Caulifroccoli

One of my "new" plants this year was purple cauliflower.  I haven't grown cauliflower before, but not only is purple cauliflower a trendy (and spendy) veggie these days, I also read that it is supposedly easier to grow than white cauliflower.  It likes cold weather and early planting, so they were started very early indoors and planted out in April.

My purple cauliflower was not difficult to....grow.  Per se.  It was not afflicted by bugs and it was not troubled by inattentiveness.  In fact it flourished, producing bundles of tropically-proportioned leaves, which I felt were very beautiful and provided a horizon of lovely texture in the garden.

The only thing was there was very little cauliflower to be found.

Actually the really weird thing was that the plant seemed to grow in three different ways.

This is a lush and leafy plant with no evidence of cauliflower at all.  About half of the 8 plants were like this, and never developed any vegetal vestiges.

This plant has some little bits that might be purple cauliflower, but it's hard to tell, even in real life.

This is my favorite, despite it's inedibleness. It consists of huge stalks of purple cauliFLOWERS, almost six feet tall.  This is not a matter of 'it used to be cauliflower and I let it bolt.'  There never was any cauliflower.  Just this ambitious lovely spray of green and purple.  I begrudge it nothing.  And although it was anything but a head of dense nutritious purple cauliflower, these flower stalks, lightly steamed, made a frankly lovely and nearly edible garnish.

I let these plants just follow their joy all summer, occasionally checking for developing vegetables.  Really they just looked like the above for a really long time.  After a few hard frosts, I started pulling out the frost-wilted tomatoes and peppers and basil, hauling them all to the compost.  The cauliflowers were untroubled by frost, so I let them be.

And then by George.  They started making cauliflower.  

As I alluded in my blog title, this vegetable was really kind of halfway between a cauli and a broccoli.  

The lovely late-October harvest was diminutive compared to the immense leafy plants they came from, but I will be growing cauliflower again.  I thought they were lovely and exciting plants all season, and the eventual harvest is unrivaled in taste and beauty.

If you have a favorite variety of cauliflower, or any tips or stories about growing it, please let me know!

Fermented Pickles

This pumpkin grew near the end of the rain barrel hose.

Nothing to complain about in a Minnesota garden this year. While much of the country struggled with drought, I never had to water my garden!  Some of this was thanks to my commitment to MULCH and my rain barrel, but all in all it was a great natural growing season, with moisture and heat in all the right places.

This year I grew cucumbers for the first time - two kinds, including a cornichon type, so I was excited for tiny pickles!  It turns out you must be a quite diligent farmer to catch them when they are little tiny babies (and they are very PRICKLY, who knew?), and cornichon type pickles do not grow out of infancy with the grace of plump picklers.  Instead they bloat out in weird ways, and they remain DANGEROUSLY PRICKLY.  The prickles rubbed off in a sink-rinse, but it is inconvenient if gloves are required protective wear for cucumber harvesting.

Can anyone offer testimony about small cucumbers that are not lethally prickly?

The other cucumber was supposed to be a standard midsized cuke, but again they were often neglected until they were overgrown, overripe, an alarming shade of raw ocher.  The problem for all the cukes was crowding.  I have been gardening for just long enough that I PREACH the gospel of plant spacing to my garden friends, but not long enough that I do not still learn the hard way every year.  The cukes were a last minute decision, crowded in with the climbing beans.

The upshot of two very productive cucumber vines was about three gallons of fermented pickles!  I feared they would taste weird, but they were  SO.  GOOD.  Craveable.  And it was a proud day when I filled my fermenting crock with cukes, garlic, dill, grape and horseradish leaves ALL from the yard.  After 5-7 days of quiet bubbling on the counter, the pickles were ready, and I transferred them to the fridge.  So easy.

Next year I will give more informed consideration to my choice of cucumber seeds (tell me your favorite!) and I will give them ROOM to stretch, grow, and be harvested with ease.

It might be too late for you to try fermented pickles this year, but it is the perfect time to grab one of these books so you can read up and be ready for next year:

Wild Fermentation is a well known resource for everything relating to fermented foods, including bread, beer, vinegar, cheese, miso, pickles...  the list goes on.  I checked it out from the library a few times before I concluded I needed to just own it.

Nourishing Traditions is a book that changed my life, really.  I won't get into it here, but if you want to read some radically different ideas (so old they are new!) about food, this book is awesome.  It also includes lots of info about fermentation and is just different enough from Wild Fermentation that they really complement each other.

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