On recession and lettuce

There might not be many of you out there whom I surprise when I say that years bring new fashion trends. In clothing (anecdotal evidence) and in eating too. Of this latter I have first-hand experience, especially if we are talking lettuce. So: let’s.

Lettuce is water, nicely packaged. Whether it is enjoyed in sandwiches, salads, or left behind as rabbit-food on the plate where it arrived as a side dish to spoil an otherwise decent steak, it occupies a sizeable niche in our cuisine. Popular vegetable, it has an amazingly broad range of shapes and colours, and these can make a type extremely fashionable and sought after – or obsolete.

The schoolbook picture of lettuce is the butterhead. A no-offence type it comes in light or darker green, plump and rosy (actually there are red tinged butterheads too). Butterhead represents the olden days, when things were a bit scarcer and black-and white (but summers were summers and winters were winters). Butterhead is Mum’s sandwich, pop music with tunes, butterhead is Morris Minor.

Then we have the fancy lot. The tight, upright, buttery-tasting Cos: public-school-boy of lettuces. Lollo Rossa: dark and musky, like the first Italian holiday (sunburn aside). Basketball-tight icebergs: sadly tainted by their McDonalds reputation. Batavias: crunchy but open, shouting healthiness and weight-loss – we have a lot to choose from. Or do we?

That’s when fashion comes in. You see, as shoes, lettuces get fashionable too. After a wave of Cos Lollo Rossa became the darling of restaurant kitchens. The nineties, we are talking about: finally the economy is climbing out of the deep recession, holidays and other exotic things slowly become accessible, so we need a lettuce that represents it. But hedonism leaves its marks on soul and body – especially around the waistline. This is the time when, in the early two-thousands Batavia breaks through. Now, it’s all nice, except for the commercial grower, who doesn’t necessarily know what is the next favourite going to be. That the grower learns through the sales.

It is recession time now. (Having said that, I just read the Mercedes Benz doubled its profits and sales are booming.) And austerity in the budget, in our everyday life, in the six-o-clock news demands austerity lettuce: the good old butterhead is back in fashion. Let’s face it, with the notable exception of Cos, lettuce tastes like lettuce. They tend to grow with the same speed, so when they reach maturity and cut for sale, they are the same size, weight, et cetera. (Except, again, some Cos, they tend to be tiny.) Yet, as we speak, we have to push the not-so-long-ago fashionable Batavia, Lollobrigida Rossa and every other type, while butterheads are sold in before they can reach proper size.

I wonder what’s next. I mean, we have lovely cabbage, and a lot of it. But cabbage means depression, emergency, draughty houses and possible emigration to England – and I really like it here. Lollo, darling, come back!

July

Poultry Keeping All you need to know to keep Poultry. Sat 2nd, Cleen Hall, 10-3pm, €45

Pigs, Part 1 – Rearing Sat 23rd Cleen Hall + Farm visit, 12-3pm, €20

COOK & DINE 3 Course Vegetarian with Colette. Mon 25th, Cleen Hall, 6-10pm,  €15

Last week of June 2011

Here we are: June is almost over. The calendar month, I mean: we didn’t see much of June weather yet. But two days ago I saw dolphins (not in the garden, but nearby, at the same beach where in May we collected a whole trailer of seaweed), and people say it means good weather. Now, the animals were porpoises, a mother and her calf. Porpoises are the smallest of our dolphins, stocky and roundish creatures, sometimes referred to as ‘sea pigs’. The calf (or piglet?) is even smaller – so whether it means only a little bit of good weather, and kind of funny type too, well … In my opinion a dolphin is a dolphin, and these porpoises were really cute feeding very near the shore, the calf following the mother, so good weather should come, regardless if it is a one-and-half meter funny little creature or the twice as big, post-card bottlenose. (Secretly, as we all, I dream of a pack of orcas, and twenty-nine Celsius for a month.)

We planted out the first batch of winter Brassicas. And fed the slugs: the buggers killed maybe a third of the seedlings overnight. Part of the reason they were so successful this time and situation was the cardboard/straw mulching we use. Mulching simply means covering the ground with something that (ideally) breaks down. In a way mulching is copying a cover of fallen leaves or dead grass: it feeds the soil creatures – and through them, the plants – and keeps weeds at bay. In the case of Brassicas there is an added advantage: it protects against cabbage-root-fly. These flies lay their eggs on the ground surface, right next to the Brassica plant. The eggs hatch, and the larvae dig into the root, causing stunted growth and even the death of the plant. But the larvae cannot dig their way through cardboard, so any cover directly around the cabbage (broccoli, cauliflower, etcetera) plant is a great way to fight them. Great it is, but not without issues.
You see, in Nature ground cover like a layer of fallen leaves is utilised by all sorts of creatures. Including slugs, bless them. Slugs that hide in daytime as they have plenty of predators: birds, frogs, ground-beetles. Who could resist a soft, juicy and slow-moving prey? But nights are safer. So our slugs around the Brassicas remained largely invisible during the lovely daylight hours when we were planting kales and Savoys through the softened cardboard and already breaking down straw, but attacked when the Hour of the Mollusc came.

So: what can we do with these slugs? The most straightforward and handy way is using slug pellets. The pellets (artificially coloured blue-green, so we see they are still where we spread them) are made of some bait-material that slugs just can’t resist – and some poison. The poison, in the case of cheap, non-organic pellets is a range of aluminium-based compounds. They kill molluscs (slugs, snails, bivalves and cephalopods – although the latter two are not very likely to turn up at the cabbage plot), but they are harmful to the slugs’ natural predators too. What’s more: as the food pyramid works, these poisons get more concentrated in the bodies of predators, so we might end up killing creatures that would be our natural allies. In the case of organically approved slug pellets though, the poison is iron-based, so it kills only molluscs. The downside is the price: organic slug pellets cost roughly twice as much as the non-organic ones.

But slug pellets should be only the last resort. If we know the nature of slugs, we can find out how to fight them, using tricks that exploit their weaknesses. One is their habit of hiding during the day. If we offer them hiding places, pieces of timber or cardboard on the ground, we can find them resting there after a night of hard work – and kill them. (The best way is boiling water: it sound cruel, but they are so small that it just turns them into boiled protein in a fraction of a second. Everything else, including the pellets, is slower and presumably more painful.)
Slugs have soft bodies, and they don’t like rough surfaces. Boundaries of stone chips, broken egg-shells or ground coffee leftovers can keep them away from vegetable beds and tunnels. The soft bodies are sensitive to chemical impulses too: the slug is one big tongue. A border of copper, at least 2 inches wide, forms the most excellent slug-proof fence. Other weakness of slugs is their attraction to fermenting carbohydrates. We are talking about the famous beer-trap method, although it doesn’t have to be beer: any home-made hooch does the job: I used to make a brew of yeast, flour and water for this purpose. Then I sunk cut-off bottoms of plastic bottles into the ground, filled them with Moonshine, and then next morning dozens of dead slugs were floating in the stuff. The problem is that there were a few ground beetles floating there too – and I don’t want that. Mind you, a stick in the brew helps: they can climb out while slugs can’t.
As said before, there are a number of animals that eat slugs. Larger singing birds like blackbirds, frogs and hedgehogs are all happy to tuck in – and we can do a number of things to invite them to our garden. Birds appreciate being fed in winter, and keeping cats from taking them helps too. (You can get little collars with bells for the cat.) Frogs like ponds – some people have a small pond in their tunnel just to attract amphibians. Hedgehogs like shrubs, and like to over-winter in piles of leaves and branches.
Keeping a constant pressure on slugs pays off. If a population can build up – it will. But if we keep down the number of breeding parents, the number of offsprings down too.

Keep up! Or keep down. Confusing …

3rd week of June 2011

The longest day of the year was not, by far, the hottest. But every little helps: soft fruit is now ripening, producing enough for the Knockvicar Gardeners to pick and munch walking by the bushes. Soon the birds will discover the crop, and we have to arrange the harvest – before they do. I’m friendly with the idea of sharing, but not with the idea of letting the blackbirds to eat the result of pruning and mulching and strimming. This year will try how a ‘pick for yourself’ system works.

So it is officially launched: customers can harvest blackcurrants in Knockvicar Organic Garden. Your basket/bowl is weighed in and out, and you pay (€ 2.00 / kg) for what you picked. Of course, the customer is requested to do a tidy job: harvest thoroughly and be gentle to the bush – just as he/she would do it at home, or for that matter we do it when we pick some for ourselves. ‘Pick for yourself’ is not a consumerist experience. It is a sharing-the-crop experience.

We lit the first serious fire in the clay oven. I wanted to greet Mari-aymone with a hot and good-smelling oven on Saturday morning, so I lit a fire at around 8. Then at 9. Then at half-past-ten. But eventually it kicked in, and at around 2 I threw in a few potatoes to bake. They were delicious. Slightly charred on the outside, smoked and hot inside, they were the perfect messenger: it works! I threw the last bit of wood in the oven at around 12, and next morning at seven the oven was still hot inside.

Winter Brassicas are planted out. Under a net, they are: we have to protect them from the dreaded Cabbage White. Actually, it is the larvae, cabbage caterpillar that harm the crop, but it doesn’t happen without the butterfly.
Butterflies are highly mobile pests. Their host plants include several wild species, so they are and will be around. But we can keep their larvae off the cabbage patch, if we know how to trick them. Mummy Butterfly, you see, is a caring type. She wouldn’t lay her eggs in a place where the babies (those cute little ones, you know, like a worm with legs, the ones that chew and poo all the time) have nothing to eat. So she lands on leaves, and licks them. If the leaf tastes nice and cabbage-y, she climbs underneath and lays her yellow eggs in neat rows.
The good cabbage-y taste is important. You all know Nasturtium, the yellow-red flowered climber with the round leaves. This plant is not related to cabbage, and in fact shouldn’t be called Nasturtium at all. The scientific name Nasturtium officinale had been given to the watercress, a relation of the cabbage. The reason we call the yellow or red flowered Indian ornamental Nasturtium (its scientific name is Tropaeolum, by the way) is the taste: it tastes like watercress. And if there is no cabbage around, the Cabbage white is quite happy to lay her eggs on Nasturtium. Every year we see a few plants devastated by the caterpillars.
On the other hand, if Mummy Butterfly cannot lay the eggs on the underside of the leaf, there won’t be any larvae, there won’t be any damage. That is why we pull a light white net over the young Brassica plants. Yes, butterflies can land on the net, they can lick the plants as much as they like, but they aren’t allowed to go underneath and do all sorts of smutty business – and the problem is sorted. Easy, isn’t it, to be an organic gardener.

Laszlo’s Garden Update…
Well, we still hold Met Eireann close to our hearts. To entertain us, and to add a bit of variety to the weather menu, here comes the frost. Early morning frost, when (because if not now, then never) pumpkins and runner beans are planted out, and at last the spuds’ foliage is up and lush and green. Until the frost pinches it; then it turns black.

Orla, the other potato variety we grow indoors is at least as good as Collen was, only tastier. At this stage some brown discolouration shows on the leaves and lower stems, but I don’t think it is blight yet. You see, Met Eireann hasn’t issued a blight warning lately. And they know.

Late Potato Blight is a disease caused by the pathogen Phytophtora infestans, a fungus. As a fungus it is on the simple side, no charming toadstool and no fluffy, green mould, just single cells that sometimes join into a slimy mass to do some fungal hanky-panky, then split again and keep turning the leaves brown and the tubers rotten.
We know where it came from: America. We know it triggered the Great Famine of the 1840-s and ’50-s. We know that it is the curse of Irish farming. But we don’t know where it stays when there is no potato around.
Potato blight attacks in warm (15 Celsius-plus) and humid weather – that is what Met Eireann can predict. First there is an incubation period, when the cells settle on potato leaves, start feeding from the cells, multiply, and at this stage start destroying leaf tissue. The first sign of blight is browning on the underside and edges of the leaves (the top is always drier). Then the rot spreads to the stems, and eventually underground, on the tubers. This can happen in two ways, one is by the fungal cells washed down by the rain; the other is within the plant’s stem. But it is important to keep in mind that the fungus’ life on the plants begins 4-7 days before the first symptoms show. Whatever we do to protect spuds from blight, we should do it in a preventive manner, not when the disease is already there.

So what can we do? Actually, quite a lot. We can choose resistant varieties: Sarpo Mira, Axona and the Mexican Toluca are supposed to be the best. We can spray with copper (permitted even in organic production, although in a strictly limited dose) – there is no fungus up to date that would be copper-resistant. Copper can come in the form of Burgundy- and Bordeaux mix (made with bluestone and washing soda, Na2CO3 or hydrated lime, CaOH – the resulting compound is the same), but it is also available in liquid forms, like the organically approved Atempo mix (copper-octanoate). Seaweed, freshly collected and laid in between the drills is supposed to protect potato from blight. I have only anecdotal evidence (plenty, mind you) of that, but this year we try it, so later I will be able to report on it. Nobody seems to know how or why it works though. It could be salt, could be iodine, could be sulphur (another chemical element that tends to kill fungi in certain compounds), but it doesn’t matter as long as the blight goes. Or doesn’t come, I don’t mind.

It is June, orchids are abundant, birds sing, and Artists visit the Garden. We had forty of them, in two flocks, last week. County Council is running their Artist in Residence programme again, and of course we participate. All forty seemed to be nice and pleasant people, with nice and pleasant ideas (except the guy who wants to know when is the time when there are NO PLANTS in the tunnels, so he can do art there – there are such times, mate, but as a basic concept, the tunnels are there FOR PLANTS).
The souvenir of last year’s Residence, our clay oven is almost functional. I wanted, really, to wait for Mari-aymone to light the first fire in it, but run out of patience. So far we talk about small and slow fires: the oven has to dry before the first real burning can take place. But it works: the air goes in, the smoke comes out, and it gets lovely hand-warm on the outside. (Wayne tried to bake some spud in it, they came out hand-warm too, but it’s just a pre-production run. And they were lovely after he fried them in a pan, on the gas.)
Yum.