Wild carrots and why beans are a such a staple food

On Friday, we had a surprise guest at our house. Our friend Mike found himself needing to go to work and had no one to watch his 8 year old daughter, Callie, so she spent the day with us. Unlike my own children, who flee to their rooms the moment I mention helping in the garden, Callie was very enthusiastic to help harvest some fresh produce for dinner. Such a pleasure!

We picked some strawberries and raspberries to make home baked tarts. The newest batch of raspberries coming in are double the size of the ones I picked back in July, but I am not yet getting the same quantities. The branches that did not produce at the beginning of the season are producing now, and have been ripening slowly all week. It looks like there will be big harvest starting next week, but for now there are a handful every other day. Not quite enough to make pie, but we mixed in some apple and the few strawberries that are still popping up daily in the strawberry patch, and made a pretty tasty dessert.



We picked some lettuce. I gave in and bought a romaine at the grocery store, because my daughters will not eat my garden salads. The lettuce I am growing is too bitter. I have no idea exactly what it is that I have been growing. In the area where the lettuce was two years ago, a number of them bolted and went to seed. Last year I had a few chicories in the same place, but this year I have some reddish round lettuce and some longer leaved lettuces that are quite green. They are good for salads with balsamic vinegar and olive oil dressing, but more bitter than romaine from the store, and I put some in my ramen yesterday cut up and they made a good replacement for bok choy. I made two salads, one for the kids and one for adults. Mike said he likes bitter foods more as he gets older, "you are what you eat." We laughed and dug in.

My tomato harvest is finally starting. Rather than freezing our first picks, Josh decided to make a sauce directly, to put on some home made pasta. The tomatoes have been interesting, because I do not know what will come up. Many of the original seeds I planted did not do well, and I took some seedlings from Iulia, as well as moved some of the volunteers around. One batch I planted I believed were cherry tomatoes, but turned out to be seeds I got from Alex for some weird looking heritage tomato that was chocolate coloured, but the seeds are producing pure red fruit. They are oddly shaped, but they taste just fine, and are quite large. The one in the photo above looks like three tomatoes fused together, creating a "wrap around" effect.

I also did a second harvest of the basil, and we pureed and froze it all. At some point we will get some pine nuts and make proper pesto, but pure basil mixed with cream (or just plain tomato sauce) is pretty heavenly. Josh added a couple of newly picked hot peppers to the tomato sauce to make it arabiata. He served both the pesto and cream and spicy tomato sauce, so we could choose or mix it into a rosé. Super good dinner!

Dinner was late, so I picked a few carrots for the kids to snack on. Callie was helping me out. I explained to her that I disregarded all advice about giving each carrot lots of space by pulling out a lot of the seedlings when they were small, instead waiting until they were full size and then harvesting them by taking the biggest and letting the smaller ones catch up for a few weeks. One of the carrots at the end of the patch looked a bit different. The leaves were slightly different in their shape and the way they attached to the root looked a bit different too, like lots of small fibres rather than a solid stock. I checked the top of the root and it looked like a carrot, so I figured a stray seed from a different variety slipped in with my pack of Nantes carrots. So we pulled it out, and to my surprise, the root was orange on the top fading to parsnip coloured on the bottom, and was thinner and much more tapered than the nantes carrots, which are round bottomed. It smelled like carrot though.

This year, I have had a lot of Queen Anne's Lace pop up in the garden, so I wondered if maybe this was one of those. I know they are referred to as wild carrots, and the leaves look very similar to domesticated carrots. When the flowers grow they are easy to identify, but this mystery carrot had no flowers as of yet. So I googled, and it definitely was a match. I wanted to verify edibility. I know some wild varieties of domesticated vegetables or fruits are not pleasant to eat. What I got on Queen Anne's Lace is that it is a bit woody, but edible, and has the second highest sugar content for a root after sugar beets. So we cut it into pieces and gave it a try. It was definitely woody, and reminded me of sugar cane, the same type of texture that you can chew and get a sweet taste, but once the sugar is gone it is more like chewing on a dry stick and you prefer to spit it out like used gum than swallow it.

We had a few very tasty carrots to follow it.

I have beans coming out of my ears. I planted a bit too many this year, and they are producing like I have never seen. Tons of them, and longer than they have ever been before. Both the plants are longer, and the beans themselves. The pole beans at the back of the yard have climbed to the top of the fence, and grown all the way back to the ground on the other side. If the good weather keeps up, I expect they will cross the driveway and start up the side of the duplex behind our back yard. I noticed that some of our raspberries have started a colony on the other side of the fence. I have offered the back neighbours right to pick whatever grows on their side of the fence, but they have not taken me up on the offer, so I am am walking around the property once a week or so to clear out piles of beans that are accumulating.

My kids are now quite sick and tired of beans. I have taken to eating them raw for snacks, cooked with dinner, in soups, stir fries, omelettes. I am almost ready to add them to my breakfast cereal. I go out with a bag or two on me to give to any friends or family members I happen to see. I have even offered strangers passing by the house. I am a bit afraid to let too many go to seed, because I have decided not to plant so many next year.

From a handful of dried beans, I seem to have enough to feed a small village for a couple of months on fresh beans, and if I choose to let them grow their full cycle, I could have buckets of one-inch long beans for cooking all winter, with some to spare to plant in the spring. No wonder beans are the staple food of poor people the world over. Lots of protein and fibre, and they help keep down heating costs too.

Its been pretty hot the past few weeks, so I have not had the energy to do much weeding and landscaping, but I did manage to expand my rocky border in the front. I like how it looks, and hopefully will keep the weeds out.


The sunflowers I planted, thinking they were small, decorative ones, turned out to be the tallest ones I have ever had. I am not sure if it is the variety I planted, or the weather conditions, but they have taken over my whole yard. The largest one is over 8 feet tall, and they each have a dozen flowers on them. Its a bit of a jungle in the back. I picked a couple of ripe ones, and the seeds are the small, black ones used in bird seed and pet food mixes, but these are bigger than most and not too difficult to eat. And they taste fantastic. The squirrels are just beginning to discover them, and I caught a photo of a squirrel busily munching on a sunflower seated atop my laundry line post (you can see his tail and back, his head is down busy pigging out.)


We have a second wave of raspberries ripening, and the flowers are still going beautifully.

Lisa and Isaac give us a garden tour in Wetaskiwin

 As some of my readers may know, my son Isaac and his girlfriend Lisa moved early this summer to a small town in Alberta called Wetaskiwin, near Edmonton. Lisa's family lives there, and they are staying for the time being with Lisa's mom, Cathy.

Cathy bought a new house last September, a roomy one with four bedrooms and a big, landscaped yard. She lives alone, and generously offered Lisa to stay with her to save money. They plan to move to Edmonton eventually, but apartments are expensive, and they are not ready to take that plunge.

Having moved in September, Cathy had no idea what was growing in the garden, so this summer was one of discovery. In anticipation of Lisa and Isaac's arrival, she planted a vegetable garden. Lisa was thrilled. She had been living in a basement apartment in a duplex in Montreal, not far from our house, and over the past few years had planted flowers and some vegetables in pots and in a few small areas in the yard, with permission from the landlord. Her plants were continually ripped out by someone. She had no evidence of whom but suspected one of the upstairs tenants. Whomever it was, she was continually frustrated by her attempts at gardening being undermined. Having her own garden space was a definite bonus to moving back in with mom.



This summer has been very dry out west. Forest fires have been burning all over Alberta and BC. They have had very different weather than we have in Montreal, lots of heat and a lot less rain. Needless to say, our garden experiences have been rather different this summer.  They also have a swing in the yard, so Isaac spent more time outside on hot days than he did at home, at least up until we sent his computer to him. I am not sure if that is still the case.


In early July, Lisa started a Facebook conversation with Isaac, Josh and I, then added my mother-in-law Chloe and our friend Olivier, called "Garden Tour." It has turned into a summer long conversation and sharing of pictures of what is happening with Cathy and Lisa's garden, with some of Chloe's garden pics exchanged, and Isaac's pictures of the furniture in the house (Lisa reminded him this was for garden pictures, which ended that detour!)

After writing up a post about my trip to see Alex's garden, I asked Lisa if she would like me to do a feature on her garden. All the pictures are Lisa's and Isaac's, I am merely paraphrasing the content of our interchanges.

There is a lovely pond in the yard. Lisa was suggesting they fill it in and use it as a garden space. I could not understand why they would want to do so, until Isaac explained it seemed to be full of maggots of some kind. Josh, being into insects, wanted to get a picture to his friend Graham the entomologist, so Isaac went in for a closer look and discovered there were three (3!) dead birds in the pond. I am not sure what happened next, but we heard soon after that the birds were gone. I believe the pond remains and has become a more respectable feature of the garden.

As different flowers and plants cropped up, Lisa sent pics to identify what they were. Wild grapes and Virginia creeper on the trellis, a surprise sunflower that hitchhiked in the carrot seeds (or was dropped by a bird in the carrot patch, perhaps). A rather pretty delphinium, which looks a lot like the ones in my garden.




Lisa has a particular fondness for Hens and Chicks, and her patch of them was one of the few plants that survived the vandalism in her Montreal garden. When she left, she asked me to take her hens and chicks, which I have planted in around the stone garden path across my front yard (where they are doing very well). Cathy's neighbours are a couple who Isaac describes as "hippies" and are very nice people. They gave Lisa some Hens and Chicks for the garden, and also loaned Isaac a bicycle which, in the absence of a driver's license or public transportation, is now Isaac's means of getting to and from work.


From what I can see from the pictures, they are growing carrots, peas, radishes, chard, potatoes, dill.

Cathy's dog seems to have become interested in the garden as well.

 Lisa has been updating us with her harvests and what they are having for dinner from the garden. They were several weeks ahead of us for tomatoes and carrots (which have finally started here in Montreal.) Their chard has been doing very well. Last summer I grew chard, but my kids did not seem to like it, and so I shared it with Lisa. This summer I did not grow any at home, but have been harvesting some from the Vanier gardens. I think I will grow it again next summer.

At Lisa's request, I have added a photo of her cat Harold (seen on the leash), enjoying time lounging in the garden.

I was curious about the floating bag. Lisa enlightened me that there is a laundry line just out of sight above the photo, and her lunch bag was drying when she took the picture. It was too nice a shot for me to leave out, so there it is complete with the mystery floating bag.

Below is the most stuck up tomato I have ever seen. You just don't see ones like that in the supermarket.  

 Some of the daily picks shots which I have been getting recently along with descriptions of dinner plans.

I am also going to take this opportunity to thank Lisa for leaving me with a large bag of old, sprouting potatoes when she and Isaac took off. They have been the most productive potatoes I have ever had in my garden. And tasty too!