Starting Seeds: Culantro Ngo gai

We were delighted when Debbie shared seeds for culantro.

This herb has lots of monikers. The Kitazawa site says:

Also known as Mexican coriander, thorny coriander, spiny coriander, fitweed, saw-leaf or saw-tooth herb, recao and Tabasco parsley, this herb has a similar flavor to cilantro although much stronger. Each leaf grows from the plant base, rather than a stem, and the leaves are harvested by cutting the entire rosette at the base before the plant begins to flower. In mild climates, the plant can be considered a short-lived perennial, but more often it is grown as an annual.

In Puerto Rico it's called Recao

Purdue University has this on cultivation.

Although the plant grows well in full sun most commercial plantings occur in partially shaded moist locations. Shaded areas produce plants with larger and greener leaves that are more marketable because of their better appearance and higher pungent aroma. In a study on the effects of light intensity on growth and flowering of culantro, a significant delay in flowering and increased fresh weight of leaves were found in plants grown under 63% to 73% shade... Although culantro grows in a wide variety of soils, it does best in moist well drained sandy loams high in organic matter particularly under full light. 

Culantro will be a fun addition to this year's herb selection. Apparently there's no end to the info available.

In Asia, culantro is most popular in Thailand, Malaysia, and Singapore, where it is commonly used with or instead of cilantro for soups, noodle dishes, and curries. The Vietnamese use it to wrap other foods. Candied culantro seeds were popular in eighteenth-century Britain as a tonic, a cough remedy, and an aphrodisiac.

We're going to start our culantro seeds in a portable microgarden just like we did the agretti last year...

 

The growing medium is damp peat and coir with a little perlite, to ensure wicking.

On go the agretti seeds,

followed by a gentle tucking in + plastic greenhouse

Starting Seeds: My Favorite Heirloom Seed Catalogue

The Baker Creek Heirloom Seed catalogue is one of my favorites. I await its arrival in the mail each year and then spend hours viewing the beautiful heirloom vegetables, fruits, herbs, and flowers. It’s amazing that these seeds come from more than 70 different countries!

Jere and Emilee Gettle, a 30-something couple, own and operate this unique seed company and are passionate about wanting to preserve heirloom seeds so that future generations can grow healthy, pure, nutritious food. When Jere was a child he took a strong interest in gardening. At 17 he launched his first seed catalog, consisting of 70 different seeds. Today his catalogue boasts more than 1300 varieties!




In 2010 Jere and his wife purchased Comstock, Ferre & Co. in Wethersfield, Connecticut, the oldest continuously operated seed company in the US, dating back to 1820. Here’s a great video of Jere discussing the seed industry, how he collects his heirloom seeds, and the history of Comstock, Ferre & Co.

Here are some Baker Creek tomatoes we’ve grown... beautiful and tasty too! This year I’m going to focus on letting Little Green Girl save her own seeds. I hope it will teach her how important it is to save heirloom seeds for future generations and also how plants grow, die, and give life again.

Chocolate Stripe

Orange Flesh Purple Smudge

Black Cherry

Violet Jasper

Lastly, here’s a great video on everything you wanted to know about seeds and more. Enjoy!

Things You Don't See Everyday

This has been on my mind for some time; a waking nightmare.



Since this was made, in 2008, the numbers given in the video have at least doubled.  Maybe more depressing is that Mr. Hopey Changey himself is leading a bipartisan charge toward war with Iran.  What passed for an anti-war movement disappeared once a "D" became president.  "Savage Mules", indeed.

Putting seeds in the ground seems like such a small counterweight to all this, but it gives me a bit of hope.

Starting Seeds: Is Broccoli Worth it for Small Garden?

In our continuing seed conversation, Debbie writes: Have you grown broccoli? It takes an awful long time and takes up a lot of space no?

 DeCicco broccoli

from Seed Savers 

(48-85 days)

The Green Goliath below takes about 60 days. But I'd argue there's a big reason to grow broccoli that nobody discusses: it's a rock star of an edible teaching moment. The summer the photo below was taken we had a bunch of kids visit the roof. Without fail, seeing broccoli growing was the highlight of these visits.

"Really? It grows like this?" so many asked, as if we'd glued on the flowering stems.

My advice: grow broccoli in a SIP like we did below. Watch it thrive and watch kids get turned on to growing.

From this June 17, 2009 post...
I'm trying something new this year: overplanting a SIP that's finished hosting its original veggie. Here's the broccoli Green Goliath (with my pal Trish)...

...harvested and re-seeded with Climbing Emperor beans. These we hope will climb the arches Art designed. I didn't add fertilizer, reckoning that there might be enough remaining.

 

Starting Seeds: Seed Catalogs and Dr Terry Wahls

 Matador spinach

As predictably as sap rising in maples, right around this time of year gardeners we know get the itch to plan a garden, think about seeds, start seeds, swear they won't buy any more seeds...and then order seeds.

Even though, uh, they have a great big messy tray filled with many varieties of seeds from previous years.

How lucky are we.

A scant 15 minutes after emailing Debbie regarding seeds for 2012 and why we were both going to try to use up old seed instead of buying new, I was entering my credit card number at Bountiful Gardens. Look at this aztec spinach and tell me you would have done otherwise.

I don't buy much of anything except good food and good shoes. And I can't imagine a better way to spend $20 (OK, $27).  A lot of my order was spent on greens I've not tried before.

Here's my rationale, and if you can't sit through this vid (Minding Your Mitochondria--and FYI mitochondria are the tiny power plants inside your cells), just know that Dr Terry Wahls reversed her multiple sclerosis by essentially eating mountains of greens and other real food (including some of the calorie crops we don't grow but probably should).



After ordering, I went looking for seeds saved from last year's plants plus seed purchased in the last few years. As though blown by a stiff wind, they seemed to have scattered themselves everywhere.

In the roof greenhouse: harvested seed in paper bags and the agretti still on its stem. Plus some random seed heads stuffed into a bucket.

 

On our second floor I ran into a cache of seeds for cool-weather planting, set aside after starting the indoor greens last fall (plus some Jimmy Nardello seeds).

Downstairs in my gardening closet (aka, my closet) I found last year's warm-weather seeds--tomato, peppers, eggplant, and herbs.

 

Seeds, everywhere.

Starting Seeds: How to...

Food, Finance, and Force

I think it was in 2004 that I first read a Stan Goff essay; from the beginning I was drawn to the everyday language he uses to make connections between the seemingly disparate threads of growing food, war, autonomy, and patriarchy.  I could also relate to his change of heart regarding a formerly unexamined hyper masculine "career".  For the past several years he has been writing about the links between systemic, non-partisan, economic/political issues and growing food.  Don't let the unappetizing title of his latest, "The Roles of Food, Finance, and Force in US Foreign Policy", put you off.

Here's an excerpt:

The belief in a conspiratorial view of history seems to me to be a psychological reaction to the fear of chaos. If the world is not as one would like it, at least a conspiratorial view of history suggests that history as a process is still subject to human control, and that once we wrest control from the unjust conspirators, the world can be made right again.

This unpredictability, this sense of instability that compels some of us to reach for order in chaos with a history of conspiracy, ironically, has been produced by the current political milieu, one wherein neoliberalism has disembedded economies from local control and re-embedded them in national and transnational institutions, and those institutions are themselves now experiencing a loss of control in the face of unanticipated changes.

Click on through to read the rest.

He is also a part of Insurgent American.

Insurgent American is a practical strategic resource.  What does that mean?

Let’s start with strategy. Strategy for what? In our case, for social change that emphasizes the practical and the non-violent. We believe that Grand Strategies are an illusion, a distraction, a waste of valuable resources, the most valuable being time.

Instead we suggest that practical, local solutions are the key to deep changes in our built environment, our natural world, our cultures and societies. So instead of top-down strategies, we believe in the strategic imperative, which is aimed at a process and not a target.

A strategic imperative might be “grow your own food.” No reason to manage how people do it; that is better decided by those on the ground, and it’s different in different places. No reason to monitor, oversee, or direct.

Note that the above strategic imperative is practical, not ideological.

On the other hand, we believe that people need to relate their activities not just to local conditions, but to a larger milieu. Macroanalysis, then, is essential to contextualize our actions and priorities. In other words, we need good intelligence to make good decisions… intelligence in the military sense. Information that is organized into a coherent account of relationships and processes.

So we link to and provide original analysis, and its essential counterpart, synthesis. Hey, if you want to take it apart, then you better be willing to put it back together.

One of the owners of the site is a practicing, if heterodox, Christian. We have also included various analyses and exigeses of biblical topics that relate to our current epoch. His outlook is radical (from the roots), anti-authoritarian, and pacifist.

IA will not confine itself to its own definitions, because that would be the tail wagging the dog. Anything that qualifies as intellectual ammunition may be subject to post.

Enjoy Insurgent American, and make positive changes in your community.