Since I don’t yet have any thornless brambleberries, I’m giving you a photo essay on why they are so desirable.

I garden in a small space. So when I decided to grow brambleberries, I thought it’d be smart to look for thornless ones. The thorny kind tend to go where they are not wanted, slicing through my shirtsleeves and stabbling my bare feet.

While I’m generally in favor of looking to local nurseries for plants, in this case I had to search a little further. In fact, my search led me so far that I’m breaking up the info into two posts, so you won’t get tired. (The second post will come out next week.)

My love for berries goes way back. I had a berry-loving grandmother in the Pacific Northwest, where brambles are legend, and she taught me to love them. She was the one who named salmonberries and thimbleberries for me, sparse glowing surprises at the half-shaded edge of the forest.

Salmonberries (Rubus spectabilis) and thimbleberries (Rubus parviflorus) are lovely garden plants in the right location, small, and nowhere near as aggressive as their other bramble kin. But if you’re looking for serious berry production, you must go to the other brambleberries. And many of those other varieties are specialty items you can’t find everywhere – especially if you want the thornless versions.

I get stuck by those suckering shoots that seem to rise up in an instant, where no blackberries were before.

If you want an in-depth rundown on the different kinds of brambleberries, their habits and diseases, you can read “Blackberry Production in Oregon” by the berrygrapeorg. Oregon is prime territory for berries, as we will see, so it’s bound to be an excellent resource. This blog from Oregon gives you the gamut of brambleberries in less formal language, but with lots of detail. If you want the easy-reader description of the brambleberry family, keep going. This is it.

These tiny but fierce prickles on the backs of the leaves slice me when I think I’m reaching for something soft.

Blackberries (Rubus fruticosus) are some of the most well-known brambles (which, for the plant geeks among you, are the genus Rubus, and in the rose family – you can tell by the flowers). I first knew them as cobbler. My grandmother used to make it (for purists, a cobbler is not the same as a crisp. You top the berries with globs of sweetened biscuit dough, instead of the oatmeal-brown sugar thing). She was particularly partial to the small, trailing wild berries – not the hulking later-fruiting Himalayas introduced by Luther Burbank. Like a genie out of a bottle, these blackberries have taken over the land. (They are the very thorny blackberries pictured in this post). My grandmother would pick the Himalayas when they came in season, but she preferred the early small trailing ones that are really native, small bursts of intense flavor.

There is more choice for thornless blackberries than any other bramble fruit. It’s hard to tell, even from the descriptions, what the difference is between them. “Doyle’s thornless” gets huge ballyhoo here: it’s the best for yields and range tolerance. But then here is “Triple Crown”, which is also the best in yields and vigor. It ripens a week or so earlier than “Chester”, which is a long-known thornless variety. As is “Black Satin”, “Arapaho”, and a long list of others.

If you want to see some of the huge selection available, try here , here , here , and here (search “thornless” to get their full selection of brambleberries, including thornless blackberries), or go to One Green World , and good old Gurney’s .
If you want to know good ways to prune them, the West Virginia Extension Service has an excellent site on that. And a horticulturalist from the University of Kentucky offers an evaluation of different training systems for thornless blackberries here.

But those smaller blackberry shoots that camouflage themselves in the grass are pretty sneaky, too.

I’ve ordered the “Wild Treasure” thornless blackberry from Raintree Nursery – they claim it’s an unspined offshoot of my grandmother’s favorite trailing blackberry. I’m trying “Black Pearl”, too, a blackberry which is supposed to taste like marionberries.

Marionberries (Rubus x or Rubus sp., since it’s a cross) are a lesser-known brambleberry. They’re named for the county in Oregon where they were bred, a cross between a Chehalem blackberry and and Olallieberry blackberry. I didn’t know Marionberries were blackberries until I looked them up for this article.

It’s been awhile since I had marionberries, but my memory is that they have a redder taste than most blackberries, a sort of winey background flavor that lingers on the tongue. I do, deeply, remember a marionberry pie I ate in Oregon on a road trip. It was a regular two-crusted pie in a diner on the side of the road, and I savored its flavor for another two hours of driving.

Loganberries (Rubus loganobaccus) are another of the lesser-known brambleberries – not many people outside of the Pacific Northwest seem to know about them, but they taste sort of like darker, bigger raspberries on with more depth to their flavor.

There’s a gorgeous picture of thornless loganberries (which they say are a type of blackberry cross) at Raintree, where you can also purchase them. You can find thornless loganberries here, too.

Next week: thornless boysenberries, youngberries, and raspberries

It might seem an odd time of year to be writing about watercress. It’s a thing we usually associate with summer: cress sandwiches, cress in the salad.

But at a mountain hot springs I found a little warm stream where watercress grows year-round. You can see frost sculptures on the grasses right next to it, but the watercress thrives. You can’t see the snow, because it doesn’t start until you get a bit away from the stream, but it’s there. Frozen hard.

This is one of the things I like about wild plants. They are opportunists. They live, on bare rock,  in shade, in dry and very wet and inhospitable places – and they ask nothing of us. Although when I met up with this cress, I offered my appreciation for this brilliant green in a winter landscape, and I took a few leaves.

There’s something about wild food that’s unlike any other. It may have to do with the way the climates and soil and exposure shape the plant, and give it nutrients you often don’t find in cultivated ones. It may be that when you eat a wild plant, it connects you to the landscape you’re in.

The many Maidu who lived near that hot springs would not have had watercress in their diet, because watercress is a European plant. I have found it growing wild in more than one California stream, though. Probably it was brought here by gold miners looking to avoid scurvy. Or maybe it was brought by the many horticulturalists who followed the gold miners. Whoever brought it, it has settled in happily.

It would have helped with the scurvy many miners suffered from (they ate nothing but beans and whiskey, or close to it), as it’s high in C, as well as vitamin E and beta-carotene. For minerals, you have phosphorus, calcium and iron.

If you want to gather watercress yourself, remember that, while it only grows in flowing water, it will grow in polluted flowing water. So be sure the stream is clean. Juicy plants such as watercress and lettuce are chock-full of whatever pollutants and pesticides are in the ground and water, and I wish commercial lettuce growers would think of this.

Watercress is pretty easy to recognize, especially if you’re a gardener: it’s in the cabbage family, and it has the rounded leaves a lot of brassicas do. In the case of watercress, the leaves are strung on the arms of loose rosettes of the plant, which spread in all directions, lolling in water.

One of the easiest ways to recognize watercress, though is the taste: a peppery greenness that reminds you of its relative, nasturtium.

I’ve never had enough watercress to cook – I just eat a few leaves plain, or pick some to put on bread and butter – it’s classic. But some people like watercress soup, or watercress salad.

People get a little cultlike around watercress. There’s even a site dedicated solely to it. For those of you who have enough watercress to cook, watercress.com (the link will take you to the recipes page) offers suggestions on pasta soup, quiche, baked eggs, and a number of dishes so delicious-sounding that I may have to go and find a bigger patch of watercress…

Some might wonder why I’m putting up a post on PLANNING gardens in late summer. Personally, I think late summer is an ideal time for planning a garden: the facts of what your garden did (or didn’t do) are  fresh. Roadside stands are still selling the fruits and vegetables you want to grow next year. The taste of what you want is in your mouth.

Kitchen gardens are not my area of expertise, so only the picture is mine.  Marco from Live to Garden  believes in small, manageable kitchen gardens that are easy to keep up and delectable to eat from. And he’s your writer from now on.

A kitchen garden allows you to enjoy the freshest, most delicious vegetables. You can grow the varieties of vegetables that are special to your area, or the ones you can’t find in the store but really like, or maybe even something you’ve heard about and always wanted to try. It’s a satisfying way to join the trend of eating what grows in your immediate area.
The kitchen garden has been around for quite some time. These gardens became popular during the World Wars, where most of the food grown in these gardens was sent overseas to soldiers in battle. You can see that from the beginning, the kitchen garden were meant to do good for us gardeners. In more modern times the luster of this type of gardening has faded as we can now buy all of our food from grocery stores. But now, high prices and lack of environmentally friendly farming practices has made growing your own food popular again.

Let’s look at how to plan for your kitchen garden.

If you have done some research on these types of garden plans, you may feel overwhelmed by how large these gardens can appear. You may even feel that in order to achieve the best success, you may need a large kitchen garden. Do not fret. The best thing for you to do is to start with a small, manageable kitchen garden.

If you are starting from scratch it is important to ensure you have clean soil and you have weeded. Any weeds left in the garden may harm the vegetables as they grow. Next, select only the vegetables you want to grow. Choosing the vegetables that you know you will use is an excellent way to start planning your garden, as you will be more inclined to care for it. It is also important to include herbs as landscaping plants in your garden, as these plants protect the vegetables from pests, and when they flower they add a touch of beauty. Of course, herbs also work very well as seasonings for many of the foods you will be eating with the vegetables you grow in your kitchen garden.

When it comes to positioning your kitchen garden, place it close to the house. If it is too far away from your home you may find yourself less motivated to tend to the garden. You may also find that because the garden is too far away, you will have a more difficult time monitoring the progress of the vegetables.

Remember that in order for your garden to achieve the most success, your vegetables will require at least 8 hours of sunlight per day.

The size of your kitchen garden depends on several factors: who is eating, how much they’re eating, and what vegetables you want to grow (squash can take up a lot of room).  If you are just starting a kitchen garden, it’s important you keep the garden to a size that is below 25′X25′.  That way, the work is kept to a minimum and the fun is at a maximum.

If you are concerned about pests, place a garden fence around the garden.

In order to properly care for your kitchen garden, be sure that you check the plants twice weekly at the very least. When seedlings are young, or the weather is extra hot, you may need to check more often.

Your kitchen garden will bring you much happiness and excellent nourishment. Take care of your garden and it will definitely take care of you.

It’s time to thin carrots, and reap the rewards by eating the tiny baby carrots whose lives are ending untimely. Carrots that can be steamed to perfection, eaten with fish, sausage, tofu, or any other food that makes a tender tasty treat.

In my climate, carrots are fall-planted, but even gardeners in harshly cold climates can have carrots through the winter. Ruth Stout, who gardened in Connecticut, kept her carrots under a thick layer of mulch. In winter, she’d go out, lift off the mulch, and pull out her carrots – and she got frost through mid-June.

I wish I could say that the carrots in these pictures are my own – but they are the generous contribution of my neighbor, who handed them to me through the fence as he was thinning. He even gave me a cooking tip along with them. “Snip up the bottom part of the stems and throw them in with what you’re cooking,” he suggested. “They taste great.”

The part he means is in the center of this picture: the light-green juicy part. They do taste good. You still have to cut off the tough shoulders of the carrot, but the stem bottoms are crisp and juicy, and add a nice flavor. Since the baby carrots are easy to steam whole, there’s not a lot of work involved in the whole procedure.

Some people use the leaves of carrots as a parsley substitute (carrots and parsley are in the same family), or throw them in the juicer or stock pot. The dark-green parts of the leaves are bitter from their high potassium content, so you may want to be cautious. The light-green bottom parts have a bit of pungency, but haven’t gotten to bitterness (at least in this young stage). These lighter greens probably share some of the protein, minerals, and vitamins (including vitamin K) of the darker upper leaves.

I love carrots fresh from the garden: one of my first garden experiences was on my grandparents’ farm. I can’t remember if it was my grandmother or my grandfather who amazed me by pulling a carrot straight out of the ground. I was four years old. Who knew carrots came out of the ground? But the flavor of it, washed off under the tap, the first crisp bite taken with in a minute of pulling it free, was something I never forgot.

The carrots my neighbor gave me are true baby carrots, unlike the kind you see in stores. Those bags of baby carrots? They’re just extruded big carrots, carved into baby shapes to fool us into thinking we’re getting something we’re not. (Don’t believe it? I wasn’t sure either, at first. Then I took a close look at them. Yep. Carved.)

Of course there is a difference between the immature thinned carrots my neighbor gave me, and the seeds that are bred to grow carrots which will never get bigger than my finger. Yet the tender, sweet-and-spicy fresh flavor of thinned carrots is its own delicacy.

Like many foods, carrots were originally grown for medicine. And modern science is finding that there may have been good reason for that. Carrots are food powerhouses; according to the Carrot Museum  one pound of carrots can give a normal person enough energy to lift 64 tons one foot into the air (although having the energy and having the strength are two different things. I’m not sure exactly how this energy level is calculated.).

Most people know about the carotene which converts to vitamin A in our bodies. (Both “daucus” and “carota” refer to the orange color that carotene gives to carrots.) It helps our night vision, and staves off macular degeneration. But one serving of carrots a day will also reduce chances of a heart attack by 60% (winter squash will do the same thing; it’s that beta-carotene again). And just two carrots a day can lower cholesterol by as much as 20%. Carrots can also help protect against cancer of the larynx, bladder, and cervix.

Some people claim to have cured cancers, diabetes, high blood pressure, arthritis, and cardiovascular diseases by eating diets high in carrots. The Hallelujah Diet  was devised by a pastor in upper New York state who healed his own cancer with it, then went on the lecture circuit.

Eating carrots might have some drawbacks: the Greeks who hid in the Trojan Horse were said to have eaten carrots to make their bowels inactive. I’d never thought about that important part of infiltration strategy before. Wonder what happened to the liquid wastes?

If that last fact disturbs you, you can move on to the more genteel Carrot Nutrition quiz. (I’ve given some hints in this post.) Or, if you prefer not to work so hard, the Carrot Museum has a list of Carrot Trivia you can use to amuse your friends (that’s where I got the tip about the Trojan Horse).

Sometimes, devotion to carrots can go over the edge. Jeff Chiplis’s page  has over 10,000 carrot-related items. If  you get bitten by the carrot beetle (there is such a thing), there’s a special resort for you: reserve a room at the Armistead Cottage in Rhode Island. Romana Zawarti has decorated the place with over 2,036 carrot-inspired items, and her husband Charles photographs them.

Carrots may seem like a pedestrian vegetable, but when we have them for dinner, we’re tapping deep into our roots. Eating a piece of ancient history.

It’s rose hip season.

In fact, it will be rose hip season well into winter for all but the coldest climates. Rose hips only get better with frost: their red color deepens, their flavor sweetens, the texture of the flesh gets softer.

The rose hips in the picure are from Rosa californica, our native wild rose. They have prickles coming out of their skins, a fact that was really brought home to me the first time I tried to collect them. Those prickles lodge nastily and persistently in the pads of your thumb and fingers.

For a while, I tried using Blue Mule gloves for picking rose hips, but it was just too awkward. I finally evolved a system of holding my bucket under the rose hips and snipping off the cluster with scissors.

Why was I going through all this trouble? Well, rose  hips are one of the better sources of vitamin C (and its bioflavinoids) around,  and the tea they make is pretty and tasty as well as healthful. When you make it with fresh hips, rose hip tea comes up a pretty orange-rose, and tastes a bit like weak Red Zinger. With dried hips, the brew is a little browner, but still gives you a lot of the benefits.

In World War II, Britain’s children gathered rose hips to use as a supplement when oranges and other sources of vitamin C were no longer available. In Sweden, rose hip soup  is a traditional dish which probably helped stave off scurvy in long winters. (It may still do that, but Swedes have more resources to choose from, now.)

If you pick prickly-hipped roses (not all of them are), eventually you have to deal with the prickles. If you’re just making rose hip tea, you can pretty much just drop them in simmering water (and once the hips dry, the prickles seem to retract into the wrinkles).  Rose hips need simmering (not boiling, but simmering) for about ten minutes, covered, to make a decent tea. Then you can strain the hips out. If you have prickly roses, I recommend using an old net curtain, cheesecloth, or a coffee filter, so you won’t get any surprises while you’re drinking.

There are many roses whose hips aren’t protected by prickles – a lot of the hybrid tea roses most people plant nowadays are like this. But the real queens of big smooth hips  are rugosa roses, the once-blooming roses with deeply-etched leaves.

While rugosa roses are imports from Asia, they’ve naturalized on some coasts in the NE U.S., and elsewhere: they are very hardy to wind and weather, and not fussy about soil. Old-fashioned rose fanciers like them in gardens.  If you’re lucky enough to live near where someone grows them, or in an area where they grow wild, these would be the optimum rose hips. Wherever you gather them, you will want to make sure they haven’t been sprayed with something deadly earlier in the season. (One of the big advantages to rugosa roses is that they are a hardy breed: they don’t require the sprays and coddling that a lot of modern roses do.)

I once painstakingly (I was using the wild rose hips, so the word is apt) made applesauce flavored with cooked rose hips. I had intended to make rose hip jam,  but  I decided I needed to dilute the rose hips with something easier to work with. I got the prickles out of the hips by pressing the cooked mash of them against a large strainer lined with an old net curtain and squeezing out about a tablespoon at a time of smooth bright orange-red paste. The applesauce/rose hip combination was a beautiful pale-peachy-rose color, tasted divine, and in my opinion, worked fine as (rather runny) jam.

There’s something magical and satisfying about going into the garden or the woods or the spare lot and gathering exotic food. Roses have all kinds of beauty to nourish us with; try taking advantage of this one.