Harvest #3 - Orach, Peas and Herbs

Pasta tossed with olive oil, sugar snap peas, red orach,  Italian oregano and baby Genovese basil

The sugar peas are nearly done. The vines have mostly collapsed. Since I neglected to trellis them, it was hard to see a lot of the peas that got buried in the foliage, which means we ate some peas that should have been picked sooner. Mature sugar snap peas are still edible, but they're not as tender and sweet as the younger peas.

Orach (Atriplex hortensis) has been cultivated for hundreds of years, and it's certainly a beautiful plant. Also known as Mountain Spinach, I think it's one of the few leafy red vegetables that holds its color when cooked, as you can see from the photo above. 

Nonetheless, I don't see myself growing it again. Why not? The seeds germinate unpredictably. The seedlings are maddeningly temperamental -- wilting, recovering, wilting again - they're like Victorian ladies having fainting spells! The plants did eventually get a few feet high, but there are not that many leaves per plant (at least not on the ones in my garden) and the leaves are not particularly large, and besides the taste was rather bland.

So all in all, besides the appearance, there's not much I can say to recommend orach. It might be a bit more heat-tolerant than spinach, but I'd rather use the garden space in the future either for true spinach (individual plants yielded far more leaves) or lettuce, which is still hanging touch in my garden thus far in late May and has yielded many, many salads. 

Of course, it's always fun to grow something new and unusual, but there are many other rare leafy greens to try growing besides orach -- such as tatsoi, arugula, mibuna, mizuna, etc. etc.

We ate some of the peas and orach on their own as a side dish and then tossed some in with this pasta. Right before serving, we sprinkled in some fresh herbs - Italian oregano and a bit of baby Genovese basil sown from seed. 

Harvest #2 - Peas and Lettuce

Dwarf Grey Sugar Peas and three kinds of lettuce (Merveille des Quatre Saisons, Ruby and Lollo Rosso)

I picked all of these veggies this morning. The peas come from those beautiful flowers I showed in my first post.

Here's another close-up look at the peas:

Dwarf Grey Sugar Peas, lightly sauteed in olive oil and tossed with garlic

Many other gardeners whose blogs I read wax rhapsodic about the taste of fresh peas from the garden. Maybe it's the variety of peas I'm growing or maybe by tastes are just different, but I actually was underwhelmed by the fresh pea taste. It was not as tender as I thought it would be and the pea taste was not as pronounced as I had imagined.

But just toss those peas in a little olive oil (pinching off the ends first), saute them for a minute or two over medium heat and finish with a little ground garlic and the difference is astounding. Melt in your mouth tender. Sweet and succulent.

I actually asked my wife if she had added any sugar while she was cooking the peas, but the answer was no. Just as with the spinach, it is the cooking process itself that brings out the sweetness in the peas. (But then I guess that's why they are called sugar peas!)

As for the salad, it's a combination of three kinds of lettuce - Merveille des Quatre Saisons, Ruby and the delightfully-named Lollo Rosso (no relation except in homophony to the beautiful Italian actress and artist Gina Lollobrigida).

I'll have more to say on my success - or lack thereof - growing lettuce in an upcoming post...

Welcome!

Dwarf Grey Sugar Pea flowers

Welcome to my garden!

I do not lay claim to any great expertise. This is only my second year attempting to garden in Middle Tennessee (zone 7a) on a piece of land that is mostly clay.

I have made a lot of mistakes. I'm sure I'll make many more.

I hope this blog will be both instructive ("Here's what I did. Don't make that same foolhardy mistake!") and inspiring ("If I can get these results on a windswept clay hilltop, imagine what you could achieve in your own garden!")

So...to begin with the peas!

I planted my Dwarf Grey Sugar Pea seeds from High Mowing in mid-March in a base of clay with mushroom compost and pine fines worked into the soil. Not the ideal seed-starting medium you'll find recommended in gardening books.

And yet, they grew splendidly through conditions that whipsawed between wet and dry, hot and cold.

Frugalista Gardener has a wonderful post on these peas - their edibility, their beauty, how to cook them and how to save the seeds so that you can have a self-sustaining garden.

I don't think I can add much to what she has written, except to say that these peas will also grow and apparently flourish even without a trellis.

(Why didn't I just build a trellis and grow pole peas? Many reasons, but chiefly the fact that I excel at the twin skills of research and procrastination. I spent hours researching the topic online, couldn't decide what would be the best and most effective trellis to build and so ultimately settled for dwarf peas that were advertised as not need a trellis at all.)

Of course without a trellis, two of my pea rows have comingled. I'm not sure how I'll ever find the peas in the middle...