A day at the Farmers Market

I spent Thursday working the University of Illinois Extension Plant Clinic booth at the Eli's-Wright College Farmers Market.

From what I hear about the main Plant Clinic at the Ag School it's quite busy, with lots of people calling with questions, but I've only done the off-site clinics, at Garfield Park Conservatory and this one at this small near-suburban weekday farmers market.

We had several questions, including "I haven't planted my garden yet. Will the weather stay warm into October so that I have time for tomatoes?" She seriously seemed to want us to research this. We were also a captive audience for the several salespeople who took advantage of the fact that we were stuck in a booth and too polite to tell them to get lost.

I think these remote clinics could be more interesting--lots of people walked by, but didn't approach because first it's hard to tell what's going on, and second, there's nothing to look at. I bought some unusual vegetables from one of the vendors to use as paperweights, which brought a few people over, but I think there would be more traffic if we had a mini-insect petting zoo, and maybe a plant-a-seed demo for children (or adults for that matter). I'm doing another one in August and I'm extremely tempted to plant some tiny pots of parsley to give away.

My paperweights turned into a wonderful grilled salad.

Grilled summer vegetables with red currant vinaigrette
Golden beets
Summer squash
Cauliflower
Raw peas, chilled

Dressing:
1 pint red currants
2 T sugar
1/4 cup balsamic vinegar
1/2+ cup olive oil
salt and pepper

Slice the vegetables very thin (1/4 inch), dredge with olive oil and salt, and grill until al dente (about 10-15 minutes). Serve the peas raw and cold as a contrast. For the vinaigrette, simmer the currants with the sugar until the fruit loses its shape; strain through a food mill to remove stems and seeds. Whip with the vinegar and oil.

Drizzle over the hot vegetables. We ate this as dinner, but it's a lovely side dish as well.

I'm not allowed to call it dirt anymore

Master Gardener class, week 2-- soil.

So I've been making fun and calling it "dirt" just to watch Twitter go crazy. But really, it's fascinating, and I knew a lot more about it than I thought I did. It's amazing the information you just learn as you live and listen.

I knew it was going to be a good day when the presenter asked us to come up with a definition for soil. I proposed "It's the top of the ground, made up of minerals and organic matter. About half of it is holes, filed with air and water. Lots of things live in it." But my table mates wanted to talk percentages and chemistry and organisms.

Turned out my definition was pretty much spot on. Here's her agronomy book definition: "A dynamic natural body on the surface of the earth in which plants grow, composed of minerals, organic materials and open space plus living forms or soil biota- (vegetation, microbial, insect, ground dwelling animals, etc)."

Sometimes you need to remember that while it's soil, it's also just dirt, and not to get too above yourself.

I think my favorite thing about hearing a lecture on soil science was the concept of "horizons" or layers in the soil. I like the idea of a horizon you can't see--it's such a garden-y concept; gardeners are always planning for unknowable outcomes. That we're doing it in an unseen medium just seems so appropriate. It's especially fascinating that city soil has no horizons; again it's a bit of a metaphor for an urban landscape, where the horizon is the houses across the street.

Where the botany lecture was a lot of new words for things that already have perfectly useful names, the soil lecture was the much more valuable naming of concepts that I more or less understand, but had no words for: texture, horizons, crust, plow pan, wilting point, holding capacity. I had a lot of "oh-that's what that is. I know about that!" moments. The most hilarious piece of advice offered: if it's muddy, don't water. Do people really need to be told this?

No recipe today! I'm making this lasagna, more or less, from summer vegetables out of the freezer and fridge! I say "more or less" because it seldoms comes out the same way twice.

Update: MyFolia discussion here.

Master Gardener class, week one: Botany

Reading the Botany section in the Master Gardener book made my head hurt, but the class turned out to be quite entertaining, largely due to presenter Greg Stack, a very engaging speaker. As suspected, I know a lot about how and why things work, but not what they are called, making it difficult to talk about, or to follow conversations. Here's my notes from the first session, and a recipe for the last of the root vegetables that you harvested last fall!

Greg brought the class in a lot with tongue-in-cheek quick definitions like this one:

Botany in a nutshell is how to identify and use a plant, plus how and why it grows, without ever actually growing anything. Horticulture is growing perishables for food and fun using intensive cultivation. Agriculture is growing commodity crops for storage.

One of many new words-of-the-day was autotrope, meaning something that makes its own food (i.e. plants), completely destroying the premise of whether plants or Zombies will get us first, which is quite annoying to those of us waiting for the plant apocalypse, when they finally assert their supremacy, turn the tables and eat us instead.

So plants--
* make their own food
* release more O2 than they use
* have rigid cell walls for support (as opposed to exo- or endo-skeleton)
* are immobile (anchored to their support medium)
* slow to respond to environment
* continue to grow at maturity, unlike us, although several of us looked at our waists and disputed this one.

He reached the number one I-don't-understand section for me which is the difference between monocots and dicots. I'd heard these terms, which essentially seems to be grass and everything else (so why not just call it that. This is why I'm not a botanist).

Botanists like to group things. They like to group the same things in different ways. There are the Linnaean taxonomic groupings, which they are now conveniently changing on us, just to make sure us laypeople remember that we are not smart enough to be scientists. There are also groupings by habitat (tropical, subtropical, temperate, desert, alpine, prairie) by growing condition (wet, dry, temperature tolerance), by life cycle (annual- and sub groups summer annual and winter annuals, biennial, perennial), by superficial characteristics and by microscopic characteristics.

Kill me now. It's only 10:30.

Of course, you need to know these things because things within groups share not just observable characteristics but it can also give you clues as to problems, care, and use.

I was alternately impressed and annoyed at people who knew what Solidagos are (what Solidago is?), and who seem to know Latin, so they can immediately translate taxonomic names. I guess it would be childish to roll my eyes.

A radicle is an immature root, there's a word for immature stem as well but my brain hurts. Okay plumule. And actually, I've heard the term radicle used a lot, so it's good that I now actually know what it's called as opposed to having to pretend I know, since everyone knows I'm an experienced gardener.

Once he got past the naming and on to how all the structures actually work, I found it more interesting. I feel like I'm looking at my houseplants with a whole new level of understanding, and a whole lot less terror. I keep looking at all the little bumps and holes on twigs and thinking "that has a name. Weird (wish I could remember what it is)." I also like that I now know the term for what I've been calling "corn feet." And that every silk on a corn ear is attached to a kernel. No pollen, no kernel, that's why you get holes on an ear.

Anyway, here's what I've got left in the larder from my last harvest. Enjoy!

Beyond mashed potatoes
Per every 2 diners:
One medium to large potato
3-5 radishes
1 each: small to medium parsnip, rutabaga, turnip
Optional: 1/4 cup celeriac or celery root
1 pat butter
1/4 cup (or so) milk, half-half, or cream
white pepper and sea salt to taste

Peel, roughly cube, and boil all until soft (you can easily slip a knife in). To cube vegetables, just cut them up along each axis-- length, width, height. Mash into a lumpy mass with a potato masher or fork, then add the butter and milk/cream. Continue to mash with the masher/fork or whip with a hand mixer on low. I don't mind lumps in my mashed potatoes, but some people like them really smooth.

Serve with meat loaf, or pan fried pork, fish or portobello mushroom.