Your wealthy cousin invites you out for your birthday. You dress as nicely as possible and meet Cousin at a top restaurant in San Francisco. The atmosphere makes you feel just the slightest bit intimidated, but you hold your head up and follow the maitre d’ to your table.
The prices on the menu nearly make you fall off your chair, but Cousin doesn’t seem to mind in the slightest, so you take a deep breath and peruse the dinner selections. You notice that many items feature lists of ingredients and some specify the variety of vegetable or fruit that will be served. The menu now gets interesting.
You, after all, are a gardener. You have seen these varieties in seed catalogs. They are not special or exclusive or any more expensive than other seed varieties. Maybe you are not an expert grower, like the small farmers who provide the produce for the gourmet restaurants, but on the other hand, you can pick your veggies just before dinner. There is no way a restaurant can serve ingredients that fresh.
Here are some easily grown vegetables that upscale restaurants pride themselves on serving.
Little Gem lettuce: Little Gem is a small Bibb-type lettuce. It comes in green, bronze tip, and dark red varieties and grows like any other lettuce. Lettuce likes cool weather, which is plentiful in Alameda, and can be grown in big pots or containers, making it an excellent crop for apartment dwellers with balconies.
Lettuce is happy with only five or six hours of sun a day. It does need consistent moisture, so work on that irrigation system. Digging in plenty of compost and some fertilizer—try organic fish fertilizer—will both help your lettuce grow and help the ground retain moisture.
Plant lettuce seeds in early spring directly in the ground. No need to buy starters or start your seed inside. Harvest just the number of leaves you need for your salad, and as long as you leave a few inside leaves and don’t disturb the growing point, your lettuce will regrow.
Wild arugula: Arugula is a weed, and grows like one. Seed companies have selected arugula plants to lessen the strong taste. If you don’t like strong tasting greens, avoid wild arugula. However, a small amount in a salad will enhance the taste of the other ingredients, and some people really like the way it tastes. Arugula is grown the same way as lettuce, but is even less demanding. Hint: even watering and decent soil fertility will lessen the bitterness quotient.
English peas: English peas are showing up on the menus of quite a few pricey restaurants, which may amuse your English friends who grew up eating mashed peas on toast. Peas are another vegetable that likes cool weather and can be started from seed. Peas “fix” nitrogen in the soil, making it available to other plants, which makes them valuable soil improvers. The ability of peas to fix nitrogen can be enhanced by coating the pea seed with legume inoculant, which can be obtained at Plowshares or Encinal Nursery or on line.
Like lettuce, peas need consistent moisture and soil with a good amount of compost. They like a little more sun. Peas turn starchy soon after picking, so leave the pods on the vines until shortly before dinner and you will be one up on that celebrity chef.
The fact that peas grow on vines can be a plus or a minus. On one hand, most of us have a lot more vertical than horizontal space. On the other hand, pea vines need to be staked up, and some English peas grow six feet tall. Two options are half-inch thick dowels from a hardware store—make a teepee for your kids!—and netting stretched between thicker poles, with one pole in the middle.
Fennel: In my experience, fennel does better when started inside. Plant fennel seed a half-inch deep in two-inch pots in early February. When the seedlings come up, turn on the grow lights—use fluorescents marketed for growing plants and position two inches over the pots. Put the fennel plants in the ground in full sun when they get about three inches tall. Harvest fennel bulbs a half-inch above soil level; keep watering and they will re-grow.
The moral of this story: With a little gardening know-how, your family can have the gourmet experience without the gourmet price tag.
Margie Siegal is a long term gardener in Alameda and a supporter of Alameda Backyard Growers. Reach her via [email protected].
