Food and Flowers
is almost ( not always) a good thing. But straw isn’t always the best mulch to use.
It’s ideal for tomatoes
These tomato babies have their bases covered in more ways than one.
Strawberries, on the other hand, do better when mulched with pine needles, aka pine straw. Pine needles are slightly acid, which strawberries like, and they’re more inclined to lie flat. This is important for very short fruit plants. Fluffy oat and rye straw tend to shade low leaves, and leaves need sun to make sweetness.
are the happiest tomatoes. Well, not really. Gentle, consistent warmth is what tomato plants want – not only on their leaves and flowers ( tomato pollen is sterilized by temperatures over 85), but also around their roots, which by the way – news flash! – prefer to stay moist.
Tomato Planting Tips
By now your seedlings are probably planted, so it’s too late (for this year) to say the first line of defense is deep planting – set the baby so 1/3 to 1/2 of the stem is underground. Useful new roots will form all along the buried portion.
I used to think it was important to remove leaves and suckers before burial. Bill made fun of me. We did a side by side experiment. He was right; didn’t matter a whit. One less thing.
Ok. They’re in there. Now what? Two things
1. Mulch, really a lot of mulch. We use a thin layer of newspaper – just one fold – under a largish pile of straw. This holds moisture in the soil and helps keep roots from frying. I put my hand down on the uncovered earth when I was weeding yesterday and it was HOT. Not warm. Hot. Not good.
Tomato mulching in progress. The brown paper grocery bags are a thicker weed (and water) barrier. Helpful if your raised beds are really raised. These are about a foot above the paths.
2. Limb them up. If you have no problems with fungus diseases you can stop right here, but if blight has ever visited you, read on.
The scar is difficult to find, but if you look closely at the left side of the stem you’ll see the scar where a branch used to be.
Removing lower leaves and suckers so the stem is naked at the base accomplishes two things:
1. It provides good air circulation, an absolute necessity ( crowding is the mother of disease).
2. It deprives the fungus spores of handy landing spots from which to travel upward. In theory, a timely application of mulch will block spores so they cannot splash up. In practice, it helps but not enough to be relied on exclusively.
Back last November, after going on at some length about leaf sweepers, I promised to discuss growing chrysanthemums like this football – ‘Ticonderoga’ –
at the proper time. Which it more or less is.
For growing instructions:
Read More…
At first glance, it seems like a no-brainer: If you’re going to be an organic gardener, you ought to plant organic seeds. But it would really be better to say: if you’re going to buy organic products, put organic seeds on your shopping list. For home gardeners, the reason – a very good reason – to choose organic seeds is to support organic agriculture. It has very little to do with the seeds themselves.
Why does this matter? Because it means you can organically grow whatever you want. From the garden’s point of view, one bundle of genetic material is pretty much like another (assuming said bundle is good of its kind and has not been treated with fungicide or otherwise messed-with post harvest).* So although organic seed is preferable when available, insisting on its exclusive use is a little like cutting off your nose in order to spite your face.
In many cases, the organic version is available, especially if it’s a common vegetable. But uncommon heirlooms are another story; vast numbers of interesting flowers have not yet been included, and the number of organically grown hybrids is still mighty petite.
I shall stand back now and wait for the anti-hybrid avalanche to roll by, hating hybrids being all the rage these days. Well, ok. Hybrid seeds cannot be saved from year to year; you have to keep buying new ones.** Like many organic seeds, they are mostly produced by large corporations whose interest in sustainability is entirely market-driven, to the extent that it exists. But this doesn’t make hybrids Darth Vader.
In fact, hybrids bred for disease resistance are an environmental plus when they help you use less biocide. Pesticides and fungicides approved for organic gardening are still a long way from benign.
And while it’s true that a great many hybrids don’t taste very good, flavor having been sacrificed for qualities like heavy cropping and long shelf life, it’s also true that some of the tastiest vegetables in all creation are hybrid varieties: Sun Gold cherry tomatoes, Silver Queen corn, Confection winter squash – we just had some for dinner last night. It was terrific.
Spring is just around the corner, time to get ordering.
For the full seed spectrum: open pollinated, hybrid, conventional and organic, try
Johnny’s Selected Seeds, and Territorial Seeds,
For a good sized list of companies that offer organic seeds, potato sets and garlic bulbs, go to ATTRA, the National Sustainable Agriculture Information Service.
* Seeds from plants that thrived under organic management should produce plants that fare better when grown organically in their turn, but as far as I know there has been no scientific trial of this thesis. It would probably take several generations before any differences were evident and my guess is that even then a grower’s abilities – or lack thereof – would far outweigh any advantage conferred in the seed-production stage. Work is being done to create varieties tailored for organic production ( a very different thing), but this whole branch of plant breeding is still in its infancy.
** Actually, it is sometimes possible to “save” hybrid seeds, essentially by selecting and selecting and selecting again, over several generations of large grow-outs. It’s called stabilizing a hybrid and it’s a lot of work.
The cut flower industry is finally beginning to wake up and smell the roses, reports the New York Times. There is money to be made selling organic and sustainably raised flowers.
Lovely, as far as it goes, but like the organic spinach that goes from California to New York, most of those flowers are going a lot farther than necessary.
And of course choices are severely limited; Do not look to online flower sources for combinations like this
Bonica rose and old fashioned lady’s mantle(in garden, but it could have been in vase)
As local tomatoes and strawberries make clear, splendor and short travel time go hand in hand. Same deal with flowers: the closer you can get to homegrown the tastier your options will be.
This is not news to most of you, including Rachael and Jesse, who wrote in last week looking for
“someone in the Hudson valley – Orange, Putnam or Rockland or Westchester – that sells or uses organic or locally grown flowers. We’re having an event early July/late June and would love to support local.”
Having been out of the event racket for over 25 years, I have zip in the way of firsthand info. (if you have any, send it in!), but I can suggest something almost as good and a great deal more widely useful: a visit to Local Harvest, where the national database is searchable by location, crop and type of vendor. A trial request for farms + flowers + Warwick ( the first place I could think of in Orange county) brought up 57 listings and there was a flower farm on the first page so it’s probably one of many.
Finding your perfect match is unlikely to be instant , especially if you use the shopping tips below. It’ll take even longer if you take my advice and cover your posterior by ordering everything you need from two different farms. It’ll cost more too, obviously, but when the event is important it’s worth having insurance.
Most retail flower farms are small; weather is highly variable – a hailstorm might hit one location and leave one 10 miles away unscathed – and in real life, manure happens. Worst case, you’ll have done even more for local farms and will have extras to give away. Flowers for those who’ve helped with the event is always nice, or you could donate them to your local food bank. People who can’t afford enough to eat have probably gone without cut flowers for quite a while.
Flower Farm Shopping Tips:
* Does the grower sell by single variety or single color or, ideally, both? If so, is the price per stem or per bunch and if the latter how large is a bunch?
* Does the grower offer unusual fillers like the lady’s mantle above or the artemisia below?
That’s Queen Anne’s lace being a weed in the artemisia ‘Silver King’, an equally pernicious invader. Plant it once, have it for all time.
* Be sure timing is agreed upon. It’s best to cut flowers in the morning and keep them cool, but the grower may not have much in the way of ideal storage space. The sooner you can pick them up, the sooner you can get them home for proper conditioning.
Last Minute LOCAL Flowers for Valentine’s Day in the Hudson Valley
Yes we can! Rhinebeck’s famous violets have gone the way of les neiges d’antan, but there are two surviving hothouses that grow beautiful anemones and sell them retail, first come first served:
Battenfeld’s and Ralph Pitcher & Sons, (845) 876-3974
An anemone at Battenfeld’s
If you are a gardener with limited space and time whose primary goal is the largest amount of tasty, organic food for the smallest amount of effort, these crops are winners: easy to plant, easy to care for, easy to pick, easy to prepare and in some cases, all four:
* INDETERMINATE TOMATOES are so named because the vines keep getting bigger and producing new fruit until they are felled by frost. The choice of varieties used to be small for those who were starting with purchased seedlings, but these days there’s quite an assortment at farmers markets and garden centers. I even saw baby Brandywines at our local Shaw’s supermarket last year, so something is definitely happening.
In fact, the market for painless exotica has become so large it’s spawned a whole new industry: mail order tomato – and pepper and eggplant – seedlings from nurseries like Laurel’s Heirloom Tomato Plants and Cross Country Nurseries. Choices galore, more than enough to thrill most gardeners, at prices that may also keep them from getting too thrilled for the space available. (The whole idea of mail-ordering annuals takes some getting used to; and importing instead of buying local costs green points as well as dollars. Call a few likely local sources to find out what they plan to offer before ordering from away.)
* NON-HYBRID POLE BEANS. Like indeterminate tomatoes, old fashioned pole beans keep growing and producing ‘til frost – assuming you keep them picked. They may seem like more work than bush beans because you have to provide supports, but bush beans peter out much sooner; picking them is arduous (there’s a reason stoop labor is a synonym for work nobody wants to do); and unlike pole beans, the bush kind must be washed. If they’re mulched, most of them don’t get dirty, but at least a few in every picking need a rinse, so it comes to the same thing.
Lois is picking Rattlesnake pole beans, our favorite for some years now. Vines are disease resistant, drought tolerant and hugely prolific once they start bearing. The purple speckled green beans have great flavor. They stay tender even when quite large, so any given bean can hang in there lookin’ good for at least a week – depending on the weather, of course. And as if that weren’t enough , rattlesnakes hold their quality in the ‘fridge far longer than most snap beans, a virtue that comes in handy at peak season, when the beans are really cranking and there’s a lot of other stuff to eat. All these encomiums apply to Maine and the Hudson Valley, but most catalogs describe the beans as good for growing in the south. From ( among many) JL Hudson.
* ZUCCHINI. Everything they say about avalanches of zucchini is true, especially of hybrid varieties none of which unfortunately is as delicious as Costata Romanesco. This heirloom takes longer to start bearing than modern zucchinis; it has the prickly leaves characteristic of “unimproved” varieties; and it makes big sprawly plants instead of tidy bushes. Not good for containers or planting beside the front walk. The high return is the flavor; if space is tight pass it by and go for a hybrid – most of them are fine if you pick them young.
* SWISS CHARD. Plants hold without bolting from spring through fall in all but the hottest summer areas. There’s no need to harvest whole plants; you can keep breaking off outer leaves for months and every picking will be tender as long as plants get enough water. Unlike, for instance, curly kales, even the crumpled-leaf varieties tend to grow clean because they grow so stiffly upright. Break the leaves off carefully and place them in the basket ditto and all you have to do is rinse the bases maybe.
You are supposed to wash everything, btw, even if you have grown it organically and there is not a smidgeon of dirt anywhere to be seen. (We don’t do this; we never have; we are not young. We may just have been lucky, however, so don’t say I didn’t give you the official advice).
* GARLIC. You plant it in the fall, after most of the garden chores are over; you can get a lot of it into a small space; and it’s beyond simple to plant: Just separate the garlic cloves, shove ‘em into the prepared soil, root end down and mulch the bed with straw. Come spring, weed once and renew the mulch. First come beautiful curly green garlic scapes, good both for the kitchen and in bouquets, then presto bingo in mid-summer there’s the garlic, just in time for the tomatoes and basil and beans.
* Tall varieties of SNOW PEAS AND SUGARSNAPS squeeze onto the list because they’re so easy to pick and prepare, plus the homegrown ones are SO much tastier than any other kind including the ones in farmers markets. But they take the same setup work as pole beans without having nearly as long a season and they’re done in the middle of the summer so you have to take down the supports – unless you want to take down just the spent vines and replace them with the baby morning glories you grew in peat pots so you would be ready when the time came.
Saving seeds sounds great at first – who could argue with growing your own heirloom seeds instead of buying them? But when you take a look at what’s involved with saving things like squash and corn seeds you start seeing the beauty of capitalism. Even easy things like beans and lettuce require you to do your spring planting with fall seed harvest in mind.
But saving tomato seeds is different. Not only can beginning gardeners do it, people who don’t even HAVE gardens can do it, because the best tomatoes to eat are also the best source of seed.
It’s one stop shopping and how great is that? You can save the seeds from a single terrific tomato, no matter where you got it. In theory, at least, you could dig the seeds from a yummy tomato served in a restaurant and save THOSE. The seeds are simple to collect and process. And they last for years.
The only must-have is a tomato that is not a hybrid (read about why here) and that means we should all be very grateful that tomato names now have cachet. Instead of “tomatoes,” pure and simple, the farmer – and increasingly the restaurant – offers Brandywines, Jetstars, Black from Tula and who knows what-all. There are hundreds of ’em. Doesn’t matter. As long as you know the name you can – bless google – just look up “xyz seed. ” If it’s a hybrid that can’t be saved, “hybrid” will be part of the description,
The actual moral of this picture is do not get to the farmers market at 9:30 AM if official start time is 9:00.
I’m going to save seeds from a tomato – a big fat beautiful delicious tomato – I bought at the Rockland, Maine farmers market a couple of weeks ago. It’s called Hillbilly Potato Leaf, so I know that like many delicious heirlooms the plant will have broader, simpler leaves than common tomato plants.
Potato leafness is on the left. These were plucked from full grown plants, but even young seedlings look different enough so you can spot which is which.
Why that might be useful will be discussed presently. For right now, while there are still gazillions of wonderful tomatoes just waiting to be enjoyed – and saved! – here’s how
to save tomato seeds
1. Choose perfect, dead ripe tomatoes. The better they are of their kind, the better your chances of repeat greatness. And of course, the riper the fruit, the more ripe seeds it will contain.
2. Cut the tomatoes across the equator. Scrape the seeds into a glass jar. The surrounding gel will come along. No problem. *
Cross-cutting exposes the seeds so you can pry them out while taking the least amount of tomato flesh. Makes no difference with these little guys (Amy’s Sugar Gem, about the size of a golfball) but if you have big tomatoes with small seed cavities there’s no point in wasting the parts you could eat.
3. Ferment the seeds.**
3a) Add enough water to the jar to make soup out of the seeds and gel. Loosely cover the jar with cheesecloth or a piece of paper towel, so air can get through. Put the jar someplace warm ( not hot), out of the sun, preferably a place where odd smells won’t be noticed.
3b) Wait 2 to 4 days, during which the jar contents will bubble , a cap of revolting moldy goo will gradually form on top of the liquid and most of the seeds will sink. Those that remain afloat are no good.
3c) Lift and discard the cap. Fill the jar with room temperature water and gently swish the seeds around to wash them. Carefully pour off the water and debris, then put the seeds in a strainer and rinse under running water. Don’t press on them; they don’t need to be squeaky clean.
4. Spread the seeds on a paper plate (they stick to china and to paper towel) and let them dry out of the sun, stirring from time to time to expose all surfaces. When they’re dry enough to rattle, they’re ready to store. As long as they stay dry, cool and dark the container is up to you. An ordinary envelope labeled with variety and date will do, but a tightly-lidded jar is better. And if you want to reward yourself – or use the seeds as holiday gifts – there are all sorts of inexpensive supplies like resealable seed packets and moisture proof vials at Garden Medicinals and Culinaries.
* The gel around tomato seeds contains most of the acid that makes sweetness interesting. Recipe instructions that tell you to remove seeds from raw tomatoes should probably be ignored, but if you want to follow them be sure the recipe includes some other source of acidity.
**Many garden bloggers say they don’t bother to ferment tomato seeds and it isn’t absolutely essential, But it does 3 important things:
+ It removes the germination inhibitor that keeps the seeds from sprouting inside the tomato.
+ It gets rid of many seed-borne diseases
+ It separates good seeds from defective ones, vastly improving the quality of your stash.
Don’t panic. It’s only summer we’re coming to the end of. Even here in the far Northeast there’s still at least a month of delicious Romanesco zucchini, pale-skinned Middle Eastern cousa and the buttery old fashioned yellow crookneck that’s now almost exclusively a home garden delight.
At first glance, this may seem like no big deal. Zucchini and straight necked yellow squash are year-round supermarket staples, and most winter versions of these vegetables are – unlike winter tomatoes – edible. But they are also edible as in “ eat your vegetables” rather than edible as in “oh YUM! How do you make this thing?
(Squash Tortilla. See below.)
Long about now you may be thinking you’ve totally had it with zucchini, even absolutely perfect zucchini, and that if you find under the leaves or are given by an evil friend one more dark green baseball bat, you will subsist henceforth on potato chips.
But stay! There are two things to consider:
1) There’s no point in trying to stay ahead by harvesting the babies. Tiny squash with the blossoms still attached don’t taste like much of anything no matter how fresh they are.
The one on the left is about 1 day from perfect; the flower is just opening and has not yet been pollinated. The one on the right – I really have seen them this size in stores – is ridiculous. It would also be ridiculous if it were a crookneck or Cousa. The potential for flavor is there, but flavor itself is not.
2. You will not easily tire of zucchini if it’s Romanesco, aka Costata Romanesco, a uniquely firm and nutty variety. This one does taste good when it’s quite small and, even more astonishing, the not-seedy part will still be worth eating when the thing’s the size of your forearm.
The one in the middle looks suspiciously robust, and as a general rule it’s wise to avoid any summer squash (or eggplant) so mature it has matte rather than shiny skin. But Romanesco, sold by Johnny’s and by Renee’s, among others, is the exception.
Plus it’s deeply ribbed ( usually) so the slices have beautifully scalloped edges. It’s not yet common at farmstands and greenmarkets, but it’s showing up more and more often as growers and customers alike discover its virtues.
Squash Tortilla
This has nothing to do with tacos. It’s named for the famous Spanish dish of potatoes, eggs and olive oil; and although it’s made somewhat similarly the main reason I’m calling it a tortilla is that I was scared if I called it a squash cake you’d expect it to be sweet.
It’s not. It’s essence of toothsome squash, with a soft pale green or gold-flecked center and deeply olive oil browned crust, equally good hot and cold, as an appetizer, side dish or main course. And making it is simplicity itself, assuming you have a processor with a shredding attachment and that you allow enough time (at least an hour) for the squash to sit there and drain.
For a 9 or 10 inch tortilla: 4 main dish, 6 side dish or 8 tapa servings :
3 – 4 lbs. summer squash: zucchini, Middle-East , crookneck or pattypan in any combination. Use the larger amount if squash are large; they shrink more in preparation.
1 medium onion
2 heaping tablespoons of salt (fear not, it comes back out)
3 extra large eggs or 4 smaller ones
about ¼ cup of flour
olive oil
1. If the squash is large, cut it in quarters and slice out the seedy soft center material. Otherwise just make it small enough to go through the feed tube. Shred about half of it, then shred the onion, then shred the rest. Put all the shredded material in a large bowl.
Old ironstone washbowls are ideal for mixing large quantities. They’re a much better shape than most mixing bowls, which are too narrow and deep.
2. Add the salt and mix thoroughly – your hands are the best tool for this. Put the squash in a colander over the sink or or a bowl, fit a non-reactive bowl or pan on top and weight it with something like a 5 pound sack of flour. Leave it for an hour or so, during which vast quantities of liquid will come out, reducing the squash volume by 1/3 to ½, depending.
3. Rinse the drained squash with cold running water, press out excess liquid with your palm, then repeat the weighted drain routine for 5 or 10 minutes. If you’re cooking this for someone you want to impress with your world-class cooking skills, turn the shreds into a towel and squeeze out even more moisture. Otherwise don’t bother.
4. Beat the eggs just until loosened in a large bowl, then stir in the squash. Add enough flour to turn the mixture into something the texture of cake batter, very soft and loose but with no free liquid. Pause between additions to let the flour swell, the less you use the better but if you don’t use enough the bottom crust won’t be crisp.
5. Put a heavy 9 or 10 inch skillet over medium heat and add a generous layer of olive oil. How generous is up to you but there has to be more than a slick and this would actually be good deep fried, so it’s hard to use too much.
6. When the oil just starts to smoke, turn in the squash and smooth the top. Cook until the edges start to draw in and if you lift an edge with a spatula you can see things are pretty brown at the bottom. This should take about 10 minutes.
7. Turn on the broiler, put the skillet 3 (or so ) inches under it and broil until the cake top is flecked with brown, about 5 minutes more.
8. Loosen the cake with a wide spatula. Put a large plate over the pan and – holding both firmly with protected hands – flip the tortilla out. That’s it. You could garnish it with sprigs of basil or bouquets of cherry tomatoes or whatever. Or not.
Looking Ahead: There aren’t many vegetables worth freezing plain as ingredients for later use; but if you get a good buy on good summer squash or have a bumper crop, preparing it through step 3 and then freezing it sets you up for making the tortilla (or individual squash pancakes) with lightening speed, even in the dead of winter. Double bag the shreds so the onion aroma doesn’t spread itself around and expect to drain out even more liquid after the mixture thaws.
We are in the glory season for Oriental lilies, great big killer-fragrant beauties that are among the brightest stars of the late summer garden.
And as most veteran lily growers know, that means we’re also in the season of nearly indelible bright gold pollen stains on anything and anyone who happens to brush those loaded anthers.
Florists deal with this problem by removing the offending dye-stuff, which not only makes the flowers stain-free but also ( according to some) enables them to last longer. Gently grasp each dangling anther with the blades of a small pruner and pull, don’t snip. The docked filament will spring back gracefully and come to a point instead of looking pruned.
Not surprisingly, castration makes the blooms look sterile and somewhat fake; not plastic, exactly, but incomplete. The best solution is to have a lot of lilies ( fighting the beetles as described here and doctor only those blossoms that face traffic.
That way, your lilies won’t gild anybody…
And vice versa, I hope. “Gild the lily” may be considered a standard idiom, but I say it’s spinach and I say the hell with it. Among other things, Shakespeare’s original “paint the lily “ ( King John; I had to look it up) actually makes sense:
SALISBURY:
Therefore, to be possess’d with double pomp,
To guard a title that was rich before,
To gild refined gold, to paint the lily,
To throw a perfume on the violet,
To smooth the ice, or add another hue
Unto the rainbow, or with taper-light
To seek the beauteous eye of heaven to garnish,
Is wasteful and ridiculous excess.
It’s been a mighty long wait, but at last we’re rolling in Sugar Snaps, grabbing handfuls when we pass the basket on the kitchen table, slicing them superfine to make snap slaw, stir-frying them with summer mushrooms, dipping them in everything from guacamole to tunafish salad.
Sugarsnaps take longer than other peas, about 75 days, and they make enormous vines that need serious trellises. But once they get going they bear for well over a month, offering pounds and pounds of easily picked, crisp, juicy, sweet intensely pea-flavored pods that are as the saying goes “ not sold in stores.”
Sugar Snaps climb 8 feet and more if given support – which we provided until I got sick of dragging a stepladder into the garden. Now they’re supported to 6 feet and then let flop back into picking range. The pole on the left is wound with an 8-footer, the brown spot about ¼ of the way up is a patch of dry grass. You may notice many weeds in this picture. We will discuss that some other time.
A wimpy imitation of Sugar Snaps, grown mostly in Mexico and Guatemala, is now available at upscale greengrocers’ for a good part of the year. And in late spring many farmers markets offer decent snap peas. But almost none of them are realio-trulio Sugar Snaps: adequate-but-unwonderful bush snap peas make a lot more sense for commercial growers.*
Home gardeners prefer bush snaps too, if the catalogs are any indication. Although we have not grown Sugar Pop, Sugar Rae or Sugar Gem, we have tried Sugar Ann, Sugar Daddy, Sugar Bon, and Sugar Mel. None, unfortunately, are anywhere near as tasty as the original and that goes also for Super Sugar Snap, a vine almost as large as Sugar Snap but supposedly earlier, heavier-yielding and more resistant to pea afflictions, especially powdery mildew.
It isn’t. Or at least it wasn’t for us. In fact, the only snap pea that comes close is Amish Snap, an heirloom variety sold by Seed Savers Exchange. It’s a little shorter than Sugar Snap and doesn’t bear for quite as long, but it is substantially earlier, and the peas inside the pale green pods are uniquely sweet and full-flavored.
Setup for an informal taste-test ( pod ends are broken off because you can pick and string them in the same motion if you leave the stem end behind). Amish Snap is the one on the left.
Many food writers think snap peas are a recent development. Not so. A curved snap pea called sickle pea shows up in garden literature in the late 17th century. It faded from view in the mid 1800’s, replaced by straighter podded varieties known as butter peas and butter sugar peas. Butter peas were still around as recently as the 1950’s, when you could get the seed at Agway. But then somehow they became so rare that when Dr. Calvin Lamborn’s Sugar Snap was released in 1979, everyone thought it was a brand new vegetable.
Many sources explain that snap peas differ from flat-podded snow peas because the snap pea pod wall is much thicker. True, but far more to the point – at least the point of tastiness – is that snap peas taste best when the peas inside are full size. Snow peas must be eaten while still almost flat; the peas in those pods taste dreadful.
This is Carouby de Maussane, the only snow pea I know that still tastes good after the peas start to swell. The vines are even taller than Sugar Snaps and they bear vast quantities of enormous pods; the ones in this picture are babies. They also have exquisite edible flowers:
So why the seed is getting hard to find is a mystery. Last time I looked, Pinetree Garden Seeds was still selling Caroubys, but I’m thinkin’ next year we’d better start saving our own.
