Archive for vegetable

S Is For Strawberries

Or is it for Swiss chard?

because my chard is doing quite well, thank you very much. I am now harvesting two big bunches a week, and with all that rain, and that nice temperature, it’s growing and growing and growing – as you can see from the photo taken just after a harvest, a couple of days ago, of ‘Lucullus’, a chard with a white respectable-sized stem and pale green leaves. It has grown remarkably well in the 7 weeks since I transplanted it out.

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I also have planted perpetual Swiss Chard, ‘Golden’ Swiss chard (with, you guessed it, has yellow stems), ‘Rhubard’ Swiss chard (with red stem) and another one with dark green leaves and white stem which label has been lost. And the one self seeding from last year. Those are not as far along as ‘Lucullus’, because I started them later.

Yes, I like Swiss chard.

I like strawberries too. And Tristar, is, again, not disappointing: small, abundant and bursting with flavor.

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So, of course, I am making sorbet. I am also making strawberry jam Read more

Asparagus!

or sparrow grass or sparr grass. But an asparagus by any other name is still an asparagus.

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I learned my lesson from last year: pick every single spear, the huge fat ones (some are larger than my thumb) as well as the skinny ones during asparagus picking season (from 2 to 8 weeks depending on the vigor and the age of your plants). Any asparagus left to grow will turn into fern: not only will the crown stop sending more desirable shoots, the ferns provide habitat for the cursed asparagus beetles. The beetle damages the tips (both nibbling them and forcing them to grow crooked), lay their unsightly eggs on the tips and eat the foliage which adversely affect the following year’s crop. So pick often (as much as twice a day in the hot weather) and pick all!

So we have a bit of asparagus at the moment, but nobody complains since they go exceedingly well with just about any food (or with no other food): munched on the way out of the garden au naturel (the asparagus! not me…); raw and sliced thinly in green salads; sautéed with morels and finished with a little cream; briefly roasted with a little sesame; or as a side dish snapped in large pieces, stir fried with spring onions and served along side a nice little pork chop.

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What do you do with asparagus?

First Radishes

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I am told that open-face radish sandwiches are an acquired taste.

I am told – very firmly – that cream of radish-leaf soup is undoubtedly an acquired taste.

Nobody’s perfect!

I still plant radishes. Those ‘Radis de 18 Jours’ are young, crisp, mildly spicy and pleasantly rosy. Still… not quite “18 day” radishes as the French name would have you believed. I sowed them on the last day of March and picked them on May 1, so they are 31-day radishes. Maybe in good French garden soil that’s been manured for 300 years they become edible in 18 days? not here, at least not this early in spring. I have just sowed some more, let’s see if they are of edible size on May 19… Because I don’t have 298 years!

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Note the tiny carrots seedlings in between the rows of radishes: they were sowed at the same time, but carrots take so darn long to come to any respectable size!

The best way to eat those just-pulled from the garden radishes is with a little salt and some really good butter.

The leaves are young enough that they just get shredded and tossed, at the last minutes, in whatever is cooking.

I won’t make radish-leaf soup for a few weeks yet.

But I will enjoy those petite blushy crunchy snacks!

(I also planted ‘Champion’)

Before The Rain

Before the rain is a good time to:

1. transplant Swiss chard

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2. transplant lettuce

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3. check on tomato seedlings in greenhouse. Sigh. Too early to transplant outside. BUT Read more

Start! part 2

This is the 2nd article of a 2 part-series geared at first-time would-be food gardeners (Read Part I here)

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What should I plant?

Not so fast! (aren’t you getting tired with me saying this so often?)

Before you plant, you need a place to plant. We already discussed where. Now let’s discuss how.

Mid-April is late by all counts to start a garden the traditional thorough way – which is to dig and incorporate large amount of organic matter (i.e compost, composted manure, coffee grounds, finely shredded leaves – NOT MULCH!!!! do not dig mulch in!!!!). So unless you have the back and stamina to dig and improve your new garden over the next week or so (or unless you already have a ready to go garden plot) , do it the lazy way: frame a sunny area of your lawn, cover it with newspaper (no glossy please) and pile at least 8 inches (12 inches better) of GOOD top soil, compost and composted manure on top. This will suffocate the grass (the odd really hardy and deep rooted perennial weed may survive, but there is little chance of that). The dead grass will provide additional nutrients for the growing plants.

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Earthworms – your friends – will take care of moving things up and down and, in the process, provide worm castings (plant candy) and tunnel the soil, bringing needed air to the roots of the plants. Plant roots need air. Really. So, if you spy any earthworms, leave them alone and let them do their thing. Read more

Pushing Up!

Bow to the mighty asparagus!

The first ones are now tentatively pushing their rosy tip up – just checking on the above ground weather. Is last year holds true (and so far, it does, as after a few days of warm weather, we are back to cool – including below 32F (0C) at night), then the asparagus will just wait for milder temperature before coming out in any numbers, and growing to edible size. They’ll turn green as the stalk grow, with just a hint of purple left on the scales.

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Meanwhile… can the morels be far behind?

Hardening Off

It’s time to start hardening off the babies. At least, for those of us in the Northern Piedmont (and in the mid-Atlantic area). Yep, time to start hardening off the hardy annual vegetables that were lovingly started indoors. That include you people who took one of my “Starting The Veggy Garden from Seeds” workshops a few weeks ago.

Everything but parsley – maybe lavender and pepper (they all can take several looong weeks to germinate) – should be up now.

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Continue to give basil, tomatoes, pepper, marigolds and any other warm lovers like eggplants plenty of light and warmth. Take them outside on sunny days only when the temperature is above 50F/10C (mmm… maybe even 60F/16C for eggplants). Place them in a sheltered spot, just an hour or two the first time, then more and more progressively over the course of a few days until they can be left out the entire day when it’s mild. It’s not time to plant them out yet – by a long shot – but fresh air and sunshine will do them good. Read more

Planting Onions

Transplants: 350! (more or less); about 200 planted on Monday and 150 planted ten days ago. I have never been successful with the sets (mini-bulbs) planted in the spring: they hardly grew bigger than they start at! So, this year, I bought (more expensive) transplants: 2 bunches from our local farm store (1 red, 1 white – unnamed) and 3 more expensive kinds via mail order at Johnny’s Seeds: Walla-Walla, Mars, and Copra. It’ll be interesting to compare how they perform. The CFC transplants were available earlier, so I could plant them earlier (always a good thing in my book), but the ones from Johnny’s had better roots, and the bundles were bigger. We’ll see (I hope!)

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They are all outside, in a bed that had been “sweetened” in the winter with ashes from the wood stove, planted fairly closely as I want to use young onions for salad in late spring and throughout the summer. Whatever remains (if anything) will be used as storage onions. That’s the idea. In practice, we eat a lot of onions, so I am not even sure 350 will do!

I also have seedlings in the greenhouse planted in cell packs: a pack of bunching White Spears impulsively bought at a rack display (yes, my impulse purchases tend to be seeds!) & mini-white Bianca di Maggio. They were started later than they should have (in early March instead of Janauary) and will need to be up-potted soon. Most of the three-weeks old seedlings still have their seeds up in the air, at the tip of their first leaf. Makes them look like little people whispering oniony gossips…

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At the rate they are growing, I am guessing that I’ll set them out in late April.

Meanwhile, I’ve got lettuce, leaf broccoli & cutting celery to transplant out. Best to do it before the rain which we are suppose to get this afternoon & tomorrow.

A Potted Kitchen Garden

Do you do pot?

Not that kind of pot, silly! But “pot” as in food grown in a container…

Virginia Rockwell asked me in a comment on the post labeled “Eating Local in the Northern Piedmont in Winter” if I have “any tips for newbies [about] growing your own in central VA? […] focusing on growing edibles in containers, close by the kitchen door, and the easy, rewarding stuff – using local, sustainable sources for seeds, plants when possible.”

Virginia is a landscape designer in Gordonsville, VA and offers container gardening to her clients, of ornamental plants – as much as I can tell. So, going edible is just one step away from what she is already doing. I started to write her a private e-mail, but realized this would make a good post, so here is my letter to Virginia.

Dear Virginia:

Thanks for contacting me! I am always truly happy when one more person wants to grow some of her own food, so I hope you have a great attendance for your workshop.

My first edible garden was eked – almost 20 years ago – out of the bareness of a 6th floor balcony of an apartment building in Fairfax County. No elevator. Everything was man- or woman-carried up 6 flights of stairs: the pots, the soil, the planters, the plants, the tools. I mostly remember the tomatoes, started from seeds, and the numerous mile-long walks to Merrifield garden center, and back with plants: fern, rosemary, little annual packs… and I remember all the plants I wanted to grow then but could not. Then I got married, and we moved to a townhouse. Twice. Each time we left a small garden behind us.

Read more

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