From Word To Word

I wrote last week about making a seed table, and I must admit that the post did deem to imply that I was starting tomatoes in my seed table as of this past weekend, which horrified several of my gardening friends.  Now, I am ne wto the gardening game, but even I know that it is still early for tomatoes, and I plan to plant red peppers in two weeks or so and then tomatoes one or two weeks after that.  Though it was the tomatoes that made the table snecessary, the seeds that I put in the dirt this past weekend were of a very different sort.  They were the tree seeds that I had been stratifying in the refridgerator this winter, and they were technically no longer even seeds.

This was the reason, actually, for my hurry in making the table in the first place.  I had not expected to need the tables for a week or two yet, but I went last week to check the moisture levels of my stratifying seeds and discovered that they had all germinated, every one of them.  I no longer had little bags of dirt and hibernating seeds.  I had little bags of dirt and tangled masses of germinated seedlings, all pale and straggly and searching for light.  So, my first task was to build the table a little ahead of schedule, and my second task, accomplished this past Saturday, was to detangle and plant in seed trays the still very delicate seedlings.

The plum and cherry plants were fairly simple.  There were fewer of them, and they were stronger, and only a few of them had germinated in the first place.  The roses were a little more difficult, but there were still only a couple of dozen of them, so I planted them out without too  much trouble.  The Saskatoon seedlings, however, were a nightmare.  There were something like a hundred of them, all very delicate, and all woven together like a mat.  I was forced to pick through them one by one and to use a toothpick to help place them in the soil without breaking their roots.  This is definitely not how the manuals recommend that you plant seeds, and after several hours of tedium I would also second their judgment, but the results seem good.  I had relatively few of the seedlings die off from shock or breakage, and the cherries and plums are responding very quickly to the light.  It was good just to see the rows of little plants, and I was motivated to plant several trays of perennial herbs that can stay in the table until spring.

As our first real snowstorm of the year rolled in yesterday, it was good to have a little bit of spring growing in my basement.

There are three principal reasons that I have not been writing over the last few days.

Two of these reasons are of the sort that I am a little ashamed to confess: first, I have been playing Zelda: Twilight Princess with  my eldest son, since he is old enough to be interested in the game but is still too young to work his way through it by himself; second, my wife and I have been watching the final season of Battlestar Galactica in the evenings.  I do not often indulge in these kinds of things, and I have been getting much less done because of them, but I remain entirely unrepentant.

The third reason is at least a productive one: I have been making a seed table to start my seedlings for the garden this spring.  Last year’s experiment with putting the seed trays in the window sills was mostly a disaster.  There was too little heat and too little light in the front windoew, and there are really no better places in the house.  A seed table was necessary, and so a seed table has been made.  The photos are perhaps not entirely clear, but the table has two levels, each of which is divided into six sections that are the same dimensions as a standard seed try, so I will be able to start twelve trays of seeds at a time, which should meet all of my foreseeable needs.  I still have to add the plastic cover and buy the grow bulbs, but it is otherwise ready to go.  Best of all, the thing cost me only the price of the light fixtures.  The frame was constructed from some wood that I salvaged from my brother-in-law’s futon, and the cover will be cut from some poly that was left over from insulating the attic of our previous home.

I hope to have seeds in dirt by saturday.

Part of my fall ritual includes drying the herbs and spices that grow in my garden.  This year, for example, I have already dried wild carrot flowers and greens, lemon balm, camomile, purple clover, basil, oregano, chives, and I still have a fair amount to do, including rosemary, mint, and rosehips.  This past Saturday, as I was considering what still had to be done, I noticed the purple shiso, which grows wild in my garden and which I only just learned is edible this past summer.  I had heard that both the leaves and the seeds could be dried and kept as spices, and I was fairly confident that I could dry the leaves without much problem, I was not sure how to go about harvesting the seeds.  I had no idea when they were mature, no idea how they should be extracted from their husks, no idea whether they should be dried before or after they were extracted, no idea, in short, at all.

The internet told me nothing very useful, so I decided that some experimentation was in order.  I stripped the seed pods from a few stems and tried rubbing them between my palms to remove the husks.  This operation was somewhat less effective than I hoped.  The husks could eventually be removed, but the moisture made them cling to the seeds, and the seeds cling to each other.  I noticed, however, that the seeds from the pods at the very tip were white and soft, while those nearer the bottom were brown and harder and tasted quite strongly when bitten.  Whether or not these lower seeds were mature enough to be fertile, they were certainly mature enough for my purposes, so I cut the whole plant.  I stripped the leaves into one colander and the seed pods into another, rinsed them both, and left them to dry over night.  I then dried them as I dry everything else, turning my oven to its lowest heat, putting a large cookie pan on the lowest rack to block the direct heat from the element, placing the herbs in a second cookie sheet on a higher rack, and leaving the oven door ajar to allow the moisture to escape.

The leaves dried easily, as I expected they would.  Though they are larger than basil or mint leaves, they are of a similar thickness and texture, and they dry much the same.  The seeds also seemed to dry well, but they were still in their husks, and I was still faced with the question of whether I could extract them.  I rubbed a few between my palms again, and the husks broke up quite easily, but the seeds still clung together in their little clusters.  By rubbing more vigorously, I was able to separate the seeds, but I was left with a handful of chaff mixed with the seeds that I wanted.  I tried sifting this mixture through several sizes of colandar and sifter, but anything large enough to let the chaff through let the seeds through also.  I tried picking the seeds out of the chaf by hand, but gave this up as too tedious after a single seed.  In the end, I was reduced to putting the seeds and chaf together in a small mixing bowl and shaking it gently until the heavier seeds gathered on top of the lighter chaff.  I would then tap out the gathered seeds into a second bowl, repeating the process until I had removed as many of the seeds as my patience would allow.

There are probably more efficient ways to dry purple shiso seeds, and I would appreciate anyone who could offer advise on how to make the process simpler, but I am quite satisfied with the end product of my experiment. The seeds do seem well dried, and they have certainly retained their flavour.  Now I just need to learn how to cook with them.

Today is tomato sauce day.  Actually, it is the first of what will need to be two tomato sauce days, which is apparently what happens when you have the assistance of two children under five years of age.  To this point, we have been harvesting and processing the basil, the oregano, and the garlic from our garden.  Our tomatoes, the very few that we have, are still too green, so we had to buy a couple of bushels from the market on Saturday.  I hope to start making the sauce this evening.

I have always loved this process.  I love cutting the herbs and digging the garlic.  I love stripping the leaves from the plants.  I love washing and chopping the ingredients.  I love blanching and peeling the tomatoes.  I love these things, not despite the fact that they are mundane, but precisely because they are mundane and because they therefore allow me a kind of solitude to think and to reflect. I have always found that it is theses mundane tasks, those that do not require my attention but that nevertheless occupy me physically, that seem to open a space for thinking.  It is weeding and kneading bread dough and processing vegetables and cleaning cupboards that permit me a kind of solitude in the midst of everything, an intellectual clearing in which there is nothing do but reflect.

Labour of this sort, therefore, is often more restorative for me than simple relaxation, because it takes me away from myself for a time, beacuse it forces me to confront myself for a time.  I am forced, not just to do the mundane task, but to think through it.  Though I do not set out to think, though I do not even know how to go about thinking, it is in these spaces that I find myself thinking nevertheless, that I find myself unable to do anything else.

I planted three apple tree last summer: an Empire, a Red Courtland, and a Honeycrisp.  They all bloomed well this spring, but they were still too small to carry much weight, so I thinned the young fruit quite heavily until there was only a single apple per branch.  This means that I was always going to have a small crop anyway, but the squirrels soon reduced it even further, which was especially frustrating because they seemed to eat less of the apple than they left littered under the tree.  So efficient were the squirrels at harvesting that by midsummer there was only a single apple remaining, dangling from the end of the longest branch of the Red Courtland tree.

Then, yesterday, as I was sitting on the porch reading Roberto Bolano, I looked up to see a squirrel dragging an apple up the Maple tree in my front yard.  Without even checking, I knew that this was the Red Courtland’s last apple.  I watched as the squirrel dropped and retrieved it twice, then finally managed to hoist it onto a branch.  It was, I reflected, only one apple more or less, but I still would have liked to eat it myself, to have tasted it, that last apple.

I have been reading about wild edibles lately, as my recent defence of Wild Carrots and my still more recent experiment with Plantain soup will attest, and I have been especially amused by a book called Feasting Free on Wild Edibles by Bradford Angier.  It was first published in 1966, so there are certainly more comprehensive guides now available, but there are few, I suspect, with an author as idiosyncratic as Angier, and his peculiar style has made the book one of my instant favourites.

I will not bother to list his literary mannerisms at length, but will merely let a single example be a figure for the whole: Angier’s peculiar tendency to begin sentences with the adverb ‘too’.  In his entry on Watercress, for example, he writes, “The flavour of nearly every salad can be enhanced by the addition of this edible.  Too, watercress is famous sandwich fodder.”  Another example of this stylistic quirk can be found in his entry on the Willow, where he writes, “Bitterish in many species, in others the inner bark is surprisingly sweet.  Too, this inner bark is sometimes dried and ground into flower.”  I am unashamedly amused by these things.

More to the point, however, the book has helped me to identify the quite surprising number of edibles that already grow wild in my yard.  With a great number of my garden weeds still waiting to be identified, I can already offer a whole range of food for the backyard naturalist, none of which I had to plant myself.

White Yarrow (Achillea millefolium) – The young leaves are edible raw or cooked. The leaves may be substituted for hops in beer. The leaves and flowers may be used fresh or dried as a tea.

Nodding Wild Onion (Allium cernuum) – The bulbs and the young leaves and stems are edible raw or cooked.

Chicory (Cichorium intybus) – The young leaves are edible raw or cooked. The roots may be roasted and ground as a coffee substitute.

Wild Carrot, Queen Anne’s Lace (Daucus carota) – The leaves are edible cooked and may be used fresh or dried as a seasoning. The roots are edible peeled and boiled. The flowers may be used fresh or dried as a tea.

Purple Shiso (Perilla frutescens nankinensis) – The young leaves and shoots are edible raw or cooked. They may also be used dried as a seasoning. The seeds may be used dried or preserved in salt as a seasoning. They may also be eaten cooked. They may also be crushed to produce an edible oil. The whole plant may be used to producee an edible purple dye.

Plantain (Plantago major) – The young leaves are edible raw or cooked. They may also be dried and used a tea.

Lady’s Thumb (Polygonum persicaria)- The young leaves and the seeds are edible raw or cooked.

Dandelions (Taraxicum officinale) -The flowers may be fermented to make wine. The young leaves are edible raw or cooked. The roots are edible peeled and boiled. They may also be roasted, ground, and brewed as a coffee substitute.

Purple Clover (Trifolium pratense) – The young leaves and blossoms are edible raw or cooked. The mature blossoms may be used dried as a tea.

Of course, this list does not even include the more standard edibles I have growing in my yard, like walnuts and red currants and wild strawberries and red raspberries.  I almost wonder why I bother to plant vegetables at all rather than just harvest what is there already.

I have some fairly large sections of Wild Carrots in the areas of my yard that are still pretending to be a lawn.  Wild Carrot is sometimes also called Queen Anne’s Lace or Bird’s Nest or Bee’s Nest or Devil’s Plague or a variety of other things, and these names are sometimes applied to other similar looking plants as well, but only the species Daucus carota is properly called Wild Carrots.   It is a very common plant in our area and is usually considered a weed because of how prolifically it seeds.

Wild Carrots are edible, though few people actually eat them, perhaps because they look similar to the poisonous Water Hemlock plant, though the roots of true Wild Carrots can easily be identified by their distinctively carrot-like smell.  Wild Carrot roots are tasty when they are young, though they get woody much sooner than their cultivated cousins.  Their leaves can be used exactly like those of cultivated carrots, as a way to add carrot flavour to a broth or a stew.  Their flowers and roots can both be used to make a tea, though there is some evidence that it interferes with the implantation of fertilized eggs in humans, so it should be avoided by women who are pregnant or who would like to become pregnant.  Their flowers also make attractive and edible garnishes for salads and other foods.

Beyond their culinary uses, wild carrots play an important function in the ecosystem, as highly nutritious food for browsing herbivores, as habitat and nourishment for butterfly larvae, and as nectar for bees.  They are also an attractive plant with large delicate white flowers that attract butterflies over a long blooming season, so they make and interesting addition to a garden, even if they are difficult to control.

Now, I have not spent all of this time describing Wild Carrots merely for the sake of information, but also for the sake of making an observation about how urban gardens have come to be cultivated.  Despite the fact that these edible, nutritious, attractive, ecologically significant plants grow easily around us, even without cultivation, we ruthlessly eliminate them whenever possible to make way for less useful and less attractive and less beneficial garden plants.  Though there is some justification for this on the basis that Wild Carrots are technically an exotic species, they are nevertheless a long naturalized species that poses no particular threat to the ecological system, to browsing livestock, or to humans.  The reason for our objection to them, the reason that we classify them as weeds, is far more based on the simple fact that they are common.

Gardening generally, and the urban garden in particular, is dominated by an obsession with the rare and a distaste for the common.  What distinguishes the expert gardener is the cultivation of plants that are rare and difficult to grow and that are uncommonly showy in their bloom or their foliage.  What reveals the poor gardener is the invasion of common local plants into the garden space.  Yet, I would suggest that rarity is not actually a very useful criterion for judging a garden or a gardener, particularly in a world that can less and less afford to spend its resources on the merely frivolous and ornamental, and in a world that must find ways to make the most of its land and its labour.

However, if we are not entirely to replace aesthetics with functionality, we will have to find ways to make the functional beautiful and ways to understand the functional as beautiful.  An essential part of this movement, in my opinion, will be to reassess the value of the common and the rare.  Rather than regarding the common as something to be eradicated in favour of the rare, we will need to regard it as beautiful precisely in its commonality.  I do not mean that we should merely let our gardens be overrun by what happens to sprout there, because this commonality would not be any more functional than rarity.  Neither do I mean that we should leave our gardens altogether without aesthetic form, because this would serve only to eliminate the essential role that the garden plays as a place between the human and the natural.  What I mean is that we need to identify and cultivate and form the very things that grow naturally around us, to recognize the beauty that is found precisely in their commonness.

Late this past Saturday night, or, more probably, early this past Sunday morning, some people walked by my house.  They were more than likely intoxicated, walking home from one of the many bars and pubs that are within a few blocks of me, and they decided that it might be entertaining, for whatever reason, to rip out the stakes and strings that I had placed as supports for the bean plants that my kids had planted earlier in the spring.

The stakes and string were not very expensive, of course, nor very difficult to erect.  I actually found the stakes for free, and it took me all of a few minutes to hammer them into the ground and run string between them.  It will take me even less time and no money at all to return them to their places.  In this sense, pulling a few stakes out of the ground is a mostly harmless bit of vandalism.  It hurt no one, damaged little, cost nothing.

There is another sense, however, in which I find the pulling of my stakes to be a far more serious matter.  It is indicative of a certain disregard, of a certain unconcern, of a certain closedness to the other, that is the profoundest enemy of community and neighbourhood and home.  It is not a selfishness precisely, because it has as little true concern for the self as it has for the other.  It is a closedness, both to the self and the other, a closedness to the self as it becomes itself only in relation to the other, a closedness to the self in community.

This closedness saddens me.  It moves me to sorrow, not because of a few stakes and a bit of string, not because of a few extra minutes or a few extra dollars, but because it opposes entirely the possibility of the neighbourly and the communal and the familial, because it holds the seeds of inhumanity.

I am not exactly a handyman.  My father, who was in most other respects an admirable role model, gave me precious little help in this respect, and I maintained my ignorance by opting out of shop class in favour of home economics when I was forced to choose between the two in junior high school.  As I saw it, home economics meant making food and talking with girls, while shop class meant mostly an increased likelihood of severing my arm with an acetylene torch.  The choice seemed obvious to me.

In retrospect, however, I could probably have used some of the skills that were being taught in junior high shop.  Though I do try to build and repair things around the house when I am capable of it, the fact is that I am not very often capable of it, and the projects that I undertake tend to involve much frustration and profanity.  I always have great plans.  It is the implementation that gets me.

This was the case once again when I set myself to build a three bin composter to replace our mostly useless black plastic one.  I brought home a bunch of old wooden pallets that I found by the side of the road and then dissembled them into their component parts, with reasonable success.  I measured the space, drew up a design, and set to work.  It quickly became apparent, however, that the dimensions, which had seemed very reasonable at the design stage, were producing a composter that far exceeded the needs of any home.

It is large.  It looks as if I am building cattle chutes, or shipping something overseas circa 1900, or farming goats: that kind of large.  I am thinking of renting space to the city’s troubled composting program or of advertising myself as the neighbourhood lawnclippings depot, just to fill the thing.

I am not sure whether junior high shop could have prevented this situation, but I prefer to blame these kinds of fiascos on the gaps in my education rather than on my own an essential inability.  It is easier on my pride.

My famiy and I are spending the weekend at the house of my Aunt and Uncle and two cousins, and yesterday afternoon we took a walk through the large wooded property that they own.  As always, I was looking for native edibles, and I was treated to a natural buffet, or I would have been if we had been walking a month or two from now.  We came across Wild Strawberries, Wild Raspberries, Swamp Red Currant, Gooseberry, Wild Plum, Mapapple, River Grapes, Fox Grapes, and three kinds of Vibernum that I was not quite able to identfy, though only a few of the strawberries could actually be eaten yesterday.  I dug specimens of the Wild Plum, the Gooseberries, and the Mayapples, beacuse they were growing in such profusion.  They will make great additions to my garden, and they will also serve to remind me of a day that my family went grazing in the woods a month too soon.