When plants and food are better store bought

While I do always appreciate the handmade and homegrown, I am a sucker for florists' plants in full bloom. I love coaxing plants into blooming, but there is such a thrill when someone else does all the work under professional plant-growing conditions, and I get to enjoy the fruit, or blossoms rather, of their labor. For me, this red florists' cyclamen is a far superior gift to a box of Valentine chocolates. I spent my morning sipping coffee and appreciating the gorgeous leaves and flowers. My house is cool, so it may do well, though humidity is an issue. I'll put it near my fern, to remind me to mist.

I have also learned the hard way about certain store bought products being superior for cooking. The lesson came last weekend, when I decided to cook ahead and freeze some dumplings to eat on Chinese New Year. Yesterday was our Valentine's party and it went off quite well, if I do say so myself. Here's a picture of the sweets I made:

Of course, I overcooked and spent most of last night packing away all of the cheeses, roasted vegetables, cookies and candies, desperately trying to shoehorn one last container into the fridge. After an epic day of cooking, hosting and cleaning, I knew I would be left with little desire to dive in to my usual Sunday cooking projects. If I hadn't thrown the party, I would have probably spent all day making the insanely delicious Shanghai soup dumplings that I wrote about a while ago. Yet I knew I would not have the energy for dicing aspic. So last weekend, when I came upon a Fine Cooking article on traditional foods to celebrate the Year of the Tiger, I decided to make these dumplings and freeze them for a quick heat-and-eat meal in my haze of post-party fatigue.

The article waxed poetic on the authentic way to make dumpling wrappers, complete with instructions for fashioning a small rolling pin from a wooden dowel. To me, instructions for projects like this are nearly irresistible. I am a moth to the flame. Make a recipe harder and more intricate, especially in the name of authenticity, and I must cook the dish, no matter what hurdles are set before me. Obscure ingredient? Who cares! I have a toddler who loves quests of all sorts and gladly hops into the car seat for "dinner adventures". He has ridden with me to the ends of Chicago in search of specialty products. This particular dumpling recipe involved no such quest, but rather a time-consuming and generally unnecessary process of rolling my own wrappers. I could understand this coming in handy, especially when one lives in a region that has few supermarket options. But I live within short driving distance of multiple Asian supermarkets. They all sell locally made dumpling wrappers in generous stacks for less than two dollars. And, to be honest, Chinese cooking is popular enough that even my Grandma who lives in a small town in Wyoming can pick up won-ton wrappers at the local Albertson's. This general accessibility was yet another enticement for me to kick it up a notch on the DIY difficulty level and roll my own wrappers. I had a spare dowel, and all it took was a saw and some mineral oil to fashion the proper tool.

It will come as no surprise that the wrappers took hours to produce. Even with careful rolling by an experienced cook, they were uneven, misshapen and prone to tearing. Additionally, the recipe yielded about twice the filling necessary for the amount of wrappers provided by the dough. A reasonable person would have called it a day and made meatballs with the rest of the filling mix, but of course, this was just a siren call to try the wrapper-production process all over again. Sadly, my rolling skills showed no measurable improvement during the second attempt.

Eaten on the day of, the dumplings tasted great and held up okay when boiled, but did better when pan-fried pot sticker style. Most of the dumplings, though, were carefully frozen for today. This morning, I inspected our planned lunch and found that the dough had done something odd: each dumpling was encased in a fragile mosaic of frozen dough shards. The shards seemed held together by a thin web of dough, with the surface of each dumpling sporting a museum-quality craquelure finish. I freeze dumplings all the time, and I have never seen this happen with store bought wrappers. Nor does it happen with my frozen homemade ravioli, although, with an egg base, that dough has more structure. I tested a few of these morphed dumplings on the stove top and the filling promptly oozed out and made the water a chunky, greasy mess. I would post a picture of the dumplings except that I quickly threw them out in a fit of disappointment. So much for planning ahead -- at least we have tons of party leftovers! From this day forward, dumpling wrappers are a thing better store bought. Complicated recipes be damned! The year of the tiger has started inauspiciously from a culinary standpoint.

Seed starting with children

Valentine's day is soon upon us and an assortment of children ranging from 1 month to 4 years old are descending upon my house tomorrow for a holiday celebration. Valentine's Day conveniently falls on a holiday weekend this year and, being a government employee, this means I have Friday to prepare and Monday to recover. I figured this party would be a nice activity for the folks who aren't going out of town for the long weekend. It was also a way for me to get around the usual birthday party ritual of opening a pile of gifts, which always leaves me slightly queasy.

I do understand that en masse gift opening is a treasured part of most American childhoods, as are sweets and party decorations. However, with a Valentine's party, my son could host his friends and revel in balloons and cupcakes without Mommy wincing inwardly as he greedily tears open a gift of a toy gun, baby video game console, or other such contraband in this liberal hippie household. Even my husband, who is less earnest than me about only having peaceful, nutritious toys, resents the influx of plastic and electronic noise-making clutter that comes with every new round of gift giving. I still laugh sympathetically at the memory of a birthday party we attended last year wherein the two year old birthday girl received, no doubt from a loving but childless relative, a three hundred piece miniature plastic grocery store set. I could see every parent in the room calculating the hours of pickup represented by an afternoon with that box. I do recognize that all of these gifts are given in the spirit of love and give us an opportunity to teach our son about generosity and gratitude. Nor have I arrived at the point of some parents who insist on no birthday gifts or who make their kids donate everything to charity. Those folks are doing their best to raise their kids as they see fit, and I commend them, but that is a little too extreme for my tastes. So for now, I will have quiet family birthdays involving books and a small toy and which focus largely on food and candles. And I can use other holidays - like this Valentine's Day! -- to host a guiltless gift-free party for my son's little friends.

I realized as I planned this party that, as the hostess, I could easily fall in to the same gift trap I was seeking to avoid. Goody bags and party favors also usually involve lots of mass-produced and near-disposable plastic baubles. The easy answer to this would be candy - and lots of it! -- but I know my crowd. While some of the parents wouldn't care about a sack of chocolates or lollipops, I know that many are trying to raise their kids without exposing them to the usual amounts of over-sugared, high-fructose corn syrup snacks. For that reason we are serving apple bread refashioned as Valentine's cupcakes. I am making fruit punch, though -- it's a party after all! Kids can have some juice, can't they? Everything in moderation, including moderation. But what to do about the party favors? That's when I realized my ace-in-the-hole: my saved seeds from last year.

I went on a seed saving jag this fall, and now have many baggies of seeds stored in my basement. I saved most in amounts that cannot be reasonably planted in my tiny garden. After sharing many with gardening friends, I still have plenty of beans, tomatoes and various flowers. I also have too many seed packets, partly from my winter tradition of seed catalog impulse purchases, and partly from the generosity of gardening friends who are looking to unload a similar overstock. I decided that the perfect party activity would be to decorate a small pot, fill it with soil and plant a few seeds. Thus, each child can leave with a party favor, and one that will likely last longer than a plastic water gun from Target.

Now, what seeds to plant? I feel that I have three ways to go on this: exciting seeds, fast germinators or ones with cute holiday references. By exciting, I mean seeds that toddlers will enjoy using: large, brightly-colored and satisfying to manipulate. Minuscule seeds like cactus or begonia are nearly impossible for my adult hands to handle. Even larger ones like marigolds would be hard for chubby fingers that still fumble with shoelaces. Corn and peas are big and bright and also have added value as being recognizable to little ones. A scarlet runner bean, however, is just the thing: black and purple, large and with a pleasantly smooth surface. I also happen to have a large jar of them from last season.

There is an argument to be made for planting fast germinating seeds: most garden websites advise parents to use these seeds since rapid results should keep the kids readily engaged in the process. Browsing the blogs and websites of elementary school teachers, I found lists of seeds that are reliable for fast, high-percentage germination. Of the seeds I have in my stockpile, they recommend cosmos and marigolds. Notably quick and reliable vegetables include lettuce and radish. Several experienced teachers recommended rye and other grasses, which pop up the quickest at 3-5 days. I remain unconvinced about selecting seeds based on this characteristic of fast germination. For one, even three days is an eternity for my little boy. Secondly, I bristle at the suggestion that kids must always be given the seeds with the most rapid results and high yields: why can't even young children appreciate a longer wait? And the occasional seed failure, while discouraging, is a fact of gardening life. With the fruit of your labors also comes the detritus destined for the compost heap.

Finally I considered the Valentine's theme seeds. Sweet 100 tomatoes have a cute name, and I can also tell the kids how tomato plants were once known as "love apples". Alpine strawberries are red, and sweet as well, although they tax even my patience for germination. I could also be more ironic, aiming to entertain the parents with Valentine's seeds like bachelor buttons or love-lies-bleeding.

In the end, I am going with Scarlet runner. My son loves to sort and count them, and they have a magic Jack-in-the-Beanstalk look about them. They are also no slouches in the speed of germination department. Lastly, the name "scarlet runner" has a certain tang-- perhaps conjuring the image of ill-fated Valentine's hosiery or an adulterous Hawthorne escapee? Alright, that is stretch. Come Saturday, however, chubby hands will be plunging these gorgeous seeds into Valentine's planters. I can rest easy knowing that I have not distributed party favors destined for the landfill, though perhaps they will wind up the compost heap.

Garden book round-up

The seeds germinating in our upstairs bedroom have let me live in a dream state of near-Spring for the past week. I woke this morning to another thick blanket of snow, and the heavy flakes have brought me to back to Chicago's wintry reality. There are few ways, at this point, for me to get out my gardening ya-ya's. The seeds have been purchased, the catalogs thumbed through until pages have started ripping from the binding staples. The seeds that should be started early have been started. Last weekend, I even prowled the local garden stores, looking for clearance shelf bargains prior to the imminent 2010 restock. I am restless. This mild state of gardening desperation is, I suspect, a boon to nursery retailers everywhere. Isn't it the anxious itch for Spring that makes otherwise thrifty gardeners impulse purchase gloves, trowels, and inappropriate plants on the first day the sap starts rising?

In this same prowling and restless state, I went to the nearby Barnes and Noble to check out their stock of gardening books. The offerings were disheartening, mostly coffee table landscape books, second-rate container gardening guides, and marijuana growing manuals. While I do concede that a few familiar gems were mixed in (like Our Life in Gardens and the Guide to Illinois Vegetable Gardening) in general there were few real classics or even hot new books, like the bulb one everybody was crazy about at Christmastime. I really should know better than to expect more from the big-box bookstores, although I do suspect the more suburban North Shore bookstores might have a larger selection. If I ever buy books these days -- and I rarely do -- it is from Amazon. Online browsing, however, does not have the same therapeutic heft as standing in front of a shelf of real books.

So where does the literary gardening woman go in Chicago? In New York, I had the Strand, my favorite used bookstore. In New Jersey, there was the annual College Women's book sale, a dusty treasure trove of -- among other things -- gardening books. For every outdated 1950's gardening manual, there was a 25 cent copy of one of Euell Gibbons' guides or an out of print edition of Living the Good Life. I have not found an equivalent to the store or the sale here in Chicago. Yes, there are some used book stores, but their garden related stock is scant, and pricey. The Chicago Reader book swap had slim gardening offerings last I went. Maybe a local blog reader can point me in the direction of some yet-undiscovered source. But for now I have only the Chicago Public Library. And trust me, I ain't complaining. The library has an astounding array of garden books spread out over its many branches, available to me at the click of the mouse, and delivered rapidly to my local branch for pick up. For all of the downsides of living in one of America's largest urban centers -- the crime, the pollution, the stifling bureaucracy! -- I can crow that I have access to one of the most excellent public library systems in the country.

The online hold system at the library is indispensable, but still it is basically a borrower's Amazon -- a click-and-ship, minus the supersaver shipping. But even Amazon is more conducive to browsing, with its suggestions and "list-mania". With the library website, you need to do a directed search for specific authors and titles. The library holdings are so vast and varied, and the keyword search function so limited, that I find it difficult to genuinely browse. So all this lead-up was to announce that this is why I go directly to different branches, to lurk among their shelves, nosing out books I have yet to find online. This habit has acquainted me with the quirks of the various branches: the collections in other languages, a particularly excellent librarian at one location, and, much to the delight of my two year old sidekick, the goldfish in certain children's sections. So, after the disappointing visit to the bookstore, and in the full throes of garden Spring-itch attack, I headed to a new branch this weekend and found two books I have been meaning to read: The Garden Primer by Barbara Damrosch and Gardening When It Counts: Growing Food in Hard Times by Steve Solomon.

The Garden Primer, from what I can tell, aims to be the equivalent of an all-purpose cookbook, like my beloved How to Cook Everything by Mark Bittman. It covers nearly every topic in home gardening, from shrubs to vegetables, from tools to composting. Each topic has a brief yet sensible entry. I did, overall, find the primer a bit unsatisfying. The entries, though well written and succinct, usually sent me to the computer for more information. Additionally, anything aiming to be a general primer necessarily sacrifices a certain regionality and charming sense of place that interests me as a reader. I know she is a four-season gardener in Maine, so I would have preferred to hear more about that, rather than Zone 9 invasive vines. My favorite aspect of the book is that Damrosch seems to have actually done and tried everything she writes about in the text. I have leafed through one too many garden manuals only to find the same worn advice, the same diagrams, the same "facts". How many of these garden authors have actually built and used the insulated, vented root cellar that I see recommended in every manual of vegetable gardening? How many of these authors have actually tried to till under green manure without a rototiller? Have any of them really tried vermicomposting? Now that I have started a worm bin myself, I read their few paragraphs on the topic with a skeptic's eye. It all seems to be recycled from some big gardening wiki in the sky. So here's to Damrosch for writing with the authoritative voice of actual experience.

The authoritative voice is certainly present in Steve Solomon's book, Gardening When it Counts. The pages are bursting with highly opinionated and occasionally cranky tidbits of advice. I don't mind a crank when they are actually speaking from experience, so I read Solomon's wise words with joy and amusement. He also writes with refreshing skepticism on well-worn gardening topics, questioning some "truths" about composting, eviscerating the garden and seed industrial complex, and acknowledging some of the genuine limitations of homesteading. Almost every homesteading manual I have read -- and believe me, that's a lot of them -- blithely, nay almost smugly, lists the benefits and joys of living off the grid. It all looks so easy on the page! Few acknowledge the drudgery of months of winter greens. Solomon makes me laugh out loud with surprise when he predicts likely tooth loss from soil calcium depletion if one was truly living off the land. I was expecting, however, a more "survivalist" mentality, especially given the subtitle of the book. On the topic of soil amendments, while Solomon does offer advice on how to use compost and manure exclusively, he is pessimistic about long term soil quality with such a plan, and endorses a mix of homemade fertilizer using bulk products from the agricultural store. He also stands firmly against intensive raised-bed gardening. While I applaud him for bucking a trend, and agree with many of his critiques of this method, this makes his book of little utility for the urban gardener. His method requires two tracts of land (one active and one fallow) around 3,000 square feet in area. Just one of these tracts is larger than the entire footprint of my city lot (on which, mind you, sits a house and a garage). So I recommend this book for its grumpy, grandfatherly wisdom, but it is certainly a text that makes me wistful for a larger swath of rural real estate. For now, I am forced by my environs to go with the intensive potager method.

So, dear reader, if you too are suffering from Spring itch and need to get your garden ya-ya's out, these two books may sate your appetite for a while. While the flakes fall, I will sit with these two experienced dirt farmers and plot out my own follies. Perhaps, one day, I will speak with the same optimistic wisdom as Damrosch or the bemused skepticism of Solomon. I will have my own failures and successes to report, and --who knows?-- maybe I will actually have built that oft-diagrammed root cellar.

Food writing and France

I picked up some local cream this week from a farm in nearby Wisconsin. I am astounded how thick and rich it is compared to the usual "ultra heat treated" cream I find at the grocery store. This local product is close to the consistency of yogurt. Just a few spoonfuls have added a silky richness to my sauces that I can usually only achieve with a beurre manie. This thick, intense cream brings to mind M.F.K. Fisher's writing on the cream of France. Her books no longer live on my shelves -- they were long ago loaned out to kindred spirits -- so forgive me if I am short on details. In one of the most charming passages in her long body of work, she recounts cooking with French heavy cream in her first humble kitchen in France. For a quick lunch for friends and family, all she needed to do was pour a few cups of the rich cream over a pan of cauliflower, bake it, - et voila! -- she had an unctuous, full-bodied gratin. Even 50 years ago, she was lamenting how the cream had changed since her first youthful culinary adventures. She complained that the cream of yore had been replaced by a liquidy light cream that required careful reduction over a low flame prior to use in a gratin, lest you be left with a soupy mess (as an aside, Marcella Hazan echoes a similar lament about Italian cream in her Classic Italian Cook Book).

I adore M.F.K. Fisher. Along with her memoirs of her early French experiences, her essays on wartime scrounging and hunger - "the wolf at the door"- rank among my all-time favorite food writing. Other Francophile writing also has much to recommend it; I always enjoy returning to Waverly Root's exhaustive Food of France, Peter Mayle's first Provence book, and the recent Julia Child memoir My Life in France. One can hardly discuss the food writing of France without mentioning A.J. Liebling and Hemmingway, but I find them less compelling than the aforementioned writers, perhaps because these two men are so intensely focused on the consumption, rather than production, of food. But my "desert island pick" of French food writing is The Apprentice by Jacques Pepin. If you enjoy cooking and writing, I urge you to run, not walk, to the nearest library, and get a copy of this book.

I generally have a low opinion of celebrity chefs, who are more focused on promotion than actual innovation or authenticity. Everything this breed of chef puts out seems to have been shellacked into a carefully edited product that promotes their ever-expanding brand. I approached this book with trepidation, yet after a few pages was completely enthralled. Who knew Jacques Pepin was such a marvelous writer? And he is writing in his adopted language, no less! Putting aside the evident technical skills of the author, the narrative itself is so engaging that the reader turns the pages with an alacrity usually reserved for guilty-pleasure books like Lee Child mysteries. Pepin shares the often painful details of his harsh childhood, yet writes with such a generosity of spirit that the reader almost wishes to be fourteen and poor and working 16 hour days in a resort hotel kitchen.

After befriending Jacques on the pages of his memoir, I sought out his cookbooks and TV programs. The PBS series that he put together on the basic techniques of French cooking is probably the best set of instructional programs I have ever watched. My favorite episode involves Jacques breaking down a side of salmon with deceptive ease. His gentle guidance changed my entire approach to preparing fish. Jacques' rigorous training in thrifty kitchens always bubbles through in his teaching: he has a suggestion for little dishes based on almost every scrap and discarded morsel he generates in the production of the main meal.

After smugly proclaiming my disdain for celebrity chef culture, I must now admit that my favorite show on television is Top Chef. If you are unfamiliar with the series, it is essentially Iron Chef meets American Idol. And if you somehow have escaped all knowledge of American reality TV, then I will tell you that it is a contest wherein young chefs are given culinary challenges and they are eliminated one by one until the finalists meet in a three-course all-out kitchen battle. The series has gone through many seasons, but my favorite moment ever on the show involves none other than Jacques Pepin, invited to participate in one episode on a panel of celebrity guest judges.

The scene: Carla, an eccentric Southern caterer, is facing an uphill battle against more traditional chef contestants. The battle: each celebrity guest judge picks the food they want for a hypothetical "Last Meal". Jacques picks squab and peas and Carla is assigned to prepare this "last meal". In a bold move, edited by the producers to foreshadow guaranteed elimination, Carla simply roasts the squab and serves the peas with tarragon. No risottos, no foams, no gelees. Just a plain preparation that most decent home cooks could crank out on a weeknight (albeit with chicken not squab). Jacques, master technician, takes a bite. He tells Carla that, if this were his last meal, he would die happy. Can one ask for more than hearing that from Jacques Pepin?

Perfect peas bring me back to another treasured passage from M.F.K. Fisher, in which she documents her quest for ideally cooked peas. On the hillside of a French -- or is it Swiss? -- farm, she has the water boiling in an outdoor pot prior to even picking the peas. Fisher recounts in hurried paragraphs the rush to get the new-shelled peas cooked and buttered and on the table prior to losing their ephemeral garden freshness. The whole event is written with a breathlessness and suspense normally reserved for tales of Olympic-level athleticism. She wrote this at a time pre-Alice Waters, when most gourmet recipes still involved processed and packaged ingredients. What foresight! What simplicity! As a gardener, cook and writer, can I ask for more inspiration than to read these pages prior to planting my spring pea seeds? Which reminds me...who did I loan those books to? I need them back before April.

Martha in my garden

The garden issue of Martha Stewart Living arrived in my mailbox yesterday to both my delight and chagrin. I wish I could muster the disdainful attitude of the bloggers over at Garden Rant -- their manifesto proclaims boredom with perfect magazine gardens and a love for "real, rambling, chaotic, dirty, bug-ridden gardens". Many gardeners call the seed catalogs "plant porn", but for me, Martha's annual garden issue is the real hard-core deal. The sweeping vistas, the picturesque compost bins and gorgeously weathered stone walls are akin to the airbrushed abdomens and gravity-defying double-D's that litter the pages of any Playboy. Tantalized yet guilty, I pore over every page of Martha's garden issue like some hormonal teenager. I know it is enhanced, overly-groomed and astronomically expensive, but I want it. I want it all.

First, the disheartening. Martha gathered several tomato experts as well as four-season-garden-guru Barbara Damrosch for a tasting of heirloom tomatoes. Not one of the tomatoes I am growing made the list! The only one I've even tasted is a Green Zebra, and after two disappointing growing seasons in my scant garden space, I have nixed it from my repertoire. I feel inadequate. The tomato in the article for which I am definitely considering finding space is Reisetomate, which first popped onto my radar screen thanks to those anti-Marthas the Garden Ranters. Of course, now that Martha has featured it, the chance of getting my hand on some seeds are nil -- maybe I can get to them if the issue has yet to hit newsstands. I also sighed longingly over the article on an artist that sculpts garden fire pits. The 2008 catalog lists the prices from $4,000 to $50,000. Gulp. If only they also came with the gorgeous settings, like the Atlantic beach-scape in the opening photo! For now, I must content myself with a rusting Weber grill and a vista dominated by plastic Disney figurines.

On the happier side of things, I was excited to see some of my chosen 2010 plants featured in the magazine's article on fragrant gardens. I had, for example, been mulling my choice of sweet peas for several months, and finally settled on Cupani's Original from Seed Savers Exchange. Martha's gardening editors give it their stamp of approval, hailing Cupani's for its heat tolerance and bicolored blossoms. I also was glad to see my favorite doyenne of canning and preserving, Eugenia Bone, featured in the cooking section. My absolutely favorite piece, though, was from Stephen Orr, a writer from the New York Times, in which he extols the pleasures of gardening gloveless. I, too, find it much more pleasurable to go without gloves, no matter what it does to my hands. I have been trying to be more conscientious about hand protection, especially since my day job involves a lot of human contact. But who among us hasn't given themselves over to the "gritty, muddy, slightly painful joys of the purely tactile"?

The February/March issue of Organic Gardening is also on my nightstand, and has a much more reasonable approach to gardening. I will definitely be inter-planting onions with lettuce after reading their 3-season garden plan article (also, by the way, starring Barbara Damrosch - is she on some PR tour?). But a close-up picture of a dew-kissed organic cabbage is just never going to get my blood flowing the way it does when I ogle the impeccably designed landscapes featured in Martha Stewart Living. In another life, with limitless time and money, these oases would be mine. Just as in another life, with limitless time and money, I could sport a magazine-worthy abdomen.

Yes, the culture critic in me would say that both shelter and skin mags are precisely designed to create feelings of inadequacy so that we spend more trying to reach unattainable goals. Neither the landscapes nor the abdomens have anything to do with the dirty, shabby reality of daily life. Yet, I do want to hail Martha for championing the organic, the heirloom and the homemade, even though I know many feel she is simply gentrifying folk-ways. For me, she is another welcome voice in the chorus of people preserving lost arts, emphasizing sustainability and supporting independent seed companies. Who cares if she does it all while wearing $300 garden clogs?

Winter sown seed on Candlemas

It is halfway to Spring and snow is falling in Chicagoland in big, thick flakes. I am glad for this reminder that we are still in the thick of winter, since it was only yesterday that I got around to starting my winter sown seed project.

As a cook, I thrill to the discovery of unfamiliar recipes and cooking methods. After years of braising, baking and stir-frying, it is always wonderful to feel the occasional jolt of the new and unexpected -like when I recently found a recipe for roasted garden radishes in Saveur. Rarely do I feel this jolt in my garden reading: year after year, the magazines and books recycle the same methods and advice. I tire of the litany, in the same way that I tire of reading, yet again, a cooking article on "sexy" Valentine's menus or reusing Thanksgiving leftovers. But new excitements still lurk, beneath the oft-repeated articles on "discovering" heirloom tomatoes. Eliot Coleman's Four-Season Harvest recently awakened my imagination, and got me thinking about the way I limit myself to edible gardening only in the warmth of summer. This primed me to be especially interested in a recent blog post at Artful Greens about an unfamiliar approach to seed starting: winter sowing.

It is no small excitement to flutter about with seed mats and grow lights, especially in the doldrums of January, but it always makes me sigh and wonder why I have complicated everything so much. All of these expensive accessories, all of the time rigging up wiring! Looking at my fussing, it should be a wonder my foremothers ever managed edible gardens and beautiful flowers. Wintersown.org encourages the curious gardener to throw the received wisdom of modern seed starting out the window. Sowing flats in the dead of winter, and leaving them outside under protection avoids all the nicking, filing and stratification we put seeds through just to mimic the treatment of a winter outside in the ground. Advocates of this method argue that not only does it save time and money, but it also yields hearty seedlings that are more productive over the long term. As further enticement, the lady at wintersown.org will even send you free seeds for the price of postage. With nothing to lose but two first-class stamps, I signed up.

My seeds came yesterday, and thanks to my husband's voracious milk habit, I had plenty of containers ready to recycle as mini-flats for my winter sowing. I found a great pictorial post on how to prep the jugs at the blog Our Little Acre. Some folks do a "U" shaped cut in the side of the milk jug and use it like a pull down flap. The cut-in-half method at Our Little Acre seemed easier in the long run, especially when removing seedlings. Above you will see my collection of nine "flats", with everything from columbine to kale, soapwort to tomatoes. If nothing comes up, all I have lost are some stamps and a pleasant afternoon in the basement, getting my fingernails dirty for the first time this year. I suspect, however, that something will germinate, and I will be converted to this new low-tech method. I am especially interested in the tomatoes. Beside what wintersown.org sent me, I may put out some Opalkas and Sweet 100's just to see what happens. I may never be able to rid myself of the heat mats, especially if I want my passion flowers and cacti. But just as a new recipe launches me on new adventure in the kitchen, this method has renewed my enthusiasm for gardening, no matter how thickly the snow falls outside.

First germination of 2010

I checked on my first seed-starting projects of 2010 today and was excited to find some babies popping up! I started my Passiflora incarnata seeds a mere two weeks ago. My web research had indicated that germination could take months, especially for seed that wasn't fresh out of the fruit. As is typical of gardening advice on the web, germination instructions varied wildly: some sites recommended soaking seed in passion fruit juice prior to planting, some said to nick or pre-soak in water while others just said to plant directly with no foreplay. I suspect some of the confusion stemmed from people discussing "passion fruit" seed rather than the specific scientific name of the plant -- there is more than one Passiflora! The seed packet had minimal information, and said germination occurred at 30 days to 3 months, with only a 30% germination rate. I planted 9 seeds and left them on top of my fridge, which I hoped would keep it at a tight 70 degrees. Last week, when I pulled out my seed heat mat, I decided to stick the P. incarnata on there, as I suspected that even with the radiant heat of the fridge, my kitchen temperature was more in the 60's on average.

Ahead of schedule, I have two seedlings. Maybe more will pop up -- I am owed another one, if I am to trust the reported germination rate. I wasn't expecting such rapid progress -- now I am worried I started too soon. Fortunately, I saved some seed for this exact scenario -- when you are facing a spotty "days to months" germination prediction, one always needs to keep some reserves. I will be breaking out the grow lights sooner than expected, and hopefully I will have a nice healthy plant to put out in the spring. For all of the hand-wringing about the difficulty of propagating from seed, the Maypop passion fruit seems to be cheerfully resilient. Many gardeners in warmer zones complain about the plant's invasiveness, and by all reports the hardiness limits are underestimated. I will hedge my bets (if I only have these two seedlings) and stick one in a pot to bring in to overwinter, and one in the ground, close to the house to benefit from a warmer microclimate.

The other little seeds that popped up are my cacti -- I got a packet from Pinetree Garden Seed on a whim, and picked up a bag of cactus mix medium on sale at Lowe's. The seeds are incredibly small and must be sown on top of the surface since they need light for germination. I stuck these on my seed mat as well. At first, I had Saran wrap over the rectangular container, but when water condensed it drooped onto the medium. When I pulled up the wrap, little black specks were sticking to it, and I couldn't figure out for the life of me what was potting medium and what was a cactus seed. I scraped as much as a could back onto the surface, and put a seed starting tray lid on top. Here is the first germinator! The packet was a mix of several different types of cacti, so this is another "days to months" scenario. I will keep a close watch -- I may need to prick out the early risers and transplant to a different pot as environmental needs change.

Finally there are my hellebore, which are still in their cold stratification period. They currently inhabit the butter compartment of my fridge. I get to pull the bag of seeds and medium out on March 15th and send it into the homestretch of germination. I am keeping my fingers crossed that it works. If not, I have to repeat the 5 month warm-cold-warm process. Aargh! I am so desperate for some hellebore that I may just suck it up and pay the premium prices for a plant at the nursery. My passion fruit and cacti give me hope, though. Maybe my seed-starting stars have aligned for 2010.