Homegrown Coriander

 

A minor frustration in growing cilantro is the plant's notorious haste in going to seed.  I deal with this by planting cilantro seed almost weekly from spring through midsummer.  That ensures a relatively steady supply of one of my favorite summer herbs, so essential for salsa and Asian stir-fry dishes.  Still, the plants have their own agenda, which seems to be ensuring future generations of cilantro as quickly as possible, and then dying.  Those future generations take the form of an abundant seed set.  I'm sure most of you will know this, but the seed of cilantro is coriander.  Every so often I see cilantro referred to as "fresh coriander" or "green coriander."

This is the first year I've allowed the plants to fully ripen their seed.  In past years I ripped out the bolting plants to make room for other things.  This year I decided to harvest the seed, both for culinary uses and for re-seeding.  The technique I use is pretty basic.  On a dry day I unfold a full-size newspaper section underneath the dried out plant.   Ideally I manage to arrange the newspaper such that it is slightly bowl shaped, with the center lower than the edges.  Then I bend the seed heads down as low over the paper as possible, and rub the dried stalks and seed pods vigorously between my hands.  What collects in the paper will be a combination of seeds, stems, leaf debris, and a few odd insects.  I fold the newspaper up and bring it to the covered porch, where I open it up to dry for a day or so.  During this time most of the insects will wander off on their own.

Next I remove the larger, more obvious pieces of stem and other detritus.  Then the seeds go into a colander with holes small enough that the seeds cannot pass through.  Shaking the seeds around in there removes the vast majority of other chaff.  After that I pick over what remains by hand.  Medium sized bits of stem take just a few minutes to pick out.  All told, it takes me only about 15 minutes of hands-on work to collect what easily amounts to a year's supply of coriander.  It's one of my mainstay spices when cooking beans.  And we eat a lot of beans.  It's also great for curries and all sorts of Indian dishes.

I put most of the cleaned coriander in a clean glass jar, labelled it, and added it to the chest freezer.  The rest of it lives in the freezer attached to our refrigerator.  I'm sold on the idea of keeping spices and herbs frozen to preserve as much flavor as possible.  Both the chill and the darkness of a freezer help protect the flavors of these ingredients.  Considering that purchased spices are - on a price per weight basis - among the most expensive foods I cook with, it's important to me that I get full value out of them.

Fig Tree Update

So we've had our three fig trees in large containers for a year and change now.  I wanted to wait this long to post an update on them so that I could have some results to share.  The figs are in 17-gallon containers with a sizeable water reservoir at the bottom that takes away some of the growing space.  These containers were constructed along the same lines as the self-watering potato buckets I experimented with last year.

The figs are doing well.  It's likely I jumped the gun just slightly in pulling them out of the garage this spring.  I was overeager, and the garage was really crowded.  I knew fig trees could withstand light frosts.  The garage where they spent the winter is large enough that the temperature inside had never dipped below 30 F (-1 C), even though it's unheated.  I pulled the trees outside in late April, though our last frost comes typically in early May.  I covered them with a drop cloth when frosts were predicted, and even put bottles of warm water under the cloths with them when temperatures in the 20's were forecast.  These precautions proved insufficient to fully counter my overeagerness.  The trees took some damage on the higher branch tips which held up the drop cloth.  I was afraid that I'd done serious harm to the trees.  But true to form, the figs proved they could withstand light frosts.  I waited a few months to see how much of each branch had died, and ended up needing to trim only a few inches here and there.

The soil in the containers had settled quite a bit after planting last year. In late spring I laid each container on its side, hauled the tree out, trimmed the roots that had grown down into the water reservoir, and added more soil to the bottom of the growing space.  The figs already had their leaves on, but they took this disturbance in stride. It's clear that the third year root trimming is going to be necessary next spring.  This is considered standard maintenance for fig trees in containers.  All the plants were working on becoming root bound.  The extra soil should do for this year though.

All three varieties now have unripe figs on them.  I've got them positioned on the edge of the driveway, and they seem to relish the extra baking that the blacktop provides.  Making sure they're well watered through the heat wave has been a priority.  They are thirsty plants indeed.  I think keeping them in sufficient water would be very difficult without the water reservoir.  It needs filling at least every other day.  I'm especially anxious to keep up with their water needs because I suspect the first few figs that one tree put on were lost last year due to lack of water.

I'm looking forward to our first fig harvest, perhaps in a month or so.  I don't expect it to be huge by any means, but I think we'll see a good handful or two from each of our three different varieties.  An older friend of mine who grew up in Italy told me once about a breakfast he ate every day for a few weeks in late summer.  Ripe figs smeared over crusty bread, drizzled with good olive oil and a pinch of salt.  His mouth watered when he described it to me, almost 50 years later.  Sign me up for that.  Or figs skewered on rosemary twigs and roasted over a real charcoal fire.  Or fig clafouti.  Or figs with soft goat cheese on a green salad.  Or, or, or...

Got any favorite ways to eat figs?

Harvest Meal: Pad See Ew

There are two topics I want to cover in today's post: a new variety of broccoli that I'm growing this year, and the dish I keep making with it. Let's start with the crop.

It's a Brazilian variety of broccoli called piracicaba.  Yes, it's a mouthful.  Say: "peer-ah-SEE-kah-bah."  Piracicaba is referred to as a non-heading broccoli, but what that really means is that the heads it produces are quite small.  The largest ones I've seen on my plants are the first ones formed in the center of the plant.  They're big enough to divide into two or maybe three good sized spears.  When that one is removed, more heads start to form on the outer branches, each one smaller than the last.  The salient point here is that piracicaba broccoli was bred for its leaves, not its florets.  I learned to love broccoli leaves when I lived in the city and shopped at a good farmer's market.  There was a vendor who sold "baby broccoli leaves" which I used for stir-fries.  Maybe that vendor was hip way back then, and they were piracicaba leaves.  They were certainly addictive.  So growing a variety of broccoli which can deliver a steady supply of small and tender leaves all through the summer is a real joy.

But wait, there's more.  Perhaps it wouldn't surprise you to hear that a Brazilian broccoli variety is exceptionally tolerant of heat and drought.  The extent of this plant's endurance is on display this summer.  We've had scorching heat and very, very little rain; and the piracicaba couldn't care less, apparently.  Given the way our summers are trending with the global climate weirding, this is an attribute that has my full attention and respect.  Piracicaba is also fairly cold hardy.  I grew some last year as a trial and found that it held on till the first frost.  That did surprise me.  That's still not all though.  The most amazing thing about this brassica variety is that the cabbage moths (small whites) utterly ignore it.  I mean they have NO interest.  None, zip, zilch.  The only damage I find on the piracicaba leaves is from flea beetles, and that's pretty minor. 

Noticing this lack of damage from the cabbage moths last year, I resolved to grow no cabbage at all in the spring this year.  My spring brassicas therefore consisted of Tuscan kale, piracicaba, kohlrabi and a few turnips.  Without the cabbage in the garden to attract the moths, all the other brassicas took much less damage than usual from them.  I've got my fall cabbages under a row cover now, to protect them from the depredations of both moth and heat.

Piracicaba & pad see ew ingredients

So how do I eat this stuff?  That brings me to a harvest meal that's been in heavy rotation this summer: pad see ew, a Thai noodle dish.  I grew to love Thai food in those years I lived in the city.  Now I indulge in some of my favorites at home.  Thai cuisine is well suited to summertime in Pennsylvania, since I don't want to heat my house up any more than strictly necessary.  Thai cookery usually relies on lots of ingredient preparation followed by a very short cooking period which brings everything together into a delicious whole.  This describes pad see ew to a tee.

This dish is not at all spicy-hot, and can include meat or be vegetarian.  I've been making a vegetarian version, so that's what I'll describe.  What follows will prepare a generous single serving.  Scale up proportionally to feed more people.

Place 2 ounces of celophane (transparent) rice noodles in a pot.  Cover with cool water and soak for at least one hour before cooking.  The longer the soaking time, the less you'll need to cook them.  I've seen this dish most often prepared with the widest rice noodles.  These will require some heating to fully cook through.  Medium cut noodles require less, and the thin cut noodles can skate by with no pre-cooking if you soak long enough.

Prepare all your other ingredients.  Slice one or two shallots, and mince three large cloves of garlic, or as much as you like, according to your tastes.  Wash 3-4 ounces of piracicaba leaves and florets, or an equivalent amount of any other type of broccoli.  Trim them into small pieces that will cook quickly in a stir-fry.  In a small bowl measure out 1 and a half teaspoons of fish sauce, and add 2 tablespoons of soy sauce.  Keep both sauces on hand in case you want to add more during cooking.  Beat one egg in a small bowl.  Measure out one tablespoon of sugar in another small bowl.  Coarsely chop several stems of cilantro.  Have all these ingredients and some cooking oil laid out near your cooking area.  A long handled spoon or cooking chopsticks will be useful, and you may want tongs for serving.

Check your noodles.  If you are using any but the smallest of the flat rice noodles, put the pot of noodles on the burner and warm the water, giving the noodles a gentle stir from time to time.  You will not even need to bring the water to a boil.  (Don't put rice noodles you failed to soak into boiling water.  They'll just stick together in a tangled mess.)  Make sure they are well softened, but keep in mind they'll get a final cooking as part of the stir-fry.  Do not overcook them or they will fall apart when you cook the rest of the dish.  When softened, turn off the heat.  Have a colander in the sink ready to drain them at the last moment.

Preheat your largest heavy skillet over high heat for at least four minutes.  Add a generous amount of cooking oil to the pan and immediately add the garlic and shallots.  Stir these only long enough to separate them in the hot oil.  Then add the piracicaba and stir it very gently around the pan so that it just begins to wilt.  Drain the rice noodles, shaking off excess water, and stir them to combine with the broccoli.  Sprinkle the sugar over the ingredients in the pan and continue stirring until the broccoli is wilted.  Push all the ingredients to the edges of the pan, forming a ring of ingredients with a hole in the middle.  If the pan looks very dry in the center, add a little more oil.  Pour the beaten egg into the center and let it sit for a moment.  Pour the fish sauce and soy sauce mixture in a circle over the mixture of noodles and broccoli.  When you can see that the bottom of the beaten egg has begun to set up, mix all ingredients thoroughly in the pan.  The uncooked egg should coat the noodles and broccoli.  Check the color of the noodles.  They should be brown from the soy sauce.  If they are very pale, add a bit more soy sauce and mix well.  Cook just long enough that the eggs have cooked and excess liquid has evaporated.  Turn off the heat and mix in the chopped cilantro.

If you're a strict vegetarian you can leave out the fish sauce.  If you're a committed carnivore you can add small pieces of raw meat to the center of the skillet before the eggs go in.  Cook the meat thoroughly and push it to the edges with the other ingredients before adding the beaten egg.

Ugly picture, yummy food

I count this as a harvest meal for us since we produced the shallots, garlic, eggs, cilantro, and piracicaba that goes into the pad see ew.  The rice noodles, sugar, oil, fish sauce and soy sauce are purchased.   This is another one of those dishes that I just can't seem to get enough of.  Fortunately our six piracicaba plants produce very steadily.  From those six plants I can harvest enough leaves every three or four days to prepare a meal for my husband and myself.

I plan to have some piracicaba plants in the hoop house this winter.  We'll see how long they hold on in there, and perhaps they'll even overwinter with enough protection.  Piracicaba will definitely be a mainstay brassica in next year's garden.  I recommend it to anyone who loves broccoli and lives where the summers are warm.  Seeds are getting easier to find.  Fedco has carried them for at least the last two years.

What harvest meals are you preparing these days?

Chicks

Back in early spring there was an offer of a broody hen from a local farmer I know.  I got all excited and built a nesting box for the broody girl and her eggs.  When late spring rolled around and we weren't hosting a hen, I put the chances of that project playing out at slim to nil.  Farmers get real busy once winter is over, and with that in mind I wasn't willing to nag him about anything.  Besides, if he didn't have a broody hen at the moment, he couldn't exactly produce one.  In any case, I've got the nesting box all ready to go, so if and when he has a broody hen in a non-frantic part of the year, I'm ready to accept her on a moment's notice.

But having psyched myself up to host some little chicks, I reconsidered my lack of interest in getting chicks from a hatchery.  In the end I asked my farming friend if I could buy a few chicks from her the next time she started another batch of broilers.  She gets Cornish Cross chicks from a nursery that is fairly local to us, though they're still delivered by mail.  So just over two weeks ago when her order of chicks came in, I went to her farm with the WWOOF volunteers we were hosting  and picked up six day-old chicks.  Our volunteers at the time were vegetarians, but surprisingly accepting of my plan to raise these birds for our table.  I encouraged them to handle the chicks as much as possible, wanting the birds to become accustomed to being picked up by humans.

My setup for the brooder was pretty simple.  I just covered a large storage plastic bin with garden caging and filled it with a few inches of wood shavings.  Our volunteer constructed a little wooden frame with fine mesh across the top to hold the waterer.  This serves to catch any spilled water in a limited part of the wood shavings, and to keep the chicks away from the wet bedding.  When the chicks are very tiny, they don't tolerate getting even slightly wet as they must stay very warm indeed.  I had set up the brooder with an incandescent bulb hanging from the caging, since my chick-rearing guide warned me that they need 95F (35C) temperatures in their brooder the first week.  But these chicks arrived in the midst of a summer heat wave, when indoor temperatures were 80+F (27C) during the day.  I turned on the bulb for the first few days and left it on overnight.  From observing the chicks it was obvious they didn't need the extra heat.  The bulb was positioned in the middle of the brooder, and they scattered to the four corners to sleep.  So I happily turned the light off and let them bunch up for warmth if they felt the need.  The crazy heat has passed, for the moment, but the chicks still don't seem to need any extra warmth.

You may notice in the picture above that I've been providing weeds to the chicks from day one.  Every day I hang some purslane (which is rampant in the garden right now) from the caging, and dandelion or other weeds when they come easily to hand.  The chicks seem to like the dangling plants.  They jump for individual leaves and tear off what they can with their beaks.  Anything that encourages exercise in these chicks is a good thing.  Cornish Crosses are, in my opinion, overbred.  They are noted for a growth rate so rapid that it causes leg problems because they cannot support their own weight.  It's also not uncommon for their bodies to outgrow their organs.  Heart failure is a feature in this breed which is typically slaughtered at six weeks when raised industrially.  Because we're not lighting them at night, our broilers won't eat 24 hours a day.  So they'll grow a bit more slowly and have a few more weeks of life.  It should also help prevent organ failure and leg problems. 

Last week, when the chicks were less than two weeks old, I started moving them for part of each day to "daycamp."  This is just a wire mesh enclosure with their food and water.  I place it on a fresh, shady patch of grass and let them hang out there whenever the weather is fair and I'm at home.  This wouldn't be feasible for two-week old chicks in spring or fall, but it works in the summer. Fortunately our cat shows absolutely zero interest in the chicks.  I'm not complaining about this or anything, but it is odd since he's such an accomplished hunter of chipmunks, baby rabbits and smaller rodents of all kinds.  Perhaps the chicks smell to him like our hens, and the hens being clearly out of his range so far as hunting goes, the chicks get sorted into a non-prey category in his little feline mind.  The broilers grow very fast indeed and this simple pen is going to be a bit crowded for all of them in a very short time.

I'm guessing it'll be slaughter time in another six to seven weeks.  So far the broiler chicks have been very little bother at all.  If the rest of the process is this easy I may plan to raise two batches of six birds each next year.  That would represent a very significant portion of all the meat we eat in a year - probably something like a third to half of our total meat consumption.  Knowing that we can do that much for ourselves on less than an acre would be huge.

The Horse that Threw Me

Sometimes not having posted in a while becomes its own bar to restarting the writing process.  My unannounced retreat from blogging began when two unexpected deaths coincided.  My profoundly mentally and physically disabled cousin died the same day our cat Lucy was hit by a car.  Needless to say, it was a tough time for us and for my extended family.  The memorial service for my cousin took me out of state for a few days, and after that I just needed some downtime. 

Left to my own devices I probably would have hibernated, but prior commitments meant that I've been consistently busy hosting and working with WWOOF volunteers through most of this month.  Occupation is therapy of a sort, I realize, but it left little mental room for posting here.  There's plenty to write about however.  We've gotten some new critters and had the usual mix of successes and failures in the garden.  I'm doing my best to shake off the summer garden blahs that seem to hit me every July.  We're behind schedule with the biggest project of the year, the mini-hoop house.  Deadlines for other projects are on the horizon as well.  I blame it on the outrageous high temperatures we've had and my husband's heavy travel schedule for work.  I beat back my garden doldrums enough to start new seedlings for the yet to be built hoop house, so we're going to have to knuckle down and get it built within the next month.  Besides, the tomatoes are about to come in in earnest.  Tomato crops give no quarter to the unmotivated nor the unprepared.  So I'm going to have to get back on that horse.

While I've been neglecting my own blog, I've also been neglecting many of the blogs I usually read and profit from.  I'm playing catchup with many of your blogs as time allows.  I suspect next week I'll have time and space enough to do some catching up with my own posting.  Hope summer is going well for all of you!

Potatoes in Buckets, Round III

I may not be the most diligent blogger, but I'm dogged when it comes to gardening.  I'm not a quick study, and certainly no expert.  But I'm willing to experiment, and to persevere with empirical tinkering.  For the last two years I've experimented with growing some of my potatoes in buckets.  The first year, wet and cold 2009, saw all my potatoes eventually succumb to late blight, but the potatoes in simple perforated buckets held out longest and produced very respectable yields.  Last year was hot and incredibly dry, and to compound matters I situated my fancy self-watering buckets on the driveway, which only baked the poor plants all the more.  The yields were abysmal.

This year I'm trying a new potato-in-bucket method.  I realize that those of you in the northern hemisphere who grow potatoes will already have planted yours by now.  So this is just for documentation purposes.  I'll do a follow up post around harvest time, and maybe some of you will choose to use a bucket method next time you're ready to grow a few spuds.  I came across this technique about two years ago, somewhere on the internets.  It's a very easy one to implement and may just combine the best aspects of in-ground cultivation and container growing.  All you do is cut the bottom off a bucket, turn it upside down, and plant your seed potato in a prepared garden bed.

Potatoes cultivated in the ground have plenty of space and access to the huge reserves of nutrients in that soil.  The drawbacks include higher susceptibility to damage from rodents and other pests, some difficulty in digging for harvest, the risk of damage from harvesting tools, and the likelihood of missing some tubers entirely.  Potatoes in containers can be easily hilled, which is thought to encourage better yield.  They can also be pampered with a rich mixture of garden soil and compost.  My experience suggests that in a year of blight both their elevation and the ability to spread the plants out protect them from the fungus by increasing air circulation around the leaves and stems.  Harvest is also remarkably easy, with little chance of missing any tubers, and no chance of spearing them with a digging tool.  Simply dump the buckets in a wheelbarrow, and gather up the spuds.  The downside is the need for additional diligence in watering, finite growing space inside the container and thus limited nutrients, which may limit yields.

This third potato bucket method promises to deliver most of the advantages of both in-ground and container cultivation, and few of the drawbacks.  While hilling will be easy, the plants' roots will still be able to draw on the garden soil for both nutrients and moisture.  To harvest, the buckets can simply be kicked over one at a time, and the tubers easily gathered without the need to dig, and therefore without risk of damaging them with shovels or pitchforks. That, anyway, is the theory.  We'll see how it works out in practice.

I know of two potential drawbacks of in-ground cultivation that will remain with this method. Once planted, the spacing of the plants is fixed.  If late blight shows up, the plants can't be separated to increase airflow around them, as would be possible with other bucket methods.  Also, damage from rodents is still possible.  With loosened soil around and below the buckets, gnawing critters might have little difficulty making inroads.  This risk may be mitigated by the fact that I used the buckets directly over the cardboard layer of sheet mulching in the beds.  So the rim of the bucket rests against a flat surface, at least until the cardboard rots in place.  I cut through the cardboard inside each bucket in several places to prevent water from pooling in there and rotting the tubers.  This also gives the potato roots access to the underlying soil moisture.  I suspect that just the elevation of the potato leaf canopy creates a much less favorable environment for late blight through better air circulation.  It's also a less sheltering and inviting space for rodents as compared to in-ground plants which drape their leaves to the soil.  It might also help to tamp down the soil around the bucket, making it more difficult for the rodents to get in, but I'm very reluctant to deliberately compact the soil after working so hard to loosen our clay.

I had hoped to be organized enough to run side-by-side trials of the all the bucket methods I've tried.  That didn't happen this year, but I did at least record the weight of the seed potatoes I planted in each bucket.  I can compare those to the results I got with my first bucket potatoes in 2009.  If I'm more organized and less frazzled next spring, perhaps the three methods of bucket potato cultivation will go head to head.

The potatoes are all growing well, with the bucket grown plants showing a big more growth so far than the in-ground plants.  I've already hilled them once, and they're due for another.  So far the year promises fair for a good potato harvest.  I'm also allowing all the volunteer plants coming up from spuds we missed at last year's harvest to go ahead and grow.  We had no problems with disease last year, so there's no real reason to remove them.  They came up in what I intend for a melon patch this year, so they should be able to share the space nicely.

This year we're growing Red Pontiacs, Kennebecs, All Blues, German Butterballs, and possibly a few Sangres, depending on which varieties are represented among the volunteers.  Are you growing potatoes this year?  If so, what varieties and what methods are you using?