The Bad and the Good
Winecaps, Not For Me
My successes with growing shiitake mushrooms emboldened me, this past spring, to venture further afield, to wine cap mushrooms (Stropharia rugosoannulata). After all, it’s been billed as “prized, delicious” and “edible when young.”
Their quick production also prompted me to give them a try. As a matter of fact, my spring “planting” started bearing a couple of weeks ago. A bed can also be refreshed or a new bed can be inoculated from an old bed for repeat performances.
Let’s go back to spring, to my planting. Wine caps grow very well in wood chip mulch, something that’s aplenty on my farmden. My berry bushes are mulched, my pear trees are mulched, as are the paths in my vegetable gardens. Why not do double duty with those mulches?
A few years ago, I attempted just that, laying a thick mulch of chips atop my asparagus bed in spring. Two problems: The thick mulch almost killed the plants, and the weather was very dry for weeks on end. Mushrooms need moisture.
This past spring, I pulled back twigs and other debris from a patch of ground beneath a Norway spruce tree and laid down a few inches of hardwood chip mulch. After sprinkling the purchased spawn over the mulch, I topped everything with another inch or two of, this time, wood shavings.
For this spring’s planting, I also decided to water, so set up a sprinkler. Rain fell pretty consistently all season long, obviating the need for further watering.
The tasting: To me, the mushrooms were tasteless. Sure, I could have sautéed them with butter and garlic; then they would have tasted like butter and garlic. (Disclaimer: Your results may differ from mine.)
My taste for wine cap mushrooms went down another notch when I more recently read a caution to eat them moderately and not more than two days in a row. My yard abounds with plenty of other good tasting, healthful food, so I’ll pass on the wine caps.
Seaberries For Me
On to more tasty items. Seaberries (Hippophae rhamnoides). The harvest is in, the first harvest from my 2013 planting. I wanted them for juice and, on the recommendation of seaberry expert Jim Gilbert of www.onegreenworld.com, planted Titan, Leikora, and Orange Energy.
Seaberry plants are either male or female. Only female plants bear fruit; to do so, they need pollen from a nearby male, which I also planted. One male can sire up to 8 females.
Seaberry, Titan
In addition to yielding very healthful berries, seaberries further earn their keep as landscape plants. (I’ve seen them planted as ornamentals in New York City’s Battery Park.) The bush’s thin, olive green leaves are the perfect backdrop for the bright orange berries, clustered thickly right along the stems.
And there’s the rub. Long, sharp thorns also cluster along the stems, making harvest a potentially painful proposition.
I used the method Jim recommended for harvest, and that is to cut stems heavily laden with berries into 6 inch long pieces, put them into a covered plastic tub, and then freeze them. The frozen berries came off the stems when the tub was shaken vigorously. All I had to do then was to pick out the stems, and then winnow the leaves from the fruit in front of a fan.
The berries are now back in the freezer, to be made into juice at my leisure. That’ll involve cooking them in a little water, mashing them with a potato masher, and then straining. My previous planting yielded a delicious juice once diluted with 1/8 part water and sweetened with 1/8 part maple syrup or honey.
This season’s juice should be even better because the berries taste better than the previous varieties I planted. Especially good — even straight from the bush — in the new planting is the variety Titan. Seaberry generally tastes, to me, like very rich orange juice with the addition of pineapple or passionfruit. Titan has more of a tangerine-y flavor.
Permaculture-esque
Wine cap mushrooms and seaberries are both plants beloved by permaculturalists. The mushrooms for the little care they need, and their use of mulched ground. The seaberries, also for their low maintenance, their beauty, and their enrichment of the soil with nitrogen.
Seaberry bush
My seaberries are in a permaculturalesque planting, along with elderberry, highbush cranberry, nannyberry viburnum, rugose rose, Korean pine, and aronia. They’re all easy to care for. They’re all very ornamental. The only ones that taste good or yield anything are the seaberry and the rugosa roses.
Picked At Peak Of Perfection
Tomatoes Vs. Sweet Corn
Some gardeners sit tapping their fingers waiting for the first tomato of the season to finally ripen. I don’t. I’m waiting to sink my teeth into my first-picked ear of sweet corn.
Not that my tomatoes don’t taste really good, but they’re also good all winter dried or canned, as is or as sauce. Or just frozen.
An ear of sweet corn, though, captures the essence of summer. Not just for flavor and texture. It’s the whole ritual of peeling back the husks and snapping them off at their bases, brushing away the silk before steaming the ears, and then, holding an ear at each end, biting off kernels from one end to the other like an old fashioned typewriter carriage. (An image perhaps unknown to readers below a certain age.)
An art to harvesting corn at the just-ripe stage, and anxiousness for that first taste, make harvesting, especially early in the season rather tenuous. I do early planning for that first taste by counting the days-to-maturity from when I planted. Problem is that the days listed on seed packets vary: One seed company lists days to maturity for Golden Bantam, the variety I grow, at 75 days; another lists it at 85 days; another at 78 days; and yet another, more realistically, at 70 to 85 days. It depends on where the variety is grown and how the season develops.
The real countdown begins when tassels first appear atop the stalks. Harvest will be about 3 weeks hence.
Then it’s time to keep an eye out for drying tassels at the end of an ear. Once that happens, the time is near. That right moment is critical because harvested too soon, and the kernels have little taste. And this is among those fruits — yes, corn is a fruit, botanically — that will not ripen at all following harvest. Harvested too late, and the kernels are tough and starchy.
That exact right moment for harvest is when the ear feels “full” when grasped in my hand and a kernel on the peeled-back husk, with the ear still attached to the stalk, oozes a milky fluid when pressed with the thumbnail. If all these systems are go, it’s time to snap off the ear and whisk it to the waiting pot of steaming water.
Golden Bantam is a non-hybrid variety. Like other non-hybrids, a planting does not ripen all at once, which is not a good commercial characteristic. It’s fine for me, though, because between staggered plantings and a wide window for harvest for each planting, I intend to be eating Golden Bantam corn, a favorite for many gardeners since its introduction in 1906, for weeks to come.
Watermelon, Are You Ripe
Besides the first harvest of Golden Bantam, which I’ll be enjoying by the time you read this, I’m also eagerly awaiting the first harvest of watermelon, which, according to days-to-maturity listed on the seed packet, 65-75 days, I should have already been eating. (I sowed seeds indoors in pots in mid-May but it’s been a relatively cool growing season.)
While I’m confident in harvesting sweet corn at just the right moment, not so for harvesting watermelon, another fruit that will not ripen at all once harvested. Yes, I know all the published indicators of ripeness: drying up of the tendril closest where the fruit is attached to the vine; a dull thud, rather than a tighter, ringing or hollow sound, when rapped with my knuckles; and a yellow or cream-color of the fruit where it rests against the ground, and a toughening of the skin there, enough to resist indentation with a thumbnail. (The thumbnail is evidently a useful harvest tool.)
A ripe watermelon?
Still, I’m not confident about harvesting watermelons on time, and not even just the first ones to ripen. The trial and tribulation is worth it. I hope to be harvesting and eating ripe watermelon also by the time you read this. (Update: I did and it was.)
Tomatoes, You Are Ripe
In contrast to harvesting Golden Bantam corn and watermelon (I grow the variety Blacktail Mountain), tomatoes are cinch to harvest. Except for some green-ripe varieties, which I don’t grow, tomatoes turn their characteristic shade of red when ripe.
Tomatoes can even be harvested underripe to ripen off the vine. Research has shown that when a tomato is about half green and half pinkish-red on the vine, a layer of cells form across the stem of the tomato sealing it off from the main vine. Then nothing that can move from the plant into the fruit, so the fruit can ripen to perfection.
I came across some older research (J. Amer. Hort. Soc. 102:724-731. 1977) showing that the best-tasting tomatoes are those thoroughly vine-ripened. Duh. I knew that, and will harvest only vine-ripened tomatoes.
