Does Your Rooster Taste Funny?

I don’t currently keep chickens, because of deed restrictions in my family’s subdivision. My soon-to-be father-in-law, however, has a nice little property unencumbered by rules against poultry (or any other livestock, for that matter), and he’s been keeping chickens for the last year or so. He’s done it the old-fashioned way: hatching them himself and raising them to laying age. He even kept a rooster around to produce a second generation of layers.

Recently, though, the rooster became something of a problem. He had always been a bit mean, as most roosters are. You had to watch your back going into the chicken coop, or he’d fly at you and try to spur you in the face. I took to carrying a big stick anytime I went to collect eggs. All this was a bit of a nuisance, but a tolerable price to pay for future chicks. But, then, the rooster started beating up on the ladies. He pecked some of their backs completely bare of feathers. And then, a few weeks ago, he killed one of them.

Well, that was it, said daddy-in-law. As much as it pained him, Mr. Cock-a-doodle-doo was going to have to go.

And I, always on the lookout for a way to make my diet more local and more fresh, volunteered to do the dirty work. And share the coq au vin.

I’ve had a little experience butchering chickens, from raising a flock of broilers a few years ago. And most of the process was exactly the same as before: hanging him by his feet, slitting the throat, waiting until he was completely dead and bled out, then dunking in a pot of 145-degree water to loosen the feathers for plucking. The big differences were at the beginning and the end of the process.

At the beginning, of course, it was necessary to catch him. That can be difficult with all chickens, but usually it’s because they’re too skittish to let you get close (not so stupid, these chickens!). With this guy, the difficulty was that he was actually dangerous.

So I sent my fiance after him.

(I gave him a pair of thick, heatproof gloves my dad uses to rearrange logs on the fire.)

After enduring a couple of flying spur attacks, my man decided that he was never going to be able to just grab the rooster by the legs, even with the gloves I’d given him. Not if he wanted to keep his face intact. So he grabbed a nearby shovel. And hit the rooster on the head. Hard enough to daze him and give us time to tie his ankles.

He’s a big sucker!

Once the rooster was slaughtered, plucked, eviscerated, and rested for a day in the fridge, the question was how to cook him. I knew that old birds (and old birds are generally anything over 3 or 4 months) are tougher than younger ones. Fortunately, in the Joy of Cooking recipe for coq au vin, I found instructions for tenderizing an old bird: after disjointing, bake in a covered cast-iron pot on a bed of bacon for 45 minutes at 250 degrees. So I did just that. And then I continued with the recipe for coq au vin: sauteing vegetables (including leeks from our winter garden), browning the chicken pieces, adding herbs and of course a delicious dry red wine. It smelled like heaven simmering on the stove for the next hour. By the time we sat down to dinner, I was ready to devour our exemplary local cuisine.

The only thing was…it tasted…awful.

I may have overcooked it. That might account for the lingering toughness. Maybe he was a particularly tough old bird, too. And maybe getting hit on the head with a shovel made him tense up a bit more than he would have otherwise.

But it wasn’t just the toughness. There was a very strange aroma and taste to this bird. Nothing like the deliciousness of the ones I’d raised and eaten before.

So what could it be? Well, I wonder if it might not have had something to do with the really large testicles I pulled out of that bird–about twenty times the size of the ones in the younger birds I’ve slaughtered. I think I may have read somewhere that the hormones of an adult rooster affect its taste…. Besides tenderness, that’s why you want to butcher broilers while they’re young and immature.

So my question to you is…do any of you know anything about this? I thought that, because the French had a special recipe for “rooster in red wine” (that’s the literal translation of coq au vin), mature old roosters could be made palatable. But is that just a myth?

Ordering Seed Potatoes

In early January, when I took inventory of my seed stocks and sent off my 2013 order to Southern Exposure Seed Exchange, I told myself that I had plenty of time to order my seed potatoes later. I didn’t have to order everything at the same time this year because I’m ordering the seed potatoes direct from the grower, so as to get a larger quantity (and better rate) than through Southern Exposure. But, for some reason, it didn’t cross my mind until today–the last day of February–to check when I did need to order those potatoes by. And it turns out, I need to order them right now!

Potatoes should go in the ground once the soil has warmed to 50 degrees F. Last year, this put my potato planting in the last week of March. But before the potatoes go in the ground, I like to chit them: set them in a sunny windowsill so the eyes get a head start sprouting. Last year they got about a week and a half of chitting and they could have used more. So I’d like to get that order in and the potatoes arriving as soon as possible!

I’m going to order my seed potatoes from Wood Prairie Farm in Bridgewater, Maine. They’re certified organic, and I had success with them last year. Even though it wasn’t a bountiful year in the garden, the potatoes still produced 10 lbs. for the 1 lb. of seed potatoes I planted. And they were delicious: Yukon Golds that were so naturally creamy and buttery when baked that you didn’t need to add anything at all to them. We went through our 10 lbs. in record time, and I vowed to plant more the next year.

So this time, I’m ordering 10 lbs. of seed potatoes, which will hopefully produce a harvest between 100 and 200  lbs. Each pound of seed potatoes generally needs 7 ft. of 3-ft.-wide row. So 21 sq. ft. per pound.

To give you an idea of what to expect if it’s your first time growing potatoes, the harvest last year for my Yukon Golds here in Virginia was in the first week of July. Yukon Golds are pretty early potatoes, which I’m told is good for our area, since potatoes don’t grow well in extreme heat. I did read in Carol Deppe’s The Resilient Gardener, however, that Yukon Golds keep very well left in the soil through the summer, until temperatures drop enough that they’ll keep well in a cellar or garage. It is important that if you grow many potatoes you have a place to store them that’s cool, dark, and moist (just like the ground!). Otherwise, they’ll sprout, shrivel, and/or turn green–a color that actually indicates toxins in the potato.

For instructions on planting potatoes, see my post So Many Ways to Plant Potatoes.

The Resilient Gardener

I’ve read a lot of gardening books in my thirty-one years, and I’ve learned something new from every one. But it isn’t often that a book comes along in which I not only learn something new in every paragraph but each bit of new information feels absolutely vital. Carol Deppe’s book The Resilient Gardener is that kind of book.

The subtitle to Ms. Deppe’s book is Food Production and Self-Reliance in Uncertain Times. As much as I hate to admit it after toiling so proudly in my 2500-sq.-ft. backyard garden, if disaster struck and the commercial food distribution system in this country shut down, my family would still go pretty hungry. We would have great-tasting, very nutritious veggies, but very few carbs and very little protein.

Let’s face it: if we aren’t providing ourselves with carbs and protein from the garden, we’re really not independent of the commercial food supply. Which means that, one, we’d be very vulnerable if natural or economic disaster reduced our access to purchased food. And two, the bulk of the things we eat are not as well-grown, nutritious, or tasty as the vegetables we lavish so much attention on.

As someone enamored of the idea of self-sufficiency and convinced of the superiority of homegrown crops, this bothers me. But until now, I haven’t been sure what to do about it. The meat and potatoes I might be able to handle. I’ve slaughtered chickens before, and grown a few hills of Yukon Golds. But I have to confess, I’m addicted to bread. And from everything I’ve read about growing wheat, I just can’t honestly say I have confidence in my ability to one day grow, scythe, thresh, winnow, and grind all of the grain consumed by my family.

But last week I read Carol Deppe’s The Resilient Gardener. And I discovered something that Native Americans knew countless generations before we Europeans arrived on the continent with our sacks of wheat seed: that the plants that are native to the Americas–potatoes, corn, beans, and squash–are quite sufficient sources of carbohydrates and protein, especially if combined with a little game. And perhaps the reason most of us don’t know this is that, since we’ve made wheat such a staple of our culture, we’ve lost the particular varieties of these vegetables that are capable of being such staples–and that taste spectacular in the process! Deppe’s work as a plant breeder has made a giant step toward retrieving these varieties, and this latest book of hers will help us recover and put to work the lost cultural knowledge about how to grow, select, harvest, cook, and preserve them.

I am most fascinated by Deppe’s chapter on corn. Not sweet corn. Flint corn and flour corn. Corn that you can grind (by hand, in your own kitchen) into flour fine enough and tasty enough to make into angel-food cake. And yes, she provides the recipe. She also provides recipes for pancakes, sweet breads, polenta, and skillet bread. Skillet bread is cornbread baked in a cast-iron skillet. But hers, it seems, has very little to do with the cornbread we’re used to, prepared from store-bought cornmeal. The cornbread from this recipe–developed by Deppe over the span of a decade of experimentation–doesn’t contain any wheat flour or refined sugar, and yet it holds together well enough to make sandwiches out of! The secret is a special “pre-batter” made with boiling water, and of course the natural sweetness of traditional, pre-industrial corn varieties.

It is clear throughout Deppe’s book that the information she provides is hard-won through years of her own experience, trying and trying again. How many of us have heard of Buffalo Bird Woman’s method of drying squash for winter? How many of us have tried it only to fail miserably? Well, Deppe kept at it and now is able to tell us that the variety of squash is very important. Drying squash changes the flavors, and only some varieties produce delicious outcomes. Her favorite is Costata Romanesca, though she says Golden Zucchini and Golden Bush Zucchini also do excellently. Generic, green zucchini produces “bland, virtually tasteless dried squash.” And, as she says, “[o]ne very dark green zuke variety whose label was lost produced a dried flavor that was actually foul.”

You will also find much of use in Deppe’s book if you’d like to know which squash and pumpkin varieties keep all winter long just sitting in a corner of the living room–and actually improve in flavor! Or if you’d like to know which variety of potato can be stored for months right in the ground where it’s grown. Or which corn varieties make the best bean poles to which beans, and whether you should plant the corn or the beans first. Or what variety of garbanzo bean can be popped in the microwave just like popcorn and tastes like a roasted nut!

In short, there’s a wealth of information to be discovered in The Resilient Gardener. (And I didn’t even mention her chapter on duck eggs….) I read a copy from my local library, but I’ve already ordered my own, since this is going to be reference work for years to come.

(If you’d like to order a copy, check out my favorite online bookseller, Better World Books. For every book you buy from them, they donate a book to someone in need. Plus they have free shipping!)

Fresh Winter Food: Turnips

The green shoulders could probably be avoided with some straw mulch, but as far as I can tell, the greenness doesn’t affect the taste–and it’s only skin-deep!

Most people don’t think of winter as a season in which you can garden, but here in Virginia, you certainly can–even without greenhouses or cold frames.

One of the foods we planted last fall and haven’t had to protect all winter is turnips. Now, it’s true that the temperatures down in the twenties a couple of weeks ago frostbit some of the leaves, so the turnip greens are not as good as they could be. (This could be fixed with some floating row cover.) But the turnip roots are just fine.

Since I planted our turnips a little late–not until Oct. 3, when prime turnip-planting season is more like late August and September–we’ve had to wait a while for our harvest. I pulled our first roots yesterday, even though they’re still a little small at 2″ in diameter. But they taste great.

Turnips are also very easy to prepare. Just peel and slice/dice as desired. Put into boiling water and simmer until soft (about 15-30 min., depending on size and quantity). I like to throw in a couple strips of uncooked bacon. They lend a lovely flavor to the roots. And of course, if your turnip greens look nice and healthy, chop them up and add them to the pot as well!

Do make sure that, if you plant turnips, you get a variety adapted to the season in which you’re growing them: spring or fall. Our fall turnip this year was Amber Globe, a pre-1840 heirloom purchased from Southern Exposure Seed Exchange. Plant turnips 4-6″ apart in rows 3′ apart. Or, if you can count on good rainfall, plant them 3-4″ apart in rows 2′ apart.

Starting Onions

Here in Zone 7, January is the time for starting onion seeds indoors: two months before the last expected frost. I got mine planted a little over a week ago, and the shoots are already green and unbending towards the sun. (When an onion seed first germinates, its stem is folded over with both ends in the ground, but slowly one of those ends reaches toward the light, making it into a tall, skinny spear of a leaf.)

It’s very easy to start a lot of onion seeds indoors, because the plants will get moved outside before they’re very big and so don’t need much soil. Also, the plants are very easy to separate, so you can grow them in a flat instead of individual cups. I use the flats that clementines come in at the grocery store.

I plant just one of these flats each spring. I sow about 120 seeds and expect to get about 60 plants. That will fill 20 feet of row in the garden. (I plant onions 4″ apart in rows 2′ apart.) 60 onions is about all my family of four can use between harvest in late July and when the onions start rotting in storage around December.

To fill a clementine flat, I use almost a gallon of potting mix. I don’t use commercial potting mix. It’s too expensive and doesn’t contain all the microorganisms that are important for healthy plants. Instead, I mix my own, using about 5/8 gallon garden soil, 3/8 gallon compost, and 1/4 cup all-purpose organic fertilizer. (See my recipe for mix-your-own organic fertilizer.) I mix it all together in a 2-gallon bucket.

Once I’ve filled the flat with my potting mix, I scatter my 120 or so seeds on top. Then I gently mix them into the top 1/4″ of soil with my finger or a pencil. I don’t water, since the soil is already moist. I just cover with plastic or aluminum foil and set in a warmish place until the first seeds begin to germinate, usually in five or six days. Then I remove the cover, move the flat to a sunny south-facing window, and begin to water each morning (with room-temperature water).

That’s all there is to it until planting time arrives at the end of February!

Oh, and in case you’re wondering, the variety I grow is Australian Brown. It’s an heirloom variety of bulbing onion that did very well for me last year. I had 56 plants in 19′ of row, and the harvest weighed in at 23 lbs. I didn’t have to do anything special to store them, just put them in a well-ventilated spot in the coldest room of the house (maybe 60°F), and they kept fine through December. I could probably keep them a lot longer if I made a little extra effort, but by the time these start rotting, I can just use green perennial onions for cooking–or wild garlic tops from the yard!

The Vegetable Oscars

It’s that season of the year when every vegetable gardener is up to their ears in seed catalogs. They’ve been arriving for weeks now, and, if you’re like me, you can’t throw away a single one–even the ones you’ve never ordered from–without peeking to see what stunning new varieties they may have on offer this spring.

Of course, in an ideal world, we would have enough time, money, and energy to grow every variety. From White Wonder tomatoes to the Edible Luffa Gourd. But in reality, we have to pick and choose. And it’s hard. Because every variety has unique virtues, as well as a downside or two. For instance, Wilson Sweet Watermelon. The catalog says it “draws comments like ‘the best melon I’ve ever tasted.’” But there’s nothing about productivity or resistance to drought. (And goodness knows we have drought!) How do I know if it will be a good bet for my garden?

In an effort to help you wade through all the possibilities for this spring, I bring you…the Vegetable Academy Awards!

In this post, I’ll let you know some of the best performers in my own garden from last year. If you live in a climate similar to that of northeastern Virginia and have a clayey loam soil like mine, then you may find you get similar results from these varieties. In any case, these are varieties that are definitely worth a shot, for the reasons I describe. (And they are almost all available from Southern Exposure Seed Exchange, my favorite source.)

Green Beans

For outstanding flavor, the winner is…the Potomac pole bean! While these heirloom beans were pretty good when eaten fresh, we had so many of them last summer and fall that we put up several jars in the pressure canner. And when we opened the first of them in November, we discovered this variety’s purpose in life. Canned with no seasoning but salt, these beans taste like they’ve been cooked with meat. It’s such a wonderfully rich taste that your vegetarian friends may refuse to eat them!

Bell Peppers

There’s a huge variety of bell peppers available in most seed catalogs, in all different colors, shapes, and sizes. It makes even people who don’t eat that many peppers (like me) want to grow them all! Last year I tried three different varieties: Corona (an orange pepper), Jupiter (a red pepper), and Sweet Chocolate (guess what color pepper).

I have already marked Sweet Chocolate off the list for this year. It’s pretty, but it doesn’t produce nearly as well as the other two varieties, and the fruits have a thin wall that I don’t think is particularly tasty.

Corona, on the other hand, is good eating and a medium producer.

But the Oscar for best-tasting and best-producing bell pepper goes to Jupiter! Jupiter peppers, whether picked green or left to ripen to red, have thick, juicy walls excellent for snacking on raw, cooking, or stuffing. I love to eat them with Vidalia salad dressing. The plants are also very productive, each one producing twice what a Corona plant produces and over four times what a Sweet Chocolate plant produces! This past year, one Jupiter plant produced 5 lb. 12 oz. of green peppers and 1 lb. 5 oz. of red peppers for me (and took up 3′ x 4′ of garden space).

The one downside to this variety seems to be that about one in every three plants or so dies early in the season. This has happened to me two years in a row and hasn’t happened with any other variety so far. So you may want to start one extra to be on the safe side.

From L to R: Deer Tongue, Bronze Arrow, Bibb, Simpson Elite. That big plant in the front right is actually endive.

Lettuce

Last year, I grew three varieties of leaf lettuce: Simpson Elite, Bronze Arrow, and Deer Tongue. Deer Tongue was my favorite for flavor and texture. It almost resembles a Bibb lettuce in these areas, though it’s a little less “buttery.” Bronze Arrow gets the award for productivity, growing very quickly even in colder temperatures. And Simpson Elite gets the award for bolt resistance. Honestly, I think all of these varieties deserve a place in your garden. Lettuce doesn’t take up much room (I plant mine 6-12″ apart on each side), and a salad is more enticing the more colors and shapes of leaves it contains. Simpson Elite is a bright green, Deer Tongue a dark green, and Bronze Arrow green to red depending on how much sun it gets.

Tomatoes

As I wrote in an earlier post, the award for taste in tomatoes definitely goes to the Large Red. Contrary to its name, its tomatoes are actually on the small side. But what deliciousness! These tomatoes don’t need any olive oil, basil, or mozzarella to taste like a gourmet dish. These are the tomatoes you’ll want to serve at all your dinner parties. These are the ones you’ll want to take to friends. These are the tomatoes that will convince anyone that growing your own produce is worth it. And you know what’s funny? These are one of the oldest varieties grown in the U.S. SESE’s catalog says, “Prior to the Civil War, one of the most commonly grown and best documented tomato varieties in the country.” Check these out; you won’t be disappointed!

As for yields, in my experience Large Red varies greatly from year to year. In 2011, I got about 13 lbs. per plant (in 24 sq. ft.). In 2012, I got only 3.5 lbs. per plant (same spacing). They do self-sow readily, though, so I had a couple of volunteer Large Red plants last fall that produced quite well–better than the ones I’d started indoors.

My other award for tomatoes goes to Eva Purple Ball. Eva has a fine taste (though not rivaling that of Large Red), but its real strengths are productivity and freedom from blemishes. In 2012, which was overall quite a bad year for my tomatoes, Eva Purple Ball managed to produce over 16 lbs. of fruit on one plant (in 24 sq. ft.). And almost all of those were good for canning. (Also, Eva Purple Ball isn’t really purple. It’s quite red, with maybe a light purple cast.)

Ground Cherries

And now, the Oscar for most exotic plant in the vegetable garden goes to…the ground cherry! Ground cherries are a kind of husk tomato. They come in a papery skin like tomatillos. But their flavor is more like pineapple! They’re tiny fruits, only about a half-inch across, but there’s really nothing else like them. And you certainly can’t get them at the grocery store. They’re also easy to grow. Start them indoors just like tomatoes and then plant them out giving each plant about 12 sq. ft. of growing room. They stay low to the ground, so there’s no need for staking. Just keep an eye on them, and when the papery husks have fallen to the ground, that means the little ground cherry inside is ripe!

I’d love to hear what vegetable or fruit varieties are your faves. Drop me a line!

Does Vegetable Gardening Actually Save Money?

While my primary reason for gardening is love–love of the outdoors, love of physical work, love of plants in their infinite variety–my pleasure in gardening is immeasurably enhanced if I know that my labor is actually productive, if I know that, down the road a few weeks or months, I’m going to be enjoying the fruits of my labor. And that pleasure is even greater if I can put the productivity of my labor in terms of dollar signs.

Now I know as well as anyone that money is not an adequate measure of the benefits of tending a home vegetable garden. After all, those benefits include enjoyment of the outdoors, physical exercise, and food much fresher and more full of taste than anything you can find in a grocery store. And how do you put a price on those things?

Nevertheless, at the end of each growing season, I’m always extremely curious to see how much cash I spent on the garden and how much my harvest would have been worth if purchased at a farmer’s market. That is, how much green stuff did I actually save by all those hours of toil?

In 2012, I spent a  total of $742.64 on my 2000-sq.-ft. vegetable garden. If we subtract from this the amount that I spent on capital investments such as fencing, tools, and pots, which will be usable for many years to come, the figure comes down to $617.14. That includes the cost of all purchased compost, fertilizer ingredients, seeds, and plants. (Though I grow most of my own seedlings, I do purchase seed potatoes, sweet potato slips, and perennials that don’t come true from seed.) The amount for seeds will be less than half of that this year, because my stocks of seeds are so high now that I don’t have to buy nearly as much this spring.

Now, how much was my harvest worth? It’s hard to get a really accurate figure for this, but I do my best to estimate the value of my produce if it were sold at the local farmer’s market. And what I came up with this year was $964. So a profit of from $221 to $347, depending on how much of the capital costs I include.

Honestly, that doesn’t sound like a whole lot of pay for an entire season’s worth of labor. I did a heck of a lot of digging, planting, hoeing, weeding, fertilizing, and watering. I certainly wouldn’t work for those wages anywhere else.

But as I pondered this fact recently, I realized that a lot of the compost, fertilizer, and labor this year went towards crops that were “experimental.” Things that I hadn’t grown before, or at least had never grown well before. And I thought, Well, if I were trying to get the biggest return on my investment and only planted things that were sure to do well, what would I plant, and what would my profit be? In short, I decided to see what would happen if I designed a super-efficient vegetable garden.

I began by figuring out the cost for compost and fertilizer per square foot of garden space. That came to 22.4 cents/sq.ft. for one application of compost and all the applications of fertilizer needed throughout the growing season. I then multiplied this number by the square feet I devoted to a particular crop and divided by the pounds of that crop I harvested. That told me how much that crop cost this year to produce per pound. I could then compare that number to the market value per pound (for organic produce) and determine if that crop was a good profit maker.

My most profitable crops in 2012 were the following:

Pole beans at a cost of $.54/lb and a value of $2.25/lb

Beets at a cost of $.19/lb and a value of $4/lb

Cucumbers at a cost of $.06/lb and a value of $2/lb

Bulbing onions at a cost of $.37/lb and a value of $2/lb

Jupiter green peppers at a cost of $.36/lb and a value of $2.40/lb

Zucchini at a cost of $.15/lb and a value of $2/lb

Pumpkin at a cost of $.30/lb and a value of $1/lb

Hungarian Italian paste tomatoes at a cost of $.41/lb and a value of $3-4/lb

Eva Purple Ball tomatoes at a cost of $.43/lb and a value of $3-4/lb

Leaf lettuce at a cost of $.03/serving and a value of $.50/serving

Now, what if, this year, I planted only these super-profit-makers in my garden? First of all, I wouldn’t need nearly as big a garden. To get enough of these ten types of vegetables to feed my family of four (including a huge amount for canning), I would need to plant only 641 sq. ft. of garden: a little less than one third the size of my current garden. And so, presumably, one third of the work.

If I planted those 641 sq. ft. with 162 sq. ft. of pole beans, 20 sq. ft. of beets, 9 sq. ft. of cucumbers, 13.5 sq. ft. of lettuce, 38 sq. ft. of bulbing onions, 36 sq. ft. of Jupiter bell peppers, 20 sq. ft. of zucchini, 48 sq. ft. of pumpkins, 144 sq. ft. of paste tomatoes, and 150 sq. ft. of Eva Purple Ball tomatoes, and my yields per square foot were similar to this year’s, then I would reap a harvest of 66 lbs. of pole beans, 7 lbs. of beets, 35.5 lbs. of cucumbers, 120 servings of lettuce, 23 lbs. of bulbing onions, 23 lbs. of bell peppers, 17.5 lbs. of zucchini, 36 lbs. of pumpkin, 78 lbs. of paste tomatoes, and 80 lbs. of Eva Purple Ball tomatoes. And the total cost of compost and fertilizer for that garden? $138.33. When the value of the harvest would be somewhere in the vicinity of $940.

That is, I could get almost the same money value of food out of this super-efficient garden as with my actual 2012 garden. But I’d use only one third of the space and one third of the labor and invest less than one third of the cash.

So, am I going to plant the super-efficient garden this year?

Of course not. Or rather, I’m going to plant the super-efficient garden, but I’m also going to plant another 1000 sq. ft. of other crops that may not produce such a big financial return but that I want to learn how to grow. Or that I want to have the convenience of having always at the ready in my own garden.

Because that’s a benefit to a home vegetable garden that we haven’t mentioned yet: the fact that all of this food is waiting outside your doorstep whenever you decide to harvest it. You don’t have to get in your car and go to the market or grocery store. You don’t have to decide ahead of time what you’re going to want to cook this week, and then feel bad when half of your produce rots unused in the crisper drawer. A lot of the food in a home vegetable garden can stay on the plants until it’s time to eat it, which means less room taken up in the fridge, more variety available when each new mealtime arrives, and hopefully less waste.

Large Red Tomato

Another reason that I wouldn’t plant only the super-efficient vegetable garden is that some of the best foods in my garden grow on plants that are not terribly productive and even a little finicky. For instance, the Large Red tomato. This heirloom tomato is tastier than any other I’ve ever eaten, from the store or from a garden. Last year it yielded less than 1 lb. per 9 sq. ft. (the previous year it did much better), but if I hadn’t had any Large Reds, it wouldn’t even have felt like summer. The taste of the Large Red is reason enough in itself to garden. And so even though this past year it cost me $1.93/lb. to produce, I’m planting them again this year, and in even greater quantity.

The same goes for watermelon. Last year was a bad year for my watermelon plants. I planted two hills, totaling 48 sq. ft., and I only harvested one watermelon, which weighed in at 9 lbs. But again, it wouldn’t have felt like summer without that taste. That sweetness is simply not available at the store.

And so, yes, it is possible to save a great deal of money by tending a home vegetable garden. And for people who have a very tight budget, I can recommend a few crops that would be very profitable investments. But even people on very tight budgets should consider splurging on a few Large Reds. Because, really, even at $1.93/lb., they’re a steal. And, eating them, you’ll feel like you’re living in the lap of luxury.

Pearly Pink Cherry Tomatoes

There’s so much to think about when gardening–soil, compost, fertilizer, water, sun, planting times–that once you’ve figured out a way that works, it’s easy to start thinking that’s the only way to do things. For instance, I’ve known for a long time that the time to start tomato seeds is 6-8 weeks before the last expected frost. Here that means the end of February. So when, in April, KeriAnn of Paisley Carrot sent me a lovely gift of seeds for Pearly Pink cherry tomatoes, I thought, Oh, it’s too bad I’ll have to wait until next year to try them. Silly me!

It’s true that if you want the longest possible harvest from your tomatoes, you should start them before the last frost, but here in Virginia, the tomato season is so long (4-5 months) that starting plants a couple of months late still gives you the opportunity to harvest quite a few tomatoes. Which is what I realized once I took a moment to question my preconceived notions about tomato growing.

So I planted some Pearly Pink seeds in a pot on April 21. May 7, I planted the strongest seedling into the garden. And on July 25, I had my first taste of this yummy new variety. Even though I started it almost two months after my other tomato plants, it matured much faster–since it was growing outdoors the entire time, and growing during months when there’s more daylight.

All this is to say that it’s good to remember that there are very few hard and fast rules in gardening, and experimenting often pays off! Thanks for the Pearly Pinks, KeriAnn! They’re delish.

Garlic Harvest, Part II

A couple of weeks ago, I pulled the garlic from the garden and spread it to dry, stems and all, on the concrete floor under our deck. A couple of days later, I peeled off the outer leaves, culled for the refrigerator a few of the bulbs that were showing some deterioration, and, for convenience’s sake, moved the rest to the garage floor to finish curing. Then, I kind of forgot about them.

Finally, today, I thought to go check on the drying process. A little over half of the heads had cured nicely and were ready to have their leaves braided. The others each had some stinky brown rotten spots. So I braided the heads that were good enough for keeping, hung them on the side of a cupboard in the kitchen, and then turned my attention to the sadder-looking bulbs.

I cut some open to see what the damage was, and it turned out that most of the cloves were perfectly fine. There were just one or two in each head that looked like they were starting to get eaten by some kind of maggot. Though one head didn’t have any cloves at all; it was just a papery mass!

So I peeled all the heads and kept the good cloves. I put them in the food processor and poured in enough olive oil to cover. Then I puréed them into a sauce with the appearance of melted butter. I licked a drop off my finger–whew! this is potent stuff! The whole lot of it went into a Tupperware into the freezer, to be dished out as needed. (With all that oil in there, it won’t freeze solid.)

Wild Fruit

It’s been a little while since I’ve posted anything about foraging. Once the garden started coming into its own this spring, I felt less of the urge to snoop through the tufts of wild greens encircling the yard in the hopes of finding something edible. Eating from the garden just seemed…well, easier.

Until now.

It pays to keep your eyes open when you’re out and about, because sometimes you hit the jackpot. Out walking the dog last weekend, I thought I spied some familiar-looking bushes. A few steps closer confirmed that, indeed, on the edge of the woods (at a location in our neighborhood that will remain selfishly undisclosed) stood a thicket of fruit-bearing brambles. At first I thought they were wild blackberries. That’s what every wild bramble I’d seen before had turned out to be. But then I saw that the berries were red–and the ripest, plumpest ones were purplish red. This was the mother of all jackpots: wild raspberries.

I reached up my thumb and index finger to nudge one of the ripest-looking fruits. With barely any pressure at all, it fell from the branch into my palm. It was a short trip from there to my mouth. And while I know that I rave about a lot of things on this blog (for good reason: fresh food really is that good), these berries were pure heaven. Not even my friends’ homegrown raspberries could compare (no offense). These had the concentrated, brilliant sweetness that only a strain selected by the palates of countless generations of wild animals could maintain.

Now I have tried growing domestic raspberries. And I can’t fully explain why all the bushes I planted in our yard two years ago have withered, yellowed, or been chomped to the ground by deer while these wild ones just a thousand feet away have flourished into a giant mass of prolific canes. The wild strains are hardier, I imagine. Faster-growing. More drought-resistant. Better camouflaged. But, whatever the reasons, while I slaved over my private little berry patch, nature produced a thick stand of luscious red fruit without anyone’s having to dig, weed, fertilize, or water. All that’s to say, I’m content to be outdone by nature (yet again). Because, in addition to being a good instructor of humility, nature is also generous enough to share. Bountifully.