Tag Archives: Hosta Frances Williams

Harvesting winter vegetables before the freeze

I’ve been self-sufficient in fresh vegetables year round and have blogged and lectured about how I can do this even in winter without a greenhouse, without a freezer and without using additional energy apart from my own manual labour :) The most important factor allowing me to do this is the cold cellar under the house where I can store vegetables cold and frost free. None of the common winter leafy green vegetables further south in Europe – kales (grønnkål), chards (mangold) and leek (purre) – can be reliably overwintered outside here, although winters are getting milder. For example, swiss chard is killed by the first hard frosts which due to our northern location last all day (little direct solar warming at this time of year). Usually I’m taken by surprise by hard frosts in early November and there’s a panic digging up vegetables and I often have to use an iron bar to get through the ice layer. Not so this year. Thanks to corona and a very mild first part of November, I’ve had more time for the harvest. Last week I lifted the swedes and turnips and yesterday the parsnips, jerusalem artichokes and carrots. Today, I moved all the swiss chards, celery and chicories (sikkori) to large buckets, planted in soil, ready to move quickly inside later in the week if necessary as colder weather is forecast. In the past I’ve stored these winter vegetables in hand made wooden crates filled with soil. However, after 20 or so winters, they’re no longer usable and I hadn’t got round to making new ones, so I will store in these large plastic buckets, which had been purchased to plant the Allium collection, now with a permanent home at the Ringve botanical garden. 
I’ve also been digging up perennial vegetables for winter forcing. This includes various onions – Allium senescensAllium flavescens, Allium angulosum and Allium cernuum.  In addition, I’ve dug a udo (Aralia cordata) root and also a few ostrich ferns (Matteuccia struthiopteris) and Hosta “Frances Williams” (sieboldiana). Finally,  I’ve been digging large amounts of my most important winter vegetable, dandelion! (see my 2018 harvest here: https://www.edimentals.com/blog/?p=20124)
19th November: the next morning it snowed (see the video at the bottom)!

Harvested swiss chards including the Lucullus type and perpetual spinach (all Beta vulgaris var cicla):

Chards with celeries at the beginning:



Korean tempura and dipping sauce for perennial vegetables

AROUND THE WORLD IN THE EDIBLE GARDEN; Part 2 – Korea
Inviting you to the second in a series of dinners from Malvik’s Edible Garden where we “forage” from different parts of the world!
We don’t often eat oily food, but now and again its great and this meal was exceptional!
From top left and clockwise:
Ligularia fischeri
Dystaenia takesimana
(Giant Ulleung celery, seombadi)
Aralia cordata (udo) (blanched for dipping and green for tempura)
Phyteuma (should have been japonica, but I used nigra; svartvadderot)
Allium victorialis subsp platyphyllum (victory onion; seiersløk)
Aralia elata (devil’s walking stick, fandens spaserstokk)
Hosta “Frances Williams”
Hemerocallis dumortieri (flower shoots) (dayliliy, daglilje)
Parasenecio hastatus (also the first time I ate this one and it was delicious, but I wouldn’t advise eating a lot: see here http://www.edimentals.com/blog/?p=23845)
Matteuccia struthiopteris “Jumbo” (ostrich fern; strutseving)
Taraxacum albidum and to the right of this:
New Zealand spinach and
Serratula coronata (also a first for me; the subspecies insularis is eaten in the Far East)
Oplopanax horridus (North American species substituting Asian species Oplopanax japonicus or Oplopanax elatus)
More information with the pictures!

 

Belated happy birthday to me

The first veggie food I ate was macaroni cheese and chips at Edwin Jones (now Debenhams) in Southampton, a treat when we Mum took us shopping back in the 60s…

Most years since I’ve followed this tradition on or near my birthday, no chips this year as the potatoes have run out and nowadays the macaroni cheese is mixed with masses of green stuff both from the garden and, yesterday, fiddleheads harvested on the Homla walk. This is more or less the only time in the year I have dessert and the only time I eat sugar…in rhubarb crumble, also with family roots back to the 60s :)

rhubarb crumble, also with family roots back to the 60s :)

 

Edimentals in the garden; early August 2017

Here’s the first batch of Edimentals pictures from the garden this week :) More to come!

030817: More added

040817: More added

050817: …and even more added!