Roast Figs Two Ways

Our enormous fig tree normally gives us more fruit than we can handle -- plenty t0 can, dry, freeze, and give away. We normally don't do much of anything to keep animals away. The tree grows right by the back door and the dogs keep that area on SuperMax-style lockdown.

This summer however, the dogs were no match for squirrels and birds. I don't think it is an exaggeration to say that this was a desperate, starving season for the local wildlife. The drought meant our cove was bone dry and the creatures who call the normally lush, green surrounding area home got bold, drinking from dog bowls on our deck, lurking around trash bins, grazing in our front yard. Often I'd go out to the fig tree to see six or seven squirrels in it, bending the limbs with their weight.

So not enough figs to preserve, but we did get a few for snacking and dinners. Here's one of our favorite ways to have figs, as a main course, along with a salad, or as an appetizer:

--Split figs

-- On half the figs, sprinkle with brown sugar and a pat of butter.

-- Wrap the other half with a bit of bacon, jamon serrano, or prosciutto

-- broil on high until bacon is cooked and sugar/butter is sizzling

The Patient Gardener

Here's a dream: my own mangosteen tree. I've been dreaming about it since a recent trip to Costa Rica where we ate them by the bucketfull. Luscious, light, fragrant mangosteens. We brought back some seeds, but growing mangosteens is not a short term project. I was told it takes fifteen years for a tree to bear fruit. Hope they let me bring the tree with me to the nursing home.

Last of the Summer Flowers

Last of the summer drought survivors.

The Return of Water

A few days ago we had a lovely, thundering storm. Our cove, which had been completely dry, suddenly looked like a rushing river, complete with roaring whitecaps.

The water drained into the main body of the lake within a half day, but still, it was a beautiful sight while it lasted.

Fall Renewal

It's amazing how quickly this little hilly land can bounce back from a drought. The crunchy seared grass, shriveling trees, cracked earth -- it swells and brightens, it softens and unfurls. We've got blooms and fruit. I guess I shouldn't be surprised. That's what this land, these plants, made themselves for: to survive and thrive in our ancient weather pattern of boom and bust, drought and flood.

Rumor has it we're in for a long, cold, wet, winter. We, the plants and I, say, bring it on!

Central Texas Springs Back

The drought isn't over. We're still many, many inches behind our average rainfall. The lake is still half empty. But we've had a series of storms, green is reappearing.

And look, here's the first rainbow I've seen since I don't know when. It was huge, glowing. And if you looking carefully, you can see it's a double.

End of the Spring Garden Whirlwind

After a day spent in town, running errands and teaching a class, I got home with just a few hours of daylight left. It was enough to harvest a surprising number of lemon cucumbers, along with another two or three gallons of tomatoes and assorted squash as well as a few ears of corn. Poor, poor peppers are looking pretty wilted, so it won't be much of a harvest, I suspect.



The busy day left me too tired to cook. Widget man was in no mood either, so it was melon for supper and then some soaking in the solar tub.

But there was energy for thinking and planning. I'm thinking the best idea is to freeze all or most of those tomatoes. Really, it's just crazy to heat up the house right now.
I'm happy to hear that spagetti squash last a good while without needing additional preservation. For now, they'll just live in a basket on my counter in the kitchen. Through a combination of obsessive opening and closing of windows, a series of solar screens, heat chimneys, and ceiling fans, as well as running the AC a few hours a day, we keep the house right around 80 degrees, which I'm told is a good temperature to store these thick-skinned squash.

As for the eggplant, well, let's just hope preserving them is something I get to worry about. As of this evening, some insect is enjoying gnawing on their leaves very, very much.

More on Heat Resistant Armenian Cucumbers

Not only are Armenian cucumbers heat tolerant, drought resistant, tender-skinned, and non-seedy, they have the additional virtue of staying crisp for a day or so after they're sliced and drizzled with vinegrette.

We usually try to make just enough of a tomato, onion, cucumber salad for one meal, because we know by the next day, any leftovers will be a little soggy. Not these crunchy things though. And the slices look like pretty little flowers.

In a Drought, Abundance

This is what my kitchen table has been looking like lately. I'm canning, freezing, and dehydrating as fast as I can.

We're breaking heat records that stood for as long as anyone's been counting, for numbers of days in a row of 100+ degree weather, for high temperatures of 105+. Coupled with record low rainfall, and record low humidity, plants just don't stand a chance. It's been so dry that our lake is losing a foot a month of water just to evaporation.

It's been nine days since we lost access to our water for the garden, but about 2/3 of the garden is still going strong. I would not have predicted this. I give credit to Steve Solomon, and his fantastically useful book, Gardening When It Counts. He outlines some strategies for dry farming and for suddenly losing a water supply. I had already implemented a few of them before we hit our water crisis.

• Space plants widely so they can spread their roots to the largest possible area.
• Start with vigorous, home-sprouted seedlings (as opposed to nursery seedlings), raised in your own garden soil (as opposed to commercial potting soil).
• Use drought tolerant varieties.

Once we lost our water for the garden, I implemented another Solomon strategy, and for this I had to gird my loins: I took a sharp hoe to every second or third plant and removed it. This instantly reduced moisture consumption while providing double the capillary moisture to the remaining plants. I chose carefully, picking plants that were the weakest, or that had almost finished making fruit. For example, most of the cucumbers were barely hanging on anyway, and probably would have produced only a few pounds of fruit before they died. But the tomatoes and tomatillos are still going strong so I'm hoping they'll make it a bit longer.

Solomon doesn't think mulch does much to reduce moisture loss, since plant transpiration is the greatest source of water use, but I mulched earlier in the season anyway. I added some green mulch, in the form of weeds and sacrificial garden plants, piled high around the roots of the remaining plants. I hope they'll add just a tiny wisp of moisture to the ground as they dry up, but who knows if that will make a difference.

Earlier this year, I built a small series of berms and swales, so if we do get a few drops of rain, my garden will be there to take advantage of it and soak up every last bit.

Meanwhile, I'm just so happy that in this, my first season of gardening on anything but the tiniest of patio-sized lots, and in any ambitious way at all, the garden has thrived. It's been a strange year to start a new endeavor like this -- spring came really late, we had oddball hail storms, tornadoes, and late-season freezes. And now we have this drought and heat. Despite all that, the freezer is crammed with veggies, the cupboards overflow with canned tomatoes, salsa, and pickled everything. The dehydrator runs twenty four hours a day.

Widget Man is hard at work designing our barn and rainwater collection system for the garden while I harvest what I can, as fast as I can, until the fall veggies give up. I'll start a very small fall garden near our house, where we can water a small bit. We'll just grow a few things in the mini-garden -- a couple of tomato plants, some greens, some herbs. These are the kinds of things that are nice to have fresh and we're lucky to be able to grow them during most of the winter in our area.

Heat Tolerant Cucumbers

Not too long ago, most of the cucumbers gave up the battle against the summer sun. Even the lemon cucumbers, which had continued setting fruit long after the picklers stopped, were finally ready to cry uncle.

But not these babies. They're Armenian cucumbers, and I've never seen or eaten them before. Earlier in the summer, they just kind of sat there, taking up space, so I more or less ignored them.

Then the 100+ heat wave came, and the Armenian cucumbers took off. The vines, festooned with pretty yellow flowers, seemed like they grew a couple of feet a day. I still pretty much ignored them because there was so much to do, and I was sure they'd never set fruit in this heat.

But they have set fruit, and with a crazy heat-living vigor. They're delicious too -- sweet, not too seedy, and very firm. The texture is closer to a young carrot than the cucumbers I'm familiar with. And I think they have a slight celery flavor as well.

This may be just the cucumber for central Texas and other hot summer places.

Recipe for a Zucchini Explosion: Spicy Migas with Zucchini

Migas are a traditional Mexican dish, and a fine way to use up leftover corn tortillas. They are, in the simplest form, simply torn or cut corn tortillas, cooked in a little oil, and then scrambled with eggs. Common variations include adding cheese, tomatoes, mushrooms, onions, salsa, or chorizo (spicy Mexican sausage).

Around here, this dish is ubiquitous and you don't need to go to a Mexican restaurant to have it served up for breakfast. It's as commonly as bacon and eggs or pancakes. And it's a favorite Sunday brunch item.

My favorite variation includes zucchini, especially at this time of year when those green squash are coming out of the garden in truckloads, and if you're not careful, the size of baseball bats.

Spicy Migas with Zucchini
2 medium zucchini, cubed
4 corn tortillas, cut evenly into strips or squares
3 eggs, beaten
olive oil
comino (cumin)
dried ancho chile powder
dried chipotle chile powder
salt
shredded Oaxacan string cheese

1. Saute cubed zucchini in a very hot skillet, with olive oil. Sprinkle with salt, comino, and chile powders. I usually use about a tsp of comino and ancho and just a pinch of chipotle. Chipotle is the hottest of the two chiles, so adjust according to taste. You want the zucchini to end up slightly crisp on the outside, lightly coated with the spices, and creamy on the inside, so don't toss too much while it's cooking. Allow the squash to brown instead.

2. When the squash is brown, add tortilla pieces. There are two schools of thought about how tortillas should be cooked for migas -- some like them crisp, like a chip; others like them soft and chewy. I'm from the soft and chewy school myself.

3. Add eggs and scramble lightly.

4. Top with shredded cheese. Take pan off the heat and allow the residual heat of the dish to melt the cheese.

5. Serve drizzled with your favorite salsa.

A word about the spices: Comino is the most important spice in many Mexican dishes. Ancho and Chipotle just happen to be two of my favorites and are always at hand. By all means, adjust the spices to your taste and to what you have available.

Also posted at Food Renegade's Fight Back Fridays!

Hot and Cool Summer Salsa

When my good friend came back from a trip to El Paso and brought with her some amazing homemade tamales, I knew we needed a side dish worthy of their deliciousness. Just the ticket is something light -- the best homemade tamales are filling, dense, and intense.

Here is one of my favorite fast, easy ways to make a quick salsa cruda (a salsa made with raw ingredients). It combines the hot spiciness of raw serrano chiles with the cool, sweet smoothness of cucumber, avocado, mango, and of course, fresh-from the garden tomatoes.

Hot and Cool Summer Salsa
2 or 3 fresh serrano chiles
5 or 6 ripe tomatoes
1 large avocado
1 small mango
1 small sharp onion
1 large cucumber
a splash of olive oil
juice from 1 lime
salt to taste

Chop first 6 ingredients; toss together with olive oil, lime juice, and salt to taste. That's it! Of course, you can use a milder or hotter chile, according to your taste. You can even use a canned, picked chile for an even milder salsa. And by all means, remove the seeds and white membranes of the chile's to take some of the bite out. I don't have an extremely high tolerance for heat, so that's what I do. And the sweet, cool tomatoes, avocado, and mango seem to take some of the bite out of the chiles. Also delicious with fish and chicken.

On a related note: It might seem counter-intuitive, but hot spicy food is perfect for hot weather. It provides a strangely cooling, almost euphoric experience. All the finest world cuisines from hot climates are hot and spicy, after all.

This post part of Real Food Wednesday.

Solar Powered Outdoor Bathing and Soaking Grotto

I learned to love outdoor bathing during the year Widget Man and I spent in Mexico. For a month we lived on an isolated beach in the Yucatan, in a bamboo palapa with an outdoor shower. There was something so amazing about washing my hair every morning in the middle of a white sand beach, watching waves break on the coral reefs.

When we go camping, we try to reproduce the experience with a Sun Shower, which is just a plastic bladder with a show nozzle attached, that we hitch up to a tree limb. It holds five gallons of water and heats up amazingly fast if there's any sun around. What really amazes me is that we can both shower with a shared five gallons of water, once we learned not to dilly-dally.

We have low-flow showers in our house, but I can guarantee we use far more than two and half gallons of water, even when we try to move fast. I also love soaking in a hot tub of water at the end of the day. I hate to even think about how many gallons of water that uses.

So even though we don't live in a palapa anymore, and we don't have a white sand beach or an ocean to gaze at, we are setting up an outdoor bathing and soaking space, in the interests of water conservation and for the pure pleasure of bathing outside, in nature, under the sky.

It's solar heated and pumped, with a UV filter. If there's anything we have plenty of in Texas, it's sun, so the water gets as hot as we want it to. The barrel is from Snorkel Tubs and the solar pump and various components are from a dozen different solar power vendors.

Our plan is to add an outdoor shower, also with hot water from the solar panels, so that we can have a Japanese-style bathing and soaking grotto.

The tub is surrounded by grape vines, cedar, oaks, and a huge fig tree, on a terrace below our house, so it's completely private.

Water Rights, Water Choices

We never really intended to live out here. We bought this place as a weekend escape and somehow, fell in love.

Our little lake cove has eight houses, and we're the only ones who live here full time. The rest come in from Houston, El Paso, and Austin, on weekends and holidays. We all share a well. It's not much of a well, really, sunk shallow, built on the cheap, without a water holding tank. The decision to build a well on the cheap was made long before we moved out here and we didn't realize how much this was going to effect our lives. Most of the time, it's just fine, but when the weekend people come, they bring guests. Lots of guests. Who are heavy water users, not used to water conservation.

This weekend, with the cove packed with weekenders and their guests, the water situation came to a head. We had hardly any water pressure, and the well pump was really struggling to keep up. While we worried and tried to conserve, our sometime-neighbors stewed over my use of water to irrigate our little patch of garden.

The truth of it is, I have no rights to irrigate with our well water. The well belongs to our neighborhood, and my annual dues pay for household water, and specifically exclude any outside watering. The truth of it also is, if we were watering a patch of lawn or some ornamentals, no one would blink -- they all do it. But this neighborhood has always been uncomfortable with my veggie garden. They feel it brings down property values. It's just too...rural.

So I have some choices now. We could sink our own well, and do it right this time. Nothing in our neighborhood bylaws precludes us from doing this. But I don't want to. Another well would stress our already-drought-stressed water tables, and possibly further deplete the neighborhood's water situation.

We have been planning to build a water collection system for the garden, drawing and re-drawing plans for a barn, from which we'd collect the water. Rainwater catchement is the perfect solution for our area, where we get plenty of water in the winter, and often in the spring too. But that's going to take some time -- a lot of time. And I need an immediate solution.

So here are my choices to get through the next few months, until the rainy season, and until we build a water catchment system:

1. Buy a water tank for the garden now and have a commercial bulk water supplier fill it. Use this water to get through the next few months.

2. Abandon the garden until we build a water catchment system.

There is also a third option that I'm trying to think through. Our house perches on a steep hillside overlooking the lake. To get to the lake we have a wooden stairway, in three flights of about fifty stairs each. At each flight, there's a landing, and along each landing is a naturally terraced strip of land. The second terrace might be a suitable place for a garden.

When I think about having a lovely, secret garden, away from dissaproving stares, I get pretty excited. I'd love to just make the tension go away. But I need to think this through logically -- building a brand new garden is a lot of work. So here are the advantages and disadvantages to each site:

Advantages to the Existing Garden:

• Open field with plenty of sunshine.
• Fenced.
• Reasonably good soil.
• Garden beds already constructed.
• Plenty of room to add more garden beds, orchards, or even to have animals like chickens or goats.
  

Disadvantages to the Existing Garden

• In full view of my neighbors. They drive by frowning and muttering and I hate that it makes them so unhappy. I also hesitate to do other things that I know would drive them crazy, like have big piles of compost, dirt, and manure. Or get chickens. Or try making biochar.
• No trees for windbreak, which is very rough on young plants.
• Far enough from the house that I can't see what's going on -- like a deer or raccoon invasion.
• Open field make it less pretty, and more simply utilitarian, despite my efforts to plant vines on the fence and flowers in the beds.
• No easy water source.
• Will be very expensive to build a water collection system here. Since it's uphill and across a private road from our house, we need to build a barn for water collection. The barn will have to be approved by the neighborhood architectural committee.

Advantages to the New Garden Spot

• Very pretty place to garden, with a view of the lake, across the cove to unspoiled land.
• Shade trees nearby.
• Trees provide a windbreak.
• Will be very easy to create a waterwise irrigation system. I can hook up to our existing lake-water pump, and/or build a simple, gravity-fed rainwater system, fed by the house above.
• It's private, with no possibility that the neighbors will be disturbed by it (unless they sit on my dock below and stare up at us with binoculars.) I'd be more experimental without their frowning stares.

Disadvantages:

• The land is very rocky. I'd need to either bring in new soil or try to find a way to move the soil from my existing beds.
• It's located two levels down from my house. Every trip to the garden means descending two flights of outdoor stairs. It's impossible to get a tiller down there and pretty difficult to move soil, manure, etc.
• It's slightly smaller than my existing garden.
• I'd need to build a new fence.

Well? What would you do?