Victory With Rosemary
by John Laumer, Philadelphia on 04.29.06
TreeHugger thinks it’s time to re-invent the Victory Garden. In the WWII period of US history, a “Victory Garden” …largely a matter of growing your own food in the backyard…was a government promoted way for citizens to get fruit and veggies that were unavailable due to fuel shortages and from diverting commercial production to the troops overseas. A half–century later we are entering another global crisis: Climate Change and fuel shortages caused by Peak Oil and rapidly growing consumption. Growing your own food is personally redeeming in the same way that recycling is. More than that, it tastes better than store-bought, can save you money, and reduces your potential exposure to pesticides.
We’ll start our Victory Garden project by having our writers unveil their own victorious secrets for growing and cooking. To begin we’d like to introduce you to our first kitchen garden SuperModel plant, Rosmarinus officinalis: a.k.a “Rosemary.”
Unlike the one shown here on the garden runway, we recommend you save money and buy the smallest plants you can find. Rosemary grows fast, does well in containers and terra firma, looks nice as an ornamental, will produce for you until well after the frost, and makes for some good cooking. Pests seldom bother Rosemary, not even deer, so you needn’t worry about fencing.
The important thing is to get some planted now so you can harvest some sprigs by the time the small potatoes are are in the market. Don’t worry much about choosing among varieties. To experiment, get three small plants, perhaps one of each variety, and put all three in a large container or near each other in the garden.
You can start harvesting sprigs and needles as soon as the plant is a foot tall. This writer has tried many harvesting/cooking techniques and suggests the following. Don’t sweat the details. I cook with the woody stem and needles intact. You can separate the needles if you like but some recipes do better to leave them on the stem.
To separate the needles take a side clipper pliers or hand-pruner and clip off the sprigs well into the woody base. Over a sheet of newspaper use your forefinger and thumb to lightly pinch on each sprig an inch or two below the light green tip, and pull back toward the thick part of the stem. Leaves will fall away. Use them fresh or freeze for the holidays. Note: freezing is the only way to preserve the high aromatic compounds that make fresh rosemary so wonderful. Try either of these recipes as soon as your plants are big enough.
Rosemary New Potatoes:
Pour about a quarter inch deep of olive oil in a wok or deep pan. Don’t turn on the heat yet. First peel several cloves of garlic and split them into quarters, tossing into the oil – the more the better. Now toss in a good handful or two of fresh rosemary leaves (frozen if it’s winter and you’ve saved what you harvested). On top of this oily heap, set a pound or so of whole, washed potatoes. Get them as small as possible. The “baby” or "new" potatoes that are sold early in the season are fabulous for this. Sprinkle on some coarse salt. Now cover tightly and turn the heat on medium to low.
Don’t open the lid for at least 15 minutes…about the amount of time it takes for wonderful smells to emerge. Toss the potatoes with a spoon. Then prick a potato that was near the bottom to see if it’s soft. A few more minutes, a few tosses of the spoon, and all should be done to tender and slightly wrinkly. Don’t overcook and never add any water.
You can always reheat them later if need be. When you serve, remove the potatoes with a tongs, so that most of the rosemary leaves will fall back into the pan. Sprinkle generously with coarse black pepper and they’re ready to eat.
Rosemary Chicken:
Salt the cavity of a whole roasting chicken. Put three or four large rosemary sprigs, tips first, into the cavity as far as you can push them. Fill up the remaining cavity space with quartered apples. Use a tart variety like Macintosh and don’t bother to peel them. There is no need to tie up the cavity opening. Season the outside however you like and bake the chicken until its’ done.
Thirsty for more? Check out these related articles:
- TreeHugger Deals: Give the Gift of Green with Pangea
- Recycling TreeHugger: Celebrating Thanksgiving & What It Stands For
- 3 Green Pre-Conditions for a Big Three Bailout
- MyFarm Does the Work For You
Another great way to cook chicken with rosemary is to use the woody stalk as a skewer. Marinate the chicken in lemon and pepper for an hour or so, thread the chicken onto the rosemary stalk and throw it on the barbeque.
Even before planting, gardeners amend their beds with compost. Since having good dirt is key to producing a nice crop of fruits and vegetables. And making dirt is a fun pre-season project. Starbucks gives coffee grounds away for free, which are a great source of nutrients. I live near the beach and have used a mix of shredded palm fronds, various kinds of seaweed, newspaper clippings and kitchen scraps to produce rich black soil. The veggies/herbs will like it and so will you, when the results show up on the plate.
I think that the more self-sufficient every individual makes himself in terms of energy (solar panels, small wind generators and microhydrogenerators, biogas digesters, etc.), transportation (bicycling, walking, electric scooters, etc.), water (rainharvesting, wastewater recycling and reuse, etc.), and food (home gardens and livestock) eases pressure on scarce resources in a disproportionate way. As an example, when you grow your own food, you not only ease pressure on forests and graze lands that might otherwise be cut or turn to desert. But it also eliminates that enormous energy required for production by energy intensive tractors. It eliminates energy intensive transport to your local store. It also eliminates use of really nasty fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides which typically require a lot of energy to produce. It eliminates energy needed to keep food refrigerated until you buy it (since you pick your own vegetables off the stalk when you need it). It eliminates packaging. It tastes better. And so on and on. The resources you would need to grow food are exponentially smaller than the resources it would take for someone else far away to grow the same amount of food.
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Well said.
I forgot to ask, is rosemary natural to the Mediterranean? Does it need any special attention here in central Spain?
Houston, lucky you, that info is easy to find. If you go to the wikipedia rosemary page, the second sentence is: "It is native to the Mediterranean region."
Growing your own food is a a very good thing to do. After the fall of the USSR, Cuba stopped receiving oil and other resources, so they had to figure out a way to produce enough food without energy and fossil fuel (to make fertilizer, pesticides, etc) intensive agriculture.
They developped urban agriculture, and now there are tons of community gardens in public places and on rooftops, potted food-producing plants are common, etc. Very cool.
I agree with the "more self reliant" post. Sometimes I wish I could do what they did in the movie, "The Villiage". Minus the scary monsters. :P In real life though, I'm pretty sure the ATF would be in there every few days, looking for a reason to arrest and burn it down.
MGR
Thanks for the quick link. I read it and am now hooked on this plant. Perfect for my land.
I would agree that growing food in your own back yard is quite good
but in order to grow more than a meals worth of food you would need an area larger than a postage stamp lot
like most of the first world I live in a development area nice houses built close together the backlot is 15 feet by 10 foot deep leaving just enough area for my son to putter about with a single skinny maple tree dead center of the back yard
between the outdoor toys and furniture it leaves just enough space for the family to stand there and say home sweet home then go back inside and enjoy the air conditioning and tv before bed and then trudging back to my slave position at work
our morgage and home loans are the maximum we can handle
so a bigger lot is out of the question
so I guess that the majority of us will continue on depending on grocery stores for some time to come
==== author's response follows ====
Try an arbor that supports vining squash and cucumber. An amazing amount can be gotten and it looks nice.
for chuck817 - even if you can't grow much outside, there's always room for cherry tomatoes in a bucket. And many herbs and small greens can be grown inside, with a minimum of fuss.
If you absolutely positively can't grow anything at home, you can also look for farmer's markets. Veggies in season are cheaper and it is a lot less impact on the earth than veggies shipped from around the world.
An amazing amount of salad greens can be grown in a small space and tomatoes can be grown in hanging baskets. All it takes is a little and some elbow grease. I have harvested five, 1 gallon sized ziploc bags of salad greens from a 4'x6' plot. Not a bad haul for 99 cents worth of seeds and about 30 minutes of digging and prep.
There's also square foot gardening. You can grow an amazing amount in a 4' x 4' square.
And there's nothing wrong with growing food in your front yard, either. All depending on which way your house faces, the front yard might be the best place.
I'm going to be starting my own square-foot garden today. And I've only got a tiny backyard in the middle of the city.
Another thing about rosemary: It's a natural deer barrier. Deer wont' eat it or walk through it.
Thanks for the square foot gardening link. I've got 3 hectares of land, but I still want to minimize the amount of land used for my food needs while still producing as much as possible. I want to reforest the rest. This method will come in handy.
Yard is overrated. I'm heading for an edible front yard (it gets more sun the my backyard). I'm also a proponent of Sq Foot Gardening, and mixed up 2 4x4 boxes of Mel's soil mix a couple weeks ago. The idea is if you soil is crappy (and mine is), why spend 7 years amending it (and most people move within 7 years, replaced with someone who likes the perfect grass lawn) - instead, mix 1/3 blended or homegrown compost, 1/3 vermaculite, and 1/3 peat moss, then every ear mix in more compost. Now, hwat's the treehugger view on the pros and cons of buying shipped-in peat moss one year vs not buying shipped in veggies perpetually?
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Life is full of tradeoffs and contradictions. The TH party line is to be aware of them as much as possible, which your comment shows strong evidence of.
Long ago, I spent a good bit of time strolling through the Tokyo suburbs. Many of the houses had less than 8 square feet of visible dirt, typically a 10 ft section just under a foot wide, between a wall of the house and the alleyway pavement.
I never ceased to be amazed by the things that were planted there. Some of the 'plots' even had trees growing in them.
As to chuck817's plight, I would recommend googling "vertical gardening". Container, or even basket planting works perfectly well for many vegetables. You might even consider putting a small planter in the middle of your patio table.
Don't get too hung up on owning land. Find a neighbor or friend with a little more space than you've got and trade labor for a split of the crop. We've found that people are totally amenable to free gardeners.
There are also millions of ways to do container gardens even in cramped little city apartments. I think in Havana they get something like 80% of their produce from inside the city.
Houston: There are also plenty of edibles that will grow amid your re-forested land. There's a lot of stuff that can make your trees and you healthier and happier simulteaneously.
Speaking of Victory Gardens, here's a book on setting up a "War Garden" from the US Gov't.
It's hosted at this site at Duke University.
==== author's response follows =====
Thanks much for this valuable link. You have brought to our attention an error in my original post. Apparently the Victory Garden was started in 1918, for WWI, not WWII as I wrote. That discovery makes the Victory Garden even more interesting as the "treatment of pests" methods cited in the manual pre-date the chlorinated pesticideal technologies developed by Hitler's scientists in WWII. Not to say all the sprays and dusts from the early 1900's were benign, because the use of arsenicals and lead based poisons was fairly common in that era. But the general principles are of interest. More victorious secrets revealed. Take advantage TH readers: before Dept of Homeland Security decides to expunge them for classified content.
I agree with Alisa Ka above:
I have been using the square foot gardening method for years. The best advice for those whow want to start a garden is keep it small!
On the rosemary note, be sure you get a variety that is hardy in your zone, and add lime to the soil.
On the victory garden concept, let's all ask the government to re-introduce gasoline rationing as part of our current wartime effort. I recall my mother saying they had to collect aluminum and scrap metal, use food and gas rationing as well as having a limit on tire and other WAR effort items.
Look around: What has you and your neighbors had to give up in this current war cycle? Where is the war "effort"? The US military is the largest consumer of oil in the US. Should we not only be feeling the pinch at the pump but in our collective psyche? I'm not for the war, but I think rationing should b part of it.
I live in CT and have not had any luck with in-ground planted rosemary surviving the winter. I tried to winter-mulch with clipped evergreens, but this spring brought a dead plant. Does anyone have any ideas on this for the Northeast? Perhaps a different, more hardy variety?
Do you have public allotments in the US?
I live in the UK, in a small rented apartment with a tiny garden. I rent a half size 'allotment' from the local council, 95 square metres of land which I can use to grow my own veggies. It only costs 15 pounds per year (about 30USD) and I get a lot more out of it than lovely veggies (cheaper than a gym subscription, good company of my neighbours on the plot, good for the soul!.
Jo, there is a similar system in Helsinki and most Finnish cities.
Jo,
The US doesn't typically have "public allotments", but most cities have something like a "Pea Patch", a system of community gardens throughout the city.
Seattle has a veru active P-Patch community, and before I owned a house with yard, I had a year's waiting list for a spot in my near area. There are a few huge gardens out near the city limits that usually there is no waiting period for, and if you take good care of that patch you can get moved to one of your first selections (as those people stop participating, fail to maintain their garden, whatever). There's a nominal fee.
You might find the "Giving Away Gardens" article on our site http://www.jeffnet.org/~hgpf of some interest. Keep up the Good Work. - DB