Cape Gooseberries 'Aunt Molly'

Okay, I just finished off a bowl of the marketed name "golden berries" with my coffee. They were the plate of gooseberries I entered in the county fair in their neat natural papery individual wrapping. I entered them in the category "other vegetable not listed above". In this category, there were some nice looking green beans (wax beans being the traditional bean category), and rhubarb. I lost out to the nice looking green beans. I don't think the judges awarded the couple of rhubarb entries any placement.

If I was choosing gooseberries or beans for breakfast, my choice would be the gooseberries. If the judges had actually tasted the beans and the gooseberries, they may have agreed, especially if they has tasted them as part of Sister-in-Law's gooseberry pineapple (gluten-free) crumble!

This leads me to my next thought, everyone grows green beans. Green beans are plentiful in the shopping aisles. Try finding some gooseberries.

I can understand the reasons why gooseberries are not commercially produced. With their low, ground-hugging branches and fruit that is ripe when it falls to the ground; harvesting them mechanically is a beast. This is all the more reason home gardeners should include them in their backyard (or front yard) gardens.

In their papery husks their shelf life, literally just sitting in a bowl on the counter, is 2 to 4 weeks. What other garden veggies, other than squash and pumpkins, can make that claim?

They are so sweet, they easily fill that void for annual fruit in the garden. Raspberries, grapes, and apples take time and some expertise to get going. Cape gooseberries are easier than tomatoes.

Sister-in Law and I have a few ideas about how to make harvesting quick and easy which we will try next year in the family garden. No, we aren't going to hang them in the Topsy Turvy Tomato bags. We have found growing them next to eggplant and potatoes keep the Colorado potato beetles at bay. And, as there are no selected cultivars, I may attempt some seed selection based on size of berries (typically about 3/8" of an inch in diameter) or branching formation. The plants I grew this year came from seed saved from the two cold hardiest of our plants. Last year we had what we thought was a killing frost on May 26, 2011. Two plants grew back out of the twelve we planted. Last year, they were half the size of the behemoths that loved the heat this year.

So looking for something new for your garden? Look no further!

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!

A Work Day in the Family Garden

(Meanwhile, in my potager, the smokebush 'Golden Spirit' is growing back from its base. You can see the last year's growth cut back in this picture.)

Yesterday was a work day in the family garden. This family garden plot is at my brother's historic home. It has seven acreages of the original couple hundred which was homesteaded in the 1850s. While I am at his home, people often stop and read signage or take pictures from the road. They must wonder what is actually going on in the field which because of train rails, road, and acreage for the community school (also on the historic register) has been cut into a strange triangle. It in within this strange triangle, we have cut two tangent rectangles which form our family garden.

When I am gardening pesticide and herbicide-free in this plot, I often get a very real sense of the travails of the original sod busters. I am pretty sure they had to contend with the same quackgrass which is the primary and nearly sole weed in our plot.

This year, we did manage to have it plowed and disced, which has greatly increased the soil's tilth. Last year, rainy days prevented us from much more than a once over with a lawn tractor-drawn tiller. In the fall we mulched with a thick layer of straw, primarily in the areas of berry and orchard production. My sister-in-law and brother were dismayed to find even this early the quackgrass growing a foot high in these areas. Something to know about quackgrass, though, is its roots prefer to be running along the surface. When they have to grow through these materials, they tend to grow in them, Making them very easy to remove in their entirety, versus digging out bits and pieces. Sometimes it is not just a battle with weeds, but a multi-year war.

So mulching is good.

One of the biggest improvements this year is the two electric fence posts with triangular metal and a string stretched between them. Mapping out straight lines in the garden is not something at which any of us seem to excel for some reason. This alone has brought the appearance of our garden to a whole new level, to say nothing of ease of cultivation with the tiller.

Straight lines, a good thing.

Yesterday, I did some weeding in the grapes and berries, with my three-year old nephews standing next to me as I filled their waiting arms with sheaves of quackgrass. They would then run off to deposit in the composting areas. They particularly like berries, so they see this as an important and "big" job.

We also planted what they refer to as "tomato berries", but which are really cape gooseberries 'Aunt Molly'. I would dig the hole and they would hand me the unpotted transplant. The cape gooseberries are the most frost-tolerant of this group (other than potatoes). They figured out how to husk these gooseberries even as two-year-olds and could more readily discern the ripe ones when picking than even their poppa, who did not manage to get many of these sweet berries. We planted a whole lot more this year.

More gooseberries is a good thing in a year which with the late, hard frosts affecting cherries, apricots, apples, and strawberries can only be a good thing.

We also planted beans. Working on getting more fiber and veggies into our diets, we also have been working on perfecting a good home-made veggie burger. My sister-in-law has one featuring black beans, but so far the best addition to this is to top it with guacamole. I think we can do better. We're still working through the whole Martha Stewart thing....

Obviously...

This Year's Spring Giveaway from Jung's: Sunflower Seeds and Cape Gooseberry

Cape Gooseberry

This year Jung's was giving away seed packets with qualifying purchases. I managed to get both packets they offered, a sunflower and cape gooseberry.

I duly planted the sunflowers in the family garden. They were a big hit with my twin nephews who liked to watch the bees working the flowers, to count the bees in their own informal bee census, and pick the flowers for Momma. One nephew has even been concerned about where the bees have gone now that their bee work is done and the sunflower heads droop heavily laden with seeds.

The other packet was cape gooseberries. These cousins of tomatoes I started in flats, pricked them out, and at what we believed to be an appropriate time planted them out to our hopefully frost-free garden at the end of May.

Ouch!

Frost-free wasn't yet on Mother Nature's calendar and a pretty hard frost killed these tender young things. I had held back two plants for the potager here in the village, and at that point decided I'd plant them out in the family plot instead.

Within a couple days of the killing frost, temperatures soared into the upper 90s not dropping below 70 at night. This went on for a week; extreme weather, even for us here in central Wisconsin.

At the end of the week, my sister-in-law calls to tell me she thinks the cape gooseberries haven't died and are resprouting from the roots. I was hopeful, but thought she probably had it wrong. This is her first foray into vegetable and fruit gardening. She is a fair gardener and her husband, my brother, is a farmer. Even so, my mother had long given up on vegetable gardening by the time my brother, child number six, was born. They are pretty "green" veggie gardeners in more ways than the popular one.

Well, she had it right. The cape gooseberries seemed to spread out and eat up the ground. Neither of us thinks this is the typical growth habit of the cape gooseberries. The gooseberries, affectionately named "mato berries" by the twins, are growing laterally having lost their vertical growth tip to the frost. Even one of the others I held back and which never actually made it into the ground, attaching itself into the ground through the holes in its pot epitomizing the saying "grow where you are planted", or not... phrase, tends to be more horizontal rather than vertical.

I have to say Jung's got it right. Any parent that handed the free seed packets to their kid and suggested they plant them probably had a successful child gardener in their midst this year.

The twin sit right down on the ground and scramble about looking for ripe husks chanting "mato berries, mato beries" like noisy baby birds in a nest. The 1/2" berries are incredibly sweet. The boys know what they like.

They have learned which are ripe and which are not. They greedily pick the or scoop up ripe ones laying on the ground and remove the husks in what has become a daily ritual with the twins.

They have eaten almost the entire harvest of the five plants that survived in the family garden-- much to their mother's and my hopes of having enough at some point to make a jam or marmalade.

A surprise hit for all of us this year, but something we will definitely be looking forward to next gardening season. As these are non-hybrid, heirloom seeds, I am attempting to save seed from these more frost-tolerant tomato cousins. We want at least twice as many plants as last year, where I started out with just 12 seedlings.

Every season can bring surprises in the garden, both good and bad. This was certainly a good one, and one which we hope to repeat in the future.