It’s about time you decided what you want to eat from the garden in 2012 and get it in terroir, tout de suite! Don’t procrastinate too long as some of your favorites may take awhile, especially if you’re planting seed. We’ve enjoyed fresh lettuce, arugula and spinach all winter. I never covered anything this year, nor did any of my gardening neighbors in Collin County. Winter just never got serious this season in North Texas.
We made a favorite dish during a cold March night recently, maybe celebrating a breath of chilly air and putting thoughts of hot, dry summers on the back burners of our brains. We roasted Peruvian purple fingerlings in a bit of olive oil and fresh garlic and set aside, while wilting fresh winter rainbow chard, French rocket arugula and Greyhound spinach from our garden, adding a bit of fresh rosemary and tarragon. Stir the roasted potatoes into the wilted greens and serve with crusty bread.
Becca is not a fan of oaked wines (red or white), so we enjoyed a bottle of Castillo De Jumilla 2009 Monastrell with the hot salad. This is a clean, level-headed Spanish stainless we get from Andy Doyle at McKinney Wine Merchants, downtown on the Square. The wine has lots of berry in the nose, lovely purple color, with a nice classy finish. It’s great for veggie casseroles.
Our own planting from seed includes Nantes carrots, which are thick and sliceable in 65 days, but I can never resist pulling the sweet orange treasures while babies, around 40 days. Plant Napa type cabbage now. It will take about 50 days, but won’t bolt on you as soon as others, so it’s better, in case we should get a lot of hot days early this year..
My experience with growing all kinds of beets over many years in this part of Texas has been greatly rewarding (remember I’m growing everything in raised beds or untilled, elevated gardens on organic soil and compost). Striped Chioggia and Golden beets are beautiful on the table, but they have never come through for me like Detroit Reds and Bull’s Blood. You can’t beat the rich taste of Bull’s Blood, for the fat root itself, or the delicious greens. Bulls Blood beets will get big in about 60 days, and the green leaves can be harvested for salads in about 40 days. Your guests will love the flavor.
Plant lettuce and spinach now, which ever variety you prefer. North Texas gardens produce spectacular greens these days, with prolific early winter and early spring crops. Plant Swiss Chard, Kale, greens, radishes and spinach today. Some folks are just now getting those seed-potatoes into soft, mounded soil with plenty of organic compost, leaves and straw piled up on the mound. They’ll be okay (but should have been planted on Valentine’s Day).
Dignified and costly organic plants such as arugula, salad burnet, chervil, French sorrel, lemon thyme, Florentine fennel, and Greek oregano grow fat and green, perched high up and proud in their penthouse-like raised beds. These are pampered plants, the elite. Gourmet-gardeners don’t want these beauties threatened at the sight of their ugly cousins who will soon try to scale the walls and break into the elevated mansions of fine families like the Lovages. Unwanted in-laws, weeds such as Little Barley, Yellow Sweet Clover, Johnsongrass, Prostrate Knotweed and Mimosa Vine are forbidden to show themselves in proper, tended gardens.
A lawyer friend once told me he thought weeds were simply flowers without representation. Maybe that’s so.
Edward Lowe’s nineteenth century drawings and prints of grasses and weeds are magnificent examples of the beauty to be found in those plants “without representation.” Lowe’s images are precise, linear silhouettes, emphasizing the delicate formations of wild flora, especially the diversity of the shapes of ferns.
The German Renaissance artist, Albrecht Durer, known as the “Leonardo of the North,” drew and painted many studies of native flora and fauna during his travels, including weeds. A single watercolor by Durer, Tall Grass, (also titled The Great Piece of Turf) has provided countless art history doctoral candidates with a winning topic. It is a richly detailed description of every blade and tendril within Durer’s cropped view of a simple tuft of grass in an open field.
If Will Rogers never met a man he didn't like, then you might say that Euell Gibbons never met a weed he didn’t like. Gibbons is frequently resurrected and very popular on YouTube, where you can see him in an old TV commercial, hawking Grape Nuts cereal. A favorite food book of mine, “Secret Ingredients: The New Yorker Book of Food and Drink,” is a compilation of tasty pieces by various New Yorker food writers over the years. “Secret Ingredients” includes a delightfully hefty 1968 article by John McPhee, titled “The Forager.” It’s one of those tales that the reader really doesn't want to end too soon.
In “The Forager,” John McPhee accounts several days’ hiking with Euell Gibbons in the immense northern woods near Troxelville, Pennsylvania, then Gibbons’ farm home. The two trekkers ate only wild food during the trip. They ate lots of herbs and weeds.
They ate cattail sprouts, dandelions, and burdock root. They also ate wild poke, sorrel, persimmons, walnuts, and ground cherries, foods more familiar to most of us. I was pleased to read about the ground cherries, also called “paper-husk tomatoes,” as we grow these tiny delicacies. The little ‘tomato’ inside the paper-thin shell is sweet and tart, producing a “pop” of flavor in your mouth. It has always been a top favorite with my market customers.
John McPhee’s opening sentence of “the Forager” starts the reader off on a wild food adventure with gusto in even an urban setting. McPhee reports that Gibbons “…..once reached through the fence that surrounds the White House and harvested four edible weeds from the president’s garden.” Yum.
Just remember that ground cherries, delights to human palates and health, are poison to horses. Let them eat oats at the barn.
Tom Motley
Letter from The Prairie, March 9, 2012