E.Coli Outbreaks: One More Reason to Grow Your Own

Make a free compost bins from pallets and baling twine.

A deadly E. Coli outbreak in Germany has just been announced in the news, with scientists across Europe racing to find the source. E. coli exists naturally in the intestines of all animals, including human animals, but several strains of it can cause iarrhea and kidney damage severe enough to lead to death, especially for infants and toddlers, the elderly, and others with compromise health.

In years past, we heard about E.coli outbreaks primarily associated with contaminated meat, and the cause was usually poor factor slaughtering techniques and butchering hygiene. More frequently, however, we are hearing of E.Coli outbreaks from fresh, raw fruits and vegetables.

Since E.Coli is a bacteria that resides inside humans and other animals, how does it get into your cucumbers and strawberries? The answer is usually water--water infested with unprocessed manure, or simply unprocessed manure from livestock or sewage from humans that has been spread on fields or even sprayed on crops as fertilizer. Improper handling and packaging, with transmission from contaminated hands to the produce, can also cause E.coli to be present in fruits and vegetables, but it's highly unlikely that the unwashed hands of one fruit processing factory would cause a widespread outbreak of fatal strains of E.Coli.

Regulation of manure handling is quite strict for farmers who qualify for the National "Organic" program label of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. According to the Organic Trade Association, raw animal manure must be properly composted before use in a certified Organic farm, or applied raw to land at least 120 days prior to harvest to ensure that E.coli and other potential contaminants die out and decompose. Non-organic American farms, and certainly farms outside of the United States which are the origin of an increasing quantity of our supermarket produce, do not have to comply with this precaution.

Home composting of animal manure for your garden will kill off E.coli bacteria, according to a publication of the Colorado State University Extension, Preventing E.Coli from Garden to Plate. Just watch your compost pile temperature and be sure it reaches an inner core temp of 130 to 140 degrees for five days or more. For added protection, turn manure into your garden beds in the fall and let it decompose through the winter. 

Knowing how your food was grown and being able to exercise a high level of control over its safety is just one more excellent reason to grow your own. For more about composting and to learn how to ensure your compost pile temperature stays high, check out Stu Campbell's classic volume Let It Rot, or Nicky Scott's book Composting: An Easy Household Guide, published by Vermont's own eco-minded publishing house, Chelsea Green.

Just skip buying the expensive garden-catalog compost bins -- some free pallets from your local transfer station and some leftover baling twine will do the job just fine.

Planting and Politics: The Irish Potato Famine

The Great Hunger, as it's referred to in Irish-American culture, was a famine brought on by the potato blight in several subsequent years in the mid-19th century. There was nothing uniquely Irish about the potato blight itself; the fungus spread worldwide in a most egalitarian manner, without concern for national boundaries or the race, religion or politics of the people whose hands tended the potato plants. The reason that the event is usually thought of as the Irish potato famine is that unlike most of the rest of the world, the people of Ireland had nothing else to eat.

(My band O'hAnleigh, with Patrick and DonnCherie McKenzie, performing An Gorta Mor, a song I wrote to honor the Irish famine dead, at the Town Hall Theater in Middlebury. See all our performance videos at www.youtube.com/ohanleigh1) 

Potatoes had been introduced to Ireland and the rest of Europe by Sir Walter Raleigh, the Englishman of Virginia exploration and tobacco fame. As the native Irish population was increasingly disenfranchised by a series of laws declaring that Catholics could not own land or engage in a variety of trades (or speak their native language, or wear their native clothes and hairstyles), they moved onto every smaller tenant farms. The land enclosures as the British increased their dairy and beef herds drove the tenant farmers onto smaller plots, on rockier soil at higher elevations. Potatoes remained the only crop that could produce enough bulk and calories to keep a peasant laborer alive and also be grown on top of rocky soil by the straw or mound method. Families fortunate enough to score a piglet to raise in the house also fed it potatoes.

When the potatoes failed, millions wandered the roads of Ireland slowly starving to death, while others begged borrowed or stole the money for passage to Canada, the US and elsewhere--or were stuffed onto coffin ships by landlords anxious to clear their lands of the Irish problem. Meanwhile, the English landlords who had been awarded Irish land shipped millions of pounds of beef, butter and cheese back to England from the very lands the Irish had been evicted from.

The potato blight has been in the news again the last few years, as the same fungus has been doing economic harm to market and commercial tomato and potato farmers in the Eastern United States the last few summers. Yet bad as the impact has been on some of our Vermont market farmer friends, no one is starving or emigrating--we all have plenty else to eat, and our neighboring market farmers own their own land and houses and plows and pickup trucks, so they have the resources to be flexible and plant other crops--or sell their land for other purposes--as soon as the potato blight appears.

Lesson learned: Owning the means of food production--and making sure that the ownership remains in the hands of people with substantial involvement with and dedication to the local community--is critical to food security. It's unlikely we'll starve, but if wheat or corn fails one year due to disease, weather, or some political snafu, our food prices will skyrocket and a lot of us will be in a world of hurt. As petroleum prices rise, the cost of food from commercial farms concentrated in California and Florida--and even China, where a significant portion of America's garlic now comes from--will go up exponentially.

Planting even a small portion of your own food helps to distribute that means of food production, which means a stronger web of food security for all of us--not to mention healthy, tasty, nutritious and inexpensive food for you no matter what happens to supermarket prices. 

Plant, because you can.

Memorial Day

It's Memorial Day, and all across the norther tier of North America (except where still under snow, floodwaters, or tornado debris), gardeners are heading outside to till up a plot and plant the tomato, pepper and eggplant flats they brought home from the local garden center. Overnight, vegetable gardens will appear as if my magic, transforming a rectangle of lawn or weeds into a plot of cultivated earth with good-sized plants in it.

I applaud anyone who grows any portion of their own food themselves, even just a single tomato plant. There are psychological, philosophical, and even political benefits from seeing where something comes from, from watching a plant from seed or small seedling to a nurturing, nutritional product on your family's dinner plates. Just knowing that you could manage to grow your own food if the the world as we know it crashed tomorrow is comforting and practical. I like living here in Vermont, in a land of gardeners, market farmers and food preservation fanatics--no matter what happens, no matter how big the storm or the floods or the stock market crash, we all know that no one here is going to starve. That's not necessarily a given in other parts of the world.

I was slow getting into the garden this spring, as even my raised beds were saturated. But we've still been eating salads and braised greens for several weeks now, partly from early plantings or spinach, arugula, Italian dandelion, mizuna and other cold-hardy salad fixings, and partly due to my own sloppiness--thanks to the fact that I never cleaned out the kale, radicchio and chard at the end of last year, they all sprouted again, adding to the early spring bounty.

While the Memorial Day weekend still marks a big apex in my planting schedule, gardening for me has evolved into a year-round part of my life. There is just about always something you can plant, indoors or out, any week of the year. There's also likely something you can harvest, indoors or out, every week o the year.

If you are a new gardener and you missed the Memorial Day planting date because you were out at the parades and barbecues, fishing or visiting relatives, don't worry, you can always plant next weekend, or the weekend after. Just start small--I can't count how many folks I've know who decided one year (usually associated with moving to the country) that they'd have a huge vegetable garden, worked themselves to utter exhaustion on Memorial Day weekend, then stared in bafflement at the patch of dead stalks and weeds in mid-July.

So plant a few things this Memorial Day if you possibly can -- and if you don't have ground, plant a cherry tomato plant in a container or hanging basket, or check around for community garden plots available in your neighborhood. Planting a single veggie plant this weekend will make you part of a huge, borderless community of gardeners, all keeping the skills of food security and self-sufficiency alive.

If you can't plant this summer--order up a copy of Barbara Damrosch's Garden Primer for your summer beach read, and patiently plan next year's garden. However you do it, enjoy your holiday!

Foods From Afar

Organic gardening wisdom would seem to lean towards selecting garden crop species and varieties that thrive in your local community. Even better are heirlooms that have been developed by farmers and gardeners in your area. Here in Vermont, the Gilfeather Turnip is a fine example of a locally-developed variety that thrives in the region's soil and climate. Roy's Calais Flint Corn is another regional favorite--which I'll be growing for the first time this year--which is attributed to the native Abenaki people of northern Vermont.

These two varieties have been recognized by the Slow Food USA's Ark of Taste -- a program that highlights locally developed or prized foods that are in danger of disappearing due to the prevalence of commercially grown substitutes.

Much as I appreciate and love to grow these local favorites, there is something special about also creating a bond to other gardeners throughout the world by growing varieties developed in other communities. Just as I also mainly purchase my seeds from Vermont's own High Mowing Seeds, I also buy a few seeds from afar, especially when I'm trying out distant and exotic varieties.

The last couple of years, one of the tomato varieties I've grown is called Rouge D'Irak. There's nothing utterly extraordinary about the tomatoes themselves --they are nice sandwich-sized slicing tomatoes, somewhat akin to a Glamour, with smooth red skin and a little acidic bite, though not too sour, that I really like. The interesting thing about these tomatoes is that they are from the family-saved seed from an Iraqi homestead. Forced to flee the war in Iraq. the gardener brought seeds from his family heirlooms with him to France. From there, he shared them with the good folks at Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds, who propagated them and offered them in their stunning catalog of all open-pollination, non-GMO vegetable seeds. Baker Creek offers heirlooms from many American growers, but annually offers varieties from world 'hot spots' where war, politics, or natural disaster threatens to wipe out locally-developed vegetables. Reading the published Publishing notes in their catalogs from the folks who offer them these seeds,  it is clear that in many areas where war forces subsistence and home gardeners to flee, the seeds they have saved down through the generations are often lost. Redevelopment in Iraq will likely entail the installation of modern, commercial agricultural practices that will supplant local organic agriculture.

Some folks count that as progress, and I will admit that there are advantages to an organized agricultural program that may not be present in a system based solely on home gardening. But importing commercial quantities of industrially-developed mono-crop tomato varieties without investigating local types that are well adapted to the growing conditions, and supplanting the means of self-sufficiency with a commodity market model as the primary or sole food supply, are certainly not among those advantages, and do the local culture a grave disservice. I'm troubled by reports that folks are not allowed to save over seed in Iraq anymore but must purchase from approved commercial seed suppliers--but I honestly don't know the truth of this, and it might be hype.

Since nobody is about to call me to ask advice on the agricultural redevelopment of Iraq or anywhere else, my options for effective action are limited. But I can grow Rouge D'Iraq tomatoes, and be mindful of their origins and the people who grew and loved them in their own home gardens.

And, okay, I can start trays of them and give a plant to anyone who will listen, too, and save my own seeds over for future years. I'm such a troublemaker. :) 

Swapping Jars

I just finished eating my share of an absolutely delicious pizza: A crust made with King Arthur never-bleached flour according to my next-door-neighbor's prized pizza dough recipe, cheese from a Vermont cheesemaker, and a fabulous rich-flavored roasted veggie pizza sauce made by my buddy Skip Woodard, the marketing manager at Sweet Clover Market in Essex, Vermont. I had swapped Skip for this jar last year and then neglected it on my pantry shelf since it had disguised itself as one of my own canning jars, since we both use the same Ball Brand canning jars and lids. Finding it this afternoon, as I had just come back from a long hot day of sitting at a tag sale table raising money for my daughter's high school's graduation festivities, was like a mini-Christmas present, I was that excited about it.

An hour and a half later, biting into crisp, right-out-of-the-oven pizza, I found my excitement was well founded. Not only can homemade pizza sauce not be beat--but someone else's homemade pizza sauce is even better. It's like when someone else has cooked you dinner when you are tired or don't feel well or have traveled a long way--you know how good that tastes?

I love to swap canned goods with people in part to get that someone-else-cooked-me-dinner sensation over and over again, but also just to mix up the flavors and textures and get a taste of something new. I make pesto that we use for pizza frequently, and what I consider "plain old pizza sauce" which is my tomato-onion-garlic-green peppers-oregano cooked down until it's thick variety, with a touch of sugar, salt, and olive oil.  It's wonderful, but after 8 or 10 pizzas with it on 8 or 10 sequential weekends, it's nice to try something different.

Photo by Jack Rowell
I also like to swap jars to get home-canned items that I don't make myself.  For example, I make wonderful bread and butter pickles--both the originals from my Great Aunt Margaret's recipe, and my own lemon-ginger variation. However, confession, my couple of attempts at dill pickles have failed miserably. A couple other notable canners in my town, however, make splendid dills. Since pickles seem to make themselves into several dozen jars with no warning, and there are only so many pickles one can eat in a year, I make my bread and butters then swap a few jars for some dill spears and chips, and wind up with a whole variety of pickles when ever anyone has a hankering for them.

I'm a fiddlehead fanatic and always freeze and can some up. I find a number of my male hunting and fishing friends are fond of other wild foods like fiddleheads, so I swap them canned fiddleheads (or jars of rowan jelly, a Scottish treat with winter game meats) for fish or a bucket full of wild leeks or elderberries they've picked on their hunting ventures.

Want to expand the fun of the bounty even further? Hold a jar-swap dinner party! And hey Skip, you aren't by any chance making that roasted pizza sauce again are you later this summer? 'Cuz DANG was that good!

Fiddleheads!

Photos by Jack Rowell

Fiddlehead Fever: Succulent Scrolls of Spring

                              

The first of May is celebrated around Vermont in many guises, from flower baskets to the first lighting of the barbecue grill to organized labor demonstrations.  But no May Day festivity quite combines the sense of magic of the season with independent Green Mountain spirit of living off the land as an annual pilgrimage to pick fiddleheads.  These deliciously coiled new sprouts of the ostrich fern (Matteuccia struthiopteris), named for their resemblance to the scroll at the tuning-peg end of a violin fingerboard, can be picked and eaten in Vermont with patriotic pride: they are our official state vegetable. 

Fiddleheads grow in alluvial and swamp muck soils from the far northern reaches of tundra to the bottomlands of Virginia, but folks in Vermont and Maine (where some call them ‘fiddlegreens’) have a special affinity for these elegant spring sprouts, which share the early season with such other wild-crafted delicacies as early dandelion greens and the first shoots of wild garlic. Restaurants across Vermont pay good money to local pickers to put fiddleheads on their plates beside the earliest spring-caught trout, possibly more to see the looks on tourists’ faces as they pick curiously at the strange green stems than for purposes of actually serving a nutritious, delicious vegetable.

Fiddleheads have their own unique taste, but it’s comfortingly similar to a good green bean or nice fresh asparagus.  While they can be eaten raw as a crunchy antipasto, do be warned that the Center for Disease Control has connected a few outbreaks of food-borne illnesses with raw fiddlehead consumption.  This is most likely due to residues of pollutants from the rivers whose bottomlands the fiddlehead inhabits.  No reports of health problems have been associated with washed and well-cooked fiddleheads. 

True fiddlehead afficionados hold their favorite fiddle-picking spots as safe-guarded secrets, protecting them with the same possessiveness as a Hobbit exhibits over his mushroom patch (and  fiddleheaders have been known to keep a weather eye out for the occasional early morel as well).   Fortunately, there are plenty such spots to go around along the banks of any of Vermont’s major waterways, from the White to the Black, the Otter to the Poultney.   Look for last year’s ostrich fern bases inside bends in a river, where March flooding has overwashed a sandy island and ancient willows drape their flowering wands in verdant curtains over budding pillows of dutchman’s breeches.  Or cheat and keep an eye out for where people are suddenly parking their cars and dashing off with buckets – the landlubber’s equivalent of fishing for runs of blues by watching where the other boats are clustering. 

Pick fiddleheads by simply snapping off the curls which have cleared the top of last year’s fern base cluster, but have not yet unfurled and are still wrapped in their papery brown scale covering.  Never pick all of the fiddleheads from any one fern crown; leave some to unfurl and gather energy back into the roots to support next year’s crop.  Walk gently around the fern bases, and try not to pick in a spot that other people have already heavily picked over. 

When you get your fiddleheads home, you’ll need to remove those papery brown scales that cover the overwintering fern crown.  There doesn’t seem to be any substitute to sitting on the front porch and picking these off by hand, one by one, but I have had some luck submersing the fiddleheads in a bowl of cold water.  I let them soak for about fifteen minutes, then place the bowl in the sink and let more cold water flow gently into it, allowing the brown scales to simply float away.  Sort of.  At least some  do. Then you still have to pick the rest off, so suit yourself. 

If you want more elegant looking fiddleheads, while picking off the covering, you can rub off the small leaves that may have begun to sprout out the sides, revealing a clearer spiral shape; you can also take a sharp knife and put a clean edge on the bottom stems, which may darken slightly where they were broken. 

As with all food wildcrafting, do exercise caution.  There is a slight danger of mistaking the edible fiddlehead ferns for other fern shoots like those of the Bracken Fern, which are known to be carcinogenic.  However, no fern but the edible fiddleheads has the distinct papery brown wrapping; most ferns are either smooth or have fuzz and fur. And should you make a mistaken identification, one taste should clue you in: most other ferns are intensely bitter and acerbic on the tongue.  If you are not completely confident of your plant identification skills, hook up with a skilled fiddleheader, bring along a fern field guide, or buy your fiddleheads at an early farmers market or your natural foods store – which saves you the trouble of getting that brown papery stuff off.

Your fiddleheads will taste their best if you cook them as soon as possible after picking.  As soon as you give up and admit defeat on getting all those papery scales off, get a pot of salted water boiling.  Drop the fiddleheads into the salted water (if you put them in first then bring the water up to boil, they’ll overcook and be mushy).  If you are going to use the fiddleheads in a dish requiring additional cooking – a quiche, soup, or in canning – five minutes ought to be about right.  If you are going to eat them out of the pot or marinade them, you’ll probably need closer to ten minutes of cooking time. 

Marinated Fiddleheads, Fresh or Canned

The simplest way to enjoy fiddleheads is to saute up some garlic in butter while they are cooking in the boiling salted water.  Drain the fiddleheads well, then toss them with the butter, garlic, and a squeeze of fresh lemon juice.  Or mix up a good fresh Italian-style salad dressing with olive oil, cider vinegar, and fresh herbs to taste.  Amply drench the cooked fiddleheads in the dressing and let them marinade for a few hours before serving, or pack them into pint canning jars with approximately one-half inch headspace and process in a boiling water bath canner for ten minutes. Serve marinated fiddleheads at room temperature, on their own or over pasta or rice.

Blue Cheese Fiddlehead Crepes

My favorite, more elaborate way to eat fiddleheads is in blue cheese fiddlehead crepes, which I devised twenty years ago while living on the fiddlehead-rich banks of the White River. All proportions are simply to taste: 

Fiddleheads, lightly boiled and drained.

Garlic

Sweet white onion (or wild onion and garlic shoots)

butter

salt

white pepper (fresh ground black pepper may substitute, but not as aesthetically pleasing)

blue stilton, or other strong blue cheese

prepared crepes

prepared white sauce (flour, butter, and sweet cream)

chives

parmesan cheese

Preheat over to 300 degrees.  Saute garlic and sweet white onion in butter with salt and white pepper. Toss in the fiddleheads, then crumble in some strong blue cheese such as Blue Stilton.  Roll tightly in prepared crepes. Put the rolled crepes, seam side down, in a buttered lasagne pan. Add more crumbled blue cheese to your prepared simple white sauce, and pour over the crepes. and top with fresh chopped chive (or more wild onion and garlic shoots) and parmesan cheese.  Cover with foil or a glass lid and bake for 20 to 30 minutes, until they crepes are heated through.  Serve with a light rice pilaf, some slices of fresh lemon, and fresh ground pepper. 

Fiddlehead Quiche

Fiddleheads can substitute for the asparagus, green beans, or other vegetables in most quiche or cheese pie recipes, and makes a fine gratin with a well-aged Gruyere.  This variant of the classic Quiche Lorraine is simple, and works equally well for a hearty breakfast with homefries and toast, or a light dinner with a side soup or salad.

Pastry for 9-inch one-crust pie

6 slices bacon (optional – or substitute vegetarian bacon or tempeh) crisply fried and crumbled

1 cup lightly boiled fiddleheads

3/4 cup shredded Swiss cheese

3/4 cup shredded sharp Cheddar cheese

½ cup finely chopped onion (or slice onion in rounds and saute on low in butter until carmelized)

4 eggs

2 cups cream

3/4 tsp. Salt

½ tsp. Pepper

½ tsp. Cayenne pepper (or, for milder flavor, paprika)

Preheat over to 425 degrees. Prepare pastry.  Sprinkle bacon over bottom of pastry-lined plate.  Top with half of the cheese, then layer in the fiddleheads and onion, then the second half of the cheese.  In a medium mixing bowl with a whisk or hand beater, beat eggs well, then beat in cream and spices.  Cook in 425 degree oven for fifteen minutes, then reduce temperature to 300 degrees.  (To help avoid browned crust, you can cover the crust edge with a ring of aluminum foil for the first 15 minutes of baking.)  Cook approximately 30 minutes more, until a knife inserted half way between edge and center of pie comes out clean.  Let stand 10 to 15 minutes before serving. 

Growing Tea

Growing tea herbs is about the lowest-maintenance gardening operation you could imagine. Bee balm, mint, and anise hyssop--like the Golden Jubilee variety shown here--thrive in even marginal soils, spreading to sometimes invasive proportions, which you can contain by harvesting frequently (or assaulting with the lawnmower if necessary). Lemon balm and most mints will also grow happily even in partial shade. If you are a rogue urban gardener, plant tea herbs around street trees or in empty disturbed lots (where you will not interfere with native ecosystems -- don't ever plant in parklands or healthy wild places) and harvest as they spread, but monitor carefully to make sure the plants have not been sprayed with herbicides or pesticides before your harvest.

More unusual tea herb options include thyme and sage, which makes a wonderful broth-like tea sure to sooth a winter cold (add honey and a quarter onion to each cup for a truly powerful cold fighter). Yarrow blossom tea warms you right up when you have the chills. Raspberry leaf tea is a traditional treatment to strengthen women's health. Rose and lavender blossoms sweeten the teapot with scents of summer.

Cut your tea herbs back a few times in the spring to encourage branching, then harvest again while the plants are blooming and include the blossoms in your tea for a cheery touch of color and scent. Hang small bundles of the cut herb stems (I use a small rubber band to hold them together, as wrapped string will slip once the stems dry and shrink) in a shady, airy place out of rain and wind to dry, or use a dehydrator. Just keep a careful watch on the herbs in a dehydrator, they usually only need an hour or so to dry thoroughly, and after that you are losing flavor.

Strip the dried leaves off the stems and store them in glass jars, out of direct sunlight. Use about a teaspoon of dried leaf per cup of boiling water, but feel free to mix and match herbs or adjust the quantities to taste. Save the peels from organically grown citrus fruit through the year and dry those as well, adding a chunk to your tea in winter when citrus is quite expensive to add a flavorful zing to your tea.