This week we brought our fingerling sweet potatoes up from the basement where they’d been curing after this fall’s harvest.  Unfortunately our basement wasn’t as cool as we’d thought, so they were a little soft.  Next year we’ll need to keep them under the fan.

This hasn’t  make our little babies any less tasty, though—they  are delicious–but it does mean  we  need to eat them up in a short amount of time.  Of course, I’ve been binging on them from the moment I brought them up from the basement.  It’s been a few days now, and my skin now has a nice, orange glow.

A couple of nights ago while peeling a bunch of them   in front of the television,  I discovered that our bobcat, Franklin, loves sweet potatoes almost as much as his daddy.  He’s become quite a discerning herbivore with a sophisticated palate.

He loves the stringy ends of the fingerlings, usually slinging them around before crunching down on the delicious orange center.  I  gave him a few of the smaller ones.  He seems to like the peeled skin too, which makes me wonder if he’s looking for nutrients. I did a little wikipedia research to find out about cats and vegetables.  Apparently when cats kill a bird they eat the vegetable matter out of its stomach. Kind of gross, huh?   Gives me an idea for a cat toy with a sweet potato center.    

It’s fig season on Farthing Street.

This annual harvest is accompanied by a sense of urgency because there is always a very short window of time, sometimes just a day or two,  when a fig is truly ripe and ready for consumption.  Left on the tree too long, the fig will ferment and become food for wasps and bees.

For weeks  I had waited, somewhat impatiently, for that special moment.  Shawnna would come home from work and find me outside, my face buried in the branches of the tree, deftly squeezing the bulbous fruit for signs of “mushiness.”   The mushiness means that the fig is sweet and juicy.

When that glorious day arrived, we had so many figs that I filled up a mixing bowl from the kitchen.  I decided to try a recipe from our mediterranean cookbook, which involves wrapping the figs with pancetta and bay leaves, and then cooking them in the oven.

For you vegetarians or those of you on a kosher diet,  pancetta is pork belly meat that is salt-cured and contains  peppercorns.  It is heavenly.  I was caught off guard when I took it out of the package.  It smelled so good that for a minute I lost the ability to concentrate.  Fortunately I had already halved the figs, and the rest was easy. I gently wrapped my figs in the strips of pancetta, like little pigs-in-blankets. The bay leaves were the finishing touch.  I placed them in a baking dish and set in the oven at 300 degrees for 20 minutes.   Shawnna and I couldn’t get enough of them.  Figs in the raw are tasty enough,  but this was a culinary delight.

Fig trees, which thrive in  mediterranean climates, are drought-tolerant plants. That means you don’t have to water them much, provided your yard gets a lot of sun.  If you live in the Triangle, consider getting one.  The leaves are tough and leathery (you may recall that Adam and Eve, in their postlapsarian shame, made clothes out of them.)  I’ve noticed that the leaves seem to be impervious to the pests that like to chew up our fruit trees.

Plant a fig tree this fall! You won’t regret it.

UPDATE:  Dear readers, it turns out that the “bamboo” in my back yard is actually wheat.  Shows you what I know.  (5/10/13)

Recently some bamboo sprouted up in our yard.

The sight of it made me a little anxious, probably because I’ve heard enough bamboo horror stories over the years to compile an anthology.  These are tales that pit neighbor against neighbor; someone’s well-intentioned bamboo screen screen gets out of control and crosses the property line where it becomes a problem for someone else.

There are two kinds of  bamboo: running and clumping.   The running variety is such a problem because its rhizomes grow laterally, through the soil surface, which make it spread very fast.  I’ve  heard that if you’re going to plant bamboo, definitely plant the clumping kind. Check out the difference:

You can control the running kind by creating something called a rhizome barrier.   The idea is to dig a trench around the bamboo that is at least two-feet wide, and just two inches shallower than the width.  Because the rhizomes will eventually pierce through concrete and steel, a HDPE (High Density Polyethylene) barrier must be placed in the trench.  When placing the barrier in the trench, it is essential to angle it in such a way that the rhizomes will move upward as they start to spread.  That way,  any rhizomes peeking over the barrier can be clipped.

I dug around my neighbor’s fence line and discovered that the bamboo was coming up under the fence from their yard. I’ve been digging a trench along the fence line, and  I’m going to get some Polyethylene soon. As far as the rest of the bamboo that has sprouted just a few feet away from the fence line, I think I’m going to create a barrier around it as well so that I will be able to manage it.  I realize  some of you will think I have just lost my mind.  If I create an epidemic, I will take full responsibility for it, and you’ll be reading about it in another post.
I’m willing to take that risk because I truly want our lot to be a closed system, where everything is produced onsite  and nothing is thrown away. With that paradigm in mind, why shouldn’t we harvest our own bamboo? We use it extensively for building trellises and staking out plants in the garden. I’ve even constructed a privacy fence out of it before.  And besides,  Toby Hemeneway gushes over bamboo in Gaia’s Garden, This could be the best thing, or the worst thing we’ve done in the backyard this month.  To be continued…