Oxheart Carrots

When I read the descriptions of Oxheart carrots last year, they all sounded about like what I had been looking for: short, broad shouldered, does well in clay soils. What the descriptions didn't do was translate all that into a picture. Here are a few that I pulled up today:



If I had known that the mature, ready-to-eat carrots were so short that they were nearly spherical, I would have ordered a different variety. This is one of those little lessons about doing more research before devoting time/space/$ to planting seeds. You'd think that by now I would have learned that lesson very well, but, based on this particular carrot experience, that would seem to not be the case . . .

There are, however, two bits of good news here. The first is that these little carrots are good to eat. The second is that there are lots of them, which helps make up for how little "carrot" is actually in each one.

Also, their very shortness may make these carrots a good variety for people who grow most of their veggies in containers.

Seed Decisions

My friend Cheryl and I usually put in an order to Fedco together, so we can meet the minimum order size for free shipping. Separately, we never have big enough orders to qualify. One of my activities for the day was to work out my final order for that seed company. Cheryl is taking a turn filling out the form, which is a little more complicated than most seed-order forms. Thank you, Cheryl!

One of my seed packets from Fedco will be filled with seeds of Jericho lettuce. I am planning to grow Jericho next to Slobolt so I can compare the two varieties. They both do well into the warmer weather of early summer, but I want to know which will be best in my yard, and for more qualities than just the slowed down development of bolting and bitterness. Growing them together in the same bed at the same time should help me figure that out.

My other seed order is to Sand Hill Preservation. One packet from that source will be filled with Tennessee Greasy pole beans. They are supposed to be good to dry for leather britches, and that is a food preservation/preparation method that I want to try on a larger scale than in the past.

I've dried other green beans from the yard in small quantities, but I haven't been impressed with the outcome. I've also dried small amounts of overly-mature white mountain half runner beans from the Plant-a-Row-for-the-Hungry garden. These were beans I've taken home because they were too far gone (turning tan, tough) to take to the food pantry. I am hoping to work with beans at a more tasty stage of development; hence the need to "grow my own."

Wanting to try this old-timey method of food preservation/preparation may seem weird, but canning, which I do a little of every year, takes some time. With all the other responsibilities in my life right now (as with so many other gardeners!), I am hoping for a few more crops that require minimal effort to keep for the winter. Right now, sweet potatoes are the champs in that regard. Although there are a lot fewer now than there were in November, the sweets that remain are keeping just fine in a basket in the kitchen.

In addition to these little goals/experiments, I will be growing a few tomato plants from seed I saved last summer, and I will be working on my melon de-hybridization project. This will be the second generation of melons, and the first crop for which "choosing wisely" becomes important.

In other news, we adopted a special needs kitty this weekend. His name is Louisiana; he has a heart problem, he sneezes, and he has no teeth. He is about eight years old, and, as cats go, he is fairly small. My youngest son volunteers at the shelter (Good Mews) that had been housing Louisiana, and he has been nervous after every "adoption day" that Louisiana might be gone the next time he went to clean the shelter and feed cats.

In the good news/bad news department, Louisiana has enough health problems that he is designated a Halo Kitty. This means that the shelter will help with his medical expenses, covering everything related to his heart problem. When his prescriptions need to be refilled, we can pick up his meds at the shelter, for free.

Here is Louisiana:



He is such a sweet little cat when it comes to humans, that his reaction to our dogs was a bit surprising. Here he is with Zack. Just looking at the picture, you can almost hear the hiss and the doggy-toenails scrabbling on the wood floor as Belle (barely visible on the right) backs away.



Even funnier, Louisiana actually stalked Moksha and scared her enough that she climbed up onto my chair and tried to worm her way around behind me.



I had been working on my little laptop (with assorted papers all around me) and had to shift everything else off the chair in a big hurry to make room for 65 pounds of quivering dog. Right now, she is tucked behind my chair on the floor.

In a week or two, the animals will all work out a truce, but until then, and for several weeks afterward (just in case . . .) Louisiana will stay in Zack's room when the humans are all out of the house.

Planting Dates

I know that plenty of gardeners time their planting with phases of the moon. Last year, when I looked that up on the online Farmers Almanac, I was happy to see that the "planting by the moon" times coincided with times I had planned to plant, anyway.

That meant I had one less thing to consider as I completed my planting calendar. I will have to look that up again for this year, but it turns out that there are even more planning methods than watching the moon or counting weeks before or after average first/last frost dates.

It shouldn't surprise me, because I plant peas each year when the trout lilies bloom in my yard, but there is a little booklet, "The Seedling Handbook," published in 1968 by the American Guild Garden Book Club, that lists planting times by what's in bloom.

I am assuming that the logic behind this is something along the lines of "plants are smarter about what's going on above and below ground than we are." I could be wrong, but I watch the trout lilies because I think they are a good indicator of soil conditions. Their bloom-time can vary by as much as two weeks from year to year. That means my pea-planting time varies, too.

The booklet was written by Elda Haring and was "prepared for the members of The American Garden Guild Garden City, N.Y." That particular town is not anywhere nearby, so it is not unexpected that some of the plants listed as being among those to watch are not represented in my neighborhood, but some are.

Here is an example:

When these are in full bloom--Chionodoxa luciliae (glory of the snow), trailing arbutus, border forsythia and weeping forsythia, Lindera benzoin (spice bush), and Scilla siberica (Siberian squill)--it is safe to plant beets, cabbage, chard, chervil, Cos, Cress, Endive, Escarole, Kohlrabi, leeks, lettuce, onion (sets), parsley, parsnips, peas, spinach, radishes, salsify, turnips, and whitloof chicory.

Among the first few thoughts that sprang to my mind, on reading this list was that I'm not sure the Siberian squill and Glory of the snow bloom at the same time around here. Another was that I have a long way to go in terms of exploring all the kinds of veggies that can be grown in a garden. I haven't yet tried kohlrabi, for example, or endive, or escarole, or whitloof chicory . . .

Since I already watch for the trout lilies, it shouldn't be too hard to watch what else is blooming as I plant my garden. It will be fun to put together a similar set of planting times for my yard!

The Last Catalogue

I still haven't worked out exactly what to grow this year in terms of varieties. I took a little stack of seed catalogues with me to Oklahoma to look at while staying with my Mom following her hip replacement surgery, but I didn't have a lot of time to look at them. Hospitals are busy places!

I got back home today, though, and there in the mailbox was the Last Seed Catalogue--the one I've been waiting for-- the one from Sand Hill Preservation.

This coming weekend must be the one in which I make a final plan. Of course, there are plenty of seeds left from last year, stored in the fridge. But I still haven't hit on the perfect carrot, for example, for this yard, so there are decisions to make after doing yet more research.

'Brave Sallet'

Back in the late seventies, while I was in college, I walked across town a few times to visit a great uncle who lived in the same college town. He was almost completely blind from macular degeneration and had been giving away books. One day I walked home with an old two-volume dictionary set and a little Dover book called "Culinary and Salad Herbs."

The herb book was a 1972 reproduction of a 1940 British publication by Eleanor Sinclare Rohde. The book contains some information on growing herbs that isn't 100% applicable to growing herbs in Georgia, but it also offers a lot of simple recipes and a few tidbits of interesting information. These features are a couple of the great reasons to look more closely at older, "out of date" gardening books when they are available.

One page in particular caught my attention back when I first received the book, and it still kind of amazes me. This is what it says:

I think our ancestors would have had a poor opinion of the few ingredients that compose the modern salad. James II's head cook considered that there should be at least thirty-two ingredients, and a "brave sallet" contained more than that, for it was the decorative centerpiece of the table. John Evelyn gave it as his considered opinion that he "could by no means approve the extravagant Fancy of some who tell us that a Fool is as fit to be a gatherer of Sallets as a wise man," and his ideal housewife numbered among her virtues that she "could in a trice set forth an handsome sallet." She must have been a remarkable woman, for those of us with practical experience know that making an elaborate salad takes time.

I agreed with the author that the person who could set forth such a salad "in a trice" must have been remarkable. However, the little book also offers some shortcuts to achieving the "brave sallet." One is to use up bits of leftovers in the salad (little bits of meats, for example, or bean or macaroni dishes). Another is in the use of herbs. Herbs can easily overwhelm a salad, but she recommends using just a couple of tablespoons of finely chopped herbs, and having those be from a mix of leaves (one or two leaves each of whatever the garden provides).

Every year, I grow enough herbs to make the "brave sallet" possible, but I don't always use them as effectively as I think is possible. Just one more thing to think about . . .

Snow! Again!

On Sunday night, snow started falling, and it continued long enough to cover our yard with about four inches of snow. At first, it was all the classically fluffy white stuff, but it changed to hard little bits of sleet toward the end. Today, we had more flurries, but not any significant addition to what was covering the ground.

Most winters, we don't get to use the sled even once. This winter, we've been able to have plenty of fast rides down the hill in front of the house over both the Christmas weekend and the last couple of days. Other people have come out to take turns on the sled, too, and the chance to visit with so many neighbors has been great.



One of the things about snow in the South that is both good and bad is that it packs to ice on the roads almost immediately. The situation is made more interesting by the lack of snow-plow trucks to clear the ice or to spread salt or sand on the roads. The icy roads make driving dangerous, so schools and businesses close, and most people stay home.

However, when Joe and I walked the mile and a half to the nearest coffee shop earlier today, the TV there was on, showing news coverage of Atlanta's roads, and it was pretty obvious that a whole lot of people who should not have been driving were actually out in their cars. Plenty of those people were stuck, either on a highway or in ditches or yards.

Roads have begun to look more passable, though, as the day has gone on, which means the return to work and school most likely will begin tomorrow.

Leather Britches Beans

I finally spent a half hour looking into leather britches beans, and I found out a lot in just that little bit of time.

For people who don't already know, leather britches is really a preservation/cooking method for green beans. Mature beans are threaded onto strings to dry, and later cooked, usually with some kind of pork for seasoning (I don't eat any kind of pork, but I'm working on this one step at a time). This is a very "old-timey" way of preserving beans for use in the winter.

I had heard that any kind of green bean can be used for making these, but my experience with the beans in my yard had made me think that some varieties of beans would work better than others. Basically, Burpee's Tenderpod, which is a great green bean for fresh eating, shrivels to almost non-existence in drying, and the flavor is dramatically less than great. After reading my new book "The Resilient Gardener" by Carol Deppe, who found that some squash varieties were better than others for drying, I knew I would have to do some actual work to figure this out.

The writer over at vegetablesofinterest.typepad.com confirmed that thought:

The hulls of today's beans all become very tough as the bean matures. Some gardeners will dry a commercial string bean as a substitute for 'old time' Leather Britches beans but they risk criticism from historians, Southern chefs and anyone who has tasted the real thing.

It turns out that more than one gardener recommends "greasy beans," especially the "greasy cut shorts," for this use. Steve from Western North Carolina, posting at newsgroups.derkeiler.com, said:

There are at least 3 different greasy beans grown by seed savers in Western NC. All are pole beans and strong runners. The Greasy Cut short has only 4-6 beans to the pod, so they're just strung and broken in 1/2. The long greasy (my type) has 8-11 beans per pod and then there is the big greasy. It has 8-11 beans and a very thick, fleshy pod.

I like to let the long greasy get very full before picking. The beans have a rich, nutty flavor and are wonderful for canning. The cut shorts make the best "leather britches".

At the site community.berea.edu is this comment:

"Black greasy" beans were a popular old-fashioned variety. They could be eaten fresh out of the garden or canned. When strung and dried, they were called "leather britches" or "shucky" beans.

A poster on the gardenweb forums agreed with the above comments:

Until her demise my adoptive granny, Sarah Lou Back, made leather britches every year. Her bean of choice was Greasy Grits, and there were so many strings of them hanging from her porch you couldn't see through what superficially looked like a bamboo curtain.

The writer at vegetablesofinterest.typepd.com added some other bean varieties to the leather britches list:

By general acclaim the best heirloom bean varieties to make Leather Britches include the Barnes Mountain Cornfield Bean, Pink Tip Greasy Bean, Tobacco Worm Bean and the NT Half Runner Bean.

Other writers added white half-runners to the list of good varieties for leather britches, and it sounds as though any bean described as a "shucky bean" is also a good candidate.

The writer at vegetablesofinterest included one more piece of very useful information in his post, the name and URL for a source of heirloom beans: Bill Best's Sustainable Mountain Agriculture Center Inc.'s catalogue. Since this is the season for planning, I will be looking more closely at this particular catalogue.

Starting Out Right

On 1 Jan., 2011, my little family ate crowder peas from the yard, cooked with carrots and greens (turnip) from the yard. It seemed like a good way to start the New Year. I'm still not sure that people were meant to eat turnip greens, but Joe seemed to like them just fine.

I made cornbread to go with the crowder peas, using the recipe from one of my favorite cookbooks, More With Less, by Doris Janzen Longacre and published by the Mennonite Central Committee. I have had this cookbook since 1980, and its history as a well-used book shows in the stains on many of its pages.

The day before, on New Year's Eve, Joe, Zack, Stephanie and I set off "Georgia" fireworks (nothing is allowed to shoot up into the air, so there were a lot of fountains and things that spin on the ground), and the teenage boys from across the street did, too. A couple of the neighborhood rascals, along with their Mom, came out to help. It was fun. I am very lucky to live in a neighborhood that is actually a neighborhood, where people know each other.

On Jan. 2, 3, and 4, I was at work. Considering that many people are starting the New Year unemployed, this also is good. If I could just settle on a garden plan, my year's beginning would be complete.

It is interesting to me that this year's garden-planning is going so slowly. Last year's goal of more seed-saving went well, and it's too late for a midlife crisis to be getting in the way. I am hoping that when the catalogue from SandHill Preservation arrives, a light-bulb will go off in my head (figuratively), and a plan will coalesce. Wish me luck!

Miracles Every Day

Snow on the dogs:



Snow on the boy:



Snow on the blueberry bushes:



Snow everywhere:



In my own mind, miracles are the unexpected things that go my way. These are not to be confused with what a Cajun would call "lagniappe," the unexpected little something extra that comes along with the usual expected events/items, or a bonus. These events stand on their own.

Just lately, I've experienced the Atlanta area's first white Christmas since 1882, the last ping-pong table tomato's not being eaten until TONIGHT (almost the end of December!), and finding a live bat in my kitchen (also tonight!). The mail lately has been stacked high with seed and garden-related catalogues, and everyone at my house is well during the holiday season (usually, someone has a cold). Right now, I am feeling really blessed in this season of miracles (yes, weirdly enough, even with the bat).

If you count as miracles the flashes of insight that sometimes strike people, I've had a couple of those, too. They are both related to a book Joe gave me for Christmas, "The Resilient Gardener," by Carol Deppe, who also wrote "Breed Your Own Vegetable Varieties." I am using that second book as a guide in dehybridizing my favorite canary melon.

In "The Resilient Gardener," Deppe points out that she has a large garden only because she and a friend lease a two-acre property on which to grow it. Her own house's yard is too small to grow many veggies. If she can lease garden space, it is likely that I can, too, if I really want more garden space. That is definitely something to think about.

The other insight was something I've suspected but haven't wanted to totally face: if I want to find a really good list of veggies that do well here in metro-Atlanta, I can't wait for a seed company to pull that together for me. I have to make that list myself. It's going to take some work, researching seeds and sources, and it could take years of experimentation. I've been growing veggies here for a long time, but it seems I have a long way to go . . .

Deppe recommends that gardeners begin with seeds from a local, or at least regional, seed company. There isn't one for the Southeast, not really. Park Seed in South Carolina is the closest, but it sells plenty of varieties that are more trendy than region-appropriate.

The next closest seed source that might count as regional is Southern Exposure Seed Exchange, and it is in Virginia.

Locally, my best source so far in a lot of ways is Ladd's Farm Supply up in Euharlee. It offers some seeds, to measure out from bins, that local farmers have been growing for years. It's a good starting point, but its offerings also have a lot to do with what is commercially available. For example, the owner would like to offer some other varieties in particular that customers have asked for, but hasn't found a good source for those.

I have a lot of work ahead of me! That, too, is a miracle. How wonderful it is to have goals and plans.

Food Traditions

I am pretty sure that gardeners think about food more often and in different ways than a lot of non-gardeners. Since I am the only vegetable gardener where I work, and I get to choose most of the news “briefs” that go into the little newspaper for which I work, it wouldn’t be a surprise to any of my gardening friends that the paper contains a fair amount of food related news.

However, a week or so back, a non-gardener asked why we’ve included so much news about kosher foods (it’s a Jewish publication), threats to kosher food rules around the world, new certifications, and sources of information about keeping kosher. My thinking is that food plays a very important role in tying people to their cultures and to their families. The laws of kashrut (kosher lifestyle) are an important part of Judaism, even though not all Jews follow the rules in their daily lives.

Many less observant Jews, though, do follow the kosher laws to the best of their ability during the High Holidays, the holiest days for the community. My belief is that food traditions are a strong connection to community and to the past, that following the food traditions of Judaism during these times provides a great connection to the Jewish community, and can even light a way back to the community for people who have not been actively Jewish in the rest of their lives.

Since I think that community is important for the happiness and well-being of people in general, I keep including information about kosher foods and laws.

I am not Jewish, but my family has some food traditions, too. One that is important to me is making egg-noodles for holiday meals. The dough has to be rolled out, dried for an hour or so, cut into noodles, and then dried some more, so making these noodles doesn’t exactly provide instant gratification, but taking the time to make them connects me to a kitchen-full of older female relatives --an assortment of aunts, great aunts, and grandmothers, now all dead-- who put together huge holiday meals in Claremore, Oklahoma. The noodles, cooked in broth made from chicken “parts,” also connect me to the frugal frontier cookery of my family’s past.

Of course, we have some other food traditions that are less frugal. One is Aunt Mickey’s fruit salad, which includes Jello, whipped cream, and a whole lot of fruits that are not all in season at the same time. I don’t make this one any more, but my Mom does, and so do some nieces (who learned how from Mom/Grammy) and probably a sister or two. We also eat a lot of pie during most holidays, and some of us have convinced ourselves that pumpkin pie, in particular, is a healthful breakfast food.

As a gardener in the Southern US, the foods I grow in the yard help connect me to the South. Sweet potatoes, especially, play a larger role in my winter diet than ever before, because they grow so well in my yard. I’ve been eating more greens, all kinds, and in summer I’ve had tomato sandwiches after my neighbor-across-the-street, a Southern girl, told me how much she likes them. If I had a bigger yard, we would have more corn and more crowder peas.

I would say that these are also foods that mostly grow well in Oklahoma, but when I was a kid we ate a lot of magazine-inspired meals that involved cans of cream of mushroom soup. Holiday foods were an exception (except, obviously, for Aunt Mickey's fruit salad).

As I begin to put together my garden plan for next year, one of the things on my mind is making sure that the varieties are totally appropriate for the place where I live, the Southern US. I’ve made a lot of progress in this direction over the past almost-twenty years, but I sometimes get pulled off-track by the amazing descriptions in seed catalogues. If I choose carefully, though, the foods I grow will be great ingredients for traditional Southern meals.

In this way, gardening and then eating what grows in the yard serves as a reminder of my connection to the geographical and historical place where I live and have raised my family, and to the community that is here.

A Mexican Food Miracle

The unprotected cilantro survived the hard freeze! We had a low of 14 degrees F in our yard last week, and the cilantro is still there. I had fully expected it to keel over in the cold.

I can't take a picture because Joe has the camera in Austin where he is visiting his mother, but the plant is definitely looking perky and green. In other winters, the cilantro has not made it through such low temperatures.

In other news, my friend Eddie, of the persimmons, sent a correction to the previous post:

The persimmons I gave you were not American but Asian. The tree you got from me might be an American type that has seedless fruit.

He also added that the weeping persimmon's name should be Diospyrus kahki 'pendula.' (Thanks for the update, Eddie!)

Persimmons and a Friend

A friend sent an email note that he had persimmons and did I want any. Of course, the answer was "Yes!" Joe and I went over to to his house, and we saw that our friend's little weeping persimmon tree was loaded with fruit. He stayed with us out in the Very Cold weather, picking persimmons. This is what we brought home:



I have some work to do! These will all need to be washed and then pushed through the ricer to separate the pulp from the skins and large seeds. The work will be worthwhile, though. The flavor of the pulp is exceptional.

My friend Eddie Rhoades grafts fruit trees, and he has grafted a piece of his weeping persimmon onto a sturdy rootstock, so he will have another one of these little trees producing fruit in a few years.

There is a persimmon in my backyard that he grafted. It should produce fruits that have few or no seeds at all. If I am lucky, it will start bearing in another year or two. It has already been out there for two full years, and the scion was from a fairly mature tree.

We have a young Ichi-Ki-Kei-Jiro (Asian persimmon) in the front yard that set three fruits this year, but they disappeared about midsummer. I am hoping for more next summer, and for them to stay on the tree until ripe. This particular persimmon is supposed to be non-astringent even when hard; American persimmons, like those that my friend Eddie gave us, are powerfully astringent until they become fully ripe.

Eddie is also the source of my shiitake mushroom log. His haven't produced mushrooms yet, either, but I am thinking that this spring we will both get plenty.