Harvesting from the greenhouse

It’s been a long day of chasing work on the vessel you’ll see in today’s Studio Snippet. I’d like to call it a day, but I promised I would try to get a short post out each day and I want to keep that promise until the end of the week at least. So this evening I’m going to share a few things I’ve been harvesting already from the greenhouse.

(Please note some of the links in this blog post are affiliate links. What this means is that should you click through them and make a qualifying purchase I will receive a commission which I’d certainly appreciate since it helps support this blog project. However, this shouldn’t increase your cost any, and certainly don’t ever feel like I’m pressuring you to buy things through the links I offer or anywhere else. I’m all about being frugal first!)

First up is a plant many of you may have seen, but not known was edible, wintercress (Barbarea vulgaris), also often called yellow rocket. I’ve been eyeballing this particular plant growing up next to one of the raised beds for quite a while now, meaning to harvest and eat it. All the while its been… well I guess growing like a rocket. A day or so after taking this photo I did finally snip all the buds ready to flower, along with lots of the tender leaves and stem.

Wintercress is something I’ve been eating for many years now as it’s a fairly ubiquitous weed all around my property, esp. in areas where I’ve disturbed the soil with some building project. I understand it’s fairly common across North America, as well as other countries around the world.

Outside the greenhouse there are quite of few of these plants I could gather greens from, but they aren’t nearly as far along as this one which has been enjoying the humid heat inside this space. I’ll wait and eat those other ones later on.

I should say wintercress has a pretty strong flavor which most won’t immediately like. I understand some people like it raw, perhaps even grow to crave it that way. Not me. I always boil it a bit and drain off the water. I hate doing that since I know so many of the nutrients get lost in that process, but it’s just too strong for my liking otherwise. Even with this I generally use it as just one ingredient in some sort of concoction to tone things down more. This one became part of a dish with carrots, onions, and black rice with an assortment of other spices.

I should note here that I don’t recommend trying to identify this plant around your home using just my poor quality photo. For any wild edible plants I talk about you really should get some good books to help positively identify them. Some people will make it sound like foraging for wild edible plants is a dangerous and difficult thing. In my experience it’s not at all, but there are some very poisonous, deadly plants out there you need to make sure you aren’t eating by mistake! I am not trying to cover all that in these short blog posts.

I plan to make a longer post at some point to more fully present the books by Samuel Thayer. For the moment though I’ll just say that he happens to cover wintercress in his latest book “Incredible Wild Edibles”. If you have any interest at all in wild food I can very strongly recommend any of his books! They are the absolute best that I’ve found!

I also thought I’d note that I’ve happily been getting all my salad greens the past couple days from plants I’m growing. I should be able to continue this for several more days at least, hopefully much longer than that. This has been one of my goals for this year since I otherwise tend to spend quite a lot of money buying salad greens.

In addition to the sunflower micro greens I wrote about previously I’ve been harvesting sylvetta arugula in fair abundance from the green house. As I understand it, this is more of a “wild” type arugula, and also one that is perennial in many growing zones. I seem to be right on the edge of where it is perennial. It’s not supposed to be here, but I’ve had a patch of it out in the garden that stayed alive for a few years. Checking today I don’t see any signs of arugula life there though. I think the wicked cold snap we got this winter may have done it in.

In anticipation of that though I made sure to start some in the green house last year. It pretty much died back during the winter as I expected, but the root system stayed healthy and alive, ready to spring into action as soon as it got warm enough. It was one of the early things taking off in here. In the last few days it has really started putting on the growth. If I wasn’t eating it back it would get huge real quick it seems. Anyway, I very much like this plant as it provides lots of tasty greens all through the spring, summer, and fall for me. Right now though they are in their prime inside the green house.

My lunchtime salads have also seen a decent amount of chickweed mixed in. This is another wild edible I’ve been consuming for years. It’s perfectly good raw, and excellent as part of a salad. Varieties of it are apparently even more widespread across North America than the wintercress. For those reading this who are in other parts of the world it’s probably worth looking to see if it grows around you too.

The chickweed plant you see in the photo was a “volunteer” in the raised bed. I deliberately didn’t weed it out earlier, because I knew it was edible and tasty. Since one of my goals is to grow salad greens why should I pull out something that planted itself, began growing very early, and perfectly fits the bill? Honestly, isn’t that the sort of plant I’d rather have in the garden? I should probably consider actively planting it! There’s quite a bit of it growing along the edges of the paths in here too.

I didn’t plan it this way, but Thayer’s “Incredible Wild Edibles” also happens to be the book of his that covers chickweed if you want a good place to learn more about it.

So while I’m still far from there, I’m moving along a path to sourcing all my food first from what grows for free around me. I want to get to where I only purchase a few things from the store. I may not fully achieve this, but every little bit helps my wallet and the living ecosystems of our beautiful planet, not to mention boosting my health with the freshest nutrient dense produce possible.

Studio Snippet

Not too much to say about this. I’ve been picking away at this piece for far too long it seems. I love chasing this design style, but it takes forever to do! I made decent progress today, doing several of the “medallions” you see here. There is just one more to go, but it is the largest. I’m hoping I can finish it tomorrow. If so perhaps you’ll get to see in the next Studio Snippet.

I’m happy to have a site where I can again allow comments. (I had to shut them off on my main website because the spam was simply uncontrollable!) So please I encourage you to share thoughts of your own. My general rule about comments though is just to play nice. Differing views are fine, but I’m not interested in engaging in or moderating verbal fights. If I feel things get out of hand, by whatever criteria I decide, I’ll just start blocking or deleting things.