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(DJ Mitchell Photo) Suellen & Annie
This picture is our East view. Obviously taken during a warmer time of the year. DJ is already getting spring fever and has ordered some seeds for the garden.
Another resource from Google Books: A Garden of Herbs: Being A Practical Handbook To The Making Of An Old English Herb Garden Together With Numerous Receipts From Contemporary Authorities. By Eleanour Sinclair Rohde (1920).
This fascinating book discusses the hows and whys of creating an intricately designed herb garden of the traditional English style. It covers design and herb selecion, with thought toward what to do with the herbs grown: salads and other recipes fill several chapters. From p. 147:
A Brave Warming Salad for Winter: Spinnage, sorrel, lettuce, and a few onions then add oyl, vinegar, and salt, balm, pepper grass, mint, endive, young green buds of cole worts, and garlic. (Tryon: A Treatise of Cleanness in Meats 1692.)
And from page 166, under herbal drinks:
To Make a Tysand: Take borage, sorrell, endive, cinquefoil, two or three handfuls of barley, then take halfe a handful of red fennell rootes and a quantity of liquorice sugar candie, figges, dates, great Raisins; boyle all together from a gallon to three pintes and strain. The Good Housewife’s Handmaid 1588.
Several weeks after our first frost, with many nights dipping into the low teens, only the hardiest of vegetables are still standing. In our garden, that means chard, our last surviving crop. We planted five-color chard for the second year this year and found it not only tasty, but sturdy as well.
We like it baked. Break off the stems. brush (or spray) it with oil– olive oil adds nice flavor– and sprinkle with salt if desired. Arrange it on a baking sheet in a single layer. Then bake it in the oven with whatever else you’re cooking. Depending on the temp, it may take 4-10 minutes, until it’s just crisped. Serve plain or with seasoned vinegar.
I have these two plants growing in my garden, and I thought they were eggplant. they had small, purple fruits, but the fruits never seemed to get bigger. I got online and searched for eggplant varieties: nothing looked similar. So I thought maybe it was a tomato: again, no match. It didn’t look like any sort of tomatillo or ground cherry that I might have planted, either. Yet the leaves looked somwhat like a tomato…
At this point I began to get concerned. What the heck was growing in my garden? I called an avid gardening friend, who suggested perhaps it was a tree tomato, or tamarillo. I looked at the pictures and decided it wasn’t that either. But in the course of my research, I ran across a familar name: garden huckleberry. I searched for that, and found this information:
The Garden Huckleberry (Solanum nigrum var. melanocerasum) is probably not what one would necessarily add when making up their seed lists for the garden. Often it may come with your seed order as a free gift along with Vine Peach (Cucumis melo) or some other oddity that would normally sit on the shelf of a seed retailer for almost ever.
And indeed that is exactly what happened: a seed retailer threw in two free gifts, garden huckleberry and vine peach (which is a variety of cantelope). I planted them both, and completely forgot about the garden huckleberries.
The garden huckleberry is not a berry at all, but a nightshade, a distant relative of the tomato. The green fruits are poisonous, but the purple fruits are edible. They’re a bit bland, and require lemon juice to perk them up, but for those of us living in “fruit tree challenged” soil, it’s a forgiving annual plant that lets us harvest at leasta little of our own fruit.
I found recipes online for pies and preserves, but haven’t tried them yet…
As gardens begin to deluge us with fresh vegetables, we may wonder what to do with it all. Give it to the neighbors? Throw it out? Feed it to the chickens?
Don’t despair: one solution is to can foods in canning jars for later use. Most foods will last at least a year when canned; some will last much longer.
Last weekend, we made salsa from our tomatoes, peppers, onions, and parsley. Add a little garlic, cumin coriander, and vinegar. Throw it all in the Salsamaker. It’s so much better than store-bought bottles! It’s even better than fresh salsa made with cardboard tomatoes from California.
Canning may seem intimidating, but there are plenty of reliable resources on the web. Check out PickYourOwn.org for example, or the National Center for Home Food Preservation. About.com offers this list of resources. Your local Universty Extension Service probably has tips and recipes. And don’t forget the Ball Blue Book of Preserving, available most places canning jars are sold– it’s filled with instructions, recipes, and tips.
The main thing about canning is, leave yourself plenty of time. You don’t want to skimp on the hot water bath, because that’s what kills all the bacteria. And as long as you’ve got the water hot, you might as well make more than one batch. So take an afternoon, download some recipes, and go at it! Come March, you’ll be glad you did.