Total Garden Immersion

My brain is tired from two days of immersion at the Organic Growers School. We in Western North Carolina are very, very lucky to have this amazing event happening here every year. Somewhere around 1,300 people gathered yesterday and today for the OGS at the University of North Carolina at Asheville, and it was fabulous as always.

I always learn so much, and love communing with other growers, plant lovers, garden geeks, and lovers of organic foods and farms. It's always so inspiring to be there, and I find myself scribbling notes to myself the whole time with brainstorms about things we could do in the garden, new plants to grow, little known facts, and resources to check out later. There is also always an excellent seed swap, and I got to meet some of my "internet friends" from the seed and garden world online and swap seeds in person - delightful!

All in all, the OGS contained way too much information and to try to summarize here, so I'll settle for a couple of greatest hits lists.

Top 5 Quotes from the 2010 Organic Growers School:

1. "Plants' mission is to cover the earth. Plants are the skin of the earth." ~Joe Hollis
2. "To me it is an ecological crime to heat greenhouses to grow food." ~Patryk Battle
3. "Clear communication is a learned skill." ~Elizabeth Gibbs
4. "Future farmers are one of the main products of our farm." ~Tom Elmore
5. "To me, plants are innocent until proven guilty. Just like every other living organism, they want to be fruitful and multiply. No need to demonize them for it. Outbreaks of exotics are nature's efforts to clean up our mess --plants trying to heal a wound that we created" ~Joe Hollis

Top 13 Things I Learned at the OGS:

1. How to make a germination chamber out of a bakers' proof box.
2. To find out if legumes are fixing nitrogen well, you can pull one up, cut open one of the root nodules, and if it is RED inside, nitrogen is being accumulated (the red substance is a form of hemoglobin!)
3. To cure sweet potatoes for optimal storage life, close them in an 80 degree room at 80% humidity for 10 days.
4. All grapes in Europe, even in the Frenchest of French vineyards, are grafted onto native American grape root stock.
5. Rufus Mayhaw is both a productive, hearty, edible variety of hawthorne and a good name for a hound dog.
6. There are two kinds of creasy greens, and one tastes a whole lot better than the other. The one that tastes good has 6-8 small lobes and one big terminal lobe. When you find the good one (there is some in one of our production beds) you can just let it go to seed and "anoint the soil" with a stalk with a seed pod on top.
7. Lambsquarter seeds are edible and comparable to quinoa (though smaller).
8. A single muscadine grape vine can produce up to 100 pounds of grapes in a year.
9. To get all or most of the nitrogen benefit from a cover crop, the plant has to decompose into the soil.
10. One piece of science that supports the traditional use of hawthorne for heart medicine is that hawthorne leaves, flowers, and fruits contain high levels of antioxidants, specifically the flavonoid procyanidin.
11. There is an excellent organic wine made from Baco Noir grapes produced at a vineyard near Boone, available for $18.
12. How to make a DIY greenhouse heat table with gravel and plywood and heat tape.
13. Even though there are over 15,000 known varieties of grapes in the world , 99.5% of the world's grape production is from only 100 varieties.

And here's a little photojournal of our DIY greenhouse and germination equipment class building a gothic arch hoophouse on the quad at UNCA:

Guerilla in a Bright Red Dress: Sumac

Over the summer, Christopher took this photo (left) of sumac in bloom on our land -- if you click to enlarge, you'll see how beloved the sumac flower is by bees. Providing sustenence for pollenators is just one of the wonders of sumac, a woefully under-appreciated plant.  

Sumacs are a family of native plants that grow througout most of North America, and are widely thought of as a common weed.  Here in WNC, sumac grows along the highways and in trashed-out urban lots, among other places.  It's a tough plant.

I've heard sumac's growth habit described as rangy or scrappy, but if you look at stands that have been allowed to mature, the plants cluster together and take on a graceful, curvy, elegant form that I think is quite beautiful.  

In the summer, sumac looks like a bushy green shrub or small tree, eventually bearing huge yellow flowers.  In the fall, the leaves turn deep crimson and the flowers dry on the plant, becoming a gorgeous shade of red. After the leaves are gone, bright red fruit clusters remain on the tips of the long thin branches.  

Below: two photos of Sumac that I took across the river at Warren Wilson College today - neither of these shots captures the color but you can get a sense of the shapes of sumac trees.

Coming across a stand of sumac in the winter feels to me like witnessing a ritual of some kind. A mature patch of sumac with its branches bare looks like a gathering of lanky, sinewy women, arms and legs intertwined, reaching up to the sky.  In the winter the sumac sisters, those tough leafy warriors, shed their red dresses and stand still together,  their arms snaking throuh the air, holding up offerings of bright red fruit.  Magical.

Each red sumac pod is made up of a cluster of tiny bright red berries. Birds and animals feast on the fruits as long as they last--the fruit is a rare treat for wildlife in a winter landscape.  

Food and medicine traditions of many native peoples include sumac, and for good reason.  The dried fruit makes a deliciously tart beverage, and the tiny hairs on each of the small red fruits are jam-packed with vitamin C.  In addition to the high C content, sumac fruits contain potent natural antibiotics (Foster/Duke).  According to Peterson's field guide to medicinal herbs,  sumac was used to treat and prevent a wide variety of maladies in native traditions throughout North America.  For more on sumac's medicinal qualities, see this overview.)  

So back to our sumac.  In the fall, Christopher remembered that an old friend of his, Lalynn, used to make a tea from dried sumac heads to drink during the winter, and decided he wanted to harvest some for us.   So he picked some dried heads of sumac and we broke them apart and let them air dry inside (see photo above) before jarring them up.  We left plenty behind for the birds and other wildlife, and ended up with about a half gallon of dry sumac berries.  I snacked on the tiny berries as we processed the heads, and the zingy, tart flavor was so strong it sometimes made my eyes water.  This winter we'll use the berries to make hot sumac tea or steep and then cool and strain to produce refreshing sumac-ade.  

I appreciate sumac as food and medicine, but most of all because I see it as a plant that goes where others can't, takes root, and grows like wild.  Sumac is often found growing in neglected areas, along roadsides, in old railroad beds, and in places where woods have been recently cleared or there has been a fire.  

Above: Sumac and rivercane growing on a roadside in Swannanoa, December.

I see Sumac as a guerilla gardener of the plant world, with dandelion and mullien and other tough front-line plants, dropping seeds in wastelands and bringing bare earth back to life.  

Sumac is one of the first plants to come in as living systems begin to recover and regenerate.  It is drought-tolerant and can survive conditions that would kill many other kinds of plants, and it helps make way for a succession of plant and animal life gradually to renew and heal damaged places.  (See the US Forest Service's page on Sumac for more information on sumac's role in rehabilitation of damaged and disturbed land, as well as other interesting facts about sumac).  

I'm thankful to sumac for being one of the tough ones on the front lines of the healing of damaged ecosystems.  And for its beauty and healing power, and its tenacious presence as an ancient native medicinal plant.  

Long live sumac--graceful, strong, and powerful plant warrior adorned in flaming red!

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

References:

Foster, Steven and James A. Duke.  A Field Guide to Medicinal Plants and Herbs of Eastern and Central North America, Second Edition.  Houghton Mifflin, 2000.

Winter Seed Catalog Lesson #1: Tepary Beans

My annual winter seed catalog immersion has officially begun, and as usual it is promising to be a rich educational experience.   Every winter as I read and re-read the dozens of seed catalogues that come in the mail, I learn a ton about about seed histories, vegetable diversity, and food traditions.  

If you are a beginning gardener, I recommend getting on the mailing lists of good seed companies, particularly those selling open-pollenated and heirloom varieties.  Good seed catalogues are fabulous sources of gardening information, food lore, and growing tips. 

So yesterday I was cozied up on the couch reading the Seeds of Change catalog (no better way to spend a very cold Sunday, in my opinion). When I got to the bean section, I came across a whole species I had never heard of, which rates as a discovery significant enough to blog about.  

At left: A few heirloom bean varieties from the Saving Our Seeds collection.

I love heirloom beans, and have grown several beautiful and delicious dry bean varieties over the years and fantasized about growing a whole lot more.  

I have about 35 particular bean varieties on my lifetime bean-growing wishlist.  And the list keeps growing. 

Jacob's Cattle. Hutterite Soup. Black Valentine. Indian Woman Yellow.  Amish Gnuttle. Even the names are magical to me.  I've spent hours poring over bean listings in the Seed Savers Exchange catalogue and reading about the histories of the hundreds (thousands?) of bean varieties that exist.  What I am saying is that I am a major heirloom bean dork (See previous posts on Local Protein and Cherokee Trail of Tears Beans for more evidence of this...)  

So imagine my surprise when I discovered Tepary Beans (the aformentioned whole new species) a type of bean more ancient and storied than any of the heirlooms I've ever known.  Three varieties of Tepary Beans were listed in a sidebar in the Seeds of Change catalog, along with the botanical name of the species: Phaeseolus acutifolius.  This was enough to send me down the google rabbit hole in search of more information about the mysterious Tepary. 

Here's what I found: Tepary Beans are pre-Colombian heirlooms with flavors and growing habits distinct from other beans.  They were cultivated throughout dry areas of what is now the Southwestern US, Mexico, and Central America, selected from native beans and grown for thousands of years by ancient peoples.  

I found much more in a Seeds of Change newsletter article by Jay Bost:

"While most beans that we eat belong to the species Phaeseolus vulgaris and are native to South America, tepary beans belong to an entirely different species, Phaeseolus acutifolius, which grows wild in the Sonoran Desert, with local populations currently documented on Isla Tiburon in the Sea of Cortez and in the Santa Maria mountains of Arizona (Nabhan 1985). As long ago as 8,000 years ago, the native peoples of the Sonoran Desert began to domesticate wild tepary beans, which, until quite recently, were eaten by some in Mexico, along with Phaeseolus filiformis, another wild desert bean." 

Bost details the history of Tepary Beans, and the reasons that they are apparently experiencing something of a revival.. He says that Teparies "are considered by many to be the most drought-tolerant annual legume in the world" and "are capable of producing a harvest of beans with a single rain."  We've been in a severe drought for the last two years here in Western North Carolina, so a bean that can grow without irrigation is an exciting discovery indeed.

Bost's article also details the nutritional appeal of Teparies:

"Part of the tepary bean's appeal, in addition to its drought tolerance, is its superior nutritional content. It has a higher protein content (23–30%) than common beans such as pinto, kidney, and navy, as well as higher levels of oil, calcium, iron, magnesium, zinc, phosphorus, and potassium."

Bost's overview is great - you can read the whole article here.

  

So I've added Sonoran Gold Tepary Beans (pictured above, courtesy of Seeds of Change) to my bean wishlist.  It's a dry soup bean developed by the Papago people, and contains more than 30% crude protein.  

We'll plant some in the spring and see how they taste.    Stay tuned for further adventures in seed catalogue reading.  

Irises and Lilies-Beautiful Medicine

I came home from 5 days away to find the slender blue flag irises in the bog garden blooming, and the water lily in the frog pond...hurrah!



Both of these plants are medicinal.

The root of the native Blue Flag Iris, according to my Peterson's Field Guide, was used by native peoples in a poultice form on "swellings, sores, bruises, [and] rheumatism," and internally, as a tea, when a strong laxative or emetic was needed, or to stimulate bile flow.



Physicians used to use Blue Flag Iris as a stimulant and "blood cleanser," and homeopathic doctors apparently still use the plant "for migraines and as a cathartic, diuretic, and emetic."



I ordered these irises last year as bare root plants from Prairie Moon Nursery, a really fabulous online source for native plants. I planted them about a year ago, and now they're blooming for the first time.

Prairie Moon is a great source for ethically grown native plants of all sorts. What do I mean by ethically grown? Prairie Moon is a nursery that propagates their plants organically in outdoor beds, rather than robbing wild populations and damaging ecosystems. Here's a tidbit from their website about why that's important: Since persistent digging of wild plants can deplete and destroy local plant populations, it is important for prospective native plant buyers to be aware of the origin of commercially sold plants.



And then there's the Fragrant Water-Lily, which came from Short Mountain Sanctuary as a gift from Alan, who hauled the root in a giant heavy pot out to our land last year. He perforated the pot and we sunk it down in the water. It has exploded this year and is full of buds, and the first bloom is incredible (above). Peterson's says the roots were used by native peoples for lung ailments, mouth sores, and as a poultice for swellings.

Who knows if we will ever dig up any iris or water-lily roots for poultices, but it feels good having them around and they sure are gorgeous spring ornamentals....