Herbal Teas

It's the season of beautiful herbs! While many of the herbs we grow at Oliview are rated as "drought tolerant", that really just means that we won't kill those plants if we forget to water them for a few 110-degree days... not that they thrive in hot, dry conditions. In fact, the conditions they love are happening right now: cool nights, evenly moist soil from the rain, and warm - not hot - days. The thyme is big, bushy, and with beautifully green, moist leaves. The culinary sage even bloomed this spring (it generally blooms once every couple of years)! Lemon balm looks shiny and just so luscious. Roses are prolific this time of year, and the calendulas have been popping up as if we have the perfect conditions... because, for now, we do!

An herbal vignette: feverfew, roses, sage, comfrey, scented geranium, and lemon balm... all 30 feet from my front door!

A bunch of herbal tea ingredients - so pretty!

Some of these herbs I do end up drying for use throughout the year, but some of them are only good fresh. Soooo...

With nights that are still cool, I love herbal teas as I wind down and get ready for a good night's rest. And I'm not the only one: Sunset featured this article in the latest issue, and I found a great BHG article on planting a garden to supply herbal tea. It's a popular sport! My favourite is a mix of lemon balm with calendula flowers and some rose petals: it's beautiful, light, and sets the perfect tone for sweet dreams. A sage leaf or sprig of rosemary two adds some throat-clearing power, without overpowering the brew.

I know some people chop or crush the leaves and petals, but I don't do that. I do use just-off-boiling water, though, and let it steep for about 10 minutes. It's so beautiful in the pot!

A little cup of tea is the perfect accompaniment to a biscotti and a good book before bed. Sweet dreams!

- Elizabeth

Berry Blast... or, in other words: The Great Negotiation

There's a lot to negotiate on a farm. You think you have something figured out, and then a chicken, or an insect, or the weather... or a spouse... comes in a messes with your vision! This is the story of the berry patch.

I grew up with boysenberries in my back yard. When dinner wasn't ready quite soon enough, Mom would send us out back to play, where we'd usually end up at the boysenberry fence finding berries that we'd missed the evening before. In fact, there are STILL boysenberries in this SAME spot in my childhood backyard.

If you have never had a boysenberry, you can't know what you're missing, but know that you're missing something major. They have the je ne sais quoi of a raspberry, and the luciousness of a just-ripe blueberry, as well as the deep sweetness of a blackberry - without the subtle, slightly off-putting rancidity that blackberries seem to carry. In any case, they're stellar. AND they're super-easy to propagate. They do so themselves, quite naturally, but you can easily plant a cane one fall, and the following spring have a boysenberry plant! 

Boysenberry plants, in their current/old location. They're just leafing out - which they do before blossoming! It's not an ideal time to move them, development-wise... however, it is a GREAT time to move them, human-relationship-wise! Note the slightly weedy-unkempt look of the bed... ahem.

SO: my dear mother supplied us with boysenberry plants when we moved up here. They're delicious, part of my childhood, and don't take up a ton of space. An easy "go", in my garden (notice the ownership, there... this becomes part of the challenge). So we - husband and I - agreed to plant them along the garden's north fence line. I promised to care for them: cut the year-old canes, pin up the new ones, weed, feed, etcetera. They're an exuberant plant, and did end up somewhat taking over that fence line. Not offensively so, but exuberantly. I was still caring for them, though, and Pedro - and CSA customers! - was reaping the spring/summer berry rewards... Great, right? 

No so great for Pedro. 

The plants were coming under the fence and showing up in the nearest garden bed... as well as growing wildly - exuberantly! - and creating nasty scratches on those brave enough to walk the pathway on the opposite side of the fence. Sigh. I still say: "small price to pay". However, it is not only my garden. Sigh. So they had to be moved.

The deal was that Pedro build a structure and I'd move the berries. It being Easter-time, this seems like a good opportunity to show the structure:

Boysenberry trellis in the making... looking oddly like three crosses in the middle of our property! 

Pedro put the trellis structures in last weekend, and then over the last few days I scraped the ground of weeds with our Valley Oak Tools wheeled hoe, a most amazing tool (the piles of weeds and topsoil will be composted). I then forked loose an 18-inch-wide strip on either side of the trellis for the actual berry plants. In the photo above, the chickens are helping to cultivate. This is very hard work, so I welcome any help I can get!

This morning I planted the west side of the trellis (the right side, in this photo). (Sorry: no photos. I was too hot and annoyed to get my camera.) This afternoon we'll be wiring it up with two long wires connecting across the length of the main posts, and then another few wires creating a kind of umbrella structure across the cross-posts, at the top. And then I'll dig more berry plants (sigh) and have a brand-new boysenberry trellis to enjoy! Yay! Hopefully we'll get a few berries this year, but I've composted the soil really well so that they'll settle in this year and we'll have a bumper crop next year! AND now I'll get to pick both sides, and not be hemmed in by the garden!

Here's to hard work, negotiations, and a better solution out of all of it!

- Elizabeth

Our First Cabbages!

It has taken all of my childhood and some of my adult years, but I have been enjoying the complex fresh/bitter flavors of some of the more... challenging vegetables for the last several years. One of those happens to be cabbage. It's a beautiful vegetable in the ground, and if you're about my age, you probably will think of Cabbage Patch Dolls with the following photo, as well:

Mature cabbages, ready for eating!

It's my pleasure to be doing some fun things with cabbage this year, now that we've finally figured out how to grow it (starting it WAY earlier than we thought, and being very, very patient). I made some great kraut last month, but I also made a cabbage soup. French onion is one of my favorite foods, and I couldn't get a similar version with cabbage out of my head. It turns out that I was right - cabbage soup has a lovely flavor, and is quite similar, though quicker and not as pretty, to French onion. 

Our first Oliview cabbage! It's not as dense as store cabbages, but is infinately fresher and more satisfying!

I had a medium-small head of cabbage that I chopped up similar to how you might for kraut. I chopped up some onions, too, and LOTS of garlic, sautéed those, and added in the cabbage.

After seeing it soften (though not brown), I added in about 3 cups of chicken broth (from our own chickens, of course!), some thyme, oregano, and tarragon, to play up the French flavors. After boiling for about 15 minutes, I went at it with the immersion blender... which promptly failed me. I did a few rounds in the conventional blender, but it ended up chunkier than I'd planned. This was still pretty good, and a great way to eat a lot of cabbage! I topped it with Gruyere cheese and some of our amazing garlic scape pesto and had myself a fabulous veggie-heavy dinner.

Yay for a mature palate!

- Elizabeth 

Adaptive Planning for Spring and Summer

As I write this, we're getting our coldest snap yet, this year... in February! We still have some beautiful winter greens in the garden, and they should all be fine, but some of our sage is still blooming(!), or at least was, until last night... and the borage has definitely bit the dust for the season. Despite these losses, the cold weather is so important for balance on the farm: it helps to keep pest insect numbers down (goodbye, flea beetles who ate up our eggplant leaves last year!), it helps us to keep invasive weeds in check (goodbye, bermuda and johnson grasses!), and helps our fruit trees to keep their dormancy, at least a little longer! 

However, in this cold weather we're thinking hard about what's coming: last year was incredibly challenging, even for established farms and farmers, but especially for us newbies! The heat, and the length of the hot season, really did in some of our best-laid plans. We're thinking hard about long term sustainability of the farm under climate conditions, and are trying to plan accordingly.

For example, our root vegetables seem to do pretty well, even when it's hot. Beets, onions, leeks, , parsnips, and daikon radishes are all things that we've had pretty good luck with, even in the heat. That suggests that we might try other roots, such as turnips, rutabagas, and celeriac. These vegetables are healthy for us, with high mineral content and great caloric density, but they're also great for our soil, leaving high levels of organic matter behind, in the soil, when they are picked.

Tomatoes have been terrible producers over the last two years, but peppers have produced quite well, heroically surviving, and even thriving, in the heat! That means that expanding our repertoire of peppers may be a good way to get a wider variety of nutrients from a crop that seems to do well in the extreme heat, and are an equal harbinger of summer in the way that we think of tomatoes.

In addition, we've noticed that our older beds - the ones that we dug in 2013 and 2014 - have hosted some of our hardiest crops. This suggests that growing our own compost, increasing soil tilth through organic matter, and increasing the water holding capacity of our garden beds is an important adaptive action for the coming decades. It also suggests that regular watering is important. We saw this when we left for a few days last September, and a dearth of water on the watermelons - despite our well-meaning farm sitter! - made the aphids move in and the fruit rot on the vine. Note to ourselves: no vacation time in summer!

The FUN part of planning is choosing the vegetables: I'm pulling hard for celeriac this year, though Pedro doesn't always love these "weird" things. We've probably missed the window for fennel, but we might get a few months of cilantro in, yet. I'm also hoping for some new herbs: tarragon, savory, and lavender should do quite well in our hot summers, and I'm hoping that they'll contribute to balancing our pest load in the garden, as well.

We wish you beautiful summer dreams in these cold days!

- Elizabeth

Winter's Flavors... and Vitamins!

I adore winter food. Deep, complex flavors, contrasting textures, and the very vitamins and minerals we need to get through a long, dark season. I love that these fruits take so long to ripen: they absorb all of the goodness of summer, growing and developing over the hottest months and then sweetening as the sun declines. What a beautiful natural poem!

Over Thanksgiving I received about a half-bushel of persimmons from a very generous family friend. These are some of my most favorite fruits ever, but a half bushel was a lot - even for me! - to get through! What to do with these lovely fruits, other than eat out of hand or slice into yogurt? I came up with a gorgeous and delicious salad recipe, perfect for local, seasonal fruits and vegetables this time of year, and exactly what I need to get me through short days and a virus-prone office! 

Luscious winter fruits in sunshine colors, ready for salad making!

Winter Sunshine Salad

1. Cut 1 persimmon in half and remove the leaf cap, then slice into the size segment you want in a salad. I do thinnish slices to the center, so that I can see the body of the fruit in each slice. Put all of these into a medium-sized bowl.
2. Peel 1 mandarin orange and segment (cut segments if you'd rather have smaller pieces). Place in same bowl as persimmons.
3. Take about 1 cup of parsley and chop small. Toss into the bowl with the fruit.
4. Toss in the same bowl about 1/4 to 1/2 cup of chopped walnuts.
5. Now, isn't that beautiful? For the finishing touch, drizzle on some basalmic vinegar (I use Skylake Ranch pomegranate basalmic - from our very own rural northern CA!) and freshly-milled Oliview Farm olive oil! Maybe a sprinkle of salt, and you're ready for lunch!

This salad is packed full of fiber, vitamin A, and vitamin C, and ready to bust your winter blues and bring sunshine to your table and your tummy! Enjoy the beauty and bounty of winter!

- Elizabeth

Winter Sunshine Salad ready for tomorrow's potluck!