Oh, and Angel Heart.
This week, Kathy had her first overnight business trip of her new gig, and that’s when I fire up a Trader Joe’s frozen pizza and dip into my DVD stash of guilty pleasures that I can watch again and again. Can’t believe that, back to back, I again watched “The Last of Sheila” (written by Stephen Sondheim and Anthony Perkins, no less!) and the 1972 eco-themed grindhouse horror cheapie “Frogs” starring a slumming Academy Award-winner Ray Milland. Brilliant! As one used to say, back in my stand-up comedy days, “It’s great to be here in your fine city of [looks inside suit jacket] Harris Tweed.”
But with my act, it was great to be anywhere.
Hey, we’ve written previously about CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) and I kicked off this post with Cinema that Shoulda Atrophied, but wanted to hip y’all to the progress of our garden here at the Oakley ranch. Last November, we hired a designer to dream up a drought-resistant yard to replace our weed-infested water guzzler. She hooked us up with a great installation dude, and five months in, even with the miracle of drip irrigation vs. pop-up video/sprinklers, the joint is filling in wonderfully! Truth be told, I think our cool neighbor Syed has permanently adjusted his pop-up sprinklers to water our lawn while watering his own, knowing how much trouble we had with our veggies in front last year.
2010 was our first full growing season in the house, and we were so excited about the abundant sun and 100-degree days; the citrus and fig trees that we put in the ground autumn 2009 were surely going to thrive. Wrong. By July of 2010, the trees were scorched and the raised beds in the front yielded stunted or nonexistent fruit and vegetables. A disaster.
This year, our garden design places all the raised beds in the backyard (where we had some success with more tempered sun exposure), and I’ve topped up to almost-overflowing each bed with a grow mix delivered from a local nursery. Kath has been in full-metal raised-bed-garden mode since last weekend, arriving from Orchard Supply Hardware or Navlet's with a hatchback full of seedlings or seeds to put into the beds.
With all of the beds amalgamated in the backyard this year, Kath has been able to refine her bed design, begun last year utilizing the book “One Magic Square” by Lolo Houbein. It’s a cool read: The idea is to instruct one how to grow organic, seasonal themed plots in small spaces. So, a few weeks ago, I heard Kathy up at the computer, printer buzzing away, and saw that she had input her chosen designs, suggested by the book, for our seven beds, all newly reacquainted in the backyard.
She has a Berry plot: a couple of different varieties of blueberry and raspberry canes with strawberries in the center. Another bed is her Pasta/Pizza plot, with red onions, arugula, eggplant, bell peppers, chilies, chives, basil and bush tomatoes, with onions center-stage. A couple of different Salad plots: six lettuces, bush beans, green onions, radishes and cherry tomatoes in one; endive, mizuna, garlic and three lettuces in the other. Then it gets funk-ay: the Stir-fry plot features broccoli rabe, sugar snap peas on a trellis, carrots and red mustard, with marigolds in the center. And the Aztec plot highlights pumpkin, sweet corn and climbing beans.
As noted, this was Kathy’s raised bed garden bible last year, but our unfamiliarity with Oakley’s heat, sun and the garden’s water requirements have given us a do-over in 2011. Our new landscape design puts all of our beds in one location with proximity to each other, and they’re all topped up with fertile grow mix. We’re seeing lots of honeybees, and not many earwigs (which devoured so much, overnight, last year).
There, but for the grace of denim overalls, go I.
Well, we’re down to the last bottle from the CoCo wine stash that Kathy assembled early on in the days of this blog. We pulled its cork today to taste the 2008 vintage of Turley Zinfandel Duarte. The Duarte plot is on Laurel a few blocks from the house here, and is also known as Jesse’s Vineyard, a designation that appears on Rosenblum bottlings in salute to the father of vineyard manager Dwight Meadows. Years ago, Joe Duarte sold it to a housing developer, and Dwight manages the acreage for these new owners, at least until the housing market rebounds. The Turley 2008 Duarte Zinfandel is a real spectrum of translucent blues, blacks and plum purples in the glass. The nose reveals Port-like whiffs of dried currant and stone-fruit richness. The wine coats the tongue with nice viscosity, a slight alcohol burn, bright acid and dried blueberry notes on a deceptively lengthy finish.
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