Today we celebrate having grown, harvested, and eaten 1.009 percent of our annual calories from our suburban, less-than-a-fifth-of-an-acre yard.

To get to one percent (15,000 calories), we grew 33 varieties of 21 different foods.  Among those edibles, we ate 72 Husky cherry tomatoes and 14 heads of Little Gem Romain lettuce; 85 Snow Pea pods and 39 cups of raw Fordhook Giant Swiss Chard (netting just 272 calories — it’s worth more cooked, we’ve found); and four kinds of tomato, three kinds of carrot, and three kinds of potato.  We tried 12 varieties of vegetable we’d never tasted before.

We made jam.

Nearly a third of our overall calories, about 4,000, accumulated in the first half of June, a month in which we consumed bags of potatoes — with more still at the ready.  This month we’ve also eaten carrots (Purple Haze and Pink Dragon), green beans (Contender and Kentucky Wonder), Early Crookneck squash, a few strawberries and Anne berries, Mulberries, and Roma tomatoes.

And it all came without the baggage that trails industrial agriculture, the questions of where from and how dirty and at what cost.  Our property’s better for our sowing and growing, and with any luck our dent in the world’s ecology got a bit shallower.

Perhaps shallower still in these remaining weeks.

Last week I dug up ready potatoes that had been thriving in a small plot below our bougainvillea.  In the past two weeks the tops had turned yellow like straw and wilted to the ground.  I gave them one last watering, as recommended in various readings I’d read, and a few days later carefully scratched back the surface of the earth to reveal good-sized Purple Viking and Yukon Gold potatoes.  The sets of early March had in 80 days become about 15 pounds of good eats.

And eat them we have.  We pan-fried them in the mornings with butter, onions, and pepper.  We cooked and blended them with leeks for a fine soup.  We dribbled them with olive oil, dashed them with fresh rosemary (from the yard), and baked them.  We boiled them and diced them for crumbled-blue-cheese-prosciutto-dill potato salad, and tossed them in with a roast to soak and simmer all day.

We ate them baked plain because the fresh spuds are so flavorful they need nothing added.

At least as many potatoes still sit in the yard, ready for harvest.

This haul improves greatly on the six small potatoes we pulled last season (see “Small Potatoes” posted on August 20, 2009).  Poor soil and inadequate sunlight were the culprits then — problems that I remedied this spring by working plenty of mulch and compost into a fairly sunny plot before planting.  The 80 or so days they took to mature is about 20 short of expected, but done is done.  A new round of Yukon starters are in the ground for early fall eating, as well as a few rows of a russet-type potato we’ve never tried before called a Carola.

If this good return keeps up, we’ll have potatoes till Christmas.

The potato-surplus coincides fortuitously with our need to keep my wife off dairy till we can calm our mildly colicky baby girl.  We have plenty of potatoes to go with the meat in the mostly meat and potatoes diet that we’ll be sticking to for a few weeks.

It’s nice to find we have just what the doctor ordered right out the back door.

Last spring I took a chainsaw to it, slicing clean through one of the trunks.  I intended to cut the whole thing down, but stopped short when the pile of trimmings got high and I realized I had no plan for what to do with the space once cleared.  I decided wanting to cut a tree down wasn’t a good enough reason to do so.

And it’s a good thing, too, because it turns out it’s a Mulberry Tree, likely a Riviera or Kaester (M. nigra) variety.

In the past I’d never thought much about the heavy load of long, deep purple-black fruits that weighed the wide canopy down between April and June.  I assumed — for no good reason — that the berries were nothing we’d want to eat and left them to the birds.  Perhaps I didn’t think of homes as coming with something so huge and edible.  My mom, who grew up eating mulberries from the trees in her neighborhood, suggested the type of tree it might be, and with a little research I found her to be right.

That was last year.  This year, we made jam.

Our mulberries are the first crop we’ve had that realistically calls for preserving some portion of the abundant harvest.  The 20-foot-tall and 30-foot-wide tree grows multiple clusters of fruit on every branch, so harvesting takes time and a ladder.  It also takes a gentle touch, since the delicate berries would just as soon squish as be plucked whole.  A better method might be to lay out a clean tarp or expendable sheet and then shake the ripe fruit from the tree, but our space doesn’t allow for this.  I filled a massive bowl in an hour of picking and didn’t even make a dent in the overall yield.

It took two tries to turn it into to jam.

The first batch looked like tar, spread like tar, and chewed like tar.  I ended up stirring the fruit-sugar mix for 45 minutes seeking the illusive “jelly-like” consistency the recipe said would indicate a finished product.  Turns out boiling hot jam doesn’t ever really look like jam in a jar.  Kind of like melted anything looks different than if it wasn’t melted.  “Jelly-like” comes 24 hours later — after the mix has cooled.  I also tried to use the fruit’s natural pectin this time around, rather than an additive, by including 15 – 20 percent unripened berries.

The second effort, after some additional reading, was at a boil for fewer than five minutes, just long enough to dissolve the sugar-pectin mix.  Overall, making jam is relatively easy … when done right.

1. Clean the canning jars with warm soapy water, submerge the jars and lids in boiling water, then turn down the heat and let them stand in the hot water.
2. Mix four cups of de-stemmed (this takes a while) and crushed fruit with 1/4-cup of lemon juice and one teaspoon of calcium water in a large pot.  Bring to a boil.
3. Thoroughly mix two cups of sugar and two teaspoons of pectin and stir it into the boiling fruit mix.  Stir for two minutes then let it return to a boil.  Remove the not-jelly-like liquid from heat.
4. Pour the jam into the hot canning jars up to 1/4 inch from the top, clean rims and threads meticulously, and fasten the lids.
5. Return the filled jars to the boiling water and submerge for 10 minutes.  Turn off the heat and let them stand in warm water for five minutes.  Let them sit for 24 hours out of the water before eating or saving.

We now have two jars of mulberry jam ready for eating — or storing.  Unopened, they should be good for up to a year.  Opened, they should last about three weeks refrigerated.  I tried some on toast today, and it looks, spreads, and tastes like jam.  The mulberry is a surprisingly sweet fruit, and the jam is no different.

We shared some of this second batch with mom, and will make more when the last round of berries come ripe later this month.

Winter’s been good so far.  We’ve been able to eat a variety of vegetables from the yard fairly regularly: Bull’s Blood Beets, Autumn King Carrots, Little Gem Romaine Lettuce, Marvel of Four Seasons Butterhead Lettuce, Correnta Spinach, Fordhook Giant Swiss Chard, Mammoth Melting Sugar Peas, Green Sprouting Calabrese Broccoli.  It’s all tasty good stuff, but it doesn’t add up too fast when charting calories.  And, we’re looking at another lull in production, just like at the start of our cool season crop, with nothing really ready to eat for a little while.

We achieved the .5 percent Saturday night, sharing two soups with my parents, sister, and grandpa.  We cooked the split pea soup we made a month or so ago (see “A whole meal of food”, posted Dec. 8), and we tried a new potato-chard soup.  Chard is the only crop we have in abundance, so we’ve been eating more chard than I ever imagined — which is easy, because I never imagined anything about chard.  We have also experimented with a sauted chard and look forward to trying a chard-tomato casserole in the coming week.

Hopefully the chard will sustain us until the next round of winter crop comes in.

This leaves the question of the other percent.  We’re shooting for 15 percent from our yard, so for us the other percent is a big 85.  What do we do about that?  The answer to this question is as important as any decision we make about what grows or how it grows on our property.  If we satisfy this big giant number of calories irresponsibly, or without the ideals that we apply to our own home growing in mind — then what’s it all about?  We could easily overshadow the global benefits of our super local effort by satisfying the rest of our calories at McDonald’s or stocking our freezer with CAFO meats from 1,000 miles away or filling our bellies with international fruits and vegetables.  And we’d be missing our own point, which is a decidedly unattractive quality in a person.

So, what do we do?  Support local farmers who share our ideals and the markets that sell their work.  And the restaurants that cook with their foods.

We’ve been enjoying a nearby farmer’s market these past few months, and we intend to make it a regular part of our week.  There is something fundamental in shopping a place where all the food’s not pretty.  In San Diego there are dozens of farmer’s markets we’ve yet to try, but want to, particularly one that we’ve heard specializes in meats in cheeses.  We’re also planning on buying into a CSA with a few friends, which will support growers and give us access to local, seasonal produce — and challenge us to cook with ingredients we’re not used to.  Each of these options eliminates costly intermediaries between food and people, in the same way that growing at home does, and requires a more thoughtful relationship with what’s being eaten, how it’s being grown, and who’s growing it.

In terms of related New Year’s resolutions, I’m resolved to do better with the foods I buy, particularly concerning their place of origin.  I’ve been doing well the past few months in buying organic produce and range-fed meats (and in making meats a side rather than a main dish), and I’ve been shopping and supporting a market that shares some of my philosophy, but I could do better with figuring out how local the food is.  Distance takes some of the responsibility out of responsibly raised.

I’m also resolved to add a little foraging to the menu.  And by a little, I mean one act of foraging.  I’m keeping my effort minimal because this is way beyond my skill level and comfort zone.  But, I’m inspired by the author of Fat of the Land, which is by far the best food blog I’ve read.  And, foraging is a pretty ecologically sound way to go in terms of consumption.  What will I forage?  I have no idea.  I guess we’ll see.

With the other percent in mind, I’ve added two widgets to the blog (see sidebar at right).  One maps out all the farmer’s markets in your area (and there are probably more than you are aware of, with different specialties; this was true for me).  The other helps you find local and responsibly raised foods at a number of different places, including restaurants.  These will be permanent additions and will hopefully help anyone who is interested find a route to better eats — a supplement to the home-raised bit of calories, no matter what percent that adds up to.

Despite winter’s rep as a food-less time of year, a season during which many home growers and their yards hibernate, waiting for warm weather and the common edibles that come with it — we’ve been having a good growing experience.  Our cold season crop has been a windfall compared to the pest-devastated warmer months earlier this year.  Without the context of a bountiful spring and summer, we’re looking at our food-producing December garden with wonder.

This winter has really been our first harvest.  Being able to head out into the yard and choose from several different ready crops is what I had in mind when I started this effort, and that’s where we’re at now.

Would I like more variety, more volume?  Yep.  But for now, I’m feeling pretty good about being able to walk out the back door and snip, pick, or pull romaine and butterhead lettuce, spinach, carrots, beets, broccoli, peas, chard, oranges, or tangelos.  Just last night we combined a few of these for salads and sides to our meal, eating more than 300 calories from the yard in one sitting — more than half what we need to get to 15 percent for the day.

I feel optimistic for the spring planting as I order seeds and imagine the hearty yields they’ll bring.  But I also recognize that our successful winter garden relies in part on the inactive pests hibernating in their dens like warm-season gardeners.

They’re waiting for spring, too.

Must read.

1. The Ominivore’s Dilemma, by Michael Pollan
2. In Defense of Food, by Michael Pollan
3. The End of the Wild, by Stephen M. Meyer

Should read.

1. When the Rivers Run Dry, by Fred Pearce
2. Citizenship Papers, by Wendell Berry

Could read.

1. Field Notes From a Catastrophe, by Elizabeth Kolbert
2. Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, by Barbara Kingsolver

Skip it.

1. The World Without Us, by Alan Weisman
2. Coming Home to Eat, by Gary Paul Nabhan

This last book I’m working my way through now, and it’s a bit wandering and self congratulatory without imparting any real knowledge or sense of experience.  At best.  Which is disappointing because I had high hopes: It recounts a guy’s attempt to consume only what he can get from within 220 miles from his Arizona home (a bit far for “local”, but a great goal).

I have a “to read” stack on my desk that includes The End of Food, by Paul Roberts; Hot, Flat, and Crowded, by Thomas L. Friedman; Fast Food Nation, by Eric Schlosser; and Second Nature, by Michael Pollan.  That’s where I’ll be heading next, trying to read as many as I can before the spring semester starts and my reading turns back to student work.

If there’s anything else I should read, or any of the above that I’ve misread — drop me a note.

We have been saving snow peas for three or four weeks, dutifully blanching and freezing them until a combination of preserved peas and fresh-picked measured out to two cups.  We got there this past Sunday and made vegetarian split pea soup with our harvest.  Our friends Paul and Amy, who are always game for a good food experiment, helped shell the the 30 or so pods that made up the final, and fresh, bit of peas.  Then we cooked.  Then we ate.

The soup turned out excellent, made more so by the fact that this was our first meal where the primary ingredient came from the garden.  Every other edible from the yard has been either a side dish or a snack, but the peas were what the soup was all about.

Here’s the recipe (serves 4):

• 1 tablespoon of extra virgin olive oil (more to drizzle)
• 2 large onions, chopped
• 1/2 teaspoon of fine-grain sea salt
• 2 cups split green peas, rinsed
• 5 cups water
• juice of 1/2 a lemon (reserve the zest)
• a few pinches of smoked paprika
• a few small broccoli trees or a handful of spinach (optional)
• 1/2 cube of vegetable bouillon (optional)

Add olive oil to a big pot over medium-high heat.  Stir in onions and salt and cook until the onions soften, just a minute or two.  Add the split peas and water.  Bring to a boil, dial down the heat, and simmer for 20 minutes, or until the peas are cooked through (but still a touch al dente).  Using a large cup or ladle transfer half the soup to a blender and puree.  Return the blended soup to the pot and stir in (you should end up with a soup that is nicely textured — and green).  You may need to thin (water or stock) or thicken (flour) the soup to your preferred consistency at this point.  Do so just a little at a time.  Stir in the lemon juice and taste.  If the soup needs more salt, add more a little at a time.  Ladle into bowls or cups, and serve each drizzled with olive oil and topped with a good pinch of smoked paprika and a touch of lemon zest.

We used a whole cube of the bouillon, which was fine and didn’t overpower any of the other flavors.  Next time we will use more broccoli — we only had two small trees available from the garden, so that’s what we went with.  The onions were tasty and not as overpowering as they were being sliced (Amy, Paul, and Sarah took to switching off to get the job done), but next time we will use a half-onion less.  To get the consistency we want, we are going to try adding one large potato, and maybe even another half cup of peas, leaving a bit more to the un-blended portion for taste and texture (Sarah is opposed to this revision, but the super-majority in the house prevailed).

And, as a final note, watch the lemon zest (finely-grated lemon peel) — even a pinch can leave you eating lemon soup with peas, rather than pea soup with a hint of lemon.  We might do away with the zest after the next long harvest leads us to another two-and-a-half cups of peas from the yard.

It’s hard to predict where this leaves us in terms of our annual goal.  At first glance it seems to project a final achievement well under one percent and far from the 15 percent we envisioned.  But hidden in that fraction of a percent is all the knowledge gained to get there.  Many one-time mistakes exist in so grandly and grossly missing a benchmark (off by about 95 percent).  And knowledge forged in such calamity is a tenacious knowledge.

Besides the pests, we also had something else working against us: fruits and vegetables.  It may seem obvious that the majority if not all of the calories from a typical suburban yard would come from these two food groups.  But before attempting this home-grown effort I failed to ask an even more obvious question: What percent of our total calories come from fruits and vegetables?  The answer is 5.8 (fruits) and 13.2 (vegetables), for a combined total of 19 percent.

What does this mean?  Well, if I’m trying to eat 15 percent of my calories from my yard, and those calories only take the form of fruits and vegetables, then what I’m really doing is trying to grow 79 percent of my annual fruits and vegetables at home.  Since 81 percent of our daily calories come from something other than fruits and vegetables, getting to the 15 percent goal would be a lot easier if I could diversify and get some of that “something other” from the yard, too.

Let’s just be honest and say that milking and meat off the bone probably aren’t going to happen.  But grains are a possibility, and we are zoned for up to 25 chickens.

The tiny .25 also hides what we have accomplished.  It suggests we’ve pulled little from the yard, when in fact we’ve eaten Cherry and Beefsteak Tomatoes, Strawberries, Grapes, Asparagus, Garlic, Basil, Mint, Purple Viking Potatoes, Gala Apples, Carrots, Chard, Mesclun, Butterhead Lettuce, Snow Peas, Straight Neck Squash, Peanuts (only four, but still), Broccoli, and Oranges.  And with some of these we’ve only begun to harvest what’s there.  In the next few weeks we’ll add Romaine Lettuce, Bull’s Blood Beets, Tangelos, Delicata Squash (fingers crossed), and Spinach to that list.

And it’s all so good.  And it comes with learning, which I appreciate.

So we celebrate our .25 percent.  There’s a lot going on in that little number.

I came across the phrase that heads this entry in the writing of Eliot Coleman, a pioneering organic farmer.  Coleman farms in Maine, where the less than 10-hour days the phrase describes are not only low on light but also bitter cold.  The Greeks crafted the myth of Persephone to explain why their lands were less fruitful in the winter months.  According to the legend, Hades abducted Persephone and took her to the underworld to be his queen.  In her anguish, Persephone’s mother (and goddess of the earth), Demeter, refused to allow the earth to grow and fruit, essentially starving all of humanity.  Zeus negotiated the girl’s release, but a trick of Hades required that Persephone live with him part of the year.  Thus, when mother and daughter are reunited, there are bountiful harvests, but when Persephone returns to the underworld each year, all is barren.

San Diego doesn’t suffer under Demeter’s sorrow — a fact attested to by the fat, out-of-season squash that hang from my garden beds and the stubby watermelon that recently decided this would be a good time to set fruit and grow.  But those are a long way from edible.  As are the beets, lettuce, beans, carrots, and peas.  My next harvest will come in the traditionally barren months between November and February.

For us, these typically plentiful times are our Persephone months, and it’s hard to blame the gods.  Sure, I could invent some tale to explain away the troubles my warm-season crops suffered, but it seems more practical to chalk it up to inexperience and do better.  I mean, if we’re flush with fruits, vegetables, and nuts next summer, I’m not going to give credit to the gods.  I’m going to say, “I did it!  Look what I did!  It was me!”  So it hardly seems fair to dump these fruitless times on Hades because he thought some girl was smoking hot.  Nor on a goddess that grieved.  The problems with my warm season crop were not Greek.  They were more local than that.

I did it.  Look what I did.  It was me.

We’ll eat better.  Soon.