A Seed Saver's Garden

[Pulsegleaner]

General Updates
Peas, Tinga and Rice Bean seedlings are now in their permanent spots as are the Horse Gram seeds (I did dig around in the pot I planted with them last year, but either the web was wrong about the perennial rhizome, it takes more than one year to develop, or it rotted with the plants, because there seemed to be nothing down there.

Have already picked up a few packs of pansies, but nothing as yet really eye stopping. No activity yet from the planted seeds.

Did do a run to the bodega on Monday, but all I got of use were a few Andean corn kernels (maybe three or four with purple spots, a dozen or so with some red on the pericarp, one "muddled" (a sort of weak purple that mixes into the base color), and one Cuzco Gigante kernel with a yellowish tint).

Set up a pot with the wild mungs and rice beans. There aren't many of either, so I suspect I'll just take that pot outside later and it will be where they grow permanently.

Still no movement out of customs with the Australian herbs, and, at this point, it's probably a lost cause (since, even if they DID eventually let them through, it's been so long they are probably dead in the box.)

I have finally found someone (two someones, in fact,) who are offering actual greengage plum TREES (as opposed to more seeds, or cuttings for grafting. But besides the question of where I'd plant them on our property, I have sent out questions about their fungal resistance. I KNOW we have bad Black Knot and Brown Rot problems here (I can see it on the wild black cherries) and since I know greengages (like all European plums) are super sensitive to that, I want to make sure the strain being offered is resistant enough to give me a decent chance of the trees actually living long enough to produce fruit (I know I need at least two for pollination.)

 

[heirloomgal]

General Updates
Peas, Tinga and Rice Bean seedlings are now in their permanent spots as are the Horse Gram seeds (I did dig around in the pot I planted with them last year, but either the web was wrong about the perennial rhizome, it takes more than one year to develop, or it rotted with the plants, because there seemed to be nothing down there.

Have already picked up a few packs of pansies, but nothing as yet really eye stopping. No activity yet from the planted seeds.

Did do a run to the bodega on Monday, but all I got of use were a few Andean corn kernels (maybe three or four with purple spots, a dozen or so with some red on the pericarp, one "muddled" (a sort of weak purple that mixes into the base color), and one Cuzco Gigante kernel with a yellowish tint).

Set up a pot with the wild mungs and rice beans. There aren't many of either, so I suspect I'll just take that pot outside later and it will be where they grow permanently.

Still no movement out of customs with the Australian herbs, and, at this point, it's probably a lost cause (since, even if they DID eventually let them through, it's been so long they are probably dead in the box.)

I have finally found someone (two someones, in fact,) who are offering actual greengage plum TREES (as opposed to more seeds, or cuttings for grafting. But besides the question of where I'd plant them on our property, I have sent out questions about their fungal resistance. I KNOW we have bad Black Knot and Brown Rot problems here (I can see it on the wild black cherries) and since I know greengages (like all European plums) are super sensitive to that, I want to make sure the strain being offered is resistant enough to give me a decent chance of the trees actually living long enough to produce fruit (I know I need at least two for pollination.)

As someone who has poured over the pages of Martha Stewart's original big coffee table book about gardening many times, I've read about these special plums you mention. She spoke very highly of them, and in desserts treated them as though they were very special. Can you describe a little what these are like @Pulsegleaner? I've been curious about them since I first read that book many years ago, and I've never met anyone who's had them.

By coincidence I actually made plum cobbler today, using the Italian type medium sized burgundy plums. It was just delicious; regular plums are some of the most scrumptious cooked fruit in my experience so I can only imagine how good these greengage ones must be?

 

[Pulsegleaner]

As someone who has poured over the pages of Martha Stewart's original big coffee table book about gardening many times, I've read about these special plums you mention. She spoke very highly of them, and in desserts treated them as though they were very special. Can you describe a little what these are like @Pulsegleaner? I've been curious about them since I first read that book many years ago, and I've never met anyone who's had them.

By coincidence I actually made plum cobbler today, using the Italian type medium sized burgundy plums. It was just delicious; regular plums are some of the most scrumptious cooked fruit in my experience so I can only imagine how good these greengage ones must be?

There are a lot of subtypes but they have a few thinks in common. They are green to yellowish green, as opposed to the other Gage plums (oddly while Greengage is treated as one word, all of the others are two i.e. Red Gage, Yellow Gage, etc.) They take their name from Lord Gage, who apparently introduced them to England from France (where they are know as Reine Claude plums.)

They are generally smaller than the Asian plums we are used to, though by how much depends on the variety (I've seen them about the size of a billiard ball down to that of a large marble) The skin is green to yellowish green, and the flesh is green to yellow. The skins tend to be thickish, and sort of bitter, but the flesh, when ripe, is very sweet.

In this country, they tend to only be seen at farmers markets, for various reasons. Besides the difficulty of growing them here due to diseases, they also have an extremely short fruiting season (as short as four weeks for some types). As I said, they are also often fairly small, and a lot of customers prefer bigger plums.

To make things even worse, a lot of people in the US think that ALL green plums are greengages, which they are not. There are green Asian plums as well (usually those sort of heart shaped super firm ones.)

There is also the fact they look identical to a kind of plum called a Kaskarta, which is grown in the Middle East/Turkey, and eaten unripe with salt ( I have tried and, no, you generally can NOT take those and ripen them up into greengages, even when ripe, they do not get sweet.

I suppose you CAN cook with then, but since they oxidize very quickly, they cook up brownish. I've seen them candied (in Harrods).

I also assume someone probably makes brandy out of them somewhere. Polish plum brandy (a.k.a. Slivovitz) uses the stone plum (i.e. the long bluish purple one they also use for prunes) and French eau-de-vie likes to use the Mirabelle (an extremely tiny yellow plum), but, in areas where there are a lot of them, I assume extras of them get boozed as well.

 

[heirloomgal]

This is all sort of fascinating @Pulsegleaner as I consider myself a bit of a plum aficionado. I'd love to learn about all the various types of plums out there, and there are lots it seems. All the different origins, the colors, shapes and uses. I've never even seen a green plum!

In a blind taste test, would you be able to distinguish cooked greengages from, say, Italian prune plums? Of all the plums I've eaten thus far they've mostly tasted similar cooked. A Yugoslavian friend made me some traditional plum dumplings, where they remove the pit (using those very tiny little blue plums), insert a suger cube inside, cover it with dough, boil it and then fry in breadcrumbs on the stove. I've never eaten a plum dessert that tasted quite so divine as that did.

 

[heirloomgal]

Nearly all the tomatoes I plan on growing this year are up and sprouted. I planted a few last minute ones a couple days ago, but that'll be it. Given that many of the seeds I planted (all are new to me, none are my own seed) were likely 10 years old the germination has been outstanding. I'm positively thrilled about that because the majority of them are extremely rare in North America. I feel really lucky to have these.

Same goes for peppers varieties for 2024, almost all are up. I replanted the few that didn't sprout. Got some new heating mats for the job and they're working great. I'm sort of relieved that I didn't start the peppers earlier, because I'm already a bit cramped for space under lights.

Herbs all seem to be doing well, though it's clear the thyme and savory family are not speedy growers. The scent on the herbs is quite detectable already though. The lemony scent of the Winter Lemon Savory is simply to die for. Incredible.

 

[Pulsegleaner]

Never having either cooked, I wouldn't know. The few times my mom has cooked with plums, it's usually mixed in with other fruits in a tart, so it would be hard to tell them separately from most of the other fruits. I do remember a lot of Asian plums stay pretty firm when cooked, but that's about as far as I would be able to tell.

The "very tiny" blue plums are a bit hard for me to work out the identity of. Over here, that would sound like a damson plum, which is one of the native American ones (along with the American Plum, the Beach Plum, and the Chickasaw Plum). The sugar cube would make sense in that case, as damsons are too sour to eat as is. The original recipe in Poland might have used sloes, which are EXTREMELY tiny (they tend to mostly use those as a gin flavoring, but you might be able to stuff them if you had deft fingers.) There is also something I once encountered called a Victoria plum that was basically a black Gage plum.

I'm fairly sure that most or all of the American wild plums are too sour to eat raw (I had no problem eating the plums from the tree at college raw, but while I assumed that was an American Plum when I found it, given how it tasted, it may very well have been a European plum that got very lucky about lasting long enough to fruit (it is telling that, the year after I found it, the tree died completely from black knot.)

There was also the "vomit plum" tree. That isn't a comment on the flavor of the fruit (I never ate one, but one of my teachers did, and he said it wasn't very good but it didn't get it's name that way), but due to it's circumstances (it was at the corner of the street between a housing complex and a bar, and was primarily fertilized by the countless college students who, having had too much to drink at the bar, lost it on the tree's roots. That plus a lot of food garbage. No real clue what that one was (it sort of looked like a mirabelle in fruit shape, but again, mirabelles aren't supposed to grow well in the US, and clearly, no one was pampering this tree* Fruit was a funny color as well (up until then, I have never seen a plum that was orange.)

Besides the Greengages, the "plum" I'd most like to find is the "hand fruit Mei" . Mei plums (or Ume plums, if you are in Japan) are a separate species (Prunus mume**) They are INVARIABLY preserved, be it boiled in sugar/candied (what they do in China) pickled (umeboshi, the thing Japanese people like with their rice) or made into plum wine (which is so central to Japanese tradition that it's the one form of alcohol exempt from the Japanese ban on home brewing.)

The reason it is preserved is simple, raw, they taste TERRIBLE (even when ripe, which they usually aren't for processing). But, I have heard rumors of forms that ARE sweet enough to eat raw, and that is what I'd like to find.

* When we had the person responsible for the city's tree plantings in for a lecture, I asked about that tree, but apparently they weren't the one's who had planted it, and, indeed, they didn't know who had.) It's gone now (I haven't been back in person, but I did a Google Maps trip down the street, and both the tree and the place where it was are now gone.

**Some people classify the Ume as an apricot, since the fruit is fuzzy, but I usually see it translated as "plum". It's also the same tree used ornamentally as "flowering plum" (as in "plum blossoms). And, though it literally just made the connection, it's probably the one used in China to make plum sauce (my Chinese cookbook, said that the sauce was because local "apricots" were too sour to eat as is, but it never occurred to me that he could have been talking about Mei plums.

 

[Pulsegleaner]

Updates 4/6
Just fertilized the two big pots on the side patio and added the lablab beans (two types per pot, none with specific names).

Did plant such Chinese garlic as still looked alive (two of them ) but honestly can't be sure if either will take (none of it really seemed to grow any after I got it, with one expectation, and NONE really have any roots to speak of. May have to wait for the fall and try again to get bulbs or bulbils.

Had a bit of a surprise when I went to plant the lablabs. There were two leguminous sprouts ALREADY in the pot. Obviously something I put in last year that has lain dormant. Didn't want to get stuff mixed up, so I moved them to a portable pot, brought them in, and gave them some water (to deal with transplant shock). Assuming they both stay okay, I'll move them out to the back patio soon (if they SPROUTED outdoors, they must be fine with current temperatures.

Unsure about current status of tomatoes. When I looked today they were all flat to the pot from lack of water, but some looked fresh enough that they may bounce back now that I have watered them. (looks like I won't have to worry as much about thinning as I thought I would.

If they DO, I'm moving them to pots indoors, the peat plugs are just too shallow now to keep them going. I REALLY wish I could put them out right now, but it's still a month until approved outdoor tomato planting time, and the temperatures outside are not conducive currently to an early start (I think all of the domestic rice bean seedlings died from cold. Glad I put the wild ones in with the wild mungs indoors.)

Doing the same with the gherkins, for the same reason.

The Fava beans look GREAT, but I HAVE to get them into the ground; if they get any bigger they'll probably overrun the cold frame!

Guess the only seeds left to do is the corn in a few weeks. By my calculations, given how long my indoor part takes, I COULD probably start them NOW and be OK, but that relies on the earlier guess as to when corn can go out, and I'm playing it cautious and waiting a week or two. Besides I haven't built the device yet, nor do I think still have enough virgin peat plugs to do all of the corn (with most of them, if the seed never grows, or the sprout dies, it's okay to re-moisten and re-use the plug. But, since every time they touch the air, they can accumulate mold spores, the more times you do that, the higher the risk of mold getting in. And since corn has a higher carb count than most of the seeds I plant (particularly sweet corn) it's extra sensitive to mold. So corn has to go in fresh, never used before plugs.)

 

[heirloomgal]

Did plant such Chinese garlic as still looked alive (two of them ) but honestly can't be sure if either will take

What are these? A special type of clove?

 

[Pulsegleaner]

What are these? A special type of clove?

No, as far as I can tell it is a different species of allium, Allium macrostemon. It's also called Japanese Garlic.

 

[heirloomgal]

Unsure about current status of tomatoes. When I looked today they were all flat to the pot from lack of water, but some looked fresh enough that they may bounce back now that I have watered them.

Any interesting new varieties? I thought you grew Phil's 2 last year (or before?), which is a very unique one. I've only got a few wierdos on the list this year, so I'm trying to live vicariously through others growing them. ;>

I do have Wagner Blue Green, Cherokee Tiger Black (the one with the chartreuse foliage) and a European peachy fuzzy tomato I got from @Artorius though I can't recall it's name at the moment, but it looks pretty neat already even though it's just a wee seedling. I guess Ramillette de Majorca counts too, since that was called an 'odd duck' in my tomato book. I actually have a few long keeper tomatoes planted, though not as many as I originally planned - Ruby Treasure and Zhiraf, a Russian long keeper. I only had 2 seeds left of Zhiraf and both sprouted (yay! because no one else offers it anymore here).