Left Coast Cowboys

Yes, we are doing our part here on the Sonoma home front. Our enemy is insidious, all but invisible and skilled in taking advantage of our own resources to further his evil plans. Of course, I’m talking about non-Native plant invaders who are encroaching on our little piece of Sonoma paradise. But our defenses are marshalled. At the risk of a pun, I’ll add that we have a Plan. Yes, we are doing our share.

For those of you who have shown up a bit late, let me give you the lay of the land, as it were. When we purchased this land, it had been virtually undeveloped — except maybe for migrating Miwok Indians who used our seasonal creek as a highway (we’ve found their acorn grinding stones and arrowheads.) Some rusty barbed wire at the edge of the property showed that someone at some time pastured some cattle out here. But elderly locals all tell us this area was always “the back of beyond”. Younger Sonoma residents say this was where they came to drink, smoke pot and make out. The result is a forty acre patch of Sonoma that is almost entirely undisturbed. That means a wide variety of native vegetation and animals — even including a stand of 500 year old Redwood trees that, by all rights, probably shouldn’t even be this far from the coast, and an increasing population of threatened Tree Frogs, who have now grown in significant enough numbers to comprise a veritable Amphibian Mormon Tabernacle Choir.

Why We Fight: Checker Lily, Mission Bells or Fritillaria affinis

Why We Fight: Milk Maids or Cardamine californica.

Why We Fight: Indian Warriors or Pedicularis densiflora

Of course, we want to preserve it all. Seems easy. But it’s frightening how fast you can compromise a pristine environment, even if you think you are in preservation mode. First mistake, when the vineyard was put in three or four years ago, we allowed hay bales and straw “snakes” to be brought in for erosion control. Big mistake. Apparently, if you aren’t a careful buyer, these things can harbor all sorts of alien seeds and invasive plants that then take over. And they’ve started their march down the swales and water drainage areas. Apparently we should have specified rice bales, which are not native, but can’t possibly survive in Sonoma once the weather heats up. Next mistake, allowing mustard to be planted as a fallow season crop in the vineyards. Apparently, this plant multiplies faster than Aliens. We now need to plan our strategy for eradicating the mustard.

We're doing it for the critters. Although deer aren't endangered, they've got a clean, well-lighted place to graze here.

I should digress here for a John the Baptist Nature Lesson. Again, if you are showing up late, John the Baptist is our trails man, plant guru and freelance forest spirit. With his trusty lieutenants, Louis and Jesus, he speaks for the plants. Many readers of this blog have written, after reading about our efforts, to ask “Why do you make it sound like Natives are so weak they can’t survive as well as invasive species?” I put that question to John, and here’s his answer: “Natives exist in their landscape in a balance. They have enemies and predators and plants that keep them from overpopulating. Certain non-Natives have no native enemies and they just run wild, choking out all the Native plants.”

So we’ve brought out the Big Guns for the Armageddon of the Vineyards. This year is Blitzkreig. We’re even resorting to selective spraying of Round-Up to kill back some of the invasives that already have a foothold. The marketing information says that this particular formulation dissolves into inert ingredients in three months and doesn’t affect the groundwater. John says he doesn’t believe a thing Monsanto says. But, you’ll see the measure of desperation here. Unfortunately, this is John’s Guantanamo and he’s willing to sanction extreme measures to even the odds. Tell it to Dick Cheney, John!

John the Baptist and Jesus armed for chemical warfare on invasives.

Oscar does his bit with more natural herbicides.

Even shy Lucy Terrier got into the act by killing a gopher...which she promptly gave to her new boyfriend, Jesus.

After this year’s Shock and Awe, we’re hoping that we’ll only have about a 5% recurrance next year. With quick burning and pulling before germination, we should be able to reduce the non-natives in the year after next to about 1% ressurgance. And so it goes.

We're keeping Sonoma safe for Wavyleaf Ceanothus.

Neil Young told us that “Rust Never Sleeps”. Ditto for non-Natives. But we’re at the barricades and we won’t be stopped. With a British husband, it’s now appropriate to misquote Winston Churchill:

“We shall fight in the swales. We shall fight at the creekside. We shall fight in the vineyards. We will never surrender.”

A new project here is to photograph and catalog all the Native California and Sonoma wildflowers that are growing around our little slice of heaven. John the Baptist and Louis are leading the charge by bringing me examples of flowers they find in their trailbuilding work. For now,these bouquets will have to serve as my educational pieces as I’m finding it a lot easier to get good photographs in the wild than when the flowers are picked. I believe I’ve also made my position clear on using common names instead of the Latin. A California Native don’t need no steenkin’ Latin. (Sharp eyes might notice the yellow flower outside the vase that has been chewed and stomped by terriers. It’s one of our despised mustard plants. Decidedly NOT native.)

Here’s a selection of flowers I’ll be searching for this weekend to photograph in the wild:

The white showy flower is Star Lily. I'll give its Latin name since it's named after John C. Fremont, pioneer and relentless booster of California statehood: Zigadenus fremontii.

The orange flower is one of my personal favorites, Sticky Monkey Flower. The red brushy one is Indian Warrior.

Here's a beauty: Checker Lily or Mission Bells.

The name for this one seems to have gone right out of my head. According to my flower book, it looks like Blue Dick or Dichelostemma capitatum.

This poor orange guy is getting a bit crushed, but he's an Indian Paintbrush.

This weekend, we’re going on a Wildflower Safari.

The first tour will be along the banks of The World's Most Beautiful Drainage Ditch.

Addendum: Let me know, Informed Readers, if I’ve misidentified anything.

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.

Kermit the Frog had it right. It’s not easy being Green. It’s even harder being Native. Tell it to Sitting Bull. That doesn’t stop us from fighting the good fight here at Two Terrier Vineyards. We are blessed with a unique piece of land. Unique mostly because it was neglected for probably hundreds of years. While we have evidence — grinding stones and arrowheads — to proved that Miwok and other local Indians used this as thruway, it seems most later inhabitants left it alone. There is some ancient barbed wire on the outer perimeter of our land that would indicate the sometime presence of cattle, but the oldest Sonoma residents I’ve spoken with all say this particular plot was always “the back of beyond”. What is truly unique about our little 40 acres of Heaven is that it seems to be a bit of an ecological anomaly. We’re too far East for Giant Pacific Salamanders and too hot for Redwoods, but we seem to have both in abundance. John the Baptist was telling me that naturalists say the Giant Pacific Salamander is so reclusive that it’s a coup to find one after a week of searching. John and Louis have seen up to fifteen in a day in our creek. I’ve even found one at the exact moment that I actually had a camera handy with the right lens attached. I can’t tell you what a “blue moon” moment that is. So we must have a unique Giant Pacific Salamander refuge going on here.

A Pacific Giant Salamander caught swimming in our seasonal creek. Apparently, one of many.

A few of our Redwoods. Or perhaps Ents from Lord of the Rings.

Those Redwoods, of course, frequent visitors to this site will know are special treasures here. They shouldn’t actually be this far into the hot climes of Sonoma County. Yet here they are in a little gully leading to our seasonal creek. Several good stands of them that are estimated to be over 500 years old.

Which is what brings me to the subject of mustard. When you have a unique environment such as ours, you can’t imagine how hard it is to keep it pure. Our “landscaping” efforts (and the quotation marks around landscaping are meant to be completely ironic) have been confined to restoring native habitat. With a few notable misteps.

Here's the offending Mustard. (Terrier shown for scale.)

That would be the Mustard. It’s everywhere. It’s the look of off-season wine country. A plant that fixes nitrogen in fallow vineyards, then gets plowed in  as green manure. It was actually brought here by the Spanish Conquistadors in the 1500s. But it’s not Native.

And that makes it beneath contempt for our Native Storm Troopers, John the Baptist and Louis. Think of them as the Native Americans who took over Alcatraz in the late 60s.

I try to talk to them about the heritage of mustard in California Wine Country and they are having none of it. They are Ghost Dancers. Bring back the old ways. When I pass John and Louis on the property I can hear the hiss through clenched teeth: “Mustard. SSS. Damn. Mustard.” See, what we should have planted are Lupines. Apparently, they fix nitrogen just as efficiently. But they are Native. And Natives are as vulnerable as the Sioux were to Smallpox and Measles. You let those infected interlopers in and it’s all over.

Baby Lupines. John the Baptist and Louis say that's what I should have planted in the vineyards.

So it doesn’t matter how traditional Mustard has become. Your protestations that it’s pretty will never drown out the hissing of John and Louis, “Mustard! Damn Mustard!”

That means an emergency call to our Vineyard Manager. If there is anything that should be in ironic quotation marks, it’s Vineyard Manager. Disabuse yourself of any notion of an effete guy in a a beret. Our Vineyard Manager is named Clarence. He wears overalls and a cowboy hat. He’s a farmer. But he’s Old Skool Sonoma. And that means a guy who plants Mustard in the fallow season. So I’ve got to call him up and tell him Crazy Horse’s Love Children have told me that Mustard must die. Or at least be cut down and plowed under before it can seed.

I can imagine how Clarence is going to laugh at this one. It’s  going to be like the second war on the frontier. But my money’s on John and Louis.

I think we are looking at revisionist history here. This will be the stand-off where the Native Americans win.

Addendum: Don’t know a California Native from a hole in the ground? John the Baptist is recommending this book:

John and his wife, who know the author, swear by this book.

Best thing about it? It categorizes plants by something we amateurs can all get behind: color!

Why don't horticulturists realize that this is the easiest way for us amateurs to spot plants?

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.