Truly Local

Steve Smith and Patti Osburn nurture their vegetables from the seed stage all the way to their dinner table. (Photo: stpimages.com)

There’s been a lot of talk lately about where our food comes from and how it’s grown. Is it organic? Is it sustainable? Is it local?

For Sarah Pesikoff’s family, including her husband David and their teenaged boys Jacob and Ethan, produce couldn’t possibly be more local. That’s because if they crave a salad – or beets, or cabbage, or beans – all they need to do is walk out the back door, survey what’s ripe and harvest dinner.

Sarah started gardening modestly years ago as a law student in San Antonio, “trying to make my balcony look pretty with some pots.” She continued in California, “where everything grows instantly,” she says, and came home to Houston with the gardening bug. One thing led to another, and a couple of houses later Sarah had mastered herbs and flowers and decided to try tomatoes “just for fun. They really took off, and I [thought], ‘You know, what I want is a vegetable garden.’” And she made it happen.

Sarah called the landscaping firm Thompson + Hanson to design and create an area in her Rice University-area backyard that would get good sun. “I couldn’t prep the bed myself,” she says. “They made a long bed that widens at the end, with places behind it for plants to climb. They made it pretty.”

Pretty is fitting, because most everything in Sarah’s world is pretty. She is the person who is always put together, whose house always looks beautiful as if it attracted its own light, and who has the ability to cook and host a dinner that seems simultaneously effortless and all-out. Of course her cabbages are gorgeous specimens totally unlike the grocery store variety and worthy of gift-giving. Cabbages.

“I do lots of lettuces and grow a lot of things I can eat in salad form. Lots of carrots, radishes, green onions, cabbage, beets. Spring planting is peppers and cucumbers; fall is climbing beans like snap peas. Sometimes I’ll have broccoli and cauliflower. I did do turnips once, but it turns out I don’t like turnips!” Sarah also recently planted a row of citrus trees.

“Summer is when things lie fallow – it’s too hot. So we plant in the fall to grow all fall and winter and again in spring.”

“I take the easy way out,” Sarah says, referring to her relationship with the gardeners.

But don’t get her wrong. Sarah is a true gardener, weeding, harvesting, generally getting a little dirty. (Several years ago she spent time in a hospital fighting a staph infection she likely contracted while working in her garden.) “They plant the seeds for me, but then they don’t touch it again.”

Ironically, the crop that brought Sarah to vegetable gardening – tomatoes – has been the one she’s been least successful with in recent years. “They can be really finicky, and every critter likes the bright red. I’ve tried netting, but it’s a big tangly mess, and I get caught up in it and kind of gave up.”

When Sarah Pesikoff wants something to eat, she heads for her backyard garden. (Photo: lawellphoto.com)

Steve Smith has tips on that. The owner of Rover Oaks Pet Resort cultivated his own large vegetable garden and says, “The biggest challenge hands-down is birds and tomatoes.” Steve feels the same way as Sarah about netting: “It’s a pain.” But, like Sarah and every other gardener, he needs to keep the birds away from his tomatoes. So he’s learned to “put out lots of water sources around the plants and keep [the water] fresh. Birds need food and water so things like tomatoes are awesome to them. One of the things I’ve learned is that the birds may not necessarily be going for food, but they want the water.”

Steve’s love of gardening began early, growing up in Tennessee helping his dad. “We didn’t have a lot of money, so we needed the garden to help put food on the table,” he says. “A lot of my young memories were with my dad, out there harvesting corn and beans. It was a big part of what we did as a family in the summer.”

Years later, when Steve bought a home on a large lot in Bellaire, he said gardening became “a way to connect with my dad in a big way.”

Steve has had to learn to tailor his efforts from what worked in Tennessee to what’s feasible in Texas. “I have a raised garden, but Dad and I had a flat piece of land that we plowed. Here, you have to raise it so there’s drainage. Regarding weeds, you don’t till the soil here, but you mulch it. It makes sense, but it’s not the way Dad and I did it, so I still till the way we did.”

Steve has learned a lot online. “I don’t really have a favorite source. I just Google when I have a question,” he says. “It’s pretty easy to tell the master and professional gardeners from chat rooms where everyone has an opinion but you don’t know who knows their stuff.” Steve says it’s a safe bet to trust agricultural websites of state governments for gardening tips. He especially likes Texas A&M University’s online gardening resource, which offers vegetable-planting guides and soil sampling, which starts at $10.

“The first thing any [gardener] should do is send a soil sample off [to be analyzed] so you know what you’re dealing with before you add any amendments,” Steve says. “When I was growing up with Dad, one of the things we did was fertilize and use compost and manure to enrich the soil. Back then we had friends who had a dairy farm. We would literally take shovels and take old patties and spread them out and till them into our garden, and we had great crops.

“So my first or second year gardening in Bellaire I bought some compost and manure, tilled it and thought it was going to be great. But I couldn’t understand why everything was wilting and turning brown. I sent a soil sample off, and they said, ‘You’ve got way too much phosphorous and nitrogen and potassium.’ I had fertilized it too much.

“After that, it took five years for the soil elements to drop to a reasonable level.

“I’m a hobby gardener,” Steve says. “I make lots of mistakes, but at the end of the day we have a pretty nice harvest.”

That includes beans, tomatoes, carrots, kale, spinach and peppers as staples, along with a varying assortment of “experiments.”

“Now I have three kinds of beans growing and two kinds of carrots. It depends on what strikes me, and I’ll see which ones perform the best. If you lose it you lose it. Part of the fun is not doing the same thing over and over again.” Steve leaves the flower gardening to wife Patti Osburn, but they both participate in harvesting the veggies.

Both Sarah and Steve say that they stick to simple when it comes to serving their harvests. Neither had a favorite recipe; they both said they mostly like to sauté, steam, roast and eat the veggies raw in salads. Sarah suggests adding feta at the last minute to roasting beets, then popping them back into the oven to warm the cheese topping. That’s as close to a recipe as either got.

Both Sarah and Steve also enjoy being generous with their harvests. Sarah has been treated at MD Anderson Cancer Center for the past year, and she often gifts her doctors and nurses with vegetables from her garden. Steve shares his crops with employees at Rover Oaks and friends at church.

“When things are ready to harvest,” Steve says, “I’ll come home from work, we may pick some beans and carrots and kale, and we’ll have a meal out of the garden. Maybe we’ll supplement with chicken, but it’s all pretty simple and straightforward.”

Call it what you will – organic, local, sustainable – Sarah and Steve and their families have got the real deal.