Seed Safe

I find this stoneware vase, called a Seed Safe, completely charming. It was created by Spanish designer Marti Guixe for Alessi, the Italian kitchenware and tabletop company. It is being introduced at the Alessi showroom in NYC this week.

The idea behind Seed Safe is that you store up the seeds of the foods you've eaten so you can plant them later. I know you could just throw the seeds into a plastic takeout container or a paper bag, but come on, where's the whimsy in that?

The nicest part of this design is Guixe's drawing explaining the purpose of the vase.

Grow your own morels

There are thousands of people out there with a mushroom obsession. Specifically an obsession for a wild mushroom called a morel, and the hunting thereof.

Morel hunting--which occurs in the spring--inspires contests to find the most or the biggest (or the smallest) morel. It inspires artists to carve morels out of wood or cast them in resin. For example, check out a store called Morel Mania where you can buy a morel-topped walking stick to use when you're in the forest looking for morels.

So, why am I talking about morel hunting in November? Because this is the time you need to order a tree that has been inoculated with morel fungus for planting in early winter. This way, when morel hunting season hits in the spring, you'll have your own personal morel orchard.

The trees--which are elms--are inoculated with a process patented by an avid morel hunter and are available from a company called Morel Farms. The trees cost $15 each, with a minimum order of 10 trees.

While you're waiting for your morels to mushroom in the spring, read this extremely informative book called Morels by Michael Kuo (University of Michigan Press).

On hiatus

Hello to my loyal fan base. I am on blog hiatus (blogiatus?) because I'm developing recipes for a new cookbook. This is a good thing. Will rejoin you in awhile.

Meanwhile, here's a photograph of a spaghetti squash plant in my garden. My Pumpkin Tree Project failed miserably (not enough sun or water or both), but now there's the Inadvertent Spaghetti Squash Project.

One night this summer I made spaghetti squash for dinner (well, Mother Nature made the spaghetti squash, I cooked it). When I split it open to clean it, I discovered that the seeds had begun to sprout. So, seizing the opportunity, I planted them. Now the plants are climbing fences and putting out blossoms like crazy, but they entered the game a bit late so I would be surprised if I got any actual squash. Whatever.

Next year I'm planning a weed garden. I've heard they do well.

The pumpkin tree project: day 60

Blossoms on both types of pumpkin, though Wee-Be-Little (right) is still edging out Sweet Lightning. I'm told that there need to be male and female flowers in order for any fruit to grow, but boy oh boy, do I not know how to tell which flowers are the males. Wait, maybe it's the ones playing video games in the basement...

The pumpkin tree project: day 30

For the record, Wee-Be-Little pumpkins (top) are looking a little more robust than the Sweet Lightning, but the poor dears have suffered through a month of almost solid rain, and the future isn't holding out a lot of promise for sun either. Luckily [knock wood] slugs don't seem to like pumpkin plants.

The pumpkin tree project

A couple of years ago I planted a type of gourd called a birdhouse gourd (well that's probably not its botanical name) that you can turn into a birdhouse: You dry it out so you can cut a small hole in it to act as a front door for the birdies.

The gourds I grew weren't quite up to snuff birdhouse-wise, but that's not the point of my story. The point is that the gourd plant decided it didn't have enough sun where I had put it, so it simply grew up a tree. It made lots of little gourd fruits, all dangling from the branches of an evergreen tree.

This inspired me to make this happen on purpose. Today--Memorial Day--I planted two kinds of baby pumpkins at the base of the same tree (photo above). I'll report on the progress. I'm aiming to have a hilarious picture of the pumpkin tree in September.

For the record, I planted 2 pumpkins: one called Sweet Lightning, which produces 3- to 5-inch fruits, and one called Wee-Be-Little, which makes 3- to 4-inch fruits. They're both from Jung Seed.

The world's hottest chili pepper

New Mexico has a huge chili pepper industry, so I guess it's not unusual that New Mexico State University would devote itself to the search for the world's hottest chili pepper. In 2007, scientists at NMSU announced that they had found a chili pepper in northeastern India that claims the title. It is a pepper called Bhut Jolokia, which translates as ghost chili.

The heat in any chili pepper is measured by something called a Scoville Heat Unit (SHU). It is an index that measures the amount of capsaicin (the substance that makes chilies taste hot) in a pepper.

• At the low end are cherry peppers (500 SHU), poblano (1,500) and pasilla (2,500).
• In the middle range are jalapeños (10,000), cayenne peppers (50,000) and tabasco peppers (75,000).
• Chilies with very high SHU scores include Thai chilies (100,000), habaneros (300,000) and red Savina (500,000).

The Bhut Jokolia pepper weighs in at over 1 million SHU!!!!

If you're actually crazy enough to want to eat one, you can grow your own bhut jokolia peppers from seeds sold by NMSU's Chili Pepper Institute Chile Shop. A packet of 10-15 seeds costs $5.

Gentlemen, start your garlic

I am not a great gardener. I don't have the patience. But the one thing I plant every year, without fail, is garlic. Years ago, a friend of a friend encouraged me to grow garlic. He told me all I had to do was remember the garlic-planting mantra: "Plant on Columbus Day and harvest on the Fourth of July."

So that's what I do. This time of year, I go to my local farmer's market and buy a couple of heads of really good garlic. Then on Columbus Day (not the observed day, the real day) I plant them.

Here's how it's done: Separate the head of garlic into individual, unpeeled cloves. Dig a small hole in your garden about 2 inches deep and put in a garlic clove pointy-side up. Cover the hole. Repeat, spacing the holes about 4 inches apart. That's it.

In the meantime, check your local farmstand for garlic. I prefer the so-called hard-neck varieties, like Rocambole. If you don't have a convenient farmstand, then just use supermarket garlic. It works just fine. Or if you want to check out "gourmet" garlic, go to one of these sites:

Fox Hollow Farm
The Garlic Store

My garlic harvest

Last October, I planted garlic in my garden. As with other bulbs, like daffodils or irises, you plant garlic bulbs in the fall, then come spring they sprout, and round about the end of July, the garlic is ready for harvest. (Click here for information on planting garlic.)

When I first started planting garlic about 10 years ago, I judged when to harvest the garlic by the fact that the lower leaves had started to turn brown. Then I stumbled on the best advice ever. It all has to do with garlic scapes.

Garlic scapes are the hollow stalks that a garlic plant sends up. It has a flower bud on its end and the scape is curled over in a kind of gooseneck shape [Photo 1]. The theory is that if you cut off the scapes, you will force the plant to put all its energy into growing a big bulb instead of growing a flower. The cut scapes [Photo 2] are actually quite tender and you can cook with them; they have a nice mild garlic flavor.

Now here's the trick I learned about knowing when to harvest garlic. When a garlic scape UNcurls and points straight up [Photo 3] in preparation for opening the flower, it's time to harvest the garlic. So when you cut off the scapes earlier in the summer, leave one scape to use as your barometer for the harvest.

Here's my harvested garlic [Photo 4]. The garlic in a freshly picked bulb is nicely pungent and almost crisp in texture. It's really rewarding to cook with your own homegrown garlic.

Growing square watermelons

If you lived in Japan, you could actually buy a square watermelon in the market (though it would cost you a pretty yen). However in this country, you'll have to grow your own. If you have a garden and are already interested in growing watermelons, then you can actually grow a square watermelon. On a website called Instructables: The World's Biggest Show & Tell, there are full instructions for how to do that.

The concept is really quite simple: grow the fruit inside a box so that it is forced to take on the shape of the container. The instructions for making the box, however, seem a little daunting to me, but then I'm not especially handy with power tools.

If any of you tries this--or has already tried such a project--I would love to know how it worked out. Please send me photos.

Norwegian Global Seed Vault

Sort of like a giant time capsule for plants, the Global Seed Vault in Norway officially opened for business on February 26, 2008. The seed vault will ultimately house and preserve the seeds from hundreds of thousands of plants (at the moment the count is around 730,000). The purpose is to "store duplicates of seeds from collections around the globe. If seeds are lost for any reason--natural disasters, war or power failure--the seed collections could be reestablished using seeds from [the seed vault]."

The seed vault is built into a mountainside in Svalbard (a group of islands in the Arctic Ocean off the coast of Norway) and looks for all the world like something straight out of a Sean Connery-era Bond movie.

To read more about the efforts of the Global Crop Diversity Trust, check out the Global Seed Vault website.

Tomato hornworms

I am not much of a gardener. I really don't have the patience for all that pruning and watering and weeding. However, when it comes to growing things that I can eat, I make an exception. In my very small garden at my weekend house, I grow tomatoes, basil, chili peppers, oregano, thyme, parsley, sage, mint (well, actually the mint grows itself), blackberries, raspberries, hardy kiwi and table grapes.

My plants all happily toodle along, growing without much of a challenge other than the occasional snail or slug.......except for the tomatoes. The tomatoes are the yearly victims of the dreaded tomato hornworm.

If you've never encountered a tomato hornworm, then you're lucky. If you have, then you know that this obnoxious pest can completely camouflage itself as a tomato leaf and then eat an entire tomato plant to the bone in a matter of hours.

So starting in mid-July I turn into a horticultural vigilante. I am normally very respectful of animal life. I avoid killing spiders and feel bad if I brush an ant away with too much vigor. But I have absolutely no sympathy for the tomato hornworm.

Anyway, a friend of a friend has a wonderful little video blog called gardenfork.tv where he holds forth on all sorts of things, including how to deal with tomato hornworms.

Planting pumpkins for their seeds

If you're a gardener who lives in the temperate zones, you're probably making plans for what to put in your garden this year. So here's an idea: How about planting kakai pumpkins? They weigh between 5 and 8 pounds each and have dark green stripes. But here's the cool part: Inside are large, hull-less, dark-green (almost black) seeds, which are delicious roasted.

*Health bonus: The kakai is related to the pumpkin used to make Austrian pumpkin seed oil, which has been found in a number of European studies to be extremely good for prostate health.

Each plant will produce 2 to 3 pumpkins in 100 days. The plants are described as "semi-bush, short-vine," which I take to mean that they take up less room than a standard pumpkin plant. You can get a packet of 30 seeds for $3.35 from Johnny's Selected Seeds. Or, if you have an empty field available, you can buy 25 pounds (55,000 seeds) for $1,300.

Romanesco: a fractal vegetable

Say what? A what vegetable? A fractal?!?

OK, I have just the barest grasp on the concept of fractals, but here goes: A fractal (a term coined in 1975 by Polish-French mathematician Benoît Mandelbrot--whose last name means almond bread, by the way) is a fragmented geometric shape whose individual fragments contain mini versions of the larger shape. Phew.

This idea can actually be better understood if you look at a romanesco cauliflower. This green-tinted member of the cauliflower family is made up of lots of conical "florets," which are in turn made up of identical, but much tinier conical shapes. So when you buy it, you can first admire its incredible natural geometry, and then you can cook it and eat it. It will do fine in any recipe that calls for regular cauliflower (it tastes the same).

Romanesco cauliflower is available pretty much year round. Your best bet is to look in local greenmarkets (it doesn't have much of a presence in supermarkets at the moment) or contact the folks at melissas.com to find out how to buy it from them. Or if you have a home garden and want to plant romanescos next spring, check out www.gourmetseed.com.