Tomato plants are poisonous, right? Actually, not at all, according to a New York Times article that a coworker sent me on Thursday.
I’d bought into the common wisdom that tomato plants, along with potato plants and many other members of the nightshade family, contained poisons that rendered them inedible. The article stated, however, that the alkaloid in tomato plants, tomatine, has no history of poisoning humans or livestock, and that there was at least a brief record of the leaves being used in cooking, most notably in a tomato sauce served at the landmark Berkeley restaurant, Chez Panisse. Furthering the argument that tomatine is “probably not a killer,” Harold McGee, the article’s author, mentioned that the alkaloid is present in significant amounts in green tomatoes. There’s definitely a long history of eating those, often in fried form, often in the South.
I consider myself to be both a curious eater and a curious gardener, so I had to put this knowledge to the test. At the same time, I thought I’d also try my first preparation of “cossack asparagus,” the shoots of the aquatic cattail that I have growing in the pond.
First, I cut some tomato leaves off one of the plants. Next I trimmed some of the cattail shoots that had escaped into the pond from their pot. I removed the toughest outer leaves from the cattail shoots and rinsed them.
I chopped the cattail stems and the tomato leaves, and added them to a stir-fry of ginger and Japanese shishito peppers from the garden. If I were a little more adventurous, I’d have left off soy sauce so that I could have tasted the ingredients better. But I chickened out. In went a drizzle of soy.
The conclusion? I served a little side portion to John without telling him what the ingredients were.
“At first I thought they [the cattails] were green onions,” he said. “But they didn’t taste like them. And then I thought they lemongrass. But I was able to chew them.”
Such gushing enthusiasm! But after he made the reserved comments above, he agreed that the ingredients were indeed edible, and that we could have them again. And yes, I lived to write about eating both of these new ingredients.
Next time I’ll try simpler preparations so that I can better enjoy the individual flavors. Maybe a pesto sauce with raw tomato leaves. (I found that the cooking removed most of their flavor.) Or maybe I’ll try preparing a side dish of cattail stems steamed like asparagus.
One of my gardening resolutions for the year was to explore the lesser-known edible qualities of my garden plants. I’m glad that I did.
August 01 2009 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: cattails • tomatoes | 7 Comments »
When we purchased the house it came with a nice, deep pond that was perfect for waterlilies. It also came with an upper pond with a waterfall into the lily pond, and two other small ponds. Two decades later, one of the small ponds has now been converted into a planter, and another into my bog garden. Remaining are the two largest ponds, the lily pond and the upper pond, which we reduced in size by half.
We’ve had waterlilies blooming since the end of April. I have no idea what variety this one is–It came with the pond that came with the house. But it’s a tough and reliable plant.
The ponds are mostly John’s territory, but I’ve sneaked a couple California native species into them. The first is a cattail (Typha sp.), one of my favorite water plants.
If you’ve ever grown these, you realize quickly that there’s a certain amount of maintenance that goes with them, mainly in dealing with their spreading rhizomes. If the plant is potted, it’ll soon escape and will require frequent trimming when growing actively. Here are a couple of shoots that have escaped into the fertile pond scum. In the past the shoots got tossed, but I just read in an excerpt from Steve Brill and Evelyn Brin’s Identifying and Harvesting Edible and Medicinal Plants in Wild (and Not-So-Wild) Places how they’re totally edible and are nicknamed “Cossack’s asparagus.” The next trimmings will be going into the skillet.
A new native to the pond is California bulrush (Scirpus californicus), a replacement for a giant papyrus that finally succumbed after two decades. Although the new scirpus is called a rush, it’s actually a sedge. Two months ago it was a one-gallon plant. Now it’s easily twice the size.
Its little flowers aren’t spectacular, but a mass of these little bloom clusters could be a nice effect once it gets a little larger.
The closest canyon is about an eighth of a mile away, but various critters find their way to the water. Raccoons, opossums and tracks from a cat larger than a house cat, smaller than a cougar have been sighted over the years. During the first years a couple of visits from a great blue heron finally discouraged John from trying to raise koi in the lower pond after they ended turning in expensive birdfeed.
These days the main visitors are sparrows, which blend so well with pond scum and the surrounding rocks that they’re hard to see…
…and these days we’re seeing a lot of these lesser goldfinches.
Now that our daytime temperatures have finally been climbing into what you’d expect during the summer, I think I might be frolicking in the water if I were one of these birds.
July 21 2009 | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: birds • California bulrush • cattails • Scirpus californicus • Typha • water gardening • waterlilies | 6 Comments »
