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

I probably should have titled this “Harvesting Wild Mushrooms;” there are all kinds of them just about everywhere (or at least everywhere in the Northeast). Our vegetable gardens may be soggy – even without Irene this has been a mighty rainy summer – but in the silver lining department there’s a bumper crop in the woods and fields.

Oddly, we haven’t found too many Cantharellus cibarius, the chanterelles usually sold under that name. Instead, we’re getting boatloads of the smaller sorts, including the Craterellus tubaeformis, aka Cantharellus infundibuliformis in Bill’s picture and the ever-popular black trumpet (Craterellus fallax).

Also lobster mushrooms (scroll down for collecting and cleaning tips) and a great many boletes.

This includes Boletus edulus, or king bolete , the species called Porcino in Italy. Friends familiar with both insist our kings are not as royal as true Italian porcini. In my opinion, they’re plenty delicious enough – far better than other common boletes – and absent the genuine article it’s difficult to compare.

Being married to an expert mycologist puts me next to a grand assortment of less-well-known edibles, about which I will not speak just now since you really need to know what you’re doing before it’s safe to eat them.

Actually, you should know what you’re doing before you eat any wild mushroom. After all this cheerleading I’m sorry to be the ghost at the banquet, but I keep reading about wild mushroom feasts where a grand variety is served to people who have not tried them all before and it’s making me nervous.

Most of the time, no problem; the combination of good will and a healthy fear of legal retribution seems to be working pretty well. The scary part is the chance of trouble; sooner or later, it’s pretty much inevitable. The more different mushrooms consumed, the more likely it is that one of them will provoke discomfort – or worse – in at least one of the consumers, and if you’ve served a whole bunch of different species it’s going to be near-impossible to figure out which one’s to blame.

Even mushrooms long classified as the safest of the safe can cause bad stomach upsets. Sulfur shelf, for instance, has long been classed as one of the “foolproof four” because it’s so easy to recognize, yet there are many (myself among them) who cannot eat any of what has turned out to be a whole class of related mushrooms.

Short version: persnickety as they may appear, Bill’s Long Lived Mushroom Eaters Golden Rules are worth following.

This festival of links is just a taste of our blog entries over the years. There are many more of Bill’s expert collecting tips and a few of my favorite recipes in the mushroom section. It’s not logically organized( time for an upgrade!), so scrolling can take a while. If you know what you’re looking for, try the index first.

* Michael Kuo, in themushroomexpert.com.

Photo by Bill Bakaitis

And in the meantime of course baking cookies, including vanilla almond Moth Cookies and The Spritz Bill Really Likes. Links to more never-fail all-timers after the jump, but first:

Our favorite Pepparkakkor, crisp, spicy, better-than-gingerbread. The quintessential Christmas Cookie and if the Christmas part gives you trouble just use a bird cutter and call ‘em doves of peace.

The recipe makes approximately a zillion. The dough is easy to mix, easy to handle and perfectly happy to stay in the icebox for weeks while you slice off chunks of it to roll and cut and decorate. Or not; a lot of people like them best plain.

PEPPARKAKOR

This is the recipe exactly as given to me about 35 years ago by someone who would certainly get credit if I could remember who it was. Whether that tiny amount of vinegar is really necessary (to ensure rising, presumably) I couldn’t say, never having been moved to mess with a good thing.

½ lb. butter

2 c. dark brown sugar

1 egg

1 c. molasses

1/3 c. strong brewed coffee

2 tablespoons orange juice

1 teaspoon white vinegar

3 tbl. finely shredded orange zest

2 tsp. baking soda

1 tsp. cloves*

1 tsp. ginger*

½ tsp. salt

8 crushed cardamom seeds or ½ tsp. ground cardamom*

7-8 c. all purpose flour.

1. Thoroughly cream the butter and sugar. A wooden spoon will do fine. A stand mixer will do even finer.

2. Beat in, in order, the egg, molasses, coffee, juice and vinegar. Let the batter sit a minute or two, then beat in the zest, soda, salt and spices.

3. Add flour gradually until you have a dough the texture of soft, very slightly sticky clay. Let it mature in the fridge for at least a couple of hours.

4. Heat oven to 350. Roll, cut and bake on buttered or parchment-lined baking sheets for 8 to 15 minutes, depending on thickness. These do rise quite a bit, so even paper thin dough yields reasonably durable cookies. Anything over about 1/8 inch yields cookies that are too durable – unless you plan to dunk them or hang them on the tree.

* Don’t forget to use a bit more if the spices aren’t absolutely fresh.

Rolling and Cutting

You can always tell a home baker’s assortment: here a yard-sale find, there a weak moment at the cookware store...as time goes on it turns into a piece of living history.

Cookies are more tender and shapely if you go the paper route instead of rolling the dough on a lightly floured board and then transferring the shapes. Roll between sheets of waxed paper, lifting and smoothing the paper as needed. After rolling, chill briefly to firm, then peel off one sheet of the waxed paper and replace it with parchment. Flip the dough, peel off the second piece of paper and cut the cookies.

Leaving the cutters on the dough makes it easy to crowd in as many shapes as possible.

Use a narrow-bladed knife to lift away the scraps. Set large scraps on a piece of parchment and reserve until you have sheet full, then bake for family nibbling. Keep all the small scraps together, roll them out at one go and cut into simple squares so they all get used up without re-re-rolling.

Decorating

Classic material is Iron Icing – lightly beaten egg white and confectioners’ sugar. A few tips for using it are in the Spritz recipe post (link above), which also has the recipes for pfeffernüsse and, via R. L Beranbaum, David Schamah’s Jumbles probably the world’s best jumbles. Iron icing actually tastes pretty good if you use cornstarch-free glazing sugar and add a drop of rum or kirsch.

Let the thick glaze sit overnight to harden if you want to decorate using edible ink.

The edible ink comes out of the Foodoodlers, as easy to use as marking pens. I don’t know why I left the ladies bald when I could have given them chocolate curls distantly resembling my own, so please don’t ask.

Other cookies made this year or on the list for this weekend: Sour Cream Piecrust ravioli with apricot filling, Pizzelle made with Bill’s grandmother’s iron and Universal Suit-Yourself Fruit and Nut Bars , everything that’s good about fruitcake but not so damned much of it.

On right, fresh chestnuts. On left, one of the all-time convenience ingredients: peeled, skinned and ready to go, as easy to cook as dried beans.

Admittedly, dried chestnuts don’t have the mashed potato fluffiness of the fresh article. Somewhere between mealy and creamy is about the best they can do. But other than that they’re just shortcut chestnuts: great in soups and stews and stuffings, great with winter vegetables and great in holiday sweets and why they aren’t more widely adored is a mystery to me.

Sweet Snowballs (chestnut and white chocolate candy) recipe at the end of the post.

Dried chestnuts and I got married many years ago, when I read somewhere that you could cook them along with brown rice to spiff it up for company. No company necessary; this is a sauce-mop we eat all the time. Just throw in a handful of nuts and add double the chestnut volume of water along with the water for the rice.

Once discovered, they started appearing as the base note in vegetable puree soups, in place of potatoes in chicken stew (hold the carrots or it’ll be too sweet), curried with cauliflower as a meatless main dish and in other locations too numerous.

Most frequent use: cook in water until soft; brown lightly in butter, olive oil or duckfat and mix with whatever winter vegetable happens to be on hand -  Brussels sprouts, broccoli , kale, cauliflower, squash…They’re also delicious in green salads:  crumble and let soak in the vinaigrette for a little while before proceeding.

DEALING WITH DRIED CHESTNUTS

1. Not all of them are perfect; before using, check for worm holes or other insect damage and discard any that look suspicious.

(1a) Soak for a few hours in cold water if you have the time. Bad nuts will float; cooking will go faster, and – there goes the convenience part – after soaking you can take a toothpick and winkle out the little bits of remaining skin. Not essential. I don’t bother with the rice, for instance.

2. Dried chestnuts can be cooked in any thin, non-acid liquid: water, broth – even milk if they’ve first been soaked overnight in water to cover. Allow 2 cups liquid for each cup of chestnuts if they will be cooked tightly covered, a bit more if some liquid is likely to cook away. Avoid acids like orange and tomato juice unless heavily diluted or you’ll have leather instead of velvet.

3. In water, cooking time is generally about an hour. The richer the liquid, the longer they’ll take. Chestnuts in milk can take two hours or more to soften properly. Always check by breaking a few open, sometimes nuts that test tender with a knifepoint are still tough inside.

RED CABBAGE AND CHESTNUTS REVISITED

Standard recipes for this winter classic call for fresh chestnuts and long simmering, often in red wine. You wind up with a very tasty dish that’s also very rich and soft,  not exactly an ideal partner for the heavy meats – roast duck, smoked pork loin, etc. – with which it’s traditionally served. In this fresher tasting version only the chestnuts get the long simmer; the cabbage is more or less stir-fried.

For 6 to 8 servings:

6 oz dried chestnuts, about 1 c.

2 1/3 c. unsalted chicken broth

1 small onion, halved root to tip, then sliced into thin shreds

2 lbs red cabbage, about 1/2 large head, cored and sliced into 1/4 inch ribbons

a 1-inch cube of peeled fresh ginger, shredded on the fine holes of the grater

2 large garlic cloves, shredded as the ginger

2 tbl.  red wine vinegar, or to taste

salt

(2 or 3 tablespoons chicken, duck or bacon fat, semi-optional)

1. Combine the chestnuts with the broth in a deep, heavy saucepan and simmer partially covered over very low heat , stirring from time to time, until the chestnuts are completely softened, about an hour and a quarter. Add hot water if broth cooks away so much chestnuts become uncovered.

2. Remove chestnuts with a slotted spoon and reserve. Boil liquid to reduce to a scant 1/2 cup.

3. Transfer the reduced broth to a wok or large saute pan and add the onion, cabbage, ginger and garlic. Cook over high heat, stirring almost constantly, until the vegetables are crisp-tender and the broth has almost cooked away, about 5 minutes.

4. Stir in the chestnuts and keep cooking just long enough to reheat them, then add  the vinegar and a bit of salt. Taste. Adjust. This recipe is essentially fat free, so if it tastes flat in spite of adjustment that may well be why. Consider adding a bit of fat before upping the sour and salt.

Variation(s). This is often pushed with sugar and vinegar until it’s sweet and sour. Caraway seeds are a favorite seasoning, caraway and cabbage being like a horse and carriage. If you want to use them, omit the ginger,

SWEET SNOWBALLS
(Chestnut and white chocolate candies)

For about 30:

3 oz dried chestnuts, about 1/2 c.

a 2-inch length of vanilla bean

1 1/2 c. low-fat (1 1/2 %) milk

6 oz white chocolate, chopped

tiny pinch of salt

granulated sugar for coating

1. Put the chestnuts in a deep bowl, cover with cold water and soak for 14 to 18 hours. Drain. Pick out any bits of skin.

2. Split the vanilla bean and combine it with the milk in a small, deep, heavy saucepan. Add the chestnuts,  partially cover the pan and cook over very low heat until completely soft, about 2 hours. The milk should barely shudder, lower the heat if it threatens to simmer or, heaven forefend, boil. Stir occasionally, removing any skin that has formed. The milk will gradually thicken. If it gets thicker than heavy cream before the chestnuts are done, add a little water

3. Let the cooked chestnuts cool in the milk, then remove them with a slotted spoon and puree through a food mill or in a processor. Rinse the bean and set aside for reuse. Save the small amount of semi-caramelized milk to add to creamed spinach, carrot soup , mashed sweet potatoes, etc.

4. Melt the chocolate in the microwave or over hot water, then mix with the chestnuts and salt. Chill until firm.

5. Cover a cookie sheet with waxed paper, then distribute the chilled mixture on it in teaspoon sized dabs. Again chill until firm, then roll the dabs into balls and roll the balls in granulated sugar.

Allow the Snowballs to sit uncovered in a cool, dry place for several hours or overnight. The sugar will form a light crust. Store in one or two layers in an airtight container in a cool place for up to about a week. After 2 days or so, the crust will soften and the chestnut color will tint the sugar, turning the Snowballs into Sandballs, but they’ll still look and taste fine.

Buying Dried Chestnuts: Some natural food stores carry them in bulk. Some Italian deli’s carry imported ones in bags. There are many online sources, none of which I’ve ever used so you’re pretty much on your own there. But I will say even a brief look showed prices ranging from 12.oo per pound (for organic colossal) to 22.00 per pound (for size and growing method unspecified). Last batch I bought at the deli – last year, I bought many bags –  cost I think $8.00 per pound. Just sayin’.

Then, after the mail came, very much time to be thinking about next year’s tomatoes.

Seed catalogs don’t wait for Christmas any more; they’ve been coming in for about a month. Now the pace is picking up and after last summer’s disastrous late blight, I’m looking through their offerings in a whole new way, because

In the summer of ’09, purely by accident, we had hybrid beefsteaks in the greenhouse.

They were the only tomatoes we got and although they weren’t as good as our favorite heirlooms they were better than anything we could buy locally, heirloom or hybrid.

The story of how this came to be is with the tips for managing late blight organically. But since it would be far, far better not to have any late blight to manage, this is my seed-choosing strategy for (I hope) lots of delicious tomatoes in 2010:

1. Diversify even more than usual. Late bearing heirloom beefsteaks like ‘Brandywine’, ‘Kellogg’s Breakfast’ and ‘Costoluto Genovese’ are unquestionably the most delicious, but they’re also the iffiest. So this spring we’ll be starting a wider variety of mid-season slicers, adding red classics – ‘Marmande’? ‘Rutgers’? ‘Bonny Best’? – to old favorite ‘Evergreen’. And on the theory that stronger is better, at least two varieties will be disease resistant hybids.

All that was left of this year’s crop after Thanksgiving

The greenhouse tomatoes were ‘Big Beef’, but that was chosen because it looked good as a rootstock for grafting. Don’t know what we’ll choose this year except that it’ll be something else and that it won’t be ‘Celebrity.’*

2. Plant more cherry tomatoes, including ‘Matt’s Wild Cherry’, a variety several readers – thanks, guys! – reported had natural LB resistance. The disease resistances available are many and various, but Late Blight (Phytopthera infestans) is not among them. There are no proven LB resistant tomatoes unless you count ‘Legend.’

3. Remain fussy. It might seem as though ‘Legend’ should be on the must-have list, but it’s an early, cold-tolerant determinate, which 35 years of trials have convinced me translates as “ after you say they’re tomatoes there’s nothing else good to report.” No matter what the consequences, my vegetable variety bottom line remains Better than Bought or don’t Bother. Life is too short – and the gardens too small – for anything else to make sense.

4. Avoid imported plants. All seedlings not grown by Jan up at Barley Jo ( see heirlooms) will be grown by me or by a local farmer I deeply trust. That includes all seedlings offered by garden centers that sell mass-produced tomato plants, even unrelated things like marigolds and cosmos. The blight only grows on nightshades but its wind-borne spores travel fast, so they could easily be lurking on any plant in the tomatoes’ vicinity. The spores don’t live long on their own, but they live long enough to travel for up to 50 miles and that’s tough enough for me.

* In my 3 years ( I’m a slow learner) of growing ‘Celebrity’, it was always super-dependable. Drought or deluge, disease attack or simple neglect, it made huge numbers of firm, blemish-free, almost perfectly round bright red tomatoes that were as close to tasteless as it’s possible for a fresh fruit to be.

Bears, Bees, Bacon and Morels

by Bill Bakaitis

Flash!  My neighbor just informed me that the bears are back.

A few days ago he went out in early morning to feed his horse and discovered that the large bin which stored the sweet feed and biscuit treats was missing. Well, not quite missing as there were drag marks and when followed led to one of the neighborhood bears (last year there were five) having an early morning snack of the biscuits. After a brief encounter and short stand-off the bear beat a retreat.

End of that story, but Whoops, thought I, I sure better check the electric fence around our bees and rebait the hot wires with the Rancid Bacon Bear Bait stored in the freezer for just such occasions.

A spreading patch of bloodroot is now encroaching into our small fenced-in bee yard, and over the past few rainy days had grown tall enough to be in contact with the lowest hot wire of the electric fence. 

The errant bloodroot leaves sizzled, snapped, crackled, popped and were draining the voltage of the wire. Good timing, I thought and went to the shed for a small sickle, to the freezer for the bear bait, and after disconnecting the solar charger trimmed all of the bloodroot and other vegetation under the fence. That’s when I found the morels.

They were growing right under the lowest hot wire.   Whoa!  Is this a new morel habitat, I wondered?  Should I begin to check other electric fences in the area? Bee Yards? Bloodroot patches?  Bear Shit?

These must be omens of some sort.  After all, the neighbor’s horse is named Lightning, and after trimming the weeds and stringing up the bacon all the lights of the fence tester now glowed: five thousand five hundred volts. Zounds!

Bears and morel poachers be forewarned.

Two young esculenta, part of a much larger patch, growing under the electric fence of our bee yard, their pitted surface looking very much like a section of drawn honeycomb.

Five thousand, five hundred volts pulse only inches above this morel. No bear is going to poach on this patch!

(More about the bears and bees, with solar electric fence construction details, is here. )

As we were spooning in the eggs with asparagus and black morels I was just going on about yesterday, Bill mentioned that he should maybe say something about how to find the blacks  - they’re a bit trickier than the main season blondes, but they have a special savor for being the first.

“Have at it! ” said I;  and so here is some more from our resident guide to wild mushrooms:

THE FIRST MORELS OF THE SEASON

By Bill Bakaitis

The first morels of the season are the hardest to find. They are not Morchella esculenta, the blonde varieties standing tall under elm and apple but the Eastern Black Morel, M. elata/angusticeps/conica complex.

These early morels usually will begin to fruit near the end of April in the Mid Hudson area, just as the forsythia blossoms fall to earth, the maples begin to leaf out and the black flies begin to bite. I found my first of this season on Saturday, April 25, as the spreading heat wave pushed the thermometer to the record breaking 89 degree mark.

The Eastern Black Morel, typically the first morel of the season

Whereas the big blondes that appear later offer a nice contrast to their background, the early blacks blend in so well with the fallen, weathered leaf litter that it takes a patient, trained eye to spot them. They appear as shadows pushing through shadows.

Black Morels: hard to find, hard to see

Morels apparently utilize both mycorrhizal and saprophytic feeding strategies at different parts of their life cycle but overall the blacks are probably the more prone to feed on organic litter than the blondes. Unlike the proclivity of the blondes to fruit under Apple and Elm, the blacks appear in a much more varied assortment of habitats: I have found them under Norway Spruce, White and Red Oak, Maple, White Pine, Apple Trees, in wood chip mulch, in old foundations, stone walls, along railroad tracks and blacktop, under wild grapevine, near Barberry and Bramble and in open mixed hardwood forests.

Typical Black Morel Habitat

Unlike the Western Black ‘Burn Site’ Morel, the Eastern Black variety is not thought to grow in such a habitat. For a period of years I investigated every forest fire site that I could find in the Mid-Hudson area. Nada! Zilch! Not a one! At one nature museum where I was asked to lecture I was told of regular fruitings that would follow the seasonal burning of a field next to the museum, but I was never able to verify this.

A word about names: Scientists have ‘identified’ and named about 200 species of morels, and a rich literature of their distinctions exists both at the macro and micro levels. In recent years genetic research has indicated an impressive genetic diversity in this group of fungi. One geneticist has said that no two morels she has ever investigated were genetically identical, even if they arose in a cluster from a common mycelium.

In addition, identical genes appear to give rise to an assortment of biological forms. A recent 170 page reassessment of this state of affairs (from the US Forest Service) reports that “calling morel taxonomy ‘problematic’ is an understatement” and concluded that the use of scientific names must be considered the equivalent of imprecise common names. Conservatively, three major groups appear to clump together in genetic analyses: these are the black, the yellow, and the half free morels. The full report can be accessed in four parts here. (see esp. p. 14 of part A for nomenclature and see later parts for developmental, ecological and genetic features)

The Eastern Black Morel is a hard mushroom to cut your eye teeth on, but if you must, then try a well drained hillside in open woods. Put the sun at your back and let it do its work relaxing your step, melting your gaze as you slowly move across the hill side. Enjoy the mottled leaf of the Trout Lilly, the white clouds of Spring Beauty, the yellow haze of Witch Hazel. When you come upon a spot where the Turkeys have scratched pause just a bit longer. If you are lucky you might see a pine cone out of place and realize that this is what you have come for.

The peak season for Eastern Black Morels often coincides with the fragrant bloom of Lilac

I have a number of garden tools to which I am mightily attached, but none so precious as the Italian rototiller, my husband Bill, who has written this guest post about his favorite tool.

The Italian Rototiller

By Bill Bakaitis

It may not be what T. S. Elliot meant when he referred to April as being the cruelest month, but around here the breaking of spring ground also means breaking the sweet silence of winter.  Motorcycles roar, dogs bark, the machinery of lawn maintenance springs into gear and out come the rototillers, churning and burning their way into the modern landscape. The ‘greening of exurbia’ is what they say.  Consumer doublespeak is more like it.

The Grape Hoe, Mattock or Italian Rototiller, all oiled up and ready to go!

When I break ground I use Grandfather’s tool. Anglo types who hang out at the Agway probably call it a Mattock, and it is often listed in specialty garden supply outlets as an Italian Grape Hoe. I once heard it referred to disparagingly as an “Italian Rototiller” and in honor of my Calabrese Grandfather, that’s what I call it. Were he alive today he would chuckle and cherish the approbation.  Leslie, of course, says it only works when used by an Italian (meaning me).

Why do I use and love it? Let me count the ways:

1. For starters it is INEXPENSIVE. The price of a brand spanking new one online at Easy Digging is about $27. EBay has several listings for the hoe w/o handle for $18, and I have seen used ones at yard sales for $3 to $5, a hundred  times cheaper than the cheapest rototiller you can find.

2. And they are DURABLE. Not to worry about purchasing a used one for unlike the motorized rototillers, these things don’t break down, and if they do they are easy to repair.  The one I own was used by my Grandfather in the 1930′s and ’40′s.  In 1956 he and I installed the current handle, cut from an oak branch and shaped by him with a drawknife.  Maintenance by me has included replacing the end wedge once and rubbing the handle with Tung or Linseed Oil once a year. It even sharpens itself as it is used.

This durable Grape Hoe has been in use since the 1930's. Its self sharpening edge cuts like a knife.

3. It is STRONG, I might even say MIGHTY, able to loose large clods with a single stroke, able to bounce off rocks, even Kryptonite, with impunity, and able to chomp roots as if they were linguine al dente.

A large clod.

removed.

with a single stroke.

4. And yet, it is also EXQUISITELY SENSITIVE. In use I can direct it to shave a little or a lot, to go deep or skim the surface, and to change the angle from aggressive to gentle all automatically in a dynamic nanosecond as the hoe falls to earth.

If this sounds implausible, think of the way your foot on the gas petal adjusts to the 80 miles per hour traffic on the highway speeding up and slowing down instantly gliding into a lane without so much as a conscious thought.

The angle of attack is easily adjusted as the hoe falls to earth.

On Easter Sunday as I was tilling a few rows in the garden, I uncovered a potted plant inadvertently left in the garden from last fall.  Underground, new tender red shoots were beginning their journey moving out of the pot up from the roots. A mechanized tiller would have lunched the plant in an instant but as the Grape Hoe transmitted the feel of the thin plastic pot to my hands it immediately fell limp, dead in mid-stroke, the plant saved for rescue and future identification.  So too with the adventitious asparagus and arugula that have taken up residence in another row; they too were saved by the feel of the fall of my grandfathers tool.

5. Perhaps the most noticeable attribute of the Italian Rototiller, however, is that it is QUIET and POLLUTION FREE. It uses no gasoline, no oil (save the yearly smear on the handle), produces no noxious fumes and no noise. I love its whispering whisk, whisk, whisk and occasional clink of stone to metal as it cuts through the earth. The melody rises softly joining the breath of air that stirs in the trees and the bright cheery, cheery, cheery of bird call that floats down in response.  Call me what you will, but in its serene, dignified simplicity this experience rivals all for its reverent, sensuous spirituality.

6. And, it is EFFICIENT. In High School I was fortunate to have majored in agriculture. Mr. Lowery, our one eyed Ag instructor (losing his other to a clutch assembly that fell from a tractor on which he was working) also taught Earth Science and Physics. He had it right when he spoke of efficiency.  To have an honest measure of efficiency, be it on the farm, in nature, or in the lab you have to account for all of the variables involved.

For the motorized rototiller some of these variables range from the energy costs of mining the ore, smelting, milling and machining the metal; exploring and drilling for oil, cracking, refining and delivering the gasoline; developing, assembling and maintaining the machine, along with the associated labor costs at every step along the line. No motorized machine can compete with the inclined plane for energy efficiency, he said.

Years later, long after graduate school, reading sophisticated tracts on General Systems Theory I ran across input/output energy accounts of raising grain. For every calorie expended by a farmer with a bullock driven plow, the authors calculated, one could expect 10 calories from the sun in return. For every calorie extracted from the soil by modern machine methods, on the other hand, some 10 to 15 calories had to be expended. Hardly green are these technologies. They are economically efficient and viable only when major costs have been externalized. The authors concluded that it would be cheaper and more energy efficient to eat the oil than to convert it into tractors and fuel to plant, cultivate, harvest, process, distribute and market grain with the mechanized agribusiness technologies.  (These are important lessons and when understood reveal why grain ethanol is not green. But that’s a different story.)

For a graphic illustration, take these before and after shots of one row in my garden.

before,

during,

after

It took only 17 minutes to do this row from beginning to end, including the time necessary to stop and take four or five images, and to separate out the weeds. Not only did I end up with a clean weed free row, but I also have a barrow full of excellent organic matter fit for a compost pile or land improvement project at the edge of my property. Two for the price of one: now that is a good measure of efficiency in action.

7. Cultivation with my Grandfathers Grape Hoe has yielded a VANISHINGLY SMALL CARBON FOOTPRINT. Consider that this single Italian Rototiller has been in nearly constant use since the Great Depression when my grandparents bought their farm at the end of Dewy Avenue in Washington Pennsylvania.

They had a truck garden in the bottom land of their sixty four acre farm, and with his ‘mattock’ as he called it, my Grandfather scratched out smaller plots across the hillside. The farm prospered and the produce they grew was sold in their own store at the corner of Park Avenue and Main Street. The surplus was distributed to two or three other grocers in town.

As a teenager, I contracted with a local florist to grow his mums on a three acre hillside plot. I used my grandfather’s big hoe, and when he died, a few years later,  possession of the hoe was passed on to me. It has been used in every garden I have created ever since. I can’t begin to calculate how many acres, tons, mountains of soil have been moved with it.

Use of the Grape Hoe to turn the compost pile. With the exception of the initial tilling of sod with a machine, this garden has been maintained for the past 17 years exclusively with hand tools, chiefly with my Granddad's Rototiller

As for the amount of carbon based energy necessary to make the Grape Hoe? Well once for the 8″ blade, undoubtedly from the coal and steel industry based near Pittsburgh, once for a braze to repair what looks like a crack in the eye, and twice for oak handles. What does this add up to?  A bushel or so of coal?  A gallon or two of Gas?  An evening’s use of heat for the home? As I say, a vanishingly small carbon footprint!

8. Using this big hoe is HEALTHY and ECONOMICAL. Using it helps relieve me of the cost of joining and maintaining a membership in a Health Spa. It helps keep me reasonably trim, limber, calm and clear headed, and in good cardio-vascular health. The same cannot be said of some I see using the machine version.  One poor fellow I know can no longer see his knees. Another sits on his motorized lawn and garden machines, then gets into his faux luxury car to drive to the gym in order to work on his sculpted abs and pecs, muscles that are quite likely to turn thick and fat in a down economy. (Don’t get me wrong: I know some will need a bit of mechanized help to till their gardens, but most, I am willing to bet, would do well to avoid this consumer trap.)

9. COMPACT STORAGE. It takes only a few inches of wall space to store the Grape Hoe.

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Storing this rototiller is a cinch

10. Use of this inclined plane PROMOTES SOIL HEALTH. In the tilled row, there is virtually no soil compaction. One is left with a loose friable structure of the bed. Because the weeds are not chopped into the soil there are few, if any, to compete with the seedlings or sown seeds and therefore less cultivation and subsequent soil disturbance – with accompanying weed growth – is needed throughout the season.

A bed of deeply cultivated, friable soil ensures easy rooting and a healthy start for the seedlings that follow

Tilled in this manner, our New York beds will be able to maintain themselves with modest input throughout the summer. Leslie and I both operate on the assumption that if you build a healthy bed in the spring the seedlings get off to a great start, root deeply and given adequate mulching can be left to their own devices throughout the growing season. This is vitally important to us as we maintain both the New York and Maine gardens. And less time in the garden enables us to invest in those other activities we so much enjoy.

So, there you have it. A bountiful life, full of promise, produce, and vitality all made possible by my Italian Rototiller.  Who woulda thought?

Thanks, Grandpa!

Fred Cario, my granddad, tending his cattle, mid winter, in the mid '50's.

Or, Pruning spring-blooming shrubs that grow as thickets of svelte trunks and slender stems, because although they  have their differences they all behave pretty much the same way.

Forsythia in thicket mode

Flower buds form during the summer, mostly on one and two year old wood, so the standard advice is “prune right after bloom.”  That way there’s maximum time for next year’s show to get itself together. 

But after years of following that advice I started doing something that’s more fun and just as good or better from the pruning standpoint: making big bouquets.

In other words, “prune ‘em while they’re blooming.”  Pruning when the plant is in flower not only turns a chore into a pleasant experience and decorates the house with unimpeachable flowers, it also enables you to see exactly which growth is being most productive on that particular shrub.

A forsythia in partial shade, for instance, may bloom most generously on 2, 3 and even 4 year old wood. A spirea in a sunny spot may just keep pumping out the ones, while older growth rapidly gets twiggy and unappealing. Even very common plants have individual personalities; the closer your acquaintance with each, the better the pruning job is likely to be.

Of course pruning is as much – or more – about shape as it is about flowers,  and here is where we have to start by saying

Please don’t.

No, really, it isn’t a wise idea. There are about two extremely sophisticated garden designers who might be able to get away with this, in a severe modernist setting that features a lot of very expensive hardscape.

Absent that sort of special circumstance,  the shape to aim for with loose growers is natural plus. Natural being weeping in the case of forsythia and spirea, upright for mockorange, viburnum and ceanothus. The plus is the gardener’s tactful enhancement of that natural shape.

Whether upright or weeping, the plant is inclined to form a dense twiggy mass with lots of dead wood inside. Pruning is editing, not creating; basically you just want  to loose the mess.  

Most of the time, this means removing both the oldest trunks and the newest shoots. Not all the newest shoots, obviously, or you’d never get blooming wood (or much of anything else) but until the plants get quite old, they send up too many new sprouts for the space allotted. If you leave just one for every old trunk that will be removed next year, the plant will be stronger and better looking.

All the extra new shoots come off right at ground level and so do most of the old trunks that no longer produce much bloom. But the standard advice to always remove old growth at the base is, like all standard advice, a little too standard. It’s the right move most of the time but does not supersede the first rule of pruning: always let the plant tell you what’s happening. If there’s a graceful combo of old trunk with mega-blooming new branch or branches you might as well leave it alone. 

For diehard fans, here’s a post that focused on forsythia , all by its cheering golden self. 

“Hey Leslie, come see what’s in the trap!”

A muskrat.

Full grown muskrat - they're smaller than you'd think.

It’s not completely surprising; there’s a little creek just a squinch to the south, almost on our property but not quite. And they do come out during the day, especially in rainy weather. But although they eat a wide range of aquatic plants, no one has ever said anything about Brussels sprouts.

Brussels sprouts are – supposedly – irresistible to rabbits and of course that’s why they were being used as bait. We’re giving the crocus-eating invader a decent chance to be transplanted before I am moved to say “will no one rid me of this troublesome rabbit?”

The muskrat got a pass, on the theory that the sprouts were an aberration. They can be pests if you have a pond, but we don’t.

muskrat leaving trap behind

Bill opened the trap facing the shortest way to the creek ( about 75 feet straight left ). The muskrat headed for the fence instead, ran along at quite a clip until it found a place to slither under, then booked it eastward across the yard, presumably headed upstream.

Like opossums, muskrats have many fans. One way to find them is through Everything Muskrat.