Why Heirloom Matters - A Primer.

It's so hip to be green right now, it's awesome.



Consumers are panicking about the recent Harvard study which suggests that pesticide residue in fruits and vegetables may increase the occurrence of ADHD. Analysists predict the demand for organic produce will double by the end of the decade and every urban restaurant worth its salt, has heirloom vegetables on the menu.


Unfortunately, the lexicon has become ponderous - USDA organic, non-certified organic, locavore, F1 hybrid , non-GMO, heirloom etc. If you are lucky enough to eat heirloom vegetables but have no idea what they are, we are here to help.


Heirloom vegetables come from plants, usually old varieties that maybe your grandparents grew, which have undergone no genetic modification or hybridization. Simply put, if you save a seed from an heirloom sweet chocolate bell pepper and then stick it in the ground, you will grow a sweet chocolate bell pepper plant.

"But wait," you say. "I've never heard of sweet chocolate bell peppers, I can't even imagine what one tastes like." That's because sweet chocolate bell peppers look weird, they're delicate and don't fare well in shipping containers crossing the ocean. So, in our industrial food system, farmers don't grow them because wholesalers don't buy them. Therefore, you don't get to eat them.
The good news is you can save seeds from bell peppers and plant them in your garden. Humans have done this for millenia. Unless, of course, the supermarket bell pepper you are eating is an F1 hybrid - which it probably is.


With apologies to Gregor Mendel; a first generation hybrid is the product of two different plants with desirable characteristics, like heavy-bearing, frost-tolerant etc. Their union creates a new, uniform variety with those desirable qualities. These days hybrids are bred not so much for flavor and novelty but to withstand the rigors of the industrial food system.


Say you were inclined to save hybrid seeds to plant in the garden. You'll wind up with a pasty, wilty mess of a plant that is good for nothing. "So what," you say. "Seeds are cheap. I can just go to Walmart and get more." Well..yes..but those are probably hybrids too and they make plants that can't reproduce themselves either, so you go back to Walmart the next year and buy more seeds and...see where I'm going with this? Also, the seeds for sale at your neighborhood garden supply are, due to supply changes in the industrial food system, a narrow genetic slice of the variety that was once available.


Are you Irish-American? I am. Two and a half million Irish were displaced in the 1840's because they basically all planted the same variety of potato. Nature likes diversity and if the Irish had planted several varieties of potato, maybe one of them could have survived the blight; and I could be drinking a Guinness in County Cork right now.


Seed Savers Exchange, whose members have saved an estimated 1 million varieties of rare garden seeds since 1975, put it thus: "The vegetables and fruits currently being lost are the result of thousands of years of adaptation in diverse ecological niches around the globe."


Renowned plant collector Jack Harlan said of seed saving, "These resources stand between us and catastrophic starvation on a scale we cannot imagine."


Whoa.


In addition, seed company scientists are churning out varieties that have been genetically engineered - Genetically Modified Organisms or GMO. For instance they might splice a cold-water fish gene into a tomato to make it more frost-tolerant. Unlike hybrids, which are like breeding a horse and a donkey to make a mule, this is mating fish and tomatoes - something that could never occur in nature.


So is this food safe to eat? Thirty countries from Japan to Austrailia and the entire EU don't think so. These countries have passed restrictions or outright bans on GMO. The US is a different story. According to the USDA, in 2007, 91% of the soy grown was GMO. By the way, if you eat anything processed, you eat soy.


Health questions aside, there are two other facts that freak me out as much as the phrase "catastrophic starvation."


Problem #1 - Worldwide 81% of GM crops were genetically engineered to resist herbicides, says research by the Center for Food Safety. That means you can spray the whole field and everything dies, including beneficial insects, beneficial microbes in the soil, birds, fish, frogs, etc., but the crop doesn't. This is the wonder of modern science.


But oops... this just in,  farmers across the US have found 10 weed species growing quite well in their Round-Up Ready crops. Round-Up Ready means the plants are genetically engineered to tolerate the application of glyphosate. The presence of weeds means the weeds are evolving to resist the chemical. So what do we do now? Spray more? Yum!


Problem #2 -  Fans of the recent documentary Food Inc will recall a fellow in it named Maurice Parr. He travels from farm to farm, for a living, helping farmers save their seed.. However, since genetically modified crops are developed in a lab they can be patent protected as intellectual property.


So the film tracks Parr's legal troubles with Monsanto - who according to Wikipedia is the largest conventional seed producer in the world, who produces 90% of the GMO sold and posted revenue of $11.3 billion in 2008. In the film, Goliath has been punching David in the face without pause for several years now but David just won't lie down. Look at Monsanto's website, they defend their position.


It's fascinating and provokes questions like: "Who owns the global food supply?"  A question which is worth calm consideration and then complete hysteria.


So here's what it boils down to.


If you buy seeds from places like Seed Savers or Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds, you can skip all this nonsense. You can save your seed and grow it again next year without being sued or growing crappy plants. And you are personally helping prevent a catastrophic starvation event by encouraging genetic diversity in your own garden.


If you can't swing all that, just eat a prosciutto and melon appetizer made with an heirloom Charantais melon at your favorite restuarant. After you freak out over how good it is, find the owner, thank him or her and then go get all your friends and repeat the process as often as you can.


We can handle supply, if you handle demand. May 22, 2010

Free Lunch!

They say there's no such thing as a free lunch.

They are sooo wrong. There is one. It is absolutely free, it's everywhere and we all learned about it in fifth grade. Its called photosynthesis!

Now before you roll your eyes and go check your Facebook page, consider the following excerpt from Second Nature, Michael Pollan's fine treatise on gardening, which he wrote before the Omnivore's Dilemma made him the prophet of the local food movement.

The first person to verify that indeed this is a miracle was a seventeenth-century Flemish scientist by the name of Van Helmont. He planted a willow sapling in a container that held 200 pounds of soil and, for five years, gave it nothing but water. At the end of that time, the tree was found to weigh 169 pounds, and the soil 199 pounds, 14 ounces - From just two ounces of soil had come 169 pounds of tree.

Pollan's relays this story after considering the giant, warty Sibley squash he planted from seed in May and harvested in October. It took nothing from anyone but water, air, sunlight and time and here's the best part: Pollan ate it. He may have even fed his family with it.

Herein lies the miracle of agriculture and it's so simple we miss it three times a day. Through photosynthesis, plants take air and sunlight and turn it into food for us.

If that isn't the quintessential free lunch, what is? May 13, 2010

A Texas sized surprise!

 Here's a fact from the Texas Hill Country. 


Should you ever pass a 30-acre field of red corn poppies surrounding a massive farm store at 70 mph, it is acceptable to brake hard enough to give your husband whiplash.


To call Wildseed Farms a "farm store" is like calling the Sistene Chapel a community church. A huge retail section at the entrance is home to every lavender and bluebonnet product the mind can imagine. Garden art, architectural elements, clothing, jewelry candles and gourmet kitchenimplements fill this beautiful "barn." Shop cats snooze in box lids on the checkout counter but you don't even have to buy anything, you're welcome to just soak the place in. (As if!)


Outside, walking paths wind through an impressive nursery collection of herb starts and ornamentals and cactus in full bloom. Did I mention the bier garten and the gourmet food section - brimming with local, artisan delicacies. After snacking on samples of sweet potato butter and peach salsa, one can sidle up to the bar which serves Shiner Bock and homemade peach ice cream from Gillespie County peaches.


But the best part is the 1/2 mile of walking paths that meander past shady benches and fountains and row after row of deliberately cultivated (and labeled) wildflowers. 


In 1983 a Texan named John Thomas began converting his turf business into a wildflower farm. At that time, buying wildflower seed was prohibitively expensive. Thomas invented equipment for large scale wildflower cultivation and seed collection. Today, Wildseed Farms boasts 200 acres under cultivation and another 800 acres in production. Pause and calmly consider that - I'll wait.


The company sells 88 varieties of wildflower seeds on line and in the store and you can even buy mixes for your particular region of the US. Wildseed Farms is the largest working wildflower farm in the US and more than 350,000 people per year stop by.
As luck would have it, Ranch Boss struck up a conversation with a lovely woman named Marilyn - who happens to be married to John and owns this rolicking, extravagant whoop-de-do of a business. She said part of their inspiration was Former First Lady, Lady Bird Johnson who was a neighbor and friend. They built the business row by row and hired a local builder who sucessfully translated John's architectural vision into an absolute masterpiece.


She said a few years of drought really hurt their fields but after all the rain Texas saw this winter, the fields of black-eye-susans and larkspur and cosmos and bluebonnets are positively orgiastic. (My word not hers).


To me this is evidence that you can build something sublime and miraculous from absolute scratch if you are doing it out love for the task. John and Marilyn have been at it for 25+ years and their place is love incarnate. Go see it!


If you can't swing that, here's a virtual tour. May 1, 2010

Courtesy of a Generous Rain

Some days I wonder if I have the faith to farm.

It takes faith to believe that tiny, delicate seeds put in the ground are actually going to grow into radishes. It takes faith to believe the rain will fall at the right time and bugs won't destroy everything and more faith that our organic approach will even deter them. It takes yet more faith to believe the mulch layer isn't too acidic and the baby tomato starts we yanked from the greenhouse won't fall over and die at the prospect of living outside.

Faith is the substance of things hoped for but not yet seen, says Hebrews.

I remind myself of that daily when I stare at my beds waiting for new things to sprout. Aren't we all waiting for new things to sprout? Really?

Nothing sprouts without rain and despite a wet winter, the drought topic has been creeping into casual conversation around town. But yesterday it rained hard and it galvanized this gardener's faith in a much-needed way.

On a physical level, 68 degrees and raining couldn't be better for vegetables. The soil is warm and wet, the wind is calm - things can't help but grow well, like weeds. So I'm grateful for the approximately 2" that has fallen since yesterday. 

Despite the drizzle, I took 24 tomato babies out of the greenhouse and planted them in their beds. Ty Wolosin - an organic growing neighbor friend - said don't kid yourself, April15th - no sooner. 


Late frost and wind are a topic of great paranoia to Texas gardeners, so I've been agonizing over this. Consider taking your kindergartener to New York City and turning him/her loose in Times Square to "grow up." That's kind of how planting tomato starts in Texas in April feels - it's a cold world and predators love innocent, little babies like these.

No sooner had I begun, the rain got serious. I was halfway through wrapping protective plastic around my kindergarteners' cages when it really started coming down. Incidentally, 13 gallon kitchen trash bags with the bottoms cut out fixed with clothespins make pretty good mini-greenhouses for tomatoes.

Rather than dashing for the house, a move Ranch Boss suggested from the covered porch, I just kept working.

I recalled days when I used to take dude ranch guests riding in the forest. Panic would descend the moment it began raining. After we put on our rain gear I would always suggest that everyone hold still, notice how dry they actually were and how the horses seemed to care less about the rain. Once the panic subsided, people remarked on how much mist warm, wet horses create and how each rider got to swim through it. We noticed how much louder the birds and frogs got and how the pine trees smelled.

Oh, how a wet forest smells. 

It's not all that different in a wet garden. In fact, it felt like a benediction - a message to quit panicking, quit questioning and just focus on the task at hand. I calmly moved from cage to cage continuing to work as if I were not soaking wet. I just enjoyed the warm, heavy rain and a rested in what to me was a tacit confirmation that "the farmer who plants generously will get a generous crop." 

The soil is fertile around here. April 17, 2010

Oh Yah Spring!

Spring exploded all over the Kirk Ranch this week.

Apologies to our Pagosa friends for spreading on the "No way, you still have snow on the ground" routine. It's inevitable.

I'd like to think we are out of the woods with freezing weather, but the old timers say if it thunders in February you can count on frost on that same day in April. It did. So this gardener is betting on April 9th.

This is the fabled Texas Bluebonnet. It and several friends are growing in our front yard. The Lone Star State will be silly, gorgeous with them for the next month or two. Local lore holds that because of former first Lady and wildflower advocate, Lady Bird Johnson, the pockets of state highway workers were filled with wildflower seed. It is a fact, according to the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center in Austin, a 1987 federal law mandated one quarter of one percent of all highway landscaping funds be devoted to planting natives. This was largely due to her efforts. She was an early and avid environmentalist and a proud Texan.

I've been dying to show off this fabulous greenhouse. I'm dying even more to tell you that its mine. 

Well....It's not. This is the home of Hardwick Nursery & Produce in Rising Star, Texas. It is the mothership for three separate retail nursery operations. They must have, on site, fifteen or so 100x30 foot green houses packed to the gills with daisies, petunias, bouganvillea (which in Texas is a hanging, potted annual - smart) peonies, begonias. lobelia, hotpeppers, bell peppers, tomatoes, okra starts and countless other plants. 

It is possible to feel a little inadequate wandering through the Hardwick greenhouses, but I had to remind myself, they probably started with one, little recycled materials greenhouse too.

Grandaddy Kirk was able to celebrate his 85th birthday on the Kirk Ranch, last week.He was escorted all the way from Lexington, North Carolina by our good friend and gynecologist Dr. Quiche. (The gynecologist jokes, believe me, are never not funny).

A fried chicken, creamed-potato dinner was held in his honor and also in attendence was Ms. Garrett, who is our favorite 91 year-old neighbor/friend. After comparing some notes with Grandaddy on the Depression and dirt roads, she told some amazing stories about growing up in DeLeon, Texas (10 miles south).

Her family lived in a two-room house and farmed peanuts with teams of horses. As a child, she was the smallest and was often tapped to ride atop a cultivator of some kind and drive one of the teams! Due to my complete lack of mastery in the "southern woman" arts, I was preoccupied with frying chicken and I can't remember how many kids were in her family - but I think there were a bunch.

She told Ranch Boss that baths were taken on Saturday nights. That's where the expression "don't throw the baby out with the bathwater" comes from. Baths were taken largest person to smallest, so the baby got washed in some pretty dirty water. Ranch Boss asked "Ms. Garrett, did you have running water?"

"Oh Lord no!" she answered and giggled. She has a great giggle.

In our spare time, we also planted 27 new trees. The driveway now has a unique landscape design I like to call "compromise."

You see, the principals at the Kirk Ranch agreed that the driveway should be lined with trees. One principal favored a tidy, flowering manicured tree called a Bradford Pear. It is pictured at the right.

Another principal, who happens to also be pictured at the right, believes that Bradford Pears are not a "manly tree" and prefers something a little more "masculine" and "western." As such, the bottom half of the driveway features fourteen manly, western, Mexican Plums. The top half features eleven tidy, pretty Bradford Pears. 

We often talk about the amazing availability of resources here in Texas. All of these trees came from the Snider Nursery which is less than a half mile from the Kirk Ranch. The owner, Mike Snider, has a zillion trees for sale there, so if you are in the market for a bunch of really nice, high quality trees - masculine or feminine - Mike's the guy. He also set Ranch Boss up with a gorgeous Weeping Willow that will make some fabulous shade for our front yard in the long, hot Texas summers.

So yep, spring is pretty sweet 'round these parts. I know it is still snowing in Colorado, so y'all come visit now!  April 3, 2010

Dig It!

At Kirk Ranch Organics we really love plants...I mean really love them. 

So much so that we will spend 8 hours digging up a 100 square foot raised bed to the depth of 24", just for them. This is a ton of hard work, which over the next ten days will be repeated five times.

Normal people build raised beds from the ground up with construction materials and then fill them with dirt. We used to be normal. Then we met John Jeavons and read his book. Now, we dig down and attempt to create a bed of "spongecake" for our baby plants. 

Prior to this activity, our midsections resembled spongecake, but after two straight days of double digging, we think John Jeavons might just have a hot new weight loss program on his hands.

The theory is this: Most plants have deep root systems. There is a lovely band of topsoil for about 12" in our garden. We even add year-old kitchen scrap

compost to this topsoil (can you believe that's what's in the wheelbarrow)? Unfortunately, under that topsoil is hardpack red clay. It makes sense that if plants aren't working to penetrate the clay layer, because we have already done it for them, they will have more energy to grow strong and healthy with abundant vegetables.

So we dig.

This is driving ranch boss seriously crazy. Anything that cannot be done with a diesel-powered machine may not be worth doing. Our custom farmer friends, who certainly know a thing or two about growing stuff, confirmed upon surveying our progress yesterday that "Yep, there's no machine that can do that." 

So we dig.

The funny thing is, this really is not driving me crazy. In fact, we are rather enjoying ourselves. During a little rest break yesterday, we heard the cranes, who are coming back to Texas. We need to ask around a bit about them because all we know is 1.They are definitely cranes 2. They make a noise that, from 1,000 feet overhead, sounds like doves cooing. We sat and watched them fly over and noted with glee this definite sign of spring. The last time we saw them was  November with their V pointed south.

So yes, double digging 600 square-feet to make spongecake beds for baby plants is hard, but so are things done in office buildings. And in office buildings there are no cranes.

So we dig. March 15, 2010

Yoga in Gorman, Texas?

I keep remembering this line in the movie High Fidelity.

John Cusack's girlfriend is criticizing him for being a professional critic. Because, after all, its much easier to criticize what other people put out in the world than to put something out there yourself.

We're proud this week that we have put something new out in the world. Kirk Ranch Organics Yoga just finished its second class with six students. As usual, all of the things we worried about ahead of time never materialized and we got a few inspiring surprises to boot.

Consider the 65, 74 and 75 year-old women, who have never done yoga in their lives, showing up to class tonight. Two of them, even attended the first one, where their instructor was fooled by their youthful good looks and had them lunging from down dog to standing over and over like nazi yoga girl. They were so gracious to return for a second time. We hope when we're 75, we have the gumption to try new, not to mention physically challenging, things. We are really inspired by these women.

One of our younger students keeps posting to her 450 Facebook friends little reminders to come to yoga in Gorman. We love her. She's our marketing department.

Not only is the company of giggling, sweating women gratifying, but that company, when you are new in town, is especially sweet. As a joke, we suggested that the first man to come to yoga class gets an award, but on second thought...maybe it's perfect with just us girls.  March 11, 2010