Gardeners' Holidays 2023: First Picking

The Gardeners' Holiday that falls at the start of May is always a bit of a catch-as-catch-can. For the first few years, it was a celebration of our asparagus harvest, but lately the asparagus hasn't been reliable enough for us to count on having enough of it for a meal by this point. So instead, I've used this holiday to mark various other gardening activities, such as putting in our spring crops, our honeyberry bushes, and our new flowerbed.

This year's May Gardeners' Holiday is a little different. It's not about anything we planted; it's about something we harvested without planting it. Specifically, dandelions.

Most people think of the dandelion as just a useless weed, but it's also a vegetable. In fact, just about every part of it is edible. You can boil the roots or roast and grind them to brew into tea. You can batter-fry the blossoms or brew them into wine. And you can use the nutritious greens in a wide variety of ways: steamed, boiled, sauteed, raw in a salad, ground in a pesto, or blended in a smoothie.

So, when Brian pulled out a whole mess of dandelions while weeding the garden beds, he decided he might as well put them to good use. Rather than just toss them in the compost, he brought them in, washed them, wrapped them in a clean dishtowel, and stashed them in the fridge. (Side note: this is the best way we've found for keeping lettuce or any kind of greens fresh. Clean them thoroughly, soak them in water to plump them up, then wrap them in a cloth towel and store them in a zip-top bag. The towel absorbs excess moisture, so the greens don't rot as quickly. Most sources say to use paper towels for this, but we find a cloth one works just as well.) 

Then, of course, he had to figure out what to do with them. For years, our go-to method of cooking dandelion greens was one we pulled out of a cookbook called Mountain Cookin': wilt them slightly in a hot skillet, then toss them with a dressing of hot bacon grease, vinegar, and a touch of sugar and salt. This combination of flavors (salty, sour, umami, and a little bit sweet) balances out the bitterness of the greens and makes them quite palatable. But now that we've almost entirely given up meat, this method was no longer an option. Of course, we could have used a plain vinegar dressing without the bacon, but we strongly suspected they wouldn't taste nearly as good this way. 

So instead, Brian experimented with several different methods of concealing the greens in different dishes, the same way he's learned to do with eggplant. First he tried chopping some up and adding them to a batch of savory corn cakes, a recipe from Mollie Katzen's Vegetable Heaven that he's tinkered with considerably over the years. He'd done this before with frozen spinach and found that the greens more or less melted into the background, and it worked pretty much the same way with the dandelion greens. 

Next, he tried stirring some into a batch of chili. This was also reasonably successful. The texture of the greens stood out a little more, but their bitter flavor wasn't really noticeable with all the other flavors in Brian's chili. With onion, green pepper, tomato, eggplant, red kidney beans, black beans, garlic powder, nutritional yeast, a touch of lime, and a whopping three tablespoons of chili powder all vying for attention, the greens were barely detectable.

His third attempt, however, was not a success. Since we had baby bella mushrooms and leeks in the fridge, he improvised a mushroom-leek soup that would probably have been quite tasty on its own, with nutritional yeast, bay leaf, and thyme to boost the flavor and silken tofu to give it a heartier texture. But then he decided to throw in some of the dandelion greens as well, and that turned out to be a mistake. The flavors in this soup were milder and more subtle than those in the other two recipes, and the bitterness of the dandelion greens became the dominant note. Brian didn't mind it as much as I did, but neither of us really enjoyed it.

Based on this experience, I'd say the secret to eating dandelion greens is to combine them with other flavors that can stand up to them and not get pushed around. If you just pick a leaf off a dandelion and chew it up, you will find it bitter and somewhat tough, and you most likely will not enjoy the experience. But in a recipe with lots of other strong-tasting ingredients, that same bitter green becomes at least unobtrusive and, at best, even pleasant. In cooking as in life, a touch of bitterness adds a welcome complexity to the flavor, but too much of it spoils the entire dish.

One-day yard makeover: before

Last weekend, my friend Tim—the same one whose den I helped redecorate last winter—asked me if I could help him make over his front yard. For as long as I've known him, he's mostly ignored this part of his property. He'd tend to critical matters like filling in holes in the driveway or removing trees that grew too close to the house, but with just about everything else, his approach was "live and let live." Hence, the weeds have run rampant; the foundation shrubs have grown up to obscure the windows; the gravel drive is overgrown with moss and lined with rotting landscape timbers; the outdoor lamp-post is nonfunctional, missing all its glass, and rusted nearly clean through; and, although the yard boasts several mature trees, there's nothing under them but bare dirt.

None of this bothered him at all until just recently, when he started dating a woman whose own yard he describes as "very nice," and he began to think he ought to make his more presentable before letting her see it. So not only is he trying to make up for years of benign neglect, he's also trying to do it on a rush schedule. So the plan is for me and Brian to go over there and help him with the biggest jobs tomorrow, in the hopes that we can accomplish enough to make the yard pass muster.

Clearly it isn't going to be possible to fix everything that's wrong with this yard in one day of work, so I went over for a preliminary visit earlier in the week and we set a few priorities. Our goals for tomorrow are:

• Clear away all the rotting landscape timbers. (His original goal was to put something nicer-looking in place to define the boundaries of the driveway, but I thought they'd look reasonably okay undefined, and it seemed to me that a lot of other jobs were more urgent.) 
• Remove the worst of the weeds. These include a couple of stands of poison ivy and a stubborn catalpa tree that's growing perilously close to the house; Tim has already tried to remove it twice, and it keeps coming back. Looks like a job for our King of Spades.
• Trim back the overgrown foundation shrubs. (Personally, I'd like to remove them completely and replace them with something more reasonably sized, but even if I could talk Tim into it, I'm assuming it's not a job we could do in one day.
• Build a path from the driveway to the front door. Currently, there is none, or at least none that's navigable. Tim didn't see this as a problem because he never uses his front door anyway, preferring to enter the house from the garage side—but I suppose he eventually came to the conclusion that it looks a bit unwelcoming. Fortunately, most of the slate flagstones that used to form the path to the front door are still in his yard and reasonably intact, and we also have a few in our yard that we don't have a use for. By pooling our resources, we should be able to manage a path leading diagonally from the driveway to the house, so you can traverse it without having to wrestle with the shrubbery.
• Add a bit of greenery to the area under the trees. Grass doesn't grow well in full shade, which is why there's none of it left, but there are various other things that do. My first thought was, since he has plenty of moss in various parts of the yard, he should try to spread it across the entire bare section using the "moss milkshake" method: grinding up moss with buttermilk in a blender and just painting it on the areas where you want it to grow. Sadly, when I went looking for the recipe, what I found instead was a site all about moss that says this method doesn't actually work very well. It's still possible, according to the same site, to propagate moss by planting tufts of it directly on bare soil and keeping it moist and clear of debris, but the process takes months if not years. Tim is still planning to try and spread some moss in the area, but it's not going to turn into a lush, green carpet overnight.

Fortunately, we had something else in our yard that thrives in shade and grows so vigorously it's hard to get rid of even if you want to. Directly in front of our wildflower bed, there was a heavy stand of lilies of the valley. They used to form a dense carpet all around the foundation shrubs before we ripped them out; we thought we'd removed most of them with the shrubs, but several big clumps survived, forming an untidy mass in front of the wildflowers.

So this evening, we dug the whole lot of these up (or at least, all of them that we could see; they spread by underground rhizomes, so we shouldn't be surprised if a few more pop up in the spring and have to be yanked). We piled as many as we could fit into our collection of big garden buckets, as well as an old litter box we had sitting downstairs the workshop; the rest we threw in the compost bin, where we'll hope they don't take root and start taking over the yard again. So if all goes well, we should be able to add a splash of green to Tim's yard tomorrow, and come spring, he'll have several patches of fragrant flowers. Perhaps eventually we can even turn it into a proper woodland garden with a whole bunch of perennials that bloom at different times, like bleeding hearts or forget-me nots...but for now, we'll just work with what we have.

Tune in on Monday for the exciting conclusion of Tim's garden makeover. Or at least, I hope it will be exciting.

An unconventional approach

Brian says he made a conscious decision, about three or four years back, to stop worrying about dandelions. It simply isn't possible, he concluded, to eliminate them entirely without resorting to noxious chemicals that will kill practically everything else in sight as well. Thus, our best option is to coexist with them, taking steps to beat them back only when they get too ugly.

What that means in practice is that most of the time, we simply ignore any dandelions that pop up in our yard (except for occasionally picking and eating them). About once a year, however, right around the beginning of May, the dandelions start to get a little too big for their britches. They spread all over the entire yard, both front and back, turning it into a sea first of innocent-looking yellow blooms and then, if we don't get out there and whack them immediately, of white puffballs—which quickly blow away, leaving behind the even worse-looking naked stalks.

This annual Peak Dandelion event, then is the point at which we intervene—not to actually remove the dandelions, which would be impossible, but just to clear them away so they don't make the yard look too much of a mess. And this year, Brian decided to take a rather unconventional approach to dealing with them. Since they'd already gone to seed, and going after them with the string trimmer would serve only to spread the seeds around, he decided to try tackling them first with a different electric tool: the stick vacuum.

As it turns out, this worked surprisingly well. He just plugged the vacuum into a big long extension cord and took it around the yard, snorking the little seeds right off the heads of the dandelions. Then, once he'd denuded them all, he replaced the stick vacuum with the string trimmer and whacked off the stems. The only problem, he says, is that the dirt cup on our vacuum can now be considered a WMD: a Weapon of Mass Dandelion. He'll probably have to put the entire thing inside a big garbage bag before opening it, lest the seeds all burst out of the cup the minute he removes it and go stampeding around the room in a frenzy, looking for a place to take root.

So if you, too, have decided to manage your dandelion problem rather than trying to cure it, and you happen to have a lightweight vacuum cleaner, I suggest you give this unconventional approach a try. Even if it doesn't work for you, it can't make the problem any worse, since let's face it, dandelions in May are as bad as it gets.

Mugwort the Merciless

A supervillain has invaded our back yard. Its name is MUGWORT.

Mugwort, for those who don't already know it and curse its name, is the weed that makes all other weeds look cute and cuddly. As far as I can tell, it can grow just about everywhere and outcompete just about everything. It starts out fairly short and sprawling, but if left to itself, it will grow knee-high or taller, turning the whole yard into a jungle that has to be beaten back with a machete. But the worst thing about it is that once it's taken root, it's all but impossible to remove. It spreads by long, underground runners, so a single plant can send up dozens of new shoots. When you try to yank out a mugwort plant, instead of resisting until it finally comes loose, it will seem to come up right away—but then you'll find yourself dragging up a long attached tendril of root, like an umbilical cord, that seems to have no end to it. You just keep pulling out more and more of it until it eventually breaks, leaving a living end from which a new plant can grow. This makes trying to pull up these weeds by hand like battling a hydra: every time you remove one head, two more pop up in its place.

Unfortunately there's not much else you can do to remove them, either. A Google search on "how to control mugwort" yields a bunch of documents of varying credibility, but the gist of all of them is, "Well, it's not easy." This document from the Cornell Cooperative Extension, after noting that hand-pulling doesn't work well because "new plants quickly emerge from rhizome fragments, just like the brooms in 'The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,'" goes on to say that most herbicides won't work on the stuff either, and the few that do will kill everything else in sight as well. It suggests "mulching beds to reduce their growth," but based on my own experience, I don't think much of that strategy. See this fine specimen, here? It's growing up out of the slope on the northern side of our yard, which we pretty much smothered under a huge pile of dirt last year as part of our patio project. The grass and the other, tamer weeds haven't reappeared, but the mugwort has already pushed its way blithely to the surface, stretching its little green arms and singing, "Oh, What a Beautiful Morning!"

The only remotely helpful suggestion I've seen was in this article from the National Gardeners' Association. It says there are two effective ways to deal with perennial weeds like mugwort: smother them or crowd them out. Smothering the mugwort under heavy plastic won't really work for us, since it's spread all throughout the yard and we'd have to smother everything else along with it. However, the suggestion of "cover cropping" with another plant to keep mugwort out of garden beds caught my attention, because there actually are a couple of small spots in our yard where there isn't any mugwort visible. One is in a shady spot where most of the ground is covered by wild strawberries, and the other is in a sunnier area where all the microclover blend we planted last fall seems to have settled. I was initially disappointed with this stuff, thinking that it had only taken root in patches, leaving other areas bare—but now, seeing how thick is is in this low-lying patch, I suspect what happened is that the seed all washed off the slope and settled in this one area, where it eventually grew in thickly enough to crowd out even the mugwort.

So I suspect our best hope of dealing with this supervillain weed in the long term may be to try and wipe it out by attrition. Each spring and fall, we pull up all the large mugwort plants we can find, leaving bare patches behind; then we fill in all the bare patches with the microclover seed, spreading it as thickly as possible and giving it plenty of water and compost to encourage it to take root as quickly as possible, ideally before new mugwort plants can grow up from the broken-off runners. If we keep diligently following this program over the course of several years, we can at least hope that the microclover will eventually become well enough established to crowd out the mugwort completely. If it also crowds out some of the other weeds—the dandelions, the purple deadnettles, or even the wild strawberries—then we'll consider that a nice bonus, but frankly, at this point, we're not even going to worry about them. In the face of the Merciless Mugwort, all other enemies must be ignored as mere distractions.

Looking for cover, part 2

Those who have been reading this blog for a while may recall my consternation last June on the subject of ground covers. I was trying to find a suitable ground cover for our small front yard, which is a real nuisance to mow because of its placement (up a flight of stairs from the back yard, where the mower is stored). The problem was that every plant I could find was in some way ill-suited to our yard, which has a western exposure (meaning full sun in the afternoon) and rich but heavy clay soil. The few I found that were capable of tolerating these conditions (such as creeping jenny and blue-star creeper) were all described as invasive by at least one source.

Well, I've done some further research on the subject, and I've come up with a few alternatives that look like they might be workable. None of the choices is perfect, but they look like the best of a bad lot. The candidates are:

1. Herniaria glabra (commonly known as green carpet or rupturewort). This plant is native to Europe, but it's described as a fairly "sedate" plant that's easy to keep under control and unlikely to become invasive. Although it's slow-growing, sources indicate that it will eventually form a nice, dense, low-growing mat that will do a good job keeping out unwanted intruders. It can grow in just about any soil, is drought-tolerant, and, according to some sources, can handle foot traffic nearly as well as grass. And, as a bonus, it provides "winter interest" by turning a nice reddish hue in the fall. Its only drawbacks are that (1) it's not a native plant, (2) its "sedate" growth means that it will probably take quite a while to become fully established in the yard, and (3) despite its many advantages, it's not that common as a landscape plant, which could make it hard to find. I might have to order it online and hope the plants don't suffer too much in transit.

2. Barren strawberry (Waldsteinia fragarioides). Like the rupturewort, this plant forms a dense, low-growing carpet that can stand up to foot traffic. It can tolerate clay soil and grows in full sun or part shade. Some sources describe it as drought-tolerant, while others say it requires consistently moist soil. It's evergreen and produces yellow flowers from spring through early summer, which is a nice feature, although not quite as nice as adding winter interest (since blossoms aren't in short supply at that time of year). This plant actually is native to the northeastern U.S. and thus can't literally be described as "invasive," but one of my garden guides, The Philadelphia Garden Book, describes it as a "relentlessly overbearing" plant that shouldn't be grown outside a container. On the other hand, that aggressiveness could be a benefit in some ways, since I'll be trying to grow it in such unfavorable conditions. Like the rupturewort, this plant doesn't seem to be widely available, and the sources I've found online charge $5 or more for a single plant, so planting the whole yard with it could get rather expensive.

3. Lastly, we have the humble Dutch white clover (Trifolium repens). Many gardeners view this plant as a troublesome lawn weed, but others love having it in the lawn because it grows easily and is a nitrogen-fixing plant that serves as a natural lawn fertilizer. I do have some clover in my yard already, so this is the one plant of the three that I know for a fact will grow in my soil. It does indeed produce nice, lush, green growth, and it doesn't get too tall to walk on. Like the barren strawberry, it flowers in the spring, although I don't consider its blossoms very attractive. Some sources say it can't take a lot of foot traffic, but I'm not planning to ride a horse across it; I just need to be able to step on it occasionally while pruning the cherry tree or weeding the flower beds, and it seems to be able to handle that much. It's also the cheapest option of the three, since it's fairly easy to grow from seed. White clover is native to Europe (although it has naturalized throughout the entire continental U.S.), and the USDA warns that it "can be weedy or invasive." However, the Center for Invasive Species and Ecosystem Health describes clover as being a "troublesome weed" only in certain southeastern states.

So, ecofrugal readers, I put it to you: which of these is the best choice? Is an aggressive native plant a better choice than a non-aggressive, non-native plant? Is the inexpensive, easy-growing clover an ecofrugal choice, or is it an invasive weed? Which one will make the best carpet for my yard? Or is my best option to buy some of each, plant them all together, and let them try to cover all the ground among the three of them?

Ecofrugal tidbits

Today we bring you an assortment of ecofrugal tidbits, gleaned from e-mails from family and friends.

Our first topic, at the risk of being morbid, is ecofrugal funerals. This article, forwarded to me a few weeks ago by my friend Laura in Knoxville (thanks, Laura!), describes a funeral home in Tennessee that's started offering "green" burials as an alternative to the traditional formal funeral complete with embalming, a costly casket, and a vault to put it in. Options include direct burial, with just a shroud, or a simple wooden casket. Green funerals are not only easier on the earth but less expensive, as well. According to this article from the Dollar Stretcher, a basic funeral costs $10,000 on average—even without "extras" such as overpriced thank-you cards and elaborate floral arrangements, which unscrupulous funeral homes often try to push onto grieving relatives at this vulnerable time. Yet all this pomp and ceremony doesn't necessarily serve the real purpose of a funeral—to help people honor their dead, express their sorrow, and say goodbye in a meaningful way. People interested in simpler, more meaningful last rites (for themselves or someone else) may be interested in joining a memorial society. For a small membership fee, these organizations will step in at the time of a death and help the mourners make the arrangements, rather than being left to the tender mercies of a funeral home more concerned with racking up as big a tab as possible than with helping the grieving family.

Topic number two, also from Laura, is about a novel way of coping with invasive plants. This article from a Knoxville news outlet describes how officials at Fort Dickerson Park have brought in goats to eat the ubiquitous kudzu that threatens native plants and even trees. This method is a much healthier alternative to herbicides, which can't distinguish between native plants and invasive ones, and which don't necessarily get to the root of the plant (meaning it can come back next year). Goats eat the stuff right down to the roots and don't appear to be harmed in the least by the harmful chemicals the plants put out. (Apparently, goats can even eat poison ivy without ill effects—though humans shouldn't drink their milk for a while afterwards.)

And lastly, from my sister, we have an interesting article from today's New York Times about the relationship between money and happiness. The gist of it appears to be that what makes people happy isn't stuff; it's experiences. Thus, the only category in which spending more money leads to increased happiness is recreation. Spending money on an experience (a vacation, for instance) is more likely to increase your happiness than buying a new car—unless the new car makes it possible for you to have a lot more Sunday drives in beautiful places. Spending on stuff only supports happiness when that stuff contributes to better experiences, like a board game that leads to spending more time together as a family. (The article does cite a contrarian viewpoint from people who deeply love clothes and argue that buying, owning, and wearing beautiful things truly contributes to their happiness. However, I don't think that necessarily contradicts the main point, since for these people, wearing wonderful clothes is an experience.)

I enjoyed the article, but I couldn't help wondering: would these same experiences contribute any less to people's happiness if they hadn't spent so much money on them? Is a week spent touring Europe, staying in fancy hotels, really more satisfying than a week spent camping in the woods—or a week spent visiting family members or friends you seldom see? Is the experience of reading a novel more satisfying if you go out and buy the hardcover as soon as it comes out, rather than waiting for the paperback—or taking it out of the library? I'm willing to concede that spending money on experiences may be more satisfying than spending it on stuff—but why not go the extra distance and have the great experiences without spending the money?

Looking for cover

I don't know how many people have been following the debate carried on between me and my friend Nif in the comments on the "Beautiful weeds" post, but the gist of it was something like this: I claimed that dandelions and purple deadnettles (Lamium purpureum) weren't really weeds in my yard, because I didn't object to their presence. Nif argued that I should object to their presence, because they were invasive and messed up local ecosystems. I argued in turn that even if these were aggressive non-native plants, it was less destructive to let them grow than to try to eliminate them (which might require toxic chemicals) and then replace them with plants that had to be cultivated (which might require lots of water and fertilizer). At that point, the discussion kind of petered out.

Now, naturally, Nif and I would agree that the best option of all would be a native plant that flourishes without assistance in the environment of my yard. But unfortunately, there don't seem to be any plants that fit that description. To illustrate, consider the problem I've been going through trying to find a ground cover for my front yard.

My front yard, as you can see in the photo, is a little sort of boxed-in patch of grass raised up from the sidewalk. That means that in order to mow it, you have to go out back, get the mower out of the shed, haul it up a short flight of stairs into the driveway, haul it up two more stairs onto the front path, and then heft it up over the short wall that encloses the yard. Even with a lightweight little push mower like we've got, that's a nuisance. So I've been looking for some time for a simple, low-maintenance ground cover that could replace the grass. Such a ground cover would have to meet the following requirements:

1. not too tall (say, 8 inches or shorter)
2. tolerates full sun
3. can grow in clay soil
4. can handle occasional light foot traffic (we're not going to be playing soccer on it or anything, just going out from time to time to do some work on the other parts of the yard)

There are almost no plants that meet these fairly modest criteria. I've only found four: silveredge goutweed or bishop's weed, barren strawberry, moneywort or creeping jenny, and blue-star creeper. All four of these are described as invasive in at least one source I've consulted.

So in other words, either I put a potentially invasive plant down in my yard, or I'm stuck with water-guzzling, high-maintenance turfgrass. Bah!

Beautiful weeds

Saturday's mail brought us a flier from Lawn Doctor, offering to help us get a "lush, green, weed-free lawn." This description is so unlike our current lawn that I couldn't help wondering whether they had sent around spies to scope out the yards in the area and target the folks that they assumed were most in need of help. Our yard has become more or less a safe haven for weeds of all kinds, from chickweed to dandelions to wild garlic. One whole slope in our backyard is thickly covered with purple dead nettles, which look beautiful in the morning sunlight as I hang out the laundry. Yet I realize that the sight of this thick, lush growth would sent many if not most homeowners running for a bottle of Roundup. This fact moves me to wonder: who exactly decided that these flowers are "weeds," anyhow? Whose idea was it that the ideal lawn should be a thick, dense carpet of turfgrass with nothing else in it? Why is grass better than dandelions?

My handy desktop dictionary defines a weed as "a wild plant growing where it is not wanted and in competition with cultivated plants." So basically, these various wildflowers are only weeds if you don't want them where they are. I'll readily agree that in my garden, a dandelion is a weed, because it's using up water and nutrients that I want to save for my tomatoes. But a lot of people seem to assume that every part of the yard should be filled with "cultivated plants," and therefore wild plants of any kind, anywhere, must be weeds. This seems like an awfully wasteful approach, since it requires you to get rid of all the plants that grow naturally in your yard, with no assistance from you, and put in plants that don't grow there naturally, which will require constant attention from you to keep them looking their best. For example, to keep a grass lawn looking good, you have to mow it, water it, fertilize it, and, oh yes, exercise constant vigilance to keep out the "weeds." (Or you can pay someone like Lawn Doctor to do it, to the tune of about $300 a year. Sure, you may have to stay inside for a couple of hours after they've sprayed all those chemicals around, but isn't it worth it to have a "lush, green, weed-free lawn"?)

So what's the ecofrugal alternative? Well, here's one that's really simple: if only unwanted plants are weeds, then all I have to do to get a "weed-free" lawn is to declare that all plants are welcome in my yard. Without pulling up a single plant, I'll have eliminated all the "weeds" by declaring them to be non-weeds, and it won't cost me a cent!