Category — Food plants

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.

Here’s a story about a plant that’s conservative in the best sense of the word: it protected the life of a civilization, it grows in the desert, and it’s been able to hold on to its own life force for 2,000 years.

In the 1970s, archaeologists excavated Herod the Great’s palace on Masada, in Israel. One of the things they discovered was an ancient jar which proved to hold Judean date palm seeds, Phoenix dactylifera, still dry and well-preserved. When they were radiocarbon-tested, they were found to be about 2,000 years old. One theory is that they are the pits spit out by soldiers, caught in the compound during a Roman siege. Rather than surrender, they committed mass suicide. But they left their date pits behind.

Those soldiers are long gone, but the seeds are moving on to a new life. Thirty years after their discovery, on the Jewish new year of trees (Tu Bishvat), Dr. Elaine Solowey soaked three Judean date palm seeds in a solution of fertilizers and hormones. Then she planted  them at a desert kibbutz. Six weeks later, one had come up and started forming fronds; by June 2008, depending on whose report you read, it was four feet (1.4 meters) or five feet (1.5 meters) high, with nearly a dozen fronds.

“Methuselah” (the tree is named after the oldest person in the Bible) broke a previous record of old-seed-sprouting: a 1,300-year-old Chinese lotus seed. The Judean date palm may be younger than some ancient grain seeds that have been sprouted, though. Nobody knows yet whether Methuselah will bear fruit;  as with many ancient plants, date trees are dioecious, with male and female flowers on separate trees. You can see it pictured in its smaller stages here.

Judean date palms were an important part of ancient Judean culture – so important that they became a symbol of Judea itself. When the Romans invaded, they found forests of 80-foot date palms, part of a fruit-export business, and a source of shade and shelter as well as food for the residents.

Any sweet-fruit-bearing tree is important, not only for the candy rush but for the things you can make from fermenting and processing their sugars: vinegar (for disinfection and food preservation) and alcohol (no need to describe its uses, I think). The rest of the tree was used to make furniture, rope, fuel, and packing material.

Probably because of their generous gifts to the people who grew them, Judean date palms  are were a symbol of grace and elegance in ancient Jewish culture; the name “Tamar” is derived from the date palm’s ancient Hebrew name. Judean date palms were also used medicinally, for anything from a hot sex life to tumors, heart problems to constipation. But by about 70 CE, when the Romans invaded for the second time, the date palm was on the decline; the fruit-export business had stopped. By 500 CE, the Judean date palm had disappeared.

Until now. Genetic tests show that its DNA is most closely related to an old Egyptian variety, Hayany. It may contribute endurance and disease resistance if it’s crossbred with other dates. (It seems as if it would certainly contribute to longevity.) Modern Israeli date palms are a strain originally from Iraq, which arrived in Israel via California. As far as anyone knows, they don’t have the medicinal qualities of the ancient Judean date palm.

In ancient Egypt, date seeds were placed in pharoahs’ tombs, symbolizing immortal life. Whether this refers to date’s medicinal powers, or just the everyday miracle of a plant’s ability to renew its own life, that practice gives resonance to the Judean date palm’s botanical name, Phoenix dactylifera. The fabulous Phoenix was able to burn itself at the end of its life – and then fly up, resurrected.

 JUNE: A MONTH TO HONOR WATER

In a way, my whole blog is about low-water gardening; that’s the reason I got involved with tulips, and I already loved natives and Mediterranean herbs. During June, my posts will all be about conserving water in the garden. This gives me scope to cover everything from containers to cityscapes, soil to site to sprays, and of course portraits of more of those stellar plants that spread their glories with little or no watering. (Hint: the “Wild Plants” category will give you quite a few more; so will the “Bulbs” category.)

I was intrigued by hyperlocavore when I found it on Twitter. The short version (that’s all you get on Twitter) was that this site helps you find gardening partners in your area, so you can share your yards or dig up your lawns and grow food locally.

A lot of people in my area are involved in the slow and local food movements; in fact, a lot of people in my area moved here in the earlier “grow your own” era, and some of the ones who are still moving here have the same sentiments.

While this site is definitely in favor of “grow your own”, the vision is a lot bigger than that. I checked out some of the videos to get the flavor of what was on offer here.

One of the videos, “Transition Towns”, caught my attention.The video might benefit from a little editing. Peak oil philosophy is not a riveting opening for most. But I kept going, and found original and inspiring thinking about how gardens might be a part of  dealing with an oil-based culture that is running out of oil, and choking from the bad effects of oil dependency. That’s what Transition Towns are all about, according to Rob Hopkins, the movement founder.

“We could do nothing, let this unfold as a series of lurching crises, or we could do something…there’s no  reason why a world with less oil couldn’t be preferable to where we are now,” says Rob Hopkins “We really need to re-discover what was actually good about the life before cheap oil.”

So they set about doing it - what else? - locally. In Totnes, Devon, UK, Transition Town enthusiasts began mining their own resources; old people, with their memories from the time before cheap oil  came in and really started to change things.

One thing you notice when you start interviewing, says  Hopkins, is “how resilient people were in those days, how everybody had skills they could turn their hand to. Dig for Victory - Victory Gardens I think it was called in the U.S.  - that was possible because everyone knew how to garden. They hadn’t been to gardening college, they knew it by osmosis. Nowadays, if you said, ‘here’s a spade, dig a hole,’ you’d have lots of people who could design a hole, you’d have lots of people who could quantity survey the hole, inspect the hole up for you, put the hole-digging out to tender, and they could insure the hole-digging process against public indemnity,  but actually there’d be very few people who could actually dig: so we’ve moved away from being a practical, hands-on society.”

Transition Towns is no pie-in-the-sky idealist movement; their idea is to find workable community solutions - solutions that are, in fact, much more workable than the ones we use now.

“The idea is to look to draw what was good  about  those times before cheap oil, not to romanticize it. We try to apply the best of the old and the best of the new, but it’s really about getting people to ask the right questions. We don’t claim to come in with all the answers.”

What they’re looking for is a way to replace common misconceptions with common sense. “If you look at all the plans the government draw up, town planning, it’s based on the assumption that oil prices will always remain cheap, the move away from the household economy will continue.” Hopkins points out that we really have no basis for those assumptions, and so we make bad decisions based on shaky foundations. In the U.S., such decisions have allowed us to become a sedentary, obese, depressed people, whose food travels long distances, and is often highly processed and without nutritional value.

For  Hopkins and the Transition Town movers, one of the first obvious good decisions is to produce food locally. The old model puts “good economy” as the enemy of “sustainability”. The Transition Town movement seem to be saying that we need to work together, locally, toward a richer and more sustainable economy. Which only makes sense. If we mortgage the future, how good is our economy, anyway? Any gardener knows that if you deplete the soil, you’re going to have to pay somewhere down the line.

But I think the most inspiring part of the Transition Town movement is the concept that we don’t have to wait for Big Experts to Solve the Problem for us. “Rather than breezing in with lots of experts who design everything for everybody, it’s a question of unleashing the genius of the community around you.”

(To read more about local food gardening, visit http://hyperlocavore.ning.com/)

Miner’s lettuce is a wildling here in Northern California, so I was surprised to find it in Johnny’s Selected Seeds, a catalogue from Maine. On second thought, though, it makes sense: miner’s lettuce is something you harvest in early spring, here: Johnny’s lists it as a cold-weather salad green.

Miner’s lettuce (Claytonia perfoliata, sometimes found as Montia perfoliata) has that name because the gold miners used it for hard-to-find greens. Groceries were not in steady supply in gold rush days, and if you were on the claim or at a big mine, it was a day’s trip to town to get them. Even then, you were unlikely to find much garden produce; food supplies ran to stodge, things that lasted under the long slow unrefrigerated shipping conditions of the time, and they weren’t cheap (European versions of California agriculture were in their infancy). In those days, many European Americans still didn’t know that greens could stave off scurvy and other diseases (Claytonia has a high vitamin C content), but even the miners who were ignorant must have craved greens by the end of winter.

Probably they learned about claytonia from the Maidu, who knew everything about the plants here and, unlike the miners, knew not to destroy their food sources by cutting them down or digging up large tracts of earth. The Maidu name for claytonia is wedakdaka (wuh-DOK-dokka).

Western claytonia is related to spring beauty (Claytonia virginica), the little cormous pink wildflower of the eastern woodlands. You can see the relationship in the miner’s lettuce flower, though its membership in the purslane family is only evident in the crisp juiciness of the stems and leaves.

Miner’s lettuce can be a low-water plant if it’s grown to time with seasonal rains. In our no-rain summers, it comes up in late winter, goes through early spring, and then dies off when the weather warms up and dries off, only to come back another year. Though it spreads into little patches, it isn’t invasive under these conditions, and would be a good plant to consider for filling in holes in the low-water garden. It will die off conveniently just when warm-weather plants are beginning to feel their strength. In more conventional, watered, garden settings, Johnny’s says that miner’s lettuce is suitable for multiple cuttings. The native plant books I have give it a long growing period, from February to June,; that’s probably because every hillside and altitude here has a different timing for winter and spring; the claytonia would grow any time after that first spring surge in February, for as long as the ground is still moist and the air is still cool. In my area, it would be unusual to see this plant as late as May, when native grasses and flowers begin to dry up.

Miner’s lettuce is happiest in moist semishade (too much sun will burn the leaves). Sierra Wildflowers  (Niehaus) and Sierra Nevada Natural History (Storer and Usinger) both say that claytonia likes shade, but in decades of observing claytonia, I’ve never seen them thrive where they don’t get at least a little filtered sun each day. Sierra Wildflowers says they grow in foothill woodlands, mixed coniferous forests, and chapparal; they’re not high-mountain plants. They also seem happy in people’s yards, especially around spigots or under trees at the edge of the clearing.

While it doesn’t grow at high altitudes, claytonia can grow in moderate frost or cold greenhouses. Sierra Wildflowers says it’s grown as a salad green in Europe, which often picks up on the beauty and usefulness of our wild plants before we do.

If you want to try claytonia as a crop, here’s an important piece of information that might keep you from weeding it out by mistake: it has an odd growth pattern. When it comes up, you wouldn’t associate the skinny-leaved rosettes

with the broad leaves that come later. This picture shows they are one and the same plant;
you can see the broad first leaves emerging among the thin ones.

The pink-purple flowers make tiny flourishes as the broad leaves age. They are pleasant to see, but they mark the end of claytonia as salad: it gets drier and more bitter as flowering advances.

Claytonia’s a labor-intensive crop to pick; the leaves are at most two and a half inches across, with many of them only about an inch in diameter (richer soils get you bigger leaves). But gathering them in cool weather is fun, and the leaves and cut-up stems make pretty and vitamin-rich additions to a salad, or nice eating right off the plant, as you walk by. I once brought a miner’s lettuce salad to a potluck and received many oohs and ahs. I think this is probably due to the novelty of the round leaves as much as anything, but it was gratifying seeing these townsfolk enjoy the food I’d gathered in the woods.