The Usefullness of Cilantro

Cilantro is a mainstay of our cooler season garden. We love having it in meals and it also provides a pretty green spot in our garden. But besides eating the leaves, did you know about all the other parts you can eat? And did you know that it’s thought to be an aphrodisiac? And helps with digestion? And is the oldest herb mentioned in literature? Who knew?

We typically grow cilantro from seed in late winter and fall and it always grows healthy and large. We put it in full sun and provide it with moist soil and it grows to about a foot tall. During the times when we’re really on top of it, we’ll plant a handful of seeds every few weeks so we have a constant supply of it. But once we have had our fill and the season starts to change, it sends up these beautiful white flowers.

After the flowers come, they develop little round seed pods that when dried are commonly called coriander in America. In other countries both the leaves as well as the seedpods can be called coriander, so make sure to read your recipes carefully to find out what part of the plant they mean. Dried coriander seeds are commonly used in Indian curries. We’ve tied ours upside down until they fully dry. We’re looking forward to some delicious curries this winter.

While I knew about eating the leaves and seeds, I just found out that you can also eat the roots. I read about that in Ruth Reichl’s book, Comfort Me With Apples(which is a fantastic read). On her trip to Thailand, she discovers them making stir fries with cilantro root. We haven’t tried this yet, has anyone else? At first glance, they don’t look especially appetizing, but we should give it a try one of these days.

The taste of cilantro is pretty distinct. Do you like it? Or do you hate cilantro? You might not if you are of European heritage. It’s been said that those of European descent don’t care for it, and thinking of it, cilantro or coriander has never been a big hit in Europe. My mom can’t stand the stuff, but me, oh I really enjoy it. What do you think of it?

The Perfect B for your BLT

It’s official, the Brandywines are ripe and it’s BLT season. We had our first one last week and it was divine! There’s a lot of talk about choosing the perfect tomato for a BLT. And of course if you aren’t already growing some, you pick out a nice head of organic lettuce, but you can’t just pick up a pack of cheap old Farmer Johns bacon. Oh no, you’ve got to find some really good bacon.

Well, last year we did a 12 month intensive search for the perfect bacon, by way of the Bacon of the Month Club, and we’ve found the perfect BLT bacon. We really liked using a pepper bacon, because it adds a nice spiciness. However, it can’t be too spicy because that distracts. And you don’t want a really smokey bacon, because, well, that’s just too smokey. But Hempler’s pepper bacon is perfect. It’s just the right mix of smoky, peppery, meaty, crispy goodness for your BLT. You can order it online here. And if you are feeling really indulgent, you too should try a full year of the Bacon of the Month Club. It’s great fun to have bacon delievered to your door each month.

All about our Carrots

I’m quite convinced that everyone needs a few purple haze carrots in their life. Especially sliced thin. So beautiful. This is what I like about growing our own food. We have the option to fill our meals with little works of art like these. They say it’s the small things in life that make you rich. This is one of those small things that we try and fill our days with. Sliced purple haze carrots. And our lives are ever so slightly improved because of them.

We picked (or rather Scott picked) all of the carrots around the tomatoes Saturday. He was inspired after reading the “All About Growing Carrots” article in the new Mother Earth News. They wrote that you shouldn’t leave mature carrots in warm soil any longer than necessary because critters start to find them. And we have started to notice that a few were getting nibbled on.

We also learned that carrots are divided into five types: Nante, Chantenay, Miniature, Imperator and Danvers. our Purple Haze falls into the Imperator category which means that they have long, tapered roots with stocky shoulders and that they store well.

Our little Thumbelinas rightly fall into the Miniature category, who’s notes say that they have a sweet flavor when mature and have only limited storage potential.

So what can we do with this carrot bounty? Well, we can freeze them, eat them raw, can them, pickle them, but I prefer the carrot cake option. Yes, I see a carrot cake in our near future.

Beans and Cucumbers like each other

After reading Carrots Love Tomatoes, the past two growing seasons we’ve been experimenting with companions planting. We already have our carrots planted with our tomatoes and now we are trying beans and cucumbers together. Beans, as with most legumes (like our winter fava cover crop), draw up nitrogen from down deep in the soil, brings it up and fixes it as little white nitrogen nodules to their roots. You don’t have to fertilize beans, in fact they really don’t like being fertilized, because they can do it themselves.

Cucumbers on the other hand are heavy feeders and like a lot of fertilization. But we’ve read if you plant them along with plenty of beans, the beans fertilize the cucumbers without you having to do a thing. We like that ‘not having to do a thing’ part, a lot! And so far, its worked. We have both more beans and cucumbers than we can eat and both plants look happy and healthy.

The only issue we’ve found with planting these two together is that cucumbers like a little more water and beans like a little less water. We’ve done our best to accommodate both by focusing our water on the cucumbers and it seems to be working.

If you haven’t read Carrots Love Tomatoes you should give it a try. It has really helped us.

Also, A Sonoma Garden is featured in this week’s Home Preserving Blog Carnival. Go see what other home preservers are doing.

Our Little Praying Pet + Free Download

The other day while walking through the yard with my camera I glanced down at my shoulder and saw this little guy sitting on it. There he was sitting here, just along for a free ride, as I strolled along. Of course my little one wanted desperately to hold him. This hasn’t been the first time we’ve had a hitch hiking praying mantis. They are friendly little creatures and love to hop on for a free ride when they see that you’re walking through the garden. And they’re bad ass too. Read this description I got from Wikipedia:

Mantises are notable for their hunting abilities. They are exclusively predatory, and their diet usually consists of living insects, including flies and aphids; larger species have been known to prey on small lizards, frogs, birds, snakes, and even rodents. Most mantises are ambush predators, waiting for prey to stray too near. The mantis then lashes out at remarkable speed. Some ground and bark species, however, pursue their prey rather quickly. Prey are caught and held securely with grasping, spiked forelegs (”raptorial legs”); the first thoracic segment, the prothorax, is commonly elongated and flexibly articulated, allowing for greater range of movement of the front limbs while the remainder of the body remains more or less immobile. The articulation of the head is also remarkably flexible, permitting nearly 300 degrees of movement in some species, allowing for a great range of vision (their compound eyes have a large binocular field of vision) without having to move the remainder of the body.

Ellen asked me the other day what we did for pest control so Scott and I had a talk about it this morning over breakfast. And really, we take a preventative approach to pests. When we first moved in 6 growing seasons ago, we did have a pest problem, and a lack of water retention problem, and a whole lot of other problems. Our plants were small and bug eaten, but as we’ve learned more and more about organic gardening we’ve learned that the key to pest prevention is to nurture healthy plants. Give them highly nutritious soil, water them correctly and provide habitats for beneficial insects.

Now while we do have our fair share of white flies, aphids, grasshoppers and other pests out in the yard, after six years of returning the soil back to health, we have them outnumbered with ladybugs, praying mantis’, birds, chickens, soldier beetles and all sorts of good little guys. And really at this point we don’t do much to control the bad bugs. We collect snails when we see them and pick off a worm or two, but at this point we let nature take it’s course and live with the little bug bites we do get. Of course, that’s not to say that we haven’t lost a plant or two, but really that was my own lazy fault for not jumping onto of the situation earlier.

If you’d like to read up more about different pests and what you can do to organically treat them you can download this free pdf. It’s an exerpt from the ebook I have over in my sidebar: How to Start an Organic Garden. You can download the pdf here, it’s full of photos and treatment ideas and its yours for the taking.

Confession

The thing about gardening is that once you figure out a few things and start to think that maybe you’ve got a handle on this whole ‘growing food’ thing, you get humbled. Then you start a blog and make your random musings public and then you find out you’re wrong and you really feel like you have mud on your face. So it’s confessional time.

Let’s start out with the zucchini’s. I was totally wrong. Those little lady flowers do need to be pollenated by bees that have also visited the male flowers. I found this out soon after my posting when I on my ‘useless male’ high horse went out and clipped off all the male flowers for quesadillas. The next day I found a poor shriveled four inch dying zucchini. The thing with these squash are that they grow really fast, so those woman flowers don’t get a chance to open up until the zucchini are already five or so inches long. If it doesn’t get pollenated it shrivels and dies, if it does get pollenated, it keeps getting bigger.

Want to hear about our garlic failure too? Remember all that lovely hardneck garlic we picked? Yep, well, we picked it too early and half of it rotted. That was a very grim discovery. There’s so much moisture in those garlic heads that you really do need to wait until the plant dries up and browns before you pick it, or, it rots.

Next up. Fenugreek. I don’t know what we did wrong with it. It looked great when it first sprouted, lovely green with pink edged leaves. Then it got kind of spindly, then kind of brown. Were we giving it too much water? Too little? Did we plant them too close together? Are they supposed to look spindly? Anyway, somehow it’s unhappy, but there are a handful of big seed pods forming so at least we’ll have a little bit for making Indian food.

So there you go. Just a few garden failures of many I suppose. Scott attended a weed class this past weekend (more on that soon) and the woman teaching was announced as having 22 years of experience. It sounds like a lot, but the teacher said, “Really, it’s not that much experience, it means I’ve only grown tomatoes 22 times.” When you put it that way, it really doesn’t sound like that much. I guess we’re all just learning as we go, really.

Any gardening confessionals you need to make?

Weeds and Why They Grow

Here’s an unusual read for Green Bean’s Bookworm Challenge.

I bet you never thought that weeds are really an indication of the nutrients in your soil. I never did. I just thought certain weeds grew where they grew because they just kept sprouting from the year before. But by changing the nutrient content of your soil can actually allow new weeds to grow and stop the growth of weeds you currently have. Interesting, isn’t it? I never would have thought. We learned this all in a book that Scott ordered called, “Weeds and Why They Grow” by Jay McCamen from Moses (Midwest Organic and Sustainable Education Service, Inc.)

The root systems of some weeds, especially perennials, can penetrate deep into the subsoil to loosen it. Some weed roots can go down into the soil as much as twenty feet, breaking up the soil and improving drainage and aeration. They also bring up minerals and make it possible for the root systems of other plants, such as vegetables, to use those minerals and natural aeration.

As I mentioned, you can identify problems in your soil by what weeds are growing in it. There is a detailed chart that lists almost every weed out there and the soil nutients that allow that weed to proser. Through reading this book and looking in our yard, we found that the prolific srouting of purslane, amaranth, dandelions and some others that we have a calcium deficiency. That would also explain our yearly battle with blossom end rot on our San Marzanos. So off to the nursery we went, and back we came with liquid calcium which the man working there said is the best way to apply calcium at this stage in the growing cycle.

So once we get our calcium problem fixed, will the purslane, amaranth and dandelions leave? Quite possibly. And in its place maybe red clover will arrive. How will it get there? Well weed seeds can lie dormant and viable in the soil for as long as 30, 50, even 70 years! They are just waiting for a spec of light and for their proper soil conditions to sprout. (I’m serious about that spec of light, a fraction of a second of sunlight will do to get it growing, which is why he recommends tilling at night.)

Another thing I learned is that a garden that is free from weeds is actually a very unhealthy garden. When very little weeds grow it means the soil is actually extremely unhealthy. So it’s a good thing if you have weeds. Heathly weeds mean a healthy soil.

Dandelion Goodness

So by now, my regular readers are rolling their eyes saying, “Another weed post, Kendra? Give it up already, let’s talk about real vegetables.” Well, I can’t seem to give my weed obsession up. And I found another place to cater to it. You may have noticed it on my sidebar, but I have a link now to Learning Herbs. It’s a pretty neat place where they teach you all about how to make herbal goodies out of things you have growing in your own yard, medicines, teas, food recipes, etc.

The owners, John and Kimberly, has compiled an ebook which you can get for free if you sign up for their newsletter and its pretty interesting. It’s all about how to make home remedies. They even have good uses for lavender which is my all time favorite fragrance and flower, and it just happens to be blooming right now.

Their first newsletter has a recipe for how to make dandelion lemonade with dandelion flowers. Our flowers are all gone by now, but I’m going to save this for next year. They say, “dandelion blossoms steeped as tea can help relieve headaches, menstrual cramps, backaches, stomach aches and even depression.” Cool stuff isn’t it?

A Little Zucchini Sex for You

We don’t get much time for uninterrupted talking time these days. With two talkative kids who constantly ask questions, fight and need a booboo kissed, its a rare moment when we can utter more than a three word sentence to each other. But this weekend we got a moment and what did we talk about? Oh, that’d be zucchini sex. You know, what every couple talks about in their spare time. (We seriously need to get a life!) But I thought I’d share with you our findings on zucchini sex. Mind you, these musing are only learned by observation and not by fact or science or anything reliable other than our experiences.

So I posted that beautiful picture of the zucchini blossom the other day and I expected to see a zucchini grow from it, however when I walked out into the garden yesterday it was completely dried up and dead with no sort of zucchini in store. However when I looked at the next door plant there was this below zucchini growing just fine and the flower hadn’t opened at all yet. What the heck?

Well, Scott explained that the first flower I saw was a male flower and they don’t produce zucchini, their job is to provide pollen for the female flowers. Okay, that makes sense. But then why is the female producing a zucchini when she hasn’t yet been pollenated? Well the answer, we think is that its a hybrid. Heirloom females do need the male’s pollen to produce an offspring, but it looks like hybrid women are, ahem, self sufficient in the fertilization area. There you go ladies, in the hybrid zucchini world, men are totally useless.

We, in the past have always grown heirloom zucchinis, but when our neighbor gave us one of this Portofino squash last year, we had to try growing our own. The one he gave us was large, over a foot long, but the flower was still in tact at the end of it. We liked it because it had that crisp skin and sweet taste that the young, small zucks have without the pulpy seedyness that the older heirlooms get. And of course the hybrids wouldn’t get seedy, because they aren’t breed for saving seeds. They are breed so that you’ll buy seeds again the next year (tricky little business move, eh?).

So, what are we going to do with all these useless men? Eat them of course (very black widow of us, isn’t it?). Hopefully in the days and weeks to come I’ll be able to share with you some squash blossom recipes. Oh, and since you’re dying to know, the later planted zucchinis are the ones that have the first zucchinis on them. So back to my on-going self-debate, its not worth it to plant seeds ahead of time.

(Oh thanks to Compostings for such a lovely write up about us, we’re blushing.)

7 Things to Improve Your Soil

We’ve been thinking a lot about dirt lately. Or, rather ’soil’ as we gardeners like to say. We’ve been thinking about weeds and learning about how you can tell a lot about your soil by what weeds grow in it. We’re just starting to learn about this so we’ll keep you posted. But it’s gotten me to think about how as gardeners we are truly stewards of the soil. Any organic gardener knows that your plants are only as healthy as your soil, so its important to take excellent care of it. The best way to ensure your soils health is to add plenty of organic matter. Sure, we know that the three big soil nutrients are nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium, but macro and micro nutrients are also critical because those are are what break down the organic matter to release the nutrients to your plants. Here’s a list of things you can easily do to improve your soils health.

1. For new garden beds, mix one inch of compost or 3 inches of grass clippings into the top 6 inches of soil.

2. Mulch around plants with 2 inches of grass clippings, coffee ground or compost which will slowly add nutrients to the soil and encourage earthworms and other soil organisms

3. Apply a spray of compost tea. Compost tea is low in nutrients but high in micronutrients

4. Plant a living mulch this summer such as oats or white dutch clover around your vegetables. Their roots will loosen compacted soil and concentrate nutrients for your vegetables to feed on.

5. Dry out eggshells and crumble them into the soil for a boost of calcium and micronutrients. (via katrina)

6. Start a compost pile, bin or vermiculture box.

7. Double dig your soil about 2 feet deep, blending in compost as you go. The benefits will last indefinately. This will improve drainage, aeration, improve root growth, encourage earthworms and allow nutrients to be evenly spread through the root zone.

All these ideas are pretty easy things that you can do this weekend. I hope you try a few!