June 2016 – Fleur-de-Blog

Sometimes gardening in a yard—whether it is a city plot or several acres—is overwhelming.

Don’t throw in the trowel just yet. Try a grow box.

Basil Box

Last summer, in the Ag Progress Days high tunnel, Master Gardeners grew gardens in EarthBoxes. Our beverage box garden included lemon verbena, stevia, and chocolate and pineapple mints. Our south-of-the-border box featured chili peppers, basil and cilantro. Our Scarborough Fair box was planted with parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme. Last summer and this, we offered classes on how to build your own self-contained growing system. Last winter, I babysat two of our EarthBoxes and was rewarded with fresh herbs all winter long.

I mentioned to Richard that I was going to be sad to see the Master Gardener EarthBoxes go. Before I knew it, a large package arrived in the driveway and I was the proud new owner of my very own EarthBox™ Gardening System. It comes ready to assemble, with container, potting mix, fertilizer, wheels, watering tube, screen, and instructions. The beauty of the box is that plants are bottom watered, and the water reservoir only needs to be refilled about once a week. Each EarthBox™, by the way, is made in the USA, and the company is headquartered in Lancaster, PA. Check it out at www.earthbox.com

As fate would have it, a mini-tornado blew the plastic off our Master Gardener high tunnel in February, so I am still babysitting the MG herb boxes. That gave me the luxury of making my EarthBoxes Basil Boxes, also known as portable pesto pocket gardens. One has a mix of Genovese and Salad Leaf basils. The other is dedicated to Salad Leaf basil, nothing else. I had the benefit of seeding the boxes long before I could plant outside and giving the basil babies a good start inside. When the weather warmed up, I moved the boxes outside. It wasn’t until yesterday that I set my horizons beyond pesto and realized I had a living, breathing, fragrant, self-contained, appetizer and cocktail oasis. Here’s the story:

We were invited to a party. The host and hostess supplied dinner and drinks. Guests were to bring appetizers or desserts. A lot of gardeners were invited to the party, so I wanted to bring something fresh, and easy. We found just the thing. We bought bamboo picks at Wegmans, as well as a container of mozzarella “pearls”. At Friday’s Farmers Market, we spotted multi-colored cherry tomatoes just harvested from a local a high tunnel. We slid a mozzarella pearl on the mini-skewer, then threaded one end of the Salad Leaf basil leaf, pierced a cherry tomato, wrapped the other end of the basil leaf up and looped it onto the pick, and then added another mozzarella pearl. They are lovely to look at—a simple salad on a stick.

Salad on a Stick

With such easy preparation, we had time for an afternoon jaunt. We went to Tait Farm’s Summer Cocktails sampling with April Myers from Spat’s Café and Speakeasy in State College. I had never imbibed basil—until yesterday. April made MayBerry Cocktails and Sour Cherry Smash, both featuring basil as a muddling ingredient and even, as an infusion into vodka. I’m seeing my old friend basil in a whole new light. One basil box for pesto, the other for cocktails and salad sticks? Laurie Lynch

MayBerry Cocktail

½ oz. Tait Farm Strawberry Shrub

1 ½ oz. Basil-infused Vodka

Strawberries

Basil leaves

Ice

Club Soda

Muddle a strawberry and a basil leaf with the Strawberry Shrub. Add ice, vodka, and stir. Strain into a rocks glass filled with ice. Top with club soda. Garnish with a strawberry and basil leaf.

Garden Poppy

For other recipes or to order Tait Farm Shrubs, check out www.taitfarmfoods.com

Garlic Mustard Update: I pulled as much as possible, and keep working at it. Just so you know we have a few pretty things growing, I took photo of a blooming poppy.

The Not-So Secret Garden Update: The firepit continues to be a go-to hotspot for evening conversation and contemplation.

Richard’s Firepit

Written on Slate: “I live in the garden. I just sleep in the house.”

What is it about guys and chainsaws?

I can understand resurrecting your grandfather’s secret garden, increasing the size and height of the fire pit, and clearing fallen trees. I appreciate creating focal points with sculptures that Nonno chiseled many, many years ago in an art class. I respect the need for mood lighting, a nook to stack firewood, and a few gnomes.

But what about the garlic mustard?

I swear I patiently explained the need to pull the dastardly weed popping up in every flowerbed that skirts the house and the woods that surround the yard. I actually demonstrated at the pond garden, bagging the pesky plants, suffocating them in black plastic.

First-year plants

Alliaria petiolate, aka garlic mustard, is a vigorous biennial. To a garlic lover, there is a certain attraction to garlic mustard. Crush the stems or leaves, and you smell that delicious garlic fragrance. That’s probably why it was brought from Europe to Long Island, NY, shortly after the Civil War. But the plants invaded the northeast and headed west, forming dense colonies, crowding out forest trilliums, trout lilies, wild ginger, native orchids, and even oak seedlings. Garlic mustard also inhibits beneficial soil fungi, damaging the forest ecosystem. The plants survive and thrive in wet or dry soil, shade or sun, and deer don’t like to eat them, so they run rampant.

The first year, garlic mustard looks like an innocent rosette of round-toothed leaves. That is also when it is said to be tastiest. But EARLY in the second year, March and April, it shoots up erect flowering stems with white, four-petal flowers. If garlic mustard is in or beyond the flowering stage when you first notice it, pull it out, root and all, bag, and dispose of it. If left undisturbed, each flower could produce a needle-like capsule filled with hundreds of seeds.

A dangerous tree was leaning precariously into the yard. Out came the chainsaw. So proud of the sacking of a giant locust tree, Richard found the tape measure—100 feet tall—and took a picture to post on Facebook.

So what about the garlic mustard?

He had a job at a local brewery. He is his Nonna’s almost-constant companion. He prepares lunch and often dinner. He takes his Nonna for nightly cruises down College Avenue and back on Beaver so the 87-year-old social butterfly can “see if there is anything going on.” He goes to the post office and supermarket, making my work day shorter. The chainsaw went into the repair shop. I had hope.

Then we got the darn rain. More rain. And more rain. He had a tonsillectomy. He was out of the labor force for two weeks. The sun came out.

The garlic mustard went to seed.

Needle-like seedpods

If breaking a mirror is seven years of bad luck, garlic mustard going to seed easily matches that. Estimates are that each plant produces up to 8,000 seeds. When they ripen in mid-summer, the pods eject the seeds several feet from the stem. Those seeds can live in the soil for five to seven years.

Garlic mustard is considered an invasive plant from Maine to Washington State. At a nature preserve in Wisconsin, they hold annual Garlic Mustard Pull-A-Thons. Monongahela National Forest in West Virginia has volunteers participate in a Garlic Mustard Challenge—Eat It to Beat It—is the slogan. Their goal for 2016 is disposing of 20,000 pounds of the plants. The Mid-Atlantic Invasive Plant Council has a website which offers recipes for Garlic Mustard Ricotta Dip or Stuffed Garlic Mustard Leaves. Why, some entrepreneurs even make an Invasive Weed Pesto out of batches of garlic mustard. If only I could get Richard interested in the culinary aspects of garlic mustard.

On the way to my asparagus patch, there it was: a colony of garlic mustard surrounding a tall spruce where I rest my shiitake logs. I started yanking, piling the fallen soldiers into a bag without remorse, yanking some more. Finally, I could see the trunk of the tree. Where were my shiitake logs?

The Chainsaw-He-Man struck again. My two 4-foot tall shiitake logs were turned into four 2-foot-long campfire logs, with just the buzz of a chainsaw. Please, what about the garlic mustard? Laurie Lynch