hungry to make eating them worth the pain. A number of different cardoon varieties that have been developed by farmers, and most of them have been selected to have few, if any spines. The kind of cardoon I grow is an Italian breed called Gobbo di Nizza. Massed over hundreds of thousands of acres, the way that
Cardoons evolved around the rim of the
The word for thistle in Latin is cardo. The word for “big thistle” became cardone in Italian and chardon in French. In
When the Spanish conquistadores came to
copyright 2008 Andy Griffin
*Andy tweaked this piece just a little from the one we ran in our CSA newsletter last week.
photo of Red Swiss Chard, it sort of shows it’s thicker stalks
Photoessay of making cardoon gratin with Martin in our kitchen
Martin’s Cardoon Potato Gratin
8-10 stalks Cardoon
2-3 medium potatoes
8 oz grated parmesan cheese
1 pint half and half or cream
S & P to taste
Blanch the cardoon stalks in water that has a splash of vinegar or lemon juice until medium tender. You can peel them if you like. We don’t. Cut the cardoon stalks in 1/4 inch crescents, across the grain, like you would celery. Peel the potatoes. Cut the potatoes into batons, about like a french fry. Toss the cut, blanched cardoon stalks with the potatoes directly in a gratin dish. Reserve a handful of the cheese for the top and toss the rest of the cheese with the cardoon/potato mixture. Add the pint of half and half (or cream if using.) Season with salt and pepper.
Bake in a 425 oven 40 minutes or so: until golden brown and the potatoes are all the way through.
Andy and I had a great little cardoon dish a few years back at the upstairs Chez Panisse and loved it. Here’s Russ’ recipe:
Russell Moore’s Cardoon Recipe
Russ cooked upstairs at CP for 20 years, now he’s about to open Camino! we can’t wait.
Peel stalks of cardoons to get the bitter outer skin off. Boil in salted water until tender, that could be from 5-20 minutes. (I would cut the stalks in half so they’d fit my pans. -jw)
Slice cooked stalks on the diagonal (like you would celery) then dress with a vinaigrette. For this dish the vinaigrette has a bit of anchovy, garlic, lemon and a small splash of red wine vinegar, and olive oil too of course. (Julia’s hint: one basic formula for vinaigrette I’ve read includes 3 parts oil to 1 part acid: lemon juice or vinegar)
They serve the cardoons this way room temperature with some hardboiled egg: either chopped or in wedges. Russ said this dish benefits from a bit of fat served with it and he likes the hard cooked egg for that contrast.
Cardoon thoughts and a recipe from Chef Andrew Cohen:
Cardoon is a vegetable like artichoke in that it oxidises and discolors. Chefs will usually toss it into acidulated water (water with lemon juice) to keep it from discoloring.
When thinking of cardoon, keep the flavor of artichokes in your mind when planning the dish.
Chef Andrew’s simplest Cardoon-Pasta preparation:
Slice and blanch cardoon. Saute onions and garlic and toss with pasta. Grate some parmesan cheese. This could benefit from some green olives as well.
Here’s an idea I picked up from a book of Mid-east cookery. This is based on a lamb dish with cardoon. Cut cardoon into 2″ long pieces and blanch in salted water. Saute onions and garlic with turmeric, paprika, parsley, and coriander. Add in cardoon and a handful of cracked green olives or oil cured black olives. Give a toss, and add a couple chopped tomatoes and some water( a couple cups). If you have some mid-east style preserved lemons, cut one up into largish pieces(1″ or so) and toss that in as well. Cook for a 1/2 hour to soften vegetables and integrate flavors. This could take peppers(hot or sweet) or eggplant as well. Simmer cardoons cut into batons (3″x1/4″) until tender and layer into a gratin dish that has been rubbed with a garlic clove and lightly oiled. Layer with parmesan or gruyere, then pour in cream over all. Bake until golden and bubbly.
I’m Back
Hi Everybody: Sometimes people ask me how I find time to run a farm and write a bi-weekly essay, and the answer, of course, is that sometimes I don’t. This week’s Ladybug Letter will be the first one written in over a month. Spring can be a lot of work on the farm, and as I get older it gets harder and harder to keep up. It’s not so much that I get tired easier, because I’ve learned how to delegate chores well. Triage is the skill I need to master. And setting priorities. I get distracted and overwhelmed by the numbers of things that I want to do. Raising my children and staying married has to be priority #1. Almost every farmer I know has been through a divorce or two, and I want to avoid that. The second most important thing to accomplish is to meet payroll, because without a happy crew I can’t accomplish anything. Keeping the customers satisfied comes third, because without their steady checks flowing in, I’ll soon have problems fulfilling my obligations to my family and crew. And then there’s writing. I’d love to develop my writing skills to the point where I can be proud of everything I write, and I’d love to leave my children a body of letters that are entertaining, informative, and can serve as a scrapbook of sorts for the years they lived on a farm. Writing has been a lot of fun for me because of the people that I’ve been introduced to, and writing has been a good way for me to force myself to think about how and why I farm. And there’s the problem. The more I think about farming, the more kinds of things I want to try. The older I get, the less time I have to try them. The farm serves as a muse that prompts me to write, and the farm serves as a task-master that keeps me from writing. Julia says I need a “sous-farmer” the way chefs have sous chefs, but really, with Jose and Gildardo, I already do. What I really need is focus, or the opportunity to live to be a hundred. Here’s a list of the things that have been keeping me from writing.
Cows. In my middle age I’m reverting to my adolescent dream of having a cattle ranch. I leased thirty acres next door to my home ranch, fixed a mile of fence this winter, and bought two Dexter cows. There was more grass than they could eat, so I traded the extra forage to my friend Linda, who brought 15 of her Angus heifers and a Longhorn bull over to feed, because she had ran out of grass on her ranch. I got to play cowboys this winter, and when Linda took her cattle home she left me a couple of lambs and another goat for my flock.
Seeds. We get a lot of our seeds from Italy, and the Euro is doing damage to my budget, so I’m trying to teach myself to produce my own seed. This is a fun project, but it is a new project, but I find myself on a steep learning curve, kind of like the hot dog stand vendor who begins to learn the business of making the hotdogs starting from “scratch”, as in starting with a critter in a corral.
Goats and Sheep. I want to increase my flock, and this winter we had over 30 baby kids plus 8 lambs. Plus we had mountain lion and bobcat predation that kept me preoccupied.
Herbs. My home farm has very little water, so I’ve been trying to propagate herbs that go well with lamb and kid and that use very little water, like savory, nepitella, marjoram, oregano and laurel. To save on water we’re mulching a whole acre of land with straw.
Weeds. The chefs at Evvia and Kokkari, two local Greek restaurants, have been teaching me about a number of “weeds” that are appreciated in Greek cuisine, and they brought me seeds from Greece, so I’m learning to grow a whole new set of crops I’ve never intentionally grown before, like amaranth, sidewalk dandelion, and ditch chicory. I’m also trying to teach myself about Greek cuisine because it seems so earthy and fundamental.
Grass. I’m having fun trying to learn how to manage pasture organically and sustainably with cattle, sheep, and goats. Taurus, Aries, and Capricorn get along well enough in the heavens, so why not on land as well?
Food. The more I hang around cooks, the more I envy their skills. I bought a clay pot at Spanish Table to cooks beans in over an open fire, but now I want to raise a rainbow of beans so I can road-test every variety. I’ve got oak trees on my place, so cutting wood is a priority, but I’m also thinking it would be fun to learn how to make my own charcoal.
I can see a year’s worth of writing just digging into these topics. I’m currently working on an essay about cardoon; we’ll post it in about a week. I hope you like it. -Andy
Beans for Bedtime
Fee! Fie! Foe! Fum! I smell an acre of fava bean plants in full bloom on my farm. The sweet scent of the fava blossoms prompts me to sniff critically at contemporary accounts of Jack and his magic beanstalk. What magic can a bean possess? What variety of bean did Jack plant, anyway? And what was really going on once-upon-a-time in fairy tale England? The vagueness of the folkloric record makes any forensic botanical taxonomy of the Jack myth speculative, but we do know when certain species of bean were introduced to Europe. First, a word of caution about beans. The word “bean,” as it’s currently used in the food press, is an imprecise term that can imply the seeds from any number of plants, mostly from the legume family, or Fabacaceae, but also from the coffee, cacao, and jelly families. When beans are mentioned in ancient, Old World sources, like the Bible’s Ezekial 4: 9, “Take thou also unto thee wheat, and barley, and beans, and lentils, and millet, and fitches, and put them in one vessel, and make thee bread thereof, [according] to the number of the days that thou shalt lie upon thy side, three hundred and ninety days shalt thou eat thereof,” the prophet was probably talking about fava beans, or Vicia faba. Before the Columbian collision with America, Europeans, Asians, and Africans were not yet acquainted with the common kidney bean, Phaseolus vulgaris, in all of its myriad glory. The legumes the Old World ate were fava beans, peas, garbanzo beans, and lupini beans. What’s interesting to Jackologists about these four ancient pulses is that they’re all planted and grown during the cool weather of winter or early spring. This makes sense, because in and around the Mediterranean basin, where these crops were developed, farmers could count on winter rains to water their crops. The pea also conforms to this evolutionary pattern, but if Jack had climbed a pea plant, we would have been told about it. It’s also remarkable that, except for the fava, none of the old world “beans” grow with any height. Fava bean plants have rigid stalks, and with good soil, adequate water, and grown using good cultural practices, they can easily reach six feet tall.By contrast, garbanzo plants have a lax habit. Lupines can be bush-like, but they’re low growing, and ramose, with solid stems, but more about that later.
Favas are called broad beans in England, and they thrive in plants thrive in Britain’s cool, moist climate. Summer in Britannia is roughly equivalent to winter in Aegyptus, and the plant has been a common food crop ever since the conquering Romans legions brought it to Northern Europe from the Middle East. Columbus encountered America in 1492, and it wasn’t long before the new beans made their mark on Old World cookery. Accounts of Jack and his magical beans first appeared in print in 1734 as The Story of Jack Spriggins and the Enchanted Bean, but the tale of the beanstalk to the sky existed before in the oral tradition, though for exactly how long is uncertain. So, while the broad bean is the traditional English bean, it remains possible that Jack’s bean could have been any one of the more than three thousand cultivars of Phaseolus vulgaris.
Jack was sent by his mother to take the family cow to market and sell her. But he allegedly traded the cow to the first leprechaun he meets for a handful of beans. A cow was easily a family’s most important resource back during fairy tale times when eating locally and seasonally was the reality, so Jack’s exchange seemed like a stupid, doomed strategy. But supposedly when Jack planted one of the beans it grew into the stratosphere, and he was able to climb the stalk to where a giant lived in a castle set among the clouds. First Jack stole a sack of coins, then he slipped off with a goose that laid golden eggs, and finally he took a magical harp that sang. Jack killed the giant and used his new wealth to attract a lovely bride. In short, Jack owed his elevation in social status from that of a poor single cowboy living at home with his mother to being a wealthy bride-holder to a bean. The only question for those of us that would like to follow his footsteps is, “which kind of bean do we plant?”
New World Phaseolus beans differ from the Old World beans in that they grow during the hot summer months. Over much of the American tropics where Phaseolus beans evolved, rain comes in the summer months. In the desert Southwest region of Utah and Arizona, where beans are a staple food, Native American farmers irrigated their crops from ditches during the summers. The dramatic growth rates that warmth-loving Phaseolus vulgaris can achieve during optimum conditions could well have appeared as magical to English peasant folk, accustomed as they were to the sedate pace of the cold tolerant fava. If you were an English farm worker in the 16th century, responsible to train the sprawling Phaseolus beans to poles, it might seem as though the new American beans could stretch out to touch heaven overnight. But vulgaris means common in botanical Latin, and Jack’s bean was anything but common. Ironically, for much of its history, Vicia faba was not only more common than Phaseolus vulgaris, but more magical as well.
Broad beans had been a staple food for people in the Mediterranean basin and central Asia for over thirty thousand years. As the fava bean was passed from generation to generation, its reputation grew. Rameses III offered 11,998 jars of shelled fava beans to the Nile god. The hollow, tubular stems of the fava plant were understood by the priesthood of ancient Egypt to be channels through which souls passed to the underworld. It is probably for this reason that the Greek philosopher/mystic Pythagorus, who learned his wisdom in Egypt, promoted his theorem that “it is evil to eat beans.” Favas, which grew through Egypt’s mild winters, were an obvious sign of rebirth, too. The tender fresh bean the fava plant yields in early spring was the first edible gift of the year from the ancestors to the living.
Later, in Christian Europe, a dried fava bean was traditionally folded into the batter of a Twelfth Night Cake at Christmas before the dessert was set into hot ashes to bake. One third portion of the cake would be dedicated to the virgin mother and one third part offered to the Magi. These pieces were offered to the poor, while the remaining third got eaten at home. Whoever ended up with the bean in their mouth was “King” for the day. From Rameses the third to Henry the eighth, and from the underworld to the heavens, broad beans were agents of transformation.
Jack’s poverty, trickery, and violence is faithfully reported in the beanstalk story, but no consistent, specific graphic details are included that might help any of us to pick out a magic bean from among all the common ones. Contemporary artists illustrating the story invariably picture the kidney shape of a Phaseolus bean in Jack’s palm, and when they draw foliage that in any way resembles bean leaves, they show heart shaped Phaseolus leaves hanging from the vine, not spoon shaped Vicia faba leaves. This artistic leap to conclusions is understandable, if unwarranted. Jack and the Beanstalk is considered a children’s story and children are not taught to be picky about the graphic details of systematic botany. Then too, many modern illustrators are computer savvy urbanites, comfortable with the virtual world, but unable to tell a bean tree from a banana vine on our actual planet. And if gardens have largely disappeared from the average person’s experience, it’s also true that fava beans have mostly disappeared from the American diet. Broad beans were once ground into flour and prepared in belly-stuffing starchy gruels, but that role has largely been taken over by the potato in the last two hundred years. But despite the testimony of children’s book illustrators, I think Jack’s bean was a broad bean.
Phaseolus vines can reach to fifteen feet in length, but the stems are lax and the plant must cling on something if the plant is to reach the sky. No edition of Jack and the Beanstalk that I’m aware of makes mention of a magical bean pole to support a magical Phaseolus. Maybe deceptive botany and sloppy illustration is appropriate for Jack and the Beanstalk because, “Fee!Fie! Foe! Fum! I smell an English scam at the heart of this fairy tale. The “immoral” to Jack’s story is that luck, trickery, and murder gain you the girl, but the real fairy tale here is that any honest agricultural endeavor can yield riches overnight.
But there is magic in a broad bean. Favas duplicate themselves so prolifically and reliably that they can remind us of the metaphoric geese that lay golden eggs. On Mariquita Farm, we harvest the green tips of young fava plants for cooks to use like pea shoots, and when the first beans are only the size of tender young green beans, we harvest them too. By the time the broad beans are swelling in their pods, we’ve been harvesting from the fava plants for several cool, wintery months, and the main harvest is still out in front of us. In that sense, favas work magic on our farm’s cash flow. Then too, fava beans are actinorhizal plants, which means that by virtue of a mutually beneficial relationship they have with a microorganism that infects their roots, they’re able to capture inert nitrogen from the atmosphere and convert it into a usable for of nitrogen, so that as they grow they fertilize themselves and enrich the soil for the crops that follow.
Fava beans are great, and magical in their own way, but even with a field of them to look at it still takes work to live happily ever after by farming. Jack is such a hustler I suspect that the real story is that he sold the cow and then spent the money on wenches and beer after the farmers’ market. At the inn, the barmaid was probably serving salted, toasted broad beans to help beer sales, and before he left, Jack probably stole a handful for the road. When he got home, he likely had nothing to show for the cow but bad breath and a handful of beans, so he made up a fairy tale about a leprechaun to satisfy his credulous mother, and then turned to a life of crime. The End.
copyright 2008 Andy Griffin
Fava Bean Recipes
rose-colored fava blossom photo
Fava Bean Ladder
Winter Reading
Winter Reading
Right now I’m working my way through The French Revolution, by Thomas Carlyle. This is a “no-food” book. If it had been written now, instead of in 1833, the chapter I’m reading now might have been titled “The Women Who Had Nothing to Eat,” or “French Women Can’t Get Fat.” As Carlyle relates, generations of appalling Royal French agricultural policy combined with a freak August hailstorm that destroyed the nation’s grain crop to bring
But women don’t want to live off of bread alone. Culture evolves when there’s enough food available that people can chew their meals slowly and ruminate on what life means. Charles Darwin is so famous for his speculations concerning the origins of species that his food writing came as a surprise to me. In The Voyage of the Beagle, Darwin recounts stumbling over fossilized mastodon skulls on the Pampas and he ruminates on the implications of the shark’s teeth he finds imbedded in rocks high up in the Andes, but he also focuses his considerable forensic powers on his dinner plate. One night
Jeffery Steingarten might try to test
Then there’s Beatrix Potter, the gentle storyteller of ordered English landscapes. In The Tale of the Flopsy Bunnies, Beatrix Potter uses the soporific effects of lettuce as the dramatic device by which Farmer McGregor catches six bunnies. Before I flipped the third page I knew things wouldn’t go well for Farmer McGregor, but as a lettuce grower he had my sympathy. I put the Potter book down and turned to my copy of The Oxford Companion to Food, to learn more about the pharmacological properties of lettuce.
I learned that in the beginning there was Lactuca serriola, or wild lettuce, which grew on rocky or disturbed ground across Asia, North Africa, and
In the end, the Flopsy Bunnies are saved by a mouse. Beatrix Potter is no Steingarten, Carlyle, or Darwin. By lulling young readers with a drowsy tale of lettuce and bunnies, she makes the night comfy. But even for farmers like me, who might resent the fictional breaks she gives to varmints, there are reasons to admire Beatrix Potter. Carlyle and Darwin drew their readers’ attention to the dire consequences of shortsighted agricultural policy, but Beatrix Potter did something about it. She invested her earnings from her animal tales in farmland. She knew the best way to preserve the countryside is by protecting working farms, so that consumers can eat fresh, local food, farmers and farm workers remain gainfully employed, and the landscape is well husbanded. When Beatrix Potter passed away she passed her properties on to the National Trust, and today the land the Flopsy Bunnies paid for lies at the heart of
copyright 2008 Andy Griffin
The Field
The Field
“The best time to buy a new suit,” Greg said, “is when you’re broke.”
I hadn’t gotten into farming to wear a suit. Greg’s point was that it’s precisely when you have no money that you need the confidence a new suit can give you. But what we needed was a field.
We’d just lost the lease on the ground we were farming. We didn’t have any money or credit, but if we could find some land we could improvise. Time was on our side. In 1991 there was a future in organic farming. So Greg and I walked down the railroad tracks with his friend Steve, and had a business conference of sorts. Steve wanted to show us an abandoned field he’d found. You can see the field too, if you’ve got access to Google Earth.
Boot up, click on Google Earth, and rotate the planet until you see
The town of
If you watch East of Eden, starring James Dean, wait for the scene where he’s riding in a box car “from
Down stream from the quarry the
Have you found the field? Follow the river east from the quarry, to a point where three counties are shown to join, near an oxbow. It’s triangular, with the traces of an access road dividing the land along a north/south axis. The latitude is 36 53’53.15” North, the longitude 121 34’30.85” W. Elevation, 158ft. The horizontal grey strip that forms the northern border of the field is the railroad track that Greg, Steve, and I were walking on.
“Here it is,” Steve said.
We looked down from the raised roadbed of the train tracks across the field. Scattered clumps of coyote brush stood ten feet tall among the thatch of dead weeds. Any houses on the other side of the river were screened from view by the thick jungle of cottonwoods, willows, and live oaks along the riverbank. The field felt like a forgotten place.
My uncle George told me once that back in the thirties this field was called “Okie Flats,” because dustbowl refugee families squatted here. There were apricot orchards in Aromas then, giving migrants an opportunity to pick fruit. And on a hike one day, in a canyon behind the field, I found Indian grinding stones, splinters of obsidian, and an asphalt seep where the Indians used to collect the tar they used to seal baskets. I’ve read that tar from these pits was traded the length of
“We could farm here,” Greg said.
“Nobody’s farmed here since the forties,” Steve said. “Somebody did a crop of sugar beets. It was a bitch to haul the harvest out.”
Steve had touched on a problem. The only access to the field was a rutted four-wheel drive track that ran along the railroad right of way. The track had been the Stage Coach road between the
“Do you know who the owner is?” Greg asked.
“No,” said Steve, “but I talked to a cowboy who works on the ranch across the railroad tracks, and he says the owner is a Chinese guy in
“Maybe he won’t care if we farm this field just a little” Greg said.
“The cowboy said that for a thousand dollars he won’t notice if you do.
“The tall hemlock weeds make me think that the soil here is perfect carrots or parsnips,” I said.
“Then it’s settled,” Greg said.
So we broke the old rusty chain that stretched across the entry way to the field along Highway 129 back by the
The soil was rich. We chased the dirt bikers off that would come into the field to tear up the rows or chase the cattle on the hills beyond. We chased off guerilla recyclers that were stealing our aluminum sprinkler pipe valves to sell for scrap, or pulling the cables out of the Southern Pacific fuse boxes to steal the copper wire. We chased off the people from town that came to toss their trash in the riverbed. As we entered the field one day a pick-up truck pulled in behind us.
“I don’t know that guy,” Greg said. “Cut him off!”
I pulled over, blocking the road. The man jumped out of his truck. His face was red with fury.
“This is private property,” Greg said.
“You’re goddamn right!” the man yelled. “I’m the property manager. Get the f#$% out!”
Greg got out the car, wearing a warm smile and extending his hand.
“Hi. My name is Greg. This is Andy. We’re delighted to meet you.”
The man thrust a business card at Greg. Greg glanced at the card and pocketed it.
“You’re trespassing,” the man said. “This land is owned by CSY Associates. Get out, or face charges.”
‘You know, you’re absolutely right, Herman,” Greg said. “Can I call you “Herman?”
Herman’s face looked like a boil about to burst.
“You can call the Sheriff,” Greg said. “It’s criminal. I mean, we even went and got a power drop.”
“You’ve got no goddamn right,” Herman said.
“Herman,” Greg said. “Let’s all try to look at this situation as an opportunity. If you go to the Sheriff and charge us with trespassing, you become the property manager who was so slack he let hippies invade the field. We’ll go to jail and you’ll look like a real asshole….”
I was hoping Herman wouldn’t hit Greg, but Greg was mellow.
“But what if you present the Associates with the opportunity to realize a profit off their previously unproductive asset?” he said. “You tell your employers that if you’ve found some potential tenants who will accept the responsibility of grading an access road to the field, clearing the land, and getting a power drop, in trade for a free year’s rent. After that, they’ll be able to pay 400 dollars per acre rent for a five years’ lease on thirty acres. That’s 60,000$ your employers wouldn’t have had in their pockets if you hadn’t put it there. When we look at things my way, Herman, you’re a hero.”
“We’ll be in touch,” Herman said.
The rent contract ushered in a prosperous period, and we farmed the field for the next seven years. We laser-leveled the ground so that it was perfectly flat and pitched just slightly towards the river away from the centerline road, so it drained well. We alternated vegetable crops with cover crops of legumes, oats, and rye. Cool breezes blow up the
In the summer we could reach the field easily in a pick-up truck. In the winter we’d ferry the harvest out in wagons pulled behind four wheel drive tractors. During floods, when the road was submerged, we’d walk our harvests out on our backs. I drove the tractor up onto the railroad tracks a couple of times and drive right past the flooded sections of trail, but after I almost got flattened by a locomotive I stopped that foolishness.
The CSY Associates had a golf course/ luxury home concept for their property, which extended for thousands of acres across the railroad tracks towards the town of
We started having problems with meth-fueled punks in jacked-up pick-ups tearing around the field in the middle of the night. Thieves tried to steal our tractors. We called all four Sheriffs’ Departments, but they were unable to help us. There was no Google Earth back then, and the way the Sheriffs understood it, our field was just over the line in somebody else’s county.
Then a California Fish and Game representative arrived and said that due to new regulations we’d no longer be able to pump from the
Until I dropped in on the field via Google Earth, I hadn’t been back. Sometimes I miss the field. We used to see wild turkeys there, and badgers. I liked the quiet, and it was fun to wave at the engineer and the passengers on the train when it rolled past. Nobody has followed us onto the field yet. As you can see from Google Earth, the field is fallow, waiting for a farmer in a new suit.
copyright 2008 Andy Griffin
Carrot Recipes in honor of the CSY being a great field for carrots. Both of these recipes are on our carrot page.
Carrot Mint Salad
I love mint. I love carrots. Here’s the result of another Tour du Fridge. This was actually at a restaurant I worked at. – Chef Andrew Cohen
1 lb. Carrots
2 T lemon juice
4 T fruity olive oil
S&P
1/2 shallot, minced
A pinch each of powdered cumin and caraway or A largish pinch of ras el hanout
2 T fresh mint, minced
Peel the carrots and use a mandolin to shred medium, or use a grater and grate the carrots coarse. If carrots are tender, proceed. If not, quickly blanch the carrots just long enough to render them tender, then plunge in ice water to stop the cooking and refresh the carrots.
Make dressing; add the spices to the lemon juice, along with the shallot. Allow the flavors to bloom for a few minutes. Whisk in the olive oil. Toss carrots with the dressing. Add the mint just before service. If you wanted something a little creamier, you could add in a little plain yogurt to the dressing.
Chocolate Chip Carrot Cake adapted from Recipes from a Kitchen Garden by Shepherd & Raboff
1 cup butter, softened
2 cups sugar
3 eggs
2 ½ cups flour (I use half whole wheat)
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon cinnamon
½ teaspoon nutmeg
½ teaspoon allspice
2 Tablespoons cocoa powder
½ cup water
1 Tablespoon vanilla
2 cups shredded carrots
¾ cup chopped nuts
¾ cup chocolate chips
Preheat oven to 350 degrees.
Cream butter and sugar until light and fluffy. (I use my standing mixer for this recipe!) Add eggs one at a time, beating well after each addition. Sift dry ingredients together. (if using whole wheat flour mix thoroughly but don’t sift); add to creamed mixture alternately with water and vanilla. Fold in carrots, nuts, and chips. Pour/smooth into greased and floured 9×13 inch pan. Bake for 45 minutes. Cool and top with dusted powdered sugar or a citrus glaze or a cream cheese frosting.
Pomona in Chains
Be gone, flee from Toulouse ye red ones,
For the sacrifice to make expiation:
The chief cause of the evil under the shade of pumpkins:
Dead to strangle carnal prognostication.
-The Prophecies of Nostradamus, Century IX, quatrain 46.
I don’t have the gift of vivid obscurantism that has given the rhymed prophecies of Michele de Nostradamus such relevance to so many people over the centuries and provoked so many varied and contrasting interpretations. Nor do I claim to be able to predict the fates of nations and princes as far out as 3797 AD, the way the French seer did. I’m a farmer, yoked to the mundane and obvious. But it’s a new year, and I’m not going to let my plodding, blindered, draft horse mentality hold me back any longer. I have six prophetic visions of stories that will be covered in the food/agricultural press during 2008, and if it turns out they’re not, they should have been. I’m not much of a poet, but you only have to wait one year to see if I’m totally full of bull. As a courtesy to the literal minded or cryptically impaired I provide my own interpretations for three of my oracular raving below, but let’s see if you can guess the rest. Here goes:
The Prophecies
- Demeter and Pomona in chains, tied to scaly trunks,
Of giant eucalypti that smother all new shoots.
Children in face paint talk to scarecrows at the harvest festival,
While inspectors certify the parade. - Tattooed youth flash navel rings,
And suck on silver straws.
Carried in a hollow gourd, green, frothing and aromatic,
The vice of Paraguay spreads across the northland. - A new ice age dawns.
The Queen of Holstein bellows in pain,
Her breasts swollen to bursting.
But no men in white hats ride to her rescue. - The apple tree goes up in smoke,
But the little apple lingers.
A joint turns on the spit
While the sated critic looks into the coals. - With a pass of the wand
Decay shows itself beneath the green.
The miles, the days— all is revealed.
A little knowledge is an evil thing. - Stupid thieves have eyes for gold,
Coins, rings, and the pendent dangling in her cleavage.
But junkies and men in loafers look beyond the surface,
And see the wealth that glitters in dull metal.
Suggested Interpretations:
1. Pomona in Chains: As Americans become more aware of their ignorance about where their food comes from and how it is produced the curious among us naturally want to learn more. Consumers, suspicious of the food for sale in chain stores and fast food restaurants, are turning to farmers markets as a wholesome alternative. But does the farmers’ market industry, as an institution, live up to the image the public has of it, or merit the faith and good will that the public places in it? Consumers can find the same farmer selling apples in at a farmers’ market in Vista, down by San Diego, as well as in others along the San Francisco bay. In fact, if you travel from market to market, you will see a number of the same farms selling all over the state— this in a state with thousands and thousands of farms. “Small” farms that have secured spots in the most profitable markets are becoming retail chains that spread their branches like mighty, water sucking trees, while new, local, smaller farms struggle in the shade to get any exposure at all. And the farmers markets themselves are increasingly organized under umbrella organizations that give consumers cookie-cutter versions of what “small” and “local” means in town after town. I predict that in 2008 an enterprising reporter for the business section, or community-minded bloggers with interest in the vitality of the food-shed, will begin to look beyond the face paint to seek answers for the following questions:
a) What is a farmers’ market legally, and how does it differ from a flea market, a supermarket, or the black market? Does the CDFA have the budget and the staff to adequately fulfill its mandate to oversee the markets? Is anyone really checking to see that all of the farmers are really farmers? Are inspectors or market managers willing or competent to tell the difference between dried apricots imported from Turkey or garlic imported from China? Can anyone explain how some small farms are able to “harvest” perfectly sized, graded red creamer potatoes all year long, while other farmers have to contend with seasonal harvests of potatoes of mixed sizes?
b) Who decides which farms get in to a farmers market, and why? Does the state have an interest in making sure that the institution of the farmers market serves the public as an incubator for a rising generation of new farmers, or should the privileges of a choice spot in a choice farmers market remain with the farmer/vendor in perpetuity? Should tax-paying farmers have to compete for limited farmers’ market stall spaces or divide their retail sales with tax-exempt non-profit organizations? Do farmers pay income taxes on their farmers’ market sales?
c) What role do farmers’ markets play in addressing the public’s increasing concerns about food security? Are the pesticide use reports that farms must submit to county agricultural agents public records, and if so, in this age of digital everything, might the public ever be in a position to know what’s really being put on the crops they eat? Why do some neighborhoods have farmers’ markets and others don’t. In short, what are farmers markets’ really like at the present, and what could they be, or are they perfect the way they are?
3. An Ice Age Dawns: It’s all the rage to bash illegal immigrants for all the jobs they’re stealing, and politicians of every stripe outdo each other in promising how fast they’ll throw the Spanish speaking terrorist/parasites from our country, but none of them want to discuss how the work is going to get done if they don’t also make it possible for trained workers to become legal. ICE, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency, has been stepping up workplace raids. I have a farmer friend who was next door to a dairy out in the valley when ICE raiders hauled the entire workforce off to Mexico in a bus. “You should have heard the cows bellowing,” my friend said. What happens to all the cows with engorged udders when the dairy workers are deported? Who feeds the confined cows or checks their water when, all of a sudden, the cowboys are shipped off to Mexico? Does anyone really believe that there’s an available pool of trained, legal milkers available to take on the burden of milking several hundred extra cows for an employer who’s just been raided? Does anyone really think America’s unemployed come crowding into the milking barns at 2AM to regain the jobs that were stolen from them two generations ago? If the mainstream press doesn’t hear the cows mooing for relief, the “vegangelical”/animal rights activist blogosphere will. Got milk? Got mercy? Got a clue?
5. A Pass of the Wand: “Use-by dates” are on every box of milk, but what about bags of prewashed ready-shreddy salad. Actually, given the amount of press given over to “fresh and local,” it might be far more interesting for shoppers to learn when something was picked, and where. After all, you can use your eyes and nose to tell when your veggies are rotten. In a basement laboratory somewhere a tech nerd with an interest in food science is even now inventing a tiny gadget that can be installed in every cell phone. Soon, all the information about where and when “farm-fresh, triple-washed” salads were harvested will be digitally contained on bar codes on the side of the bag. Industry already keeps this information to comply with health and safety regulations— or at least they’re supposed to— they just haven’t focused on how and why they could/should share it. Impossible? Know this: Even if digitalized harvest data gets lost or computers crash when health inspectors go looking to determine who’s responsible for an e coli outbreak, the information was gathered. Modern corporate “farms” are more like interlocking partnerships than “Old MacDonald’s” back forty. Behind a “label” and an advertisement showing a little girl in an Edenic setting, there’s a sales company that represents the label, there’s a wash plant that blends the harvest of dozens of far-flung fields, there are “independent” harvest companies that do the cutting under contract, hauling companies that get paid by the load to deliver greens from the field to the wash plant, and there are finally even farms that plant, cultivate, and irrigate the product. At each step of the harvest process there are reams of data collected, not to satisfy the health inspectors should they ever come calling, but to help the accountants who must reconcile all of the bills and bills of sale that are passed around. If the health inspectors can’t figure out where something came from, then maybe they should ask the book keepers. Accurate “picked-when, picked where” information will be appreciated by stores and consumers alike. Shoppers will appreciate knowing when and where their greens were harvested before they choose to buy their salads, and stores will find new cross-marketing opportunities for sedatives by offering bottles of pills in little racks next to the jars of salad dressings. The information age could come to the produce aisle.
That’s my idea of what Nostradamus meant by “evil under the shade of pumpkins,” and I’ve tried to give you some “carnal prognostication” to strangle on. I look forward to seeing if anyone hazards a guess as to what the other three prophecies mean. Have a happy New Year.
copyright 2008 Andy Griffin
*If you would enjoy getting our every-other week newsletter (I usually put in a recipe, other links, etc. you can sign up here. -julia)
*please do comment on this piece if you have questions/comments for Andy, I’ll remind him to post replies; and please forward this to anyone you think would enjoy it! thank you. -jw
An Herbal Infused Christmas Tale
Tradition says that in 1531 the Virgin of Guadalupe appeared to an Indian named Cuauhtlatoatzin, or Juan Diego, on the hill of Tepayac, near Mexico City. Mexico was in crisis, her territory only recently conquered by the Spaniards, her population diseased, her pride crushed. “Juanito,” said Mary, “Let not your heart be troubled. Am I not here, who is your Mother?”
Tradition also says that where the Virgin Mary appeared to Cuauhtlatoatzin, roses of Castile grew and bloomed overnight, even though it was the middle of winter. Mary is the mother of botanical miracles. In Europe, the swaths of marigolds that sprang up in green fields in the spring were said to mark the footsteps of the Virgin Mother. On my farm, when the rosemary patch bursts out with tiny, sky blue blossoms, tradition says we can thank the Virgin Mary for that too.
The Bible says in Genesis that God created the heavens “for signs.” The sun and moon measure out the days, months and years so that we know where we stand in the present. The billions of stars scattered across the night sky serve us like a diamond-studded Rorschach test to open up inner vision and give access to the future.
With all the sky to serve as a billboard, it’s no surprise the early Christians said the Lord chose a blazing star to announce the birth of a son. The Christmas story tells of three wise men in the East who read this news in the heavens, and I imagine royal Persian astrologers sighting on a newly bright star from observatories atop their ziggurats. Three astrologers didn’t confuse the message with the messenger and deem the star itself to be a King like Cepheus or a Queen like Cassiopeia. Instead, they took the Christmas star as a road sign, and followed it to the court of King Herod in Jerusalem.
“You say the stars announce the birth of the Prince of Peace,” said Herod. His eyes narrowed as he addressed the men of the East. “When you find the infant, report back to me, so that I can go and worship him too.”
The three astrologers were wise because they could read the faces of men as well as the stars of the sky. “Herod means to kill the child,” they said to each other. The three wise men reached the end of their journey, and found an animal shed where a carpenter’s young bride cradled her infant in her arms. The astrologers gave the baby Jesus gold, frankincense, and myrrh. They gave his mother some frank advice: “Get out of Bethlehem while you can. ”
They astrologers must’ve also given Mary the star-spangled burkha she wears in icons, where she’s portrayed, standing on a crescent moon, back-lit by sunbeams, in her role as Mother Mary, Our Lady of Guadalupe, Queen of Heaven and Mexico. A carpenter’s wife couldn’t have afforded such a splendorous and significant garment. But what an appropriate gift for wealthy astrologers to give a poor young Queen Of Heaven! Mary fled with her young family into Egypt. Along the way, perhaps still in the hills of Judea, or in the stony wastes of Sinai, Mary spread her burkha over a rosemary bush and took shelter underneath. While the sun was still up, the blue cloak could cast cooling shade, and after dark, the burkha could serve as a makeshift tent to protect her baby from the dew and chill of a desert night.
Rosemary, like Mary, is native to the Mediterranean. The pointed, waxy, and resinous leaves of the rosemary plant are drought adaptations that reduce water loss through transpiration. The Holy Lands are revered by three religions, but that doesn’t mean the climate is any kind of paradise. Mary had practical reasons to spread her starry, blue cloak over the rosemary bush before she slept beneath it with her baby. Rosemary is a mint family member, and eighteen different essential oils are produced in its leaves, giving the herb its complex pine, camphor, and citrus aroma. Most people enjoy these scents, and find them healing— but flies, lice, and fleas do not. Country girls all around the Mediterranean have known for ages how to take advantage of rosemary’s bug repellent properties by spreading their wet laundry out to dry on rosemary bushes, so that the scent infuses the fabric. Mary, who’d already talked with angels and astrologers, would also have had mystical reasons for draping her cloak over rosemary brush. Rosemary was said to ward off the “evil eye.”
In the morning Mary gathered up her things from the ground. She wrapped herself in her blue shawl once more, and took up her journey east towards exile in Egypt. The Bible says the sun and moon and stars were placed in the heavens for signs, but tradition tells us that plants have things to say too. The rosemary plant that had given shelter to Mary and her child, which before that night had flowered white for purity, now bloomed blue for fidelity. Today, in Spanish, rosemary is called romero, which means “religious pilgrim.” And to this day, rosemary’s flowers reflect the blue of heaven where Mary will always walk.
Heidi Swanson’s Rosemary Lemon Shortbread Recipe
Julia’s Rosemary Recipe page, including rosemary lemonade, cheese fingers, and other uses of the herb.
Virgin Mary’s Shrine in Watsonville
Tales of Innocence and Experience
Dear readers: The weekend after Thanksgiving our office trailer was robbed and the thief made off with one of our computers, some memory sticks, a cell phone, and a hundred dollars in change. The overall value of the stolen items was not significant and the thief couldn’t stay high long off his sales at the flea market, but the loss of the information contained in the hard drive and memory sticks was devastating to us. The thief is now in jail on felony charges, but the computer is still gone and we’ve lost several thousand email subscriber addresses that came in over the last year. We already have new computers, and Julia, Caitlin, and Gayle have pieced together most of the relevant financial information, but we’re sad about the loss to our Ladybug Letter. The newsletter project has always been a labor of love, and we don’t want the people who appreciated it to think we’ve given up. In the wake of the theft, Julia and John are revamping the website and the blog and switched the subscribing to a service that can do it automatically. If you’re no longer getting the Ladybug Letter and you miss it, please re-subscribe. If you know someone who we’ve lost tell them about the theft so they can sign up again. We’re still in business, and Julia and I would like especially to thank Marcel Beerli, our farm landlord and computer wizard, and John Mauceri, our longtime friend and techno-mentor, for helping us get on our feet again. -Andy Thursday Night Sales: Serpentine this week!
Andy’s Article:
Tales of Innocence and Experience
The Lamb
Little Lamb who made thee
Dost thou know who made thee
Gave thee life & bid thee feed.
By the stream & o’er the mead;
Gave thee clothing of delight,
Softest clothing wooly bright;
Gave thee such a tender voice,
Making all the vales rejoice:
Little Lamb who made thee
Dost thou know who made thee
-William Blake Songs of Innocence and of Experience
“Widdle-Wham!,” is my new name for our newest sheep, a waggy-tailed, spotted lamb whose wide, innocent eyes and squeak-toy bleat prompt a nod to Blake.
I went down the hill the other day to check on my flock of sheep and see if any ewes showed signs of incipient lambing, like full or dripping udders, swollen vulvas, or irritated behavior. I must have approached the field quietly, because my sheep didn’t turn to greet me the way they usually do, but remained shoulder to shoulder with their noses to the ground, grazing. Behind the flock by a few paces lay the year’s first new baby lamb tucked in between two hummocks of grass, snoozing in the late afternoon sun as her mother nibbled at the green pasture. And behind the lamb by only fifteen feet, crouched down and creeping forward, stubby tail twitching, was an adult bobcat— a Tyger Tyger burning bright, in my field in broad daylight!
I yelled and scrambled over the fence. Five of the last six animals born on my ranch last spring—two lambs and three goat kids— disappeared without leaving a hair behind. I suspected a bobcat, but I’d never caught one in the act. Bobcats are like that. You could loose a baker’s dozen of bobcats in the empty parking lot at the Oakland Coliseum and still not spot a single one, they’re so good at quietly blending into their surroundings. When bobcats make a kill they strike fast, bite hard through the neck and carry their limp prey off to a discreet spot to eat their meal in privacy.
The bobcat spun to face me, and then it ran off, but it didn’t run in panic. Instead, the cat loped gracefully towards the woods, and before springing over the fence it looked back at the lamb one last time, as if to say, “It’s ok. You’ll be fatter when I return anyway.”
I promptly named the lucky lamb “Widdle Wham!” and hustled her and her mother up to the corral by my house where I could keep a better watch over her. Seven days have passed, and I still have Widdle Wham! in one piece, looking cute, bleating in a tender voice, and waiting for another lamb to play with.
Of course I could put all my animals next to my house, but these security measures cost me money. When my animals are confined I have to feed them hay. Right now, I’m looking into buying a livestock guard dog. They cost a lot of money too, but I have no other alternative. In the Bible the prophet Isaiah speaks of a day when such precautions won’t be necessary— The wolf shall lie with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid…and the lion shall eat straw like an ox— but he gives no firm dates for this rosy scenario. Meanwhile, I’ve got a flock that is threatened, and a sore thumb and a pain in my leg to remind me that nowhere in the Bible does it ever say that one day the lion will lie down with the ram.
A ram is an adult male sheep. Widdle Wham’s mother is a wooly, black-faced Suffolk sheep, but her father, Alfonso, is a 200 pound Katahdin ram, a sleek, white hair sheep. Several weeks ago I observed two men hiding in the reeds on my neighbor’s property and fishing for bass in his pond. When they went to leave, they crossed onto my property, I confronted them.
“You’re trespassing,” I said.
“What are you going to do about it?” one of them asked. “Shoot us?”
“You’re putting yourselves at risk,” I said. “I’ve got a crazy ram out here, and he’ll come after you.”
One of the two smart-ass fishermen looked across the field at my goats grazing peacefully and scoffed. “They don’t look fierce to me!”
“Those are goats,” I said. “Nanny goats. Girls. They each have two horns, because that’s they way God created goats, and I don’t cut their horns off. I’m talking about a male sheep. He’s only got one horn because he broke the other one off in a grudge match with an oak tree that waved its branches at his girlfriend. He’ll come after you for less.”
“We only climbed over the fence,” one guy said. “We weren’t fishing on your property.”
“When you climb over the fence you push the wires down, and you make it easier for my animals to get out. A ram can be a dangerous animal, and I don’t want to put you or anyone else at risk. You’re not welcome here, and the next time you come, I’ll call the sheriff— or the hospital.”
The two trespassers left, but they left thinking I’m a bullshitter. I didn’t even tell them that last week Alfonso got into a fight with a 700 lb shed and knocked it off its pier-blocks. His face was all scuffed up from the battle, but he “won.”
Like most people anymore the trespassers knew very little about farm animals. They don’t know that both male and female goats naturally have horns. And if the crypto-klepto-bass-busters had seen my ram, they’d have thought he was a goat, because like most people, they don’t know that there are sheep that aren’t wooly, but have sleek hair coats. Most people even think billy goats are more dangerous than sheep, which I find odd, because my bucks have always been pussycats.
One thing I always do is to leave each buck with a doe for company so they don’t get lonely. Maybe that’s why my bucks have never been aggressive. But I don’t trust in their good manners, and I always keep an eye out, because I remember “Bill.”
When I was a kid, someone brought a billy-goat out to the ranch where I worked. Jimmy, the rancher, named the goat “Bill” and parked him in the corral while he figured out what to do with him. Bill was tame, and he had an impressive sweep of curled horns and a long beard. There was also a big old Formost Milk truck refrigerator in the corral that we used as a walk-in cooler, and we dry-aged beef in it. There were metal steps at the back we climbed to get into the cooler.
One day Jimmy and I went to remove a quarter of beef. The billy was in the corral at the far end. We were wrestling a two hundred pound beef quarter out, Jimmy backing out, me following, each of us straining to hold the ungainly beef by greasy, cold meat hooks. We couldn’t see the billy turn and charge. Bill butted Jimmy from the back, catching him right behind the knees, and he tumbled backward into the dirt with the beef—and me— on top of him. Jimmy scrambled up swearing, grabbed for a rifle, and drew a bead on Bill. But Jimmy couldn’t shoot. One view over the sights of the handsome, stupid buck peeing on his own beard with masculine pride and delight and Jimmy’s heart melted— a little bit. He lowered the rifle and we loaded Bill into the back of a Jeep pick-up with stock racks. Then we drove the old goat up the Tassajara Road into the Los Padres National Forest. We jumped Bill out of the truck on the back side of Chews Ridge at the trail head to Pine Valley, and wished him the best of luck. Two years later I overheard a story in the bar at Miller’s Lodge out in Arroyo Seco — a drunk guy bragging about the trophy big-horn mountain sheep he’d just bagged in Pine Valley.
“That makes a better story than telling everyone you shot a tame, piss stained barnyard billy,” Jimmy said.
Yesterday I went down to the field to check on my flock of sheep. I saw my old dowager fifteen year- old ewe, hooves to the heavens, struggling on her back. I scrambled over the fence and ran over to see what the problem was. I was trying to right the old gal when I heard hooves behind me. It was Alfonso, head down, coming at me like a crazy buffalo. I dodged him, but he came back at me, and on the fourth try, before I could make it over the fence, he gored me in the shin. I flipped him off me, but I sprained my thumb, and there was blood soaking through my jeans into my sock.
I got Manny to come help. We each roped Alfonso by the head and tied the lassos off to separate fence posts. As long as Alfonso didn’t strain on either rope he didn’t gag, so he stood still, looking cross, as we tried to diagnose the problem with old Mrs. Sheep. We brought her some hay and water, and she ate and drank with gusto, so we knew she wasn’t sick, but she wouldn’t stand. Just an old lady with a bum hip.
Manny told me to go to the doctor. Horn wounds are dirty, he said. He’d seen guys die from infections in Mexico.
The doctor had me on the table, and as he worked, I told him my story. He sewed up the wound with seven stitches and gave me a tetanus shot.
“I’m going to have to recommend that you take an antibiotic,” he said. “And keep the wound dry for at least 48 hours. Also, speaking strictly as a medical professional, I’m going to have to suggest that you change your story. It sounds better if you were ‘attacked by a savage, four hundred pound wild boar. But you beat it off, suffering only one deep gash from its curving, ivory tusks!’”
I thanked him for his advice, and he called for a nurse to come and dress the wound. The nurse entered. He was a fifty-ish male, balding, with a sensitive manner and round glasses.
“Oh dear,” he said. “What have we got here?”
The doctor turned and put down his clipboard.
“This man was attacked by a savage 450 lb wild boar, right here on the outskirts of Watsonville, and he was barely able to drive the beast off and shoot it with his sidearm. He got tusked in the leg, but I’ve stopped the bleeding.”
“Jesus Christ!” said the nurse. His eyes behind his glasses were wide with astonishment. “I didn’t even know that could happen anymore!”
“You see?” the doctor said. “It’s a better story!”
Copyright 2007 Andy Griffin
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