The art of germinations

Cet article en français. 

Este artículo en español.

Step 1, lentil seeds soaking in water.

Hélène :That's it, we can't kid ourselves anymore, the gardening season is definitely over. The first snow fell some days ago (probably more if you are farther north), there's not a leaf left in the trees and most neighbors have put out their Christmas decorations. So what to do if you are already longing for Spring? What can we taste that will feel fresh and remind us of the plentiful season?



After a day, we can already see the sprouts!

How about germinations ! This way of eating greens is excellent for the health and is wonderfully tasty. And it's simple. Really simple. If you go in a natural food store, you can find there all sorts of seeds packaged for the express use of germinating them, but sometimes the price tags on these is high (for example, I bought a 250g bag of fenugreek seeds priced at 6.49$). This may seem excessive, but with this bag you'll make a long way. Nevertheless, there is a way to get a better price elsewhere. You can save by buying dried seeds in bulk at your grocery store. We can easily find beans, peas and other types of seeds in plastic bags and all of these, well, they can germinate, as long as they are whole and raw (not crushed, roasted, bleached or whatever processing technique they can do on the poor things to make them suffer). For instance split peas will not germinate, simply because they don't have the germ anymore, the part that makes a plant out of it. The picture on the right features plain green lentils! They make amazing germinations.

I'll give you the "Mason Jar" technique for germinations, which is possibly the simplest one. Or you can also buy a seed tray made expressly to germinate seeds. But it's really not necessary to dedicate space in your kitchen for yet another gadget when an ordinary glass jar works so well.



Step 1, Mung beans germinations

So here's the technique me and Louise are using.

Step 1 is so simple, as shown in the first and third pictures of this post. Put a small quantity of seeds (one or two tablespoons will give you enough germinations to spice up a couple of salads). Rinse them once with water and then fill the jar to cover the seeds with cold or lukewarm water. Let the seeds soak like this 2 to 6 hours or more. I generally let them soak an entire night and the bigger the seeds, the more diligent I am on this point. The water really has to permeate the seeds to make them germinate.



Step 2, take the water out, rinse once more and cover the top of the jar with a thin piece of light textile, kept in place with a rubber band. Keep in mind that the bigger seeds are easier to rinse. With smaller seeds like alfalfa, you have to either use patience or ingenuity. Some people make fitting screens for their Mason jars. (However, just don't ever use aluminum doors and windows screening material; this aluminum is poisonous and it will leave traces on your germinations.) My own trick is to simply use an old nylon sock (after washing it thoroughly). You can rinse through it like a charm! 





Steps 2 and 3
To cover up your jar, you could also use one of those old coton covers used on jam jars to make them prettier. With smaller seeds, like alfalfa, Louise likes to use a small kitchen sieve.

Step 3 : put the jar in a bowl, head down. This way, any excess water will seep out. Rinse the seeds twice a day. It's very important especially in hot weather, else rot might start. After 2 to 4 days (some seeds take longer) you will have germinations for your salads, pastas, sandwiches and more! The ambiant temperature also plays a role : The warmer it is, the faster the germinations will sprout. They are ready when they reach about one or two inches long.

Hélène's favorites : I use my germinations mostly on pasta and in salads. I am far from having tried them all of course, but right now my favorites are Mung beans. Followed closely by corn. Alfalfa is pretty nice too and lentils are fabulous! Next thing I'm trying : chick peas! However, I am not fond of fenugreek and I hate red cress! There's also little to do for some seeds that keep a layer of saponin, like flax seeds (I even persisted on their case an entire week - nothing was growing); they became sticky, smelled bad and their germination rate was close to nothing. 

Louise's favorites : In my home, classics are the most appreciated. Alfalfa is the real winner, but we also appreciate clover very much. Daikon Radish has an interesting hot taste. Anyway, there's so much more to try out there! The time required to make germinations at home is ridiculously short and what I especially appreciate of this technique is that I'm growing a vegetable right on my kitchen countertop !

Here's one for the camping lovers : Put seeds in a nylon sock and that sock in a ziploc full of water. Strap this securely on your backpack. 6 hours later, take the ziploc and water out and keep the sock with the seeds strapped on your backpack. Rinse it twice a day and after 2 to 4 days, surprise! A fresh meal as sprouted. This idea comes from this book.

One last trick. If your green thumb isn't fulfilled with all this, keep a couple of germinated seeds aside and make plants for the winter. Lentils make an absolutely adorable little plant! This last idea (tested by yours truly) came from this book.

Update : Well, chick peas germinations didn't work for me. The time it took for these peas to grow to a decent size, a quarter of them become slimy and smelly and were mostly just rotting away! Maybe they needed to be rinse more frequently to prevent mold? Anyway, it then occured to me they could be used another way... to make another beautiful house plant!

Chick pea plants looks like lentil plants, but are straighter
and bushier.

Successes and failures, part 2

Cet article en français. 

Este artículo en español.

Ode to variety : zinnias and daylillies flowers,
 cherry tomatoes, groundcherries,
shallots, beans and strawberry spinachs
(these funny-looking small red fruits). 



Louise :

My turn to talk about what happened in the garden this season, a season that's been really bountiful, as you'll see. But I'll start with the failures. You see, first of all, I want to highlight a simple truth : in gardening, nothing is garantied. I must also confess another motivation : I want to get rid of the bad things first! (Note : This exemplary discipline comes from my family who, with no originality whatsoever, thought me to eat the main course before dessert.)

So, here we are... This failure list, I can sum it up like this :  the root vegetables (carrots, turnips, radishes and onions) and the brassicas (cabbage, cauliflower, brocoli).

Root vegetables that stayed obstinately slim :

Anorexic radishes
sporting malformed roots

I don't know if my radishes, turnips, carrots and onions teamed together against me, but this had all the air of mutiny : everyone made lots of leaves, but the root stayed thread-like. Weird, since I sowed them all in different corners of the garden, corners that had different conditions, and I haven't been sparse on the amount of seeds scattered. So this comes as a surprise. I did manage to harvest 2 or 3 dozens of minuscule carrots, about 6 radishes, not one turnip that was worth it, and only about thirty or so shallots. Only my sweedish turnips, planted in containers in small quantities gave a reward of any kind.

On the squash side: I only harvested one Butternut and one Buttercup. Not one zucchini! I wanted to try to dry slices of this vegetable, but alas!

Cabbages became the salad bar of the insects :

I know here why I haven't been successful. I didn't protect any plant with a veil on it. Everything was well until mid-July, at the time I went on vacation. Maybe the insects were poised for my departure, because when I got back I found out some of my plants were eaten up to the trunk. My fault entirely, since a friend told me to protect the plants with a piece of netting, a caution I did not give heed to. Well, I came (back from vacation), I saw (the disaster) and they (the insects) vanquished. Julius Caesar would have been ashamed of me.

For the rest, there were half-successes : for example,  I got about 20 cucumbers, half a dozen or so peppers and bell peppers and some eggplants. And there were great harvests : for instance, a nice variety of culinary herbs including a couple of new things for me.



Some samples of abundance : groundcherries, green tomatoes and a still-warm apple pie.



And now, let's talk about the fun stuff... Tada! The real successes of the season by importance.

A lone stalk of tomatoes "Millefleur" variety, harvested a the end of the season, still green,
before a night's frost.

This stalk alone gave me 1 liter of fruits!

- Number 1: tomatoes ! Not really original surely, but how delicious! I got 6 plants in containers and 6 others directly in the ground. For these ones, I used a plantation method that allow them to crawl on the ground, shoot more roots and multiply their heads (in short, I don't stake the plants et I don't remove any sucker. I had almost exclusively only cherry tomatoes, a yellow-pear variety and red "Christmas Grapes" variety. There was also 4 plants of tomatoes "Millefleurs" variety (L. Esculentum, a different species of tomatoes, from Solana Seeds), that can easily reach 6 feets high and makes gigantic clusters that can each produce 150 cherry size tomatoes. I could have left them crawling on the ground like the others, but this being my first year with them, I wanted to familiarize myself with their temperament first.

Why no normal-sized tomatoes? My strategy follows this line of thought : Since I knew I would be beyond busy at work from the end of August till the end of November, I reasoned that cherry tomatoes would take me less time to prepare for conservation. At this size, all I had to do was make sure they were clean, and put thewhole  in a freezer bag ! No muss, no fuss. Perfect for me.

I harvested1258 ripe tomatoes (I'm also enough of a maniac to count them) including about a dozen normal-sized tomatoes, from a plant given to me by a friend. We ate them, gave them, preserved them and made red fruit ketchup with them.

And then, there was also the green tomatoes : 1570 !

It was out of the question to waste them ! It took more work to prepare them, however, since I had to slice them in 2 or 4 for the recipes I was planning. I did freeze some for later use, but mainly, I made a lot of green ketchup... And I made astoundingly delicious green tomatoe cakes.

- Number 2 : Fruits ! Here they are approximately in the order they graced our table.

- Rhubarb : About 5 liters, in pies and jam. Here's a picture of a flowering plant.
I do let them flower since it's quite pretty.

- Strawberries : 6 liters, all eaten raw.
I bought strawberries from a local producer
in order to make jam.

- Juneberries : 750mL -
My first harvest of this delicious little fruit.



- Blueberries : 7 liters, most of them eaten raw.



In addition to being quite productive, my grouncherry plants make a wonderful thicket of pretty green leaves.

 - Grouncherries : 11,5 liters of fruits, almost all eaten raw (I put one jar in the freezer). In addition, I still have about 2 to 3 liters of still-green fruits. Some will ripen, others won't and will end up in the compost heap since green grouncherries are toxic (like green potatoes, a cousin).

Tiny watermelons Sugar Baby (from Solana Seeds). You can spot one here. I got 3 in all. 

- Gooseberries : the harvest promised much but a heat wave unfortunately dried all the berries, still green.

- Black raspberries (true!). This picture shows the flowers. They also succumbed to the heat wave like the gooseberries, when I was in vacation.

- Spinach strawberries (or Strawberry Blite, Strawberry Goosefoot, Indian Paint, depending on the source, Chenopodium Capitatum).
With 6 plants taking very little space and reaching only 30cm up,
I got about 15 stalks full of these berries as big as peas and tasting slightly like beets.
They do bring great color to a salad. And the leaves are edible too, if you care to harvest them.
You can eat them raw or steam them.

    I also made a lot of wild foraging (pears, apples, grappe, cherries, etc.) as previously discussed in this article.

- In third position : beans, lettuce and mushrooms! All in all, 12 plants of climbing beans (9 of them being grown in containers) yielded 598 really long pods, green (Blue Lake) or violet (Purple Peacock - both bought at Solana Seeds again). We ate most of them as soon as they were ripe, either raw or steamed.I froze a tiny bit of this harvest, and I also got 200g of dried beans from pods I left alone to mature and dry on the plant..




  And the lettuces, 8 heads of Romaine, allowed us to have salad on our table from the 1st of July throughout August. then, at the end of September, I brough back inside seedling and put them under fluorescents, so they gave us a couple of salads a week for almost a month.


It's on the front deck that the lettuce plants faired
the best.

We have enough frozen mushrooms to last us until February if not later. Here's the article on the subject. 

My surprises and tryouts for 2011 

At my home throughout the years, I planted 150 different cultivars of
daylilies. In all those years, I never suspected it could be
a substancial food source early in Spring!

My first taste of tender daylily leaves was in last April. I also tried Violas leaves at that time. I never thought these were edible and thus was marveled to discover these delicious Spring greens! 

And there's the added bonus that they grow aplenty here. In the middle of summer, I also realized I could eat the daylily seeds and buttons.

I tried burdock (bardana) root, but I found its harvest and preparation tedious for the reward. Same for dandelion root, but since we only use a small quantity of the dried root for a cleansing spring herbal tea, taking time for it didn't bother me that much.

I've grown for the firts time quinoa in very small quantities, so this only gave me a tiny amount of seeds. But... it made me aware of what these seeds require in harvesting time, curing and preparation. Since then, I also realized I could have eaten the leaves of the plant (like mustard, by the way). Quinoa also requires to be soaked before cooking to get rid of the saponin with which they are naturally coated. I readily realized that I could then use this water, full of the chemical coumpound, in my home-made insecticide recipe.This is the first cereal I dare grow and since quinoa as a good yield when one knows its intricacies (not yet my case, but I'm learning), this becomes a very interesting cereal for city gardening (in numbers we speak of a kilo of seeds per plant, each plant taking only square 30cm of space - a square foot).

I've also discovered lovage, a tall perennial that can replace celery leaves in culinary use, and horseradish, another perennial that can offer its leaves for our plates - in addition to the root.

Another pleasant discovery (and source of relief) was the fact that we can cook the leaves of turnips, radishes and rutabagas (swede turnips). It's a good thing since my turnips and radishes pretty much only produce that : Leaves! So this was a kind of way for me to "save" these harvests from complete disaster! 

For the first time in my life, I planted potatoes. These have grown on a
small elevation called "Hugelkultur". Check the net if you are too curious
to learn more about it before I write  an article on the subject.

That's it! Another year full to the rim of beautiful experiences! My garden is 26 years old, but the vegetable patch hasn't been worked for a full 15 years before I started it again this year (excluding a couple of berry varieties). This year, at last, I'm back to fill our plates... and with a vengeance.

All in all, my biggest surprise was to find out I can grow an astounding quantity of food providing a lot of care and effort, but in very little space. My husband as been even more surprised then me and since he does have a hearthy appetite, I'm pretty sure he won't object to an increasing surface of the garden being dedicated to grow edible plants!

Successes and failures, part 1

Cet article en français. 

Este artículo en español.



Pumpkin harvest, one standard pumpkin from the mystery vine
and 10 Baby Boo pumpkins.

Hélène : It feels like the gardening season just started to gain steam a couple of weeks ago and here we are, already at the end of the show. Nights are fresher, it's raining quite a lot and nothing is of a vibrant shade of green anymore. But here we are with a cornucopia of delicious vegetables from the garden! There are of course also a couple of spots in it that are empty, not because what was there was harvested but because it simply did not work out. So here's the article that compounds the successes and failures of this beautiful year's garden season, welcome to the recapitulation of what happened in 2011.

Successes :

Juneberry flowers

First and foremost, juneberries and strawberries. These tiny fruits have wooed us at the end of spring and the harvest was huge. We mostly enjoyed them like that, nothing special. Anyway, I wouldn't have had time to do much with them since my son usually finished the bowl we just harvested. You can read more about it in this article.

On the other hand, I only made one dessert out of unappealing strawberries, strawberries that passed too much time under the rain to the cares of slugs. I also had a decent peach harvest, my first year with this tree, but this is a subject that deserves its own article (here's the article, a year later in August 2012).

The first 4 Zlata radishes,
these are yellow radishes.



There was also lettuce (2 kinds, one of which got a second wind recently because of October's colder weather), carrots, mustard and radishes, all of these planted in Polyculture. For those who don't know, Polyculture is a simple gardening technique: you throw a blend of seeds  in a predetermined space and wherever the seeds land will be where they'll grow. When it becomes crowded, you methodically harvest the biggest specimens to allow the smaller ones to grow in turn. It's a great way to eat baby lettuce for an extended period.

You can however bring the technique a step farther : making an educated choice of plants that complete each other in different ways. The classic combo of carrots and radishes is one (radishes grow so fast compared to carrots that the carrots are just poking out when you harvest the radishes, resulting in a lot less weeding to do than if you had a space dedicated to carrots only).

But there's other combinations worthwhile mentionning like lettuce-carrots-leeks (or onions) : the carrot grows underground and its leaves barely gives any shadow, the leek grows straight and doesn't bother its neighbors, while the lettuce gives enough shadow to prevent weeds but doesn't impact the tall leaves of carrots and leeks. My experience wasn't a complete success however. I got barely 10 radishes. Carrots have been as finicky; I harvested between 15 et 20, but since I didn't pay attention to my clay soil, they came out somewhat small and deformed. I'm still kinda proud since this year, I grew 3 different varieties, 3 different colors. For the mustard... I've talked about it here. The lettuces, Komatsuna and Langue de cerf (Deer's Tongue) come from Solana and have been a resounding success all summer long, rewarding us with lots of delicious salads.

Did you ever try to grow your plants from seeds inside? I did, years ago, near a window, with a too-big container and potting soil. I never quite managed to make anything grow like that, so obviously I got discouraged, because when nothing wants to grow from seeds, it just doesn't make us want to invest more in it. And then for the first time I got a serious setup, with a tabletop grow light, and a heating mat from Veseys (I didn't want to risk disapointment again). Many types of plants grew there from February to May.



3 varieties of tomatoes here: The traditional but good yellow pear,
the White Currant and the P20 Blue Tomato.

 
 Tomatoes were a success spread with failures here and there. The seedlings grew pretty well considering the lack of water under a lamp, a mistake I will not make next year. All in all, 4 plants survived the seedling stage, a quantity I judged sufficient at the time. But there was trouble : putting the seedlings in the garden. Too cold? Not enough water? I'm not exactly sure, but I came really close to losing the 4 plants. And in a moment of panic, I turned toward my favorite garden center (this site is in french) and I bought a tomato plant, one that's very popular and common, cherry yellow pears, something that's found pretty much everywhere. When my seedlings started to show color again, I ended up with a lot of tomatoes and actually a good range of different tomatoes. My 2 seedlings of White Currant managed really well, but in the garden, only one seedling of P20 Blue made fruits (The other one came so close to the brink, it only grew leaves). Me and my family, we love cherry tomatoes, that's pretty much the only kind we eat fresh, so it's not surprising that they take the biggest space in the garden. But next year, I promised myself I would try a fantastic variety of normal size, maybe for canning. The White Currant and P20 Blue came from Solana, like the lettuces mentionned above.

I'll skip the sunflower subject, since it's already been explored here. But I'll add that I use my sunflower seeds mostly in germination in Mason jars even if they're not easy. Again, here's a subject that deserves an article all to its own (and here's the article in question, dated december 2011).

Another small success was found in the golden raspberries. Each harvest was very small however: a handful here, a couple there. My biggest harvest was only 15 raspberries! The plant is small and young. But if you count on the length of the season, it did extremely well ; my first harvest (of maybe 4 raspberries) was in mid July. Well, here we are in the middle of October, and I'm still harvesting some! And if everything's well, I expect I'll have some until the first frosts!

One thing to mention : the first year brought me fruits too (normally a raspberry plant only fruits on second year stalks), but they were acidic and not good. This year however, they're absolutely delicious! If I first had doubts about keeping the plant, I don't have any, anymore!

 Somehow, the red raspberries coming under the fence from my neighbor didn't do good at all. I didn't pay attention, but these were 3 years old stalks. They dried and died just as they were setting fruits. Maybe next year they'll come back with a vengeance (hope springs eternal).

I barely had the time to take a picture when a little hand grabbed
the fruits, its owner ready to swallow all of the delicious fruits!

Here's a sample of  July's harvest : 4 gigantic turnips,
a handful of golden raspberries, tomatoes, tomatoes
and more tomatoes!



One of the enormous success of the garden was the turnips. Louise gave me early in the season seeds of the variety Early Snowball. I sowed them in a polyculture design with seeds of calendulas. The calendulas have been shy, but managed regardless. The turnips on their part, took all the place they could and we are still eating some on a regular basis!

Louise's Sidenote : Note here we are taking about true turnips, not swedish turnips -look at the picture. And by the way, the leaves and stalks of turnips, radishes and swedish turnips are edible, I'll talk about it in a future article.

There's also a pepper, Corno di Toro, from Solana again, a good sweet pepper that gave a good harvest, albeit a mostly green one. I also planted a purple bell pepper variety, but they had so much trouble getting sun with the sunflowers and pumpkins that I collected only a few, mostly small, deformed and still green inside (I discussed this here). Out of all this bounty, I made a mix of vegetables preserved in oil that I'll taste in a couple of weeks.





The calendula flowers, lost among turnip leaves.

 A note on the potatoes : This year, for an unknown reason, my potatoes died. I heard that sometimes it just happens even if the place attributed to them was a success years prior. So it is only fair that I try it again next year!

There must have been a problem
with the polination of the Mini Boo :
Normally this squash is supposed to
be a bit bigger and white with green
stripes.

And then there's the pumpkins. I had bought Mini-Boo pumpkins from Solana, a completely adorable, small and white variety. From that vine, I collected 10. They made excellent Halloween decorations and probably will finish as stuffed delicacies. There were also my 2 mystery vines, sprouted from my compost heap. Unfortunately out of that experiment, only one pumpkin grew... At least it was very, very good and as I write this text, I have a bag full of pumpkin squares in my freezer!
Louise's Sidenote : It would be normal to harvest a very small quantity of squashes from a single vine. The standard would be of 2 or 3 squashes, even for farmers.

And finally, there's this must-have here, the Scarlett Runner Bean. It's a wonderful vine that grows so fast and high it was the inspiration for the folktale Jack and the Beanstalk. The beans can be eaten whole with the pods when young and tender, but if you let them mature and dry on the vine, you can harvest the seeds (the beans), and these are absolutely superb! Dried, the beans can wait a long time before being cooked, or you can put them aside to make new plants the next year. In a spaghetti sauce, they add color, taste and nutritious value. This year was my fourth year growing them and they had a new space for them, growing directly on my balcony's railing. So, technically, they take little precious space and all by themselves, they make a pretty spectacular vertical garden.

Harvest 2011. All in all, for 5 plants, I collected 736g worth
of delicious dried beans!

The red flowers on this type of bean are vibrant... and edible!
I only planted 5 seeds and my cosmos and nasturtiums were overwhelmed
by the vines. This picture was taken in August, and they
didn't spread that much yet. But you should have seen them at the end of the season!

What about the failures?



This naked obelisk in spring becomes a huge green mountain
in summer. Years before, it was used for the Scarlett
Runner Beans. In 2011, it's a mystery vine
that grew there. I never knew what variety ;
the only benefit I got out of it was experience.

Well on that topic, I do not have many pictures, of course. Besides the potatoes and the second mystery vine, I failed with my cucumbers. I boughtt a dwarf variety that apparently does really well in containers... If the water input is perfected to an art I have yet to achieve. The blueberry plant only produced 9 berries... It's the second year I got it and I think I know why it's a problem : I heard bluberries yield were better if cross-pollinated. Next year, I'll buy at least 2 other plants. I also tried to grow a variety of tiny melon, but it was so small, its vine just couldn't compete with the squash vine : both of them shared the obelisk in my garden. There, I also have a plan : I'll try to grow this variety inside. It did really well on my tabletop mini-glow, so I'll probably just try it there again.



Freya searches for a mouse that I placed
 back in the compost bin where it lives.

There were also surprises...



I somehow managed to grow tomato plants out of the compost bin again. Of course, I only got a couple of fruits since the season was just too short for these late newcomers. But the two biggest surprises of the summer were of a totally different aspect.

First, I found mice in my compost. It's when I noticed my youngest cat running like a maniac after something in the yard. When I got close, I not only noticed a small mouse (it wasn't harmed, but it might have made a heart attack, it wouldn't have surprised me!), and then I noticed through the compost bin's ventilation holes, not too far from where the cat and mouse drama was unfolding... tiny paws running around inside the bin. Lots of tiny paws! Not only that, but under the tool shed, not even a meter away from the bin, I found a lot of tiny mouse-size holes... and one much bigger hole. When I looked into the huge one, I saw two big eyes look back at me. Huh, that wasn't a mouse. But what was it? At the time I'm writing this article, I'm still not sure. I can venture my guess on a wild bunny ; there're some in a tiny forest, nearby, and this passed winter, I found some rabbit manure in my front yard. I never saw gophers around here and althought I did smell a skunk once in a while, its "fragrance" was never powerful enough to signal it was as close as to be in my backyard. This backyard is, by the way, well fenced since the previous occupants owned a dog. The last visitor we had was a raccoon that came around only once : it opened the compost bin, took its fill and went on its merry way. From now on, I do make sure my bin is secured but I do think my 3 cats also made an impression on him. At the very least, he made an impression on them.

Oh yes! One surprise I also found in the compost was a mushroom! I'm pretty sure it was a Button Mushroom, the standard variety we find in grocery stores, since I threw out some, some days before this event, but as mentionned in Louise's article if you don't know for sure, you do not touch it!

I also explored the interesting flora of my lawn. Red and white clover, dandelion and plantain were some of the plants I actually used this year (the clover and dandelion for herbal tea and the plantain to suit mosquito bites - it works!). But the other complete surprise was German Camomile. Considering this plant can sometimes be hard to grow, I was skeptical, but after making an herbal tea out of it, I have to admit it was, indeed, Camomile.

It's to say that nature is always ready to give a little help to curious gardeners... Keep your eyes open  for the second part, Louise's Successes and Failures!