Orange Eggplants and Currant Tomatoes Oh My: Are Exotic Vegetable Varieties Worth Growing?
Are you seduced by curvy Golden Crescent beans? By Purple Dragon carrots, cushion shaped orange eggplants or yard long Red Noodle beans? Welcome to the club. I’ve never been able to resist oddball vegetables; show me a shape or color that’s different and bam, it goes on the order list. This has been going on for 30 years and will no doubt continue for many more, but meanwhile some of these bizarro thrills have become staples in my garden — and just as many have been consigned to the “interesting experiment” list. STAPLES: *Ronde de Nice zucchini, not the best for slicing but ace for stuffing. Instead of the conventional canoe, you get a tidy little bowl that stays firmer in the oven and looks prettier on the plate. My favorite filling is caponata, topped with a thick layer of coarse breadcrumbs tossed with a little olive oil. Most delicious at room temperature. * Yard long beans (Vigna unguiculata). You get a lot of bean with each bean, so they’re quick to harvest and prepare. The taste is unique, sort of nutty and meaty instead of sweet and light like snap beans (Phaseolus vulgaris). They’re not as crisp and juicy as snap beans, either, and are not helped by being lightly steamed. It takes thorough cooking to bring out their best. Most published recipes are Chinese or Indian and involve several ingredients, but I usually just stir-fry them over medium high heat in olive oil or bacon fat until many brown spots appear. Note: the red ones are great in flower arrangements and for the general wow effect, but they don’t taste quite as good as the green ones, take longer to grow, and lose most of the color when cooked. * Currant tomatoes, especially white currant. A labor of love. They’re beyond easy to grow; plants are right next door to weeds and grow to huge size with no help from us. The labor part is harvesting. They’re tiny ; each cluster ripens sequentially so they must be picked one by one and the calyxes tend to hang on, so if you’re not careful the ripe fruit comes away with a hole in the top. Why bother? The love part. Beyond delicious. They are to full sized tomatoes as wild strawberries are to the cultivated kind. * Yellow (Golden) beets. Everything that’s tasty about beets, with no bleeding, and just as easy to grow if you don’t count chronically lousy germination. More on beets anon; in the spirit of advocacy inspired by hearing that our new president hates them. No doubt he grew up on boiled and/or canned, and I’m sure that’s got nothing to do with Hawaii though as I write the specter of pineapple raises its head …
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By Louise Gray Published: 5:10PM GMT 08 Dec 2009 As the world gathered in the Danish capital for the UN Climate Change Conference, more than 50 scientists, businessmen and lobby …
How to Get Your Garden Ready for Winter
Clean up time, aka late fall, is a joyful time in the garden. The weather is pleasant, warm enough to be inviting, cool enough for work. There are no bugs. And there is major satisfaction in restoring order to what is usually pretty untidy by now. But before you get carried away, a few suggestions: * Before you remove all the evidence, make a rough map/post mortem report that can be used for planning next year. Include relevant outside factors like deer predation — which you’d THINK you’d remember but if you’re like me you tend to have denial problems about the smaller, less painful losses. It’s also helpful to note things like the amount of rain: lousy tomato taste, for example, may be blamed on too much water and the too little sun that implies. But that same rain is probably why the hollyhocks hit 10 feet. These are actually the smaller hollyhocks, only about 7 feet; all my pictures of the 12 footers came out rotten. Use your imagination. * When removing sick plants, don’t forget to rake up underneath, especially around roses and peonies; diseased leaves are a prime place for bugs and diseases to winter over. Put all possibly infected (or infested!) material deep in the woods or on the bonfire.
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