Tending to organic matters

Last spring, while planting seeds in the garden, I discovered that the soil in our raised beds had become quite hard and compacted. This was very frustrating and confusing, because the beds hadn't been walked on for 15 years and had received regular infusions of compost every spring. But after doing a bit of research, I found that the amount we'd been adding—maybe one bucketful per bed—was far less than the one to two inches gardening experts recommend. Since our little home compost bin couldn't produce nearly that amount, and since bagged compost is costly and requires testing to make sure it isn't tainted with herbicides, we decided our best bet was to pick up half a yard of leaf compost every year from the Belle Mead Co-Op. This stuff isn't as rich in nutrients as homemade compost or manure, but it's still useful for improving the soil texture.

Unfortunately, we never got a good opportunity to do this last fall. As this year's spring planting drew nearer, we kept a nervous eye on the calendar, looking for a weekend that was both free and tolerably warm for outdoor work. Yesterday, we finally got our opportunity. I had to make a trip out to Somerville that afternoon for my Citizens' Climate Lobby meeting, so we combined that trip with a jaunt to Hillsborough—not directly on the way, but not that far out of it—to visit the Co-Op. We brought along a carload of trash barrels and empty birdseed bags and loaded them all up as far as we could while still being able to lift them. (In some cases, in fact, we couldn't lift them and ended up having to remove some. We forgot that that leaf compost was much finer than the bulk mulch we usually buy at the Co-Op, and consequently the volumes we're used to weighed a good deal more.) While there, we also dropped $8 on a new set of asparagus crowns, as the plants we have are now over 15 years old and their productivity has dwindled to almost nothing.

After my meeting and a little hanging out in Somerville, we decided it was too late to bother unloading all the compost from the car. We waited until this morning to suit up in our grubby gardening clothes and start hauling those extremely heavy bags and barrels out to the back 40 (square yards). First, though, we had to go through all the beds and remove the detritus from last year's garden—another chore we hadn't gotten around to tackling in the fall. Brian used both tools and bare hands to dig out the roots of last year's bean and basil plants, while I went along the trellises breaking up and extricating the tangled remains of the squash and tomato vines.

Then Brian, who could manhandle the loaded barrels a lot more easily than I could, began dumping heaps of compost out into the beds. I raked each pile out into an even layer covering the whole bed, and we added extra scoops to fill in any thin areas. By the time we were done, we'd used up the contents of both large barrels and two full bags, and all the beds were filled with dark organic matter to the very brim. 

Since we still had lots of compost left, we used up another bag supplementing the soil in our new outdoor planters. These aren't looking too good after this bitterly cold winter; of all the starter plants we put into them at the end of the summer, the only ones that look like they might still be alive are the heucheras (coral bells) and English ivy, and I wouldn't give heavy odds on either of them. But those plants were more or less just place holders anyway, the odds and ends that we were able to pick up at the Co-Op's end-of-season plant sale. Soon enough, we'll have our pick of a fresh, new batch of nursery plants to choose from, and we should be able to find some that have a better chance of lasting out the year. And when we do, they'll have a nice, new layer of fluffy leaf compost to dig into.

By this time, we were pretty tired, but we found the strength to haul one more bag down into the side yard and spread it on the asparagus bed, preparing it to receive its new batch of crowns next weekend. We stowed about half the remaining bags in the shed and shoved the rest under the planters, where they'll be ready to hand for use on any plants in the front yard that need a little topping up. (In theory, there's nothing to stop an enterprising thief from grabbing one and walking away with it, but we think their sheer weight will be enough of a deterrent.) Then we put away our tools and dragged ourselves inside for a couple of well-deserved showers.

After putting in all this work, I'm trying not to get my hopes up too high about the results. I realize that just one load of organic matter probably won't be enough to make a noticeable difference in the quality of our garden soil, and it will take another few years at least before we see real results. But having the compost layer on top of the beds should make at least part of this year's planting earlier. We'll still have to dig down into the hard-packed soil for transplanting, but most seeds should be able to go directly into the soft, fluffy compost. It won't provide much nutrition for them, but their roots won't have to probe too far to get to the richer, denser soil below.

Recipe of the Month: Vegan Pasta Alla Norma

Several years back, I mentioned in a post that Brian and I had become fans of the Netflix series "Queer Eye," in which five queer powerhouses (four gay men and one "nonbinary fairy," as they call themselves) team up to help others spruce themselves up both inside and out. Along with being energetic, funny, and heartwarming to watch, this show has proved to be a good way to discover new dishes. One of the earliest episodes introduced us to mujadara with fried eggplant, which has since become one of our staple recipes. And in a more recent one, we watched chef Antoni teach a deli owner how to prepare his girlfriend's favorite dish, pasta alla Norma: pasta in a light sauce made from tomatoes, eggplant, garlic, and fresh herbs, topped with crumbled ricotta salata cheese. It looked so tasty that right after watching the episode, I went to my computer and hunted for a recipe.

The one I found at Serious Eats looked pretty simple, but it had one problem: the cheese. According to the description, this particular cheese is a pretty major component of the dish's flavor; the notes on the recipe describe it as "funky as all get out with a punchy barnyard flavor, an intense saltiness, and a savory aroma somewhere in between a good aged pecorino and a feta." So simply swapping it out for some of our vegan mozzarella wouldn't work. 

My first idea for a substitute was to crumble up some firm tofu and spike it with nutritional yeast, lemon juice, and salt, as suggested at Voyo Eats. But when it occurred to me to just look up a vegan pasta alla Norma recipe and see what it used, I found that most of them didn't bother with any of that. The one at Holy Cow Vegan, simply left out the cheese altogether, and at Lazy Cat Kitchen replaced it with two tablespoons of toasted pine nuts. These nuts taste nothing like Kenji Lopez-Alt's description of ricotta salata, but they do have a pleasant taste of their own and would add a nice bit of crunch to the texture. 

So Brian made this simple substitution in the Serious Eats recipe, along with a couple of other minor changes. Kenji Lopez-Alt said to use whole peeled tomatoes and crush them by hand into 1/2-inch chunks; however, since the Lazy Cat Kitchen recipe called for four fresh tomatoes, peeled and diced, Brian figured he could get away with subbing in a can of diced tomatoes instead. He increased the amount of eggplant from 3/4 pound to a full pound and reduced the amount of pasta from a whole pound to half a pound, thereby boosting the veggie-to-pasta ratio. He replaced the fresh basil in the recipe, which we didn't have on hand in early March, with a roughly equivalent volume of our frozen basil. And he dialed back the quarter-teaspoon of red pepper flakes in the recipe to half that amount to accommodate my low heat tolerance.

I don't know if these modifications made a big difference in the flavor, but I found the result something short of extraordinary. There was certainly nothing wrong with it—with a sauce that was essentially just eggplant, tomato, garlic, basil, and oregano, it's hard to see how there could have been—but there was nothing all that exciting about it either. It certainly wasn't the best dish we've made with eggplant; it wasn't even the best pasta dish. I prefer the similar one we call pasta melanzane, which includes fresh mozzarella (regular or vegan) in the mix. 

Thus, this new vegan pasta is unlikely to make the cut to be included in our regular rotation. We'll save our eggplants for dishes we truly love, like our favorite eggplant and pepper sandwiches.