It’s not just that these beans hadn’t done anything for me lately — they hadn’t done anything, ever.  I originally sowed this supposed cool-season crop in November, when San Diego finally begins to give cool weather a try (not cold exactly, but cool).  I planted Aquadulce Fava Beans, and they grew bushy, strong stalks that needed staking right away.  But January came and went with no beans, as did February, March, and April.  For a 75 – 90-day variety, 165 days seemed too long.

The plant had also become a sprawling mess that took over the space near our porch, crowding out other plants, blocking a short stone path.  I inadvertently encouraged this sprawl by planting the beans with a wall at their back: While they received full sun, it only came from one direction, causing the plants to reach.  The wall also only allowed for growth on one side of the support.  The uneven weight of it had destroyed one trellis and had begun to tip and tweak the sturdier, custom trellis I built for my warm-season beans — the Dragon Tongues, Kentucky Wonders, and Scarlet Emperors — back when I believed the cool-season beans would be done before it got warm.

A menace, the fava beans had to go.

But when I lifted the first stalk to cut it, I found them: meaty, fibrous pods, some of which had grown eight inches long and an inch-and-a-half wide.  Instead of cutting, I ended up propping with a few sturdy bamboo poles.  I trimmed out a few sickly stalks and then individually fastened the rest to the trellis, exposing more and more beans with each move.

The likely culprit for the 165-day growing period (and it’s not over yet) is San Diego, which seems to defy planting standards at every opportunity.  With the fava bean — known elsewhere in the world as the broad bean — it’s a winter cool season crop in mild climates and a spring cool season crop in colder zones.  It prefers 70- to 80-degree weather and is neither heat nor frost tolerant, dropping flowers at 85 and 35 degrees.  We don’t get frost in our part of town, but we can have an 85-degree day any time of year.  However, such heat less likely November – February, which is the time period I chose for growing our Aquadulce.  But I have read that fall-planted fava beans can take 200 – 240 days to mature.

Six months seems like a long time to wait for a bean I’ve never tasted.  But, there’s no reason to uproot a producing crop — so I’ll just have to find somewhere else for the summer beans I have sitting in pots, seeking for something to climb.

We’ve got rain today, which is good for everything but out-in-the-yard farming.  Having no opportunity to prep the few areas that still need prepping frees up a moment to think back on the last four — and eight — months that my wife and I have been trying the things we’ve been trying.  Good eats, but good grief.

The chart never lies.  It doesn’t take a statistician to make sense out of the numbers we’ve cultivated so far, nor any kind of education, really, to see that we’re a wee bit off the mark.  In the face of such shortage, I have to defer to Vonnegut’s oft-repeated wisdom: So it goes.

In the last few months my objectives have shifted like a political alliance — driven by convenience.  For a time, the cold-season crop seemed a boon (and really, any amount of steady food would seem so in the context of last summer and our first four months at this) and I hoped for 2-percent-plus by the end of March.  But salads and carrots and beets only cemented our understanding of how calorie-poor healthy food can be — hence the “healthy”.  By the end of February, though still able to harvest something from the yard any time we wanted, I had adjusted to the certainty that we’d at least eke our way to our first big percent: 1.0.

Not quite.  But we are more than halfway to that mark, and I’d like to think that the past eight months have shown us what the hard half of a percent can look like.

We’ve had some great successes since December 1, a highlight being the Anna Apple grafts, both of which have taken and begun flowering and leafing out.  We’ve also made some good moves for the future, chiefly the construction of a coop and the raising of four chickens.  Additionally, we planted a Haas Avocado and a Hall’s Hardy Almond, as well as several perennial fruits and vegetables: a blackberry and three raspberry plants, including an Anne; a blueberry bush; a Chayote Squash; and several plots of asparagus.

And, we’ve got warm-season sprouts pushing through the soil all over our property, with more planting yet to come.

All we have to do is get those little spits of green to fruiting.  Easy, right?

So, I’m left with a bit of a Catch-22: Raze the beds of the winter crop that has yet to fruit, or delay the spring planting and forfeit my opportunity to get my edibles established before the pests come out in force.  Perhaps this is a false dilemma.

Either way, this overlap can easily be avoided next year with more competent successive plantings.  My error this past winter was in seeing the multiple plantings as something to be crammed into the season, one after the other.  I waited until the first harvest had completely dried up before replanting.  Rather, effective successive planting should be more integrated, with tighter intervals.

One method involves combining started transplants with direct seeding of the same type.  Another uses periodic direct seeding to accomplish the same goal of a staggered, extended harvest.  The frequency of seeding depends on what is grown, with a vegetable like spinach being planted as often as once a week, lettuce and other greens every other week, and squash once a month.  You can also look to variation in growth rate in the different varieties of the same type of crop, like an Early Yellow Crookneck squash (52 days) versus a Burgess Buttercup (100 days).

Such strategery would have helped us to avoid the light harvest we had in February.  Being more attentive to maturation rates could also have let us plant our winter crop with an exit strategy in mind to avoid the quagmire we find ourselves in during this winter-spring transition.

However, in a month or so when the Waltham Broccoli, Bull’s Blood Beets (which have been so good), and two varieties of carrot I’ve never tried before (Purple Haze and Dragon) come in, I’m sure I won’t be complaining about space.  In the end, much of my spring preparation involves developing new areas of our property to devote to edibles — and removing another section of lawn that does nothing but consume dwindling water resources and need mowing.

So, with our eyes on the last of the winter crop, we look forward to spring.

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.

During a respite in the week-long storm that’s projected to drop 8-20 inches throughout San Diego County, I wandered our near-fifth acre, harvesting a few things for a dinner salad and surveying the damage.  The winds have been gusting hard and regular, battering our fruit trees and tilting the giant Silk Oak that tends to shed thick branches in such weather.  The new chicken coop looks a bit fragile, and precarious, beneath it.

Most of the garden has held up well, but the dozen or so pea vines I have growing in our front yard have been torn and tangled, the trellises in some cases snapped, pulled out, tossed.  The wet weight of knotted peas is testing the resilience of our young English Oak, bending branches they hung delicately from just a few days ago.

Many of the vines will probably have to go, which isn’t a total loss since we’ve been able to harvest so many peas and pods from them for soups and salads.  And there’s still time to plant another round.

We’ll see what else goes down.  The brunt of the storm hits Thursday.  The rain has again left me wishing we had a catchment system in place.

Sunday we decided to finally do something with a few of the Delicata Squash that have been ripening in a bowl on our counter for about four weeks.  I have been extremely skeptical of how edible they’d turn out to be because they were grown way out of season, and for the last few weeks of that time they sat on plants sickened first by a massive aphid infestation (see Convergent lady killers, posted Nov. 17) and then by powdery mildew — the same pest that kept all the other out-of-season winter squash from producing and killed them (see Death by a billion spores, posted Oct. 15).

So, I harvested these squash not because they were ready, but because the plants were dead or dying.  Not a confidence builder in terms of quality.

We cut a few of them up, and they looked and smelled like squash should look and smell.  The recipe called for carrots, which we were able to pull from the yard, too.  And we threw together a salad made from greens from our garden as well as from Paul and Amy’s.  It turned out to be a flavorful and hearty soup, more so than the split pea we made a month or so ago (see A whole meal of food, posted Dec. 8).

I have never been reticent about sharing the food we grow, but since I started this calorie-counting effort, I can’t help but to — just for a second — think of the shared food as calories lost.  The thought never lasts because I enjoy giving food I’ve grown (especially when it tastes good).  In truth, the people receiving the shared food have been more hesitant in accepting, often saying, “But you could be eating this!”  Friends also counsel us to just count the calories anyway toward our 15 percent (actually, until last night my wife had no idea we weren’t doing just that).  However, what other people eat doesn’t really have anything to do with our annual calories and where they come from.  It has to do with theirs.  But if they’re eating from our yard, it’s definitely local and raised responsibly — so it should be counted in some way.  Where everyone’s food comes from and how it is grown matters.  And, sharing the food we grow is part of the community side of this effort: people getting together to grow as much of their food as they can, eat it, and share it.  Ultimately, it’s not just about what I or my wife eat.

So we’re going to count shared calories, separately, as a way to acknowledge that responsible food that gets eaten is never wasted.

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.

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.

Put another way, I could have grown 400 White Lisbon Bunching Onions, 300 Yellow Sweet Spanish Onions, and 300 Carantan Leeks.

I could have grown 1,200 Autumn King Carrots.

Or maybe not.  Even taking into consideration pests, disease, thinning, and successive plantings on some of those crops, I just don’t have the space.  Most people don’t.  And what if I did get 1,200 carrots?  I like carrots, but come on.  That’s carrots every day for a year even if I give away two thirds of that yield to — who?  The couple hundred people I know who trust me enough to eat something from my yard?  (For you regular readers, you’re probably thinking I don’t have to worry much about that kind of return, but I’m getting better — and some of these crops are easy.)

These enormous, space-consuming yields come from one, $1.89 packet of seeds for each crop.  That’s just the way seeds come.  For me and my space, that leaves a lot left over after I’ve planted my fill.  Typically I save them just in case of a crop disaster, but often by the time whatever ails my plants fells them, it’s too late in the season to start again from scratch.  Besides, that’s some pretty pessimistic seed hording going on.

Instead, we should plant with optimism and give away our remaining seeds as soon as the ones we’ve used hit the ground.  I tried this in the spring, a bit, and have done better with the practice this cool season.  In the spring I shared ground nuts and watermelon with friends and fellow amateur growers Paul and Amy Reams (who operate a fabulous wedding and portrait photography business out of San Diego).  Between us, I pulled six peanuts out of the ground and we all ate store-bought watermelon this summer.  But there was camaraderie in our lack of success.  I gave my parents tomato and pepper plants I’d started indoors, and while mine got eaten by pests, theirs made it to fruit.  This fall I shared all the cool crops mentioned above with my sister, Anna, and just this week she, her husband, and our grandpa ate salads fixed from her bursting raised bed (pictured above).

My sister never gardened before this season, and she’s doing great.  And in the coming seasons we’ll grow more edibles we’ve never grown before with Paul, Amy, and Anna, experimenting in good company.  And my folks will grow stuff, too.

Typically when people have a hand in producing some of their own food, when they see that it’s possible to step into their yard, pick something, and eat it — something they had no choice but to go to a supermarket for in the past, that they’ve only seen piled in a produce section — they tend to plant and grow something every season after that, even if they’re not gardeners by nature.  Because it’s so possible.  And so good.

Sometimes all someone needs is a handful of seeds and an encouraging word.  Every homegrown tomato is one that hasn’t been chemically raised and shipped and preserved and irradiated, that hasn’t been part of an industrial food system that devastates the environment and results in massive waste.

Yeah, you can save your seeds for coming seasons.  Some seeds last longer than others.  It all depends on how you store them.  But how frugal do you need to be?  Hundreds of seeds for $1.89, or so.

Didn’t your mother teach you to share?

R.I.P. Waltham Butternut, Pink Banana, and Table Queen Acorn Squash.

Powdery Mildew infects a variety of plants, but the cucurbits — the family of edibles that includes squash — are particularly susceptible.  The infection reduces yields, deforms fruit that does manage to ripen, affects flavor, and predisposes the host plant to other diseases.  Powdery Mildew is caused by any number of fungi in the order Erysiphales, but the most common for the cucurbits are S. fuliginea and E. cichoracearum.

The fungus is an aggressive sexual and a-sexual reproducer that is wind dispersed, hopping from leaf to leaf and plant to plant in the breeze.  Dry weather, as we have here in San Diego in abundance, helps the mildew get established.  It starts with the oldest plants first, working down from the crown leaves until the plant, stem and all, is dusted snow white with spores.  Infected leaves die, and the plant senesces prematurely.

Wetting plant leaves when watering can make them prime breeding grounds for this type of fungus — something that was nearly impossible to avoid with the raised beds I built.  Crowded plants make the transmission easier, and that is another quality of my garden: I packed the plants in and didn’t thin nearly enough for the space available, partially because I was so keyed up on producing something in the aftermath of my summer losses.  Also, raising my beds put my squash at the perfect height to catch the hot, dry winds that race off the canyon behind our property — the likely vehicle of the original spores.

Apparently the fungus can be wiped off, but this seems a dubious suggestion since the reproductive structures of this fungus are smaller than the eye can see, and my eyes don’t see that well anyway.  Most recommendations for treatment quickly turn to chemicals — at the same time that they note chemical treatment breeds resistant strains of fungus, in addition to secondary pollution of groundwater and humans.  When I originally researched Powdery Mildew, my plants had a mild infection and my reading led me to believe that established plants might not be adversely affected.  Further reading and my own experience has proven this to be … wishful thinking, at best.

My winter squash hang languidly from the planters, their leaves largely withered, browned and yellowed by a parasitic relationship with this fungus that is not mutually beneficial, as some pairings in nature tend to be.  The four butternut fruits stopped growing sometime ago, and the promising pink bananas have begun to wrinkle and wilt into themselves.

I think it’s quits for the winter squash I was so cocky about at the start of the fall planting.  This weekend I’ll cut them out and make room for the true cold season crops — the broccoli and the beets and the carrots — to get fat in roomier digs.