Grow – Cook – Make

Fava beans, barely a week out of the ground and already looking like themselves. A short version of themselves, to be sure, but very fava like.

I love fava beans. A little mint and garlic, a drizzle of olive oil… In the salad, in the paella, with eggs, as a side dish, as appetizer. They go well with pork, with fish, or all by themselves.

November is supposed to be the right time to plant favas in our area. For years I didn’t manage to get them in the ground that early. February or even March was more likely to be the time for me. It works out reasonably well. However, fava beans like cool and moist weather so it is already too hot by the time the pods are ready to pick. Insect and fungal problems proliferate, so I always had the feeling that my yield was not that good, my season too short. There was definitely room for improvement.

Now I am in the middle of a timing experiment. I will plant fava beans at a two month interval from fall to early spring. I planted a batch in September, another one in November, will plant in January and March. Let’s see which batch stays healthier, is more productive and gives me the tastiest beans. I’ll keep you posted.

So far the September favas are getting ready to bloom although they seem too short to me. Our warm fall may have induced earlier blooming… The November batch is just out, all bright and new, ready to face the world. And the gardener? Taking notes and trying not to get too excited at the prospect of having fresh favas in a January.  A lot can happen in a month…

I’ll say it up front: I don’t like to eat alone. I don’t like to sit down to eat a meal alone. A cooked meal, at the table, with plates and forks and knives, napkins, tablecloth, everything, without company? Nah! I won’t do that.

What I will do if I am alone and I am hungry is grazing. As I clean the kitchen I’ll take a little bite of this or a little bite of that. On the move, between the dishwasher and the cupboard. I’ll wipe the counter with one hand and feed myself a cracker with the other one. Or a chunk of cheese, an olive, whatever, anything. Cutting up an apple is already too much work. I will let food go bad in the fridge and in the garden. I just won’t really feed myself. No, not if I am alone.

But today I decided to treat myself well. For the sake of fairness if nothing else, I decided to do for myself what I am willing to do for family or company, to put a decent meal on the table. Simple and easy, to be sure, I don’t want to risk giving up before I get started.

A decent meal, easy, tasty, from the garden means tomatoes. Which by mid December generally means freezer: my stack of frozen fire-roasted tomatoes from the summer. A huge operation back in August and September (matter for a future post) and today’s quick meal.

Open the freezer, reach for a tomato container, heat it up. Presto! A linen table cloth and napkin, crystal, fine china — remember, I am treating myself well. Gnocchi with tomato sauce and goat cheese. And me at the table, trying to east slowly and mindfully.

I am not sure I managed the mindful part. I still don’t like to eat alone, with or without linen tablecloth. I still get a tad nervous all by myself at the table. But from time to time, when I have to, I can do it. And do it in style.

By the way, tomorrow… I will not eat alone.

The garlic is sprouting. One by one the cloves I planted about three weeks ago have sent their new leaves straight up into the light. They’ll keep growing all tight and straight for a few months until the leaves are long enough to lazily flop over, without much regard for good looks.

In southern California, garlic is planted in late fall for a summer harvest.  I seem to always do it around Thanksgiving, but one year I waited until late December and it grew just fine. The plants in the foreground are Spanish Roja, a hardneck variety, which in garlic parlance means that their stem is hard like a piece of wood. Hardnecks bloom readily on the season they were planted. Before the flower open they can be harvested to eat, an then is called  garlic scapes. The smaller ones in the background are the softneck variety Incheliun Red.

I’ve been planting these two varieties for years. As I harvest, I reserve the best cloves, which I cure and store until planting day. To plant,  I bury them about two inches down. That is basically all I do for them. When the rains stop, I’ll water them some, and that’s it. Totally undemanding crop. Dense and heavy garlic heads in return for  little work.

My garlic is pungent. I don’t know if it is those specific varieties that are so pungent, maybe the growing conditions in the garden make them so, or simply homegrown garlic is more pungent than storebought. But I’ve had to learn to account for this by reducing the amount of garlic I cook with.

If you like to enliven your cooking with a touch of fresh garlic before harvest time, you can pull out immature plants for green garlic, or cut the flower buds of hardneck varieties for garlic scapes.

I’ll show it to you in this space when It is ready for harvest. Right now all I have is hope and a few rows of green tips peeking out the soil.

Past the orchard a little bit, next to a boulder, the Flannel Bush has been blooming for a while now. In the late afternoon light its flowers are truly golden, such an intense color!

Do you know that these flowers have no petals? When you look at the flowers from behind you can clearly see that what look like petals are actually sepals. They are fooling us with their burst of gold. The leaves have a fuzzy underside reminiscent of flannel.

When I moved in this plant was already here. Someone planted it: it is not native from precisely this area of our mountains (it occurs naturally further east). It doesn’t need any care and it offers this gorgeous display every winter.

For most of the year I don’t notice it. Dark green leaves, out of the way, so many other things to pay attention to, no, I don’t even notice it. Then one sunny day in late fall, ups! what is that…yellow flowers back there? Ah… the Flannel Bush… Thank you! Another season of bloom. Thank you.

It is dark outside. Can you see the garden? It is down there, believe me. Can you make out the shop’s red roof, down the driveway, a little bit to the right? Barely… if you squint you’ll see the touch of red.

The garden is just there, a little bit past the shop, also to the right of the driveway. Hard to see.

We’ve had three days like this: inside the cloud. Up here on the mountaintop when it rains we are inside the cloud.

Aren’t those lettuces happy? Three days of calm, steady rain make a garden and its gardener happy. If you point out that I am developing a little rain obsession these days I’ll have to agree. I may get over it if we indeed get more rain than usual this year. It takes me a while after our long dry season to take the rain for granted and even to get annoyed at it. See, in our Mediterranean climate, it is feast or famine with rain. After long months of famine, we are finally feasting, me and my garden. And the nearby chaparral. Oh yes, we are feasting!