No rest for the weary

Today we finally took out our packet of seeds for March planting. Besides the annual herbs, such as dill and cilantro, we will start our annual flowers. With our mild spring weather, these seeds can go right in the ground. But we still like to start them in an outdoor nursery, where we can tend the seedlings during their first few weeks of delicate growth and then, when they are good and hardy, transplant them to their summer places.


As usual, we are planting more flowers than we need: 3 varieties of cosmos, 5 varieties of zinnias, 9 varieties of sunflowers, Mexican torch flowers, a mix of butterfly-favorites, and lots of marigolds to companion plant among the tomatoes. Also, we are planting 2 varieties of morning glories -- a weed, but a beautiful weed. And we are planting moonflowers. Do you know about moonflowers? They are morning glories of the evening. They bloom at dusk. Each flower pin-wheels open in beautiful slow motion, while releasing a heavenly scent.

And these are just the annuals. Don't forget the forget-me-nots. And don't forget the hollyhocks, the dahlias, the roses, the gladioli, the lilies, the lavender, ...

But really, can you ever have too many flowers?

When March is wet, seeds will sprout, we bet

Coming from Southern California, 10-week-old Tess was surprised, but not unpleasantly, by our March rain. She also told us that she really likes matching shoes and jackets--Bella's green ones and her own white ones.

The rain has been coaxing all of our recently planted seeds to sprout: second crops of spinach, lettuce, arugula, escarole, bok choi, green onions, and chives, and new crops of fennel, radishes, mint, and two kinds of beets--tri-color and golden beets (which even Rick will eat).

And of course, peas. This year, we went hog-wild with peas. We started with 36 feet of tomato trellises. (The tomatoes will go in after the peas come out.) With 1 vine every 2 inches on both sides of each trellis, that is 432 pea plants and a whole lotta peas. Not content with this, a few later, we put a row of bush-style peas between every pair of trellises, for a total of 180 pea plants and a whole lotta more peas. Still not content, a few weeks after that, we lined the edges of our dahlia boxes with double rows of short vines, for a total of 480 pea plants and a whole lotta more peas. (Actually, we seem to have left about 2 row feet bare... So make that 468 pea plants.) Those
plants are about 3 inches tall now.



Of course, we did not plant just one kind of peas. It's true that, with the exception of a few row feet, they are all shelling peas.
We just love shelling peas. We especially love the French petit pois, which are packed so snugly, shoulder-to-shoulder in their pods. But we also packed a few other varieties of shelling peas that come in earlier than the petit pois.

With our succession plantings, we figure we will have pea shelling parties every 2 weeks during April and May! Of course, we won't be able to eat all of these peas fresh. We'll freeze most of them for next winter. It is easy to freeze peas--just par-boil them and throw them in a freezer box or bag. And they will be wonderful!

There is another reason to fill empty areas of the winter garden with peas. They are nitrogen-fixing plants. That means that, instead of depleting the soil, as most vegetables do, peas actually improve the soil for the tomatoes and other vegetables that will follow them.

Oh, there is one other kind of peas we planted -- sweet peas. Flowers, that is. We put them in a nice new 6-inch tall box that Perry and Aaron planted along our picnic area. We hung a net down the center of the box so that in the spring we will have a wall of delicately scented sweet peas.

Pizza Mashup

Da Michele is reputed to make the world's best pizza. Determined to taste it, we walked out of the Naples train station last October and approached two polizia, asking, "E siguro camminare qui? (Is it safe to walk here?)" They reassured us, saying, "Si, si, e siguro. Momentito. Non portano gioielli? Non c'e problema. (Sure, it's safe. Wait a minute. You are not wearing jewelry, are you? No problem.)" Following their expressive hand gestures, we entered the maze of gritty streets and, after getting hopelessly lost, asked a shop keeper for Da Michele. Of course, everyone in Naples knows Da Michele and everyone is happy to point and suggest, "Camina un po e poi chiede un'altra persona. (Walk a little this way and then ask another person.)" After several rounds of this, we easily recognized Da Michele by the crowd of people, mostly locals, waiting outside the door. A kind woman advised us to go inside to get a number, which we did. Later, we passed on the same essential advice to a Japanese woman whose English was only slightly better than her Italian and whose husband spoke only Japanese. When she returned with her number, she asked us to pronounce it for her in Italian several times so that she would recognize it when it was called. Da Michele is famous indeed.

After waiting about 20 minutes, we squeezed inside to sit at one of the long tables that crowd two small dining rooms. The waiter gave us a choice of pizzas: margherita or marinara, regular or large. That was it. No sausage, no peppers, no nothing else. Needless to say, the pizza was splendid. However, we couldn't help but notice that the dough, delicious as it was, appeared to be made entirely of white flour. Bella, on the other hand, makes her dough entirely of semolina. That gives it more flavor, more body, and a beautiful golden color. Da Michele makes the best pizza in the world, but we like Bella's pizza better!

Following the masters at Da Michele, Bella makes two red sauces, a sweet sauce for pizza margherita and a spicy sauce for pizza marinara. Whether for pizza or
pasta, margherita or marinara, San Marzano tomatoes are the best for red sauce. That is what they use at Da Michele and that is what we use at home. We grow 10-20 San Marzano plants in our summer garden, producing hundreds of sweet, long, gently pear-shaped, densely-fleshed tomatoes. We grow enough San Marzanos to make fresh red sauces all summer, enough to puree and freeze in quart containers for winter, and and enough to make several quarts of "sun-dried" tomatoes in our dehydrator. (In fact, we already have dozens of San Marzano seedlings flourishing next to the windows in our garage. More on this later!) We also grow basil for our margherita pizzas and oregano for our marinara pizzas. Last week, we made a sausage and caramelized onion pizza, with marinara sauce from San Marzanos we grew, pureed, and froze last summer and fresh oregano from our winter garden.

Of course, not all of our pizzas have red sauce on them. In fact, the current family favorite is a four-cheese pizza. You can find many great "recipes" for the four cheeses. We got ours at a restaurant in Venice several years ago. It actually includes five cheeses: gorgonzola, fontina, ementhaler, mozzarella, and parmegiano.

After our visit to Da Michele, we decided that we wanted to eat a lot more pizza. So we started making double recipes of pizza dough and freezing a few one-pizza balls for future use. We can take out one to make an hors-d'oevre or first course for dinner. We can take out five or six to make a variety of pizzas--margherita, sausage, peppers, anchovies, olives, eggplant--for movie night in the family room.

Recently, we've been feeling more inventive. For example, Bella fondly remembered the "clams casino" she used to enjoy at the Jersey shore and thought it might be fun to make a clams casino / pizza mashup--her all-semolina dough, marinara sauce with frozen San Marzano puree from our summer garden, barely steamed fresh clams, chopped garlic and pancetta, and fresh oregano from our winter garden. Mmmm. Deliziosa!

Stroke those tomato seedlings

While nurturing our tomato seedlings in their nursery in the garage, we try to simulate natural growing conditions as much as possible. Daytime sunlight, nighttime warmth, and regular watering are the obvious requirements. But we recently learned that tomato seedlings also benefit from al fresco breezes ruffling their leaves and bending their stems. Apparently, this "exercises" them and makes them grow stronger. To simulate natural breezes, we gently stroke our seedlings 3-5 times a day, whenever we pass through the nursery. They seem to like it!

Daffodils are signs of spring

I wander'd lonely as a cloud

That floats on high o'er vales and hills,

When all at once I saw a crowd,

A host of golden daffodils,

Beside the lake, beneath the trees, Fluttering and dancing in the breeze. -- First stanza of "The Daffodils" by William Wordsworth

In the Bay Area, paper-white daffodils appear in December. That's right. On the shortest, coldest, wettest, darkest days of the year, when everyone in our house gets just a little bit cranky, daffodils appear in the garden to reassure us that the light will come again. This is cause for celebration. We pluck the perky flowers as soon as they appear and bring them into the house, where the warmth calls forth their heavenly scent.

Since you can never have too many daffodils, we planted a few hundred bulbs on a small hill (very small) in our garden, beneath an arcade of ancient California live oak trees. That's our "daffodil hill." The oaks allow filtered light all summer, just what the braided leaves of our spent daffodil plants need in order to put away food for next year's flowers.

We planted several varieties of daffodils -- early, mid, and late-blooming. When the paper-whites finish in early January, the next-blooming variety is just starting to blossom. So it continues through February and March.

We planted each daffodil variety in several clusters of 3-5 bulbs and spaced the clusters 2-3 feet apart. The bulbs "naturalize," multiplying each year and filling in the gaps between the clusters to form great swaths of color and texture across our daffodil hill. As the great English gardener Gertrude Jekyll advised, our daffodils "look happy and at home, and make no parade of conscious effort".

Wordsworth's "host of golden daffodils" no doubt refers to the iconic King Alfred daffodil, familiar to all for its huge golden trumpet and great surrounding collar of petals. Somehow, we neglected to include King Alfred on our daffodil hill. We have many colors of flowers -- yellow, white, orange, even pink. We have large and small, plain and ruffled flowers. But no King Alfred. Perhaps next Fall, when we add a new variety or two, King Alfred will be among them.

Spinach: the crop that keeps on giving

As we leave February behind and begin March, we thought it appropriate to have a nice dinner of spring lamb chops with a fresh mint/parsley chimichurri, and spinach cooked slowly and briefly with olive oil, garlic, and salt.

The spinach in the garden, planted last September to be ready in time for the traditional spinach gnocchi at Thanksgiving, is still growing and yielding! Here Tess (now 10 weeks old) is "helping" to harvest some spinach for dinner. We just cut off the largest and mature leaves, as many as we need, and keep the plants in place to keep producing...as we have done all fall and winter so far.

In the kitchen, we made some spaghetti carbonara (using guanciale and pecorino, of course), to savor as a first course. Then we moved on to the lamb chops and spinach, shown here. It was a wonderful dinner, and we look forward to many more meals made with garden parsley, mint, and spinach. And, although we now have our border collie Tess to herd sheep, we doubt that we'll be growing our own lamb chops anytime soon!