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June has arrived: lightening bugs, thunder storms and spinach fresh from the garden. But as Chef Bill Howard of Three Tomatoes Trattoria in Lebanon recently told me, early June is still a "shoulder season." By that he means that winter veggies like parsnips are still available locally, but no one wants to eat them. And fresh local tomatoes and basil? They're still on the horizon.
Chef Bill told me that Blue Ox Farm in Enfield, NH is starting to pick spinach, Luna Blue Farm in South Royalton, VT will have some cherry tomatoes from their greenhouses soon, and that Janine Weins at Acorn Hill Farm in Lyme, NH tells him that a wide variety of greens are headed his way: Pirate Head, Butter Crunch, Yankee Mix and Flame lettuce. And the farm has Cardinal Spinach with dark green oval leaves and red veins. You can almost hear the vitamins as you crunch it!
I wish I lived closer to Burlington so that I could visit Nika, the new version of Three Tomatoes, more often. Chef Dennis Vieira has been using a wide variety of seasonal treats including ramps, fiddleheads and wild-gathered mushrooms.
Dennis told me that they were serving pheasant back and oyster mushrooms at Nika, though by now those have disappeared from the woods - and the menu. He said the pheasant back mushrooms are very hearty, very meaty, and that they are colored with white teardrops and bits of black - like the tail feathers of a pheasant or grouse.
 
Co-owner Robert Meyers (and others) supplied Nika with ramps, which are a real seasonal favorite of mine. Also called wild leeks or wild onions, these are spring ephemerals: they pop up out of the ground in hardwood forests after the snow disappears, show a pair of smooth green leaves for a month or two, and then disappear. The underground portion looks a bit like a small leak or spring onion. Bears come out of hibernation about the same time the ramps appear in the woods, and earlier this year a friend of mine saw a black bear munching the leaves - getting a good dose of vitamins to start the post-hibernation season. Just like me - I cook the leaves and the bulbs.
Chef Dennis also served some wild harvested nettles earlier this spring, though by now nettles have gone by. He braised young nettles the way he would greens and served them with a Middle Eastern condiment, lime pickle. Dennis even offered spring pizzas made with ramps, pheasant mushrooms and local fresh mozzarella. You never know what he will come up with at Nika - which means if you are local, you should stop in regularly or check the menu on line.
As a gardener and a chef, I really believe in growing plants that allow me to vary my menu considerably with each season - just like that black bear. It's easy enough to do - if you do a little planning. Right now I'm eating rhubarb at least twice a day. I start my day by chopping a stem of rhubarb and cooking it briefly with a little water. Once it has started to boil, I add whole oats and sometimes a little maple syrup. Normally I eat oatmeal with milk, though the rhubarb is so tart it curdles the milk - so I have to eat it with vanilla ice cream! Rhubarb crisp or rhubarb sauce over ice cream is standard after dinner fare for me at this time of year.
If you don't grow rhubarb, you should. Buy 3 plants (if you like rhubarb) and dig holes 18 inches deep and wide, and add lots of rotted manure, compost, or bagged Moo-Doo. Stir the topsoil and compost together, mostly re-filling the hole. Knock the purchased rhubarb out of its pot, and fit it into the hole. Don't pick any stems this year, and pick conservatively next year. Rhubarb is a leaf plant, which means that it doesn't need prime garden space - some shade is okay. It likes rich, lightly moist soil and is one of the easiest plants I grow. Space plants 2 to 3 feet apart.
Last summer I had a young man helping me do some weeding, and he inadvertently pulled out all my perennial sorrel. Or so I thought. But this spring, early, one plant came back. It is a leafy green with a lemony taste. The French make soup from it, but I just mix it into spring salads. I believe - and have read - that slightly wild, slightly sour or bitter leaves are much more nutritious than iceberg lettuce, and I believe it. Meanwhile, I had purchased seeds for sorrel, and they germinated and grew nicely in the house. I transplanted them to the garden so I now have a good supply of plants growing with my one survivor.
In my experience, magenta spreen is harder to germinate and grow from seed than sorrel, but it is sometimes available at good garden centers as started plants. I bought some from Cider Hill Gardens in Windsor, VT this year. But then low and behold, I discovered that I had magenta spreen plants growing as "volunteers" in my garden - I guess the plant or two that grew last year spread some seeds.
According to Wikipedia, magenta spreen is a leafy green which "tastes very much like chard or spinach with a hint of asparagus when cooked. The best-tasting parts of the plant are the tender growing tips, which can be harvested continuously, the plant becoming bushy. Since the plant contains oxalic acid, it should be cooked in a steel pan, not in aluminum." That oxalic acid is present in rhubarb, too, especially the leaves, which we are warned never to eat. And although Wikipedia describes it as a plant that can grow to 8 feet tall, that is not my experience - it's more like 2 feet tall, particularly if you harvest the growing top.
Another tasty green that spills seeds on the earth and starts new seedlings is arugula. Dedicate a small corner (3 feet square?) of your garden for it, and it will reward you with plants in perpetuity. It is almost a weed - and behaves like one, so watch out. But it does mean that you can use arugula in salads and sandwiches before you can harvest any of thisyear's lettuce crop.
The last of my "shoulder season" veggies is orach, a lovely purple-leafed "green" that comes back for me every year. It throws seeds into the soil willy-nilly, and I transplant them where I'd like them to grow. A reader of my gardening column (which appears in 12 newspapers and which you can read on my web site, www.Gardening-guy.com, sent me an e-mail while I was working on this article and told me that Johnny's Selected Seeds (www.johnnyseeds.com) now has two varieties of orach available by seed. I like it in salads, but it can also be cooked like spinach if you like.
Right now asparagus is up - and used in many of the dishes at Nika and Three Tomatoes Trattoria. I had a chicken limone last week at lunch which used arugula, asparagus and cherry tomatoes that was so good I wanted to come back the next day. I thought maybe I had somehow been transported to Paris, it was that good!
I'm a firm believer in eating seasonally and locally. So I garden, and I wild harvest ramps and fiddleheads and some mushrooms. (A note of caution: be careful if you harvest anything from the wild. Learn from someone with lots of experience. Some mushrooms can be deadly.) And of course, my favorite restaurant, Three Tomatoes, will serve me locally grown veggies that are seasonal whenever they can. Bon appétit.
Visit Henry's Web site to see his gardening column and learn about his books. That's www.Gardening-Guy.com.
His newest book is a fantasy adventure for children, Wobar and the Quest for the Magic Calumet.
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