Hot

It's not exactly pepper season. But it's so bloody cold that we need something very hot. Enter the world market, and cayenne and Thai chiles. Chillies. Chilis. 

The plan is to make shatta, a hot sauce from the Eastern Mediterranean. There is a recipe for it in Sami Tamimi's beautiful cookbook Falastin (a.k.a Palestine - there is no p-sound in Arabic), where the chopped peppers are fermented conservatively in the fridge. I'm throwing caution to the whipping, doom-laden winds and will ferment at room temperature, since very little happens in the cold. 

Stay tuned.

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The camera turns

An accidental selfie. I hate selfies. And if you'd told me just a few weeks ago that I'd be making homespun videos in our kitchen this week I'd have laughed, and rolled my eyes.

But lockdown is waking up all kinds of slumbering beasts in all of us.

It began with an Instagram invitation to share a wild foods story and then I decided I didn't hate it as much as I expected to. So I may even graduate to teaching from home. I just need to practise some more and sort out some kinks.

What new things have you been trying?

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Read a Book

On the move

Ten days ahead of our move a plant party was thrown. In terms of garden space we are downsizing from a ground floor's 1,000 square feet (if that is confusing read the About page for this blog, all is explained) to a top floor's 100 square foot terrace.

For drinks we had chilled prosecco poured onto a dash of common milkweed gin (made from fermented common milkweed flower cordial and gin).  And nice Brooklyn tapwater with wisteria ice cubes.

Ready...

(Ones with ribbons are my keepers.)

Set...

Go!

Thirty nice people came and went and most plants went out the door to new homes. Heavy pots and plants are being picked up over the next few days.

Melina made a plum cake. I made bruschetta rubbed with garlic and topped with heirloom tomatoes and garden basil. (Bye-bye, basil!) Radishes and butter for snacking.

And now, back to packing.

To see all stories about this garden, visit the 1st Place BK tag in the sidebar Pigeon Holes.

If you'd like to catch me in the next couple of weeks, I will be giving a talk about Native Flora and Regional Character at The Museum of Food and Drink on October 4th at 6.30pm (you need to book, and tickets are $20) and on the 6th I will be signing copies of Forage, Harvest, Feast at the Union Square Farmer's market.

Forage Harvest Feast

Today is the official release date of Forage, Harvest, Feast, which looks right at home on the foraging table with mugwort and wild black cherries. And a bonus of chanterelles. Torrential summer rains have made mushrooms explode all over the city and our happy hunting grounds.

The book is now available for purchase (not just pre-order) on Amazon.  Today it rose to the top of the ranks - No. 1 in the...? Vegetable section! I thought that was very funny. But I do include cultivation tips for most of the plants, so. And it's No. 19 right now in Professional Cooking. These numbers change very fast but they are fun.

Thank you very much if your copy is already winging its way to you, in North America or in Europe. Copies are traveling by sea to continents further from its US printing base.

If you like what you see and read, please tell Amazon, in a review. It would be very helpful to me, the book, future readers, and not least to my wonderful publishers, Chelsea Green Publishing.

Indigenous Plant Palettes - a South African book giveaway

If you would like a chance to win a copy of the very handsome and hefty Indigenous Plant Palettes (R495.00), by Marijke Honig, please head over to my Instagram account @66squarefeet and tell us where in South Africa you garden.

The giveaway is very generously sponsored by Quiver Tree Publications, publishers of exceptional South African books. A copy will be posted to the lucky winner.

Deadline is 12am (midnight), October 26th.

The beautifully illustrated plant palettes detailed in the book cover all kinds of local garden scenarios, from plants for hedging and security, to edibles and fragrance.

Marijke (above, with her book) is a friend of mine, and a well known landscape designer. In Cape Town you can see her work at the Biodiversity Showcase Garden in Green Point, whose plantings she designed. We went for a hike the other day on Table Mountain, a real privilege, both for the beauty of the fynbos and for Marijke's botanical knowledge. It's like walking with Google, with the best search result available at once.

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Book a Fall Finale Forage Walk

Foraging and Feasting - a book for cooks, gardeners and foragers

These botanical plates are just a modest spring sampling of the dozens of illustrations in Dina Falconi's beautiful and useful book Foraging and Feasting (Botanical Art Press, 2013). The artist is Wendy Hollender. We just gave away two copies on Facebook and Instagram, where the response was so positive that I thought I'd give you a better glimpse of the book, here. It was published thanks to funding via Kickstarter, printed in the US, and is a sturdy and very attractive hardcover, complete with wild onion endpapers. Both author and illustrator are based in upstate New York but many of the plants covered are ubiquitous.

My fridge is loaded right now with garlic mustard, above. I have made a relish from the roots, stews and curries with the leaves, have a lacto fermentation bubbling angrily to itself, and am about to preserve a bucketload for later in the season (by blanching, squeezing and freezing). It is a super invader and happens to be very good to eat. Pick it while it is sweetly in bud and you prevent it from setting its pernicious little seeds and spreading even more.

What I like about the illustrations in Foraging and Feasting is not just their accuracy and obvious aesthetic appeal, but that their notes explain at a glance which parts are used and at what time of year. There is a patch of dame's rocket seven doors down from where we live and my mouth waters a bit whenever I walk past. But it's behind a fence and in a garden, so...

Foraging and Feasting has an approach to recipes that I like. Dina gives a Master Recipe for a plant or for a technique (like water kefir, syrup, sauces, catsup, herb and flower butters - it's a long list) which gives you a solid grounding and technique for using a plant, and then she has ideas for improvisation, guiding you but granting you as much creativity as you can muster. Follow the link for a good sense of how each plant is described, and to Dina's Master recipe for Nettle Frittata.

Day lilies - today happens to be the day I must clean a bunch of day lily tubers for some more recipe testing of my own...dig them now, eat their young shoots and snack on the flowers, come early summer. As with all new foods, sample a small amount, first - I do know a couple of people who have exerienced unhappy reactions to day lilies (not me!), as the author mentions in her Cautionary Note above. Eat in moderation. Tonight I'm making rösti with the little tubers. To go with our rabbit and gifted D'Artagnan morels.

Also in season in my hood, the terrible spreadable: goutweed, also called ground elder or bishop weed (Aegopodium podagraria). Tastes a little like lovage. We ate Japanese knotweed and lamb for dinner, and then there are all those dandelions... And nettles. Must blanch more nettles!

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Next Wild Foods walk: Inwood Hill Park on May 13th

Forage and Harvest Book

The end of 2016 brought some happy negotiations with a publishing company I have long admired. When a senior editor there asked me over the phone, Vermont to Cape Town, "Why Chelsea Green?" my answer was simple: "Integrity."

Because it matters more than ever. 

Chelsea Green has a reputation for producing books on subjects ahead of the curve, and are firmly on the appropriate side of important environmental and political issues.

Back home in Brooklyn recently, a contract arrived. I celebrated by sprinkling it with agathosma* salt and dried mugwort. For luck, of course. 

* Agathosma from my mom's Cape Town garden - very aromatic.

Forage and Harvest is a book for cooks, gardeners, and foragers. It represents years of research: foraging, reading, cooking, eating. And gardening. It will cover over 40 wild foods and contain over 400 recipes. There will be techniques for making simple essentials and kitchen basics like field garlic oil (above).

Wild salad recipes will contain feral and domestic ingredients. In some cases I will make horticultural arguments (with cultivation tips) for taming wild ingredients: they are excellent vegetables and fruits, and sometimes borderline in terms of sustainability. And not everyone can get out and forage. We should be growing them, both for our own consumption, and for market.

There will be many one-pot wonders, it's how I often cook at home, like this pokeweed ribolitta, above. There will also be soups and side dishes and stews, risottos and roasts, and lots of ideas for breakfast. I like breakfast.

Breads and syrups and jams and muffins will march through the pages, like this spicebush bread with black cherry syrup.

There will be cake. With foraged mahlab, from black cherries.

There will be meaty and hearty main courses, like these bayberry meatballs with sumac.

There will be fire.

And there will be esoteric and fragrant vinegars and ferments made with highly seasonal edible flowers, like black locust.

...and the ever popular and wildly fizzy elderflower cordial.

With just a few weeks before spring arrives, I am furiously transcribing recipes from a small mountain of Moleskine notebooks so that I can be ready to gather, photograph and test when foraging season begins. Friends have offered help from their own tracts of wild land, while many of my edible weeds will be sourced locally from community farms and forgotten wild places.

Forage and Harvest will be published in spring of 2018.

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Book a Spring Forage Walk

The New Wildcrafted Cuisine

I have written a review of Pascal Baudar's The New Wildcrafted Cuisine for Gardenista. Please head over there to see and read more (and to enter your name for a giveaway of the book). I have known Pascal online for years, as we hang out in the same digital foraging places. Attending one of his wild foods classes in the wilds of LA is high on my wishlist.

Wild kimchi is one of dozens of interesting recipes included in his beautiful book. 

Sourdough baked with wild elderberry starter, fermented green elderberries, white fir soda, his concept of Drink the Forest (now appropriated by every forager out there, I think), how to make wild mustard and vinegar, cooking with cattails, pickling mushrooms, baking trout in clay and shrimp in tree bark, creating wild spice blends, food preservation techniques... It's a thrilling book.

Ready, set, garden!

The week has been busy. Which is why I have not been here. Also, May turned into summer, like that. So I picked some of the Boscobel and the Windemere (white) that are flourishing in pots in front of our bedroom windows. They would have fried by the next day

Earlier I gave myself 45 minutes to garden inbetween other things, and set my alarm: charged into the garden in my denim dungarees (the best gardening clothes in the age of low rise jeans) and mowed down the bolting spinach and cilantro (eaten for supper) then spread 3lbs of pulverized egg shells (it takes 5 minutes in the food processor - lots of fine dust) and dug it in - still raising the pH.

Instead of tossing or composting the remnants of my mache plants two week ago I snipped them into bits and left them in a layer on top of the soil, and I did the same with the spinach bottoms, today - they'll decompose eventually, but right now are a much-needed mulch, as this soil loses moisture fast. Beneath them I planted 'Dragon's Tongue' and painted pony beans - both bush beans. I must still remove the fava beans - suddenly besieged by aphids. They are in the prime and the sunniest spot where the test tomatoes will go (back left of the central plot, below). Not sure that we have enough sun, but it's not bad right now - from now till August this spot will receive 6 hours, before waning. And at the back the tall tomatoes will not shade anything else.

My alarm sounded, I went in, showered, turned myself into a human, and headed to Manhattan. 

Back home, a box of books arrived - I have lots of reading to do. All I need is...time. 

If you have any to spare, I am collecting it.

Painted weeds

This large first-and-last-edition book arrived in a padded envelope the other day. 

My friend Don had mentioned it: Weeds of Crops and Gardens in Southern Africa, published in 1985. I remember 1985. My braces were off, my contacts were in, and I had my first modeling contract.

I bought it with a click of a mouse. You know me. I like weeds. And I love this book. The illustrations are beautiful - the artist is Barbara Jeppe. I'd love to own some of her prints. I wonder where her originals live? If they live.

Each entry tells you what the weed is, what pestilential effects it has, and how to kill it.

And, occasionally, which bits of it are edible.

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Book a Spring Forage Walk

My Tiny Garden

I had no idea till now that our Harlem terrace provided the cover for Lucy Anna Scott's new book, My Tiny Garden. The black diagonal lower left is the bird feeder - it got in the way of a lot of my own photos. But how sweet to see the Harlem birds and scarlet runner beans, months - it feels like years -  after that space has been taken apart.

Lucy and photographer Jon Cardwell visited the Frenchman and me last year, and stayed for dinner (above) on the terrace. Apparently the birds cooperated.

I've been lucky to have had both our New York gardens immortalized in print (the Cobble Hill terrace has featured in several books and magazines). The pleasure I take in these spaces is intense, but of course transitory, subject to the whims of real estate and New York rental life. Lots of heartbreak when they are demolished, but so much joy when we live in them.

I don't know how long we will be in our current space in Carroll Gardens, or how this garden will look at its best. I have seen it only in my head, which is where all garden dreams begin.

We shall see.

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Book a Spring Forage Walk

Sundays for house-bound foragers

Valentine's tray

What does a forager-gardener do on a February winter weekend when it's -11'C/14'F outside?

Stay in bed, of course.

At-home Sundays usually mean breakfast in bed, for me - the Frenchman makes a tray and I sip and eat and read while he does complicated things next door on his computer.

Grow Journey Seeds and reading

Today I dived into my Ben-Erik van Wyk books to read more about Solanum nigrum and other species after receiving some very interesting bonus seed from Grow Journey in my February seeds-of-the-month package.

The common name for the seed in this packet is garden huckleberry, a term I had never encountered before. The botanical name on the packet is Solanum nigrum var. melanocerasum. I had no idea black nightshade was actively cultivated in the States. How exciting. A brand new crop. And I thought I did not like surprises. This is one of the unexpected pleasures of the monthly seed membership: considering crops I had not thought of.

Garden huckleberry jam. Photo: Tyrant Farms

There is a recipe for the fruit and more background about it at the Tyrant Farms blog.

I grew up with black nightshade. In South Africa you can sometimes find jam made from the fruit at farm stalls, and the tender leaves are eaten cooked. The unripe fruit is considered very toxic.

Planting these will satisfy the forager in me. I saw the fruits maturing as late as October on a walk in Red Hook last year. And just around the corner from where we live, in a neglected side garden that has provided me with mugwort before, the black nightshade plants were still blooming in November.

Edible black nightshade - Solanum nigrum

Common names can freak people out. I know what you are thinking:

Deadly nightshade is another thing altogether - Atropa belladonna; the flowers are very ornamental, bell-like and purple-pink. Deadly nightshade's poisonous fruit are borne singly, each being framed by a helpfully conspicuous and oversize (wider than the berry) coronet of calyces (plural of calyx) which distinguishes it easily from edible black nightshade, whose calyces are petite. There are other differences, of course, but that is the easiest, if you are going berry by berry.

Deadly nightshade - Atropa belladonna. Photo: stefancek, Flickr

So many articles written by people who are not tuned to plants confuse the two. Read carefully. Even a Slate piece I found had to add corrections, after the fact.

Incidentally, with plants known to be poisonous, the ripe fruits can be the least poisonous part of the plant (if you except the seeds). The danger resides in the roots, stems, leaves, and seeds. Often, the ripe fruit pulp itself is innocuous. That does not mean that I advise you to go grazing on known poisonous plants, but it bears mentioning. For instance, you would not want to ingest cherry bark, eat the leaves of peach trees, or eat many of the seed kernels. But do we consider cherries and peaches to be poisonous? No.

And some day it will be spring, again. But right now the early buds are very, very unhappy.

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Book a Spring Forage Walk

Where to stay near Cape Town

In frozen-solid January (in New York) it is good to think about faraway places. 

What are my favourite things? Food, flowers, foraging, fruit, a Frenchman.

Shake that all up and you get an idyllic 18 hour stopover.

In September, at the end of our wildflower trip up South Africa's West Coast, we cruised back towards Cape Town by way of Babylonstoren, less than an hour from the city. While I have visited on day-trips many times - for lunch, for garden stories - I had never spent the night, before, and we were thrilled to be Babylonstoren's guests for our last stage on the road. 

The transition from the preceeding two days in a remote and very basic semi-desert cottage without electricity to intense luxury in the winelands was an experience that left us both with the best sort of whiplash. It was rough, but we handled it.

The kitchen gardens at Babylonstoren typically combine indigenous South African plants like spekboom ("bacon tree") - Portulacaria afra, bottom right, and succulent waterblommetjies (Aponogeton distachyos, in the pools), with deeply familiar western plants like southern French lavender.

In spring the lettuces were popping.

And the orchards were blossoming. While the central kitchen gardens inside whitewashed walls are planted with plenty of espaliered quince, plum, nectarine, citrus, and more, the larger farm beyond contains big orchards, and while we were there every citrus tree was in bloom, with a perfume that I last smelled on the Mediterranean in southern Turkey. It was like being in a scent-movie.

And when the day visitors left, the overnight guests had the run of the place. 

The grounds are large, and beautiful and we walked, and walked. The clivia show had just begun.

There was no one else to be seen...

(...but some chickens.)

Leaving our cottage was hard enough. Within half an hour of arriving, and our early exploration of the estate-bottled and chilled Viognier waiting for us, a waiter was at the door with smoked trout canapes. Our feet were up, the fire was roaring, and we smiled.

The old Cape Dutch buildings have been renovated to within a glossy inch of their lives, with polished floors, heated towel rails, huge baths, scented posies of herbs, thick towel and robes, silky linen, and baskets of freshly picked fruit.

And a fully equipped - and very sexy - kitchen, with the farm's tea, olive oil and wine on tap. And that roaring fire (with pine cones!). 

New York could go to hell, for all we cared.

Books. An exquisite collection of books.

We were invited to pick what we wanted, where we wanted, but I still felt like a child raiding the neighbor's fruit trees.

The lemons went back to Cape Town with us, as gifts.

Breakfast in the conservatory yielded my favorite fruit, good coffee, farm eggs and invitations to enjoy spa treatments, mountain bike rides and wine tastings.

But we were Cape Town-bound. If we could have stayed I think I would have buried myself in a book and walked in the garden some more, perhaps picking salad for a self catered supper near the fire.

So we shopped for a bit, quickly.

And bagged some more oranges.

We drove away with the windows rolled down, sniffing the last of the citrus blossom.

If you have the time and the opportunity, and you are in the cold North, head south (the exchange rate is very much on your side, right now, you will get very good value for money). Spend a few nights at Babylonstoren. This is the kind of hospitality that needs to sink into your bones. There is so much to do and see on the farm, and in the immediate vicinity that you owe yourself the luxury of coming home to that cottage, in those gardens, every night. 

There endeth my lesson.