Soybeans

I planted edamame (green soybeans) in the garden before I left Italy this Summer because we like to eat them and they're hard to find here.  But we were delayed coming back, so instead of finding 4 long rows of plump, green pods, the beans were already too mature--turning tan and rough. I crawled about at the bases as a few plants in the shade hid a few green pods--and these we ate that night, steamed and salted--a simple treat made exotic by the local scarcity.  But the rest I let dry in the field...and these will hold until next summer. Since these are organic, non-GMO soybeans specifically bred for edamame production.... the seeds are more valuable as next year's crop than as this week's dinner.

Starting Over

Sometimes you just start over.
It may not be well thought out, or prudent, or financially promising, or likely to succeed, but you do it anyway.
The small farm that started this blog has been idle for years---I travel too much and and am too often away summers and winters for work in the US to have kept my word in maintaining it.

Nevertheless, when a neighbor, who had been cleaning out his artichoke patch, asked if I wanted some leftovers.....I hesitated only briefly before saying " Yes".
He asked if I had the soil prepared already and I said, "No".
He said, "you'd better start....it's supposed to rain tomorrow...."
and I left his house with about 50 Artichoke plants.....

He saved the small ones. They're really good lightly boiled and eaten like cardoons.....but his wife can't stand them.....so he didn't need many and was happy to give away what would have ended up in his compost pile.

The soil was wet and heavy from Fall rains. Too wet for a tractor and too wet really to walk in.
I used a greenhouse tool to fork the soil over, aerating it from below, then tilled in lightly some well-aged compost.  Alex and Sami helped dig shallow holes, throw in a fistful of compost and a plant and cover them with soil. A single stamp of the foot to settle the soil around them. We cut off the tops of the plants to help them avoid withering before they put out new roots. We finished just before dark and it did indeed, rain that night.
They're Morellini, the small oval purple artichokes the Italians love (and eat raw or preserved in jars of olive oil).

If things go well they'll grow new roots and establish during the rest of the Winter and early Spring and come MAY they should be a meter high and a meter across and send up the flower buds that will become our next crop....and even if we have to be gone again this Summer; we will still have artichokes to eat before we go.

Note: Artichokes (carciofi in Italian) are a common local crop.  Each plant is a biennial, growing a big, spiny, bushy plant the first year, then flowering the next. While the flowers are enormous purple thistles, they are usually picked as unopened buds which you'd recognize as an artichoke.
Only one type is grown commercially in the US (Green Globe)-- a huge, round stuffing type of artichoke) but in Italy there are many varieties and in Florence, the favorite is a small crispy green or purple artichoke that is usually eaten raw. (You can't do this with a green globe no matter how fresh it is). Each plant dies after flowering but the plant sends up numerous small suckers/shoots before it does and these will flower or produce each year. So while technically a biennial, the plant will produce artichokes for years from the new suckers.  (We usually thin them to just one per plant so they get bigger and so did my neighbor, which is why he had them to give away....).

Rimproveri (Reproaches)

I am a frustrated farmer and left Italy some years ago very reluctantly.  When, in 2000, we moved back to my wife's family home, I tried to revive an abandoned farm on the surrounding acreage. But hampered by my inexperience and tethered by family responsibilities I didn't do such a good job of it. But it was something I took very seriously and still feel was one of the few times of my life I was doing something really important.  The fields had been cultivated heavily for centuries and the last 50 years had been hard. The loss of the farm animals and subsequent heavy instrument/tractor farming by itinerant farmers had really depleted the land and weakened the soil.

I tilled the soil, double dug vegetable beds, imported tons of manure and compost and started trying to fix things. I pruned the olives and old fruit trees back into production. I started tending the small vineyard and made oil and juice and wine with the fruit. Planted many heirloom old fruit tree varieties, french strawberries, American pumpkins and sweet corn.  We ate well but never made any money and we traveled too much to ever really make it work. New farms like most new businesses do not tolerate absentee owners and much of what I planted died. We moved back to the USA in 2008 and I left fruit hanging on the vine--no wine to be made that year.

It's always hard to go back.  I remember much of what I planted, where things went and what they should look like now after another year away--but it's always a shock to see how much things have changed;  I walk the fields and see so many errors of judgement and promises broken.
Empty fields--planted to clover and vetch, borage and rye now sprouting instead with dock and thistles--plants that will slowly take over and later be hard to be rid of.

But it was the grapes this year that were the saddest.

Someone, wisely, had covered them with netting to keep the birds out--it's a small vineyard and they'll slowly eat them all as they ripen left to their own.
But the grapes  never got picked and the netting never got taken down.
These are the mummies.
Moldy clusters of once yellow and gold; black and purple fruits.
They never got to the table or the press and only their names remain things of beauty.
These are Malvasia and Trebbiano, San Giovese and Canaiolo.

Or they were.  It would have been better to have left them to the sparrows and blackbirds.
If I had the energy, I'd take down the nets; cut off and burn the moldy fruits, prune back the vines in anticipation of next year.....
But I'm already gone.

Not just another segmented worm

An acquaintance of mine suggested I'd sell more work if I stopped drawing all these naked people and did some baby animals or something. Since, so far I've never sold anything, I couldn't really test this hypothesis, so rather than argue I went ahead and sketched, carved and just finished printing the keyblock proof on a little piece that shamelessly is pandering to that market. I haven't decided yet if I'll carve the color blocks or just leave it black and white. Nor can I decide whether to print it in a special limited edition to artificially inflate it's value or leave it open, to better anticipate possible future demand. My eight-year-old son, said, "Dad, I think that's the best drawing you've ever done." But, he likes worms.

This is the real hero of the organic farm and garden. Given the right environment the various species of earthworms will aerate the soil, improve soil texture, fertilize and help remineralize the soil, improve both drainage and water-holding capacity providing drought resistance and preventing runoff. Pictured above would be be Lumbricus terrestris or the nightcrawler. He/She (a true hermaphrodite, the earthworm contains both male and female sex organs) emerges at night or during rains and pulls surface debris (leaf litter, compost, straw, etc.) into their vertical tunnels that can penetrate the soils to 8 ft. Makes decent bait if you're into fishing and is sure to gross out half of any audience by it's size, color and movement. They lay 70-80 small, translucent lemon shaped egg cocoons each year each which will hatch into minuscule baby worms.
Your compost pile however would be home to Eisenia foetida or the redworm. She's red to red-brown and thinner and shorter. These worms tend to live above ground in leaf litter, compost piles or manure heaps breaking down the debris to worm castings, a mixture of soil, carbohydrate slime, and digested nutrients. Very prolific, a cubic yard (3' X3'X3') can hold up to 100.000 worms. These are the cuties used by worm farms for fishing bait or to provide live worms to those who want to start vermiculture or worm-composting bins in their yard or under the kitchen sink. They arrive in those little cardboard boxes that chinese food comes in. I always found that amusing.
The enemies to the earthworm aren't limited to the foraging robin, crow, toad or hedgehog. Damage on the organic farm comes from tillage. The plowing, ripping or rototilling of the surface soils to prepare the fields for planting are very harmful as the steel blades chop up the worms and can drastically reduce their numbers. On conventional farms the real damage however is from both deep tillage-often to depths of a meter and the use of harsh chemical pesticides and herbicides that kill them or deprive them of food or cover.
Earthworm numbers are considered a good barometer for soil health in the organic farming community. In our organic farm in Italy, the organic fields are full of worms; each shovelfull will reveal 2-3 of the big ones and lots of little ones. A layer of leaves or compost mulch will disappear over two to three weeks as the worms pull the debris down into their burrows. In contrast, our bottom fields, farmed conventionally by another farmer (with erbicides and pesticides until very recently and deep plowed every summer) had none when I went looking several years ago. Shovel in hand I walked over the fields and turned up just heavy clay with the occasional antpile or cricket uncovered.

This woodblock print was printed from a small board of hard maple. It measures 4 1/2" X 9" and is the keyblock for what will hopefully become a color print if I can manage to carve the color blocks and figure out how to mix just the right shade of "Nightcrawler Pink" from my limited palette of watercolor colors.

Making Bad Wine

2005 was a bad year for the Marignolle vineyard.
In a usually unsuccessful attempt to balance the tied-to-the-land needs of a small farm and other family/marital duties we usually spend some months during the Summer away from Florence in Santa Cruz, California. While the Monterey bay area is a paradise for good food and organic vegetable and fruit production-not to mention great wines, being there in the SUMMER while our small farm is mostly abandoned is always a disaster.
When we are away, the vineyard is mostly abandoned to chance. Attempts to have "helpers" look after the vines have mostly failed. One sprayed a "little bit of pesticide" on my organic grapes "just to be safe" killing all the beneficial spiders and ladybugs and other insects that a few years of non-spraying had brought back. Another helper, a local farmer with much wisdom and years of experience just didn't like the way I was doing things and so pruned the grapevines during my absence to a different geometry, setting me back again by a year or so.
But 2005 was particularly bad. Another helper decided to "shorten" the vines to get rid of all those unnecessary leaves.
He cut the vines back to just above the grape clusters. So I returned to find these stubby little vines with a stem, a leaf, a grape cluster and then nothing.Since the sugars in the grapes come from the photosynthesis in the leaves, no leaves meant no sugars. Tied in with a cooler than usual late Summer the grapes hung on the vines and did......nothing. They didn't get riper, they didn't get sweeter. Even the birds wouldn't eat them.
We waited as long as we could; they were mostly ripe but bad weather was predicted and we thought it best to harvest.

We had the kindergarten class come out that Saturday to pick the grapes and it was a great day. We had a big picnic and the kids and their parents picked the grapes and tossed them into plastic crates. Usually we pick very carefully, picking off, cluster by cluster, any spoiled or damaged fruit, picking off the leaves or debris...it is the one real advantage we have over commercial wineries. But these were 5-year-olds. So leaves, spiders, branches and all the grapes all went in the box.
And it didn't really matter. While there was no mold, the grapes were unevenly ripe with lots of little green berries in what were supposed to be black bunches of grapes. But the worst was yet to come.
We usually and deliberately use very traditional methods. We crush by foot, ferment in small batches and intervene fairly little in the winemaking process. But we are very clean as mistakes mean spoiled wine or vinegar. We scour out the buckets with hot water and make sure everything that comes into contact with the grapes is as clean as possible. In this case it meant scrubbing the legs of lots of little kids too, anyone brave enough to hop in the crushing vat. Shoes off, legs scrubbed, clean socks put on, carried to the vat, socks pulled off, in you go. Crush, Crush, Crush. It was a great party.
But quietly, off in a corner one child discovered my compost pile. And seeing us dumping grapes in the vat crate after crate she decided to participate too. She managed to find a small bucket and a handful of compost and before anyone knew what was happening in went a bucket of finished compost into the freshly squeezed juice.
Winemaking isn't a sterile process. Wild yeasts on the grape skins are responsible for the fermentation and the grapes aren't washed so there are bits of soil, dust, bugs and spiders in every vat of wine made everywhere and the rising alcohol levels--we usually reach 13-14% alcohol levels are pretty protective. But compost in the must isn't a great idea.
But it was too late.
The choice was either dump it all out or make the wine anyway. We can't sell it anyhow and it seemed a shame to just pour it all out. So we made wine anyway.

Vino Rosso di Marignolle 2005. Marignolle (our hill and house name) 2005 Table wine. Alcohol 12% (those low sugar levels). Ruby red, very astringent, notes of blackberry branches, pruning shears, children's laughter and a hint of something else...........that I just can't place.
It's actually not that bad and since I made it I drink it, When we have friends over who insist on tasting it they always say it's good but I always notice that for the first time since we started making wines, there is always still half a bottle left on the table when dinner is over.
.