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Edible Asian Garden. Rosalind Creasy
Читать онлайн.Название Edible Asian Garden
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9781462917631
Автор произведения Rosalind Creasy
Жанр Кулинария
Серия Edible Garden Series
Издательство Ingram
When I first became interested in Asian vegetables, I was most drawn to Chinese varieties and cooking methods, and I still find them a great place to start for beginners and for gardeners in cooler climates. But in the last decade the gardens and cooking of Southeast Asia have caught my fancy and I now also experiment with Thai chiles and basils, Vietnamese coriander, lemon grass, and cilantro, among others. Most of these plants are perennials, and while finally becoming more available in nurseries, as they are native to warm climates they are less hardy; most gardeners, including myself, must bring them in over the winter. While they can be a challenge, they are well worth the effort.
The following sections detail both cool-season and warm-season gardens. Most are in my northern California USDA Zone 9 garden, but David Cunningham’s Vermont garden offers time-proven techniques for growing in a colder climate. In “The Encyclopedia of Asian Vegetables,” I give copious information on growing all the vegetables in the coldest climates as well as in the semitropical regions, where some of the specialties of Southeast Asia will do especially well. For detailed soil preparation, composting, crop rotation, starting from seeds, transplanting, maintenance, and pest-control information, see Appendices A and B.
A typical Asian harvest (right) includes Asian eggplants, pac choi, bitter melon, and shallots.
Creasy asian gardens
I live in an unusually good climate for growing cool-season (fall, winter, and spring) vegetables, but it is only so-so for warm-season ones. My garden is in USDA Zone 9, about twenty-five miles from the Pacific Ocean—even less from the San Francisco Bay. The marine influence means winter temperatures seldom sink into the low twenties, with daytime averaging in the fifties. In summer, often the fog doesn’t burn off until midmorning, daytime temperature averages in the high seventies, and most nights are in the high fifties. The moderate winter temperatures are perfect for peas, carrots, root vegetables, greens, and all members of the cabbage family, but summer temperatures are borderline for peppers, eggplants, yard-long beans, and some semitropical herbs.
Over the years, I’ve experimented with hundreds of Asian varieties of vegetables, growing them in small beds by themselves or tucking individual plants in among my lettuces, beans, and tomatoes, but I became inspired to grow a whole garden of Asian vegetables over a twelve-month period, all done specifically for this book.
To give the gardens the feel of Asia, I used bamboo for fencing and trellises and selected rice straw for the paths. The plants were grown in straight rows, which is typical of most Asian gardens, and the beds were raised and formed into geometric patterns. I moved my decades-old Japanese maple into the garden for a focal point, and Edith Shoor, an accomplished ceramist, provided some of her Asian-style pottery for decorative touches here and there. The process was great fun and it entirely transformed my front-yard vegetable garden.
I have incredibly good soil. Of course I should. After twenty years of adding organic mulches and lots of loving care—such as never walking on the beds, planting cover crops, and adding chicken manure from my “ladies” every year—I can dig a hole using only my bare hands.
Shown in the photo to the right are some typical Asian ingredients: Winter melon; Southeast Asian green and white and yellow round, and long purple eggplants; lemon grass; luffa; white bitter melons; and bitter melon vines. One of many Creasy cool-season, frontyard gardens is shown on the opposite page, above. Snow peas are trained on string tepees and Shanghai pac choi and tatsai are growing in the front bed. The harvest from the garden (opposite, below) includes snow peas, Japanese red mustard, leek flowers leaves, and pac chois.
The Creasy Cool-Season Vegetable Garden
In late August, my crew and I started seeds of pac choi, mustards, and golden celery in flats to transplant into the garden. In late September, the seeds of snow and pea shoot peas, coriander, fava beans, daikons, Japanese varieties of carrots and spinach, shungiku greens, and bunching onions were all planted directly in the garden. We had good germination on all of the plants, but the slugs went after the coriander seedlings and they needed replanting three times. All went well until January, when we had seven nights in a row that went down to 23°F. Now that’s real cold for us Californians and the fava beans burned back to the ground and some of the half-grown pea plants were so weakened we took them out. The cold weather continued into April (March was the coldest on record, with few days climbing out of the forties) and the whole garden was almost a month behind. But it’s amazing how resilient cool-season plants are. The fava beans completely recovered and, in fact, produced six or seven stalks instead of the usual three; by early March, the mustards, carrots, onions, daikons, and many greens had revived from their sad-looking state and were producing beautifully. Most of the mustards and the pac choi were played out and the bunching onions were gone by midMarch. Baby turnips, different greens, and new onions were planted to fill in the beds before the summer crops could be planted.
Another Creasy cool-season Asian gardenis shown opposite, above. In November, the beds in my USDA Zone 9 garden are filled with seedlings of mustards, daikons, pac chois, and Japanese carrots ready for thinning. A few months later (opposite, below), the beds are ready for harvesting. The cool-season garden in May is pictured on this page. The fava beans on the left are starting to produce, the snow peas and spinach are in full production, the mizuna is in full bloom and attracting beneficial insects by the drove; and a second planting of greens is ready for harvest.
Stir-fries with gai lon, snow peas, and carrots, and dumpling soups with pac choi and mustards were favorite dishes in my house. I had never made them with pea shoots or with gai lon before, and they are great. New to me were the daikons, shungiku greens, and burdock. As I don’t especially enjoy radishes, I was pleasantly surprised to experience their mild, almost sweet taste in a pork soup my neighbor, Helen Chang, taught me to make, and I enjoyed the daikon pickles made with carrots as well. Helen also showed me how to cook fava beans in the Chinese manner by stir-frying them with garlic and letting visitors peel their own beans as a snack, making them easy to prepare. The shungiku greens were lovely made with a sesame dressing and their flowers created a smoky, mild tea. The burdock was great in a beef roll; I plan to grow it again next year to explore more recipes that feature it. In all, the garden expanded my Asian repertoire. Next winter, I am sure to plant more daikons and fava beans. This garden almost made winter so great I will look forward to the cool temperatures. Well, maybe that’s an overstatement.
Plants in the Cool-Season
Creasy Asian Garden
Bunching onion: ‘Evergreen’
Burdock: ‘Takinogawa’
Carrot: ‘Japanese Kuroda,’ ‘Tokita’s Scarlet’
Celery: ‘Chinese Golden’
Chinese chives: ‘Chinese Leek