Past-it parsley showing off its new spiky leaves
Celery blossom
Parsley going to seed
Parsley fireworks
Beautiful even past their prime, the Umbelliferae.
Gone to seed
Tag Archives: celery
Implausible vegetables
Running bamboo
I don’t know if it’s spring or the big rains we had a while ago, but bamboo shoots from the neighbours’ giant hedge are popping up everywhere. I say it’s the neighbours’ bamboo hedge but since it’s running bamboo, it’s ours as well. It makes a frequent guest appearance amongst the native shrubs, pokes through cracks in the concrete driveway, squeezes its way around the foundations of the house. Regularly hacking it back is the only thing stopping our yard slowly transforming into panda paradise (in fact, every time I get out the saw the kids accuse me of species-threatening habitat destruction).
But rampant bamboo is actually fine. In fact, it’s great, since I consider myself to be an artist whose natural medium is bamboo stakes and zip ties. So far my oeuvre includes four gates, a 10 metre long enclosure for the vegetable garden, five trellises in a range of styles, a pergola, some windchimes and more bean tripods than you can shake a stick at. Obviously, if you did shake a stick in my vicinity I’d probably grab it from you, attach zip ties to it and turn it into a trellis.
The wall of bamboo is a magical swaying whispering verdant thing. Every year it manufactures the living fenceposts that keep our property’s ancient teetering side wall more or less upright. And now it feeds us! Okay, it feeds us with grass. In fact, grass laden potentially fatal amounts of cyanide. But it’s still food, even if you’re not a panda.
Bamboo shoots, I think, should be included in a new class of produce I’m calling “implausible vegetables”. I’m not 100% sure how we define this category of foodstuffs. One possible definition: “a vegetable that, in the process of preparation for human consumption, shrinks to a tiny fraction of its pre-preparation size. The amount of the implausible vegetable that can actually be eaten is dramatically smaller than the quantity of peelings, husks, stems or leaves destined for the compost bin”. Another possibility: “a vegetable which even rats refuse to eat”.
But is it simply implausible vegetables, or should it be implausible and dangerous vegetables?
The pics above were taken for our 7 year old’s class presentation: an explanation of a simple procedure in the kitchen. In her notes, she did stress that you needed to boyl the sliced shoots for at least 20 minits or you will be poysned. Even so, if a wave of year twos with histotic hypoxia turn up at the local hospital, we will be keeping a low profile.
After three meals on the trot containing home-grown bamboo shoots, there has been some hypochondriacal consultation of Dr Google. Hard to distinguish the early symptoms of toxicity, though, since weakness, confusion and headaches are, in my experience, a fairly normal consequence of a day at work.
Globe artichokes, of which I am a passionate admirer, are also clearly implausible, to wit:
All those fallen petals…
But lethal? Well, for a start, it’s clearly a mistake to allow anyone as unhygenic as I am near any kind of sterile procedure. The throwaway line in my recipe that inclusion of raw garlic in the jar could induce botulism did not significantly reduce Home Canning Anxiety, either. And to me, pickled veg and stuff in jars just scream deranged-scientist-in-subterranean-lab-full-of-body-parts-in-formaldehyde. My own disturbing inaugural effort at artichoke hearts in oil was no exception.
It looks like a body in formaldehyde, but does it contain botulism?
But the more I think about it, the more all plant-based foods seem deeply implausible and highly likely to be dangerous. You grow grass, pick the seeds, grind them into dust with rocks, add a single-celled micro-organism found on the human body, warm the mixture til it produces carbon dioxide, pummel it until the carbon dioxide diffuses, warm it again, pummel it again, heat it in a fire until you kill the eukaryotic microorganism, cool it and eat it. What a lot of effort. No wonder we all used to eat gruel. And I’m not even factoring in the possibility that along the way the grain might have collected another fungus that causes hallucinations, convulsions, burning of the limbs and gangrene.  Â
But it’s not just modern, non-paleo foods. You eat the tiny tiny flower buds? You eat the tiny tiny inverted flower buds? You eat the stems of a plant traditionally giftwrapped before eating? You eat the extremely sour stems of a plant whose leaves are full of a toxic chemical used as a metal cleaner? You eat the fruits of a carnivorous plant closely related to deadly nightshade? You grow and then systematically bury a plant closely related to deadly nightshade so you can eat its roots without them going green and prompting delerium, hypothermia and paralysis?
And I’m not even considering the implausibility of cheese – stealing the breast milk of a lactating mammal, mixing it with the stomach lining of a ruminant until it curdles, straining it, pressing it, putting it in a cave until it gets mould on it and then eating it. Hard to imagine the weird circumstances that led to this culinary breakthrough – although I guess cow-keeping cave dwellers with an acute food shortage and limited access to the internet were less thin on the ground in the past.
My conclusion: hungry people will eat anything, even if it takes weeks to prepare it and if, at the end of all that effort, it may well kill them. We’re just lucky we have so many things that will potentially kill us on our doorstep.
Death toll on the windowsill
Methuselah. Yearning to mingle its genome with an organic celery seedling.
This punnet of celery is 900 years 9 months old. It’s a heritage variety, lovingly protected from the wicked hybridising ways of multinationals, raised without recourse to superphosphate or pesticides, its seeds collected and harboured by sequence of people of good will, finally given a new home on a windowsill that has scarcely ever seen any form of domestic cleaning product.  And look how it has repaid me and all the hippies before me that sought to give it life.
At some point during the epic period of time it has taken this recalcitrant celery to grow to its current puny dimensions, I succumbed to a pack of genetically modified and chemically drenched celery seedlings from Bunnings. The evil celery has been planted out, watered, mulched, fertilised, endured winter, had a spring growth, been mulched again, and seen the inside of at least three soups. But it’s all too hard for our home-sown hero.
I wish I could claim that this diminutive plant was a radical experiment in developing kitchen-garden bonsai, or the result of a daring hybridisation of celery and genetic material from Methuselah, 4,845-year-old Great Basin bristle-cone pine, which holds the current record for the oldest tree in the world. Indeed, I’m sure any hypothetical future celery sticks that might be harvested from this uninspiring specimen would have the same flavour and texture as a lump of a four thousand year old pine bark.
Sadly, however, this is no horticultural break-through. It’s normal service. This is how we raise seeds in our Berowra backyard. The fact that the celery seedling is still clinging to life at all is, in truth, a triumph.
Here’s a typical sequence of events.
1. I observe a change in the seasons: a warm breeze, the hint of autumn rain. It’s late winter/ late summer – just the right time to put in some seedlings. I resolve to grow some.
2. Weeks pass. Sometimes months. Eventually in a late-night frenzy of consumer excitement, I order about a hundred packets of seeds from the prompt, informative and ever-reliable Green Harvest: eighteen types of beans, twelve types of rocket, cherry tomatoes shaped like a banana, a rubik’s cube and the Sphinx, vegetables I don’t like/have never heard of/have never successfully grown/wouldn’t know what to do with even if I succeeded in growing them.
3. Seeds arrive in my postbox in a flash. I file them carefully in an enormous box that previously stored floppy disks, fastidiously organised by season of planting and vegetable family, and filled with a panoply of seed packets, mostly well past their “use by” date. Weeks pass. Sometimes years.
4. One Sunday afternoon, in deep denial about the terminal decline of the weekend, I plant out at least four punnets of each of the hundred varieties. Space on the kitchen windowsill is now at a premium.
5. Within a week or two, nearly all of the seeds emerge and turn into thriving little plantlets, thrusting up into the light, energised by the stored resources of their subterranean seed. They grow a second thrilling set of leaves and sometimes a third.
… and then suddenly everything stops. It’s as if we’ve had a sneaky overnight visit from a vegetable hating comic-book super villain with a freezing deathray.
6. Tormented by the failure of my seedlings to grow even a millimetre, I am prompted to do one of the following:
(a) Anxiously over-water them. They rot. I throw them into the compost heap.
(b) Vengefully serve them up a little tough love (ie, neglect to water them). They maintain the same utter stasis but look a little bit crispier. Eventually, I throw them into the compost heap.
(c) Bemusedly supply them with more light and gentle healing rain by putting them outside in the Valley Of The Shadow of Death (aka the zone at the edge of the carport). From here they will inevitably tumble to their doom, knocked down by a promenading brush turkey, a pair of wrestling brush-tailed possums, a child with a skipping rope and/or RB on a bee line for the first cup of tea at the end of the working day. I swear a lot, scrape up the seed raising mix and throw it into the compost heap.
(d) Despairingly give up on producing decent sized seedlings and abandon the flimsy weaklings to their fate in the bottom of the garden. The following day will be the hottest of the year and by six in the evening the underprepared seedlings have been vaporised, leaving, at best, one or two limp greyish leaves draped over the mulch as a cruel reminder of the three months I’ve just wasted.
But it doesn’t have to be like this. Surely.
I have some ideas for diminishing the windowsill death toll. This is a non-exhaustive list and I welcome further suggestions.
1. Defrosting my static seedlings with Essence of Death (TM) compost tea. Treasure the Light Sussex drinks it with gusto and she has grown to an enormous size so surely it must give the seedlings a little vim and vigour.
2. Treating the babies to the occasional little holiday in the veggie garden, to suck up the rays and meet new friends.
3. Experiment with newspaper pots so plant and container can go, holus bolus, into the ground. The only outstanding issue with this plan, given the volume of newsprint bought by our household, is whether plant pots made of iPads and laptops are biodegradeable.
4. Plant everything out under veggie nets or horticultural fleece. With lucky, the seedlings, however feeble and under-developed, will transpire a bit less in those tricky first days. At worst, this will both delay the moment when I realise that it’s all been in vain and provide a fitting burial shroud.
Cherry blossom in autumn
What’s the difference between a good gardener and a bad gardener?
Two weeks.
That’s me, at least two weeks late with everything. Most of the autumn planting happened today, in delicious sunshine after three days of deep, seeping rain. Peter Cundall says my newly sown carrots (should they germinate, always rather unlikely – I got one solitary seedling out of the batch sown a month or so ago) will be pale and thin. Gothic carrots. Hopefully the spindly survivors will be the purple ones: seems more appropriate somehow.
I’m not very optimistic about my garlic either. In previous years I reaped, almost to the clove, an identical amount of garlic to the quantity I planted six months before (I have a similar success rate with potatoes). However, I live in hope that all that will change in 2014: “The Year of Lime”. I have been very slapdash with soil preparation in the past, hoping that cow manure and lucerne-and-straw mulch, with the odd splash of comfrey tea will do for pretty much everything. This year I’ve taken the same approach to dolomite on my leeks and garlic, that the Scottish other half takes to salt on his dinner: more is more. Hopefully it will make a difference. I’ve also put in not just the usual Italian White but also a day-length neutral type, Glen. Perhaps its not me that is harshing my garlic, but my latitude. Now I have a controlled experiment to settle it.
Having discovered the implausible passion of brush turkeys for the allium family, I’ve gone for a belt and braces approach to protecting seeds and seedlings. This year I’ve draped my usual little hoops of wire fencing with vege nets, partly to keep out the beasties and partly to shade the newbies in what’s been an unusually warm March. My home grown brassica and fennel seedlings are working with that same goth aesthetic and I fear that one sunny day might be the end of them.  The nets have done sterling service with the beans, which are up and cropping well.
So since we’re in the dying days of March, it may be that my celery and rainbow chard, broccoli, kale and fennel are destined to spend the next six months in suspended animation waiting for the sun to hoist itself above the trees and get things going again on our chilly south-west facing slope. But then, I noticed only a few days back that the little pot-grown cherry tree that has, for the last five years stubbornly refused to flower or fruit, has spluttered into bloom at this most inpropitious time, and that the strawberries beneath the custard apple have sprung little white petals and even greenish fruits. I’m not sure what all this portends: the unnatural beginnings of climate change or just the confused reaction of temperate plants to subtropical seasons. Either way I’m hoping for a harvest.