Lavender

Lavender in bloom

Lavender is a member of the mint family. It is used in perfumes and soap for its fragerance. We dry it and use bundles around the house. We also use lavender in our chocolate truffles. Like everything, lavender is blooming early this year. We'll have some lavender bundles for sale at the Richmond Farmers' Market this weekend.

Hollyhocks

Years ago, Karen and I visited the Upper Peninsula of Michigan on vacation. My family had vacationed in Michigan every summer when I was a kid, so I was anxious to show Karen some of my favorite spots. One day we took a ferry to Mackinac Island. By sheet coincidence, the day we were there was also the day of the finish of the Chicago to Mackinac Island sailboat race. As each boat passed the lighthouse, a cannon sounded to signal their crossing the finish line. Karen and I watched several boats finish the race and I took pictures that hang on the wall of the office at One Love Farm. The other striking thing about the island is the residents love for Hollyhocks. Many of the island cottages have hollyhocks behind white picket fences or framing doorways making for a quite a sight when they bloom every July.

Hollyhocks are biennial meaning they will bloom one year, seed the next and then bloom again the following year. They come in many colors and we love our hollyhocks for their striking black color. This creates quite a contrast to the orange Tiger Lillies which bloom at the same time.

Heirloom lettuce

Yugoslavian Red lettuce

There is a lot of talk about heirloom vegetables right now. Most people have heard about heirloom tomatoes, but there are many heirloom varieties of other vegetables. Heirloom simply means a seed that has been saved and passed down for many generations. Some heirloom varieties are over a hundred years old, or more! The reason they are so popular is because they they tend to have a better taste than seeds that have been bred for shipping and consistency of size and shape. The tomatoes your grandmother grew may have looked funny, but they tasted great. The problem was when food buyers started demanding tomatoes in January (where they are out of season in most of the US), the tomatoes had to be shipped very long distances from California, Florida or Mexico. Shipping is very hard on ripe fruit and veggies, so they are picked when they are hard and not ripe so they can be transported thousands of miles.

Over the past few decades, seed producers have bred for characteristics in plants like long shelf life and resistance to herbicides, not flavor. As a backlash, many growers are looking to heirloom seeds for more variety and flavor in their fruits and veggies.

At One Love Farm we are growing many heirloom varieties of tomatoes and lettuce greens. One of those heirloom varieties is Yugoslavian Red (pictured above). We will be sampling this lettuce as well as several others at our annual Greens Day celebration at the Richmond Farmers' Market Saturday June 24th.

Pruning tomatoes

Karen and I spent Saturday afternoon pruning tomatoes and tieing them to stakes. The tomato pictured above is an heirloom variety called Cherokee Purple. Pruning tomatoes yields fewer fruit, but the fruit themselves turn out larger and sweeter since the plant creates more sugar in the fruit and less in the leaves.

We have tried many different ways to stake and trellis tomatoes over the years. Tomato cages were unwieldy, often tipped over and made the fruit hard to access. We also tried a trellis system with nylons, but the plants were so difficult to prune that we often neglected this chore. In the end, old fashioned bamboo poles do the trick. The plants are easy to access and tie to the stakes. But, if there is one piece of advice I could offer, it would be to wear gloves when pruing and staking the plants. Without gloves, the plants get a black gum on your hands that you really need to scrub hard to get off!

Red Romaine

We've tried several new varieties of lettuce this spring including several heirloom varieties. One of the most successful has been a Red Romaine. We got the seeds from a small company in the Pacific Northwest. I've been cutting some of the leaves when they are very small and adding them to our lettuce mix. Now that the larger heads are maturing, we are cutting them whole and selling them at the Richmond Farmers' Market. On June 26th, we will be having the second annual Greens Day at the market where we will sample several different varieties of lettuce, including Red Romaine!

Garlic Scapes

Two years ago I posted about Garlic Scapes . Since then, we have moved the garlic bed and planted more bulbs. Since it is mid June, the time is now to trim the garlic to make the heads big and full (see previous post as to why this is important.

Garlic Scapes had been thought of as a by product of the garlic growing process until recently when they came back into fashion. We've been eating Garlic Scapes for a while and have found that far and away the best way to enjoy them is in a Garlic Scape Pesto. So easy to make, too. Just roughly chop some Garlic Scapes, add them to the food processor with a pinch of salt and then drizzle in olive oil until the pesto is smooth. You can add other stuff like chili flakes, but we like it simple with these three ingredients so that fresh garlic flavor comes out. We store the pesto in sanitized jars that we put in the freezer to enjoy yearround. A spoonful on the top of a pizza crust is wonderful and we love putting some in soups and marinades or using to coat veggies before they go on the grill.

Lupine

One Love Farm used to be part of strawberry farm back in the 90's. Because of this, there was absolutely no landscaping or ornamental plants near the house. For the past eight years we have been working to not only get the planting beds up to par, but also to create ornamental gardens. One of the focal points is the berm. We have put in a water garden and many perennials that have filled in and thrived over the past few years. Earlier postings about weeping cherry and Dianthus and Foxglove and Mountain Laurel were all about plantings on the berm.

As these larger plantings and some trees have filled in, we have been able to put in some other perennial plantings to fill in spaces. We have used Jumiper, lillies, lavender and Lupine to fill in these spots. Lupine has been cultivated by humans for centuries. Native Americans harvested the beans and Romans planted it as their empire spread. Most gardeners are familiar with the spikes of the ornamental variety which is quite striking in late spring and early summer.

Parsley

I've talked a lot about plants going to seed in this blog. That's because seeding is one of the main ways that plants propogate and reproduce from year to year. Even without humans collecting and saving seeds in their basements, plants have multiplied by seed for millions of years. Check out my earlier post this week about Cilantro going to seed and posts from last year about lettuce dropping seed.

Yesterday I was planting some Sweet William in the herb garden. While clearing away some weeds I noticed the parsley had gone to seed. If you look closely at the picture, you can see the stalks shooting up and small seeds starting to form at their tips. I will let these seeds form, dry and drop. Then, next spring, we'll have more parsley!

Cilantro

Cilantro is a native to Southern Europe and Northern Africa according to Wikipedia. I can't recall, however, having Cilantro in any European dish I've ever had. Cilantro is very popular in Asian and Mexican cooking. We haven't grown much Cilantro in the herb garden at One Love Farm because it bolts (goes to seed) so quickly in hot weather. And since we like the fresh Cilantro in salads and bean dishes, we want to prevent it from bolting. While some suggest pruning Cilantro to help delay bolting, this only temporarily delays the inevitable. If you are a real Cilantro fan (folks either truly love the herb or despise it) the best method is to plant the seed every two to four weeks in good soil to keep a continuous harvest. Once the plant bolts, either let it go to seed, dry out and drop seeds on the ground for next year or, if you are motivated, dry the plant in your basement or garage, collect the seed and plant next spring. The picture above is one of a few Cilantro plants that came from the first method which is to allow the plant to self sow.

One final note about Cilantro. To some folks, the bolting of the plant is not something to be avoided, but encouarged. Cilantro's seeds are called Corriander and these seeds, sometimes crushed or toasted are used in a great many Asian and Indian dishes.