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Bees love the Thai basil's pretty purple flower spikes.
- Atticus, fearsome hunter of earthworms
Is there anything prettier than a red cabbage seedling?
Green cabbage, tucked into a cozy bed of compost and leaf mold
Swiss chard. Mmmm.
Savoy cabbage, my 94-year-old grandmother's all-time favorite.
Alliums and a few hardy herbs. Garlic. Multiplier onions.
Bees love the Thai basil's pretty purple flower spikes.
Mark's citrus trees have put on new growth. It's lemon time!
Not much is in bloom now, but Texas tarragon is a bright spot.
Cuban peppers, producing continuously since April.
The lettuces grow through the winter in our only part-shade bed.
Baby broccoli in a double-dug "Chinese style" raised bed.
There was a beautiful Eastern Black Swallowtail in the fennel patch yesterday. This morning, the herb’s tender green shoots were peppered with tiny butterfly eggs. The little orbs are pale yellow now, but they will turn black just before they hatch into small caterpillars. In several stages, these fast-growing creatures will pass through increasingly vivid color patterns — all the while steadily consuming an impressive quantity of fennel, parsley and dill. Individuals lucky enough to avoid hungry wasps will eventually transform into a chrysalis and, finally, something that looks a lot like this:
(c)2009 Val Webb
Meanwhile, we have defaulted to our usual steamy south Alabama late-summer gardening schedule. Manual labor is now limited to really, really early in the morning. We’re prepping beds for fall planting, checking our saved seed and picking those die-hard eggplant and peppers… and some scrumptious ambrosia canteloupe that the Perfect Man incorporated into an experiment in edible landscaping.
Summer is also canning time. Last week, it was green tomato chow-chow… and this week, it was blueberry jam. The hardest part is not opening the jars immediately and devouring the carefully preserved contents. It’s a treat to live with a man who has impressive food preservation skills! (Here’s a tip for any guys out there who might be contemplating an online dating service: just be sure your profile includes the fact that you’re inordinately fond of Mason jars and pressure cookers, and then stand back.)
It was hard, but we refrained from eating this one
Last year, compelled by his rich Italian heritage, The Perfect Man planted artichokes. Tender gray-green leaves sprouted, stalled and then took off in a lavish display of foliage that radiated three feet from the central stalk. This spring, a promising vertical shoot rose from the plant’s base, and then another. And another. Soon, there were tasty green artichokes aplenty. We ate them, shared them, and in an almost superhuman effort (for two artichoke lovers, anyway) left one on the plant to bloom. The huge, surreal artichoke flower is a study in contrasts: thorny and tender, aromatic and yet faintly stinky. Bees love them.
I’m proud of The Perfect Man’s artichoke crop. I’ve never seen them grow in this region… in fact, I had never heard of them being cultivated in the United States outside California. Native to the Mediterranean, they were adored by the Romans — not only as a culinary delight, but also as a popular pre-Viagra remedy for men who lacked a certain lustiness. From its earliest cultivation, deep in the recesses of history, the artichoke has been a world leader in the “sexiest vegetable” category.
With the collapse of the Roman Empire, the artichoke dropped off the cultural radar for awhile. But by the Middle Ages it reappeared, and was quickly forbidden to young maidens, lest they become overwhelmed by its reputedly potent aphrodisiacal powers. Luckily for artichoke fans (as well as young maidens) the unconventional Catherine de Medici ate them constantly, and even included them in her trousseau when she arrived in France for her wedding with King Henry II. Soon French cooks discovered what the Italians had known all along: artichokes are scrumptious.
But don’t take my word for it… check out the recipe section here. Happy eating, maidens! Try not to be overwhelmed.
When it comes to scary subject matter — the stuff you try not to think about when you wake unexpectedly at 2 a.m. — Stephen King can’t hold a candle to Poisonous Plants of the Southern United States. If you’ve ever wondered what would happen to you within 48 hours of, say, nibbling a little lantana from your curbside landscaping, this handy guide from West Virginia University will tell you in excrutiating detail. (Don’t read the lantana section if you are about to have lunch. You’ve been warned.)
Eeeeeeeeek!
As the grandmother of two toddler girls who love to pick flowers, I’m all for nontoxic landscaping. Better yet, edible landscaping. So this year, while our regular backyard garden is doing its usual exuberant summer thing…
… some food crops have replaced traditional landscape plants on the “public” side of the fence. Five itty-bitty Bush Pickle cucumber plants, tucked next to a privacy fence and around the foot of an antique urn, have produced several dozen fat seven-inch cukes and show no signs of slowing. No sign of wilt or insect infestation, either — which, here in the coastal subtropics, is cause for rejoicing.
We tried a ten-foot row of Greasyback Cornstalk beans, a wonderful heirloom that was my great-grandmother’s garden favorite, against a section of privacy fence. A strip of plastic bird netting is tacked to the fence posts to give the beanstalks something to grab. I’m watering them with a dipper from our algae-rich fish pond, and they’re producing lots of characteristically knobby, slightly shiny green beans. Some catnip and St. Francis finish off the little bed.
There’s something very satisfying about landscaping with table fare. Our lawn crops over the past two years have expanded to include citrus, blueberries and culinary ginger, and we want to keep moving in that direction. Eating the yard isn’t for everyone — there are a lot of folks living in suburban housing developments with restrictive covenants, for example, and inner-city gardeners whose street gardens are fraught with unforeseen hazards.
But, personally, I love the idea of yanking out a poisonous invasive and replacing it with something the grandbabies can happily harvest. Hey, lantana! Let’s see you do this:
This gardener took a break from tending his rattlesnake beans and tomatoes, and gave us a quick tour.
It was Saturday, and we were rambling around Pensacola’s first New Urbanism neighborhood — a whimsical 20-acre community called Aragon. We turned a corner and there it was: a lovely community garden, divided into individual family plots and hemmed all around with a white picket fence. Each family has a rectangular plot in the public space, and about two-thirds are currently under cultivation. The garden appears to be designed to encourage its use as a gathering place, with porch swings on one side and a big playground on the other. Brick walkways and trellises of sweet-smelling Carolina jasmine bisect the garden property (our friendly gardener pointed out that the jasmine probably wasn’t the best choice for this location, though, since its big woody roots keep snaking into the vegetables).
Some Florence fennel and a big ol’ rosemary.
Florida summers are hot, hot hot. The community garden at Aragon has a sprinkler system that comes on automatically, three times each week.
They sat there on our potato plants in the early-morning fog, tiny coffee cups raised high, waiting for The Perfect Man to drench them all in their favorite new breakfast beverage. Unlike the slugs in that Hawaii study (the one where coffee was toxic to the slimy little potato-plant-munching devils) apparently Alabama slugs LOVE caffeine. I’m pretty sure I heard one of them request extra froth.
It seems that everyone has their own favorite anti-slug strategy. Sympathetic gardening friends left suggestions on my Facebook wall: cayenne pepper and garlic oil sprinkled around the base of the nibbled foliage; nifty copper tape that mysteriously repels the slimy marauders. Or, if you have the culinary fortitude, you can even cook them up and eat them just like Tim Pearce.
Pearce, the assistant curator of Mollusks at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, shares handy slug recipe tips in a strikingly unappetizing post on Tribe.net. It’s a pretty good bet you won’t ever hear Rachael Ray exhorting the importance of slitting open your future lunch to peel back the translucent skin and pull out the “foul-smelling digestive gland” located in its posterior. And, if that tidbit of advice isn’t enough to inspire spontaneous vegetarianism, there’s more. “It is a very good idea to cook land mollusks before eating them,” Pearce advises, “as they are good vectors for human parasites.” Yum.
Waverly Fitzgerald at the wonderfully esoteric School of the Seasons believes that January is “a blank month, best spent dreaming about what you want to do during the next year.”
I’d like to believe that’s the reason my brain is so sluggish today, dragging out even simple art assignments… like the lab pup character design (above) that would normally take up only an hour or two. Instead, it has taken most of the day to get paws and ears to come out right, tails to curve properly and faces to express that happy-go-lucky lab puppy smile.
But I can’t blame January. It’s actually more likely that the slow-as-sorghum trickle of my creative juices is the result of our relentlessly muggy weather. The thermometer on our back fence has been stuck in the mid 70s for more than a week now, a fact I try not to mention to our shivering friends up north. But the unseasonably balmy weather, almost 20 degrees above average, is causing its own problems in the garden.
Utterly confused, the entire broccoli crop burst into bloom overnight and was lost. We salvaged 10 heads, but the flavor and texture is poor. I replanted a third of the patch (18 transplants) but another mass of warm Gulf air came ashore and they are showing signs of bolting, too. The lettuce rapidly gave up the ghost, convinced that May was here.
The forecast is for cooler temperatures by early next week, so I’ll compost all the casualties and sow an interim crop of spinach and peas. Meanwhile, we’re getting ready to start some flats of herbs and heirloom vegetables for spring planting and the downtown Growers’ Market. The Perfect Man has been rising early to garden before work, mulching around his fruit trees and digging a new bed for his growing collection of bulbs. Garden life marches on.
Well, not just kale. Cabbage and broccoli, as well.
Is there anything prettier than cruciferous vegetables in the morning dew? We are awash in a rising tide of broccoli and cabbages this week, as the winter garden reaches maturity. Neighbors and kinfolks are handed bags of tasty green stuff as they walk out our door.
But the wonder crop of the winter garden, as far as I’m concerned, is kale. I first tasted the tender little green about 20 years ago, when an elderly neighbor told me that kale was her secret for staying youthful and energetic.
“I cook a big pot of it once a week,” she confided. “Never been sick a day in my life. Never took a vitamin pill, either.” At 73, she was still tossing hay bales into the back of a farm truck like a teenager. I immediately ordered a packet of seeds.
Each fall, we plant a small bed of Russian kale — a sweetly mild variety that grows rapidly and abundantly right through winter. We sow it thickly, and it’s up within days. At the two-week mark, we thin the bed and eat the tender baby plants in mixed salad. After that, we harvest the mature leaves weekly as new shoots continuously grow up from beneath the dense, eighteen-inch canopy of ragged tops.
Here in the deep South, most people cook kale the same way they cook collard greens: stew it into submission along with a big hunk of ham bone. But (a) kale cooks much more quickly than the bigger, coarser greens, and (b) we’re vegetarians around here. So we simmer it briefly in vegetable stock, then use it in our favorite quiche or pasta recipes. It’s very tasty.
A few more good things about kale: bugs dont like it. It’s packed with Vitamin A and antioxidants. And finally, it is a terrific “green manure” crop when you’re through eating it. It will grow happily through our cool winters, but the party’s over around late March, when daytime temperatures climb into the 80s again. That’s when we plow the remaining plants into the ground, where it rapidly breaks down… to the delight of our earthworm friends.
Cheap, easy, full of calcium and protein — and it’s delicious, too. The Perfect Man makes yogurt about twice a week, using his own foolproof method. In response to several hungry-sounding email requests, I’ll pass along his recipe and some basic directions. Creamy white, mildly tart, with the texture of heavy custard…. mmmmmm. You’ll never buy commercial yogurt again.
1. Assemble the supplies pictured above:
- A half-gallon glass jar. Just this once, resist the urge to save the planet by using a recycled pickle jar. For yogurt making, you need a heavy, heat-resistant jar that will hold up to hot liquids. The one we use is sold in the kitchen department at Target for food storage.
- A wooden spoon.
- A kitchen thermometer. Ours is digital, with a six-inch probe.
- A large saucepan. A nice heavy one is best.
- 1 cup nonfat powdered milk. It adds nutrition and gives your yogurt a wonderful, smooth, custardy body.
- 6 ounces of plain yogurt. This is your starter culture, the troupe of happy little beneficial microbes who do the real work of transforming milk into yogurt. After your first batch, you can simply set aside a little of your own for this purpose. But at the start of your first yogurt adventure, you will need to use yogurt from somewhere else. Buy the best-quality plain yogurt (no sugar, no flavors or fruit) you can find. Make sure the label says it contains live cultures. We have used Dannon with good success, but other brands work, too. Take it out of the refrigerator before you start, so it can warm to room temperature.
- Slightly less than 1/2 gallon of milk. It’s “slightly less” because you’ll need to leave 6 ounces out, to make room for the added yogurt and yet still be able to fit the mixture into your jar. So, what you really need is 58 ounces of milk. You can use skim, 2 percent or whole.
2. Okay! Here we go. In the saucepan, combine the milk and the nonfat powdered milk. Suspend your thermostat probe in the milk mixture and heat slowly (stirring now and then) to 170 degrees. The Perfect Man uses a wire whisk to keep the probe in the center of the pan:
3. When your thermometer says you’ve reached 170, pour the hot milk mixture into the heavy glass jar. (Transferring the liquid while hot will help sterilize your container.) Move the temperature probe into the jar and set it all aside for awhile, to let it gradually cool down to 100 degrees. This can take two or three hours, so go on out in the garden and pull some weeds. See you later.
4. At 100 degrees, it’s time to stir in the 6 ounces of yogurt. Then, put the jar in a warm place (105 to 110 degrees is ideal) so that your live cultures can get busy. The Perfect Man puts our yogurt in the oven on the “proof” setting. I have known people who used an electric heating pad for this step. Others use the top of their water heater. Think about where you put your bread dough to rise — you need that same constant warmth for yogurt. You’ll need to leave it there for eight hours.
5. Enjoy! Eat it with granola. Eat it with fruit. Put peanuts on top of it. Make cucumber yogurt sauce and pour it over grilled veggies. It’s good.
With apologies to Titian.
Last night, I dreamed about apples – tart, juicy Granny Smiths; shiny Macintoshes; Golden Delicious with the mellow taste of autumn beneath their skins. I dreamed of glistening chunks of apple piled on a plate, just waiting to be speared with my fork. They looked delicious. And then…and then…
I woke up. It was Day 6 of the 2008 Eat Local Challenge, and if there are apples grown within my 200-mile range northward from the Gulf coastline, I haven’t found them. Nor bananas. Nor rice. What I HAVE found in generous abundance are sweet potatoes. I got out of bed and had a plump, baked sweet potato for breakfast.
As a longtime vegetarian with a big organic garden, I didn’t realize how dramatically my diet would change with the onset of the October challenge month. Before last week, the major part of my daily food intake consisted of fresh fruits and vegetables, grains and soy. I occasionally ate bread, and my moderate dairy consumption came mostly in the form of homemade yogurt and cheese. I drank lots of juices.
Now, under the 200-mile rule, most of those fruits and vegetables are off limits. It’s planting time in our subtropical gardening zone, so all our winter greens and cole crops are mere seedlings this month. Kale, bless its fast-growing heart, will be ready to start eating next week. But the rest — four types of lettuces, three types of cabbage, the broccoli, cauliflower, collards, field peas and butternut squash – are weeks and weeks away from harvest. So, I’m eating LOTS of whole-grain bread and LOTS of our homemade dairy, which has been an unpleasant surprise to my fruit-and-veggie-based digestive tract.
Suddenly, shopping for vegetables has taken on a treasure hunt aspect. My Saturday trek to the weekly grower’s market was disappointing (plenty of candles, flowers, handmade soaps and honey, few edibles) until we spotted a table selling eggpant. Yay! And a pint jar of blueberry preserves from a neighboring county. Yesssss! I found some leathery-looking Alabama green beans in a neighborhood market this weekend, and — hallelujah! — some fresh squash from a grower in Lucedale, Mississippi (50 miles from home). I discovered on Saturday night that tiny red potatoes, roasted in the oven, taste even better when they’re seasoned with thankfulness that the soil they were pulled from lies only a little way down US Highway 98. Like pieces in a culinary jigsaw puzzle, we fit together a half-dozen zucchini here and a handful of green tomatoes there, as we find them. I’m learning that practically every item in the average grocery store – roughly 50,000 different items — has been hauled here from somewhere far away. I’m learning to be flexible. I’m learning a deep appreciation for simple meals.
But man, oh, man. An apple sure would taste good.
