Left Coast Cowboys

Photo by Flickrite Kelly Sue DeConnick

If you are familiar with this San Francisco favorite, you know there is no definitive recipe other than starting with the catch of the day — whatever that may be. And tomatoes. Then you could add sausage. Or not. And serve it on rice. Or spaghetti. Or as a soup. In other words, Cioppino is a grab-bag, just like this post. I’m hoping, if I throw in all the bits and pieces, nuggets and chunks I’ve been collecting over the past few days, it will all turn out beautiful and tasty. We’ll see.

First up: I’m having a blast with the Wine Country Wildflowers field guide I told you about in yesterday’s post. That’s the one that wisely categorizes things by color. I see a blue flower and I just flip to the blue chapter and scan through the glossy pictures until I find a match. The book also wisely puts the common name in big bold letters and the Latin names in little subordinate italics. Don’t get me wrong, I love Latin. Took years of it. But it just seems to take the fun out of flowers. Say I told you I had some nice stands of Liliacae, Mimmulus guttatus and Cynoglossum grande. You might yawn. If I told you they were Diogenes Lantern, Sticky Monkey Flower and Hound’s Tongue. Well, now you’ve got the picture.

Behold the Hound's Tongue. Named, I'm assuming, for the leaves.

See the resemblance?

Yes, I’m forming a Chapter of The Campaign for Real Plant Names. And I’m appointing myself President. Consider Henderson’s Shooting Star. I don’t know who Henderson is, but I love his flower. Apparently so did California Natives. They roasted the leaves and roots for dinner.

My wildflower book calls this "a perky little charmer". Its other name is just as descriptive: Mosquito Bills.

Thus ends the teaching portion of our program and we move to the question period. Where I ask the questions and, hopefully, you give me answers. You’ve probably guessed that the topic is going to be my misadventures with vegetables. So Question One: how do you tell when carrots are ready for harvest? Do I dig them up to check? If they aren’t ready, do I replant them? How do carrots feel about this?

I uncovered a little bit just for a peek. They aren't very orange. Not ready?

Similar question with Fava Beans, which I’m growing, not for beans, but as a nitrogen fixer and green manure. All my gardening books say they’ve “fixed” when the nodules on the roots turn pink. So, I pulled one up. Not ready.

I quickly replanted it, but I think my Fava will like this as little as the carrot did. There must be a better way.

Next question: how does anyone grow bulbs outdoors? Mine are dug up and chomped down by varmints as soon as I put them in the ground. That’s with a fenced raised bed covered with netting. And two terriers on patrol.

The remains of the feast.

Okay, bored with showing my ignorance. How about a quick check of this week’s highlights at Two Terrier Vineyards?

John the Baptist found the tracks of a Bobcat and a baby Bobcat. So I guess Bob the Bobcat will have to be rechristened Roberta. I rushed to take a picture of the track, but two terriers stomped all over the site before I could focus.

Cats walk with retracted claws. So I think this is the right print. It was the only one without toenail marks.

The Barn Swallows are getting set to build nests in the eaves of the barn. One little bird dude decided there was an evil interloper living in my wing mirrors.

I had to park 100 yards away before this little guy decided we were out of his personal space.

On a culinary note, I finally tried the American Bison meat that Sonoma Market has been pushing. Yeah, yeah, lower cholesterol, less fat. But what got me to buy was their great new slogan. And I’m always a sucker for a good tagline.

Buffalo: The Meat Americans were meant to eat.

The verdict: delicious! Especially when served with Sonoma produce (obviously not my own.)

So that’s it. Everything’s in the pot and hopefully coalesced into some sort of post.

Now be vewy, vewy quiet. We're hunting varmints.

I’ve decided Michael Pollan is the most interesting man in America today. He’s the man who’s making us take a closer look at our place in the food chain. If you haven’t read his two most famous books, In Defense of Food and The Omnivore’s Dilemma, you may have seen him in the documentary Food, Inc. That’s the polemic against big agribusiness that had Sonoma near revolution this summer.

I haven’t read his earlier work, The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s-Eye View of the World. Now I don’t have to. Because I’ve just seen the excellent documentary version of it. And I think Michael Pollan is even more thought provoking to see and hear than he is to read (and he’s a pretty good read.) In short, The Botany of Desire looks at the world from the viewpoint of plants, specifically four very successful plants: apples, tulips, Marijuana and potatoes. The conceit is to examine the symbiotic relationship between these plants and humans. But consider that relationship as you would the symbiosis between, say shark and lamprey. Each animal is an active participant in the exchange, each giving and taking to make the symbiosis mutually beneficial. So the premise is: think about what these four plants have ACTIVELY done to force us to nurture and spread them. For instance, consider the apple. It was a bitter fruit growing wild in a small area of Kazakhstan. What did the apple do, in its own evolution, to become so attractive to humans that we spread it across the globe to become, arguably, the most successful, widespread and popular fruit in the world? And how about Marijuana? It has evolved to mimic a human brain chemical that is linked with blissful, relaxing forgetting. Something so attractive to us that we’ve made it a rival for the apple as world’s most successful plant. It’s a fascinating point of view, backed up with lots of science and some spectacular cinematography. Along the way, Pollan also makes us think about how we change ecologies and the destiny of plants by our choices.

X-treme Symbiosis. Somehow our plants have convinced me to turn John the Baptist loose with a flamethrower on their invasive non-native enemies. Die, Star Thistle, Die!

I bring this all up by way of saying I certainly know Pollan’s theories well. I’ve been workin’ for the plant since I got to Sonoma. With a few blunders along the way (we’ll gloss over that mustard we mistakenly planted in the vineyard) most of our “landscaping” has been weeding out invasive non-native plants to let our native species reestablish themselves. In fact, at this point, our plants have a whole crew working for them, including me and John the Baptist. I haven’t yet determined when their end of the symbiotic relationship kicks in. We do have Miner’s Lettuce coming up, which is edible, and millions of mushrooms, which are probably not. All I probably should ask, as in Pollan’s case of the tulip, is that they provide beauty. However, the many pest eating birds and insects they seem to be attracting are worth their weight in the Monsanto chemicals we don’t need to buy. From vineyard to vegetable garden, we haven’t had a pest to contend with and no significant loss of any part of any crop.

Flocks of swallows patrol our vineyards providing effective, chemical-free pest control.

In a show of symbiotic support, the land is providing me with Vitamin C-packed Miners Lettuce.

Well, that’s not exactly true. While my plants are working hard for the money, certain critters seem to be taking more than fair advantage of this symbiosis we’re supposed to be having here. Any bulbs or large seeds I plant are dug up and chomped down overnight. I’m blaming some ground squirrels and foxes I’ve seen lurking around the vegetable patch. I’m a little bitter about the foxes, especially since we’ve thrown more than a few culled grape clusters on the ground for them. It’s not really fair for them to go after my melons and cucumbers as dessert. If I only had evidence that the foxes were cleaning out some of the ground squirrels, I’d happily set aside melons for them. But, no, the foxes don’t seem to be holding up their end of our symbiosis.

So I’ve called in reinforcements.

Meet Hudson Hawk...

and his wife, Kitty, AKA The Redtailed Avengers.

They can eat their weight in garden varmints every day. Now that’s the symbiosis Michael Pollan and I are talkin’ about!

End note: Check out the website for the documentary here. Then put this one in your Netflix queue immediately.

I’m thinking a lot about chickens these days. Something about oncoming Spring in Sonoma makes me get a little more serious about my final vision for Two Terrier Vineyards. I guess it’s that the hard work of winemaking is far enough behind me that I suddenly feel braver (or more foolish) about contemplating yet more farm chores. And I’ve always kind of liked chickens. Not that I’ve had much experience with them, other than from the meat counter. But, to misquote Isak Dineson, “a chicken is something that gets hold of you.”

I think I have a vague rationalization brewing about fresh eggs. But let’s be honest, these chickens will probably end up as pets. Oh, I’ll happily take all the eggs they can give me. But I’m not going to tie myself in knots and stress them out adjusting “false daylight” in their chicken coops to force them into winter laying. You’re surprised I know about that trick?

Well, my friends, we've been doing our research here.

And our research has led us to exactly the chicken we want, the Dominique or Dominicker. That would be the proud beauty whose picture leads this post. The Dominique is the oldest American breed of chicken, one that is seriously endangered as it is not, nor has ever been, a favorite of Frank Perdue and his battery farming ilk. Why? Because the Dominique is that old style of bird your great grandmother probably kept. Since your great grandmother had her hands filled with chores, she preferred a chicken that could find its own food, fend off its own predators, take care of itself and provide her with meat and eggs. In technical terms, the result was a dual purpose bird — but one Frank Perdue would find too slow to pack on weight and not inclined to pump out eggs at the accelerated rate he prefers. In less technical terms, you get a big, beautiful, bodacious lady who can hold her own in any situation. Is it any wonder I’m already toying with the idea of an Oprah and a Queen Latifah when I get around to naming my flock?

That would be the flock that I don’t yet have. There is a load of work to do before I get it. And unless I find a particularly eager 4-Her who wants to work for merit badges, my flock may have to wait until I live in Sonoma full-time instead of being a part-time and harvest-time commuting farmer.

But that doesn’t keep me from planning. I go to my favorite Sonoma winery, Benziger Family Winery, and somehow never get to the tasting room. I’m stopped in my tracks by their gorgeous chicken house and pen.

This is one nice piece of chicken real estate!

And it's filled with heritage breeds. Even a Dominique.

Yes, my chickens are going to have a veritable chicken palace. But they won’t be homebodies. No, my chickens are going to run free during the day through the vineyards. They’ll work beside me eating pesky bugs. (I mean they’ll eat the bugs, I’ll work the vineyards.) They’ll tag team me in the garden between plantings cleaning out pests and turning over the soil. They’ll be so big and sassy no Red Tailed Hawk — or terrier, for that matter — will mess with them. I see a rooster named Foghorn Leghorn in my future. Two Terrier Vineyards will be a veritable Chicken Utopia where man, terrier and chickens are friends.

Anyone with experience with chickens, don’t disabuse me of my notions. Before the hard work of chicken raising reveals itself, I’d like to experience this Dreamtime. So I’ll quote Oscar Wilde, who is eminently quotable but, more appropriately, probably had as little experience with chickens as I have:

“People who count their chickens before they are hatched, act very wisely, because chickens run about so absurdly that it is impossible to count them accurately.”

Thanks, Oscar, I’ll probably name a chicken after you.

Long-time readers were probably wondering when I’d get back to the farm. Well, after nearly six months tending the grapes, harvesting and terrier wrangling (mostly on my own), I was thrilled to get back to San Francisco, where we officially live. With the wine all fermented and snugly sleeping in barrels, there isn’t much to do up in Sonoma. It’s what Judy Collins once musically called, “The Fallow Time”.

But in reality, even when you are doing George Bush ranching (defined as having no livestock but terriers), there’s always something to do. So we went back up to Two Terrier Vineyards to putter around and see how things are going.

First, everything is greening up after some rain, but not as much as we would like or are used to this time of year. However the low-hanging fog in the morning drops a surprising amount of moisture on the ground. Puts me in mind of an old nursery rhyme:

One misty, moisty morning when cloudy was the weather...

I chanced to meet an old man all dressed in...flame-retardant synthetic fabric.

Apparently, we don’t have enough irons in the fire and Andy has decided he has to take up go-cart racing down at the local NASCAR track. He says it’s perfectly safe. I say: any “sport” that requires a rib protector, a helmet and a flame-retardant suit is, at the least, questionable.

Meanwhile, back at the ranch…

The vineyards have been sown with mustard to put nitrogen back in the soil.

I love how the mustard comes up in little combed rows. It should burst out into yellow bloom any day now. By the way, I caught hell for this from John the Baptist, our native plants guy and trail builder. Seems he doesn’t consider mustard native — even though the Spanish are credited with bringing it over in the 1500s. And it’s somewhat invasive. Next year, on his advice, we’ll be planting fava beans for our nitrogen fixing. They aren’t native, but they aren’t invasive. Better yet, John says to plant lupines. Then when everyone else has mustard yellow vineyards, ours will be purple.

By the way, John saw our resident mountain lion, who I’ve named Joaquin, but who John insists is female. Apparently, she was sitting serenely on a rock overhang above our favorite hiking trail. Only forest spirit, John the Baptist, could sneak up on a mountain lion. Me, I think I’ll give that trail a miss for awhile.

The next big maintenance job is to prune back all our vines. We're just waiting for complete dormancy. Which is right about now.

The story isn’t so good at my raised bed garden.

Three carrots seem to have sprouted.

And no fava beans. Despite the netting, I saw signs of varmint activity.

Git along, little doggies. Git on varmint patrol.

That is, you can chase varmints anywhere but down a drain. Luckily, John has "Oscar-proofed" them all after an unfortunate stuck terrier incident.

And that's the State of the Farm, January 2010

It seems as if it’s been a long harvest season, but it finally looks to be drawing to a close. Tomorrow we press our Cabernet and transfer it from vats to steel tanks. Once there, they’ll need no more attention from me except on weekends. I can go back to the Big City. Which is looking very attractive now that it is getting very cold. Yesterday, it was still 46 degrees at 10AM, so I’m assuming it must have been near freezing overnight. With a woodstove the only source of heat in the barn, cold weather takes a bit of the charm off the place. I’ve been waking up at 3AM to stoke the fire for morning. Luckily, I’ve remembered to bring enough wood in every night. I’d hate to walk the quarter of a mile to the woodpile now that we’re having more frequent coyote sightings.

Still, even in the cold and the isolation, Sonoma still has it’s charms off-season. Here are the vineyards, stripped of their grapes, leaves turning and heading into a graceful dormancy.

The rows between the grapes are already rototilled and planted with mustard waiting for spring. Which around here is February.