Portland Gardens

One of the fun things about being a writer, and a gardener, is getting to hang out with other gardeners and writers. Our trip this week to Portland, Albany and Corvallis, Oregon, for the annual (and 60th anniversary) of the Garden Writers of America convention illustrates what I mean. Not only did we hang out, we ate out, ate in, cooked, smoozed, cooked and ate some more, all before even getting to the convention! And we visited lots of gardens, as well.

Long time friends, and wholesale customers, Keane and Rose Marie Nichols McGee were our hosts for the pre-conference touring. Their business, Nichols Garden Seed (which you will find listed on our website under the "Looking for Plants & Seed?" button and their blog is listed on my blog list on this page) specializes in herbs and unusual and heirloom vegetables. Rose Marie is the author of The Container Garden, among others, so I posed her with her book. If you're interested in gardening in containers on the patio or deck, this is an excellent resource for you. Their garage apartment was our home base for a couple of days before the conference.

Cathy Barash, author of Edible Flowers and other books, was being hosted by the McGees in their home, as well. Rosalind Creasy, author of a whole bunch of books including The Edible Landscape, photographer for lots of beautiful garden calendars and books, was there visiting, so they both got posed by me with one of their books.

Chef Eddie Chong, who you may recall came from Malaysia and stayed part of the summer with us here at Long Creek Herbs 3 years, flew up from his home in San Francisco. Chef Eddie is making a name for himself in the cooking wilderness of San Francisco. He organized a pot luck, which you may recognize takes guts considering everyone except the McGees had traveled half way across the country to be there. We were 14 people in all, including Betty who maintains the catalogs for Nichols Gardens, garden columnist Nancy Sczerlag, from Detroit (as I recall), Gregg, Chef Eddie's friend and on-line entrepreneur from San Fran, David McGee, who, like me, had a kidney transplant a couple of years ago and is doing fine.

Under Chef Eddie's encouragement, we "shopped" for vegetables in the All American Award Winning demonstration gardens at Nichols Garden Seed Co., then cooked and cooked. Imagine, a housefull of cookbook authors, with all the food they want to play with and an evening with Oregon wines and the cheering of everyone not cooking. A feast was enjoyed by all.

Josh and I arrived home late Tuesday night, I unpacked and repacked and am heading to Asheville, NC tomorrow for a friend's wedding. Hopefully, I'll find some interesting plants and farmer's markets along the way. It will be hard to top visiting Oregon, however, which is a gardener's paradise. Just about everything grows there and it is one of my favorite places to visit.

Growing Gourds

Growing Gourds

I don’t know if anyone has ever actually figured out why people like to grow gourds. In the thousands of years of human culture, the gourd has been not just beneficial but necessary. Big, round gourds served as bowls and storage containers, not unlike the plastic storage boxes we get from discount stores today. Smaller gourds, the kinds with handles, were used as dippers, spoons and ladles. Remains of gourd dishes and tools have been found in archeological sites that date back thousands of years. The gourd accompanied humans around the world as dish, carryall and vegetable.

My parents grew what used to be called, “Guinea beans,” in the seed catalogs. They are long, slender gourds that are harvested when 15 to 18 inches long, sliced, battered and fried much like eggplant, okra or green tomatoes. I grow them every year as well, and it’s one of my favorite summer vegetables. The name comes from their being native to the island of New Guinea, where they are also worn as clothing.

Even now, in West Papua, New Guinea where I traveled a few years back, natives still wear the koteka, or penis sheath, a gourd worn for modesty by men in the interior regions of the island, and it’s the same gourd I grew up with as Guinea bean. (Different tribal groups grow different varieties of gourd; Lagenaria siceria is one, while Nepenthes mirabilis is another; not all varieties are edible). Gourd pieces are carved and beaded for jewelry while others are used for canteens and medicine bottles. While I was in New Guinea I traded for some gourd seed, which I received, packaged in another gourd. (Pictured are men from the Dhani tribe).

There is a fascination in our own culture today for growing gourds even though they are no longer necessary in our everyday life. Gourd conferences in Missouri, Ohio and other states, attract thousands of visitors who come to see objects made from gourds. (See the American Gourd Society for more information). Everything from bird houses to works of art are on display, and generally for sale and there are several gourd societies that offer newsletters and trade gourd seed among it’s members.

Possibly it’s the fact that a gourd is a near permanent object that accounts for the fascination. With a pumpkin, you can carve it or eat it, but otherwise there’s not much else you can do with it. With a gourd, once it’s grown and seasoned, it becomes almost like carved wood and can last for centuries if not broken. When I was a child I had a dipper gourd that had a perfect square knot in its long handle. The owner, my next door neighbor, had trained the gourd into that shape and used the gourd on her back porch as a wren house. When she passed away and her family disposed of her possessions, they threw the gourd birdhouse in the trash where I retrieved it.

Gourds are remarkable in how long the seed remain viable. Three years ago a friend brought some decorative gourds to me that I’d never seen before. These had yellow handles with green bottoms, not warty but more with horns. Odd looking things and I kept them on the dining room table in a bowl for about a year. They wound up on the back porch where they remained for nearly two years, where it’s hot in summer and freezes frequently in winter. This spring when I ran across the gourds, I figured the seed were no longer any good. I tossed the gourds out the back door onto the septic tank mound where there are several kinds of decorative grasses and forgot about them.

To my surprise, a plant sprung up. I’d planted pumpkins in the area in the spring and assumed the additional vine was another pumpkin. But long about mid summer I noticed I had lots of the yellow and green horned gourds hanging off of the quince bush, dangling from the variegated cane and several hung like Christmas ornaments from the dwarf cherry tree. Not only had the seed been good all that time, but the gourds had come true to seed and had not crossed with anything else.

Gourds are just one more of the crops that make gardening fun. Happy gardening!

The Garden is Still Swimming

It's a shame to complain about rain when there are parts of the Southeastern U.S. that could use some. But this week, we had over 5 inches, 3 inches last week, nearly every week the same all season. The peppers have quit even trying to bloom, several have dropped their leaves and just look bewildered. The Bhut jalokias, though, are continuing to produce lots of those hotter than hot peppers. So far, I've found no one who can even remotely eat a piece of one. I will post a video soon of a friend who tried to eat a tiny piece of one!

The Seneca bear beans are blooming well and are worth growing just for the flowers (I've not tasted the beans yet). I bought the seed from a lady from Minnesota last spring when I ran across her at the Rendezvous at Fort des Chartres at Prairie de Rocher, IL. I asked her why they are called Seneca bear beans and she said, "Because we're Seneca, and we cook them with bear." Makes total sense.

Adam, our summer WOOFer/Intern/Friend, went home for a visit with his father this past week before he's off on his next adventure. We'll miss his work and his company. He was fun to watch work because he was always tasting everything in the garden. He sort of "grazed" on green beans, papalo, tomatoes, figs, whatever he passed and looked good to eat. He has been a joy to work with in the kitchen, always trying new ways of cooking garden produce, always inquisitive. We ate really well from the garden this year and hopefully Adam will return next season. His many projects have made the garden even more enjoyable, and he worked hard to improve the soil and new planting beds.

I've been drying things in the food dehydrator this week. Adam had been drying apples and peaches and some stevia and herbs and since the dryer is out, I just continued keeping it running. This week I put in a tray of black sesame pods to dry before shaking out the seeds. And a tray of hot peppers along with a tray of okra, one of tomatoes and a tray of bhut jalokias for seed.

Molly spent the better parts of 2 days digging under the garden shed, then the Herb Shop porch, after some unnamed animal. Most likely it's an armadillo and most likely she'll eventually either get it, or run it off. But the digging took place in, and after, the rain, so she changed from the black and white dog she normally is, to a brown and black one. It doesn't bother her one bit to dig in a mud puddle if there's something to chase or catch on the other side of it, but any other time, she hates to get in the water for any reason at all. Unlike this little dog I saw on Sunday, quite happy to float on its own little raft while people were swimming nearby (in the Buffalo River).

No Matter What I'm Doing

"So no matter what I'm doing, there's something I'm not doing."...Crescent Dragonwagon, on guilt.

When you do a garden well, it seems like there are two choices. You either spend all your waking hours, canning, drying, freezing and eating the excess, or you turn your head the other way and feel guilty at not using the bounty completely. Our long time Ozarks-now-Vermont friend, Crescent, described such guilt well on her blog. She and her partner, David, planted and grew, heads of cauliflower, described how they were eating a head a night, roasted.

I wish I liked cauliflower, or even broccoli. Those are full of amazing anti-oxidents, I'm told, preventing cancer and keeping the earth from shaking and the sky from falling. It's in my genes, I think, not liking cauliflower. You probably can't grow up eating cauliflower that's cooked to baby teething softness, drenched in Velveta cheese, and then later in life learn to love cauliflower that's slathered with good olive oil and broiled. Raw, it's fine, dipped in a homemade dipping sauce, maybe one from my favorite Easy Dips Using Herbs book. It's not too bad in soup, given enough flavors to give it some flavor. Give me a head of savoy cabbage anytime. Grill an eggplant with some olive oil. I like almost every vegetable I've encountered in one lifetime, broccoli and cauliflower just aren't on the list, unfortunately.

Our savoy crop this year has been outstanding. Rich, buttery, crinkled heads of the sweetest cabbage. Josh wanted to make kraut and I opined that using savoy cabbage for kraut is like spreading caviar on a peanut butter sandwich. But, since guilt had taken hold with cabbage about to go to waste (one can only eat so much coleslaw and summer salad) several severed and savoyed heads went under the kraut hammer this week and either into jars or into a crock, I didn't watch which.

The big news, for anyone who cares one bit about plants, is a new acquisition in the garden when Drs. Art and Sherry Tucker and friends from Australia were here. Art brought an Aeollanthus suaveolens, a fantastically coconut scented plant from Africa that now resides in the middle of the garden under an umbrella. Why, you might ask? Because newly planted plants, especially those having traveled by car across half the United States, have become pale and in need of a bit of protection. But doesn't this plant have a common name, you are probably wondering? Unfortunately, no. I think we will have to name it. Maybe just, "Art's Coco-nutty."

I read that Aeollanthus is used in voodoo rituals in Brazil, some kind of body washing ceremony, which is probably pleasant considering it's luscious aroma. It's used medicinally in Africa, it's home, and in fragrance and culinary processes, too. Some people say it reminds them of the beach, I think because it smells like Tropicana suntan lotion, only better. Very pleasant, and the fragrance lingers on your fingers for several minutes. We'll have to try it in a dream pillow and see if it evokes beachside dreams.

I enjoyed watching Hillary's speech at the Demo. Convention. She's good and thinks fast on her feet. The first time I met her, many, many years ago (1985, to be exact), she was holding up the lavender wand I had made for her, the first lavender grown at the Ozarks Folk Center's new Heritage Herb Garden. I'd designed and created the garden for the State of Arkansas - a garden that has evolved much differently than imagined and has a delightful life of its own now. Hillary Clinton was there to dedicate the Garden, and after I presented her with the first lavender wand from the garden, she held it up and gave a two minute off the cuff promotion of my work and my lavender wands. It came at a very fortuitous time for me. I'd had a back injury while working on the herb garden, had no medical insurance and could not work due to the injury. (She knew none of this, however). Her simple off the cuff remarks in front of a hundred or so people and news media, sold a lot of lavender wands for me that year, contributing to the pitiful little income I had.

Then in 1988, when Bill Clinton dropped out of the race for the White House, I sent another lavender wand to Hillary, this time with lavender made from my garden and including a quartz crystal from Hot Springs, AR. That wand was 18 inches long due to an exceptional lavender crop that year. In the presentation box I'd had made, I included a humorous note about how lavender has always been an enchanting and magical plant, and how some people believe that crystals have energy. In that note, I said I was sorry Bill had dropped out of the Presidential race, but if he chose to try again in 1992, to keep the lavender wand and it might give just enough boost of energy to put him over the top.

And, quite remarkably for me, I was sitting in Washington, D.C. in January of 1993, in town f the Inauguration, watching ABC news coverage of Bill and Hillary as they packed up to move out of the Arkansas Governor's Mansion. They had lived in that same public building for something like 16 years and were describing what was to be disposed of, and what was to goor with them. It was an enormous thrill for me, when Hillary pointed to a stack of memoribilia that "must go with them". The top of the stack included a basket from the Ozarks Folk Center, with my lavender wand in the very top.

That trip, with Crescent and Ned, along with a whole crew of folks from the Dairy Hollow House in Eureka Springs, AR, and including Mr. & Mrs. Workman, the publishers at Workman Publishing in New York, was to create an Inaugural Day Brunch for the Clintons. So it was with great pride that I watched Hillary's unifying speech tonight. I feel privileged to have known her and seen up close what a dedicated public servant she is and felt like that was a friend delivering that speech.

The Garden This Week

Even the Gourd People (left) are surprised at the continuing rains. This one's hiding in the malabar vining spinach, which is listed as edible, but has more oxalic acid than its all-green Asian cousin, which is the better tasting. Malabar spinach is from Africa, loves summer heat and thrives in dry conditions and produces leaves to cook all summer long. The two kinds cover an 8 ft. high arbor in the middle of the garden.

On the subject of arbors, Adam built several bentwood trellises out of native cedar, along with this very handsome arbor in mid-summer. It's already covered with Indian snake gourds and morning glories, which the goats have been standing up on their hind legs to nibble on. He has the trellises installed in the garden with beans growing on one, passion vine on another and morning glories on the third.

Here's what the garden looks like this week. We have a bounty of beans - 8 or 10 varieties of climbing beans and several bush types. I'll post photos of some soon as they have quite attractive flowers. The garden is a bit jungly, as the constant rains all season have causes everything to over grow their beds. The photo to the left was taken in early morning with a bit of light fog. And below, right is part of the culinary beds and pathway that leads to the Herb Shop.

Visitors to the garden this week and last have expressed surprise at the extremely sweet stevia plants, and the great numbers of butterflies in the garden. We saw the very first Monarch butterfly today, a harbinger of fall weather to come.

The red and white cucumbers are really producing rapidly, lots of Brandywine tomatoes and the Egyptian malokia is ready to start harvesting for greens.

Plant People Visit

(Pictured here are Rex and Carmel, Art and Sherry and our summer intern, Adam...who we've dubbed Papalo Picasso, since his budding interest in the herb, papalo and his degree and talent in art).

We were very pleased to have Drs. Art & Sherry Tucker from Delaware. They brought with them Carmel and Rex from Australia, who are commercial lavender growers. Rex said they grow 10,000 lavender plants in their fields, harvesting them by hand and running the lavender through the threshers and selling the flowers.

Art Tucker is a long time friend and Research Professor, and co-director of the Claude E. Phillips Herbarium at the Dept. of Agriculture and Natural Sciences at Delaware State University. He's the author of 2000. Herbs of Commerce, co-author of The Big Book of Herbs (with Tom Debaggio), and many, many, many more writings. We know him as the walking encyclopedia of herbs and the foremost authority of fragrance oils in herbs. One of the plants in our garden, which we dubbed, "Art Tucker's Russian sage," is a white clary sage we look forward to seeing bloom in the garden each year, and which the goldfinches also anticipate because of the abundance of seed the plants produce.

Carmel is the editor of Lavender Australia magazine and we had previously only met by email as she had invited me to write articles for the magazine. Now we have an invitation to go to Australia and visit these delightful folks and see how commercial lavender is grown.

It was great fun having serious plant people here and feeding them some of our garden produce. Even more fun were the walks in the garden, learning new things and trading information and plants. It was a great reminder to me of why it is I love to garden. Not just the plants, but the people and the food that we get from all the herbs and vegetables. What a treat for us to have such wonderful visitors.

Ravishing Rubies Red Hats

Ravishing Rubies Red Hats

We have several Red Hats groups visit the garden during the summer. Most bring sack lunches and make a morning of it. The Ravishing Rubies (aka Blue Eye Red Hats) came to visit and enjoyed a Dream Pillows workshop in the gazebo. Everyone made a dream pillow to take home and learned about the various herbs that effect dreaming. (All of the recipes for my formulas are in Making Herbal Dream Pillows, Storey Publishing).

They had cold pressed mint tea and Lemon Balm-Blueberry Cake for dessert after lunch. We gave out little envelopes with instructions to place the herbs I handed them (to smell and taste) into the envelope, put it on the dash of the car and they would have a potpourri record of the herbs they'd enjoyed. Alternatively, they could empty the packet into a pot of boiling water in which there was an couple of onion slices, a stalk of celery and a couple of pieces of chicken, and make soup!

Many of my dream pillow formulas are available on our website on the Dream Pillows pages, both as ready made pillows and as bulk blends for those who want to sew their own. We also offer Kits and individual Bulk Herbs for other projects, too.