Our garden is big. Yours doesn't have to be to yield lots of great food and flowers

I did not hear this in person. Bill did (on Marketplace Money on NPR last Friday). But he couldn’t resist telling me about it, chortling loudly the while.

As well he might. According to him, a garden advisor – whose name he didn’t catch – had pronounced that “if you can’t keep your room swept, you shouldn’t try to garden.”

This struck me as so wildly improbable I thought he must have heard wrong, so I looked it up.

Sure enough, there in the synopsis:

“…not every budget-conscious person can make a garden grow and save money. Meg Favreau of WiseBread.com says that if you can’t keep your own room clean, most likely, you won’t be able to take care of a garden. Just go grocery shopping. But for those of who (sic) can maintain a clean living space…”

Arrgh!!

In extenuation (please see update below), the interview was about frugality, not horticulture, and Ms. Favreau was presented as an expert on all things frugal, rather than as an expert at gardening, or, for all I know, housekeeping.  But still. There may be a few personality traits that would get in the way of successful gardening – hating the outdoors comes to mind – but a deficiency of tidiness is emphatically not one of them.

A few reasons cleaning the house and caring for a garden have nothing to do with each other

1) No amount of housecleaning will create some new piece of furniture or decorative object that was not there before. But if you plant an inexpensive 6-pack of baby zinnias, you could have great bouquets for months.

2. No amount of housecleaning will create something to eat. We hold this truth to be self-evident.

3. Cleaning what does exist in your own room may improve the looks of that thing, but not transformatively. There is no way that dusting a steel clamp light will turn it into a crystal chandelier. Tend to a little tomato plant, on the other hand, and more likely than not it will become a great big green vine dripping with delicious crimson fruit.

4. Cleaning indoors may be good exercise, but opening the windows won’t make it exercise in the open air. Even the most benign cleaning products do not smell nearly as nice as newly-mown grass or blooming lilacs or the warm earth all by itself.

5. There are degrees of uncleanliness, but basically a room is either tidy enough to occupy pleasantly or messy enough to inspire discomfort. In the garden, no such dichotomy exists. Instead, there’s a huge spectrum of imposed order from maintained-to-the-max to utterly overgrown, and there will be recognizable benefits just about everywhere along the line.

6. With maintained-to-the-max we arrive at the most important reason Ms. Favreau’s analogy is bunk, and (because of what it implies) dangerous bunk at that. The one thing that will doom you as a gardener is being a control freak. Doing the work, yes. Good idea. If you put plants in the right place, weed, water, fertilize and similarly help Mrs. Nature to the best of your abilities, you will greatly increase the chances of reaping rewards from your garden. But you cannot for a minute assume that you are in charge. You’re not.

That’s one of the things that’s most wonderful about the whole untidy, ever changing, always productive process of gardening. It’s always a partnership, and the gardener is always the junior partner.

Some posts that might be especially useful for food gardeners just starting out (try the Garden dropdown menu for more)

High Return Vegetables

Tips for Success with Vegetable Seeds

How to grow Garlic

How to build simple, easy trellises for tomatoes, peas and beans

* Update: Ms. Favreau‘s gratifyingly mild-mannered mother wrote in (see comments) to point out that the synopsis was by no means the whole story and that she didn’t discourage gardening and I should give a listen instead of simply relying on the retelling from NPR. Fair enough, and I do apologize; you’d think I’d know better in a political season full of dubious out-of-context quotes. So listen I did and so can you if you click the synopsis link. As it happens, I don’t particularly agree with her suggestions for how beginners should get started, but that’s a whole different post and a far less emphatic one.

Yet all that said, post-listen (not surprisingly, she was analogizing room-tidying to weeding) the gist of  it remains and I still think the message was unfortunate. There are indeed reasons that food gardening may not be a money saver  - again, a different post – and there are crops that will fail unweeded: carrots, onions and others with small tops that are easily crowded out, but one of the great things about gardening is that you can still get a lot of food if you don’t weed very often. For instance, once her recommended zucchini – and other squash – plants get going, their giant leaves will shade out weeds and you won’t have to worry about them.

Magnolia in usual late April mode

The pattern itself is always the same: 1) multi-week warm spell, 2) magnolia blooms, 3) seasonally-appropriate frost comes, 4) flowers turn brown. But it used to happen between late April and early May. Then the whole sequence moved back to April.

In 2012, all March. Bloom started around the 10th and was thoroughly whacked when the temperature dropped to 25 degrees on the night of the 26th.

April 18th, three weeks and change after the frost - just a few late-opening dots of pink.

Meanwhile, the combo of February and March was the 3rd driest on record and April is not shaping up well.

I could go on, among other things airing the usual caveat that this is weather, not climate. But I’d rather cut to this not-climate’s effect on the maple syrup industry, as described in the crop reports written by Arnold Coombs, a seventh generation maple syrup producer and packer in Vermont.

Full disclosure:  The 2012 crop report abbreviated below was originally sent to me by the farm’s publicist, who thought it might provide a story about the connections between maple syrup and climate change.

Indeed it does. Especially when combined with Mr. Coomb’s reports from 2009 (best crop in the last 75 years) and 2010 (production dramatically below average).

Up, down, up, down, way hot, way not, dust-bowl dry and then hundred-year flooded, the globe is on a violent weather see-saw that is not well described by “warming,” a word that usually evokes something pleasant. “Climate change” is a little better,  but not by much. Change isn’t always pleasant, but it’s beneficial at least as often as it is harmful, which cannot be said about the see-saw.

The search for a term that is both scientifically defensible and sufficiently horrifying is ongoing. As is the phenomenon the term will describe. Here’s an on-the-ground look at one early shape of the agriculture to come, and following that, links to a few recipes. Maple syrup shortages and price hikes are probably inevitable, but they’re not likely to be crippling, especially given that our local, sustainable sweetener is not only delicious but also, for what it is, inexpensive.

2012 Preliminary Crop Report

By Arnold Coombs  (edited and condensed by me)

Following a huge crop like 2011, the 2012 crop had a tough act to follow.  The winter weather was most unusual with temperatures well above average. In southern VT and NH we had only two significant snow storms with the biggest being in October.

Because of the warmth and the lack of snow, getting around in the woods was much easier. Most sugar makers were ready to start producing early, but then in the week of March 19th, temperatures hit the 70s for four days in a row and ended our season prematurely.

This year, half of last year’s record amount seems to be normal, which translates into about 70% of an average crop for some, less for others.  We estimate the final US production at 18,000,000 lbs. compared to over 30,000,000 lbs. last year. Canadian production looks to be similar. What does that mean for prices? They will be going up. How much? That is still to be determined…

The farmers’ union in Quebec increased the base of syrup price 3% and with other costs rising (what isn’t going up?) we see a minimum increase of 5%…. pricing usually settles down by Late May or early June.

Due to the warmer weather, this year’s crop is running darker than usual, (last year the crop was 30% Grade A Light Amber and this year it is 5%) but the flavor is still quite good and we have plenty.

Personally, I’m delighted. As long it isn’t “buddy” (off-flavored because the tree has started to leaf out) I like the darker grade B better anyway.

Recipes:

Yes, it's dessert. (Carrot cake for pie-preferrers, albeit without raisins.)

Assorted maple tarts (carrot, apple and wild rice), and Downeast Company Coleslaw are here.

Crisp Crust Maple-Walnut Pie is here.

Les Grandperes (French Canadian cottage pudding, aka biscuits on syrup) is – or I suppose are – here.

Ramps (Allium tricoccum) at home in typical habitat

We regularly hunt for and pick them, trying to be responsible about it. We frequently  cook and eat them  in season, trying not to be too piggy about it. And I, at least, have two sub-questions:

1. Is the worry about over-harvesting* justified? And
2. Is it possible to formulate a general rule for the ethical enjoyment of foraged wild foods?

Given our intense involvement with wild mushrooms, you won’t be surprised to hear I didn’t start thinking about this the day before yesterday. It’s been at least 15 years since morels entered what might be called the upscale mainstream, and at least 10 since a host of other wild mushroom species started popping up in retail markets.

Ecologically, mushrooms and ramps are very different. Fungi are not plants and mushrooms are not fruits, but the mushrooms we eat are like fruits in function. Their purpose is purely reproductive, so they can be harvested over and over without damaging the parent fungus. Ramps, on the other hand, are entire plants, ** and they are plants that grow slowly. The trip from seed to harvest size can take three to five years.

But for the purposes of this discussion, wild mushrooms and ramps are very similar: both are foraged foods that have only recently become popular with a wide range of consumers, even though they have long histories of culinary use.

Traditionally, most foragers were country dwellers who gathered these foods recreationally from places nearby, for themselves and their families and, on occasion, for sale or sharing at local festivals.

These amateurs are still around, but now that there’s an expanding market, there is also an expanding group of professionals,  foragers who gather wild foods to sell, who do this work full time and who may move from place to place with the seasons, following what is for them a primary source of income.

Regrettably, many professional foragers are not professionals in the sense of having respect for the long term health of their industry. They have no interest in conservation – either of the target comestible or of the environment that sustains it -  and because time is money as surely in the woods as anywhere else, the more they can harvest from any one place, the better.

As a result, large swaths of territory can be so thoroughly stripped that the valuable product – whatever it is -  cannot regenerate. And if the land is so badly torn up that other species become collateral damage, well, tough darts.

In view of these problems, it might at first seem as though the rule is easy, an extension of the currently fashionable idea that one should slaughter the animals if one wishes to eat meat: do it yourself or don’t do it. If consumers don’t buy wild foods, heedless harvesting will not be an issue.

All very well and good (about the wild foods, I mean, please don’t get me started on the meat). But there are a few little problems:

1. Not all commercial harvesters are full time, and not all of them are pros-come-lately. I may be particularly sensitive to this because I live in Maine, where foraging has been a way of life for many since time out of mind, but I think most people would hesitate before suggesting an end to, for instance, blackberry picking. And there are a lot of reasons why telling clam diggers to stop it sounds like a bad idea, right up there with saying all lobster boats should be converted to sport vessels.

2. Also because I live in Maine, I’ve seen first hand how a niche product, in this case sea urchins, can quickly go from ubiquitous nuisance to species at risk, complete with licensed harvesters and very short, tightly regulated harvest seasons. It took about two decades.  But regulations did get adopted before it was too late; the urchins appear to be recovering. I suppose there’s no point in hoping a lesson was learned, the tragedy of the commons shows no signs of going away. But it may not be too farfetched to hope a more organized industry could be a sustainable one.

3. Although there are examples of local near-extinctions, there’s not much hard evidence that foraging is endangering wild foods to any significant degree. And it’s becoming clearer and clearer that – if you’re talking about the survival of an entire species – over harvesting may be  less of a threat than loss of habitat. Urchins, for instance, are very sensitive to things like pollution and water temperature. Ramps can grow in shady back yards, but not under streets and houses.

April 1, 2012 (no fooling). You can just see the tips of the ramp leaves below the sign. The much smaller lettering says “Good for salads and pesto!”

* For a decent, albeit tip-of-the-icebergy overview of the endangerment issue, see When Digging for Ramps Goes Too Deep, by Indirani Sen, published last April in the New York Times.

** One conservation-minded suggestion, made by me among many others, is to harvest only leaves and not too many, so  that the bulb below will be able to regenerate. This is fine as far as it goes, but it doesn’t go to the root of the problem, which is that the bulb is the tastiest part.

Ramp photos by Bill Bakaitis

In some ways this is really Part One, because although Bill’s set of instructions for  building your own wood burning oven is  thorough enough, the inspirational ovens of his childhood got only fleeting mention when he wrote it.

Now, thanks to the comments section, the story has its start. A simple query (from a fellow Lithuanian) has summoned those missing memories: of the outdoor brick ovens built by the southern Italians on Bill’s mother’s side, and of his apprenticeship with Willie Orban, his Lithuanian Godfather, who ran “the largest and the best bakery in town.”

First, the (abbreviated) query:

Hi Bill… I have a winter place in south west Florida where I plan to build an oven, however the clay belts are in the panhandle!!! Are you aware of an alternative to raw clay? I was thinking of using clay bricks which I can get readily get for free. I think baking bread is in the genetic code of all Lithuanians. Thanks much, Stan.

Next there should be a thanks to Stan from me, because here is Bill’s reply:

Hi Stan,

Well free is the way to go, isn’t it?  Although father’s side of the family, and hence my name, is Lithuanian, it was from my mother’s southern Italian side that I learned about home made bread ovens. There were several in our neighborhood (in Washington Pennsylvania, just south of Pittsburgh) and all were made from clay brick.

As I recall, and as old Angelo de Francesco described it to my uncle, the process consists largely of laying in a circular course of brick, leaving room for the door, and raising this course for a foot or so.

Then begins a gradual reduction in the diameter of the circle, by setting the successive courses not directly on top of the previous course, but somewhere between 1/3 and 1/2 of the brick width inward. This process is carried on until the constriction of the wall meets at the top. I think this is called a corbelled vault in brick-laying parlance.

The bricks must be laid with mortar/cement and are, of course staggered along their length, no two successive courses having seams directly overlaying one another.

I recall at least one smaller oven which was built using a wooden barrel as a form over which to arrange the bricks.

In some of these ovens, the entire outer wall was cemented over, thus making the ovens stronger, more efficient (due to the greater thermal mass), and relatively water and weather proof.

In others the geometry of the corbelled brickwork was unadorned, and these were protected from the weather by a shed roof.  I think one oven was double walled with rubble/gravel between the inner and outer brick walls.

As I recall, all were built upon a waist high base, all were domed, and all had but a single door. And I think all of the bricks were red, probably coming from clays mined just down the pike; the entire area was known for its pottery industry.

As I say, I learned about building these ovens from the Italians in the neighborhood. You will be pleased to know, however, that I learned baking from Willie Orban, my Lithuanian Godfather. Willie ran the largest and the best bakery in town.

We had several large electrical geared mixing bowls that were capable of handling 200 pounds of flour at a time, several proofing and retarding boxes, each working full time, and a large gas-fired oven with 20 foot long Ferris-wheel revolving shelves.

I would show up for work somewhere around midnight, commence to mixing the bread and set it to rising using pound sized bricks of gray, squeaky bakers yeast. As this ferment began I had just a half hour to mix up the sweet doughs for the pastries. Then began the successive pinching off of the dough as it aged, each fifty pound pull to be cut and kneaded into distinctive shapes.

As these rose in the pans and trays and the remainder of bread in the mixing bowl continued to work,  I/we had just a jot of time to roll out the sweet dough into buttered layers for the pastries, then pull off the second fifty pound batch of dough for the crusty loaves. Somewhere in between, the first batch of breads would go into the oven; the pastries cut, filled, proofed and then set into the oven; cake batter made; a second and third batch of dough mixed and set to working; dinner rolls mixed, proofed, cut, rolled and proofed again; cakes baked; cookie dough mixed, chilled, cut, filled and baked; large bread loaves weighed, cut, kneaded, braided, seeded, proofed and baked off; cakes cooled, cut and layered/decorated; goods coming from the ovens moved to cooling racks, the sweet ones dipped or drizzled with fondant. Meanwhile, doughnut batters were mixed, aged, proofed, fried, and glazed or filled;  puff shells baked and then filled with creams; fruit pie dough mixed, chilled, rolled, filled and baked…

And then the cleaning up, washing of the pans, sweeping of the floors, maintaining the machines, delivering the wedding cakes to the churches, hard rolls to the VFW, pastries to the Bar Mitzvah or Rotary Club.

There was never time to eat, never time even to stop and pee, but then again there was never a need; food was everywhere and the heat and work caused constant sweat to seep from the skin.  Time, meaning, horizon all dissolved into a blur.

It was great! Like living in New York City. I wouldn’t have missed it for the world, but would never want to do it again.

I did this as a skinny teenager and then went on to college. For Willie it was all he knew. He was trapped there, strong as an ox but with no teeth, aching joints, high blood pressure, a bad stomach, crippling arthritis and the paranoid world view of a mind pumped to the limit by fear and adrenalin, finally eroded to half its potential. The last time I saw him he was glued to his TV set watching endless reruns of the Pope’s visit to what looked like a ball field. He wanted me to watch the reruns with him, share the vision, the glory, marry and put a baker’s dozen in the wife’s oven…

I begged off and walked across the road to the spring near my grandmother’s house, passing my granddad’s bread oven on the way.

Yes Stan, go with the free bricks. You can make a very good oven with free bricks and a little mortar. And the smoke of the fire puts such a splendid color and taste in the crust of the bread. You won’t regret it!

best of luck,

Bill Bakaitis

Billy and Willie @ 1950

Zone 6 zone denial tip: standard hybrid gladioli are reliably hardy only to zone 9 - or 8b, maybe - but if you have well drained soil, plant them 5 or 6 inches deep and mulch heavily in fall (in this case before the ground freezes), there’s a good chance they’ll come back.

By now you’ve probably gotten the word: the long awaited, massively updated USDA Climate Zone map, the first revision since 1990, has finally arrived. And  – insert giant snarky “this is news?” – it shows large swaths of the country have moved up at least a half zone.

In 1991, when I got together with Bill and began gardening in the Hudson Valley, I could joke that my new life didn’t net me a single climate zone, even though the NY garden is about 300 miles southwest of the one in Maine. Until a couple of weeks ago, they were both in zone 5b. Now, while New York remains 5b – by the skin of its teeth, from the looks of things – Maine has been promoted to 6a.

Of course the difference between the two may well be less than the full 5 degrees between half zones. Same with the big chunk of Nebraska that’s now 5a instead of 4b. It’s also possible that Chicago, a heat island, may have remained exactly the same while getting a higher zone assignment because of better measurement.

But whatever the physical changes, most of the numbers did go up. The USDA, however, refuses to draw what appear to be obvious conclusions.

Perhaps not surprisingly, there has been a lot of flapdoodle* about how the zone changes are strong proof of global warming and the USDA is simply stonewalling. There has also been a fair amount of wishful thinking along the lines of “I thought it wouldn’t be hardy here, but now I know I can grow it. Yay!”

Well, yes and no. USDA representative Kim Kaplan doth perhaps protest too much when insisting that the new map differs so fundamentally from the old that the two cannot be compared. Given the unanimity of projections of increasing warmth in future, it could be quibbling to maintain that the 30 years of data behind the new map is weather, not climate, because climate measures brackets of at least 50 years. And when it comes to wishful thinking, no one with any gardening knowledge would deny that plant hardiness is indeed an increasingly mobile target.

But all that said, I don’t think it would hurt to calm down a little and stop making the poor map carry far more weight than it should. On the first count, there are a lot more robust proofs of global warming (check out this government sanctioned analysis of trends in the Southeast, for instance, if you really want to have your pants scared off.) On the second count, it pays to remember that average winter lows – the only thing measured on the map – are by no means the single factor influencing plant survival; and when it comes to climate change the challenges far outweigh the benefits, even at the home garden level.

Some Factors Other Than the Thermometer That Influence Winter Survival of Plants

Time to harden off. When cold comes gradually, plants have a chance to toughen up in preparation for winter. When cold comes suddenly, plants may be killed by temperatures they could otherwise sail through unscathed.

Duration of the coldest temperatures. A plant rated hardy to -10 is more likely to survive a few hours of -15 than ten straight days of -5.

Winter soil moisture. Dry climate plants from lavender to cactus care a lot more about drainage than they do about air temperature.

Yearly rainfall. Seattle and Tucson have the same zone number but are not otherwise similar. Moisture needers and drought needers alike will go into winter deeply stressed if grown in the wrong place, and that weakness can finish them off when deep cold is added.

Late summer and fall care. Nitrogen fertilizer spurs tender growth that’s vulnerable to winter kill. Late pruning does the same thing.

Snow cover. A deep fluffy blanket of snow that lasts all winter will protect plants (especially perennials) from cold that would kill them if the ground were bare.

Some Gardeners’ Problems Headed This Way As a Result of Climate Change

Rapid temperature swings. A long mild fall followed by a plunge into the deep freeze, and/or a very early spring, followed by a plunge into the deep freeze.

Extreme weather events. Extended droughts, torrential rains, hurricane force winds.

Shorter winters. Plants like apples, peonies and lilacs that must have a long winter sleep can languish with too little rest. Insects and diseases once kept in check by extended cold will have higher rates of survival.

Less reliable snow cover, more frequent ice storms. Snow protects; ice kills.

Hotter summers. Northerners will have better luck with heat-loving annuals from tomatoes to moonflowers. Southerners may well have less; too much heat prevents fruit set and pushes annual flowers into early graves. The region of happiness for plants that must have cool nights even in summer (peas, delphiniums, rhododendrons, sugar maples) is headed toward Canada.

A Few Coping Strategies may be found here.

* Some back story on the flap.

Whatever its limitations, the USDA hardiness zone map has long been a widely recognized metric. Breeders and nurseries use it to rate and label plants. Scientists use it (along with a lot else) when investigating things like the spread of invasive weeds. The USDA itself uses the map to set some crop insurance standards.

Not chopped liver; and by the time the century turned, it was clear to all that the 1990 map was both insufficient and inaccurate. The USDA commissioned a new one from the American Horticultural Society, which had produced zone maps before. Projected appearance date was 2003.

But then the map didn’t show up – or rather it didn’t show up for long. As I remember it, there was a new version on the AHS website, but only very briefly. The curious were told it went away because it was just a draft; the USDA was not satisfied, and revisions were under way.

This was the party line for quite a while. During this while, we were enjoying the G.W. Bush administration, increasingly notorious for its disinclination to confront man made climate change. People began to think dark thoughts.

These thoughts were not brightened when, in 2006,  the Arbor Day Foundation published an updated zone map of its own, using some (but not all) of the same data as the rejected AHS draft. The ADF website provides an animation of the old map morphing into the (ADF) new one. It is not reassuring.

More grumbling. More Bush administration. More delays, now routinely attributed to the difficulty of producing a sufficiently sophisticated, web friendly interactive map.

Not so fast forward to January 25th, 2012. The new map is introduced at the National Arboretum. Distant journalists are invited to attend via webinar. I attend.

Neato! The thing is terrific. It really IS a great leap forward – for doing what it’s supposed to do, anyway. One need only enter a zip code to get the corresponding zone assignment, and there is a lot of other information there for the drilling down.

The introduction ceremony concludes with a question period. Various reporters ask questions. The most vocal questioners do not appear to be gardeners and what they really, really want to know is why the long suffering Ms. Kaplan, who has been fielding these enquiries ever since the flap began, will not knuckle under and admit that the map proves global warming is undoubtedly here. She won’t do it. (Her reasons are detailed on the map site, under “what’s new?”)

So, official word is still that the map was not delayed  - perhaps by underfunding? –  during the previous administration, which may or may not be true. But in fairness, nobody’s trumpeting its appearance as the return of sanity, either. So at the very least the USDA is an equal opportunity sphinx.

Well Pooey on that, as stepdaughter Celia used to say. I wouldn’t be without one and I’m not particularly gadget prone. In fact most of my cooking equipment is either

Vintage:

Bill manning the Strand Universal kitchen stove.

Or primitive

The outdoor clay oven. Beans in the pot, pork roast in the pan, coals banked at the back to boost heat for the first few hours of cooking. The wooden door is lined with flashing to keep it from getting burned.

We didn’t choose the current incumbent it because it was a turbocharged 1300 watts, or because it was black and chrome, thus more or less matching the kitchen decor. We chose it because it was the only mid-sized unit that would fit on the shelf as currently configured.

This selection method worked out very well with the dishwasher. When we did the kitchen back in 1995, the Asko was the only one that would fit under the 34 inch counter top (unless you count dishwasher drawers, already available but out of our financial reach – which alas they still are). Fifteen years later, it’s still going strong, quietly, efficiently…

Where was I ?

Oh, the micro.

Our current microwave - and, it must be admitted, a few other gadgets I’d be hard pressed to do without.

So far so good, except for its being way too powerful for some of the uses I’m used to. The defrost is little short of amazing, but a full cup of room temperature liquid will boil if you push the beverage button and fail to extract the cup in roughly half the pre-measured time.

There are 10 power levels. As far as I can tell, level 6 is about equal to full power on our old one. Fortunately 1 and 2 are still low enough to make melting chocolate the same tidy, near-foolproof breeze it was with the previous machine.

Chocolate (and caramel) aside, we mostly use this handy appliance to defrost and reheat, so it sounds at first as though the naysayers are right. They’re not; defrosting and reheating are huge, because they make it so much easier to eat well locally all year ‘round, even in the frost belt.

From late fall to mid-summer, the freezer is our reliable source of home grown tomatoes and sweet corn, harvest vegetable soups and stews, a good supply of local meat, and plenty of leftover lasagna, cassoulet, etc. the slow food version of heat n’ eat fast food.

Defrosting can of course be accomplished by always knowing what you want far enough ahead of time to allow complete thawing at room temperature. This is not how we operate, and I well remember the pre-micro days: Become fed up with how long it’s taking to thaw whatever by immersing the container in cool water. Switch to warm water. Become fed up. Put it in a saucepan over low heat. Poke and prod and pry at the slowly dwindling frozen lump while the rising sea of already-thawed material inexorably overcooks. Personally, I’d rather put the frozen item in the machine, go do something else and come back in 5 to 10 minutes to find the job accomplished.

Reheating is equally gratifying, for more or less the same reasons. Whatever it is reheats quickly, all of it at the same time, and unlike things reheated on stove or in oven, it’s  unlikely to dry out while doing so. Of course that’s why micros are lousy to cook with – unless you want to do a lot of waterless steaming – and may explain why the anti’s are so down on them. Nothing dries out, but nothing reduces either. Nothing browns and genuine crispness simply isn’t happening.

* Illustrated oven building instructions here, should you be looking for a project.

A genuine heirloom (i.e. passed down through generations) turkey: my mother’s gravy boat. It has a matching ceramic ladle that broke about 15 years ago and has been in storage awaiting repair ever since. This speaks equally to my tendency to procrastinate and to the fact that said ladle, while cute, does not hold enough gravy to be practical.

In the edible bird department, some givens, about which more below:

1.) Like the proverbial yacht, if you have to ask how much a heritage turkey costs you probably can’t afford it.

2.) Buying a heritage turkey helps keep an endangered gene pool robust, so you get preservation points as well as a delicious dinner (assuming you cook it correctly).

I’m not in the yachting class and am already convinced on the deliciousness front, but I’m cooking two turkeys this year anyway, just for the sake of comparison.

One is a heritage bird from a farm about a half hour north of here, the other is an “organic, free range heirloom,” imported from Pennsylvania (about 5 hours south of here) by a specialty grocery. Although I haven’t cooked them yet, some things are already clear.

Those who simply want kitchen tips can go immediately to Roast Turkey 101.2 for general cooking hints and a recipe for wild mushroom stuffing. Guidance that’s specific to heritage birds is in the second part of  Wild Turkeys, Thanks But No Thanks. 

Otherwise, onward, with background research help from: My friend Ilana the egg lady at Blue Moon Farm;  her friend – and now mine – Maryann Hegel, at Freedom Farms, where I attended a turkey harvest last Saturday;  and Peter Davies and Mark Sherzer, co-owners of Turkana Farms LLC. (Mark’s a lawyer), where I bought my heritage bird.

1.)Why They Cost So Much

Just how much varies quite a bit, but a heritage bird (probably but not definitionally raised on organic principles) will cost somewhere around three times as much as a USDA Certified Organic conventional bird, which will in turn cost roughly twice as much as the supermarket standard. This is because:

* Right at the start, baby heritage chicks (poults) cost the farmer twice as much as conventional chicks. It is in the nature of turkey raising to lose at least a few poults in the first week or so, so right away the heritage grower is out of pocket at twice the going rate.

* Whatever their individual merits, all of the many heritage breeds take roughly twice as long as the agribusiness standard to make market size. During this extended period, those birds that survive childhood are eating more and more and more, all the while requiring protection from predators and an assortment of other regular attentions.

*Heritage  market size is @ 8 – 24 lbs, compared to conventional’s 10 – 40 lbs. or more, so fixed costs like shelter and care are higher on a per-pound basis.

* Most growers of heritage turkeys are small to tiny fry as the turkey biz goes. They can’t buy feed grain in cost-saving quantities and they don’t sell enough birds to recoup the cost of proper on-farm slaughter facilities. There aren’t many inspected slaughterhouses willing to accept small orders; those that do charge a lot for their services and of course the turkeys must be transported to and from.

2.) Doing Your Bit for Conservation

Almost all – maybe 97 percent – of the commercial turkeys in the US belong to one breed: the Broad Breasted White, a miracle of efficient feed conversion that otherwise has very little to recommend it, being both profoundly handicapped and not especially tasty. Then another percent or two are Broad Breasted Bronze, immediate progenitor of the whites and not a whole lot better in either regard.

But even if the Broad Breasted’s were models of animal health and gastronomic delight, confining an entire domestic species to a single very narrow gene pool is orders of magnitude not smart.

Alternative turkeys: a couple of closely related heritage breeds: New Jersey Buff hen, Bourbon Red tom, photographed at Blue Moon Farm

As I see it, you could save money and still help out by donating a less-big chunk to a worthy organization like the American Livestock Breeds Conservancy , but that’s a lot less fun. You can’t serve a thank you letter for Thanksgiving dinner – and you don’t get the extra bang-for-buck of helping a nearby farmer stay in business.

Genuine heritage birds (Chocolate Slate) on left; psuedo-heritage bird (Broad Breasted Bronze), delivered to Freedom Farms by mistake but raised as carefully as his cousins.

One minor irritation: Organizations like The Heritage Turkey Foundation and Slow Food and many individual suppliers wax lyrical about the particular merits of Bourbon Reds and Narragansetts, Chocolate Slates and Royal Palms, but can you order them by name? Probably, somewhere, but everywhere I looked “heritage” was the extent of the guarantee.

Obviously, this gives the growers maximum wiggle room to hedge their bets with assorted breeds and then deliver whatever does best in a given year, but I think it may also be because so many of them buy day old poults, rather than breeding their own, and they’re buying from hatcheries that are willing to sell a relatively small number – tens and hundreds, rather than thousands – of birds.

The catalogues from such places are closely related to seed catalogues when it comes to enticement. This breed is gorgeous, that one is especially sociable, this other is teetering on the brink of extinction. If you’re not breeding your own, you have no incentive to stick to just one when browsing in the candy store.

Unfortunately, if you’re not slaughtering your own you have no way to keep them separate for marketing purposes. They leave the farm as distinct as can be, but they come back headless, footless and featherless, looking pretty much the same.

That said

There’s no mistaking the difference between heritage (above) and not (below).

The fat bird on the bottom is the one imported from PA. It is a Broad Breasted Bronze. It is not, however, the same as these

A couple of the standard issue Broad Breasted Bronze turkeys that landed by accident at Freedom Farms.

When I ordered the commercial turkey I was just trying to compare Broad Breasted Modern with Heritage, but it turns out (after a bit of googling) that the bird I got is probably an Orlopp Bronze, a protected hybrid of a hybrid, created by Hendrix Genetics, a huge multinational major player in livestock breeding.

None of this means it won’t be delicious, and none of it necessarily means it has genes not normally found in turkeys. (Can’t say for sure about that part since although it was supposed to be organic, it wasn’t) But in any case this does suggest that “new and improved” might be a more accurate description than “heirloom”.

My oven is orders of magnitude too small for me to cook them at the same time;  the largest contingent of leftover eaters will be here on Friday, and by me the whole reason to have Thanksgiving is in order to have stuffing that has indeed been stuffed into the bird.* So I’ll be cooking the BBB on Thursday and the Heritage (which will come out better if cooked unstuffed) on Friday.

Stay tuned for a comparison based on the cold leftovers, which can be tasted side by side.

Might as well give it a shot, even though it’s actually apples and oranges. The conventional bird, while theoretically raised humanely and given plenty of room to roam, was actually neither, as far as I can tell from a bit of internetly drilling down. It did get far better treatment than anything raised for the mass market, but that’s not saying much.

Maryann may be the one who’s had the best chance to really see. She didn’t cook two birds side by side, but she did cook one of the accidental  Broad Breasts she raised side by side with her Chocolate Slates. The verdict? “It was absolutely delicious.”

Her guests said they liked last year’s heritage bird a little better, but it sounds to me as though (not surprisingly) nurture matters as much as nature if you’re talking strictly about table quality.

Before we met, Bill raised BBB’s for a few years, not de-beaking or clipping their wings, letting them roam freely and all the heritage usual, and he says they were far and away the best turkeys he’s ever eaten.

Update: When Bill read this last night he denied the BBB part. I thought he’d gotten his original birds from the local Agway, which even 40 years ago would have meant the Bronze turkeys he’s raved about all these years would have been BBB’s. But I seem to have misunderstood. He traded with a farmer friend – some rabbits for the turkey poults – and as he also got a Royal Palm or two and a Bourbon Red, his Bronzes – all of which flew with no problems, one of which mated with a wild turkey, were probably every bit as heritage as any in this story.

* See The Food Lab at Serious Eats for an interesting suggestion about preventing the “stuffed bird doesn’t cook through fast enough” problem. Short version is you put the stuffing in a cheesecloth bag and get it good and hot before you put it in the turkey.

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 The American Livestock Breeds Conservancy Definition of a Heritage Turkey

“All domesticated turkeys descend from wild turkeys indigenous to North and South America. They are the quintessential American poultry. For centuries people have raised turkeys for food and for the joy of having them.

Many different varieties have been developed to fit different purposes. Turkeys were selected for productivity and for specific color patterns to show off the bird’s beauty. The American Poultry Association (APA) lists eight varieties of turkeys in its Standard of Perfection. Most were accepted into the Standard in the last half of the 19th century, with a few more recent additions. They are Black, Bronze, Narragansett, White Holland, Slate, Bourbon Red, Beltsville Small White, and Royal Palm. The American Livestock Breeds Conservancy also recognizes other naturally mating color varieties that have not been accepted into the APA Standard, such as the Jersey Buff, White Midget, and others.  All of these varieties are Heritage Turkeys.

Heritage turkeys are defined by the historic, range-based production system in which they are raised. Turkeys must meet all of the following criteria to qualify as a Heritage turkey:

Naturally mating: the Heritage Turkey must be reproduced and genetically maintained through natural mating, with expected fertility rates of 70-80%.

Long productive lifespan: the Heritage Turkey must have a long productive lifespan. Breeding hens are commonly productive for 5-7 years and breeding toms for 3-5 years.

Slow growth rate: the Heritage Turkey must have a slow to moderate rate of growth. Today’s heritage turkeys reach a marketable weight in 26 – 28 weeks, giving the birds time to develop a strong skeletal structure and healthy organs prior to building muscle mass. This growth rate is identical to that of the commercial varieties of the first half of the 20th century.

Beginning in the mid-1920s and extending into the 1950s turkeys were selected for larger size and greater breast width, which resulted in the development of the Broad Breasted Bronze. In the 1950s, poultry processors began to seek broad breasted turkeys with less visible pinfeathers, as the dark pinfeathers, which remained in the dressed bird, were considered unattractive. By the 1960s the Large or Broad Breasted White had been developed, and soon surpassed the Broad Breasted Bronze in the marketplace.

Today’s commercial turkey is selected to efficiently produce meat at the lowest possible cost. It is an excellent converter of feed to breast meat, but the result of this improvement is a loss of the bird’s ability to successfully mate and produce fertile eggs without intervention. Both the Broad Breasted White and the Broad Breasted Bronze turkey require artificial insemination to produce fertile eggs.

Interestingly, the turkey known as the Broad Breasted Bronze in the early 1930s through the late 1950s is nearly identical to today’s Heritage Bronze turkey – both being naturally mating, productive, long-lived, and requiring 26-28 weeks to reach market weight. This early Broad Breasted Bronze is very different from the modern turkey of the same name. The Broad Breasted turkey of today has traits that fit modern, genetically controlled, intensively managed, efficiency-driven farming. While superb at their job, modern Broad Breasted Bronze and Broad Breasted White turkeys are not Heritage Turkeys. Only naturally mating turkeys meeting all of the above criteria are Heritage Turkeys.

Prepared by Frank Reese, owner & breeder, Good Shepherd Farm; Marjorie Bender, Research & Technical Program Manager, American Livestock Breeds Conservancy; Dr. Cal Larson, Professor Emeritus, Poultry Science, Virginia Tech; Jeff May, Regional Manager & Feed Specialist, Dawes Laboratories; Danny Williamson, farmer and turkey breeder, Windmill Farm; Paula Johnson, turkey breeder, and Steve Pope, Promotion & Chef, Good Shepherd Farm.

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Blue Moon Farm photo by Ilana Nilsen

I would rather show you something that was pleasantly autumnal, so there will be no picture of the equally autumnal Eek. (The link to an easy recipe for old fashioned pumpkin chiffon pie is at the end of the post, should you wish to skip the horror and go semi-directly thence.)

Pumpkin Style Pie Dessert is a mix, brought to you by the folks at Jell-O, aka Kraft Foods, and it came to my attention because my local supermarket featured it on an end cap, exactly at eye level. Boxes and boxes and boxes of it, so it was at everybody’s eye level.

As “Pumpkin Style Pie Dessert” makes clear to the label savvy, there is absolutely no pumpkin – or any other fruit or vegetable (unless you count carrageenan) in it. Whether the non label savvy will be enticed by “flavored with natural cinnamon and ginger” is a near-existential question I don’t feel equipped to answer.

The 9.2 ounce package costs $3.59.  To make what is probably a pretty thin 9-inch pie, you add 2 tablespoons of sugar and 5 tablespoons of butter or margarine to the trademarked Honey Graham graham cracker crust, then 2 cups of milk to the agglomeration of  sugar, starch, other sweeteners, texture enhancers, preservatives, artificial colors and flavorings that turns an innocent dairy product into the ersatz pumpkin filling.

I know, I know, fish in a barrel but good grief. Plus I for one need frequent reminders that this is the norm for a whole lot of people, people who are responsible for getting dinner on the table. Not perhaps the majority, but almost certainly many more than make pie from scratch. Our current culture’s problem with food goes far beyond a fondness for the fast kind you buy from your car.

If all this makes you think positive thoughts about making a genuine pumpkin pie – not a difficult pie to make, especially if you use a crumb crust – consider scrolling down here for Mamie Eisenhower’s Pumpkin Pie recipe.

You have to scroll down because the first recipe is for Cheese Dollars, “the ultimate potato chip,” a close relative of cheese straws that gets its addictive quality at least partly thanks to a food-industrial product than cannot be manufactured at home and for which I make no apologies.

Photo by Bill Bakaitis

I first saw this thing around Easter time, took a photograph (finding it almost uniquely eekworthy), then realized I couldn’t excoriate it here because I’d forgotten to take a closeup of the label.

And when I went back it had disappeared.

Or so I thought. No such luck. It has returned. The greenhouse/nursery at Adams is a reputable outfit and has therefore posted a warning

But the distributors of this abomination

are less conscientious

At least as far as the label on the plant itself is concerned. Pretty expensive for a cheap trick. Especially when for the same money you could buy a tree peony like

'Ezra Pound'

I almost like it better closed

Ezra in the rain

One bit of advice: Do not plant a tree peony – or anything else with fragile branches – at the corner of the drive and the walkway to the gas tanks. Persons dragging heavy hoses must be warned, which rather spoils the effect.

Tree peony prices vary, but as it happens Klehm’s, where I bought our plant, is truly selling E.P. for 39.95.

Lois in action, in more ways than one.

Whether you’re already a fan or not, you can learn a lot about how she works from this interview with John Yau (in the Brooklyn Rail), but you can also just cut to the chase and go see the show, at Alexandre Gallery in NYC until March 12.

Image: Shadow of Painter Painting “September Light,” 2009, oil on linen 32 x 50 inches