Historia Plantarum (On plants), Italian, second half of 14th C. From the copy online through the Library of Congress. I’m just starting to work with this, and I thought someone out there would surely appreciate this picture. I, myself, like the little “illuminated document” style of the text underneath a giant representation of the plant.
The book is online at https://www.loc.gov/resource/gdcwdl.wdl_11560/?st=gallery&c=160
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I was not kidding, earlier this year, when I said I plan a much better garden. Next year, I want more flowers. I have a pretty strong preference for edible gardening, so I am making a list of flowers that I know to be edible (and which I might actually grow). That is kind of redundant, one would think, considering my lists of edible plants from pre-1603 sources, but this list may include things that I don’t know to be available to pre-1604 Europeans. **
It should also be made clear that “edible” doesn’t necessarily mean eating the flower specifically. Tomato flowers are cheery, but I’d rather have the fruit. Sage flowers are pretty but you get more bang for your buck using the flower as a tea than as a salad ingredient.
I’m also struggling to narrow it down a bit, because veg and herbs also flower, and if I put every flowering, edible plant in my sightline, the list will be so long as to be worthless. So, for now, I am trying to keep it to things I might grow specifically for their flowers, and plants that I grow and forget about the flower as part of the decorative element.
() Calendula only comes in shades of orange before 1603 AFAIK, but I will be looking for modern colors, as well.
() Columbine is only useful for the flower, which has a very sweet nectar. The remainder of the plant is problematic if ingested.
()Unfortunately, the version I KNOW to be period, Oxeye Daisy, is considered an invasive in a lot of states, so I don’t think I will be growing it. I already have enough dandelion to fill that bitter green role.
() In this list, Gillyflower refers to both Stock (Matthiola) and Pinks (D. plumarius or, more generally, Dianthus caryophyllus). Wallflower, another flower sometimes known as gillyflower, is of an uncertain edible quality and best left out of the plan right now. To the best of my knowledge, there are two named varieties in the dianthus family from either the late 16th C or early 17th C: Sops-in-wine and Fountains Abbey.
() Johnny Jump Up is a specifically medieval/Renaissance flower, but all pansies would work.
() Nice little discussion about Lilac’s history, here. Since I LOVE lilac, my persona had some imported to her gardens. https://thegardenstrust.blog/2017/04/15/lilac-time/
() I learned some interesting things about Okra. It’s not a plant one finds mentioned in cookery books or herbals of the European bent, and it doesn’t show up in the New World until the African slave trade. I planned to grow it just because it is a beautiful flower. However, apparently, there was a Spanish moor, Ahmad bin Muhammad bin Mufarrij bin Abdillah, who wrote a book called Botanical Journey around 1216, which very specifically described what we know as okra.
() Squash blossoms, in this list, refers to plants from Cucurbita pepo, the New World squashes. I haven’t followed up on whether or not the flowers of Old World gourds (the edibles in the Lageneria family) are edible; I only know that the flowers from my bottle gourds are much smaller than my squash blossoms, so I wouldn’t be able to use them in the various recipes calling for squash blossoms.
I’m suddenly tired and overwhelmed; I want this to be a useful list but don’t have the gumption to pour through list after list to pick the candidates for my garden.. I just meant this to be a quickie project to plump up my floral options, and I’m fighting my tendency to do wayyyyyy too much research for a simple project. So, a couple of references to circumvent that and then I can add or subtract a few things as I make decisions or learn more.
Here’s a link (and a mirror) to a 1980’s era book on the gardens at the Cloisters, which are in my sight for some other projects:
https://www.metmuseum.org/art/metpublications/Sweet_Herbs_and_Sundry_Flowers_Medieval_Gardens_and_the_Gardens_of_The_Cloisters.
And here is a link to a 1943 Met publication on the Medieval use of Herbs, which is also useful: https://www.metmuseum.org/art/metpublications/Herbs_for_the_Mediaeval_Household_for_Cooking_Healing_and_Divers_Uses
Here’s a trusty reference for edible blooms: https://whatscookingamerica.net/edibleflowers/edibleflowersmain.htm
***
**A side comment about that “pre-1604 Europeans” limitation. The SCA, when I showed up, focused on Western European culture prior to 1600, with room for cultures that would have had contact with Western Europe. What that meant when the SCA first defined that versus what that means now are two different things. I have always had a more forgiving attitude about timelines and places than some other SCA participants, and diversity is welcome. My personal preference is for things that would have been grown or imported by someone, somewhere, in Europe, prior to the death of Elizabeth I, the last English monarch of my persona’s life span. I intend to drop a dagger (†) by the items I would grow as part of my enduring English Renaissance Garden project, but that doesn’t mean that other plants that show up on my list might not also be reasonable for a pre-17th C. garden. They are just not what I think my persona might have been able to grow (If you wanna go the distance and prove that some unticked flower/herb/veg on this list is a reasonable garden plant for a Tudor garden, knock yourself out, I welcome the information). I may further refine the list by indicating the earliest variety I can find no matter the era, or perhaps by indicating which flowers were known, but the variety was not known, but that’s really a bunch of finer points that I am not interested in right now. I just want pretty plants that I can eat and a little tick mark to indicate the ones my persona may have known.
It should shock no one who knows me that I can get a bee in my bonnet and not rest until I have an answer to my dilemma. If you has told me, when I was 16 years old, standing in the Jewel, and buying* way more seeds than I could possibly plant in the area my parents allotted for me in the garden, that I was ever going to be confused and falling into a rabbit hole about fava beans when I was a Woman of a Certain Age, I would have looked at you like you were out of your mind. In fact, at 16, I did not know what a fava bean was. Mom was of Norwegian descent. There was not a lot of bean cooking in her repertoire.
Seriously. Look for Norwegian recipes featuring beans. This is the internet. I’ll wait.
Not a lot, are there? If you spread your net a little wider, to include all legumes, you’ll catch some pea recipes. You might find some recipes for brown beans, but those tend to be from the Norwegian diaspora. And, since I have no idea how far into the future someone might be reading this, I can only say that I hope you can find more than I did. Modern Norwegian cooking has influences from outside Norway, so things drift into the cuisine. Beans are delicious and more people should eat them.
Especially fava, because they seem like a good fit for the Scandinavian climate.
So, anyway, my experience with eating beans was pretty limited until the point in time I was cooking as an independent adult. I ran into fava beans eventually, and I eventually became interested in historical varieties, and I eventually learned that the martock is a pre-1603 variety of fava bean. I considered getting some a few years ago, but I went for carlin peas, instead.
I’ve mentioned before that I lost huge amounts of seeds at some point in that first Pandemic Winter. I’ve been diligently trying to replace things, and today, I got word that a small sample of carlin peas is on the way to me. I am so glad. I thought I lost them forever.
But I decided that this year, I’d also allow myself the martock. I rather wish I had decided that BEFORE I bought a new packet of Windsor Broad, but it’s not tragic that I have two varieties.** They are available through a US retailer now, and I treated myself. I figured I especially deserve a treat because I did not buy myself those spendy saffron crocuses.***
But then I found a martock page on Ark of Taste that just insisted that the proper martock has a crimson flower. WTF? I’ve been tempted to grow crimson-flowered fava, but I wanted to do it more as a fun thing some off year. Down the rabbit hole I went.
So I dug into some sources, looking for pre-1603 color renditions of fava beans; of those I have found, they show the usual white-with-dark-interior flower. Naturally, the disclaimer applies: I did not search every book I have and every web site I could think of, but I did search enough to feel comfortable in believing that a scarlet-flowered broad bean wasn’t the only broad bean in England, in 1603. In fact, here is an earlier fava bean, from an English book:
It’s worth remembering that many of the herbals were copied; the fava bean from Rembert Dodoens (1554) is essentially the same as the one from Fuchs, shown below. It’s possible that the predominant fava flower is white with markings because the herbals all copied the same model, but I’ve little expectation that artists in the 16th c. never saw fava flowers–it’s not like elephants or rhubarb–so I don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect that this is what the favas looked like.
It’s not true that there is no mention of red-flowered fava’s, though. The 1597 printing of Gerard’s Herbal states plainly that there is a red-flowing fava that produces an unpleasant tasting, pea-sized, black bean. The plant is smaller and has tendrils, like a pea plant. It’s labeled as Faba sylvestris, The wilde Beane. Now, that right there is reason enough to see if I can get a hold of those crimson-flowered fava’s, although 1) the seeds of crimson-flowered favas are reputed to be green and 2) modern research indicates that there may be no such thing as a wild fava bean but there are some fava-like vetches, so the issue could just be the way that classifications have changed.
From the Cloisters: How to Propagate the Martock Bean, a very pretty film tutorial.
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*Well, selecting. My mom bought them. Bless her, she did not stop me, even though I bought selected so many seeds that we would have had to tear up the entire yard to plant them. Strangely, that is exactly what I just did: I bought so many seeds that I’d have to tear up all my grass to plant it all. Shocker, right?
**After all, I have learned a lot about runner beans and I am working to restrain myself from buying a white flowering version.–I have already got scarlet, painted lady, and black coat as period varieties. I don’t need to grow a white. I don’t. I do not.–
***Nah, no amount of martock is going to make up for not having those spendy saffron crocuses.
A long time ago, I devised a personal project I called “One From Each.” The idea was to force myself to make something from/with all the things I had acquired–I have so much raw material for crafting shit that I need never buy another thing. I dawdled along with the project for a while, but did not really make as much headway as I wanted.
And, of course, in the intervening years, my interests have changed… but not so much that all that stuff is no longer useful.
So when a copy of both Better Homes and Gardens Home Canning circa 1980 and The National Trust Book of Pies showed up at prices I was willing to pay, I purchased them. My friend Fancy has long been recommending one, and the other had a classic (and not USDA approved) recipe for meatballs that, well, I already have. The recipe I’ve that I have made me want to have the whole, slender book. After all, web resources disappear like chocolate candies out of a Halloween dish.
I look forward to trying all the things.
For a couple of years, my gooseberry bushes did okay. They were planted in shade, they were establishing themselves. Then a storm took out two of the trees on the other side of the street, and my gooseberry bushes exploded with fruit, because OMG! SUN! Then, however, came the Roofinators, followed by a tragic application of weedkiller by someone who was careless (not me! not M! Such are the hazards of Urban Pretend Farming!). There was no joy in Alasville that night those several summers.
This year, the problem has largely been the lingering effects of the chemical damage and the mixed cold/heat/drought cycle we have had through the growing season. Nonetheless, I got a pretty good crop of them, and the last of the fresh ones are holding out in the crisper. I’ve mostly used the fresh for rødgrød med fløde, occasionally with some ground cherries thrown in. However, I have always been looking for something other than gooseberry jam or gooseberry pie to use up these yummy darlings, and so I went down the savory lane. I’m familiar with lingonberries as a member of the Norwegian diaspora and cranberry as an American, so why the hell not gooseberries with meat?
A little web searching, a conversation with Rhys ap Ishmæl Llygad Odd, a lot of time digging through Medievalcookery.com, and I had an idea of where I wanted to start. The gist of the gathered research as applied: Medieval recipes frequently serve gooseberry, as part of a savory dish, with poultry, beef, or fish, while modern recipes I reviewed tend more towards pork and fish. As Rhys noted, they all tend toward fattier meats, and a few of the pre-1604* recipes I looked at specifically mentioned using pork fat as part of the preparation. After digging about, I selected the two recipes I wanted to use to guide me in making a very simple sauce for meat, something that can be made on a weeknight after work or for a feast for 50 people.
The basic recipe for this comes from this site. It took about 5-7 minutes to prepare the sauce, once the gooseberries had been topped and tailed. The top/tail can be done in the time the pork chop is cooking up.
It’s served on a lovely bit of pork from Kettle Range, my locally preferred butcher. I can’t say I followed the sauce recipe precisely (a little more soy sauce than was called for, a little less sugar), but that shouldn’t shock anyone. The arugula salad (arugula, cheese, a lemon & oil dressing of some kind) is also from Kettle Range, part of one of their ready made meals I occasionally get. Even with the use of the soy sauce, I could still feel comfortable serving this plate at an SCA event, because there were plenty of examples of some kind of umami-adding component in period and in the various recipes I consulted. Someone from the Prince of Transylvania’s court would recognize this food.
This dish, though it looks so very similar to the prior plate, is different. The recipe, beef with gooseberries, comes from The Prince of Transylvania’s Court Cookbook, hosted on the ever-splendid Medieval Cookery site. It’s served on a “pan-broiled” steak from Kettle Range and with the last of the arugula salad. The medieval recipe is very simple, basically prep your beef, cook your gooseberries in your beef water, pour the sauce on your beef.
This time, rather than pour the dressing on the salad and call it done, I actually dressed the salad. While that seems a minor difference, think of it like this: finely shredded cabbage with a tablespoon of slaw dressing poured across it is a cabbage salad. To get coleslaw, you need to mix the dressing and the cabbage. The two things, while compiled of the same ingredients, have different tastes and mouthfeels. Presumably, the acids in the dressings do the same things to the veg as the lime juice does to the shrimp in a ceviche.
But I digress. One of the reasons I mentioned the actual butcher is to emphasize that this is the best quality meat I am able to buy going into this food experiment. The meat is organic, and while I don’t think I used a chop from heritage pork this time**, it is something I sometimes can get there, so all the pork has to be very good to compete with that heritage pork (or else we would all just wait until the heritage pork is in stock, right?). My gooseberries were without applied pesticides ever and untouched by weed killer this year, so they were the best I could plate, too.
But this sauce was a disappointment as written. Not enough umami left in the pan, no added umami, no anything but mashed gooseberries in beef drippings. It was not good enough for my beautiful steak.
I have a lot of appropriate options for pre-1604 ingredients around here, but most of them are on the sour end, like vinegar or verijus. I thought about wine, and will try that in future, but I was not going to open a whole bottle for this. So it was Worcestershire sauce as a stand-in for liquamen , the closest bit of umami I had open. I used less of this than of the soy sauce a couple nights before, so there was a much more pronounced flavor of the gooseberry. It was nice, but I have to say, I preferred the pork and gooseberry, and will be playing around with umami additions for the sauce. That made it a better fit, but Ryhs called it correctly when he advised using pork.
I am planning to make a third version, with chicken thighs and wine as the extra bit of sauce flavor. I can’t decide if I want to try white or red; I guess it will depend on what I feel like opening that night. 😉
___________
*Scadian wankery: I am a Tudor in persona and will try not to use items after 1603 (the year Elizabeth I died) to document, but I will go up to about 1630 for personal practice and inspiration. And, you know, sometimes there just isn’t any other guidance.
**I used a chop from my monthly packet, and I did not check the label, I just grabbed a chop. I don’t think they include the meat from heritage breeds in their meat shares–I can’t imagine it’s financially feasible. But I wanna pretend it might have been, okay? It’s not like the SCA is not chock-full of pretend. 😉
I have not thought about us for a long, long time.
Maybe I would have been better off if I had.
I have to be careful about writing such things, for surely someone, somewhere, will assume I mean someone by those statements. The only someone I mean is myself; it is an example of how a joke-ish reference to a song from the 1970’s can turn on a proverbial dime to a bit of introspection. Once you say the words out loud, though, they become targets for misinterpretation. You can’t really know who is accidentally overhearing when you are talking to yourself.
It’s been a difficult couple of years for gardening, just as it was in the years before, and I am kind of amazed by how life and its curveballs can smack the crap out of my plans. Every time I think I got a workaround figured out for all my failings and all the world’s flingings, life, the universe, and everything conspires to show me just how mistaken I am. I expect I will be bitching about this into eternity; the arrogance of hopeful self-delusion is a particular weak point in most humans, including me. I am always hoping that this will be the year I don’t fall flat on my face for some thing or another. 🙂
And here I am, again, picking myself up, again, mildly cussin’ and stompin’ about falling immeasurably short of my personal expectations, again. Alas.
So, anyway, I had to have my roof redone a few years ago, and it was a terrifying project, involving the tear-off of 5 layers of roofing, thanks to the previous homeowner’s tendency to just throw more shingles up when it was time to fix things. I’ve no idea at what point the local building codes stopped allowing more than three layers, but clearly it was either after I bought the house, or the magic words “homeowner repair” bought more forgiveness for blatant code violations back then.
You might reasonably ask “What does this have to do with garden wankery?” Well, I am here to tell you!
The roofers did in about half my garden beds. The barren raspberry bed pictured above is perfect evidence of the results. They set their ladders up in my raised beds, they threw the asphalt shingles on the ground, they walked all over everything. I have very mixed feelings about how that re-roofing played out; they did a tough job that needed doing, but they pretty much ruined 50% of my planted yard and they had to come back to repair their work.
On a side note, let us not even discuss the mess they made in the attic. M can’t even talk about it without words like “devastation,” “heartbroken,” and “catastrophe.”
I tried establishing some black raspberries over in the AS50 bed, but all I can say about that is “at lEaSt SoMe oF tHe PlAntS mAde iT tHrU tHe wInTer.” I am just going to have to look at what is in the back section of the house that can be moved and to where it can be moved in order to establish new permanent beds. Mother pussbucket, sez I.
The other thing that has made me quite unhappy is the loss of a good selection of my seeds. I mean, I’ve lost them. And it is, of course, some seeds I can not replace, like the carlin peas. I am hoping that I can at least locate one of the little pill bottles I had full of peas and beans I meant to eat rather than to save for seed. I might be able to rescue some of them. During the course of the lock down, things got rearranged, and I have no idea where they got buried (other than not in my garden). The pandemic also took out my favorite tomato grower’s business, so I had no access to the varieties I most desire. And of course, I had to compete with other gardeners for the reduced supply of plant starts. AND the weather has been terrible, from the worst coolness to the excessive heat, cycling between the two rapidly and repeatedly, and oh, YEAH, the period of drought. Gah. I was not fit for the task that I wanted to do, I could only manage a shadow. There you go, Universe keepin’ me humble.
I did get to visit my cousin in Indiana and my friend in Illinois, both of whom have better growing seasons than I do, and I keep the memories of their beautiful gardens in my mind’s eye. I can get back there, I can get back to that niceness, I can, I can! I just have to replace all the dirt and start over! There is no arrogant self-delusion in that personal expectation at all!
Writing it down helps. That is why I am here today! There isn’t a lot of harvest talk here, because that’s not the most salient thing–or rather, the lack of a notable harvest is, in fact, the salient point and I need to plan to make next year better than this one. I’ll work on that through this medium. Next Harvest Monday, I hope to limit myself just to what happened since this entry, rather than try to cover the last 2 years. 🙂
We had the opportunity to visit New York this January. Michael has a piece in the Museum of the Moving Image as part of the Envisioning 2001: Stanley Kubrick’s Space Oddity, and he so very much wanted to see the whole exhibition that we ground our teeth, sold plasma, and otherwise simplified our lives to bare bones in order to scrape together the fundage for a visit.
Well, I might be exaggerating about the selling plasma bit, but it felt like that might be a choice, because the budget got chopped hard.
I have always wanted to see the Cloister’s gardens, but it never felt like it was something that I should insist upon a trip to New York to see, and at first, I was so disappointed by the fact that when my opportunity to visit the gardens came, it was in muthaforkin January. But I shook myself out of my sorrow and decided to do the best I could with what I had available, for I may never be in New York again.
The gardens were sleeping, of course, and the specific garden I most wanted to see looked like this:
A bare quince and barely living bed at Bonnefont Garden in the Cloisters
It was quite cold out, and I’d left my jacket with the coat check, so I could not be out nearly as long as I wanted. I got pictures of all the plants still happy in the beds and went into the building.
And that is where I met one of the Cloisters’ newest acquisitions: Book of Flower Studies by The Master of Claude of France. I stood there and wept, overwhelmed by how lovely it was and by how perfectly it encapsulated all my most favorite interests. I could hear M laugh gently as he noted my tears, and he took a picture of me crying before it: he says that this tenderness in me is part of why he loves me. It was an intimate moment before an intimate book.
Of course, I must be who I am, and so I compiled a list of the plants therein as ingestible plants suitable for the Renaissance garden. The list is limited by the subject matter of the book–flowers–and my inclination to list only those plants I know you can ingest. Any plant in a medieval or Renaissance garden had some use, but I’m not going to advise planting a flower unless I’ve a certainty that it’s considered modernly safe as a food or herbal tea.
Edibles:
Apothecary Rose
Blackberry*
Borage
Calendula
Chicory
Dandelion
Fava Bean
Grapes
Heartsease (modern name: Johnny Jump Up, Wild Pansy)
Hazelnut
Mullein
Saffron
Scottish Thistle
Sweet Violet
White Rose of York
Wild Pea
Wild Strawberry
*I question the identity of this; I’m not enough a botanist to know why this was identified as a blackberry rather than a raspberry, nor do I have access to any supplemental material the museum may have used to identify it. I’m just noting that it looks more like a raspberry to me. The entire book is online, here, and so review it yourself for your opinion, for your scribal inspiration, for your gardening inspiration, or just because it is a beautiful thing to see.
Other entries related to medieval and Renaissance plants for your garden:
Plant list from The Arte of Gardening
A kitchen garden by Leonhart Fuchs
A list of edibles pictured in Mira Calligraphiae Monumenta.
In which the historical place of rhubarb is discussed.
A Gathering of information on two pre-1601 soft fruits, or, I bet you thought I’d given this up, eh?
I’ve been busy. Weekends for family and friends, weekdays for work, and little time for anything else.
Queen G and her French BreadWe attended St Rad’s this year, our first time. M and I did not tent it; instead, we were generously allowed use of some unclaimed bunks on site. We showed up with the intent to car camp. The Event Steward saved us. Yay!
We left for the event much later than intended, and the SuperAwesome! that is mapping software left us staring at a blocked road at approximately midnight, somewhere in the remote fields of Minnesota. It took us some while to find a route that was actually paved to eventually get to site, and so the kindness of the Event Steward can not be overstated.
G recently had a trip to France, and she visited Château de Guédelon. She brought back flour ground in their gristmill, and she baked up bread in the clay oven you can see in the background. It was a really lovely bit of experimental archaeology. The bread was very good, and I rather wish I had thought to bring commercial, American whole wheat flour to compare the taste of the two loaves. My sense of G’s bread was that there was a difference, but I can’t be sure it was not psychological. I can be sure it was delicious.
During the night, a terrible thunderstorm rolled in, and we watched as people broke camp and either left site in an attempt to beat the storm, or brought their beds into the big cabins and bunked for the night. It was weird and wonderful to listen to the storm.
Sunday morning, we packed up what little we had and had breakfast with G at some restaurant, then made the long trek home.
Beans Be BloomingI’m glad to see that both runner beans (left and lower right) are blooming, so I hope to get some seeds this year. The Bartolotto Lingua Bush are also blooming (top right). What was a surprise is that they are both in the same bed. I thought I planted one in one bed and the other in the other bed, but the bean plant that is in that other bed, the single plant that came up, has not yet bloomed.
The 16th C. Garden at Bristol, such as it is.Other fun: a couple of trips to the Ren Faire, one to meet up with M’s family and a couple weeks later, one to enjoy with the spawn posse. The second trip, I tried to really look at the 16th c. garden they grow there, but other than a quick run up to the bed and speed glancing (yeah, I know, right? Speed glancing) at the plants, I didn’t really spend much time there. The Posse was on the move and the crowd was thick. But I was able to at least confirm that the plants I have chosen for my 16th c. gardening pleasure are pretty much the same as the ones they grow there.
Look at us, all having a life and shit!Summer is ending, alas.
Thinking though my fingers helps me sort what is happening now and plan what’s going happen next in my garden. I like to write and I have been woefully distanced myself from any time to do the things I like. Getting seriously sick makes me think about how I am spending my time, and let me tell you, social media does not provide the same sort of joy that *anything* creative provides. Sometimes I feel like I need to be a little more open about the background this garden is happening in, in order to combat all the tales of perfection one sees in social media. Kind of like beautiful women who contrast their professionally posed, photoshopped pictures with unretouched snapshots. Except, instead of beautiful woman version fake and version real, it’ll be curmudgeonly, not-beautiful old me showing the weeds.
Because, lemme tell you, my gardens are a hot mess this year. I am living proof that even in a terrible weather year, when struggling with personal limitations, you, too, can have some success as a gardener. Maybe you’ll only have amaza-plots amongst a jungle, but you can still make all the jam you want and eat all the soft fruit pies you can handle.
Or maybe all the treefiddy you want. *I* did not get all the treefiddy I wanted, because M took all the treefiddy away. I only got two pieces. Bummer.
Stages of the started plants. They grow so beautifully… because the insects can’t get them.One of the things tasks that got left behind in a three-summer-streak of too many other things to do was the usual review of the seeds, that beloved chore that promises hours of lush garden dreams while you sort through what’s left and decide: Do I grow this one this year, or give that one up? Will the seeds I have last another year or do I HAVE to grow them to ensure I still have viable seed beyond this year? And what is in all these beautiful new seed catalogs that I have yet to try and will immediately lust after once I read the description?
I did not even get to that chore until the end of June this year.
There are a lot of seeds I will have to be on the look out for next year, because they have reached the point of “can’t really expect these to germinate” and must be replaced. ::sigh:: That is a lot of years of picking the plants that grow best in this little micro-climate to get better plants and yields–a simple version of landracing–all gone to waste.
I think the most disappointing thing was the germination rate of the sugar snap pole peas, which I have been landracing since about 1998. I finally got them from their little starter pots to the spot on the 16th C bed that M and Steve helped me to reclaim. There are only 4 spots of the sugar snap poles; the others are the remaining White Dwarf snow peas. I purchased these from Victory Seeds back in 2013 and saved seeds in 2015. I think that the pots that did not come up probably had the remaining 2013 season peas.
It wasn’t too hard to chose from the many pea varieties I have, because the peas I loved are these and a few empty packets that I held on to in order to remind myself to obtain more. The remaining pea seeds are all things that I was not particularly impressed with, and I am thinking about growing them for their greens under a grow light this winter. That way, I’ll get something out of them.
Next year, I must plant the Carlin Peas. They are no longer available, not even through seed savers exchange. If I lose them, I won’t get them again.
This is where the hard decisions lived. I have a lot of varieties, and even the ones I like least are ones I will grow again. In the end, I tried to start two (out of 4) varieties of runner beans and the oldest of my other sorts of beans. The Mayflower and Whipple beans I tried to start all rotted in the ground. The Scarlet Runner and the Sunset runner both produced at least one living plant. So I planted more old bean seeds in the pots that did not produce a single plant, this time Baker Creek’s version of Bolita beans, and Bartolotto Lingua Bush–the seeds from a single chance seed that made it through a winter a few years ago. I had planted the seeds there the season before, none of which came up. I was pretty surprised to have one come up the next summer! Anyway, 80% of the Bartolotto lingua and 20 percent of the Boilita did not come up, so I replanted the starter pots with Royal Burgundy in the last days before the fall cut off. I managed to get Royal Burgandy to start in time for there to be a chance of a crop. The Royals were older than the bolitas and yet had better germination. The other thing I love about the Royals is that they will continue to produce even after seriously cold weather kicks in; they have produced well into November for me.
So, my worries are that I won’t be able to save my landraced pole beans (Cherokee Trail of Tears and Turkey Craw) because there was not enough growing season left for them by the time I was planting fall beans. And I’m really afraid that I am going to lose my other two runner varieties (Scarlet Emperor and Painted Lady) and my favas. So they are on the list for next year.
Likely the second worst set of decisions, because I have so many different sorts. I elected to try the two freshest packs of seed (Soyo Long and Japanese Climbing, which I bought suspecting that they are the same thing) and the one set of seeds that had the best history, Collier. All of those came up, yay. I hope I can get some cucumbers from these plants–enough to eat and enough to save seeds.
There wasn’t enough time to try any kale or collards, and I haven’t started chard or radish yet, so I will not be long-winded about those. I did start some beets, choosing the packets that had the least amount of seed, and we will see what we get. Something came up in every row, but not in every pot.
I hope I get me a little something from each, especially the peas and the runner beans.
Ars Gratia Artis 
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