That splotchy, yellowish leaf coloration? Not good. This is sweet basil. Other varieties such as African Blue are better at surviving cold weather, but I find they don't taste as good in recipes.
Fortunately for us, I had two cruciferous starts just kicking around, left over from the winter planting interval, and I decided to pop them into the soil this spring just as an experiment (if nothing else, maybe for those local not-quite-killer bees).
If you ignore the volunteer tomato growing up among them, this is how they unexpectedly turned out.
I harvested this perfect 4.5-pounder last week! In greater Houston in mid-April! To put that in context, I harvested its litter-mates in late January. In normal weather conditions, this kind of a result would not likely happen in April, but this year, we've had enough cold weather (especially cold nights) to keep these things healthy through to maturity.
The broccoli weighed in at 2 pounds, so I ended up with a total of 6.5 pounds of organic food here from two seed starts that I normally would have discarded. Bonus.
If you look carefully at my harvested cauliflower, you'll see that I do something different than commercial growers: I allow it to advance to a more mature state before I harvest it. The individual florets separate and spread with increasing age as it prepares to bolt, and harvesting at that stage allows for easier division into sub-bite-sized pieces. Those pieces, by virtue of their manageability and the very mild, unobtrusive taste which is derived from the home-grown organic method, can then be shoe-horned into a wide variety of recipes as a significant nutritional augmentation. In this photo above, I'm boiling some white rice, but I'm adding finely-divided cauliflower pieces to it. White rice by itself is primarily an energy food with a high glycemic index. Augmenting it with cauliflower helps to round out its nutritional profile.
If instead you buy cauliflower from mainstream grocery stores, you'll see that it's been harvested at an earlier, less-developed stage of growth. It's essentially a giant dense lump, and more difficult to chop into uniform small pieces.
I'll close with a link to this interesting piece that describes, from the perspective of several nursery owners (one of whom is an urban Houstonian), just how much the residential vegetable-growing consumer base has expanded in the past five years. I'm an old fart who falls into the "always wanted to do this but never got around to it until recently" category of home gardener, but many young people are taking this practice very seriously as an assumed component of their lifestyles. That bodes well for future creativity and idea-sharing.
Left to Right, lower series: Broccoflower, cheddar cauliflower, and purple cauliflower all currently growing in my suburban back yard. Unlike Andy, I did not take artistic license with any colors here - that's what these three specialty cultivars actually look like.
I was afraid that the hard freeze of two weeks ago would wipe out each and every one of them, but they all bounced back to look exactly like this today. This is an amazingly easy and productive vegetable to grow in our area.
Actually, you not da Bombus, which is the bumble bee genus. As near as I can tell, you da Apis - one of the honey bee genera, although I have no clue which one(s).
I'm no expert on insects, but they're probably European, and I don't know how extensively our little Centerpointe friends have been Africanized (as this TM article notes, all wild North American honeybees have been Africanized by this point - the only question is degree). But here for your viewing pleasure is seventeen seconds of backyard Hell-on-wings (if you turn up the volume on your computer, you'll find that it sounds as formidable as it looks):
It's cruciferous vegetable season, and I showed a pic in a recent post of some nascent broccoli. I also grow cauliflower, including this 5.5-pound behemoth that I harvested a few days ago:
Don't be fooled by that demure presentation - there's a monster lurking under there (my foot for scale). I grew this in one of my stock tanks.
Incidentally, do you know why cauliflower produces such a remarkable collection of leaves? It's because the leaves supply the energy to the plant. They are the solar cells. And if you're a plant intent on creating a 5.5 pound yield, you need to gather a lot of solar energy to get the job done.
That, and cruciferous vegetables are colder-weather plants. They grow in our area when the sun angle is lower and the energy is correspondingly weaker.
I see a curry just waiting to happen. Although this home-grown organic tastes so good, it's wonderful simply baked to a light golden brown in garlic and olive oil.
But anyway, I don't harvest all of my cruciferous yield. I allow some of it to bolt, because the flowers are pretty and I figure the bees need something to forage. It is the middle of winter, after all. It's not like there's a single other flower out there for me to look at, or a single other thing out there for the bees to eat.
But then what happens?? Well, those ten thousand visiting bees also realize that there's not a single other thing out there for them to eat. And they get very, very unhappy about anything that they perceive might be a threat to their precious bolted cruciferous. I have never been stung or attacked, but they will aggressively shoo me away from the feeding frenzy. It's obvious from their hairy little body language that they will not tolerate any interference.
GCDN frontpage from July 24, 1993.
The resolution is too low for me to read it, and the archive URL wants six bucks for it, so that's out of the question.
...but I don't know of any stories about local attacks. Well, there is this one about a man in Freeport, just 60 miles from here. I'm not sure what the common threads are in these attack stories, but they sure don't seem to like lawnmowers. That much is obvious.
I dunno. I will say this: after a few successive years of gardening, what I'm finding about our Centerpointe bees is that their behavior is heavily influenced by the season. Right now, they are ten thousand junkyard dogs on wings, ready and willing to pick a fight. Come springtime when everything is in bloom and there is no more food pressure, they will be positively stupid with passivity, assuming they follow previous trends. I have chopped down whole plants laden with bees in the springtime, and they simply do not care. They just follow the plant all the way to the ground and keep happily foraging, with me stomping to and fro directly above them.
Somewhere in our neighborhood, there's probably a hive with a great deal of honey. But I'll leave that to its rightful owners, and I will continue to knock wood about never having been stung.
Here's an example of how to maximize taste, enhance nutrition, and double your bang for the restaurant buck all while simultaneously minimizing your calories:
This is my take-home portion of arroz con pollo from the excellent local Peruvian restaurant called Chuyos, which I blogged about previously.
It's excellent, but it contains white rice, which has a sky-high glycemic index, and heavy cream sauce from the potato side dish. Even though this is "home-made" rather than fast food, its caloric density is very high...
...but never fear - workarounds are here:
Chopped cauliflower and broccoli. It's past the season when I can grow my own, so I use an organic brand available at HEB. I keep it chopped in the fridge for easy meal incorporation.
Bush 41 was legendary for not liking the stuff, but good cruciferous vegetables should not have a strong or bitter taste - they shouldn't taste like much of anything, really. They should instead be mild enough so that they primarily pick up the taste of the other food components and spices that they are cooked with. If that doesn't happen for you, try another source, maybe organic.
Steamed for a few minutes.
Dump the heated rice / heavy cream sauce left-overs on top of it.
Mix and eat. This literally took five minutes to assemble.
In this example, the rice has a spicy cilantro base which absolutely dominates the taste of the broccoli and cauliflower. And the cream sauce is full of spices and garlic. And the onions are pickled.
Basically what I did here is almost triple the volume of tasty food while adding virtually no extra calories.
That's not 146 calories per serving - that's 146 calories per medium-sized head. Of which a small fraction was incorporated into this dish shown above.
Screengrabbed from Google.
I thought I'd offer this idea in a blog post because I'm in the process of re-teaching my teenager about healthy eating. This is exasperating, because didn't I teach this same stuff, like, ten years ago?! Yes, of course I did - but what happened in the intervening time was what I call "cultural creep", aka "going with the flow". With the passage of time and without intervention, home-based messages get displaced and cultural messages grow to dominate. And the next thing that happens is that I look at my teenager's on-line school cafeteria debit account and I see ten bags of potato chips purchased within a single week.
Which brings me 'round to both broccoli and broadcasting...
"You don't crave broccoli, and our generation has grown up craving a Big Mac" says one of the panicked interviewees on the fantastic HBO documentary The Weight of the Nation.
But here's the take-away on that sentiment: I do crave broccoli, because I conditioned myself to crave it, just like some other folks conditioned themselves to crave Big Macs. If someone put a Big Mac in front of me, not only would I not crave it, I would react with a negative intensity that would put Bush 41 to shame.
The human conditioning process is indiscriminate. There's no law that says conditioning only works with unhealthy habits. Healthy habits can also be conditioned.
"If you go with the flow in America today, you will end up overweight or obese, as two thirds of Americans do." - Dr. Thomas Frieden, Director, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, as stated in The Weight of the Nation.
Going with the flow means eating ten bags of potato chips in a single week. My teen is very slim, but cultural creep and going with the flow would make short work of her present healthy condition if left unchecked. Part of her refresher training is to watch The Weight of the Nation, all six hours of it. It's an eye-opening documentary and I can pretty much guarantee that, even if you are well-versed on matters of nutrition, you would learn new stuff by watching it (I sure did). Here's the trailer below and the link to the films. Happy conditionin'.
After this recent post, I bet you folks thought I had said all there was to say about cruciferous vegetables. But you should know me better than that. In fact, this may become my biggest cruciferous post of all time, because on Sunday afternoon, it was time to bring three more of my babies in from the not-so-cold.
Thing 1.
Note my black rubber boot for scale, which isn't standing out very well against the rich, dark soil of our six-foot stock tank (and of course, after reading this other recent graphic post, you now know the rrrrest of the story about why I'm so obsessed with growing our edibles above ground level).
Those shoots in the shadowy foreground are Texas 1015 onions, which haven't done well for me these past two winters. They should be much bigger than this by now. Most of them didn't survive the abnormal hot weather we had in late fall, but obviously, my caulis were more successful. I have a friend in rural Galveston County who gave me some composted horse manure this year (composted, not fresh). It seemed to serve the caulis very well.
Thing 2 is shown a bit out of focus here, but you can see that it's a purple cauliflower, probably a Graffiti variety (I forgot to ask Tabatha for the name). The purple color is reported to have certain nutritional properties of added benefit.
Thing 3 was the coy one of the bunch. I love how those leaves furl around the cauli head. My wax myrtles are a bit too close to this, our four-foot stock tank, and probably reduce the sun it gets by one or two hours a day, resulting in this tank yielding slightly smaller vegetable sizes.
I wanted a pic for posterity, so here's a pose in the style of Farmer Jane. As in, Plain Jane.
But of course, my loving husband took these photographs, and he had a somewhat different style of pose in mind. What shall we call these?? Cauli-knockers? Cauli-cans? (If you would like to try on additional slangs for size, check out this humorous page... "Danny DeVitos"? Really?!?).
And forget about DDDD - this would be more like an O-cup. O as in, OMG!
:-)
O, come on! Just because I'm four days older than the dirt I grow my caulis in... this doesn't mean I can't have a little fun with them. Especially goofing around with my husband, who likes side angle views the best. Trust me on this one - the joviality factor in my marriage bodes well for your property values.
:-)
Incidentally, that cauli-can in the foreground has more of a sun-tan than the other one. Commercial growers will wrap their heads to prevent this yellowing which, if memory serves me, derives from Vitamin A production. Consumers who don't know any better prefer not to see yellowed caulis. I prefer to let the Vitamin A develop naturally.
Once the boobies... I mean, the babies were brought in from the not-so-cold, it was time to cook 'em. I gave more than half of this mammary-lode... I mean, mother-lode to two sets of my Asian neighbors whose cooking skills far outstrip mine. But my husband and daughter are both garlic fiends, so I also had to whip up a good feed of baked cauli, which generally happens like this:
First you cut the caulis into floret pieces, and grease a baking dish. I mixed a bit of Graffiti and plain white cauli just for visual interest.
Did I mention about the garlic fiends? OMG. And I have to smell the breath of both of them for about two days after these feasts. Ugh.
So you mix about 3 tablespoons of olive oil and those minced garlic cloves together with the florets in a zipper bag. I also throw some Reggiano in there, although you'll find that Internet recipes generally recommend that it be added as a garnish during the last five or ten minutes of baking. But I like it baked in, so I add most of it at the beginning.
Mix thoroughly inside the sack.
Dump into the greased glass casserole dish. I find I have to spatula out the zipper bag and dump that garlic-and-oil residue on top because half of it sticks to the inside of the bag.
Also add salt and pepper to taste before placing the dish into the oven.
400 degrees and 25 minutes later, this is the result. Nice and crispy around the edges. My husband and daughter gobbled all this up and then screamed for more, which I'll have to supply at tomorrow's dinner.
As we were sitting down gorging ourselves on baked garlic-cauli overload, there came a knock at our door. "That would be the curry," my husband declared. "Oh hell no," I replied. "There's no way she got it done that fast." But indeed, our neighbor - she had gotten it done that fast. This is a cauliflower and ground beef number that is TO DIE FOR, I tell you. Better than any restaurant in Houston, and Houston has some really fine Indian cuisine. I will definitely be learning how to make this one.
And now you know my true gardening motivation, eh? Grow massive organic vegetables, gift many of them to neighbors, and watch what happens next. The results never fail to astonish.
:-)
And you thought life in the suburbs was boring and predictable. But behold, I have had my muffins and have eaten them, too!
:-)
You can't just start growing vegetables in your back yard (or community garden plot) and expect your meal planning to incorporate them automatically. You have to actively develop ways of making the best use of what you produce, and on the schedule dictated by your garden, not according to your own convenience. I've made this point in a few previous blog posts, and now I'll show a few additional ideas about how to make it work.
It's late January in greater Houston Texas, which means that the winter gardening cycle is in full swing. We've been having some crappy weather lately, but we really do have a 12-month vegetable growing season here in the subtropics.
Here's an obligatory art shot of what my frozen-over fish pond looked like on the morning of January 25, 2014. Life thrives under all that ice.
Despite the icing-over and freezes we've been having this month, a winter garden in Houston will usually survive if covered by tarps, sheets, towels, floating row cover, or whatever else is handy on those days when the worst of the weather hits.
Most of this was harvested while my little fish pond was still frozen over. Freezes in our area are not of long duration, and our soils never freeze, which makes year-round vegetable survival possible.
Salad burnet (an herb-like plant that tastes like a cross between cucumber and watermelon)
Kale
Six different vegetable species, all perfectly suitable for a salad. But not just any salad. We are partial to those elaborate gourmet-style salads that are common in high-end restaurants. Here's how I make mine.
I start with a base of chopped organic spinach. This stuff came from the g-store because I'm not growing spinach right now, and I'm also not growing enough lettuce to fill a whole salad bowl (I mostly grow lettuce for eating in sandwiches).
Chop and add all ingredients to the spinach. I used the six home-harvested vegetables shown above, plus I threw in a bit of store-bought tomato and red pepper (peppers and tomatoes are spring and summer crops, not suitable for growing in January).
By the way, this is what real home-grown organic celery is supposed to look like (no color enhancement here). Not that horrible pale stuff you see in the grocery store. This has a deep green color and I bet it also has a very different micro-nutrient profile.
My secret ingredient is essential to the outcome of the salad:
So you say that your kids and spouse are NOT spinach salad fans?? Try adding some of this and watch the complaints and the salad disappear. To a family-sized salad such as this one, I chop and add about three quarters of a 10-oz bacon package, which probably equates to around 3.5 oz of actual bacon because it releases so much fat upon frying.
Mind you, this salad enticement approach might not work with the cheaper, factory-feed-lot bacon found in most mainstream grocery stores. Pederson's is much, much better tasting, in my opinion.
I also add high-quality grated Reggiano cheese, as well as dried blueberries and Craisins.
Now, here is where the larger meal management strategy starts to make itself more apparent:
There's the now-tossed bacon-yummy elaborate salad which is so rich that it almost eats like a complete meal all by itself, with side servings of lower-calorie Texas chili (which DOES contain beans, thank you) and a slice of Whole Foods bread
(BTW, I useSmart Balance Original as the butter-like spread. It really did help lower my cholesterol as the product marketing claims, but your results may differ. I don't recommend the "lite" version of the same product because I find that it tastes like crap.)
No working mother has the time to build an elaborate salad like that one AND cook chili (or anything else home-made) for the same meal. I don't care how much of a Super Mom she is - that's just not going to happen. Our chili is one of those staple dishes that gets made in massive quantities and stored in our special freezer until it is needed. And then it is unfrozen bit by bit to complete a variety of different meals, of which this is one.
And that is a good example of how I both structure our meal plans to minimize the time spent on preparation while efficiently managing what my little organic vegetable garden paradise produces. I meet so many women who say things like, "Oh, that looks so healthy but I don't have the time to make elaborate salads on top of everything else." Well, you actually do, if you can find a way to put the rest of the meal prep on auto-pilot. Pre-cooking and freezing is one such way. Auto-defrost can be your auto-pilot.
Let me close with one more trick of garden management. A few weeks ago, I showed a useful recipe which optimizes broccoflower, which is a blissfully easy vegetable to grow in our area.
This is what happens when other vegetables are substituted based on what's currently being produced by my micro-garden:
It's basically the same recipe procedure, with a few exceptions.
This is what went into it. Relative to the original recipe that was published online, I substituted cheddar cauliflower for the broccoflower, I deleted the parsley, I added some chopped bok choy, a little bit of finely-shredded Reggiano, and some of our harvested frozen cherry tomatoes from last summer.
It's OK to use frozen tomatoes in almost any recipe that will be subsequently cooked. If you grow cherry tomatoes instead of larger tomatoes, you don't have to worry about chopping them and then having them turn to mush in the freezer. They freeze whole.
Tweaking a recipe like that one has the following strategic benefits:
It consumes whatever available vegetables happen to be ready for harvest from your yard.
Using different vegetables at different times changes the appearance and taste just enough so that your family doesn't feel like you're serving the same dish over and over again. Deleting the parsley from this one and adding tomatoes, bok choy, and Reggiano gave it a different character, especially given that our tomatoes are out-of-control cross-breed volunteers that have a very gamey taste after several generations of non-selective breeding (they grow wild in our yard during the summer because seeds germinate from my home-made compost).
Good luck with your own garden management. You can capitalize on your own harvests and optimize the health of your family's meals. You just have to incrementally develop a strategy that works best with your own employment- and family-related time limitations.
I took it one step at a time, literally one vegetable plant at a time. Four and a half years ago, our suburban lot was nothing but scorched earth as the 23 acres that would become Centerpointe Section 9 were razed and re-contoured in their entirety to accommodate streets and houses. There was a time when I couldn't even find a fire ant on this property. It's been an enchanting experience to build it up from such a profound ecological rock bottom.
With respect to the spring-has-sprung theme, in this post from last week, I showed two massive piles of dirt-like substances.
That's mulch on the left and Living Earth's "veggie mix" soil on the right. It's high season for landscaping, when materials like this are at their most expensive. Six yards of this material cost about $200 including delivery. Most suburbanites don't need six whole cubic yards, but my landscaping and gardening spread is extensive and my property can absorb this much without even looking like anything was really done to it.
Here are my top two personal recommendations regarding spring landscaping spruce-up in the suburbs:
(1) Mulch your beds and trees once per year at a minimum. Even if you are not into landscaping and gardening, do this one thing. You'll be engaging in sheet composting maybe without even realizing it. Most native soils in Houston are crummy "gumbo soils" which don't support healthy landscaping or gardening. They are clay-rich and exceedingly poor in useable organic matter. You have to augment that soil in order to maintain healthy growth of most suburban cultivars. Mulching is the easiest way to add organic matter without adding a lot of hassle or expense. It just sits there and breaks down, building up your soil in the process. That's why you have to add new mulch every year - because it breaks down. But that attenuation is a natural process and beneficial to your yard.
(2) If you choose to augment either raised beds and/or flower or vegetable gardens with purchased soils, face the music and realize that most of what's on the market is not going to work well for you unless you make additional expensive enhancements. That photo above... do you see how light-colored the soil is? Here's a close-up:
This is what I bought about two weeks ago, at a heart-stopping $45 per cubic yard when delivery is factored in. What I see here is a lot of light-colored loamy sand with shredded wood mixed in. Personally, I don't see a lot of humus and compost in this view.
Well-known Houstonian gardener "Jackie" described this soil yard quality effect in this concise post of hers. This is basically the type of product that we have to live with in our area. It follows logically that stuff like this is mostly what's available on the market: if our regional soils are poor quality to start with, where are soil yards going to go to excavate better soils for sale? Answer: nowhere. We have to build them ourselves.
Let's compare that purchased material to my existing garden soil: - the soil that's currently in my stock tanks, shown above. It's darker, isn't it? That's because it contains a lot more compost including stuff I've created myself, Cotton Burr Compost that I have added, and fully-composted (not fresh) horse manure. The horse manure is not an ideal additive for a variety of reasons, but I got it for free from a friend in San Leon, and compost is so expensive in our area that I have to resign myself into accepting some non-ideal augmentations.
Speaking of expense, this other local blogger, whose observations are consistent with my own, recommends augmenting your upper-Texas-coastal native gumbo soil with "as much compost as you can afford". Same goes for purchased soils.
Blogger "Jackie" mentions Nature's Way Resources as THE place to buy good soil, but we in Clear Lake are arguably too far from that source to make transportation economical (it's in Conroe).
Here's where this style of gardening is not for the faint of heart: if I must replenish ("top off") my existing tank soils because of natural organic breakdown, and if the only soils available in my local market are of poorer quality than my own created soils, then what has to happen?? If you guessed "back loading", you'd be correct.
Now you can really see the difference in richness and color: that's my own created soil removed from the tank and staged on the blue tarp to the left, and the new purchased soil in the wheelbarrow to the right. By "back loading" I mean swapping out the better-quality deeper soils with the new stuff. I have to excavate each of my stock tanks and underlay them with the new poorer-quality soil, replacing the better stuff on top where my crops can use it.
In this case, in order to do the back-loading, I had to first remove all expired vegetable and herb plant remains except for that one tenacious oregano on the left side of the tank, which is there mostly for aesthetic reasons (its waterfall cascade over the side looks very cool).
If you think that this kind of thing is a whole hell of a lot of strenuous work, you'd be correct...
...but it's a big part of how I maintain my health and my figure as the age of fifty gets closer and closer. You can work your buns at the gym all day long, but until you start making integrated mechanical use of your entire body as one cohesive unit the way evolution intended for it to be used, you might fall short of an ideal work-out. No gym machine that I've ever used compares to the core work-out I get from intensive gardening. Soil back-loading is back-breaking. And belly-busting. But you also get really good food out of it, which is another facet of belly-busting. Pic from this post on harvesting cauliflower, my winter-season crop from this same stock tank that I'm now augmenting with additional soil.
So anyway, here's what the interim result looks like after all that soil back-loading is completed and the new spring vegetable plants installed:
This is the smallest of my three round stock tanks (this is a four-footer; the other two are six feet in diameter, and I also have two five-foot oblong troughs). I added three species I haven't attempted to grow before: one crookneck squash, two zipper cream cowpeas, and two melons. I'm still at the point where I'm experimenting with what grows best where and under what care regime.
Yes, that's a large garden mirror behind the tank. I'll have more to say about that in a future post.
You may be wondering why on earth I'd go to all this trouble to grow just a few individual vegetable plants. The answer is that, under a hyper-fertile organic planting regime like this, the yields are much higher than you might first guess. Last year I planted cantaloupe for the first time, and ended up with something like 26 pounds of the stuff from just three plants. So it'll be interesting to see if these melons produce as intensely.
And also recall those two massive cauliflower heads pictured above. Producing those required only half the square footage of this one small stock tank (I also grew two broccolis with them). Done properly, this growing method can produce fantastic yields.
Every time one of these micro-targeting efforts hits the bulls eye, my husband and I try to figure out how in the hell they were able to do it. What's especially interesting in this case is that the personalized advertisement showed up in my husband's name, not mine. But I do 100% of the shopping for landscaping and gardening supplies (much of which I pay for by credit card, which is fully data-mine-able). But if these guys are as sophisticated as I suspect they are, then they probably know that, even though I didn't change my last name for professional reasons, I'm traditional enough to generally refer to our homestead as the "[my husband's name] residence" and therefore that would, in fact, be the correct marketing default, even though the purchasing forensics might suggest otherwise on their faces.
If they know our names and address, then they certainly know that we are situated on an ordinary subdivision lot that cannot possibly support the "farm" for which they are marketing personalized apparel. But if they are as sophisticated as I suspect they are, they also recognize a farming wannabe when they see one, just as Target recognized a pregnant teenager. And pairing one's last name with a lifestyle aspiration is the ultimate appeal to vanity.
So did their exquisitely-sophisticated targeting work? Let's just say that, after staring wistfully at the postcard for several minutes, my husband admitted, "I wouldn't mind a hoodie."
Let's take a closer look at that logo. There's a barn where a four-car garage currently sits, and a silo where the chimney ought to be. But otherwise, it is oddly reminiscent of a tract home property, isn't it? Especially if one is predisposed to view one's own property production potential through cauliflower-colored glasses, it's an irresistible juxtaposition.
