Tasty, tasty tubers!

Some of you may remember my tale from a couple weeks back about how my one-year-challenge to eat something I had grown or foraged every day for a full year was a total failure, due to my having been hijacked by hormones through the fall and winter. Since then I've been back on track, eating delicious sprouts and microgreens, which I have been tending lovingly in their jars and recycled containers that deck my windowsills. I've sown some seeds for spring and summer vegetables. I've been snipping and clipping from my potted rosemary, lemon thyme, and sage plants, and in no time at all I'll be gathering teapots of mint and lemon balm from the weedy recesses of the back yard. One other plant has emerged to help me get through a few days of homegrown eats, too: the knobbly, delicious Jerusalem artichoke.

If you've never eaten a Jerusalem artichoke, you're certainly not alone. I've never seen them in a grocery store in Newfoundland, and only a handful of local farms grow them. I first ate them in Montreal when I lived there, and only in restaurants, so I had never cooked them myself until this week, when I dug them up from the frosty dirt where they had been hiding out since last fall.

Jerusalem artichokes aren't really artichokes: they're sunflowers, native to the eastern part of North America, where they were a staple food long before the Europeans showed up and took them back with them as novel delicacies. There is a lot of lore around the name, and the accepted explanation is that the "Jerusalem" bit comes from the Italian girasole, which means "sunflower," and that the "artichoke" bit comes from French explorer Samuel de Champlain's description of the tuber's flavour as being like an artichoke, although, frankly, I don't get the similarity.

So what do they taste like? Sweet, nutty, crunchy when raw (really crunchy, like, water chestnut crunchy), potato-y when cooked (although they tend to go mushy very quickly when boiled, so steaming, roasting, and pan-frying are recommended). They're really very yummy.

There are two caveats to growing Jerusalem artichokes. The first is that they are notoriously invasive, so you might not want to plant them directly in the ground. Apparently, even the smallest bit of tuber left behind will sprout again, which is all fine and good if you have the time and energy and wherewithal to dig them up year after year until the end of time, but if you move, the next people to inhabit your garden might be less than impressed. The second is that Jerusalem artichokes are sunflowers, and sunflowers can suck a lot of lead out of your soil, so if you live in an area with dodgy dirt, you might want to grow them in a container. I tried to come up with some kind of cool planter option last year, but as the spring crept on I ran out of time, and just flung a bag of soil on the ground, cut a big hole in the top and some drainage holes around the bottom, and stuck my seed tubers down in it. The yield wasn't huge, but since I had them in close quarters, in a shady spot, during the most miserable summer in recent memory, I'm impressed they did anything at all, really. This year, my husband and I are going to dig a trench for them and line it with something they can't get out of, in an area of the yard where they'll get more sunlight, and where they'll have a bit more space to spread their roots.

Oh, there's a caveat to eating them, too: apparently some people have a hard time digesting them, and thus the tubers have earned the nickname "fartichokes." Ahem. Now, I can report that I have had no such reaction, and I am very happy about that. British garden writer Alys Fowler solves the wind problem by cooking her Jerusalem artichokes with winter savory. I may have escaped a gassy fate through my negligence: I've read that leaving them in the ground for a hard frost or two helps them convert the troubling carbs, making digestion easier. A full winter of freeze and thaw seems to have sorted them out nicely.

Jerusalem artichokes can grow quite tall - over 20 feet in warmer climes, but easily six or eight feet here. Mine didn't flower last year (no sun, no sunflowers), but the flowers are cheerful and yellow when they do appear. They attract all kinds of helpful insect friends. They're so pretty, actually, that Monet painted them. The variety I grew is called Passamaquoddy Potatoes from Hope Seeds, but unfortunately they're not available this year. If you can get your hands on some Jerusalem artichokes from a local grower, I suggest you toss a few in some good soil and see what happens. Come springtime, you may well be thanking yourself.

My front yard grocery store

When you garden in the city, you take your sunshine where you can find it. I have a tiny postage-stamp of a front yard, and a decent-sized back yard (for downtown). Neither one of them gets full sunlight, but from mid-June on the front yard gets blazing, baking afternoon light that vegetables seem to love. I had forgotten this when I started my garden this summer. Slowly but surely, though, I've been migrating pots and containers to the front of the yard, where they flourish, and scratching my head as I wonder about the best use for my backyard space.

Some of you may have heard the story this summer of a Michigan woman who was threatened with jail time for having replaced her front lawn with raised vegetable beds. In the end the charges were dropped, but things like this happen from time to time in the suburbs and in gated communities. In my 'hood, though, I think people are happy just to see something other than cars up on blocks, rampant sticky-buds, and abandoned, rusting home appliances.

Now, my front yard isn't going to win any beauty contests. The fence needs painting, the gate is broken, and there's a mud-pit where there once was grass. Still, people smile when they walk past, and they often stop to ask me what I'm growing. There's always some amazement when I rattle off my "grocery list": potatoes, chard, snow peas, garlic, radishes, tomatoes, fava beans, herbs, edible flowers, carrots, leeks, arugula, and some struggling squash plants... ground cherries... strawberries... did I leave anything out?

For a seasoned vegetable grower, it's easy to tell that I'm harbouring dinner among the pansies, cosmos, nasturtiums, and poppies in front of my house, but to the average passer-by, it all just looks like greenery. And I like it this way. Not that I object to front yards looking like mini-farms - I'm all for growing your veggies in any way that suits your schedule, your aesthetic, and your available growing space. But there's something fun about being able to sneak your edibles past everyone, and I love the way people react when they realize I have the makings of many meals just outside my front door.

There are a lot of inspiring books and websites about edible landscaping (aka "making your veggie garden look super pretty"). British gardening show host Alys Fowler's books, The Edible Garden and Garden Anywhere are both really fantastic (and her climate is similar to ours). Rosalind Creasy is the guru of ornamental edible gardening, and her book, Edible Landscaping, has just been re-released (it's excellent). Ivette Soler's The Edible Front Yard is a new book with lots of great ideas for creating a beautiful garden design with your fruits and veggies.

Of course, no matter what your vegetable garden looks like, it's all about what's coming out of it, and on to your plate. How about some delicious new potatoes? I cooked these ones up with chard, beet tops, and chives, and the next harvest got cooked and tossed with fava beans and dill (and doused with butter and lemon juice). Better than any store, that's for sure!

Downtown Dirt end-of-July update

Hello, friends! I had wanted to do a lovely pictorial of all the things growing happily in my garden today, but unfortunately almost everything in the back yard is completely covered in specks of black poo from the millions of tiny worms rolled up in the leaves of my neighbours' enormously large maple tree, the branches of which now reach almost 2/3 of the way across my back yard. It's to the north of my garden, so it doesn't block all the light (although if it weren't there, I could grow super sunny crops like corn and peppers without any trouble, I'm pretty sure), but it does shower everyone and everything with worm poo for weeks of the summer, then with seeds which seem to have a 115% germination rate, and which I spend the entire warm season trying to remove. Ah, but it is a lovely tree, I suppose. A lovely, wormy, shady, seedy tree. (The neighbours, though, really are lovely, and since they're renters I do not hold the pooping monster tree against them. We're all victims here!)

So yes, all my backyard plants are covered in worm poo and not looking all that pretty. They're doing reasonably well, though. My Jerusalem artichokes, which were nearly devoured by slugs, are now about two and a half feet high and have formed a thick stand behind one of my raised beds and against the neighbours' fence (directly in the line of fire of the most worm poo). When I ordered them, I knew where I wanted to put them, but I wasn't sure exactly how to execute it. I didn't want to put them straight in the ground, because they're in the sunflower family, and sunflowers suck lead out of the soil - great if you're growing ornamental sunflowers and then binning them, but not so great if you're growing them for their tasty tubers. Time was running short and I hadn't come up with a good plan, so I just flung a bag of soil on its side, cut the now-top of the plastic off, and planted them in there. They're definitely too close for comfort, and probably won't produce all that well due to cramped space, but seeing as how there's no proof that anyone but me even likes Jerusalem artichokes, I think that's alright.

Across the yard, away from the worm poo (but straight into the bindweed), my fig is putting out tons of new growth.

My fig lives in an old enamel stock pot with holes in the bottom. This year, I gave it new soil and fed it with tomato feed, which is apparently something figs like (according to someone on the web somewhere - I can't for the life of me remember). I had overwintered it indoors last year, but I think this year I'll tuck it in a protected corner of my patio and let it experience the winter. I think I've interrupted its natural cycle of dormancy by keeping it too warm, and now the poor thing is confused. If I ever want to eat a fig from my own tree, I'd best try to un-confuse it.

Right now, the most advanced crops are my tomatoes, which are all beginning to flower, and my Onaway potatoes, which are looking fantastic (and taking up half my front yard).

Their leaves are so lush and gorgeous! Since Onaways are "earlies," I can start feeling around for baby potatoes as soon as the flowers do their thing. I'm super excited, especially after last year's great potato failure. These guys don't make great storage potatoes, from what I hear, but I have Pink Fir Apple spuds growing out back for that. They went in the ground much later, so they're nowhere near as advanced, but I think they'll do alright.

Out of the crops I didn't expect to do all that well, my Aunt Molly's ground cherry seems to be coming along quite marvelously. I have one in a pot in my front yard that is going great guns, and another two in a raised bed in the back yard that are quickly catching up. I put in three more plants at my mother's house, but they're not quite so happy, for reasons we have yet to determine. I'm super excited about these. I used to eat ground cherries until I couldn't take it any more when I lived in Montreal, but they're pretty scarce around here. They really are very tasty.

So that's the good news. Sadly, it's not all looking that good. My cucumbers never came up at all. I sowed them outdoors under glass because I ran out of space under the grow lights in my basement, but nothing happened. My Gnadenfeld melon plants were eaten by slugs, and I think my Blacktail Mountain watermelon might suffer the same fate. I have plenty of seeds left of each to try again next year, but still, it's pretty disappointing. My French beans never came up at all, and I had wanted to train them up a nice, attractive teepee, with sweet peas growing up among them. Well, at least the sweet peas are growing, so the teepee won't look totally stupid.

Oh, and my brassicas at my mother's place are full of cabbage worms. We broke out the BT and are hoping for the best. Now, if only the landlords next door would come spray that tree...