Not Quite Local: Well-Traveled Winter Cress

Being a committed locavore easily becomes confusing. In our complex world one can lose the True Way and get entangled in debates over harrowing questions such as the ethics and ecosystem wisdom of removing the plant and its roots, or of calculating the carbon footprint of transporting local plants long distances; or of re-planting at a distance from a plant’s original location.

I have a story from March that combines all three of these pesky puzzlers.
Nowadays I live in the family house near Ithaca NY. We are moving into spring by building raised beds for vegetables; we transplanted 50 raspberry bushes to the front and back yard; we have signed up for a summer Community Farm Alliance weekly basket of local produce; I started a gallon of dandelion wine yesterday! (More is coming on these topics and others.)

In late March, I drove 823 miles west and south to my cabin in Green County, Kentucky. I needed to catch up with friends, and was worried about the cabin, the home I was working on when the economic imperative of these rough times called me to move back to New York State. This one-room cabin with loft was built with the advice and encouragement of my friend Deb and the math skills and skilled brute strength of my friend Sam. Surrounding the cabin are 25 acres of recovering pasture, woodland and steep bluffs that descend to the Little Barren River.

At the end of the 823 miles, accompanied by two deeply dissatisfied cats, it was a relief to find the cabin as I had left it in early December – in fact, the windows were still open and the dishes were unwashed from last fall, because my car engine had imploded on the way there, just before I had to depart Kentucky for New York State.

I cleaned up, swept out two months of wintertime dead bugs, slept soundly in the deep country silence, and donated books to the Hart County school libraries with my friends from the Bacon Creek Watershed Council. I even locked myself out and had to climb in a secret way, with my cats watching in amazement.

With a pot of chili on the wood stove, I invited friends to visit. Duke drove over from Corbin with his dog Ernie Fletcher (named after an unloved Kentucky governor), and Julian showed up with Will. These two are Kentucky naturalists of the extreme pro-native plants ilk. They argue that a plant should be as local as you can possibly manage – not merely from “the Southeast” or from Kentucky, but if possible from the same Kentucky county, or even closer, to the land it will be planted on. The DNA tracking tools are not available to do this with any accuracy, but when they say native, they mean it.

The Kentucky land that hosts my cabin is far from pristine. Home to Native Americans for centuries before the 19th century Europeans tore it up big-time, the area is now calming back down into wildness, but in two visits Julian has not found anything wonderfully native except for the tall, dense creekside thickets of beautiful Kentucky cane.

However, Julian is no plant snob, and he emerged from the woods with his hands full of a pretty little green plant – roots and all. “Winter cress! Fresh winter cress!” he called as he approached. “Delicious cooked as a winter green! Boil it twice to get rid of the bitterness,” he advised as he gave the plants to me.

To make an 823-mile long story short, the winter cress ended up traveling back to New York State with me, in a cooler atop locally-produced Kentucky ice. What carbon footprint formula is subtle and nuanced enough to calculate the energy cost of digging up a local food, then transporting it that far – and then, after consuming its green parts, re-planting the roots in New York State soil?

I am not up to these subtleties, but next I’ll tell you how to cook winter cress, with thanks to the classic advice and common sense found in Euell Gibbons’ Stalking the Wild Asparagus (1973 reprint).

Cell Tower Siting Should be at the County Level

May 4, 2009

Dear Editor:

We write to encourage readers to tell their elected officials that cell tower siting in Tompkins County should be determined at the county level. A county-wide moratorium on cell tower siting would provide time to develop a task force for intermunicipal coordination of responses to cell tower siting requests from Verizon and other companies.

Why is this important to Tompkins County municipalities? Cell companies are playing off differences in municipal ordinances, siting towers inappropriately. Sites are proposed that degrade community and natural values, benefiting one user group or municipality over others. Meanwhile, large areas of Tompkins County have little or no basic cell coverage.

At recent Dryden Town Board meetings we learned that Verizon will neither discuss long-range planning and siting nor agree to meet community needs, although municipalities and the county have worked hard to accommodate cell company requirements.

We encourage Tompkins County to take the initiative to ensure cell tower coverage that is equable for all areas and protective of neighborhoods, land values and natural areas. We recommend the formation of a citizens group to assist with coordination and communication among the municipalities of TC.

Sincerely yours,

Hilary Lambert
Hanshaw Road
(Dryden resident)

Nancy Morgan
Hanshaw Road
(Dryden resident)

The Microwave to Nowhere: Proposed Cell Tower Impacts

Here are two photos that demonstrate how the Verizon cell tower proposed for Hanshaw Road would impact Ludgate Farms Store and the surrounding neighborhood.

The two red balloons were hoisted on April 16 2009 as a demonstration of the approximate height and location of the cell tower, at the request of the Dryden Town Board at its April 2009 meeting.


Keep in mind that the cell tower would not consist of two pretty red balloons with a gap in between, but a metal tower bristling with attachments. There would also be a microwave installation that, as the Verizon rep admitted under questioning from a Town Board member, would point "Nowhere."

Because this demo was arranged at very short notice with nothing like adequate public notice, working residents along Cardinal and Meadowlark Drives on the Dryden side of Sapsucker Woods Road may not get an opportunity to view the pretty red balloons. Hence a photo is provided here of what the tower would look like from midway along Cardinal Drive. The other photo shows the impact to Ludgate Farms Store on Hanshaw Road.

Thank you to the Dryden Town Board and to Verizon for this demo, which illustrates how inappropriate this tower is at this location. It would intrude on Ludgates, on all hikers using the Cayuga Trail across Hanshaw from Ludgates, on all residents along Hanshaw Road to Monkey Run, and for many on Cardinal and Meadowlark Drives.


All the negative impacts would be in Dryden, while the tower would be invisible to the Ithacans who would reap the cell coverage benefits. Meanwhile many areas of Dryden have little or no cell tower coverage -- and stand to gain no more from Verizon over the next 5 - 7 years, according to the Verizon rep at the April Town Board meeting! Remind me again -- what is Dryden getting out of this proposed deal?


Verizon seems to be playing off one municipality against another, apparently hustling to feed its own business strategy and competitive edge while ignoring the real needs of the community it is supposedly here to serve. It claims special legal privileges as a so-called "public utility," but that's a two-way street.

What would Dryden get in return for allowing Verizon to taint this Dryden neighborhood? Absolutely NOTHING.


It is hoped that the municipalities making up Tompkins County can work together in cooperation with Verizon and other cell phone and internet companies for a better, wiser tower placement policy -- starting with this proposed cell tower. There is no right way to do the wrong thing -- and placing a cell tower at this location is the wrong thing.

Where the Woods Meet

Where Fall Creek’s woods meet Sapsucker Woods, Hanshaw Road curves between them. A small stream is culverted there under the road, carrying Sapsucker Woods runoff toward Fall Creek. Residents know to take it slow on Hanshaw Road through this wooded corridor to avoid hitting the deer and other wildlife who use the continuous woodland cover to traverse a gap between one county-designated Unique Natural Area (Sapsucker Woods) and another (Fall Creek). Those are probably not the place-names used by animals.

Big birds are often perched in the trees here, maybe for the view to be had at this wooded crest of the long slope up Hanshaw Road from Cayuga Heights, Ithaca and Cayuga Lake in its deep valley below. The wooded corridor at the Hanshaw Road crossing is narrow, just a couple hundred feet wide, but it spreads outward to the north and west into the wetland woods on both sides of Sapsucker Woods Road, surrounding the Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology. Across Hanshaw Road southward, a five-minute walk through the arc of woods that widens between Hanshaw and Freese Roads brings a hiker to the steep crumbling bluffs high above Fall Creek, and onto the Cayuga Trail. Just beyond the woodland edge in old pastures is Cornell’s Dyce Laboratory for Honey Bee Studies.

To the east of this wooded corridor, Hanshaw Road curves around the edge of flat Cornell farm fields, bordered on their southern edge by Fall Creek and its woodland cover and on the north by Sapsucker Woods, old pasture lands, and wooded wetlands that extend along Hanshaw as it takes a sharp turn northward (and Lower Creek Road continues straight). Here again there is a narrow wooded meeting place, between the Hanshaw Road wetlands and Monkey Run woods. Again, Hanshaw Road parts them and a stream, culverted under the road, joins them. The stream travels on next to the hiking trail (beloved by dogs and their owners) that was once Monkey Run Road, downhill to Fall Creek.

West and south of the Sapsucker-Hanshaw woodland corridor, blue-hill vistas can be seen beyond patches of woodland as the open Cornell farmland drops away from both Hanshaw and Freese Roads toward the wooded Fall Creek valley below. Westward and downslope lies Ithaca, its suburban homes infringing upon the edges of Sapsucker Woods.

The northern extent of Sapsucker Woods and the Hanshaw wetlands are abruptly cut off by a strip of intense human development. The heavily-traveled, limited-access Route 13 highway is an ever-humming backdrop to this quiet area. The road severs Sapsucker, Hanshaw and the area’s birds and beasts from wetlands and woodlands to the north. On the north side of Route 13 from Sapsucker Woods is the Tompkins County Airport. Its need for landings, takeoffs, wide beds of flashing lights and extended runways makes it a noisy, light-polluting neighbor for the Hanshaw-Sapsucker area.

Invisible, destructive boundaries cut through the heart of this unified natural area. Sapsucker Woods Road is the border between the Town of Ithaca and Town of Dryden. The southeast border of the Village of Lansing runs east-west across the northern quarter of Sapsucker Woods Road, and contains the airport on the north side of Route 13. This division among three municipal interests has resulted in neglect and misuse on all sides of these arbitrary, highly unnatural straight lines and right angles. An understanding of the whole has been discarded.

From the micro-scale of backyard fences to the international interfaces between countries, borders and margins are places for sloppy land-use at best, and criminal behavior at worst. Farthest from the nearest seat of power and governance, borders are where unwanted land-uses are dumped. At the edges of things, planning and zoning wear thin and can become slipshod, and are more easily set aside for convenience.

Less powerful than residents nearer the center, the human residents of border areas often have the least say in how their land is used. They lose out when land managers and agents of governance are swayed by those with attorneys and a thumb on the scale as the laws are written and the regulations are enforced.

Within the Sapsucker Woods and Hanshaw Road wetlands and woodlands, the non-human residents have the least power and have lost out most of all. Over the past fifty years their land, water and air habitats and travel routes have shrunk and shriveled, severed by new residential roads, Route 13, and airport expansion, and gouged by the bulldozers and bullying of builders who have carved suburbia out of the woodlands and wetlands on the edges of, and driving toward the heart of, Sapsucker Woods.

On the Ithaca side of the line, builders are poised to eat further into Sapsucker Woods very soon, if the planning wizards can be convinced that no real harm will be done. On the Dryden side of the line, businesses were allowed into the wetlands along Hanshaw Road before residential zoning was put in place to slow their spread and impact on this wetland area that feeds Fall Creek. There should not be, but there are, big parking lots and warehouse-sized businesses set on elevated fill pads in the wetlands at Hanshaw Road’s intersection with Route 13.

At the moment (February-March 2009), Verizon is playing games with the governments and planning entities on both sides of the Ithaca-Dryden border, trying to get a (possibly non-complying) cell tower placed on the Dryden side of Sapsucker Woods Road in order to serve Ithaca residents. Verizon proposes to place this tower in that woodland along Hanshaw Road which serves as a corridor from the Fall Creek Unique Natural Area to the Sapsucker Woods Unique Natural Area. The landowner has informed neighbors that if the tower does not go in, he will sell the woodland to a developer.

This immediate situation has prompted me to write this essay, to illustrate how these woodlands, fields, and wetlands make up a unified (though under siege) natural area of semi-wild nodes and corridors between Sapsucker Woods and Fall Creek. I argue that these natural functions outweigh the value to the three adjoining municipalities of continuing to use this area for a dumping-ground of unwanted land uses and zoning waivers.

Our informal group, Friends of Hanshaw-Sapsucker, is made up of neighbors (in Ithaca and Dryden) who see a center here, not edges. We want to protect this wonderful natural area from further fragmentation and neglect. We support the work of the Save Sapsucker Woods group. We invite you to join us.

A locavore salad to kick out the midwinter jams

Call it “late winter” or “pre-spring,” these are difficult weeks with their apparently endlessly repeating pattern of snow, freeze, thaw, rain.

But the deeply cold nights bracketed by dark mornings and afternoons are already giving way to a softer light that lingers longer each day. The snowdrops have poked out of the brown oak leaves beneath the old lilac bush. No season lasts very long: our beautiful planet spins us relentlessly from one to the next, and around again.

While brooding on these verities, a person needs a salad. The soups, stews and other warming dishes of winter can cloy the body and mind, and a sharply sparkling crunchy bowl of fresh-tasting exclamation points helps us begin the climb up and out of midwinter torpor.

How to begin? After only a few months on a strongly-locavore diet, the pallid globes of plastic-wrapped iceberg lettuce trucked in from the distant California desert look a little comical; but their green freshness is a siren’s call.

Feigning deafness to that call (.ie., walking out of the hissing grocery store doors without the damn lettuce), I return home to do a fearless inventory of the refrigerator bins, heavy with locally organically grown root vegetables. With a little bit of work, a near-rainbow of sparkling crunchiness is quickly unleashed.

Cut off a big hunk of knobbly, root-encircled celeriac to release a whiff of fresh energy. Pare off its dull exterior, along with the grimy outer skin of two golden beets, and chop them into small chunks, either by hand or with a bit of mechanical help. Suddenly the kitchen is scented with bright outdoor memories, and the vivid gold of the beets tangle in a heap with the pale white morsels of celeriac.

Chop a chunk of green or red cabbage and a handful of carrots to a slaw texture, and pile them on. A turnip cut small adds bite, as does a white winter radish with its ruby core. Chop fine a garlic clove and chunk of ginger, and stir the whole thing up really well. You now have a wildly colorful, aromatic winter salad that will blast your brain free of its midwinter slump. I’d dress it with olive oil, a dab of sesame oil if you have it, a flavorful vinegar (not much), salt and freshly-ground pepper.

Serve the salad from a big bowl, and set out a few toppings for those who like to complicate matters: raisins or currants, sunflower seeds, walnut chunks, leftover peas or chickpeas, sprouts. My own favorite topping for this crunch-fest is almonds, roasted quickly in a pan and mashed into small chunks.

It’s time to wake up!

Midwinter Locavore Update

or,

Dirty Hairy Salsify

The midwinter locavore is prey to soul-searing temptation at the grocery store: "DON'T touch those hothouse imported tomatoes -- we have parsnips back at the house!"

"It's been ages since we had a bag of potato chips...(long, sorrowful pause)...maybe I can make ... parsnip fries with salsa."

"No mushrooms for us, until we finish the damn salsify."

The parsnips have been the roughest part. Ben says, edge of menace in his voice: "I am ready to be DONE with parsnips." Peggy is dogged with the haunting conviction that they taste like pee (we do not want to know how she knows).

In comparison to parsnips, most of the other vegetables in our weekly box of locally-produced, organically-grown, seasonally-available midwinter vegetables are light and cheerful, and we greet them with comparatively glad cries:"Onions!... a teeny garlic!" "More turnips -- yummm."

Potatoes and the beauteous beet (both purple and golden!) are the gods of this weekly boxed assortment. Celeriac, peeled and used as a root-veg form of celery, is also lovely. Not to mention tart and crunchy big white radishes.

BUT below parsnips lie worse vegetable snakepits.

These are the salsifies. There's salsify, and then there's...black salsify, or oyster plant. The local farmers who are in this experiment with us to make a better world (and who have to suffer the email and verbal commentary on what they send out each week), have dealt us the black salsify hand in only one weekly delivery -- so far.

That week, I cooked both the salsify -- white tubers that arrived bearing their original soil -- and the black salsify -- black tubers with black skins -- and set bowls of both on the table for us to taste-test. Both salsifies take a lot of rugged preparation: you basically have to shave them (see photo). Cleaning off the dirt and excess skin and rootlets is detail work -- not quick. When you prepare salsify, you are worshipping Mother Nature at her most basic. Digging up and cleaning native sunflower tubers is just a little bit more onerous.

Ben has a frequent diagnosis of "It tastes like dirt!" (and he's a caver, so he knows), and when we sampled the two salsifies we heard that comment quickly, although we were fascinated by the oyster scent and flavor of the black salsify. The white has that 'slightly nutty' flavor found in so many marginalized yet nutritious foods: bland, starchy, filling.

This is Thursday afternoon: a new vegetable box looms, and there's excitement coming our way -- leeks!!

It will be St Michael's Day in mid-March (still a month distant). He's the patron saint of Wales, and the Welsh celebrate their rainy, blustery holiday with leek soup feasts. The Scots wash down their haggis with whisky at Burns night feasts: is there a liquor to brighten leek soup?

Actually this is great fun, and we are learning a lot and liking almost all of it. But we do look forward to the lighthearted joys of spring and summer crops (some of which we grumbled about last year) -- Swiss chard, spinach, and eventually the pinnacle: summer-grown tomatoes, green beans, and corn on the cob.

BUT for now: "Don't touch those tomatoes, we have a whole bin of carrots to work our way through before Thursday."

Becoming Locavores

Peggy and I went a-walking, out in the August morning recently. The sky was a cloudless blue and the air warm with meadow scents as Aurelia pulled us forward with her leash toward the trees across Hanshaw Road. We carried a plastic basket and scissors, in search of rumored wild fruits along the woodland edge.

Peg’s husband Ben had returned with reports of laden blackberry bushes by the path “just beyond the manure pile” in the Cornell field and along the tree line; I had found wild black cherry trees and a fruit-filled apple tree clustered together on the edge of a homely old field tucked into the woods. I had begun roaming through there in the late 1960s dreaming of a quiet retreat, and found an old stove and blue-spotted coffee pot tossed down the slope, suggesting that long ago others had shared my liking for the wooded slopes between creek and fields. Today, though neatened by the Cornell ag school and bordered by the Cayuga Trail, this secluded cove still feels like an old home place. (Is there a New York word for that Kentucky state of mind?)

Although not radical locavores, Peggy and Ben are well on their way. The choices they now make tend to be either local – or not at all. They bike and walk great distances, or use the bus. They sort and recycle every darn scrap, and have a compost heap for the rest. Their house is undergoing a major energy-conserving overhaul. Casual long-distance travel has faded away. Their food choices focus on what is in season and what is produced locally and or with a minimum of industrial inputs.

As part of these life-altering strategies, they have purchased a “harvest share” in Full Plate Farm Collective, the local Community Supported Agriculture (CSA). Each week they pick up a box of produce at Ludgate Farms, gathered from three local organic farms, and each week they come to terms with chard, spinach, beets, and other crops that ripen as the season rolls forward. This relentlessly fresh array of beautiful foods demands to be eaten, every single day – there is no rest from its neediness: “Eat me while fresh – and before the next box arrives!” Since June, the packaged and processed foods in Peg and Ben’s diet have in large part been replaced by vegetable-focused dishes supplemented with pastas, home made breads, local cheeses and the occasional dab of meat from the Farmers Market. (Not forgetting locally-made Finger Lakes wines and beers!)

Additionally a modest garden was started in the least-leafy, least-wet area of their big backyard. While stealthy gophers have taken the best stuff from under the fence, there has been lettuce, a few beans, cucumbers and one healthy pumpkin; and the promise of many pounds of tomatoes – if they would only ripen.

By mid-August, Peg and Ben were comfortable enough in their new vegetable-based habits to try the wild foods that grace roadsides and woods-edges during central New York’s glorious midsummer.

On this particular morning, Peg and I scrambled into a creekbed to grab green and red apples from the sunnier side of a big old tree on its bank, and snipped a half bucket of ripe wild black cherries. These became, respectively, deeply-flavored applesauce and a small bottle of cherry juice concentrate that shouted good health. Wandering along the woodland edge, we also gathered two cups of sublimely ripe blackberries.

What a haul! And our day of small, gem-like harvests had just begun. Peg and I and Aurelia took my car on the back route across the Cascadilla and Six Mile Creek valleys, up past Ithaca College to the heights where one of the cooperating organic farms, Three Swallows Farm, is situated. Probably the proprietors work far too hard most of the year to appreciate the wild romanticism of their view across the deep hidden valley with horizons of cool blue hills further on, and a glimmer of the deep blue coolness of Cayuga Lake far below.

We were there to pick stuff on our own sweet free time, and could glance up from plucking basil leaves to look at the cows in the field below, or pause between the long undulating rows of jalapeno pepper plants to gaze at other folks like us, ambling and plucking. A mother and daughter gathered a massive bouquet of zinnias, snapdragons and cleome, an outrageous blast of bright colors. The flowers were free after all so we overcame our Puritanical tendencies and collected our own bundle of bright sweet blossoms, laid carefully in our paper bags on top of piles of peppers (four different kinds), basil leaf heaps, and sharply-scented lemon verbena. The rows of beans were done, the okra was not in yet (and difficult for Peg to love), and the masses of hanging cherry and plum tomatoes were, like the ones in the backyard, not yet ripe. But we gathered in plenty for our needs.

Back at the house, scratched and sun-warmed by our day outside, we sorted our goodies, and topped off the collection with a visit to the backyard garden, adding several crunchy green beans and a cucumber to the day’s haul.

None of these beautiful foods were gathered in great quantities. We had enough basil leaves for one big pesto meal on pasta, with leftovers. The cherry juice concentrate was enough for five drinks added to wine or sparkling water (five amazing drinks). The blackberries went into a couple of servings of morning yogurt; the lemon balm made a nice small bouquet as did the fancy flowers. The apples made plenty of applesauce, lasting several days. We did have a heck of a lot of jalapenos. A few went into two fresh salsas that very night; most of the rest were frozen for individual thawing and use.

For all the time spent working at it on that breathlessly beautiful day, we did not collect massive quantities: we gained a few handfuls of most things. But you know, a little bit of intense flavor goes a long way. And, when you become immersed in the collection, harvest and preparation of locally, sustainably grown produce, the preparation becomes part of the meal: actually part of the food value. The entire process nourishes and sustains, so that you do not need as much to eat as when your food comes from packets and boxes and frozen microwave pouches.

Within a few days after our varied harvest, Peg and Ben had gone back across the road with Aurelia to gather another batch of even riper cherries. When I last checked, they had their eyes on apple trees, heavy with fruit, going unharvested across the Cornell campus and the city of Ithaca. There’s one next to the old schoolhouse, one on Triphammer Road next to a fraternity house, one on Campus Road next to frats and dorms, and one on Buffalo Street below Stewart Avenue. The harvest becomes the meal.