featured articles
The Celery Challenge...
Celery
I bought some celery starts at the local garden center this spring, even though...
Kale Flowers...
Kale flower buds
My over-wintered kale decided it was time to produce seeds in March....
Winter Kale...
Winter Red Kale
Kale is a perfect vegetable garden plant. It will grow almost anywhere....
Spring Leeks...
Spring leeks
The little leeks planted last fall are wonderfully tasty this spring....
The Gourmet’s Oni...
Growing leeks
The Roman emperor Nero may have fiddled while Rome burned, but he did...
Strawberries alive and ...
Strawberries ripening
The strawberries got off to a rocky start this year. We planted...
Blueberries are ripe...
Ripe blueberries
Blueberries are such an easy berry to pick. No thorns. Just put...
Winter savory...
Winter savory
Overlooked, practically forgotten, rarely mentioned. It is not summer...
random articles
Lettuce By Any Other Name...
New lettuce plants. Lettuce is a name for a Tokyo Mew Mew anime character, a rager band [sorry, no link], a group of ladies [no, no link], an initiative to prevent e. coli eruptions, a Sydney taxi driver with a blog, a Yuma Lettuce Days festival, and, well, you get the idea. Pets are probably named Lettuce. Just google lettuce. It’s amazing. Doesn’t anyone use the name as a food? According...
The Little Allium...
Chive buds. Chives wave their hollow leaves (known as “straws”) gently in the breezes, their purple buds dancing along with the beat. I think they are trying to attract attention. They are mentioned only in passing in chapters on alliums. Yet they can be found in most herb gardens and kitchen gardens. They are shunted off to footnotes because they are so common, and so easy to grow. They...
Pie Plant Heaven...
Young Rhubard March 18. Another weird plant. Rhubarb stalks look like celery, but they are nothing like it. The stalks are edible, the leaves are poisonous. The roots last for years. The taste is wonderful! Rhubarb is also called the pie plant. My great aunt did. She loved rhubarb pie. When we moved here ten years ago, in February, there was a large circle of blackened ground in the middle of the lawn...
Walking Onions...
Egyptian Walking Onions. Egyptian walking onions are very strange. As youngsters, they grow very much like scallions. But as teenagers, they develop lumps on their green hollow leaves, bulges that produce tiny red bulblets which, in turn, produce leaves, which then go on to produce more bulges and bulblets. When the leaves become too heavy to support themselves they droop down, allowing the formerly...
Five Thousand Eyes...
Seed Potatoes. There are about five thousand varieties of potatoes worldwide. Three thousand can be found in the Andes. Potatoes in America first traveled to Europe and then to America. In the first part of this century people worldwide consumed about 75 pounds of potatoes each year. Well, I didn’t. We planted potatoes for the first time last year. In June the leaves seemed to be rather pale....
Where exactly IS Batavia?...
Batavian endive up close. Batavia was a ship of the Dutch East India Company, shipwrecked on her maiden voyage (according to Wikipedia). OR a city in Illinois, another city in New York, another in Ohio. Hmm. Somehow I would have thought that Batavian endive originated in Eastern Europe. Escarole, or broad-leaved endive (var latifolia) has broad, pale green leaves and is less bitter than the other...
Oh Those Alliums...
The allium bed in April. I confess that I have an onion personality disorder. I have planted yellow, red and white onions, shallots, leeks, garlic, elephant garlic, egyptian walking onions (aka topset onions), chives, scallions and, this year, multiplier onions. We have too many alliums. But they’re so easy to grow! (With one huge exception. I’ll get to that. Actually, two.) They are reputed...