Vegetables – Lee Reich

GOOD GERMS

January 22, 2025/0 Comments/in Fruit, Vegetables/by Lee Reich

Despite its sinister sound, a “germplasm collection” spells good things for farmers and gardeners alike. Think beyond the flu season and the word germ takes on a broader meaning: a small mass of living substance that can give rise to a whole organism or one of its parts. Think of wheat germ, that nutritious part of a wheat seed that contains the cells — the germ — that develop into a whole new wheat plant.

My Collection Swells

To us gardeners, a germplasm collection is a collection of plants or seeds. Forty years ago, I started amassing a collection of gooseberry varieties, A collection that swelled to almost fifty of them! Besides offering good eating, that group of plants was at the time one of the largest germplasm collections of gooseberries in the country.

Some of my gooseberry varieties

SOW A (FIGURATIVE) SEED

November 20, 2024/12 Comments/in Planning, Vegetables/by Lee Reich

An Oasis

It’s not the time of year to inspire most of us gardeners to sow a seed, but sow I will, a figurative seed in your imagination. Who knows what reality it may grow into?

As the weather turns increasingly cool, then cold, and the landscape becomes washed over in gray and brown, imagine a retreat, an oasis of lush greenery and bright colored flowers suffused in warm, moist air. A greenhouse.

Greenhouse at the Nearing’s Forest Farm

FRESH, WINTER CORN SALAD

October 16, 2024/1 Comment/in Vegetables/by Lee Reich

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

AUTUMN’S LUSHNESS

October 1, 2024/7 Comments/in Vegetables/by Lee Reich

Preparation

How green is your vegetable garden? Mine is very. Summer long gone and frost in the air doesn’t have to bring on a scene of browned and ragged leaves clinging to withered stems.

My garden is green, having arrived at its present state of enthusiasm by, first, my keeping one step ahead of weeds. Especially after midsummer, some gardeners relax their grips on weed control, letting heat loving annuals like lamb’s-quarters, purslane, and pigweed take hold. And then cooler weather brings quackgrass and creeping charlie stealthily trying to . . . well, creep . . . in at the garden’s edges.

Regular weeding forays through summer and early fall took but a few minutes of my time — much less than the heroic effort firmly established weeds would have required. Read more

THE VERY BEST TOMATOES

August 22, 2024/4 Comments/in Vegetables/by Lee Reich

Variety. Variety

If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it a thousand times, “Home grown tomatoes are NOT the best tasting ones.” Not necessarily, at least.

No, I’m not advocating tossing in your trowel and doing your tomato harvesting into a shopping cart. What I am saying is that choosing the best variety is all important to being able to bite into into the best tasting tomato. Grow an Early Girl tomato to perfection, harvest it at its peak of flavor, then take a bite out of it, and you’ll taste a good tomato. But not — in my opinion — a great tomato.

Heirloom tomatoes on plate

A tomato that has been handled carefully keeps pretty well for a couple of days, so you could actually purchase a great tasting tomato from a store or farm stand. But only if — I’ll say it again — that tomato is a great tasting variety. Read more

AND THE BEST PASTE TOMATO IS . . .

July 16, 2024/21 Comments/in Gardening, Vegetables/by Lee Reich

Is a Tomato a Tomato

If a rose is a rose is a rose is a rose, then a tomato is a tomato is a tomato. Or surely a paste tomato is. After all, paste tomatoes are rarely eaten fresh; they are mostly just cooked.

Each summer in my garden, we grow and put up enough canned tomatoes to keep us in soup, stew, and sauce for at least a year. A couple of summers ago, I sorted through some of the paste tomato varieties available, planting, growing, and evaluating flavors of the reputed best. These were varieties highly touted by seed purveyors, some gardeners, and on the web.

I admit to entering this foray with prejudices. Read more

EASY RICHES

July 3, 2024/10 Comments/in Vegetables/by Lee Reich

Tasteless Tinies

Truman Capote said something to the effect that the difference between the super-rich and the rest of us is that the super-rich eat tiny vegetables. So there’s another plus for gardening: It’s easy to be super-rich, or at least eat the way the super-rich do.

Not that smaller is always better in the world of vegetables. A cucumber picked undersized does not taste better and is surely not as juicy than one allowed to swell up before harvest — as long as that full-sized one is picked before its skin yellows and seeds start to harden.

Similarly, the taste of baby carrots can’t compare with fully grown ones, unless the “baby” size is how big the carrots are supposed to be when fully mature. Read more

POPEYE’S NEEDS

June 19, 2024/8 Comments/in Vegetables/by Lee Reich

Can’t Have It

Popeye ain’t the only bloke who’s gotta have spinach on tap whenever the urge strikes him. Some gardeners have similar needs — not me, though, who, come summer, gravitates to peppers, corn, tomatoes, and cucumbers. And being gardeners, you spinach lovers want freshly picked spinach, not that wan stuff that Popeye squeezes out of a can.

No matter how good a gardener you are, though, you can’t grow spinach this time of year (a statement that will no doubt be challenged by some reader who IS growing spinach now). Spinach is sensitive to cycles of night and day, and our summer’s short nights induce the plants to send up seedstalks, then die, instead of growing the succulent, broad leaves they do in spring and fall. Read more

SWEET CORN: OLD VARIETY, MODERN GROWING

May 29, 2024/6 Comments/in Gardening, Vegetables/by Lee Reich

Genetics: Up, Up, Up with the Sugar

I plan on eating sweet corn almost daily from about the middle of July until early autumn. I know the arguments against growing sweet corn in a backyard garden: It’s cheap at the farmstand and space-hungry in the garden. What’s more, the most modern, “supersweet” varieties hold their sweetness for days.

The supersweet varieties are truly supersweet. But “supersweet” is too much of a catchall term. Old-fashioned corn, the Papoon corn developed around 1750 by the Haudenosaunee Confederacy and still available today, is noted for its creamy texture and 9 percent sugar due to its SU gene. Unfortunately, those sugars start changing into starch as soon as an ear is harvested.

Golden Bantam sweet corn

In the latter half of the 20th century, “Sugary enhanced” sweet corn came on the scene. The SE gene incorporated into sweet corn varieties jacked sugar levels up to 17 percent. More Sugar meant more time for sweetness to hold following harvest. SE kernels are very tender.

Soon after, another gene, SH2 or “shrunken-2,” was found, which pushed that sweetness even higher, up to 35 percent! Read more

A CASE FOR ASPARAGUS

May 7, 2024/14 Comments/in Gardening, Vegetables/by Lee Reich

The Evidence

I’d like to make a case for growing asparagus, even if you’re not a vegetable gardener. In fact, vegetable gardeners need not relegate asparagus to the vegetable patch. The plants hold little interest to deer, rabbits and other furry invaders that must be fenced out of vegetable gardens.

The ferny stems can provide a wispy lime-green backdrop to mounded flowers like lavatera and gaillardia, or an airy foreground to the broad, glossy leaves of holly bushes. My present asparagus provides a backdrop for three clematis plants trained skyward on wire trellises.

Asparagus is especially easy to grow, in part because it is a perennial. My patch is about 25 years old. Read more