Category Archives: Gardening

Shannon and Jason Own the Brooklyn Botanic Garden’s Chili Pepper Festival

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IMG_0922The advertising promised “5 Blazing Bands, 7 Hours of Chocolate Debauchery, 23 Years of Spicy Culture, 2 Legendary Fire Breathers, 52 Fiery Food Artisans, 52 Acres of Glorious Gardens.”

Fire breathers and free spicy food?  We’re there!

We visited every stall.  Every. Stall.  And here are our picks:

Shannon’s Pepper Picks:

Brooklyn Delhi: I cringe at paying $8 for a jar of salsa, no matter how good it is, because I could (and might very possibly) eat the whole thing in a single sitting with a spoon. But with achaar, Indian pickle, a little dab’ll do ya, and with innovative combinations like rhubarb ginger on offer at the Brooklyn Delhi booth, the price suddenly seemed entirely reasonable and left me wishing I’d packed some naan in my purse.

IMG_0925Queen Majesty: Do you know that the easiest way to catch fruit flies is with vinegar? That whole thing about catching more with honey is such a lie! Anyway, I love vinegar in many forms, and even though sweet-hot sauces seem to be all the rage these days, Queen Majesty makes beautiful vinegar-based ones that still have plenty of complexity. Try the jalapeno, tequila and lime flavor for a delicious tangy kick. Continue reading →

Farmer Dwight’s Garden Remedies

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dwight gardenMy father, in between maintaining a grueling pickleball schedule and winning a silver kayaking medal in the Ohio Senior Olympics (Jason: “Wait, there’s actually one person over sixty-five who can beat him?”), manages to grow a pretty bangin’ garden. His zucchini look like zeppelins; his cabbages inspire envy. And if you lay a gardening quandary on Farmer Dwight, he’s quick to come up with a homespun solution. Here, straight from his lips, are some answers to your most pressing vegetable questions:

One: Hungry Critters. This one is the bane of just about every gardener I know, including Jason earlier this season. Farmer Dwight’s first recommendation is to build a better fence. But if you’re in a community garden and you don’t have that luxury, here’s another answer: HAIR! “Barbers just have bags of that stuff lying around,” Farmer Dwight says. So you go to your nearest barber, obtain a bag of hair clippings, and scatter them around the vegetables while trying not to feel like too much of a serial killer. This works because animals don’t like the human scent. Some say that putting little pieces of Irish Spring soap in the garden achieves the same effect, but soap is harder to style into a bouffant.

Hair will work great for little animals, but the small print is that you might need to get even sneakier for deer (who scoff at your hair, collecting it and reassembling it into jaunty wigs that they wear while taunting you). Continue reading →

Jumble o’ Seeds Puzzle

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Tucked in an section of freezer where I dare not interfere are tucked sundry packets of seeds, patiently wintering until Jason gets around to planting them each spring. Sometimes I wonder about the disastrous confusion that would ensue if these somehow got mixed up or mislabeled. Are you prepared for such an eventuality? Test yourself with this seed identification puzzle. And don’t be too tough on yourself; give yourself partial credit if you manage to name a vegetable in the same family as the answer I’ve given.

seeds1 seeds2 seeds3 seeds4 seeds5 seeds6 seeds7 seeds8 seeds9

Don’t click continue or scroll down until you’re ready for the answers! Continue reading →

Peter Piper and Me

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pickled peppers

Let’s just call this a peck, shall we?

Never had I stopped and considered exactly how much of something constituted a peck until I was out in the garden in the dark, wiping cold rain out of my eyes and trying to locate hot peppers with a flashlight.

This project had started, of course, with grander visions. I had gotten nostalgic about the giant jars of whole chili peppers swimming in vinegar that used to grace every table in Cambodia, and I had convinced Jason to stick a single hot pepper plant in the corner of our community garden plot. Then, Peter Piper-style visions dancing in my head, I waited. And waited. And waited. Our pepper plant grew to mammoth proportions but was an exceedingly late bloomer. Finally, just this month, it sprouted loads of peppers, though most of them remained green, probably because of the chilly weather.

pepper picking

Trick or Treeeeat!

But then again, the peppers in Cambodia had always been a wide variety of colors, and ours were, indeed, hot, as evidenced by the weird panting noises that Jason made after I fed him a little piece of a raw one, so I decided that maybe the greenness wasn’t that big of a deal, and I should proceed with the pickling as planned. But the clock was ticking; it had gotten awfully late in the season, so late that it’s dark by the time I get home from work, which is why, last night, I was arming myself with a flashlight and trying to convince myself that it would be kind of like trick or treating, before heading out to lurk around the muddy garden and probably creep out all of the neighbors.

Man, it sure seemed like I picked a lot of peppers, yea, perhaps even a peck of pickled peppers. A peck is a quarter of a bushel (or eight quarts, for those of you who don’t regularly buy things by the bushel). My crop ended up filling two tiny jam jars, so I may have come in a little shy of my target. But boy, do they look delicious.

Here’s how you can pickle some of your very own: Continue reading →

Summer Garden Kasha Salad & Blackened String Beans Whatever-Style

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IMG_1375The garden is kicking it thanks to the soaker hose-timer one-two, and we ended up with a bunch of monster-mature string beans.  The things double in heft overnight.  So, what to do?  These guys weren’t up to a gentle steaming.

Blacken.

And pair them with all the tomatoes bulking up in the garden, too.

First, the ‘maters, starring in an ensemble cast in Summer Garden Kasha Salad.

Combine in a big bowl:

Purty

Purty

  • One cup cold kasha (Kasha is buckwheat; barley would work as well.  Cook it with apat of butter in the pot, then chill in the fridge.)
  • One cucumber cut into small chunks
  • One bunch of parsley, chopped, with heaviest stems removed (We used broad leaf and, uhh, traditional? parsley.  I completely forgot that the former existed until the CSA dropped a potter version on us.)
  • One sweet red pepper, diced
  • Two monster or four medium tomatoes, chopped (We had Black Krim and Woodle Orange varieties.)
  • As much feta cheese as you can get your hands on (Bulgarian Sheep Feta is the Holy Grail.)

For the dressing, squeeze, shake, grind, etc into the bowl: Continue reading →

A+ Number One Lazy Man’s Irrigation Scheme

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I have such noble intentions.  I understand that new acquaintances might not always deduce that.  For instance, that woman I called out on the corner of Broadway and Houston for throwing her cup on the ground might have been surprised when, after I called her lazy before realizing she was hammered at five on a Monday afternoon, received my middle finger and a laugh in response to her threat, “I’ll clean you so bad you won’t even know!”  Certainly a small handful of supervisors and employers have been unsure of how to assess my exuberance, vehemence, volume, and proclamations at holiday parties.  But I almost always start out on the right track.

Such is my way, I’m a bit ashamed to confess, with my gardens as well.  To reach my flagship model, I have to scooch around Rachel and Tim’s hand-me-down futon, clamber over the garden paraphernalia and assorted whatever “stored” in that corner, thrust open the ancient window, leg it out on to the fire escape where I clamber over more paraphernalia, drop the ladder, and climb down.  Every year I tell myself this is but a small hassle, and it’s not like I’m trying to grow dates in the West Bank.  Continue reading →

It’s Fiddlehead Fern Season!

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I have missed out on fiddlehead ferns for the past three years because they show up at IMG_1196the farmers markets, ramps playing Poncho to their Lefty, and are snapped up in two or three days.  But annoying that cab by biking up the narrow lane east of Union Square Park yesterday paid off because it put me at the market on one of those two or three days this year.  Hell yeah.

So, a haiku for you, fiddleheads…

Oh, fiddlehead ferns
Thank you for getting it on
With Shitakes in my pan

 

Garden of Victories

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melon seedling

Sure, you’ve heard of a victory garden, but what about garden victories? We at the blog feel like our gardening readers have gotten short shrift over the long winter months, but don’t worry; spring is officially in the air, and we want to give you a chance to brag about your mad plant skills.

So send us your best gardening victory stories. These can be brief–a couple sentences or a photo or two. For example, check out this scrappy little melon plant that sprouted on our windowsill this week. I think it’s cool that you can still see the watermelon seed whence it sprang. It’s like the chick who is still mostly inside his egg on Garfield and Friends.

Anyway, whether you’re looking for a forum in which to brag about your prize veggies (I’m looking at you, Farmer Dwight) or just particularly good at capturing the wonders of the garden in word or image (I’m looking at you, Keiko), send us your beauties, and we’ll gather and post them throughout the gardening season. And you know what they say: where there are victories, there are usually fabulous prizes. Hit us up at submissions@pitchknives.com.

The Seduction of Spring: A Seed Catalog Puzzle

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Renee's GardenI woke up this morning feeling, in light of last weekend’s sidewalk thaw, that it might be a good morning for a run. Then I realized it was 14 degrees outside, and my enthusiasm waned considerably. I like winter (I do!), but this is the time of year when gardeners and cooks alike begin to itch for warm weather and the promise of fresh local produce.

Reading through seed catalogs on a morning like this feels illicit, full of sensual but very distant pleasures. This is at least in part due to the descriptions themselves, which are colorful, exuberant and (at least to my cold-addled brain) a touch erotic. Below, I’ve pulled some names and descriptions from the online seed catalog for Renee’s Garden. Can you guess what kind of vegetable is being described in each case? If you can identify all twelve, you’ve got it bad for spring.

1) Chelsea Prize: Elegantly slender, thin-skinned English with absolutely delicious, crispy sweet flesh. Easy to digest. Self-pollinating, vigorous vines.

2) Circus Circus: Our trio of cool colors includes creamy white, bright orange and a deep, dark purple with orange centers. All 3 well-bred Dutch varieties are sweet tasting, crisp and smooth.

3) Garden Babies: These babies have softly folded leaves, a lovely buttery texture and outstanding sweet taste. Ideal for containers, Garden Babies are slow bolting, heat tolerant, and make compact 6-inch heads at maturity.

4) Mandarin Cross: Golden-orange fruits with wonderful creamy texture and a mouthwatering sweet, even flavor finish These gorgeous fruit are borne in abundance and ripen like jewels on strong indeterminate vines.

5) Neon Glow: Color combo of vivid Magenta Sunset and Golden Sunrise stalks that contrast beautifully with green savoyed leaves for bright color and great eating. Eye-catching, productive, and striking in both vegetable and flowerbeds.

6) Profuma di Genova: Our fine Italian import is bred for pure bright flavor without minty/clove overtones, a compact shape and excellent disease resistance.

7) Raven: Dark green, smooth-skinned, cylindrical fruits are glossy and especially tender-fleshed. Delicious flavor picked as babies or at larger sizes. Abundant fruits are born high up on bush style plants that don’t sprawl.

8) Slenderette: The sleek rounded pods of gourmet-quality Slenderette are particularly tender, juicy, and sweet tasting with no tough tips or fiber. Vigorous, productive plants bear delectable, bright green, 5 inch pods early in the season.

9) Striped Chioggia: Italian heirloom with bright, candy-red exteriors & interior flesh beautifully marked in alternating rings of cherry red and white. Delicious sweet flavor & fine texture. Great tasting leafy tops.

10) Sugar Daddy: High yielding bush vines that load up early with double pods, plump and nutty-sweet, at each plant node. Hard to resist eating right on the spot.

11) Sunset: Beautiful heirloom mix yields huge, elongated tapering fruits with thick, meaty flesh that mature to rich red, yellow or orange. Perfect for snacking, salads, sauté, or roasting.

12) Wyatt’s Wonder: Gorgeous, globe-shaped, deeply lobed, rich orange giants. Developed especially for impressive size and beauty.

Don’t click Continue until you’re ready for the answers… Continue reading →

I Stank I Can, I Stank I Can: All Aboard the Forager Express

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You know Ginko trees, those numbers with the stanky yellowish berries that I, and perhaps you, called “stinky trees” as a wee lad?  Well, I ate some of that stank.

This came about because Shannon is awesome and for an anniversary present took me deep into Queens to spend an afternoon with Wildman Steve Brill.  A name like Wildman primarily conjures in me images of either a crazed and burly mountain man type or a happily-hard-livin drummer in a band opening for Dokken in 1987, but Steve Brill fits neither of these molds.  In fact, this is the picture he has of himself on his website, which more perfectly sums him up than anything I could write this morning.

Our afternoon with Steve, billed by Shannon as “New York’s top wild food foraging expert,” was spent walking Forest Park learning about and filling up a bag with wild roots, berries, and greens (or weeds, if you want to be classist) that we could incorporate with dinner.  It was nothing less than unflaggingly awesome. Continue reading →