First Lunch Courtesy of the Garden

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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.

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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.

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Tripod and Pea Staking

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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.

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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.

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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.’

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Making Sorrel with Fresh Hibiscus

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Sorrel or rum punch (sorrel spiked with rum) is a popular, refreshing drink in the Caribbean, especially during the holiday season.

Knowing this, I was particularly excited to get to the market and get my hands on some fresh sorrel so that I could find out how the drink compares when the flower calyces are fresh rather than dried.

In my minds eye I imagined market tables piled high with bright red blooms. Unfortunately, this wasn’t the case. Instead the fresh flowers seem to be sold in bagged portions. It’s only day one as I am writing this (you will read this a few days later) so I’m holding out hope that there is a market stand somewhere on the island where the blooms are beautifully display instead of bagged.

The good news is that the flower calyces I bought were still fresh and crisp inside the bag. I paid about $2 EC (roughly $.80 US) for about 5-6 cups of flowers.

Photo by Gayla Trail All Rights Reserved

Photo by Gayla Trail All Rights Reserved

Turns out they make the most incredibly colourful, intense, and tangy drink. It’s so much more vibrantly red than the drink I make with dried flowers at home.

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And look at the colour of the calyces when they are removed from the liquid!

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It might be difficult to go back to dried next summer.

Here’s my standard recipe and the one I made today, but with so many tropical fruits and fresh spices available here I’m thinking of experimenting with some flavour combinations.

Do you have a favourite hibiscus/sorrel/rum punch/agua de jamaica recipe? Please share it.

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A One-Pot Garden Scraps Meal

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Before I came down with the Great Attack of the TIFF Flu 2009 (named as such because the worst part coincided with the Toronto International Film Festival) a lot of our meals looked like some version of this one. They probably looked like this one throughout the flu debacle as well but 1. my memory is shot and 2. Davin did all of the cooking.

But getting back to my point, which is increasingly lost these days underneath a jumble of words and thoughts that refuse to string together (a lingering symptom of the TIFF Flu), we were eating like this because it was the end of the summer. And you know how the end of the summer is; all sorts of surprises are popping up in the garden, the fridge and counter-top bowls are overflowing with bits of this and that all poised to rot at any moment and a troop of fruit flies waiting on standby to get their big break. I had also just scored this little single-portion casserole dish/dutch oven on sale for half price, rekindling my love for the one-pot meal.

These meals are insanely easy to make and come with the added bonus of clearing out those little scraps of this and that, that linger in the fridge, too small to serve any other purpose. The meal depicted in the above photo was actually my lunch one weekday afternoon. I like this as a work-day lunch meal because it takes only a few minutes to prepare. I can then pop it in the oven, set the timer, go back to work, and resurface when lunch is done.

It’s the meal that practically makes itself!

Every dish is different depending on what’s on hand, but if you’re looking for some ideas, here’s how I make mine:

First, pre-heat the oven to about 350-400 F. Cut up the vegetables into manageable pieces, toss in a sprinkling of olive oil, add chopped herbs (thyme, parsley, oregano, and sage) from the rooftop garden, a pinch of grey sea salt (I have a weakness for fancy salts) and throw in some kind of protein to finish. Fresh, new potatoes are a good addition, too. I’ve been known to add a few capers, a squeeze of lemon, or oven-dried tomatoes. I add a single leaf of the rounded German ‘Berggarten’ sage from my community garden plot when I want to be fancy. I am not against adding a melting cheese in the last minute or a sprinkle of Parmesan to finish.

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Snack Foods for the Apocalypse

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This is how I see canning: making snack foods for the apocalypse. Because in truth, with the exception of the plain tomato jars and sauces, many of the items I put up tend to be condiments, pickles, and intense fruit preserves — food I could probably live without. If, say, we were to suffer through an ice storm or prolonged power outage this winter, I’m not sure how long we would stay alive on tomato salsa, brandied peaches, elderberry syrup, and chutney.

Although, that’s hardly the point, is it? I’m not really putting up food for emergency preparedness. It’s really about having that extra something special to enjoy during the off season. That and the fact that the process of canning makes me feel good.

I canned up a storm this summer. It’s really not appropriate to speak of it in the past tense because frankly, I’m not done yet. I went way overboard this year, and even put up a few batches of foods I won’t and can’t eat myself. I think the reason why I went so nutty was that I needed a come-down off of the book project that was active and creative. I didn’t feel like doing any of my regular go-to creative outlets. I just wanted to play with food.

I’ve been canning long enough that it has become like meditation in motion. It’s one of those activities that allows me to focus one part of my brain on the doing while another part relaxes and opens up. I gave myself permission this year to jar up anything that caught my interest and experiment to my heart’s content rather than sticking to healthier fare. For that reason I was able to be much more creative and at times even focused on making purely aesthetically pleasing jars rather than worrying about the nutritional content.

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This is my current favourite jar, pickled crab apples. It is the only thing I have ever canned that I couldn’t (and still can’t) visualize as a flavour. I used the blemish-free crab apples that I had schlepped all the way from Montreal. They were perfect for it. I followed a book recipe exactly, rather than experimenting with my own ideas and flavours (how I usually do it). The recipe called for both vinegar and a TON of sugar. This is not something I would ever make in a typical year but I made it anyways. And it was so worth it. Man, is this jar beautiful.

I know that making food I won’t or can’t eat makes no sense and sounds wasteful, and if it were another year I would not have gone that route. However, I can’t tell you how many times I have stood, savoring the visual delight of those pretty jars and it’s not even fall yet. During the winter months I occasionally sit on the kitchen floor next to the main storage cupboard (everything else is stashed away in boxes here and there) and pull out several jars, soaking in the colours that are so desperately lacking in mid-January. I’ll give away the extra food we can’t eat as gifts to friends who will enjoy them, so why not?

As a part of my series on kitchen gardening (scroll down to where it says “Microfarming with Gayla Trail”), The Globe & Mail recently published an article I wrote on canning tomatoes, including three recipes: plain tomatoes, catsup, and green tomato chutney. You can also see a slide show of me canning in my cramped kitchen. Proof that you do not need a lot of space to can.

I also gave a workshop on canning tomatoes at The Workroom last Friday. Karyn has done an amazing job recapping the event on her blog. She also recounted her follow-up experience here.

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