Garlic Scapes - Why To Cut and How To Cook

At heart, I am a skeptical, lazy gardener. I question old-school farming practices, especially if they require me to work harder. I want evidence that I should do this or that to make my plants happy.

Every year I test a few traditional garden concepts, like removing tomato suckers, to find out whether they really benefit the plant's production. (I find no evidence that removing suckers is anything but suckers' work.) Two years ago, I used my garlic patch as a trial for the standard practice of removing the garlic scape to encourage bulb production.

Should You Cut Scapes?

Garlic scapes are the flower stalk of the garlic plant. The theory behind removing them is that by taking away the flower bud, the plant will put more energy into bulb production. Look below to see the difference between garlic with scapes removed on the right and those allowed to flower on left of plants grown in the same location and with same growing practices.

Clearly, scapes to inhibit bulb production. When removed, the garlic produces healthier, bigger bulbs. Because the scapes are edible, the gardener is rewarded for their work of removing the scape with a tasty food.

How To Eat Garlic Scapes

The garlic scape stalk is a dense cylinder of garlic-flavored goodness. At this time of year, I stop buying garlic and use chopped up fresh scapes for all my garlic needs. I add them to stir fry, soups, stocks, and pickles.

Garlic scapes are traditionally made into pesto by pureeing the scape with fresh herbs, olive oil, salt, and pepper. Garlic scape pesto can be used as a sauce for pasta, spread for sandwiches, or mixed with sour cream for a dip.

Store scapes in the fridge for up to two weeks. Alternatively, put freshly-cut ends in a container of water and keep at room temperature for a few days where you can enjoy the shapes. As a last resort, give one to your child to use as a magic wand or a sword! Lil, seen here a few years ago, love to play with scapes.

If you don't grow your own garlic but want to experiment with scapes, visit your local farmers' market. Farmers are only too happy to sell their edible plant pickings. Come see me at the Swainway/Northridge booth at Clintonville this weekend for organic Ohio scapes.

Harvesting Color from Weeds: Pokeberry Dye

When I wanted a natural dye for the Homestead Studio: Wool class, I turned to the library and discovered Harvesting Color by Rebecca Burgess. The book, arranged by seasons, is a field guide for making homemade dyes from plants with descriptions of plants, their native locations, and how to make them into dye. Each step is illustrated with clear, engaging photographs.

Autumn features a bright red wool dyed by pokeberry, also called pokeweed, pokeroot, and just plain poke. This weed litters our alleys, some plants reaching upwards of seven feet tall.

Alex, Lil and I collected several pounds of berries on a walk and juiced them by hand. Eating the berries or seeds may be toxic, but many herbalists believe they have antirheumatic properties. The juice stained our skin but washed away with a few soapy scrubs.

I cooked the juice, skins, and seeds with some water and vinegar (1/2 cup per gallon) for an hour, being careful not to boil per the book's directions. Then I let the mix cool and steep overnight. I strained out the seeds and added washed, carded Navajo-Churro wool from Cota Farms. I cooked the wool in the same way as the dye. After it cooled and steeped, I rinsed the wool in several pots of fresh water. Throughout the process I was careful not to agitate the wool so it stayed fluffy instead of felted.

The resulting wool is the color of a sunrise with tangerine and pinks. I repeated the process for a second batch, one which ended up a more evenly dyed crimson red. We used some of the colored wool to felt soap at the Homestead Studio. You can see Lil's bar with natural white, natural black, and pokeberry-dyed crimson wool.

The pokeberry wool project represents so much of what I love about my crazy homesteading life. I took a local, seasonal item, played around with lots of time and some effort, and created something beautiful and useful. By taking an idea out of a book, I learned more than words could teach me.

This type of learning always leads to more questions. I wonder if the dye might work on cotton or silk. And why did one batch turn out so much more intensely colored than the other? Can I grow indigo and make blue dye next year? Maybe I will play with weeds again and find out.

Have you ever made natural dye?

Kousa Dogwood Fruit {Foraged Edible}

Last week, we walked the dogs past this house and this tree for the thousandth time when I spotted something new: pink spiked fruit.

Alex picked one up off the ground. The soft fruit was about the size of his thumb nail. With a little pressure, the skin split open to reveal bright orange flesh inside.

"It's edible," I said without knowing exactly what it was, nor having ever tasted it myself. I just knew I looked it up a few years ago. Ever the risk-taker, Alex licked a bit. "Tastes like mango." We passed around the fruit and agreed it was very sweet and tropical-flavored.

As soon as I returned home, I looked up the tree. It's a Kousa Dogwood, an Asian version of the ornamental tree species. Kousa fruits are indeed edible and sometimes used to make wine.

Lil and I ventured out later to collect some more. We observed the Rules of Foraging and rang the bell of the nearest house to ask permission. No one answered so we limited our picking to what was fallen on the ground.

I tossed our modest haul in the Foley food mill and pressed the gritty flesh from the tough skin. With only a few tablespoons of yield, I naturally mixed the puree into a vodka martini with a lemon twist.

If you happen to see a Kousa tree in your neighborhood, collect fruit in the fall to experience this taste of the tropics in central Ohio. And if you're a gardener, consider planting one - these Dogwoods are resistant to fungal diseases that often kill the more common Flowering Dogwood.

How to Harvest Hickory Nuts

Post by Lil, age six 

This is how you harvest hickory nuts. You have to a hickory nut tree. The bark is jaggedy and there are many lobed leaves on each branch.

This is how you know the nuts are ripe: it has to be brown and also green. When it's hickory nut season you let them fall down and pick them up off the ground.

You have to have a vice to crack them. It's hard to crack the shell open. Squirrels crack the shells open with their teeth.

After the squirrels drop the nuts, they can hit the roof of the garage or the ground. It gets the ground kind of messy so watch out for that.

The meat is ripe when it is light brown. It tastes kind of like pecans. I usually eat them raw.

I like doing hickory nuts because the inside is yummy.

Note from Rachel: Encouraging your child to collect, crack, and consume hickory nuts is a most glorious waste of time learning activity.

Have you ever eaten hickory nuts? Do you like Lil writing on Hounds in the Kitchen? She wants to know!

A Most Disappointing Gardening Season

This is my garden. My dry, stunted, disappointing garden.

The year started with a heat wave in mid-spring that dried out the peas just as they started to produce pods. The same temperatures caused lettuce to bolt before the leaves were big enough to eat. A few windy storms knocked off many fruit tree blooms.

Just when I had reset the backyard raised beds with Swainway seedlings, the front yard fell prey to a public works project. Workers first destroyed a peach tree and dug up an eight foot section of the tree yard to run a gas supply line along our street. A month later, a four foot swatch also lost its grass to run the residential line to a neighbor's house. Part of our alley raspberry patch was ripped apart for reasons I cannot deduce. The gas company was entirely within their rights to do such work and made attempts to replace what was removed but it hurt to watch parts of our yard torn to pieces.

Then the heat came. Days and days of hundred degree highs and very little rain led to the hottest July on record and a well publicized drought. The temperatures damaged plant growth and made us all seek shelter in the air conditioning rather than tend the garden.

So now it is mid-August when I'm used to being inundated with sexy tomatoes and bountiful peppers. Instead, my plants are shrivelled beyond repair. Where usually there are weighty colorful fruit arching the stems, the only bent branches this year are those that sustained damage in the few strong storms we received.

The blame for the garden failure can not entirely be placed on the weather; between cleaning and vacating for house showings and fatigue from chronic sinus pain I simply haven't made the time to stake and water plants. I did take an hour recently to pull up the worst of the tomatoes and plant fall greens to try to coax some food from the soil.

Bright Spots

To buoy the feeling of failure, I look at the few successes of the year. Our rosemary plant and fig tree are thriving. We harvest a handful of beans a day. Smiling sunflowers that planted themselves from bird seed attract equally sunny goldfinches. And 'our' mama hummingbird visits the feeder many times a day, defending it from other females.

My thoughts are already turning to next year when my family will hopefully start a big new garden in a new house. But I cannot escape thinking about the farmers who count on growing food for their livelihood. I remain disappointed at my efforts, but pleased that I have the luxury of spending my money at farmers' markets to hopefully ease local farm losses this year.

How is your garden growing?

Summertime and the Living Ain't Easy

Sometimes urban living isn't all it's cracked up to be. For us, the past six weeks have been nothing but trouble. June started with Columbia Gas digging in our treeyard (site of Lil's garden) to run a new gas line. We were the lucky house on the block to receive the connection joint that required a hole six feet wide and four feet deep. Workers tried to be kind to our garden but split a four-year-old peach tree in two and trampled flowers and herbs. Because it's their right of way, we knew we were taking a risk when planting there but watching our beautiful garden destroyed was gut wrenching indeed.

Next came the storm that knocked out our power and my sense of direction. In such a dense area, having windows open meant we couldn't help but overhear conversations, children crying, and generators all night long. Prized shade trees shed branches over power lines that had to make restoring electricity all the more difficult for crews.

During the power outage mess, city bus drivers, providing central Ohio's only public transit, went on strike. While I don't use the bus frequently, I often use it for riding to the Doo Dah Parade, an option not available this year.

Meanwhile, the weather was unrelentingly hot: eleven days near or above 100 degrees, made worse by proximity to houses, cars and roads. The garden withered, chickens gular fluttered, and dogs didn't want to go outside. I worry about farmers, crops, and creatures, like the honey bees pictured above drinking sugar water from my hummingbird feeder.

Finally this morning I was awoken by a loud knock at 8 am. Columbia Gas was back to install supply lines to the house. Another full day of loud machines moving dirt trampled more of my garden, including mature raspberry plants.

I am usually an advocate for urban homesteading but today I am tired of city living. I want to run to the country where, in my grass-is-always-greener estimation, I could find a cool peace.

A Girl And Her Carrot {Wordless Wednesday}