Greens with envy. And everything else

I embarked on this gardening project ready to learn. Boy, am I. I'm learning that the grocery store has given me a seriously skewed vision of produce. Take greens, for instance - the focus of today's post before I head to Raleigh to see Silversun Pickups. And if you don't know who that is, I'm not going to tell you. But you should know, if there's even the slightest sliver in there wanting to be cool.

Unlike many people, I like greens. Always have. So I planted four kinds in my two gardens: Kale, swiss chard (above), spinach and collards (I have lettuce in a planter on the back deck that I noticed has been stuck at about an inch tall since April. Might be time to move it out of the shade). Rumor has it you can also eat beet and radish greens, but I'm pretending that's not possible in light of the leafy inundation I'm currently under.

The good thing about greens is that unlike, say, radishes (bet you thought I could go a post without talking about radishes. You thought wrong), they produce constantly so you can enjoy them at your leisure. The bad news is that greens produce constantly so you'd damn well better enjoy them, at leisure or not.

Once that spinach got going, it GOT GOING. As did the kale and swiss chard. Four squares of greens is more than enough for two people, as I'm discovering, especially in light of two really key facts: If you don't continually harvest the leaves, they get big, tough and yucky tasting while also bossing all the other plants around them. And when you harvest the leaves, you have to eat them, preferably that day and certainly within two or three. I have no idea what chemical they use to keep greens viable for so long in the produce section, but without it the clock's a tickin'.

I'm cool with that, though. First of all, it keeps me on top of the garden and keeps me from wasting food, as I tend to do when I think I have weeks to eat those veggies I bought that often end up a foul-smelling goo in the bag. Plus, they just taste better this way. To that, I can now vouch personally.

Over the past two weeks, I've perfected crispy kale. I also did it with collards. Here's a link to the recipe, not that you need it. Just tear the leaves into manageable bites, toss them in olive oil, spread them on a baking sheet, bake at 350 for 15-20 minutes, salt and pepper, and chow down like they're potato chips. Seriously. You can't stop eating them.

Kale is also fantastic in stir fry. Kristy buys kits with all the spices in a little pouch (you know, to keep the landfills from getting lonely), but you could easily spice it up yourself however you like. The kale flavor just shines through, like it did for Woody when Frasier hypnotized him into liking "Veggie Boy." Here's a picture of pre-cooked, twice-washed kale. The discolorations on the leaves? Remnants of the flour-cayenne pepper mix I use to blow up the cabbage worms. More on that later.

I've also found a really good vegetarian recipe for the collards, used the swiss card ribs in a pasta dish and sauteed the swiss chard leaves with garlic and oil. Kristy is still baffled at my sudden interest in cooking, but it's quite motivating when it's your own food.

Here are a few more shots of the greens in questions:

The first multi-veggie harvest, radishes on the left and spinach on the right. Did I have to tell you that? Probably, if you don't know who Silversun Pickups are or haven't memorized the Cheers-Veggie Boy episode. This spinach ended up in a salad, as did as many of the radishes as we could stomach. A couple of days later we sat in the living room and ate the rest of the radishes with grim determination. Getting ripe simultaneously? Not one of the strong suits of radishes.

Kale, all oiled up and ready for baking. Geez, I hope I didn't just encourage Google to make this page appear on porn/drugs searches. Then again, what better way to increase page hits? Angry, disappointed page hits.

Chopped swiss chard, about to be sauteed.

Kale and collards at the start of my kale-collards crispy baking experiment. They tasted a lot the same. That's right, delicious.

Garden 2, in all of its crazy-growing glory. On the left is an accidental cucumber that appears to be on HGH. To its right, a cherry tomato with its first blooms. Towering over everything in the back is an accidental sunflower. I moved two others, but this was right in the middle and I just wanted to leave it. At the far right is the swiss chard square, and directly to its left is the spinach. The clustered growth at the top are blooms that I must snip if the plants are going to continue to grow edible leaves.

Collards. As I alluded to earlier, I've had the most trouble with collards because of those damn cabbage worms (see this post). The flour-cayenne pepper mix works, I think, but you have to apply it constantly. Also, turns our that flour doesn't rinse off in the rain. Quite the opposite, in fact: It forms some kind of horrific paste that eventually kills the leaves itself and is nearly impossible to remove before cooking. I've been encouraged to try Bt as well as well as DE, which I'm particularly excited about. How can you not be about something that shreds bugs with a microscopic powder made of fossilized water plants? Damn, we're clever.

I'll leave you, as usual, with a random shot of the yard. That azure flower is borage. That's right. I said azure, because this is a snooty herb we paid way too much for at an herb festival a couple of years ago so it can't possibly be just light blue. We had no idea how to eat it but we were of course wooed by its rarity and ridiculous price tag. Yes, I said a couple of years ago. That's why I was somewhat surprised to see it growing in a different part of the garden this spring. Turns out, this snooty herb spreads easily by seed (sort of like, gasp!, a weed). The flowers and leaves are used to spice up summer drinks (hello, gin-and-tonics with borage), and its presence is supposed to improve the flavor of tomatoes nearby. Guess what? There's a tomato nearby. Everything's coming up Millhouse.

Gardening is making me weird

Some of my organically grown radishes. That sounds pretty high-falootin' until you realize that it serves no purpose whatsoever to use chemicals on radishes.

Yesterday, I went - intentionally - to Dirty Jack's (where this beer is brewed) in Asheville to watch soccer, specifically the U.S. against England in the World Cup. As stunning as it was for the game; errr, match, to end in a tie, that unexpected turn of events paled in comparison to fact that I, a lifelong soccer mocker, was there.

Why would I do such a thing? Well, there are a myriad of potential explanations that I won't delve into because, you know, this is a gardening blog. But my erratic behavior can't be blamed on the chemicals in my garden. 'Cause I ain't usin' any.

It would be easy to deduce if you watch a lot of Fox news that my plants aren't drenched in the world's finest poisons simply because I've devolved into a soccer-lovin', cumbaya-singin' ideologue. Perhaps. I've tried, however, to justify this decision to myself more thoroughly.

When I moved into my house and found myself taking care of a yard for the first time, one of the first things I did was run out and buy one chemical to kill the bugs and another to kill the weeds (I also bought traditional lawn fertilizer, which I have also decided to eschew. More on that later). I was vaguely troubled by all the warnings to not let myself have any contact whatsoever with the strange-smelling stuff I was gleefully spraying and spreading everywhere, but that was how you were supposed to do it.

As the years went by, though, and my reading evolved past Sports Illustrated, I was no longer so gung-ho about raining death on the world around me. On a practical level, it was expensive. On a logical level, killing every single insect in order to get rid of a couple you don't like was an ignorant way, at best, to manage an ecosystem that I'm a part of whether I want to admit it or not. On a gut-feeling level, handling things that come in skull-and-crossbone adorned jugs seemed like something to be avoided. And on a moral level, I didn't like the idea of starving or even fatally poisoning higher animals on the food chain so one kind of grass could have a competitive advantage over another.

There had to be a better way, which there was. Guess what? My grass (and some other stuff) grows just fine fed by its own clippings and the occasional autumn overseeding, surviving even Boone and Chloe's relentless pee-bombing campaign. Fleas, ticks, roaches and ants have not left me pinned in the closet with a flashlight, a revolver and a nearly empty can of Raid. Oh yeah, I've also saved hundreds of dollars by weaning myself off of that entire aisle at Lowe's.

So naturally I brought this philosophy of living-in-instead-of-being-constantly-at-war-with-the-world-around-me to my garden - but not before I asked why. Why not use chemicals? Common consensus among environmental types is that pesticides will be bad for you if you eat the food on which they were used, but the truth is I haven't been able to find any hard science to back that up (here's a good link). A major caveat is that the population hasn't been exposed these poisons for very long, and there's a long list of things - generally man-made - that, surprise!, turned out to be bad for us after all. Still, the facts are the facts right now: Scientists say I won't die or even get sick if I use a few of their modern miracles to help my veggies grow. But you know what? I still don't want to. Part of it is the challenge, but the bigger motivation is that it goes against my world view.

Humans managed to feed themselves for hundreds of thousands of years without bullying and destroying everything else. All other animals do it every day still. Evidence continues to mount that at its current scale our new way ain't gonna work forever, maybe even not for long. "Traditional" farming destroys the soil. It eliminates genetic diversity, which has sort of been the key to survival for about a billion years. Even if pesticides aren't hurting me, they're hurting a lot of other living things through indiscriminate direct killing or tons - literally - of pollution, creating a cascading effect on the ecosystem that is felt by people and animals alike hundreds and even thousands of miles away.

That makes me feel icky, and I don't want to do it that way. So I won't.

On that note, I'll leave you with a fairly ironic picture of our cherry tree's first crop last month. Only four feet tall, it surprised us with about 25 berries. The irony arrives in the form of all of those cherries being eaten by birds before we could have even one. Isn't nature cute?

And so it begins

See that guy up there, on the end of my freakishly huge finger? That's what's known to people with too much time on their hands as Pieris rapae. To me, it's a cabbage worm. I would have taken a better picture, but this is the best I could do with my Samsung Reclaim (our camera's in the shop. Could have something to do with it being dropped while being, ahem, tossed to someone else on a BEACH in Carmel, Calif., but we won't name any names. Tanja). And, if at any point during this paragraph, you made a booger joke, grow up and congratulations - you're at the right gardening column.

Anyway, cabbage worms suck, and the term can be used for any number of little green caterpillars that devour just about anything in the cabbage family, which includes cabbage (duh), broccoli, cauliflower, kale and collard greens - all of which I'm growing and all of which are falling prey to this nasty little bastard (here's a better picture). I'm fairly certain that what I'm dealing with are "Imported Cabbageworms," because I've noticed dozens of those pretty little white butterflies landing on my crops. "Nature!" I whispered in awe to myself until I learned that their sole purpose in life is to lay eggs on the underside of the leaves, which then hatch (not the leaves, the eggs, all you English dorks out there) and produce larvae that live for THEIR sole purpose: To devour as much green stuff as possible before cocooning and starting the whole process over again.

Now, you'd think that I'd have an advantage. I'm almost as much smarter as I am bigger. I know what they look like (that dude up there? Ground into green goo seconds after the picture was taken). But it's disturbing how difficult it is to deal with single-minded focus. Those little monsters do nothing but eat. Nothing. How can I be expected to have that kind of dedication to them? I'm human. I have important, person stuff to deal with like DVR, Netflix, wine and the Braves. Next thing you know, I've taken a nap - and a plant is gone. To wit, a sad cauliflower seedling that has been munched to the stalk again and again:

So what to do? I've concluded I'm not giving up TV for 24-hour-a-day kale-leaf duty, but I don't want to use poisons (more on that later). So I tried this: Flour and cayenne pepper. Supposedly, the worms eat the flour and explode, while the pepper discourages other insects. I think that has worked, but either I'm not applying it often enough or it's not working well enough. Example of a healthy cauliflower that is also being chewed vigorously:

As a result, I'm about to turn to Bt, a bacteria that is worshiped by hippies for its natural ability to destroy insects. I've heard good things. I'll keep you posted.

This grim post aside, I've actually eaten more of my greens than the worms have, as I'll talk about tomorrow. Or the next day. Until then, I'll leave you with this over-ambitious nest-building by a wren in the rose garden. And Kristy painted that house. Pretty awesome, isn't it? Except for the fact that it's a bluebird house. Stupid birds.