Category — Food plants

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.

Sometimes it’s easy to forget how exuberantly beautiful a vegetable can be. This fading but vital red chard arrested me as I was passing through a friend’s garden, just at the moment when the sun backlit it.

In the past twenty years or so, there’s been a movement to get vegetables back into the ornamental landscape (or maybe it’s the other way around). Pioneers such as Rosalind Creasy an Robert Kourik proved that edible plants can be ornamental, and that landscaping can provide food.

This seems like a new idea (it’s still controversial for some zoning boards and neighbors), but it’s actually a very old one. Food plants didn’t get split up from other plants until the age of European colonialism.

Colonialism opened up new vistas of plants, and for the first time, it wasn’t just curators of botanical gardens who were plant collectors. Wealthy people became aware that they could show off their status by using exotic plants in their gardens. Though slow transportation and primitive shipping methods meant many foreign plants arrived dead, avid collectors were willing to pay the price. Wanting to be the first on your block to have something is not a modern phenomenon.

Neither is showing off  to your neighbors.  Wealthy Western Europeans started to display their substance to the world by planting only ornamentals in the visible parts of their gardens and landscapes; the vegetables and fruits were relegated to areas visited only by the servants.  To show only ornamentals was to announce that you were too wealthy to farm; someone else could do that work for you.

This trend only applied to the wealthy, of course.  Workers and farmers kept on doing what gardeners have done for millenia: they grew what they needed as near to the door as they could get it. Plants that provided medicine or dye or food or were just the gardener’s beautiful pets or breeding project were all grown in one place: the original definition of a cottage garden. For many people, the idea of edibles as ornamentals has never passed away.

But as time went on, Western Europeans (including the ones who emigrated to the what became the U.S.) adopted the styles of those who were wealthier than they were. This trickle-down or social climbing in styles is a very pervasive feature of Western European cultures. The styles don’t necessarily have to make sense for us to adopt them. The reason why Spaniards lisp, for instance, is because one of the royals a few hundred years ago had a lisp. In order to save him embarrassment, the courtiers-the wealthiest class-followed suit. Since the courtiers were wealthy and prominent (the equivalent of movie or rock stars today), people copied what they did. The lisp spread until now standard Spanish Spanish means lisping,  and not only on the “s” sound.

Our culture is full of stories like these. Many of our fashions are not only the sign of deep changes; they are part of creating them. On a larger scale, the separation of food and ornamental plants-something you see in most of the gardens of the modern-day U.S.-reflects the economics of colonialism. A garden that shows that you don’t have to work the land yourself, that unseen others do the dirty work for you, is the basis of colonialism, where far-off workers make cheap goods for our sometimes uneasy consumption. It’s  a knotty issue we’re still struggling with. Maybe we can begin to unravel that knot by appreciating the beauty of red chard.

The last time I wrote about cucuzzi, the edible gourd, I still hadn’t gotten any female flowers or fruits.

I do now. I went away for a few days. When I left, the biggest fruit was a few inches long, and no thicker than my finger.

When I got back, it looked like this:

The female flowers are a little different than the male ones; the petals are narrower, creating a kind of pinwheel effect. It’s a nice variation.

My cucuzzi didn’t really get going for a while. I did get a late start on my garden, what with one thing and another, and it could be that they don’t have quite as much sun as they would like (though I gave them one of the sunniest places I’ve got), or that I didn’t give them enough flower fertilizer to get them flowering sooner.

Or it could just be that they were in a mood. Plants are like that.

In any case, I’m going to be eating them soon, because cucuzzis are supposed to be harvested when they’re about six inches long. Since they are gourds, you don’t want them to  get mature. (Well, even if they were summer squash, you’d want to avoid that.)

As much as I want to see what they taste like–if they really live up to the great things people say about the flavor– I’m saving this first cucuzzi for seed. I’m not an expert at seed-saving, but one of the things I remember is that, if you want a plant to bloom earlier, it’s best to select seed from the first fruits that appear. And so far the main pleasures of cucuzzi have been in their exuberant viny growth, springy tendrils, and faintly scented evening flowers.

It’s okay. It looks as if I’m going to have more edible gourds in just a few days. Unless it freezes tonight.

I started out full of myself. And multiple enthusiasms. This would be the most unusual, fresh version of the Three Sisters the world had ever seen. And it was all going into my prize bronze-brown Vietnamese pot, the big one that I’d splurged on at the discount store (it was only a few dollars more than a plastic one the same size, I told myself). I had vague, secret-from-myself dreams of how I’d win the Fine Gardening container contest, with becoming modesty of course.

Then came the reality.

Those  yin-yang beans I bought to twine up the cornstalks? Well, as it happens, they were bush beans. They weren’t going to twine anywhere. And they didn’t seem to like the circumstances I’d put them in, either; I harvested two pods with two beans in them and that was it.  The leaves had a ratty white-spotted look, too, that I think was due to nitrogen deficiency. I did get enough beans to replace the ones I planted, though the ones I harvested were kind of scrawny.

OK, then there were the violetto trionfo beans that actually do climb. (I planted three of them, and three of the yin-yang beans. Six stalks of corn.) I’ve got at least one of them running up the cornstalk now. But they’re just blooming, and the way those corn cobs feel, the corn’s going to be long dead before the beans get ready.

And then there’s the corn itself. A Japanese exotic corn, striped pink, cream, and white. How cool is that? And it’s actually very pretty-but not nearly as healthy (or colorful) as I’d envisioned. I do admit to getting a laugh out of pruning corn, which has got to be the most Garden Society thing I’ve ever done.  The leaves would go dead, and the corn would look funky, so I’d cut off the dead ones. Pruning corn.

Even though it wasn’t what I expected, I have enjoyed seeing the corn evolve, from its first pale stripes to the dark burgundy color that’s spreading ever further along the stalk. And even though it’s not as tall and bushy and strong as I would have liked, I did get one small ear of wine-red corn on each stalk.

The cucuzzi climbed rampantly out of all the other pots I put it in-but it made a few pale leaves and petered out in this one. The Waltham butternut squash  I also put in there is just putting out its first blossom now. And the surprise Brown Sugar canna (deep brown foliage, pink flower, reputedly) I planted late? It did show a tentative green point a month or so ago. And then sank back into the earth.
I think this trio, or quintet, (or sextet, if you count the canna), needed a lot more water than they got in that pot. I put in a reservoir insert, so they did get some bottom watering. And I put in some water-conserving polymers into the soil. But  I think that reservoir just wasn’t big enough for such heavy drinkers. Especially in a ceramic pot that allows water to evaporate. It’s  a glazed ceramic pot, which is a lot less porous than unglazed. But still.

I think they all needed a lot more food than they got, too. Oh, I did use a heavy-on-compost mix for soil, and put in amendments, the way I do with all of my container plants. And I foliar fed them, the way I do my whole garden. But corn, beans, and squash are notoriously nitrogen-hungry. They are heavy feeders and drinkers, and I treated them like anorexics.

Recently, I also read that the Three Sisters idea was about handy harvest, as well as space saving. The corn would have been field corn-the kind you gather when it’s ripened hard, to feed to livestock. (William Alexander suggests a modern version: use popcorn.) The squash would have been winter squash or pumpkins–not harvested until their shells were hard. Late, like the corn. And the beans would have been dry beans, not ones you’d pick off the vine to eat fresh. Dried beans that get harvested when the pods dry.

I could look at this season’s formerly-known-as-star container and be disappointed. But you know what? I’ve enjoyed the little purple curling edges of the corn leaves, and I’m enjoying the purple bean flowers and vines spiraling around the almost-dead corn, and I enjoyed the magic of opening up my two little pathetic yin-yang pods and finding replicas of the little seeds I planted.
I even enjoyed pruning corn.

Reference:

The $64 Tomato, William Alexander, Algonquin Press, 2006

Places to get seeds:

yin-yang beans: Park’s
violetto trionfo beans (I  notice they are not in the current catalogue. They’d been sitting for some years): Pinetree Gardens
Japanese ornamental corn: JL Hudson
cucuzzi squash: JL Hudson
Waltham butternut: Pinetree Gardens