Mostly chard

For the DeKalb County Times
by Karley

The roadsides and hillsides are abuzz with spring. The dogwoods have spent their blooms and are leafing out, and the landscape looks like a watercolor right now with its splashes of exuberant greens. But that doesn't mean we should put away our sweaters just yet. Who knows what April will bring? Spring in Middle Tennessee is not to be trusted!

Keep your eye out for those patches of watercress. It's growing like mad right now. I harvested two pounds, and two days later I couldn't tell where I had cut it. There's actually a huge patch on the side of the road off highway 70 West just as you come into Liberty. There must be a spring near the sidewalk because the sidewalk is covered in watercress. Free gourmet food!

Between gardening friends I've spoken with and our own garden, right now you can have cabbage, beets, chard, broccoli, turnips, mustards, green onions, Asian greens, potatoes, lettuce, kale, arugula, and peas in the ground. Our greenhouse is filled with tiny tomato babies and lettuce starts. We'll start our eggplants and peppers today or tomorrow. There's no sense rushing those seedlings; last year we started them earlier and they just sulked until the heat really got cranking.

Eggplants can be challenging to grow in our area. In our garden and our immediate neighbors' gardens the flea beetles just demolish the plants as soon as they're set out. I've heard other growers say the potato beetles chewed up their eggplants. It takes skill and luck, probably in equal measure, to grow great eggplants here. So when you encounter locally grown eggplants at the farmers' market, you should be sure to load up and thank your farmer!

As challenging and persnickety as eggplants may be, chard is exactly the opposite. Chard is closely related to beets which is why the leaves look exactly like beet tops. As an aside—you do eat your beet greens, don't you?

Chard comes in many varieties, some with white ribs, others with florescent pink or yellow, and a few with streaked ribs. The greens are usually green, but a few varieties have reddish tinted leaves. The only kind I grow is Bright Lights chard because the rib colors come in a wild array of bright colors, and some of the plants have red leaves.

Chard leaves are succulent and tender. Grasp the stem at the cut end with one hand and with the other hand, run your fingers down the length of the leaf. This lets you pull all the greens off the rib. If you're going to make a sauté, just rough chop the greens, throw in some heated oil for only about two minutes, and dress up with garlic, soy sauce, ginger, pepper, butter, coconut oil, or anything else that sounds good. Be sure you remove the chard from the heat when it's still bright green. Don't pour off any liquid since many minerals and vitamins are in the juices that are released during cooking.

When the chard is really cranking the leaves can get huge—up to several inches across. If you cut the ribs off of the larger leaves, you can use each leaf as a wrap for chicken, egg, or tuna salad. Chop up the ribs and throw them in your salad of choice. The brightly colored ribs taste very similar to the leaves. When finely chopped the ribs make an absolutely delightful culinary confetti. You can turn your humdrum deviled eggs and green salads into tasty explosions of art.

As if its stunning beauty and culinary strengths aren't enough to convince you to grow chard, the ease with which you can have it pouring out of your garden should make it irresistible. The seeds are actually little fruits which contain up to half a dozen little seeds. Some people recommend soaking or scoring the seeds for faster germination, but it's not necessary. Throw the seeds in your dirt then when they're a couple inches tall, thin the seedlings so that you have a few inches between each plant. Be absolutely sure to eat the thinnings—because they're great.

Chard appreciates soil amended with organic matter, like the compost you make from your kitchen waste and backyard leaves, but it can make its living in leaner soil, too. At our farm we really haven't had any pest problems to speak of, except the blister beetles that got a little out of hand at the end of the summer last year. At that point our chickens were eating a lot of chard and beetle salads.

Chard will grow in full sun but will tolerate a little shade. It tolerates heat after the turnip greens have gone tough and bitter and is drought resistant, so if you leave your spring planting in place through the summer you can harvest from it again in the fall. Chard is a “cut and come again” crop, so don't take more than around a third of the leaves during any single harvest, being sure to leave the newest inner growth, and in a couple days you can come back and harvest more.

Chard takes light frost like a champ, so you can eat off one planting all season long. If you make some simple hoops and cover the chard with fabric or plastic, you can have fresh greens in your garden until the low temperature gets into the low 20s in the winter. If there's another winter like this year, you wouldn't have anything to worry about!

Chard also grow enthusiastically in containers, so don't feel limited by space. Even a six inch pot can hold enough chard to keep one eater supplied throughout the growing season.

Even if you've never grown chard before, make 2012 the last year you don't have chard in your garden!

Spring and other musings

For the DeKalb County Times
by Karley

With warm temperatures in the forecast for the foreseeable future, the gardening season and spring are officially on. People are tilling up their plots and throwing seeds in the ground. It's time for cutting up your seed potatoes and planting your onion starts. Now, this doesn't mean we won't get another frost. It thundered in February, so according to the old timers, we can expect frost in May.

We live tucked back in hollow (excuse me, holler), so our daffodils are a couple weeks behind the flowers up in Smithville. Last year we had frosts almost a full month after our friends who garden up on Short Mountain, and this year their daffodils show is already over.

We're already seeing butterflies and bees. I've already also found a tick embedded in my side and have been bitten by mosquitoes. The toads and frogs are busy every evening serenading the cool nights, so we have to drive very carefully in the evenings, so as to not to squish our amphibious neighbors.

There is a huge flock of wild turkeys who roost in the trees on the hillside near our house. Driving back to the farm just before dusk a few day ago I saw a gathering of at least eighty. Some of the huge males were displaying their tail feathers for the females, but none of the ladies seemed terribly impressed. When they all decided it was time to roost, it sounded like they were going to break all the branches as they hefted their large bodies into the tops of the trees. Turkeys make a great commotion when they're all congregated in a big group—remarkably like a big group of humans.

The turnips and mustards leftover from the fall planting are bolting and blooming right now. Those cheery little yellow flowers are edible, and they do a beautiful job dressing up salads and even chicken or fish dishes. The unopened flower heads look like broccoli sprouts, and you can very lightly sauté them for a spring tonic mess of greens. Heat up some olive or coconut oil in a pan and throw the sprouts on there for just two or three minutes, until lightly cooked. Toss them with some soy sauce and some fresh grated ginger for an ethic treat.

The wild, peppery watercress is growing like crazy right now. You can find it growing in clean, flowing spring water, which we have a lot of here. It's easiest to pick the leaves growing above the water. Those leaves are usually cleaner, and you're less likely to find hitchhiking snails. You can make pesto with the leaves or eat it raw as a salad green. Since watercress is extremely easy to identify, abundant, and edible raw, it's a fantastic, easy wild food to start out your foraging adventures.

Now is the time for starting tomato and pepper seeds, but be prepared to keep them warm if we get a cold snap in April—or that frost in May. You can transplant broccoli and cabbage into the garden and direct sow peas, spinach, mustards, turnips, lettuce, and kale.

You can also be scattering flower seeds to dress up your landscape. This past week we made flower bombs. We mixed about five parts clay to one part finished compost and then threw in dozens and dozens of packets of seeds I got on sale last year. We used all kinds of herbs and garden flowers—everything from dill, poppies, zinnias, and bachelors buttons to Scarlet Ohno turnips, fennel, and sunflowers. We just formed handfuls of the mixture into roundish balls and let them dry in the sun. Now as we're walking around the farm, we throw the flower bombs in areas where we just don't get around to mowing very regularly.

At our farm, that's most of the grass. I hate mowing because I hate loud, stinky mowers; that's my own personal crusade. However, a more broadly applicable reason for mowing infrequently is that small engines like those in weed eaters, leaf blowers, and even lawn mowers actually produce many times more emissions than an engine in even a large truck. A study published on insideline.com found that a two-stroke leaf blower generated 23 times more Carbon Monoxide (CO) and 300 times more non-methane hydrocarbons (NMHC) than a large pickup. To put that in perspective, you would have to drive that truck 3,887 miles, from Northern Texas to Anchorage, Alaska, to produce the same level of emissions as half an hour of yard work with that two-stroke blower.

We use our goats and horse and donkey to mow our grass. They're more than happy to oblige. Our head goat, Dolly the Despot, doesn't seem to mind being tied on a long line, which fairly reliably keeps the herd in a twenty to thirty foot radius. The horse and donkey are never opposed to face planting in lush green grass, but their services have to be more closely monitored, as their big feet can wreak destruction in zero seconds flat. In return they all leave us free fertilizer, which the chickens very enthusiastically spread out in their diligent search for anything that squirms.

And then I don't have to mow, which leaves more time for other things, like working up our beds with the broadfork, since I don't like tillers either. We also end up with a beautiful privacy screen that blooms purple (ironweed), yellow (goldenrod), with puffs of white and lavender mixed in between our garden and the road. This year we're hoping the flower bombs will add every shade and color you can imagine to our privacy screen and then go to seed for a repeat next year.

Having wild areas near your garden is a great way to attract lots of beneficial bugs, like the Soldier Beetle, who feeds on grasshopper eggs. They love goldenrod. Those red wasps that deliver such a wallop if you upset them are the same wasps whose larvae parasitize those huge green tomato hornworms. If you've ever found a hornworm with little white eggs attached to its back, it's those wasps that laid the eggs. And after the flower show is over, the migrating song birds love the tall dead weeds, which they dance and flit through all winter.

I might hate mowing, mowers, weed eaters, and tillers, but I love living here where the color palette changes with the season and my office has no walls or ceiling.

Heirlooms, hybrids, Bt corn, and your blood stream

Column for the DeKalb County Times
by Karley

What are you putting in your mouth?

This is the season when many gardeners and farmers are buying their seeds. Some people prefer to grow tried and true varieties season after season, while some people revel in the new and unfamiliar. Some old varieties are finding new popularity, as public interest in heirloom varieties expands.

Seed companies are responding to the growing public interest, so heirloom varieties are becoming more widely available. “Heirloom” is sometimes used interchangeably with “open-pollinated” or the abbreviation OP. But what exactly is an heirloom variety?

There is no official designation on the descriptor “heirloom.” The term usually indicates a variety that has at least a 30 year established history and is always an open-pollinated variety. The variety may have been saved by someone's grandmother or may have been grown by Native Americans.

In order for a grower to save seed from season to season, the seed must be open-pollinated, or able to produce seed that is identical to the parent plant. Included under the open-pollinated category are crop plants like tomatoes and peppers, which have perfect flowers and self-pollinate. The home gardener can save seeds from any open-pollinated tomato or pepper and can expect that almost all of the seedlings will have the same traits as the parent plant. Other plants, like squash, corn, and cucumbers are pollinated by insects or wind. Since the pollen must be moved from flower to flower, these crops cross-pollinate with other varieties of the same species very easily.

However many plants available in nurseries and hardware stores are hybrid varieties, indicated by the F1 abbreviation. Seeds saved from hybrid plants will not “breed true”, that is produce plants with the same traits as the parent plants. This however does not indicate that the seed was produced using genetic engineering.

Hybridization is the breeding of two unrelated strains of a plant in order to develop some trait, like resistance in tomatoes to Tobacco Mosaic Virus or in melons to mildew. The act of hybridizing via controlled selective breeding is how the first farmers developed corn from wild grass. Because hybrids are developed by breeding unrelated varieties, the subsequent generation of seeds will display a mix of the genes in the grandparent generation.

Genetic engineering (GE) or genetic modification (GM), on the other hand, is the practice of inserting genes into an organism's genome using DNA technology developed since the 1970s. This results in what is commonly referred to as genetically modified organisms (GMOs). One form of genetic engineering is the biotechnology industry's Technology Protection System (TPS), known to people outside the industry as the terminator gene, or terminator technology.

Seeds developed using TPS produce sterile seeds and are produced at great expense to very large corporations. Since farmers growing TPS seeds cannot save seed for the next season, they must pay for seed season after season. And since the farmer can't save the seed, it protects the intellectual property of the corporation.

Other GE seeds contain genes that enable them to actually manufacture the pesticide Bt. Bt stands for Bacillus thuringiensis, which is a naturally occurring soil bacterium that can effectively be used to control crop damage by caterpillars. Bt has been used by growers since the 1920s. However, with consistent use, pest resistance can and has arisen, both with foliar Bt application and in GE plants that produce Bt.

Much of the research condoning the safety of human consumption of GE crops has been paid for by the industry itself. When Bt producing crops were first introduced, the biotechnology companies insisted that the Bt would be destroyed in the digestive tract of any animal consuming the crop, including humans. Much to the contrary, a 2011 study performed in Canada by several independent scientists found traces of the Bt toxin in 93% of pregnant women's blood and 80% of the umbilical cords in their sample population. As 70-90% of the processed food consumed in the United States contains at least one of the most common GE crops—corn, soy, and rapeseed, used make canola oil—it is almost certain similar findings would result from studies in this country.

Upwards of 90% of Americans say they want to see GE ingredients labeled, but neither the biotechnology companies nor the government seem to be heading the call. This administration has approved the unregulated release of both GE alfalfa and GE sugar beets, despite election season promises to mandate labeling. Lawyers and scientists that have worked for the big agribusiness companies rotate in and out of the regulatory bodies that oversee biotechnology regulations.

Since the people's voice is being ignored on this issue, it falls to the individual consumer to be educated about what they're eating. If you're buying seeds, pay attention to where the seeds are coming from and what all those abbreviations and letters beside the descriptions mean. If you don't grow your own food, then support your local growers and cultivate a relationship with the people who do. Ask them what they're growing and how they're growing it. Eaters and producers can educate and nourish one another.