Our recent sunny warm days have brought the happy little Crysanthus crocuses up, and when they bloom I know that I’ve survived another winter and we are well on toward spring. But we are still in the time of year called the “hunger gap,” when in leaner times you would have eaten most of your preserved and stored food and fresh food would be a distant memory. In those days, just about the time that scurvy threatened, there would be a precious few fresh foods that would come through for you. I am no longer that interested in eating preserved foods, so the fresh greens of the hunger gap are increasingly important to me.
Stinging nettles are not just a fresh green in earliest spring, they are a nutritional powerhouse. Vitality and well-being seem to course through your body as you eat them. Also, they’re delicious. They don’t occur naturally in Albuquerque, and I had to buy plants in order to have them, but I have two nice patches now. They need some water and mulch in our desert area, but given those they spread rapidly, so be ready to control them by digging out excess roots when they spread too far. They sting fiercely at any age, so don’t plant them near paths and have good heavy leather gloves (they sting right through fabric) ready for harvesting. Pick any time after they reach about 5-6 inches high, harvesting the top 2 or 3 inches. You will have about a month to harvest before they get tough, gritty, and nasty. Keep your gloves on while you wash them and drop them into boiling water. Once blanched for 1-2 minutes, their spines are softened and their venom is broken down, and you can treat them like spinach or any other mild green. I love them in omelets or just blanched and chopped with some butter and cream. Be aware that the raw nettles can sting animals as well as people, and severe allergic reactions to the sting are possible, so please do site them responsibly.
Bladder campion is another weed that doesn’t occur naturally in central New Mexico. I bought seeds from an herb supplier. Sprinkle them in a place that you can keep watered in late winter. In hot sunny areas they will appreciate a little shade. They will be scant and spindly the first year, and there won’t be anything to harvest. The second year you can pinch off the tips when they are 6-8 inches tall to add to salads, and by the third year you should get enough to cook. They are among the tenderest and mildest of wild greens, and I prefer them in salads, but a quick sauté in a little good butter is nice too.
Tronchuda is not a weed, but a Portuguese kale with a cabbagey but mild flavor and enough vitamins, minerals, and antioxidants to make you crow. I bought my seeds from Nichols Garden Nursery a couple of years ago, and am selecting the ones that live through the winter for my Hunger Gap crop. You plant them in the spring, harvest the huge leaves for greens in summer and fall ( my chickens appreciate them too), and then leave the stem and the tuft of leaves at the top over the winter. They won’t survive if you don’t leave some leaves on. Those that survive will begin to leaf out again in February and provide you with thick, substantial leaves for stir-fries and cooking by early March. They are biennial and begin to shoot to flower by late March, and you can harvest the buds as a broccoli-like vegetable. Do bear in mind that if you want to save seed, you have to leave plenty of clusters to go to flower. Bees love the flowers and they are a nice early source of nectar. Collect the seed, dry them, and start the cycle over again.
Archive for the ‘front yard gardening’ Category
12 Mar
Filling the Hunger Gap
11 Mar
Admitting What Didn’t Work
As a gardener/ farmer with a city lot, my rate-limiting step is space, and things that don’t work need to be given up and the space given to something else. This time of year, I’m often busy dealing with things that didn’t work and freeing up their real estate for other purposes.
Take my effort to create an asparagus bed with minimal work. The spot where I wanted to establish this long-lived perennial was awful, not to put too fine a point on it. The workers who built the house parked their trucks on it and used it as a dumping spot for leftover cement and other choice debris. The ground was packed hard as concrete, weeds wouldn’t grow there, and it promised hours of backbreaking work.
I decided to use less laborious methods to heal that area, and I planned to take two years to do it. In year 1, I built a long, low compost heap on my future asparagus bed. I used straw and chicken manure, layered it up about two feet high, and it heated well. I ended up with about four inches of pure finished compost over the entire bed, which I left to cool off completely over the winter.
Year 2, I stirred the surface of the compost and planted daikon and oats. The idea was that the oats would provide organic matter and the daikon would pierce and break up the hard pan beneath and make drainage channels through it for the plantings to follow. I supplied water, and the mixture grew well and looked healthy. Again, I left it over the winter to break down.
This year, year 3, I ordered my asparagus starts. On the first warm day in early February, I went out to the bed-to-be with my spading fork, to gloat over the results of my strategy.
What I found was a thin mat of organic matter, bound together by roots, over impenetrable hard stuff. The oats had made a thick mat of roots a few inches thick, and the daikon had turned at right angles when they encountered the hardened mess beneath and grown sideways
along the bottom of the compost.
So, finally, I did what I had to do and double-dug the bed, using a pick to break up the hard conglomerate and incorporating organic matter 18 inches deep. It took an entire back-breaking weekend. Now my bed is mellowing, ready for the asparagus roots to be planted in March.
Does this mean that labor-saving methods of gardening don’t work? No, it just means that everything depends on the situation. Study your situation, and be aware that some areas can’t be repaired without putting in a lot of sweat equity. Is it worth it? If you want fresh food and want to leave a piece of land better than you found it, the answer is an emphatic “yes.”
8 Jan
Welcome back, and notes on the Ketogenic diet
I’ve been MIA for a long time, and I appreciate the kindness of those readers who tactfully enquired about my whereabouts. The main reason was a series of deaths among my nearest and dearest that made 2013-14 seem like The Years That Everybody Died. Change and death are inevitable, and so are grief and railing against fate. Many thanks to those of you who are still with me.
Another change had a happier outcome. I developed clear signs and lab results indicating that the inexorable progression to type 2 diabetes had begun, and this started me wondering whether it really was inexorable. The answer, almost three years later, is an enthusiastic “No way!” After fooling around with various unsuccessful interventions, I finally took the plunge and went on an ultra low carbohydrate (ketogenic) diet, and after the first awful month of withdrawing from all my beloved toxins, it’s been great. Good energy, bubbling good health, and freedom from food cravings don’t come from medications, they come from consciously made lifestyle choices. Even more than I thought before, we choose our health. My menu of food choices includes meat, poultry, fish, seafood, green vegetables and some others, mushrooms, cheese, cream, strained yogurt, coconut milk, and nuts. Plenty to choose from, and plenty to season it with.
So some of my recipes will be a little different now, but the role of home food production is even more important than before. Green vegetables are an even bigger part of my diet now, and I want the best deep-organic stuff that I can get. Good meats are vital, and I produce my own where I reasonably can. I probably couldn’t afford to buy foods of this quality in the amounts that I eat them. This is the perfect time of year to plan your season of growing and foraging, so in the next post we’ll start thinking about what to grow and what to read.
Oh, and don’t forget:
18 Dec
Winter pleasures: pomegranates
Pomegranates are a common landscape plant in our area, although our recent cold winters have culled them pretty heavily. A little further south, they can be found naturalized by roadsides. They are ripe in early winter, and there are lots of ways to use them in cooking, but I also like them as juice. The juice is tannic, and in my view needs softening, so I drink it in orange juice, using one medium-sized pomegranate for every two or three oranges. I cut the pomegranates in half and juice them in the orange squeezer, but if you don’t have one, you can hold each cut half over a bowl and squeeze the inside with a large rounded spoon to extract the lovely crimson juice. Salute the season, and enjoy. After starting a winter morning with this lovely toast, you can complete the evening with a pomegranate margarita if you feel so inclined.
My urban homestead 