The Quarter-Acre Farm

by Spring Warren

When double-seamed cans were invented in 1900, the dangers of lead poisoning were diminished. (Though, shockingly, lead solder in food cans was not outlawed in the United States until 1984.)

  Texas Dairyman Gail Borden developed techniques to prepare evaporated and sweetened condensed milk so that it could be brought to market in cans. Carnation milk followed, which gave rise to the cowboy poem: Carnation milk

  The best in the land

  Here I sit with a can in my hand

  No tits to pull

  No hay to pitch

  Just poke a hole in the son of a bitch.

  In 1858, John L. Mason invented the now famous Mason canning jar, and homemakers the world over began to preserve food using the jars with a zinc lid and rubber seal.

  Home canning is a famously labor-intensive job. You not only need to clean, trim, chop, mix, and flavor the food that you’re jarring (on the Quarter-Acre Farm, it is usually jelly, chutney, jam, marmalade, or pickles), but you also have to process the jars of food, which can be time consuming. This is why canning has so often been a) a job attempted only once or b) a cooperative sport.

  If you can face canning a second time, you’ll find it gets easier. One of my favorite books when I was a kid was Cheaper by the Dozen, the story of efficiency experts Frank and Lillian Gilbreth and their twelve children. This book is not to be confused with the awful Disney film that has but one saving grace—showing that even comic masters like Steve Martin can make mistakes.

  What I loved about the original book was the application of “motion studies” on family life, how the father figured out how to take the best bath with the least number of movements and the smallest amount of time. “You take the soap in the left hand . . .” He mapped out the journey of the soap over the body. Brilliant. (Louis finds my appreciation of an efficient bath regimen rather strange because I myself am a soaker and usually meet the idea of hurrying out of steaming water with no little incredulity.) Frank Gilbreth figured out ways to make use of all sorts of wasted time and wasted space (as long as one is sitting on the loo staring at a blank wall, why not stare at fill in the blank instead and learn something). If we could all learn the best way to do something, we would have huge amounts of time to dedicate to other pursuits.

  I’ve found that the more you practice, the more you’ll learn the ideal way to prepare food. That’s why it is so much fun to watch celebrity cooks like Mario or Yan or Julia on the tube. Mostly, there’s no dithering, researching how to peel a cactus paddle, calling your mom for instructions, cleaning up the flour spilled all over the floor, or bandaging sliced fingers. Just expert measuring, mixing, and magical high-speed knife work that results in culinary masterworks in the space of half an hour.

  That said, there’s nothing like an entire tree full of ripe fruit to act as stern taskmaster overseeing your passage from novice to expert in cutting up a bunch of produce.

  The first couple of years after we planted our fruit trees, there was no need to wonder about how we were going to use all the excess fruit we had. The family, usually standing directly under the tree where fruit tastes the very, very best, easily consumed all of the fruit. By the third and fourth years of our trees’ lives, however, enough fruit ripened that we would have to do something about it or risk letting it go to waste (a moral failing in my book).

  The first big producer was our purple plum tree. Louis helped me pick the fruit and then he fled the house. Good thing, because after spending about an hour trying to cut the flesh from the pit (plums are not freestone), and hardly making a dent in the pile, I was not happy, I’d cut myself twice, and I was wasting the fruit that clung to the top and bottom of the pit.

  My speed, however, improved the second hour, and by my third hour chopping plums, I was so fast I could have chopped another treefull of plums in half the time it had taken me to chop the first. I had discovered the secret to cutting up fruit-in-which-flesh-clings-to-the-pit.

  Cut the fruit all the way to the pit, all the way around, like slicing an equator into the fruit. Twist the fruit apart. Half of the fruit will then have a pit, the other will be clean. Cut the piece of fruit in half to the pit again. Twist again. This will result in two quarter pieces of fruit, one without the pit and one with. Most of the time you can then take hold of the pit and twist it cleanly off. If not, make one more equatorial cut and one more twist.

  To make the process even faster, make all of the first equatorial cuts then do the entire first twists, then all of the second cuts and the second twists. Just as there is a best way to de-pit a plum, there is a best way for almost every chore. You either have to be taught that best way or, unfortunately, figure it out for yourself. But when you do, it goes fast.

  To figure out the best and fastest way to process a tree full of fruit, get help.

  It’s safe to say that cooperative work has probably been around as long as there has been work to do. Certainly in modern American history, the idea of sharing work—either out of necessity (it is a tad difficult to raise a barn on your own) or because it’s more efficient (and sociable) (threshing, corn husking)—is woven into the fabric of our culture.

  When food shortages became a part of American life, households were called upon to grow as much of their own food as possible so that the commercially grown produce could be sent to the soldiers fighting in WWII. Citizens started gardening in a big way. By 1944, food production was 38 percent above the national average of 1935-39 because fifteen million families planted gardens. In 1942 and ’43, twenty million gardens produced 40 percent of the vegetables grown for home consumption. Canning was an important part of the war effort. The Committee on Food Supply and Conservation exhorted women to preserve food through canning. Women put up almost 10,000 jars of jelly and vegetables and husked and dried over 30,000 ears of corn. The burden of work was lightened as women got together to share their labors, and while sharing the job of canning, they also built a community where they could socialize, share common experiences and worries, enjoy conviviality, and educate the less experienced among them on how to preserve food.

  Cooperative work is not exclusive to America, in any way. In societies all over the globe, cooperative work is common. Anthropologist William Bascomb points out that in West Africa, Yuba people even have distinct words to describe different types of work sharing. For example, one word connotes a simple labor exchange while another describes a group working together in much the same way as a barn-raising. Other cultures do their work in concert with singing or drumming so that rows of weeding or planting are finished at the same time. And almost all cooperative work is wrapped up by sharing food and drink.

  There is a reason that the cooperative work is wrapped up this way and not offered mid effort.

  After I’d figured out the secret to plum pitting, the green plums came ripe. My friend Sally was game to come over and make plum butter with me. I demonstrated the Spring-method of plum pitting and we got to work. There were a lot of plums, and we had started late in the afternoon—really, it was practically evening. Late enough that it seemed a good idea to have a shot of particularly nice single-malt scotch to encourage our good work. Perhaps not surprisingly, the single malt had the opposite effect. The first basket of plums were stoned and diced in short order, but the second took quite a bit longer, and by the time Louis got home, Sally and I had each sliced open a finger or two and decided that we didn’t really want to cut up plums. I had to finish the plum butter by myself, fingers clumsily bandaged, the next day.

  After a hot day spent water-bathing jars incessantly, a home-canner is usually tired and sticky and doesn’t want to eat anything. If this happens to you, just remember all the fruit you’ve been freezing as well, because now’s the perfect time to enjoy it by making a smoothie.

  Recipe

  Smoothies

  We drink a lot of smoothies at our house. In the summertime I have them for breakfast, lunch, and . . . if I could stand all the complaining from my family, for dinner as well.

 
Ingredients: • 1 cup fresh or frozen fruit of your choice

  • ¼ cup Greek (I like Vanilla) yogurt or 2-3 TB protein powder or ½ banana

  • water or juice to thin smoothie consistency if necessary

  1. If you’ve got fresh fruit, toss the washed, pitted, de-stemmed fruit (plums, strawberries, blueberries, peaches, apricots) into a blender with ice cubes and turn it on. This makes a frothy cold drink but lacks a little smoothie substance.

  2. I like to add a banana, some Greek yogurt, or protein powder to give it what I (possibly weirdly) think of as taste opacity. Others might call it creaminess.

  Of course, the best smoothies are made from frozen fruit because not only can you use June strawberries (or May apricots, for that matter) well into the rest of the year when they might not otherwise be available, but you also don’t have to add ice cubes. Ice cubes not only water down the flavor of the smoothie, but when you puree them, it sounds more like you’re crushing rocks in the blender than concocting something edible.

  How you freeze your fruit is going to make the difference in loving to make smoothies or hating it. I have found that the best way to freeze fruit of all kinds is after washing, pitting, and cutting your fruit up. Put the cut pieces on a cookie sheet so the pieces are not touching each other. Then freeze. Place the frozen fruit into bags and return the bags to the freezer.

  In this way, you can pour frozen peach slices into your blender with ease.

  One year I cut up peaches and pitted cherries and put them straight into a freezer bag. Unfortunately, they froze into mammoth fruit boulders, and I had to go Psycho on them with an ice pick in order to use them. So freeze the pieces separately, otherwise your fruit boulders will still be in your freezer two years later because who wants to be Norman Bates when you’re hungry and it’s 98 degrees out?

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  YOU CAN EAT THAT?

  “Ever eat a pine tree?”

  —EUELL GIBBONS

  Before I began eating from the Quarter-Acre Farm, I wondered about the first person who tried eating an artichoke. He must have been desperate. Armored as an armadillo, artichokes seem about as palatable as one as well. The culprit certainly must have been starving and nothing else but the artichoke was growing within crawling distance.

  My mother used to fix artichokes only once every year or two. We loved the strange finger food. I have to admit, however, that it wasn’t the artichokes we loved, it was being allowed to eat as much Miracle Whip as we wanted. I doubted there was Miracle Whip at the ready for that first bite of artichoke. Desperation indeed.

  However, the Quarter-Acre Farm taught me that desperation probably didn’t engender that first foray into an artichoke heart—for one thing, artichokes love water and cool temperatures, so they wouldn’t have been the only plant around. Instead, education likely inspired those first edible thoughts about artichokes.

  We have been schooled into believing that there is a narrow subset of edibles in the world, in our gardens, and on each plant. It’s what we see when we go into the grocery store. And the reason we don’t see more of what is edible in the grocery stores isn’t because the breadth of edibility is narrow, it’s because of ease. The grocery chains purchase food that is: • easiest to grow in large amounts,

  • easiest to douse with insecticides and herbicides,

  • easiest to pick and process,

  • easiest to ship,

  • easiest to store and sell,

  • easiest to prepare,

  • easiest to get the most money for the least effort.

  Sometimes we pay extra for food that has become fashionable (like microgreens or blue potatoes) or somehow touches a place in our collective memory (such as heirloom tomatoes or pattypan squash). But the longer a society goes without eating something, the less likely it is that people will eat it again. Foods aren’t lost as much as they fall out of use, and then out of memory (as has been the case with orach, mock oyster, sweet potato leaves, and yellow nutsedge). Not necessarily entire foods, either. We either forget how many parts of a plant can be eaten or we’re fearful of trying them. Some caution is warranted, for not every part of every edible plant is edible.

  Take rhubarb as one of the most common examples. While the stalks of the plant are prized for their tart-sweet flavor, their leaves have a relatively large amount of a compound called oxalate, which renders them poisonous. Sure, it would take about eleven pounds of rhubarb leaves to make a lethal dose, but it requires much less than that to make you feel ill from eating the stuff—perhaps, say, a mere burning of the mouth, some abdominal pain, and general weakness.

  The specter of rhubarb’s dire inedibility is so indelibly imprinted on me that the one year I planted rhubarb chard I couldn’t bring myself to eat it, even though I could see that it was chard. Since the tiny plants had been labeled merely “rhubarb,” I thought perhaps they were a tiny cultivar of rhubarb. As they grew, however, I brilliantly thought, “Gee, I never realized how much rhubarb looks like chard.” When I ate a bit of the stalk, it wasn’t sour; it tasted like chard. Since it looked, tasted, smelled, and grew like chard, I told myself it must be chard. But so strong was my aversion to being poisoned (I do consider this a positive character trait), I couldn’t bring myself to try the leaves. I eventually went back to the garden center, found the “rhubarb” and fully read the information on the plastic stake, noting the words “rhubarb chard” that had been pushed below the soil line.

  Though the leaf of rhubarb is poisonous, the stalk is delicious—whether served raw or in jellies, pies, and sauces . . . and the plant has other uses as well. Boiling the stalks in burnt pans will eliminate stains and bring back the pot’s original shine. If you simmer rhubarb root in water, you can use the resulting rinse to make blonde or light-brown hair a more golden color. And those pesky leaves? Boil them and use the water for a natural insecticide.

  Unfortunately, this sort of whole-plant knowledge is all but history for us now.

  Let’s revisit that artichoke....

  When I started farming the Quarter Acre, I was already growing artichokes, but more for aesthetic than culinary reasons—I love the giant thistly purple flowers that artichokes turn into when they reach full bloom.

  By that time, I did appreciate artichokes as more than just mayonnaise spoons, and I very much loved artichoke hearts, but the plant took up a lot of room for not much sustenance. Then I visited my friend Shawna and she offered me some Vietnamese artichoke tea. It was delicious, and more, it was made out of artichoke leaves. Artichoke leaves are edible?

  As soon as my artichokes were in full leaf, I harvested several of the large, hirsute leaves and dried them in the dehydrator. When they were dried, I readied a tea ball. But just as I was stuffing leaves into the perforated aluminum tea globe, I started wondering, What if by “artichoke” the makers of that Vietnamese tea were referring to Jerusalem artichokes? Then I remembered the picture of the fat artichoke on the front of the tea box. They were definitely talking about artichoke. I poured water into the teapot, but as I was about to lower the tea ball into the pot I thought, What if by artichoke leaf they meant the artichoke petals? Over and over again I had seen recipes in which the “petals,” the artichoke’s armor-like scales, are referred to as leaves. If the artichoke petals can safely be consumed, the leaves assuredly could be too. Or maybe not. I put the tea ball aside. I’d have to look into this more fully.

  Finding information about the edibility of plants, and certainly plant parts, is not as easy as you’d think, especially if the plant grows in a very small part of the country. (Eighty percent of artichokes in the United States are grown around the Castroville area of California where Marilyn Monroe was crowned the first Artichoke Queen.) The artichokes in the States are used virtually entirely for their buds (and hearts), and so while I found a wealth of information online regarding their nutrition, as well as recipes for cooking the buds, I didn’t find much about the rest of the plant. At least the leaves didn’t
show up on the poisonous plants list. Finally, I typed “Vietnamese artichoke farming” into the search engine and got more information.

  I discovered that in Vietnam, artichokes are not grown solely for the bud, but for many uses, including tea. My favorite description came from a Vietnamese website: The Dalat farmers grow artichokes for meals and medicine. The roots, stems, flowers, and leaves of artichokes are used in Dalat medicine. The flower heads are used in Vietnamese soup stewed with meat. The leaves, stems, roots, and flowers are dried under the sun and concocted. The resultant refreshing drink is diuretic and provides very good nourishment for humans’ liver cells. Artichoke tea is a daily beverage for many Vietnamese villagers.

  Other sites celebrated the fact that all of the “organs” of the artichoke could be utilized: roots and rhizome for brews or infusions; the whole plant as an ornamental in landscaping; the leaves for alcoholic drinks, pharmacological products, beauty creams, as a substitute for herbal tea (called tisane), as protein for biscuits and beverages, as a sweetening agent and milk coagulant, and as dehydrated flour in animal feed. The midribs can be cooked in a variety of dishes, and the immature flower heads, the receptacle, and hearts can be eaten raw or cooked in more than a thousand recipes, and can even be an ingredient in ice cream. The mature flower heads are used in dried flower arrangements, the seeds provide oil, and the byproducts of the artichoke are used as fodder for many animals. Even the stems can be peeled and eaten like hearts of palm.

  And as go artichokes, so go many plants. Everyone knows lemons provide lemon juice and the perfect garnish for ice tea, but how many lemonade lovers also know that lemon peel is edible and gives twice the tart bang for their buck. Further, both beet greens and beetroot are delicious (most people know this, but I hadn’t eaten either of them before the Quarter Acre Farm year). Still fewer people probably know that cactus paddles are edible, as well as the round red cactus fruit. If you love broccoli, you will also love broccoli leaves and broccoli stems. When I was waiting on my garlic to come to full bulb, I could enjoy the garlic leaves (just as you can onion leaves) and garlic “scapes”—the stalk and nascent flower of the developing garlic bulb, which are a real treat. Further, garlic and onion flowers aren’t the only treat—so are squash flowers, nasturtiums, rosemary flowers, broccoli flowers, pea flowers, and fava bean blossoms.