Archive for easy edibles – Page 2

More Blueberry Heaven: Never-Fail Varieties for Portland Landscapes

Perfect Plumpness in Blueberry cluster Portland Garden Designer

Never-Fail Blueberry Varieties for Portland Gardens

A few more thoughts on choosing blueberry plants. Last time we discussed some basics for choosing blueberries. I give you a larger selection to consider and continue to encourage the purchase of big plants.

Here’s a list of blueberries we know will do well in Northwest Oregon and Southwest Washington State—and tickle your taste buds. The listings summarize variety name, maximum height, harvest time and fall color.

Blueberry Varieties for Portland Landscapes

  • Bluecrop, 6 feet, July, red leaf and stems, tall enough for a hedge
  • Spartan, 4 feet, July, hot orange fall color
  • Patriot, 5 feet, early July, hot orange fall color
  • Olympia, 4 feet, late July, light red fall color, tolerates clay
  • Sierra, 8 feet, August, light red winter twigs, great for privacy
  • Sunshine Blue, 3 feet, August, blue-green (evergreen)
  • Bountiful Blue, 3 feet, August, blue-green (evergreen)
  • Liberty, 8 feet, August/September, red-orange, privacy screen
  • Legacy, 6 feet, August/September, hot red-orange

Now that you have information about specific varieties, here are some more hints to help you choose wisely for your garden:

  • Think—and order—ahead. For example, ‘Sierra’ and ‘Liberty’ are still hard to find and might need to be ordered. Contact your favorite nursery in January to inquire about the varieties you want, so they have time to respond or include your request in their orders. Portland Nursery, Farmington Gardens or Cornell Farms will be glad to work with you.
  • Mail order.   One Green World  If you have fallen in love with the flavor of a particular variety of blueberry, be prepared to wait 5 years for a big crop since mail order typically means a small plant.
  • Buy the biggest plants you can afford.   One-gallon plants take too long to yield a decent crop, so splurge if you can and buy bigger plants. I talked with Jim at Portland Nursery about getting big blueberry plants. They get regular shipments of 5-gallon sized plants throughout the year.
  • Blueberry and Dragonfly in Portland Residential Garden - Landscape Design In A Day.Clients wish they had bought bigger plants.  My clients, Jim and Jodi, just bought a home and I completed our second Landscape Design in a Day. Six years ago (at their old house) they bought and planted 1-gallon blueberry plants. Although their then puppy contributed to the stunted growth, by chewing on the canes and peeing on them, he shouldn’t take all the blame. They moved just before they got a great crop. This time they are going to buy big blueberry plants to start with. Remember we are buying time when we buy a bigger plant.
  • Learn basic pruning. Pruning is an important part of being happy with your blueberries (and vice versa). It’s easy, and proper pruning will increase your yield dramatically. There are many good sources for learning the tricks. However, there is no substitute for having someone show you how, putting the pruners in your hands and having you do the pruning. That’s the best way because it sticks in both your mind and muscle-memory.
  • Two Videos.  Here are two videos to help you: OSU Extension Services     University of Maine Cooperative Extension

Yes, getting those berries into your cereal bowl requires time, patience and a bit of training. But, conjure up the fragrance or flavor of a memorable blueberry encounter, and you’ll agree that the effort is worth it. After all, growing blueberries is easy compared to many other fruit plants.

Next time we will look at some of the newest varieties of blueberry. If you are ready to design your Portland garden, contact me to set up an appointment.


My Portland Spring Veggie Garden

An Edible Portland Garden

I’m trying some new things to improve my early spring garden this year.

Carol standing at the entrance to community garden at Rocky Pointe Marina 7 23 2014

Community garden at Rocky Pointe Marina. Photo Credit: Peggy Kreman

Early Spring Garden

Overall I’m happy with my edibles  garden experience but I miss out on the early spring garden because I don’t get my plants into the ground soon enough.  My landscape design work is seasonal and by February I’m so busy it’s too late for me to get organized for my personal garden. I’ve been vague about planting start dates.  Is it still too cold?  What is the last frost date?  This year instead of wondering about it, I’m using the Portland Nursery calendar to get out of vague and into organized.

Buying veggie starts

I called my favorite place to buy starts so I’ll know when I can purchase.  Turns out they use the same calendar and will have my starts for mustard greens, kale, collards and more by March.  My grandmother was very thrifty and every penny counted.  Her huge vegetable garden was one of the ways she contributed to her family income.  I’m playing.  The amount of greens I go through in my kitchen is significant but would not break the bank if I bought them.

Carol's winter kale

My garden supplies me with year round greens like kale.

I buy 80 percent of my plants as starts  in 4 and 6 packs.  I don’t have room in my house for setting up seeds and starts provide instant gratification and cover my soil quickly.  My neighbor Betty grows a lot of interesting plants from seed for fun.  I often benefit.  I grow spring greens from seed in my tabletop salad garden and I can start seeds for my favorite smoothie green, arugula in late February.  If it’s too cold I’m out the cost of seeds.  I sow spring greens seeds every two or three weeks until mid June.  I will purchase veggie starts for my summer garden and plant them in May and do starts again in late summer for my fall garden.

Soil Test

I’m doing a soil test this year which I’ve not done before.  My root vegetables don’t do well and I’m curious about lead.  I understand that adding certain nutrients can help lock up some of the lead in the soil.   I hope to dig out one of my beds, lay down a weed barrier and a metal grid.  Why?  One reason is to keep the ground soil which probably does have some lead in it (the garden is below Hwy 30), separate from my nice new clean soil, and the 2nd is to keep the gopher or mole from bringing that soil up into my garden and keep them from moving the soil around and messing up the roots of my plants!!  It’s a lot of physical work so I’m only going to do one bed, probably with help this year.

That’s my plan, we will see what happens!

Portland floating house veggie garden

Carol’s husband harvesting tomatoes.

My favorite place for vegetable starts is City Farm on N. Lombard.  They grow their veggie starts in a nearby greenhouse. New Seasons often has great veggie starts.  Cornell Farms is serious about their veggie starts so you can expect a good selection.  Portland Nursery, Garden Fever, Livingstone……..lots of choices for every part of town.

Scarlet Runner Bean

Gardener and guest blogger Chrissy Lavielle tells us how to grow and cook scarlet runner beans.  Her recipe below, “Scarlet Runner Bean Soup”,  is fantastic.

Scarlet Runner Bean. Photo courtesy of Seed Savers.

Scarlet Runner Bean.  Photo courtesy of Seed Savers Exchange

Early in April, when the soil is just beginning to warm up, I plant the scarlet runner beans.  It seems so cruel to bury those beautiful, thumb sized black and purple beans in the cold, damp earth, but they always burst happily to the surface in two or three weeks – depending on how cold it is.  When they get to be about six inches tall, I tie long strings onto a wire I’ve strung in the eaves of the porch, just above the bean plants.  I tie the other end of each string around the upper part of a plant.  As summer begins to progress, the beans spiral gracefully up the strings.  By mid July they’ve made a 15 foot tall, thick, green curtain dotted with brilliant scarlet flowers that shades the west side of the porch from the worst of the summer sun.

By late autumn, the flowers have been replaced by long dry parchment brown pods filled with those beautiful beans.  The cotton string doesn’t compost well, and it’s slimy remnants catch on trowels and shovels and weeding forks for several years.  And so I choose a sunny afternoon in November and spend it picking beans and unraveling string and summer from the twisted vines.

Shelling the grocery bag full of bean pods takes an easy hour – less if someone helps.  I put the beans in a pottery bowl and leave them on the kitchen counter to dry.  Whenever I find myself standing next to them, I push my hand down into the mass of cool, satiny beans and stir them around.  It feels wonderful and makes a comforting, pattering sort of sound.

I use the spiral cut ham bones from the Yule Ritual to make a fabulous stock for the beans.

To make the stock:

Put a bunch of ham bones or bones saved from several pork roasts in a stockpot and cover with water or chicken broth.  Add some salt and lemon juice to pull the calcium out of the bone.  Bring to a boil and simmer for about 4 hours.

After about 2 1/2 hours add:

A few yellow onions, carrots and ribs of celery

A large can of diced tomatoes

10 pepper corns

Fresh sprigs of parsley, sage, rosemary and/or thyme

After the 4 hours, strain stock from bones and vegetables.

To make the soup:

Soak about 1 1/2 – 2 cups of beans in water overnight.  Strain and rinse beans.  Put them in a 1 1/2 – 2 quarts of stock and bring to boil.  Simmer for about 1 1/2 hours.  Add a few spritzes of Tabasco sauce and adjust seasonings.  Puree about 1/2 the beans in a food processor and add back to thicken the soup.

You can add pasta and/or garnish with fresh chopped basil.

Family’s Rhubarb Mousse Connects Generations

Rhubarb makes a dramatic and tastey addition to designer pal Adriana Berry's garden.

Rhubarb makes a dramatic and tasty addition to designer pal Adriana Berry’s garden. Photo by Carol Lindsay

I found this story about rhubarb and a family’s history in my vacation house kitchen cupboard.  It was left behind by friends using the house.  I enjoyed reading it and learned it’s a part of a series written by Chrissy Lavielle to pass down her family’s recipes and their history.  She generously allowed me to share it with you.

I really like rhubarb.  It’s big and dramatic; it looks tropical, but survives sub zero winters and anything else you can throw at it; and you can eat it – it’s the only fruit that’s not a fruit.  My rhubarb plant flowered last summer.  A two-inch diameter club shaped stalk shot up six feet and exploded in a mass of tiny greenish white flowers.  The effect was prehistoric and vaguely ominous.  I watched it carefully, ready with my trusty loppers, in case it got out of hand.

Both my mother and Craig’s mother grew rhubarb.  Craig remembers pretending the leaves were clothes and I remember using the leaves and stalks for everything from flags to parasols.  Mothers now days would never allow this, they know that the leaves are toxic – chock full of oxalic acid.  I guess maybe mom told me not to eat the leaves, because I never did.  Or maybe she didn’t.  Why would you eat a boring green leaf when you could bite into a bright red stalk?  That eye watering, tooth roughening, mouth shriveling bitter sourness is a childhood memory of Cincinnati summers that is hardwired into my brain.

Every February my mother began to look forward to the “spring tonics” – stewed rhubarb and dandelion greens from the golf course.  I wasn’t fond of either one.  Her philosophy on fruits and vegetables was to cook them until they were really, really dead.

Red stocks are the tasty part, the leaves are toxic and bitter.

Red stocks are the tasty part, the leaves are toxic and bitter.

My mother in law’s recipe is a much better way to enjoy rhubarb.  I helped her make it once, and smiled to myself as I watched her cut the rhubarb.  Holding the stalk over the saucepan with her left hand, and the paring knife curled in the fingers of her right hand, she put her thumb on the opposite side of the stalk and cut against it.  Pieces of rhubarb fell into the pan in a quick series of metallic plops.  This is exactly and precisely the way my mother, another Ohio girl who lived through WWII and The Depression, cut up rhubarb.  Neither one of them had any use for a cutting board and to my knowledge, only used one occasionally – usually for cheese.

Mother planted her rhubarb at one end of the asparagus bed.  In the years after she died, the rest of the garden gradually faded away, but the rhubarb plants outlived both my parents.

Rhubarb mousse is one of Craig’s favorite deserts.  He also likes rhubarb pie or pan’d outy – but he is dead set against adulterating it with strawberries or blueberries.

Rhubarb Mousse

1 lb. rhubarb cut in 1″ pieces (3 cups) or 1 pkg.

1/2 cup water, divided

1 cup sugar

1 envelope unflavored gelatin

2 tsps. lemon juice

1 cup whipping cream, whipped

Red food coloring

Cook rhubarb with 1/4 cup water until it strings.

Soften gelatin in 1/4 cup cold water.  Stir into hot rhubarb until dissolved.  Remove from heat.  Add lemon juice and chill until mixture mounds when dropped from spoon.  Fold into whipped cream and mold.

For more information about growing rhubarb see my favorite garden guru’s article, “Grow Strawberries Tasty Companion: Rhubarb” by Vern Nelson at The Oregonian web site.

Rhubarb at market

Buy rhubarb at a farmer’s market and ask them what variety it is and why they grow it.

His favorites are ‘Chipman’s Canada Red’  which is nearly identical to ‘Crimson Cherry’.  ‘Victoria’ is not as sweet but is a vigorous  “do gooder” plant.

Here’s another good source for how to grow rhubarb https://happydiyhome.com/growing-rhubarb/.

 

My guest blogger Chrissy got her plant from her mother, and many people get a plant from a neighbor.  There’s nothing wrong with this method but if it were me looking for a new plant I would go with Vern’s suggestions.

Hot Time in my Summer Garden

Daizzie in the garden, it's almost a year since she arrived.

Daizzie in the garden, it’s almost a year since she arrived.

Wow, having a garden of any kind has been challenging in this unusually warm year.  For some plants it’s been touch and go as a result of the heat.  In my veggie garden I have learned a lot this year.  My tomatoes would not set fruit if the evening temperature was too high (in June and July) so what looked like a potential bumper crop of tomatoes quickly changed to dead flowers and no fruit set when the temps soared.  Now that it is cooler (as of two days ago) I see some new flowers on my tomato plants and am hoping for more fruit to set before the next heat wave comes.

South side container garden for tomatoes.

South side container garden for tomatoes.

 

I also learned to plant lettuce and dwarf petunia under my tomatoes that were in containers.  They blocked the sun by covering my soil, which cooled the soil and now the leaves of my tomato plants look so much better.  They were tip burned and turning yellow.  I also have tomato plants on the south side of my floating home and they get a lot of sun and heat.

Radicchio shades tomato root zone.

Radicchio shades tomato root zone.

We have a mole family in our community garden and we can’t set one of those nasty traps with the teeth since kids or sometimes pets could go in there.  Today I put chili powder down the holes but probably all that will happen is that they will move to a neighbors raised bed and then come back to mine when the chili smell is gone. I’m adding soil to fill their holes and I imagine an entire freeway of holes and passageways from one raised bed to another.  It’s only comical until one of my Kale wilts,  faints and dies because of no soil under the roots, then I tend to growl.

Daizzie is getting used to our new scarecrow.

Daizzie is getting used to our new scarecrow.

Dogs are no longer allowed in the garden, which is probably a good thing since Daizzie is afraid of our new scarecrow anyway.  Sharing the garden with my neighbors is so much fun and we all water for each other so vacations are not a problem.

I’ve tried some greens called Deer Tongue; ok bad name but tasty and found them to be very heat tolerant and my New Zealand Spinach is loving this heat and producing all the greens I can eat.  By the way, don’t cook them, they turn to slush; which is strange because this spinach has an oddly thick leaf.  They are meant to be eaten fresh.

My neighbor Betty and I (mostly Betty) will be starting seeds for our fall gardens – I’ll get my chard, collard greens and lettuces going to enjoy until frost.