Eat Your Weeds!

One of my new favorite early spring meals is homemade naan bread topped with sauteed greens. At this time of year, there really isn't much growing in the garden except for sorrel, onions, and some of the hardier perennial herbs (such as parsley and chives). Of course, I incorporate all of this into the sauteed greens. However, this often is not enough to satisfy my lust for veg (and one never wants to eat too much of sorrel, since it contains oxalic acid - same as spinach - which isn't good for you in large quantities). Since we are lucky to have 5 beautiful acres to roam around on, with plenty of pasture, I have begun taking long walks around the property, munching my way through the fields!

I have received a great deal of interest and questions when I talk about searching for edible greens. I preface all of the following with: I am not an expert! In no way should you attempt to taste any unfamiliar plant unless you are absolutely certain of your identification (or have already had an expert identify it). There are a great deal of poisonous plants, many that can be easily mistaken for other, edible plants. It's easy to make a mistake in identification, and sometimes that mistake can be FATAL. Please be careful!! Also, please make sure that wherever you decide to gather your wild edibles has not been sprayed with pesticides!

That being said, I thought folks would enjoy a blog post briefly discussing some of the wild edibles in my own pastures and how to identify them.

Let's start with the easiest of all - that "pest" the infamous DANDELION!

The poor little dandelion gets such an undeservedly bad rap. This so-called "weed" is actually a wonderful edible, full of vitamins and minerals, and has even been used for centuries to make dandelion wine! Dandelion leaves are higher in beta carotene than carrots, and have a higher iron and calcium content than spinach. It is an excellent early spring tonic plant, helping to "flush out" the system of its winter blues. The name dandelion means "lion's tooth" in Old French for its long, lance-shaped (or "toothed") leaves, which grow around a basal rosette.

Dandelion leaves can be anywhere from 3-12 inches in length, depending on the "happiness" of the plant. Dandelion is easily identifiable due to its well-known, sunshine yellow flowers. Because of this, and the fact that it has no poisonous lookalikes, dandelion is an excellent wild edible. You can eat both the leaves and flowers.

The leaves are actually best before the plant flowers - less bitter - but I think they taste great all season long!

MINER'S LETTUCE

Miner's Lettuce is a succulent wild edible, related to purslane (which makes it a bit easier to identify, in my opinion!). If you have ever harvested wild purslane (and we definitely do on our property), you'll notice that purslane and miner's lettuce have leaves that are quite similar in textural appearance.

Miner's Lettuce can grow anywhere from 3-12 inches tall, with leaves that are a wide oval shape with a pointed tip.

Miner's Lettuce was a major food source during the California Gold Rush, and one bite will show you why! Both the leaves and flowers are edible (currently, it's too early in the season for our plants to be blooming). The leaves are best eaten raw, but can be sauteed as well. Miner's Lettuce is an excellent source of vitamin C!


(ENGLISH) PLANTAIN

One of the great things about plantain is that it is easy to identify, and has no poisonous lookalikes! Here on the farm, we have English plantain growing wild in our fields. English Plantain plants grow in basal rosettes and have long, slightly hairy, lance-shaped leaves that grow upward as though standing at attention.

The leaves have very distinct parallel veins running lengthwise. English Plantain is one of the earliest spring edibles to come up, braving the cold weather before anything else. The smallest, youngest leaves are the tastiest - larger, older leaves are quite fibrous and tough to chew. Both the leaves and the seeds are edible.

According to Steve Brill & Evelyn Dean in their book, "Identifying and Harvesting Edible and Medicinal Plants in Wild (and Not So Wild) Places," Plantains were inadvertently brought from Europe by the first settlers, and by the early 1700s, people already thought of them as native plants.

For more information on identifying and eating wild edibles, I do highly recommend the book by Steve Brill & Evelyn Dean, "Identifying and Harvesting Edible and Medicinal Plants in Wild (and Not So Wild) Places"

Plant Starts Available for the 2012 Gardening Season

Here is a tentative list of the plants that will be available for the 2012 gardening season. They have either just been germinated, or are currently in germination trays in the greenhouse. Thus, they will not be ready for new homes until April. Tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, and other frost-sensitive veggies need to be placed in the ground (at least here in the Rogue Valley) NO EARLIER THAN MAY 15th (unless you plan to protect them via water teepee!).

• Joya de Oaxaca heirloom tomato
• Chile Negro pepper
• Long Island Improved Brussel Sprout
• Catskill Brussel Sprout
• Red Russian Kale
• Assorted heirloom artichokes (Green Globe, Purple of Romagna, & Violetta de Provence)
• Ground Cherry
• Armenian "Cucumber" (really a snake melon, and WILL cross-pollinate with your other melons - though NOT watermelons - giving them a cucumber flavor)
• Habanero Pepper
• Wax heirloom pepper
• McMahon's Bird Pepper (heirloom)

Plant Starts Available in LIMITED Quantities (Reserve yours early!):

• Carbon heirloom tomato
• Black Krim heirloom tomato
• Chapeau de Frade super-rare heirloom pepper
• Aji Limon pepper
• Ping Tung heirloom eggplant
• Piel de Sapo heirloom winter melon
• Sweet Meat Oregon heirloom winter squash
• Prescott Fond Blanc heirloom melon
• Yacon

I may be adding other plants as the season progresses. Email for details and pricing!

Figs, Potatoes, & Beans, Oh My!

The first figs of the season are ripe and ready for devouring! We have three fig trees on the property (and hopefully soon many more - as in, an ORCHARD!) - two young ones in the Herb Garden, and one mature-ish tree next to the house. The mature tree is LOADED with fruit this year, and the first few pints-worth were ripe this week. There are basketfuls of unripe ones still on this tree, which I am sure will be ready in another month or two, meaning a delicious and sustained fig harvest this year (yay!). Our trees are the variety known as "Desert King," which is ironic because they are one of the best varieties for the higher, cooler elevations here in the Applegate Valley. B&B guests this week were treated to quartered and decorated figs as an accompaniment to their breakfasts!

Also ready for the first time this season: the heirloom potatoes! Yesterday, we harvested ~half of one of our potato beds - roughly 10 lbs of potatoes, mainly comprised of Blue Shetland, Kennebec, and a few of the rare & delicious Negresse (aka "Truffle" potato!) shown below.

I noticed an interesting mutation of my Blue Shetland potatoes (at least out of this bed): instead of the traditional ring of blue/purple spots, there is a solid band of color...weird...I rather like it!

And of course we are still harvesting many pounds each week of my favorite heirloom bush bean variety: Dragon's Tongue.

Further Bean News: the rare Lenape Cutshort/Indian Hannah pole beans have mature pods now, and should be ready for harvesting in a few weeks (when the pods dry on the plants). Also, the equally rare Flagg pole beans in the Herb Garden were dry and ready for harvesting yesterday, so I spent much of the afternoon working on that!

Harvest Season is in full swing now, so stay tuned!...

The First "True" Taste of Summer!

We harvested the first of the Dragon's Tongue bush beans last night! Of course, none made it INTO the house as we stuffed our faces with one of the "true" tastes of summer. These purple-striped succulent heirloom beans are best eaten young & fresh from the garden!

Peppers on a Time Out

Yesterday, Ryan and I built our "tester" pepper plant isolation cage out of wood and reemay row cover cloth. This cage (and the 6-7 others we are planning to build) will be used to ensure seed purity in the rare heirloom pepper plants that we will be raising this year.

The reemay fabric allows about 75% light and water to pass through, and also provides a light shade and increased humidity, which the plants love.

This particular cage measures 4'x4'x4', which is a bit too large for many pepper plants. However, this one is planned for my beloved Chapeau de Frade pepper plants, which (when happy) have been known to grow up to 5 feet tall and 8 feet wide! I doubt they will reach that big here in Southern Oregon, but I wanted to give them a good amount of space just in case!

Trying to attach the reemay fabric to the wooden frame was a bit...difficult...in the breeze to say the least! The fabric covers all sides except for the bottom of the frame, with a long "skirt" that will be buried in the soil so that insects can't crawl under the frame to get into the box.

The cage took 1.5 professionals about 2 hours to construct. It is easily disassembled for storage during the off season, too! I like the way Ryan designed the cages, and I told him he ought to go into production and market these to other gardeners and seed-savers! I know when I first looked into isolation cages, I couldn't find anywhere that actually SOLD them - just a bunch of pictures of other people's cages. Many gardeners aren't married to woodworkers, and so might perhaps rather purchase a pre-made cage that they can assemble themselves...just a thought... :)

Peppers Can Be Weird Too

So, here is something new for me: about 40% of my PBC-211 peppers are germinating as albino plants! Now, I know that with artichokes (which don't reproduce true to form via seed) you are supposed to weed out the white/small plants and just let the big ones grow. However, pepper plants DO reproduce true to form, so I know that this is something different...perhaps there is some variation in color (such as in fish peppers) with this species, but not being able to find out ANYTHING about this pepper, I can only guess.

So, long story short, I am excited to see what sort of wonderfully weird peppers both forms of the PBC-211 grow into!

Looking Back to Move Forward

As I'm sure you've figured out by now: I love heirloom fruits, herbs, and vegetables. I refuse to grow hybrids or "moderns." If it's open-pollinated, and has been around for at least a few decades, you have my attention! Lately, and with some help from my hero Mr. Weaver, I've been researching old books that describe heirloom varieties. At first I thought that I would never be able to afford these books, as most are from the 18th & 19th century. Thankfully, many are available as reprints on websites such as Amazon for a reasonable price! With our recent tax refund came some designated "mad money" (about the only time we get any!), and I spent mine by purchasing three volumes (two originals, and a reprint):

"Beans of New York" by U.P. Hedrick
(the bean bible with "so many flaws" as Mr. Weaver puts it...)

"The Vegetable Garden" by Vilmorin

"The Field and Garden Vegetables of America" by Fearing Burr
(one of the celebrated and often-quoted texts on heirloom vegetables of the 1800's)

I managed to luck out on two of the books: I found an original copy of Fearing Burr's volume for the incredibly low price of $55 on AbeBooks.com, and thanks to Cornell University's New York State Agricultural Experiment Station, I managed to purchase an original, uncirculated copy of the 1931 "Beans of New York." That's just pretty darn awesome.

There are many, MANY, other old volumes that I would love to own, but in the mean time, many are available as free PDF files off of Google Books and other websites. So I was able to download some of them for reading on my computer. That will tide me over for now! *grin*

While reading through my three purchased texts, I went a little crazy with the remaining portion of "mad money." In short, I made a great deal of purchases through my SSE Member Yearbook. This time, I focused on heirloom pole beans (which are easier to grow, in my opinion, than bush beans since they take up vertical fence space as opposed to horizontal ground space!). Though beans are self-pollinating, insects will and do force themselves into the flowers and cross-pollinate. The trick to avoiding this (at least as much as possible), is to plant plenty of flowers/flowering plants around your beans, to entice the bugs elsewhere. You'll almost always get SOME cross-pollination, but by using this method, you'll reduce the amount. The other tip is to not plant two beans of the same coloring near each other, because it will be impossible to tell if they have cross-pollinated!

The heirloom (and in some cases VERY rare) pole bean varieties I purchased for this year's garden include the following:

Amish Knuttle (or "Gnuddlebuhne," which translates as "bean that looks like a dropping" - no one can claim that (Amish) farmers don't have a sense of humor!)
Flagg
Dinkelbuhne
Coco Sophie
Snowcap
Indian Hannah
Mostoller Wild Goose

I'm very excited for my summer garden! So many new-to-me heirloom varieties! Sometimes I love ordering varieties that I know nothing about, so that I can be absolutely surprised to see what they grow into!

It's The Most Wonderful Time of the Year...

2011 has not even arrived yet, and already I've put in my seed order for next year's garden. As I have mentioned previously, I did not actually need to order very many seeds. I did quite well with my seed saving last summer, so we're mostly-set for next year. I have been putting my SSE membership to good use this month, ordering Orange Fleshed Purple Smudge tomato seeds and Papa de Rola pole bean seeds from fellow members. We will be growing many varieties from last year's garden, as well as some "new" heirloom introductions. Here's the unofficial 2011 gardening list (The names in bold red are the ones that are new-to-us for 2011):

• Applegate Valley Heirloom Tomato
• Cherokee Trail of Tears pole bean
• Papa de Rola pole bean
• Dragon's Tongue bush bean
• Early White Vienna Kohlrabi
• Bloomsdale Long Standing Spinach
• Arugula
• Beauregard and Purple Sweet Potatoes
  
• Walla Walla Onions
• Egyptian Walking Onions
• Negresse Potato
• Ajawiri Potato
• Kennebec Potato
  
• Marina di Chiogga winter squash
• Black Futzu winter squash
• Ping Tung eggplant
• Aji Dulce pepper
• Aji Limon pepper
• Roberto's Cuban Seasoning pepper
• Chapeau du Frade pepper
• Orange Flesh Purple Smudge tomato
• Oaxacan Green Dent Corn
• Anasazi sweet corn
• Violet de Provence artichoke
• Litchi "Tomato"
• Giant Cape Gooseberry
• Ground Cherry
• Prescott Fond Blanc Melon
• Piel de Sapo (aka "Toad Skin") Winter Melon
• Catskill Brussel Sprouts
• Extra Precoce A Grano Violetto Fava Bean
  

And of course the usual ridiculous amount of herbs!

Four Sisters Gardening

After much delay, we finally managed to get the pasture garden tilled last weekend (or at least a large portion of it). Every year we expand our garden a bit further, amending the soil with our own "home grown" compost. When we first began gardening on this little patch of land at the back of our property, it was nothing more than rocky, hard pan clay soil. After 3 years of amending, it's finally beginning to look like good garden soil. I estimate that it will take another two years of soil amending before the ground is the quality that I would like it. The good news is that we will never run out of compost!

At the back of the garden plot (the west end), our grains will be planted: camelina, amaranth, quinoa, etc. Next will come the usual corn, beans, squash, melons. This year, I am excited to be growing Oaxacan green dent corn (used for making green corn flour!). I will also be growing two different heirloom pole beans, and training them to grow up the corn stalks, in the traditional manner. There will be plots of heirloom bush beans, and black beans, giant sunflowers, four different varieties of heirloom winter squash, three types of heirloom melons, and two heirloom watermelons, of course spread out over my two different garden plots to try to prevent cross-pollination. For those who have been following my previous posts, I have begun converting an old goat pasture at the far east end of the property into my second garden plot. I will unfortunately not have the time to complete this 2nd garden this year, but I have it about a 1/3 of the way amended/planted (and filled with onions, leeks, artichokes, and herbs). It's going to be a great gardening year!

My tomato plants are doing fantastically! I have had to replant most of them into gallon pots, and many are flowering already (one even has a little green tomato on it!). I feel proud for what I have accomplished thus far.

I have converted two raised beds into heirloom potato patches, and am waiting for Ryan to build me a third bed. This year, I am raising All Blue, Red Norland, Russian Banana Fingerling, Kennebec, and (the one I am most excited for) Purple Cowhorn (whose true name translates into "Bear Poop" - it hails from Scotland, go figure!)*. I am also excited to see if any of my potato plants go to seed this year. Raising potatoes from true seed is a fun and interesting way to discover new potato varieties. However, potato seeds do not reproduce themselves true to form, but will often produce throwbacks to ancient potato varieties, or sometimes the seed simply won't be viable. Still, with a little time and patience, it can be a fun way of growing potatoes (though you should never rely solely on potato seed for the following year's crop! Always save tubers from your harvest for planting.).

I will also be raising the now almost unknown pot herb, Good King Henry. This versatile plant - one of the earliest greens in summer, and one of the last greens of fall - is great for extending your salad season. The leaves taste like spinach (and are high in vitamins A & C as well as calcium), and the stem can be eaten just like asparagus (& tastes similar). Good King Henry was once very popular, but is now almost impossible to track down (I managed to find seeds for it at Fedco Seeds and Bountiful Gardens). More people should grow this plant in their gardens, and help to preserve this valuable herb from our past!

Lately I have become absolutely enamored with two books written by Seed Savers Exchange member and Master Gardener, William Woys Weaver. I discovered him through the local library (where I checked out his Heirloom Vegetable Gardening), and scrimped and saved until I could afford to purchase a copy of my own. That book has now become one of my most treasured volumes, and recently I also purchased his "100 Vegetables and Where They Come From." Both are what I consider the Bible on heirloom vegetable gardening. I absolutely recommend reading them!

* = Cowhorn is also known under the synonyms Purple Cowhorn, Purple Cow Horn and Seneca Cowhorn. Though listed as a fingerling in most databases, its name comes from its general appearance. It is oblong, thickest at the far (apical) end and curved to a narrow end at the stem attachment. Skin is dark purple. Flesh is cream colored. Eyes are shallow and few in number. It has large spreading plants. It is valued as a 'quick bake' baking potato. Specific gravity is 1.069. Maturity is mid-to-late and it is low yielding. It is a heritage variety with uncertain origins. It has been grown in New York state since before 1853. There is some speculation that it might have been developed in Vermont. There is further speculation that it might be identical to La Crotte d'Ours (Bear Poop), a Canadian heritage variety, thought to have roots to Scotland.
- Cornell University's "Vegetable Varieties for Gardeners" website