Guerilla Gardening

I'm about to suggest that you do something that might be a little illicit: Guerilla Gardening.

Live in an urban area with little more than a fire escape and a narrow windowsill on which to enact your gardening dreams? Renting a house but lacking permission to dig up the lawn for a garden? Don't despair.  Plant on somebody else's land.

Now yes, that's trespassing, but hear me out first.

In every developed region of the planet from small towns to huge cities, there are disturbed but abandoned sites covered with local opportunistic vegetation (also known as weeds, but that's in the eye of the beholder, I don't want to be overly judgmental). It may be a spot where a building was torn down, or a site prepared for a building but the owners were unable to secure permits or financing. It may be a corner dug out for a new highway interchange that got put off for a few years due to budgeting constraints.

What better place to throw in the fast-spreading herbs that thrive on poor soil and that you don't have room for in your own garden, like mint, lemon balm, bee balm, yarrow, parsley, dill, oregano and marjoram.

The trick is this: Throw in seeds or plants you get for free as splits from friends or relatives--you don't want to spend money on an ephemeral planting with no guarantee of how long it will be around to reap the harvest. This still leaves a lot of cheap and free planting choices that will yield culinary and tea herbs to delight you for months to come.

The personal safety rules are this: Don't climb or sneak under fences, approach a barking dog chained to guard the site that looks like it was borrowed from an old junkyard, go near any unstable pits or dirt piles, or dodge no-trespassing signs.  This still leaves a lot of available spaces.

The personal health rules? Watch out for poison ivy, and wash plants well before consuming, as you don't what car exhaust or passing stray dogs may have done to the plants when you weren't watching over them.

The ethical rules are this: Do NOT, ever, plant in a wild undisturbed area or in parklands. Invasive species, even those you love like chocolate mint, can wreak havoc on the natural environment and out-compete endangered local species or plants needed for local wildlife habitat. The idea is to plant in areas that are already disturbed and are slated for further disturbance--development, paving, etc.--in the foreseeable future. You are creating your own temporary foraging zones. Also be prepared to share -- should anyone else notice your plantings, they may well dive in and harvest too. Don't fight about it, in fact obviously you share common interests and might make good friends. The plants are not really 'yours,' you are just facilitating their existence in a place you can access.

Not quite at a comfort level for guerilla gardening? Start small -- the little patch of dirt around your street tree, or a small weedy strip between the street and sidewalk.  The benefit? Your green plants provided beauty and soil stabilization while they were growing, and left you with a potentially huge harvest of culinary and tea herbs for absolutely free.

And of course, you got a little thrill doing it, too, didn't you...

Eating Lean--On Your Pocketbook

Food prices are up. Fuel prices are up. Unemployment is up, again. Income and equity are down. Many families are feeling the pinch--often right around the waistline. The irony is that some of the most processed, least healthy foods out there are also the cheapest. My heart aches to see parents at the grocery store with a cart loaded full of instant noodle packages, liters of soda, and generic cookies, but I know that it would have taken three times the money to buy enough fresh fruit and vegetables, orange juice and whole-grain baked goods to feed the whole family.

The good news is that by planning ahead and embracing the natural cycle of abundance that rolls through the seasons, you can eat well and even feed a family well on healthful foods on a very modest food budget. Eating lean can be a boon to both your waistline and your pocketbook--if you make it a priority to learn about natural foods and how to cook them and are willing to embrace a lifestyle that focuses on food and family economic security. I realize these changes may not be easy for some, but they are well worth it.

Growing any food you can on your own is always worth it, even if it's just a cherry tomato plant in a 5 gallon bucket on a tiny front stoop and a few heads of lettuce in a windowbox. But even if you can't grow your own food, there are cheap, secure options for ensuring your family eats healthy foods in lean times.

One option is foraging, anything and everything you can. Find a knowledgeable naturalist; even in the urban landscape, cress, lamb's quarters, dandelions and other greens poke through the sidewalks while plums, apples and pears go unpicked in decorate suburban landscapes. I've knocked on many a suburban door and asked if I could pick the plums on the landscape tree out front in exchange for returning a few jars of plum jam. Some folks have shooed me off like I was nuts, muttering about potential liability, but others have been thrilled to learn that the bush some landscape company planted in the front yard is really a delicious fruit tree. (Just wash this stuff well; urban and suburban landscapes tend to be chemical-intensive.)

Hunting and fishing go hand in hand with foraging, and are a time-honored traditional way of putting food on the country plate. Check with your state's fish and game department regarding laws, seasons and licensing requirements. Also check with them about the disposition of road kill and poached game--seriously. Here in Vermont, many a family eats well off the deer and moose meat dispersed by Fish and Game to the folks who sign up on a list to receive seized and freshly road-killed animals. In coastal areas, those day-fishing trips can be a great food investment, as if you plan your timing right you'll inevitably wind up with fish for your freezer that would have cost way more at the supermarket than you paid for the excursion ticket.  Hunters and fishermen are also universally generous folks, and often can't convince their own families to eat all the game or fish they bring in, so asking at the local fish and game club if anyone has any spare bounty to share or perhaps to barter for can often fill your freezer.

Filling your freezer is also the name of the game for fruits and vegetables. But in season, and just give fruit a quick wash and vegetables a quick blanching and throw them in the freezer in plastic bags. Suck the air out of the bags before sealing for your own imitation vacuum-packing that helps prevent freezer burn.

Asparagus, zucchini and green beans are pricey in February, but gardeners and market farmers literally give them away at the peak of the season. Berries and tree fruit are often free for the picking, or inexpensive at pick-your-own joints. I buy huge bags of apple drops from a nearby orchard for just a few dollars, picking up perfect fruit off the ground after a windstorm. I make all our applesauce for a year plus several cases to donate to the food shelf on way less than $20 worth of apples.Market farmers sell canning tomatoes by the bushel box during August; if you don't can your own sauces, just chop them up and freeze them for winter cooking.

Buying grains, pasta and beans in bulk from a food co-op or natural foods store rather than buying packaged rice pilafs and canned beans saves money and eliminates all the salt and other additives in the packaged, processed products. Brown rice and dried black beans, kidney beans and black eyed peas are all way less than a dollar a pound when bought in bulk. With these dried goods, just a bit of oil, cooking water, and your cheap in-season vegetables, you are well on your way to a healthy well-balanced meal for very little money.

Fiddleheads!

Photos by Jack Rowell

Fiddlehead Fever: Succulent Scrolls of Spring

                              

The first of May is celebrated around Vermont in many guises, from flower baskets to the first lighting of the barbecue grill to organized labor demonstrations.  But no May Day festivity quite combines the sense of magic of the season with independent Green Mountain spirit of living off the land as an annual pilgrimage to pick fiddleheads.  These deliciously coiled new sprouts of the ostrich fern (Matteuccia struthiopteris), named for their resemblance to the scroll at the tuning-peg end of a violin fingerboard, can be picked and eaten in Vermont with patriotic pride: they are our official state vegetable. 

Fiddleheads grow in alluvial and swamp muck soils from the far northern reaches of tundra to the bottomlands of Virginia, but folks in Vermont and Maine (where some call them ‘fiddlegreens’) have a special affinity for these elegant spring sprouts, which share the early season with such other wild-crafted delicacies as early dandelion greens and the first shoots of wild garlic. Restaurants across Vermont pay good money to local pickers to put fiddleheads on their plates beside the earliest spring-caught trout, possibly more to see the looks on tourists’ faces as they pick curiously at the strange green stems than for purposes of actually serving a nutritious, delicious vegetable.

Fiddleheads have their own unique taste, but it’s comfortingly similar to a good green bean or nice fresh asparagus.  While they can be eaten raw as a crunchy antipasto, do be warned that the Center for Disease Control has connected a few outbreaks of food-borne illnesses with raw fiddlehead consumption.  This is most likely due to residues of pollutants from the rivers whose bottomlands the fiddlehead inhabits.  No reports of health problems have been associated with washed and well-cooked fiddleheads. 

True fiddlehead afficionados hold their favorite fiddle-picking spots as safe-guarded secrets, protecting them with the same possessiveness as a Hobbit exhibits over his mushroom patch (and  fiddleheaders have been known to keep a weather eye out for the occasional early morel as well).   Fortunately, there are plenty such spots to go around along the banks of any of Vermont’s major waterways, from the White to the Black, the Otter to the Poultney.   Look for last year’s ostrich fern bases inside bends in a river, where March flooding has overwashed a sandy island and ancient willows drape their flowering wands in verdant curtains over budding pillows of dutchman’s breeches.  Or cheat and keep an eye out for where people are suddenly parking their cars and dashing off with buckets – the landlubber’s equivalent of fishing for runs of blues by watching where the other boats are clustering. 

Pick fiddleheads by simply snapping off the curls which have cleared the top of last year’s fern base cluster, but have not yet unfurled and are still wrapped in their papery brown scale covering.  Never pick all of the fiddleheads from any one fern crown; leave some to unfurl and gather energy back into the roots to support next year’s crop.  Walk gently around the fern bases, and try not to pick in a spot that other people have already heavily picked over. 

When you get your fiddleheads home, you’ll need to remove those papery brown scales that cover the overwintering fern crown.  There doesn’t seem to be any substitute to sitting on the front porch and picking these off by hand, one by one, but I have had some luck submersing the fiddleheads in a bowl of cold water.  I let them soak for about fifteen minutes, then place the bowl in the sink and let more cold water flow gently into it, allowing the brown scales to simply float away.  Sort of.  At least some  do. Then you still have to pick the rest off, so suit yourself. 

If you want more elegant looking fiddleheads, while picking off the covering, you can rub off the small leaves that may have begun to sprout out the sides, revealing a clearer spiral shape; you can also take a sharp knife and put a clean edge on the bottom stems, which may darken slightly where they were broken. 

As with all food wildcrafting, do exercise caution.  There is a slight danger of mistaking the edible fiddlehead ferns for other fern shoots like those of the Bracken Fern, which are known to be carcinogenic.  However, no fern but the edible fiddleheads has the distinct papery brown wrapping; most ferns are either smooth or have fuzz and fur. And should you make a mistaken identification, one taste should clue you in: most other ferns are intensely bitter and acerbic on the tongue.  If you are not completely confident of your plant identification skills, hook up with a skilled fiddleheader, bring along a fern field guide, or buy your fiddleheads at an early farmers market or your natural foods store – which saves you the trouble of getting that brown papery stuff off.

Your fiddleheads will taste their best if you cook them as soon as possible after picking.  As soon as you give up and admit defeat on getting all those papery scales off, get a pot of salted water boiling.  Drop the fiddleheads into the salted water (if you put them in first then bring the water up to boil, they’ll overcook and be mushy).  If you are going to use the fiddleheads in a dish requiring additional cooking – a quiche, soup, or in canning – five minutes ought to be about right.  If you are going to eat them out of the pot or marinade them, you’ll probably need closer to ten minutes of cooking time. 

Marinated Fiddleheads, Fresh or Canned

The simplest way to enjoy fiddleheads is to saute up some garlic in butter while they are cooking in the boiling salted water.  Drain the fiddleheads well, then toss them with the butter, garlic, and a squeeze of fresh lemon juice.  Or mix up a good fresh Italian-style salad dressing with olive oil, cider vinegar, and fresh herbs to taste.  Amply drench the cooked fiddleheads in the dressing and let them marinade for a few hours before serving, or pack them into pint canning jars with approximately one-half inch headspace and process in a boiling water bath canner for ten minutes. Serve marinated fiddleheads at room temperature, on their own or over pasta or rice.

Blue Cheese Fiddlehead Crepes

My favorite, more elaborate way to eat fiddleheads is in blue cheese fiddlehead crepes, which I devised twenty years ago while living on the fiddlehead-rich banks of the White River. All proportions are simply to taste: 

Fiddleheads, lightly boiled and drained.

Garlic

Sweet white onion (or wild onion and garlic shoots)

butter

salt

white pepper (fresh ground black pepper may substitute, but not as aesthetically pleasing)

blue stilton, or other strong blue cheese

prepared crepes

prepared white sauce (flour, butter, and sweet cream)

chives

parmesan cheese

Preheat over to 300 degrees.  Saute garlic and sweet white onion in butter with salt and white pepper. Toss in the fiddleheads, then crumble in some strong blue cheese such as Blue Stilton.  Roll tightly in prepared crepes. Put the rolled crepes, seam side down, in a buttered lasagne pan. Add more crumbled blue cheese to your prepared simple white sauce, and pour over the crepes. and top with fresh chopped chive (or more wild onion and garlic shoots) and parmesan cheese.  Cover with foil or a glass lid and bake for 20 to 30 minutes, until they crepes are heated through.  Serve with a light rice pilaf, some slices of fresh lemon, and fresh ground pepper. 

Fiddlehead Quiche

Fiddleheads can substitute for the asparagus, green beans, or other vegetables in most quiche or cheese pie recipes, and makes a fine gratin with a well-aged Gruyere.  This variant of the classic Quiche Lorraine is simple, and works equally well for a hearty breakfast with homefries and toast, or a light dinner with a side soup or salad.

Pastry for 9-inch one-crust pie

6 slices bacon (optional – or substitute vegetarian bacon or tempeh) crisply fried and crumbled

1 cup lightly boiled fiddleheads

3/4 cup shredded Swiss cheese

3/4 cup shredded sharp Cheddar cheese

½ cup finely chopped onion (or slice onion in rounds and saute on low in butter until carmelized)

4 eggs

2 cups cream

3/4 tsp. Salt

½ tsp. Pepper

½ tsp. Cayenne pepper (or, for milder flavor, paprika)

Preheat over to 425 degrees. Prepare pastry.  Sprinkle bacon over bottom of pastry-lined plate.  Top with half of the cheese, then layer in the fiddleheads and onion, then the second half of the cheese.  In a medium mixing bowl with a whisk or hand beater, beat eggs well, then beat in cream and spices.  Cook in 425 degree oven for fifteen minutes, then reduce temperature to 300 degrees.  (To help avoid browned crust, you can cover the crust edge with a ring of aluminum foil for the first 15 minutes of baking.)  Cook approximately 30 minutes more, until a knife inserted half way between edge and center of pie comes out clean.  Let stand 10 to 15 minutes before serving.