I'm writing from America, interested in planting some of these garden greens which are not very commonly grown here. I have found at least one site that sells seed for some of these (gourmetseed.com) and wondered if there were any European gardeners out there more fatmiliar with these plants of whom I might ask questions (things like 'is mache eaten raw or sauteed usually, or what?' or 'how do I blanch endive?', ...that sort of thing.) Anyone willing to play twenty questions with a slightly adventurous gardening Yank? Other than trying to find a source for radicchio, I haven't actually got any just yet, but I'm sure I will, and so just trying to line up some help for the future.
I haven't purchased seed yet. I'm trying to learn to grow a 4-season potagere if possible, and to learn more about the sort of greens and veggies one can cover with straw and/or leave in the ground and harvest at one'a leisure in the late fall and/or winter. (Did that make sense?) I'm in a 5b zone, and we get fairly cold winters here without the benefit of snow cover. Winter kill here usually means plants got parched and wind-beaten or heaved.
I'm in town, but have a nice, large yard with several gardening spots.
Melis
Any rocket, radicchio, frisee, mache growers?
Melissande, my impression is that mâche is eaten raw, as a salad green. One site says "It is a small green that grows in rosette-shaped bunches. It has dark green leaves on short stems. It has a distinct sweet taste taste—“the “mayonnaise of salad greens”. It is wonderful dressed simply with toasted walnut oil and a dash of good sherry vinegar."
I am in New Jersey but have visited France and admired the gardens there. I have a lot of varieties from gourmetseed, too, plus French tomatoes, beans, squash and peas. It's fun to experiment with different vegetables that we don't see much here. I too am trying to grow a 4-season potager; one of the most helpful books I've found is Georgeanne Brennan's "In the French Kitchen Garden." She does a very nice job of breaking crops down into seasons, with a simple but attractive set of diagrams, to show how that works. Elliot Coleman is good but he gives a lot of information and it's a bit hard to apply to a small home garden sometimes. He's an admirer of French gardens as well, though.
Here's the entrance to my garden, by the way....
Leslie
This message was edited May 25, 2009 7:09 PM
Ooh, real greenhouse! I'm very jealous. Beautiful sign too. Your garden looks very beautiful and very neat and organised. Mine's much more chaotic and spread all around. I'll see if I have a photo from last year, or one from this one of my raised beds and things. I'll have to get that first book, I've heard it mentioned before. Not the second one. Will have to research it.
Only been to France once, to celebrate something in an English friend's life. She lives near Angouleme. I got to spend a week there . in early April with her a few years ago. It was a lot hotter there than I expected--I brought a winter coat and needed shorts!!!
Thank you for your suggestions and willingness to reply. I'm glad to hear that gourmetseed.com is a good firm to deal with. Do you plant radicchio? I didn't see any at gourmetseed. Maybe I just need to look further?
Couldn't find a good pic of my own garden so here's one of my English friend who lives near Angouleme's garden.
Your friend's home is just wonderful; don't you adore that look? Where is Angouleme? The area I'm familiar with is south of Toulouse and Carcassonne; I have friends there whom we have visited with twice, and the first time we stayed in their second house for a couple of weeks; the second visit we used a gîte. I loved wandering around and looking at the gardens; they used space so well and were so attractive!
Another book with lovely photos that I got at the same time as Georgeanne Brennan's is "The Edible French Garden" by Rosalind Creasy. There's a section which includes some of Brennan's ideas there, and the two work well as companion volumes.
Here's a source for radicchio
http://hirts-gardens.amazonwebstore.com/Organic-Early-Palla-Rossa-Radicchio-250/M/B000YSREOS.htm?traffic_src=froogle&utm_medium=organic&utm_source=froogle
but I just noticed that Gourmet Seed International has it too; however, it's under Chicory - Head and Radicchio for some reason, and my first search for it on their site didn't turn anything up! I have never planted it; I did get some mâche last year but never got around to putting it in the ground. Maybe I should stick it in this year.
Your garden is probably more European-looking than mine, if you have raised beds and a lot of variety in the shape and arrangements. There's a thread here that you might want to look at; we kind of got off topic at the end, but basically it was about potagers with lots of photos and lots of inspirational ideas:
http://davesgarden.com/community/forums/t/968828/
Let me know how you make out!
Leslie
Yes..I cannot do without it. Every year I sow different salads including radicchio types, rocket types and mache. Radicchio, mache and rocket types can be eaten raw in salads with a warm or cold simple dressing based on good olive oil, (a good -wine/balsamic- vinegar), fresh garlic. Radicchio has a little bitterness. I like that a lot but it is not everyone's taste. You can fry it a few seconds in little good olive oil or good butter or very very short grilled next in a dish with a good steak or fish. Mache tastes soft, delicate. Its taste remembers me of rose petals. Even little children will love it to eat raw. Using only mache as a salad it needs (I find) a more delicate dressing with a little honey, a bit lemon juice and a softer oil, maybe some fresh grind black pepper. Over here in Netherlands it is traditional eaten with a egg. You can also give it warm dressing. You can ad it raw in mashed potatoes with some fried bacon for instance.
For rocket it goes the same..not everyone will like its spicy and nut taste. You can use it raw in salads or nearly raw or as a dress on pizza.
About the radicchio and rocket...I think this is more my (Italian?) way .. But..however..it is tasty and it can be used raw or sauteed, grilled (still a little crunchy though)...there are many possibilities and recipes for it.
In my climate raddichio types and mache are fairly hardy. In soft winters it is possible to grow them at least in late fall/early winter or late winter/early spring.
Thank you both! Very enlightening. I will post a few photos of my garden and compost bins. Doubt they look very 'euro'. heh.
This first one looks past my 'scarecrow' over my lettuce and radish bed to the bins.
this isanother part of our property where we have planted potatoes, tomatoes, basil and some pepperocini.
In this one you can see some of Don's hop vines. You can also see how close my neighbors are to me, and how near the alley is. This back section is only a small triangle. Where I'm standing there's 4 'teepee' shapes of bamboo for several kinds of beans.
Around the back triangle, in addition to Don's hops, my husband has also planted cucumbers for pickling, several beds of asparagus, as yet too small for harvesting (asparagus grows wild here), and also some rhubarb plants. I also have garlic and shallots tucked in here and there. In the first photo, the bed in the back of the photo is being readied for summer and winter squash and charentais melons. There's a lot of compost in there...
Leslie, if you locate Rochefort on the Atlantic coast, and Limoges, nearly due east of Rochefort, you're nearly there. Look between these two cities and a little down the map. It's a city with a wall around it, with a large church (or smallish cathedral) which now functions as the town hall and was a market town (and may still be for all I know!)It now has many broad, beautiful gardens, park areas and shopping areas where vehicles are banned.--M
Melissande, I love those raised beds! They look great. You're growing a nice variety of veggies, too. Are you using straw for mulch? We have a little salt hay, which I spread around the tomatoes, but we need to get more. I like salt hay because it doesn't have weed seeds.
Here are a couple of shots of my garden; this one shows the right side of the greenhouse, with raab and turnips in the foreground, a flower row and a fennel and a scorzonera row (I have no idea what to do with that last; it just sounded interesting!), and on the other side of the brick walk some spinach, lettuce, onions, and at the back a strawberry bed:
And then here's the other side, showing my summer squash, pepper plants (protected by paper cup rims), tomato tripods, and beyond them there are beans - one row of bush beans (Fin de Bagnol and Pelandron) and then one row of pole beans (Fortex) and a row of peas. Beyond that is a small orchard and then the chicken yard. The denser stand of trees in the farther distance used to be part of our sheep and goat pasturage but we don't raise larger animals anymore.
Behind me in these photos is more garden; on the left side we have asparagus, raspberries, cucumbers, cantaloupe, watermelon, and winter squash, and on the right side we have blackberries, carrots (which didn't come up very well so I resowed some), arugula, beets, chard, and I planted some cabbage seed but it turned out to be radishes instead. I'll resow those in the late summer hopefully for a fall crop.
We also have an herb section, with cilantro, French thyme, rosemary, sage, parsley and two kinds of basil. We keep the hot peppers there too, well away from the sweet variety; otherwise the seeds of the sweet peppers are hot!
This message was edited Jun 6, 2009 6:49 AM
Beautiful.
I have peas too, they're swarming over the scarecrow!
I have herbs too, but they are in a separate bed, actually attached to the house. didn't get a shot of it this year, but I think I;ve got one from last year I might stick on here...how does one use tripods for tomatoes?
I'm ashamed I don't have my squash etc. in yet. I spent the morning putting manure tea on my roses and found I had no energy to do anything by noon.
That's funny that your peas are swarming over your scarecrow! It's hard to see your herbs because of the shadows, but having them next to the house is a good idea. I tried that for a while, but there's too much shade by the porch and they didn't work well. I do have two planters with basil and parsley growing in them, by the steps; the extra height seems to get them a bit more sun.
If you look at the second photo, those tripods are for the tomatoes. You can see that there's a young plant at the base of each pole. This year I'm taking off all the branches below the first blossom, per a guide someone linked to on DG, so they'll be a bit leaner. I'm also using velcro tape to tie them up on the stake; last year I used some sort of plastic tape and this is much easier because you can undo it any time you like and reposition it as the plant grows.
Ooh, interesting! Always wanted to strip off the darned leaves anyway! Will be a fiendish delight trying that one!
My herb bed faces west so it gets blasted full-on with sun from about 11 am until well after 7, so its not so shady as it appears.
Here's a pic of the herb garden after the 2008 overhaul in April of that year. You can see it much better though there's also a lot less in it at this time.
That's nice, Melis! What all do you have in there? We just gathered some rosemary, thyme, sage and lavender from the garden to put in the smoker for a goose we're cooking. This is an experiment; we've never done a goose this way before. I'm hoping it will tenderize it a bit since free-range geese tend to be a bit tough.
Here's a link to the tomato pruning article I mentioned; I think it's really interesting:
http://www.finegardening.com/how-to/articles/pruning-tomatoes.aspx
the goose experiment should go well; can't think of a better way to cook a tough old bird than hours and hours of long, slow smoking. Might want a vast basin under the blamed bird to catch all the grease though! (and too bad you're not in France now, you could probably find someone to sell the grease to, for all that it *does* smell of woodsmoke! So many things you can use the stuff for. Goose grease is gold on a farm!)
I have a little smoker too, and like to do my birds that way too. Spatchcocking them is my favorite, since it cuts the cooking time in half even if I am smoking it.
What's in there...well, lots of flowers! You saw the cannas, also asian lilies, and mounds of candy tuft at each west corner, several different thymes, *love* thyme, both for how it grows and for how it tastes, rosemary, grape hyacinthes under the thyme, and some daffs, couple of sages and different...if I see an herb I don't usually grow, like terragon, I'll usually poke it in there too of a year, just to try it. Across from it there's also a little round bed I was going to do a Biblical garden in if I could, but it hasn't got too far. It suffered an early setback when the millstone that was to be its centerpiece slipped out of my hands and was sold to someone else (a-arg!) but there's some hyssop, wormwood, lilies, and various other things famously mentioned in the good book, far enough away from the herbs I don't need to worry about any green fairy effects from Ms Thujone. I need to replace my chives as they kicked the bucket last year. I brought them inside, then, during a prolonged illness when i stayed in bed and depended on husband to run the house, he forgot to water things and they and several other herbs died.
Currently there are three small holly bushes living in the back where the cannas were last year. They are waiting for a new spot somewhere else in the yard.
Actually the goose was a young one, but it was really delicious! Not much fat on a free-range goose, at least on our place. I do save goose fat, though, when it's not smoky; I have several little jars of it in the refrigerator. It's great with oven roasted potato wedges and rosemary, for one example. I have a bunch of French cookbooks and goose fat is often useful in those dishes.
What is spatchcocking?
You have a much more ambitious herb garden than I do!
I was thinking all those old traditional uses of goose fat, like making liniments for the livestock, greasing rusty hinges and such,...but you're right, it makes great eating too!
There are other names for spatchcocking, butterfly is what Americans call it most often, only in this case, I think spatchcock refers only to birds. You turn the whole bird over so it rests on its breast, then, taking some heavy-duty shears or a really sharp knife, you make two slices down each side of the backbone, all the way down to the tail and remove the backbone. then you have to do some dissecting to get down to the collarbone and 'keel' or breastbone cartilage, remove that so the breast meat lays flat (lazy cooks just break it, but then the breastbone remains and keeps the breast meat full and thick, so it doesn't get done in a timely fashion). You then turn your bird over, admire how neatly it lays for a minute, then you finish whatever preparations you're planning to do to it, rubs, marinades, etc and slap it onto the grill. Mostly one grills the skin first, to release the grease, then flip it over to the meat side. Barding it with bacon is always a good technique.I like the extra grease and sweet smoky flavor of American-style bacon.
Bird cooks amazingly quickly this way. If you examine is sideways while its laying on the grill you can easily ses why: it's about the thickness of a generously cut steak now,and pretty even all over, too.
Try it! I feel sure you'll like it this way. My birds, done like this, cook in about 45 minutes. Three flips, 15 min each, starting and finishing skin side down.--Melis
Never heard of spatchcocking! Sounds like an interesting way to do fowl, but wouldn't it work best on something that was very young and tender, which doesn't describe our birds at all?
I butterfly deer loin to make larger steaks out of a long thin piece but I haven't applied that to anything as complicated as a chicken!
I really enjoyed reading through this, and learned some new information. wonderful description of spatchcock. Thank you, to all of you.
It works on older birds as well, though the 45 minute technique might be too quick and hot for an older bird. Like working with cheaper meats, you just have to work with a slower, moister cooking technique if you think it's going to be tough. With older birds, if I want to flatten them I like to smoke them with an indirect cooking technique.
Not sure if these kinds of barbecue-smokers are common where you are or not, but we have these smokers, both big and small, that look like barrels turned on side, with a little box meant for the fire mounted on the side--a little separate firebox. The larger part has a thermometer, and you can add a small bowl of water to keep things moist, and barding comes in handy too. Smoking takes a lot longer, but the application of long slow moist cooking will unfailingly break down anything tough, and it flavors it nicely too.
We water-smoked one of our geese recently and were really pleased with the way it came out. Juicy, tender and delicious, and since they're usually a bit on the chewy side cooked in the oven, this was nice. Our water smoker looks like R2D2 from Star Wars, but it does a lovely job.
Hello all, after being a member for a while I just decided to explore some new forum(s). I don't know why I would not have looked at the European forum before... I live in Toronto Canada, but I garden mostly in Nova Scotia, Canada and the south of France. I have to tell you that mache is on of my favorite greens. It is also called corn salad and the best thing about it is that it is a cold season crop. In northern U.S. I would plant it sometime around the fitst of September. If you can protect it keep planting some seed until mid October. The rosettes tossed with a light vinegrette is a wonderful salad. Robb
What beautiful places to garden in, Robb! How do you manage that? And where in the south of France do you go.
I just planted some mâche and I'll see what it does for me. I was hoping to have a salad crop for the fall. Nice to hear such good things about it!
Leslie
I am from Nova Scotia and my wife is frim a small village between Pau and Toulouse. I have actually taken palm seed from montpellier, grown it in Toronto and then brought them back to France to plant in the garden. I love bringing interesting seed ant trees to my french uncle who is a farmer. He is always proud of the trees that he is growing, the trees that are canadian. Robb
I have never been to Nova Scotia but always wanted to travel there. We have friends in the Aude departement south of Toulouse and just love that area. When we go there we take an Air France flight into Toulouse but we don't know that city well. We've spent time in Carcassonne, though. I grow a lot of French varieties in my vegetable garden so I know how your uncle feels.
I am going to attach some photos from the property in NS. My daughter is now 10, so you can imagine that some things have matured. Many of the evergreen hedges have been removed and replaced with mixed borders of flowering shrubs. Almost everything has been started from seed or cuttings. Robb
This is what was the pasture... still grazing ground for the deer you might be able to see in the middle near the pines. I have planted many seedlings concentrating on producing a vista of different colours, shapes and textures. You can see the ocean at the top of the photo. The shore is about 50m from the tall spruce trees. R
This is the back of the house, a north-west exposure. R
This is a 10 year old photo of the southern side of the house... there have been many improvements. I will try to find a better photo. R
This is a recent photo of my backyard in Toronto. The yard is fill of saplings in pots. Many will go to NS, some to France, and the rest I will try to find a good home for. R
Robb, what a beautiful property that is! How do you manage to spend time there, in Toronto, and in France? And how do you get the potted plants to France? I can't imagine taking them on a plane.
Your daughter is adorable!
greenhouse_gal, I am lucky enough to work in the field of education... so about 13 wks holiday a year. When we fly to France there are 4 of us so the baggage allowance is quite generous. We also keep some clothes in France, which in theory makes a lot of sense if we could only remember what we had there. I usually fill at least one hard sided suitcase with plant material. Some of the things can go bare root, or nearly bare root. You know from experience, how small, and dare I say "relaxed" the southern French airports are... I don't lie about bringing stuff in because no-one ever asks me. If we travel through Heathrow I would never dare bring anything. Robb
They do ask you to fill out a form, though, don't they? I figured that packaged seeds were okay since I get them through the mail routinely.
We both worked in education too, and had summers off; it was lovely. I would have adored being able to spend time in France during those periods but alas, we had no roots there as you do.
I really envy you your several homes; you sound as though you enjoy them to the fullest! What about photos of the place in France?
Leslie
I can't remember ever having to fill out a form entering France. There are loads of controls coming back into Canada though. I am going to post some photos from France, you will be able to tell that they are jumping back and forth through time. If I were more organized I would be able to access more current and better pictures. The first is of the house from the road. Most of the property is behind.
The yard in the back. You can see the Colorado blue spruce... what you can't see is the palm growing behind it. I always thought it was a strange combination.
Below the hedge you can see an orchard which has cherries, apples, peaches, pears and walnuts. Just below the hedge is were I planted a row of the palms that I grew from seed. In this part of France you are lucky to get 6" growth annually from a palm, so it takes patience. I am unable to manage the fruit trees because I not there at the critical times. Perhaps if they survive until I retire, I might manage to produce some edible fruit.
Roses do grow well there.
The older palm behind the blue spruce... in winter (obviously).
