The Inadvertent Gardener

I have friends all over the place, most of whom I’ve met the old-fashioned way: in person, through some job or school or work or networking connection. But oh, how the Internet has enriched my life and brought me in touch with people who, otherwise, I might never have met.

Yeah, I’m pretty much going to count 75 percent of my friends in the Bay Area in that number, just by the way.

Let’s just take a look at The Tennessee Locavore, for example. Though we both attended BlogHer Food last year, I managed to miss her entirely during the operation, and instead we have been forced—FORCED, I SAY—to become friends via Twitter and Facebook instead.

What does this mean, you ask? This means that, on a day that was, for the most part, good, but due to a Very Strange and Disturbing Incident on the way home from San Francisco, I arrived home to a care package of local food goodness (Snickerdoodles, people, Snickerdoodles.) either baked in Kristina’s kitchen or procured in her locavore zone. Also, there was a sparkly and blinky ring, which, as a devotee of Burning Man, I promptly announced would make the 2010 trip with me to Black Rock City.

I have been working through the contents of this care package, and this week, made it to the Benton’s prosciutto, which I knew I wanted to save for something special. I cooked it up to add to a dinner of locally-made gnocchi, which seemed only appropriate considering the value Kristina puts on eating in one’s own foodshed. And it was, I must say, delicious. Even if you don’t have Benton’s prosciutto at hand, and even if you aren’t lucky enough to have a care package arrive that contains pork products, this recipe is simple and delicious, and you should make it.

And, Kristina? Though I have adored getting to know you through your words, enough already. We owe each other some in-person cocktails, and some hugs. And I promise the thank you note that I more than owe you is coming shortly.

Gnocchi with Sage and Prosciutto
(Serves 2-3, depending on how hungry you are)

2 Tbsp. butter
½ Tbsp. olive oil
8 oz. prosciutto, chopped
8 oz. sage, leaves stripped and chopped
12 oz. gnocchi

1. Bring a saucepan of water to a boil and salt it.
2. Melt the butter in a sauté pan, and add the olive oil. Warm over medium-high heat.
3. Add the prosciutto and cook it until it’s crispy.
4. Add the gnocchi to the water and cook until it just starts to float at the top of the boiling water.
5. While the gnocchi is cooking, add the sage to the prosciutto and sauté until the gnocchi is ready.
6. Drain the gnocchi and toss it with the butter-sage-prosciutto mixture. Serve immediately, sprinkled, if you would like, with some grated Parmiggiano Reggiano.

“There’s a restaurant downtown I think you’d like,” said my friend Amy when I visited her in Madison, Wis. last week.

Oh my friends, how they know me. Amy was, of course, totally right, and that is how we ended up at Harvest, a small, warm space on the square that features the state capitol, for a Sunday night dinner last weekend. This farm-to-table restaurant features seasonal, regional cuisine, and apparently the Executive Chef, Derek Rowe, is all about the challenge of keeping that rolling even through the harsh Wisconsin winters. I tip my hat—that’s more of a challenge than I was willing to manage for more than three of those Midwestern winters in a row.

It turned out we’d stumbled in on a night when the restaurant was hosting a fundraising dinner—they’ve been invited to host a dinner at the James Beard Foundation on April 6 in New York City, and proceeds from last Sunday night’s feast were slated to help get the staff to the East Coast for that event.

The $25 prix fixe menu featured a salad of field greens, radish, and sunchokes with a sherry-walnut vinaigrette or a curried parsnip soup with parsnip chips; a mushroom ragu with creamy polenta and spicy spinach, a pot roast of Wisconsin grass-fed beef brisket, or an incredibly light fish and chips served with a crisp winter coleslaw of cabbage rutabaga and turnip. Dessert options included a vanilla bean panna cotta with grapefruit supremes, a date walnut cake with mascarpone ice cream, or a house-made licorice gelato with an almond biscotti.

The locavore attitude extended even to the cocktail menu, which included my choice: The Door County Cherry Drop, made from Death’s Door Vodka (made with wheat from Washington Island, Wis.), Door County Montmorency Cherry Juice and fresh lemon juice.

Harvest will host two more James Beard Foundation fundraiser dinners: one tonight from 5 p.m. until closing, and another on March 21, also from 5 p.m. until closing. If you’re in Madison or passing through, I encourage you to check it this warm, welcoming space that supports local and regional farms and producers.

One of the most gratifying things about putting out the word that a patio garden is in the offing has been the offer of seeds from friends near and a little bit far. Seed shopping? Nope. Don’t need to.

One of the offers came from a coworker, who told me she had a variety of heirloom tomato seeds and some Tokyo onions, a varietal that she described as somewhere between a green onion and a leek, and that is excellent when doused with brown sugar and soy sauce and thrown on a grill until caramelized.

“We pretty much throw them in the dirt and they grow,” she said.

“That sounds like the right kind of plant for me,” I replied. “I’m definitely in.”

A few days later, she popped her head back in the office. “I’m afraid I’ve communicated incorrectly about the seeds,” she said. “I may have been unclear.”

I assumed that she was about to tell me she didn’t really have any seeds, and that I was pretty much SOL on that front. I have one of those minds that makes up the story in absence of any sort of facts, so sure enough, I was already figuring out which one of my other friends might be able to share some of their seeds.

“I can’t give you seeds,” she said. “I’m going to have to give you seedlings. I already have them all started.”

Good people of the Internet, I cannot emphasize enough what LITTLE problem this is. Someone else will have done the work for me. For all intents and purposes, this is like going to a store and buying seedlings, except I don’t have to buy them. All I will have to do is throw them in the dirt in the wine barrels and call it done.

Of course, there is no dirt in the wine barrels yet. So, there’s that to be taken care of. Ahem.

Over the weekend, I went in a giant grocery store in Madison, Wisconsin with my friends in search of some local cheese curds. We found what we were looking for, but since it has been so long since I regularly shopped at that kind of store, the aisles and aisles of brightly-colored boxes of processed food overwhelmed me.

At the end of the weekend, on my way home from the airport, I stopped at my local Whole Foods, a behemoth of a store in itself, and certainly a bastion of its own panoply of processed foods. Let’s not kid ourselves, right?

But I was psyched to find, there in the produce section, sandwiched (oddly) between two different kinds of radishes, a pile of bunches of beautiful baby golden beets from Happy Boy Farms, a local producer that I buy from at the farmers’ market almost every week.

Sure, it was Whole Foods. And sure, it’s California. But the fact remains that, in this country, the food producers getting the tax breaks, the government support and attention, and the most shelf space in most American grocery stores are the industrial producers, not the smaller, local guys like Happy Boy.

This week, though, you have an opportunity to help change that balance. This week, Change.org is hosting a crowd-sourcing competition called 10 Ideas for Change in America, and the top 10 ideas will be presented to relevant members of the Obama administration. Even better, Change.org will mobilize its grassroots network to support those 10 ideas.

Among those ideas? Slow Money, a radical idea to fund real, healthy food by investing in small producers and local farmers. The return on that investment—for our environment, for our health, for our food security—is certainly more than any results I’ve seen in my 401(k) lately…

The voting on the top 10 ideas runs through Friday, and I encourage you to go over and check out the options. I’d love to see Slow Money make it into the top 10, but there are other great ideas that will improve food systems, including the American Farmland Trust’s effort to save ranch and farmland across this country, and an effort to put a garden at every school.

Don’t delay. It’ll take about five minutes of your time to promote 10 ideas you think can change the world, and maybe change what’s on the shelves at your local grocery store.

Gardeners, plant and nature lovers can join in Green Thumb Sunday every week. Visit As the Garden Grows for more information.

The move to the new apartment is complete, but I’m still unpacking. Plus, it’s been raining in Northern California. Raining a lot. Except for yesterday, when, of course, I was at work, and couldn’t actually work on implementing my Grand Patio Garden Plans.

Fatemeh was at work, too, but her business operates out of the apartment, which gave her the opportunity to send me this little multimedia message. Thanks to the stupid that is my first generation iPhone and it’s inability to actually receive such messages, I got to view this on the web, which means I can also share it with you:

Yes, those are indeed empty wine barrels sitting in full sun. Which means that soon-ish, that full sun will fall on some freshly-planted soil. I cannot tell you how thrilled I am about this.

Giant. Freaking. Rabbits.

(Thanks to Deb Roby for pointing this one out to me.)

Here’s the thing about wine barrels. Even when they’re empty (and oh, how sad that they were empty…), they are quite awkward and heavy. The photo you see here may indicate that one person can hold these, and they can, but you may notice the photo is a bit more blurry than I might have liked.

“Come on, camera,” I said while I was taking it. “Focus.”

“It’s probably saying it can’t focus when the subject’s legs are shaking so badly,” Fatemeh said. The damn barrel was, after all, nearly as wide as she is tall.

She had met me at the back stairs to haul the barrels up the stairs and along the back side of our building to our patio. I told her we would have to do them one at a time.

“They’re splintery, and there’s nothing to hold on to,” I said. “In fact, I just gave myself a splinter.”

Fatemeh pulled her sleeves down over her hands. “I am deathly afraid of splinters.”

“That’s why there are two of us,” I said.

We hauled the containers up one by one, sneaking along the back side of a number of other apartments, keeping our voices to a whisper so no one would become alarmed.

After they were in place, I told Fatemeh about what I’d learned about how blueberries love the acidity. “I’m not growing blueberries,” I said. “That seems like a lot of commitment.”

And maybe it would be. But that leaves the next question to be answered. If not blueberries, then what to plant? It’s time, after all to begin planning my very first urban crop.

It should be noted that the wine barrels came with instructions.

“Have you ever planted in these before?” asked the guy who sold them to me.

I admitted I had not. I did not tell him the kind of jackass arrangements in which I had planted before.

“Well, you’re definitely going to want to drill holes in the bottom,” he said.

“Of course,” I said, thinking to myself about the fact that I own nary a single drill. I drifted off into reverie for a brief second about trying to just put a bunch of nail holes in the bottom, then brought myself back to reality.

“You probably ought to put a layer of rocks in the bottom, too,” he said. “Maybe an inch or so, for drainage.”

I then thought about the fact that any rocks I haul up to the patio will have to come with me up a flight of stairs, and that they will also, upon eventually moving out, have to be hauled back down those stairs. I considered ignoring this recommendation.

“And because of the acidity, blueberries love these,” he said.

“Really?” I said. And here is where I thought the following: Oh my God. Acidity. That means I’m going to have to actually figure out how to amend my soil due to whatever’s leaching in from the wine-soaked wood. And I have not a single idea how to do that. Of course, here is what I said: “Cool!”

Because, my fellow denizens of the Internet, that is how I roll.

Here’s the thing about container gardening: You have to have containers.

Luckily, when I least expected it, an opportunity arose to drive to East Oakland and acquire a pair of half wine barrels. I pulled into a dead-end street just after dark next to two stacks of the barrels and, as a BART train roared overhead on a track, handed over $40 in cash to a friend of a friend.

“These smell amazing,” I said, breathing in the deep, winey fragrance.

“They were just used this past season,” he said. This is a guy who knows how to find things: chanterelles in the Oakland hills, locations for underground dining events, and, in this case, enough recently-drained half-barrels of wine to distribute them throughout an entire community of horticulturists in the East Bay.

“I had 70 here yesterday,” he said. There were 10 left after we loaded my pair into the back seat of my car.

“They fit perfectly,” I said. “They look like a pair of kids back there.”

Off I drove, back up onto 880 and off into the night, keeping a careful eye out for cops. After all, when the entire inside of one’s car smells like a winery, one should attempt not to get pulled over, even if one has not had a single drop to drink.