Tag Archives: radishes

On time, and in time, in the garden

The community gardening season is back! Actually it’s been back for a month now, with the recreation department having prepared the plots and let us know we could get started on May 1st. I’ll admit that my initial reaction to the later start was to be annoyed (late March/early April would have been better for peas and other things), but when I did finally make it there on May 9th (yep, more than a week after I could), it turned out alright. Like it always does 🙂

Had I gone right away, I wouldn’t have seen the small plants coming up from the seeds left behind by last year’s plants – sunflowers, morning glories, and radishes! Apparently there were some strong little seeds that made it through the winter and the recreation department’s roto-tilling.

Upon initial inspection, seeing a lot of brown

But then after looking more closely, some green

And some more

And more! Here, a radish seedling.

A cilantro plant said hello as well

It was a reminder that timing is everything. And that also important is how you respond. This time (and lately more times than not, I believe) my response was (and has been) one of more going with it and seeing the beauty and appreciating what’s there. I wouldn’t call it a laissez-faire attitude, which would imply a lack of action and responsibility, but rather more of a forward-moving, active one, with ownership acknowledged. I can control and act on what I can, like getting started in the garden and planting things (tomatoes, basil, hot peppers, summer squash, cucumbers, corn, edamame, and more sunflowers, cilantro, and radishes!, so far), but you never know how it’s going to turn out. So you go with it and adapt along the way. Like, for instance, how it looks like I’m going to be planting some more seeds or buying more transplants (I actually just got some cucumber and tomato transplants at the farmers’ market yesterday) for the places where the cucumber, edamame, and cilantro seeds didn’t come up. And that’s okay. And like, for instance, how I can take more classes, write more, draw more, apply for different jobs, go on dates, meet more people, and do whatever, and we’ll see how it goes and figure it out.

When you have the right mindset, things also seem to happen at the right time. A friend of mine, who read a number of foodnsight posts recently, remarked how a lot of them were about time, and I think he’s right. I’d thought about starting the blog for a while, but it didn’t actually happen…until it happened to be right time.

A coconut falls when it’s ready.

You can’t say your mother’s soup is the best until you’ve stepped out of her kitchen.

Proverbs add spice to language.

I think, but I’m not completely sure, that’s how these three food / life / thought proverbs go. That’s how I remember them at least, having heard them in lecture and in conversation by a bouncing, full of life college professor who was originally from Ghana and who you could tell truly enjoyed what he was doing both in school as a professor and outside of school as a minister, which in general was teaching, connecting with people, and adding a lot of energy and spice all around.

It’s always the right time to do what you want to do, and to do what feels right. The coconut for the inception of this blog fell a little over a year ago, and more have been falling since, at different rates. Sometimes it’s a chance encounter with a special rutabaga (and a day off from work, and the deadline of a family gathering), or sometimes it’s a neighbor’s gift of plantains (and a good run, plus a friend’s general suggestion to let the words come more easily), and then it falls more quickly. Other times it’s the lessening shelf-life of a winter squash, or that the gravity (and levity) simply builds up, and then it’s time. In any case, the cumulative result is also a chronicle of time passing, a certain curated version of my life that also, I hope, comes with bits of art, truth, and beauty mixed in with the radishes, pumpkins, and risotto. It’s also great when the fun, funny, and creativity are all flowing.

Given the timing of this post, more than a month after the last one, I say we also take a little time and a quick look at some of the food highlights and time-points from May.

Plantains – I made them, and they were awesome! I more or less followed my neighbor’s recipe, which in my case turned out to be the following: after letting three yellow plantains ripen (after about a week they softened a bit and the outsides turned somewhat black), I peeled them, sliced them into coins, and fried them for 5-10 minutes (flipping them halfway through) in an oil mixture of 2 cups canola oil and 2 Tbsp palm oil. I also let the oil heat up first before frying them (medium heat), and when they were done I placed them on a plate with a paper towel to dry.

Spinach – This one also deserves an exclamation point. Sauteed spinach with chopped garlic and rutabaga, made in a mixture of canola and palm oil! I could have eaten a plateful of this it was so good. It was easy too: I sauteed the diced rutabaga (about a cup’s worth) in a few Tbsp of oil over medium heat, then added the diced garlic (a few cloves worth) and sauteed that also until it was softened just like the rutabaga (this brought me to about 15 minutes now from the start), and then added the spinach (about 8 oz, but you can add more) and let it cook over low heat for a few minutes until the spinach was wilted (pictured above). As if that wasn’t good enough (though it was, believe me), I also tried the following: 1) adding a handful of chopped raisins and chopped sliced almonds, and 2) adding the chopped raisins and almonds, and also adding some finely shredded Parmesan cheese. Both ways, so good.

If the canola and palm oil mixture sounds familiar too, it should! It’s the same oil that I used for the plantains. And by the “same” oil, I do literally mean the same oil because, really, although plantains soak up some oil when they’re fried, the amount that remains from the original 2+ cups of oil when frying three plantains is…well, I didn’t measure it, but it looked something like 1-2 cups still remaining. So there was plenty left for me to use with everything I cooked for about two weeks afterwards 🙂 And the rutabaga! Like a squirrel saving a food-prize for later, I still had a softball-size piece of rutabaga left over from the original big one, tucked away in the back of the fridge, waiting for me to use. I had just gotten a fresh bag of spinach from the farmers’ market, and something in my head put the two together…spinach and rutabaga. Yes! It was time to cook the acorn. (I used the rest of the rest of the rutabaga, similarly diced and plantain oil sauteed, in a good tomato sauce the same day.)

Asparagus – Spring time means not only fresh spinach, but also fresh kale, lettuce, strawberries, and asparagus! (and more). The picture above is from a few weeks ago, when I stopped at Terhune Orchards one afternoon after a bike ride and picked a few pounds of asparagus and several quarts of strawberries. Mmmmmmmmmmm, fresh local strawberries. I wish I had some right now… Yes, and asparagus too 🙂 Part of me also wishes that I had a good picture of the strawberries to use here, as a nice, sweet, juicy, red picture would look great following the yellow and green ones above. But that’s alright. And in the absence of such a picture, let’s give asparagus a little extra love. If you’ve never seen asparagus growing, that’s really how it looks in the field, the green shoots growing right up out of the ground (followed by tall ferns later if the spears aren’t harvested). To pick asparagus, you just snap the shoots off at the base. And then once you’re home, you can steam them, add them to pasta, put them in risotto, grill them, roast them with olive oil / salt / pepper and then add a little lemon juice right at the end!, and do lots of other things I’ll try sometime. Lately I’ve been steaming them since it’s quick, like 5-10 minutes, and then adding either a little salt or no salt. Easy and good.

In the process of finding the rutabaga, I came across a few other things in the fridge that, shall we say, ran out of time. Usually I’m pretty good at using things up, but there were a few small things I had to toss this time. And in the world where food mirrors life, and combine, so too were there some ideas I thought I would use when I started writing, but that now I know I’m going to have to toss. In the process of writing, and now feeling where I’m at and the writing is at, I’m reminded again that not everything can make it into the soup. Ideas, people, and stories can’t be forced; it’s better when it all flows and happens naturally. As another friend once reminded too, if it’s important and needs to be felt or said, there’s always another post, another time.

In the garden, things are growing. The passage of time, a month, allows me to share the following:

May 9

May 16

May 23

June 5

Projected future outcome

Actual results may vary…

But where there are buds, flowers often follow 🙂

For now, I found some flowers of another kind, from thinning the radishes,

Radish bouquet

and found some color, and neat patterns too, from underground.

How about that for beauty? It’s like looking down at farm fields from an airplane, but with every shade of red instead of green (and with a lyrical inspiration nod to “The Hudson” by Dar Williams). I think I have a thing for radishes.

The Art of a Radish Seed Contest

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Look out below!!! I’ve got a radish bomb of a post, and I’m dropping it in three, two, one…

Bombs away! I make no claim to be a reluctant rebel leader or avian symbol of same, but this I will promise for what’s to come – there will be art, math, pictures, words, prizes, rhymes, and more, all brought together through the magic of radish inspiration.

To pick up the story where I’d left off a few weeks ago (In the garden, looking back, looking now) , I was recounting the end of my community garden plot for the year, and in the process, I had put forward a contest — Guess the number of radish seeds (and seed pods) that I had collected from the garden, and win some seeds! And radish art!!

How many seeds are in this many pods???

There were four entries altogether, including one that was submitted a little past the deadline and another that was left on Facebook. These ones didn’t follow all of the instructions, but as the contest-creator, participation-encourager, and all-around great guy, I’m going to declare them all valid. Done! Doing so also makes it more interesting, and given the contestant to prize-ingredient (seed) ratio, we can also make everyone a winner in The Ultimate Radish Seed Contest.

To recap, these we’re the clues:

A profile shot of the quart-size bag

And for reference and math, a picture of a handful of pods…

…and a picture of the seeds from those pods

And these were the guesses:

Jane – 60 seeds pods, 360 seeds
Galina – 120 seed pods, 480 seeds
Jim – 240 seed pods, 650 seeds
Abel – (no seed pods guess), 1080 seeds

Who’s going to take it? Whose seed guess was the closest, to win first prize?? And whose seed-pod guess was the closest, for second prize?

First prize, if you recall, included not only a packet of the seeds, but also an original radish drawing. Second prize was radish seeds by themselves. The week before Thanksgiving, I was happy to find one farmer at the farmers’ market who was still selling radishes. So I bought a bunch, brought them home, and made a sketch one night.

This particular radish might also be the bomb in the Mockingjay’s clutches above, but I can’t tell for sure. It was, in any case, one of nine good-looking models I had to choose from.

The radish sketch above was actually the second radish drawing that I made. The previous night, I had sketched a small cluster of the seed pods.

I had overlooked this cluster and another small one in my car. As a result, they hadn’t made it into the seed pod bag along with all the others. That’s a good thing though, because otherwise this drawing wouldn’t exist! And now as there are two drawings, the first-prize winner will have a choice to make: select the one with the radish, or select the other awesome one with the seed pods.

I ended up making a few more drawings – all radish-inspired – but first, back to the contest.

The first step in counting the seeds was to count the seed pods. To do this, I took all the pods out of the bag and then lined them up in groups of ten.

To the right of the pencils, I placed all the full pods. Large or small, as long as they weren’t broken, I put them here. To the left, I put all the broken or partial pods. Any extra pieces, such as twigs or pod-scraps without seeds, went into the non-pod pile above. For the purpose of getting a final tally, I counted each partial pod as a half pod.

The full pods

And the partial pods

And so the final number of pods? Let’s do the math: 202 + (64/2) = 234.

Congratulations, Jim!! You won second prize. And did so with an impressively close guess.

But what about the number of seeds?? Let’s take a look. I noticed that at least a few of the contestants used some math for their guesses – Jane with a 6 seeds/pod multiplier, Galina with a 4 seeds/pod multiplier, and Jim with a… 2.70833333333 multiplier. Based on firsthand knowledge from doing the clues, I thought there would be about 5-6 seeds per pod. And that turned out to be about right, but only if I included just the larger and the most dried out, lightweight, and maraca-like pods. The bag contained a variety of pod sizes and types, and I included them all.

As I was opening the the pods, at first I was disappointed that they weren’t all perfect maracas and didn’t all have lots of perfect seeds. But then I reminded myself that it’s okay for things – for nature, for people, for anything – not to be perfect, and that it’s the actually imperfections that make things real and good. To wish or demand otherwise would be to seek something that’s not there, and to court the opposite of peace and happinesses. As I was tallying the seeds, I tried keeping that in mind.

All the seeds from the pods

And so the final number of seeds??? Good question! The picture above shows 852 seeds, and I collected another 75 seeds from the bottom of the bag (they had already fallen out of their pods), so that makes for a grand total of 927.

Zoom in on the picture, though, and you can see that the (250) seeds to the right have a different, potentially nonviable aspect to them, and the ones down below (27 on the left, 54 on the right) have more of that. There was part of me that didn’t want to include them – they weren’t perfect! and it wasn’t how I’d planned it in my head (my radish-contest exuberance and seed-saving inexperience had me thinking I was going to find only viable seeds and so would only have perfect seeds to count). In the spirit of acceptance and imperfection, though, I say let’s count them all. So there you have it: 927 seeds.

Congratulations, Abel! You won first prize.

And with that, I have one more thing say:

Actually, including that one, I have seven more things, or rather seven drawings with radish wisdom and gusto. Like the discovery of the radish flowers in the garden, and the development of the contest that followed, the following additonal art series wasn’t planned at the beginning but rather happened happily along the way.

For your enjoyment, and for the radish growers of America, if and when they decide it’s time to form a national radish promotion council, here you go, the full series. Enjoy!

In the garden, looking back, looking now

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I got the call about two and half weeks ago. It was the Recreation Department, letting me know the community garden season would be ending soon. It was time to clean up my plot so they could rototill and prepare the garden for the winter and next year.

Listening to the message, one of my initial thoughts was, I could have planted more, weeded more…written more. There was the basil to cook with and write about, the tomatoes to see ripen, and the sunflowers to watch grow and bloom. But that’s okay. I’m writing now, and right now I’m thinking about the pictures and words that will follow here, from my recent last visits to the garden. I’m also thinking about how later on, should a thought or recipe bring a garden moment to mind, I can revisit the garden at those times, too.

This is not how the garden looked this past weekend, one week into November. But before getting to the present, I wanted to share a little warmth from the past.

The morning glories had a good time with the sun, too. These pictures were all from early September.

The interesting thing about my last visits to the garden – there was a brief stop during a morning run, the day after the call; a longer visit a few days later, to look in again; and two final trips last weekend, for the final clean-up – is that even though it was a more muted scene, with browns and fleeting greens before the final frost, there was still a lot to see and think about.

A week and a half ago, from a few yards away, this is what I saw:

The exterior scene matched my expectations – I knew it would look a little overgrown and tired, and take on a subdued palette – but then, upon walking around, and in, the garden, I realized there was more. It wasn’t from seeing up close the morning glory seeds that I knew I was going to collect, or from considering the collard greens that had leaves yet to harvest. It was the flowers. There were a few persistent flowers yet. There were a few morning glories and some radish flowers.

How often do you get to see a radish flower?

I must have seen some radish flowers earlier in the year, but now in November, with fewer distractions, it felt like I was seeing them for the first time. The novelty reminded me of the obvious – when you let plants grow, whether by accident or design, they know how to take care of themselves. They do what they’re made to do – they flower, produce seeds, and foster the next generation. The radish is no dummy.

In this case, it was a combination of luck and purpose from which the radish flowers bloomed. I didn’t harvest all the radishes initially, and then later when the remaining ones were past their, shall we say, salad days, I had the thought, ‘The plants aren’t taking up too much room…Why don’t I leave them there and see what happens?’

For the radish-uninitiated, what happens is the following: the radish bulb sitting at ground level gets a little bigger, while the rest of the plant above ground grows a lot. In the garden this year, it was as if the radish plants were playing and ultimately winning a game of, ‘Let’s see how many branches and seed pods we can produce by the fall, to make sure there are more radishes next year and to impress curious onlookers.’

The following pictures are all from November, but they convey a sense of the progression.

Flowers,
Green pods,
Dried pods,
Seedlings, and
More seedlings.

I felt a little bad that these little ones wouldn’t make it much longer with colder weather and rototiller to come, but their presence was also reassuring. The radish plants, left to themselves, had produced some good seeds. As I was cleaning up the garden, I collected all of the dried pods. They filled up more than half of a quart-size bag – a decent yield from the four or so radish plants that had been left to grow.

If you’re curious as to how many radish seeds are in this many dried pods, I have an easy three-step process you can use.

1. Consider the yield from a smaller number of pods:

2. Consider the number of pods in the bag. As an aid, I’ll also give you the profile.

3. Use your best math skills to determine the number of seeds.

This actually worked for me in my eighth grade German class when my guess was within 10 and I won the approximately 243 Gummi Bäers in the jar. At a summer picnic this year though, when I tried to guess the number of candy bars in a large jar, I was way off. But radish seeds. And seed pods. And a quart bag. Now there’s a contest!

To be honest, the idea of inaugurating a radish seed contest was not in my head when I started writing this post. But now that we’re here — Let’s do it!

The Ultimate Radish Seed Contest

These will be the rules, and the prizes:

Guess the number of seeds by leaving a comment below.
For a tie-breaker and the second prize, also guess for the number of seed pods.
All seed-guesses must be at least 5 numbers apart.
It’s okay for guesses to go over or under the actual number.
The guess closest to the actual number of seeds wins.

First prize: A packet of radish seeds, plus a small original hand-drawn radish sketch
Second prize: A packet of radish seeds

The last day to guess will be Friday, November 21, 2014 – a week from today. Then I’ll open the bag and start counting. I’ll also draw a few pictures and then announce the results.

This is going to be fun. In fact, it already is. It also brings me back to the garden, thinking of the many different yields and everything the garden has to offer. There are vegetable yields, when you plant vegetables. There are flower yields, when you plant flowers. And along the way, there’s always more. There is a little help from a garden neighbor one day. There is trading extra plants another week. And there is practicing Spanish with some of the gardeners during the year. There are also sunflowers to enjoy. There are volunteer collards to appreciate. And there seeds to collect and play games with.

In addition to the radish seeds, I also collected basil, cilantro, and morning glory seeds during my last visit to the garden. The morning glory seeds are in another quart-size bag, and the basil and cilantro, clipped as dried stalks from the garden, are for now providing household decoration.

And so the garden ends for the year, but it also continues along with everything else. There are stories to write, pictures to draw, and future gardens to plan. And there are also, I will add, seeds to count.

A good start in the garden

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I got the call from the Recreation Department in mid-April. I was officially off the wait-list! I’d be rejoining the community garden this year.

It was a good feeling to get the good news – I’d moved in the past year and so couldn’t have a front yard garden as before. I was ready to go! The only problem (but not really, in the big picture) was the Recreation Department’s follow-up detail that the garden wasn’t ready for planting yet. They said it might be ready in a few weeks – maybe by Mother’s Day – after the annual roto-tilling and plot-marking was done. In the end, they bested their Mother’s Day mark by about a week, so come the first week in May, everything was set. We were underway.

The garden area, ready for planting: a 4 x 6 grid of plots, so space for 24. My plot: center bottom here.

The community garden in early May, ready for planting. Overall: a 4 x 6 grid of plots, so space for 24. My plot: center bottom here.

And then so what to plant? To the farmers’ market! The market!…For some plugs to transplant. And to the box! The box! …For the collection of seeds I’d accumulated over time by purchase (most of them), by gift (a few), or by end-of-season collecting (a handful).

Curious to know what was inside? So was I!

The view upon opening

The box certainly contained an assortment of seeds. Here are a few stats and a look at the contents:

Total number of seed packets/bags/containers: 109
Greatest amount of any one kind: Sunflowers – 11
Second place: Tomatoes – 8
Oldest packet: Peppermint – 1999
Second oldest: Chinese Cabbage – 2001 (two packets) (also a Hot Pepper packet and a Sweet Pepper packet – 2001)
Newest packet: Zucchini – 2014 (from the NOFA-NJ conference – free)
Second newest: Sunflowers and Carrots – 2013 (from Johnny’s – purchased)
Packets that pack a story: Three flower packets from The Page Seed Company (Marigolds, Snapdragons, Pansies) that have the Hartford Courant imprimatur on the back

IMG_20140618_210305

I got these seeds for free over ten years ago, so now they're not so much Hartford Courant as Hartford Old seeds. Maybe one day there'll also be a Princeton Packet promotion -- and then I could get a pack of Packet seed packets.

I got these seeds for free over ten years ago while working in Connecticut, so now they’re not so much Hartford Courant as Hartford Old seeds. I have a feeling that the Courant germination rate may be similar to an Old germination rate now. I’m going to plant some and see what happens.

Maybe one day there’ll also be a Princeton Packet seed promotion, and then I could say I got a pack of Packet seed packets.

The box also contained some interesting odds and ends, like a ziploc bag full of marigold seeds, a bent spoon container with sunflower seeds, a small folded paper with some chives seeds, and a medicine bottle with Grandpa Ott Morning Glory seeds.

Grandpa Ott in a bottle. I don’t actually have a Grandpa Ott, but my aunt’s handwriting had me thinking for a minute that maybe I did.

I always liked morning glories – as a kid I can remember them climbing the strings on the side of the house all the way up to the attic fan, and I can also remember being inside the attic looking out, seeing the morning glories almost trying to come in – so it was an easy decision to plant some of these. Plus, there’s the awesome medicine bottle storage! I definitely wouldn’t have to worry about little kids eating the seeds and then having morning glories sprout in the their stomachs. (To be honest, morning glories probably wouldn’t sprout in their stomachs, but I heard it might be a different story with watermelon seeds, which kids could consume with a greater frequency).*

First I planted some morning glories the garden. This is how they look in mid-June, a few weeks after sprouting.

I also planted some in a planter by my house. My next step here will be to talk with my neighbor about some strategic planter placement to see how Grandpa Ott feels about climbing a fire escape.

Of the other interesting odds and ends above, I also tried planting the marigold and sunflower seeds in the garden, but apparently they didn’t share the same vigor as the morning glory seeds and decided not to come up.

No matter though, at least for the sunflowers. I dipped into my multitude of other seed packets and found success there.

A little baby sunflower in mid-June. Now imagine about 30 of these in close proximity, and then imagine all of them all grown up and with lots of beautiful flowers. And then remember to check back here in a few months to see if your imagination matches how this portion (about a quarter) of the garden plot turns out.

As for the rest of the plot, I have about 4/5 of it planted now after a month and a half. I transplanted about 10 tomatoes (mostly of the sauce and paste variety), 4 hot peppers (of the some degree of hot variety), and 6 basil plants (of the traditional Genovese, goes well with tomatoes and other things variety). Thank you by the way local community farmers’ markets and New Jersey farmers for the seedlings. In terms of what came up from the seeds I planted, I also have radishes, cilantro, cucumbers, and zucchini growing in the garden.

One of the tomatoes, shortly after its mid-May transplant

The same tomato, now in mid-June

Radishes, harvested this week

Same bunch

Nothing says instant garden gratification like a bunch of radishes

Then again, cIlantro’s also a quick pleaser

And another look at the garden, mid-June. The sunflowers will likely feature more prominently in future looks, hugging the bottom corner and all along the right side.

Overall, so far so good, and more to come.

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