edible – Page 4 – The Garden Professors™

Being Lazy Has Its Advantages

I am just about the laziest gardener you’d ever want to meet. Around my field plots at the school things tend to look good –but that’s part of my job. Around my home, well, I probably water my plants once or twice a year, I fertilize every few years. I almost never use herbicides or any other weed control methods besides pulling – again, that happens once or twice a year. And I only mulch about once every two years or so (sorry Linda!). My yard does end up being a great place for my experiments on slugs, weeds, and odd methods of insect control, but it’s far from the pride of the neighborhood. Generally I plant things and let them either live or fail and just don’t worry about it that much if they can’t make it. That said, I think that I would fare better if I just accepted weeds as an integral part of my yard. It has already happened in my lawn. This year the clover has finally started to take hold. I’m happy about this because it will mean less fertilizer. In the back yard I’ve knocked out most of the thistle (hand pulling and a little bit of Round-Up), and now daisies are popping up. Sometimes they’re in spots where I’d prefer to have a lilac or rose – but hey, they’re not bad. It almost looks like I planted them on purpose.

My laziness recently however, reached a new level (my wife isn’t particularly pleased about it, but so far the summer has been busy enough that I’ve been able to find lots of excuses). On our back porch we usually grow some tomatoes or cabbage, or something in a container. This year we didn’t bother and so the container started to grow weeds. Specifically purslane. At first this seemed like a bad thing, but then it started looking … good. It filled out the container. It didn’t need any watering, and, by golly, it actually tasted good! Now tasting random weeds from your backyard (or uncared for container) is not something that I encourage. And even if you want to taste purslane have an expert (such as a botanist) confirm that it’s purslane before you go chomping on it. But that said, I tasted this stuff after I found out it was edible and now we have a new leafy veggie for our salads. Then I started figuring out all of the weeds in the yard, both front and back, that are edible. I already love clover flowers and I’m OK with young dandelion leaves. Shoot. I’m starting to think that if I could take my laziness to yet another level my family and I could eat salad all year without ever buying lettuce at the supermarket.

Exploding watermelons and exploding hysteria

One of our loyal blog readers passed on this interesting article about exploding watermelons in China. Seems that Chinese farmers have been overapplying a synthetic growth regulator which has led to the of proliferation of plump pepos (gotta love alliteration!). Of course the media has “blown” this out of proportion with action verbs like “explode” and “erupt”, when what’s actually happening is that the melons are merely splitting. (It’s a pretty boring video if you take time to watch it.)

Ok. This isn’t to defend the practice of misapplying any chemical. But the fear generated is obvious in the comments on this video – just scroll through them. The growth regulator in question is forchlorfenuron – a cytokinin legal in the United States and approved for use in very low concentrations on kiwifruit and grapes to enhance fruit size, fruit set, and cluster weight. It’s been approved for use in the US since 2004 and has been tested extensively prior to that approval for human and environmental safety.

Fruit split happens all the time during ripening. I’m sure most of you have seen this yourself, like when your tomatoes are overirrigated or cherries get unseasonal rain. And it can happen when growth regulators – natural or synthetic – are misapplied. But the fruit isn’t dangerous. It just looks bad, and might not taste that great, either.

There are lots of things to worry about out there. But growth regulators used in fruit production really aren’t one of them.

A rant about urban farming

(I know this one will get me into trouble…but hey, if I don’t tick someone off I’m not doing my job.)

I have mixed feelings about the increased popularity of urban farming. On one hand, I love the idea that people are becoming more involved in producing their own food. But on the other hand, the naivety of many urban farmers is scary – because they assume that home-grown food is safer and/or healthier than what they can buy at the market.

I give a lot of seminars every year, on a lot of different topics. At the end I usually have a room full of happy people, asking lots of questions and eager to go apply the new knowledge that they’ve gained. But one talk I’ve done has exactly the opposite effect. It’s the seminar I give on vegetable gardens and heavy metal contamination of urban soils. The audiences are subdued and worried. It doesn’t make me feel very good, but on the other hand I know I’ve got people thinking.

Heavy metal contamination of soils is insidious. Like the iocane powder in The Princess Bride, these compounds can be odorless and tasteless…and deadly. Lead, arsenic, cadmium, and a handful of other heavy metals are the legacy of centuries of “civilized” living. Mining, smelting, manufacturing, and driving all contribute to localized toxic hot spots. Unlike organic contaminants, heavy metals are elemental. They don’t break down and go away. The lead from gasoline fumes of the past is still found along roadsides; the arsenic from early pesticides still lingers in soil used for field and orchard crops. Many plants not only take up heavy metals, but accumulate them in their tissues.

It’s easy to avoid heavy metal problems: soil tests are the logical first step. If soils are contaminated, you can build raised beds or use containers with clean, imported topsoil or other growing media for vegetable gardens. Likewise, you might want to take care in buying produce from farmer’s markets – ask questions about possible soil contamination.

So by all means, grow your own vegetables – save money and take satisfaction in producing your own food. But be careful out there.

This ‘n That

Grading finals, looking at roots, and planting seeds is consuming my time this spring, but I have just a few things to share today which might be interesting.

So, as those of you who follow this blog know, I love peanuts. This year we’re planting out a bunch of new varieties, a few of which are extremely interesting. Believe it or not there are not only red and pink peanuts but also black, white, and mottled peanuts. We have these on order — when they come in I’ll post a picture. When we introduce Minnesota Boiled Peanuts at the State Fair in a few years (that’s the goal anyway) the plan is to introduce a wide variety of really unique looking peanuts. Fingers crossed they can live here!

Here, at the University of Minnesota, we do a really great job of telling people that, when they fertilize their grass, they should keep the fertilizer on the grass and not on the sidewalk — SO WHY CAN’T THE UNIVERSITY TEACH THE KIDS WHO APPLY THE FERTILIZER TO THE UNIVERSITY’S LAWNS TO KEEP THE DARN FERTILIZER OFF OF THE PAVEMENT?!? Last week as I walked in I heard a crunching sound coming from my feet. When I looked down there was a little pile of fertilizer on the sidewalk.

Believe it or not, judiciously fertilizing your grass actually helps prevent fertilizer run-off. That’s because grass with a weak root system (as occurs in the typical lawn when you don’t fertilize at all) won’t be able to hold the soil as well — so you get more erosion. So do fertilize your lawn, just don’t go nuts.

About that whole tree in the lung thing which I posted last week? Yeah — It’s BS. How do we know it’s BS? No obvious roots on the tree and the tree’s needles were green (you don’t get green plants without sunlight). Personally I think this is some kind of odd cry for attention, but I guess it’s possible that the guy swallowed a cutting while he was shearing/pruning trees. HOWEVER, there are documented cases where seeds will germinate in a persons lung — Usually the person has a compromised immune system.

A word about GMOs from our visiting GP

I gave a talk to a group of gardeners last year about vegetable and community gardening. There was a wide variety of gardening experience represented, but one statement from a seasoned gardener bothered me a bit. And I think my response bothered him a bit too. I haven’t thought much about it until recently, when a high school English teacher I know told me a student expressed similar ideas in her class. The erroneous idea from my audience member was this: our tomatoes are being poisoned with ‘germetically modinified’…something something. The arguments have lost me beyond that (because there aren’t any). And really, there hasn’t been much talk about sex on this blog recently, so that should be remedied too. Therefore, I would like to take the platform offered by the Garden Professors to talk about plant breeding.

Fig. 1: Jaune flammee, which has at least one gene from at least one of its parents that causes the fruit to have very little lycopene.

Conventional” breeding is when a plant breeder selects parents and offspring and tests them for desirable characteristics (traits). It works the same way as breeding works in nature, except that we humans have a goal we’re working toward. Firm, 5-oz, disease-resistant, crack-resistant tomatoes, for example. In nature, the offspring that survive and reproduce the best in a given environment are ‘blindly’ selected and tend to stick around (Darwin, 1859). Male (sperm) cells are transferred to female (egg) cells by a plant breeder, or a bee, or the wind, or a beetle, or a fly or bird or bat or moth (etc.). The sperm and egg fuse to form an embryo, which grows to become what we’d call a plant. In both natural and artificial selection of tomatoes, no non-tomato DNA has been added, and no tomato DNA has been removed. By the classical definition of ‘genetic modification’, there has been none. I suppose this paragraph was only incidentally about sex, and probably a disappointment to some. Sorry.

Fig. 2. Tainan, a tiny heirloom

The confusion of the issue may lie with the Flavr Savr tomato. This was developed (yes, genetically modified) in the mid-90’s to resist softening during ripening. It has a couple bits of manufactured DNA in it to make this possible. The Flavr Savr is no longer grown or sold in the marketplace (that was SO 1990’s), and to my knowledge, no other transgenic tomatoes are either.

Fig. 3. Rutgers, historically much-cultivated and like all other tomatoes we can buy, bred conventionally.

Confusion may also lie with the plant hormone ethylene. Ethylene is made from incomplete combustion of fossil fuels, but it’s also made by plants. Keep your bananas away from your carnations, right? Bananas make ethylene gas, which causes carnations and snapdragons to senesce (die). Tomatoes make ethylene as they ripen. If you harvest tomatoes a bit early, but not too early, they are hard enough to ship but will still turn red later. If you expose these pre-ripened tomatoes to ethylene gas, they will ripen more quickly and uniformly. That’s what happens to a lot of the tomatoes in our stores. They are not genetically modified, they are treated with a plant hormone. That’s not unusual at all. Ethylene is used to ripen bananas, and to help make cucumber seeds (by eliminating male flowers from female parents). It’s used in growing ornamental plants quite a bit too (but not as much as many other hormones, and especially hormone inhibitors).

So please, if you are someone who tells anybody who will listen that the tomatoes in the store are GMOs, stop it. They’re not.

The Hottest Thing in…Veg!

Vegetable transplants and herbs were a bright spot last year (and the one previous) for most retail growers and independent garden centers. Seed and transplant companies have taken note – saw lots of veg and herbs at the normally-ornamental trade shows. As always, some good ideas, some a bit far-fetched…

Pelleted lettuce seed (much easier to handle) mixes for the grower to create patio-size planters. Not bad! Snipping a few leaves will be fine, but if you eat salad more than once a month, you’re gonna need a bigger pot.

Basil and Swiss Chard plugs (seedlings), grown by Rakers Acres in Michigan, and shipped to greenhouse growers for “bumping up” to bigger pots to sell.

Saw lots of garden center marketing ideas such as this one from Burpee. Unfortunately, I have a very strong aversion to the word “fixins.”

Oh just stop it. An onion, in a pot. What the heck are you supposed to do with that?!

Organic Honey?

As there seems to be a good deal of interest in the topic of honeybees, and I’m a beekeeper, albeit relatively novice, I thought I might continue a bit of discussion.

I’ve been beekeeping for three years, and I sold my first honey harvest this fall. Six gallons, divided into pint and half pint-sized jars. As a newbie, extracting the honey from the frames and getting it into the jars was, by far, the messiest thing I’ve ever done. It’s like wrestling with a living thing…the garage and kitchen still have sticky spots. It also took forever – honey moves through a three- pail, three-filter system (eventually removing particles down to 200 microns) like…cold molasses. Once it was properly subdued and contained, I looked into what was required for labeling. Very interesting. And very, very, vague.

Honeybees have been described as “flying dust mops” – there is no way, unless the beekeeper owns all the land in a several-mile radius, that one knows what they’re getting into. Our girls’ primary duty is pollination of our four+ acres of blueberries, so their primary pollen and nectar source in late spring is our four acres of blueberries. After that, they hit the sourwood, wingstem, mountain mint, and the smorgasbord of of perennials and annuals in the garden borders. We don’t use any pesticides on our farm (the cabbage looper and stink bug invasion this year is really testing me on that one). But that doesn’t mean the gentleman next door isn’t using Sevin on his squash or pyrethrins on his potatoes. And our bees are just as likely to be over at his house as ours (despite my stern lecture to them).

Noticing the honey labeled “USDA Certified Organic” sold for a premium at both my local grocer and favorite “natural foods” store, I spent some time digging as to certification standards, and whether it would be worth it to get certified.

I came up fairly empty-handed. There does not seem to be any USDA National Organic Program certification standards for honey. Apparently there are some trade-law guidelines that allow honey to be imported from Canada and Central/South America labeled as USDA organic. Very confusing, and very weird. But apparently some U.S. honey producers, both large and small, have gone ahead and slapped USDA Organic labels on anyway. Along with other meaningless statements like “Superior grade” or “All natural”. Some states such as Pennsylvania are pushing for NOP standards, noting their beekeepers are at a disadvantage, marketing-wise, if they cannot certify their honey but Canadian or Argentine producers can. On another front, beeswax, especially older wax in frames that are in brood hives for several years, can accumulate pesticides brought in from foraging bees like nobody’s business. So I’d also look askance at claims of products containing “organic beeswax.”

Happy Days

Today is such a good day. Really good. Almost as good as my wedding day and the birth of my kids good. Better than the Eagles won the Superbowl good (I’m a big Philadelphia Eagles football fan — Mike Vick and his transgressions aside of course).

Just for today I don’t care much about the arguments for or against organics, natives or even my favorite topic, pesticides.

What’s the news you ask?

Peanuts. Hot Boiled Peanut.

If you follow this blog you may recall that Tom Michaels, a professor and bean breeder here at UMN, and I planted a few rows of peanuts last year in between rows of trees — the trees you see below are elms from a selection program we’re running here. Between the rows you’ll notice some plants starting to turn yellow, those are peanuts. The darker green plants between the rows of trees are canola.

Below is what a peanut plant looks like when you harvest it. After the flowers are pollinated the plant sends the stalk on which the flower is growing into the soil where it forms a peanut. When we harvested we saw anywhere from 0 to about 10 peanuts per plant.

We harvested a test batch of peanuts last night — probably a little over a pound. They were a little immature, but they still tasted good fresh out of the ground. Without any treatment fresh peanuts taste a lot like fresh peas — an unmistakable “legume” flavor. For those of you love roasted peanuts, that familiar flavor is a result of the roasting process.

Boiled peanuts are a little different than roasted peanuts in that the pods are usually harvested a little bit immature, so our first harvest, yesterday, was actually right on time. We’re planning on finishing harvest next week.

Anyway, once we got the peanuts out of the ground I drove them straight home, put them into a quart of water, added a quarter cup of salt, and put that mixture into a crock-pot on high heat for three hours and low heat for another eleven. I tasted one after three and knew they would be good. After the full 14 hours? The best boiled peanuts I’ve ever had.

As my wife noted, these peanuts aren’t exactly the same as the one’s you get in
the South. She was trying to be nice — but I got the impression that
they were just a little too different from what she’s used to for her to like them quite as much as
the ones we get when we visit South Carolina (which we visit yearly). The difference between these peanuts and the other boiled peanuts that I’ve had (and I’ve had a lot — from all over the South) is that these are a little bit sweeter.

For me — Best damn peanuts ever — Minnesota grown no less. Who woulda’ thought? Not me. Can’t wait to boil a big batch next week!</d

Animal, Vegetable, Irritable

I’m a big Barbara Kingsolver fan. Just finished “Prodigal Summer” – her tall, lanky, introverted, 40-something forest ranger-heroine encounters handsome, mysterious, much younger guy in the woods; sparks fly, etc. Rowr! Ahem.

I really enjoyed “Animal, Vegetable, Miracle” when it came out a couple of years ago. It was the perfect dead-of-winter read as she captured flawlessly the itch to grow things, the scent of thawing soil, the joys of mud, the overwhelming greenness of spring, the mess of canning tomatoes. I was only slightly annoyed at the quiet pace and perfectness of her home life; as a normal working stiff I don’t have time to bake my own bread daily, or make fresh mozzarella every time we have pizza for dinner (darn this time-consuming, bill-paying job).

But I was totally mesmerized by the cover art – her daughter’s cupped hands filled with the most beautiful shelled beans in the world. The huge maroon and white Christmas Limas shined like leguminous jewels. Now THAT I can do.

So, Dr. Miss Smartypants here devoted an entire row to them this spring – about twenty feet with plants spaced on one-foot centers and a 20’ x 6’ span of netting for them to scramble up. The second 20’ row was planted with red and green yard-long beans (see my previous post about how fabulous they are). Both rows received the same amount of irrigation (a little), weeding (some), and zero additional fertilizer except the pre-plant amendment of chicken poop (of which we have a lot).

Summer wore on, life got busier. The yard-long beans just kept coming despite drought, stinkbugs and 3’ tall lambsquarters. I’d poke around wistfully in the Christmas Lima vines – there were a few green pods buried amongst copious foliage. I do know these kinds of beans do better in hotter, drier climates, but it’s been pretty much that kind of summer here.

The pods finally, FINALLY filled out a bit and turned dry and brown – ready to pick!! I filled most of a five-gallon bucket and sat down with a beer to shell them (OSHA requirement).

Behold, my bounty!

Total yield: one mess of beans. Two if used as soup components. Yes, they’re listed with Slow Food USA’s Ark of Taste. Yes, they are indeed beautiful and will probably be totally delicious whenever I get the nerve up to cook them.

It’s just… I’m not sure how to put this… but a family of four would BLOODY WELL STARVE if they devoted much of their garden to these lovelies. I don’t know whether to eat them, frame them, or string them onto a necklace.

p.s. still getting yard-longs by the handful…

The Importance of Not Leaving Your Veg Garden Unattended for a Week in July

Small dog snout + normal-sized cucumber provided for scale.

This problem is self-explanatory and probably not at all atypical for our readers. Pattypans became UFOs; grey zucchini, footballs. Note that it’s been very dry here in the Blue Ridge. I shudder to think what would have happened with normal rainfall.

Beans amuck! Scared the hell out of Joel when he opened the fridge. But they wouldn’t fit in the bucket!

If you haven’t tried yard-long beans, give them a shot sometime. Super easy to grow, just need the usual pole-bean structure. Pick daily, or they get out of hand. They have a rich, “beany” flavor and no strings attached. Best sauteed – I toss them with a bit of sesame oil and soy sauce in honor of their Asian heritage. Leave ’em long to impress the kids! I bet one or two beans equals a full serving of vegetables.

Yard-longs (Vigna unguiculata subsp. sesquipedalis) come in both green and a dark red that keeps its color after cooking! They’re actually in the cowpea genus. Normal green bean at top of plate for scale (it now has a complex).