Gardening

Karp’s Sweet Quince

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Food, Gardening
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Our good friends Nance Klehm and neighborhood fruit guru Lora Hall both had the same suggestion for our small, steeply banked and awkward front yard: plant lots of fruit trees and keep them pruned. Thus began our mini-orchard, delayed for many years by messy foundation work. One of the newest additions to the mini orchard is a bare root tree we ordered from the Raintree Nursery, Karp’s Sweet quince. As you can see from the photo above it’s just started to leaf out.

Quince (Cydonia oblonga), a tree native to the Mediterranean and the Middle East, has rich, symbolic meanings to cultures in these parts of the world. Biblical and classical references translated in English as “apples”, in most cases, most likely refer to quince (it was probably a quince and not an apple or Cheeto that Adam tempted Eve Eve tempted Adam with).

Most quince must be cooked to render it edible with way too many recipes to mention in a short blog post, everything from jams to Spanish tapas dishes. Having to cook the fruit and the tree’s susceptibility to fire blight disease means that it has fallen out of favor in the US. There are a few varieties that can be eaten raw including Karp’s quince, which the USDA’s Germplasm Resources Information Network describes:

“Grown in the Majes Valley in the province of Arequipa in southern Peru. C. T. Kennedy of the California Rare Fruit Growers received this from David Karp of Venice, California, who says it is called ‘Apple Quince’ in Peru. It is juicy and non-astringent and can be eaten fresh. Karp obtained scions from Edgar Valdivia who grows this quince in Simi Valley California, and whose relatives had brought the cultivar from Peru. The Valle de Majes is a fertile valley between 200 and 800 meter above sea level with a warm climate year round.”

Quince trees can be grown in many different climates, but the “edible when raw” varieties tend to do better in warm places such as here in Los Angeles. What little information I could dig up on the internet about Karp’s quince (also known as Valdivia quince) concerned some controversy about just how edible the fruit is when raw. Mr. Karp, if you’re out there please get in touch with me, I’d love to hear more about the story of this variety! And readers, if you’re quince aficionados, please leave some comments.

Perennial Vegetables

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Gardening, Vegetable Gardening
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For lazy gardeners such as ourselves nothing beats perennial vegetables. Plant ’em once and you’ve got food for years. For novice gardeners, perennials are plants that, unlike say broccoli (an “annual”), don’t need to be replanted every spring. The best known perennial vegetable in the west is probably asparagus which, given the right conditions, will produce fresh stalks for years. But there are many thousands more perennials little known to North American gardeners that are a lot easier to grow than fussy asparagus.

Unfortunately, there used to be a lack of information about edible perennials until the publication of Eric Toensmeier’s excellent book, Perennial Vegetables: From Artichokes to Zuiki Taro, A Gardener’s Guide to Over 100 Delicious and Easy to Grow Edibles. We’ve got a few of the species Toensmeier mentions: artichoke, prickly pear cactus, stinging nettles, crosnes (more on those in another post) and goji berries. Edible Perennials contains growing information for each species offering something for every climate in North America.

Up to now many of these plants were hard to find, but growing interest in edible perennials and the power of the internet has brought many of these species into our backyards. See the Mother Earth News Seed Search Engine on the right side of this page to hunt down some of the more rare items.

Now, time to fertilize those goji berries and ponder the controversial air potato.

Sky full of Paw Paws

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Food, Gardening
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Mrs. Homegrown Evolution is deeply concerned about Mr. Homegrown Evolution’s midlife obsession with rare fruit trees. The California Rare Fruit Grower’s Fruit Gardner Magazine is the new Hustler around here. And now our fruit tree internet video porn needs have been satisfied. This week, the always superb Sky Full of Bacon video podcast from Chicago’s Michael Gebert serves up a tour of Oriana Kruszewski’s orchard which contains Asian pears, paw paws and black walnuts trees. Kruszewski’s knowledge, enthusiasm and perseverance is inspiring.


Sky Full of Bacon 08: Pear Shaped World from Michael Gebert on Vimeo.

A Purple Dragon Carrot

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Food, Gardening
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It’s purple, it’s fairly tasty and it came from Seeds of Change. [Please note, Homegrown Evolution Reader Jeremy comments: “Seeds of Change, those super-friendly people who are owned by the Mars Corporation, who tried to shut down the HDRA’s Heritage Seed Library, and who registered am ancient Hopi “mandala” as their trade-mark? Enjoy.” Thanks Jeremy, we’ll be doing some research on this one.] According to the seed package it was bred by someone named John Navazio who I can find no information about on the internets. John clearly has more important things to do than updating a Facebook page.

My dragon carrots grew without a hitch in our “guerrilla” parkway garden. As you can see from the photo, the carrot has a deep purple color reminiscent of the domesticated carrot’s wild ancestors, which were probably tamed in what is now Afghanistan. Wikipedia identifies the purple hue of these carrots as anthocyanin a possible source of antioxidants and a common pigment in many red-hued fruits and vegetables.

Also note all that foliage. It’s edible. I tossed the carrot tops in with some couscous, olive oil and balsamic vinegar for a tasty dinner. The carrots themselves were served as a side dish mixed with a dressing made out of olive oil, lemon juice and salt.