There used to be a garden here

When I wrote recently about my old garden being torn up to make way for condos, my friend Pattie Baker, author of the Foodshed Planet blog, was so distraught she wrote the developer to plead the case that he ought to offer garden plots to the new condo owners.

In fact, I had suggested the very same thing before we closed on the deal selling our house to Capital City Real Estate, which is turning our former home into six condominiums. The developer, Scott Zimmerman, sounded receptive at the time. And in response to a beautifully worded e-mail from Pattie, he again said he would consider making this proposal to the new buyers.

With would-be gardeners waiting months or years for plots at local community gardens here in D.C., a ready-made garden right outside your condo door would seem to be a great marketing tool, to say nothing of the message of sustainability it sends to the rest of the city.

When we sold the house, we had eight big garden beds established in the yard, all rich with years of compost amendments. That’s all gone now, of course. Much of it has been excavated to make room for parking. And today I had to report to Pattie that a crew of workers armed with shovels and a Bobcat were busy on Saturday re-grading the yard.

The garden area used to sit about four feet above sidewalk level with a large plateau for the vegetable beds, dropping off steeply around the edges toward the curb. That made cutting the grass around the edges a real pain in the butt. But it was perfect for vegetable beds.

What the crew was doing yesterday was sloping the yard from the house toward the curb, removing that flat area that was so convenient for gardening in order to smooth out those steep edges. Add in the new entrances that  have been excavated for two basement apartments and the space available for food gardening is rapidly shrinking.

What the garden looked like, with Pattie

If you want to get an idea of what the garden looked like in July 2010, check out the post Pattie wrote after her visit. She also took some video that you can link to there.

Pattie is one hell of a fighter. While you’re at it, order a copy of the remarkable self-published book she’s written about her life as a sustainability activist, gardener, and mom, Food for My Daughters. If you’re looking for an exquisitely written manual for living more harmoniously with Planet Earth–not a bad Christmas gift, I’d say–this is it.

The Kindle edition is only $1.99.

Where once there was a garden

We sold our big house on the corner last August and the developers wasted no time. The next morning a crew was waiting at the front door to start tearing the place apart. Plans call for turning our former homer–a big brick Victorian built in 1900–into six condominiums.

We figure that’s a good use for the building, making a place for more people to live in the neighborhood. Somehow I had the idea that I would be able to continue gardening on the property at least through the end of the season. But as soon as we moved out, neighbors (and I suppose the construction crew as well) swooped in to loot our tomato and pepper plants. Now, as you can see from the photo above, the garden has completely disappeared. Years of feeding the soil with our home-made compost has vanished under  mounds of clay and construction debris.

Same view, different day

In this photo, you see what the garden used to look like when it was covered with tomato plants, beans and okra.

They put up a parking lot

The other side of the garden–where we started our first vegetable beds–has been entirely trucked away to create parking.  I had suggested to the builder that he might keep our eight garden beds as a selling point for the condos. People are still waiting in line for plots at the local community gardens. But apparently in the world of developers parking and landscaping remain the preferred options.

What it used to look like

And here’s a view of the same area a couple of years ago when we took delivery of a free truckload of compost. You can see the potato hill we built in the background. We used to grow all the salad and greens we could ever eat in this spot.

During our years of vegetable gardening on a busy urban corner we learned how cheaply we could feed ourselves and feel good about eating food we’d grown ourselves, two miles from the White House. Resuming life as consumers, rather than growers, has been quite a shock. It’s also left a huge hole in my life, not having a garden to tend.

But we don’t intend to remain garden-less for long. In fact, we have our eye on bigger and better things, but that will probably involve another move, this time to a place with more acreage. Stay tuned….

I had a visit recently from an English teacher who flew into Washington for a course in “backpack journalism,’ meaning documentary filmmaking by citizen journalists.

Dan Sadicario followed me around for the better part of the day, resulting in a five-minute film about a former newspaper reporter who now grows food in his front yard two miles from the White House and has made dissecting the school lunch program a personal crusade.

Okay, enough drama. I think Dan did a great job with the camera and some snappy editing. He even managed to squeeze in a few humerous moments. Take a look at what he calls “Concrete Tomato.”

Exceptionally clean and tender

We had the best halibut ever for dinner recently. It had been flown into Washington from Alaska as part of the buyers club organized by friend Sam Fromartz, shipped directly by the family fishing operation that caught it.

This was our first halibut. Last year we took possession of some terrific salmon that arrived whole and fresh. We filleted one and served it with Bearnaise sauce while on vacation in Maine. Another we roasted over an open fire at our friend Bob’s cabin in Virginia.

I have to say I prefer receiving the fish fresh. The halibut arrived frozen and sealed in individual, eight-ounce packages. I’d ordered five pounds, so what I got were 10 of these little packages. Too much plastic, in my view, spoils the idea of choosing fish sustainably harvested by a fisherman we know. Add to that the carbon involved in flying the fish from Alaska and I begin to wonder how “sustainable” this venture really is.

You can’t argue with this halibut as a dinner choice, though. My wife and I agreed it was one of the most tender, delectable pieces of fish we’d ever eat. We’d intended to dress it with a beurre blanc sauce, but discovered–too late–that we didn’t have any white wine for the sauce. We didn’t even have any lemons in fridge. In the end, we just seasoned it with salt and pepper and seared it in an iron skillet, then gave it a spritz of lime juice. With a salad fresh from the garden, we were perfectly satisfied.

Halibut is one of the few fish in the world that seems to be holding its own. Did you see this map that appeared in the press recently? It shows the stark decline in Atlantic Ocean biomass from 1900 to 2000. Essentially, there are no fish left to be caught. The waters around Alaska are different. They’ve been managed much more strictly. The halibut fishery had been in decline, but was sharply curtailed in the early ’70s and has since rebounded magnificently.

Pacific halibut fisheries are managed through a treaty between the United States and Canada per recommendations of the International Pacific Halibut Commission. According to the National Marine Fisheries Service, halibut biomass “ remains in a healthy state in the central Gulf of Alaska and will likely continue to support harvests of the size seen over the past two to three decades.”

The Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch program rates Pacific Halibut a “best choice.” So if you’re looking for a fish you can feel good about eating, try halibut.

Carroll County Farm Museum and fair grounds

On Saturday, daughter and I drove 50 miles up Georgia Avenue to Westminster, Md., and the “Go Local Fair” to give a demonstration on how kids will eagerly engage with fresh, healthful food if you give them a chance to participate in the preparation.

We arrived with three big traveling bags of food and equipment. I had agonized over what, exactly, to make for this event and finally decided on three dishes that cover some of the basics of seasonality, simplicity and essential cooking techniques that I try to teach in my food appreciation classes. We would begin with a simple “summer squash carpaccio,”–sliced raw zucchini seasoned with olive oil and lemon juice, garnished with fresh goat cheese and a chiffonade of basil–then a salad of asparagus and butter lettuce dressed with a freshly made mustard vinaigrette, and finally crepes stuffed with local strawberries and whipped cream.

I was prepared to do this without and cooking facilities or even running water on site. Good thing, because all we had under our tent were two folding tables on which spread our ingredients and prep the food. Our tent–one of several on the museum grounds–was just around the corner from grass-fed burgers sizzling on the grill. We shared the space with a local home-brewing club. Next door was a woman selling tomato plants. Other vendors were hawking rain barrels and solar attic fans.

Billed as one of the “featured presenters–along with an edible landscaping specialist, an electrical engineer on the subject of electric bicycle commuting, and a dairyman who uses robotic milking machines to produce 62 million pounds of milk–I was sandwiched between an extremely well-attended talk on bee keeping, and another on raising chickens. Fortunately, the handful of parents who attending my portion of the program had brought plenty of kids. Two young boys joined daughter in helping to prepare our three dishes.

It all went by too fast–pretty hectic, I’d say. It was all I could do to keep track of the ingredients and keep the kids busy. But they did a great job slicing the zucchini and trimming the asparagus and spinning the lettuce and finally cutting the strawberries and making the crepe batter. I had already cooked some asparagus and crepes, so we weren’t exactly waiting for things to finish on my little portable butane burner. But I did give a demonstration on how to cook a crepe–except I was distracted by the whipped cream portion and the crepe got a little burned.

One of the boys, who said he made plenty of Italian food at home, reprimanded me for suggesting we slice our fresh basil. “The Italians don’t cut basil,” he said. “They tear it.” Good for him. But that would make our chiffonade pretty difficult, I replied. Nevertheless, the kids tore and did not cut the basil.

What I tried to emphasize to the parents were some of the lessons I’ve learned teaching my food appreciation classes the last five years–mainly, it doesn’t really matter much what you cook, as long as you get kids involved. They love to work in the kitchen if you give them a chance and will happily spend hours with a vegetable peeler or a salad spinner. Sometimes they will actually eat healthier foods when they are given a chance to help in the preparation.

Our plate or zucchini carpaccio, assembled by one of the boys, looked gorgeous and the vinaigrette came out perfectly. The crepes–stuffed with strawberries and whipped cream, the folded–also looked gorgeous. All of this food we were able to pass around on plastic plates, so everyone in the audience got to sample. All this in–including the setup–in 50 minutes. I had barely had time to break everything down and move it off the tables so the chicken lady could begin her talk.

Daughter and I washed our bowls and knifes and whisks in the bathroom, then headed for the Green Akeys Family Farm tent to sample one of their grassfed cheeseburgers. We passed on the hand-cut French fries from AW Boys Fries, but we did stop on the side of the road for a soft-serve ice cream cone. Daughter declared it the best soft-serve ever. All in all, it was a lovely way to spend a Saturday in May.

Anybody remember manual hedge clippers?

I found myself at a bus stop on MacArthur Boulevard growing increasingly annoyed by the shrieking noise coming from this two-stroke clipping machine. Then it dawned on me, the conection between the latest reports of increased Arctic ice melting and the stupid things we do with power tools.

Does anyone remember when we trimmed bushes with manual clippers? Now we hire a landscape crew to do it with the most polluting engines known to mankind. What we save in labor, we now extract in years from the useful life of planet earth. If the latest polar melting predictions come true, sea levels will rise at least five feet before this century ends, meaning the Jefferson Memorial will be under water, the national mall will be one long reflecting pool lapping against our national monuments.

While the ice melts, we blithely continue spewing carbon so our bushes can look more orderly.

James Lovelock is probably correct: Humans are too stupid to survive.

Gaia will surely have her revenge.

A man out standing in his field

I was invited to lead a workshop on urban farming Friday at my alma mater—American University here in D.C. I was surprised to learn that this all-day “Eating Green” conference was sponsored by the university’s philosophy department. But when you think about it, what could be a more existential question than the one that concerns our future survival in a world where fertile soil and water are being rapidly depleted and we’ve come to depend on an unsustainable supply of fossil fuels to feed the growing multitudes?

The keynote speaker for this event was Lisa Heldke, a philosophy professor at Gustavas Adolphus College in Minnesota who explores truth, certainty and the meaning of life through food. She’s penned several books along these lines, including Cooking, Eating, Thinking: Transformative Philosophies of Food, and The Atkins Diet and Philosophy. The title of her keynote address was especially tantalizing: “Pleasure Once Removed: Eating, Suffering and Violence.”

My own presentation was not quite so lofty–60 minutes of slides showing how we grow much of the food we eat on a busy residential corner here in the District of Columbia, two miles from the White House. The underpinnings of this thriving kitchen garden (no livestock on this urban farm) are probably more instinctual than intellectual. As I explained to my audience yesterday, my wife and I after 9/11, like many others, began to re-examine our lifestyle and tried to put more energy into the things that were most important to us.

We started walking more and taking public transportation, leaving our car in the driveway. We began to recycle everything. We made a point of eating dinner together as a family, and serving Sunday suppers to friends. Remembering the small garden and fruit trees my father maintained on our tiny lot in the Chicago suburbs when I was a kid, I decided to bust some sod and grow food. Once I started, I couldn’t stop. For some reason, the yard around our house had never been landscaped in more than 100 years. The two large trees that had once towered over it had since died and been removed.

The only thing standing in my way of becoming a full-fledged urban farmer was my wife’s plans to turn the property into a formal Victorian-style garden. Occasionally as I was digging a new vegetable bed she would remind me there was nothing permanent about what I was doing: that’s where the new path to the front door was supposed to go.

But you can’t grow food without experiencing an occasional moment of profound insight. As I quickly learned, growing vegetables brings me face to face with the same issues that have bedeviled farmers since the beginning of agriculture: Do I have enough sun? How to provide water? And, perhaps most importantly, what means to employ to keep my soil fertile and productive?

Answering this latter question has been the most challenging and the most rewarding for me. You might not think of a city lot as either fertile or infertile. But the lessons of agriculture are unavoidable. If you are going to remove nutrients from the soil by growing food, you have to find a way to replace those nutrients or eventually you will exhaust your means of growing. Nature does this by decomposing dead matter and returning it to the soil. Human civilizations learned that manure would do the same thing. The Chinese for at least 2,000 years fed themselves by recycling everything–including their own droppings. But modern agriculture took a chemical shortcut, inventing a way to manufacture nitrogen from natural gas.

Our supply of natural gas won’t last forever, and we are rapidly depleting the earth’s stores of other essential nutrients such as phosphate. What then?

I had originally hoped to make our kitchen garden entirely self-sufficient–a closed system, as it were. But that turned out to be impossible. We became avid composters, but we did not have enough materials to make the compost we needed in sufficient quantities. I turned into a stealthy forager, stealing the bags of leaves neighbors placed at the curb in the fall, collecting coffee grounds from a local Starbucks, trekking to a convenient riding stables for buckets of horse manure. All of this we turn into “black gold” that we store in trash cans and use as needed to produce copious quantities of carrots and beets and green beans and okra and tomatoes.

In the process of growing all this food, we’ve also re-oriented our approach to eating. I am no longer a slave to recipes, hiking from one market to the next collecting the ingredients called for in some dinner menu out of Bon Appetit magazine. Now when we are planning a meal we look out the window to see what’s growing. Along the way we’ve developed many of our own recipes using the ingredients we have at hand. How else do you arrive at a dish like curried okra stew with eggplant, pepper and coconut milk? (We originally made this with sweet potato leaves after we discovered they are edible, but now we use fistfulls of Italian basil, which grows exuberantly in our garden.)

Had we approached this project philosophically, I’m not sure we would have found our way to where we are now. Building an urban farm, I’ve learned, is not an event, but a slow, incremental process that not only provides us with food, but also has changed us for the better. We’ve reconnected with sun, soil and water, rediscovered our place in the natural order of things. We are different people from when we started: more aware of the basic urges that drive us, the fragility of the environment we live in, our responsibility to feed ourselves in a manner that does not diminish anyone else’s ability to thrive.

Growing your own food, it turns out, is not just a matter of survival, but an act of kindness toward yourself, our planet and all of humanity. As philosophies go, that one suits me just fine.

Stirring our tuna salad

My food appreciation classes are still in Spain making tapas. Maybe we’ll never leave, as there’s so much great food to explore in this particular corner of the world. This week were were making an extremely easy salad of tuna, tomatoes and roasted red peppers that relies entirely on the quality of the individual ingredients. I also used this as a chance to talk to the kids about sustainable seafood and some particular environmental and health concerns around tuna.

Some varieties of tuna, such as the bluefin, have been fished nearly to extinction in the waters of the Mediterranean. According to Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Watch program, there are numerous different varieties of tuna on the market. It lists some as “best choice,” others as “good alternative” and some as “avoid,” depending on where and how they are caught. The best bets are U.S.-caught tuna as opposed to those fished elsewhere in the world.

For instance, albacore tuna, caught by trolling or with pole and line in the Pacific waters of the U.S. and Canada, is listed as “best choice.” But canned yellowfin tuna caught worldwide–except the U.S.–by longline or purse seine is listed as “avoid.” Unfortunately for us consumers, making a conscientious choice of tuna can be tedious, requiring some research and careful reading of labels at the market. Sometimes the labels are not very informative.

One reason to be concerned about tuna is they are a large, carnivorous fish the require some time before growing to a size where they can reproduce. Unlike much smaller fish, such as anchovies, which reproduce quickly, tuna are are more easily over-fished. Another concern is the pollutants tuna often accumulate in their flesh. Being at the top of the ocean food chain, they become depositories for heavy metals such as mercury, which falls into the sea from the smoke blown out of coal-burning power plants.

Mercury is a particular hazard for small children and pregnant women. The Environmental Defense Fund recommends that adults eat canned white or albacore tuna no more than three times per month; children aged six to 12 no more than twice per month; and kids up to age six no more than once per month. Yellowfin tun contains similar levels of mercury. But skipjack tuna, a smaller fish–found in canned “light” tuna–contains less mercury and can be eaten more frequently.

For our classes, I chose a yellowfin tuna packed in a glass jar in olive oil. This is premium stuff–not cheap, and not at all like the stinky tuna you sometimes find in a can. Since we were not going to pulverize our tuna and disguise it with a ton of mayonnaise, I wanted the kids to experience a version of canned tuna that looked something like real fish. Ours was packed as batons of meat that had to be carefully extracted from the jar, then cut into flakes.

To make our salad, we used a 6.7-ounce jar of tuna, flaked and placed in a mixing bowl. To this we added two medium ripe tomatoes, cored and cut into bit-size pieces; a couple ounces pimientos, or roasted red peppers cut into small pieces; 1/4 white onion, diced, 1 clove garlic, smashed and minced; a small handful cured and pitted black olives. Toss everything together, then season with 2 or 3 tablespoons extra-virgin olive oil, a generous splash or two of white wine vinegar, salt, freshly ground black pepper and a pinch of sugar.

This will easily make a small serving for six to eight people, or display it on a decorative platter on your next tapas bar. You might be shocked how good canned tuna can taste without the mayo.

Kojo broadcasts from WAMU, 88.5 on the FM dial

It’s time to start thinking about your spring vegetable garden. I’ll be talking about that tomorrow, Wednesday, with WAMU radio host Kojo Nnamdi beginning at 1 p.m. I may even get him to try some of my prize-winning pickled zucchini.

Kojo likes The Slow Cook’s approach to food. We aren’t about chasing after the trendiest restaurants or glorifying chefs. We eat mostly at home, cooking with ingredients we grow right outside our door in the Columbia Heights neighborhood of Northwest Washington, two miles from the White House. Over the years, we’ve developed lots of seasonal recipes inspired by the vegetables we harvest in our urban kitchen garden. We feed ourselves with fresh, organically-grown produce without having to travel to the supermarket, and for the small price of a few seed packets.

We also feel good about reducing our carbon footprint on the planet by growing our own food using compost made from recycled materials.

If you can’t listen to the show live, you can always hear it late from the archived version on Kojo’s website. Just click on “Shows,” and it will take you to a page where you can locate the archived version on a calendar.

Does the future of farming look more like this?

“Defining sustainability is not the problem,” says farmer and Leopold Center fellow Fred Kirshenmann. “The debate is over how we do it. And we don’t have a lot of time left to figure out how to keep our food system going.”

Speaking to a conference at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars titled “Reviving the American Economy–One Heirloom Tomato at a Time,” Kirshenmann listed the reasons for some urgency around the issue of a reconfiguring how humans feed themselves.

The energy sources used to fuel current methods of agriculture–meaning fossil fuels–are running out. We are rapidly drawing down the world’s supplies of vital fertilizers such as rock phosphate and potassium. Water also will soon be in short supply in many places around the world: the Ogallala aquifer, which supplies much of this nation’s breadbasket, has been depleted by half just since 1960. And there is no new land on which to grow food.

“The frontier’s over,” said Kirschenmann. “There’s no new place to go.”

Against this bleak picture there is some good news. Kirschenmann sees a “new level of civic engagement around food,” as evidenced by the months and years Michael Pollans’ books remain on the best seller’s list. A new generation of young people are eager to work on farms. And we have at least one resource in unlimited supply: brainpower.

We just have to figure our how to create “a future that does not depend on cheap energy, uses only half as much water and adapts to a changing climate.”

And it may need to produce 75 percent more food to feed a world population of nine billion.

At this point, you may be wondering what the Slow Cook was doing at a conference mostly concerned with producing sustainable food. Well, sustainable food isn’t much good without sustainable eaters. I was invited to sit on one of the panels and give my slide show illustrating the many recent improvements in D.C. school food–and how kids still untrained in actually eating that “healthier” food throw much of it in the trash.

Part of building a sustainable food system–a system that lasts into the future–must include access for everyone to nourishing food that doesn’t leave them prone to a host of weight related illnesses. Despite many good things in Congress’ recent re-authorization of child nutrition legislation, and a pending update of school meal standards that would require more vegetables, more whole grains and less salt, it’s far too early for adults to pat themselves on the back.

From what I see in the cafeteria every day, there’s still lots of heavy lifting to do to change attitudes about the food we eat. Schools should be doing much more in the way of educating children about food, but the message needs to reach parents and the broader community as well.

Reversing the work that corporate food interests have been engaged in for more than a century–convincing us that cooking is drudgery, that food should be fast, easy and cheap–won’t be easy. It may take decades.

Let’s hope we have that much time.