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...

Weeds

When we came back from our stay in the Peace Factory after 6 weeks, we found our garden in a somewhat change shape. The paths had turned into a one metre high strip of meadow snaking through our veggie patches, which had remained fairly weeds free thanks to the mulch! The plant that had taken over the paths were mostly wild Amaranth and White Goosefoot (Chenopodium album, a close relative of the North American "Lamb's Quarters"; top photo). Both of these are edible, and quite nutritious actually.

Amaranth (photo on the right) has been the most successful weed in our garden beds too, and we have grown quite fond of it. The sacred plant of the Incas, banned after colonization and christianization, is now valiantly resisting Monsanto in various countries, especially the US. There, millions of acres of round-up ready GM crops have had to be abandoned due to a round-up resistant variety of amaranth (aka. "Pigweed"). How can one not love this freedom fighter plant?

As a matter of fact, we don't weed very much at all. Our beds are full of plants: besides amaranth and goosefoot we also have plantain (Plantago sp.), persian speedwell (Veronica persica), dock (Rumex sp.), black nightshade (Solanum nigrum), sow thistle (Sonchus sp.), scentless chamomille (aka. Bladr's Brow, Tripleurospermum inodorum), Queen Anne's Lace (Daucus carota), yarrow (Achillea millefolium), red deadnettle (Lamium purpureum), nettle (Urtica dioica) and more.

So what's the problem with weeds? Why does conventional wisdom have it that gardens need to be weed free? I have difficulty believing that weeds are always bad for all plants in the garden. What seems fairly evidently detrimental to me is if the weeds are big enough that they shade the veggies. Competition for light is something we make sure to minimize by cutting down the weeds that get too large (essentially the amaranth and goosefoot, since the others are generally smaller). We also remove the weeds that are growing very close to our veggie plants, because we presume that they are "crowding" them somehow. And lastly, the other occasion we see it as beneficial to remove weeds is for more sensitive plants: root veggies, alliums, and young seedlings seem to suffer noticeably from the presence of numerous opportunists popping up around them.

For other plants, I wonder if the benefits of the presence of these wild plants doesn't outweigh the costs. Amaranth, for instance, has a taproot, as do plantain, sow thistle, docks, Queen Anne's lace; so when these plants are growing among vegetables with a different root structure, I imagine there is a niche segregation as far as nutrients are concerned. In fact, I wonder if the taprooters don't help the other plants by bringing up deep nutrients and water that would otherwise be unavailable. Periodically, we snip off the weeds that get too big at the base, leaving the roots in the ground to increase soil fertility. By laying the severed weed on top of the mulch, it dries up and eventually decomposes back into the garden bed, returning the nutrients it acquired deep down to the vegetables. I think this kind of "chop-and-drop" green mulching should be beneficial in the long run, right? And even if the effect is not very significant compared to the nutrients brought by applying compost, manure and mulch, it still saves time and effort (cutting weeds is often easier than pulling up, and less disrupting to the soil).

Then there are all the other functions of weeds:

• They are pretty. Think of yarrow or wild carrot. Persian Speedwell is actually an alien plant that was long ago introduced for its ornamental properties.
• They attract pollinators and beneficial predators. Their flowers are often larger and more showy than veggie flowers (aside from squashes!), and help to reach an ecological balance.
• They conserve humidity in the soil when forming a ground cover. This is the case with bindweed for instance, which, though it is often maligned, is actually harmless to some veggies on which it can't get a grip, such as head cabbages, potatoes, carrots, artichokes, leeks and larger varieties of squashes (this information is from a French gardening magazine, "La Gazette des Jardins").
• They confuse insect "pests". Insects that seek plants do so by looking for green things (an insect can't tell one plant from the next from a distance; even if they are following a chemical scent they don't know exactly where it is coming from). If you only have their host plant on a brown background (earth or mulch), they'll have no trouble locating it. If they can't make it out against a green background, or if they land on a weed instead, they are likely to move on elsewhere and leave your veggies alone.

I would very much like to have some way of comparing different weed management methods, but haven't tried doing so this year. Weeds are pretty much all throughout the garden to some degree, mingling with our veggies under our benevolent gaze. Wild amaranth is our most productive garden plant, and our vegetables seem to be doing fine with it there. Why on earth would we think of removing it?

Garden update

The garden has been a fun adventure so far, so full of lessons! The piece of hardened horse pasture we wet to work on in the spring has turned into a patch of half wild, tumultuous greenery. Our absence in May and June did not end in disaster for the garden (thanks mom for the watering), though it did produce some interesting quirks (see "Weeds" post!).

Beets
I can't say I love the taste of beets, but I have come to appreciate their value as a crop. They grow fast, don't need a lot of watering or care (maybe weeding/mulching), and provide both edible greens and roots. They did well intercropped with our perennial kales: by the time the kales had grown to occupy the whole bed, we got a harvest of beets! Oh, also, beets can be started either indoors or direct seeded! They aren't fussy!

Perennial Kale
Talking about the perennial kale ("Chou Daubenton" in French, Brassica oleracea var. ramosa), that has also been a hit. We haven't been eating it as much as we could be, but each plant has become huge bush. It also seems to be somewhat drought tolerant, though it would probably do better if it had more water. It hasn't been attacked by any insects, and seems generally like a hassle-free plant. We're very fond of it! So is one of the horses, who puts her head over the fence to chomp on the tops!

Three Sisters
The 2 three sisters patches have both been doing great. Planting maize and squashes together seems like a no brainer: one grows horizontally, the other vertically. Can't really go wrong, right? The carpet of squashes has now become very thick, and seems to be doing its job of keeping the ground cool and the weeds down.

The one tricky thing has been the beans. They do grow quite a bit faster than the maize at the beginning of the summer, and they seem to find it hard to hold on to the thick stems. In our windy area they get shaken to the ground and have to start all over again (we usually help them, also so that they don't waste their time twirling around squash leaves). So I'd say the one subtlety about a three sisters patch is when to plant the beans in relation to the maize, and that probably depends on the climate and varieties used.

I can't compare the productivity of such a patch to that of separate patches, but I'd say that those people who used this system for survival probably had very large patches. If you think how much a maize plant or a bean plant produce, and imagine 4 plants of each every 1.5 metres, it surely takes a large area to get enough for conservation.

Other Things
In the rest of the garden the tomatoes are becoming ripe and delicious (we got one that weighed almost half a kilo!), the red cabbages are making heads, still requiring virtually no attention from us, the kales are slowly on their way to reaching their goal of 2 metres, the sunflowers planted by the rats are flowering, the garden huckleberries are steadily ripening (though that doesn't mean they taste any better; more on them later), the Peruvian groundcherries are flowering, the pepinos are starting to think they should do the same, the peppers are swinging into action, with some jalapenos coming right up, the tomatillos have given us enough for our first green salsa, and, and, and...

The kindness of family, (animal) friends, and strangers (Recent Travels, Part II)

(Please scroll down to read Recent Travels, Part I if you haven't already)

We had a fun couple of days in Italy. The only full day we were there we spent hiking over hills and through vines out to San Gimignano (shown here), a very interesting little town full of medieval skyscrapers (15 still stand of the original 72 towers). The next day we got in my parents' rental car and headed north, stopping for the night in a little Alpine town just across the French border called Briançon. That night we ate dinner in a restaurant that actually served several wild plants in our food, which was neat. The next morning we walked around in the mountains a bit and found most of them; some we could identify but others remain a mystery. We then continued to drive north and made it back to Chris's family's place. It was nice to come back after about five weeks of being away, and especially exciting to see our garden! Chris says he wants to write about the garden, so I'll stick to the travel adventures and you will hear from him soon about how our plant friends have been faring all this time.

We spent a few days with both of our families together in once place for only the second time, funnily enough almost exactly two years since the first time, which was when we got married. It was neat to show my parents around the place where we have been living, and to feed them food right out of our garden.

After a few days we packed ourselves back into the rental car and headed north again, this time for Antwerp. Some people reading this may not know that we lived in Antwerp for a year when I was a kid. Going back was fun; it's interesting to see how my 7-year-old brain remembered things a little differently from how I found them this time. The trip was exhausting though, as we had lots of old friends to see and places to revisit, and it was very, very hot. But Antwerp is a really nice city (as far as cities go) and it was a lot of fun rediscovering parks I used to play in and plazas I remembered walking through.

After a few nights in Antwerp we drove up to Amsterdam to see some more old friends. Again, a lot of running around, but Amsterdam is also a really neat city, with all its canals lined with gorgeously rundown houseboats. Walking around the city was really nice, and we also took a day trip out to Den Haag and Utrecht. After two days in Amsterdam, my parents flew back home and Chris and I stayed on for a few more days. We moved from our city youth hostel to a campground about 15 minutes outside of the city, where we rented a tiny little cabin. The percentage of hippies increased dramatically. It was nice to get out of the city, and the countryside is really beautiful out there, even if it is very developed. We rented bikes, which were really more like tanks than bikes, but it worked out fine because there was not a hill in sight and we were never in a hurry to get anywhere. We didn't go back into the city much, but spent most of our time exploring the area. We found a really nice wild park on a peninsula sticking out into the Ijmeer, the southernmost of a series of connected lakes that eventually lead to the North Sea. And just outside this park a flock of sheep were grazing, and they were the friendliest sheep we'd ever met:

[Check out our photo album on the left, "Adventures in Italy, Belgium and Holland", for more encounters with animal friends!]

So, we eventually headed off once again, this time back to France and back to Chris's family's place. And surprisingly, we had the hardest time hitchhiking out of Amsterdam. For some reason very few people stopped, and those that did were only going to the next town. We finally decided to be proactive about it and I started asking people at a gas station just outside of town if they'd give us a ride. We managed to find a guy going all the way to Paris (who later told us that I'd freaked him out a bit, as I approached him just as he was hiding his newly procured weed stash in the back of his car). We'd been hoping to go more toward the south and avoid Paris, but since we'd had such bad luck so far, we decided to go along with it. Turns out he was making a brief stop in Lille as well, and for various reasons (including that his driving was becoming more and more erratic and aggressive, as he was late for his first day at a new job due to non-stop traffic jams we'd been encountering all afternoon) we elected to get out there. After a couple of short rides to get us to better hitching spots we finally got picked up by a really nice guy who, upon hearing that we were probably just going to find a forest to sleep in that night, invited us home with him. We'd been having good conversations in the car, sharing gardening tips and the like, so it seemed like a safe enough deal. We got to see another part of France, the area around Laon, which is really beautiful. We had a nice dinner with him, drank some regional wines, and got to see his garden. In the morning, he drove us around a bit more (all the while saying how he wished we could stay a whole day so he could take us on hikes and show us more of the area) and then eventually dropped us off at the nearest highway entrance.

There was very little traffic, but in not too much time we were picked up by an orthopedic surgeon with a passion for cheesy dance remixes. He was driving a moving van to his new home. Veeeerrrryyyyyy sloooooowllllyyyyyy. By the time he dropped us off we were way behind schedule and starting to get worried about making it back that night. It also turned out he'd dropped us off at the wrong place to get to the highway we wanted, but luckily we got a quick ride with a local woman to a better place. However, as we were standing at the entrance to the highway with our "Lyon" sign, another hitcher who'd just been dropped off coming the other way ran over to us and said that we wouldn't find a ride here; trust him, he hitched this route all the time. Instead, he said we should walk a couple of kms to the next service station, since everyone there would be going in the right direction at least. It felt like an unbearably long walk in the heat, which had been growing over the last few days, and once there we decided to not waste time with our sign and just ask people up-front if they'd take us. Seems to get us rides a lot faster, since more people say yes than would think to stop for us if they were driving past us.

Our next ride made up all the time we'd lost with the doctor. This guy cruised along at 180 km/h. That's 111 mph. Luckily though he wasn't going all the way to Lyon, so we spent less than an hour with him. Dropped off at yet another service station, we found a couple going past Lyon who agreed to take us. They were quiet, and we were exhausted, so we didn't do much talking, but they were super nice and actually went a bit out of their way to take us into the city, to the train station. We got there just in the nick of time to take the last evening train down to St Clair les Roches (the closest station, only about 15 minutes from the house), where we were picked up by Chris's dad.

And so now here we are, back again, relaxing a bit. We only have just over a month until our European adventure comes to a close. Crazy to think we've been here for six months already. And that so many new and unknown adventures await us!