Gourmet Weed Primer - Dandelions, Part I

I mean it! It's dandelion week in our yard, house and blog, and Tom is fired up about it. I harvested a smidgen of a fraction of those onerous weeds cropping up in our garden beds, and Tom has been blanching, sauteing, kneading and pulverizing these things into new recipes. Even NPR caught the vibe of his enthusiasm this week with an interview of wild greens forager Sam Thayer. If you're not sure WHY you should be eating dandelions, check out the NPR interview or visit my blog entry from last year - The Easiest Way To Remove Dandelion Weeds From Your Garden. But if you want to know WHAT you should be doing with the dandelions once harvested, TommyD is your man.

Dandelions – My Port in a Storm

Tom DiGangi Jr.

In all honesty, I don’t love dandelion greens. Most of the time, I just like them. Arugula, chard and spinach are the greens I would marry. Dandelions deserve a couple of dates, and then… move on. But, that’s just fine with me.

As winter wanes, my desire for fresh greens waxes. So, each spring, dandelions and I have a nice dinner, maybe take-in a movie, you know… get reacquainted. Then, we lose touch for the rest of the year, until winter creates that longing, once again. It’s a great relationship. And, after a harsh winter like this one, I’m fired up about spending some time in my port in a cold and snowy storm.

The dandelion is bitter and intense. Yet, it is enticing because it is the first produce from our yard. The trick is to find ways to tame the intensity of dandelions. Here are two recipes to mellow the personality of this spring spark plug. They both employ a technique called “blanching,” which reduces the bitter flavor and sets the bright green color of the greens. The recipes also utilize my other favorite harbinger of spring – garlic chives – highlighting the adage “what grows together, goes together.”

Thai Dandelion and Carrot Soup (Serves 2)

Ingredients

1 Quart Asian-inspired stock (see below)

1 Carrot, quarter inch dice

1 Quart freshly harvested dandelion greens (no roots or flowers, please)

1T fresh garlic chives, minced

2T soy sauce

Salt to taste

Procedure

Blanch the dandelion greens by placing them in a large pot of salted and vigorously boiling water for two minutes. Remove the greens and “shock” them in a large bowl of ice water, mixing the greens until they are cool. Then drain the greens, and set-aside.

Combine a quart of the stock and the diced carrots in a small pot. Bring to a boil, lower the heat and let simmer until the carrots are almost cooked through (about 10 minutes). Chop the blanched dandelion greens into bite-sized pieces and add to the pot to simmer for a few minutes. Turn off the heat and stir-in the chives and soy sauce. Adjust the salt to taste and slurp up the liquid health.

Asian-inspired stock

Ingredients

Handful of leftover chicken and/or pork bones

1 Onion

1 Carrot

3-4 Fennel stems

3T Fresh cilantro

3 Dried Thai chiles

1 Star anise

3T sun dried tomatoes

3 Garlic cloves

3 Fresh quarter inch thick ginger slices

3 Quarts of water

Procedure

To make the stock, combine all ingredients in a 4-quart (or larger) pot and simmer, mostly covered, for at least 2 hours. Skim the foam off the top of the stock occasionally while simmering. Pass the stock though a sieve. Discard the solids. Let your imagination and the contents of your pantry and fridge create variations on this list. Ultimately, you are just looking for a homemade, healthy and flavorful stock, with some classic Asian dimensions.

Come back tomorrow for Tom's recipe for Dandelion Pappardelle With Chicken Ragu!

Seed Starting Update: The Analysis of Failure

Once again, it's been a month since a post even after I swore I'd be doing weekly garden journal updates. Although my first crop of seeds fared mostly well, I had a few large exceptions. What better way to learn from mistake than by a thorough self-deprecating analysis, right?

TWO RULES FOR SUCCESSFULLY STARTING SEEDS:

1.) Don't accidentally delete your business website, or undertake a kitchen renovation, or pick up a completely consuming fiction trilogy (damn you, Lisbeth Salander!) or anything else that might cause you to totally forget to water your seeds. News flash: seeds need to be kept evenly moist. Duh .... loser! (C.Sheen)

2.) Don't decide that all seeds generally follow that same rules for soil, temperature, and lighting needs. Well, actually, you can, and get fairly good results. But you will have failures and will wind up disappointed. Here's my real life example.

My seed mix consists of 1/3 compost, 1/3 peat moss and 1/3 perlite. Once sown, I water seeds from the bottom, mist spray the top, and then cover with plastic to create a warm humid environment. They are placed under fluorescent lights which are on all the time. The seeds vary in age, depending on when I bought them. I put a heating pad under the peppers, husk cherry, epazote and culantro to keep the soil temp at about 70 degrees.

This method worked just fine for my tomatoes, epazote, chervil, and fennel. But not all my planted seeds worked as well, and here are my seed failure reasons.

• Inconsistent Watering: Once again, don't underwater. You will kill your stuff, or diminish germination rates. While we're on the topic, don't overwater either. Overwatering rots seeds, and can lead to fungus and disease trouble. Although my fennel and chervil germinated fine, the both perished the weekend we went to the Philadelphia Flower Show. The show was great, but my seeds did not appreciate my neglect.
• Old Seeds: My peppers barely germinated, and the parsley and the sage didn't germinate even a bit. One possible reason is seed age. I have ten year old tomato seeds which are still growing up every year, but pepper seeds only last a year or two. All seeds have the production year stamped on them, so pay attention or you're wasting your time.
• Soil Needs: I took a whirl at culantro (also called "false cilantro") seeds having no idea how they were going to work. Not surprisingly, they didn't work at all. Some brief googling revealed that culatro seeds are not only sensitive age-wise (they need to be used within months of purchase) but they prefer a pure peat moss starting mix with no seed burial. They also take some extra time. I'm going to retry these and see what happens.
• Seed Treatment: Certain seeds need to be tricked into thinking they are in their natural habitat and growing conditions in the real world. "Stratification" is the art of bringing seeds out of dormancy by applying levels of cold and moisture to imitate winter conditions. One way to do that is by keeping seeds between moist paper towels in the refridgerator. Another way is to just direct sow the seeds where you want them instead of starting them inside. This is another potential reason why my poor parsley failed.

I started two more flats this past week and for the most part, I will probably not learn from my mistakes. So stay tuned!

If It's For Free, It's For Me: Garden Resources To Get Organized

Picture this: it's three months from now, and time to transplant those meticulously grown tomato and pepper plants (multiple varieties of each, of course). That means it's also time to direct sow beans, and of course, I can't just grow one kind. I take my trusty (beat-up, dirty, and badly organized) garden tool bag, my garden journal (also a mess), my seed packet pile, and my hopefully-still-properly-labeled transplants.

Then I start to wonder which plants will go where and in what order. I start jotting down some scribbly notes which make perfect sense at the time but won't make any sense in a month when stuff starts growing. At the exact moment I realize my plant tags have faded in the sun and I can't tell hot vs. sweet peppers, I will also remember that I never made a proper map of the layout. Problem. The beans don't look happy either. Were they bush beans or pole beans? Were they shelling beans or fillet beans? Suddenly, meal times become a dangerous game of Russian roulette. "Here Tom, I sauteed some Italian frying peppers" "Are they hot or sweet?" "Erm, not sure" [watches as Tom pops one into his mouth, pauses, then makes The Face] "Yes, then those would be the hot ones."

I always garden like I am being chased by a live tiger, when the tiger is in fact made out of a giant to-do list shaped like a tiger and given tiger-like properties by my active imagination. Obviously, rushing around leads to an inattention to detail that produces some crappy results. Can I be saved from myself? Who knows. But with a stubborn two feet of snow still on the ground, now is the time to get some organization skills in place. Google, take me away!

Seed Starting Chart: Organic Gardening Magazine kept a seed starting chart housed on its website for years, and now that I need a fresh copy, it is nowhere to be found. Basically, it consisted of a list of common garden veggies, how long they take to grow from seed, and how many weeks before or after your last frost date that they should be planted. I always printed the sheets and kept two calculations - one for my "early" crops that would go out under protection from the cold (April 1st), and my "late" crops that would go out on time (May 15th). Once I decided my two planting dates, I would go backward from there and calculate when precisely to start the seeds which was an elaborate pain.

But hark! Having been forced to look for an alternative chart to share on my blog, in no time at all I found this wonderful excel spreadsheet that does the math for you. Check out the "lazy gardener's seed starting chart" at You Grow Girl. All you have to do is download it, and enter the date for your time zone. It even provides a link to the Farmers' Almanac list of frost free dates by region. This is already a huge improvement over my pencil scribble list.

Online Garden Planners: I still love my pencil/graph paper/college rule notebook. I do. But my vegetable garden has grown exponentially over the years, and I can't keep my paper templates in order. I don't have enough room to view the entire garden on one page per season as an aerial map overview, and it's really hard to keep track of crop rotations. I think my solution is to get some helpful software.

This will be my first computer-oriented gardening year thanks to Mother Earth News and their online vegetable garden planner. Although it does not belong in this article since it's only free for the first month, you can practice on the demo to see how it works and decide ahead of time whether it's worthwhile for purchase. I did the 30 day trial so I could actually start putting in my garden dimensions, and I'm finding it pretty user friendly. The demo videos show you exactly how to input your garden bed layout with its exact dimension. Once I get the bed layout put into the online map, I can click and drag various fruits and vegetables from the menu into their potential new homes. The software automatically calculates how many can fit in the space I have (which in itself is vastly useful to me since I am a pathological over-planter). Then it will help me use all this information to calculate crop rotations and succession planting. The downside to this is the yearly $24 subscription fee, and the fact that it doesn't SEEM to allow for integrating exact varieties of annual and perennial flowers among the vegetables. It has a placeholder called "flower" but that isn't the level of detail I need. But maybe I just haven't figured out how to do that party yet. If you have a small garden, I believe this application is really over kill, and probably not worth the investment. This year I will have about 18 raised garden beds of various shapes and sizes, so this might be really helpful for me, which saving Tom some unnecessary food-induced pain.

I've run into another great website with some truly free garden resources. Myfolia found me on the Twitter account that I can't seem to learn how to properly operate. It appears to be a hybrid garden planner and social networking site for gardeners. A free account let's you set your profile with your plant hardiness zone, which then links you to other gardeners in your area. It has easy connections to Twitter and Facebook, along with Flikr and other photo accounts. Aside from the community garden feel, the account lets you input and track your plantings, add journal entries, make task lists, organize your seed stash, and even arrange seed swaps with other members. This application seems more list oriented than map oriented, so it could be a good addition to the Mother Earth planner. They even have a mobile app so you can update your info FROM YOUR GARDEN! I don't know if I would use it, since I much prefer to write stuff down on random pieces of paper and lose it. Finally, wouldn't it be super neat-o to find other garden nerds in my area besides the only other one I know!?! (That would be you, Dina).

While we're working the free theme.....

Free Seeds: Oh no! This offer ends tomorrow, but I just heard about it. Click the link to the blog for Your Small Kitchen Garden and follow the instructions for getting your own free squash and tomato seeds. Move yourself up higher on the waiting list by sharing the info on Twitter or Facebook! But the generous gardener at this blog stops taking names tomorrow, so get moving.

Ed Hume Seeds will send you a seed packet in the hope that you will donate some of your veggie proceeds to the worthwhile program Plant a Row For the Hungry.

The Dinner Garden has designated national site for picking up your free seed offerings. If you don't have one nearby, you can submit your information via email for delivery via mail.

I'm stopping here, because there seem to be quite a few free seed offers once you start looking around. Also, I have given my self A LOT of homework to do as a result of this article. I need to follow my own advice and get organized.

JOURNAL NOTE: Day 7 of the tomato/pepper/herb seed under lights, and all is quiet. Hopefully by next weekend, I'll have some germination. Talk to you later!

I'm With Fergie. Let's Get It Started!

Even though I'm from Pennsylvania, I'm not referring to the single most important Sunday event in winter. Nor am I referring to the famous burrowing rodent from the western part of the state who pretends to be a psychic. No. Neither of these events leave me with any optimism or hopefulness after this beastly Northeastern winter we've had (and will likely continue to have, regardless of what the garden-gobbling varmint claims). My only source of hope lies in my dingy basement, since it is officially time to start early tomato, pepper and herb seedlings!

Seed starting is the official beginning of my personal spring, which is also the beginning of this year's grand garden schemes and resolutions. To hold myself accountable, 2011's garden resolutions are as follows:

1.) The meticulously chopped and bagged leaves from last fall will be placed on the garden for mulch AS the plants go in, as opposed to AFTER all weedy hell has broken loose.

2.) Trellises will be built and installed AS the plants go in, as opposed to AFTER the plants have hit that gawky teenager growth spurt that leaves them as impossible to manage as human teenagers.

3.) The blog will be ACTUALLY UPDATED and used regularly as a place to record relevant information, instead of being a high school creative writing project. Wherever she may be, Mrs. Timms is not likely reading this and recording my grade in that giant green ledger teachers used in the 80's.

4.) Thanks to this handy online garden planner, I swear to actually document what I plant and where I planted it, abandoning my previous habit of jotting stuff on random pieces of paper, losing it, and having no idea which variety of vegetable I am harvesting.

5.) Lastly, "Laura's Organic Gardening Adventures" will now just be "Organic Gardening Adventures" since Chef Tommy is doing more than his fair share of writing, cooking and hauling stones around. Time to give credit where credit is due.

I mean it, people. I really do. And where I would normally spend the next hour concocting a creative, funny and interesting last paragraph, I will now proceed to resolution #3. Let it be known that on this date, seeds were started in my homemade potting mix (equal parts compost, perlite and peat moss), packaged into plastic grape tomato containers saved from the grocery store, and placed under 4' fluorescent bulbs in my hideously ugly seed starting shelving unit shown here.

Seeds started today ..........

Tomatoes: Garden Peach, Sugar Snacker, Husk Cherry, Beaverlodge, San Marzano

Artichoke: Imperial Star

Fennel: Fino

Peppers: Ring-O-Fire Cayenne, Piquillo

Herbs: Common Sage, Italian Parsley, Chervil, Epazote, Culantro

I put the peppers, epazote, culantro, and artichokes on top of a heating pad, since they seem to need a little more heat to germinate. I have no idea whether the sage will germinate since it's a perennial, and those are usually tricky to start from seed. I'm just going to wing it and see what happens. The rest should be no big deal.

I'm most proud of the San Marzano seeds, since I filched them from Sicily (SSSSHHHHHHH!) in 2003 and the original seeds are still germinating well. I find this variety to be smaller and denser than other San Marzano seeds I've purchased elsewhere. Hopefully I'll get a good crop and save some of the seeds so I can get some fresh stock. I'm equally proud of the Sugar Snacker. I bought this as a plant from a big box store6 or 7 years ago and have never seen it since as a plant or seed. I save the seeds every year. The fruits are tiny, bright orange, and the sweetest cherry tomato you will ever taste. The vines themselves are monstrous, uncontrollable, and produce like crazy. These jerks topple every trellis I've ever made, but they are always worth it.

I usually consider these tomatoes and peppers my "early" plants because they will be put out under protective coverings called Wall-o-waters about two months earlier than is appropriate for my area. The goal, of course, is home grown tomatoes in June. The Beaverlodge variety is an early maturing hybrid with only 55 days to harvest according to the seed packet. So IF I do everything exactly the way I'm supposed to do it (not likely) tomatoes in June should be a cinch this year. Of course, hybrids with that early a maturity date were bred for speed, not flavor, so they probably won't be the most fantastic tasting tomatoes ever. But that first tomato from the garden tastes great every year, no matter what.

That's my story for today folks! By now the game should we winding down, marking yet another winter milestone. And even though I was out today trying to shovel through ice so the mail lady could drive to the mailbox to deliver me her goods, I was using Grandpa Knott's rusty old garden spade to do it. Let the 2011 garden season begin!