The new yard came with violets… lots and lots of violets. They’re blooming now and even though the yard continues to look like the excavation site of a dead body on a television police procedural…

I’m in heaven.

I have longed to have the space to grow enough violets to make cheerful springtime jellies. A few years ago I set about making this dream real by installing white and purple violet plants into a shady corner of my community garden plot. I began growing them in a large trough on the roof, too. Then we moved here and I inherited a yard of them.

Between all of these locations I should have more than enough to candy, make my jellies, and eat fresh in salads. I like the young leaves, too. Of course, we are currently in the process of digging up the yard, but I’ve been careful to dig around the violets and set each one (barring a few casualties) for replanting. I plan to carefully extract the plants from the grass that is growing around them, and replant them into their own swath along with the three other colour varieties I have collected over the last few years. You think I’m crazy for taking so much care with a plant that spreads like a weed, but I can’t wait for you to see it.

Man, do I ever love having a yard.

I grew up in a household that frequented thrift shops out of necessity, and like many kids in that economic bracket I was deeply embarrassed by our sorely out-of-date second hand outfits and household goods. Somehow between ages 14 and 16 and I did a mental 180° and found myself embracing thrifting as a lifestyle and a thrill rather than a cross to bear. Buying my clothes used meant that I didn’t show up at school wearing the same shirt or dress as every one else… being different was suddenly a good thing. When I moved away from home at 17, I began buying my home goods there as well, and for a time, thrifts stores became my answer to one-stop shopping and cheap afternoon entertainment rolled into one. Where else can you see the bizarre, discarded detritus of decade’s past?

Thrift stores are magic.

I still love thrifting, but my frequency reduced significantly over the last 10 years as our urban shops became more and more picked over and filled up with completely useless garbage. We recently moved into a new neighbourhood and I don’t know what it is about this area, but the stores are pretty good. As a result I’ve starting looking in the shops again, pretty much weekly.

Scouring the stores for items that I can transform or use in the garden this spring has been one way that I’ve made it through the grim days of winter when I was practically scratching at the walls with the urge to get outside and get started making my scrappy yard into something.

I’ve picked up an assortment of obvious garden items including an assortment of high quality terracotta pots, a well-made orange metal watering can for just a dollar, a number of plates to be used as saucers, glassware for terrariums, a cloche, a vintage windowsill herb gardening set (complete with very old seeds), and several very good canning supplies that aren’t really for gardening but it’s all one and the same to me.

The two items shown above are my most recent acquisitions. I garbage picked the wooden fruit crate from my therapist’s neighbour’s garbage. I’m probably crossing some kind of therapist-client personal boundary there, and if I am, I don’t want to know about it as the box is not the first thing I’ve dragged home from their curb side discards! Recently, there have been other items that I wanted to take, but didn’t because I “didn’t want to be too weirdly inappropriate”.

I’m planning to use the crate as a box for holding transplants. Although, it would make an excellent box for starting outdoor seedlings, I’ve decided against that use as I don’t want to damage its integrity. Those plastic trays that come free from the garden shops are flimsy and often don’t hold a tray full of transplants well.

The larger item on the left that looks like a doll crib is actually a small shelving unit. I bought it the other day for $5.99. The plan is to line the insides with landscaping fabric or screening and use it as a planter. It looks crappy now, but just you wait and see.

What crazy items are you upcycling for use in the garden this spring?

Earlier this year I discovered that the fruit from the Kousa Dogwood tree (Cornus kousa) are edible and I’ve been waiting until the end of summer to get a taste.

The first fruit on my friend Barry’s tree are starting to ripen and I managed, over the weekend, to collect a few from out of the clutches of the neighborhood squirrels. The fruit are ripe and optimal eating when they turn from green to bright red, and from hard to squishy. You should be able to squish the orange fruit from the centre easily. That happens to be just how I ate my bounty. The skin is unpleasant tasting. It looks like a lychee, with the texture of some of my favourite tropicals, sugar apple and sour sop. The insides are bright orange and soft, with a couple of hard pits. It tastes like papaya.

I’ve read that there is a lot of variation between trees and varieties, so if you have the chance, I’d suggest trying fruit from a sampling of trees. The fruit I ate are small but tasty. They are from a landscape tree that is bred for the flowers, not the fruit. But there are varieties with much larger fruit that are worth searching out if you’re looking for more than a light snack.

Related:

• Paw Paw (Asimina triloba): A local and unusual tree fruit that is also coming into season.
• Search this site by the tag, Weird Edibles to find out about other unusual vegetables, herbs, and fruit to grow or forage.

My friend Barry has an elderberry tree in his yard. Last summer he offered up the harvest in exchange for a sampling of the end product. I collected a lot of berries and was a bit unsure about what to do with them. Raw elderberries have a somewhat unpleasant scent and are not edible so it was difficult to commit to a usage without a clear understanding of what I was getting into.

[Please note that while there are elderberries leaves shown in this photo, you should not eat them. They are poisonous!]

In the end, I made cordial. It was pretty good. The berries have an earthy taste. That’s all I can come up with as a descriptor. Earthy. Perhaps a bit pungent. It does taste like berries, I just can’t place a finger on which berries exactly. We dripped it on pancakes, poured a little onto granola and yogurt, and added it to sparkling water on occasion. Elderberries are very high in vitamin C and potassium. Many people use the cordial as a cold and flu elixir, instead of store-bought pharmaceutical cough remedies.

This year I wanted to try using the flowers so I harvested about two thirds of the tree back in June, when the flowers were in season, and left the remainder to develop berries. I had enough to make two batches, so I tried two different methods. Unfortunately, I no longer remember the second (preferred) method nor can I recall what it was that I did or didn’t do that made it better. However, if you’re interested, the first, less preferred method came from the River Cottage Handbook No.2: Preserves, by Pam Corbin.

This year, with only 1/3 the harvest, I made a much smaller batch of cordial, which is fine by me because I think we prefer the elderflower flavor. I have no memory of how I made it last year, but this year I used this recipe from David Lebovitz’s website. Within the notes he makes a remark about straining the cordial a second time through a fine sieve. I’ve found that step to be essential and not overly attentive. Otherwise you end up with a very seedy, crunchy syrup. I didn’t have enough to can so I just sterilized two jars on a low heat in the oven before filling, gave one to Barry, and refrigerated the other.

I also made a quick, single jar batch of mixed berry jam last weekend (pictured). But that’s another story.

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p.s. The site will be down this weekend while we switch over to a new design and work out all of the inevitable kinks. It’s going to be a bit manic, but I’m so excited! A big change has been a long time coming.

Recently, our meals have been peppered with ingredients gleaned from the gardens; however, today’s lunch is the first that is all garden grown.

Here’s the breakdown:

• Chive Blossoms: A hardy perennial that has been growing for about a decade in a big container on the roof.
• Lemon Balm: Eat the fresh leaves in the spring. This is a hardy perennial that self seeds all over the community garden.
• Parsley: From the roof.
• Pansy petals: Also from the roof.
• Three types of lettuce: All of which self-seeded in various containers on the roof. I didn’t have to do a thing, although I did transplant a few to the community garden plot.
• ‘Egyptian Walking Onion’: Just the greens.
• Borage sprouts: I got this idea from Julianna, who brought a salad to our Saturday afternoon transplant trade/potluck that included borage from her garden. Borage self-seeds like nobody’s business and is coming up like mad right now. why not use the tender, fresh sprouts rather than tossing them in the compost? The first set of true leaves are prickly but the cotyledon leaves are smooth, with a fresh cucumbery taste.
• Baby kale
• Purple Mizuna: More on this soon. This is my new favourite edible!
• Assorted mustard greens
• Violet leaves and flowers: I have a small patch over at the community garden that is going to expand this year once I add the three additional varieties I have acquired this spring. Eat the young, new leaves and the flowers.
• Bloody Dock: If you’d like to know more, I wrote an article on spring greens including bloody dock, for Garden Making magazine.

For identification purposes, here’s what the borage seedlings look like. You can also identify them by their cucumber scent. The seedling in the top left corner is anise-hyssop. You can eat that too.

Staking is one of those topics that I was sadly unable to cover in the Grow Great Grub book due to space considerations. I covered it pretty thoroughly in You Grow Girl and I have to say that years later, and having experimented with other methods, my go-to cheap and cheerful method both in the ground and in containers is still the tripod. I find it exceptionally stable, especially on my roof where the spring and later fall winds can turn epic. It is also the cheapest and most accessible — most of us can find a source of long bamboo poles close to home for less than a dollar per pole. I have even found the occasional multi-pack at the dollar store for even less.

The tripod method is simply 3 or 4, or sometimes more, bamboo poles (branches work well too) set into the ground at an equal distance around a plant or within a container and then pulled together at the top and held in place with a strong piece of string or wire.

I have fashioned riffs on the tripod for tall plants and climbers including tomatoes, sweet pea, morning glory, pole beans, peas, and cucumbers. I add string or other supports depending on the type of plant I am growing. In 2007 I grew 16 tomato plants and several cucumbers by building 4 sets of 4 tripod stakes supported by 4 poles around the top as cross beams. The added support proved to be unnecessary and drove us nuts all season long as we continuously (and painfully) ran into those stupid cross poles with our necks and heads. A single indeterminate (vining) tomato plant was supported by each pole and I strung mesh along one side that supported the cucumbers and gherkins. You can read more about that over here.

p.s. That’s the ‘Variegated’ tomato in the foreground/left. You can just make out the white splashes in this small photo.

I have even made smaller versions using shorter poles to prop up heavily laden bush beans.

But I didn’t intend to talk about tripod staking today so I’m not sure why I am preambling with that. Today’s topic is pea staking. Of all of the easy, or what I coined “artfully lazy” methods in You Grow Girl, I like pea staking best, most especially when it comes to propping up it’s namesake: peas.

Pea staking is as simple as locating a bunch of twiggy branches (messy end growth with plenty of small twigs and branches) and then setting them into the soil with the solid end down. Next, plant your seeds in and around where you have set them into the soil and wait for the climbing plants to hitch on and eventually cover the branches in greenery.

This method works both in the ground and in pots. While bare, it appears orderly and decorative in pots, but can just look like a bunch of branches stuck in the ground if used in a large, empty garden bed.

Last year, while walking home from the greenhouse, I came upon a large bundle of bright red, freshly cut dogwood branches. I had about a minute to brainstorm projects I could make with them and whether or not it seemed worth the effort to drag that bundle all the way home. In the end I decided that the dogwood was beautiful and chances were good that I might never come across sidewalk gold like that again. I walked a treacherous gauntlet back to my abode, and despite nearly poking the eyes out of hundreds of hipsters and small children, I was right, they were worth it. I haven’t seen a bundle of any branches, let alone dogwood branches that nice since.

I used all of the branches up; some in big pots as below and smaller branches in smaller pots. They made the pots look like something was happening while they were empty, and the red provided a beautiful contrast with pale green pea plants as they entwined themselves in the branches.

Here’s how it looked when the peas were fully mature. I believe this pea variety is ‘Carouby de Maussane.’

I recently wrote about the nutritional benefits of mulching and fertilizing with sea kelp. A commenter mentioned using comfrey, to which I replied that I am a big fan of comfrey as a fertilizer and would recommend it as a mulch, although I would suggest chopping it up or drying first since the leaves are very large and would form a dense mat when wet.

Comfrey is definitely worth growing as a ready made source of potassium, magnesium, and phosphorous if you’ve got the space. The trouble is it is awfully aggressive and will take over where ever you plant it, and then some. This is why I don’t grow it. I do however, have a secret location where I go every year to harvest a bit to make into liquid feed. That was until this year when I went to harvest from my secret stash and discovered it was no longer accessible. Noooooooo……

The tally so far: Summer is too wet and too cold, the tomato harvest is mostly crappy, and I can’t get any comfrey. The horrors.

But then, a happy turnaround. The other day I ran into a fellow forager/gardener. The subject of nettles came up which lead to comfrey and my recent loss. She mentioned that the farm she works for has a huge patch of comfrey that they use for making their own fertilizer. All I had to do was pay for the time it takes her to pick the leaves. Two days later I rode over to a local market and picked up a big box of comfrey. And while it did rain briefly, Monday was oppressively hot and humid so I stopped at the hardware store on the way home and bought a fan for my office window. Then I balanced a box of comfrey and a fan on top of my bike basket and walked it home because I am not adept enough to ride while balancing both, unlike those dudes you see balancing a twenty-four case of beer (we call it a two-four around these parts) on top of the turned around handlebars of their 10-speed with one hand and a six pack dangling from the other. While I’m on the subject of death-defying balancing feats on a bicycle, I once saw a guy balancing a massive rug on the handlebars while riding. On another occasion, I witnessed a guy with a TV, although that didn’t work out and the TV smashed onto the road.

And that, friends, is the story of the week summer finally arrived (we’ve had sun AND heat for days!), hope returned for our tomatoes, and I got my comfrey. Things are looking up.

1. Chop up the comfrey with a pair of sheers or scissors and soak in a tub of water. I put a brick on top to hold it all underneath the liquid. 2. Let it sit for a day or two until it gets stinky and the leaves are broken down. 3. Strain off the leaves and put them in the compost bin or bury them in the garden. 4. Use the remaining liquid as a fertilizer by spraying on the leaves of your plants or pouring into the soil around the roots.

Ramps, aka wild leeks, are a wild North American onion-like plant that pop up in forested areas in early-mid spring. The season for ramps is short, typically no more than a few weeks between April and May depending on your location.

Believe me when I say that they are GOOD. Ramps resemble scallions except that the leaves are large and flat at the top rather than tubular. I’d describe the taste as an earthy onion or leek with the flavor of tender young garlic dominating. The garlic smell is strong with this one — our entire apartment reeks of it when we’re preparing them as does anyone who consumes them raw.

Ramps are best used in place of leeks or onions. Look for recipes in which either ingredient is the star of the show such as potato and ramp soup, ramp pesto, ramp butter, or ramp pizza. I’m considering this Fiddlehead Ramp Risotto since we currently have both on hand.

If you happen upon a seller at a farmers’ market this weekend I suggest snatching a big bundle up as fast as you can — I arrived too late at my local market last week and missed out completely. This week I made sure to get there early and grabbed up 2 lbs so we would have enough to preserve and enjoy in the coming months. There was no way I was going to go without this year. We concocted a homemade spelt gnocchi with fresh pea and ramp pesto dish last spring that quickly became our favourite way to use them up. And then we each gained 10 lbs. I’ve been salivating over day dreams of that dish for an entire year. Of course I did not write it down as I made it, but will write it up here when I’ve got it figured out, again.

Preserving Ramps

There are lots of ways to preserve ramps, from canning to pickling to kimchi, but I prefer freezing. The leaves turn mushy and a little bit gross after freezing but the bulbs are fine. To get around the problem, I freeze the bulbs whole but turn the leaves into pesto.

1. Slice off the roots and discard. Chop the bulb off and separate from the green leaves.
2. Wash and dry the bulbs and freeze them whole, packed into freezable containers or baggies.
3. Loosely chop the remaining green leaves and wash. Dry them thoroughly using a salad spinner or a towel.
4. Finely chop the leaves in a food processor with a dash of salt and a few splashes of olive oil (about 3-4 cups leaves to a 1/2 cup of oil). The goal is to create a moist, spreadable paste. It shouldn’t be dripping, but it shouldn’t be dry either.
5. You can add cheese and nuts to make a true pesto paste but I prefer to leave mine plain to keep it flexible for all sorts of uses.
6. Pack into small baggies or small freezable containers and freeze. You can also portion it out by freezing in ice cube trays and later popping them into long term storage containers once they’ve formed into hardened cubes.

Cook small amounts of the bulbs and leaves together, or use separately as you see fit. The leaves tend to have a milder flavour than the bulbs, but are less flexible because of the added olive oil.

In my world, foraging goes hand-in-hand with gardening. Maybe it’s because the compulsion to do both comes from the same place in my brain (a fascination with the natural world and an interest in knowing how things work). Or maybe it’s because I am thrifty and can’t stand the idea of so much good stuff going to waste. I’m able to save money and find a second use for discarded objects by foraging for bits and bobs for my garden. I forage for fertilizers too. And come to think about it, it might also be because I am interested in how wild foods that were once valued have been denigrated and demoted through history from nourishing wild food to a lowly, undesirable weed and I want to know for myself if they really deserve that indictment (two words: they don’t).

Whatever my reasons, I can’t imagine gardening without foraging and vice-versa.

This year I’m making more of an effort than usual to keep on top of foraging for early spring plants. There are several that are only edible within a short window of time and I don’t want to miss any of them, as is often the case. This year I got started harvesting stinging nettle (Urtica dioica) earlier than ever, since this is one herb that absolutely MUST be harvested in the early spring while the plants are still young and tender, and BEFORE flowers start to appear. I want to stress the importance of that fact since you can damage your kidneys consuming mature nettle parts.

Unfortunately my secret spot is no longer accessible. I am often able to harvest bags of the stuff, but this year could only get half of one bag. I had intended to glean enough for a big batch of nettle soup and a couple of bundles to dry for tea. I managed to get enough for tea, but do not have enough to make soup.

And now this is where I introduce a disclaimer about how I am not a medical professional and am not certified to dish out medical advice, yadda, yadda, yadda.

That said, nettle tea is said to be a mineral-rich tonic that can help allergy sufferers fight the symptoms of seasonal allergies. It’s the kind of remedy that has to build in your system — you can’t expect to drink one cup of tea and find yourself symptom free. This year I decided that I would get an early start on the tea and see what happens. So far so good, but in all honesty I haven’t been drinking it long enough to consider any positive effects.

Be advised that the “stinging” in stinging nettle is there for a reason. Merely brushing bare skin against the plant can hurt. A lot.

If you plan to go out picking nettles I suggest bringing along the following:

• A pair of leather gloves. I use the cheap workman’s gloves you can buy for just a few dollars at the hardware store. They’re bulky but the sting can not penetrate. It can penetrate through thinner cotton gloves. Take my word for it.
• A sharp pair of scissors or pruners for harvesting.
• A bag or bags for collecting the plants.

Wear the gloves whenever you handle fresh nettle parts (leaves or stems). The sting only goes away once the plant has been dried or cooked. Don’t wash the leaves if you intend to dry them or they’ll go brown. I bundle mine up, wrap with twine, and hang in a dark, well-ventilated spot. I do wash the parts that are used in soup, but only if I intend to cook them up immediately upon returning home with a harvest.

You can find out more about stinging nettle and foraging in general under the newly added “Foraging” category.

Another spring and a new crop of garlic mustard (Alliaria petiolata) is setting up camp for the season. We found a few small plants in the street garden cleanup last week and several at the community garden, many that were already much larger and lusher than any of the other cold hardy perennials growing there. And all of that despite the fact that this is my third year diligently removing every plant I find!

Now is the time to remove this highly invasive plant while it is still small and easy to pull. We learned the hard way last year that by May the roots are already enormous and deeply set. I took the above photo of an entire plant just a few days ago and the roots were already substantial.

Here’s what the plant looks like right now. In the early stages it looks more like a common violet, but the distinctive garlic smell is unmistakable. Here are some photos of later stage plants for identification.

When removing the plant, be sure to pull up as much of the root system as possible. Pull when the soil is moist and loose and use a weeding tool if you have to. Destroy the plant, roots and all — do not put it into the compost bin! Or better yet, eat it. As I’ve mentioned before, that distinctive garlicy smell and flavor lends itself to all kinds of uses.

Free food!

A jar of garlic mustard root “horseradish” that we made last spring.

My favorite way to eat it is lightly sautéed with some butter; however, we have tried making it into pesto by simply whizzing the leaves up in a food processor with a splash of olive oil and salt, and grating the roots into a horseradish substitute. The pesto is a bit bitter raw, I prefer it cooked. I’m thinking of using this year’s harvest to make “garlicy” mashed potatoes. The fake horseradish was okay, but since it took us several hours work washing and grating thin roots, I wouldn’t recommend it.