A Bouquet of Lilac Flowers

My heart has a special corner in it for Cornus florida, the flowering dogwood. When I was a little girl, we had a flowering dogwood in the front yard and its exuberant white flowers charmed me each spring.

In high school, I learned that dogwoods are one of the few opposite-branching trees and shrubs (part of the MAD CAP HORSE* crowd.)

During undergrad, I learned and then taught that the dogwood's white flowers are not petals at all, but modified leaves called bracts. The actual flowers are the tiny structures in the center of the bracts. Also, the wood was used for golf clubs - back when golf clubs were made of real wood. (Watch the YouTube video of Dr. Leopold** teaching Cornus florida - "Many regard it as the most beautiful of all our native trees.")

Finally, during a two-month stint at Overlook Farm, we sang the song "Wagon Wheel" at least once a day. On breaks from farm chores, I'd wander the forests and town streets looking for "a bouquet of dogwood flowers" but to no avail.

Sadly, flowering dogwoods are not so common in New England as in the mid-Atlantic and do not bloom in our yard this time of year, so I must substitute for another charming spring-flowering tree: the common lilac (Syringa vulgaris).

There are many reasons to recommend the lilac as my new favorite spring flower: It's the New Hampshire state flower and typically blooms here just in time for Mother's Day. The wood is streaked with purple. Our lilac hedge may be almost 100 years old and a pair of birds nest in it each spring. Mountains of pale purple, fragrant flowers are just now starting to open their petals. While I don't know of any song about picking a bouquet of lilac flowers, I'm hopeful that someone will write that song one day.

Really, could anything be more lovely?
I hope this brightens your day. Happy Mothers' Day!

Click to enlarge - you'll be glad you did.

*MAD CAP HORSE refers to Maple, Ash, Dogwood, Caprifoliaceae and Horse Chestnut - this is a helpful mnemonic to remember the small number of trees and shrubs that have opposite branching. Caprifoliaceae is a family of shrubs and small trees, including viburnums, elderberry and honeysuckle among others.

** Dr. Don Leopold's teaching and mentoring was hugely influential in my college education, teaching approach and ever-deepening appreciation for trees. You can learn the key defining characteristics of 100+ North American tree species by watching the SUNY-ESF YouTube Channel. If you are interested in native plants not just trees, I recommend his book Native Plants of the Northeast.

The Fabaceae Family: Cosmopolitan Beans

This post is all about beans... hopefully, it will be more interesting or useful than a hill of beans.
The Fabaceae is the bean family, which includes, among many others, the pea, the green bean, the lentil, the soybean, the fava bean, the black bean, the chickpea, and the peanut.

Snow peas in a tangle of vines

The bean family is considered "cosmopolitan"because these plants are found throughout the world. The bean family is extremely important to many food cultures, providing a wonderful source of vegetable protein that is portable, storable and flexible. By flexible, I mean that there is a wide variety of ways that beans can be prepared - beans can be eaten raw, dried and then cooked, smushed into hummus or peanut butter, ground into flour, fermented into tofu, tempeh, soy sauce and miso, and even concocted into red-bean ice cream.

Personally, I prefer fresh green beans to dried beans, and so I am devoting a good amount of space in the garden for both bush beans and pole beans (Rattlesnake and Kentucky Wonder). However, if I don't quite get to all the Rattlesnake beans in time, I've read that these taste something like pinto beans when dried and cooked. I'm also planning to grow a lot of snowpeas, as these flat green pods are a favorite in our household - and they freeze really well. Depending on space constraints and my ambition, maybe I will plant green shelling peas, as you really can't have pasta primavera or chicken pot pie without peas. This year will be the first year for trying to grow soybeans for edamame-eating purposes; I've ordered the Beer Friend variety from Fedco. (How could you not love a soybean that is a friend of beer?)

Hard to believe my garden will look like this in 3 short months.

For Dark Days Week 14, our challenge within a challenge is to cook a vegetarian meal. While the easy way out would have been to make this egg and cheese breakfast sandwich, I worked with my husband to make a green bean noodle casserole with mushroom sauce. I need to work on my egg noodle-making - the first time was not the charm.

Local ingredients - eggs, wild mushrooms, onions, shallots, butter and milk.
Flour from King Arthur Flour (local company, but grains grown in the Midwest)
Frozen green beans from Trader Joe's - I thought I had some garden beans left from last summer, but I couldn't find them in the chest freezer.

Dark Days Week One - Cabbage and Sweet Potato Slaw

I had no idea until this year that you could grow sweet potatoes in New England. Sweet potatoes are a tropical root vegetable - not a cold-hardy friend of kale and red potatoes and other favored New England crops.

Like potatoes, sweet potatoes are not true roots like carrots or parsnips, but are tubers, underground stems that store starch. Unlike carrots and parsnips that are grown from seed, potatoes and sweet potatoes are grown from sprouted pieces of tuber. The "eyes" are clusters of buds, which will grow new leafy stems. Despite the similarity in common name, these two tubers are not closely related - sweet potatoes are in the morning glory family (Convolvulaceae) and potatoes are in the nightshade family (Solanaceae). They are both "New World" plants, native to the Western Hemisphere.

Apparently, it takes some trickery to make the sweet potato plants believe that they are living in a warm climate with a long growing season, rather than in Zone 5A... it's a matter of starting the sprouts indoors early until it heats up enough outdoors to plant them in the ground. The enormous sweet potato shown here was grown at Spring Ledge Farm a few miles down the road. A new crop for the list for next year - sweet potatoes!

On Tuesday, Adam and I cooked up one of our 20-minute go-to weeknight dinners. This dish doesn't really have a name - it's a skillet saute of cabbage, apple and bacon and whatever else you happen to have on hand, such as a gigantic sweet potato.

Still life with dinner and (some of the) ingredients

We were doing great with the local-eating challenge of Dark Days - (what's Dark Days, you ask?)
Bacon, slivered cabbage and sweet potato, sliced apples and caramelized onions fried in a cast-iron pan and sauced up with maple syrup boiled down from our sugar maple trees this March...
But then, Adam added some mustard, salt and wine to balance the flavors - not local ingredients.

I think this is pretty good for a first attempt, and actually, I was sort of impressed that we didn't need to use any oil or spices to make a really tasty dish. Of course, we could have used New Hampshire wine or hard cider and maybe next year, I could grow mustard, let it mature, harvest the seeds and make my own mustard using vinegar that I made myself. (That would be truly ambitious.)

Here's rough instructions on how to make this dish - I wouldn't call this a true recipe because it's a thrown-together dish with whatever you happen to have. It would be good with any number of sliced-up winter vegetables.

Cabbage and Sweet Potato Slaw

Fry up 1/2 pound of bacon; once crispy, remove from the pan.
Add 2 cups of thinly sliced or slivered sweet potato to the pan and brown.
Add 2 cups of thinly sliced or slivered cabbage and a thinly sliced apple; cook 2-3 minutes.
Add 1/4 cup of caramelized onions and a few tablespoons of maple syrup and grainy mustard.
Cook another minute, add a splash or two of wine and a sprinkle of salt.
Turn off the heat, add the bacon back to the pan, and toss so that the bacon gets coated with a bit of the mustard-maple sauce.

This is one of those dishes that doesn't look great, but tastes awesome.

Source citations:
Bacon - North Country Smokehouse
Cabbage and sweet potato - Spring Ledge Farm
Apple (a Calville Blanc d'Hiver) - Poverty Lane Orchards
Onion - Musterfield Farm
Butter (for caramelizing the onion) - Cabot Creamery
Maple syrup - the backyard
Organic mustard - no idea - it's made by Westbrae, which is part of Hain Celestial Group
Cheap white wine - somewhere in California
Salt - I do not know, but here's a map of all of Morton's facilities.

Now is the Time for Great Faith...

Adam has been asking me for the past few weeks WHEN am I going to start the peppers? Last year, on Memorial Day weekend, we purchased three pepper plants at the Burlington Vermont Farmers Market. The farmers told us that they started their peppers in early February! Talk about planning ahead - we were in northern Vermont last weekend and it's the most-wintry-feeling place I've been in years.

These pepper plants were outstanding - they were head-and-shoulders above all other pepper starts when we purchased them and took extremely well to transplanting. They produced an incredible number of peppers, starting in late June and continuing through first frost!

I ordered new plant seeds from Fedco, but they will not arrive until March. So I broke down and went to buy more seeds. Fortunately, most seeds store well for a couple years, but if you are interested in sharing seeds, do let me know.

Seeds are amazing - just look at these tiny parsley seeds superimposed on an illustration of what they will grow up to be. (You may want to click on the image below to see a larger version of the photo.)

Seeds consist of three components, each with a different purpose. The embryo is the plant-to-be, the endosperm is the food for the infant plant, and the seed coat is the packaging. Each is amazing in its own right:

• The embryo will sit happily in a state of suspended animation for up to several years, only sparking back to life when conditions are right.
• The endosperm, which makes up the bulk of the seed, has got just the right mix of food for the developing embryo to get it germinated and grown enough to start taking in its own nutrients from the soil.
• The seed coat protects the embryo and endosperm through hot and cold, wet and dry, and in some species, will experience unscathed an exotic vacation through a bird or mammal's digestive system.

The size and variation of seeds among plant species is simply outstanding. In one seed tray, I planted seeds ranging in size from half an inch long (marigold seeds) to so tiny I couldn't separate them individually even with my fingernails (German chamomile). I keep thinking one day I will have to plant an avocado seed, just to see what an avocado tree looks like.

Similarly, the variation of germination requirements for garden plants can be quite fascinating. Columbine seeds like it cold before being planted (the technical term is cold-stratification), lettuce seeds require light to germinate and parsley seeds require a 24-hr soak prior to planting.

Now the seeds are sitting silently in their trays in the dark; since I did not plant lettuce, my seeds should not need light to germinate, just water and warm temperatures. Now is the time for patience.... and for faith in the miracle of seeds.

You say tomato, I say enough already

If I were a model of the "conscientious gardener" I would be able to look back at my minutely detailed, comprehensive garden journal entries and tell you exactly when our first killing frost hit. Garden records are incredibly interesting and also provide a good source of information on interannual climate variation. I think that records of this type have been used to document certain aspects of climate change, such as changes in first and last frost dates. However, science will not gain much from my garden journal as consistency in my records is sorely lacking... sorry to let you down, Michael Mann.

So I can't really say when our first killing frost hit. Sometime after Columbus Day because I remember wrapping the tomatoes in white sheets and thinking that I wish it were closer to Halloween, so that we could have garden ghosties! At any rate, it's been almost a month since the tomatoes and other hot-weather-loving plants retired for the season.

However, I took care to pick all the green tomatoes before the first hard frost, and then I also gleaned green tomatoes from our friends' garden. I pulled enough green tomatoes to make 6 pints of green tomato relish (somewhat like pickle relish that you put on burgers.) That still left me with scads of green tomatoes, which are slowly slowly turning red. I've been foisting them off on my neighbor every week, and making small batches of tomato puree every week or so. I'm really impressed because I've never had good luck ripening tomatoes indoors before - some tomatoes get moldy or develop scary rotten spots, but overall, the tomatoes are ripening quite nicely.

I feel that this is a success story and it's all thanks to our good friend, ethylene! Ethylene is a very fascinating plant hormone - unlike other hormones, it is gaseous and is released from ripening fruits to accelerate the ripening process.

But I must say that these tomatoes do not taste summer-fresh, they taste like grocery-store tomatoes. I would not recommend the large tomatoes for eating fresh, but they cook down really nicely. The cherry tomatoes are still tasty enough to eat fresh on salads, and also make a lovely flavorful sauce.

As successful as this year's indoor tomato ripening may be, I'm sort of looking forward to a time when I won't have trays of tomatoes covering numerous horizontal spaces (I've already been kicked out of the kitchen, except for one small tray). I anticipate that the tomatoes will be completely ripened by the end of November, and then it's just a short while until it's time to place my order for next year's seeds.

Chlorophyll - definitely not bore-ophyll

Adam Sandler may be a funny guy from the great state of New Hampshire - but I must say that he got it totally wrong in the high school biology class scene in the movie Billy Madison.

Chlorophyll is cool!

I have been neglecting photo-posting lately, an error that I will begin to fix today. Looking through photos taken on July 31, I came to the above realization - call it an "epiphany of botanical revelation."



It's simply amazing. Go away for two weeks in the summer and, provided that your garden doesn't suffer a searing drought, brush fire, plague of locusts or golfball-sized hail, you will return to find a jungle. A lush, green profusion of plant life and all because of a funky little molecule called chlorophyll.

Our raised beds are on either side of the driveway and receive an abundance of sunlight. Our green plants utilize the chlorophyll in their leaves to capture the sun's energy and convert it into sugars to make more plant matter. For several weeks in mid-summer, it's a positive feedback loop - make bigger leaves to catch more sunlight to make bigger leaves. (Note the size of the butternut squash leaves!) However, some of the energy ends up elsewhere, directed to flowering and setting fruit, which makes the wonderful vegetables that make gardening so rewarding. And it's all thanks to chlorophyll.



The butternut squash completely overwhelmed the upper raised bed on the far side of the driveway (in the first photo), but the acorn squash vines were more orderly and stretched out in lovely straight lines across the grass (in the back of the second photo.) The garden looks remarkably different today, but the photos from August will have to wait until another day...

Bonus quiz for the General Botany club - if I had planted corn in my garden, would it photosynthesize more efficiently, less efficiently, or with the same efficiency as the other plants shown in the photos? Leave your answer below.

Garden Runaways

I cannot post any new photos or tell any stories of my garden this week because I am out exploring the American West. We've been camping on federal lands, enjoying tall trees, clear aquamarine rivers and now the Pacific coast. July in the western mountains is wildflower season, and I have been surprised to find some garden flowers out staking a claim along the highways and riversides.

On the drier east side of the Cascades, I found yarrow growing tall and exuberant, just the white flowering kind. On the east side, pink sweet peas clamber up road cuts, along gravel banks and in open blackberry meadows. Less pervasive but also present are blue and purple bachelor's button, something I never would have expected to see outside a garden bed.

I don't know if it was just happenstance that these garden seeds escaped the garden, or if the sweet peas were deliberately introduced, but the effect is truly interesting. I know that when people come visit the Northeast in the summer, they often ooh and aah over the beautiful spiky purple flowers in the marshes, not knowing that purple loosestrife is a serious invasive plant. I hope I'm not falling prey to complimenting a nuisance species also, but I must admit the bright colors of these garden escapees are indeed beautiful.

Peas, Please

It's the height of pea season in New Hampshire, which is a very good time. I have been enjoying my own snow peas as well as Vanessa's sugar snap peas this past week. You can plant peas in late April or early May here. The seed guides indicate "as soon as the ground can be worked" but I tend to plant whenever the spirit moves me; this year I planted mid-May. For having gone to science "do things by the book" school for four years, my gardening ethic is rather lackadaisical.



Peas are fantastically tasty, raw or cooked. I especially like sugar snap peas straight from the vine, as they've got a great crunch raw. Adam is not a fan of raw peas, so I put snow peas in with some potstickers for a picnic dinner. I also tried doing a quick 90-second steam in the microwave and then rinsing the snow peas in cold water before chopping them for a green salad. I was surprised at the difference in flavor with that short amount of cooking - it definitely mellows out the flavor.

I have experimented with several types of pea fences, although I did not follow the scientific method. (That would be a great science fair project - which pea fence provides best support?) Peas naturally vine and trellis themselves, wrapping thin yet strong tendrils around anything they come in contact with. (Botany Quiz - What's the name for this differential growth habit stimulated by plants "feeling" a surface? - the answer is at the bottom of this post. Bonus points if you can remember which plant hormones are responsible for this!!)

I've tried two different trellis systems this year. One is a line of vertical tree saplings with twine running between the saplings. The other is a wattle made out of crisscrossed branches. There are pros and cons to both, but both are now too short! I've had to re-purpose part of my pole bean trellis for the pea plants. The peas are rapidly maturing, and I'll probably pull them out this weekend - peas do not take well to 90-degree heat. For the second planting this fall and the years to come, I may need to follow my some "by-the-book" advice and set up a regularly-spaced wide mesh netting for the peas that's at least 4 ft tall.



Quiz answers: this growth habit is called thigmotropism - and the hormones responsible are our dear old friends, the auxins.

Food I never ate growing up - Swiss Chard

When I was a kid, I was not a particularly picky eater and we had dinner table rules about eating vegetables, so I definitely grew up eating leafy greens, beans, peas, corn, tomatoes and a lot of other garden veggies. But when I got to college, all of a sudden the world of vegetables expanded and my new friends introduced me to artichokes, avocados, eggplant, mixed greens (the kind with bitter-tasting mustard greens), and olives that did not come from a jar labeled "Black Olives" or "Green Olives with Pimientos." Somewhere along the way I was introduced to Swiss chard, which is really one of the strangest veggies.

1. Its wildly colored stalks seem completely improbable, from a Mendelian genetics perspective.
2. You cook the leaves and the stalks separately and they both taste different.
3. How can something look so similar to rhubarb but instead be chard?
4. The Swiss are known for many things (cheese, the Alps, neutrality, anonymous bank accounts), but vegetable farming is not one of them. Turns out it's really from the Mediterranean.
5. Ever look at the seeds? Even these are strange.
6. Swiss chard is a beet. Seriously. (Cooperative Extension doesn't lie.)

After 2 years of planting chard seeds with zero success and the plants never surviving past the 2-inch stage, I have actually got 5-6 thriving chard this year. I started the seeds inside which may have contributed to their continued existence. I did just plant some golden chard seeds, so maybe those will survive as well. And while I still think chard is strange, I also find it strikingly beautiful.



I'll share my favorite recipe for swiss chard.

Steamed Swiss Chard Salad
Cut the leaves off the chard stems and cut the leaves into pieces.
Steam leaves until soft (about 3-5 minutes.)
Toss with olive oil, red pepper flakes, and a handful of pine nuts/walnuts.
Squeeze a lemon over the whole dish - I like it when some of the pulp falls into the salad.
Season to taste with salt and pepper.

If you give a mouse a strawberry...

It's raining today, but lately, it's been really nice. Spring came early this year and everyone I talk to seems to mention that their lilacs bloomed early, the black flies came AND went (thankfully) early, and the strawberries are now in - two weeks ahead of schedule!

I did plant some runner-type strawberries this year, thanks to the generosity of the McM's and Starky-starks, but I don't expect much from those until next year. Last year, I read up on and then purchased some alpine strawberries, which do not produce runners and are less likely to run rampant over the lawn. They actually produced a few strawberries in the early fall, but it's absolutely incredible what they are up to this year!! They started blooming in April and have been prolific in both fruit and flower - the first berries ripened almost 2 weeks ago.



Aren't they gorgeous (even if a little out of focus)?? These are fruit straight out of a fairy tale. I remember a book I read as a child that involved a cute little grey mouse and in the story, he eats a cute little red strawberry... just like the ones I have growing in my yard.

Alpine or woodland strawberries are actually native plants of North America. Their Latin name is Fragaria vesca. These strawberries are also known by their more alluring French name, fraises des bois. (This translates to strawberries of the wood - oh my, how poetic.)

My three plants in the front garden are substantially more prolific than the wild woodland strawberries in the back yard, but I also coddle them by putting them in a location with full sun, giving them water, pulling weeds, and piling leaves around them in the winter. The wild berries have to tough it out on their own.



These are not the kind of berries you would care to turn into jam. For one, they are tiny - compare to the size of the basil leaves in the picture above. You would have to pick and pick and pick and pick until your fingers couldn't move. The second reason is that these strawberries are too irresistible to wait to bring back into the kitchen. They have a subtle perfumey flavor layered on top of the sweet strawberry taste - they really do deserve their fancy French name because they are far more sophisticated than their strawberry farm cousins. Considering the Latin genus Fragaria, it should be no surprise that the fragrance of strawberries stands out. Barbara Damrosch is much more eloquent in describing the flavor profile in her Washington Post article on this special fruit.

Our cats have been controlling the rodent population for the neighborhood this spring, so I'm hoping that the cute little grey mice won't eat all my fairy-tale strawberries.

After the Bolt...

Just a short post today -
I wanted to share what arugula flowers look like. I think that they resemble pinwheels.

I could tell that my arugula and spinach were on the verge of bolting, and I felt bad tearing them out of the garden when they looked so vigorous. At some point, I will need to pull them and plant the next round of seeds (something warm-weather-loving, I hope)... but until it stops raining, I'm going to remain a weak-willed gardener and see what arugula looks like when it goes to seed!

Despite continuing wet, cool weather, the zucchini sprouts continue to grow bit by bit. I'm surprised by that, as I consider zucchini the ultimate hot summer weather plant. I also realized that I think I confused mixed up some seedlings that I started inside because the cucumber flowers seem very squash-like. I'll post a "name this seedling" quiz soon!