The Quarter-Acre Farm

by Spring Warren

  The main pipes ran the length of the garden, and elbows and tees sent minor roads to the individual beds. Off those roads came tiny little county roads, which ended at the bases of plants with little sprinklers and drippers. Jesse made those little flexible pipes very long so that they could be moved from plant to plant as needed for subsequent plantings. Jesse also put off/on valves at the junction of some beds, such as the melon beds, so that I could water them more often than other beds, such as the tomatoes.

  Once we got the system working, Jesse shallowly buried most of the “highway” system, leaving only the black pipe visible at the beds themselves. It seemed perfect.

  Then I found the grapes weren’t being watered, and neither was one of my side beds . . . and the potatoes were getting too much water and one of the spigots wasn’t spraying. The back seemed to have great water pressure but not the front, and speaking of the front, we hadn’t put a valve on the system to turn it off when I wanted to use the hose.

  I hated to tell Jesse, but he took it in stride. “You’ll find all sorts of ways you need it to change,” he said. Then he showed me how to do it myself. How things change.

  I’m not as good at configuring and putting together the water system as Jesse yet, but he did have those years of Lego building, which I failed to benefit from. Still, I’m doing okay—the drip system is working so much better than my octo-hose system, and it’s costing us less in the water department; it is most gratifying, and I believe it will keep getting better.

  In the meantime, however, I’m drawing up my proposal for urbanfarming water breaks.

  Recipe

  Iced Tea with Lavender, Lemon Verbena, and Mint

  When it is hot and your plants are crying out for water, it’s likely that you’re doing the same. And while water is about the best thing going (for some reason, when I was a kid it tasted best out of the hose), iced tea is a close second.

  We make sun tea in a flat glass refrigerator pitcher that has a stopper and a wide opening. The wide opening is a must or it will be nigh impossible to clean the pitcher, and you will be fishing out tea bags and herbs with a wire coat hanger.

  Ingredients: • 1 gallon water

  • 4 tea bags such as PG Tips’ Red Rose

  • 2 TB lavender flowers

  • 1 cup mint

  After the sun tea has brewed, you have two options for flavoring it with herbs. You can add the herbs to the pitcher itself, or you can add them to the glasses. It’s all about presentation at this point. I can see putting sprigs of herbs in cups on the table for a summer soiree and letting guests choose their own particular favorites to muddle into chilled glasses with their tea. Usually, however, I put the herbs straight into my half gallon refrigerator pitcher, using the nonbusiness end of a wooden spoon to muddle (or mush/crush/mistreat) the herbs to release their flavors, so I can grab a glass of the refreshing concoction fast. It’s very la-di-dah.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  WHAT WEIGHS MORE, A POUND OF DIAMONDS OR A POUND OF MUSHROOMS?

  “Shitake happens”

  —SEEN ON A T-SHIRT

  Let me apologize for this year’s Christmas present. It may be the worst homemade gift yet in the long line of horrible homemade gifts that I have been responsible for. Worse than the hand-dipped candles that had beads of water trapped between the layers of wax so that as the candles burned they sporadically hissed as if the candles disapproved of the dinner on the table, or the diners themselves, or life in general—sometimes they hissed so much so that they extinguished themselves altogether in the middle of a meal.

  This year’s present was also worse than the fish-print aprons that I didn’t wash before packaging up and sending out, so that when people opened the gift a week or two later, the smell of rotted halibut slammed out of the box.

  This year I gave bags of used coffee grounds that required the recipient to mist them with water every day until the grounds were covered with disgusting furry growths. The recipients of these “gifts” then felt like failures and surreptitiously threw the gifts away thinking they had done something wrong, vowing they must never let on what they’d allowed to happen.

  I might as well have shouted, “Happy holidays! You get a tedious, repetitive chore resulting in moldy trash and a of sense shame, to top it all!”

  Those bags of coffee grounds were inoculated with mushroom spore and were supposed to produce lovely, tender mushrooms for all of you to enjoy. Really. I promise.

  Mushrooms seemed an ideal crop to grow during the winter at the Quarter-Acre Farm. I could grow them in my garage, or even—because our house was built in California during the insulation-challenged 1950s—in my office where it was cool and damp until mid May.

  I started my mushroom-growing career by buying a mushroom kit from an online mushroom supply store. When the kit arrived, it looked like something Count Dracula would send ahead in preparation for a visit: a box of dirt. The instructions promised that if I were to gently rake the surface of the dirt, mist it, and keep the whole shebang in a dark place, I would be rewarded with a bumper crop of crimini mushrooms.

  During the ensuing days, the box of dirt grew a webby sort of growth and then did indeed bloom, thrillingly, with criminis. I harvested bunches and bunches of them. I sautéed them, grilled them, then made mushroom soup. The mushroom soup was a particular pleasure because it was so easy and amazingly delicious. The only other mushroom soup I had ever eaten was Campbell’s Cream of Mushroom Soup. As a kid I’d found the pallid glutinous dreck so disgusting I had never managed to overcome my aversion to it and try mushroom soup of any other ilk—until my own homegrown, homemade concoction.

  I was so excited by the pleasure of mushrooms and the ease of growing them that I told Jesse I was going to grow portobellos next. Jesse told me that I was already growing portobellos—portobellos are merely grown up criminis, usually a whopping three to seven days older. Apparently, they taste a bit different not only because they are older but also because they have opened (their gills exposed to air) and have lost a little moisture, making them meatier (which also makes them an excellent candidate for grilling).

  Of course I thought, how could I have forgotten Jesse’s mushroom stage? During his time at the University of California, Jesse had taken a class in mycology. I have to admit that made me a little uneasy, especially because every time I mentioned that my son was studying mushrooms in college and loving it, my friends would snort and say, “Of course he is.”

  Then there was the great delaminating.

  That year for Sam’s birthday, Jesse promised to make Sam, who was doing a lot of cooking at the time, a mushroom farm. Jesse came over on a Thursday evening with a bag of barley, some mushroom spawn, and a request to use our pressure cooker.

  I pulled out the pressure cooker and some canning jars, then Louis and I went out (fled, actually) to dinner. Several hours later—luckily after a glass or two of wine—I called the house to check on the boys. Sam answered, and with a certain amount of uncharacteristic glee in his voice, reported an explosion, smoke, and his certainty that the pressure cooker was no longer going to be of any use.

  Jesse and Sam assured me that although the smoke alarms had proved in good working order, they were in no danger. I, in turn, assured them that it was practically impossible to do any permanent damage to a heavy-duty pressure cooker. If anything, the appliance might need a new seal but it would be fine.

  However, when Louis and I returned home to a house reeking of smoke, we found that the pressure cooker was indeed ruined. I gaped in grim amazement at the warped discs of copper and steel that had delaminated from the bottom of the pot. I didn’t want to imagine what hellish temperature the pot (which had apparently steamed itself dry) must have risen to. But though my pot was damaged, my boys were not, and Sam, for his part, seemed to feel the smoke-filled adventure he’d shared with his brother was well worth the sacrifice of his mushroom farm that year.

  Now, as I contemplated growing more Quarter-Acre Far
m mushrooms without buying the relatively expensive ready-to-grow kit, Jesse assured me that not only could he help, but that he’d also learned his lesson with the pressure cooker. In fact, we actually could get by without using one at all—which was a good thing since I had never replaced it.

  I sent away for a bag of oyster-mushroom spawn. When it arrived, Jesse and I boiled wood chips for an hour, then drained them and tossed them with the mushroom spawn. We put the chips and spawn in Ziploc vegetable bags (the kind with tiny holes for ventilation), rolled some up in layers of cheesecloth, then put them on trays in the garage and kept them moist.

  Once again, success! I cheerfully clipped the white, trumpetshaped fungus, made more soups, put them in frittatas, and added them to flavorful risotto.

  I was gratified not only with the taste of the mushrooms, but also with the ease of substituting the mighty mushroom for meat. If you switched four ounces of mushrooms for four ounces of meat (chopped up in meatballs, or as a Portobello burger, for instance) once a week for a year, you would find yourself not only nutritionally richer, but five pounds lighter at the end of that year.

  As a nutritional element, mushrooms are excellent sources of protein, fiber, vitamins C and B, calcium, and minerals; they’re also one of the leading sources of two potent antioxidants—selenium and ergothioneine.

  Ergothioneine is particularly intriguing, credited with everything from cutting inflammation to increasing sperm viability. Mushrooms have four and twelve times as much of this antioxidant as the two next most powerful sources—chicken livers and wheat germ.

  Mushrooms are nutritional powerhouses. It seems that no matter what ails you, there is a mushroom that can either prevent or treat it. And wouldn’t it be nice if all medical treatments tasted so good? Mushrooms are chock full of a variety of “volatiles” (chemical compounds released in the mouth) that, depending on the type and concentration, give different mushroom varieties taste characteristics such as “sweet and fruity,” “almond-like,” “leafy,” “pine-tree-like,” and “orange and fatty.”

  Not just humans find them delicious. Almost all animals eat mushrooms, from birds and squirrels to bears and, most famously, pigs. Certainly, Jeannette the goose loves mushrooms. We had a damp bale of straw in the goose pen that sprouted a variety of fungi during the rainy months. I would often see Jeannette delicately snipping and eating the tiny ’shrooms. Perhaps she sensed the mushrooms’ nutritional riches. Or perhaps she was just enjoying the effect of a psychotropic fungi, which some animals are notorious for eating.

  For instance, psychotropic mushrooms are said to be the source of the myth of Santa’s flying reindeer. Lapland reindeer apparently love Amanita muscaria mushrooms, which are not only hallucinogenic, but they also supposedly stimulate the animal’s muscular system. This made the reindeer’s small efforts produce surprising results—enormous reindeer leaps. These leaps then led to stories of flying reindeer, which were eventually assimilated into the folklore of St. Nicholas.

  I hadn’t noticed Jeannette making any grandiose leaps. In fact, on the best of days she could barely manage a three-foot flight. But because Christmas was on my mind, and because I had been having such a good time growing my own (culinary) mushrooms, I decided to share the joy with homemade holiday mushroom kits.

  I read that coffee grounds were a wonderful medium for mushroom growing, and I knew where to get a lot of those. I sent away for mushroom spawn, collected the grounds, and acquired coffee bags (the kind you put your beans in at the grocery store) for the containers. When the spawn arrived, I put my small mushroom kits together (spawn in coffee and coffee in bags) and in doing so, made a most grievous error.

  I figured the coffee grounds were sterile since they had just been put through a high-temp steam treatment (brewing). Wrong. When growing mushrooms, one should never ever expect anything to be sterile, because everything must be sterile in order to grow mushrooms.

  Why? There are myriad bacteria, molds, and mildews floating around in the air just waiting for a nice place to grow, and most are more vigorous than mushroom spores. Trying to grow mushrooms in contaminated substrate is like plopping an orchid in the ground with weeds growing all around. The weeds are going to overwhelm the orchid, no question. Bacteria and molds, which favor the same conditions that mushrooms do, overwhelm the mushrooms in the same way. The mold called Trichoderma, or forest-green mold, is particularly problematic.

  Trichoderma is the bane of mushroom growers. If growers spy it in a jar of spawn, without even cracking the lid open, they throw the jar into a vat of boiling water for an hour because Trichoderma is so “sticky” it will float through the air, lodge in your hair, on surfaces, and tools, hoping to colonize some poor hardworking mushroom’s homeland. Which is likely what happened to my project.

  Back to those homemade holiday mushroom farms—I’d like recipients to please no longer think of them as mushroom farms; instead, consider them a different sort of educational gift. What you got was actually a primer, if you will, on molds.

  If the mold that grew on your gift of used coffee grounds was not forest green and thus not the ubiquitous Trichoderma, then perhaps it was cinnamon brown mold, or Chromelium fulva. This mold can be yellow-gold, golden brown, or, of course, cinnamon colored.

  If the particular mold on your holiday primer was a grayish cobwebby mold, that would be a Dactylium mildew. (Isn’t this fun?)

  Did your mold change from white to pink to cherry red before finally settling on a dull orange? That was Sporendonema purpurascens, or lipstick mold.

  Your mold might also have been a red bread mold, a Sepedonium yellow mold or Doratomyces, a black whisker mold.

  There, you have just learned a little something about mold. And with that I say, “Ho, ho, ho! Merry Christmas!” (And try not to fret about what you will get from me next year.)

  Recipe

  Mushroom Soup

  If you look at the ingredients on the can of my childhood enemy—cream of mushroom soup—you’d think it would take a greater intellect than mine to make the stuff. While predictably there are mushrooms in that can, there are also a bevy of non-mushroom ingredients: vegetable oils (from cottonseed to partially hydrogenated soybean), cream, cornstarch, modified food starch, dried whey, soy protein concentrate, monosodium glutamate, whey, calcium caseinate, spice extract, yeast extract, and dehydrated garlic. How could a person possibly figure out how to make mushroom soup on his or her own with a line-up like that?

  The reality is, mushroom soup could merely consist of sautéed mushrooms pureed with a bit of broth. Really, that alone would be delicious. But to make my mushroom soup even better, I add onion, celery, and fresh sage, all of which are happily growing on the Quarter-Acre Farm during the mushroom-damp time of year, which in Northern California runs seemingly interminably from December through March.

  Ingredients: • 2 cups fresh, sliced shitake mushrooms

  • ¼ onion, diced

  • 1 stalk of celery, diced

  • 1/8 cup fresh sage (not packed)

  • 2 TB olive oil

  • 2 TB salted butter

  1. In a large skillet, sauté the onion, celery, and sage in 1 TB of the olive oil until the onion is transparent. Remove the aromatics to a separate bowl.

  2. Add the remaining olive oil and butter to the skillet. Melt over medium heat.

  3. When the butter is melted, add the cleaned and sliced mushrooms in a single layer and let them cook without touching for 3 to 5 minutes, until the edges begin to brown. Give them a stir, arrange again in a single layer, and let them cook undisturbed until browned.

  4. Return the aromatics to the mushrooms and stir.

  5. Remove from heat and puree with enough vegetable broth or water to get the preferred creamy-soupy consistency. (My monster Vitamix performs this task in moments and there is not a chunk left in it.)

  6. Return the pureed soup to a saucepan, salt to taste, and warm to serving temperature. (If you wish, set aside some of the mus
hrooms to use as garnish or to add texture to the soup, along with home baked croutons.)

  This soup is so good and creamy without the cream, and carb-y feeling while being pure vegetable. Mushroom soup is no longer an enemy but the kind of friend who helps you through the cold, grey days of winter. You can’t ever have too many of those.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  HUNTING SMALL GAME

  “The hand that dips into the bottom of the pot will eat the biggest snail.”

  —WOLE SOYINKA, NIGERIAN PLAYWRIGHT

  When Louis’ brother heard about the Quarter-Acre Farm experiment, he asked, “What if a steer wanders into your yard—can she eat that?”

  Others wondered if I was going to eat our chickens, our duck, the geese, or the rabbits. I explained we couldn’t because we’d already broken the number one tenet of raising livestock: Do not name future meals. But that wasn’t the only reason I wasn’t tempted to do-in the pets for the sake of l’orange sauce. I am simply not crazy about meat. Never have been.

  When I was a kid and eating T-bone or roast for the fourth time in a week (my father was a beef and potatoes man), I used to tuck one bite of steak after the other into my cheek, then excuse myself to “use the bathroom.” And then I’d spit the stuff in the toilet.

  While my disinterest in meat made it easy to forgo entrees from meatloaf to pork loin, as I was living off of my yard, I was looking for other ways to get protein into my diet, especially since I was training for (limping toward) the annual half marathon in Davis, and I needed all the help I could get toward rebuilding my tortured muscles—most of which I hadn’t even known were there to begin with.