Garden Huckleberry

One of our garden experiments this year (well, everything was an experiment, really!) was the "garden huckleberry", a nightshade-family fruit totally unrelated to true huckleberries. It is supposedly a cultivar of black nightshade, which would make it Solanum nigrum var. melanocerasum. I have not been able to find a whole lot of information about it, but apparently it is from West Africa.

Garden huckleberry grows into a small annual bush, roughly the size and aspect of a tomatillo plant (though it doesn't flop over pathetically like tomatillos do, bless their leafy hearts). The little white flowers give way to a multitude of green berries that turn black and shiny. We had no problem growing these plants, they had no diseases or pests, and didn't mind irregular watering. They seem to prefer it hot. We got about 2L of berries in our first harvest from 6 plants, which is not bad, I think.

Now, the tricky question is what do they taste like? Well, firstly, you don't eat them raw. They are simply no good. Rather tasteless, slightly metallic, and not worth your time of day. You need to cook them, and not any old way either. First, you need to parboil them for 10 minutes with some baking soda. During this stage, it produces a most amazing green foam (photo). Then you rinse the berries, and cook them with lemon juice, during which process the mixture turns deep purple, and you add sugar at the end. At last, you are supposed to obtain berries that taste like blueberries. Well, my assessment is that they taste like damn bitter blueberries. Rosemary is rather less elogious, and says they taste like bitter sweetened boiled grass.

So basically, this plant is not really worth the time or garden space, and we won't grow it again. I find than regular black nightshade has much nicer tasting berries (and no, black nightshade is not toxic when ripe). A google search quickly demonstrates the overwhelming proportion of people who feel the same way about garden huckleberry, and only a small number of gardeners seem to want to grow it for more than one season!

Honestly though, it would make a nice ornamental plant, but I don't think I'll try eating it again...

Gluten-Freed (my new blog project)

Just a little post to tell readers about a new project of mine. I recently launched a new blog/website about gluten intolerance, including my own story about living with it, and of course, lots of recipes! Well, I don't have tons up yet, but I'll be updating it regularly with new kitchen experiments and discoveries and so on.

For anyone who enjoyed the zine I made last year for the Montreal Zine Fair, this is a new incarnation of the same project. I decided that, rather than writing up a new print zine (at least for now) I'd turn it into a website that would be accessible to more people and easier for me to keep up to date!

Any comments/suggestions welcome! Hope you like it!

https://sites.google.com/site/glutenfreed/

Potato towers update

We have 2 potato towers: one is planted with a yellow variety called "Mona Lisa", and the other is a purple variety called "Vitellotte". We planted them both at the same time, with 10 seed potatoes each (the boxes are roughly 60 cm to a side).

A couple of days ago, we harvested the Mona Lisa tower, since the tops of all but two plants were dried up. We were disappointed to find that no potatoes had been set in the upper layers of the tower. There were only potatoes in the bottom layer. The total harvest weighed 2.8 Kg, more potatoes than we've ever grown, but still way below the rumours of 50 lbs per tower we've gotten wind of. Why were there no potatoes in the upper layers? It's hard to say: we missed a lot of the potato tower action while travelling, and our knowledge of the life-cycle of potatoes is rather thin. It could be that the towers were raised too late, or at the wrong point in the plant's cycle.

Worried about the other tower, we took off some planks to check: there are no potatoes to be seen yet in the upper layers, but there are lots of roots, and the potato plants above are still very green and looking good (see photo). They even look like they are going to flower again. Since my understanding is that the plants set potatoes while they flower, it could be that the tower will fill up to the brim with potatoes then.

I wish I understood potatoes better. The two pieces of information I have about them that have helped are the simultaneous potato formation and flowering I mentioned, and the other is that potatoes are formed between the seed potato and the top of the soil (which is at the basis of potato tower theory). My knowledge of the habits of potatoes stops there, pretty much. Does anyone know where I can get some Potato 101 info, or have any potato wisdom to share? There are so many ways to plant potatoes! How do you do it?

(Minor) Troubles in the Garden

Nothing dramatic has befallen our chlorophyllian friends, and after the rush and hassle of starting sometimes stubborn and picky seedlings and then finding room for most of them, taking care of the garden has been a pretty relaxed job. A few things have popped up though.

A significant number of baby squashes, especially earlier in the summer, have had a tendency to turn yellow and brown, shrivel up and fall off. We are assuming, from doing some internet research that this is due to insufficient pollination, and have tried, when possible, to pollinate them by hand. There are still lots of squashes, and I imagine that when one squash aborts, the plant simply puts the energy into growing another one. So maybe it's not something to be overly concerned about. However, this has made it seem like growing the different varieties of squashes separately instead of all mixed together would have been a good idea (we let the idea of diversity get to our heads I guess); it would definitely have helped for hand pollination.

We have been pretty relaxed about watering, and this has been a very dry summer so far. So even though we have mulch, signs are starting to show. Especially on our tomatoes, which are just starting to produce. What you see on the photo is called "blossom end rot". Apparently it is caused by a calcium deficiency, which results usually from irregular watering (this damages the fine roots and/or inhibits soil life, hence the plant's ability to uptake calcium). It doesn't seem to be too bad though, only a few plants are affected. If we had a smaller garden, watering wouldn't be such a big deal, but the surface area combined with the heat and drought we've seen, and our leaky water collection barrels make it a serious task to water everything often enough. Maybe we must perfect our rain dancing skills!

We've also noticed some yellow blotches on squash leaves and some white ones on the perennial kale. We'll keep an eye on them and report back if it develops into anything interesting...