Category — Food plants

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.

Theoretically, alpine strawberries are a wonderful match for a woodland garden. But after a decade or so, I’m still waiting for mine to prove it. Alpine strawberries, so the story goes, don’t need as much sun to bloom and fruit. In fact, according to the writeups, they need some shade to thrive. Yellow alpines have berries less attractive to birds, less likely to be marauded. And, since I’d had “white” alpine strawberries (really a pale primrose yellow) from the garden of a market gardener (who rightly only allowed us a few out of one of his highest-paying crops), I knew they tasted great.

Many catalogues carry alpine strawberry seeds instead of the plants; I’ve never had any luck growing these, but I don’t claim to be an expert at growing from seed. (Lucky, that.) Which is why, after several tries, I was happy to find places where I could get a few starter plants (some of those resources are below. The original place where I got my own alpines no longer carries them). Having experimented with some of our local, rhizomous wild strawberries and found them slow going, I was happy to find some alpine strawberries with runners, because I thought I could propagate these more quickly.

Alpine strawberries are supposed to fruit all season, through the summer and fall. They are close to wild strawberries in their breeding, so the fruit and leaves are much smaller than the better-known commerical kinds. (The shape of the fruit is different, too; more like a tiny dunce cap than the fat wedges of store strawberries.) Some of them have runners; some spread by rhizomes. They’re hardy to about -20 degrees F (about -29 degrees C), or zone 5, according to the One Green World catalogue; zones 3 to 9. according to the Raintree catalogue. Rosalind Creasy says that alpine strawberries are good to zone 4; I would tend to trust her the most, since I know she has lots of experience as a hands-on gardener in regular people’s gardens, as opposed to nurseries with all the commercial equipment.

Creasy recommends dividing plants every three or four years for best production. Maybe that’s part of my problem; I have never done this. On the other hand, the plants have rarely looked crowded to me. And the plants she’s discussing appear to be the rhizomous strawberries, not the ones with runners; my theory has been that runners are runners, so I just heel in the new little plants-on-a-string the way Ruth Stout recommends, only in a less-organized fashion.

Creasy recommends morning sun for alpine strawberries, or filtered sun from high-branched trees; she warns against full or afternoon sun, which I have found does indeed burn the leaves. Good places for alpine strawberries are in rockeries, borders, and anywhere you need a quick-growing groundcover. I think they make a nice part of the transition garden, that edge where natives start to take over from imports. They take some summer water, though they aren’t nearly as thirsty as their big-fruited cousins, so be sure to plant alpine strawberries with natives that aren’t moisture hogs, but don’t mind some summer water.

After I gave up on growing strawberries in a strawberry pot for reasons of deadness,  I put them in some of my self-watering containers, where they have lingered, mostly berriless, to this day. They have copiously produced runners, though, possibly for lack of anything else to do in the shade. I don’t recall getting any berries out of either attempt at growing strawberries in a pot.

Some of the alpine strawberries in pots grew so vigorously that they crept over the edge, where they made several rosettes which managed to root themselves in the dry-summer ground. I’ve also grown a few in the ground on purpose, where they obligingly made a pleasant woodsy-looking groundcover, and more plants – but nary a berry. Since I give them the same fertilizers and foliar feeds that produce flowers in my other plants, I’m guessing lack of sun is the problem, though they do get that morning sun or filtered light that everybody seems to recommend. After all, that market gardener who sparked my alpine strawberry lust by feeding me a treasured few of his alpine strawberries – from berry plants that had plentiful fruit – well, that guy grew his alpine strawberries in full sun. It was in the Pacific Northwest, I grant you; their summers are mild. But still. This strengthens my theory that these berries actually need more sun than advertised. If you want berries, that is.

Even though I have only the leaves, they’re still useful. Strawberry leaves are among the winter-growing plants which have a high vitamin C content; vital in times when no other sources of vitamin C are available. Euell Gibbons devised a way to extract it by filling a blender with strawberry leaves, covering with water, then blending only until the leaves are fine-cut; he let the leaves soak in the water overnight (this continues the water extraction of vitamin C), and strained it in the morning. He recommended this in morning green drinks, or as a way to dilute frozen fruit juices.

Strawberry leaves have traditionally been used as an antiscorbutic – which means they’re effective against scurvy. Since scurvy is caused by vitamin C deficiency, it only makes sense.
My own method of getting the benefit out of strawberry leaves is to include them in what I call ‘garden tea’: leaves of whatever is plentiful at any given time. In winter, that’s usually lavender, sage, strawberry leaves, and violet leaves (which also contain vitamin C). I rub them between my hands until they’re bruised, then simmer them several minutes until the tea is bright chartreuse. Most people enjoy this tea, and it’s very enlivening.

Last fall, in yet another attempt to get some actual fruit, I transplanted the alpine strawberries into some plastic bulb bowls-I had a lot more than my original three plants. (Being an overzealous bulb freak, I also planted some Fritillaria meleagris alba in the same bowls, hoping their small white bells would fit in nicely, and that the strawberries would provide them with the moist, cool root run they prefer.) I set the bowls where they’ll get about half a day’s sun with afternoon shade, and gave them the fertilizing regime I’m giving everything over the fall and winter. We’ll see.

References and Resources:

Both catalogues are good sources for information on growing conditions and garden uses of these strawberries.

Raintree catalogue -  has not only the yellow alpine strawberries I planted, but now carries a (presumably really) white alpine strawberry plus two red ones. In addition, there other wild and wild-related strawberries for your delectation.

One Green World catalogue -  carries two kinds of alpines, different varieties than the ones offered by Raintree.

Rosalind Creasy,  The Gardener’s Handbook of Edible Plants, Sierra Club Books, 1986

Ruth Stout, How to Have a Green Thumb without an Aching Back: a New Method of Mulch Gardening, orig. published Exposition Press, 1955, with many subsequent printings. The chapter on strawberries is “Love Will Find a Way”.

If you’re in the market for immediate gratification, consider an oyster mushroom kit.  I’m harvesting mushrooms twelve days after I started growing them.

Oyster mushrooms (there are several varieties and subspecies) are some of the most nutritious around. According to R.H. Kurtzman, PhD., they are rich sources of high-quality proteins and amino acids, B vitamins, and pro-vitamin D (the vitamin a lot of people are missing these days, as indoor jobs means little sun exposture).  Minerals such as iron and potassium are also present. And oyster mushrooms are high in chitin; he recommends them as a cleaner source for chitin than shellfish.

Medical studies show  benefits of oyster mushrooms. They’re  a good source of glucosamine, which often helps people and animals with joint problems. (Glucosamine works very well for some, but not others ) Several studies are now showing that oyster mushrooms lower cholesterol.

Besides these benefits, blue oyster mushrooms were my choice because they can grow at temperatures cooler than other oyster mushrooms: from 45F (a little over 7 degrees C)  to 65 degrees F (about 18 degrees C), and aren’t hurt by freezing. In my uncentrally-heated house, with a trip coming up, this sounded good to me. The mushrooms fruit at 65 degrees, which sounded about right for a cool place in my house this time of year. The final appealing aspect of this type of mushroom is that they looked like some of the easiest, quickest mushrooms to grow.

I reported earlier that I’d done some studying of Paul Stamets’s Fungi Perfecti catalogue, and ordered some mushroom plugs and a kit. A kit’s the easiest possible way to grow mushrooms, as the grower has done all the work in getting the mycelium in their right growing medium and ready to go. You just activate it by keeping it moist in dim light.

It was only a couple of days before I started to see the primordia poking through the microscopic holes in the growing bag (some professional mushroom growers use floor-to-ceiling-long versions of these bags, making little forests of them in their growing rooms).

In a day or two, the forming clusters looked like this, close up:

As they got bigger, my blue oyster mushrooms weren’t particularly blue; maybe this is because I let them dry out too much (apparently that can turn mushrooms brown), or get too much light (mushroom colors are darker in dim light, paler in sun).

Keeping the mushrooms moist enough has been hard; I’m starting to understand why there are special mushroom growing rooms. Mushroom kits need to be in a place prominent enough that I will notice and water them every day – but if that place is too light, I run into problems. If  it’s dark, it’s a lot easier for me to forget. While my wood stove leaves some nice cool spaces in my house where I can put plants that don’t like heat, it also dries out the air, as all heating systems do. If you had a house with a basement, that might be ideal: I could keep my mushrooms outside, where they’d get all the natural humidity, but I’m not sure whether they’d fruit, since the temperature needs to be at 65 F for that.

We had a good rain, so I did put the mushrooms out for a day or two to catch rain water, on the theory they’d like it as much as plants do. I’m not experienced enough to know if this slowed down the fruiting, or helped it, but it did mean they were as moist as they like to be for a couple of days.

Some mushrooms, like morels, are temperamental; you could wait two years to harvest those. But I got my first blue oyster mushrooms eight days after I started spraying it with water and cloaking it in its humidity tent. In fact, I might should have harvested them a little earlier; the information-packed pamphlet that comes with the kit shows a picture of ripe mushrooms as being still a little convex (I always have to remember: concave is caved in; convex is the one that bulges out, like those old bull’s eye mirrors, or a bulldog’s eyes).

Some of my mushrooms had definitely lifted their caps up and started to make cups, like this:

That’s when the mushrooms have apparently gone past their prime. Still, they didn’t look so bad, so I harvested them, too, with my little pointy flower shears; I got about a double handful in all, leaving many small and tiny ones still growing and popping up. Commercial harvesters gather oyster mushrooms by the bunch, but I have the time to be a little more conservative; I hope to grow all my mushrooms to their full extent.

I think some of the reason I let my mushrooms go was that I had an inner picture of the caps opening out from the closed cups to a flat spread; I see now that I was basically transferring the image of an opening bud to the mushroom world. Note to self: mushrooms don’t act like chlorophyll-bearing plants. You knew this.

The Fungi Perfecti pamphlet recommends cooking oyster mushrooms a lot longer than I have in the past. They cook down quite a bit, to half their fresh volume, or maybe less.  That’s okay: now they have nearly 20% protein and .1% niacin, among other vitamins.  While the pamphlet sugggests sauteeing in olive oil for 10 to 15 minutes, then adding butter, tamari, chopped scallions and wine, I’m taking a simpler course for now.  For reasons I’m too polite to mention in a blog, I can’t eat olive oil, so I sauteed the mushrooms in walnut oil (my standby oil for cooking and baking: it always tastes great, and has those healthy omega-3s). The rest of the recipe sounds great, but I didn’t feel like rushing out to get the missing ingredients.

So, using what I had, I sauteed the chopped mushrooms with chopped onions in walnut oil, until the mushrooms were golden brown. A great sauce on white fish, and it made rice and beans taste like a gourmet treat.