Garden Gifts
Feb 27th, 2009 | By | Category: The Garden | Comments | 14 Comments |
After all the hunting, the cold, the short days and then an endless stream of much-needed rainshowers, I’ve finally been able to visit my garden again. I found I have a lot of work to do.
Most of my beds need digging and weeding, and I need to make some hard decisions about whether the beets, cabbages and chicories I grew in the fall garden will grow large enough to be worth eating — or will they just bolt at the first sight of warmth and sun.
Frankly, it’s a mess. But the mess is not without little gifts scattered here and there. A mark of a maturing garden is what sort of volunteers grow in and around it. I’ve started to see random swaths of wild arugula and other cold-weather greens, and yes of course I get volunteer tomatoes. Who doesn’t?
What’s new this year is a path of mache growing between two of my garden beds. Mache is one of my favorite little salad greens, nutty and substantial yet lithe and easy to eat on the other. Mache is very popular with chefs these days; the magazine I occasionally wrote for, the Art of Eating, has an article on mache in its current edition.
This will make my annual “foundling salads” even better this year. Before I do my spring cleaning in the garden, I do my spring gleaning. Wild chicories, arugula, young dandelions, sorrel, even vetch tips and other wild things find their way into my salad bowl this time of year. Now I can add mache to the party.
I think there must be something biological about this urge. It goes beyond not wanting to waste anything. What I mean is that people everywhere reach out to young green things in springtime as a way to cleanse themselves of the thick winter meals that keep us warm but make us as sluggish and short as the days. Now the days are longer. Outside work is beckoning, and we need to purge, overhaul and retool our inner machine to prepare for the warm days. It is no coincidence that lent occurs at this time of year.
But in Northern California spring is short and the creatures of summer are already stirring. There is a spot on my front porch where it never freezes. On that spot I set a pot with a special chile pepper, a rocoto. This special pepper is from Peru, and it grows at a leisurely pace in relatively cool places along the slopes of the Andes. It is the devil to grow in America.
But rocoto’s saving grace is that it is perennial, and will hang on until next summer. Sometime in late October Senior Rocoto began work on a single pepper. It grew ever so slowly and was as green as a field in summer. And then, one day in January, it began to turn. Only now has it shown its full beauty. So yes, I have a lovely hot red ripe chile pepper. In February.
I have a plan for this chile. My friend Jon, a fishing guide, gave me some mahi mahi he’d caught on a trip to Southern California last summer. You going where I’m going? Yep. Real Peruvian ceviche. In February. Ain’t NorCal grand?
I’ve also begun my peppers and tomatoes for this summer. I am hoping to grow piquillo peppers and pimientos de padron — both interesting Spanish peppers I plan to use for tapas. I also have a particularly prolific Brandywine mutant that I’ve been growing in my garden for four years. It take some time to get itself together, but once this tomato starts, it remains loaded with big beefsteaks well into November.
What are you growing this year?
I’m so jealous! I’m looking out my office window at six new inches of snow (although it’s very pretty, I must say). I’m still a good month away from being able to turn beds over, or to put in the spinach, arugula, broccoli rabe, and early Italian greens I get from growitalian.com. I’ll start peppers and tomatoes about the middle of March under lights in my basement (with a heat mat for germination). We can’t put anything tender in the garden until Memorial Day (and then only with Wall o’Water’s). Last year we didn’t even really get a spring — the ground stayed frozen solid well into May, then the weather turned hot very quickly. I wound up with broccoli plants that were 3 feet tall with nary a head in sight — all we can figure is they bolted in the heat. Thus far, the weather seems more normal — but it’s Montana, so who knows?
I just put in some cabbages, onions, and leeks from the nursery, and this weekend I’ll plant more onions and leeks from seed, along with chard, spinach, & peas.
I’ll also be starting a garden in a much bigger space at my parents’ house this year down in the Delta.
In all, we hope to have quite a variety, with beans, corn, squash, tomatoes, peppers (a few different, from bells to jalapen~os) & okra getting the most space.
Hank, this is my first time to your blog but certainly not the last. Since reading your snow goose prosciutto recipe I have been searching my house for items to barter with.
In Midtown we’ve spent the last two months taking about 200 square feet of our backyard from lawned to tilled. I think that our planting should be guided by water levels at planting time. We might be cutting back on some more water intensive crops in favor of some beans, peppers, onions, garlic. It’ll hard not to put some tomatoes in the ground, though.
It’s great having green stuff on the plate again. And what a treat to have a fresh pepper and ceviche in February. I loved reading Calvin Trillin on eating pimientos de Padron (and their sparse availability in the US), so it will be interesting to hear what kind of luck you have growing those.
Me, I have a sad looking tray of leggy lettuce sprouts going, and that’s about it.
Charlotte: I like the growitalian.com seeds, too! And a month isn’t too long to wait…
Josh: Be sure to hill up your leeks! I have seen too many short-shanked, green-sided leeks lately. It makes me mad to see that. Grrr…
Matt: Screw the water levels. Plant things that you want and let the lawn die if need be. You can’t eat lawn.
Audrey: Yeah, I am getting nervous about my padron peppers — several other of my varieties have sprouted, but not the padrons. Hmm.
Two more months at least until we see spring, so I’m so happy your letting me vicariously enjoy your wild garden bounty! You ask (I know I know rhetorically, but there was still a question mark at the end) who doesn’t have tomato volunteers. The answer is people who live in cold climates! I’ll dream of volunteer tomatoes tonight and my dreams will be sweet indeed!
Enjoying platefuls of mache here too and am in full seeding mode… finally!!! lots of everything! inside, outside, in the greenhouse… It’s so good to see hope pushing through.
Hank,
That’s the beauty of the leeks and the cabbage, that pretty soon I’ll be mounding them, while I build up my whole garden with raised beds.
Well, that’s the idea, anyway. I’ve never grown leeks before, so don’t expect anything gorgeous, just edible.
Our mâche is thriving, and I’m finally able to get the plastic off of it so we can eat it. Some endive and radicchio also made it, along with parsley and chervil. I managed to get a shovel in the ground yesterday, so we had parsnips. Indoors I just started celery, alliums, and brassicas.
We’re about to get another heavy snow, so it’ll be a while yet before I can do any of the physical work that I’m so desperate to begin. I’m freakin’ dyin’ ovah heah.
I am growing nothing this year, because I seem to kill every plant that falls under my care. I even managed to kill a rosemary plan. Rosemary. Nothing kills rosemary, but somehow mine up and died on me. So I must be content with oohing and aahing over other people’s gardens and wondering how the hell they do it.
The padrons take a while — and as I recall the germination is a little wonky. But I grew them really successfully 2 years in a row — last year was terrible for peppers in my yard — we had a short, rainy season.
Mache… Wonderful stuff. I went to school in Switzerland and they grew “Nussli salat”. When I returned to the states, I hunted for it everywhere. I asked at German grocers if they had it or knew of it but nothing. Turns out Nussli salat is the Swiss German dialect for Mache.
I grew peppers (mostly scotch bonnet, bishops crown, and habaneros) & cigar tobacco “intensively” last year so I am giving the soil a year off, focusing on legumes and wildflowers. Right now we have Russian garlic and spinach in the cold boxes.
It’s March 15 here on the NorthEast coast and I just planted some seeds:Brussels Sprouts, Carrots, Daikon..it’s a gamble but with sunny southern exposure I think it’ll be OK.
No favas or peas this year. Time to rotate crops.