Pea tops. Bird Language. Multi-purpose.

Travel

26 May

This farm has a language in the timing of its bird life. We mark the passage of the year by the Osprey returning to the pond, the piercing trill of the Red Wing Blackbird in spring, the pterodactyl-esque shadow of the Great Blue Heron traversing the vineyard in a few flaps. In early summer before there is much leaf-cover Bald Eagles and Red Tail Hawk patrol for rodents and sometimes for our chickens.

This chirping, squawking, swooshing, and shrilling which swells to a crescendo with the Dawn Chorus — now as early as 4:30AM — feels like a great conversation woven over the land. The birds are constructing the spring out of nest-building tidbits, blooms of bug populations to be noted, mating songs to be registered. There’s a great exchange of bird information we scarcely notice down below.

This is the impetus of Gemini. The sign of communication, of movement and multiplicity, of exchange. Pollination is underway in the garden, the beginnings of seeds for the year are being set. The peas we threw down in the open ground of fall and early spring as a cover crop or soil builder (they, along with their cousins vetch and alfalfa, fix nitrogen and supply a lot of biomass) are rising to flower now. Their reaching tendrils grasp at the air and each other, holding hands to climb higher. The flowers are sweet pink and bluish white.

Cover crop pea tops provide a vegetable for free. I pinch out the tips — just a flower and two or three leaf tendrils.

A handful gives me enough to sauté in butter with a crushed clove of garlic.They drape elegantly over fish or I chop them into a pea-shoot pesto.

Getting multiple, relatively passive uses out of one crop is a key to permaculture gardening or simply to a sane approach to food production. Why take up space and nutrients on a crop that requires a lot of labor or fussing over bug damage? I don’t grow spinach for this reason as I’m happy with my perpetual leaf beet or green stem chard for a steam-wiltable tender green.

Of the multi-purpose crops the fava bean is my favorite. Also from the pea family, it fixes nitrogen and makes great biomass (ie compost). My 25 foot bed grows armpit-high with thick stems and lots of leaf. If you cut it off for compost after harvest you can leave the roots in the soil where they can yield up their nitrogen — or at the very least contribute organic matter and rotting roots to the worms. In the meantime, you get the fava tops in May, the tender baby favas and pods to eat in early June, the more mature boilers later and any left on the plant can be dried for the wrinkled brown storage bean you see in the store.

Fava tops are the dense clusters at the top of each plant that can be picked as soon as the rest of the plant has set enough flowers to get beans later. Usually black aphids will appear at exactly the right time to tell you to pick off the tops. Picking deters the aphids and you get a delicious green not unlike the pea tops.

Tender baby favas are about the size of a fingernail and you harvest them before their skin turns white and tough. At this stage I will also use the pods. Either separate out the beans (and eat them raw with pecorino Toscano and a tumbler of red wine), or pull the string out and slice them. ‘Stew’ — what the Tuscans call in umido — simmering with onions, lots of olive oil and some white wine or vinegar, perhaps a branch of fresh mint or bay.

Mature favas are wonderful boiled whole in their pods. Once drained and cooled pop them out of the pod and use in any way you please. Lovely with pork. Or if you want to do the work of peeling them they make a beautiful green purée.

The dried fava is often overlooked. Cooked as for dried beans and made into a puréed brown soup in fall and winter they are delicious. Drizzle with olive oil and lemon. Possibly add cooked farro and snow with parmigiano.