The Ojai Post

This week yields a strange even spooky collection of vegetables for your diet. Eggplant and dill? Butternut squash and lettuce? Cilantro and Gai Lan? This box of vegetables may help stimulate your immune system during this potentially unhealthful season. Green is the new Gold. Prevention is the key, no matter if its H1N1 pork fever or a cold. I unlawfully prescribe ginseng ( American) to all my employees, friends, relatives and many a startled stranger, and eat the stuff by the handful when I begin to feel a little off. Coupled with my prodigious consumption of kale, I feel pretty fair.

The greens, which we insist on piling on during the season, are all best used within a few days. The lettuce should be prepped, washed, spun and put in the fridge in an air-tight container. Or eaten while reading this newsletter. I ate a salad last night from lettuce and arugula I prepped five days ago. Even the arugula was still great. We are still in the midst of the great turnaround from Summer into Winter. What falls in between reveals a mixture of seasons. It was too hot when we planted the turnips and they failed. Now its getting too cold for the radishes, even though we still try. The heavy hitters of fall and winter, like carrots, cauliflower and broccoli are half a foot high and beginning to root out well. This week we are transplanting Italian parsley, dandelion, more broccoli and some kohl rabi. Many more vegetables are in mid-grow, and well cared for, particularly by Francisco Tirado, whose shadow spurs growth and vitality in the field.

This THURSDAY, is the last BROKEN WORD poetry and prose evening at The Farmer and The Cook. Come out and see why CNN recently spent a few days here filming and interviewing various players in the soup opera called The Store. Its Happy Hour all night long for Broken Word. But wear your chill weather gear. And bring a flashlight in case you feel spooked on the way home.

We planted over half a mile of garlic cloves this week and thirty pounds of grey French shallots. The planting consisted of an experiment featuring forty pounds of our own garlic seed, thirty pounds of hard pink from Tutti Frutti Farm on the Santa Ynez River and thirty pounds of bootleg Chinese hardneck garlic I bought early one morning from a Mexican fruit and veg marketer who was just as tweaked as I am about how the Chinese have taken over the market on so many things. I bought the Allium King to show solidarity with my Mexican- American cohort, despite the obviously paradoxical conflict of buying that which I was upset over. “ We can grow this stuff in our own back yard,” he said. “ Why do we have to bring all this in from 8,000 miles away?” He was mighty glad I was buying bulbs to plant.

I had not planned on buying Chinese product to plant. I went looking for the exotic Uzbek or Khazaki bulbs, hopefully imported from fields near Taskhkent, in order to gratify the taste buds of former Soviets yearning for a little burn from the homeland. That’s where garlic originates. It’s the Italians and Greeks that made it famous, mostly because they had boats and access to olive oil.

So that’s the end of the story. Not that scary after all. I saved the scary part for Broken Word.