To Market, To Market

It's official: Palo Alto will get our second farmers' market, opening Sunday, June 3 just steps from my office on California Avenue. It may be slightly more slickly produced than the Saturday downtown market, but can you really have too much?

My three favorite reasons why farmers' markets are great -- apart from the camaraderie and the quality of the food:
1) When else do you get the opportunity to actually talk with the people who grow the food you eat? The corn doesn't come from some faceless Nebraska corporation, the bread isn't shrink-wrapped. Wondering how to know when a persimmon is ripe? Ask the grower. These people are genuinely excited about what they have produced. Somehow, that makes their food taste even better.


2) They are a wonderful way to get in touch with the seasons. No plums, Pluots® or Apriums® in March, please -- not even organic ones. The bad news is, this will shake you out of your comfort zone when you can't buy asparagus in August. The good news is, this will shake you out of your comfort zone when you get to try cardoon in August.

3) What's more exciting than trying new food? By definition, small local farmers have small local farms. And they're not going to waste their resources trying to compete with the big farms that grow big quantities of the most common fruits and vegetables you'll find shrink-wrapped in Safeway. Thus, cardoon. And homemade marmalade. And heirloom eggplants. And purple cauliflower.

(By the way, kids often enjoy this kind of diversity -- give 'em a few dollars and let them choose their new favorite vegetable for tonight's dinner -- and it's nice to learn that food comes from the Earth, not the aisle.)

I hope I'll see you on California Ave. on June 3!

Go Outside and Play

When you were a child, was there a favorite place in nature you loved to play? A seminal, memorable moment spent outdoors? Did some way of being in contact with nature help make you the person you are today? Without that contact, who will today's children be tomorrow?

Richard Louv's fabulous article from Orion magazine raises big and important questions regarding our children and nature. It's not a "how to" piece. It's why to. And after reading the article, you'll agree it's not even a question.

If I'm In The Shade, This Must Be Monday

Photo ©Chris Neale


As we approach the summer solstice, it can become difficult to design to your yard's patterns of sun and shade: more specifically, it's very easy to over-estimate just how much sun a given site receives. I've certainly planted vegetable beds in "full sun" locations this time of year, only to find them in permashade as the equinox rolls on by.

If you're only planting tomatoes or other summer annuals, such an impending lack of sunlight may not be a big deal. But if you're designing a comprehensive landscape -- and particularly if you haven't lived at the site for a full year to see the change of light and seasons first-hand -- it pays to figure out when, and where, the light will retreat.

To the rescue comes the U.S. Navy, which kindly publishes a calculator to determine the altitude (angle above horizon) and azimuth (angle east of true north) of the sun at any minute of any given day. Combined with a shadow length calculator, this data should help you determine the boundaries of your shady areas throughout the year.

Thus, if you know that you live in a 20-foot tall house in Palo Alto, CA, you can calculate that on June 21 of this year (the summer solstice), your home will cast a 5-foot deep shadow at solar noon. However, on the winter solstice six months later, that shadow will extend about 36 feet!

It's most useful to calculate shadow points for the most massive things on your property -- usually structures like houses and detached garages, but also evergreen trees, fences, and neighboring buildings -- on the two solstice and two equinox dates. If you're really persnickety, you can forecast shadows not only at high noon, but also three or four hours on either side of noon, since "full sun" plants typically want 6-8 hours of direct sunlight per day (don't forget to shift the shadow angle to the west or east appropriately).

If you map all these points onto your site plan (I find using different color pencils for the different dates helps), you can get a pretty clear picture of where to plant what (or where to site that winter sun-pocket bench). Plus, you'll have a sense of what you might need in the way of lighting or heating throughout the year, and create separately-switched circuits based on what the darkest/coldest zones will be during the times of year you plan to be outside.

I know, it's all very geeky... yet somehow strangely exciting, no?

Why I Didn't Send You Flowers

Wait! Is that the drone of helicopters? Does anyone else smell DDT?

We're under quarantine again, this time courtesy of the light brown apple moth (Epiphyas postvittana), an invasive species native to Australia. This innocent looking little guy (maybe it's the nail through his neck) destroys, stunts or deforms young seedlings; spoils the appearance of ornamental plants; and injures deciduous fruit-tree crops, citrus and grapes. All in all, the LBAM (can we call him Bam-Bam?) has a taste for some 250 species of plants.

The quarantine was implemented on March 22, about a month after a retired entomologist found a couple of LBAMs in his backyard. Bam-Bam has been established in Hawaii for a while now, but this is his first appearance on the mainland. Santa Clara county was added to the quarantine zone on April 20, after being detected in Palo Alto and Los Altos a week earlier.

Because Bam-Bam doesn't have a very long flight range, he's mastered the art of hitchhiking. The California Department of Food and Agriculture was quick to develop this brochure to explain how you can thwart his travels. The good news is, Bam-Bam is also vulnerable to organic controls, including pheremone disruption, Bacillus thuringiensis and parasitic wasps.

While the state rushes to keep LBAM from spreading (which would be, um, BAD for our sizable agricultural exports), the rest of us can keep a lid on our green waste, not bring host plants (i.e. plants, period) to non-quarantined areas, and call CDFA if we see Bam-Bam.

After, of course, giving him a one-way ticket ¡STRAIGHT TO HELL! with a nail through the neck.

(Thanks to Ron and Joe for their reporting at SFGate.com.)

Pollan Nails It... Again

If you haven't already, please read Michael Pollan's recent piece, "You Are What You Grow," in last Sunday's New York Times. In his usual brilliant voice, Pollan describes why today's national "farm bill" -- you know, the one that pays farmers to produce (or not) our ingredients -- is almost directly at odds with our health and our waistlines -- and our childrens'. Although short on action steps we can take to remedy this archaic legislation, Pollan's article will raise your eyebrows, and your conscience.

By the way, it's worth mentioning that this isn't Pollan's first trip down the anti-Big-Corn aisle... his 2003 essay Is Corn Making Us Fat? is well worth the download.