Pie season

As we head out of the growing season and into the holiday season, my thoughts turn more towards food than gardening.  A few weeks ago my friend Irvin Etienne, horticulturist and blogger at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, posted a photo of a cranberry pie on Facebook and the recipe sounded interesting (and easy) enough that I decided to try it out on my family over the Thanksgiving holiday.  The pie went over so well that I made it again last night, this time two of them (along with a focaccia) for the annual holiday party of a local garden club.

Good-bye basil, hello purslane

Purslane flowers

When I wrote about purslane (Portulaca oleracea) a year ago, I commented that I had never seen its flowers despite re-seeding prolifically (see Eat your weeds).  I speculated that it was cleistogamous, with flowers that self-pollinate without ever opening.  It turns out I've been looking at the wrong time!  I finally caught some open flowers one morning, and while it's true that the tiny yellow flowers are easy to miss and rather forgettable, it also turns out that they're only open for about an hour.  Not being a morning person, that might explain why I've never seen them before!


Purslane growing with some very sad basil

Since I let it go to seed last year, purslane is coming up all over again, in all my pots, including my container of basil.  Which is probably just as well, because my basil contracted basil downy mildew again, this time succumbing just two weeks after I planted it, when it was barely past the seedling stage.  This may be my Year Without Basil, which would be a true tragedy because I love, love, love fresh basil but I'm not sure what else I can do; any I plant now will just pick it up immediately.  Fortunately, this disease affects only basil and does not spread to other plants.

So purslane is my new go-to home-grown green.  But because even weeds have pests, I have to be careful when I harvest it not to also harvest purslane leaf miners.  They're easy to spot because they make the leaves look pretty ugly, and while they would be harmless enough to eat, I just don't want to eat bugs.


Purslane leaf miner

Purslane is a delicious and nutritious vegetable and I've experimented with it in several different recipes, always raw because for some reason, the idea of cooked purslane doesn't appeal to me (nor does the description of the cooked vegetable as "slimy"!).  I do a lot less cooking in hot summer weather anyway, unless I can cook on the grill!  Purslane makes a great salad, combining especially well with cucumber, onion, avocado, and citrus.  I always try different combinations, and this time I had some grilled corn left over from the last meal I actually cooked over a week ago, so tonight I threw together a cold salad with grilled corn, black beans, cucumber, avocado, and purslane.  I called it a salsa and scooped it with tortilla chips, and it was pretty darn tasty if I say so myself.


A quick and easy summer dinner (alcoholic beverage optional)


Salad/salsa with purslane (among other things): recipe below

Summer salad/salsa 

Serves 2-4, with or without tortilla chips (all measurements are approximate)

1 small can black beans, rinsed and drained
1/4 medium red onion, finely chopped
1 medium Hass avocado, ripe but firm, chopped small
1 medium cucumber, finely chopped
1 cup grilled corn (kernels cut from 2 ears)
1 cup purslane, finely chopped
1 tablespoon extra virgin olive oil
juice of 1 lime
salt & pepper to taste

Screw the weather, let's talk soup

Exactly what I needed today

I spent some time today working on another blog post about the weather, OMG it's snowing, hoo-boy it's getting cold later this week, isn't it great to have another good winter for testing hardiness, yada yada yada.  Screw it, I'd rather talk about soup.

In praise of pokeweed

Phytolacca americana L.!
You are reviled in the online gardening discussions,
Weedy, invasive, hard to control
But if you're a weed, you're just doing what weeds do:
Growing where you can, when you can, conspiring with the birds to spread
And like your friends the catbirds and mockingbirds you were here first
(Along with poison ivy, virginia creeper, so many other "weeds")
You even predate the honeybees on your flowers (they came with us!)
So who are we to say you don't belong?
This land is your land, it always was:
Even Linnaeus recognized that you are as americana as we are, if not more.



As for me...
You take me back to when I was just a kid (albeit an odd child)
Using the beautiful magenta juice from your berries as ink
And when other teenagers were experimenting with marijuana
I was experimenting with a "weed" of another kind,
One that grew taller than me, huge leaves hinting at the tropics
But with tender spring shoots;
(My mother never knew if these things were going to kill me--
the shaggy mane mushrooms made her especially nervous,
although they were among the few mushrooms I could confidently identify--
but pokeweed, you're certainly poisonous if not prepared properly,
or so they say, I never tried boiling you only once; I wasn't that adventurous)
And with a bit of butter you were delicious.



[After writing this, I came across this very nice blog post on the same subject at Nadia's Backyard: Pokeweed, American (Phytolacca americana): The Jekyll and Hyde Plant]

Basil Downy Mildew: say good-bye to pesto

Yellowing leaves: an early sign of Basil Downy Mildew

I just harvested what will probably be my last batch of basil (Ocimum basilicum), for what will probably be my last batch of pesto this year.  This is depressing for several reasons.  First, I love basil and I love pesto, and I always find the end of the basil season a bit depressing.  Second, my basil usually lasts much longer, only petering out in October once nights start turning consistently chilly.  But most of all, I'm depressed because I discovered that my basil has Basil Downy Mildew, a new disease that I've never encountered before, and that promises to be a major problem for basil growers--and lovers--in the next few years.


Leaf discoloration from Basil Downy Mildew

One thing I love about basil is how fast it grows, and how productive even two or three plants can be.  I grow my basil in a container on my back deck, where it gets the heat and sun it loves all day long.  I never start it from seed, always buying plants from a local garden center or farmer's market, and this year started like any other.  The first sign that something was wrong came just a couple of weeks ago, when I noticed yellowing older leaves on my basil.  But it was still vigorous and growing strongly, was yielding well, and I thought maybe I had stressed it by over- or under-watering it.  Consistent watering is not my strong suit!  But the yellowing progressed, the older leaves developed brown lesions and started dropping off, and younger and younger leaves were affected.  When I harvested the basil I noticed a dark fuzzy discoloration on the leaf undersides, which I assumed was some kind of mildew.  I still wasn't terribly concerned; I've had mildew on various garden plants, and this seems to be an especially bad year for powdery mildew on several plants that are prone to mildew anyway: peonies, columbine, and Verbena bonariensis.  I've never seen mildew on basil before, but I chalked it up to the summer being a bit cooler than usual, because basil certainly loves heat.


Leaves infected with Basil Downy Mildew, bottom (left) and top (right)

But the disease progressed rapidly so I did some Googling and that's when I started to get a bit alarmed.  I sent photos to Margaret McGrath, a plant disease researcher at Cornell University, who confirmed that my plants had Basil Downy Mildew (BDM).  BDM is a new disease, reported in Europe in 2001 and found in the United States for the first time in Florida in 2007 but already reported from all over the country, even Hawaii.  The disease spreads quickly and easily, progresses rapidly, and can wipe out a grower's entire crop of basil in a matter of weeks.  Even in its early stages the plant's foliage is disfigured and ruined for commercial use.  I'm lucky this is the first time I've encountered it, but this isn't likely to be the last.  No basil cultivars are (yet) known to be resistant, so I suppose that gives the plant breeders one more thing to keep them busy!


Underside of leaf infected with Basil Downy Mildew

Basil downy mildew can be controlled with fungicides, but I don't use pesticides of any kind in my garden so for now I'm at a bit of a loss and don't have any tips for control.  The best advice is probably to monitor plants closely and immediately remove and destroy any that show even a hint of disease.  The good news is that the mildew isn't toxic to humans, although it can and will kill your basil.  More good news is that the disease probably (probably) won't survive cold winters; but it can spread by infected seeds so if you have BDM-free plants it might be wise to save your own seeds and grow your own!

Please share this post to help get the word out about this destructive new disease!  Dr. McGrath and her colleagues are gathering reports of Basil Downy Mildew so if you have it, you can report it here: Basil Downy Mildew Monitoring Program (this link also has information on submitting samples).  Has anybody else in the Washington, DC region encountered this disease?

For more info:

Expect and prepare for downy mildew in basil (Margaret Tuttle McGrath, Cornell University)
Downy mildew on basil (photos, Cornell University)
Basil Downy Mildew and the Ornamental Greenhouse (A.R. Chase, GPN)
Fungus threatens basil plants for this year and beyond (Adrian Higgins, Washington Post)
Downy mildew on basil (Nancy F. Gregory, University of Delaware)
Basil downy mildew (University of Maryland Extension)
2014 Basil Downy Mildew Outbreak Our Worst One Yet (Debbie Roos, NC Cooperative Extension)

A midsummer miscellany

Cardoon (Cynara cardunculus), National Museum of Natural History gardens

I don't normally do a lot of walking in mid-summer, but we've had such uncharacteristically pleasant summer weather for the past several weeks that I can't use my usual excuse of heat and humidity to avoid a bit of exercise.  So come with me on a Friday evening as I walk from work in downtown Washington, DC to join my husband for dinner at a restaurant on 14th Street near Logan Circle.  This month marks 23 years since we moved here from a small town in upstate New York, so forgive me if I wax a bit nostalgic along the way!

Eat your weeds

Purslane (Portulaca oleracea), "companion planted" with elephant ear

A couple of years ago I was at a nice restaurant, eating a fancy salad, when I realized that I was eating weeds.  Yes, there was purslane in my salad and it was the exact same weed I'd been pulling out of my garden beds and potted plants for years.  That's when I realized that if they can put it in a fancy salad, I can eat the damn thing from my own back yard.  And that's exactly what I've been doing.