Garden
Christmas day: Breakfast consumed, presents opened, the tree not twinkling ( we’ve given it a bye this year) and Baby, it’s warm outside – time for a cookie-redemptive walk.
Never mind the cliches about perpetual November, our bit of the mid-Hudson Valley is eerily like March. At the suet feeder, the usual crew of woodpeckers ( downy, hairy and 
red-bellied, one of the worlds more misleadingly named birds, photographed here by Edward Russell)
has a visitor, a Carolina wren.
The wren is not mind-bendingly out of place – our 1980 Peterson field guide says “fluctuating in north; cut back by severe winters” – but personally myself I get a chill when I see Carolina in New York on Christmas day.
The forsythia at the top of the hill has been blooming for the last month, so the flowers are no longer a surprise, and neither is the clump of blewits that came up 2 weeks ago in the oak leaves by the roadway. They’re multiply frost-walloped but still hanging on, only slightly the worse for wear.
The weeds never were surprising; cold-resistance is one way biennials like wild phlox, garlic mustard and verbascum get such a jump on everything else. But we’ve seldom seen so much greater celandine , Chelidonium majus, even though, being a poppy , it’s perfectly happy to wax fat for next year in low light and cold-but-not-frozen soil.
The deeply scalloped greens were lovely, and a reminder of how close some weeds are to relatives on the approved list. This one looks a lot like our native woodland poppy, Stylophorum diphyllum, a rarer plant with larger flowers and less aggressive habits.
It’s easy to tell them apart when they’re blooming – C. majus has small, pale yellow flowers; S. diphyllum has good sized, deep gold ones – or when you see seed pods (C. majus = long skinny sticking up; S. diphyllum = sort of football-shaped, drooping ) but at this time of year the best way to know what you’re seeing is to simply assume the worst, especially if the plant is by the roadside or in some other highly disturbed ground.
Greater Celadine is a present from the New England colonists, who brought it as a medicinal herb, primarily for digestive complaints and to cure skin diseases. A brief google suggests the medical theory is hair-of-doggish; the bright orange sap of C. majus is very irritating to the skin and extracts of the plant have been implicated in liver disorders. It’s also supposed to help with sneezing, which I can testify it causes bouts of if you break the stem while pulling it up.
Greater celandine. The sap is as orange as the roots
Thanksgiving daécor from the vegetable garden: Gigante di Romagna cardoon, Bright Lights chard and Redbor kale.
It’s tough to grow artichokes if you don’t have a Mediterranean climate; either the growing season is too short ( Maine) or the summer is too hot (New York, and increasingly Maine, too, but that’s another story). In any case, the best you can usually do is about 6 artichokes per 5×4 foot plant; and while of course they are your own, they aren’t so splendidly wonderful they justify the space.
But cardoons, well cardoons seem possible. You don’t have to get as far as flowerbuds and because you’re eating the leaf ribs, big fat ribs from leaves that can be 3 feet long and more, yield is not a problem. Only catch is that you have to blanch them before harvest to keep them from being bitter.
Or at least that’s what all the growing instructions say. But in my experience – years and years of experience because some people are pigheaded about giving up on exotic comestibles – it doesn’t work. The standard blanching technique, unchanged for centuries ( loosely bind the leaves into a bundle, then exclude light with a wrapping of straw) makes the silver leaves even paler. But it does nothing else noteworthy, even when pressed past the suggested 2 or 3 weeks into 4 and even 5, the outer limit before rot sets in.
You do get a suggestion of artichoke, in that everything you eat afterwards tastes sweet and faintly metallic, but about the cardoons themselves suffice it to say that gall isn’t usually stringy.
Next year ( once more unto the breech), we’ll try a different variety: maybe “Large Smooth” instead of “Gigante di Romagna,” our current plants of which are now 3 years old.
We’ll probably leave the few oldsters around too, assuming they do come back again. Cardoons are beautiful, terrific bouquet material all summer long and especially welcome at season’s end, when they are among the last plants standing.
Last spring, we decided to go for — if not broke at least financially depleted – and plant the 700 hundred more bulbs required to fill the bare patches in the crocus carpet.
Essential to mark where they were needed. Didn’t want to make a map (lazy, mostly). Already knew big nails anchoring little bows of surveyor tape wouldn’t work because I tried it years ago. The tape disappeared into the grass, as planned, and then disappeared.
So THIS time I stuck the big nails through the centers of metal washers roughly the size of silver dollars. No way those big shiny disks were going to get lost…
You can perhaps guess the next part. It’s early November, no time to lose. Bill mows the grass and fallen leaves, using the bagger so no debris will obscure the view. I peer down. Nada. I rake , gently. Rien. I get down on my knees and claw with my fingertips, covering an area I KNOW must have at least one washer in it. Gone.
So we went next door and borrowed our neighbor’s metal detector and the moral of this little story is a giant reinforcement of the new(er) understanding of soil improvement: spread compost right at the surface, don’t dig it in deeply; it’s headed down fast enough as it is. The washers were buried almost an inch in just one season and the only thing that rises is rocks.
Bill finding the crocus planting spots and marking them with stakes.
June 19-22, 2007. Hudson Valley garden highlights from Olana to Manitoga, and of course near neighbor Innisfree,
with a couple of spiffy private places to leaven the mix ( and plenty of the Hudson Valley’s great food, to fuel all that walking) . Full details from the tour’s sponsor, the Wellesley Friends of Horticulture.
So there we were at the Union Square greenmarket,
in search of interesting squash of which there turned out to be not very much, and there IT was, Romanesco! The absolutely best cauliflower in the world, if cauliflower it is. ( Some say broccoli, some say cauliflower, most in the know say they don’t know; but if you go by culinary properties, it’s cauliflower)
Photo by John Walker
Doesn’t do to go on about the holy grail or anything, but Romanesco has yet to be readily available, even in the uppermost of upscale markets, and growing it is – see below – a pain, so it’s definitely a “must buy,” even when it costs more than the very reasonable 3 bucks a head they were charging last Saturday.
Romanesco is as delicious as it is gorgeous: less crumbly than other cauliflowers, more toothsome than broccoli, slightly sweet , slightly nutty, not sulfurous unless you let it spend too much time in table-décor mode.
Displaying Romanesco is simplicity itself; just cut the base so it stands level, then put it in a slick of water. (If you use a bowl, be sure the water doesn’t come more than a half-inch or so up the base.) It will stay handsome for 2 or 3 days if it’s kept out of the sun; you can get 4 or more if you put it in the fridge each night. The base is tough, difficult to slice without pressing so firmly you break off points. Use a serrated knife.
Eating Romanesco: For best flavor and texture, buy two, so you can display one and keep the other in the coldest part of the fridge until you eat it asap. Simplest thing is to eat it raw, with coarse salt. Next easiest thing is raw with just about any dip, although the very best may be
Bagna Cauda
Translates “hot bath,” and must be hot to be tasty, so the most important ingredient is a small chafing dish or a saucepan that fits neatly on a portable burner. Good with any vegetable firm enough to dip; just be sure to let whatever it is come to room temperature before serving; the vegetable will have better flavor and it won’t cool its coating and spoil the effect. This recipe is adapted from from my 1969 edition of Ada Boni’s justifiably durable – albeit currently out of print – Italian Regional Cooking. It’s much heavier on butter than most, and even I, the Dairy Queen, often use mostly oil. But before you dismiss the butter out of hand, try it, especially with strong flavored vegetables such as the traditional cardoon ( also endive, celery root, bell pepper and cole flowers ).
½ pound unsalted butter
¼ cup olive oil
2 – 4 tablespoons minced garlic ( use more if it’s hardneck , less if it’s conventional)
6 canned anchovy filets
optional : 1 small thinly sliced truffle
Melt butter with oil over low heat, then add garlic and let it seethe without coloring. Remove from heat, add anchovies and let them sit a minute to soften. Mush them around with a wooden spoon until they dissolve. ( Add truffle if using), salt to taste, reheat to simmering and serve ditto.
Please report back if you try the truffle; confess I’ve never in 40 years of using the recipe.
Cooking Romanesco: like broccoli and cauliflower, chunks are tastiest steam-sautaéed.
1. Cut off florets, cut interior into slightly-less-than floret size chunks. Boil about 1/2 inch of water in a non-reactive sautaé pan large enough to hold the pieces in a single layer. Add pieces, partially cover the pan and stay nearby, alert for the sizzle of “watersallgoneeeek!”. Shake pan (or stir contents) from time to time.
2. In less than 5 minutes, when almost all of the water has evaporated, test a chunk. If it’s still near-raw, turn down the heat, cover the pan and keep cooking until almost done. If initial boiling yields almost done, proceed at once to
3. Remove cover. Stand right there shaking the pan until it’s dry, then add enough olive oil or butter to coat all pieces thinly. Add seasonings if wanted: minced garlic, shredded lemon zest, julienned sweet or hot red pepper, toasted cumin seeds… Turn heat to medium and keep cooking until the chunks are just cooked through and starting to turn gold at the edges. Sprinkle w/ coarse salt and eat ’em up. Good cold if you use olive oil.
Why I say growing Romanesco is a pain:
There are a number of different cultivars, some hybrid, some open pollinated (Romanesco dates back to at least the 16th century), but even the earliest takes about 80 days to single-head-per-plant harvest , counting from when you plant out the 4 to 6 week old seedlings. Seedlings are frost tender, but those 80 days must all be cool ones, so Romanesco is a fall crop in the Northeast.
That means getting the seedlings going in the heat of summer, a challenge given their preferred growing temperature of roughly 60 degrees. Then, Romanesco being a cauliflower, it needs near-neutral, highly-fertile soil, plenty of moisture, plenty of room to grow – at least 18 inches between plants and 30 inches between rows – and plenty of attention to bug and disease prevention; Romanesco is vulnerable to every one of the 350,000 afflictions that target brassicas. Other than that, piece of cake.
The photographer:
John Walker was attracted by Romanesco’s fractal form, then fell briefly into vegetable love before once more romancing the math.
We don’t do it during the season; always too many buds coming and the urge to see ” how big can it get THIS year?”
But when the plants have to be cut back for winter…
This vaseful sat by the door in Cushing for over 2 weeks, constantly opening new flowers, perfuming the entryway, and giving me a chance to use one of the large vases made years and years ago by our friend Paul Heroux. ( He was getting rid of old work that no longer pleased him; I rescued it from certain death on the shard pile and have been enjoying it ever since). To see what he’s been up to lately, check out the show at Howard Yezerski Gallery, in Boston, from November 17th to December 23rd.
three warnings about brugmansia bouquets:
* Fragrance can be overpowering if the vase is in a small room.
* Cut branches are almost as willing as willows to root while they’re on display, so by the time the flowers are finished, you can have a whole herd of incipient plants. Good (ish) in spring. Not Good in fall; be strong and throw them away.
* Brugmansias are poisonous, even in quite small amounts. If your cat treats the bouquet as salad, adios Puffkins. One of the reasons we favor the porch is Mr. Earl, who was more or less normal as a kitten
but has grown up to be a vegetable hound.
Well, bringing in, anyway.
The brugmansia got cut back to the biggest stems, dug up – with attendant root pruning, as you can imagine – and replanted ( unceremoniously stuffed, actually) in a contractor-weight garbage bag. Bill then bumped it downstairs into the cellar, where it will remain until next spring.
The squash went into the living room while we try to find a storage spot that will stay between 50 and 60 degrees; winter squash rot if they get chilled. My food historian friend Sandy Oliver, editor of Food History News, whose lifestyle would not be alien to many of her subjects, recommends keeping them under the bed.
This isn’t just about preservation; most hard-shelled squash* are unready at harvest. They need about 6 weeks of aging to develop their smoothest texture and maximum sweetness.
* Everything except acorn, really: butternut, buttercup, Hubbard, you name it and especially Japanese “sweet potato” types like the knobby dark green Black Futsu in the wheelbarrow. It will turn a golden tan before it comes into its glory…
Even if you didn’t grow any winter squash, this is handy to remember, because the great array of nifty, offbeat squash at the farmers’ market will only be there until Thanksgiving. If you want to enjoy a wider, more delicious (and far more beautiful) assortment than the paltry selection at supermarkets, stock up now while the stocking’s good…
The frost is STILL not quite on the pumpkin – our few light dips below freezing have not even killed the summer squash, I’m sorry to say.
But almost.
So here are a few Garden Cleanup Tips:
* Before you start removing the evidence, make a rough map/ post mortem report that can be used for planning next year. Include relevant outside factors like deer predation – which you’d THINK you’d remember but if you’re like me you tend to have denial problems about the smaller, less painful losses.
It’s also helpful to note things like the amount of rain: lousy tomato taste, for example, may be blamed on too much water and the too little sun that implies. But that same rain is probably why the hollyhocks hit 10 feet.
* when removing sick plants, don’t forget to rake up underneath, especially around roses and peonies; diseased leaves are a prime place for badness to winter over. Put all possibly-infected ( or infested!) material deep in the woods or on the bonfire.
* Healthy garbage can go on the compost, along with the lawnmower-chopped leaves, but it’s even better to let it rot in place (lettuce, nasturtiums) or, if it has stiff stems, catch snow and protect crowns (echinacea, delphinium, most perennials).
* Better-to-leave-it notwithstanding, the combo of aesthetics and prep-for-next year does demand removal of spent annuals like basil and marigolds. If you can bear to take the extra time, it pays to cut them down, rather than yank them up; leaving roots in place helps preserve soil structure and minimize weeds.
If you don’t count chives, the first allium flower I planted was a leek that didn’t get harvested. Next spring there was a flower spike and not long after that, in early summer, a great big ball of little white stars that lasted about 2 weeks.
After that, the deluge. Every year there are more of the genuinely ornamental kind (the kind in the back of the bulb catalogs, after you go past the tulips and daffodils and crocuses and lilies and just about everything else), because even though they come back reliably it’s very hard to stop buying.
Favorites include:
* the fireworks special A. schubertii (not the composer. A 19th century naturalist/plant collector named Gotthilf Heinrich von Schubert). It has pink stars that shoot out on long stems from a tight ball of other pink stars; a truly amazing effect.
* The graceful yellow A. flavum, which blooms in midsummer and is always in peril of being weeded out…until the flower stalk comes up it looks an awful lot like tall onion grass.
* A. bulgaricum, now Nectaroscordum bulgaricum. It has pink and green striped white bells instead of the more usual allium stars.
Allium christophii, the Star of Persia, is almost as lovely in the dried state as when fresh (and pale purple). This stem is about 3 years old and has been being used as outhouse daécor. I just stuck it in the pachysandra next to the barn in order to take the mugshot.
Christophii is an exception; most alliums don’t have common names. What they do have is one big flaw: leaves start turning yellow and dying just as the flowers bloom. Bulgaricum sometimes stays green throughout , but you can’t count on it. And most of the others are worse.
Solution? Plant alliums where the the leaves will be hidden by more obliging plants – even pachysandra will do. Just keep them out of the front of the border unless you want to see the gorgeous blossoms rising from decidedly unpoetic ruins.
What’s Wrong With This Arrangement?
Answer of course is that it makes no seasonal sense: Blewits are fall mushrooms; Sweet peas are spring flowers.
Nevertheless, 2 weeks ago they intersected, thanks to an unusually damp summer where all the big heat came early. Now that we’re losing the light, the sweet peas have about conked out; there are more and more blewits; maples and poplars are turning fast. Must be time to order bulbs.
Actually, the time to order bulbs was months ago – but It Is Not Too Late. Tempting rarities like the lavender and deep purple C. tommasianus ‘Pictus’ (introduced in 1914) one of many treats from Old House Gardens tend to be sold out, but given how much they cost ( 3 for $11.25) this may not be a bad thing.
The pale lavender C. tommasianus ‘Lilac Beauty’ and gold-throated purple ‘Tricolor,’ ( a C. sieberi ) from Van Engelen scarcely compare in the beauty department and give nothing in heirloom bragging rights, but at 100 for $ 10.25 they do make a crocus lawn affordable enough to leave a bit of bulb money for yet more alliums, beauties of which one cannot have too many.
