Bitters and brine. Yields. Imbolc .

Travel

13 Feb

I scrambled my attunement to the season’s change by driving to California. The second day of February, or Imbolc, one of the six divisions of the Celtic calendar, is when the light, if not the temperature, shifts into spring. On this farm daffodils begin to push up, the spinach and arugula in the greenhouse take a new grip on life and return to greening. It’s a marked shift.

But in the Central Valley it was already eighty degrees and the almonds were in flower. The bees were lined up militantly along the highway in their white boxes. California, and all other Mediterranean climates, have their own beautiful sequence of seasons. But stepping out of my own northern climate at this delicate moment in the year made me keenly aware of its preciousness. The hardness of winter is just yielding. The precocious green points of bulbs (from crocus to garlic) are breaking through. Even if you live somewhere colder, there might be a slight thaw, or you might notice different birds arriving, or possibly just that the snow gets fatter and wetter.

My body was confused — delighted with ripe citrus, blooming rosemary, and sunshine — but rather in shock.

To recalibrate on returning home, I summoned radicchio — still crisp and mild from late winter — and artichokes and olives to make a salad.

Bitter and brined, these are foods for the liver, and traditional in Chinese medicine for this late winter season when the body needs cleansing after the stodge of winter food. The artichokes were certainly fruit of California’s milder winter but even in Oregon they appear in early spring farmers’ markets. I had steamed them the day before so I ate them cold dipped in hot butter. Into the melting butter I sizzled a clove of garlic and some chile flakes then squeezed in half a sweet lime (from the amazing Berkeley markets, but lemon would do just as well). Radicchio benefits from soaking in cold water, a thorough wringing out in a salad spinner, then chilling wrapped in a cloth in the fridge. In winter radicchio shouldn’t actually taste very bitter. It is traditionally a winter crop in Italy, the firm heads stand up well to cold temperatures and the cold makes the plant produce sugars so it becomes infinitely sweeter than when grown in summer.

For all this stirring of spring and livers, it’s still a quiet time on the farm. This is when I dream of making my own willow stool hedge for basketry. Willow cut on a yearly cycle stands out in bright colors now, its linear shoots like colored chalk sketched on the grey landscape in shades of acid green, gold and deep burgundy. A farm should have many yields. This is another permaculture principle. When times are slow, or if one crop fails you have others to fall back on. Thus, an orchard should sell fresh fruit but also make cider and distillate (Calvados) as well as fatten pigs on the fallen apples and produce pork. Making baskets isn’t for sustenance but for the soul. Also any willow family (Salicaceae) shoots, if not used for baskets, could be harvested for goat fodder. They grow so readily, with long thin leaves my goats adore.

A diversity of yields on this farm is best expressed three ways: our production of wine; managing grazing for meat and dairy animals; and use of semi-wild foods to augment our vegetable garden. These elements spread our needs across the year and diversify our investments by giving us storable and fresh produce, dual purpose and stacked functions. Grazing animals on the same land as fruit production is a win-win proposition as the animals crop the grass for you, fertilize the land, clean up fallen fruit, and produce meat flavored with that fruit (or nuts like hazelnut or acorn). Animals can be harvested or held ‘on the hoof’ depending on meat needs. Wild foods require little to no input. Here they are the plethora of blackberries around the verges of the vineyard in August, but also the ‘cover crops’ we’ve sown like tillage radish seed pods (fried and salted), field pea tendrils (sautéed with garlic), and the early spring fennel stalks (boiled as the Sicilians do).

Wine, as an inventoried, value-added product, brings stability to the system and solid income. It could be apples and cider instead, or high value berries and jam like those grown and produced by my friends Anthony and Carol at Ayer’s Creek Farm. Their jams are exquisite and represent acres of diverse berries — and all the labor entailed in these — preserved in a jar on the shelf. On their farm in the Willamette Valley the fields of loganberry and blackcap and table grapes are then able to be offset by carefully curated vegetables. When Anthony grows something he has a vision for an entire dish. Thus, a corn field becomes the basis for a pozole. He has to grow a good corn for hominy, and the beans, and the appropriate chiles, and the tomatillos for the salsa. A neighbor supplied the pork.

Pursuing this vision he came across the Mexican notion of the milpa. This is typified by the classic example of companion planting, The Three Sisters guild where corn, squash, and beans, being mutually beneficial, are planted together. But the milpa is also about the little herbs and greens that grow almost uninvited below the corn plants. These quelites, are greens like lambsquarters, pigweed and purslane. They are a delicious and nutrient rich accompaniment to the meaty corn stew. Essentially the whole meal grows together in one field.