Nanabush Food Forest Stories — vegetables

Seems like only yesterday, I was processing buckets and buckets of black walnuts, testing the structural integrity of double layers of heavy rubber gloves...  This year promises to be similar as those tasty little buggers will soon start dropping en masse.  Thanks to Giacomo Panico from CBC radio for coming over to visit our base camp food forest and try out one of my favourite recipes to use them in, the scrumptious Black Walnut & Lentil burgers with Sour Cherry Salsa.  It was a lot of fun to tour him through the chaos and wonder of a 4 year old...

We are very excited to report that the wild food forest tomatoes that have to date received no irrigation, weeding or general attention are LOADED with fruit!  One of the prettiest is the lovely Indigo Rose tomato, which upon readiness sports a deep black exterior, with a rich red to purple interior flesh.  Yum! 

Though not quite a perennial in our part of the world (Zone 4), certain short season types do grow well here. There are many benefits to this delicious tuber. Due to last year’s success, we are setting up to grow Covington sweet potatoes again. We cured even some small potatoes so that we can use them to propagate this year’s batch. 1) Easy Keepers: When properly cured, they will easily keep through the winter into May at room temperature, with no shrinkage or loss of flavour. 2) Nutritional Powerhouses: Loaded with Vitamin A, beta-carotene, fibre and anti-oxidants, and being a...

Puttering through our Basecamp Food Forest, we are enjoying the experience of ‘discovering food’. We love Kogane cabbage, and could not find a source for more seeds, so we started the last of our saved seeds this year and let them all go to seed. We’ll be set for kimchi material now! They are the yellow flowers in the background. In the middle, a pleasant discovery of some alpine strawberries, with astralagus, wood sorrel and borage in the foreground. You could not ask for a happier mix of plants! The astralagus (a.k.a. milkvetch) fixes nitrogen and so helps feed the...