Archive for Garden

27 Feb 2009
Bees • Garden

Postcard From The Meadow

Yes, this is a food related post. Look closer… can you find the honey bee? her butt sticking out from one of the snowdrops? “her” indeed… they are all “she”, you know.

ah… honey: the food of the gods! bee barf!

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On warm sunny days, they fly out of the hive where the cold weather has kept them cooped to stretch their wings, clean the hive (yes, they do! really!) and see if they is any foraging to do. Pickings are slim, but there are some: crocuses, snowdrops, Johnny-jump-ups, early willows and anything flowering in the greenhouse. Whatever it is, some of them are coming back to the hive with sacs of dark pollen, and you know, they only collect pollen from one species at a time…

There must be something else blooming in the woods.

sylvie | 2 comments | Tags: , , ,
22 Feb 2009
Appetizer • Cookery • Garden • herb • herb recipe • Kitchen Garden • locavore log • Side Dish • Soups • vegetable • Vegetable recipe

Lovely Lemony Sorrel

There are indubitable signs of springs out there (besides the 2 minutes of additional daily daytime we are getting now).

For once, the snowdrops are nodding their tiny white bells in the still blustery gusts of wind and then, then!, yellow IS swelling the buds of the early daffodils. But for the ever hopeful kitchen gardener, a much surer sign that spring is coming is what’s budding, swelling, germinating, pushing up or otherwise showing signs of life in the vegetable garden.

Is there something fresh I can sink my teeth in – or at least wake up my taste buds (pun intended) with? Something green? With a little bite? Something… live? I have talked about reliable mache growing outside in winter, but a few other denizens that grow happily enough in a cold frame provide fresh taste at this time of the year: spinach, cutting celery, parsley, arugula, and sorrel are among them. They do not need a cold frame per se, but the protection provided by a cold frame allows them to send forth new leaves much earlier than their unprotected brethren, left totally outside in what is otherwise a generally bleak landscape at this time of the year.

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Sorrel might be less well known on the list, so let’s talk about it, a little, shall we? Read more

sylvie | 23 comments | Tags: , , , , , , ,
18 Feb 2009
Garden • Kitchen Garden • Pests

Of Seeds And Mice

Swiss Chard and Cardoon. Cardoon!!!

Since those two are not interested in mice hunting in the greenhouse (only the great outdoors)…

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keith-dodo-in-the-snow

… we had to resort to those:

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…baited with organic peanut butter – no less.

Round 2: minus 2 mice.

Ungerminated flats also moved to the house until germination and all re-seeded as necessary. I suppose that’s why I start seeds early. Sigh!

sylvie | 4 comments | Tags: , ,
04 Feb 2009
Garden • Garden Technique • Kitchen Garden • Seed Starting • vegetable

It’s That Time Of The Year Again

Yes? Yes! YES! It’s that time of the year. Nooo… not the time of cherries (although that will come too), but even better: the time to start seeds for the spring & summer kitchen garden.

I am giddy, giddy, giddy. First of all, the days are visibly getting longer. Finally! almost 8 hours of direct sun at Laughing Duck Gardens. For other gardeners in the area – the ones that live on flatland – the days are longer with 10 ½ hours between sunrise and sunset, but the mountains surrounding us don’t let us see the sun until later in the morning and we loose it earlier in evening. And, when it sinks down behind Jenkins Mountain around 5:00 in the afternoon, the air chills and the hollow immediately feels somber. So any additional minute is a blessing, and since we bask in almost 40 minutes more of sunlight than a month ago, we have 40 blessings. Secondly, by the end of the month, we will have picked another 1 hour of daylight (60 blessings). Yeah! And then! then, yesterday I started my seeds.

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Read more

sylvie | 3 comments | Tags: , , , , ,
29 Jan 2009
Garden • Kitchen Garden • Propagation • Seed Starting • vegetable

Growing Chayote in Virginia

Growing what?

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You know… “chayote” (sometimes spelled “chayotte”), also known as chouchou, chocko, christophine, mirliton, vegetable pear. You don’t know? Time for today’s lesson, then: Sechium edule, a member of the cucurbitacea family (or if you prefer a cousin of squashes and cucumber), originates from Mexico and Central America and was already cultivated there when the Spaniards arrived. The word chayote comes to us from a Spanish word derived from the word “hitzayotli” in the Nahuatl language where it designates both the plant and the fruit.

The plant is viviparous, as was discussed in the post on starting chayote, meaning you need a fruit to start the plant: the smooth large whitish seed (perfectly edible and considered a delicacy by the chayote connoisseur) must germinate inside the fruit.

Chayote is perennial in its native climate and in the tropical and subtropical areas of the world where it was exported and made itself at home (like here)- which is why you find it on the menus of cuisines as diverse as Vietnamese, Australian, Reunionese, Louisianan, Nigerian etc. In the mid-Atlantic area, it will be killed by a hard frost, although it will stand to a light one: in my garden it is killed by the same type of frost that kills my dahlia tops (another garden denizen that hails from Central America). If a plant were several years old it would have had a chance to form tuber-like roots, and like dahlias, would send new shoots up when more clement weather arrives. In the Northern Piedmont, though – as in the entire mid-Atlantic area – the winters are too harsh and the plant must be considered an annual. Read more

sylvie | 21 comments | Tags: , , , ,
25 Jan 2009
Garden • Kitchen Garden • vegetable

Enamored of Mache

The last three winters since we’ve been here, I have been able to grow salad greens throughout most of the winter. While it dipped down to 0F (-18 C) in February of 2007 (or was that 2006?), there was a thick snow cover that helped to mitigate temperatures on the ground – and in my improvised cold frames – as well as insulate plants from the effects of desiccating winds.

Not this year! Not having set-up my second-hand hoophouse cold frames yet, everything is growing in the open or under agricultural fabric layers. Growing… or dying that is, since we have seen -5F (-21C) without snow covers and icy drying winds sucking the life out of my kitchen garden.

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The arugula, cutting celery & parsley while alive do not look too happy – darn right bedraggled, actually. The mature Swiss Chard has expired in a messy brown & slimy goo (the seedlings seem OK). The lettuce has rotted to the base. Since they may send side shoots in early spring, I am leaving the stumps. The bokchoi, tatsoi and the likes are still buried under their blanket of straw. The mache, however… the mache… is green, and while I would not call it “lusty”, it certainly looks good enough to eat. Which is what we are happily doing, as seen pictured with this slab of homemade pate.

What is mache, you ask?

If you are English, that’s “Corn Salad” or “Lamb’s Lettuce”, in German “Feltsalat” or “Ackersalat” and in Italian “Valeriana”. While there are many species of mache, each slightly different in taste, leaf form or color, Valerianella locusta is the one you are most likely to find in cultivation. It originates from Eurasia, and grow wild in many places in Europe and the British Isles. I read that it also escaped cultivation in the North Eastern US, but I have not found it in the wild (I have also not looked!). There is also an Italian species Valerianella eriocarpa which is not as cold hardy. Read more

sylvie | 6 comments | Tags: , , , , ,
02 Aug 2008
Cookery • fruit • Fruit recipe • Garden • locavore log • vegetable • Wild Food

Peachy-Wild Berries Jubilee

A few weeks ago, I blogged about picking up berries in the hedge rows – free wild food… well.. free as in “spend no cash”, but after several hours in the delightful mugginess and bugginess characteristic of a Virginia summer, the numerous scratches that you have collected – not matter how careful or layered you were – and the (relatively) meager harvest, you understand why berries seem so expensive when you buy them. And those are the cultivated ones that grow meekly and obediently in rows and trellises. Wild berries are … well… wild in how they grow – and you do have to keep an eye out for snakes and bears. It’s always amazing the things some people will do for wild berries!

So I froze berries by the bag full and jubilantly made wild blackberry sorbet & wineberry sorbet.

Then I read about Sugar High Friday on FoodBlogga where bloggers and non-bloggers alike are invited to make a dessert featuring berries and send it to the organizer. The round-up is the brain child of Jennifer at the Domestic Goddess. I am very new to the blogosphere – having had high speed internet only very recently and just discovering all those neat food blogs out there. I am still struggling with a lot of the technical blog stuff, but I can cook (or so I’d like to think). While dessert is not necessarily my forte, I’ve got berries: besides the aforementioned wild blackberries and wineberries, the garden is currently producing a few late blueberries, day-neutral strawberries, the odd raspberries and alpine strawberries (neither of which by the way is a berry, botanically speaking; but that will be a post for another time). Mmm… I hope Jennifer meant “Berries” as cooks and gardeners would mean it – not as botanists…

[Update August 4, 2008: Stop by FoodBlogga where Susan posted today pictures and links to 82 desserts all featuring berries, some very simple and some quite elaborate - but all looking simply delicious.]

Anyway, why not try to make a dessert, a COOL dessert – as it’s way too hot to do any real baking around here – that I could send in? A dessert good enough for a festive occasion but simple enough to assemble on any week night – as all the components – except for the fresh berries – can be made days (or even weeks) in advance. It’ll give me a topic for a post and will make my friend Margaret happy since she asked me to post a sorbet recipe using berries. Voila! I love it when I can accomplish several things at once! (Margaret: do note, you are getting TWO new sorbet recipes, two herbal syrup recipes that may be used in ice-teas and cocktails AND the dessert is fat free if you omit the toasted almonds and the whipped cream)

Peachy-Wild Berries Jubilee

And so Peachy-Wild Berries Jubilee was born.(It did not stay alive very long: hands kept trying to grab it as as was trying to take “one more picture”… and if you can pronounce the name 3 times very fast, you get to eat the jubilee). Read more

sylvie | 4 comments
10 Jul 2008
Garden • Kitchen Garden • Pests • vegetable

Of Beans Growing

Gardening keeps you humble.

Here you are: pretty proud of yourself, because you’ve been gardening for over twenty years – you’ve even had some pretty good years and raised some unusual plants; you’ve dabbled in all kinds of things; have propagated a lot of your own plants and saved seeds; you are even teaching people how to start or improve their kitchen garden; AND people call you or e-mail you for advice.

The ancient Greeks knew it: Hubris will cause your downfall. Ok, so Nemesis won’t come for me – or so I hope! – but I certainly got what was due to me. A reminder that cockiness has no place in the garden. I got humbled by the humble green bean. Read more

sylvie | No comments | Tags: , ,
21 Jun 2008
Garden • Kitchen Garden

Out numbered, out composted

I really thought I was a pretty serious composter. I have two large (at least 5 x 5 x 4) bins going at once, often three – mmmhhh… “piles” would probably be a better word than “bin”, although I do try to corral my compost … some. All kitchen vegetal scraps, garden debris, weeding, grass clippings, raked leaves, old potting soil, mulch etc go in there. And a few truckloads of horse manure when I can get my hands on it (actually if my garden facilitator can get it for me). A few months later, tada! Magic has worked and I have black crumbly deliciously earthy-smelling compost. I actually thought I might be good enough to earn recognition in Organic Gardening magazine if I ever wanted to send a photo of my compost piles for that special last page. Some visitors to the garden are clearly surprised by the compost zeal – then really ask questions when they start looking around at what’s growing. Anyway, I thought I was pretty good. That is, until I visited the garden of Tobey & Jennifer Wheelock a few days ago. Read more

sylvie | 2 comments
18 Jun 2008
Garden • Garden Technique • Kitchen Garden • Seed Saving • Seed Starting • vegetable

The Scent of Swiss Chard

I had no idea that Swiss Chard flowers smelled so good.

The flowers themselves are small and inconspicuous – albeit on top of rather incongruously awkward stems that flop onto their neighbors – and, unfortunately onto the cowslip primroses. The scent is powdery sweet, not cloying. How I got to revel in the scent of Swiss Chard is a (not that) long story. Read more

sylvie | One comment | Tags: , ,
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