The top posts of 2012

Happy new year! It's January second, and many of you are heading back into work despite not having quite recovered from the holidays. Fortunately, it's a short week. If it makes you feel better, I spent the afternoon shoveling rabbit poop and soggy compost.

I did take a minute to check the blog stats for 2012 (readers in 47 countries, not bad for a 6 month-old blog) and thought I'd share the most popular posts from 2012. It looks like I should post updates on the ficoide glaciale and the cape gooseberry plants; both are doing splendidly. Although looking at the search engine reports, if I really want to target the most popular search terms, I need to do more posts on "big melons."

The most popular posts of 2012:

FAQ: Ficoide glaciale    

FAQ: Cape gooseberry    

Garam masala oatmeal chocolate chip cookies    

What to do with that leftover pumpkin puree    

Tuna salad, with chickpeas instead of tuna    

Warm kale salad with roasted butternut squash, parsnips, and caramelized red onions    

Fee Fi Fo Fum: scarlet runner beans    

Lemon-thyme-rosemary cake #2

FAQ: Ficoide glaciale

What's that plant? and other frequently asked questions.

I lied about the "frequently" part. People rarely ask about this plant. At first glance, it just looks like the kind of fuzzy succulent you see in every drought-tolerant yard around.

Then I snap off a leaf and make people taste it. Ficoide glaciale, or "glacier lettuce," has a lemony, briny taste you don't expect from a land plant. It's not fuzzy at all, but covered with tiny bumps that look like frost and burst open when you bite into it, hitting your tongue with a tiny salt spray.

FAQ: Cape gooseberry

What's that plant? and other frequently asked questions

Tucked behind my litchi tomato plant is a less prickly member of the nightshade family. Unlike its thorn-covered cousin, the Cape gooseberry is a friendly, slightly fuzzy plant, with sweet fruits hidden inside papery husks. They look something like tomatillos, but taste like a fruit flown in from somewhere tropical. Fortunately, they seem to grow just fine around here.

FAQ: Litchi Tomato

What's that plant? and other frequently asked questions

The litchi tomato is neither a litchi nor a tomato, though it is a member of the nightshade family. It is also one extremely hostile plant. The whole thing is covered in thorns: stems, both surfaces of the leaves, and the husks that wrap around the fruit. And these are big, long, extremely sharp thorns that will draw blood, even through your gardening gloves. I speak here from experience.

Why, you ask, would I plant such a thing right smack in the middle of my vegetable garden? Particularly given that it gets to be about five feet tall, with long sprawling thorn-covered branches sticking out everywhere?

Because the plant label said its fruit tasted like cherries, that's why.

FAQ: Purple peas

What's that plant? and other frequently asked questions

As mentioned before, I'm a sucker for vegetables in unusual colors. So once I finished harvesting my first pea crop (the wonderful Laxton's Progress #9), I planted a row of these purple-podded peas.

They're good, but not spectacular. The per-pod yield was excellent, but they didn't produce a lot of pods — which means I probably won't plant them again, since I like to be able to grab a handful of pea pods to snack on every time I walk past the garden. Not sure if the light harvest is typical for the variety or just because the sunflowers ended up shading the pea trellis.

FAQ

What's that plant?

Sugar Magnolia Purple Pea
Pisum sativum

Is it purple all the way through?

No, only the outside of the pods are purple. The peas are bright green. The purple color fades to green if you cook it more than a minute or so. 

What does it taste like? Can you eat the pods?

You can eat the whole thing, pod and all. The flavor is pretty good — sweet and juicy, though not as sweet as the Progress #9 peas.  

Where did it come from?

The seeds came from Redwood Seeds, an organic seed farm here in northern California.

Is it GMO?

Nope. All of Redwood Seeds' seeds are open-pollinated, non-hybrid, non-GMO.

FAQ: Yacón

What's that plant? and other frequently asked questions

After the wild success of the potato experiment, I rushed to the nursery to see if I could get a second crop in. This late in the season, they had no more seed potatoes, but told me I could probably do fine with supermarket potatoes, as long as they weren't treated.

As long as I was there, I wandered around to see if there was anything else I might want to grow, and found Yacón: a relative of the sunflower, grown for its edible tubers. Not quite a potato, but definitely worth trying.

What's that plant?

Yacón, also known as "Peruvian ground apple."

Yacón, a.k.a. Peruvian Ground Apple

What part do you eat?

Edible tubers grow underground, like potatoes. They taste kind of like apples, or jicama. You can eat them raw or cooked.

What kind of plant is it?

Yacón is related to the sunflower. No word on whether its flowers produce edible seeds, though one web site said it had been cultivated by dividing the root cluster for so many generations that it no longer produces viable pollen or seeds.

Left: Yacón  Right: Sunflowers.

Where does it come from?

Yacón is native to South America.
I bought these plants as seedlings from Berkeley Horticultural Nursery.

FAQ: Evil tomatoes

What's that plant? and other frequently asked questions

Is that a black tomato?

Yes. The variety is called "Indigo Rose."

Why is it black? 

It gets its color from anthocyanins, the same antioxidants that make blueberries blue.

How do you know when it’s ripe?


If you look carefully, some of the tomatoes have green patches where they were shaded from the sun. When the tomato is ripe, those green patches will turn red, and the rest of the skin will change from the dark black to a slightly brighter purple color.

What does it taste like?

I don't know – this is the first time I've grown this variety.

Is it a real tomato? Is it GMO? Is it a hybrid?

It is a real tomato, and it's not GMO or hybrid. In fact, it's open-pollinated. (That means that if you let the plant pollinate itself and then plant the seeds, the plant that grows will be the same as the parent. You can't do that with GMO or hybrids – you have to buy new seeds every year.

Where does it come from?

Indigo Rose was developed by vegetable breeders at Oregon State University using traditional methods. Many kinds of tomatoes contain small amounts of natural anthocyanins in their leaves and stems. Some wild tomatoes from Chile and the Galapagos Islands had small amounts of the purple pigment in their fruit, too. The OSU breeders took tomatoes from these lines, cross-pollinated them, and chose the purplest of the offspring to be the parents of the next generation.

I bought these plants as seedlings from Berkeley Horticultural Nursery.

Purple pesto

The slugs ate my first three basil plants in record time. I've set out another dozen, and am amusing myself in the meantime by making alternative pestos. They're great because a) they use up lots of whatever herbs need pruning and b) I end up with intensely flavored goodness that I can toss into whatever I'm cooking.

This week, I had an excess of Red Orach (a.k.a. Hillbilly Spinach). Its flavor isn't as intense or distinct as the herb-heavy pestos I made last week, but it made a nice base for the usuals -- garlic, parmesan, pine nuts, olive oil -- with a bright hit of meyer lemon (zest and juice). 

Of couse, the best part is that it's purple, and will turn your noodles magenta.

Red Orach, aka Hillbilly Spinach. I've found it to be a great garden producer -- I keep cutting, it keeps growing back. Pretty heat-tolerant, bug-resistant, and tasty raw or cooked (though it gets bitter once it goes to seed).

Washed, stemmed, and stuffed into the Cuisinart. Started with about 1/2 the leaves, gave them a few pulses with the rest of the ingredients, then added the rest.