Sow Native Seeds to Celebrate the Solstice

Take a minute to think about the plants that sustain you. Everything you eat came from plants, either directly or indirectly. Your house and furniture may have been built from the bodies of plants. Some of your clothes came from plants. If you’ve delighted in leaves turning colors, fragrances wafted from flowers or leaves, or unexpected bursts of color in nature, give thanks to plants for enriching your experience of the world and lifting your spirits.

As the days grow shorter and frost nips at tender plants, the winter rains bring new growth. The winter solstice, when day and night are equal, signals the return of longer days. To honor the turn of the seasons and turn away from the frenzy of commercialized holidays, try a ritual to get grounded in nature.

My favorite winter solstice ritual was created by Trudi Davidoff, who runs the organization WinterSown Educational (http://tinyurl.com/746u6cv). Though she lives on Long Island, she plants seeds outdoors all winter in plastic clamshells. In midwinter, she can look out at her picnic table and see bits of green starting to show in her snow-dusted minigreenhouses.

The ritual involves sowing four sets of seeds. “It is a very wonderful thing to experience,” Trudi said.

Seeds of Remembrance “remind us of someone we knew and loved but is now gone from our lives forever.” Did a loved one have a favorite wildflower or native shrub? One of my favorite dogs loved miner’s lettuce, so I picked leaves for her in the garden. I saw the first sprout of miner’s lettuce in my garden in early  November, and it can grow throughout the cool season in a shady spot until mid spring. I remember the unusual flowers of a spicebush that grew in front of my grandfather’s house, and in remembrance I can plant seeds of the western spicebush.

Seeds of Life “make fruit or nectar to invite birds or butterflies to our gardens.” I grow hummingbird fuchsias, as well as clarkias and globe gilias, for the winged ones. Toyon, elderberry, penstemons, and goldenrod are also great choices.

Seeds of Trees “honor Mother Nature.” Trees clean the air, keep soil cool, and give us shade. Native oaks are the iconic California tree. Smaller trees you can try growing from seed include desert willow, western redbud, California hazel, big berry manzanita, vine maple, and mountain mahogany.

Seeds of Faith are for plants recommended for a warmer climate zone to signify a “leap of faith” and know that “Mother Nature is capable of miracles.” You can get seeds of native plants you’ve admired in Santa Barbara or San Diego and plant them in a warmer part of your garden. 

If you don’t have seeds, come to the Gardening with Natives seed and cutting exchange each fall. Even if you don’t have materials to share, there’s always plenty to go around.

November 2011. Copyright 2011 Tanya Kucak. All rights reserved.

365 Little Festivals

The gardening year is “365 little festivals,” Barbara Damrosch said. “You can go into any supermarket and get anything anytime. But the real entitlement is to eat each fruit and vegetable at its perfect moment.”

She contrasted “hotel melon,” the tasteless fruit often available in hotel lobbies, with a slice of luscious heirloom melon fresh from the garden picked at the peak of sweetness. No comparison!

Damrosch spoke about “the joy of eating with the seasons and from the garden” at the San Francisco Flower and Garden Show in March. With her husband, Eliot Coleman, she owns the “experimental market garden” Four Seasons Farm in coastal Maine and wrote the book The Four Seasons Farm Gardener’s Cookbook: From the Garden to the Table in 120 Recipes (Workman, 2012).

They’ve simplified their gardening and cooking “to make the most of space and time,” Damrosch said, and are always looking for “how to do it quicker and better.” The secret to making the most of the space you have is to always have something ready to plant before something else comes out, she said. Other ideas include interplanting shallow-rooted plants such as lettuces with deeper-rooted plants such as radishes, and training vining plants such as cucumbers or melons on trellises.

Damrosch offered interesting ideas for saving gardening and cooking time.

To grow leeks with more of the edible, white part, usually you’d have to mound soil around the plants as they grow, which takes time. But Damrosch offered a way both to plant only once, and to get an extra-long white shank. Instead of planting seedlings at ground level, she uses a metal rod to make a hole 9 inches deep and drops the seedling into the hole. (I’ve used a crowbar or a piece of rebar.) The whole plant still gets enough light to grow, because the hole is not filled in. By the end of the season, though, the hole will have lightly filled in, and you can harvest a leek with a very long white shank. 

To make applesauce or lemonade a pretty color, Damrosch adds some grated or juiced red beets. Conversely, if you like the flavor of beets but don’t want your food to be pink or red, you can grow golden beets or white beets.

Rather than processing fresh tomatoes, she freezes them in plastic bags. When she’s ready to use them, the skins easily slip off the frozen tomatoes if they’re rinsed with hot water, Damrosch said. Then, she puts the tomatoes in a colander and lets them drain for several hours. The liquid can be saved for soups, and the drained tomatoes won’t need to be cooked down to make puree, she said.

To control brambleberries, she ties several canes to a stake, with adequate space between clumps. When it’s time to pick, she can walk all the way around each staked clump, rather than reaching through a thicket from one side.

March 2013. Copyright 2013 Tanya Kucak. All rights reserved.

Grow Your Own “Eat Me First” Winter Greens

August, when edible gardens are bursting with tomatoes and squash, is the time to start thinking about your winter garden. Seeds planted in the next few weeks will have time to grow into plants that are robust enough to endure the cooler weather that’s coming all too soon.

I start my seeds in 6-packs so that I can protect them more easily. Tender sprouting plants are irresistible to birds! Or you can buy seedlings and plant them from now until early October, either in a garden plot or in large containers.

Winter greens are some of the most nutritious foods you can eat, but they are best fresh from the garden.

Jo Robinson, author of Eating on the Wild Side, said in an NPR interview that certain vegetables are “heavy breathers,” meaning they use up their sugars and antioxidants quickly after being picked, so you should eat them within a day or two. 

Robinson’s “eat me first” list includes artichokes, arugula, asparagus, broccoli, Brussels sprouts, kale, lettuce, parsley, mushrooms and spinach. Other vegetables, such as roots, can be stored much longer without declining in nutritional value, she said.

Leafy greens and brassicas are good cool-season crops. 

Parsley deserves to be eaten in salads for its own bright flavor, rather than being demoted to a garnish. In my gardens, it reseeds itself and comes back year after year. Rather than pulling it out when it flowers, I keep at least one plant to attract beneficial insects and to produce seed.

Arugula is another easy reseeder. As a member of the cabbage family, it has a more assertive flavor than most salad greens. I grew to like it when seeds blew into my garden from a neighboring plot this spring. For several weeks, I grazed on arugula and brought some home to eat in salads with whatever I’d picked from the garden, such as mache, redventure celery, beet tops, parsley, sunchokes, miner’s lettuce, viola flowers, or kale. I often topped my spring salads with chunks of cooked butternut squash, marinated tofu, or a ginger sauce.

I’ve given up on broccoli a few times because they’re aphid magnets. But I have found one variety, Purple Peacock Broccoli, that seems less attractive to aphids, produces side shoots for months, and has a lovely sweet flavor. It’s broccoli-kale cross, so its magenta-accented leaves are delicious as well.

Kales are my winter staple. Red Russian kale and Dinosaur kale (also known as Tuscan, Lacinato, or Black kale) are both choice varieties and easy from seed. All kales get sweeter after they’ve been touched by frost, so they’re an especially good winter crop. If you sow them directly, you can eat the thinnings as baby greens.

I like kales so much, in fact, that I rarely grow lettuce or spinach. The most versatile varieties are loose-leaf types, rather than head lettuces. You can pick exactly what you need, cutting the outer leaves first, and the plant will continue to grow. Choose red-tinged varieties to bump up the antioxidants.

July 2013. Copyright 2013 Tanya Kucak. All rights reserved.

Native Superfoods

If you’re eating blueberries or pomegranates for their chart-topping levels of antioxidants, you may be interested in a few native berries that nearly triple those values.

Alicia Funk sent samples to a lab and found out that elderberry, manzanita, and madrone fruits easily bested those more common fruits. She published the data in her book Living Wild: Gardening, Cooking and Healing with Native Plants of California (second edition, Flicker Press, 2013), co-authored with Karin Kaufman. 

Funk discussed native foods and handed out samples at a recent local gathering. She encouraged people to grow these plants in their gardens rather than collecting them from somewhere else. 

Note that it’s illegal to collect plants from wildlands without a permit. In fact, get written permission before you collect plants from anywhere other than your own garden.

Native blue elderberries have a long history of use, but are best picked fully ripe and not eaten raw. The cooked or dried berries get sweeter, and compounds in the raw berries that might cause a reaction in sensitive people get detoxified. Elderberry syrup is an effective antiviral that has long been used for colds and flus, though most of the research has been done on European species. 

Funk picks manzanita berries in the summer when they are ripe, a deep orange-red. “Use whatever species is in abundance,” she said. To separate the big seeds and the skins from the “sugar,” she grinds the berries in a blender or food processor on low for a couple minutes. Then she pours it all into a mesh strainer and pushes the “sugar” through with a wooden spoon. She sprinkles the strained product on cereal, adds it to baked goods as a gluten-free, antioxidant-rich flour, or uses it to flavor salad dressings. Either the whole berries or the manzanita sugar can be stored for a year, she said. Rather than discarding the seeds and skins, she simmers them in water for 20 minutes to make a refreshing drink.

If you’re fortunate enough to have a mature Pacific madrone, the berries keep well refrigerated or dried. Funk made a Beyond Cranberry sauce using madrone berries for Thanksgiving. She also recommends a delicious tea made from crumbled-off madrone bark. Pour hot water over some bark shreds, steep for 10 minutes, and strain.

You can make a caffeine-free wake-up tea that has “the same catechins as green tea,” Funk said. She sent samples of her local deer brush, C. integerrimus, to a lab. Add a few fresh or dried ceanothus leaves to a cup, pour hot water over them, and steep no more than 2 or 3 minutes. Like green tea, Funk said, it gets bitter if it steeps too long.

Finally, “toyon berries are available in the winter when not much else” is, Funk said. The berries don’t taste good fresh, but get sweeter when they’re dried. She grinds the dried berries into a powder and uses it as a condiment on her cereal or in vegetable stir-fries. It adds tanginess and is a good source of antioxidants.

July 2013. Copyright 2013 Tanya Kucak. All rights reserved.

Practical Uses for Native Plants

When I’m working in my garden late and the mosquitoes are biting, I usually rub an aromatic plant on my arms and face to minimize bites and keep welts from rising. But I recently learned how to make a simple bug spray using native plants, for those times when I’m away from my garden.

At a talk sponsored by the Gardening with Natives group of the California Native Plant Society, Alicia Funk said mugwort was an especially effective bug repellent. To make it, she fills a glass jar with the plants, pours boiling water over them, and lets them steep overnight. In the morning, she strains the overnight infusion and puts it in a spray bottle. Other plants that can be added to the mixture include California bay, mountain pennyroyal or coyote mint, yerba santa, or manzanita.

I’m delighted to find this practical use for mugwort, since it’s a vigorous plant that needs to be cut back regularly to stay within bounds.

For poison oak, Funk makes a spray using manzanita leaves, in the same way: fill a jar with manzanita leaves, pour boiling water over them, let it steep overnight, and strain. Put the liquid in a spray bottle to use it. The astringency of the leaves dries up the rash and it’s a very effective treatment, she said. Other plants that have been used to treat poison oak include mugwort, California bay, yerba santa, acorn shells, and grindelia.

Did you notice that bay, manzanita, and mugwort can be used in both formulas? One of the first things I noticed when I began studying herbs was that the same herbs seemed to be used for many different conditions, which made me think it was a scattershot approach. But as I learned more, I realized that this is a strength, because you can use what's available. For first-aid uses, often all you need is a certain property. For an insect repellent, you need aromatics that repel bugs. For poison oak, you need something that calms the itching or that’s anti-inflammatory. To treat chronic medical conditions, however, you’d look for a unique combination of herbs to bring the system back into balance.

The all-purpose household cleaner Funk has used for the past four years is also an overnight infusion she makes from native plants. She uses California bay leaves and the bright-green tips of douglas fir branches, and adds distilled vinegar to the strained mixture. She puts it in a spray bottle and uses it to clean wood floors and disinfect countertops. 

“If you can boil water,” Funk said, you can make these useful concoctions. But the most important skill is learning to recognize the plants.

Her 5-year-old knows about yarrow’s antiseptic qualities. Whenever someone has a minor injury, instead of getting a band-aid he runs out to the garden to get some yarrow leaves. Lightly crushed and applied to a cut or scrape, the leaves stop the bleeding and quickly reduce pain. The most effective varieties are the native white or Island Pink yarrow.

 July 2013. Copyright 2013 Tanya Kucak. All rights reserved.

The Garden Is the Remedy

Getting my thumbnail pinched while assembling my folding bicycle sold me on herbs for first aid. I had some herbal salve in my backpack, so I quickly applied some to my throbbing thumb. I could already see a dark spot at the base of the nail. Within 20 minutes the thumb was no longer painful, and over the next few days the pain did not return and the dark spot on the nail did not get worse.

Since that day about 25 years ago, I’ve used herbal preparations as well as herbs straight from the garden. 

My rule of thumb is to treat a minor injury immediately, before the body’s defensive reactions such as inflammation can kick in. In practical terms, that means it’s important either to carry a small herbal first-aid kit with you, or else to know what you can use wherever you are. If you can positively identify a plant you are certain is nontoxic, you can chew the leaves and apply a quick poultice. In a pinch, many green leaves can work.

As a beginning herbalist, I read books that recommended 5 or 15 herbs for a single use, which seemed imprecise. With experience, I learned that although plants have different chemical constituents, when it comes to first aid, precision is not in fact important. It is important to positively identify any plant you intend to use.

If I’m in my own garden, I can choose from my living apothecary. Since it’s a vegan organic garden, my plants are safe to use. If you don’t know whether pesticides have been used in a particular garden, don’t use those plants for medicinal purposes.

A great all-purpose healing plant is plantain, with either narrow or wide leaves. It usually occurs as a weed, but I cultivate a plant or two in containers. For any minor cut, bruise, or insect bite, I briefly chew a leaf and apply the macerated leaf as a poultice.

Yarrow has a reputation as the premier herb to stop bleeding. Yarrow leaves are my second choice after plantain for minor garden injuries. The white-flowered form, rather than any of the colorful cultivars, is the best choice for medicinal uses.

If I’m in my garden when the mosquitoes are biting, lavender or sage leaves rubbed on my arms and face keeps them away successfully. But they’ll still bite my feet, so if I need to be outdoors for a while, I use aromatics head to toe.

Any of these herbs can also be made into a healing salve, alone or in combination. The base of a salve is generally a light oil such as grapeseed or olive, with a wax such as jojoba or beeswax. Calendula petals, as well as comfrey leaves or root, are quick skin healers and work well with other herbs in a salve.

Copyright 2011 Tanya Kucak. All rights reserved.

What If They Control Us?

Have you noticed that growing native plants makes you want to grow more native plants?

Maybe you haven't had success with any other plants, so you start with a black salvia. You water it the first dry season, but it doesn't do much, so you neglect it, but then it flowers and is gorgeous. You don't have a black thumb after all, so you try more natives and discover they're easy to grow. In a few years you're teaching other people about natives.

Or you want to replace a lawn with native bunchgrasses and wildflowers. You're sold on the idea, but it takes lots of arguments to persuade your spouse. But once the birds start flocking to your meadow, your spouse is calling you to come look and spends hours taking photos of the birds. And when other people visit, your spouse tells them all about the plants.

Or you plant five different Ceanothus plants. Three of them survive: success! As you pay more attention to your plants, you realize you're also learning about the weather, the soil, the bugs, the birds, architecture, energy, and water conservation. And you're out in the yard so much that you get to know your neighbors.

Or you look closely at your wildflowers and start noticing that tiny bugs like the same flowers you do. Then you learn more about these beneficial insects, and soon you're planting the wildflowers in the vegetable garden, too.

One of the best expositions of the positive feedback loop that's triggered when you start paying attention to plants is in a brilliant new PBS documentary entitled The Botany of Desire. Based on a book by Michael Pollan, it was produced and directed by Michael Schwartz.

Pollan points out that a bee collecting pollen from a plant thinks it's in charge, just as a person planting a garden thinks he's in charge. But the plant is using the bee to carry pollen from one plant to another, and it's using the human to expand its range. To the extent that a plant appeals to people, it will get more copies of itself made and expand its habitat.

Pollan argues that the more you're aware of the symbiotic relationship between plants and people, the less alienated from nature you become and the more you feel yourself a part of the web of life. "Everything we do -- what we choose to eat, what flowers we choose to put on our tables, what drugs we choose to take -- these are evolutionary votes we're casting every day," Pollan says.

This exhilarating look at a plant's-eye view of the world focuses on four plants' strategies for getting us to plant more of them, and how they have in turn influenced human culture and consciousness in surprising and revolutionary ways: apple, tulip, marijuana, and potato.

Don't miss it! The Botany of Desire premiered Wednesday, October 28, 2009, on PBS channels. The Botany of Desire dvd is available from ShopPBS.org.


September 2009. Copyright 2009 Tanya Kucak. All rights reserved.