It's a great time of the year to enjoy late spring greens, while anticipating summer vegetables (tomatoes, peppers, and squash to come. I love the combination of textures and colors in these greens in the Snell Vegetable Garden (at the South Carolina Botanical Garden).  |
| a mix of greens |
I recently purchased a head of cauliflower. Grandma would fix it steamed with a little salt, pepper and butter as a side dish. Over the years when my children were small, I, too, tried this same approach .. and it was a miserable failure .. in their eyes. So off to 'google' for a family pleasing recipe. The one I found had rave reviews about how kids liked it .. so this is what became of that beautiful head of cauliflower.
Oven Roasted Cauliflower (click link for the actual recipe) .. you toss it with olive oil (I used a bowl instead of a throw away plastic bag), sprinkle it with salt, pepper and fresh pressed garlic .. roast in a hot oven .. then sprinkle it with Parmesan cheese and parsley .. broil for a quick minute. I tossed in a little cumin to spice it up. The bowl was empty and the family was almost fighting about who would get the last serving. Last night my daughter called to ask for the recipe. It's so easy .. give it a try .. better make extra.
With our greens being limited to what's frozen (chard and spinach) .. or what we purchase, my sprouting jar is getting started up again today .. so we can have some enzyme and vitamin packed additions to our sandwiches and salads in just a few days. Have your grown sprouts in a jar? It's very easy .. you can use a standard quart mason jar with a little mesh or screen placed under the outer band. Rinse the seeds and drain .. tipping the jar to empty excess water .. do this several times a day .. and keep in a dark location. Once the seeds start to sprout .. they really take off. Rinse well and store in the refrigerator for several days. I ordered these seeds (a mixture) on-line .. but I've seen them in the health food store. (Detailed instructions here.)
This coming gardening year I am going to give my hand at growing celery .. and overwinter it .. just imagine the tasty greens you can selectively harvest when the garden is sleeping. How do you get your winter greens?
Our young neighbors in the mountains (who live in the apartment building next door) have been fun to watch (and encourage).
There was a large cast iron water feature that was breeding mosquitoes when we took over our cottage; we put anti-larval dunks in it to their approval (they're mostly health professionals).
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| a re-purposed salad bowl |
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| Our late November raised beds with leeks, chard, lettuce, and greens |
I thought I'd organize my seeds a bit to get ready for planting the first sowing of lettuce. I usually try to keep them in a (vaguely) organized way in containers, according to planting season. But my flurry of seed ordering activity in early summer had overwhelmed that 'system.' So I thought I'd spread them out on the breakfast table.
This is a pretty amazing array of seeds, even for me. (Notice that the seed packets are stacked, and the full containers of flower and spring vegetable seeds....). Uh-oh. I think my idea had been to give seeds away at upcoming vegetable gardening programs? Plant things in the Food for Thought Garden?
Since I'm really not a file-sort of person (I have started shoving my seed order packing slips in a folder, however), and like my (somewhat) orderly stack method of working, I normally just enjoy discovering seeds that I'd forgotten I'd ordered -- and hadn't yet planted.
But this does seem a bit of an overabundance of seeds. I don't have enough room to plant half of these things....
I knew I had ordered some unusual sort of winter radishes, and hmm, I still have some scorzonera and salisfy seeds (both root crops that I saw growing in a restored colonial garden in Old Salem, NC). I think I germinated some, and didn't manage to get farther than that. Canola and sesame seeds were a momentary enthusiasm -- they're good cover crops to reduce nematodes, I think. Growing spring wheat is always fun, of course -- need to remember to do that again.
I have LOTS of different sorts of lettuces, asian greens, chicories, kales, mustards, turnips, sprouting broccoli, spinach, beets, chard, arugula, radishes, lettuce mixes, edible flowers, etc. etc. An embarrassment of riches to be sure. I'd better get going and plant some of them!
I've been growing something called 'Italian dandelion' for some time. Actually, since it seems to be perennial, and has really deep roots, I can't actually dig it all out. It's quite attractive and tasty, if prepared by leaching out most of the bitter sesquiterpene lactones first! It does appear to be a selection of common dandelion, Taraxacum officinale; my plants came from seed ordered from The Cook's Garden.
There are lots of other chicories that are enjoyed in Italy and elsewhere, with a number of different species being eaten as a salad herb or vegetable.
I sowed a red-stemmed Catalogna chicory in early spring this year which has flourished. Radicchio, which has tall and heading varieties, are largely subspecies of Chicorium intybus.
Italian dandelion ~~~~~~Catalogna chicory ~~~~~~~Treviso radicchio
Here's a trio of greens to be part of dinner this evening, braised with olive oil and fresh garlic.
It was mild enough on Sunday to have fun preparing the main vegetable garden for seeding of cool weather vegetables and flowers. The soil is lovely, fluffy and dark. The fall amendments and mushroom compost from the fall change outs has been nicely incorporated, and since I try not to ever step on the blocks, all it takes is a quick turnover to provide an excellent seed bed.
Now, I do have a soil thermometer that tells me that the soil temperature is still closer to 40° than 50°, so I do need to be patient a bit longer. But, I had some older seeds of spigarello broccoli, broccoli rabe, mache, and something called Zamboni broccoli (another sprouting sort) that I went ahead and sowed in my potting bench flats, which were warm on a sunny afternoon. I should have put them in the cold frame, or on the germination pad in the garden shed, but the light was waning. We'll see how they do.
I put some more peas to soak (sugar snap and sugar sprint), waiting for the legume inoculant that came today. The directions say I'm supposed to swirl the seeds in a mixture of the inoculant and chorine -free water (uh, I already am soaking them in regular tap water), but I'll rinse them off, swish them, and see what happens. I'd think that I'd have plenty of Rhizobium bacteria in the soil already, but it can't hurt, and might boost productivity.
The hardest lesson I've had to learn (and am still learning) as a native plant expert turned vegetable gardener is how pampered and selected our vegetable plants are. They need lots of nutrients, period. They're water hogs too, compared to more thrifty native cousins. But that's why they're tasty and edible, compared to their wild relatives.
It's been a tough summer in the vegetable garden. The late freeze in April, the drought and heat for most of the summer, and now really low soil moisture levels combined with higher soil temperatures, make it hard to coax along even the fall greens.
Seedling in the flats are coming along OK, but the seeds sown directly in the garden are taking their time. I haven't been optimistic enough to plant anything in the satellite garden, as I think the thirsty woodchucks will appear out of nowhere to devour any young kale, chard, or lettuce plants that manage to germinate.
But we've just had a lovely downpour for quite awhile, thanks to some left-over moisture from the hurricane in the Gulf, and hopefully got at least 1 1/2 inches, maybe two. This would be excellent for recharging the soil layers farther down. I'll sow another set of seeds of greens and lettuce tomorrow, I think....
When we first moved to the south over 20 years ago, I had never eaten kale, collards, mustard greens, or turnip greens. I don't recall eating much spinach either, as a child, since it was largely available as the canned sort. And my mom was a decent, but relatively uninspired plain cook, from a farm cooking background. Although I grew up eating broccoli and green beans (frozen), my education with vegetables and fruits started in the SF Bay Area markets during my graduate school years. I first had fresh brussel sprouts (good), fresh mushrooms (delicious), fresh local Gravenstein apples (great), peaches, apricots, and plums straight from the Central Valley (fabulous), and learned about so many unusual vegetables in the Chinese and other ethnic restaurants that were springing up in the late 70's and early 80's in the melting pot that was the SF Bay Area even then.
But moving to SE Georgia in the mid 80's was interesting in a different way. Southern cooking with its greens, fried fish, and biscuits and gravy were a long way from the plain cooking of my youth or the Schezuan restaurants in Chinatown. A new, older colleague who was a keen organic vegetable gardener was amazed when I said I had never eaten kale, or turnips, or collards. I quickly learned to appreciate the greens at a local restaurant, where the fried whiting was a Friday night standard. A bit salty, by today's tastes, but delicious with a bit of Texas Pete.
Today, I stir-fry homegrown greens of all sorts with olive oil and garlic, and we thoroughly enjoy them. And I've grown all sorts of 'ethnic' greens from the Tuscan kale, to Russian kale, to Asian mizuna, to the pac choi. All delicious! The high-end Italian dandelion greens were more bitter than I expected, requiring par-boiling, but hopefully quite the spring tonic. And hopefully the radicchio (that was such a favorite of our nursing female squirrel) falls into that category as well.
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The recent rain, (slightly) cooler weather, and the greening up of the garden overall have me thinking about sowing greens for fall. It certainly seemed way too hot in August to contemplate sowing broccoli for transplant and I certainly wasn't able to get chard or beet seedlings to survive, although maybe the squirrels nibbled them.
But I've had tremendous success in previous years (photo above) with a variety of greens in fall -- Tuscan kale
(also known as dinosaur kale), different sorts of red kales, radicchio, and perpetual spinach (a sort of beet). Mizuna, red mustard, chard, and argula are all great, too, if there aren't too many late cabbage butterflies. Lettuces are beautiful in fall, and the really hardy winter varieties can make it through heavy frosts in mid-winter, if conditions are right. I also need to start sowing the small Violas that are so much nicer than pansies, and less demanding and take cuttings of Spanish lavender, to increase my supply.
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