SUMMER BOUNTY

I've been traveling a great deal for the last couple of months to photograph gardens for the new book I'm working on, but have had a blissful week on the farm this past week before I take off again, and just in time to really start reaping the benefits of all the wonderful things I planted in the vegetable, herb, and fruits gardens in the spring. Surely, we've been harvesting lettuces and early crops like beets, Asian greens, peas, and radishes for months, but right now is when the gardens truly start kicking in.

The tomatoes are just starting and yesterday I harvested two each of Great White, Caspian Pink, and Yellow Mortgage Lifter, with the first Monomakh's Hat (a superb Russian Bull's Heart variety) just about ripe on the vine. Not only are each of these heirloom varieties beyond tasty, but their colors are wonderfully vibrant, especially when tossed together in a salad (why not give feta and mint a try instead of the usual mozzarella and basil?). All I need is a nice verdant type like Green Zebra to complete my edible Solanum spectrum!

My kales are looking absolutely glorious right now. I planted two favorite types: Dwarf Blue Curled Scotch and Dinosaur or Lacinato (also called "Tuscan Palm Tree). To me, kales are tremendously undervalued as a food plant as they are usually harvestable even out of the snow and, like all Brassicas, are packed with vitamins. I love them sautéed with garlic, pancetta and olive oil until nicely wilted, but I've recently discovered kale chips, which make a wonderful hors d'oeuvres: toss leaves with salt and olive oil, place them in a single layer on a cookie sheet, sprinkle with grated parmesano, and bake at 350 for about 40 minutes, until totally dehydrated and crisp.

We pulled up the onions this morning (one yellow sweet and one red variety) as their tops had collapsed and turned brown, signaling harvestability. We set up one of our big wire grid nursery tables out in the garden and have spread the harvested onions on it to cure for a bit before we store them. I'm looking forward to some rich and warming French onion soup come fall -- is there anything easier or more soul-satisfying? The potatoes in the main garden are nearing readiness, too (waiting for their tops to collapse...) and, when the time comes, we'll spread them out on the grid table to cure as well.

Our four kinds of basil are also currently in full flush -- so much so that I need to trim the flower heads practically daily in order to keep them from going to seed. As the chives are planted right next door, I think I'll whip up some tasty green sauce to slather on meat or vegetables (process with garlic, olive oil, pitted green olives, and a tin of anchovies). And, as we have just harvested a bumper crop of cucumbers, I think I'll also slice up a big batch of cucumber salad with the chives and lemon basil: peel, seed, and slice the cucumbers, salt them in a colander for about an hour, rinse, and toss with olive oil, rice vinegar, s&p, and the chopped herbs. A crunchy delight!

The second flush of strawberries (Tristar) had also started, which is a very happy thing, and the Magnolia Vine's incredibly nutritious berries are just beginning to color up (wonderful to dry and make tea), also a very winning idea, but the big fruit excitement right now is our first crop of the hardy kiwi Issai four years from planting. They are still ripening but what a horticultural coup to be able to enjoy bite-size, fuzzless kiwis right off the vine as handily as plucking a grape (and self fertile and hardy to zone 4!).

And, still, so much left to come! The visual triumph of the Asian long beans (Yard Long White Snake and Red Noodle)... eggplants Rosa Bianca and Thai Green... bush beans Beurre de Rocquencourt and Royal Burgundy Pod, peppers hot and sweet (Purple Cayenne, Peach Habanero, Jimmy Nardello), summer squash Eightball... and loads more tomatoes! Ah, nature is bountiful and life is good!

GOING TO POTS

This month, we've been moving potted plants out of the greenhouses like crazy, not only to decorate our precincts with some early leaf and bloom but to give the plants themselves the healthy dose of fresh, circulating air they've been craving after a long winter of close confinement under glass.

Pots are wonderful for adding an instantaneous and difficult to achieve otherwise swat of hard architecture and contrasting leaf and blossom texture to a garden environment. They fill in empty spaces, flank entries, sparkle up shady nooks, are wonderful grouped around water features, and add a becoming softness to walls and steps. We usually pair them with some other hard architecture like flagged or gravel terraces, stone steps, etc., but have even seen them set on plinths in the middle of perennial borders to great effect, as one would place a rose tuteur or statue.

Many of our most prized potted specimens, including our collection of begonias, find their way down to the stone terraces below the house, overlooking the creek and little milk pond,. Grouped multiply on tables and in corners, they soften all the surrounding stone and add spectacular architecture and punch. For those of you unfamiliar with begonias, they are the perfect houseplant: undemanding, tolerant of low light, offering the most stunning foliage imaginable, and blooming year round with a modicum of feeding.

In the courtyard garden outside the front door, we've placed both a big pot of Conca d'Or lilies with a bamboo rail to help keep then upright, and a handsome glazed pot of variegated acanthus. The former will stun with it's tall, tall stems of sunny, wildly fragrant blossoms, while the former is surely one of the most extravagantly foliaged plants around. Both add just the right complement of form and color to this fern-y, mossy space.

Out in the summer borders, flanking the steps to our Temple Canus, we always place two pots of immense, truly show-stopping tropical furcraeas. Each of these plants is five feet high and wide and it takes a ride in our backhoe to set them in place each year. However, their unique, strappy, sharply pointed tropical form and pale yellow striation makes them the perfect formal foil to the surrounding, decidedly non-tropical perennial plantings.

Further out in the Mediterranean Garden, we enhance the Mediterranean mood by grouping pots of succulents and tropicals around the Italian village fountain at the center. With these unlikely specimens scattered beneath a pair of non-bearing pear standards, true body doubles for the un-hardy olive trees we lusted after for this space, one could well imagine one was somewhere in the Tuscan hills.

But surely our most remarkable potted specimen is the 100 year old bonzai forest we purchased in Little China in Los Angeles over twenty years ago. We bought this miniature grove of eastern red cedar from a family of Japanese nurserymen whose elder, then in his nineties, had been training it for more than 75 years. We had a special table built for it and it is the pride and joy of the summer terrace, where it can be enjoyed by our garden visitors passing through.

Speaking of which, isn't it time you paid us a visit? Do keep in mind, we're open Wednesdays and Saturdays, May to October, 9-4, for self-touring and we'd love to see you!

THE BIRD IS THE WORD!

Although, so far, April has been drenching with the showers for which it is so justly famous, there has also been an amplitude of the brilliant blue days necessary to getting the gardening juices flowing as Mother Nature wields her artful brush and starts to transform the stark silhouettes and gray tones of winter. First, the greening of the lawns and the clouds of daffodils that start drifting across their flanks, and the earliest stellata magnolias, with their white pinwheel blossoms born on bare limbs, creating magical, ghostly forms in the woods. Now the muscaris, so intensely blue, encircling the trunks of trees and lining woodland paths, and the fruit trees -- cherries and pears and crabs -- bursting into pastel bloom.. Soon, the dogwoods and azaleas and bluebells: a world of the purest white and green and yellow and blue imaginable. Make no mistake: spring has sprung!

This year, in part, our thoughts have turned to our birds. The farm would be a very hollow place without the scores of fowl we keep to enliven our precincts: chickens and ducks, geese and pheasants, pigeons and peacocks. Now is nesting time and the farm is flurry of noisy bustle as the females take to roost, the various husbands and aunties and uncles standing clamorous sentry about them. At this moment, our female whooping swan has decided to plant herself firmly in a quadrant of the cutting garden and elected to pick out all the blue pansies I planted in the central urn to better feather her nest. Our new female Australian swan has taken up a post in the protective curve of the lowest step to the lake pavilion, and we are rabid with excitement over that possibility.

Over any winter, however, there is always some attrition. Unpinioned ducks and geese fly off. Others fall prey to foxes and raccoons. Chickens and peacocks and pheasants expire from old age or a panoply of avian diseases almost impossible to detect. So, this spring, we are in the happy position of ordering some new friends for the farm from two of our favorite purveyors, the Murray McMurray Hatchery in Webster City, Iowa and Stromberg Chicks & Game Birds Unlimited in Pine River, Minnesota. Both offer an impressive assortment of eggs, chicks, and even full grown pairs of everything from racing pigeons to quail, guinea fowl, and turkeys.

This year, we're particularly intent on expanding our family of pheasants and ducks, and our intention is to purchase full grown pairs. Fowl of almost any sort mate for life, and the widow or widower of a lost bird is a plaintive sight indeed, so it pays to buy devoted couples: they'll be happier and so will you. We have transformed our former corn crib into a pheasant run, one which became sadly depleted after the rigors of the past winter, so we have set our sights on a pair each of Lady Amhersts, Red Goldens, and Yellow Goldens: all flamboyantly, even surrealistically colorful, the last two being exotically Chinese in origin.

In the duck category, we have fallen in love with White Crested Ducks, which sport a tamoshanter-like pompom atop their heads, so we ordered a pair of those, as well as some Chocolate and Fawn Runners, tall and slim and tipped forward like they're about to fall on their beaks, and a pair of startling black/green Cayugas. These will join the White Muscovies, Mallards, and White Pekins all ready on the pond, as well as our large family of White Chinese, gray Toulouse, Canadian, and White Emden geese.

It's easy to forget that birds are cold-blooded creatures (a friend says "like snakes with feathers"), so they can withstand winter temperatures with surprising ease with a modicum of shelter, open water for the water fowl, and a daily feeding. Our chickens, pheasants. pigeons, and peacocks we keep caged, mainly to avoid the tragic results of a chance meeting with a fox, raccoon or hawk, but our water fowl wander freely all year round so, if you have a pond or lake, give some waterfowl a try. And, of course, if you can keep chickens, there's nothing more appealing than a fresh from the henhouse omelette and the happy morning cacophany of a resident rooster.

Murray McMurray Hatchery can be reached at (800) 456-2380 or at www.murraymcmurrayhatchery.com, and Stromberg Chicks & Gamebirds at(800) 720-1134 or at www.strombergschickens.com. Both are happy to mail you a catalogue, which is almost as much fun to thumb through as getting a favorite seed catalogue this time of year. Happy Spring!