People often throw away fruit that has even one soft spot. They’ll spit out in disgust an apple that’s mushy and mealy. Yet fruit at this far limit of ripeness actually makes the best cooked sauces.
When fruit is green, it’s hard and sour. It’s hard because the cells are firmly glued together by pectin. It’s sour because the carbohydrate is starch, which has no sweet taste.
Unripe fruit is sour and hard
If you were to try to cook green fruit into sauce, it would never get sweet, because cooking doesn’t break down starch into sugar. What you might get, if you drain off the liquid, is a solution of pectin, useful for making jelly. This was the traditional way of getting pectin before it was a commercial product.
As fruit gets ripe, several processes occur. At the surface, the whole fruit changes color. Inside, the fruit tissues produce a mixture of esters, flavor molecules that give the characteristic essence of, say, apple, peach, or pear. If this fruity scent is not there before you cook fruit, there’s no way it can be there after!
The pectin that binds the cells, one to another, begins to break down, so the whole fruit gets softer.
ripe fruit is sweet and flavorful
The starch turns to sugar, and goes into each cell’s central vacuole. This vacuole is like a storage tank, which makes up most of the internal space of the cell. The fruit cells become like tiny water balloons, full of flavorful liquid.
When you bite into a piece of fruit that is perfectly ripe, your chewing crushes the cells open to release their sweetness and flavor.
As fruit gets past the point of perfect ripeness, the same processes go further. Esters build up even more, and can give the fruit an “off” flavor, even reminiscent of paint thinner. The starch continues to convert to sugar, and builds up even more in the cell interior.
overripe fruit is excessively soft
If there’s so much sugar, why is an overripe apple mealy and bland? The pectin that used to glue the cells together is gone, so the cells come apart from each other when you chew. They roll around in your mouth like little BBs. They don’t pop open and release their sweetness.
If you take courage, and dare to cook fruit that has gone into this unpromising state, the magic happens. The heat drives off excess esters, and tones the flavor down. The cells burst open, and release all their internal sugar.
If there’s any complaint, it may well be that the product is “too sweet”. You can always blend it with something that could use additional sweetness, or use it as a sweetener in its own right. Some years ago, there was a spate of natural products advertised as “pear juice sweetened”. This is where that pear sweetener came from.
In using past-peak fruit, there’s a line between overripe and actually rotten. Apples and pears can be completely brown and translucent, but it’s merely their own ripening process.
Extremely ripe, but fine
This is the same thing that happens, to a different degree, in the fruit of the medlar (Mespilus germanica), closely related to pears and apples. Medlars are not considered ripe until they are “bletted”, which is the word for this stage of being brown and soft.
You can tell by the smell. If it smells like fruit, even very fruity, it’s OK. Your nose knows. But if it smells like vinegar, or mold, or fermented, it’s gone beyond. And of course don’t use it if you can see actual mold.
surface mold, truly rotting
If you have overripe fruit trickling in piece by piece, you can collect it in bags in your freezer until you have enough for a batch to cook. You can cut it in quarters so it packs better, and to make sure there are no “worms”, as in homegrown fruit.
Damage, such as worms, induce early ripening, so a worm-stung fruit may originally be only overripe, though the hole can introduce rot which quickly spoils the whole thing. Often, especially in pears, a worm does little damage, causing only a hard lump by the core. The major part of the fruit is fine, though unsightly, and perfect for sauce.
Create a microhabitat for a bog plant in a floating pot.
Round-leaved sundew (Drosera rotundifolia) is an intriguing little plant. Part of the intrigue is that sundew is insectivorous, though most of what it “eats” are tiny gnats and midges, nothing even as spectacular as a housefly. The plant maintains its mystique by being seldom seen. It’s not rare. It can be profligately abundant, in the right habitat. But that habitat can be difficult to access — quaking bogs.
A quaking bog is a lake, or lake edge, where sphagnum moss has grown in the water to sufficient quantity that is has formed a floating mat. You can walk out on it, if you don’t mind getting your feet wet. It will support you, but it “quakes” (moves), as you step around. You can play by shifting your weight to alternate legs, and get the surface mat rolling in lazy waves.
The classic explanation of why insectivorous plants grow here is that it’s acidic and nutrient-poor. The plants get nitrogen from insects they can’t get from the ground. But part of it is also physics. Sundew is a tiny plant. If it tried growing on the shore, it would dry out when when water levels dropped, and drown when they rose. Instead, it rides up and down on top of the floating moss, and stays constantly moist despite any lake level changes.
But sundew can also be found in a few curious microhabitats. I lived for a while in Bellingham, Washington, and heard that sundew grew at a certain lake, a popular day hike. I went there, and scoured the area for this little plant several times, never finding it.
The lake was in a rock hollow, scooped out by glaciers. The shore was clean-edged, no quaking bog. Conifer trees grew all around, but evidently the bedrock did not give much to dig their roots into, because they would blow down in storms. The lake was crisscrossed by fallen logs.
Finally, somehow, I thought to look out on the floating logs, and there were the sundews. Not many, but there they would be, right at the edge where wood met water. Wet wood is certainly a low-nitrogen substrate.
The plants were not on logs that draped into the lake. Those would be alternately wet and dry through the year. But logs that were entirely floating could ride up and down with lake level fluctuations, and allow the tiny sundews to stay constantly moist.
So that’s the clue to growing a sundew, without having to water it by eyedropper. You might want to scroll to the bottom to see where this is going.
I had a few sundew plants someone had collected as botanical specimens from a bog. I thought I’d see if I could keep them alive.
Sundew specimen
I used my largest spade bit.
Spade bit
I drilled into a scrap of half-inch-thick cedar board.
Drill
I cut out the drilled section to form a cup.
Cedar cup
Notice that I drilled the point all the way through, to make a hole.
Hole in back
I test-floated this in a little “elevated pond” I have. This is the only way I have found of growing some water plants, without the raccoons tearing them up every night. The “pond” is suspended as a hanging planter, up off the ground. I have it set up to refill every morning from the drip irrigation. The local birds drink from it, and use it as a birdbath.
Test float
I wanted to make sure water came through the hole, and kept the interior constantly moist. With this satisfactory, I potted the sundews along with a bit of the sphagnum that had come from the bog.
Potted up
Then, I floated this back in the pond.
Floating
This idea might be useful for growing other insectivorous bog plants.
A grafting experiment that did not work; to make tall fruit trees short.
In winter of 2019, Arne (I’ll call him), of a local Ecovillage I’ll refer to as “Bamu”, contacted me about some cherry trees. This post is a record of the process. It’s all too easy to never report on failed experiments. But experiments never fail. You always learn something, if only what doesn’t work.
The three cherry trees in question were very tall. They were evidently seedlings, not any improved variety. They bore small, mediocre fruit. They were casting dense shade on other parts of the orchard, preventing fruiting there. The community had decided it was time to try and do something about this.
Everybody else Bamu had consulted said, “Just cut ’em down!” I suppose my name came up because I have broader perspective on what you can do with fruit trees.
In the fruit growing country east of the Cascades, orchardists routinely re-work big fruit trees, but in urban Portland this is scarcely heard of. Nobody knows anything but “Cut it down!”
In commercial orchards, this would be a huge economic waste. There is no need to completely remove trees, then plant new trees, then wait years, or decades, till they get to bearing size. Instead, trees are re-worked.
If one variety of, say, apple goes out of fashion, an orchard will “change” all the trees in a block to a more popular kind. Workers go through, cutting off the limbs and grafting the new variety onto the stubs.
This amounts to a rather severe pruning. When the trees grow back out, the new limbs are from the grafts, and therefore bear the new type of fruit. The trees can be in full production again in only a few years.
Re-work
This diagram is simplified. In practice, the grafting is done at a particular time of year, not when the host tree has fruit. The illustration is to show the change of fruit variety.
The cutting back can be to any degree. One extreme is to put a great many grafts out on all the small branches. This is of course very labor intensive. The other extreme is cutting the tree off to a stump, and grafting on to that stump. This requires the minimal number of grafts. Orchards generally do the larger limbs, or stump, to control costs.
Orchards are already controlling the size of their trees, so the primary reason for re-work is to change the fruit variety. In urban areas, on the other hand, tree size is a major issue. Often, fruit trees have been let to grow for years, with little thought. When they start to bear, all the fruit is way out of reach.
Part of my proposed re-work of the Bamu trees was to control their size. Cherry trees naturally grow very tall, one of the largest types of fruit trees. The use of “dwarfing” rootstocks is now widespread. Trees grafted onto such roots grow to only a fraction of the standard size.
A variant of that is “interstem”. The tree starts on a sturdy rootstock, not necessarily dwarfing. Then, the dwarfing moiety is grafted on, then the desired variety is grafted onto that. The section of dwarfing stem between the roots and the top causes the whole tree to be dwarfed.
Standard, dwarf, and interstem
In the case of the Bamu trees, the roots were what they were. I thought of trying an interstem so that when the trees re-grew, they would fruit at smaller size. Otherwise, varietal cherry grafted onto this seedling rootstock would grow to just as large a size as before.
The appropriate technique for grafting onto a large cut stem is the bark graft. This video shows exactly how to do it.
I made this video on request from my niece’s husband, Ryan. In the Southeast, where they live, there is a widely planted ornamental, the Callery pear (Pyrus calleryana). Birds spread the small inedible berrylike fruits, and Callery pears come up everywhere.
Ryan had a big such tree at the new house they bought, and asked me if it could be grafted to edible pears. I couldn’t visit at the time of year to do it myself, so I made the video. Ryan followed the video, and now has ‘Avers’ pear growing on the Callery pear stump.
Pear trees, like cherry trees, want to grow big. Even though Ryan’s pear tree is no longer a trunk towering up to the sky, it is still a challenge to control the size. Thus, the idea of the dwarfing interstem on the Bamu cherry trees.
I mapped out a plan where the trees would be cut off to stumps. Then scions of a dwarfing cherry would be bark-grafted on. This would be in the second week of April, the correct time for bark grafting.
These bark-grafted dwarf cherry scions would grow out and serve as the interstem.
Plan to re-work trees
When the interstem had grown sufficiently, varietal cherry would be grafted on. These grafts would be bud grafts, done the second week of July.
So the varietal cherry would be in place within one growing season. Then it would be a matter of re-shaping the trees for productivity.
However, there were other considerations. The community at Bamu had been using the large cherry trunks as hammock supports, and the area had a fire circle which was a social focal point. They wanted to keep the hammocks. Even if the tree tops were taken off, they would like to have the trunks remain, to build some sort of pavilion.
Other uses
The discussion went back and forth. There was the idea of cutting off the trunks higher, perhaps to six feet, or ten feet, and grafting on top there. I pointed out that growth from grafts grows upward, and so all the fruit would again be out of reach.
Then came the idea of notching in the bases of the trunks, to “separate” the upper section, and get the bases to behave as if they were cut stumps. I explained this could effectively act as girdling the trees, and they might die.
Compromise, graft onto notched trunks
Still, with all considerations, we settled on this compromise and decided to try it. At worst, the trees would die, which was no worse than the original “Cut ’em down!” proposal. And we would learn something.
On March 20, an arborist topped the cherry trees, and notched them at the base.
Notches at base
Topped trunks of notched trees
On April 11, I bark grafted the trees. I used scions of a rather strongly dwarfing cherry rootstock. Trees on this rootstock can be kept to 15 feet in height.
Individual bark graft
On the south tree I put 28 grafts, the middle tree 22, and the north tree 27. This amounted to grafts every few inches around the circumference.
People at the community were interested and curious. “Why so many?” they asked, “Do you need that many grafts?”
Bark grafts
I explained that I always like to make lots of grafts, to try and get some kind of statistics. Seldom do all of them grow; and if there are lots, you can get an idea why.
For example, if drying out from strong sun causes them to fail, I would expect to see it more on the south side of the trunks and not on the north. If by some chance they do all grow, you can choose the best.
Arne was proceeding with taking the bark off the upper trunks, but it was slow going. As an idea, it hadn’t seemed too hard, but when it came time to actually do it, working so far off the ground was awkward and strenuous.
Also, the bark was not peeling as readily as I was used to. Bark peels easily, or “slips” when the cambium cells are actively growing. The trees seemed compromised, in that the cambium had not become as vigorous as on a healthy tree that time of year.
On April 28, some of the grafts looked promising. People in the community were hopeful the grafts would take. “We’re rooting for them!” Unfortunately, trees have to root for themselves.
Bud growth
I was already doubtful the grafts would succeed. I look for vigorous generation of new leaves, not just unfolding of existing ones, as seen here. I thought it was a false start, the scions surviving on stored moisture, and what water could diffuse in from the stock below.
The hammocks were back up, and I could see how much the community loved them. I was a little concerned the grafts might get knocked by activity around them; but, well, there were lots of grafts. It’s always statistics. It would have been a mistake to cut the trees off to the ground. This experiment was worth a try.
By May 24, it was clear the grafts had failed. Arne had not been able to keep up with de-barking the upper trunks. I doubt this would have made much difference.
Failed bark grafts
I noticed the de-barked trunks were wet with sap, to the extent some mold was growing on them. This indicated the roots were still “seeing” the upper trunks as alive, and so the roots were expending their strength to support them.
A check on July 17 showed some growth from above the de-barked area. This was the worst of signs. I meant the work was essentially behaving as a girdle. The tree was continuing to try to keep the top alive, at the expense of further exhausting the roots.
Shoot growth above de-barked area
I believe this was the major factor. Minor factors could have been:
The initial cutting on the trees was three weeks before time to do the bark grafts. Usually, scions are inserted immediately as the limbs are cut, before the ends can dry back or the plant cells otherwise reorganize.
It could have been the time of year. Whereas apples are very reliable to graft in spring, cherries are less so. If this were the major factor, though, at least a few of the grafts should have grown.
Normally, after bark grafting, the entire cut end of the limb is sealed over to prevent water loss, and make maximum moisture available to the grafted scions. Here, since the trunk was only notched there was no way to seal over the end.
Tall trunks did not live
The cherry trees have died. The Bamu community is going ahead with planning to construct a pavilion, using the dead trunks as support. The formerly shaded sections of the orchards are expected to be more productive.
You can “bonsai” a wax vine, for a compact house plant.
Wax vine (Hoya carnosa) makes a good house plant, tolerant of low light and neglectful watering. However, its natural growth form is an extensive vine. If you’ve got room for that, it’s fine.
Here we have one in the bathroom. Notice that it’s also tolerant of being potbound. All that vine, growing out of a small flowerpot.
On bathroom shelf
Of course it would have long since toppled off the shelf, except it’s guyed up by strings. The anchors are those stick-anywhere hooks.
Side view
The flowers are nice. We would be glad to have more of these plants, but no room for another big vine.
Wax vine is easy to propagate by cuttings. We started a cutting in another small pot.
A wax vine plant grows in spurts. It sits there a long time, gathering strength. Then one day, a vine shoots out. If you let it, it’ll grow six feet or more.
Instead, every time a shoot grew out one node, we pinched off the tip.
Shoot pinched after one node of growth
Most plants, If their leaves are not allowed to develop early on, those leaves die. However, wax vine has the ability to keep new leaves small, and then later enlarge them to full size, weeks, months or even years later.
In the picture below, these new leaves are the two small fingerlike structures above and below the pinched-off stem tip.
Pinched tip budding
The part hanging down is the beginning of a flower cluster.
By stopping growth at the pinch, the plant’s strength “builds up” there. Usually, after a time, growth resumes by enlarging the leaves and making flowers. Below is a picture of the flower buds, further along.
Flower buds developing
Finally, they bloom. Don’t pinch off wax vine flower clusters as they fade. The down-curving stalk of the cluster will stay alive. Later, it will make a new flush of buds on the same spur, and bloom again.
Flowers
By pinching this way, the whole plant stays most compact.
A strawberry patch is great, but a couple problems crop up:
Strawberry plants don’t stay in tidy rows. They multiply by runners, till soon you have a tangle. This makes it hard to walk without stepping on the plants — and the berries.
The berries tend to rest on the ground where they are prone to dirt, rot, and slugs.
Weeds come in between the strawberry plants. They crowd the strawberries and compete for moisture. If the weeds grow tall, they shade the strawberry plants, and cut their production.
Growing strawberry plants in the cracks between bricks solves these problems, and more.
The basic diagram
One key idea of growing strawberries, which I did not know at first, is this: Strawberry plants get old. Say a new plant gets started from a runner. The following year, that plant will bear the most flowers and fruit it will ever have. After that, it will decline. So, for sustainable strawberries, you need to have new plants coming each year, replacing the old.
There are various ways to do this:
You can do like commercial strawberry growers: Plow up the whole field each year, nix all the old plants, and re-plant with newly bought starts.
Do like they did on my grandma’s farm: Move the strawberry bed every couple years. The family had a general notion a strawberry patch would “run out” after a few years. This was simply the site getting too thick with weeds and unproductive old plants, leaving little space for the new. The answer was to just dig up some of the plants and put them in new ground. This works well if you have a family farm, and kids for the chores.
Do like we did at my mom’s yard in Alabama. There was lawn to mow, and we would dump piles of grass clippings on the strawberry patch. This would smother and kill the plants direct hit. But, in that heat, the grass piles would soon molder into the ground. New runners would colonize the bare spots, so there were always young productive plants. This works well in a hot climate, where you have extensive lawn to mow.
Roto-till your intended strawberry plot, and set a stripe of plants along one edge. Next year, roto-till those; but by now they will have spawned a population of progeny a few feet out beside them, from runners. This year, those will be your productive plants. Keep “chasing” the strawberries back and forth across the ground. This works well where you have fine soil you can easily roto-till — and of course a roto-tilller.
Grow strawberries in a strawberry jar. Each year, clear out the plants from half the holes. Then train a runner from one of the remaining plants so it starts a new individual in the vacated hole.
With all these in mind, I came up with the brick method. I’d had an old chimney removed, for earthquake safety, It was no longer serving any purpose now that I had a new high-efficiency furnace. So, I had lots of bricks.
Overview of the brickwork pattern, with strawberry plants
I laid the bricks out on the ground with finger-width spaces between. I just put them in rows,, but I could have done herringbone, or anything. I planted a few strawberry plants in between.
This was a part of the garden that used to be muddy all winter. To go through there, I needed boards, for catwalks. Even these would gradually squish into the ground. Now, the brickwork provided an easy walking surface. No more mud.
Most strawberries rest on top of the bricks, and stay clean
In due season, the strawberry plants had berries. It was easy to step around among them, on the bricks. The fruit, for the most part, rested on the bricks, keeping up out of the dirt.
This same winter-muddy area would get very dry in summer. Now, the bricks acted like rock mulch, and held in more of the soil moisture.
In their usual way, the strawberry plants sent out runners. These would tend to nestle into the spaces between the bricks, and start new plants there. Sometimes I would help them a bit, nudge them where I wanted them to go. But for the most part, the strawberries took care of themselves.
There were not many weeds because, well, 90% or more of the surface was brick. About the only thing that will grow on bricks is moss.
This has been going on about eight years now. The old plants seem to die off naturally on their own. When a strawberry plants lives into its third, fourth year and beyond, it lays over on the ground and forms a short, creeping stem that roots from the new part, while the old part gets ratty. This can happen on flat ground. However, in my brick bed, the old plants try to “climb out” of their crack, and lose contact with the soil. Then, they naturally dry up, and make room for the new ones.
My brick bed is June-bearing strawberries. These produce a single crop, in spring and early summer. Then, no more berries till next year. This means I seldom have to water the bed. The winter and spring moisture, from the rain, brings in the crop. Then, the area dries out, too dry to get good berries, but the plants are not trying to make berries anyway, so it does not matter. It’s still not as dry as it used to get, before the bricks. The plants tough it out on the residual moisture until the rains come back in the fall.
A brick bed like this would have a lot of the same advantages for ever-bearing strawberries, but you would need to water them through the summer to keep on getting berries. Too dry would mean small, deformed berries, or none at all.
Is there any other flower people plant in their garden hoping the bugs will eat it? To encourage monarch butterflies, many people want to grow the caterpillar host plant, milkweed.
milkweed stalks
I never thought there was anything to it. When I lived in Colorado, a milkweed seed floated into my garden one day, germinated, and set about its usual program of taking over the world.
milkweed spreading through a garden
Yet, here in Portland, many people have told me of failure. “I got the seeds, but they never grew!” So, when some milkweed seeds came into my hands last fall, I decided to see what I could figure out.
ripe milkweed pod, just opening
I was on a garden tour of a native plant nursery. There was a just-ripened pod of showy milkweed (Asclepias speciosa) on the drying stalk. The owner said I could have it. People on the tour were asking how to germinate the seed, and others were clambering “Cold stratify! Cold stratify!”
Now, I have been “cold stratify”-ing seeds since I was a teenager, and think nothing of it. But I have come to realize that for a lot of people, it’s beyond their ken. “Cold stratify” is technically redundant. Stratify means cold, as see this blog.
I had my doubts about milkweed. It’s typically a summer-ripened seed. A lot of summer annuals have a simple germination requirement of dry storage. If the seeds sprouted as soon as they got ripe they wouldn’t have much growing season left, plus, lots of competition from adult plants. So, the seeds have an internal inhibition of germination when they are fresh, which fades over time.
Even though milkweed is perennial rather than annual, I wondered if it might be the same. It sure would be easier if people could forget about stratification! So, this was my hypothesis. That milkweed seeds just needed a period of dry storage to grow. To test it, I would do a series of germination assays, over a period of months, and see what changed.
Cut to the chase. I was wrong. The seeds germinated right away. There was some variation over the months, but probably random. I just put the seeds at about 85°F, and voilà! Milkweed seedlings.
The 85°F temperature was my standard growth chamber, where I was already growing other things. Maybe it was luck.
A good germination test, to be statistically valid, ought to use 100 seeds. My milkweed pod only held about 150 seeds total. So I compromised, and did smaller tests of ten seeds each month (I skipped February). This means the results are more prone to random variation. Still, we learned something.
I germinated the seeds in what I call a “standard germination test setup”, a paper towel rolled around a chopstick, as in this blog. I checked the setup every night, and as soon as a seed put out a root, I planted it in potting soil. Then I later gave the seedlings away.
root can emerge, up to the length of the seed, in one day
seedling planted
Incidentally, I found I could keep the seedlings in “suspended animation” by putting them in a sunny window in my unheated garage through the winter. They seemed to remain healthy, but stopped their pesky growth! The picture is of three batches started a month apart. Not growing, but unfazed by the cold. What a magnificent weed!
seedlings in unheated garage, in winter
Below is a chart of the total germination by month. If I’d had enough seeds for good tests, the counts might not have shown any variation at all. Still, germination was never less than 50%.
total germination by month
The chart of germination speed is even less instructive. Sometimes they started soon, sometimes after a delay. Sometimes they came up quick, sometimes drawn out. But not really over that much variation. Germination usually started the 4th day (rarely 3rd). No more seeds ever germinated after the 12th day.
rates of germination
All too much science never reports negative results. So here I admit, my hypothesis did not pan out. My experiment did not show anything about how to enhance milkweed seed germination. However, it clearly disproves “Cold stratify!”
Now, it is just possible this particular milkweed lost its chill requirement from being in cultivation. This is how it could work. There is always variation in plants. Suppose there were a big batch of wild-collected milkweed seeds, brought into a nursery to grow. Suppose, within those thousands, there were a few freak seeds that did not need any cold period to grow, while all the others did. Those few would be first to sprout. If the nursery person pounced on those, grew them out, and further propagated them, he/she might soon have a strain of milkweed that, genetically, did not need “cold stratify” while wild milkweed does. This is how a lot of crop seeds, such as beans and corn, have evidently lost any wild-type germination inhibition.
If you ever find wild milkweed with enough seeds, you can do your own tests. Cold treat one batch, don’t treat another, and then write your own blog!
Meanwhile, if you just want to get some milkweed growing, try planting your seeds at warm temperatures, and see what you get.
Asclepias speciosa
Here’s my original data, in case you want to check if it was the phase of the moon, or something!
Don’t expect these dolmas to taste like the usual Mediterranean grape leaf rolls. They’re a sensation all to themselves.
Grape leaf cuisine can be a way for the modern gardener to eat more seasonal greens. Grape leaves are perfectly edible alone. If you taste one, you’ll find it pleasantly tart, but a bit dry and fibrous. They need a rich, volumous filling to help chew.
Grape leaves come in May and early June when other greens can be scarce. The winter greens have finished, but the summer plants not yet big. I say “come” because grape greens may literally fall off the vine.
Grape plants are not very intelligent. Sometimes they put out shoots into open air, where there is nothing for support.
Grape shoots growing straight up.
When these shoots get too long, they snap off, yielding yard-long strings of tender grape leaves.
First you catch your grape leaves.
The ancient Toscans would have scoffed at the idea of buying brined grape leaves, instead making use of this windfall. Rather than letting the goats eat them up, the frugal Toscans invented oatmeal dolmas.
The ancient Toscans, a seafaring people, were in trade contact with the Scottish Isles, mainly because they liked the music. Naturally, they would also borrow from the cuisine. The Toscans didn’t have time to go out and buy fifteen different spices (especially when they were seafaring). Instead of an elaborate Mediterranean style dish, which takes all day, they came up with the simplest grape leaf rolls — oatmeal.
The word “dolma”, from the Turkish verb “dolmak”, means “to be filled,” However, in Toscan, “dolma” is a euphemism for, “Stop whining and eat! There are starving children in Scotland”.
How to:
Make a batch of oatmeal. Size depends on how many grape leaves you have.
Don’t skimp on the goodies.
It’s especially good with raisins and lots of nuts.
Big leaf, little leaf, eat more greens.
Put a portion on the base of a grape leaf, and roll it up. If you got your leaves from an actual grape vine, there will be bigger leaves and smaller ones. The small ones are of course too small to make their own dolmas. You can tuck a small leaf inside a larger one, to help fill any holes.
Rolled up!
You don’t need to blanch the leaves or anything. Just roll them up. Then, put them in an InstantPot, with a little water, and pressure cook for 20 minutes. That’s all there is to it.
A small test batch, for breakfast.
It is not known how the ancient Toscans cooked these dolmas, before the modern InstantPot, perhaps the radioactive hot springs that dot the Toscan landscape.
You can add the tender bits for an added treat.
Each oatmeal dolma will make one or two bites. The tartness of the grape leaf is reminiscent of fruit. Be sure to eat them outdoors, preferably overlooking the sea.
Use water flotation to remove the grit (small rocks) from sesame seeds.
I have been piqued that even high quality sesame seeds contain grit. There’s the disconcerting crunch between my teeth, when eating food made from these sesame seeds. You don’t want to wear out your teeth, chewing rocks! A cracked tooth can cost thousands of dollars to repair. Who needs that?
Cleaning seeds and other agricultural products is a challenge. The only practical way, on commercial scale, is to make use of some difference in properties between the contaminant and the desired material. For seeds, this is typically some combination of sieving and air-blowing.
When you cook a batch of dry beans, you occasionally find a rock or clump of dirt masquerading as one of the beans. it got through the threshing because it was about the same size and weight as a bean. Beans are big enough you can spot the rocks, and pick them out. But sesame seeds are too small.
After trying this a couple of times, I came up with a way, and decided to post this. Here, I use the difference in density. Sesame seeds are oily, and therefore mostly float in water or at least stay suspended. The grit sinks.
Sesame seeds seem to have a life of their own. They are light and slippery, and yet at the same time like to stick to everything. Pouring and spooning them, some always get out and make a mess. So I thought ahead. I was going to have a mass of wet sesame seeds I would need to dry. And dry fairly fast, to prevent mold.
I have a dehydrator. The setup for drying the seeds is one of the dehydrator trays, and a clean bandana.
Set up for drying
The bandana goes on top of the tray screen. It serves as a strainer to hold the sesame seeds, while letting water go through. But the cloth is bigger than the tray. The edges would be in the way, when slid into the dehydrator.
Bandana overlaps tray
So the edges of the cloth are tucked behind the tray screen.
Fold the edges under
The time to get this ready is at the start, before fumbling with a mass of wet sesame seeds.
Edges tucked
Next, the sesame seeds. I did about a 3-cup batch.
Batch of sesame seeds
I added water to make 4 cups, and stirred a bit.
Add water to float the seeds
Then I just poured out the floating sesame seeds on the cloth. I also included the sesame seeds that were not clearly floating but only suspended in the water.
Pour out the floating seeds
The grit stays on the bottom.
Grit is on the bottom
I spread out the wet sesame seeds and got them drying. The lowest temperature setting is enough, about 90°F.
Spread out the wet seeds
The next part is optional, if you want to prove the grit is in that residue. It just looks like more sesame seeds.
The dregs
I put the remainder on some metal that could take the heat, in this case, a juice can lid.
Support to burn
I set up to burn out the remaining organic matter.
Set up to burn
After the water boiled away, the seed oil caught fire.
Oils burn off
This last part takes a lot of propane, so you might not want to waste the fuel. The charcoal bits have to be red-hot.
Roast the remainder
The carbon slowly oxidizes away.
Carbon slowly oxidizes
When the carbon is gone, there are the tell-tale rocks.
Remaining grit
Sure enough, they are about the size and color of sesame seeds.
Measures like sesame seeds.
Meanwhile, the wet sesame seeds are drying. The bandana makes it easy to put them away with minimal mess.
To keep grape hyacinths from taking over your yard, plant them in a few inches of soil on top of concrete.
Grape hyacinths
Grape hyacinths (Muscari species) are charming spring bulbs. The “grape” in the name presumably refers to their small balloon-like flowers that grow in clusters that resemble upside down bunches of grapes.
Flower cluster
However, these little plants can be too much of a good thing. Below is a picture of them taking over somebody’s yard.
Grape hyacinths taking over a lawn.
When I bought my house, there were numerous clumps of grape hyacinth spreading through the garden. When conditions are good, grape hyacinths can multiply rapidly. Below ground, new small bulbs bud off old ones. Above ground, they scatter seeds. Where they become abundant, the soil can be a nearly solid mass of bulbs!
Be careful digging them out. Any scattered dirt can spread them around. I managed to beat them back to manageable numbers by lifting out chunks of soil and literally cooking it in a glass bowl in an old microwave oven.
Now, I enjoy grape hyacinths in moderation. Prevention is better than cure. That means making sure their growing conditions are, well, not so good. It’s helpful to understand the ecology of bulbs.
Our familiar spring garden bulbs evolved to survive through an inhospitable part of the year, usually a dry summer. Also, lack of sunlight for photosynthesis, such as under trees that leaf out and cast a dense shade. During this off season, the entire life of the plant is in the bulb. There are no stems, flowers, leaves or even roots. In this state, bulbs are remarkably resistant to drying out, and to freezing.
Tulips under a tree that will completely shade them in summer
In the brief time of year when conditions are good, bulbs leap into action. They “spend out their bank account”, rapidly pushing up leaves and flowers. While the good times last, they capture solar energy to create next year’s bulb. As soon as conditions worsen, the plants shut down operations, and retreat back into bulbs. If the overall balance sheet for the year is positive, the plant shows a profit: A bigger bulb than it started with, a few new side bulbs, or some seeds.
This is why you are advised not to trim off the ratty foliage of, say, your tulips and daffodils, after they have bloomed. The plants need those leaves for photosynthesis, to restock their bulbs.
If you have ever “forced” bulbs, such as paperwhite narcissus, or hyacinths, you can see why they are typically treated as a one-time thing. The bulb has enough “bank account” to flower, and make some leaves. But after that, it’s pretty much broke. The conditions to restock are not there. You had the bulb in water, with none of nutrients it would normally get from soil. It’s in your dimly lighted house, where it can’t photosynthesize. If you do stick it out in the ground, the indoor-adapted leaves sunburn and the water-adapted roots struggle to adjust. If the plant does survive, it retreats to a bulb much smaller than the one it started as.
The Pacific Northwest is heaven for bulbs. In our mild winters, they get started early. After they bloom, they have a long, moist springtime to rake in the photosynthetic profit. Many of them open branch offices. A few tulips or daffodils soon become dozens.
It’s not like that everywhere. I lived for ten years in Colorado, where summer slams down hard. Tulips would bloom, then shrivel in the baking heat. Whether they pulled ahead or fell behind would be a matter of microsite. For example, on the north side of a fence, the soil was shaded and stayed a little more moist. In spring, tulips would stay alive long enough to replenish their bulb, plus store up a bit extra. Each year, there would be more blossoms. But on the south side of that same fence, tulips would slowly fail. They dried down early. In a year or two, they stopped blooming, only put up leaves. The leaves got smaller every year. Unless rescued, they would finally die.
Incidentally, here’s a trick to rescue bulbs, or just move them when they are in the best stage to move, namely completely dormant. Maybe you think you’ll remember where they are. But lo! Those lush blooms and foliage disappear without a trace. It’s midsummer, and the ground is hard and dry. Maybe you poke around with a trowel, and occasionally stab one of the bulbs, and cut it in two. How can they hide so well? Next spring, there they are back again, blooming. But at that stage, it is very stressful on them to be moved.
Crocuses marked for moving
Here’s the trick. When the bulbs are blooming, slip a bamboo skewer down beside each stem. A package of 100 costs only a few dollars. If you accidentally poke into a bulb, it does little harm. Then, just wait for summer. The skewers look significantly different from anything else likely to be in your garden that time of year. The ground is dry. Just tunnel down by each skewer, and there is your bulb. If you want to sort out different kinds of bulbs, make up a barcode, and mark each skewer with a grease pencil (all other kinds of ink fade away). Say, one band means yellow, two means purple, and so on.
Different kinds of bulbs are more and less aggressive, and grape hyacinths are the toughest ones I know. Take note: Grape hyacinths start pushing up new leaves after the first rains of late summer. So, they are in business months before anybody else! No wonder they multiply like mad.
Growing after a single summer rain
So here’s the method to control them. Put a few inches of soil on top of bare concrete. Use the worst soil you have. Plant grape hyacinth bulbs in that.
Plant bulbs in only a few inches of soil
In the winter rains, the bulbs will grow. In spring they will bloom.
Plants flower in the spring
But as soon as the rains slack off, the season’s over. The minimal soil dries out, and the plants go dormant. They do not get to spend the long luxurious spring months drawing moisture from the subsoil, to increase themselves, and bud off side buds and make seeds.
Bulbs go dormant when rains end
They just about break even. They will sleep all summer, and be back next spring.
Here’s an actual planting done this way. The concrete steps run right over to the adjacent concrete foundation. There is no other soil. (This photo is from late March.)
Planting, on concrete steps
The large straplike leaves mixed in are tulips. The tulips produce leaves every year, but have not been able to make enough headway to bloom.
In May, as things dry out, the grape hyacinth plants are packing away everything they have into their bulbs. They do not have the resources to even try making many seeds. In the photo below, notice how few pods there are. Some of these are not even filled. If the stalks do manage to ripen a few seeds, they are stranded out on the concrete, not likely to fall any place they can grow.
Pods are sparse
A similar method, using the same principle, is to confine grape hyacinths to pots. These look pretty good when in full bloom. They fill out, and don’t even look like potted plants.
Showy blooms
Put they are entirely in pots.
Entirely in a pot
I have a line of these pots set, again, on top of concrete, up under an overhanging eve. They get only the rain that drifts in on them during the winter. They provide some welcome spring color, then die back and disappear for the rest of the year.
They start growing as early as September. These started after an anomalous August rain.
Grape hyacinths sprouting after a single summer rain
There are some other flowers I treat in a similar way. I grow them where they can barely survive.
This is Kenilworth ivy (Cymbalaria muralis).
Kenilworth ivy
Here, I have it on a mossy concrete block in the midst of, you guessed it, an expanse of concrete. It gets a little drip irrigation overspray during the summer, but not much. This plant is so invasive, I don’t let it get anywhere near topsoil! Even this little patch of it, I come along periodically and rip half of it out.
This is the annual forget-me-not (Myosotis sylvatica).
Forget-me-not
Yes, they have pretty blue flowers in the spring, but each plant can make thousands of seeds. Here, I’m letting it root where it can, in chinks at the base of a concrete block wall. These blocks are not on the soil, but on top of (somewhat dirty) outdoor carpet. The plants manage to snake their roots down enough to grow and bloom. But they die when the weather turns dry. Even so, they still make more than I want, and I weed out the extras,
Nowadays, many manufactured objects are “snap-together” or “snap-fit”. This makes for quick assembly, with no fasteners needed, but difficulty if you ever need to take them apart. Here’s a hack that may help.
In this case, I was rewiring a fluorescent light fixture for LEDs. I needed to change the connections in the lampholder sockets from “shunted” to “non-shunted”. In many cases, it’s easier to just replace the entire sockets, but these were non-standard. Rather than trying to hunt down replacements, and wait for the order to arrive, I decided to try removing the shunts by taking the sockets apart. The sockets were snap-together.
shunted socket
The details are not so important. In this case there were four tiny tabs that caught in four tiny catches. I could pry one tab loose at a time using a miniature screwdriver. However, for the part to open, I needed to get all four pried at once.
spacers all in
This was the trick. I used small nylon zip-ties as extra “screwdrivers”. Nylon is stiff, and tough. As I pried each catch open, I would insert the tongue-like tip of a zip-tie to keep it open. When all four were in, the socket came apart with only moderate coercion. After removing the shunt and other existing wring, the socket snapped back together, ready for re-use.
socket open
This idea may help the next time you need to take apart something snap-fit. I have to admit, I usually break the first one, before I know where the snaps are. In this case, I worked carefully, and was lucky, and didn’t break anything.
