Adding Ornamental Edibles to Your Landscape

The beautiful fall orange color of a blackberry cane is decidedly ornamental.

I have always had an eye toward growing my own food.  Maybe it is because my dad is a farmer.  I know where food comes from; someone has to grow it.  Maybe it is because I live in a food desert of a sort; because I live in an agricultural area, unless you grow it, it is terribly expensive, or not to be had unless you find something that is damaged falling off a truck.  Maybe I am just too cheap to buy it because I can grow it.

The decorative aspect of the savoy type cabbage which was grown in a large pot along with a canna and crocosimia  (non-edibles) is hard to deny.  As I only eat a cabbage or two a year, growing a couple in a pot is ideal.

I don't know, but I have always tried to incorporate as many edibles into my landscape as possible.

Postcard from the Family Garden

Cabbage 'Red Acre' and sage

'yum Yum' pepper

'California Wonder' pepper

Amaranth

Sweet corn 'Early Sunglow'

Amaranth

Leaf lettuce mix

Pineapple sage


Cucumbers and tomatoes

'Contender' beans

Potatoes and tomatoes

Sweet potatoes

Turnip greens

Mizuna

P.S. Wish you were here! It would beat a lousy t-shirt!

My Grandmother's Kitchen

My maternal grandmother was an amazing cook. As a child, I liked her cooking best of all the places I was able to pull up a chair to a table. Her fruit pies were incredible, I liked the blueberry best. She made everything from scratch, and she canned.

Recipes were closely held by her. My mother swears her mother used no written recipes at all, that everything was in her head. My mother has some recipes like this, prepared so often there is no need for a written reinforcement, although there are cookbooks and cooking magazines scattered throughout my mother's house. My grandmother's cooking was like a family's oral history, passed from one generation to the next.

Unfortunately, as I child I barely glimpsed at this rich heritage. My grandmother who ran her kitchen like a German battleship, did not deem my mother worthy to inherit. I remember being sent from the kitchen in tears one late summer day after breaking a jar I was filling with sliced cucumbers.

My grandmother canned everything imaginable. She had racks built in her basement to hold this bounty. Going to the basement to fetch a jar of dill pickles was a bit like going to a grocery store, for all the efficiency of her ordered shelving, with jars lined up with precision, neatly labeled.

Her dill pickles were really crunchy, a feat not easy to duplicate, and which I have yet to achieve. Packed with these pickles would be a couple carrot and celery sticks, heads of fresh dill, garlic cloves, red peppers, and onion. In addition to spices, she also used alum.

I asked her what alum was, and I remember her telling me it was the crunch. We shall see.

My canning bible, 'Ball's Blue Book of Preserving' does not include a single recipe with alum. Today, with the Internet, I am able to find dozen of recipes for dill pickles using alum. Although, they will not be my grandmother's dill pickles, perhaps they will be close. I also know it is important to take a fork and pierce the pickles several times with the tines and removing a tiny bit of each end of the pickle is equally important to the crunch.

Today's recipe is a simple one from my childhood, a simple vinegary pickle:

Select a largish cucumber. Slice it into crosswise circular slices, 1/4" thick. Place in a plastic or glass bowl. Cover with cider vinegar. Weigh the slices with a small glass plate. Cover with plastic wrap.

The vinegary pickles will be ready to eat in one week.

Pickles

When I was a kid the word "cucumber" was as foreign as finding a Thai food restaurant in central Wisconsin. Everything, whether the plant, the vegetable clinging to the vine, the slices on a hamburger, or the things stored in huge vats lining many roads in quasi-industrial agricultural areas; was a pickle, brined or not.

The word "pickle" persists in my vocabulary for each of these, and linguistically identifies me as a native of a place and time in history when Wisconsin's cucumber harvest was an important economic feature of our landscape here.

Migrant workers harvested cucumbers, or pickles.

Right along side of them were many white kids, whose parents put in a half acre or acre as a summer job for their kids. Typically, an efficient picker could keep up with the four-day rotation of picking down an acre of well-grown, irrigated cukes. Picking that acre, made me rich in teenage parlance, with a couple thousand dollars in my pocket after spending a few hundred in those days for all the shoes, clothing, and accessories a teenage girl would want, in addition to any original garments I would sew copying Vogue designs from pattern books.

We, my two older sisters and I, would get up about 6:00 or 6:30, and be in the field by 7:00. Our goal was to finish picking by 1:00 P. M. The mornings would sometimes be cool, sometimes in the 50s. As the course of the sun reached its zenith, it would find us stripped down to blue jeans and bikini tops. By 5:00 P.M., we would be sorting our pickles at a huge pickle sorter from #1s to #7s. The #1s would pay as much as $24 per hundred pounds; the #7s about $1.50. Sometimes I would make a couple hundred dollars for a half days work. It was probably the higher dollar per hour rate I will ever make in my life.

Those days are long past. I don't know anyone white kids that pursued the pickle as feverishly as I did. Now cucumbers are harvested once or twice by hand, typically by male migrants (versus whole families of kids 10 and up when I was a kid). Then they are picked by machines that tear up the vines and the harvest is done. The fields are staggered so the human pickers pick numerous field in succession as each comes ready to harvest.

I have three short rows of pickles in the family garden. They are just loaded with blossoms. I think they are probably a higher percentage male blossoms than the vines I picked when young (5% were typically male then as they would bear no pickles). Each four days I pick, and I pick them all in one pass, I get just a 5-gallon pail of pickles. And each four days I have to decide what I shall do with these beautiful pickles.

I have made relish. I have some brined to make sweet icicle pickles. Last Saturday, I decided on gherkins. My son wants some very crispy dill slices for burgers. I have also made a Greek cucumber and yogurt salad.

I can't imagine a garden without pickles. And although they are "really" cucumbers, having not been brined, for me I grow pickles.

This week: My favorite pickle recipes!

Timing is Everything

Messing around with dill and my camera resulted in this image.

Timing is so important.

The last three years I have tried to time the planting of my dill with the first bountiful pickings of my cucumbers so I have dill available to make gherkins and dill pickles. I like fresh, not gone to seed, dill in my canning. Yes, I can pick it and dry it, but it is just not the same.

This year, I thought I had a chance of hitting it right, but no, that week of heat the beginning of June baked the ground. It was a week, before I realized I would need to replant, because germination was so spotty. My dill is starting to seed out; the cucumbers are just now starting to load up. I missed it again.

Politicians here in Wisconsin and in our nation's capital have been playing with timing a lot, too. Fake Democrats running to force recall primaries allowing recalled Republicans time to do what I haven't a clue; the Tea Drinkers playing with the 2012 election and the debt ceiling.

It all makes me very nervous.

I feel like I have been a victim of poor timing all my life. I am old enough to be my son's grandmother (althought most day's I don't look it, even if I do feel it). It puts a different perspective on child-rearing.

Being on the tail-end of the aggregate that is the Baby-Boomers, I have often felt like I was the runt of the litter when it came to getting to the "job trough". The older Boomers got the cool jobs and the tail-gunners just have to clean up behind.

Now with the flattening of the earth, I wonder how America's labor force will go forward, particularly for those occupations where the products of labor can be transported anywhere via the internet. An engineer here expecting to make $60K to $100K can compete with one in India willing to work for $10 an hour. Who will a global company choose?

The other day in the wee hours of the night I happened to catch the New America Foundation's panel discussion on how to develop jobs and energy security here in America. I was terribly impressed by the expertise these scientists AND politians brought to the table. I wish every policy maker, banker, business owner, had seen it. Being on C-Span and airing in the middle of the night, I'm sure most did not. The audience did not include any major press coverage either.

Seems like I'm not the only one with timing issues.

Today, in my corner of the world, I just hope the rain holds off until evening.

It's THAT Time of Year AGAIN!

Well, this time of year I can literally see the pendulum swinging back and forth. It seems each swing brings an extra three minutes or so of daylight to central Wisconsin. That's big...almost an extra half hour of sunlight every week! I can't help but pick-up seed catalogues and make a stop at Jung's in Stevens Point "just because I'm going by..."

Last year, my vegetable garden planting had its ups and downs. A lot of people were again cursed by late blight. I think late blight might actually be spreading across the area not only on the wind, but on the very transplants gardeners bring into their own gardens. I am encouraging everyone to attempt to grow their own tomato transplants and be extra vigilant of disposing any infected foliage.

Tomatoes

This year I have decided on four different tomatoe varieties: Olpalka, an heirloom paste tomato; Chocolate Cherry tomatoes, another heirloom; Superior, a super early tomato; and Supersteak. Last year, I grew a Mountain hybrid. I like the Mountain breeding: very uniform tomatoes and good resistance to blights and other diseases, but a bit on the small side, and about 7-10 later than a lot of people start picking tomatoes. With the sometimes short season, I'm not getting the number of tomatoes I'd like.

I do a lot of sauces and salsas. I need a lot of tomatoes!

I have a small yard, so I can't plant more, I need them to ripen all at once and early!

I also grew some Legend and Rutgers a neighbor gave me. They were beautiful plants and grew well. I did see some disease and I did get some decent tomatoes, but just not the number of smooth shouldered, nice beauties I wanted.

Peppers

The peppers transplants I purchased grew well. Serrano did well. I tried Serrano rather than a typical jalapeno last year. Serrano is fine for someone who wants a bit of the hot pepper kick, but can't take the heat. The Hungarian Banana peppers did well, too, as did the Cayenne peppers. The Cayenne peppers were not quite as prolific as I would have liked. The bell peppers I grew, I think it was Arthur, did not pump out the nice sized peppers I desired.

The real pepper winner in this area, were some peppers a neighbor gave me. They were a corno di toro pepper, which has to have been either Planet Hybrid or Carmen. They were given to me fully red and ripe. They were some of the sweetest red peppers I have has, no hint of hot. They were picked out of some commercially grown peppers grown by her family; they sell the green, but no one wants the red, thinking they are not sweet, but hot. Their lost was my gain. I cut and froze strips, I dried some, and canned the rest as a sweet red pepper spread.

This year I am going to start seed for the pepper Carmen. Hopefully, I can duplicate her family's commercial effort in my own garden. I am looking for some prolific cayennes like Andy (but it was sold out where I tried to get some). I like to use the cayenne in gherkins and other pickled vegetables.

Favorite Seed Companies

I'm going to plug my favorite two catalogues and online seed sources here, Jung's and Johnny's Select Seed. ( www.jungseed.com and www.johnnyseed.com )Jung's has this incredible, free, online garden planner and is a local Wisconsin company. The planner is easy to use.

Johnny's is an employee-owned company and has a great online catalogue (I like the page turning sound effects!) Pages load very quickly, considering my connection speed. Johnny's also lets you pick out your wish list, so you don't have to decide and purchase everything in one online session.

Other vegetables that were winners for me in 2010

My favorite potoato is Yukon Gold. It really is as buttery as they say. The tubers were all very uniform and well-worth growing for a special treat. I live in the middle of potato-growing country so potatoes are generally cheap for the commercially grown varieties, so checking out some of the red ones to eat fresh, fingerlings, or Yukon Golds is really the only efficient way to go.

Cucumbers had a pretty wet August. I grew Alibi, which were tasty and sweet and filled my canning needs. The Straight 8 was a nice slicer for fresh salads. I didn't get the late season yield because of over-watering right before a major rainy period.

Flat leaved parsley was a winner. I didn't care for basil "'Dani', not enough basil taste for me, although the lemony flavor was nice on the early leaves.

The long day length onions I grew did not do it for me. I am going to try and grow my own sets for leeks, onions, and scallions this year. I'll try to remember to post how that turns out.