Seed for Thought

Saturday’s mail brought the first of the season’s seed catalogs. And Saturday night it snowed. The snow was just a sugar coated dusting, but it was a reminder that winter is coming—eventually—because it is forecast to be as warm as 59F/15C by next Saturday.

But today is gray and very windy and below freezing, a perfect reason to lose myself for a little while in the seed catalog. Yes, yes, I know, the garden just finished up and James picked all the collards Friday and has them fermenting—collard kraut! It’s a thing!

My internet recipe searches told me collard kraut used to be very popular across the southern United States and some people say it is even better than sauerkraut. James has ours fermenting with some garlic and crushed red pepper. I’ll let you know how it comes out.

This is the first year I’ve ever grown collards in the garden, and they’ve been a great success. Not only did they grow well, but we enjoyed eating them too. The small leaves made it fresh into salads and as they got bigger they’d get sautéed with onions and eaten as a side dish or combined with other things like tofu scramble, lentil eggs, curry, or soup. The variety I grew was “yellow cabbage” and came from a Minnesota seed company called North Circle Seeds. I asked James whether he liked the collards enough to grow them again next year, and he said that while it took him a little while to figure out how to use them and get used to cooking with them, he did indeed like them and we should definitely grow them again. Noted!

I also grew Swiss chard for the first time this year and we liked that too. I grew “bright lights” and the plant stalks and leaf vein colors ranged from golden yellow to bright red. We generally ate the leaves while they were small, chopped up in salads, which added some lovely color. The bigger leaves sometimes ended up in a stir fry. This will also make it into next year’s garden. Yum!

It’s sunchoke digging time! I dug up the first bowl Saturday afternoon just from one small area in the chicken garden. There are sunchokes in the chicken garden because last year I was silly enough to plant two roots along the outside of the chain link fence thinking—actually I don’t know what I was thinking. At the end of last season I dug up half a bowl of huge roots and thought, there, I’ve got them all. Yeah, right.

This year I had even more sunchokes growing along the fence outside and inside the chicken garden. So I dug and I dug and I didn’t worry about pulling out runner roots I came across because I am sure in spring I will discover that they have spread even more.

The sunchoke patch in the main garden is enormous. There will be more bowls to come as James has time to preserve them and I have time to dig and as long as the ground is not frozen. In spring when the ground thaws I will be able to dig up more, and there will be more, because I will find out as they pop up where all the runner roots have gone to this growing season. It’s a good thing we like them.

My turn for Reaping What She Sows: How Women are Rebuilding Our Broken Food System by Nancy Matsumoto came up on Friday. So far I’ve read the first chapter, “Black Mutual Aid, From the Rural South the Urban Northeast,” and it is fantastic.

As with everything in U.S. history, Black farmers have been, and continue to be, discriminated against. You can read a very good and succinct history in this September 2019 Atlantic article (gift link), The Great Land Robbery: The shameful story of how 1 million black families have been ripped from their farms.

Matsumoto tells pieces of this history in her storytelling about a number of women farmers who have created cooperatives, training and helping Black farmers acquire land, seed, and fair prices through a cooperative distribution network. The women and their stories are inspiring and full of lessons on how to support regenerative farming outside a white-supremacist agri-capitalist system.

Matsumoto is familiar with cooperatives. Her Japanese grandparents were interred during World War II and her grandfather helped create a cooperative network in the internment camps. This network became the second largest consumer co-op in the United States. Given the political and economic situation in the United States currently, I suspect we will be seeing more cooperatives and mutual aid societies popping up all over the country in the coming years.

Throughout history women have been the seed keepers, carefully saving and preserving seeds from season to season and generation to generation. A few years ago I read a wonderful novel called The Seed Keeper by Diane Wilson. It is the story of a current day Dakota woman who is gifted a cache of seeds saved by her ancestors when they ran from being attacked by U.S. troops. It is a story of healing and renewal. I was reminded of this novel while reading the first chapter of Reaping What She Sows because one of the women she profiles is a seed keeper and works for Truelove Seeds, an heirloom seed company that offers culturally important seeds.

Of course I had to look at their offerings, and wow! If you want to read more about the company, The Sierra Club has a great article about them, The Preservation of Culture Begins With a Seed I am definitely going to try and grow green striped cushaw squash! And they also have Korean hong-gochu peppers so I can make kimchi and even collard-chi next year.

The next chapter of the book is about rebuilding the grain economy. Looking forward to learning even more!

While I am on the subject of seeds, I have been a fan of Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds and bought seeds from them many times through the years. But in the last few months I’ve found out that as wholesome as they advertise themselves to be, this is not the case. In 2019 they invited a white supremacist to speak at their spring planting festival. After much uproar, they uninvited him, but issued no statement of apology or anything that I was able to discover. I have also heard that they steal seeds from indigenous peoples and then rename them and don’t acknowledge where they really came from, though I am unable to find direct confirmation of that. However, just last year the tomato they had on the cover of their catalog turned out to be a recently released GMO variety they sold as non-GMO. They said their seed came from France and they tested it and the results were inconclusive. Nonetheless, they pulled it from their stock and destroyed all the seeds.

Along with just discovering Truelove Seeds, I learned a few months ago about Native Seed Search and there is also Bertie County Seeds I just found out about. I generally buy seeds from Fedco who tell you exactly where the seeds come from (corporate grower, independent farmer, etc) and also credit and pay indigenous communities for their seeds. There is also Seed Savers Exchange. And then, as I mentioned earlier, North Circle Seeds, a small independent Minnesota seed company that sells varieties that will grow in my climate.

I guess I am getting a lesson in seed keeping and seed companies that I hadn’t thought much about before. Seeds are more than hybrid, open-pollinated, heirloom, GMO, organic. It’s important to know their origins and to make sure the people who have stewarded them are acknowledged and compensated. For some reason I always believed this was the case, but it turns out to be otherwise.

#collardKraut #collards #cooperatives #firstSnow #NorthCircleSeeds #seedCatalogs #seedKeepers #seedSaving #seeds #sunchokes #swissChard #TrueloveSeeds

My #cosmos & #sunchokes are still blooming daily 😀

#Bloomscrolling #florespondence #gardening #plants #botanical #nature #DroughtResistant #Wsanec #Saanich #VictoriaBC #YYJ #Zone8 #VancouverIsland #VanIsle #PacificNorthwest #Cascadia #PNW #flowers #FallFlowers

Eat Your Weeds

Hello friends, it’s been a minute. When it’s between the garden and sitting down to write a post about the garden, the garden wins every time. Priorities!

Everything but for a few still too small to plant out perennials started from seeds is finally planted, which means the work has shifted to harvesting and maintenance. And wow, is there a lot of maintenance to do thanks to fairly regular rainfall and the occasional blast of heat. It’s a good thing we like to eat our weeds in this house! I use weeds broadly here since I have feral arugula all over, walking onions all over, sochan (aka yellow cone flower) in abundance, also violets, nettles, and actual plants considered weeds—lamb’s quarters, wood sorrel, and creeping bellflower. So many spring greens for salads and stir fries, soups and pasta. 

The newest weed to the edible lineup is the creeping bellflower. I have it growing all over underneath the apple trees in the front yard. When it first appeared many years ago I didn’t know it was an invasive weed. I’ve seen it in yards all around town and it gets pretty purple flower stalks on it. Since I was having trouble getting plants to grow in the shade beneath the apples trees, I let it do its thing. For several years. And then I learned what a horrible weed it is.

It spreads by seed and roots and once it is established, it is impossible to get rid of unless you manage to remove every last bit of root. I no longer allow it to flower, and the stalks are easy to pull out, but pulling out the stalks doesn’t hurt the plant because of the insidious roots lurking everywhere.

Last fall, I learned the stuff is edible, both greens and roots. So why not give it a try since I have plenty? The roots are not big and are harder to get at than I expected. I probably spent about 30-45 minutes digging around for a kind of small payoff. I also picked greens. James, ever the trooper, sautéed the roots and greens along with some nettle, arugula, walking onion, and seitan and we had them for dinner over mashed sunchokes (I can at this point, count these as garden weeds too). I don’t think I will ever grow potatoes again because mashed sunchokes turn out to have a potato-y flavor, though they aren’t very starchy so lack a bit of “fluff.” If you want to learn all about sunchokes, I just listened to an episode of a new to me podcast today (The Poor Prole’s Almanac), Exploring the Many Names and Tales of the Sunchoke.

Our patch of wild ginger has also grown pleasingly large, and I dug up one of the little roots for the first time to try in the dinner. Wild ginger is native to North America and loves the shade. It is not the big rooted tropical ginger you buy at the grocery. These roots are small—rhizomes actually—and they do have a mild ginger flavor that is kind of earthy with a hint of pepper. You may have heard that wild ginger is toxic. Well yes, it does contain a toxin. However, I’d have to eat a whole lot of it, like a pound or more, for it to have any sort of affect, and really, that’s not going to happen. Everything in moderation!

So how did it all taste? Delicious!

If things keep on as they have been, it is going to be a banner year for black raspberries! I am so very excited. After the drought a few years ago they really suffered and have been making a slow climb back to fruitful. Well, it looks like this year they have made it! My mouth is watering in anticipation.

The cherries are doing well too. And, I’m afraid I am going to jinx it, but it appears I will be getting plums this year! There are quite a few that have reached olive size already. I am over the moon about this. Please think good plumy thoughts!

The chokeberries are also covered in little green fruit. And the clove currant likewise. I have two freezer bags full of rhubarb. Nom nom nom! My heart is so happy! And my mouth will be too.

The roses are covered in flowers at the moment. I picked a jar of petals, some petals from the two peony flowers that bloomed this year, and thawed out the rose hips I put in the freezer and forgot about last fall. James then undertook to make jam. I had rose jam on toast with some spiced chai for an afternoon snack. Divine!

The chickens are always disgruntled about not being allowed in the big garden, but they are quite pleased that we moved the compost bins out next to the coop. Sia especially loves to climb on top and mine for gold. When I am out in the garden she alternates between the compost bin and standing at the gate complaining loudly. Sometimes she stands on the compost pile, looks at me over the fence, and complains. But she can’t help but like me because we’ve got a treat thing going.

When I find a beetle, grub or cutworm I carry it over to the gate and yell chickens! in a sing songy voice. Sia rockets over from wherever she may be because she knows there is a treat at hand. Because of her bouffant, she can’t look up to see me drop the bug, but stands at the gate looking down at the ground in front of her. I drop the bug and she sees it when it hit the ground—most of the time—and gulps it down. It’s only Sia who comes running to the gate when I call. I’ve tried calling her by name but she doesn’t respond. Clearly I’ve established a recognizable treat call and I am now required to stick to it. Chic-ken!

Today I played garden statue while a young robin hopped around near me looking for insects. He must be able to hear them under the ground because he never scratched like the chickens do, but would hold still then stab his beak into the ground and pull out a cut worm or earthworm. It was pretty amazing to watch and I felt so honored that he hunted around for quite some time while I stood just a few feet away.

A week or so ago I was eating dinner and looking out the sliding glass door into the garden when a big crow swooped through with something in their claws and landed on my neighbor’s garage roof. That’s when I got a good look at what the crow had—a baby rabbit! I briefly felt bad for the rabbit, but then was glad there will be one fewer of them testing my anti-rabbit garden defenses. Soon there were a two other crows wanting to enjoy some rabbit and a bird—possibly a robin—who began dive bombing the crows trying to get them to leave. It was all a big ruckus. Finally the crow with the rabbit decided they had had enough and took off with their dinner, followed by the other crows and the poor parent bird, who obviously had a nest in the tree next to the garage, could relax.

When I mentioned the ruckus to someone the next day he was surprised to learn that crows eat meat. And then he was upset about the crow eating a baby rabbit. He said he found it disturbing when animals eat other animals (clearly he didn’t grow up watching nature shows on TV or reading nature books). I said, well you are an animal and you eat other animals and don’t find that disturbing so why would you be bothered by other animals eating each other? From the look he gave me I had clearly just rocked his world. Finally he managed to mutter, well I never thought of it like that before.

Speaking of crows, we have three adolescents hanging around. They were all in the maple tree squabbling but they didn’t have their grown up crow voices yet and James and I had to look up the tree to see who was making the noise. And then we laughed and laughed. Their voices are now starting to change. Sometimes they manage a big crow caw before their adolescent voice takes back over. It’s like when boys hit puberty and their voices change, only it’s crows, and it is utterly delightful.

That’s it for today. I will try to catch up with all the kind comments folks have left on previous posts as soon as I can!

Reading

So many good books!

• The Message by Ta-Nehisi Coates. An important book everyone should read, especially the long final essay on Palestine and Jim Crow.
• One Day Everyone Will Always Have Been Against This by Omar Al Akkad. Another important book everyone should read. And also be sure to listen to his interview on the Between the Covers podcast.
• Salvage: Readings from the Wreck by Dionne Brand. A sort of reading autobiography and literary criticism of what it’s like to be Black and taught racist white imperial literature in school. She does a deep dive into Oroonoko, Robinson Crusoe, and Mansfield Park. There is also a Between the Covers podcast interview with Brand about her book.
• The Lost Soul by Olga Tokarczuk, illustrated by Joanna Concejo. Everyone moves so fast in today’s world that we lose our souls because they are not able to keep up with us. Soulless, we try to fill the void with other things. In this story, a man slows down long enough for his soul to find him again.

#arugula #creepingBellflower #crows #nettles #roseJam #sunchokes #walkingOnions #weeds #wildGinger

@MCDuncanLab
I'm hoping there's some of those sunchokes you gave me among all these weeds!
And also hoping they can stand a lot of competition!

#gardening #sunchokes #eatwhatyougrow #eattheweeds #permaculture

Pumped

Heat pumped that is! Oh friends, I have been so busy with the garden and all the things. Two weeks ago we had a heat pump installed. It was a good time to do it because the contractor wasn’t busy, it was neither cold nor hot outside, and our 25-year-old central air conditioner unit and just as old gas furnace were close to end-of-life but hadn’t died yet so we had time to shop and choose. We are now efficient and all electric. The heat pump will both cool and heat our house through the existing duct system. In Minnesota we are required to have backup heating because when temperatures get close to zero fahrenheit, the heat pump probably won’t be able to keep the house warm enough, so we had an electric furnace installed. Expensive, but we also got a significant discount between power company rebates, city rebates, and federal tax credits (won’t get the tax credit until we file next year, but it will be awesome).

The weather has been so mild the heat pump has yet to turn on to cool the house. There is a whole-house fan as part of the install and we have that running, recirculating the air throughout the house. Which means the cooler basement air gets redistributed. We are looking at a brief heat wave, however. Today through Wednesday we are expecting temperatures close to 90F/32C. So at some point the house will warm up enough for the heat pump to turn on. It will be so much quieter than our giant air conditioner roaring away.

Friday was the huge Friends School Plant Sale. James and I make an annual event of it. We were out the door around 6:30 in the morning to bike over to the State Fair Grandstand in St Paul and pick up our wristbands for entry. We got group 15. I think last year we were group 11. After we got our wristbands, we biked back across the Mississippi River to Minneapolis to have breakfast at one of our favorite places—Seward Cafe. We hadn’t been there since before the pandemic. They are cooperatively owned and they closed during the pandemic and didn’t re-open until last year with limited hours and menu. So for the past several years we’ve been enjoying plant sale breakfast at Hard Times Cafe, also really good. But it was great to be bak at Seward enjoying a super green tofu earth breakfast with a bottomless cup of coffee.

Fueled and overly caffeinated, we biked back to the fairgrounds to await our group entry. We found a shady place to sit and enjoyed watching rabid gardeners and the wheeled contraptions they had put together. A lot of just plain wagons, but others had DIY carts with multiple shelves on which to put flats of plants. Then there was the person who just had two of those giant blue Ikea bags. James and I each had a box that fit inside the crate baskets on our bikes. My list was only a page long—quite short compared to years past.

We waited about an hour and a half before our group was called in. It only took us about 30 minutes to get what we wanted and another 10 minutes to get through the checkout line. Then we carefully packed the taller plants in my side pannier, and the rest went into James’ rear basket and my front basket. Here is what we got:

• Jostaberry (fruit bush, gooseberry-black currant cross)
• Serviceberry, variety Honeywood (fruit tree)
• Rosy sedge (native perennial)
• English thyme (culinary herb)
• Wild boneset (perennial medicinal herb)
• Lady fern (native perennial)
• Wild lion’s foot (native perennial)
• Wild pearly everlasting (native perennial)
• Betony (perennial medicinal herb)
• Black cohosh (native perennial, also medicinal)
• Wood poppy (native perennial)
• Adam’s needle yucca (native perennial)
• Jalapeño pepper 4-pack (since my seeds didn’t germinate)
• Tomatillo, variety tomate verde (never grown them before so trying it out)

Everything except for the peppers and tomatillo are planted and those two will go in next weekend if it doesn’t suddenly turn cold on the other side of this heatwave, which it totally could!

Meanwhile, I’m working at hardening off all the indoor seedlings. We had an unfortunate gusty wind day last week and the row cover fabric I was using to protect all the squash starts partially blew off and four of the squashes were burned to a crisp. So, starting those over again. I don’t technically need to start the winter squash indoors, but I do to keep the critters from digging up and eating the seeds from the ground.

Yesterday evening when the sun was out of the garden, we started planting the onion seedlings. I don’t know what I was thinking back in February, but dang, I have a lot of onions! Well, I do know what I was thinking. I sowed the pots with fewer seeds than the year before and also planned on thinning them, which I did, to make them easier to remove from the pot and plant, which they are. But, to make up for fewer plants in a pot, I planted more pots. I’ve not counted, but we’ve probably planted close to 50 red summer onions and twice as many sweet yellow storage onions. Even if only half of all of them produce onions we can eat, that is still a lot of onions. Good thing we love onions in this house.

The garden peas for shelling are all sprouting up strong as are the purple snap peas. The collards, radishes, non-heading broccoli, parsley, chard, cilantro, and leafy greens are also at various points of sprouting. The carrots haven’t come up yet, but they take longer to germinate. Nonetheless, I’ll be seeding more carrots this evening along with more radish, some borage and non-bulbing fennel, and sunflowers.

Stevie, our North Star cherry tree, had a rough go of it their first year in the garden. They got a little rabbit chewed, and then last summer a fat squirrel decided to climb the spindly little branches and broke them. Poor Stevie went into last winter looking pretty much like a 6-foot tall stick. I was not confident that Stevie would survive, but they did! And they even bloomed, not a lot, but there were flowers. Yay!

The bush cherries had a gorgeous bloom. They are currently thigh high and will eventually be about two meters tall. The thing I like about the bush cherries is that their fruit tends to be inside the bush, hiding beneath leaves, making it more difficult for birds and squirrels to get at, which means I get most of them.

Professor Plum also put on a gorgeous display and is still going, though clearly winding down. The Professor was covered in blossoms last year too but didn’t produce a single plum. But I think is was a weird plum year because the plum tress I usually forage from blossomed extravagantly and didn’t produce any plums either. Hopefully this will be a plum year and I will taste the first ever plum from the Professor.

The clove currant is currently covered in yellow flowers. The red currant, who joined the garden last year, is not flowering, but I am not surprised since they aren’t even as tall as my knee. The aronia is covered in white flowers and my mouth is already anticipating their earthy fruit in oatmeal and pancakes. The honeyberries are looking lovely and will hopefully find it within themselves to produce more than four berries this year.

One of the two gooseberries partially died over the winter and will need to be pruned and spend the next year recovering, but the other gooseberry is flowering. The black raspberries are leafing out and looking fantastic.

The highbush cranberry, who joined the garden last spring, is almost knee high, too small yet to flower, but is looking healthy. The mulberry tree is just over knee high and leafing out nicely. The three goji berries I started last year from seeds all survived the winter to my surprise and delight. They, like all the others, are about knee high. And Marlon, the peach is about two meters tall and leafing out nicely. Will they blossom? I’ll let you know!

The rhubarb is huge and I have a full freezer bag already. The second rhubarb, planted two years ago, is doing well and has decided to flower. I’m going to try and save some seeds and see if I can get them to germinate. One can never have too much rhubarb.

Oh, and the peony has flower buds on it! This is actually a big deal. I moved them from their previous location last spring because they hadn’t flowered in a couple of years and now it appears I am going to be rewarded for finding them a happier location. I’m also itching to try peony flower jelly. We’ll see if I get to do that this year.

We’ve been enjoying early spring greens—sochan, violets, curly dock, and feral arugula/rocket, as well as green onions. Also, sunchokes. So many sunchokes. I have not been aggressive enough digging them up these past couple of years and they have taken advantage. I have dug up enough to fill a 5-gallon bucket and they are still coming up in unwanted places! James has been adding sunchokes to meals when he can. He even made sunchoke soup, which was so delicious! He also made a sunchoke and lentil dal, also delicious. We are going to be tired of sunchokes before we manage to eat a 5-gallon bucket’s worth, so we are looking at ways to preserve them to enjoy through the summer.

Non-gardening related. Last weekend James and I volunteered at a fundraiser for Interfaith Coalition on Immigration (ICOM). It was a dinner fundraiser held at the multi-faith building where the Buddhist sangha James and I attend meets. The building is home to Buddhists, United Church of Christ, a Catholic congregation, a Lutheran congregation, and a Baptist congregation. ICOM is a separate organization not affiliated with any of the congregations, but I believe they were invited to use our space for their fundraiser and we all provided the volunteers to help run it. I spent three hours bussing tables while James got to wash dishes. We were exhausted when we were done, but we had a good time, and ICOM raised more than their $20,000 goal to help asylum seekers and immigrants.

I hope your garden is growing and flowers blooming and you are finding time, energy, and strength to get out in the world and do good work. Until next week!

Reading

• Book: Bibliophobia by Sarah Chihaya. This is the dark side of loving books, when you wrap yourself in books in order to avoid facing up to severe depression, your entire identity is in books because you are hoping that you find the one that will eventually save you. A short, fascinating memoir about mental illness.
• Essay: Urban Legend: The Harebrained Myth of Urban Sustainability and Why You Should Bet on the Country Tortoise by Jason Bradford. Small is beautiful, the future is rural.
• Poem: As a Kid I Was Told, “Don’t Step on a Crack or You’ll Break Your Momma’s Back” by Karla Cordero
• Interview: How Manosphere Content Placates Disenfranchised Men, Meagan Day interviews Kristin R. Ghodsee. Boys and men are lost, but thankfully this article does not once imply that women are responsible for their being lost, nor are they responsible for saving them.
• Article: Worsening allergies aren’t your imagination. Didn’t need an article to tell me my allergies have gotten worse, but it’s nice to have confirmation about why.

Quote

“I was more and more fixated on the idea of life as narrative structure, and narrative structure as control. Both my belief in the immovable genre of my life—the suicide plot—and my belief in the fantastical possibility of being saved by the right book—the reading plot—were further enabled by the idea that I myself had become nothing but a text. It felt so important to be able to give a clear account of what was happening in it—to show up to a meeting with a colleague, or a drinks date with a friend, ready to deliver a neatly organized book report. I alternated between being someone who was forever at the mercy of plots I had no control over, and being someone who believed they knew exactly how those plots worked: in other words, between being a character and being a critic. Nowhere did I take responsibility for being my own author.”

~Sarah Chihaya, Bibliophobia, p195

#cherries #currants #FriendsSchoolPlantSale #gojiBerries #gooseberry #HardTimesCafe #heatPump #peachTree #ProfessorPlum #rhubarb #SewardCafe #sunchokes

I made Red Stew, which I named for the number of red ingredients. It turned out very tasty and certainly rates high on the healthful scale.

https://leisureguy.ca/2025/05/01/red-stew/

@vegancooking @wfpb
#food #recipe #WFPB #vegan #vegetarian #omnivore #health #tempeh #cooking #sunchokes #JerusalemArtichokes #kale

I just made an excellent stew that's high in inulin.

https://leisureguy.ca/2025/04/10/collards-sunchokes/

@vegancooking @wfpb
#food #recipe #WFPB #vegan #vegetarian #omnivore #health #tempeh #sunchokes #JerusalemArtichokes #cooking #stew