How limited our tastes

Maybe I've just been reading too much Michael Pollan, but now as I look at the vast array of products in the supermarket, I see a whole lot of sameness. Two big grains, corn and wheat, in every product that contains flour (which counts for the majority of snack foods and processed foods), with a smattering of rice, rye, and barley. A half-dozen kinds of dry beans: "white," "kidney," "pinto," "black," "garbanzo," and sometimes, "black-eyed peas." Fruits? Apples, pears, oranges, peaches, nectarines, grapes, cherries, melons -- now we seem to be getting somewhere, as we add in the veggies: lettuce, carrots, celery, beets, turnips, chard, cabbage, broccoli, kale, brussels sprouts, cauliflower, peppers, squash, potatoes... and yet...and yet...

I've been reading a book I found at a used book store some time ago, Kitchen Gardening in America by David M. Tucker. It's out of print, alas, but it's not too hard to find used. I have a bit of a beef with the section where he describes most Native American practices as being based in "magic" (as though wise elder women couldn't figure out a more earthbound explanation of why ashes or fish made corn grow better), but otherwise it's an interesting history of gardening in America, looking at both Native American and European roots.

Native people who farmed, as many gardeners know, grew the plants that have come to be called the "three sisters": corn, squash, and beans. They also grew sunflowers for the seeds and Jerusalem artichokes for the nutritious tubers. These, with the addition of meat that the men brought in from the forest, formed the staples of the diet of many native groups. The staples, mind -- for while the women tended the fields throughout the year, they didn't have to work at it daily. They spent a good deal of their time in the forest, too, not hunting as the men did, but gathering forest and meadow plants. Nations of the eastern seaboard gathered something near two hundred different wild plants for food, including greens, roots, and berries.

Nearly two hundred. That makes the selection in the produce section look downright puny.

Turning to the European tradition, the same book lists a 17th century recipe for mutton stew that includes violet leaves, endive, succory (a relative of endive, it seems -- I had to look that one up), strawberry leaves, spinach, calendula flowers, green onions, and oatmeal. Lots of greens that we no longer consider food went into the pot, some simply for food value, some that were considered preventative medicine. The Medieval Garden by Sylvia Landsberg lists many more: dandelions, Alexanders, nettle, mallow, wood sorrel, betony, daisies, dead nettle, rockets, rampion... the list goes on and on.

Here I thought I was being wild and crazy when I ordered seeds for purple carrots and Flashy Trout's Back lettuce.

The advantage to eating a wider selection of foods is that so many foods have so many different pigments and other interesting substances that we lump under the generic heading of "phytonutrients": beta carotene, anthocyanins, lycopenes, lignins, various vitamins, and a whole lot more and even more yet to be discovered. The broader your range of foods, the more likely you'll take in the range of phytonutrients that will keep you in the best of health.

Those Medieval ladies who threw strawberry leaves and violets in the pot had something good going.

Good seed catalogs that carry heirloom vegetables often list lots of interesting, little-known vegetables not found at the supermarket. Not just different varieties, but entirely different vegetables from different gardening traditions. Next season I plan to delve into some of those, as well as look into cultivating patches of some of the native plants from my area that used to feed the people who lived here long before my ancestors came. With a degree in botany, I know enough to distinguish the edible from the poisonous. I already have Siberian Miner's Lettuce (Claytonia sibirica) in the yard. There's a start.

As for the camas (Camassia quamash) bulbs that the Kalapuya people in my area used to harvest -- doggone but the bulbs for sale in the catalogs are too expensive to eat. I'll just have to wait until my camas patch gets bigger.

A school garden in Portland could grow with your help.

Jefferson High School has served high-needs students in the north end of Portland, Oregon for decades. Recently the building was restructured to house magnet school for students interested in the arts and sciences. Among the student body are students from many other nations who are new to the country and are just starting to learn English.

One of the teachers at Jefferson Academy of Science and Technology who teaches these English Language Learners wants to create a garden, a wonderful little secret garden in a walled area of the school. The garden will have a pond and a little ferny patch. All they need is $146 to buy the pots, seeds, plants, and pond kit.

This teacher has posted his request on the DonorsChoose website. Here's what he has to say about the project:

I teach students English. My students are new to the United States. My students come from Africa, Vietnam, Haiti and Mexico. To come to America as a highschool student and not understand English is hard. I do everything I can do to help them become good citizens of our country.

I need to find a away to make them feel they can do something. The first year as a newcomer to America is hard. This garden project is a way they can give back to the community and learn about nature.

I need plants, pots, seeds and a plastic pond liner. These materials and my students hard work will create a secret garden where now the space is only an ugly concrete walled off space.

This project will change the lives of the new students and the school. The student body will be able to see the hard work that my English Language Learners put into this garden and may inspire them to contribute to the community.

My students need to create a secret garden in a walled off space. We need one Woodwardia Fern Garden kit and one Create-a-Water Garden. The cost of this proposal is $146, which includes shipping for any materials requested and fulfillment.

If you'd like to pitch in, just click on the thermometer widget here and drop in a contribution. Ten dollars here, twenty there, and this project will be funded in no time. The deadline in in August.

Read your fruit

You know those little sticky labels on your fruit, the things you have to remember to peel off or they get annoyingly stuck between your teeth? The ones with a little number on them? Ever wonder what the little number is for?

Those are PLU numbers -- product look-up numbers. They're 4-digit numbers established by the International Federation for Produce Coding, and each number corresponds to a particular kind of fruit. The grocery store codes them into the price scanning system, so all the clerk has to do is type in the number and voila, the system spits out the price-per-pound of your navel oranges or Bosc pears.
Every now and then, however, you may run across a 5-digit number, and that's where things get a little more interesting. If the first digit is a 9, that's a code for organic produce. They get their own special digit because, as we all know, the stuff costs more so the organic Gala apples get a higher price in the system than the grown-with-pesticides Gala apples. If the first digit of the 5-digit number is an 8, what you've got is genetically-modified produce. So if that's an important bit of information to you, now you know.

Many of the 4-digit codes are listed on the Fruit Labels Site, which is a site for people who collect those pesky little stickers as a hobby. Wow, who knew?

Gardeners doing their bit for science

So what's up with your garden? Are plants blooming early or late or right on time? What kinds of trends are the gardeners in your area seeing?

Project Bud Burst wants to know!

The deal is, the only way that climatologists botanists and horticulturalists can track the effects of global climate change on the plants of this world is with good, solid data. But the quantity of data needed is so huge that both the time and expense would be astronomical.

That's where gardeners come in. After all, we do sometimes get just a wee bit obsessive as we eagerly anticipate the first blossoms on our prize helebore, or peer intently at the buds on the winter-damaged Cecil Brunner rose and wonder if there's still a bit of life left in it, if maybe its buds will open again this year.

What Project Bud Burst wants is for people everywhere to watch one or more types of plants in their gardens, parks, or nearby wild areas and report on things like first bud burst or first blossom. With a huge database of reports like that gathered from many places over many years, the statisticians can go to work on the data and report any trends they see.

Remember, we're dealing with global climate change. Calling it "global warming" oversimplifies the case. It's a matter of more energy going into the system, and the results can be unexpected. The more data the scientists have, the better they can understand what's going on.

How hot was it?

As measured by the household kitty thermometer, it was THIS hot:


Not quite a month ago, it was snowing. This weekend, the temperatures soared into the 90's. All around the garden, plant leaves were hanging limp in spite of moist soils simply because the plants weren't prepared for the sudden heat and couldn't pump water fast enough. By this coming Wednesday, however, temperatures should drop into the 60's. Maybe we'll get a spot of rain to dampen things down again.

Field Trip! Forest Wild Flowers

I have a not-so-attractive sloping, shady strip on the north side of my house, where I've been slowly removing the vinca and mulching it over in preparation for turning it into a shady woodland garden full of native plants. So it was all I could do to restrain myself from sharpening a stick into a digging implement and digging up a whole bunch of the beautiful plants that I saw last Thursday out in the McDonald-Dunn Forest.

I was leading a field trip for a biology lab, where students were to go out with tape measures and plant guides and do some basic vegetative survey. As I trotted up and down the trail, supervising the students at work (okay, mostly work -- one student decided it was a good time to chat with someone on his cell phone), I snapped some pictures of some of the forest plants.

There was, of course, a particularly noxious hazard to contend with: Poison-oak. It was everywhere, both in its "don't mind me, I'm not really here" small shrubby form, and it its enthusiastic vining form, scrambling up tree trunks.

On a prettier note, there's the lovely yellow Wood Violet, also called the Pioneer violet (Viola glabella):
Vanilla leaf (Achlys tryphylla) was in bloom:
Pathfinder (Adenocaulon bicolor) is an interesting specimen. Normally it has these arrow-shaped dark green leaves like this:
but if someone walks through a patch of it, some of the leaves flip over, leaving white arrows pointing the way the person walked:

The leaves of rattlesnake plantain (Goodyera oblongifolia) are more interesting than its spike of inconspicuous white flowers. This native orchid wasn't in bloom quite yet.
Solomon's seal (Smilacina racemosa) has such terrific foliage that it makes a great woodland plant even when it's not in bloom. The white plume is lovely, too.

Trillium ovatum has white petals when it opens, but the petals turn purple as the flower ages:


And the best of all, spotted at the very end of the trek, tiny and barely noticeable in the foliage: Calypso bulbosa, the pretty little Calypso orchid, barely two inches from the ground to the tips of its petals:

Arbor Day tree plant

Doing a bit of catch-up here. The end of the term has been a bit of a bear, what with projects coming in, exams to write, and grading to be done.

Nevertheless I did get out two weekends ago to assist with a tree-planting project in Monmouth a couple of weekends ago. I'd offered some extra credit for my students if they joined in the fun, too, but alas, while several students showed up, none of them were mine. And college students were outnumbered by eager young Cub Scouts, who set the proper example of public service.

Gentle Woods Park on the edge of town was the destination. In the course of the morning we planted about ten trees, some of them flowering cherries, some native Ash. They'll be watered and cared for by park staff until they're established.

More trees for fixing carbon and providing habitat. Excellent.

Eating a species from the brink of extinction

In an article titled To Save a Species, Serve it for Dinner (free registration required to read), the New York Times reports on Gary Paul Nabhan's new book,titled Renewing America's Food Traditions: Saving and Savoring the Continent's Most Endangered Foods. Mr. Nabhan has compiled a list of over 1000 endangered American foods, comprising not only heirloom vegetables that gardeners are already keen on, but also American natives used by Native Americans and Europeans alike (pit-roasted antelope, anyone?).

The thing about preserving food species, as gardeners know, is that it isn't about protecting the species and its habitat as it is with preserving most wild species. It's about actually using the plants and animals as food. Heirloom vegetables will only stick around if someone grows them, eats them, and saves the seeds. Heirloom livestock will only exist if someone raises them and breeds them, and that will happen if there's a demand for the meat (or someone has a lot of money to spend on keeping livestock). Just keeping heirloom varieties around as a kind of living museum doesn't work, because unlike wild species, it takes a lot of work to keep them around. That Seneca hominy flint corn doesn't sow itself, ya know.

What's more, successfully preserving heirloom species also involves preserving the knowledge of how to use it. It's hard to get people to save Ny'pa (a kind of salt grass) if they have no idea what to do with it.

The good thing is that many gardeners and small farmers are keenly interested in heirlooms. Many have flavor or other qualities missing from mass-produced supermarket varieties. The tender skins of Brandywine tomatoes, for example, aren't good for shipping, but the winey flavor outshines any pale pink pseudo-tomato you can find in the produce section.

So where do you find heirloom varieties to grow? Some have made enough of a renaissance that they're available in a wide variety of seed catalogs. My two favorites, Territorial and Nichols, carry some, as does Pinetree Seeds. One Green World has a super selection of unusual fruit trees and shrubs. Then there's Heirloom Seeds, an online supplier which features varieties our parents or grandparents grew in victory gardens during the World Wars.

Not all heirlooms make it into the catalogs, though. To find really unusual varieties that haven't reached commercial production yet, turn to the seed exchanges like Seed Savers Exchange. Or ask around the neighborhood to see if gardeners in your area are harboring a local heirloom.

As for that salt grass -- you're on your own there.

The garden in April

You're only getting closeups, garden-porn style, 'cause the rain-snow-rain-sun-rain-freeze-rain-sun-rain-snow weird weather has limited my gardening time while at the same time pumping up the weeds and making the lawn grow like crazy, so the garden looks like a herd of demented flower fairies have been partying every night without bothering to clean up in between, which I guess they figure is supposed to be my job. And they haven't invited me to any of their parties, either. Hmph.

The bleeding hearts are just starting to put on their show:


A native pink honeysuckle that I planted in the hedgerow is in full bloom. Nice foraging for the hummingbirds.


With all the blossoms on my young Montmorency cherry, I think I'll have enough for a pie this year, if I can get to them before the birds do:


A lovely dwarf iris -- wish I knew the variety name:


A little surprise in the new garden: a tiny morel popping up from the bark dust and wood shavings:


I ordered this dwarf hardy pomegranate from Territorial Seed Company. I've never tried pomegranate before. Sounds terribly exotic, and just the thing for the center circular bed in the new garden:


The Labrador violets have been romping all over the garden and they're blooming like crazy right now. Some folks see violets as weeds. True, these aren't fragrant like the English violets (of which I have a few also), but they do look lovely with their dark foliage contrasting with the lime-green Lady's Mantle. There's a little Corydalis "Blue Panda" just peeking out, too, that bit of lighter green foliage with dainty blue flowers. And ya know, I didn't really plan this. It just turned out that way.


On with the weeding... ::sigh::

An almost 100 foot meal in April

A fresh crop of brand-new asparagus, the first of the season, inspired this almost 100-foot Diet Challenge lunch this weekend: a pile of freshly-picked, lightly steamed asparagus with mayonnaise (um, of unknown origin), with a salad cut from my cold frame and served up with a dressing made by a restaurant over on the coast (a little more than 100 feet away, but local-ish), and a slice of my super-duper apricot and walnut and other good stuff homemade breakfast bread and some Tillamook butter.

The DH was away for the weekend and I couldn't let all that good asparagus go to waste, now, could I? Mmmmm...

Earth Day: trees, flowers, kids, and rain

Earth Day 2008 is closing with torrential rains, flashes of lightning, and a huge roll of thunder that sent our cats stampeding for the farthest corners of the house.

In spite of the showers all through the day, the university campus where I teach managed to pull off some Earth Day events, including a recycling demonstration in the University Center, and several tree planting and flower planting events with the help of the grounds crew.

Here, in a space where an old, diseased rhododendron had to be removed, a contingent of sleepy-eyed youngsters fresh from their nap at the university's preschool gathered around to help plant a weeping cherry. All the kids got a turn at scooping some dirt into the hole. Some insisted on the "big shovel," with some help from a teacher, while others were happier with a trowel suitable for pint-sized tree planters:

In the meantime, crews of bigger kids planted flowers in some of the large planters and flower beds around campus:

A soggy but good time was had by all.

Earth Day 2008

It's coming right up this Tuesday.

Of course, every day is Earth Day when you're a gardener, especially if you go organic. Beyond our own gardens, though, anyone have anything special planned?

Ho, ho, ho, Merry April!

Now, I was going to have a lovely, long post about how spring has finally sprung and the flowers are all in bloom:
How the flowers are filling in nicely:

How I sowed the first seeds for cool-weather crops, like broccoli and spinach, and started an experiment to see how early I could start warm-weather crops outdoors using Kozy Koats:

And show everyone some pretty wild-type tulips like these:


And these:


And some other nice tulips:


But yesterday and today we woke up to this:

And more of this:

So what's up with that? Was I suddenly transported to Fairbanks or something?

The Pea Experiment, Part 3

The great pea-planting experiment continues. To review, my grandmother always planted peas in late February on Washington's birthday, but advice I read in several garden columns for my area advised planting in January. Another said one could wait as late as March and still do just fine. To find out who is right and who is full of green peas, I decided to experiment. I planted Sugar Snap peas in late January, late February, and again in late March. Each time I soaked the seeds and let them germinate before planting.

Now the seedlings are emerging and the results are starting to come in.

Here are some of the January-planted seedlings:

And here are some of the February-planted seedlings:


Hmm, so far the January planting doesn't seem to be ahead in the least. In fact, many of the February-planted peas seem to have the advantage. Both went through a period of hard frost and late snow. It's been a cold, wet, late spring this year.

I mean, look at this:


This was March 27, for pity's sake. Maybe this would be balmy for Saskatoon in March, but snow this late is pretty rare in the Willamette Valley. Heck, snow at all is rare in the Willamette Valley. Freezing rain and black ice are more our usual style.

The March-planted peas aren't up yet. In a few weeks, we'll see who's ahead and who has fallen behind. Eventually we'll see if there's any difference in harvest dates for the different plantings.

My new lemon tree

My free-plus-postage dwarf Meyer lemon tree arrived last week. I've got it potted up in the pot that it came with -- though I added some good, compost-rich soil to the potting mix that came with the kit -- and now the little critter is residing in a sheltered place under the deck awning. I keep it covered with a tube of bubble wrap while the night temperatures are still cool. So far it's chugging along.

Doesn't look much like a tree yet, but give it time, give it time...