Cool as Cucumbers

#232, August 27, 2008

What could be more fun for a pair of eight year old soccer-players than… McNear Park Community Garden! Yes!! Practice is over, and now the reward!!! Soccer Mom flashed the “whataya gonna do?” smile as she passed me, her two athletes racing into the maze of greenery like they were entering Disney’s Magic Kingdom.

I went right to our plot and grabbed a pair of Straight Eight cucumbers for gifts. “They love cucumbers,” said Mom. “Oooooo, cucumbers, wow!” said the girls. I invited them all to forage for more. Karen and I grow cucumbers, like our tomatoes, climbing in cylinders of concrete reinforcing wire. The vines were nearing the top, and those cukes sure can hide, but the girls stuck in their heads into the canopy and emerged with another pair. Día maravilloso!

Do you have a Victory Garden? I’ve been reading how, during the “Great War”, the “Greatest Generation” grew nearly half the nation’s food in backyard and community gardens. The great war of *our* time is stopping the war on our Earth, and there is no better single way than to eat local food, low on the food chain. It puts less greenhouse gas in the air, from the CO2 of the February Chilean tomato jets to the deadly methane of McDonald’s feedlot flatulence. It improves personal health (through nutrition and outdoor exercise), saves money, increases local economic vitality, fosters community, and, oh yes, tastes like food rather than packing material.

We are in a great time and place to learn about local food. For a mood-setting opener, listen to Greg Brown’s sumptuous voice singing “Slow Food” (from “In the Hills of California”) or “Canned Goods” from (“One Night.”) Take his advice and “taste a little of the summer”: with empty stomach, visit the Petaluma’s Wednesday eve or Saturday afternoon Farmers’ Markets, or browse the produce aisles of the Petaluma groceries that feature local foods. Buy. Then eat. As you begin your meal, close your eyes, relax your mind, and “chew grace.”

It’s back to school time, and not too late to plant a garden! This Saturday, 10:30AM at the Petaluma Library, the UC Master Gardeners present Steve Albert, gardening book author and creator of www.harvesttotable.com. Steve’s 2 hour talk is on “The Autumn and Winter Kitchen Garden”. You’ll learn how to, in Steve’s words, “organize a small garden close to the kitchen that will provide you with your favorite, fresh-picked-at-the-peak-of ripeness vegetables, small fruits and herbs.” Want hands-on education about urban food production while you help provide people in need with healthy tasty food? Contact the Petaluma Bounty Project. They support community gardens and the Bounty Farm (just east of the Police Station). Their “Bounty Hunters” glean otherwise-wasted food from local sources, and their Bounty Box program is a CSA weekly delivery subscription program rooted inside Petaluma’s city limits. Visit their website www.petalumabounty.org.

If you’re long on lawn and short on cropland, it’s not too late to sheet mulch your grass goodbye for a spring planting. If winter greens ain’t your thang, try cover cropping with fava beans, digging them under when the flowers start to show. Feed your soil and it will feed you! For you leek geeks, download my pest-free Excel spreadsheet to help you keep track of what you grow, at www.bruce-hagen.com/gardenjournal. I offer this as a seed for a multi-local gardening community, a foodatabase-driven portal where people share their learning – the good varieties, pest control and food preservation techniques, zucchini recipes – with others in their watershed/microclimate. For the staycationers, there’s this weekend’s Slow Food Nation event in San Francisco: “Celebrate, Learn and Act to build a food system that is sustainable, just, and delicious.”

Suggested reading? Try “Animal, Vegetable, Miracle” by Barbara Kingsolver, an inspiring chronicle of her year-long effort to eat local food.. and a clue to why those little girls considered cucumbers so cool. Gardens invite us to discover that food *is* a miracle. When it’s twilight and I reach way up into our “Howard’s Miracle” plum tree, pluck one of those huge sunset-colored fruits and take a juicysweet mouthful… Delicioso! Real food is*totally* cool.