Backyard Herbal

In my successes post, I wondered whether it would be “cheating” to include herbs because I've had more experience growing them than any other type of plant, and because they are fairly easy to grow (sure bets, in other words). Later I realized I shouldn’t downplay herbs. They are essential to a Backyard Nest Egg due to their multiple contributions: culinary, nutritive, and medicinal.

As everyone knows, herbs can improve the humblest of fare. Today, for example, we’re having meatloaf and potatoes. Ho-hum. But the meatloaf is a Bobby Flay recipe that incorporates lots of finely chopped, sautéed veggies, as well as fresh thyme and parsley. The potatoes are our own homegrown German butterballs, roasted with olive oil and rosemary. Suddenly, our simple menu sounds like something a waiter in one of the better restaurants could wax eloquent about when taking your order.

Rosemary and thyme are among my favorite herbs for cooking. Thyme improves any beef dish and enhances just about any vegetable dish as well. Rosemary is a marvelous addition to many dishes, especially poultry, lamb, and potatoes. I also love rosemary baked into a hearty bread. These woody perennials are easy to grow and dry, and I’ve never had a problem with rabbits going after them!

However, here in Wisconsin, it’s impossible to overwinter rosemary outdoors, whereas thyme will survive as a perennial. If Thanksgiving doesn’t fall too late in November, and we haven’t had extremely cold weather yet, I still have fresh springs of rosemary, sage, and thyme for stuffing the turkey (together with onion and lemon – I bake the bread stuffing separately.) But that’s the absolute latest in the year I can hope for fresh rosemary from the garden.

Rosemary also takes a bit of time to get going in the spring. So my practice now is to plant one rosemary and one thyme seedling in pots in the spring. At the end of the summer, I bring the pots in. They don’t grow much, so I can only snip limited quantities of the fresh herbs over the winter. But in spring, I have a good-sized rosemary plant with an established root system. I plant it in the garden, together with several small purchased rosemary seedlings. The overwintered plant has a head start, so I get more fresh rosemary earlier. At the same time, I plant another small seedling in a pot, to take inside during the following winter, and provide a larger plant for the garden next spring.

I’ve only recently started thinking about the nutritive value of herbs. I was astonished to learn that parsley contains twice the iron of spinach and three times the vitamin C of oranges (by weight)! Parsley is definitely worth growing for those reasons alone. Parsley also enhances the flavor of many dishes, and complements other herbs as well.

Grown from seed, parsley is an herb that teaches patience and faith. Germination is slow, and no matter how I try to manage the seedlings, they are leggy and limp by the time I plant them out. They (and cilantro) look like the weak sisters of the herb garden, and it seems hard to believe you’ll get much out of them. But soon, parsley seedlings take off and produce lush, abundant foliage.

Before supermarkets shipped in out-of-season produce from distant locales, people in northern climates eagerly sought the first greens of spring for their nutritive properties. Chives are an easy-to-grow and versatile source of early greens in spring for the Backyard Nest Egg. Chives can survive the harsh winters of Wisconsin and are the first herb in my garden to send up green shoots in the spring. Chopped fresh chives are a great finish to many types of dishes – including soups, salads, and cooked vegetables.

Finally, as we all know, herbs have long been valued for their medicinal uses. In fact, it’s likely that some herbs, such as rosemary, thyme, and parsley, became popular culinary herbs because of their medicinal properties. Historically and today, rosemary, thyme, and parsley are considered beneficial as digestives and carminatives (a carminative is something that relieves flatulence). Rodale’s Illustrated Encyclopedia of Herbs identifies rosemary as a liver and gall bladder stimulant, and thyme as a liver tonic, while Michael Tierra (The Way of Herbs) describes thyme as an important parasiticide, useful for treating intestinal worms. (Contemporary research indicates that rosemary and parsley also have antioxidant properties.)

One of my goals for my Backyard Nest Egg is to expand my knowledge and use of homegrown herbs for medicinal purposes. I have used some simple preparations for minor complaints for years. For example, I always dry lots of sage for use in treating congestion in the head or chest in winter. Basically, I throw a handful of dried sage in a bowl of just boiled water and take in the steam with a towel over my head. (Rosemary is also a great expectorant and decongestant, but sage is more abundant in my garden and I find a little goes a long way in cooking. So I use the sage for colds and save the rosemary for cooking.) I find both peppermint and parsley tea refreshing and good digestive aids, and parsley to be a useful diuretic.

Other herbs take more time and effort to process. Echinacea is one of my favorite native flowers and I’ve grown it for years, when I lived in Nebraska and here in Wisconsin. But for medicinal purposes, I always use commercially produced preparations. I want to learn how to dig and process the root myself. Next year I plan to add Black Cohosh, another native plant to my garden. Like Echinacea, the root is the part used for medicinal purposes.

But our first experiment with processing root will be horseradish. (An upcoming post will focus exclusively on this herb.) Rick loves horseradish as a condiment and suggested we add it to the garden last year. The root is harvested the second year, so in a few weeks we’ll be digging it up. It got so big last year, we had to move it out of my backdoor herb garden to it's own place of honor in the larger garden. We must have left a piece of root, because as you can see in the photo above, there is a small horseradish still in the herb garden. Medicinally, as anyone who has eaten it knows, horseradish is great for clearing sinus congestion.

As food and medicine, for pleasure and health, the herb garden is obviously essential for any Backyard Nest Egg.

Successes & Failures: Part II

There are two good reasons for always including “sure bet” cultivars in your Backyard Nest Egg. One, obviously, is to ensure that you actually produce something to eat, even if the weather doesn’t cooperate or the stars don’t align properly that year. The other is the psychological boost you get from successfully producing food for the table.

That’s why I advise people who are starting their first garden to plant at least a few cultivars that are easy to grow. Otherwise, I’m afraid they might give up. There’s nothing like success, or even a partial success, to hook a person into trying again next year. I can’t be the only gardener, who at the end of every summer thinks, next year, this garden will be FANTASTIC. I can’t wait to show it off!

I have a neighbor with a gorgeous garden, all ornamentals, but beautifully laid out and cared for, with a huge koi pond he built himself. It looks like something you’d see at a professional botanical garden. But, according to him, it’s not “finished.” He still has a long list of projects to work on. His wife said she finally grew exasperated, and told him, “It’ll never be done! Let’s just invite people over already!” I relate this as a cautionary tale – it may happen to you, once you start gardening and get a few successes under your belt!

SUCCESSES
Carrots
I planted carrots in a large planter box on the deck. Because I’m still trying to find a cultivar I really like, and they take awhile to grow, I didn’t want to commit too much space to them just yet. My first planting was ruined by squirrels and chipmunks rampaging through the planter box. These varmints are a serious problem around here. We got the rabbits under control by building a fence and staple-gunning chicken wire to it. But the squirrels and chipmunks party on! They appear to especially love digging through soft, freshly turned soil. However, once the plants are established, they usually leave them alone. I covered my second planting with chicken wire, and now have a very healthy crop of carrots that should be ready to harvest soon.

Chiles
In an earlier post, I wrote about my success with chiles, so I won’t continue bragging here, lest I bore my readers. I’ll just note again, that the key, in this cooler-than-usual-summer, was that I grew them in clay pots. I harvested enough for many batches of fresh salsa over the summer, and even canned a small batch last week-end. (Oooops! Guess I couldn’t help myself with the bragging!) It was my first year growing poblanos, and I found them less productive than the Anaheims and jalapeños. The poblanos started strong, but then growth slowed and the size of the peppers declined. My solution for next year is to grow a few additional poblanos, and put them in larger pots.

Eggplant
In my earlier post about chiles, I also reported success with eggplant in a clay pot.
However, as with the poblanos, production and fruit size declined as the summer wore on. These, too, will get a larger pot next year.

Lettuce
I tried Butterking lettuce this year, and it grew beautifully. We had more lettuce than we knew what to do with, even though I planted two groups of seeds two weeks apart. I decided that next year I would grow individual lettuces in small pots. I’ll plant them at different times to spread out the harvest, and plant more varieties of lettuce. Using small pots will also allow me to move them to cooler spots once the weather warms up. The goal here is to delay bolting and extend the lettuce season.

Potatoes
I’ve also written about our potato success in an earlier post. (Isn’t it interesting how many posts about successes manage to get written?) I feel really blessed with the potatoes, given the late blight that has plagued potato crops in many parts of the country this year, including Wisconsin. I grew Red Norlands and German butterballs. I have one more patch of Red Norlands yet to be harvested, and so far, no sign of blight. We were so thrilled with our success in growing potatoes in large pots, we’re going to try growing even more in potato towers next year.

Tomatoes
A few weeks ago, I wrote about our success with the Juliet tomatoes. The Amish paste and Beefsteak tomatoes have finally started ripening. I have many fruits on all these cultivars, but the Beefsteak are nowhere near Beefsteak size. I’m guessing the cool weather was the problem here. Given the cool summer, and the late blight afflicting tomatoes this year, I consider our tomato crop a raging success. I canned a small batch of salsa with our tomatoes last week-end and expect to can at least one more batch, as well as a large batch of pizza sauce.

Herbs
I debated whether to list herbs as a success. They’re fairly easy to grow, and I have more experience growing them than any other type of plant. Even in years when I lived in an apartment, I always grew herbs. So is it cheating to count them as a success? I don’t know. What I can say is that my herb garden is full and lush. I have rosemary, thyme, sage, lemon verbena, oregano, chives, parsley, cilantro, and mint.

WORK IN PROGRESS
Here I include a few words about plants that appear to be doing well, but are too early in their development to be called “successes.”

· Asparagus. I planted my first ever asparagus crop this year. They got off to a slow start, but are looking healthy now.

· Apples. We planted two columnar apple trees this year that are leafing out beautifully and have doubled in size.

· Blueberries. We planted dwarf blueberry bushes in raised beds last year. They started off well, but later looked anemic. Eventually I learned that I needed to correct the pH and add iron. The bushes perked up right away, but I’m going to have my soil tested again. Blueberries require acid soil – it’s a little tricky to get it right when your soil is not naturally acidic. (Hence, the raised beds, to better control soil pH.)

The books recommend removing all the blossoms the first couple of years to promote root and foliar development. There were loads of blossoms on them this year, but I pulled them off, especially because the shrubs didn’t look as healthy as I’d like. However, I must have missed a few blossoms, because we found four ripe berries later. We ate them – they were sweet and delicious! I have high hopes for next year’s crop.

· Raspberries. We planted summer-bearing raspberry canes last year and were rewarded with some fruit this year. Summer-bearing raspberries fruit on the previous year’s canes. Since we just had a few small canes from the initial planting, we got a small crop of berries. This year, lots of healthy new canes developed. With any luck, we’ll have more berries than we know what to do with next summer.

· Strawberries. I planted strawberries last year, and although they were moderately successful, I wasn’t satisfied. The cultivar I planted was second choice – they were out of what I wanted at the garden center – and I planted them in a large planter box. Strawberries are often depicted as a great plant for a container, but my experience last year indicated otherwise. This year, I planted the cultivar I wanted, in a special bed in the ground. They look amazing. If all goes well, we should have a great crop in the spring.

· Sweet potatoes. These require a long growing season, so most cultivars probably cannot be successfully grown in Wisconsin. However, I heard about a cultivar called Porto Rico that is supposed to do well in northern climates. I couldn’t find it locally, so ordered some slips from a seed catalog. When they arrived they were limp, light green, partially brown pieces of plant tissue. I couldn’t believe they’d actually grow, but I planted some in a large container.

Only one survived, and for a long time I felt like I was watering a dead plant. Eventually, improbably, it started to grow leaves. It’s now a lush, beautiful plant, but it got going too late. I doubt there are any sweet potatoes of any significant size in the pot. However, I now have healthy plant material to save for next year. I’ll follow Denckla’s advice in The Gardener’s A-Z guide to Growing Organic Food for harvesting and rooting plant material for the next crop.

In Praise of Juliet

The Juliet is my favorite tomato cultivar. I know heirloom tomatoes are all the rage these days. They are beautiful and succulent, delicious sliced and sprinkled with just a little salt. I do grow a few large slicing tomatoes, as well as tomatoes for pizza sauce, such as Viva Italia (last year) and Amish Paste (this year). But the little Juliet is dependable, tasty, and prolific; in sum, a sure bet.

These elongated cherry-style tomatoes have performed for me in good soil and bad; in poor weather and great weather. I planted some the summer after we moved into this house, before I’d had a chance to start improving the soil, and was rewarded with dozens of tasty fruits. This summer has been unseasonably cool, and the Juliets are the only cultivars (so far) on which fruit has ripened (partly, or maybe mostly, because they are smaller tomatoes.)

Tomatoes need nighttime temperatures of above 60 degrees F for fruit set, and we have had many nights this summer when the low hovered at or just below that temperature. I consider myself lucky to have as many fruits on all my tomato cultivars as I do. But the Juliets are really loaded with tomatoes, most of them full-size and ready to ripen.

Juliets are less sweet than grape tomatoes, and have a better flavor than the traditional cherry tomato. They will complement a salsa or stand up to a pasta sauce. They’re also ideal for drying, with thick walls and little pulp. Apparently, you just slice them in half, push out the pulp, turn inside out, and place in the dryer, skin side down.

The University of Wisconsin extension advises against solar food drying because the weather here is humid. However, Minnesota homesteaders Larisa Walk and her husband Bob Dahse have designed a solar food dryer that works in our climate. Instructions for building one are in Walk’s booklet A Pantry Full of Sunshine, which you can purchase through their website.

Sue Robishaw, another upper Midwestern homesteader, has built the dryer and reports that:

[It] works by convection, drawing air in at the bottom which flows across the trays of food and exits out the top taking moisture with it. And it works in the humid Midwest because there isn’t much space in the dryer for that moist air to hang around in – it quickly moves out.

I plan to build the dryer this winter and try it out next year. If you’ve ever canned tomatoes, you know what a job it is – blanching, peeling, packing hot jars – made more miserable because you’re usually slaving over a hot stove during the hottest time of year. If the tomato drying works out, I may never can another tomato, except as pizza or pasta sauce. The thought of escaping a sweltering kitchen for the chaise lounge in the shade with a good book while the sun dries my tomatoes is very appealing. And I’m told sun-dried tomato-based pasta sauces in winter are delicious.

The only complication with Juliets is that they are hybrids, meaning that saved seeds will not breed true. A major reason heirloom vegetables are so popular now is because the seeds can be saved. So, how will I minimize purchased inputs and do an end run around corporate seed producers? By taking cuttings from this year’s plants.

I’ve done this successfully with annuals like geraniums and coleus. Tomatoes are perennials in warm climates and easily grow adventitious roots along any section of stem that is beneath the soil line. They’ll probably get a bit spindly over the winter, and certainly won’t produce fruit, but in early spring I’ll take cuttings from new growth on these little seedlings and put them under grow lights with other seeds I’m starting. By the time it’s warm enough to plant them out, they should be sturdy plants.

Apples of the Earth/Pommes de Terre

I consider potatoes indispensible for a Backyard Nest Egg. They fall into the category “sure bets” because they are easy to grow and productive in small spaces using large containers or potato “towers.” Saving seed potatoes is also relatively simple, thus minimizing your purchased inputs for the next year’s crop. Potatoes don't require energy and labor intensive preservation processes such as canning or freezing. All you need is a cool, humid spot for storage (we plan to use the crawl space in our basement).

Potatoes are also a nutritious source of calories that will see you through hard times, if necessary. In his remarkable book, Indian Givers: How the Indians of the Americas Transformed the World, Jack Weatherford credits the introduction of potatoes from the Andes to Europe with stabilizing food production, decreasing debilitating cycles of famine, improving the overall health of the people, and increasing population.

Prior to the widespread cultivation of potatoes, Weatherford points out:

[T]he Old World depended primarily on grain crops of domesticated grasses such as wheat, rye, barley, and oats in Europe and the Near East, rice in the Far East, and millet and sorghum in Africa . . . Because [grains] grow on high stalks above the ground, they are easy prey to the destructive elements of wind, hail, heavy rain, and snow as well as to birds, insects, and animals . . . For as long as the Old World depended on grain crops, the great population and power centers remained in the warmer southern nations around the Mediterranean, where the grains flourished (p65).

In addition to being less vulnerable to the elements than grains, potatoes require less work to cultivate, produce more calories per field planted, and have a shorter growing season. Potatoes also provided northern Europeans with new source of vitamin C during winter.

(Eaten with their skins, potatoes are a significant source of vitamin C, a moderate source of iron (better absorbed because of the vitamin C), and are good sources of vitamins B1, B3 and B6, and minerals such potassium, phosphorus and magnesium.) Further, because potatoes produce fewer dental cavities than do grains, “the northern Europeans retained strong teeth until an older age, and this improved their general health” (p68).

Weatherford claims that this new source of nutrition and calories was major factor in the power shift in the 18th and 19th centuries from Spain and France toward Germany and Britain and that “finally all were eclipsed by Russia” (p70). Around 1988, when his book was published, Russia was the world’s greatest producer of potatoes, and among the greatest consumers of potatoes. Interestingly,

the largest producer of potatoes today is China, which produced in 2007 twice the tonnage of potatoes as second-ranked Russia. (The United States ranks 4th in production).

Potatoes are often associated with famine in minds of Americans, largely because of the 19th century waves of Irish immigration due to potato crop failure in that country. However, scholars generally agree that the disaster could have been averted had the Irish planted many varieties of potatoes, as do the indigenous people of the Andes, instead of relying on just a few.

If hard times are indeed upon us, (and propaganda about “green shoots” notwithstanding, I think they are), maybe we all ought to plant a few potatoes. So this year I started my first crop. Previously, I thought a lot of space was required for growing potatoes. Besides, I reasoned, you can get potatoes cheaply in the supermarket. It would make more sense to focus on things that are expensive, like cherries, or that are significantly better-tasting from a home garden, like tomatoes.

Once it occurred to me to try growing them in containers, I found many good sources of information on how to do it. The basic idea is to grow them vertically, because potatoes, (botanically speaking), are stem tissue. So, fill your container about 1/3 full of soil, plant your potatoes, and cover with two inches of soil. Once your shoots get to be about 6 inches tall, add soil, leaving just three inches of vine above the soil line. Continue this process until your container is full. (Nichols McGee and Stuckey provide complete instructions in their book The Bountiful Container.)

I started with two large pots on the deck, one planted with Red Norlands and the other German butterball potatoes. Then I waited for the blossoms that the books said would appear at time of harvest. The blossoms never came, and the vines, which had been healthy, began dying back. I did a bit more research and learned that some potatoes don’t flower.

So we decided to attempt a harvest. We dug into the container about 4 or 5 inches down, feeling for potatoes, but couldn't find any. I was a little dejected, but Rick pointed out that since the vines were dead anyway, we might as well empty the pot.

We spread out a tarp (so we could reuse the soil) and Rick dumped the contents. We were excited to see a few potatoes and began digging through the soil like it was a treasure hunt. Eventually, we harvested 5 pounds of potatoes from that one pot, as well as 8 potatoes small enough to be used as seed potatoes.

The butterball potatoes look like they’re about ready to harvest, and we have another patch of Red Norlands in the garden. We’re so thrilled with our success, we set a goal of growing and storing enough potatoes next year to see us through the winter. (It turns out that, like tomatoes, home-grown potatoes are much more delicious than any I’ve ever bought in a supermarket.)

The Bountiful Container has instructions for growing potatoes in 20 gallon cans. But I think we’re going to try potato towers next year.

This article claims 100 pounds of potatoes can be grown in a tower with a four square foot base! Rick and I don’t need that many potatoes; but that level of production would be pretty cool. I’d give some away to family and friends, and haul some away to the food bank. The rest I’d store, with some sprigs of sage. Tanya Denckla reports, in The Gardener’s A-Z Guide to Growing Organic Food, that some aromatic herbs, such as sage, English lavender, spearmint and rosemary inhibit potato sprouting.

Meanwhile, I’m looking forward to harvesting this year’s German butterballs and the second batch of Red Norlands. And dreaming of tasty potato dishes this winter. Creamy ham, leek, and potato soup . . . Potatoes roasted with olive oil and rosemary . . . Mashed potatoes piled atop Shepherd’s pie and browned crispy on top, hot and fluffy below… Mmmm…

Hot Picks in a Cool Summer

I’m gradually developing a set a principles for gardening as a nest egg, or an investment in food security. They include things like minimizing purchased inputs, such as fertilizer, by making your own compost and keeping chickens for manure, finding and developing methods for simplifying the work, so that even into old age, one can continue to garden, planting perennial fruits and vegetables, such as berry bushes, asparagus, and multiplier onions, and planting what I call “sure bets.”

“Sure bets” are crops you can count in, in good times and bad; crops that will produce in poor soil or when the weather doesn’t cooperate. In some cases, a “sure bet” may be a specific cultivar. In others, it may be a method of growing that can be counted on as a “sure bet.”

Here in Madison, Wisconsin, the summer has been unseasonably cool, frequently with night-time lows in the 50s and daytime highs only in the 70s. We had a record low high in mid-July of only 66 degrees F. Because I kept a fairly good gardening journal last year, with lots of photographs, it’s glaringly obvious that my vegetable garden is far behind where it was this time last year. If I really needed to produce a significant proportion of our vegetables in our backyard, (as I think many of us will have to do in the future), we’d go hungry this year.

However, I did actually harvest some warm weather vegetables last week-end, during our record low high. How did I do it? I grew those vegetables in clay pots placed on stone pavers. I learned this lesson last year when I grew jalapeños along a southern facing wall, hoping for reflected heat and light. They limped along and produced a few chiles, but the outstanding performer was a single Anaheim in a clay pot. We harvested dozens of chiles from that single plant. I was astonished because, although I knew the clay pot would be warm, I thought the southern wall strategy, that I’d used to good effect when we were living in the Pacific Northwest, would work as well, or better, since the plants were in the ground. I had no idea that a vegetable in a container could be so prolific.

So this year I planted all my chiles in clay pots (I have half a dozen – jalapeños, Anaheims, and poblanos), harvested the first 8 during our record low high week-end, and enjoyed some fresh salsa. I had a similar experience with eggplants last year, planted another in a clay pot this year, and have already harvested and grilled the beautiful fruit you see in the photo above.

Containers are invaluable in small gardens, where space is at a premium. Clearly, clay pots are also about as sure a bet as you can get when it comes to improving production in cool climates. Don’t waste precious time, like I did, learning the hard way how best to use containers. Get Rose Marie Nichols McGee and Maggie Stuckey’s terrific book The Bountiful Container.

I've picked up other, more lavishly illustrated container gardening books, with gorgeous color photographs, for just a few dollars on remainder. They're worth almost what I paid for them when it comes to advice for actually producing a significant crop. McGee and Stuckey’s book is packed with useful information, including which vegetables and fruits are worth trying to grow in containers and which are not, which varieties grow best, methods of planting, plant diseases, garden design, and recipes. It’s the only container gardening book I’ve found that is serious about food production.