Journal

January 11, 2011

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Cooking (and Hopefully Growing) Lampascioni

We moved a few months back. Over the last year I’ve received a few threatening emails. I’m not talking about, “You’re a jerk, I hate your stupid website” type emails. No, these threatened my person in a clearly violent manner. I knew that when we moved I’d be more protective about where we lived and I have hemmed and hawed since then about how much information to reveal about my new neighbourhood.

Over the months I’ve discovered that I hate withholding like this. Where I live factors heavily in my gardening experience. As a writer, I am not interested in writing disconnected third person how-to’s. Gardening is a personal experience that is unique to each of us. I am always careful to include the personal, even when I am contracted to write a third person how-to.

Not being able to talk about the neighbourhood has been torture. I find that whenever I have to cut myself off from a topic, that’s the one thing I want to talk about. Keeping these details off the board has created a huge block. There have been times when I felt I couldn’t write about anything at all. So I’ve decided that I will talk about my neighbourhood. I need to protect our safety, but I also need to be free to write.

Now that I’ve got that out of the way… We’ve moved north in Toronto to Corso Italia, a neighbourhood I had not explored in my nearly 20 years in this city. As you can gauge from the name, it’s home to a predominantly Italian population, although I am finding that Brazilian Portuguese are a large group, too. As you can imagine, there are a lot of food gardeners here. There are plenty of front yard food gardens and pots of peppers growing in sunny store windows. Now you know why I gave the new yard an Italian name!

About a month into living here, I discovered a small Italian food grocer that has since become my favourite. On our first visit, I spotted a large bin of bulbs outside the store. When I asked what they were, the grocer replied, wild onion. But they didn’t look like onions. I asked him to describe how they are prepared and he went into a lengthy process of boiling and water changing that sounded daunting. I had to try them!

When I got home, I did a quick search online and discovered that wild onion are also known as Lampascioni or Vampagioli. They are actually a type of muscari (aka grape hyacinth) that grows wild in the Puglia region of Italy. Apparently, when onions were not available, people would dig up the bitter muscari bulbs to use in their place. They became a regional delicacy that are prepared seasonally.

Cooking:

The bulbs secrete a very bitter goo and must be boiled endlessly to make them palatable. That night, I tried cooking up the batch I bought. After cooking, I doused them in salt, vinegar, and olive oil. Mine weren’t bad, but in the future I will change the water a few times throughout the cooking process to further reduce the bitterness.

Within just a month of switching neighbourhoods, I had already learned about a new edible plant. Who knows what I will discover once the growing season starts.

Growing:

I went back to the store a few days later and bought the best looking bulbs I could find in the bin for planting. This muscari (Muscari comosum) has an absolutely gorgeous flower, and the price from a greengrocer is a lot cheaper than one would find in a garden centre. I bought a bag of bulbs for about 3 bucks. I’m not certain these plants can withstand my climate. A lot of the information I found had them hovering around zone 6 and higher. Since we were also planting awfully late in the season (it snowed 2 days after we planted) and in a new garden that is still unfamiliar to me, I set aside more than half of the bulbs and planted them in pots. I potted them in gritty, well-draining soil meant for cactus and succulents and I put them in about 3 or 4 inches deep, and packed them in more tightly than I did outdoors (just a few inches apart). Those plants have been sitting on the floor of my unheated porch, where the soil has likely frozen a few times, if only temporarily.

I can’t wait to see what they do (if anything) come spring!

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August 4, 2010

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One Life to Live: A Wish List

This post is a little off topic and not exactly related to gardening. Please indulge me as I go off on a completely decadent, shoe-gazing tangent for a moment. Ignoring is also an option. Please also note that I wrote the bulk of this before my birthday last week so the tense is a bit off. One of my goals way back when was to stop spreading myself around and to bring more into this site, even if it doesn’t always fit neatly into the “GARDENING” package. I do try to stay on topic most days.

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It’s my birthday this week and it’s got me on the subject of how I want to spend the year until my next birthday rolls around. 37 is feeling like a big one for me. Like I am poised for a lot of change that I can’t yet determine. When I was younger, I imagined that 33 would be my best year, ever: an ideal age. I imagined that by 33 I would be, “…kicking so much ass!” What that said for the years after 33, I do not know. I only managed to get that far in my imaginings. Back then, my version of kicking ass meant feeling comfortable with myself, feeling accomplished in my work, and not putting up with or eating anymore shit. That is how Gayla at Age 33 looked to me. And then 33 rolled around and it was the year of the TV show that went wrong and other perceived failures, and I spent the remainder of the year carrying around a lot of anger and feeling generally AWKWARD. So 33 wasn’t all that to be sure.

Last year I turned 36. I suddenly felt OLD. It was like I had stepped over an invisible line and whoa, what the hell just happened there? I now have a prominent streak of grey hair on my left side, which I’m really not complaining about. I like it enough as far as grey hair goes. It’s just that sudden physical changes are a bit freaky. I lost a lot of friends at a young age so I became aware of the very real possibility of death and dying earlier than most. But last year I suddenly became more conscious of my mortality in a physical way. That said, I don’t mean for this to be a diatribe on growing older. For the most part I like getting older and look forward to what’s yet to come. I very much appreciate everything that experience has taught me, for better and for worse. I like the person I am now a hell of a lot more than the person I was at 25. Or 30. Or at 33, come to think of it.

I am much closer to achieving that ideal I imagined I’d reach at 33. But it’s a slightly shifted ideal, one that has changed as I have changed and my desires and expectations have matured. I enjoy things more. I find more joy in little details and in the work I do. I’m much less afraid and much more able to see what scares me and push against it effectively. Or still be kind of screwed up about certain things and be okay with that, knowing I’ll figure it out eventually. Or not. Because I’m also a bit more comfortable with my fallibility. I am more conscious of my needs and better able to say no to the things I need to say no to. And saying no doesn’t feel so much like I’m strapping on a pair of boots and going to war as a result. Because I’m also more comfortable with the fact that some people won’t like it when I do. I’m mostly okay with being perceived as a “bitch” sometimes. I hate the subtext behind that word. Being able to say no when I need to has also opened up the possibility for saying yes more often, too. At 36, going on 37 (now going on 38. yikes), I do feel more at ease with myself and accomplished. And I do believe that I am in fact eating far less shit.

All of this to say that my pal Karen recently celebrated a birthday. And on her blog she talks about making this the Year That She Becomes A Woman of a Certain Age. I was very inspired by the post and the way she has defined her goals for the year. Several years ago, when I kept a photoblog that was also more or less a journal, I wrote a list of “Things I Want to Do Before I Die”. It was a vague list as I did not expect that I would accomplish all of those things in my lifetime. It was more or less a guide post for what I might like to do and a kick in the pants to make some of them happen. Inspired by Karen (again), I thought I would resurrect that list and continue it here, the week of my 37th birthday. Some items from the old list have made it to this one and a few have even been accomplished. I did not include anything too personal, because I do believe in keeping some aspects of my life private, and I very much doubt you’d care to know regardless.

Not surprisingly, a good many of the items on my list have to do with travel, food, and PLANTS.

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February 25, 2010

31 Comments

The Requirement to Garden

This is a long one. I suggest you make a cup of tea and a snack before starting.

And now listen carefully. You in others-this is your soul. This is what you are. This is what your consciousness has breathed and lived on and enjoyed throughout your life-your soul, your immortality, your life in others. And what now? You have always been in others and you will remain in others. And what does it matter to you if later on that is called your memory? This will be you-the you that enters the future and becomes a part of it.

Back in December 2009 my partner Davin and I took a month long trip to the Caribbean. We spent 4 days in Barbados, 3 weeks in Dominica, and one week in St. Lucia. Since that time I have posted on and off here with photos and short stories depicting my botanical experiences through that month. There are still so many gardening and plant related stories left to tell. Every single day was loaded with new plants, flowers, food, sights, and sounds. We went on hikes into the rain forest, up mountains, and to a Boiling Lake. We got to see a place that felt like witnessing the birth of the world. We stayed on an organic food farm and picked ginger flowers that would be made into centerpieces for rich people. We visited an organic farm that specializes in traditional herbal medicine. We went inside an ocean-side cave. We touched walls covered in more ferns than I have ever seen in my life. We walked among grasses and cacti. We saw plants I will probably never be able to identify. We spoke with humble gardeners, visited massive backyard farms, and met an incredible 99 year old woman. We found new friends to whom I feel a great deal of gratitude. It was pretty much awesome.

As you can see I have barely scratched the surface here and hope to get a chance to tell you some of these stories over time.

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February 16, 2010

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February at the Community Garden

We popped over to the community garden yesterday afternoon with a frozen pail of compost. I thought I would take some pictures so you can see what it looks like in the middle of winter.

As you can see, not much is happening. Drab and dull. We stop using our plots between October/November and March/April depending on the season.

If I wanted to really maximize the space, I could construct some cold frames within my plot and grow cold hardy greens like kale, mache, and spinach. And I would, but unfortunately the lane-way that leads to the garden is typically treacherous terrain through the winter months. We haven’t had much in the way of snow and ice this winter — it’s the first year since joining the garden around seven years ago that I’ve been able to get to the garden gate with relative ease.

Instead, I grow edible perennials as a strategy for extending the season. Cold hardy, perennial herbs such as garden sage, oregano, marjoram, chives, garlic chives, mint, and ‘Egyptian Walking’ onion function as the bones of the garden, holding in the soil and offering up a harvest that starts in the early spring and lasts straight through to the late fall.

Here’s what it looks like in April.

There are also a few self-seeders including calendula, chervil, bloody dock, lovage, shiso, lemon balm, and chamomile that pretty much grow themselves. They can be a curse or a blessing of plenty depending on how you look at it.

Over the years I’ve also added a few small fruit bushes including gooseberries and American black currant, and several strawberries (wild and alpine types) as a way to get garner yearly crops that don’t require seasonal planting.

This is a wild geranium that showed up one day. I always let a few survive since they’re not too invasive and I like their pretty little pink flowers. As you can see, it is also proof that plants don’t necessarily “die” during the winter, but stay alive in a dormant stage underneath the snow.

And it looks like we’ve had a visitor in our absence. I noticed new graffiti in a couple of spots along The Beer Store wall.

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August 14, 2009

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‘Gezahnte’ Tomato

Behold, the first of the non-cherry, indeterminate tomatoes that has reached maturity for 2009. And it’s a beauty. Incidentally, I’ve managed to grow several ruffled tomato varieties this year purely by happenstance. Well, that and the fact that I have a very obvious preference for that shape.

I’m yet to try it out, but I believe this tomato is a stuffer, which means it is fairly hollow on the inside and great for stuffing with veggies and rice and baking in the oven. I’m waiting for another to ripen so it can be put to the test.

And this is where I admit that my rooftop, container-grown tomatoes are doing pretty well this year despite the troubles that most in-ground gardens are facing with so much rain and cool weather. Don’t hate! These are the sort of conditions under which rooftop and container gardens have the upper hand (finally). I can regulate excess water, I rarely have to pull out the watering can to keep things moist enough, and the garden is warmer than gardens on the ground because it’s up high and exposed. In a typical year I am fighting the excess heat, sun, and drought but this year is almost too easy.

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