CURING CHESTNUTS, AND MORE
Gathering
“There’s many a slip ‘twixt the cup and the lip.” Likewise for chestnuts, in this case twixt the ripening of the nuts (in September and October and the lip. That is, if you want the highest quality nuts.
We can start right when the nuts begin to drop. They’ll do so still enclosed in their spiny burs or the burs will open to release the nuts. Don’t be disappointed with burs pretty much empty, perhaps containing a couple or more small, slivers of nuts; these are the result of inadequate pollination.
Those disappointing burs are among the first to drop. The real show yields burs bursting with two, even three fat, mahogany brown chestnuts. For the best quality nuts, I gather them daily, at the most every other day, before Read more
FRESH, WINTER CORN SALAD
A Welcome Weed
I am happy and proud to admit that I have firmly established a weed in my garden. That weed is corn salad (Valerianella olitoria). Not that it took a lot of effort on my part; this plant is after all a weed, one that got its name for the way it invades European corn fields — “corn,” in the Queen’s English, being any grain except for corn, which is “maize.” I can still call it a weed because a definition of a “weed” is any plant that shows up where it’s not desired; much of corn salad here comes up where I don’t want it to.
Corn salad, the weed
The second part of this weed’s name, “salad,” explains why I nonetheless want it in my garden. Read more
UPS AND DOWNS AND UPS WITH CHESTNUTS
The Best of Them, No More
Of all species of chestnuts, none is finer than the American chestnut. This majestic tree towered to 100 feet high in America’s virgin forests and yielded a wood that was used in musical instruments, molding, fenceposts, barrel staves, even telephone poles. The nuts of American chestnut are deliciously sweet and flavorful. Or, so I have read and been told, having never tasted one myself.
But the sturdy chestnut had its Achille’s heel — chestnut blight. The disease, accidentally introduced from Asia, was first noted at New York’s Bronx Zoo in 1906. It spread 25 to 50 miles a year and within 50 years had left 7 million acres of Appalachian forests with dead or dying chestnut trees.
The American chestnut is not gone, though. Trees cling tenaciously to life. Read more
