Crimson-red amaranth eaten in Pre-Columbian rites
Best yet, it is a grain crop that home gardeners can easily grow. You sow it after danger of frost, about ½-inch deep, in a finely textured, moistened seedbed — the kind you’d prepare for carrots.
Kitchen Garden
-
-
Relish the garden harvest that each season bestows
If you have ever wondered who created the great classic recipes, the answer, in most cases, is “nobody.” They sprang from the garden, farm and orchard, just as a carrot sprouts in the row or an apple falls from the tree. No Italian chef set out to invent minestrone; it is simply the contents of …
-
Growing your own artichokes
The artichoke is a formidable vegetable. Armed like a cactus, the spiny globe is as much a challenge as a temptation. You must peel away many sharply pointed scales to reach what Pablo Neruda called “the peaceable dough of its green heart.” But the reward is great. The heart is silky-tender when steamed or boiled, …
-
Let vegetables speak for themselves
Gardeners and cooks make excellent bedfellows. Likewise, farmers and chefs, judging from the number of restaurant menus that honor the producers of their vegetables, meats and cheeses. An affectation? A fad? I think not. It reflects a passionate interest in how food comes into being. Farmers, in turn, love to see what chefs do with …
-
Preserving tomatoes to enjoy all year
If I had the self-discipline of a Zen Master, I could walk out to the garden on a late summer day, pick the most perfect tomato for lunch, then make compost out of all the others too numerous to consume. At heart, I believe in living from moment to moment in the garden, eating only, …
-
Stop the rot: avoid sordid messes in fridge
When you pick a fruit or vegetable, it is still a living, breathing thing. It respires, taking oxygen from the air and releasing carbon dioxide. But it can’t live indefinitely. A peach, lettuce or bean, once cut, can no longer make food by means of photosynthesis, and begins to draw down its stored reserves. It …
-
Sifted compost ultimate luxury
If compost is the Holy Grail of organic gardening, what’s the holier than thou? Sifted compost. What you want in making perfect mature compost is, of course, organic matter so fully broken down that the original ingredients — whether straw, weeds, kitchen scraps or goat droppings — are no longer recognizable. Finished compost looks like …
-
Happily gardening ever after
In youth, you look for mentors to get you going down a path. Later on, you look to them for a glimpse of where the path eventually leads. As a beginning gardener, I exploded with questions about seeds, soil chemistry or how to predict frost. In midlife, I looked at old gardeners and wondered …
-
Garden barriers to keep the wind at bay
After an April marked by snowy mornings and chill winds, spring planting requires an extra shot of courage. Even if you’ve hardened off cold-sensitive transplants such as tomatoes and cucumbers, setting flats outside on sunny days, it will be an act of faith to finally put them in the ground. Will the weather “have …
-
Cream doesn’t belong in dietary damnation
A drizzle of cream. A dab of butter. A slice of cheese. What could possibly be wrong with pleasures like those? And yet, to the fat-fearful, they might as well be arsenic — especially heavy cream, which seems to occupy its own circle of dietary damnation. Granted there are some folks whose systems don’t react …
-
Biological and cultural diversity in your backyard
This is a great time to be a gardener. Each year the choice of what you can plant seems larger and more eclectic. And for the home grower, especially, much of what’s new is what’s old. Many catalogs include heirloom vegetables, many of them from places far distant, throughout the world. By not sticking to …
-
It pays to grow some herbs from seed
The herb garden needs a makeover. Some of the sage plants are so old and woody they look like a failed experiment with bonsai. Ornamental flowers of all sorts have stolen in. This year I want fresh new herbs and lots of them, so I can dry them, make herb vinegars, and have a plot …