Heirloom Gardening, Food and Other Thoughts
This is really one of the nicest cucumbers we grew this year. It is a slicing cucumber (not a pickling one), and it has a really nice crisp flesh and a nice flavor.
Like all heirloom cucumbers it has large seeds. This plant is also not very productive, so if you are only growing one cucumber plant this may not be the best choice. It is a real treat if you have the space for a plant that will only yield a few cucumbers.
This is very much a work in progress. I planted sunflowers for the first time last year, and this is the first year for this variety. It would seem I have a long way to go to acclimate this variety to local growing conditions by roguing out weak plants, then saving seed. I also need to experiment more to determine proper spacing and other growing conditions.
This particular variety is Russian. It is the black seeded type, which is also the type for oil seed. The vendor I got this seed from, Synergy Seeds, says it is a good variety for making sprouts.
In the meantime, it’s nice to have some pretty flowers in the garden! This is a short variety, growing to about 50cm high.
There is no food more typically Dutch, that you can grow in your garden, than the purple podded capucijner pea. In Holland nearly all the supermarkets carry jars of precooked capucijners, and everyone knows what they are.
The only edible part of the plant is the dried peas, which look like this (shown on a coffee saucer):
When cooked they stay whole, make their own rich gravy, and have a distinctive pea taste. They are frequently eaten with pork, but also taste nice just plain or cooked in other ways.
These are a nice alternative to green snow peas. They have a nice yellow/green color, and look particularly nice when served mixed with green snow peas.
The plants are good producers, and grow to about 2 meters. I got good results by planting a double row, with a trellis in the middle and about 3cm spacing for the seeds.
If you grow hard neck garlic you also get a bonus harvest of scapes.
Since garlic reproduces asexually, it has no flower and no true seed pod. It does however have something similar to a seed pod called a scape. The scape does not contain true seeds, but rather bulbils. These can be planted and will produce more garlic plants, but they will be small. It takes several generations of replanting to get plants of the same size as the original, and for this reason most garlic growers prefer to grow garlic from the cloves rather than the bulbils.
If left to mature on the plant, the scapes will consume a lot of the plant’s resources, and result in smaller garlic bulbs, so for this reason are best harvested from the plant shortly after they appear.
Garlic scapes are delicious. They do have a distinctive garlicky taste, but they are not very strong. They have a texture like, and are cooked similar to, green beans. You can eat the whole stalk together with the scape, so be sure to harvest it as close to the plant as possible so you don’t miss any. They can be fried or steamed, and eaten by themselves. When cooked in something like a stirfry, they give the whole dish a wonderful garlicky taste. They are best not eaten raw, because the flavor is too strong.
