The Friends School Plant Sale is offering a new vegetable this year: ramps – a native, wild-foraged cousin of the leek. (V138 and V139)
Their flavor is garlicky-mellow, their culinary usefulness is broad, and their health benefits are considerable. If you enjoy cooking with local ingredients, consider cultivating ramps.
These shade-lovers are edible in early spring (leaves and all), so a planting in your shaded yard could expand your harvest season. Carefully dig, clean and trim them, then have a ball caramelizing, grilling, roasting, currying, pureeing, pickling or otherwise preserving the little darlings.
A new book, Ramps: Cooking with the Best Kept Secret of the Appalachian Trail, is a charming resource for first-time ramp cooks.
Every recipe feels accessible. The ingredient lists are straightforward. There's a pleasing diversity of dishes that can be made using ramps (along with a good deal of compelling photos): salad dressings, fish and chicken, various soups, crepes, risotto, biscuits, fritters, jam, dips and much more.
Recipes for every day and fancier dishes, too. Plus instructions on freezing and preserving your ramp harvest.
But my favorite feature of the ramp? Dry eyes in the kitchen. Ramps don’t make you cry!
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Here's a previous article we wrote about ramps.
We’ve been selling Blue Poppies (Meconopsis betonicifolia) for years now. However, we’ve heard that they are difficult to grow. It’s not that they die from our cold winters — no. It’s that it’s too hot here in the summer.
Despite this difficulty, several Plant Sale shoppers have sent us photos of their blooming Blue Poppies. What we’ve learned from this is that, like some hydrangeas, they are only truly-blue in more acidic soil than you naturally find in the Twin Cities. Gardeners near the shores of Lake Superior have an easier time with the plants, both because of their moderate summer temperatures and their more acidic soil.
Here are some of the photos we’ve received.
Maggie in Minneapolis wrote to us this spring,
I bought 4 of the small plants. I have 3 different zones in my yard. I live on a northwest corner lot in Mpls and have a neighbor’s privacy fence on the south side. After reading up on the poppies I decided to place them in the shaded section of my yard that runs zone 4a/3. Normally I still have snow there, this year being an exception. The space receives a little early moring sun, no daytime sun, and about 3 hours of afternoon/evening sun.
Of the 4 I planted, one received too much sun (almost all day) and I moved it but I don’t think that one will make it. The other three did great and bloomed. One as you can see from the picture bloomed 3 times. I did not expect to see growth this early in the season but the plant that did the best has already come up about (2″) out of the ground. The other 3 have not made an appearance. I’m excited to see what happens this year. I do plan on buying a few more to add to the bed, if available.
Another gardener, Keith, picked up two of our $1.50 blue poppies last spring. He planted them on the east side of his house, in the shade of the entryway just south of the planting site. It gets good morning sun, but is shaded from late morning. He has an automatic sprinkling system, so they are watered three mornings per week.
No blooms the first year, but two of them survived the summer and are back this spring. One has a foot-tall stem with a fat bud at the top.
Barbara in Cloquet sent us these photos of her blue poppies from the sale:
She wrote,
I know these aren’t very good pictures, but the plant’s location in my garden is good for growing…. not for photographing! This plant is from last year and is the first one I finally got to grow and it sure grew. It is about 3 feet high and will have multiple blooms. The location was on the north side of the house and in shade, but bright shade. It probably has only minutes of direct sun per day, if at all.
Plant Sale shopper Krista from Stevens Point, Wis., tells us:
I bought 3 of these at the 2008 sale. They didn’t seem to do much where I put them originally so I moved them in the fall. This spring all 3 plants initially looked good but 2 petered out. This one ended up with 3 buds! I was so excited. The first bud never opened for some reason but the second one blossomed today. It is gorgeous! Hopefully bud #3 will open too.
The plant is on the north side of my house with early morning and late day sun.
36″ tall, part shade or shade. Well mulched! Find it in Perennials, $1.50 in a 2.5″ pot.
Here are a couple of helpful links if you’re interested in growing blue poppies:
The hottest fruit for Minnesota is the cold-hardy kiwi (Actinidia kolomikta). While the plants are related to the ones that produce the brown, fuzzy fruits you see in grocery stores, hardy kiwi fruits are more grape-sized, nonfuzzy, noticeably sweeter, and eaten whole.
Kiwis require at least one male plant to pollinate a female plant or plants. At this year’s Plant Sale, we’ll finally have both males and females, after selling the male plant, Arctic Beauty, as an ornamental for several years. The female variety is called Red Beauty. (Both are in 1 gallon pots for $10.00, F026 and F027.)
The fruits ripen August through October. Once established, one female vine can produce 15-20 pounds of fruit. It’s high in vitamin C, and can be dried like raisins.
As an added ornamental benefit, the leaves of the male plant are variegated green, white and pink. The female plant’s leaves have a reddish cast. The vines need a support to grow on as they twist and climb upward to 12′.
Keeping the base of the plant shaded is recommended because the plants like consistent moisture, plus it keeps down weeds and decreases suckering (when more shoots come up from the roots).
A recent article on The Heavy Table local food site included a lot of good background on the fruit and how to grow the plants, including these tips: “Only one male vine produces enough pollen for six female plants. A few considerations before planting: The growing site should be sloped, shaded from afternoon sun, have well-drained soil, and organic matter.”
If you’re interested in growing hardy kiwis for fruit, I recommend reading up on growing and pruning tips on the following websites:
University of Minnesota Fruit Production website
Growing Taste: A Home Food-Gardening Resource
(All photos from the Wikimedia Commons)
While visiting one of the local greenhouses that supply the Friends School Plant Sale, Henry found a plant he had never seen before. But when he showed it to the head grower, she said, “Oh, those are Song’s plants.”
Luckily for Henry, Song is the only Hmong employee at the greenhouse who speaks English.
She called the plant “cook with chicken, makes body strong.” She said in white Hmong the name translates to “duck foot.” It looks a little like celery and has a pleasant taste and aroma. It’s is used in dishes such as spicy wedding chicken and a chicken stew made for women who have just given birth.
Song said it’s a perennial, but only likely to survive our winters with heroic protection. She got it from her sister in California.
Knowing that the Friends School Plant Sale was in the midst of expanding our offering of herbs and vegetables from Asian and other world cooking traditions, Henry tried to find out more.
But he found that there’s very little info about Hmong plants available, including at libraries. He visited the Hmong ABC bookstore on University Avenue, where a helpful young man assured it was indeed “cook with chicken, makes body strong,” but he knew no more about it than that. He said to ask an elder, saying, “Any elder would know.”
Henry went to the Hmong library and cultural center where the librarian introduced him to a roomful of elders. They all agreed the plant was “cook with…,” and Henry learned it is not actually one plant at all, but several that are combined and cooked together with chicken. He also found out that Hmong writing cannot be sounded out using American phonetics.
The plant Henry had first seen is called: ko taw qos liab.The newly released Cooking from the Heart: The Hmong Kitchen in America calls this koj liab. “Liab” is pronounced like the name “Leah,” and it means red. The Hmong have one word for red and it covers all the reddish hues including pink and purple. The plant has purple stems.
Ko taw qos liab
A second herb that Song said fit into the same “common” name was chuaj rog (tshuaj rog in the Hmong cookbook). Henry couldn’t figure out how to write it phonetically. The first word is pronounced choo (not like a train but with the oo from hook), while the second starts with a “t” sound but does not rhyme with dog. This name means “fat medicine” in English (because it’s used to improve appetite). It comes in three different colors, green, red and white.
chuaj rog
In addition to the plants from Song, we also found out about a few of the other herbs that are part of the Cook with Chicken, Makes Body Strong medley, and will have them at the sale:
ntiv — also called sweet fern (not the same as the North American native sweetfern).
licorice flag, Acorus gramineus, whose Hmong name is pawj qaib (pronounced pakai)
All of these plants can be found in the Herbs at H036. We assume they would like full sun for best growth. Their heights are a bit unknown to us.
(According to Cooking from the Heart, another herb that is traditionally used as part of Cook with Chicken, Makes Body Strong is one of our local “weeds,” the common day flower. We won’t have that at the sale, but you may have it growing in your yard!)
Friends School Plant Sale is a fund-raising event sponsored by the Friends School of Minnesota in Saint Paul. It's held each year on Mother's Day Weekend at the Minnesota State Fair Grandstand (map and directions).
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