Straight from the Farm

The other day something so utterly bizarre happened that I literally stopped in my tracks and stared, mouth agape. There, among a box of seeds sitting on a neighbors porch, was a packet of purslane seeds!   Any gardener worth his or her salt knows that purslane is a nasty invasive weed that can take over a garden plot in a week if left to its own devices.  Who the heck would sell its seeds?  And why the heck would anyone buy them?  Sadly, I know the answer to both those questions.  Purslane has recently become a highly favored gourmet addition to salads and such in upscale restaurants.  I’m guessing some marketing guru got the notion to sell its seeds, not knowing enough about its cultivation to realize it was a weed!  I could only shake my head in disbelief.

Eating weeds is not a new concept though.  In fact, I think it’s one that should be highly encouraged, with a little weed identification education of course.  Don’t go out and eat just any weed. Only some are edible.  But once you know what is edible – and some are quite delicious – go get ‘em! 

It certainly is a unique way to clean out the invasive species from your garden or local park.  One caveat though when foraging for edible weeds: be sure you know if they’ve been sprayed.  It’s best to get them out of your own garden or overgrown backyard if you can. And let’s face it, we all have a weed or two somewhere.  

I’ve been doing a lot of weed pulling in my new line of work/study and one that repeatedly rears its unusually pretty head is garlic mustard.  It’s a member of the Brassicaceae family (the one with broccoli and cabbage in it), and it gets the same small white flowers when it bolts into seed.  It spends its first year low to the ground though as a mounded rosette of deep green kidney-shaped leaves.  It’s a little harder to identify if you don’t know what you’re looking for, but I think these younger clumps make for better eating. 

While pulling a few hundred garlic mustard plants, I meditated on the name and decided it surely must be edible with a name that included two delicious flavor agents.  After a little research, I learned it was once a very regular part of the colonial diet as an herb and salad green, particularly in winter when not much other green leafy stuff was available (garlic mustard pops its head up before anything else in the Northeast which is one of the reasons why it’s such a “successful” weed).  Since it’s a prolific seeder, at some point it no doubt got out in the woods where it grew like crazy in the shade and has ever since been the scourge of all those horticulturalist intent upon preserving native undergrowth in our woodlands. 

I’m always intrigued by older food traditions and the idea of putting a weed to good use, much like my beloved sorrel (weed-turned-delicacy), set my cook senses tingling.  Since I was thinking of sorrel as a good cultural comparison and maybe even somewhat similar in flavor, I decided to revisit the recipe I created for sorrel almond pesto to see if I could make a spring version of that more summery dish.  I still have some frozen basil on hand and instead of fresh tomatoes accompanying the pesto, I put the last of my oven-dried tomatoes to use.  Presto, some fresh *spring* pesto!   And a few less weeds in my yard to boot!

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Two weeks of having my new garden, and I finally feel like I’m making some progress with it.   Digging the pathways and raised beds was quite the laborious task and took a lot more time than I anticipated.  But I wanted to do the framework right, putting in deep paths with a deep layer of mulch so weeds and mud will be staved off most of the time. 

Grunt work done, it was time to get planting.  It’s already quite late in the seaons to be planting some of the cool weather spring crops.  But since I already had the seeds, I figured it was worth putting a few in just to see what would happen.   On April 24th, I sowed seeds for Easter Egg Radishes (Raphanus sativus), Sugar Snap Peas (Pisum sativum), and an “antique” lettuce cutting mix (Lactuca sativa).  For the radishes, I put in a 3′ x 5′ section of one of my raised bed.  For the peas and lettuce, I sowed them together in the same section of another raised bed, hoping the peas growing up the trellis will eventually provide enough shade to keep the lettuce happy a little longer in this unseasonably warm spring.  If nothing else, I can hang a tent of filmy cloth from the trellis too.  Granted, this little scheme of mine depends in part on the peas taking off themselves, a challenge on dry near-80 degree days like we’ve been having this April.   Fingers crossed! 

    
                Radish Seeds                                Sugar Snap Pea Sees

In any case, I sowed 20 peas and broadcast a 2′ x 6′ section of the lettuce seeds.   I wish I had talked to Harold, one of my teachers, a little sooner about some of his helpful tricks for planting in clay-rich soil like what’s in my garden.  Next time I direct sow small seeds like lettuce and radish, I’ll follow his advice and cover them with potting soil instead of the existing dirt that tends to form a hard crust that diminishes germination success. (Of course this is only practical advice for the home gardener with a small manageable plot.  Farmers would be hard pressed to do this.)   Live and learn, right?

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my garden as it looked at the end of my first day of digging in it

It took a week and several revisions, but I’ve finally come up with what I think is my final design for this year’s garden.  It consists of four long raised beds for the vegetable plot, each three feet wide.  Figuring out that part was easy.  The design of the herbaceous/ornamental plot was a whole different beast.  

I wasn’t exactly intimidated by it so much as I was uninspired.  I knew that I wanted to focus a good portion on growing flowers for cutting as that’s an area of interest for me moving forward in my horticulture career.   I also wanted enough room for a “tea garden”, a section that will allow me to experiment with new herbs in order to broaden my portfolio of homemade teas.   Here’s the starter list for that:  

Another general group of plants that interest me are seedums, something I know little about but am very intrigued by their shapes and textures.  I put them on the original design layout but really had no vision for their presentation.  Then the horticulture gods smiled upon me, and I was gifted with three baby Metasequoia trees.  They were just the jolt of inspiration I needed to get going with some ideas.  The major design element of my herbaceous area will be a constructed “bank” to showcase a sweep of succulents resting under the three trees that are now anchoring the bank at its highest point (more on how I engineered this bank to come).  Tucked in below the bank of succulents will be my tea garden, assuming all those herbs can play nice in such a small space.   

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What did you do to celebrate Earth Day? 
I planted a couple baby Metasequoia (redwood) trees. 
Fun!
(that’s not a metasequoia above; it’s a magnolia)

You might have noticed that I haven’t been very, um, active in the kitchen lately.  I’ve already explained that in part a few posts back.  But I didn’t realize just how much having dirt under my nails every day now would divert my attention.  I gotta scrub for a good fifteen minutes before anyone would be wanting me in the kitchen! 

But I’m not complaining.  Nope.  I’m lovin’ the ride so far.  I broke ground on my garden plot this week, something I’m absolutely dying to tell to you about, but I haven’t got the photos I want just yet to put up that post.  I keep changing my plot layout, and I want to get that solidified first.  I will tell you about what I’m planting first (tomorrow, in fact).  I’ve got an antique lettuce mix, sugar snap peas, “easter egg” radishes, and sorrel.  I’ll be direct seeding all of those considering the current hot streak here in the Northeast.  These cool weather crops are going to need to get started as fast as possible if they’re going to have a productive spring before the real heat wave hits. 

But this is a recipe post, not at garden post.  So, I did get in the kitchen on an evening this past week, one of the evenings I didn’t have a class, a meeting, or a lecture to attend (there seems to be one almost every night now), but I didn’t quite have the energy to start from square one.  What to do…what to do?  I spied the leftover roasted roots in the fridge, looking a little worse for the wear (certainly lacking any “crispy” factor), and got the notion to make a quick soup with them.  

I’m a sucker for lentils in soup.  And I’m an even bigger sucker for how pretty uncooked red lentils are (if only they stayed so pretty after boiling).  I know they’re rather unassuming, but I’m still drawn in by their perfect circular shape and the feel of them running through my fingers.  I thought I was a bit of an oddball until I saw Amelie, my favorite movie of all time, and the scene at the grocers where she takes pleasure in running her hands through sacks of legumes.  

Since red lentils cook so quickly, they seemed a good match for my roasted root soup idea.  So there were lentils and there were roasted roots, but quite frankly, the rest of it is a bit fuzzy.  I’ll do my best to recap in a recipe that will let you recreate this silky smokey soup.  The pureed red lentils make this soup thick and filling.  If you don’t have the exact same mix of roasted roots, you can still make the soup with only roasted potatoes. 

So here goes with the “recipe”… if anyone notices anything terribly amiss, feel free to point it out.

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