Verjuice and Stuffed Grape Leaves from Dad’s Yard

While I was at my dad’s this weekend, I did a little foraging before I left on Sunday. I scoped out some sassafrass seedlings I might try to transplant into my sideyard later this fall (or dig the roots of for some homemade rootbeer…) But most obvious right now were the grape vines bordering between the grass and the woods. Before my parents built the house, my dad’s land was almost all vineyard, in Northeast Ohios’ Grand River Valley. Over the decades, a lot of those grape vines have gone feral, and still are producing pretty good tasting grapes on their own. The vines are probably a re-wilded Concord-type.

Of course, right now, the fruit isn’t anywhere near ripe, but there’s still a lot you can do with the plant. If you’ve never made stuffed grape leaves with fresh leaves – you’re really missing out! The brined, canned leaves are pretty foul and delicate things – but fresh ones make a big difference!

Fresh grape leaves, from my dad's backyard.

 Janna is a big fan of stuffed grape leaves, and the recipe I used was pretty close to the savory/sweet dolmades she loves from Columbus’ Cafe Shish Kebab. The only changes from the recipe were that I used almonds rather than pine nuts, and I added lemon juice-marinated onions on top while baking. 

The finished stuffed grape leaves (which turned out fantastic!)

 Next, even though the grapes weren’t close to ripe yet, they were getting to be close to full sized. On some vines, therer were so many clusters of grapes that, had this been a vineyard, some would have been thinned out. So, with that in mind, I picked some bunches, and thought I’d take a stab at verjuice, which how people would have gotten use out of unripe grapes. Verjuice is just the juice of unripe grapes – and it was commonly used in the olden days as a substitute for lemon juice, in climates where lemons couldn’t grow. It has a sour flavor that’s less intense and a little more floral than vinegar. 

About a pound and a half of wild grapes.

 Making verjuice couldn’t be easier. I stemmed the grapes, threw them in a blender, and pushed the pulp through a sieve. I tried to filter it through coffee filters, but it took forever to percolate through – so I just poured half into a Mason jar to use from the fridge, and the other half went into the freezer in smaller containers. I’m not sure exactly how I’ll use it, but I’ve read it’s nice in salad dressings. I’d imagine it would be nice in a seafood marinade too.

The finished verjuice - kind of an upapetizing shade of green, but it has an appealing sweet/sour/bitter flavor.

Working in Another Garden

The new rock walls and garden beds.

Later this summer, my brother is having his wedding reception at my dad’s house. There’s lots of work to do to get the yard in order, so this weekend, I’ve been up helping with hauling, shoveling, digging, mulching and whatever else is needed. My dad’s yard makes me so jeaolus – he has about 2 acres of landscaped area around the house, and 9 acres overall, compared to my 1/10. But gardening there can be tricky, because under a thin film of topsoil, there are many feet of tough clay.  Even my unimproved riverbed soil is easier to work with than the best spot out here.

This weekend, my brother, Janna and I worked most on re-building a planting bed near the back of the house. We extended the bed about 15 feet, and built some rock walls to retain the soil. In addition, we pulled up a flagstone path and some railroad ties that were in need of repair. It’s a project so huge, I couldn’t imagine tackling it at home. But with just a few minor injuries, I think it looks pretty good!

The next step will be to lay gravel and sand along the route of the new path, compact them and rebuild a more narrow flagstone path. After that, compost and fill dirt will go into the large bed, and gravel inside of the circle around the linden tree. And then, it’ll be ready to plant out with hostas and other shade loving plants like hostas and Japanese anemones.

Rows and rows of white pines.

One of my long term goals is to convince my dad to plant some low maintenance fruit trees rather than the red osier dogwoods and white pines and ginkgos he’s so fond of. My dad lives in northeastern Ohio, on a ridge above Lake Erie, so winters are much snowier up here, summers a bit cooler, and autumns seem to last longer. He’s planting more groves of trees to cut down on the area he needs to mow. I think there are some spots in the yard that would be perfect for a mulberry, or a hazelnut hedge, or even some cherry trees.

Red oiser dogwood living hedge.

Filling up the Tomato Bed

Last week, I planted some cucumber plants and tomato seedlings and volunteers in the tomato bed, and this weekend, Janna and I filled up the rest of the bed after a trip to Franklin Park Conservatory’s plant sale. Last year, we got some great heirloom varieties and this year didn’t disappoint!

We ended up buying 12 plants – 11 tomato and one eggplant. Maybe a little overboard on the tomatoes… I planted the two large eggplant seedlings I got from Lowe’s (Ichiban and Purple Beauty,) three Thai White Ribbed seedlings and three Voilette Longue Hative seedlings that I grew from seed (still tiny) and the one from Franklin Park Conservatory’s sale – a medium white variety.

The tomato bed with eggplant and cucumbers on the left.

We bought two Black Krims (our favorite from last year,) two Black Brandywines, a Mr. Stripey, a Boxcar Willie and six cherry/pear varieties that we’ll plant in our Topsy Turvys later. I removed a few of the volunteer seedlings to make room for the new plants, and potted them up. If anyone needs some seedlings – they’re still small – I have six tomatoes and an eggplant to give away.

A tomato seedling in the ground.

An Idea from Indy

I’m in Indianapolis for work today, and during lunch, I decided to take a stroll around the city. I can’t say I’ve ever intended to take a trip to Indiana for fun, but Indianapolis is a pretty nice city! I walked along the canal pathway, which was really great, and found my way around the huge Indiana Statehouse and a few more city streets. 

One thing I didn’t expect to find in the midst of downtown Indianapolis was a vegetable garden – but as I climbed the stairs out of the canal walkway, there one was, right in front of me, among the museums and convention hotels!

Growing Places Indy Slow Food Garden

The Growing Places Indy Slow Food Garden is a collaborative effort among many Indiana organizations to bring argriculture back into the urban core. This truly is an urban farm – it’s not an allotment community garden, but a farm intended to grow produce to sell to  local restaurants and at the city’s farmers market. The proceeds help support the farm’s operations.  At 6,000 square feet, it’s not huge, but with proper crop rotation/succession and enriched soil, there could be a lot of produce to sell!

Cabbage growing along nicely

The garden looks like it just got its start about a month ago, and while it could already use a pretty significant weeding, and lots of it is yet unplanted, it seems like a great start! 

There is even an on-site compost bin!

Projects like this take a lot of people working together, but I think this is a great way to demonstrate that people can grow food almost anywhere and to encourage more people to grow food gardens at home. We don’t think about it every day, but we’re incredibly lucky to live in the Midwest, where sunlight, rich soil and water are all plentiful enough to feed ourselves with plenty to spare. The investment in raw materials for this urban farm is relatively small, and the business model for selling produce to maintain the garden’s operation is very smart.

If Indianapolis can do this, why not Columbus (where I live and work)? And couldn’t we do it better? I could see downtown workers using their lunch breaks now and then to tend to the farm and get some stress relief. We’re about to get a large, new area of greenspace downtown, at the former City Center Mall site. Demolition is already completed. Why not make a small piece of lawn in that new park into a productive patch of land that can feed our people?

What would do you think it would take to get a project like this going in Columbus? I think the chances are improved by the City Center park site still in planning stages. There would have to be plenty of partnerships created to build, maintain and market the garden, and to get its produce into local restaurants, but I think it’s a challenge the people of Columbus are up to. Who’s with me?

Native(ish) Shade Garden

The southwest corner of the backyard is shaded by those two big walnut trees, so I knew it was going to be hard to grow any food crops in that area. In addition, the black walnut trees leach a toxin called juglone from their roots, and most tender, non-native annuals (which most vegetables happen to be) in the area are slowly killed off. 

After a spring hike at Clifton Gorge State Nature Preserve, I got inspired to recreate a native wildflower landscape as best I could. This bit of natural beauty about halfway between Columbus and Dayton really comes alive with wildflowers  in the springtime. The Little Miami River cascades through a steep walled gorge, and everything at the bottom is damp, green and alive. I saw white bleeding hearts, lots of ferns, mosses, tiny trout lilies, triliums and some wild geranium. And of course, there are the giant pancakes at Clifton Mill, just a few mintues’ walk away. Midwest Native Plants has a nice post about the plant life at Clifton Gorge, and there are some beautiful photos at Natural Born Hikers.

Without getting too techincal about it, I headed to a few local garden centers to gather up some shade plants that were tolerant of juglone and had some of the same shapes as the native plants I had seen at Clifton Gorge. To anchor the corner bed, I chose a purple lilac (which reminds me of the giant bush that grew outside of my great aunt’s house next door to where I grew up,) two white viburnums for their fragrance and fall color, and an oakleaf hydrangea. Interspersed among these, I planted several varieties of ferns, astilbe, some hostas, columbine, forget-me-nots, wild geraniums, a white bleeding heart and a showstopper Lenten rose. Not all of the plants are native to my region, but most of them are. I kept the color palate mostly to white and light blue to focus on the foliage of each plant.

Plants are laid out, but sod has to come up!

I enriched the soil with peat moss and composted manure, and then grouped the plantings closer together than recommened to ensure a lush look. I’ll have to fertilize a bit more than if I had spaced them apart, but the denseness and a thick cover of mulch discouraged weeds.

In all, the shade garden took off really well the first year. The lilac bloomed just a few weeks after planting, and the ferns and hostas took off like wildfire. A few of the more tender flowering plants seemed to languish a little, and the hydrangea and viburnums didn’t bloom last year.

Last fall, I dug in a few tulips, crocuses and anemones that had been sitting in my basement since the spring before. I don’t think all of them will sprout, but the few that do will add a nice early splash of color.

More mature, but obscured shade garden (right rear) at our 4th of July Party