The Cellar and the Pantry Blog

There are some fruits, herbs, and vegetables that never made the trip from the traditional garden to the modern supermarket, because of changing tastes or because they're perishable rather than "shelf-stable." They are the Unmarketables, and if you want to eat them you'll have to grow them yourself.

I'm breaking in on my World Cup hiatus because one of the most delicious foods you can't get in the store is now in season.  Or, from another point of view, one of the most widespread invasive weeds in North America is getting ready to spread to your garden.  It all depends on how you feel about the wineberry.

The wineberry, sometimes called the Japanese wineberry (Rubus phoenicolasius), is a bramble in the same family as the blackberry and raspberry. It is easly recognizable by its stems, covered with fine red thorns that can look almost like fur. Native to Korea, China, and Japan, wineberries now thrive on roadsides, abandoned fields and forest borders throughout the central United States, especially east of the Mississippi.  The leaves have bright green tops with faint red veins, and white undersides.

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Today's Ottawa Citizen has an interesting first-hand account of foraging for morels, one of my favorite foods of all time.

If you don't have a secret morel hunting ground of your own nearby, there are companies that will sell you morel spawn--but since nobody is quite sure what morels need to thrive and it can take two years for newly "planted" spawn to form fruiting bodies, take any claims that you can grow these delicacies at home with a grain of salt.

The recipe in the article also calls for ramps (Allium tricoccum, sometimes called
"wild leeks"), which can be easily grown if you have the right climate and a suitable spot of shady ground or, even better, a forest floor; here is a link to one source of seeds and bulbs.

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There are some fruits, herbs, and vegetables that never made the trip from the traditional garden to the modern supermarket.  Some went out of fashion, while others aren't "shelf-stable" enough to handle modern industrial farming and transportation.  Whatever the reason, if you want to eat them, you'll have to grow them yourself.  They are...the Unmarketables.  One of the earliest of the season is spring garlic.

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Like many suburban homes, mine has a narrow strip in between the sidewalk and the street.  They're called the "parking strip" and are usually surrounded by concrete or asphalt on four sides, making them the perfect container for a hardy, aggressive spreading crop that otherwise might threaten to escape and take over your garden.

The only problem is that people don't expect there to be edible crops there--and neither do dogs.

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So says one of the "urban homesteaders" interviewed recently in the New York Times' look at traditional food crafters in San Francisco.  Apparently "homesteading" is the term the Times has chosen to apply to people who make their own food from scratch.  I'm not wild about it, but I haven't been able to find a better one ("foodcraft" was my attempt).  What do you think?

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One blogger's interesting take on what makes food "traditional."  I've run into this problem myself; when you make certain foods at home, you end up using a lot of ingredients that these "traditional food" advocates would shudder at; sulfites, tartaric acid, saltpeter...I just bought a bag of calcium hydroxide (aka pickling lime).  And I'm using these products in an attempt to be more traditional.

An interesting, similar take can be found in Why Some Like It Hot: Food, Genes, and Cultural Diversity, Gary Paul Nabham's excellent analysis of the so-called "caveman diets."

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The three feet of snow in the Cellar and the Pantry Garden are almost, but not quite, melted, and I was finally able to start prepping some of the beds for the upcoming season.

Of course, first I had to harvest a few leftovers.  The sugar beets I planted last spring held out great over the winter, under a warm blanket of snow.  They've now been chopped and frozen, and sometime soon I'll be treating them with pickling lime and seeing if I can get some homemade sugar out of them.

Get ready, gardeners.  After last year's sopping wet summer and this year's snow-covered winter, it's time to give it another shot.  Hopefully this season the weather will cooperate.

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An interesting read...The 7 Foods Experts Won't Eat.

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Perennial Vegetables: From Artichoke to 'Zuiki' Taro, a Gardener's Guide to Over 100 Delicious, Easy-to-Grow Edibles

by Eric Toensmeier; published in 2007 by Chelsea Green Publishing Company

Anyone who thinks that perennial vegetables begin and end with asparagus will welcome the arrival of a well-written, comprehensive survey of perennial vegetables for the home garden.  Eric Toensmeier clearly knows and loves his subject.  While his survey of perennial vegetables could have been better organized, its thoroughness and its unusual subject matter make it useful and fascinating.

The book is divided into two parts; an extended introduction discussing general gardening issues as they apply to edible perennial vegetables, and an extensive listing and description of some of the plants themselves.

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When I think of urban gardening, I remember the hand-pollinated heirloom tomatoes I grew on my windowsill when I lived in Manhattan, or the herb garden on my Brooklyn fire escape, or the container garden my friend kept next to her stoop.  I think of the fight to keep community gardens in empty lots, and guerrilla gardeners lobbing "seed grenades" into fenced-off abandoned plots.

Luckily for their circulation, Urban Farm, the new title launching this month from the publishers of Hobby Farms magazine, has a broader definition of "urban."  The subtitle is "Sustainable City Living," but this new magazine, published out of Lexington, Kentucky, mostly caters to the suburban demographic--basically, anyone with a small enough garden that they don't feel comfortable buying Hobby Farms.  Read on for the full review of the first issue.

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