One of the great joys of gardening is learning how stuff grows. Did you know that green beans are just baby bean-beans? You harvest them when the pods have developed but before the beans inside get plump and then hard. Green peppers are just unripe red (or orange or yellow) peppers. Green olives are just young black olives. Cherry tomatoes are just … no, they’re just bite-size tomatoes. The green tomatoes in fried green tomatoes are just unripe tomatoes, but some tomato varieties are green (or black or yellow or orange) when they’re ripe. White button mushrooms grow into cremini (baby bella) mushrooms, which grow into portobello mushrooms.
Artichokes are the flower pods of a gigantic thistle plant. Seriously.
Do you know how to grow ginger? Plant ginger. It’s a root, so if you stick it in the dirt, it’ll send up grassy shoots and spread, and at the end of the season you’ll have more ginger. Same goes for potatoes and garlic. Coriander is just cilantro that has gone to seed. Hops grow on vines and smell like beer. Bay leaves come from bay trees. Asparagus shoots up out of long, ropey, horizontal roots, and if you let the stalks keep developing, they’ll grow wispy fronds out of their tips and get as tall as you are.
I was showing a (very smart) visitor my garden the other day and she was delighted to learn that blueberries grow on bushes. There’s so much about food we don’t know! Or didn’t always know. The first time I grew corn, I ordered a packet from a seed company and laughed and laughed when I tore it open and found … corn. Obviously corn grows from corn, but I hadn’t really thought about it before. You grow beans from beans, peas from peas.
I love to see people share their garden porn photos on social media this time of year. People are so proud of the produce they’re harvesting, as they should be.
I garden out of interest in how stuff grows and for flavor. Fresh-picked herbs and vegetables make it a lot easier and more delicious to get your five servings a day. (Even if you’ll get so sick of kale after a couple of weeks of kale.) It’s fun to eat produce varieties that you can’t easily find in groceries because they’re too delicate (like tart cherries, which grow on trees) or weird (like tie-dye tomatoes). But you can’t sustain yourself on a backyard plot, no matter how many potatoes you plant.
Gardening is itchy, achy, tedious, hot, endless work. The people who grow, harvest, process, and prepare food for a living are heroes and deserve safe working conditions, honest wages, and protection from being abducted, imprisoned, and separated from their children.
Anyway, this is a fuck ICE post. Fuck ICE. May the thugs in the U.S. Gestapo never be welcomed into a restaurant again or know the pleasure of a fresh vegetable.
Photo by Laura Helmuth, who planted way too many radishes this year.
With you til the politics at end. The migrant workers need proper permits and wages. How about investigate how farm owners take Social Security payments out of migrant workers wages and never give it to gov! How about rail against the true injustice-a living wage for a day of hard labor.
Just wonderful.
Love this from the interesting food facts to the fuck ICE. It hasn’t hit hard enough yet, but the bill for deporting all the people who grow and harvest our food is coming due. The campaign promise was to deport gang members and violent criminals. So far the folks being deported have been citizens, legal green card holders and people who work for a living (most under terrible conditions for meager pay that keeps our grocery prices low) and pay taxes. The cruelty and inhumanity of ICE raids and masked assailants snatching people off the street (generally because of the color of their skin) has got to stop.
I often stick veggies from the market into the ground to get more of same. It’s worked with lemon grass, butter leaf lettuce, celery, green onions.
Love this, including the turn at the end. I too chuckled when I got a handful of peas in the snap pea seed envelope, and learned respect for skilled farmers when I tried to grown some of my own food.
I misread “Hops” as hope, growing on vines, smelling like beer. More of that, too: intoxicating hope that takes hold in surprising places!