I Am the Groundhog

I finally got a good day of gardening in today! Since my last post, I've been leading a groundhog-like existence, vegetating in the house, trying to get back in shape musically and making (and eating) lots of kimchi. Which is better than sitting around eating cheesecake in the long run, but still the steadily greening view below kept reminding me that there was a lot to do before I could start planting!

And we still have March to get through... March is fickle; in Turkish there's a saying about March:

Kapıdan baktıran, kazma kürek yaktıran ay

The month that has you looking out the door, and burning your picks and shovels.

...the jist being that the warm weather encourages you to go out, but it could just as easily be wintery cold that has you burning whatever is left because your winter fuel has run out! And since you never know what's coming, it's best not to look out on the weed-filled expanse and say "I'll do it tomorrow..."

The snow was not the last of the things keeping me out of the garden. It was followed by several weeks of non-freezing but consistently wet weather -- I think three days was the most we had without rain at any given point. I did take advantage of that three-day spell to get the worst of the weeds out of the vegetable garden, and as the soil was marginally workable, I managed to get half of my cover crop of fava beans planted. I'd wanted to do that as soon as I got back from Seattle in November but well, it was late November, and winter had kicked in. Now I have a dense growth of favas an inch high covering half the garden. I'll leave a couple rows to fruit as I love fresh fava beans, but the rest will get dug into the soil that will support this year's expanse of squash, tatsoi, garlic chives, rainbow chard, amaranth and sunflowers. Oh, and big Korean radishes!

Today was devoted to other pursuits - I weeded my neighbors' garden. Now before you think "what a good neighbor, I wish he lived next to my garden," I should note that I weeded only very selectively, and with a clear ulterior motive.

I mentioned in a very old post that the yard had a plethora of borage in it. There's so much that it forms carpets in some areas, as in the photo above. And my neighbors are very much fair-weather gardeners; they won't be out tilling the soil till the warmth of April, which gives lots of weeds a glorious opportunity to reseed themselves abundantly, and grow big before they're hacked out.

They also tend to overfertilize. While this makes for astounding growth of their tomato plants, it also means that the weeds turn into a veritable forest. They can keep the mallow, the Arum (the arrowhead leaved clumps in the front), the dock, the poison hemlock, the mystery weed that smells so bad that even goats won't eat it, the chickweed and veronica, but the borage is mine! There was enough borage growing there, multi-branched with stems over an inch wide, to make several piles three feet high. And since the rain and mud had foiled my cover cropping plans, what better way to have a nice layer of green manure than to import it from 30 feet away?

Of course, growing a cover crop serves a dual purpose - not only does it provide organic matter and friability when dug into the soil, it also shades out weeds and makes it more difficult for them to grow. Since I missed the boat on that, I decided not to dig the borage in right away, but to spread it all over the non-planted side of the garden and let it break down, all the while covering the weeds. I'd already gone through and dug out all the buttercups and arum I could. I also pulled lamium (dead nettle) I could before it has a chance to set seed. It's all over the lower garden but there's relatively little of it in the middle section, and I'd like to keep it that way. It produces millions of seeds that lay dormant in the soil for years, just waiting for their chance in the sun. And when they get their chance, they come up in a dense green carpet that you can turn under repeatedly, only to watch it renew itself as ever more seeds are exposed to the sun. It's an effective evolutionary strategy used by plants that can't normally compete well with neighboring plants. When they are suddenly exposed to the sun it normally means disturbed soil and therefore the elimination of their immediate competition. This is the reason that plowed fields in Europe throw up a dense carpet of brilliant red poppies in the spring.

I'm not sure if borage concentrates potassium in its roots like its relative comfrey, but it certianly provides the bulk if its happy. Another plus is that it's an annual, where with comfrey you have to be careful or you'll turn your garden into a comfrey plantation...as long as you yank the borage (and even large plants are very easy to yank) before it sets seed you won't have an invasion the coming year.

But fortunately borage is also a beautiful plant, so I let it grow to its heart's content in the non-cultivated/cultivable parts of the garden, where it delights with its sky-blue flowers each spring. I also left several developing plants in the neighbors' garden so that I can raid it again next year....

Edible Weeds - Amaranth / Yenilebilir Otlar - Sirkem-Horozibiği

In the States, Amaranth is best known as the holy grain crop of the Andes, where it was the staple grain of the Incas. It was also an important ritual food; cakes of it were made with the blood of sacrifices and this led to it being forbidden by the colonial priests. It's an incredibly productive plant, the large grain varieties can produce over a pound of seed per head.

There are also several ornamental amaranths; "Love lies bleeding" is one of the best known. I'm growing one grain Amaranth - Orange Giant (which I planted way too late so it's not "giant" at all...maybe next year...), and a beautiful deep red one called "Hopi Red Dye," that has seeded itself prolifically each year since I first planted it in my last garden several years ago. It was used as a source of red dye for ceremonial foods. My apologies for the really bad quality of the picture here. The plants are quite puny as well since it's being grown in the dry flower bed, but it goes to show just what a tough plant it is!

But there are local, native Amaranths in Turkey too, and they are just as tough. None of them are showy, they are green plants with green flowers, some with red stems. They are mostly considered weeds here, and will come up in waves wherever the soil is watered regularly and lots of places where it is not.



I would probably be trying to eradicate it entirely if it weren't for the fact that it's one of my all-time-favorite summer greens. Istanbul is not such a center of wild green lore as other parts of Turkey, and many local people just pull it out without ever thinking of eating it, but in the Aegean region, "Sirkemotu" is a very well-known and popular wild green. It, along with purslane, are two of the very few wild greens that are edible throughout the summer. You can pull off the tender last few inches of stem along with whatever leaves are there, and it will immediately branch and come back improved. If it's happy, it can get up to a meter and a half tall though usually it's shorter. Mine would get that high but I tend to keep it in check, otherwise I'd have nothing else growing in the garden. It produces a lot of seed. So much that I will not consider requests for seeds of these plants...I don't want to inflict it on the southern U.S.! Don't worry, plain old Love Lies Bleeding is every bit as good to eat, and actually preferred in many Greek gardens, where it serves as both an edible and as an ornamental. In Greece, it is known as "Vlita." Vlito is also a slang term for someon who is not too bright, due to the fact that if you eat a really large amount of it, it is said to make you a bit foggy-headed. I wouldn't know, pretty much any good meal does that to me anyway and I don't consider "food coma" to be an entirely bad thing!

You can use Amaranth in almost any way you'd use spinach - raw in salads, as a filling for pita (a friend in Naxos made a really nice "vlitopita") or boiled/steamed as a potherb and drizzled with olive oil and lemon. A little crushed garlic mixed in is not bad at all. Just be sure not to overboil it; just like spinach it will become mushy if overcooked but I think overcooked Amaranth is even less appetizing.

Today I made a very Turkish dish out of it - gözleme. It's a bit of work but not all that hard. I started with a plain dough of flour and water with a little oil mixed in and a bit of salt. It should be about the same consistency as bread dough or, as they say here, "like an earlobe." Knead it for around ten minutes, then cover it and let it rest. After 15 minutes or so, divide the dough into pieces about the size of a large egg and let rest again. (You might want larger or smaller, depending on the size of your frying pan.)

By the way, if you don't feel like dealing with dough, you could also take two flour tortillas and do this as a quesadilla. But it won't be nearly as good!

Meanwhile make your filling. Chop the amaranth leaves fairly finely. Chop an onion finely and sautee it, then add it to the Amaranth (the amaranth will cook later). The rest is up to you; I mixed in a handful of crumbled beyaz peynir, Turkey's take on feta cheese, some red flake pepper and some paprika, some salt and black pepper and that's pretty much it. You could also add kashar cheese, or boiled and semi-mashed potato.

Heat a heavy frying pan. In Turkey they use a "sac" (pronounced "saj"), like a shallow convex wok placed over hot coals. But a cast iron frying pan or griddle will do just fine.

Take a piece of dough, generously flour your counter and roll it out into a long oval about 1 mm thick. Here they use a thin dowel-like rolling pin called an oklava to do this, but you can do it with a regular rolling pin as well. You'll have to be a bit more patient though. Once it's open, take a generous spoon of the filling and spread it over half of the oval of dough, then fold the uncovered side over the filling. Press the edges to seal. Add a bit of oil to your pan, and put the gözleme in, and brush some more oil over the top. Once the bottom is browned, flip it over and cook the other side. Repeat with the rest of the dough. Gözleme filled with various fillings is a common wedding dish in E. Turkey, and I saw gözleme filled with Amaranth in the weekly market in Söke near Kuşadası. By the way, Kuşadası is pronounced "KOOSH a-da-suh," not "koosaDAWsee!"

Another great way to eat Amaranth is with eggs. Fry some onion in a generous amount of olive oil, add chopped Amaranth along with pepper if you like and saute till the amaranth is soft. Add salt to taste, then pour beaten eggs over the Amaranth, cover and let cook till the eggs are cooked through. Afiyet olsun!