Ladybug Letters

Our Lady’s Birds

Posted by: Shannon Muck / Posted on: / Category: Ladybug Letters, Ladybug Postcard

We call them “Ladybugs” but they’re beetles, not “bugs.” Scientists call the Ladybug family “the Coccinellidae” and count some 5000 different species around the world. The name “Coccinellidae” comes from the Latin “coccineus,” meaning “scarlet.” But while the different coccinellid species from around the world all share a common, dome-shaped form to their shiny-shelled bodies, they are not all scarlet in color, nor do all species have black spots on their backs. But try telling a kindergartner that there are yellow ladybugs, orange ladybugs, black ladybugs, and even spotless ladybugs; not only will they not believe you, they won’t want to believe you!

In England, early images of The Virgin Mary often portrayed her wearing a scarlet robe so it made sense from a medieval perspective to call the little red-shelled beetles that made the gardens their homes “Our Lady’s Birds.” The English Seven Spot Ladybird beetle’s “look,” rocking black spots on a shiny red shell is so striking and memorable that it’s image “branded” the entire family forever. When you factor in that the seven black spots on the Ladybird beetle’s shell recall the Virgin Mother’s “Seven Sorrows,” then the name is even richer in meaning. When Our Lady’s Birds crossed the Atlantic to the Americas they got their names changed at Ellis Island, just like so many other immigrants. The name, “Ladybug,” is an Americanism.

Be they birds, bugs, or beetles, these cute little creatures are fierce predators in the garden and gobble many times their weight in pesty aphids during their lives. Interestingly enough, the Ladybugs that eat the most pests don’t look like Ladybugs at all. Like all beetles, the Ladybugs have a larval form of life before they pupate and become the cute, red shelled, black spotted creatures we love to find in our gardens. The larval, or nymph stage, ladybugs eat a lot more pests than the mature, hard-shelled forms. For the gardener, the goal has to be to create an environment so attractive to the Ladybugs that the mature beetles fly in, have a meal, then decide to lay eggs. If you buy a jar of ladybugs and turn them loose in your garden they may all fly away. So save your money and create the garden they fly to!

Planting a mix of perennial and annual plant species will give the Ladybugs a place to take shelter and lay their eggs even when one part of the garden is being turned under. If you don’t spray your garden with pesticides then some pests will be able to survive, which will give the hatching ladybug larvae something to eat. We aim to create a delicate balance wherein there are enough living pests to support a permanent predator population of Ladybugs, but not so many pests as to damage the crops. At our home ranch we’ve planted a drought tolerant hedgerow at the edge of our citrus orchard that is only a year old, but is already serving as habitat for aphids- and the Ladybugs that feed on them.

~Special Note~

As the weather is getting warmer, the sun is rising earlier and the harvesting begins with the sunrise, we will be closing our East Bay/Peninsula shop by 6 PM on the Wednesday evenings before the Friday delivery. We close our San Francisco & Mystery Thursday shops on Wednesday mornings by 8 AM and our Santa Cruz/Los Gatos shop by 8 AM, on Monday mornings. Please get your orders in early so you don’t miss out on the harvest! Thank you all again for being such a part of our bountiful farm!

If you haven’t ordered a Mystery Box recently, now is a great time to get in on spring deliciousness! LadybugBuyingClub

The Many Scents of Lavender

Posted by: Shannon Muck / Posted on: / Category: Ladybug Letters, Ladybug Postcard

Planting a garden is a blatant act of optimism; even the tiniest seed takes some effort to sow and any reward a harvest might bring is “deferred gratification” at best, and only an illusion if the bugs or deer or gophers or rabbits get there first. So when the Covid inspired “shelter in place” protocols went into effect and Starr & I were stuck at home for most of our time we started planning and planting for an eventual lavender labyrinth. It must have been therapeutic to have a project to work on that could only be fully realized once the pandemic was over and we could invite people over. So now that Covid almost seems to be winding down here in Central California where are we at with our labyrinth and why have we chosen to create it with lavender?

Lavender is beautiful and it smells magical so you don’t need to be a deep thinker to understand why people chose to grow it in their gardens. And the fact that lavender has been reputed to be a calming herb that is useful in treating anxiety, depression, and insomnia certainly makes this a good plant to cultivate during a pandemic. But as apropos as a lavender bed might have been during a pandemic we’d actually been planting different varieties of the herb in our garden for over a year before. The calming effects of beauty and alluring scent are never out of style, and by the time the pandemic hit Starr and I had a good sense of which types of lavender would grow well for us here in Corralitos.

There are at least 47 different species of wild lavender that occupy a variety of habitats from the Cape Verde and Canary Islands in the Mid-Atlantic all the way across Southern Europe and Mediterranean Africa to Southwest Asia and Southeast India. And then there are the myriad hybrid forms of lavender propagated by farmers and plant breeders. In the popular imagination there are three main types for gardeners to consider; Spanish lavender, French lavender, and English lavender. Academic botanists will recoil in horror at such a gross simplification of the Lavandula family’s complex taxonomical issues. As the son of an Academic botanist let me say for the record that I understand a full and complete understanding of the taxonomy of the Lamiaceae remains elusive, but I’m not holding my breath while I wait for a scientific consensus. For our purposes today I find the simplistic reduction of Lavandula species into “Spanish,” “French,” and “English” forms calms my anxiety.

Spanish lavender, or Lavandula stoechas, is a Mediterranean lavender that is very robust and hardy and can grow from a tiny seedling into a waist high shrub in a year. This is the lavender species that was most likely grown or gathered from the wild during the ancient times. Lavandula stoechas has flower buds that are big, fat, and almost tarry with very aromatic essential oils. Most people believe that this highly scented herb got its name from the Latin verb, “lavare,” meaning “to wash,” because lavender plants were used to make soap or used in infusions to fumigate clothes. The word Latin “Lavare” is cognate with the modern English word “laundry” and the Middle English word “Lavendrye,” meaning “place of washing.” Of course the Etymologists are just as prone to controversy as the Botanists, so there are rogue wordsmiths who believe that Lavender takes its name from the Latin “livere,” meaning “blueish.” Whatever…..

“French Lavender” is a blurry term that can refer to either Lavandula stoechas or

Lavandula dentata. I’m using it to refer to a Lavandula dentata variety that has a thinner flower bud than the “Spanish” lavender as well as a somewhat different scent. The French worked with Lavender species to create varieties that were especially useful in the perfume trade. Lavandula dentata has a more refined look to the stem and a somewhat less aggressive habit of growth than the “Spanish lavender.” It’s worth noting that the French refer to Lavandula dentata as “English lavender.” We’re not ICE agents here, so we’re not checking passports. We value the Lavandula dentata varieties for their scent and for the nice, long, spicy wands we can make from their dried stems.

“English lavender,” or Lavandula angustifolia, is yet another complex tribe of lavenders. Like it’s Spanish and French cousins, English lavender is a highly scented member of the Lamiaceae, or mint family, and compared to them it has flowers that are on the purple end of the spectrum. The English lavenders we’re growing are typically shorter in stature with a brighter blue to the flower petals than the French types. Our English lavenders are the most disciplined and compact in their growth habit, making them the most desirable plant to use as a low hedge in a labyrinth, and they make nice, smaller bouquets. Over the last 100 years there’s been more culinary interest in lavender than in the past. Yes, long ago Lavandula stoechas was used to make spiced wine, but in these days the English types have been more frequently used to flavor pastas, desserts, or teas. Please note that drying increases the “potency” of lavender, so if you choose to cook with lavender you can use rather less dried lavender than fresh flowers to achieve the same effect.

I’m not a doctor, nor do I claim to have any medical insights; if the smell of lavender gives me a lift and dispels anxiety, then that is a purely personal issue. If you look up Lavender on the internet you’ll find any number of health related claims as well as warnings that no scientific tests prove the health benefits of lavender. I wouldn’t want to advocate for the use of any homegrown herb if it meant that a major pharmaceutical corporation might lose sales for their anti-anxiety products. The meditative virtues of walking the path of a labyrinth have not been proven by science either, so where are we with that project?

The first step we took was to circumscribe the outer rim of the labyrinth to be by cutting through the turf with a tractor. The labyrinth will have a diameter of around 80 feet, with a twelve foot wide circular center. The second step was to begin sowing lavender seeds in our greenhouse. We will use the so-called English lavenders for the interior rings of our design. While we’re waiting for our lavender plants to size up I’ve been developing the water system that will serve the planting. The old spring box that my Great Grandfather dug out and lined with bricks still works well to provide water and I had a new pump put in. I’m now in the process of digging the ditches that will carry the water to the drip system that we’ll use to irrigate the lavender beds that will define the paths of the labyrinth.

So far, so good. Hopefully the Covid crisis will end soon. By the end of the year I’m hoping to have the labyrinth finished. In the future we’ll be able to invite people to walk the lavender scented paths with us. And right now we’re enjoying a nice harvest on all the lavenders we planted before Covid when we were testing out our location and our soil to see if the plants would do well here. They do! And this week we’ve got a “Lavender Flight” special to offer, with a bunch each of Spanish, French, and English lavender so that you can enjoy their different their scents.

~Special Note~

If you haven’t ordered a Mystery Box recently, now is a great time to get in on spring deliciousness! LadybugBuyingClub

The Milpa and the Holy Trinity

Posted by: Shannon Muck / Posted on: / Category: Ladybug Letters, Ladybug Postcard

We planted the first stage of our little “milpa” this weekend. A milpa is a “corn patch.” The City of Milpitas is named after the little corn patches that characterised the area during California’s Spanish colonial period. But a classic traditional milpa is always more than corn. The Mesoamerican farmers who created the milpa typically grew a diversity of crops in their corn fields. The corn stalks grew high and vining beans snaked up the stalks, using them for support. Broad leaved squash plants would grow between the scattered hummocks of corn, and the dense canopy they formed would choke out the weeds. Crops that we moderns might think of as noxious weeds to be exterminated, like pigweed or lambsquarters, were “quelites” to the farmers of the milpas and they’d gather them to add leafy greens to their diet. A fully realized milpa consisted of Corn, squash, and beans -the Holy Trinity- surrounded by a cohort of useful and nutritious herbs.

I’m playing around with the milpa idea for fun, and to see how well it works out in practice. I see my milpa as a typical type garden which might be found anywhere along the French-Mexican border. For my hard squash I’ve chosen to plant “Doran,” an heirloom French squash for the Cucurbita moschata- like a butternut, but round, like a pumpkin. I think the Doran hard squash will be an excellent size for our farm’s supporters, since they’re small enough for us to fit in the box and for our supporters to consume in one meal. We received seed for this crop from our friend and neighbor, Zea, at Fruitilicious Farm, who has been saving this old fashion variety. Any purslane weeds that come up in our milpa we’ll let go to seed so that we can have “verdolaga.” Purslane, AKA Verdolaga, which is esteemed as a cooking green in both the French and Mexican traditions.

For corn, I’m going with a purple and white Oaxacan corn that has big, floury kernels for making masa, or corn meal. Fidel, our greenhouse foreman, brought us this corn which has big, sturdy stalks that the beans can climb up. For beans I’m going to plant The Japanese selection of a purple seeded runner bean that originated in Oaxaca but is now known in

the trade as Scarlet Runner beans or “Akahana Mame.” I’ll wait until the corn is up before I plant the beans so that they won’t choke the poor corn plants out. And to help the beans find direction up I’m also putting some sunflowers in my milpa. Sunflowers are another gift of the Americas to the rest of the world, and the ancient farmers who developed them treated them as a grain crop for their rich seed. I don’t think I can beat our local birds to a crop of sunflower seeds, so I’m growing some ornamental varieties for late summer bouquets.

A Mexican farmer would be sure to have cilantro somewhere in the milpa, and I’ll plant some too, but I’m also going to take advantage of a shadier side of the field and plant cilantro’s French cousin, chervil. In my experience, if the chervil is happy enough it’ll self seed, and soon I can count on having it as a low grade “weed” to enjoy.

I won’t plant any tomatillo de milpa- the tiny wild tomatillo that is the forerunner of the big, green tomatillos we see in supermarkets. For a couple of years in the mid 1980s I shared my house with the Campos family, and Ramiro Campos planted some tomatillo de milpa seedlings from his home ranch in Sam Andreas, Michoacan. The progeny of those original plants are now with us forever, and everywhere a drop of water falls in my field there’s a wild tomatillo seed to drink it up and sprout. We can’t let them all go to seed, but we’ve saved a few along the path so that later we can grab a handful of the tiny tomatillos they bear when we need to make a green salsa.

We have a lot to look forward to this fall and I can’t wait to see what comes out of the milpa. Meanwhile, basil season has started in the greenhouse. Here are a few cautionary tips about storing basil:

1. Basil is a mint family member. You can keep it fresh by re-cutting the stems when you get it and putting them in a vase of fresh water, like a bouquet. If the water stays clean enough and you don’t eat them first, some stems may even set little roots.

2. Basil doesn’t like getting cold. If you put the basil in a vase of water, don’t then put it in the fridge. Leave it out in a cool spot out of direct sunlight. The same advice goes for basil that you simply un bunch, wash and put between damp paper towels- keep out of the cold! When basil gets too cold the leaves tend to turn black.

3. Don’t try too hard to save your basil. Eat it! There’s more coming, and when we have enough we’ll be doing some specials for people who want to make larger batches of pesto.

We have a lot to look forward to this fall and I can’t wait to see what comes out of the milpa.

~Special Note~

If you haven’t ordered a Mystery Box recently, now is a great time to get in on spring deliciousness! LadybugBuyingClub

Brand New Potatoes!

Posted by: Shannon Muck / Posted on: / Category: Ladybug Letters, Ladybug Postcard

New potatoes are just that-new! And they’re probably my favorite crop of the year. We’re picking some rosemary this week too so that we can make one of my favorite recipes possible for you; Here’s our strategy for our potato crop:

Potatoes are a great crop because they can be an integral and satisfying component to so many recipes and I like to grow a couple of tons of them. But if potatoes are going to be harvested to be stored for use over a long period of time so that they can be used as needed they must be “cured.” Not that they’re “sick.”

Potato plants do make fruits with seeds, but we don’t plant potato seeds. Instead, we plant “seed potatoes,” which are pieces of potato with viable “eyes,” or buds, that will sprout new foliage. A potato is a tuber, a starchy, engorged stem, not a root. When we plant a piece of stem we’ll get a new crop of potatoes that are a clone of the original potato plant. The potato pieces we plant sprout and grow into bushy plants that reach about two feet

high, and when they start to bloom we know that they are setting a new crop of potato tubers underground. Red skinned potatoes make rose colored flowers. Yellow and white potatoes have white blossoms, and purple potatoes have purple flowers. If these flowers get pollinated they will eventually form small, hard green fruits full of seed that resemble their tomato cousins, but we don’t worry about them. Instead, we wait for the potato plants to turn yellow, then wilt, and “die back.”

Of course, the mature potato plants are not really dying when they mature. As the potato vines are shriveling up, what’s really happening is that the young potato tubers under the ground are withdrawing the vitamins and minerals from the leaves above and storing them, and all that extra nutrition goes towards making the tuber a repository of energy that will be available to power the next generation of foliage to sprout when the time comes. As the soil dries out the skin of the buried tuber dries out too, becoming the tough jacket that will cloak and protect the potato and prevent wilting. When all the energy has been withdrawn from the old foliage and the skin has firmed up then the potato is said to be “cured” and it can last underground until the conditions are right for it to sprout anew. We won’t leave them in the ground because we don’t want to feed the gophers and beetles and wild pigs. We’ll dig the potatoes up and store them in a dark, cool, dry place. Potatoes aren’t very smart, so they won’t know the difference between the soil and the storage shed and they’ll wait happily enough for the conditions to be right to sprout anew.

When we’re sorting and washing our potato crop for you we will take out all the potatoes that were damaged in harvesting, or were maybe chewed on by a beetle or gopher, or are sun scalded on one side. Another farmer might throw them away or feed

them to the pigs, but I save them. I like to make an early, thick planting of these cull potatoes that are too ugly to sell. When I see this crop flower I know there is a swarm of tiny potatoes growing underground. Once the young potatoes have swollen to about the size of golf balls we’ll dig them up as “new potatoes.” The gophers, beetles, and wild pigs that would gobble up our potato crop are not stupid; they know that there is almost nothing on earth as succulent and tasty as a fresh, young potato.

These new potatoes are not cured. We are plucking them from under green plants. The skins are so tender that sometimes we can’t wash these new potatoes or we’ll remove the skins by accident and spoil them. We let the cooks wash the new potatoes right before they prepare them. New potatoes will wilt quickly or rot after being harvested, just like broccoli, lettuce, or any other fresh vegetable. But new potatoes are so tender and tasty that storage isn’t an issue- they’ll be eaten too quickly for storage to be an issue. I like mine prepared very simply by washing them, splashing them with olive oil, sprinkling them with a bit of minced, fresh rosemary and roasting them at 350 until they’re ready. New potatoes don’t take long to cook.

For our main crop of cured potatoes we plant certified disease free seed potatoes that we buy from seed dealers each year. We could harvest new potatoes from this main crop as well but we’d probably lose a lot of money doing it. We need to let the main potato crop get as mature as possible to guarantee ourselves the biggest yield if we’re going to cover our costs and make a little profit. New potatoes are a treat, a luxury, almost a novelty, that you never find in stores, but it would be hard to make them pay without charging an arm and a leg. We could say that spring is “new potato season” but it’s really more of a moment. And that time is now.

~Special Note~

If you haven’t ordered a Mystery Box recently, now is a great time to get in on spring deliciousness! LadybugBuyingClub

What Kind of Pea?

Posted by: Shannon Muck / Posted on: / Category: Ladybug Letters, Ladybug Postcard

The girl was SO insanely sensitive, and yet her morbid fragility was somehow proof positive of her nobility? I was confused. Do you remember the Princess and the Pea? As a youth, I puzzled over her story. The poor thing couldn’t sleep. She complained that she’d tossed and turned all night because of a stone in her bed, and after the palace staff pulled the bedding from the frame, seven feather comforters in all, they found that it was a single, tiny dried pea seed at the bottom that had provoked all the distress. Why were we supposed to validate this girl’s hyper-sensitivity by crowning her? Compare the Princess of the pea to Tanya Tucker, the reigning “princess” of Country Music when I was a young. “Would you lay with me in a field of stone?” Tanya sang. She was 14 at the time, a year older than I was. Now that I’m an old fart with a snail mail box full of cremation insurance offers and AARP fliers I’m not so worried about figuring women out. I find myself wondering more about the pea that caused the Princess so much discomfort. “What kind of pea was it ?” I ask myself. The answer is not obvious.

Pea Soup Andersen’s, a popular restaurant chain for travelers with locations along California’s Highway 101 as well as on I-5, bases its menu around “split-pea” soup. The pea that Andersen’s uses would be a modern variety of Pisum sativum that has been selected by plant scientists for its utility in producing dried peas. A “Split pea” is not a

Snow pea flowers

specific variety of pea.The pea plant is a “dicotyledon,” meaning that the seed is an embryonic plant that will germinate to present a pair (“di”) of infant leaves (cotyledons). A dried pea seed can be “split” into two halves, each part being a half of the starchy dicot pair that is enveloped by the hull of the seed. The Snow pea, the Sugar Snap pea, and the English pea are also varieties of Pisum sativum developed for use as fresh vegetables, but you could let their seeds mature on the vine until dry, then “split” them and make them into soup too, if you wanted or needed to.

The Andersen who founded Pea Soup Andersen’s was a Danish immigrant using a traditional family recipe. Hans Christian Anderson, who wrote the Princess and the Pea back in the mid 1800s was a Dane too, so it seems likely that they’d both be thinking of the same pea, but there are some concerns we must address before we can be confident about this because there are other possible peas that could have been used by a conniving palace staff to “trigger” the aristocratic tendencies of a potential princess. Consider the “Sweet Pea,” or Lathyrus oderatus, for example.

Lathyrus oderatus, like Pisum sativum, is an “Old World ” species meaning that the plant evolved in Europe. (Yes, the American half of the planet is just as old a world as is Denmark, but we won’t address that issue now.) The Sweet Pea was native to Southern Europe- places like Sicily, Southern Italy, and the Aegean Islands. While the seeds of the Sweet Pea are toxic and inedible, the amazing fragrance and lovely form of the sweet pea would have been appreciated by royal and humble gardeners alike. We’re talking Fairy Tales here, so it’s entirely possible that the palace maid charged with hiding a dried pea in the bedding was herself having a relationship with a palace gardener (probably named “Boots”) and maybe he gave her a Sweet Pea seed from his seed inventory for her “Royal Blood Test.”

Or what about the Black Eyed Pea? The Black Eyed pea is a form of Cowpea, or Vigna unguiculata, and was originally developed in Africa. The Black Eyed pea may be one of humankind’s oldest cultivated crops. Vigna unguiculata can tolerate very sandy soils as well as high heat, which makes it an especially valuable plant in the Sahel of Africa. It’s unlikely that the Black Eyed Pea would have been cultivated by Boots, the Danish Royal Gardener, but we can’t rule out a Black Eyed Pea from being found under a stack of mattresses. After all, Black pepper, or Piper nigrum, is an essential spice in traditional Danish Split Pea soup and the Danes couldn’t grow black pepper either. The Royal cook would have needed to buy her spices from a Spice trader. The Spice trade was dominated by Muslim traders who gathered their wares from across the Muslim world, from the Indies in the East to Timbuktu in the Sahel. Mohammed was himself a spice trader before he drifted into prophecy. Maybe a Spice Trader sold the palace kitchen a “magic pea” which could turn a whining, entitled, malingering teen into a princess. Weirder things have happened in Fairy Tale world.

And then there’s the “Chickpea,” or Cicer arientum. Chickpeas are also called “Garbanzo beans,” but they’re beans in name only, since the true bean is an entirely “New World” phenomena. Chickpeas were developed in the Levant, but they made their way into Northern Europe early on. Charlemagne, the Holy Roman Emperor, had chickpeas served in his court over a thousand years ago, for example. A Chickpea is a dicotyledon just like the Sweet Pea, the Black Eyed Pea or the Pisum sativum peas, but its seeds are considerably larger. The size of the Chickpea speaks against its use in tests for nobility. If the true test of royal blood is to be capable of complaining about the smallest thing, then a girl only noticing a Chickpea would certainly be less refined than one who could find discomfort in Sweet Pea seed. Tanya Tucker comes to mind again; she could find relief laying in a field of stone. Tanya’s no princess!

So the controversy can’t be resolved at the moment. For the last couple of weeks we’ve been enjoying snap peas. This week we begin the English Pea harvest. We even have planted a crop of Chickpeas, and we’ll see how they do. Peas of any kind are an important crop for the farm because they are legumes. Legume species have the important ability to capture unusable atmospheric nitrogen and convert it into a form that plants can use as fertilizer. Legumes have a symbiotic relationship with a bacteria that infect the roots of the host plants and pay for their stay taking in and digesting nitrogen gas, then excreting it in a form that is available to the plant. That’s pretty “magical,” if you ask me. We grow peas to feed you, but we also plant peas in our cover crops to feed the soil so that we can keep farming the land happily ever after.

~Special Note~

If you haven’t ordered a Mystery Box recently, now is a great time to get in on spring deliciousness! LadybugBuyingClub

A Different Type of Sting!

Posted by: Shannon Muck / Posted on: / Category: Ladybug Letters, Ladybug Postcard

As I cultivated my rows of young lime trees yesterday with my little tractor I looked down with satisfaction as the rototiller ground the carpet of green weeds in front of me into the trail of soft fluffy earth rolling away behind me. If the weeds continued to grow they’d use up the subsoil moisture that I want to be available for the limes. We use drip irrigation to water the citrus as economically as we can and there’s a drip emitter at the base of every tree, so I’ll still have to hand weed around the base of the trees where I can’t reach with the tiller so that they don’t grow thick and rank. I don’t need a thatch of weeds providing a nice, fresh, green hiding place for slugs and snails because they can do so much damage to citrus. The weeds had to go, but I was happy to see that there are so many stinging nettles in my orchard.

Down in the canyon below my home and my little citrus orchard there’s a swampy wetlands full of ducks, frogs, bobcats….and nettles; lots of nettles, a jungle of nettles, olive-drab nettles that tower over seven feet high, with tough, fibrous stalks. If you touch these nettles they’ll sting you with a pain that comes on as fast as an electric shock but lingers like a burn. Needless to say, I don’t go down in the swamp very often.

The nice nettles in the orchard are an entirely different species of plant. The garden nettles will sting you, all right, but it’s a surprising, irritating prickle that they deliver, not the searing flash that their swampy cousins lash out with. And the two plants look a lot different, too, with the garden nettles being fine-stemmed, low-growing, and bright, emerald green in color. It’s said that a weed is merely a plant out of place, and garden nettles definitely live up to this wisdom.

Garden nettles “belong” in the garden; they’re only weeds when or where I don’t want them growing. Sometimes when I have a nice patch of tender, garden nettles I’ll harvest and sell them to the folks that know these “weeds” were brought to California by Italian immigrants who grew them as cooking greens. Garden nettles are excellent used, like spinach, to make savory green sauces or winter-time ravioli fillings. Steep a pinch of garden nettles in hot water and you’ll have a soothing glass of herbal tea in minutes.

The nettle’s many virtues may seem surprising, but when you research many of the so-called “weeds” in a garden you’ll discover that they too are not “wild” plants that have crashed the gates of your garden, but are, in fact, plants that were once esteemed by gardeners and only thrive in garden settings or “disturbed earth.” Sow thistles, for example, are an example of a very antique form of lettuce. “White Goosefoot,” also known as “Fat Hen,” or “Lambsquarters,” is a primitive spinach. In the right context many garden weeds are still appreciated. I’ve sold a lot of Lambsquarters over the years to Greek restaurants, for example, and my Oaxacan farm crew always take home big bunches of this “weed” to cook at home when they can. But nobody that I was aware of ever wanted to eat any swamp nettles.

One day at the Farmers Market a frequent market shopper breezed past the sign I’d posted at the back of my stall that read “BEWARE- STINGING NETTLES. USE TONGS TO HANDLE!” She thrust her hands into the fresh nettles and then let out a little squeak of pain. I stepped over to point to the sign and hand her the tongs. “They’re not called ‘stinging nettles’ for nothing,” I said.

“Well, they didn’t sting much,” she replied.

“A nettle is covered by tiny tubular silica hairs which are hollow and filled with histamines and acids,” I told her. “The nettle’s sting doesn’t come from an actual prickle, or thorn.When you touch the nettle the silica hairs shatter and the toxins splatter onto you, giving you a chemical burn. When we wash and bag the fresh nettle we break a lot of those hairs, so the leaves don’t sting as much as they might have when they were first picked”

“Do you have any nettles that sting more?” she asked.

So I told her about the swamp nettles and how ferocious they are.

“Those sound perfect,” she said.

So I told her how they’re not preferred for cooking. “Swamp nettles are coarse and fibrous and don’t cook up with a nice appealing green color like garden nettles do,” I said. “When they’re cooked they look like wet army pants; not sexy, not nice to eat and not fun to pick.”

“Swamp nettles sound great,” she said. “I’m not a cook. I run a flogging booth at the Folsom Street Fair and I need wands of fresh, organic stinging nettles.”

“Hmmm,” I thought, reflecting on the wealth of swamp nettles down in the canyon. “Is this an opportunity for ‘brand-able, niche marketing?”

No, I decided. I’d be the first one to get stung, since I can hardly ask someone else to pick them. So my nettles are still down there, growing in the mud. But my garden nettles are tilled under now, and I’m happy. There weren’t enough nettles to harvest as a green but a healthy crop of weeds means that the soil is rich. Nettles appreciate lots of nitrogen in the soil, and they’ll hardly even germinate if ambient nitrogen levels are low. When I see that the nettles are no longer coming up like they used to I know I need to fertilize again. As it is, the ground is perfect for a crop of pumpkins. Maybe by October Covid will be in our rear view mirror and kids will be able to go trick-or-treating. I’ll plant some Jack ‘O Lantern pumpkins in between my little lime trees as a marker for my hopes that this year is better and healthier than the last.

~Special Note~

If you haven’t ordered a Mystery Box recently, now is a great time to get in on spring deliciousness! LadybugBuyingClub

From Oaxaca to Watsonville

Posted by: Shannon Muck / Posted on: / Category: Ladybug Letters, Ladybug Postcard

Fidel is working out a grass roots level marketing program for his nascent farm. He shows up on Sunday mornings at the laundromat where the Oaxacan women congregate with his car loaded full of fresh produce. Watsonville is no food desert. Our town is surrounded by farms, many people who live in town work on farms, and if you stroll around the suburbs you’ll see plenty of gardens. If there’s a big patch of fava beans in someone’s yard you can almost bet that a family of Azorean Portuguese descent lives there. The huge, floppy leaves of a Taro plant suggests that the residents have roots in the Philippines or Pacific Islands. And there are plenty of markets scattered about that cater to every taste, from mainstream supermarkets like Safeway to more specialized ethnic markets that cater to Mexicans or Japanese. Fidel has worked for us for at least ten years but he wants to have his own farm so it’s natural that he’s reaching out to his own community of immigrant Oaxacans for support. I’m trying to help him get started by sharing some of our greenhouse space with him, and he’s teaching me how to grow some of the varieties of vegetables and herbs that are grown and appreciated in Oaxaca. Right now I’m learning about chayote.

If you want to be a farmer it can’t hurt to take classes in plant biology, crop and soil science, or business. But you can also get into farming the way I did and learn by just doing the work. If we’re smart we learn from our mistakes and do better every time we try, and getting better at farming is no exception. But if we’re really wise we can learn from other people’s mistakes and spare ourselves some agony. I’m impressed with Fidel because he has an industrious and curious nature about him. He has a lot of questions and I’m happy to try and answer them as best I can. I remember how important it was for me to have spent a number of years working at Star Route Farm in Bolinas during the early 1980s when my employer, Warren Weber, was so generous with his time and knowledge. He taught me how to farm and I figure now is my time to pay him back in spirit by helping someone else. Besides, Fidel seems to be a natural, not just at growing food but selling it too.

Many people have come from Oaxaca to Watsonville to work in the strawberry fields. Sure, Oaxaca is part of Mexico and the Hispanic markets are here to serve their community. But Oaxaca is also a nation unto itself, or rather a region with a number of very independent nations with a number of different indigenous languages and ancient traditions and the people resist being reduced to a generic “Mexican” status. They have their own ways of preparing food and they have their own varieties of herbs and vegetables that they can’t always find in the markets here. Fidel saw an opportunity to grow some of these ethnic crops, like alache, which is a herb in the okra family with leaves that are used to thicken soups and stews, the way filet is used to give body to gumbo. When he shows up at the laundromat the Oaxacan women will leave their laundry swishing in the washing machines and come out into the parking lot to inspect the fresh alache, turning the bunches over and buying what they need. They’ll be cooking later on that day and they’ll tell their friends about where they were able to find these greens they all miss. This parking lot “pop-up” strategy is perfect marketing- convenient, convivial, and “viral,” if I may use that word in these times. But Fidel grows other unusual crops too, and I’m most interested in the chayote.

Chayote, or Sechium edule, is not an uncommon crop in Mexico. In fact, chayote isn’t even an uncommon crop across the world, despite the fact that it is still relatively unknown across white bread America. The chayote plant is native to Southern Mexico and Central America, but when Columbus came to the “New” world sparking the so-called “Columbian Exchange” this squash family member was dispersed across South America and also found new homes in Asia and eventually even in Australia. Most chayote varieties are smooth skinned, with a firm but creamy flesh that can be used like their summer squashes cousins are, but can also be grated, tossed with lime juice and served as salad. But the Oaxacans prefer a very spiny variety of chayote- not as convenient for a cook to prepare perhaps, but more to their taste, more “authentic.” So Fidel is growing the spiny Oaxacan variety. As for me, I’m always interested in any crop that can find a happy home across cultures. I think of myself as “ethnic Californian,” which means that, like my state, I’m open for business across the myriad of cultures that make up our population. Plus I’m curious about food. I haven’t cooked chayote and I’m looking forward to learning how. Besides the squashy fruits, the plant also has big, potato-like tubers that can be cooked like potatoes and I’m looking forward to trying them.

Fidel described for me how to build a frame for the chayote plants to climb on. He gave me

a number of different chayote plants of different varieties; smooth skinned, spiny, white-fruited, yellow fruited, green fruited. He told me how to protect the tubers from the gophers by putting them in wire baskets so that the plants could sprout back from underground every year as soon as the soil warmed up. And Fidel encouraged me to top off the frame with a rigid and strong mesh so that the squash can hang down to be picked easily by reaching up into the foliage with a pair of clippers. So far, so good. As the weather has warmed the young chayote plants are picking up speed, and this weekend, as cold as it was, the first vines still managed to grab onto the wire mesh and start their ascent. In the fields our summer squash are just flowering, but our chayotes won’t be ready until early fall. That should work out perfectly. I planted 20 plus chayote seedlings, and this planting will likely provide us with many, many pounds of harvest. At the very least we’ll be able to select out the varieties that perform the best here in Watsonville.

Top photo is the Growing Chayote Vines.

If you haven’t ordered a mystery box recently, now is a great time to get in on spring deliciousness! LadybugBuyingClub

A Tale of Avocados

Posted by: Shannon Muck / Posted on: / Category: Ladybug Letters, Ladybug Postcard

I don’t care what Marjorie Taylor Green or the other “researchers” from the Q-anon community say, the Bacon avocado is not the unholy, genetically modified bastard offspring of a guacamole tree and a salt cured pork. No! The Bacon avocado is so named because it was hybridised by a Mr. James Bacon back in the 1920s.

He was farming near Buena Park in Southern California and he named his new variety after himself. The Bacon avocado has a very nice fruit but it is not as popular today as it’s rivsa, the Hass avocado, is. But popularity has its limits, as we’ll see.

The Hass avocado is so ubiquitous in the contemporary American marketplace that for many consumers it is almost the only avocado that they know, the ne plus ultra of avocados, but the variety was only discovered in the late 1920s by a Mr. Rudolph Hass, postman and rare fruit enthusiast, who lived in Southern California near Whittier. (His children actually deserve the credit for discovering the variety because it was the kids who noticed how rich and unctuous the fruit was compared to other avocados and they drew his attention to the first tree from which all other trees were cloned.) But the avocado is a tree native to the Americas, probably originating in what is now Southern Mexico and Guatemala. Our English word, “avocado” is derived from the Nahual word “ahuacatl,” meaning “testicle.” But that’s not the only fun fact about the avocado plant.

Avocado trees are not fond of cold weather. Scientists believe that avocados evolved during a warmer, more humid time in Earth’s history when our planet’s social life was defined by “megafauna,” the REALLY BIG prehistoric mammals reached gargantuan

proportions by eating plants. One theory has it that avocados developed their oil-rich, flavorful fruit in order to appeal to the appetites of giant sloths, who would eat the fruits and then “disperse” the avocados’ big, round seeds around the jungle when they defecated. An avocado’s seed, or pit, is so big that you’d have to be a megafauna to “pass” one. Today, we not-so-mega mammals cultivate and disperse the avocado agriculturally and our attentions have changed the plant.

In nature there are many natural varieties of avocado with fruits that range in size from little quail’s eggs up to basketballs, but they’re all frost sensitive to a greater or lesser degree. When Mr. Bacon selected the “Bacon” avocado out of the different seedlings he was trialing, one of the positive attributes that the variety possessed was that it seemed to be a bit more tolerant of cold nighttime temperatures than other avocadoes. Here in California we’re at the outer edge of the climatic zone where avocado can survive- that was true for Mr. Bacon in Whittier and it’s especially true for us growers even further north up here in Central California. And the Bacon avocado does have a nice flavor and an appealing, buttery texture to the flesh.

Avocados are often self-sterile, which means they will not self-pollinate. A Hass avocado tree will set some fruit after it gets older but it can’t be a really productive commercial crop unless it is cross pollinated with another variety of avocado. As avocados became popular in the United States beyond Southern California the Hass won the popularity contest in the marketplace. But you can’t have a viable Hass industry if you don’t also cultivate the pollinizer trees. Here in Central California I’ve seen growers use Zutano and Fuerte avocados as pollinators, but most farmers around here look to Bacons to get the job done. I like Bacons; I made a guacamole the other day using Rangpur Limes and Bacon avocados that came out very nicely. (I’ve planted a bunch of Rangpur limes, but at present only one tree is bearing. The Rangpur lime is actually a very tart type of mandarin orange, with a loose, thin skin and a bright scent. We should have a small harvest to pick and sell next year.)

In Mexico it is possible for avocado farmers to get two crops a year, or at least 3 crops in 2 years. We’re so far to the north that we can only count on one crop per year- if we’re lucky! Sometimes we get a hard frost that not only damages the fruit that is hanging on the tree, but also the avocado flower buds that would be the following year’s crop. This year, though, everything worked out. The Marsalisi Brothers are getting a decent crop of Bacons now, and there’s a nice crop of the Hass avocados that they pollinated coming in a couple of months.

Top photo is a Bacon Avocado on a Marsalisi Brothers Farm tree.

If you haven’t ordered a mystery box recently, now is a great time to get in on spring deliciousness! LadybugBuyingClub

Feed the Soil

Posted by: Shannon Muck / Posted on: / Category: Ladybug Letters, Ladybug Postcard

The organic mantra is “feed the soil.” Feed the soil, and the soil will feed you back. The plants that we harvest are the alchemists that can transmute the base elements of the earth into our food by spinning minerals together with light and water to make leaves, fruits, and seeds. When the soil is rich our crops can thrive. Sometimes we think of the earth poetically as a giving mother who feeds us, but it’s also clarifying to think of the soil as a bank account; every harvest is a “withdrawal” of nutrients and if we don’t make deposits then, sooner or later, we run out of funds. So we try to care for the soil by putting at least as much back into the soil as we take out. But really, to only replace what we have withdrawn is a bare minimum concept of soil care; in a better world we improve the soils we depend on, and cover crops are one very basic way to do this.

This year our cover crop is a blur of purple and white pea flowers. Every year we sow a

“soil builder” blend of cover crop seed. The idea is to “make a deposit of seeds” which then germinate and “accrue interest,” growing into a valuable crop of carbon and nutrients that can be “reinvested” by getting plowed under. There are grasses in the mix, like barley, oats, and rye. The grains germinate fast and first. And there are legumes in the mix; fava beans, vetch, and peas. The legumes sprout later than the grasses, and as the grasses grow taller the vining vetches and peas can lean on them in support. While the fava beans don’t need the grasses for support, they do benefit from the way the grasses act to break the winds that might beat them down.

The grasses in the cover crop mix do a lot to lock down the soil and keep it from eroding in the rain. The legumes capture lots of available atmospheric nitrogen for the soil. Together the grains and legumes that make up a well blended cover crop can grow a rich, green thatch of foliage, and when the farmer turns the cover crop under the farm “feeds the soil.” The cover crop captures carbon from the air and when the farmer turns the cover crop under that carbon is put into the soil where it acts to make the earth more biologically active, with better water retention and more friable texture. In many cases, a good, thick cover crop can also act to clean the soil of weeds. In our fields, for example, malva, or “pigweed” is a problem. The feral malva seeds in the field will germinate with the first rains, the same as the cover crop we’ve planted, but the cover crop will choke them out before they can flower and set more seed, so the field gets a little cleaner with every cover crop.

But just because we plant the same blend of seed every year doesn’t mean the crop comes out the same every year. We’ve had years with such cold weather that all the peas

and favas were killed by frost and the cover crop was almost pure rye, because rye is tough in the face of cold weather. This year, Starr and I tossed out the cover crop seed by hand, counting on the dark clouds overhead to rain our seed into the newly turned soil. But after we planted our cover crop the clouds left without raining and a flock of birds came out of the sky and pecked up most of the grass seeds we’d just sown. The birds moved on when they’d mined out most of the oats and rye but they didn’t care for the peas, vetches or fava beans, so our cover crop is mostly made up of legumes. We didn’t have a “wet” winter, but we got rain enough to support a flourishing cover crop. There’s a sweet scent in the air from all the blossoms. I’ll almost be sad to turn this crop under.

Top photo is the cover crop on the farm. And below, are a few things we’re planning for this week’s mystery box! If you haven’t ordered a mystery box recently, now is a great time to get in on spring deliciousness! LadybugBuyingClub

Living on the Central Coast

Posted by: Shannon Muck / Posted on: / Category: Ladybug Letters, Ladybug Postcard

His supporters say it was a “heart condition” but opposition politicians claimed that the late John Magafuli, then President of Tanzania, was being treated in Kenya for Covid 19 when he died last month. Mr. Magafuli’s death provoked more conversation on our farm than you might have expected, given that Tanzania is a long way away and there are plenty of people closer to home- and closer to us wherever they are- who have been affected by this disease. But Starr’s daughter, Yarrow, had been stationed in Tanzania as a Peace Corps volunteer until just before the pandemic started. Yarrow’s projects in Tanzania included helping HIV/AIDs survivors set up poultry projects for egg production so that they could help support themselves and their families. But the late Tanzanian president had a misunderstanding with a foreign NGO and chose to strike a politically expedient “Tanzanian First” stance by denying work visas to aid workers, effectively kicking all foreign aid organizations out of the country. At first, we were sad that Yarrow couldn’t stay in Africa until the end of her service term to see all of her projects through to successful completion. But the Covid 19 pandemic erupted almost immediately upon her return to the US from East Africa and our dismay turned to relief that she wasn’t stranded in Tanzania while a loud Covid-denying leader was in charge.

Yarrow and her friend, Trent, another Peace Corp veteran, showed up at our farm coincidentally just in time to get the Covid vaccination from the farm worker outreach program that was sponsored by the Farm Bureau/ Strawberry Commission. They’ve been helping us here since then and their efforts have been a “god/goddess-send.” Covid has been fatal to many small businesses, like some of the restaurant kitchens I used to serve, and it’s been difficult and awkward and stressful for most of the rest. For us, the dilemma has been that our packing shed and cooler and office are at our home. One of the most successful health protocols that a person can follow to minimize the spread of this highly infectious disease is to create a secure and virus-free place to retreat to. We decided that having workers show up at our home on a daily basis was not in our best interests–we’re 61 after all, the same age as President Magafuli was when he didn’t die from Covid. So Starr and I have been making up all the boxes ourselves, “sheltering in place,” you could say, and “working from home.” But those are heavy, wet boxes full of produce that we are schlepping, not weightless mouse clicks, so we’ve been feeling it. I’m not complaining. It is obvious to me that the ability for an average citizen here to enjoy or afford any degree of “social isolation” is entirely dependent on being affluent to some degree. Being stuck on a farm during a pandemic is a blessing, not a curse.

Looking at Pico Blanco in the distance.

Covid isn’t anywhere near over, I know, but we had an almost normal day this past Sunday. Trent is from Florida and Yarrow had arrived from Colorado, so we wanted to show them a little bit of California besides the shed and field here at home. So we took them to Big Sur for a hike up Serra Hill in the Los Padres National Forest, just south of the Bixby Creek Bridge. It’s a beautiful drive any time of year, but we were treated to a gorgeous sunny spring day with green grass, wildflowers and wild strawberries. Heading south of Carmel I always make a game of calling out the names of the creeks to myself before I cross the bridges and culverts, just for fun; “Rio Carmelo, Wildcat, Malpaso, Garrapata, Rocky, Granite, Bixby, Little Sur, Big Sur….Bixby Creek has a fame all out of proportion to the amount of water it conveys to the Pacific due to the graceful and photogenic arch of the bridge that spans its gorge. But for me, especially now during this pandemic, it’s Garrapata Creek that means the most to me.

When I was kid I spent a lot of time with my neighbor, Jimmy, a cattle rancher in upper Carmel Valley. Jimmy was a real old-timer, and he’d had a job as a mule driver on the grading teams that carved Highway One down the Big Sur Coast back in the 1930s. But as a child he’d grown up in a fisherman’s shack just off Monterey’s Cannery Row. When the 1918 flu pandemic hit Monterey Jimmy’s mother feared for his life, so she dispatched him to live in a healthier atmosphere with his Uncle Harvey. Talk about “social isolation!” Uncle Harvey had a remote homestead/ranch way up Garrapata Creek, accessible only on foot or horseback. Harvey was a near hermit, just minding his own business and cattle, choosing only to work as a cowboy on neighboring ranches when he needed a little cash. Jimmy spent several years growing up there in the redwood forests of upper Garrapata and he had a lot of crazy stories to tell about his experiences. When the pandemic ended he returned to Monterey and got schooled, but it’s fair to say he got his education in the Santa Lucia Mountains. Standing on top of Serra Hill with Starr, Yarrow and Trent, and looking into the interior of the Little Sur backcountry, I was thinking about Jimmy and his stories with an understanding that I didn’t have when I was a kid and didn’t know the contours of a pandemic.

So where to go from here?

I don’t think anyone can really know what’s going to happen next. We’re still taking the pandemic seriously, but we’re also planting as though life will open up. Farming always demands lots of forethought, because crops take “real” time to germinate and grow. We’ve picked the first handful of artichokes and the sun will bring the crop on fast now. The first basil has sprouted in the greenhouse, the tomatoes will get planted out this week, and the potato crop is already a few inches high. The squash crop goes into the ground as soon as the field is worked up and the beans and corn follow as soon as the soil warms up. Thank you for your support; we appreciate it.

Photos by Starling Linden. Top photo is looking back at the Santa Lucia Mountains.

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Letters From Andy

Ladybug Letters

Our Lady’s Birds

The Many Scents of Lavender

The Milpa and the Holy Trinity

Brand New Potatoes!

What Kind of Pea?

A Different Type of Sting!

From Oaxaca to Watsonville

A Tale of Avocados

Feed the Soil

Living on the Central Coast

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