From Forest to Skillet: Edible and Native Plants in the Cross Timbers of Oklahoma. 773 yard species and counting!
After thinking about what Judy and I have been texting about on snow vs ice and the extreme and unusual cold impending, I decided to cover the biggest part of every strawberry bed, even the backyard ones. I hope it will snow as forecast on Sunday before the most extreme cold for insulation.
I checked on some native flower seeds I tried stratifying in the fridge in January. A single Missouri fluttermill primrose was sprouting!!
Supposed to be really cold (with highs not above freezing) later this week, so I figured I should get my lately acquired native and wildflower seeds in the ground. These included desert globemallow, blue flax, Liatris mucronata, and mystery Aster sp. (the latter two from Mom, thanks Mom!!). The first three I also put some seeds in the fridge for manual stratification and the first two I saved a bit to try planting in the fall if the spring planting doesn’t take.
I also had a few indoor seedings to catch up on. Judy kindly sent me some Chimayo chile pepper seeds, my Jimmy Nardello peppers never sprouted, my ground cherries only had two sprouts, and the poor Tommy Toe tomatoes died of cat and damping off.
Gardening with Prairie Plants was SO BEAUTIFUL. Mom gave it to me a few weeks ago and it was just filled with magnificent pictures of prairies and prairie gardens throughout the Great Plains. I really also liked how it paid attention to the different regions (wetter and drier, north and south), so it has lots of good info on plants native to each region. It mentioned some medicinal and edible uses of native plants too though it refers to other more complete sources. Did I mention the prairie photos? Definitely added to the favorite references spreadsheet.
Grow Cook Eat by Willi Galloway had a lot of useful tidbits I hadn’t found elsewhere, such as soil temperatures for germinating (the Johnny’s seed catalog seems to have air temperature? or so I assume, as it’s not specified) and some sections on mustard greens and bok choy. I have added it to my spreadsheet of useful books.
For those interested in cooking (aka not me anymore), it also had a lot of recipes and talked about eating parts of plants that aren’t usually discussed, like radish seed pods and various flowers of vegetables.
I am on a garden-book-reading spree it seems. I just finished The Beautiful Edible Garden (got it as an ebook from Pioneer Library Systems, our local public library). It had a lot of suggestions on how to arrange edible plants into an existing decorative garden. Mostly not relevant to how we have the yard laid out, but probably helpful for others. They did recommend a three-group crop rotation of brassicas, legumes, and nightshades, and ignoring herbs, lettuce, and alliums. So that was similar to The Vegetable Gardener’s Bible which I read a few weeks ago and liked.
Some guest plants are departing, so the Salvia greggii cuttings are moving into the plant window where it’s safer from the cat.
Paula and I were going to plant things tomorrow, but it’s looking quite chilly. It’s just gorgeous out right now. So we spent a half an hour or so and got two kinds of onions (yellow granex and white granex) from sets in the beds, two kinds of potatoes in containers (experimenting with burlap sacks, potting soil bag, and cardboard boxes to make hilling them easier to get more potatoes), and seeds of French breakfast radish, green wave mustard, and Oregon sugar pod II pea. The peas we already have a few little vines of but I figured another round wouldn’t hurt to replace some since they blanch and freeze well if we get a lot.
Last time on parsnip news you can use: “My parsnips (“Harris model”) said on the package I could do either spring or fall planting. While researching whether this was true for Oklahoma, I came across a useful post on an Oklahoma gardening forum (expand the featured answer by “macmex” who is located north and east of us, in Talehquah in northeastern Oklahoma) It sounds like you CAN plant them in fall, but as a biennial, they may flower (“bolt”) in the spring before the roots are big enough to be useful. So, we’ll see what happens with my fall-planted ones, but I have just put out a row of them today and I will put out another row each week until the third week of February and see what happens to those.”
No more cases of damping off since Wes has added the fan for me. Many plants were ready for watering! So I think the fan is helping dry things out.
