So-So Tomatoes Become Excellent When Dried

As we reported earlier, we weren't thrilled with our cherry tomato choice this summer. They were just plain dull. They were also rather large for a cherry, more like mini-plum tomatoes, which made them awkward for salads. But they were healthy plants, and very, very prolific. In situations like this it is good to remember that tomatoes which don't taste good off the bush often cook or dry well. The ratio of skin and seeds to pulp in these tomatoes made them a bad candidate for sauce, so we've been drying them.

And man, are they good dried. Like tomato candy. It's very hard not to snack on them, but I'm trying to save them for the depths of winter, when I really miss tomatoes.

We have maybe a couple of quarts of them now. Several years ago we had an absolute disaster involving a pantry moth, its many offspring, and one big jar of dried tomatoes. For this reason I'm storing the dried tomatoes in a series of small jars, to offset the risk. Another good tip for fending off moths is to freeze any food stuff which you suspect might be at risk for 4 days to kill moths and their larvae.

How did we dry our tomatoes, you ask? Usually we use our homemade solar dehydrator, but this year we've got a friend's electric dehydrator on loan. It seemed wicked to run the thing day and night, but it dries a lot faster, and with less work overall, than our solar set-up. (Oh, the wonders of Modern Living!) The one thing I did not like, though, was the constant noise. The dehydrator sounds a little like a running microwave, not loud, but persistent. I was always half-consciously expecting to hear the microwave "ding!" at any moment.

So, while the electric dehydrator let us process this crop of tomatoes in record time, I don't think we're going to ever buy one ourselves. Old Betsy, the wonky wooden dehydrator, suits us well enough.

Broom Corn--or is it Broomcorn?

Mrs. Homegrown here:

This summer I suggested we plant broom corn for no other good reason than I saw the seed pack at the nursery and thought it would be fun to make a broom. (This sort of temporary insanity often overtakes me in the seed aisle.) So without knowing anything at all about broom corn or broom making we planted a block of the stuff. Maybe I should have done a little research into broom making before planting, but I let it slide 'til harvest time. It's not a disaster--I'm still going to try to make a broom. But now I know more and would do things a little differently if I was serious about the broom biz.

I'm going to share with you what I know about growing and harvesting broom corn to make brooms. Making the broom will have to be another post.

Loofah Sponges

We talk about the joy of loofah--or luffa-- (Luffa aegyptiaca) all the time, but I don't believe we've every blogged about it here. I was reminded of it when we received a letter from Candace, who heard us on a podcast talking about how much fun it was to grow loofah sponges. She said:

I wanted to thank you for that part of the interview in particular.  I decided to grow some this summer and it has been a great joy.  It is a beautiful vine, and the flowers are always loaded with bees, bumble and honey and all kinds of other insects. By the way, luffa are delicious.  Mine has been eatable at a diameter of 1 to 1.5 in and a foot long with no problem.  There are several recipes on line for them as well. They are a definite interesting grabbing item to share at get togethers, pulling the skin off and shaking out the seeds.  I've gotten several people interested in growing them that have never grown anything before by showing them the luffa.

Thanks for the feedback, Candace! And thanks for reminding us about this great plant. It's just fantastic to be able to grow your own cleaning tools. They're expensive in stores--too expensive to consider using on dishes and such--and just try to find one that's organic and locally harvested!

The grape that ate the world

grapefail or grapewin?

We've posted about our grape problems before. Pierce's disease makes it hard to grow grapes in SoCal. We've been trying to get resistant varieties to grow on our patio arbor (aka The Masculinity Pavillion) with no success. Our most recent planting attempts are stunted and unhappy, meaning that once again we're experiencing A Summer Without Shade.

While our "resistant" varieties are proving not-so-resistant, there is at least one grape that laughs at Pierce's disease: the native California grape, Vitus californica. I believe this sturdy wild grape provides the root stock for the vineyards up North. We planted one of these near our north side fence maybe five years ago now. While the rest of our grapes wilt and struggle, this one is completely the opposite. It is monstrously huge, cheerfully indestructible, and absolutely out of control.

Without water or any encouragement whatsoever it has grown all along the side of the house, from the back yard to the front yard--some 50 feet. It long ago swamped the 6' chain link fence and now entertains itself by making grabs at both our house and our next door neighbor's.

This week we have to go next door armed with pruners and machetes and flame throwers and beat it back out of the neighbor's yard. Meanwhile, tendrils of the vine are reaching into our kitchen window. I've allowed this to go on because it pleases me to be reminded of the supremacy of nature--and also, it ensures we can't forget to go save the neighbor.

(And yes, we really should have done this over winter, when the vine was bare. As I recall, I made noises about it, and Erik grumbled, "Put it on the list..." Anyway, the monster didn't lose its leaves until quite late--maybe December or January, then seemed to sprout again immediately.)

The grape grows about six inches a day. Since I took these photos, 3 more vines have made their way in and one has reached the ceiling. It's going beyond cute to somewhat alarming.

Oh, and do we at least get fruit from this beast? No, we do not. It has never fruited. Not a single grape. californica does make fruit, supposedly, but we've never tasted it. Our vine is too busy putting all of its energy into swamping the world.

You may be asking why we don't plant a Vitis californica on our arbor. The answer is we probably will next year. Erik had his heart set on a tastier grape, so resisted that option, but judging how the newest set of contenders are struggling out there, I'm thinking we have a native in our future. Perhaps the beautiful Roger's Red.

If we do so, we will definitely be better about staying on top of the pruning. This is our lesson learned.

Vegetable Gardening in the Shade

New Zealand spinach in partial shade

Inspired by Scott Kleinrock's work at the Huntington Ranch, I've been experimenting with growing vegetables in partial shade. Two of our vegetable beds sit under two large deciduous trees. In the winter these beds get full sun, but in the summer they might get as a little as four or five hours of direct sun.

Now my shade gardening experiment may not be applicable to northern climates. In fact, the sun is so harsh here that partial shade can be a good thing, in that it keeps more delicate veggies from drying up and blowing away.

What has worked in our partially shaded beds:

• New Zealand spinach
• cucumbers
• tomatoes (not as much growth as in the sun, but they are fruiting)
• lettuce
• Swiss chard
• dandelion greens
• raspberry

Growing but struggling:

• bush beans (cover crop)

For more information on growing in the shade, check out this article in the San Francisco Chronicle,  "Best Edibles to Grow in Shade in the Bay Area"

Also, follow Scott Kleinrock's research on the Huntington Ranch blog.

And I'm interested in hearing other people's experiences growing vegetables in the shade so please leave some comments noting where you live.

Which fruits and vegetables should I buy organic?

Want the rest? You'll have to visit the site.

Mrs. Homegrown here:

My recent post about tomatoes reminded me that I needed to post this--I've been meaning to for a while.  The Environmental Working Group's 2011 Shopping Guide has a listing of foods most contaminated with pesticides, and those least contaminated: the Dirty Dozen and the Clean Fifteen. Keeping this list in mind help you make choices as to where laying out the big bucks for organic--or growing your own--is going to make the most sense.

Tomatoes don't appear on either short list, but they do appear as #34 on the EWG's ranked list of 53 fruits and veggies, #1 being the most pesticide-laden (apples) and #53 being the least (onions). So tomatoes are sort of middling contaminated.

I should note the EWG wants to make it clear that you should not necessarily flee screaming from the Dirty Dozen. This is about awareness, and choices. From their FAQ:

  Should I stop eating celery or blueberries or other produce items on your Dirty Dozen list?

No, that has never been the Shopper’s Guide message. We would certainly recommend produce from our Dirty Dozen list in lieu of other, less-healthy foods or snacks, like fat-, sugar- or additive-laden processed products. But with the Shopper’s Guide you can have all the benefits of eating more produce while substantially reducing dietary exposure to pesticides.

Shop well, and prosper.

Our favorite way to cook zucchini

It's that time of year again.

Put aside those zucchini bread recipes and try this instead.

This recipe--or technique, rather-- sounds too simple to be good, but it really works. As one friend said of the dish, "It tastes like there's a lot going on, but there's not."

All you've got to do is shred your zucchini up on the large holes of your kitchen grater. Saute the shreds in an uncovered skillet with lots of olive oil and some chopped up garlic, until there's no water in the pan, and the volume of the zucchini is reduced by about half.

This transforms the zukes into a savory, glossy, succulent mush. Maybe that's not the most elegant way to phrase it, but it's the best I can do. Yes, it does have a baby food texture, but it's really, really good, so you don't care.

I can't begin to tell you quantities--we've never measured. Just guesstimate. It will work. The one rule of thumb I can offer you is that you will lose about half the volume of the zucchini through cooking, so grate up more than you think you can eat.

The central idea here is to cook off all that water. This can't be emphasized enough. That's what makes this dish taste good. The zucchini will release a lot of water as it cooks--at least ours does, because it's very fresh. Older zucchini may be more dry. So keep it simmering at a good clip, stirring occasionally, until the water bubbles off.

Saute until there's no water pooling at the bottom of the pan. Until you start to run the risk of browning the zucchini. Then take it off the stove. Add salt and pepper to taste.

How long will this take? It varies by how much zucchini you're cooking, and how wet it is, how deep the pan is, etc., but for a general guideline, when we shred up one big boy, enough to fill a 11" skillet, it takes 20-30 minutes to cook it down.

Starting out...

Reducing...

Done.

Note: This year we're growing a type of zucchini called Albarello di Sarzana (Little Tree of Sarzana) from...as usual...Franchi. We're really liking it. It's a pretty, light green, spotted squash, and the leaves have silver patterning on them. But more important that looks, it's tasty, and seems to be resistant to powdery mildew.


ETA: Love all the recipe suggestions we're getting in the comments! Please do tell us how you like to cook zucchini.

Advances in Gardening Series: A Garlic Mystery

 

One of the new features of the garden this year is a long, trough-shaped bed that Erik installed along the edge of our patio. Its inaugural crop was garlic, which is generally a very easy plant to grow. We've done it before, many times, successfully. This year it didn't work. The stalks failed to thrive. Many plants did not set bulbs at all, looking instead like green onions. The heads that were formed are quite small. 

We're not sure why this happened. All spring Erik scoured books trying to find an obvious solution, but couldn't make any clear diagnosis. Our winter/spring weather was strange: torrential rains and cold interspersed with heat waves. Our best guess is that this irregularity created conditions ripe for various sorts of molds and bacteria which garlic does not get along with. Another possibility is that the soil in this bed, which was transferred from another bed, may have pre-existing problems. C'est la vie, as we say around the compost heap. We'll be buying garlic this year. 

We may send the soil in this bed off for testing, or just plant a legume cover crop in it for the summer, and decide what to do with it in the fall.

The bed newly constructed and planted. Alas, those were hopeful days...

It started off good, but just sort of declined steadily.

The original post about the garlic trough here.

Pop Quiz Answer: Pineapple Guava

Fruit forming. photo credit: Kurt Stüber, via Wikimedia Commons

Yes indeed, as so many of you guessed, that was a picture of our pineapple guava. For those of you who haven't seen one, meet the pineapple guava, aka feijoa or Acca sellowiana: a small, evergreen tree or shrub that bears tasty green fruits which have a Jolly Rancher-like flavor. The fruit form off of flowers that taste like cotton candy. The trick is not to eat too many flowers or you end up with no fruit.

It shouldn't be confused with regular guava, as it tastes much better. In my opinion.

Pineapple guava has pretty silver grey foliage, evergreen foliage, as I said, so can make a really nice addition to the landscape. I've heard of folks planting them in rows to form a hedge. It's a great plant for small spaces. The fruit forms late in the year, which is also nice, since so few other fruit trees bear so late.

But yes, I'm sorry, like so many things we mention here it is plant that prefers a warm climate. It's hearty to 12 degrees, and generally recommended for zone 8 and up, though I think some people have successfully grown it in colder places with special care. But when grown in a climate which is comfortable for it, the pineapple guava is a really sturdy, easy plant. We utterly ignore ours. It gets some of our laundry greywater once in a while.  That's about it in terms of care. It doesn't seem prey to insects or other ailments. All we have to concern ourselves with is keeping the birds and squirrels away from the fruit--which we do by netting the tree.

Okay, next quiz is going to be really hard...

Adventures in Gardening Series: Wrap up on the Hippie Heart: Growing lentils and flax

The Hippie Heart got a crew cut

We're clearing out our cool season crops for the warm season ones, so it's time for some reporting on the new beds we've been profiling under the "Advances in Gardening" series. We'll start with the Hippie Heart.

The Hippie Heart is a heart-shaped bed where I was intending to experiment with planting seeds straight out of the pantry, ill-advised as that might seem, just to see what happened. Erik grumbled at this plan--and for good reason, since a lot of seeds we can buy in bulk bins may be hybrid, sterile or irradiated. But I wanted to try it anyway. This first season I planted the Heart with bulk bin flax seed and lentils from a boxed lentils. The results were mixed. Sort of interesting. Not super-productive, but not a failure, because I learned lots.

First, both flax and lentils are very pretty plants. In its prime, the Heart was an attractive thing The flax grew straight and tall and made lots of periwinkle blue blooms that turned their faces to the sky.  (The mature were knocked over in a storm, so if I plant it again, I will do so with supports). The lentils, which were planted around the edges of the heart, made pleasant, rounded shapes, not big and sprawly like so many legumes can get. The folliage is delightfully delicate, almost lacy.

Fascinating flax

The flax proved fertile. The flowers died back and left pretty little round pods, each of which holds a few flax seeds. Of course, we didn't plant enough flax to really do anything with it. I have a few bunches of harvested flax now, and if I beat the pods, I might harvest a cup of flax. This doesn't seem worth the effort. The dried stalks are very pretty, and I might bring some of it inside to put in vases. Also, the chickens like them a lot, so the bulk of it will probably end up chicken fodder.

The harvest is in

What's more important to me was the experience of growing flax. I hold it in my hands and say, This is linen. This is flaxseed. This is linseed oil. Henry the VIII's shirts were made of this stuff, as were my grandmother's best napkins. Rembrandt mixed his paints with this--most oil painters do, since linseed oil is a common carrier for oil pigments. Heck, he was painting on linen, too.  The linoleum of our kitchen floor is made with this. And at this moment, all over LA, raw foodie are subsisting on dehydrated flaxseed crackers.

Flax pods. They rattle, and kittens like them!

I love growing a plant with that much cultural relevance and history. It doesn't matter so much to me if it's practical, though I may not do it again, not on this scale.

The fate of the lentils

The lentils were less successful.  They came from a box of Sabarot green lentils. They were planted in November. Months passed. They didn't flower, didn't flower. I began to figure they were sterile seeds. At the very last moment, in May,  a few tiny flowers appeared here and there, but by that time I had to take it out. So that is the risk of growing from unknown seed raised for commercial consumption. It was a risk I took. In the future, though, I'd consider planting lentils from real seed, because the plants are compact and attractive.

A cover crop option?

Here's a side thought--being a legume, lentils help draw nitrogen into their soil via the roots. If you want to boost the nitrogen in your soil, you can plant legumes, then cut them down when they flower, leaving the roots with their nitrogen nodules in the soil for the next crop to feed upon. (If you let them grow beans, they consume much of that stored nitrogen). This process is called cover cropping, and though it sounds like something only a farmer would do, you can do this in your garden beds to rest and rejuvenate them. The thing about these boxed lentils is that they didn't flower for months and months, and then hardly at all, so they're an ideal cover crop: they give you plenty of time to knock them down at your leisure.


What's next?

While I liked this experiment, I don't know if I want to continue with pantry seed--though I do have a lingering desire to grow sesame plants! I'm not even sure if I want to continue planting annuals in that bed. Edible perennials are always preferable to a lazy gardener like myself, so I might be leaning that way.  Will let you know what we figure out.


Previous posts on the Heart:

http://www.rootsimple.com/2011/01/advances-in-gardening-series-progress.html

http://www.rootsimple.com/2011/03/advances-in-gardening-series-were.html
http://www.rootsimple.com/2011/03/hippie-heart-horizontal.html

Growing Artichokes on the Sly

Artichokes also provide shade for lazy cats

It is possible to grow vegetables around the grounds of an apartment building, especially if the landlord is neglectful. Often the biggest challenge you'll face is the gardeners, who will weedwack everything to lawn level. If you can negotiate with them, or somehow put a protective barrier between your plants and the whirling cord of death, you can grow stuff.

Take this lovely artichoke. It was a sprout off of one of our own plants, which we gave to a friend who lives in a courtyard apartment. She tucked the sprout near a wall, between some permanent shrubs. It flourished through our wet winter--she says she didn't give it any care at all. Now it's way too big to weedwack, and covered with fat artichokes. It's also such a magnificent plant that it looks like it belongs there. She's harvested over forty chokes so far--that's a lot of good eating!

We realize artichokes don't grow everywhere, but investigate perennial food-bearing plants that grow well in your area. Check out the book Perennial Vegetables for inspiration. Herbs, like chives, are an easy place to start. Alternatively, consider tucking some annuals here and there among the landscaping. Garlic is a good bet. It blends easily into flower beds and grows with little care. (Of course, you'll want to take note of whether your landlord is spraying the landscape with pesticides.)

And homeowners can use these same tips to integrate edibles with their existing, ornamental landscapes without alarming their neighbors or the HOA.

Pornographic Parsnip

What the hey. It's Friday. I can't share the image here, because...uh...I just can't. But I gotta say, of all the naughty root vegetables I've seen, this is by far the naughtiest.

Link courtesy of our intrepid friends at BoingBoing

Spigarello: Nature's way of saying that broccoli is so over

Spiga-what-the-who-now? The wavy leaved stuff is the spigarello. The flowers are arugula.

Mrs. Homegrown here:

Spigarello, more properly called Cavolo Broccolo a Getti di Napoli, is a leafy green that tastes a lot like broccoli. But unlike broccoli, you eat the leaves instead of the flowers.

Unlike many of the "exotic" Italian greens we grow, this one is not bitter, and probably will pass muster with those who are fussy about vegetables. To me, it tastes like broccoli, but better. A little like broccoli sprouts. Or a cross between broccoli and kale. Let's just put it this way--I fell in love with it the first time I took a bite of it a Winnetka Farms. The texture of the leaves is sturdy but tender.

It's very easy to grow. If you don't give in to temptation and eat it prematurely, each seedling will grow into a big, sturdy plant. I think of them as broccoli trees. You harvest the leaves as you need them, leaving the plant intact to generate more leaves. Eventually it produces tiny white flowers the bees love.

We've never had any luck growing regular broccoli--I really resent fighting off aphids and cabbage worms for months, all for the privilege of harvesting one lousy head somewhere down the line. For that reason, we've always grown broccoli rabe instead, and I like that too, but rabe has a more aggressive flavor than either broccoli or spigarello, while spigarello has that true broccoli mildness.

We've been growing this as a winter crop in our southern California climate (I believe we planted the seeds back in November, and it's still going strong).  Fundamentally, Spigarello is a cool season vegetable that can take some frost. That means it's suited to be a spring or fall crop in 4-season climates. All in, in deciding how and when and where to plant it, I'd just pretend it was kale.

Our source for seeds was our friends at Winnetka Farms who sell heirloom Italian vegetable seeds at gardenedibles.com. They are out of stock right now, but will have more in the fall.

_________________________________________

• Interesting side note from Mr. Homegrown:  Sources I've come across cite spigarello as a kind of primitive ancestor vegetable of either broccoli or broccoli rabe.

• Translation request: Do any Italian-speaking readers want to help us with the translation of the full Italian name? We're thinking it might be something like "Jetting Cabbage Broccoli from Naples"--but we could be very wrong about the getti.

Concord grape, newborn and amazing

Mrs. Homegrown here:

This lovely thing is a newborn, unfurling Concord grape leaf. I had no idea it would be so beautiful. Why the crazy pink? Why does it look like it was dipped in sugar?

Even more amazing is that this event, though spectacular, is tiny. The Concord grape in question is a presently a 10-inch high stick, newly planted bare root stock, almost invisible. Only the flash of color caught my attention today and drew me to it to inspect. That this stick is suddenly bearing sugary pink wonders seems like a miracle.

Wish us luck with this grape. It is meant to shade our back porch. However, we're beset by the sharpshooters, and the disease they carry (ever wonder why SoCal doesn't grow wine?) which killed the first vine we planted, and then proceeded to kill the second one we planted, even though that one was supposed to be resistant to that blight--leaving us without summer shade on the porch for...how many years now? Fingers crossed that this grape will thrive, and grow from 10 inches high to 10 feet high and spreading.

Avocados

Green gold!

We're very lucky that when we purchased our house 13 years ago it came with a mature, and delicious avocado tree. Wanting to know more about how to care for that tree I attended a remarkable lecture at the Huntington given by avocado experts Carl Stucky and Julie Frink. From the Huntington lecture I gleaned the following factoids:

• Avocados varieties are divided into three "races": Mexican, Guatemalan, and West Indian.
• Avocados are extremely frost sensitive, more so than citrus.
• Mulch, mulch, mulch! Avocados like a thick layer (6 to 12 inches) of course mulch. Once you mulch you have to keep mulching because the shallow roots of avocado trees will often grow up into the mulch.
• Avocados like a well drained soil and won't tolerate wet feet. So if you dig a hole and fill it with water and that water sticks around for a day, plant something else.
• Avocados use a lot of zinc and may need supplemental applications of zinc sulfate placed in shallow holes.
• What few pests avocados have can be sprayed off with a hose. 
• Occasional deep waterings flush out chlorides in the soil that can cause leaves to turn brown at the tips and poor fruit production. In fact if the first rain of the season is less than 3 inches, you should irrigate to flush out salts that build up during the dry season.
• Avocados take a long time to ripen on the tree--12 months or more depending on variety.

For additional reading Stucky recommended the following internet resources:

Avocadosource.com
California Avocado Society
California Avocado Commission (The "growers" part of their website)

One thing that I discovered this year is that you can leave avocados on the tree for a very long period. We had at least a six month harvest window. There's actually still a few on the tree.

As for squirrels, Stucky's advice involved extraordinary rendition and water boarding, but we'll spare you the details.

Borage: It's what's for dinner

image courtesy of wikimedia commons

Our friend Milli (Master Gardener of the Milagro Allegro community garden) stopped by today to pick up some sourdough starter. On seeing our back yard swamped abundant with borage (Borago officinalis), she mentioned that she's been really digging borage tacos lately. This was very exciting news to us, because we'd never eaten our borage leaves--only the flowers.

So tonight I went out and cut a whole mess of stiff, prickly borage leaves. The prickles vanish on cooking. Some sources say only to use small leaves for cooking but I say fie to that. I used leaves of all sizes and after cooking there was no difference between them. Borage is actually rather delicate under all its spikes and cooks down considerably in to a very tender, spinach-like consistency.

Instead of making little tacos with it, we folded it into tortillas with a bit of goat's milk gouda to make yummy green quesadillas--a quick, light and satisfying meal at the end of a busy day.

How did we cook it? -->

Bare Root Fruit Tree Season is Here!

Yet another Internet "un-boxing." This time fruit trees.

Our bare root fruit tree order just arrived from Bay Laurel Nursery. We ordered:

• Tropic Snow Peach on Nemaguard rootstock
• Panamint Nectarine on Citation rootstock
• CoffeeCake (Nishimura Wase) Persimmon
• Saijo Persimmon (pollinator for CoffeeCake)
• Flavor Finale Pluot on Myrobalan 29C rootstock
• Santa Rosa Plum on Citation rootstock (pollinator for the Flavor Finale Pluot)
• Flavor Delight Aprium on Citation rootstock

The plan is to follow the Dave Wilson nursery's backyard orchard culture guidelines which we blogged about in detail here. In short, you plant trees close together and prune the hell out of them to keep them small and manageable. We also used Dave Wilson's handy fruit and nut harvest date chart to, as much as possible, assure that we have some kind of fruit ready to eat during most of the year. All of the varieties we chose have low chill hour requirements since we live in USDA zone 10.

Los Angeles Fruit Tree Pruning Workshops

Homegrown Neighbor here:

Growing fruit trees has obvious rewards. You can eat the fruit at its peak, straight off of the tree, full of flavor, aromatic and juicy. And the sight of an apple, peach or other deciduous tree in bloom is an ephemeral yet breathtakingly beautiful sight. But many of these trees will not bear good fruit without proper pruning. Good pruning encourages stronger limbs able to hold heavy fruits, prevents limb breakage, improves air circulation and light penetration and overall makes for a more attractive tree. Improper pruning or sheer neglect can mean weak, spindly limbs, a chaotic looking, ugly tree and puny fruits.

But how do you know what to cut? I'll be teaching two workshops this weekend for the locals. The first is this Saturday, January 15th at The Learning Garden in Venice. The workshop will run from 11 am-12:30 pm and there is a suggested donation of $25. The Learning Garden is at the southeast corner of Walgrove Avenue and Venice Blvd.

Then on Sunday, the 16th at Milagro Allegro Community Garden in Highland Park at 1pm as part of their 'Organic Sundays' series I'm teaching another one.

And for those of you who aren't local, the Homegrown Evolution team is going to work on some web based stuff for you. I'm going to teach Mr. Homegrown how to prune (in exchange for help baking bread, which I'm terrible at) and we will take photos for a blog post explaining the basics of fruit tree pruning.

The Making of a Great Olive Oil

Kelly admires the olives

Thanks to our good friend Dale Benson, Kelly and I got to see how a really high quality olive oil is made. Dale knows Matt Norelli, the wine and olive oil maker at Preston Vineyards of Dry Creek, an organic family farm near Healdsburg in Northern California. Matt was nice enough to let us watch the complicated olive oil machinery in action.

First the freshly picked olives go into a big hopper (above). They are then crushed and churned (below).

After the churning process (called malaxation) the pulpy olive mass goes into a high speed centrifuge:

Matt (left) Dale (right) with the centrifuge

At the end of all this machinery the oil pours out of a spigot and into a steel drum:

We all had the great privilege of tasting the freshly squeezed oil. I won't soon forget that heavenly flavor. Matt told us that it takes around a ton of olives to make 25 to 30 gallons of oil. The olives come from a thousand trees that are tucked around the vineyards.

If you're ever in Northern California the Preston Vineyard is well worth a visit. We got to taste a Barbera wine that they make--quite amazing. They also bake a delicious sourdough bread, keep a flock of laying hens and sell cured olives. And the scenery? Let's just say it was difficult to come back to gritty Los Angeles.

Preston Vineyards website with visiting hours and map.

Lou Preston's olive curing recipe (scroll down towards the bottom of the page).

More Medlar Mania

We blogged about the medlar, a rare fruit that tastes kinda like perfumed apple butter, last week. We left out a few bits of medlar trivia and linkages.

First off that Caravaggio painting above, "Boy with a Basket of Fruit." Please note the medlars:

In other breaking medlar news:

The fine folks at Winnetka Farms, responsible for this outbreak of medlar mania, have in-depth medlar factoids on their blog.

Graham Keegan, who went on the medlar harvest, shot some glamorous photos of us and, of course, the medlars:

Want to buy a medlar tree? Check out the selection at Raintree Nursery--enter "medlar" in the search thingy.

Anduhrew has a post on his blog about medlars, including Shakespeare's shout-out to medlars in Romeo and Juliet.

And, lastly, CRFG Operative left a comment on our blog about growing medlars in San Diego with a warming about fire blight:

I was able to grow medlars down here in San Diego county with no problems. They were grafted on a pear tree and eventually fire blight killed the limbs they were on so I lost them. We are in a colder spot but still are only about 15 - 20 miles inland from the coast. If you have an existing pear tree you may want to graft medlar onto that so you don't have to plant a whole tree to see if they will do well in your area. Make sure you sterilize pruning tools and grafting knives between cuts and do not share infected scion wood. This will help to control fire blight. If it does develop cut it out a couple of inches down into non-infected wood before it takes further hold.