Little Italy in the Sticks

Research at Indiana University in Bloomington, reported in the American Heart Association journal Circulation: Cardiovascular Quality and Outcomes, confirms what many foodies have believed for years – a Mediterranean-style diet is not only tastier, it is also healthier.

A diet characterized by low saturated fats and high consumption of fish, fruit, vegetables, legumes, nuts, olive oil, whole-grain cereals, and moderate alcohol consumption reduces the risk of developing heart disease.

An intensive study of identical and fraternal male twins, the key findings showed that the Mediterranean diet is strongly correlated to a higher heart rate variability (HRV), which is a key measure of the health of autonomic system control of heart function.

As luck would have it, many of the foods eaten throughout the Mediterranean region are relatively easy to grow in the Brazos Valley.  We don’t have anchovies or sardines locally, but we do have ready access to most of the same fruits and vegetables, beans, nuts, and olive oil as our counterparts from Gibraltar and points East.

We have even painted our little homestead in a Morrocan style, so as to heighten the similarities.  While culturally, Bryan/College Station often seems like the sociological equivalent of mayonnaise, there are plenty of reasons to think of it agriculturally as “Little Sicily”.  We at Myrtle’s place would like to play up some of these similarities in hopes that this meme is infectious.

For starters, if you can’t grow Mediterranean herbs in Brazos County, you are hopeless as a gardener.  We have six different kinds of basil, some of which is gone to seed and growing willy-nilly wherever it chooses.  Our rosemary is equally prolific, and provides year-round greenery everywhere it is planted.  Oregano, thyme, lavender, mint, coriander and chamomile round out the essential Old World herbs in our garden; everything necessary for the spices of Spain and Portugal, Morrocco and Algeria, Italy and Greece, Turkey and the Levant, they all grow here, though some require a little more care than others.  We would bore you with our English herbs, but they are, frankly, as boring as English food.

Fruit trees are a little trickier, but we still have plenty of variety to choose from.  Pomegranates will grow anywhere you could grow yaupon; since yaupon grows like a weed in almost all of South/East Texas, that means pomegranates can also grow like a weed around here.  Several species of plum tree do quite well here, and we have noticed some successful peach plantings around town, although we typically think of peaches as a Hill Country fruit.  Pears are not quite so successful, and apples, although they will grow here, are nowhere near as tasty as one would like.

Dwarf citrus specimens do extremely well here, too, although you really have to plant the dwarf variety and keep them in pots, because even though we don’t get below freezing on a regular basis, we do occasionally get well below freezing, making it absolutely essential to get citrus trees indoors.

Grapes perhaps demonstrate the greatest similarity between our climate and that of the mediterranean.  There are several species of wild grape in the Americas, and all of them are native Texas plants.  In addition, several domesticated varieties of wine grape do well here.  In fact, the Messina Hof winery produces some of the best wines, particularly dessert wines, that we have ever tasted.  It is no accident that the Texas Reds festival held in downtown Bryan every year is a fast-growing event.  Global warming is putting California wines on the endangered species list; this is certainly a shame, but it appears that California’s loss will be the Brazos Valley’s gain, because the area’s climate is hospitable to vintners already, and is likely to only become more so over the next several decades.

Most Mediterranean vintners would cringe at the suggestion, but we will be making wine with other berries, as well.  We have written before about our bounteous blackberries; this year, we will be adding raspberries to the mix.  Throw in honey from our own bees, and we will be producing organic wines soon with very, very few ingredients not produced on our own property.  It will be less Bordeaux and more paisan, of course, but we don’t really mind; it’s the peasants in the Mediterranean who cook the most interesting food, so we will be more than happy to drink the same wine, too.

As for vegetables, if it grows in Sicily, it will grow here.  The smaller varieties of tomato do best – Roma, cherry, grape.  You can grow bigger tomatoes if you so choose, but for spring plantings, the quality will not be quite what you desire, and the quantity will be exceedingly limited.  In the fall garden it is possible to get away with a little more ambition, because the limiting factor for tomatoes is the heat – they do not set fruit well when temperatures are over 90°.

Eggplant, squash, spinach, peppers, zucchini, cucumbers, these are the “low hanging fruit” of vegetable crops for Brazos Valley gardeners.  We also do melons quite well.  Again, if you can picture it being eaten by a large family on a beautiful rustic table set up on a terra cotta paved veranda overlooking an azure sea, and being washed down by a sweet red wine with anisette or lavender overtones, accompanied by fresh-baked bread and maybe a little goat cheese, then you can grow it in southeast Texas.

Olives, too, grow here.  At Myrtle’s place we were rather excited this year to get our olive trees in the ground; that puts us a good four years out from actual production, but that’s closer than we were this time last year.  Patience is a virtue, particularly when the payoff is so incredibly delicious.  For those who can’t wait that long, there are several olive groves in Texas which have started olive oil production, and the critical reviews thus far are stellar.  We suspect that this will soon become a staple crop for the state, limited only by the imaginations of potential growers.  Our own grove will probably top out somewhere around 12-15 trees, so we will not be considered “major” producers by any stretch, but that is more than enough to press our own oil and still have enough fruit left over for table servings.

The bad news in all of this Mediterranean-mania is that pigging out on foods drenched in alfredo sauces and smothered with shredded romano and chased by tiramisu, cheesecake, and pannetone continues to be unhealthy, regardless of any study praising other Mediterranean foods.

But if you’re going to have to exercise moderation, shouldn’t you couple that exercise with a touch of decadent taste?  Eating healthy, let us be frank, sucks.  Eating tasty, on the other hand, absolutely rocks, in spite of the fact that in the case of Mediterranean foods, it is also healthy.

Myrtle is willing to ignore the manipulative qualities of such word games if it means she gets fresh eggplant parmegian and a nice salad with a raspberry-pomegranate vinagrette followed by a plum parfait.

Agricoltura felice!

Hope Springs Eternal

It's the first day of Spring.  So why did the temperature fall to 38° last night?  And why, oh why, a week after we planted all our veggies, given that we had passed the average date of last frost by a full week, is it supposed to get down to 34° tonight?

We'll tell you why:  'cause that's the way the ball bounces.  Life is experienced in non-linear, fractal geometric fashion.  Things happen, then other things happen, and then something changes.  No observable cycle is any more circular than the Earth's orbit which, if we remember our 5th grade science at all, is actually elliptical, not circular.

So.  We've got plants in the ground, we're going to cover them at night, and hope for the best.

We've got other plants not yet in the ground because they weren't in stock -- most notably African Basil, which we have on order, and Goat's Rue, which should be coming any day now.

And, we have ordered an abundance of new trees from The Arbor Day Foundation, including a slew of new Loblolly Pines, White Pines, and Bald Cypresses.  The perimeter of Myrtle's place, particularly around the fish pond, needs to be more forested, and we want an abundance of pine-needles on hand to mulch the blackberries every year.

One unusual addition (unusual, at least, for us) is a Forsythia, which the Arbor Day folks threw in for free.  We don't usually go for ornamentals -- we planted some Raspberry Autumn Sage (Red Salvia, for those who may have heard it by another name), but that and our daughter's Morning Glories are the only inedible plants on the place (excepting a few of the trees, of course).

The Forsythia is an interesting case.  Free is always good, naturally, but in addition, it has this going for it:  it's a member of the Olive tree family:  As an Oleacea, it naturally comes near and dear to our hearts.  We only have four Arbequina Olives on the place, but we're hoping that now they will feel a little less lonely.

We're not yet sure what to make of the Forsythia's bright yellow flowers, but we're sure we'll adapt.

In other news, we have moved garden plots around, expanded some, contracted others, but mostly we've gone about the business of getting as much good chicken-poop compost as possible in the places it needs to go.  Two of our 6'x6' garden beds are dedicated to sweet corn, in addition to a new 4'x20' "S" shaped bed which we placed where the 2nd Olive bed is going to go next year.

Also, we replaced the chickens' plastic water feeder with a stainless steel variety.  It holds more water and, more importantly, is not a source of leached bromides.  Perhaps we are partly motivated by a sappy, syrupy-sweet fondness for our chickens, and we do not wish to poison them any more than any other member of our family.  But mostly, we just don't want getting bromides in our eggs.

For the next couple of days, keep your plants and maybe even yourselves warm, and...

Happy farming!

Gardening at Night, and Other Absurdities

Those of you who have been paying attention may have come to the conclusion by now that we're a little odd.

No denying it.  The proprietors of Big Myrtle's Tea Shoppe and Egg Emporium do not care much about conformity; the surest way to make us yawn is to talk about a master-planned neighborhood, where every home on the platte is painted the same color, and none of the houses is allowed to have trees or shrubs at unauthorized heights.

Which may go a long way to explaining why we're posting pictures of plants obviously taken at night, when the photographic capabilities of our cheap little digital camera are dwarfed by those of your average pinhole camera made by enthusiastic 3rd graders.  See, we planted our brand-spankin'-new olive trees at night.

Why?  Because that's when we bought them, and we were so excited, we couldn't wait 12 more hours before putting them in the ground.

We had assumed we were going to have to travel over 100 miles and pay much higher prices to purchase arbequina olive trees, and we were on the verge of despair because between gutting the lighting in the house, building a new bedroom for our daughter, and putting a new roof and new laying box on/in the chicken coop, funds for major improvements were beginning to run a little slim this spring, and we thought we may have to put off the olive tree purchase until next fall at the earliest.   Then, miracle of miracles, when we stopped at Farm Patch (a local produce stand which also sells garden plants), with the express purpose of buying african basil (much nicer plant than your standard "sweet" variety), we noticed a group of olive trees bunched in the corner.

We naturally bought them all.

So, our two big projects in the garden this year were pomegranates and olives.  We have now succeeded in installing the two plants in our garden which we have been expressly discouraged about by the priggish pessimists of the Brazos Valley gardening world.  And, more to the point, we have a solid plan, we're sure it will work, and we are executing the plan precisely.

If we can't get the western side of our yard to grow into a sicilian paradise using chicken-poop compost and rancid pond water, then it can't be done.

Tomorrow, we'll put in our traditional summer veggies and some more herbs, we'll weed, and we'll mulch.  But in the meanwhile, we have olives and pomegranates growing in our yard!

Happy farming!