3 Fruit Fantasies That Make Me Drool on Myself

I drool on myself thinking of the fruit that I want to grow. I go catatonic and slack jaw as my mind wanders from one out of body culinary hallucination to the next leaving a gapping hole for the drool to just dribble out.

I live in a rental in Wallingford a cute and quiet garden neighborhood of Seattle with two lawns, one in the front and one in the back, neither of which I can rip out and replant with childish haste the fruits that I dream about. The thing is, I’m not even sure that the effort and care that I would undoubtedly put into these trees and shrubs and vines would be reciprocated with ripe fruit. My USDA hardiness zone is 8, which would  to easily thrive here, but fruit? That’s a little trickier. The chill hours (the number of hours needed for a fruiting perennial to stay dormant before production) I have, it’s the ripening time and the heat to do so that I’m not so sure about. Regardless I’m in a rental that I won’t be in for long enough to even experiment with these fruits so until I do I will describe them while I drool on my self.

Paw Paw

#1 Paw Paw (Asminia triloba) : The Banana of the North. ~ When I was a kid my grandpa Scotty used to buy me an eclair before we went fishing. The custard would ooze out of the dough and down my chin and I would smile this huge smile. Since I first heard about the Paw Paw and how it tasted like spice custard I’ve wanted to grow it, harvest the ripe fruit one early summer morning and go sit in a boat on a lake and think about all the fish I don’t have time to fish for because I’m eating real live natural custard with a huge smile on my face.

Kaki Persimmon

#2 Persimmon (Diospyros kaki and americana) ~ Diospyros means fruit of the gods according to Lee Reich. He may be lying but he ain’t lying if you catch my drift. When I lived in Olympia, WA I would go to the co-op and get these delectable fruits from Burnt Ridge Nursery right about now. They didn’t last long, but Good GOD! I would pay half my student loans per pound and take it to the front stoop of the store and eat it, suck on it, rub my lips with this small human heart shaped half-rotting fruit just basking in the sweet jelly like glory of the meat. I can’t think of one that made it home. And those were just the Asian varietals. The Americans were so different. Butterscotch in flavor and the size of a large cherry tomato. I don’t remember much about that day that I tried the wild American Persimmon. It was sunny and I was in White Salmon on a friends farm, the rest is a blur, all except the butterscotch.

Yup, that's Shipova

#3 Shipova I have never tried a Shipova, but I once grew several when I worked at Sleeping Lady in Leavenworth, WA, but I never saw them fruit. Somewhere between a European pear, an Asian Pear and heaven lies, according to catalogues, the flavor of the Shipova. They are rare beauties whose graceful habits are ruined  by pruning (so I’ve heard). They don’t store so you must eat them quickly, but it’s been getting around that store them isn’t as much of a problem is taking a break from eating them.

Do you grow any of these? Let me know. I promise I’ll leave some for you…

eat well. live well. be happy.

Free Mulch is Falling!

 

save your back and use a tarp

I found that for an easy low impact mulch for vegetables there are two options. Leaves and grass clippings. During the summer months using grass clipping that you collect from your push mower is a great free mulch that offers nitrogen to your vegetables. It is readily available and easily acquired for free. But now its fall and the grass is about to hibernate for the next 6 months. We’ll need a mulch for the winter to protect our soil and help retain moisture in the ground through the winter so that it’s available early spring. Just in time is the falling of the autumn leaves. You may not need to drive some of Seattle’s Maple and Elm lined avenues to collect all you need for your garden this year, you might be lucky enough to actually have enough in your backyard or sidewalk. Last weekend I visited a friend on 20th Ave E and found two laborers and two home owners collecting leaves all bound for the yard waste bin. They were more than happy to have me take them away. My truck wasn’t quite full so I kept raking. One home owner actually came out and gave me a bottle of wine for raking his sidewalk! I’ll be using the sidewalk leaves in my veggie beds next season. I left the street leaves for obvious reasons. Leaves decompose more readily than wood chips do and don’t steal nitrogen like their woody counter-parts

 

Leaf  Mulch

Wood chips are great for perennial beds. Save your back and have your local arborist drop a load of chips. They have to get rid of them and rather than paying for the dumping fees they are happy to unload their days work on to you. The trick is you may not be able to dictate what kind or how much you are getting. You should also be careful not to get fruit wood if you are mulching fruit trees. The fruit wood that is being chipped rarely is just pruned out stems and branches. When an arborist is called in to do work it often revolves around disease. When using diseased wood chips it is important not to mulch trees in the same family. An easy way to get around this is to use conifer chips on fruit and fruit chips on conifers. Pine needles are also good mulch but have a tendency towards acidifying the soil which works well for some berries like Evergreen Huck and Blueberry which both like acidic soil.

arborist chips

Once you know what you need, this is the time of year to start collecting your mulch from your neighborhood.

More Green Tomatoes – Green Tomato and Cactus Leaf Relish

I’m finishing off the last jar of my take on a pickled green tomatoes recipe that I found on-line. I’m just going to tell you now, if you want to floor your friends with some killer fajitas follow this recipe and then add it at the last minute to the sauteed peppers and onions. This is the kind of stuff that inspired James Brown’s Southern culinary funk master pieces (Pass the Peas and Breakin’ Bread and the soul food breakdown at the 3 minute mark of Make It Funky Pt 1 for example)! I guarantee you’ll be screamin’ GOOD GOD! when you taste this. You wouldn’t dream about givin up this food for funk…

GREEN TOMATO RELISH

1 lbs green tomatoes
2 onions

1 cactus leaf

1/8 cup canning salt (non-iodized)
2 roasted peppers, chopped
1/2 qt. vinegar
1/4 tsp. celery seed
1/4 tsp. mustard seed
1/2 tbsp. whole allspice
1/2 tbsp. whole cloves
1/2 lb. brown sugar

Choose firm, small to medium green tomatoes (entirely green, not partially ripe) and firm, white onions, but yellow will work if white is out of season. Wash well. Remove stem ends.

Slice tomatoes at about a 1/4 inch and onions, sprinkle with salt and let stand overnight. Drain water well; add peppers and cactus leaf, sliced into spears.

To the vinegar, add spices (tied in a cheesecloth bag) and sugar. Mix with vegetables and cook over low heat (or in a Crock-Pot) for about 2 hours. Remove spice bag just before canning.

Put vegetables into clean jars and cover with hot vinegar, leaving 1/4 inch headspace. Adjust and seal lids. Process in boiling water bath for 10 minutes.

Makes five or six 1 quart jars, depending on size of vegetables used.

I only used the cactus leaf because I had one left over from the fajitas the night before. If you haven’t had the privilege of partaking in the prickly pear action, check it out. Both the leaf and the fruit are edible and Prickly pear (Opuntia ficus-indica) is hardy to zone 9 so it can, with the right protection, grow in this climate with out getting insanely out of hand like it does in drier, hotter climes. It is frost tender so depending on your exposure it could make a really cool container feature. The leaf is a really interesting addition to any dish whether raw or lightly sauteed or in this case boiled hard. It’s tangy a little chewy and completely funky lookin’.

And another thing. I may write another post about this, but green tomatoes aren’t the only remaining part of our cherished tomatoes that we have left. Add the leaves to the mix. Tomatoes leaves once considered toxic actually aren’t  toxic even in relatively large amounts. The alkaloid Tomatine that I wrote about in the fried green tomato post is in the leaves as well. It would take a pound to do any harm. In the mean time they are a killer addition to marinaras, putanesca, antipasta, veggies and chicken and anything you want to have a tomato flavor with out the toms themselves.

Okay enough for now…I gotta get back to the garden.

eat well. live well. be happy!

Abundant Shade

I love going to a client’s house for an initial consultation and walking the property. Inevitably there is a north side and sometimes a shady side too. Their response is commonly the same, “Well, this is the shady side. I wish we could grow food here. Is there anything else we can do with it?” What about growing some grub? I’m not just talking about growing mushrooms or fiddlehead ferns, which might be a common solution. I’m talking about berries and fruit as well.

There is a whole host of plants that actually produce better in the shade. Yes mushrooms do grow well in the shade and there is nothing better for the epicur-ious than a mushroom garden with a variety of mushrooms. But here are a couple others to consider. If you have the room put in a hedge of Evergreen Huckleberry (Vacciniuum ovatum). In the shade V.

Huckleberry and Salal share a border in this shade garden.

ovatumcan get 6 – 8 feet tall, while in the sun it only gets to 3′. It even produces better in the shade. By pruning and trimming it into a hedge you encourage it to branch more and thus fruit more. Plus its native.

Also native, but not as tall is  Salal (Gaultheria shallon). Known for its berries, which can be used as a thickener, sweetener and wine as well as eaten fresh, Salal also has tender young leaves that can be eaten as well. I haven’t tried them, I’m more likely to use them in flower arranging if I ever take up that hobby. I use the berries in combination with the evergreen huckleberries for jam and really want to give the combination a go as a wine.

Here’s another berry, technically. Kiwi. Hardy Kiwi specifically. Kiwis are vines and vigorous ones at that growing up to 30m into trees.  Actinidia species arguta(this link says they are flavorful…don’t believe ‘em) and kolomikta fall into the hardy category. They will tolerate temps to -20F. As producing vines kolomikta needs warm spring temps with little to no chance of surprise frost, while thearguta flowers later and has a better chance of not losing their buds to a spring frost. This makes them a good choice for Western Washington and similartemperate climates around the world. Actinidia deliciosa, the fuzzy kiwi that we find in the store, is a different species with a to-the-point latin name, but don’t let the lack of “deliociosa” in the hardy kiwi names deter you, they are amazing and can be found at the farmer’s markets right now. Keep in mind that Kiwis plants are dioecious so you will need a male and a female for fruit.

I hope this inspires you to find some shade and play with it. There are, count them,1 - 2 - 3 edible nurseries between Washington and Oregon that sells these fruits. They have a number of varieties. All three will mail the plants to you in a reasonable time period for a reasonable cost.

eat well. live well. be happy!

Green Tomatoes: Fried and Gluten Free (or If Happiness = Health)

If you read my post at the GoodWorks blog you’ll know that frying up tomatoes is a first for me. I’ll be the first to admit that I was really skeptical. I’ve always been told that green tomatoes are poisonous. So, I figured, frying must breakdown the alkaloids in green tomatoes and make them digestible. As it turns out, green tomatoes are actually poisonous and frying doesn’t break down the alkaloid they harbor.

Tomatoes are members of the nightshade family known for some seriously deadly members…like nightshade. Unripe red tomatoes (you can actually get tomatoes that ripen green on the vine) contain an alkaloid called tomatine. While it is an alkaloid it isn’t the alkaloid known for killing live stock. That would be solanine. Tomatine is a mild alkaloid that is digestible in moderate sized quantities and is even known for helping to remove LDL (low-density lipophans) from our systems. If eating fried green tomatoes isn’t the healthiest side dish it is at least neutral unless you consider it is a quick short cut to short term happiness and people who are happy are more likely to be healthy, then fried green tomatoes are actually good for you.

I had a lot of unripe Cherokee Purple and Brandywine tomatoes left on the vine this weekend. With overnight temps in the 30s and 40s it was a no brainer that tomato season was over. I harvested the un-ripes left on vine and brought them in.

Seriously.

My girlfriend Amy is allergic to gluten and corn so the all purpose and corn flour traditional recipes that she is used to seeing in cafes of her native Memphis were not going to happen. We had to come up with our own recipe. I took a traditional recipe and used amaranth flour instead. Amaranth is gluten-free grain that has a distinctive “soil” flavor that I’m not a huge fan of, but I wasn’t about to leave my kitchen cohort out of the equation. So we did things our way.

As a matter of fact we didn’t even follow the recipe. Distracted by conversation, I mixed the amaranth flour, eggs, milk and spices together into a batter. Usually the tomatoes are dipped in each separately (milk then eggs then flour then the optional bread crumbs) which helps all the individual ingredients stick to the tomatoes. To this we also added 21 Season Salute from Trader Joe’s.

The result was a mouth watering bitter/sour flavor that was really unusual but really good! Combined with the 21 Season Salute we had a really soild foundational flavor to play with. We added a sweet and sour zest with some left over balsamic vinegar reduction, kicked in the spice with some Tapatio sauce, and of course we added grease

Fried Green Tomato Sandwich

Think Fried Green Tomato Sandwich. Fried Green Tomato, Fried Egg, Fried Bacon (Turkey or Pig), Fried Green Tomato…um, yes, it was good.

Edible Gardens NW Fried Green Tomato Recipe:

INGREDIENTS

3 medium, firm green tomatoes
1/2 cup amaranth flour
1/4 cup milk
2 beaten eggs
1/4 cup grape seed oil
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/4 teaspoon pepper

21 Season Salute to taste

METHOD

1 Cut un-peeled tomatoes into 1/2 inch slices. Sprinkle slices with salt and pepper. Pat slices with towel to get relieve of excess moisture then let stand for 15 minutes. Meanwhile, place flour with 21 Season Salute, milk, eggs, and bread crumbs in separate shallow dishes (or if you don’t read instructions, get distracted by coffee fueled conversation or generally work against the grain, just mix it all up and call it good.).

2 Heat grape seed oil in a skillet on medium heat. Pan should be big enough so that the oil comes about half way up the slice. Dip tomato slices in milk, then flour, then eggs, (or the batter thereof) then bread crumbs. In the skillet, fry half of the coated tomato slices at a time, for 4-6 minutes on each side or until brown. Season to taste with salt and pepper.

Enjoy! (For better flavor and experience add grease and fat)

Growing Food

I had a friend a couple years ago claim he “couldn’t grow a rock.” I knew the answer but I asked anyway, “Have you tried?” He hadn’t. It wasn’t the obviousness of his statement that caught my attention, but to what he was alluding that struck me as unusual. What he meant to say was that he didn’t think he could grow a plant to save his life. I told him he was wrong. “Well if I did, I’d have to grow it with chems. I’d need all the help I could get.”

The idea that growing food organically in our backyards is new, difficult, and a somehow radically fringe concept reserved for elite horticultural nerds or botanical science prodigies is flawed. For fifteen thousand years before WWI, humans grew food crops close to their homes using only what nature provided them. And much of the world still does. Seeds were saved and strains were developed for specific locales that provided communities with food year round.

The “organic” production of food is one of our most primordial ways of relating to the earth. It is in our genes. Besides being innate to the human experience, growing food is a relatively easy activity. Compared with the amount of time and money we spend buying food, it is a relatively enjoyable one as well. Now it seems it is simply “natural” to buy our food at the store. On average our food travels between 1500 and 2500 miles before it winds up on our plate. That’s like traveling round trip from Seattle, WA to Cheyenne, WY for your food! Without the advent of the automobile and refrigeration, our frail modern bodies would probably perish somewhere near Issaquah. Hardly natural! To boot, each moment that the food is in transport from it’s origin somewhere in Florida (or New Zealand…) it is slowly, imperceptibly, decomposing, losing its nutritive value along the way.

Backyard food production has a lasting synergistic effect far beyond just providing fresh food free of chemical dependency. A well-designed edible landscape can have aesthetic appeal, be a learning and growing experience for ourselves and our families, create habitat, build soil, and corrupt influence otherwise unconvinced neighbors who reap the profits of our bounty. By growing food an accessible ten feet from our door using organic methods, we not only provide ourselves with fresh nutrient rich fruits and vegetables, but we also build a legacy for our children; that of being modern humans on a natural human scale. If you can’t grow a rock, try to grow some food. It’s far easier and there are plenty of people and resources (this blog post for one) to help you along the way. The good news is that if plants elude your TLC even after you’ve received all the help you can get, the farmer’s market and the organic section of your local grocer is right around the corner. *By the way, if you can grow a rock let me know. This I have to see…

Garlic!

The anatomy of a Garlic Bulb

Alright! It’s time to start thinking about next year’s garden! One of the greatest parts of growing your own grub is that you can grow varieties of crops that you simply can’t find in most grocers. Garlic is so completely prized as a culinary mainstay that most of us have never bothered to ask about the kinds of Garlic we have to choose from. We are usually content to consider purchasing only one variety, Silverskin and it’s various strains. Like much of what we purchase in grocery store, Silverskins are prized for its long shelf life. And they need it, because they have traveled a long way to be here. Most garlic (77% or 23 billion pounds) is grown in China. Chinese ag standards are a lot lower than ours, which is reason enough for you to be growing your own. if that’s not good enough growing your own garlic gives you more diversity too. In May the scapes (stems) of the garlic are cut to prevent the flowering head to get too much of the energy from the plant. The energy is transferred to the bulb increasing the size of the head and thus the cloves. This also helps storability with varieties other than Silverskins. Filaree Farm in Okanogan County has dozens of garlic varieties to choose from and experimental packs to play with. The trial packs give you a few varieties to whet your palette towards becoming a true garlic connoisseur.There is not enough room here to go into the joys of garlic. Books have been written about the wonder and glory of this bulb. But if you want to plant it you need to order soon. Once it comes wait until the 3rd or 4th week in October to plant. Break a part the head of garlic being careful not to break the basal plate, (see insert top left) which is the hard part of the garlic clove that is at the bottom. That is where the new roots are coming from so it’s important that it’s intact. Prepare the bed with compost and loose soil for good drainage. Plant the largest cloves with the basal plate down at a depth of 3” and a distance of 6” from each other. Cover with soil and then mulch well with straw or leaves before the frosts. In Seattle we don’t need to worry much about the ground freezing and expanding and thus pushing the garlic out of the ground but we do have to worry about nutrient depletion due to the rain. In June the garlic will be ready for harvest. If you want to let them go to seed they can offer a nice architectural piece to your edible garden in the frosts of next fall.