Gardening: The Cutting Row

So, we've declared that one of the long rows in The Farm will be devoted to cutting flowers. That's eighty feet by four feet of space, all of it with at least half day sun.

Woohoo!

I've already started planting perennials. Two each of a few kinds of Japanese anemones, including Honorine Jobert, my favorite. I'd tell you what the others are, but, um, I forget. I'll have to make a note when I get out there.

Two plants each of a single-flowered and a double-flowered coreopsis. (Cultivars, you ask? I avert my eyes and promise to go make that note, too.) Two Magnus coneflowers. Two black-eyed Susan plants. Eight assorted columbine. In case you're wondering what the unifying theme is, it's that I went to the Grange and bought two of every plant that (1) I like, that (2) wasn't rootbound, and that (3) at least one source claimed was suitable for cutting. Not exactly systematic, but there was bare space out there!

I also bought some unsatisfyingly short things - squat little dahlias and, even worse, squat little sunflowers. I refuse to buy the sad, short cosmos seedlings. Why won't nurseries sell the tall ones? I suppose it's because people who aren't me like "bedding" annuals. Plus, people like to buy annuals that are already blooming, and it's hard to get a blooming four-foot-tall soft plant home without breaking it in half. So if I want the tall stuff, I have to seed it myself. This year I seeded Art Deco zinnias and Double Click cosmos, with delightful results; I'll repeat both next year, plus more kinds of  cosmos and zinnias, plus sunflowers.

I'm busily hunting online nurseries for more perennials. Vintage Gardens is going away in 2013 (noooo!), so I'm making lists of roses and possibly hydrangeas to buy from them--and Himself and I are discussing the possibility of devoting another long row just to roses. And every year I regret my failure to plant dahlias and chrysanthemums, so I plan to finally correct that error, though I haven't begun to narrow down the hundreds of options. I like the whacky ones that look like they need to comb their hair, or they're ready to blast off for Alpha Centauri, or they're waiting for you to get a little closer so that they can shoot spores in your face. That kind.

Then there are bulbs. Tulips, of course. At six inches between bulbs and a four-foot-wide row, that's sixteen bulbs per linear foot of row. That's a lot of bulbs, and enough space to offer at least a chance that they'll come back next year.

And...

Um...

My brain just stopped. Maybe those short squat little dahlias successfully aimed their spores.

First vase photo: By trish. Wikimedia Commons.
Second vase photo: By Patrick.Charpiat. Wikimedia Commons.
Third vase photo: By David Palterer. Wikimedia Commons.
Dahilia photo: By Vulkan. Wikimedia Commons.

Gardening: Random Randomness

• I cut my first winter squash today. Unfortunately, I don't know what it is; the pencil-written wooden tag was rubbed off by the time I thought to make a note, and the woman who sold it to me and said that it tasted like chestnuts wasn't at the next farmer's market. I know that it covers an amazing amount of ground and produces an amazing number of squashes, for a single plant. And the squashes look rather like pictures of white acorn squash, though they turn a slightly darker tan when they ripen.
• A friend ate one of the Delicata Honey Boat squashes at the summer squash stage, and said that it was good and sweet. I've rarely eaten a summer squash that didn't taste like water. Maybe I should start eating immature winter squashes instead.
• I planted three kinds of squash and no pumpkins. What's with that? I'll correct it next year.
• I cut a zinnia and put it in a vase. Two weeks later, it was still alive. This is both good and a little bit frightening.
• There are unidentified round fruits on one of the plants in the cucumber patch. I still don't know if they're cucumbers, melons, or alien pods. 
• I still haven't eaten a sunflower bud. This was one of my big planned experiments this year, but I slacked off. If I don't get moving, all the sunflower buds are going to flower.
• Apparently, I sold about half of my vegetable gardening books to the used book store when I resigned myself to a small garden space. Now I need to decide which ones to re-buy. But I'm more pleased with myself for having done the decluttering than I am annoyed with my errors.
• The two watermelons in the garden are each only slightly larger than a softball. Next year I'm going to try Blacktail Mountain watermelon, if I can get the seeds. I read about it in Breed Your Own Vegetable Varieties; it's supposed to successfully ripen melons in cooler and higher parts of Oregon than I live in. I think.
• This is the first time in months that I didn't have a sad, reproachful cluster of plants in pots huddled around the hose bibb waiting to be planted; a friend and I got the last of them in the ground this morning. Of course, I'll buy more any minute now.
• There's a volunteer petunia in the corn. That's just weird.
• Speaking of the corn, the main corn crop is ready to eat! We're in the middle of the generosity/gluttony dance where we want to give lots away to keep it from going to waste, and want to keep it to make sure we don't give away so much that we can't eat ourselves silly.
• I know that corn is supposed to have lots of genetic diversity, but does that extend to pure white kernels and corny yellow kernels on different ears that came from the seed packet? The silk colors were very different, too. Is this normal? And shouldn't the white and yellow be mixed in the same ear, depending on what fertilized what strand of cornsilk?
• Is it wrong to plant tulips as annuals? I need to know!
• Either way, it's time to order tulips. And to make sure that I ordered enough shallots and garlic and potato onions and Egyptian walking onions. And gopher wire. I read that without gopher wire, there will be no garlic whatsoever.

Image: Wikimedia Commons.

Plant Breeding: That Lettuce Plant

So, on 4/30, I planted some seeds, including some Red Sails, Little Gem, and Four Seasons lettuce. The Little Gem and Red Sails took a good long time to sprout, but when they sprouted, after about fourteen days, they did so fairly evenly--most of the little plants were within a couple of days of each other. All very nice and normal.

The Four Seasons was more interesting. One seed sprouted earlier than any other seed in two flats - I think; I  really must keep better records and stop expecting myself to remember things. But I don't need memory to see that that one plant is larger than any other lettuce seedling in the greenhouse, and that it's one of only two Four Seasons seeds to sprout at all.

So what does that mean? It could just mean that I somehow planted it differently. It could mean that most of that packet was bad seed. It could mean that I have one seed of an inherently superior Four Seasons--inherently superior for sprouting in the microclimate of my own tiny greenhouse, anyway. It could mean that I have one seed of either an accidental cross, or some other lettuce that was caught up in the sorting machine. I can't compare the plant with other Four Seasons plants, because the only other Four Seasons seed to sprout has barely broken ground. It does have somewhat mottled red and green coloring that seems like a reasonable fit with Four Seasons.

Whatever it means, it's potentially interesting, and if all goes well, I'm planning to save its seed for next year. Maybe it'll sprout earlier than standard Four Seasons. Maybe it'll grow out to a variety of plants, suggesting that it is an accidental hybrid. Or maybe it won't do anything interesting at all. But I'll be growing lettuce anyway, so why not?

This is all assuming, of course, that the rabbits don't eat the plant first

Photo: Mine.

Gardening: The Bloom List

I've decided to maintain a weekly list of blooms. Why? I'm really not sure. How? Every Sunday I'll drift around the garden and list everything that's blooming. Not when it started or when it stopped, just whether it's blooming or not. And I'll blog about it.

So what's blooming this week?

• Wisteria.
• Parrot tulips. There are just three, conveniently placed so that they block the entrance to the path to the greenhouse shed in a self-satisfied sort of way. Like cats. They've returned for several years, and I'm increasingly fond of  them.
• Princess Victoria Louise oriental poppies.
• Er... one of the shrubs in the shrub border. The one that isn't photinia or lilacs or... yeah, that one.
• Last year's onions.
• Sweet bay. Is sweet bay supposed to bloom? According to Google, apparently it is, but I've never seen it do this before.
• Those low white hardy geraniums that make such a perfect bed edging. Except for their eagerness to march right across the path.
• Veronica. The low perennial kind.
• David viburnum. Himself hates David viburnum with a fiery passion. I think it's looking lovely.
• The variegated vinca that crawls under the fence from next door.
• The bishop's weed that rampages under the fence from next door.
• That pink stuff. With the name that I can't remember. It's becoming embarrassing, how many plants there are growing in my garden, that I can't identify. Ha! Jupiter's Beard! That's it!
• Columbine. I haven't planted columbine for years; I love the way that they just reappear anyway.
• Prostrate rosemary.
• Upright rosemary.
• Those... er... OK, more shrubs whose name I don't know.
• Lilacs.
• That white-flowered shrub under the Italian cypress. The one with the little caps of tiny white flowers. 
• Raspberries.
• Violets, but only the ones with the smaller darker leaves. They might be Labrador violets. Or they might not.
• Culinary thyme.
• Creeping thyme.
• That blue-flowered stuff that looks like bits of creeping rosemary but isn't. Yeah, yeah, go ahead and mock me.
• Dogwood.
• Grapes. At least, there's a tiny something that looks rather as if it might eventually turn into a bunch of grapes.
• Chives.
• The rose on the shed. The white one. I know it's a hybrid musk. It's probably either Bubbles or Moonlight.
• The freakish two-tone purple irises. They're all over a bed that's supposed to contain only a specific blue iris. After repeated attempts to thin them out, they're more numerous than ever.
• The first blue iris. Woohoo!
• Sweet woodruff.
• Candytuft.
• The tall blue hardy geranium. Possibly Johnson's Blue.
• Pheasant eye daffodils.
• Bluebells. At least, we call them bluebells. 
• The white azalea.
• The magenta azalea.
• California poppies.
• Lenten rose.

Image: By Stan Shebs. Wikimedia Commons.

Gardening: It's aliiiiiive!

Carol Deppe's book Breed Your Own Vegetable Varieties is back on my nightstand, for the fifth or eighth or perhaps tenth reading. I have an earlier edition, full of fun stories and genetics and how-tos, and a later edition, with a lot more of the politics of plant patenting and other depressing things. I focus on the earlier edition. I'm shallow.

I feel a mad-scientist glee at the idea of breeding my own plants. I must confess that I have to do a lot of thinking to conjure up "something new" that I want, because I haven't come anywhere near exhausting the possibilities of plants already commercially available. For example, I want a particular mellow meaty yellow-orange tomato that I once tasted, but I know that I just need to discover it, not breed it, because I've already eaten it.

But now that we have more space, my fantasies of breeding are coming to new life, and I'm reading the book again and searching, again, for ideas. In fact, I'm making a list of things I could work on.

My first thought is podding radishes. You know those seed pods that radishes put out after they bolt and bloom? They're edible. There's already at least one variety of radish out there that's sold specifically for its edible pods, but surely the market could use more, right? Right? In any case, this scheme has the advantage of providing discovery in the very first year, because I can start by sending off for a bunch of different radishes and just eating their pods, without ever having done any breeding work. Then I can cross some and grow something new next year. Or, considering the relatively short life cycle of some radishes, could I even grow out the result of this year's cross this year? I need to do some research.

Then there's squash blossoms. Rather like the radishes and the radish pods, I have little use for squash, but I love to eat the blossoms. Fried. I know that there's already a squash variety bred specifically for its tendency to produce lots of male blossoms and few female fruits, but maybe there's more to be done here? Or maybe my squash blossom preferences are different? The variety in question is Butter Blossom, but I can't seem to find seeds, so I'm thinking of experimenting with Costata Romanesco, since Johnny's says good things about its blossoms.

Except, hey! Aren't there climbing squash? Tromboncino, and others? And wouldn't that be a particularly good characteristic for a squash grown primarily for blossoms? Without the weight of a bunch of fruits to pull a trellis down, you could get your squash flowers in a minimum of space. It appears that Butter Blossom (pepo) and Tromboncino (moschata) aren't candidates for a cross, so that obvious path toward combining the two target characteristics (climbing and a high percentage of male blossoms) is closed. I'll do some more thinking.

What else? My favorite vegetable is onions, and my main onion goal is an onion that will have maximum knock-you-down flavor, both hot and sweet, when slowly caramelized. But I already suspect that Copra may be the onion for me.

And just to expose my ignorance (and perhaps my need to read the book again) I'm not at all clear on how one evaluates onions, the kind from seed, when doing breeding work on them. If you do a tomato cross and grow out the results, you can taste a tomato on a plant, and if it's transcendent, you can then let another one on the same plant ripen and rot and make seeds. But tasting an onion kills the onion, so there's no getting seeds out of it later. Do you wait another full generation and keep track of each individual onion's seeds, and evaluate each group of progeny separately? But how can you be sure that the glorious onion that you just tasted wasn't the only one with that particular group of genes? Am I missing something obvious here?

Now, there are the vegetatively propagated onions. Potato onions, multiplier onions, shallots, Egyptian walking onions, bunching onions, chives, garlic chives, garlic, elephant garlic, perennial leeks. And some of them reproduce from seed. I suppose those are the ones to work on--once you have something you like, you could just keep on propagating it.

Actually, that's another area that interests me--perennial vegetables. There are the obvious ones--garlic and potatoes and asparagus and artichokes and so on. But there are some less obvious choices that I haven't experienced. For example, according to Carol Deppe, salsify not only produces edible roots, but also edible green shoots and salad greens. Daylily blossoms are supposed to be edible, though you shouldn't take my word for it. I've never tasted a sunchoke; I'd like to.

Well, this is interesting--I see on a website that unopened sunflower buds, steamed, taste like artichokes.  Is that something worth some breeding work?

Bwahahaha!

Image: Wikimedia Commons.

Rambling: Bad Peony Timing

So. Gardening. This blog once had garden content. Then the garden filled up. Then winter came. Then NaNoWriMo came. Then I started the 100-fiction-words-a-day resolve, which is still in effect as a goal. And there wasn't a lot of gardening, in my writing or in real life.

But the days are getting longer, and this weekend was deceptively springlike. And, most important, I may have access to some fresh gardening space soon.

Bwahaha.

So it's time to start the spring gardening dance. Seed catalogs. Websites. Peonies. At this moment, particularly peonies. And, yes, I realize that it would have been much better to have thought of this in the fall.

I used to garden in the San Francisco Bay Area. Bay Area weather doesn't support peonies--there isn't enough winter chill. All the same, many of the garden centers sell the things, presenting me every year with those gorgeous pictures on glossy boxes of peony roots. Every gardener knows that there are plenty of things sold in garden centers that are highly unlikely to do anything at all in the garden, but that's usually about skill. And skill improves every year, so each spring the gardener buys a new batch of plants, and most die, but some unexpectedly live, or even bloom, and so everybody's happy.

But when the garden centers sell something that simply won't bloom unless you live a few thousand feet up a mountain or dump a truckful of ice on it every few days through the winter, that seems to be an unfair stacking of the deck. I planted and lost a couple of peonies before reading about them and learning that they were a doomed pursuit. Then I ignored what I read and planted some more. But nothing ever bloomed.

So when I moved to a Southern Oregon garden that not only supported peonies, but had one already blooming, I was excited. I planned to plant many more.  But we had new paths made and new beds built, and in all that tromping around, peony roots seemed somehow too fragile to insert and too hard to keep track of. So we installed roses for me and irises for Himself, and space filled up.

And then one fall I had a spark of peony determination, one that wouldn't wait for catalogs and mail-order, and I planted six of what they were selling at the hardware store. And then we revamped the irrigation system, and then we did remodeling, and people did their very best not to walk on the flower beds, but planting more seemed like a mistake. And then, two or maybe three years later, those peonies bloomed, and they were lovely, but they were still what they were selling at the hardware store. They weren't gasp-and-fall-down peonies. And the garden was full.

Anyway. Enough history. Now I may have another chance to plant the really glorious peonies, the ones that transcend the hardware store. Except... it's spring. And I should have planted them in the fall.

Hmph.

The quick thing to do would be to search local nurseries and buy any potted peonies that I can find. The sensible thing to do would be to accept reality, prepare a luxurious bed, perhaps plant a few annuals to keep myself entertained, and order roots for perfect, glorious, transcendent peonies, to be received and planted in the fall.

What, I wonder, are the odds that I'm going to do the sensible thing?

First Pink Peony Image: By Epibase. Wikimedia Commons.
Second Pink Peony Image: By Epibase. Wikimedia Commons.
White Peony Image: By Usien. Wikimedia Commons.
Striped Peony Image: By LapisLauzli Tomorrow. Wikimedia Commons.

Gardening: Flowers I wish I'd planted

This is the time of chrysanthemums and dahlias - big, bright, crazy flowers. I have no chrysanthemums, and my dahlias are languishing from lack of space and plushy conditions. So there are no crazy flowers. Right now, that makes me (slightly) sad.

In the spring, I briefly consider the fact that I'll want these flowers when fall comes. I eye the blank spaces in the garden or, more likely, the blank spaces that I could create by evicting something else. But in the spring, the roses and Oriental poppies and lilacs and irises are budding, and I'm certainly not going to evict any of them. And any existing blank spaces could be used for beans or tomatoes or nice stocky annual flower seedlings - things that will pay off sooner than chrysanthemums or dahlias. So the moment passes.

It's not as if the garden has no flowers right now. The Japanese anemones are in their prime, and they're my very favorite flower. And the roses aren't done yet. And our wisteria is still blooming, as it does all summer every summer. I don't know if it's sterile, or if there's no pollinating plant nearby, but I'm pleased either way.

But I like the crazy. I want Alice in Wonderland flowers, and right now I have none. Logically, now, when I'm feeling the lack, should be the time to motivate myself to clear out something else (driveway, Free sign - it'll get a good home) and plant some crazy-flowered hardy perennial chrysanthemum. But I fear that next September I'll be posting these same sentiments all over again.

Image: Wikimedia Commons.

Gardening, A Plant Wardrobe, Plant Three: International Orange Oriental Poppies

Our neighbors, three houses down, have a stand of gorgeous blood-red Oriental poppies. And I've been lusting after them for years, without quite having the nerve to ask for a root cutting. I planted a tiny plantlet of Beauty of Livermere last year, with great hopes, and early this month it started blazing blood-red right outside my desk window. I couldn't be more delighted.

I thought that as a result, I could live without the more common orange Oriental poppies. You know the ones. Life vest orange. Traffic cone orange. Goldfish orange. Orange. The orange that wreaks havoc with almost any color scheme. That orange.

I was wrong. I can't live without them. Beauty of Livermere is magnificent, and I'll love it year after year. But I need the gaudy orange.

Photo: Mine.

Gardening: A Plant Wardrobe, Plant Two - Dr. Huey Rose

I'm not supposed to like Dr. Huey.

In case you don't know, I should explain that Dr. Huey is primarily a rootstock. When those self-important primadonna hybrid teas...

Ahem.

... when gardeners want to grow a fine and attractive rose that has limited tolerance for cold or other issues, that rose will often be grafted onto a rootstock that can tolerate those issues. Dr. Huey is one of the most commonly used rootstocks. So when you buy a hybrid tea rose, the rose above the ground will be the hybrid tea, and the roots below the ground will, most of the time, be Dr. Huey.

But Dr. Huey is rarely content to just leave it at that. His roots will merrily send up branches from below the ground, or from bits of the rootstock that may not be altogether buried. The whole Frankenstein-like rose structure is then said to be "suckering". The branches, or suckers, grow eagerly into long arches, since Dr. Huey is a climber, and the arches are covered, for a few weeks in spring, with lovely semi-double red roses. After that, Dr. Huey subsides into foliage and, um, blackspot.

At the very first signs of this process, proper rose growers descend on the rose with various investigative tools, trace the suckers down below the ground, and rip them right off the roots.

Me? I celebrate. Why? Because I normally can't grow hybrid teas, at all. They don't like me, probably because I fail to give them all of the things - like fungicides and pesticides and, well, regular feeding - that they demand. I normally get two or three grudging blossoms per year from hybrid teas.

Until Dr. Huey breaks ground. When that happens, not only do I get lots and lots of Dr. Huey foliage and flowers, I get lots more blossoms from the original hybrid tea. My theory, perhaps expressed in this blog before, is that all of that enthusiastic Dr. Huey foliage manufactures extra food that the good Doctor generously shares with the hybrid tea. Unlike hybrid teas, Dr. Huey seems to be able to feed itself from prosaic substances like, um, dirt.

But I don't love Dr. Huey primarily for its kindly food-distribution ways. I love Dr. Huey because I love Dr. Huey. Spring isn't spring without those sprays of red flowers. I can see them all over town, because when a hybrid tea dies, Dr. Huey usually survives. But I still need my very own Dr. Huey - or two or three.

In fact (go ahead, laugh) I ordered, and paid real money for, a custom root plant of Dr Huey - an action not unlike paying money for dandelions or crabgrass.  When we moved to our present house and garden, the one hybrid tea was slow to sucker, and I feared that I'd have to live with no Huey. So I panicked and submitted my order. Of course, the hybrid tea started suckering before the custom plant arrived, so now I have two. And that's just fine with me, even taking the blackspot into account.

Image: Mine. A bad shot, but look at all those flowers!

Gardening: A Plant Wardrobe, Plant One - Honorine Jobert

In the perfume world, my other major area of obsession, it's common to discuss the idea of a fragrance wardrobe. An essential part of this concept is that it's a limited fragrance wardrobe. It would probably consist of more bottles than the average person owns (two? three? none?), but not so many that that average person would eye me worriedly and back slowly away. So, less than a hundred. One common figure is ten. I recently posted about this concept, and listed nine perfumes.

So if we're limiting perfumes, if only theoretically, why not go through the same mental exercise for plants? The obvious "why not" is because people don't think that you're crazy if you have a few hundred different plants. But all the same, all the brave talk about simplicity and limiting choices and appreciating what's left could, in theory, also apply to gardening.

So if I were to limit myself to...

OK, I can't limit myself to nine plants. In the whole plant world, from ground cover to trees, only nine different kinds? No. Very funny.

So if I were to limit myself to nine different perennial flowers, what would they be? Nine cultivars - no fair cheating by including "roses" as just one plant.

The first one is obvious: Japanese Anemone Honorine Jobert. The most beautiful flower on the face of the earth. Period. Look. Just look. Could anything be better?

Yes, yes, I understand that no doubt you have a plant that you think is better. In fact, I'm continually surprised that this flower is my favorite. I would have expected myself to pick some dripping, quartered rose, or an exploding peony. When did I become a minimalist?

But there it is. Nothing is more beautiful than Honorine Jobert. No doubt the exploding petals will be represented further down the list.

What about you? Got a favorite?

Image: Mine

Gardening: Peonies! And celebrating nursery errors.

Two or three years ago, I planted some peonies that were supposed to be red, according to the packaging.

Then I waited two or three years for them to bloom, because we remodeled things and some trampling was unavoidable.

And during those years, I wondered if red was really the right choice. I'm very picky about my reds. I don't like them too magenta, and I really don't like them orange. I slowly came to the conclusion that red was a mistake.

One of them finally bloomed. And as you can see from the photo, the packaging was utterly mistaken. About the redness.

Woohoo!

Photo: Mine.

Gardening: The benefits (for a plant) of being first in line

So, I've often wondered why one plant thrives, and another, perhaps only a few feet away, experiencing the same care and light and soil and fertilizer, languishes or flat-out dies.

Today, a couple of hours spent with lettuce seedlings gave me part of the answer: The plants that I put in first are the ones that are destined to do well.

When I start planting, I do it right. I gently and apologetically loosen the rootbound. I pull away the mulch. I dig good generous holes. I space the plants in nice little triangular patterns. I get the hole depth just right, test-fitting and adding or removing soil. I firm the plant down and pull the mulch back, up to but not quite touching the stem. I water every few new plants in with a soft mist.

As the planting progresses, mulch preservation is abandoned. Holes are less carefully tailored. Correction of the rootbound is less a massage than an attack. Spacing is adjusted to cram in those last few plants.  Watering is delayed and then emphatic.

The shift today was sudden. I lovingly pulled the mulch over the previous perfectly-planted lettuce, dug the hole for the new one, and placed the tiny seedling in the hole. It was half a centimeter too high. I... encouraged it to fit.

That was, of course the moment when I should have stopped planting. I know this. But my enthusiasm for getting all the plants in the ground seems to last longer than my enthusiasm for getting them in right. I finished planting all the lettuce.

So if I'm wondering, in a few weeks, why the Salad Bowl lettuce isn't doing as well as the Speckled Baby Red? Remind me.

Image: By TalkingITGlobal. Wikimedia Commons.

Scenes From Gardens Past: Pachysandra 2006

Pachysandra is not considered an exciting plant. It's seen as dull. Tough. Utilitarian. Overused. Cliched. George Schenk, in The Complete Shade Gardener, refers to it as "ubiquitous and boring".

But he also calls it "indispensable." And when I look at this photo, I think that overused or not, it's beautiful.

Photo: Mine

Scenes From Gardens Past: Nasturtiums 2005

I love nasturtiums. They're easy to grow from those giant seeds. They make lush mounds of beautiful lilypad foliage, even in a fair bit of shade. They grow in a laughably small amount of dirt. (I once saw one leafing out merrily in the dirt washed against an uneven sidewalk edge.) And of course, sometimes they have flowers. But for me, it's all about the foliage, like those leaves in the photo above.

You can also eat them. A quick search turned up nasturtium risotto, and capers, and pizza and pesto and soup. Yum.

Photo: Mine.

Gardening: Leafy Gluttony - Squash Blossoms (And butter! And cheese!)

I don't like summer squash. I agree with Hercule Poirot that they taste like water.

But I love squash blossoms, whether they're from summer squash, winter squash, or pumpkins. And they continue the leafy gluttony theme of food that's better from the garden than any other way. Groceries do sell baby squash with blossoms attached, but they're generally sadly wilted - squash blossoms aren't good for more than a few minutes away from the garden.

So when I grow squash, it's for the blossoms. That means that ideally, I'd grow squash that produce plenty of male blossoms, and a minimum of fruit-producing and therefore energy-wasting female blossoms. A hunt through Google points me to Butter Blossom summer squash, but fails to find me a source for seeds. Sources suggest that Costata Romanesco and Sunray, both from Johnny's Selected Seeds, are also good producers of male blossoms.

So once you've gotten the seeds and have a handful of blossoms in the kitchen, what do you do with them? Fry them in butter, of course!

At least, that's one option, and the simplest. I rinse the blossom, pull the petals off in one flat sheet, dust them in flour, and fry them, carefully, in a generous pool of foaming butter over medium-low heat. Let them cool from the pan just long enough to allow them to crisp, and eat them. This is not a plated dinner party dish; just as the raw blossoms aren't good for more than a few hours out of the garden, the fried ones are at their best a minute or two out of the pan.

The less simple options? I've never tried them yet, but gathering some nice-looking links, I see:

Five Ways to Eat Squash Blossoms, from Apartment Therapy The Kitchn. Cheese-stuffed and fried, cheese-stuffed and baked to steamed, or in pasta, quesadillas, or soup.

What to do with squash blossoms, from Gastronomical Three. A detailed gorgeous-picture-laden description of how to do the stuffed fried blossoms.

A bruschetta version of the stuffed blossoms, from MyRecipes.com.

A version filled with pulled pork, from the Food Network.

Basil-stuffed blossoms from SippitySup.

And finally, baked squash blossoms with ricotta and honey, from NYMag.com.

Yum. I'm not going to have enough blossoms.

Photo: By Rasbak. Wikimedia Commons.

Gardening: Leafy Gluttony - Alpine Strawberries

I don't grow food to save money. That's partly about skill - I'm not skilled enough to get a substantial harvest. And it's partly about space and sunlight. And largely about laziness. I'm just not prepared to work hard enough to maximize pounds of potato, or ears of corn, or cubic feet of pumpkin, harvested from my few sunny areas.

So, why grow food at all? Largely because it's fun - I started my gardening career with vegetables, and it took me a long time to care about ornamentals. But I need more of a reason, more of a goal. That goal is to produce taste experiences that I just can't get from the grocery. And, well, to produce them lazily.

One of the first candidates for this goal was strawberries, and we've grown them rather lackadaisically a few times. I've never tasted a strawberry from a grocery, restaurant, or any other source, that compared in taste with dead ripe strawberries harvested from the garden. This is, I think, no great surprise and no testament to our skill. When a fragile fruit doesn't need to travel more than the five feet from the ground to my mouth, it's possible to grow very delicate varieties, and to harvest them at a level of ripeness impossible for a grocery strawberry.

But there's a catch: Strawberries take work. Weeding. Watering. Mulching. Nipping off the fruits the first year. Dividing the plants the third or fourth year. A second bed to grow out of sequence so that there's something to eat during the years that you're nipping and dividing. Fighting off snails and slugs and birds and probably raccoons. And they occupy generous amounts of dedicated, prime, plush, sunny bed space.

So we evicted the strawberries and planted their bed with culinary herbs. And then we missed them.

This year, I have a new theory: alpine strawberries. Rumor has it that these smaller strawberries can grow in the empty spaces in a flowerbed, instead of hogging dedicated space. Other rumors claim that they're better than ordinary strawberries, even those miraculous home-grown ordinary strawberries. The harvest is supposed to be small, but that's fine - the goal is an occasional bonus bite of something miraculous, while I'm puttering in the garden.

Photo: By James McNally. Wikimedia Commons.

Gardening: September Bloom Project

After thinking over my lament about excessive May focus from yesterday, I've decided that this year I'm going to put some effort into getting the garden blooming in September.

Now, there are some things blooming in September. But aside from the all-important Japanese anemones, most of September's blooms are leftovers - roses and coneflowers and buddleia and daisies that aren't quite tired enough to give up for the year. Beautiful, but I've been looking at them since June. I want to watch something new develop.

But what? For one thing, big, showy individual blossoms. I know what Henry Mitchell said about "the tremendous effect of small flowers massed". I also know that he liked flowers the size of dinner plates and leaves the size of garages. So I'm not going to hide my vulgarity. The Japanese anemones will supply the elegance, and these new flowers will supply the circus balloons. Not that I demand that the blossoms be quite that big - the size of my fist will do just fine.

Also, I demand flowers, not flowerlike structures. So, no ornamental brassicas or alliums. I realize that allium flowers are composed of many smaller flowers, but that's not what I'm after. Monstrous single blossoms, that's the goal here. (And if you tell me that chrysanthemums, say, really have flowers the size of a head of a pin and all those petals are just leaves? I'll hide under a pillow and pretend I didn't hear you.)

Chrysanthemums and dahlias are top candidates- though dahlias don't generally wait until September to get going. I also read that some delphiniums bloom in autumn, and delphiniums are certainly showy enough for anybody. Hydrangeas, too, can be satisfyingly gaudy, but the appropriate shrub-sized partly-sunny spaces are already filled with moderately dignified oakleaf varieties (yes, I did forget them in the list of what blooms), so no giant puffballs for me.

I confess that I am thinking longingly of puffball hydrangeas as I consider the large spaces occupied by the David viburnums, especially since Himself hates the viburnums passionately. But it's the David viburnums, and the green winter structure that they provide, that make the skeletal winter remains of the existing hydrangeas tolerable. And they're in my flower bed, the one that Himself washes his hands of. So I think they stay.

What else? One website got my hopes up by putting Gerbera daisies, fabulously gaudy things, in their "autumn flowers" list, but that appears to be a cruel joke - everyone else speaks of them as summer flowers. I'm guessing that they're autumn flowers if you're a florist.

Lilies? I only like the kind with extremely recurved petals. Martagon lilies? Turkscap lilies? My lily ignorance is, sadly, substantial. But research suggests that August is the latest that I can hope for blooms from Martagon lilies.

Oh, and phlox. The tall perennial white kind. It blooms very nicely along with the anemones, on those rare occasions when it doesn't go to mildew. I realize that I've forgotten the biggest flower of all - sunflowers! I'll be growing the ten-foot monsters as part of the snack garden, but I could scatter the cutting kind around as well.

So it's a plan: chrysanthemums, sunflowers, phlox, possibly some delphiniums, and probably some dahlias and lilies sneaking in a few weeks early. At least, it sounds like a plan. Now, of course, to choose which ones. Good thing it's catalog season.

Coneflower photo: Mine.
Chrysanthemum photo: By Juni. Wikimedia Commons.
Lily photo: By Marcus Koljonen. Wikimedia Commons.
Sunflowr photo: Mine

Gardening: Japanese Anemones

There is a large box bush, and in front of it is a fat clump, three feet across, of the plain white Japanese anemone...

... Some might argue that no plant is beautiful or ugly in itself, but all depends on how it is used. Those who think so are wrong.

Henry Mitchell, One Man's Garden

The passage above inspired me to seek out the Japanese anemone, and subsequently to fall in love with it. You know my passionate dedication to fried chicken, right? My attachment to the Japanese anemone is similarly intense, or perhaps one might say obsessive. It is the best flowering plant. Period.

It has specific practical advantages, of course. Can I quote Henry Mitchell again?

For small gardens, which require of a plant not only handsomeness of flower but good-looking foliage and orderly habits as well, the Japanese anemone is a perfect choice. Moreover, its wonderful combination of vigor and refinement is epecially welcome in late summer when most things look a bit blowsy. It is soundly perennial, and spreads a bit but could hardly be called invasive.

All of that is true, and that's why I feel perfectly sensible about having clumps of these growing on the street, and along the north side of the house. And I plan on even more in the half-shady areas adjacent to the vegetable garden and the south lawn, and maybe accompanying the roses that we're going to plant along the garage wall.  It's sensibly long-blooming - our several clumps, in varying patches of sun and shade, bloom for weeks in August, September, and sometimes well into October.

But all that sensibleness is just an excuse. It's really about the flower. To me, the white blossom of Japanese Anemone Honorine Jobert is the most beautiful flower in the plant kingdom. And without even having a perfume.

All that praise for Honorine Jobert is not to say that the others, both white and pink, aren't worth growing. Prince Henry, Alice, Party Dress, and the other relatives are less elegant, but happier and more whimsical.  All of the varieties I've tried grow very easily and survive with limited water, though they do need decent watering in order to bloom. They do bloom with a good deal of shade, a valuable characteristic in our low-sun garden.

I'm a little confused about the relationships - Anemone hupehensis, Anemone hupehensis var. Japonica, Anemone Japonica - but I'm happy to grow them all. I've never grown Anemone tomentosa 'Robustissima', a larger and grander pink cousin, but I intend to.

Oddly, I never cut Japanese anemones of any type for the house, and I'm newly surprised each time that I read that they're suitable for cutting. I think that cutting them and taking them inside, then tossing them out once they fade, would just feel too irreverent.

Photos: Mine.

Gardening: Snack Garden (And catalog season!)

I've grumbled that we grow vegetables, but don't eat them. I rarely go out at dinnertime to corral any of that nice fresh food and bring it back to the kitchen. But I do nibble when I'm outside. I hunt for raspberries, or peapods, or I nip off the occasional lettuce leaf to eat on the spot.

So when I started leafing through my shiny new heap of garden catalogs, a plan came to me: A snack garden. If I'll only eat what I can eat in the garden, then that's the sort of thing to plant.

So, what's in these catalogs that a roving gardener could eat? And which ones would look good if the plan fails and I don't end up eating a thing?

The candidates:

• Peas! As I recall, Cascadia snap peas, in the Territorial Seed Company catalog, are sweet enough to eat raw, right off the vine. If any of them make it inside to meet a pan and some butter, that's a bonus.
• Can you ever eat a pepper out of hand? Territorial says that Yum Yum Gold sweet peppers have very few seeds. They're tiny and they're adorable, so I'll add them to the list.
• Cherry tomatoes are an obvious candidate. Abundant Life Seeds has Black Cherry and Snow White cherry tomatoes, both indeterminate. A plant of each, twining together on one big stakes, could be a sort of tomato War of the Roses. I like the vision. 
• And Johnny's Selected Seeds brags about the sugar content of Matt's Wild Cherry, and also warns that it's soft. Since I'm going to eat it six inches from where it grew, and I'm not crazy about that explode-in-my mouth feeling, soft is a bonus.
• As another color contrast combination, Abundant Life has a Miniature White cucumber, and Territorial has a snack-sized Rocky cucumber, this one dark green. I could encourage these to share a trellis.
• Territorial assures me that Pineapple ground cherries really do taste like pineapple. I have to try that.
• Next, I see Mexican Sour Gherkins. Territorial says that they have a  "powerful, sweet, cucumber flavor with a tangy, citrus twist." That could be a nice contrast to all the sugary things.
• To add even more spice, I could add rattail radishes, hot little spears of radishnyess. I haven't found these in any of the catalogs yet, but somebody's got to be selling them.
• And as the last snack when the season's winding down, a few Russian Mammoth sunflowers, for cracking and eating as I stare at the garden and plan next year. 

Sunflower Photo: Giovanni Dall'Orto

Past Posts: Plants (Link)

Click here to reach all of the plant posts from ChickenFreak's Obsessions.

Illustration: Wikimedia Commons.