Category Archives: books

My garden guru has a new book.  It’s all about winter gardening, and I am so pleased he wrote it.

You have to understand one thing about me:  I am guru-less as a matter of principle.  I never quite could understand the need to follow, be it some kind of spiritual leader or some kind of money person or some kind of visionary politician:  good ideas speak to me, not the people who spout them.  Plus, I am a firm believer in the idea that the best shepherd follows his flock, leading from behind.

And Eliot Coleman is chock-full of good ideas, and very familiar with the phrase “you can do it.”  A born tinkerer, it has been his fervent goal to work with less and less inputs, growing the things that will best grow in the conditions they are given.  For this reason, he “discovered” the unheated winter greenhouses used in Europe for the last 100 years or so.  The northern half of the U.S. and southern Canada, though colder than Europe in the winter, have a lot more sunlight:  thus, we can also grow things in the winter, despite the cold.

This new book, however, is geared much more toward the small market grower, much like his first big published book, the New Organic Grower.  Sure, there are a ton of tips in it; in particular, he makes some fine distinctions regarding the methods his farm employs to grow their produce.  All his greenhouses, save one, are mobile.  To aerate the soil, he moves each greenhouse twice a year over a single rectangle of land:  dead in the middle of this land is an electrical hookup and a hose bibb so the structure always has access to both.  He has one greenhouse that stays in place, and is heated to just above freezing.  It is in this greenhouse that he and his workers clean their lettuces and produce year-round.

He also makes a fine labeling distinction between these greenhouses.  See, *I* call my own growing structures “greenhouses” because most people have no idea what a high tunnel, hoophouse or polytunnel are, and I don’t want to be so imperious as to school them on the distinction.  He thinks “greenhouse” is inaccurate because it is not the glassed-in, immovable enclosure filled with palms and orchids that most people know.  “Hot house” is accurate, but only for half the year.  So, his movable, unheated greenhouses?  He calls them “cold houses,” and the one where he’s got a propane heater in it a “cool house.”  I like this distinction.

For the average homeowner itching to perhaps extend their season beyond spring-summer-fall, this might not be the best book to own.  To really get dreaming on what’s possible in your back yard, Four-Season Harvest is your book.  He wrote this for just this kind of ambition, and it’s what got me noodling around with sketches and graphs years ago.  He details coldframes to low tunnels to the cold- and even cool houses above, including charts and lists of crops you can grow.

What I admire about the man is his extreme passion for fresh produce.  Everyone should have a farmer like him nearby:  wouldn’t that be a wonderful world?  Fresh produce year-round, local, and using “deep organic” methods…and that’s why he wrote this book:  it’s his dream too!

SO:  small market growers?  BUY THIS BOOK.

Thomas Allen: Remedy C-print, 2008

Just to step away from farming for a minute, I thought I would update you on the art happenings here and around the country-slash-world.

As some of you know, my husband is an artist. Between his artmaking and my architecture, we’re very fortunate to be able to work from home and have this hobby farm. Tom’s book came out last fall. He will be on the cover of Harper’s Magazine in September, and has six commissioned works in August’s O Magazine (O is for Oprah). He illustrated a feature on memoirs, and had a lot of fun with it; it’s on newsstands now.

On Saturday, August 2nd, he will be in Jackson WY for his show at Oswald Gallery. I love Wyoming, but I love canning season more, so the kid and I will be home-bound.

On September 3rd he persuaded me to go to his show in Boston at Bernard Toale gallery. Bernie is handing the reins over to Joseph Carroll, and Joseph is reopening the gallery that week as Carroll and Sons; it should be a hoot. I could be persuaded to go to this because 1. Boston is a great city and 2. Boston has seafood!!

Other recent publications in which Tom’s work has been shown: New York Magazine did a spread on the precipitous fall of Governor Spitzer. Tom’s take is here. The Irish literary publication Field Day Review did a huge feature of his work in April, with a nice write-up by the novelist Seamus Deane. In Singapore, Designer magazine did a spread in Issue 16.

So. Just thought I would share. There’s been a lot of artmaking going on around here recently!

Knockout (2006: 24×20 c-print) courtesy foleygallery.com

All you all in Dallas (or environs) on Thursday the 10th to, well, until Feb. 16th, go see my hubby’s show at Light & Sie gallery!

The opening is Thursday, and Tom will be there. (Me? I’m watching the chickens.) This new gallery is really very cool, and this will be a fairly big display of his work. He’ll also be around town for a few days signing his new book.

Hey! Allow me a bit of spousely bragging. My husband’s book came in as book #100 of Amazon’s Best Books of 2007!

My comment: “Somebody had to be #100.”
His response: “Better than #101.”

FYI: it’s an art book, in a toddler’s board-book layout. Uh, it could be considered a bit too naughty for your average toddler, but our daughter has taken it to school at Show and Tell (and she’s pushing 4). You can see more of Tom’s work here.

Hello all…

My kid and I will be away for the week, going to “pick up” her daddy in New York.

Tom’s book signing/book release party and talk will be on Tuesday night, October 16th, starting at 6:30, at Aperture’s offices in Chelsea. He will be holding a joint talk with Chip Kidd, the graphic design world’s rock star. Chip has followed Tom’s work for years, and has utilized Tom’s art on book covers for some James Ellroy rereleases and to illustrate a full edition of Francis Ford Coppola’s literary publication, Zoetrope: All-Story.

Personally, I am hoping that book release parties are as entertaining as art openings. This should be some serious fun. And, of course, it’s great to step off the farm every once in a while…at least for a bagel and a schmear.

Yep! Hot off the press, just released Tuesday night: Alice Waters’ latest. I am happy, as simple food is what I love. It’s a fairly basic cookbook, actually. But consider the source: in her talented hands, and with her instructions, simple magic can happen in anyone’s kitchen.

But what you’re looking at, of course, is a bribe.

You see, Tom leaves for London on Tuesday. Alone. Without us! So he needs to do some things to curry my favor.

He’s going to be in an art fair–slash–show there. It’s his profession’s version of a convention, I suppose; in such an instance I am glad I am not going, conventions being what they are. (I would never drag him to an AIA convention.) But then, London is a place where the child and I could have plenty of fun…with or without him.

As it is, we’ll see what trouble we can get in at home…

Meredith, bless her heart, asked for some of my favorite culinary reads. So I did a quick gleaning, and scooped up “something for everyone” in this pile. She wanted ten, but I’m giving you eleven.

Biography/autobiography:
Mary Frances Kennedy (M.F.K.) Fisher: any and all essays, but a good place to start would be The Art of Eating. She is able to limn the most attendant details: if you read her, you are seated across the table from her.

Barbara Grizzuti Harrison: Italian Days. This is another instance of food plus autobiography. BGH returns to Italy in her 50s. I did not want this to end.

Julia Child: My Life in France. Like the previous two books, this is personal history. This is a love story, though: love of food, love of France, love of her husband. Child is just as witty and charming as ever, willing to make mistakes and quick to laugh about them. Now, if I could only find out if her pot/pan shop is still open somewhere after Les Halles closed…

Eat = Memory, so I cannot in good conscience overlook Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu: Remembrance of Things Past. If you have a lot of time on your hand, you should try this.

Technique:
Paul Bertolli: Cooking By Hand. Bertolli is a former chef of Chez Panisse, and now mostly makes sausage. I admire his passion, and the depth he takes with his subjects. This book handles balsamic vinegar, sausage, and pasta-making to a depth that will astound you.

History:
Jared Diamond: Guns, Germs and Steel. What the hell am I thinking, including a book about the rise and fall of civilizations in a list of culinary books? The social history of food is directly tied to the success or failure of any civilization. The cultivation of grain, the domestication of animals, the migration of peoples: it is all here.

Michael Pollan: The Botany of Desire. Pollan, who’s well-known thanks to his recent book, has actually been around for quite a while, writing his little heart out. This book’s my favorite of his, covering the history of apples, potatoes, tulips and…pot.

The Oxford Companion to Food. Everything, and I mean it, is in this book.

Studies, Polemics, or A Bunch Of Food Nags
These books will hopefully make you think about what you eat.

Peter Singer and Jim Mason: The Way We Eat (hardback) or The Ethics of What We Eat (paperback): Why our Food Choices Matter. Singer is the preeminent philosopher and ethicist best known for his work in applied ethics (i.e., weighing life choices) and animal liberation. That said, this book will give you a lot to think about regarding food choice: local versus organic, farmed fish versus wild…it’s all here. And you won’t turn vegan after reading it.

Want to figure out how to negotiate the fraught aisles of your grocery store? Marion Nestle’s What To Eat will show you just how very devious stores and food companies really are.

Nina Planck throws bombs, too. Her book Real Food is one I turn to often, mainly because I cannot readily remember which oil I should grab for what purpose: this book is the best one I have found to decipher the mono- versus polysaturated fats. It is an interesting read.

Tom hit a library sale yesterday and this was his take for me.

Now that we have a kid, library sales are our book-gathering method of choice. There’s a lot more bang for your buck there, and, let’s face it, with a few exceptions, children’s literature is a fleeting thing, captured and consumed.

I give him vague directions (“Oh, anything gardening, I guess”) and he usually nabs something that contains a few gems, a few pearls of wisdom. The Gourmet mags were a fluke. They are from the 1950s, and, without exaggeration, a good 25% of the pages are liquor ads! All of a sudden, all those John Cheever stories make complete sense. I can just imagine Pauline Hausfrau setting her ruffled apron afire while making crepes Suzette, fortified, as she was, by all those cocktails.

The gardening books are always fun reads, especially old issues of Organic Gardening. I usually can glean some earthen tidbits from all of these books. And, if not, our own library sale is in about a month, so we can recycle the duds.

I’m stepping away from the garden for a few days (going to DEEtroit, especially to hit my favorite spice shop downtown), so I thought I would leave you with words that are not my own. (I feel I’ve been overly wordy lately anyway.)

Eleanor Perenyi has not written enough on gardening, in my mind; she is my favorite writer on the garden, though. I tried to find her take on peonies, as she had said something profound about their ability to drop their petals “like prom dresses atop the grand piano,” or some such; don’t quote me. But instead I found this paragraph on vegetables. Please note the date, and her sentiments.

“All that has changed. I am a full-time resident now and not as hell-bent as I used to be. I have cut down on many things, but nothing short of total decrepitude could make me decide to give up the vegetables. Ordinary greed comes into it, of course, and the bolstering of insecurities: Scarlett O’Hara grubbing for yams evidently made more of an impression than I realized at the time. But most of all they bewitch me with their textures, infinitely varied forms, even their sounds–the silky rustle of cabbages, the rattle of peas in their pods. Whether in orderly rows in the garden or lying in a heap on the kitchen table, they are almost too beautiful to eat, which at least proves that one isn’t just a hog. Given the aesthetic choice, I prefer vegetables to fruits or flowers. I am hardly the first to experience this half-worshipful emotion (think what Chardin could do with a scallion or a plum), but it is undoubtedly sharpened by the premonition that I may be the last. The seven-year-old-son of one of my garden helpers brought this home to me the other day. An intelligent child, he wanted to know what were the pea pods he saw lying in the compost heap. I explained. Still a blank, and it came to me that although he knew perfectly well what peas were, he had supposed they came out of a cardboard box, frozen. And there will soon be many more of him than me. Already I am something of a freak in the community on account of my vegetables, herbs and fruits. I foresee the day when I graduate from freak to witch.” from Green Thoughts: a Writer in the Garden, 1981.

Two things I am taking away from this book of letters:

1. Hellebores. They’re something I’ve only admired in OPG (Other People’s Gardens).

2. A great thankfulness that Civil Rights has passed in this country.

Yes, cantankerous me: wouldn’t it be LOVELY if I could just revel in these letters for their breadth of gardening knowledge? Well, whether it’s simply cultural oversight of a Yankee gardener with “hired men” or a Southern gardener with “half grown Negro boy[s]”…I seriously wonder if we can really consider these two women gardeners in the sense that we understand the term. (Especially Katharine White, who never deigned to even get out of a dress and heels.) I guess instead I will blame the editor, who did a fine job of delineating the silver spoon set but neglects to mention the hired help by name. It especially galled me when the editor saw fit to mention who Elizabeth’s mother’s doctor was, yet in the same paragraph, the ONLY place where he’s mentioned, she doesn’t cite Elizabeth’s gardener. “All saying things can’t be done, that my yardman, Willie, and I have been doing for years without a fuss.” [p. 76,Beacon Press ppb edition]

Okay, THAT is out of the way. Elizabeth Lawrence, if I were to rank them, is more bona fide a dirt digger. She wrote a gardening column for The Charlotte Observer and also had a landscape consulting business. Her personality comes through loud and clear in her letters, which describe a somewhat one-sided “friendship” between these two women. Katharine S. White (wife of E.B. “Andy” White, of Charlotte’s Web fame and a lot more) was an editor at The New Yorker who on occasion wrote a mostly gardening-related column for the same magazine. She had a large flower garden at their farm in Maine.

As a historical document, this batch of letters describes well how plantgrowing moved from one of local nurseries with local specialties to national nurseries with, as we know now, nothing local. This trend was helped somewhat by Katharine’s New Yorker articles about mail-order nurseries. (Katharine relied heavily in writing these articles upon the expertise of people like Elizabeth.) These letters document the loss of scent in roses, the hardiness of North Carolina daffodils in Maine, and bloom times for plants in December (!!). As such, it makes a very interesting read for those of us who’re plant-happy.

These letters also follow gardening trends, especially the emergence of the horrors of DDT and the re-emergence of chemical-free gardens. I think we were all a bit horrified to read how they describe how their yards were regularly sprayed with DDT and they noticed the loss of certain creatures because of it. (It was The New Yorker that first published chapters of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring.)

The letters also describe what happened in their lives, particularly in terms of illness. (It is said that the Whites tended to be hypochondriacs.) Part of me wonders if some “real” gardening, the bend-and-stretch, dig-the-dirt, spread-the-mulch sweatiness that most of us practice wouldn’t have benefited these two, Katharine White especially. But then I also realize these women were very much products of their time, even though they were highly unusual by being fully employed. So getting sweaty in the garden was ONLY acceptable if they did it with their yardmen.

And that makes me wonder. Is my reaction to these women’s gardens a visceral kind of backwards jealosy? I am definitely in the bite-off-as-much-as-I-can-chew camp here on the farm. My vision, of course, is much larger than my time allows. If I had a yardman, or a crew…who knows what I could do. And seeing what these two COULD do, well…

And it is here that I should mention that my husband is in this week’s New Yorker. They mention his New York show, and include a photo (not online, unfortunately, but in the magazine itself). He’ll be in April’s Harper’s, so the ghosts of the Whites are all over this house…

(Thanks again, Carol, for hosting!)

Teaming with Microbes: A Gardener’s Guide to the Soil Food Web (Lowenfels, Jeff and Lewis, Wayne; Timber Press, Portland, OR; 2006)

Now, here is a useful book. There was enough handy information that even a seasoned organic gardener like myself could still glean a few kernels of wisdom from it. Here’s the spoiler: “Rule #2 holds that most vegetables, annuals, and grasses prefer their nitrogen in nitrate form and do best in bacterially dominated soils. Rule #3 points out that most trees, shrubs and perennials prefer their nitrogen in ammonium form and do best in fungally dominated soils.”

I also want to use the word “exudates” in a sentence now. Or at least in cocktail conversation. Cocktail conversation that does NOT include compost tea.

Forget about the idea for a second that the average human has a hard time with the concept of a “web.” Maybe it’s New Math (I certainly was a product), but most fields of study are linear in nature, and thus webs are kind of hard to conceptualize. That said, to team with the teeming trillions found in a tablespoon of soil is the stated purpose of this book. They have detours, they kind of get caught up in a few reductivist, or at least quantitative, digressions into these trillions…but I suppose that was important, considering the subject matter.

Here’s the rub, kids: soil is a living thing, or at least the host to trillions of living things. If you did not know that before, then you are probably not a gardener. Most folks know there’re earthworms in the soil. But there’s more to love than your average red wiggler.

There were a couple of things that stood out (i.e., annoyed the crap out of me) while reading this. One: “spouse”=”wife,” we get it. That your wives weren’t that keen about your raids of the pantry for brewing compost tea is your business: don’t lump the rest of us in that category, mainly because there are a lot of single gardeners out there, and there are a lot of wives who garden (ahem.). And two: doesn’t this whole compost tea-brewing obsession seem to any of you to be, well, the graying of your average basement beer brewer? Maybe it’s my particular demographic, but most beer-loving boys I know got into beer-brewing about age 25 or so, or at least when they had their first basement. I also thought the authors were showing their true colors (or at least their woo-woo bona fides) by giving us instructions to make our own fish hydrolysate by adding papain (aka papaya peptidase). Yep. Right there on the top shelf of MY pantry.

And the whole don’t-use-manure-in-your-compost thing because of (eeks!) E. coli. seems really like a lawsuit-avoidance tactic. Your average Nelly Nag down the road is not fed the same gut-turning crap your commercial Bessie is, so I would think this is a bit disingenuous on the authors’ part.

But the biggest apostacy of course is the throw-your-tiller-away dictum. Yes, we now fully understand how continued, twice-yearly tilling breaks the long strands of fungal hyphae. Hmm. Understood; understand. However. If one is to throw down the gantlet like this, I suppose I would’ve appreciated an alternative. My own little circle of hell here is clay soil. Before the tiller, in creating my garden beds, I was out there with a 10-lb. mattock. (Granted, I was a breastfeeding stay-at-home mother at that time so I felt my yin was way off my yang and I needed a butch-ifying outlet. This is also the time I took up with a chainsaw. But enough about me.) So yes, the only time I get out there and chop up the soil is when I bust the sod for new garden beds. Scraping the grass away daintily at the rootline was a hobby I could enjoy in my small city lot. Now, well. Manifest destiny.

And that brings me to the best line(s) of the book: “The organisms in the compost you apply…will spread life as far as they can. It is microbial manifest destiny.”

Eat or be eaten, kiddos. Go out and feed the eaters.

(and thank you, Carol, for your book club!)

KNOCKOUT (2006)

We’re off for a few days to hit Tom’s show. He’ll be hobnobbing. Our kid wants to ride another bus. Me? I am looking forward to lots of great meals and some decent bagels (it’s been so long!).

p.s.: There’s more of Tom’s work here and here. Oh, and here; there’s an interview that was just published today.

Carol of May Dreams Gardens came up with the wonderful idea of doing an on-line book club with a bunch of us gardening bloggers. Great idea, sign me up! Then I heard about the first book selected. Oh no, I thought.

The ancient Romans had an expression that I re-remembered when I reread this book. (In point of fact, I thought of it when I bought the book, too, but more about that later.) It goes like this: “De gustibus non est disputandum.” This translates to “In matters of taste, there is no argument.” And I had to keep that in mind when the very particular Mr. Mitchell would tee off on one or another of my favorite growing things, or elevate one of my least-favorite.

About the book: Henry Mitchell was the beloved garden writer for the Washington Post for a time during the 70s-80s. His style was a bit revolutionary, and his yarns about his city and country gardens actually do travel very well. He’s something of a curmudgeon, his humor is dry, his opinions (like I mentioned) are legion. In other words, he (normally) would be someone I would love. This book is a collection of his essays, and therein lies my problem with the book. As far as narrative structure, the book is something easily picked up, read, and put down again…it is the gardening dilettante’s dream. Great for the bedside table, great for reading on the train to work.

One of my other favorite garden bloggers has this theory of her blog that I truly admire. She basically avoids giving advice because gardening advice is…boring! “Snoozy voice of God stuff,” she says. And honestly? Henry Mitchell’s voice is quite in my head, thank you; and yes, he, to my ears, is prone to sermons, and tendentious, even when (especially when) I agree with him. I frankly think this is ONLY because this book is structured the way it is, i.e., as a series of narrowly-connected articles. Quite fun to read in the newspaper, yes; as a whole book? no.

Considering Henry Mitchell is something of a sacred cow in gardening circles, I do feel bad that my review of this book is so harsh. My review of him? He’s great. In small doses.

But remember the Romans. In matters of taste, there is no argument.

This also came in the haul Saturday. I forgot to photo it yesterday because I was reading it.

Isn’t this the way YOU turn your compost heaps? Flower in your hair, Madras shorts, and tiny shoes?

I have the updated copy of this book. It lacks the photos and zany testimonials of Mrs. Henry So-and-So and Mrs. Eugene Such-and-Such. Most of the pics show women who look like Ma Barker and men who look like, well, your grandfather, doing all they can to make compost. Nowhere is there the Nancy Drew type found on the cover. Quite fascinating. LOVE it.

I have had the good fortune of finding a husband who loves books as much as I do. You see that “what kind of flower are you” thingy I put on this site? One of the questions is “How many books are in your house,” then it gives in my eyes an absurd option like 0-5, 6-10, etc. up to 100. A hundred? Per room, I hope they meant, and checked it, because geez, we even have books in our dining room.

And to add to our sagging floor joists, Tom went to the local library’s book sale yesterday, armed with two large cloth Ikea bags. He came back with the little stash in the photo below for me. And he got a lot of kids’ books for the kid, with names like “My Turtle Died Today” and “Jeepers There’s a Jet”, all in the same obvious vintage as my gardening selection, i.e., 1950s.

Here, of course, is my favorite. Now my question is, when is it that I can become an Old Wife? I mean, I am not young, but I have only been married 4 years. Do I have long to wait?

…to brag about my husband.

This is the cover of the latest All-Story magazine, a literary publication that specializes in short fiction. Tom’s work is featured in it; actually, 39 of his images are used to illustrate the fall issue. Zoetrope: All-Story was created by Francis Ford Coppola, and its guest designer for this issue was Chip Kidd, who’s kind of THE go-to guy, book design-wise.

Go pick up a copy at your local bookstore. Here’s a link for you, too. ZOETROPE: ALL-STORY