Been a while, no?

I’ll make up for a little lost time with pictures.

I haven’t stopped going to the market every week. I have a column to write, after all.

And I do bring the camera along. Every week. I’ve lost track of how many shots I’ve taken in the past year, but you can get an idea here.

Yup. Those are the very first cherries of the season. Never QUITE the best. But gosh, after a winter of citrus-all-the-time, my heart makes them taste like plump, mid-May Rainiers.

See you at the market.

Tuscan Oliveto from Paul Bates on Vimeo.

Tuscan Oliveto, a short film by Paul Bates.

Ever wondered where your olive oil comes from? This film captures the process at a unique non -profit olive grove in Tuscany. In this day and age independent manufacturing is very rare and it was refreshing to see the care put into the process with the emphasis being on quality and not quantity.

Love the shot of the olives raining down from above. And the bright green of the new oil.

Sometimes you have to escape the urban for a little of the shmurban. Los Olivos is a two-hour drive outside of LA and is home to some fine Central California wineries and, as their name suggests, olive groves. We may or may not have plans to move here some day. As much as I love the rural surrounds, the bright night sky, roosters crowing, goats frolicking, fresh air, I’d miss…actually, not that much now that I think of it. Y’all can come visit.

Wine and olives aside, Los Olivos — and Santa Ynez and Solvang and Los Alamos — are a literal breath of fresh air and full of some of California’s most interesting historical tidbits. Many of the original land grant families still farm or ranch hundreds of acres of rolling hills and at Rancho Sisquoc, you can visit the gravesite of one of our California firsts, Benjamin Foxen, a sea captain born in Norwich England in 1796 and became a naturalized Mexican (known as Don Julian or Guillermo Domingo) in the mid-1800s. The Foxen family (who run a winery of same name) tells one story of his local importance while a local historian writes another that debunks it. Only Ben knows for sure.

We had a lovely time. Forecasted rain waited. Holiday crowds were going or gone. Time was slowed. We didn’t cram in a mess of stops on this visit (we’ll be back). We followed some advice, ate exceptionally well, drank some wine, tasted some oil, took pictures and communed with the locals. It’s a fun day trip though the drive back is always a little more tedious than the drive up. But you come back with lingering terroir. Sometimes on your shoes. Purple mud. Go figure.

This literally was a case of what’s old is new. Steve and I were doing a New Year’s Day walk when I spied a pine cone. The rest was a sticky trip toward happiness.

Despite our zip code and being within easy walking distance of the 110 freeway, we also have access to some very pretty urban wildlife areas along the Arroyo. Right next to a horse barn where chickens roam (and mate, and lay eggs, and crow…) freely, is the entrance to a dirt horse trail and hiking path through a lightly-managed woodland. I found the pine cone as we exited the oaks and sage and knew immediately its future purpose.

This is not Homesteading 101. This is not even Intro to Homesteading. This is much more K-5 and not even very productive. I had peanut butter. I had nuts and seeds. Voila. A recipe for wildlife and a way for me to drive my dear Royo cray cray bananas.

I will admit that after a year of my own cray cray, pulling out the kitchen twine and making this sticky bad boy was extremely satisfying. We have the ability to attract myriad wildlife here and we have a glorious mix of migratory birdlife and both grey mountain and brown squirrels. I leave plant seed heads up as long as my sense of esthetics and/or laziness allows. But right now, there’s nada. A little peanut butter with nuts and seeds is just the thing.

But mostly, it’s just reinserting myself into the small patch of outdoors that we have under our control. Sure, I also weeded, amended, and planted up the arbor garden for some last minute winter harvests (see above — broccoli and kale on the right, seeded peas and sugar snaps on the left). But it was this three step process within a few square feet of kitchen space that made me nod in satisfaction. Tie a string. Paint with peanut butter. Roll in seeds and nuts. Done. And now all I have to do is wait for Royo to start a vigil. I hung it within view of his usual desk perch by our office window. Hee.

I think 2012 will be The Year of Contrasts.

Spent the holiday with family out in the desert. The green you see above is just one patch from one of many golf courses that dot the stark landscape around Palm Springs. The rain clouds in the background were over LA, and Steve, who was still working, let me know it was a wet Christmas back home.  It made me think of the green hills to come.  It was a dry 2012.  Rain is a very good thing.

So in the desert, watching it rain a couple hundred miles away next to a presumably frequently watered golf course.

We visited the Salton Sea, an accidental body of water that illustrates how nature can upend human intent. On the day we visited, Christmas eve actually, it wasn’t the foul death trap (the Salton Sea is dying) it was rumored to be. There was a slight “off” aroma in the air, but it could have easily been a local farm working the field. Still, we crunched a million bones and shells underfoot — barnacles and the remains of tilapia and some birds — and found evidence of the decline of the environment everywhere we looked. Except for one beautiful surprise. The bird life. Within one patch of water that was maybe a couple of acres in size, we found over a dozen species of birds, from gigantic white pelicans with teradactyl-like wing spans to lean and graceful ibis to tiny chirpy plovers.

Steve got me a much-coveted Kilner jam pan (woo! marm for all!), a book on bitters (and cocktails!) and California olive history (this olive obsession has been a several months long obsession). I got him an N-scale train engine (not an obsession for him…yet) and a travel voucher for Amtrak (he loves trains).

This past week has been spent in reflection. 2012 was the kind of year that felt like someone else held the reins for the majority of the time. Someone with both a cruel sense of humor and a penchant for drama. It wasn’t all bad. In fact, there was a lot of glory in 2012 — Steve opened his first play at the Hollywood Fringe Festival, I got promoted, things were built, dishes were cleaned, etc. The scale just tipped an awful lot. It feels like I only recently grabbed the reins away from my deranged invisible pilot and I now have hopes for a more even keel 2013. Enough…

Stinging nettles from Flora Bella Farm

You’d think after writing the farmers market column every week for over three years that I would have run out of material by now. I’m happy to report, not by a long shot. This past week, I found yet another crop that I hadn’t covered yet — stinging nettles — that highlights the diversity our small farmers bring to our local markets and how our view of wild edibles has undergone a fundamental shift.

Giant agro-business tries so very hard to create a farm environment that grows nothing unless it grants permission. Large swaths of freshly turned soil stay remarkably barren for weeks until someone comes along to plant something. In contrast, small organic farmers often share their property with the local wild flora and fauna. It can be a costly relationship to maintain, but there are dividends. Several farms benefit from wild patches of chanterelle mushrooms (at $25/pound, quite the unintended gold mine) that pop up during the rainy season. And the stinging nettles above love our mild winters. Local restaurants use them to torture prep cooks and highlight their local/seasonal credentials, but one local grandmother clucked at me as she passed. “My family spent lean times picking that damn weed for food so we could survive. You couldn’t get me to eat it again for all the money in the world.”

Food for thought.

Me and Mint — goats were a big part of 2012. Thanks, Steve and Gloria.

The calendar is already filling up for 2013.  Slow Food LA will be growing and adapting to a new leadership team.  I’ll be teaching food preservation classes here at the house, some to other master food preservers to help keep our skills fresh, some to local 4-H kids looking to show at the LA fair.  And I’ll be one of the teachers at the 2nd annual Nocino Festival.  Tickets sell out really fast because it’s a fantastic event — cozy, raucous and highly informative.  I love being a part of it.  Hope you can join us.

I complain a lot about the dramatic twists and turns of this past year, but if I’m honest about it all, it was also the year I learned the most about myself and the people around me. The unexpected brings insight. So my wish for you is that 2013 brings you everything you ask for, and maybe a few extras, but never more than you can handle. I’m a big fan of personal growth, but I’m not a masochist. Happy New Year, friends. Be well.

When California was still the undisturbed home of the Chumash, Tongva and Yokuts, the local abundance of resources available to them cemented them as hunter-gatherers. Seeds like acorns were a dominant part of the diet and over thousands of years, they adapted to fit the local environment, their bodies finely tuning themselves to water scarcity and seasonal wild harvests. There were no oranges, no walnuts (actually I take that back, there is the endemic Juglans Californica, but that’s another post.), and no olives.

That changed with the arrival of the first Spanish and British explorers in the 16th century. And the Spanish, having already established a long string of church sanctuaries in South America, eventually worked their way up the coast to found the first California mission — San Diego de Acalá — in 1769. It was the first of 20 missions the Spanish would plant in California, and with them came Spanish agriculture and tastes.  Wheat for bread.  Cattle for dairy and meat. And pivotal, for both them and the future of California, the olive, which perhaps more than any other crop made them more self sufficient.  Thanks to the olive, they had lubricant, lamp oil, soap, medicine and of course, calorie and nutritive dense food.

San Diego de Acalá, along with being the first mission in California, was also the first to press its own olive oil. Cuttings from Spanish olive trees that had been established in Peru were propagated  in the late 1700′s, starting what would become a tree dynasty that would continue until today.

(Interesting coincidental side note:  Acala  (or Ācala, Achala अचल; Fudō-myōō (不動明王) – literally “immovable” one.) is one of fierce, angry-faced guardian deities of Vajrayana Buddhism, otherwise known as esoteric Buddhism and is particularly revered by Buddhists in Japan.)

After the missions were secularized in 1834, the olive groves of Acalá were left to run wild. Secularization meant the church’s many mission acres were no longer theirs and were subsequently distributed via land grants to  politically appropriate friends of the government, which a that time was Mexico.  In 1838, a mission inspector  would report visiting two olive orchards at Acalá, “one of 300 trees and another of 167 trees.” But mission agriculture was abandoned by the new landowners in favor of cattle ranching to satisfy a growing market for meat back east.  Only around the little Pueblo de los Angeles were a few intrepid farmers trying their hands at grapes and citrus (Jean Louis Vignes and William Wolfskill).  The old olive groves were either torn down or left to their own devices.  The groves at Acalá were left largely untouched during this time, except for a brief period where United States troops used Acalá as a military post during the U.S. Mexican War and almost, but not quite, decimated the orchard for firewood.

California became a state following the Bear Flag Rebellion in 1846, and few years later, gold was discovered.  An “irrational exuberance” for olive farming and its potential to make one wealthy was in part fueled by the go-west fever following the Gold Rush and citrus boom.  That fever brushed aside a few pivotal points — olive trees take almost seven years (not the one year some articles proclaimed) to establish themselves, are slow to fruit and need time to begin producing quality crops. When the olive-fever trees finally started bearing, their early crops were insipid, damaged further by farmers and processors who really had no idea what to do with them. In 1873, Frank Kimball, often called the father of the olive industry, would come back to those remaining Acalá “Madre trees” and use them as a cutting source to join California’s new olive boom.

Media enthusiasm, well-founded or not, continued unabated. Sunset Magazine, the west’s shining storyteller of the California dream, published an article in their November 1900 issue titled, “Gold Mines Atop the Ground,” which amazingly enough is available online via Google Books. The entire issue is a FASCINATING read, but if olives are your interest, scroll to page 97. One of the gems from that article was this sentence:

“That pale, greenish-yellow, limpid, sweet, inodorous liquid that runs from the first squeeze of the press in the oil mill is called “virgin” oil.”

One can practically imagine the pucker-lipped fluttering of a Victorian-era editor concerned about the implied sexual overtones. But then again, this is California. There are other mentions of purity, salad happiness, California’s dominant “empire of climate” and the shocking notion that we’d grow tired of oranges, surely, but never, ever of olives. Big words during those times, especially when in this same issue at the very front of the magazine is a full page advertorial taken out by the Riverside Chamber of Commerce titled, “The Greatest Orange Growing District on Earth.” Funny that the paid ad would spout more truth than the journalistic wanderings of A.L. Wells, but there you have it.

Olives did eventually boom. Kind of. At least not in the way various California agriculture enthusiasts of the time would have you believe. A major turning point would come from the city where the California olive was first established. C.M. Gifford, a former tugboat captain from the Great Lakes, went to San Diego in hopes of starting a citrus orchard. A taste of some locally pickled olives changed his mind and he eventually became known for driving a horse drawn carriage full of pickled olive barrels around his new city. An excerpt from The Journal of San Diego History states:

“From the first, Gifford experimented with new processing methods. He consulted with an agricultural scientist, Professor F. T. Bioletti of the University of California who, in 1899, had helped to perfect the process for canning olives. Gifford’s business changed dramatically in 1902 when he began packaging olives in tin cans. He won the first ever award for “canned pickled olives” from the San Diego Agricultural Association in 1902 and collected many subsequent prizes for his olive products. In 1906, it was reported that San Diego canneries had produced “not less than 120,000 cans of ripe olives” in the past year and that the industry was expected to double in San Diego County.”

And that was when olives started to become the cash crop so many people were banking on. In cans, California olives could be exported all over the country. And they were. By 1928, Gifford was the king of olives in California and a very rich man.

Today, you couldn’t get me to eat a “traditional” California canned olive if you paid me. European imports, once heavily scorned by the likes of A.L. Wells, have introduced a plethora of curing techniques that lack that tinny, metallic quality found in so many, once-hailed brands of olives. My one exception being Graber. Great history. Great facility (which I toured back in 2005). No tinny flavor but their brining method is very old school and ergo, lacks modern punch. Their olives are great quality for canned though, and I often adulterate them with a stronger, garlicky brine and seasoned oil.

Home curing and pressing is a simple, if long process. The giant Manzanillos fermenting on my countertop won’t be ready for at least another three months. So, I wait, diligently doing brine and water changes like clockwork.

One of the recipes I follow — brine-cured Sicilian style olives — comes from the University of California, which provides a very thorough and handy olive curing document online (the recipe is on page 7). It’s a favorite among the Master Food Preserver crowd and not a few of us have fermentation jars bubbling away right now, chock full of green, red and black olives. It’s the California way.

My LA Weekly piece on the California Mission olive may be read here.

I didn’t go out to various mission libraries or peruse the State Library up in Sacramento for info.  I’m just a rabid Internet hound when it comes to California agriculture and many people have very kindly made their academic publications, complete with miles of citations, available for free on the web.  I’d like to particularly thank the Giannini Foundation of Agricultural Economics for their essay, “A Stylized History of California Agriculture from 1769 to 2000,” Nancy Carol Carter for, “San Diego Olives: Origins of a California Industry,” and Sunset Magazine and Google for helping me see just how far the rabbit hole goes.  Seriously, Google Books is a resource of unsurpassed greatness.

I spent the morning at EVO Farm out in Mar Vista today.  David Rosenstein (founder, aquaponics guru, nice guy) stuck his hands into some seriously alive compost (“I can feel the dirt moving in my hand.”), posed for pictures, and made sure I left knowing why aquaponics was so incredibly important for an urban food system.  I’m now eyeing my backyard with dangerously uninformed eyes, but with dreams of backyard tilapia, high density vertical gardens and the sound of water bubbling through my own, mostly self-sustaining artificial ecosystem.

I’ve promised my editor at Edible Westside that I wouldn’t pre-publish anything pivotal.  So all you get is one shot and this short little piece of aquaponic teaser candy.  But the full article will be in the Winter 2012 issue, which comes out December 1st.

Ok.  Two shots.  The rest in December.  In the meantime, if you haven’t picked up the Fall 2012 issue (and read my big, beautiful and inspiring article about Backwards Beekeepers) you can now flip through it online.

Ok, three.  But that’s it.

Quince, a tart Asian cousin to apples and pears, is a fruit almost like Michelangelo’s women — knobby, with large, nearly muscular curves and sloping, feminine hills that cast interesting shadows across its gravid belly. A natural web of knitted cellulose gives quince its shape as well as its inedibility. At least while it’s raw, it is punishingly astringent and unpleasantly chewy, yielding nothing but a bitter pucker and confused customers. Quince’s rewards come only with time and heat.

Custom and culture make Californians (and really most Americans) fond of fresh and ready fruit over anything that requires prep. But cooking — the long slow kind — transforms quince’s white flesh into a beautifully pink fruit paste, heavily perfumed with elderflower, pear, vanilla and tropical fruit. For more on this, Emily Green beautifully details the processing of her homegrown “accidental” quince. And for where to find local varieties of quince, turn the page.

The method for preparing most quince fruit is perhaps the simplest demonstration of what our modern culture calls slow food. But time and attention yield incredible results. Hardly surprising then that one of the more flavorful heirloom varieties of quince — Meech’s Prolific — made Slow Food USA’s Ark of Taste.

Mike Cirone of See Canyon and Cirone Farms is the only California grower currently offering the Meech’s Prolific, but if you can’t make it to the Santa Monica Wednesday market — or Morro Bay, if you’re up for a farmers market road trip — you can find the more readily available pineapple quince from Mud Creek Ranch and Walker Farms. Mud Creek Ranch attends the following markets: Ojai (Sunday), Hollywood (Sunday), Santa Monica (Wednesday) and Santa Barbara (Saturday); and Walker Farms is at: Pasadena (Saturday) and Glendale (Thursday).

Here in L.A., the dark red squares of dulce de membrillo (Mexican quince candy) are pretty commonplace, their intensely sweet and floral fragrance adding a seasonal exclamation point to autumn festivities and apple pies. My personal favorite — a wedge of salty, creamy bleu with a bit of quince paste.

When ripe, its flesh turns from green to golden yellow and its fuzzy covering (similar to a peach) rubs off, revealing smooth, waxy skin that has an intoxicating perfumey scent. Most quince will come to market green. Let them ripen at room temperature. To keep them for a few weeks after they’ve ripened, wrap them separately in paper and refrigerate. Quinces are difficult to freeze fresh but they keep well once cooked and pureed, with or without sugar.

Quince contains enough natural pectin to to make your own homemade pectin. But with reliable commercial pectins on the market, why would you want to? In a word, organic. Most commercial pectins are made from non-organic fruits, primarily oranges, and there are currently no organic commercial pectins in the U.S. market (looking forward to updating this post someday). So if organic, pesticide-free pectin is important to you (it is to most of the people I know who grow and then preserve their own food), then you’ll want to look into making your own pectin. Quince is a fantastic pectin source, but you can also make pectin from apples, though you need more apples (about 1/3 more) to achieve the same strength of pectin that you get from quince.

Homemade Quince Pectin

1. For every pound of washed and sliced quince (leave the peels on), add 2 cups of water and combine in a large pot. One pound of fruit yields approximately 1/2 a cup of pectin.

2. Cover the pot and bring to a rolling boil then reduce heat and simmer for about 20 minutes. The fruit will be fork tender. Allow to cool.

3. Strain the quince mixture through a jelly bag or cheesecloth, hanging the bag over a bowl overnight (like you would when draining cheese).

4. Boil the strained juice in a pot over high heat until reduced by half. The pectin is usable immediately and will keep for about a week in the refrigerator. To process the hot pectin for canning, pour it into sterile pint jars (boiled for 10 minutes), leaving only a 1/4 inch of headspace, for five minutes in a boiling water canner. Homemade pectin also freezes well.

To determine the strength of the pectin stir two tablespoons of grain alcohol into one teaspoon of homemade pectin. Juices that are high in natural pectin will form a lot of bulky, gelatinous material. Those with average pectin content will form a few pieces of the jelly-like substance. Juices that are low in pectin content will form only small, flaky pieces of sediment. If the pectin test weak, continue to boil it down further. Do NOT incorporate the test batch back into your main batch of pectin. Toss it.

Generally, 2/3 cups liquid pectin will set four cups of most low-pectin fruit or juice.  So as an example, if you are making strawberry or blueberry jam use the 2/3:4 cups ratio. Quince is a pretty reliable pectin producer, but the strength of the pectin will still vary from batch to batch. The plus? With each batch used, you become a more expert food preserver, intimately understanding the chemistry of fruit preservation and yielding more consistent results each time. However if reliable consistency is more important to you, use commercial pectin. It’s a personal value judgement.

BALANCE NOTE: As a working professional, do I have time to make my own pectin? Not really. I’ve done it once and the results yielded a few batches of satisfying, but ultimately not consistent batches of jam. Some set beautifully. Some did not.  The did nots are still usable, just not County Fair material.

I LONG for a commercial organic pectin. But calls to many suppliers, wholesale and otherwise, have yielded bupkiss. In the end I’ve decided to use both commercial and homemade, depending on the situation.

Think of it like you would think about making your own chicken stock.  Homemade is a beautiful testament to your skills, altered to fit your own style and quality-controlled to yield the results you want.  But in a pinch, a carton of Kitchen Basics (the best store-bought stock available IMHO) will serve.  It’s  one more valuable skill to have in your pocket.

It has been a while since I’ve (we’ve) been able to spend more than just comment approval time on Urban Schmurban.  So, indulge me for a moment and allow me to summarize the hurricane that has been 2012.

In the early part of 2012, my boss and mentor, Linda, became very sick with a rare disease.  I’m going to talk about it here because awareness of it may save some lives down the road.  It’s called psuedomyoxma peritonei.  It’s diagnosed in 1 in 1,000,000 people each year and mostly women.  Treatment is highly invasive, risky and life changing even if you “recover”.  But that’s only if you are diagnosed early enough to be a candidate for treatment.  Most aren’t.  Linda was diagnosed via a fluke in a routine procedure.  She got lucky.  Or so we thought.

So around February/March, Linda was preparing for a second medical leave to undergo treatment and I was slowly stepping into her role at the office.  Then in April, something unprecedented happened at the office.  We created two new departments out of one and fundamentally reorganized a core part of how our agency serves the community (a quick Google search reveals all, but for quickness’ sake, I work for a local transit agency that provides bus service to over 14 million riders a year in the San Gabriel and Pomona valleys).  That change promoted my boss into a new role and left her former director position open.  I applied and was awarded the position in May, right before Linda went into surgery at City of Hope.

So most of May, June and July were spent adjusting to my new role, responsibilities and boss, working 10-12 hour days, and coming home exhausted but happy to be doing something new with my career.  A career, I’ll add, that I was struggling to reconcile with the allure and demands of my “other” life as a food educator, writer and photographer.  I still struggle, but now it has taken on another, more positive flavor.  I’m trying to find ways to merge the work I love in transit with the work I love in food.  It’s no longer a painful either/or situation and I’m finding myself coming to peace with a multi-faceted life of gifts.  I’m still writing, still teaching, and very soon I’ll be pouring a lot of energy into the Slow Food LA chapter.  Many big and wonderful things are yet to come.  But I don’t want to jump ahead.

Linda had a few serious complications early on after the surgery but she recovered and seemed to be making slow but steady progress.  She was at City of Hope for five weeks and then moved to a hospital closer to home to begin physical therapy that would hopefully allow her to go home.  Initially, she had anticipated that this treatment would only have her out of the office for two to three months.  Once we hit July, it was obvious that we’d be lucky to see her by Thanksgiving.  Accomplishments were measured by heart breaking metrics — how many minutes she could sit upright in a chair, how many minutes could she stand on her own, or could she eat solid food today.  Walking hadn’t quite come into the picture.  But on Sunday, July 22nd, we received a text from her husband Nick that was very positive.  She ate a full solid meal for the first time since her surgery and she was making progress in her therapy again.  The next day, I pulled my assistant aside and started making plans to work with IT to set up her computer so that she could remotely access files.  We both knew that if she was going to start feeling better, she’d want to jump back into work soon.  It was just her way.  I gathered together a few other coworkers to coordinate setting up her office for her (she moved out of her old one when she left and everything was in boxes) so that on the off chance she decided to come in on a weekend, she wouldn’t have to bend over or rifle through cardboard to find things.  We knew it’d be a while until that happened, but we wanted to be ready (she always was) and it felt to all of us like a turning point.

Within 48-hours of that text, Linda was gone.  An infection took hold and between a ravaged immune system and antibiotics that just wouldn’t work, she couldn’t fight it off.  She passed away on Tuesday, July 24th around 11:45PM, surrounded by her family.  I was told the next morning by my boss (her former boss), and together we started the long and painful process of informing the hundreds of colleagues she knew throughout our industry.  I wrote her obituary for our industry trade publications and threw myself into organizing a memorial service for her.

I had worked with Linda for nearly a decade.  I was in my 20′s when she recruited me.  I was in my 30′s when she promoted me.  And I was nearing 40 when I rose into her old position, the same summer that she died.  She had been with my agency for 17 years.  SEVENTEEN years.  I can’t even count the number of times in the past few months that I’ve wished for her sage advice or reassurance.  It happens every day.  It took her death for me to realize that the challenges we faced in our own working relationship were a part of her mentorship.  Good mentors don’t coddle.  They push.  They pull, drag if need be.  And I have been a stubborn little employee.  But that’s another post for another blog.

Trying to wrap my head around the fact that it is now October has been a little dizzying.  Things have been calming down a little.  Either that or I’m adjusting to my new normal.  Blazing summer heat has started to wane (Fingers crossed.  This is L.A. after all) and I’m starting to think about readdressing the homestead and jump start all those ambitious projects I listed when the year was new.  The garden is a non-garden.  I watered, but that’s all I could do.  The fall/winter garden will be better.  And things will begin to pick up here.  My sister, Ana, is facing not-a-few changes herself and will probably be stepping away from contributing.  So Urban Schmurban will change, too.  More on that in a later post.

Thanks for reading.  More to come.

As head of Hawaii Tropical Fruit Growers on the Big Island, Ken Love often gets asked to talk to folk about what he does and how to do what he does. This week, he’s in L.A. and I was invited to go a gathering of neighbors at the Hollywoodland Orchard to hear him talk about fruit trees – how to propagate them, how to feed them, how to trim them, and how to love them.

I think the original plan was to talk to us about how to prune citrus, specifically one particularly rambly lemon tree on the property. But we’re in mid fruit and flower right now — pruning now would “confuse” the happy tree — so he suggested we work on, “that poor loquat,” that was shading the ground behind him instead.

That “poor loquat” actually looked pretty spectacular to me — tall, big broad leaves, and lots of potential little loquats (those will be ready for harvest in May). Ken’s worked with loquats for over 30 years and some of that time was spent in Japan, where they’ve not only mastered the peculiar art of growing big and juicy loquats (a complete mystery to me up until now), but they’ve bred over 600 varieties of them.

I’ve never liked loquats. Or rather, I never liked the loquats from my tree. They have always been more seed than fruit and had all the sweetness of soaked paper towel. But it turns out that’s what you get when you don’t actually tend to your loquat tree. I can leave my navel orange and lemon trees alone and they’ll give me big juicy fruit each season. Do that with a loquat and you get what you give.

Who knew having all these little fruits on the tree was actually a bad thing? Proper pruning for big fleshy fruit dictates only the three base fruits of the crown remain. I spent part of my morning carefully clipping excess fruit bud off of my tree.

I also harvested some leaves. Ken blew my mind when he told me the leaves (which I needed to thin out anyway) would make a passable tea. Not only was it a nice way to achieve a homegrown cuppa, but the tea would allegedly help me with my lungs. I was diagnosed with adult-onset asthma about a decade ago and breathing in the colder months can sometimes be a bit of a chore, especially post-cold and cough. I had been growing and ignoring a potential medicinal helpmate this whole time?

Even after working for the Traditional Acupuncture Institute in Maryland, even after benefiting from acupuncture and various holistic herbal therapies, I am still an “alternative medicine” skeptic. I question its real efficacy all the time, and often wonder if it’s mostly my desire for it to actually work that manifests a result. Placebos anyone? This makes me a flawed test subject for things like checking how much better I feel after drinking my homegrown loquat tea.  As much as I question it, I am also, thankfully, curious.  After checking to make sure the tea wasn’t actually toxic or potentially harmful, I plowed forward, washing leaves in preparation for dehydration.

My worst chest congestion and breathing issues occur first thing in the morning, linking perfectly with my preferred tea time. Loquat tea is called Biwa-cha in Japan. A lil research, a lil testing, and voila, I had a sizable tin of dried leaf flakes ready for brewing. I set them aside and waited for sunrise.

How to prepare Biwa-cha and the results…tomorrow.