Tag Archives: gardening

The Zero Waste Kitchen Blog

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Running a zero-waste kitchen isn’t all that hard. And it’s super-cheap. All it will cost you is your sanity.

Once you realize that just about every green thing in your garden is edible, you will never sleep again. I don’t mean kale, spinach, lettuces, where the leaf is the crop, or even the famous “yes you can eat that” broccoli stalks and turnip greens. I mean carrot tops, the weed known as lamb’s quarter, even the frigging clover.

Caveat: don’t eat rhubarb leaves and don’t mess with pokeweed. After that, you can google it all and see just how easy it would be to spend the rest of your life cooking down all the edibles into stews, soups, and broths redolent with vitamins. Making pestos to hide bitter herbs behind bright cheeses. Mixing that patch of ground elder that escaped weeding notice with cucumber and lemon before canning—and you haven’t lived until your mother has brought down a mason jar from your shelves and read aloud: ground elder, serve chilled, and then looked at you.

Gardening isn’t my forte; I tend to spend March drawing diagrams on graph paper and dreaming of trying wasabi this year. By the time planting starts in May, I’m sick of thinking about it and eyeball plant the whole thing. The results look like someone sneezed while carrying open seed packets.

But once I discovered those weeds that sprang from nowhere were edible, well, hey, even a sad little garden is productive. The radishes grew big as bushes and flowered while I was away for a week. Did you know radish pods are delicious when charred with lemon butter? Radish flowers taste great straight.

The problem is, busy people trying to keep one simple patch of carrots from taking over the world thin the carrots and are done with it. A zero-waste kitchener (also known as OCD) will take them inside, dive to the bottom of the freezer for the black walnuts she collected from her backyard last fall and made her husband shell all winter long, and make vegan pate. She will throw the entire overgrown radish bush into a blender for vegetable broth.

Things that can be bought for $3 (last week, it might be $5 now) can be made at home for about an eight hour time investment. Most days my laptop is running next to my canner or fermenting crock so I can jump up and adjust foodstuffs before I go back to adjusting words.

Zero waste – not even a waste of time, because underneath the “not one pea shall fall” lunacy, I know where my food came from (that crazy overgrown garden) and it was fun to make it. Is it worth it, this zero waste kitchen?

That’s a question with two answers for every person. I’m having fun. Go by, mad world.

Gardening for People who Kill Plants

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Jack and I have about an acre of back garden, stretching out behind our house. People are always surprised by the amount of space we have. Last year, we decided to go all in on a vegetable garden.

Probably we should have remembered a few things:

  1. I have killed spider plants.
  2. Jack considers gardening a form of punishment for all the crimes he ever thought of committing, even if he didn’t. He dislikes dirt, green leafy vegetables, and time spent in the sun.
  3. I am frightened of most bugs. I once screamed when a ladybug flew toward me.
  4. We were going to be in Scotland for a month in the height of summer.

Other than that, we were golden: plenty of land, easy access to seeds, and an inherited plethora of gardening tools—none of which we knew how to use. Jack held up a hoe and said, “How am I supposed to shovel dirt with this?”

I actually gave it a try before realizing, you know, it wasn’t the shovel…..

Growing up, we had gardens, but my dad did all the stuff like prepping the rows with stakes, string taut between them to help you keep your rows straight. He did the plowing. My sister and I just came along and did the finger-sticking and seed-planting. It was fun to drill down into the dirt and then plop a corn kernel in. Or follow along behind his row of hilled dirt and sprinkle carrot seed.

Doing it as an adult, you realize how hard the work is. First thing we had to figure out which plants were okay with walnut trees. A former student visited and told us about this weird thing called the wood wide web, where trees talk to each other under the earth. Mostly walnut trees plan the death of other plants through excretion of a chemical called juglone. Literally, walnut trees are like bad politicians: they want it all, they want it for themselves, and they want to take it from you. Trying to grow anything in the nightshade family would be a no go unless we got raised beds, my student told us.

And I thought, “why would we grow a deadly plant? Who puts anything to sleep in a garden?”

Yep, it was that bad. We threw some boxes in, put gardening cloth in the bottom, and called them raised beds. When we planted tomatoes in them (proud of our new knowledge that these were in fact a nightshade family member, I might add) they held water and drowned the little guys. Tomatoes hate having their feet wet, we learned that first year.

Then we planted peas. They came up, interspersed with the carrots and broccoli we also planted. Those nice straight with stakes? Ha.  Basically, the whole place looked like someone tripped while carrying a seed tray. (Which is not far off. I sneezed and they fell.)

The broccoli grew – and grew, and grew, and grew, like Jack’s infamous beanstalk. It never put out a single head, but once we learned that broccoli leaves were edible, well, game-changer.

The cauliflower did put out a single head. Literally.

We gave up on hoeing these ungrateful wretches and left for Scotland. When we returned, the asparagus had little weird red balls on its fronds (we found later that these were seeds) the broccoli reaching for the sky, and the black raspberries in the back part of our yard had come for the tomatoes. We never did get them separated.

This year, things will be different. This year….. we will buy our produce from the farmer’s market.