Garden lettuces

It’s been such a fast and furious spring that the flip switch from scarcity to overload is hitting on Memorial Day. For the last 10 days, I’ve been harvesting a little arugula, some tiny snippets of lettuces, a small radish or two every evening. But I can tell that by the first days of June, the garden is going to be teeming with greens ready for eating. All at once, I’ll be looking for takers. Not everyone qualifies, though. My criteria is that the recipient handle with care — no bruising the leaves, no overloading the salad with too many ingredients, no heavy, sweet, or (horrors) bottled dressings.

I like my vinaigrettes on the spicy side — almost equal parts white wine vinegar and olive oil (my new favorite is Olio Carli from Liguria) with salt, pepper, and plenty of  tarragon or basil.  Drizzle lightly over arugula and other greens along with sliced radishes and those little Armenian cucumbers. The little black dress of salads.

And if you follow the rules,  you’re automatically in line for green beans –those skinny French filets — and black kale. We’ll see about the raspberries.

Maxibels are on order

With Michele Obama championing gardening, the weather suddenly turning (briefly) warm, and spring official, I finally got around to ordering seeds. It’s a gamble — not the seeds, really, but the balancing act that it takes to home garden. The unpredictable weather, my time, the right mix of plants, my back — will this be a good year for the garden? A bad one? Or, as is usually the case, mixed?

Hope springs eternal, every year, and I’ve sent in my order. Come by in late July for green beans and raspberries!!

The days of summer are getting away from me, and little time for blogging. Luckily, great food memories linger. Monday night at Gibbet Hill Grill in Groton is one of them.  Chef Richmond Edes went all out at the Farm-to-Fork dinner, creating fantastic food with vegetables from the new vegetable garden on the property and local meats, dairy and cheeses.

The striped bass with black trumpet mushrooms, honey-roasted heirloom tomatoes and sweet and hot pepper emulsion was great, and so was the duck with potato millefeuille, watermelon radishes, chard, and stewed Mayflower plums.

But my favorite was the assiette of summer vegetables — a gorgeous arrangement of raw and lightly pickled fennel, radishes, green and yellow beans, nasturiums and herbs with a little carpaccio of River Rock beef. Just what summer is made of!

Congratulations to Gibbet Hill, the Webber family, and their chef for an inspiring meal.

News came via email today that the Food Project, the Lincoln-based outfit that teaches disadvantaged youth in Lynn, Dorchester, and elsewhere how to grow vegetables and eat better, has been hit by the potato (and tomato) blight sweeping the Northeast. Most of us might know the Food Project from stands at local farmers’ markets. The market sales help support the program and give youth a connection between food and serving the public.

We’ve gotten complacent about our food, even the wonderful fresh produce at farmers’ markets. I hear people  complaining about prices,  taking for granted how difficult it is to farm, locally, sustainably. A disaster like this — only a few hundred of the 5,000 tomatoes expected will be sold this season — shows that growing food — and feeding people — is always a fragile enterprise.

The Food Project plans to grow more broccoli and carrots to compensate somewhat for its most popular crop. Buy those, I say. Good for you, good for them.

Raymond Gillespie, the chef-in-residence at Salumeria Italiana,  asked me the other day if I would like some asparagus starts. Of course I would, but would I? Asparagus is one of those crops that strikes fear into the heart of the amateur. Not because it’s hard to grow — it’s ridiculously easy. Buy one-year old starts, put them in and the next season, you’ll have asparagus. And the next, and the next, ad infinitum.

Lovely asparagus

But there’s that commitment issue. At least that’s what I thought when I started my garden longer ago than I want to reveal. “What if we move? What if I’m not here next year, or the year after that. What if I decide I hate gardening. What if we (then my boyfriend) break up. ” Asparagus somehow seems so permanent. Like marriage.

Considering that I have mint that I’ve been trying to get rid of for a couple of decades, it may be time to say yes to asparagus.  After all, the marriage stuck, so maybe the asparagus will, too. For me or for the next gardener in my plot.

As a long-time (if rather disorganized gardener), I offer a few tips for beginners:

1. Choose the seeds or seedlings you want and then prune the list by half. Gardening is back-breaking work, kids and spouses rarely follow through on promises to help, and investing in plants or seeds you can’t tend can be expensive and frustrating.
2. Remember that weather is the biggest factor and you can’t control it. Think about what grows well in New England’s climate. The reason for amusing anecdotes about spending three times as much growing a tomato as buying it is that New England is not Missouri or New Jersey – it doesn’t really have tomato weather. Some years you get lucky; other years, frost beats the harvest or rain washes out your crop. Grow them if you must, but also plan to frequent farmers’ markets where the experts have (usually) figured out how to work around Mother Nature.
3. Invest in what you and your family like. Lettuces, radishes, green beans, carrots and summer squashes do grow well, and you can easily keep those crops going for a good part of the summer and into the fall. Many herbs – tarragon, thyme, sage, oregano – are perennials and will come back for years. Blueberries and raspberries are also a good, long-term investment if you have room for the bushes or canes.
4. Ask questions at farmers’ markets or farm stands. Farmers are invaluable resources of knowledge, and most are happy to share what they know.
5. Plan to be organic, persistent, and eat what you grow. Gardening can be very rewarding, and there’s no reason to grow your own unless they’re the very best you can do.