Urban Gardener: Chives and Daffodils
Leonard Moorehead, GoLocalProv Gardening Expert
Urban Gardener: Chives and Daffodils
Green Chives
I have very good luck with an old fashioned favorite, chives. They are a clumping style member of the onion family delicious in soups and especially egg dishes. Here’s a herb to grow with children, who can identify the plants by its distinctive aroma and petite size. Chives are a lovely green color and often have purpling in the older stems or parts closer to the mulch. We lift and divide clumps in our garden. The ancestors of my chives became part of the household long ago and migrated from garden to garden, always close to the entrance for easy kitchen harvest. They love loam enriched with organic material and reach for the sky when top dressed with Milorganite. A couple times a year I scratch bone meal around the clumps of chives. They also enjoy a manure top dressing and I grow everything with year round mulch.
Chives will remain green well into cold weather. I like seasonal foods. It’s easy though to harvest chives with kitchen shears, bring in, wash, remove anything less than perfect, and cheerfully snip chives into smaller pieces. They will quickly dry out laid on brown paper or I’ve found inter office mail envelopes with a few holes punched into them nearly perfect for drying chives and a multitude of other herbs and flowers. Store them in small boxes or bags on pantry shelves safe from moisture and add to soups, cheese sauces, and egg dishes. Friends and others joyfully accept dried herbs full of flavor and nutrition.
GET THE LATEST BREAKING NEWS HERE -- SIGN UP FOR GOLOCAL FREE DAILY EBLASTEarly in the spring, clear away the winter mulch surrounding your chives and carefully prepare a sweet planting bed full of composted mulches and loam. An ordinary garden spade dug into the soil on four sides will free a good sized chunk of chives. Without shaking the soil loose, use the spade or a good trowel to divide the clump into smaller groups. Don’t isolate the chives, they are a sociable plant and do best as families together. Replant in the new soil and enrich the mother clumps with composts and old mulches.
Garlic Chives
Some gardeners dare to cultivate a close cousin of the chive, flat leaved garlic chives. This sturdy plant is tenacious and a pioneer, I long knew it as a plant growing up through cracks in an old cement pavement. Both types of plant offer cheerful blooms to gardeners, chives have distinctive heather purple hues and garlic chives a lovely ivory white. It’s possible to lift and divide chives virtually throughout the growing season but Fall and Spring are more common. Now, while you’re putting chives to bed for the winter is a good time to exercise hope and optimism. Let’s put in spring flowering bulbs.
Daffodils
Urban gardeners thrive best when combining the laconic merits of simple chives with eagerly awaited spring blooms. Don’t hesitate friends, box stores have made bulb buying easy and accessible to every level of gardener. Please do support your local growers and small businesses. Or you may have friends who are happy to lift and divide old plantings of daffodils. Wherever you find them, October in southern New England is an ideal time to plant daffodils. Once again, bring the children into the garden and encourage them to gently scatter a prime number of bulbs, always 3’, 5’s, 7’s, into spills allowing 5 or 7 inches between bulbs. Avoid regimentation with the bulbs and gardener alike.
Good garden soil is fine with bulbs, loosen the soil down just about the depth of the trowel, generously spoon on bone meal, and plant, bottom side down of course, look at your bulb and find the roots before you firmly bury the bulb. Make this a fun time to be with youngsters and relieve what could be a tedious task into a joyful one. For those of us planting in solitude, this is a garden project for every Fall akin to climbing Joseph’s Ladder and add the hosts and choruses of spring bulbs into garden niches. The choices are endless. Do plant for color, fragrance, shape, form, and song. Squirrels won’t eat daffodils nor will moles or other garden varmints. Blooms are reliable for years to come and each bulb divides itself eventually into a long term program of lifting and dividing spring after spring.
While you prepare for fine eating and visual, soulful spring treats, the leaves begin to turn. Organic gardeners relish the next harvest: the leaves that fall upon our city and soon conscientious homeowners will rake and bag the leaves for sidewalk pick up. I bring bag after bag of leaves to the garden. My passage ways are usually sidewalks and people are often amused to see the leaves go into the garden. Let’s talk about that in a couple weeks.
12 Fall Recipes With Classic Rhode Island Ingredients
Johnnycakes
Roasted red pepper, basil and parmesan johnnycakes
with Kenyon’s Johnny Cake Corn Meal
Our local specialty, johnnycakes (or jonnycakes, or johnny cakes, whichever way you spell them) isn’t just for breakfast, though we can’t deny they’re pretty terrific slathered with butter and local maple syrup. Why not go savory? Serve these Italian-inspired mini cornmeal cakes for an appetizer or halftime snack, with beer or cocktails.
Find the recipe here.
Fritters
Baked clam and corn cake “fritters”
with Iggy’s Chopped Clams, Kenyon’s Clam & Fritter Mix, and Rhode Island Red Hot Sauce
Even though summer’s gone, you can enjoy the taste of the beach in your kitchen year-round. Make these packed-with-clams fritters with canned chopped clams and frozen corn, Kenyon’s Clam Cake & Fritter Mix and a splash of zingy hot sauce.
Find the recipe here.
Nachos
Slow cooker sweet coffee flank steak nachos
with Dave’s All-Natural Coffee Syrup
We know what you’re thinking: my goodness, these look great, but what about the caffeine? We have the answer! Dave’s All-Natural Decaf Coffee Syrup, made right here in Rhode Island, is perfect in the slow cooker. These unusual nachos will wake up your taste buds and delight your friends.
Find the recipe here.
Meatball sandwiches
Rhode Island weiner spice meatball sandwiches (slow cooker)
with Olneyville NY System spice mix
Imagine our glee when we first discovered Olneyville NY System’s “secret” spice mix, packaged and sold in our local supermarket! In Rhode Island Recipes, we made appetizer meatballs dunked in salsa. Here, we used the slow cooker to make turkey meatballs, and topped them with onions and mustard.
Find the recipe here.
Apple cider coffee pork
Sweet and sassy slow cooker apple cider coffee pork
with Dave’s All-Natural Coffee Syrup
Easy enough for every day, fancy enough for company, this pork loin cooks low and slow in your Crock Pot. Coffee syrup is the magic ingredient.
Find the recipe here.
Pulled chicken roll-ups
Slow cooker coffee-chipotle pulled chicken roll-ups
with Dave’s All Natural Coffee Syrup and Rhode Island Red Hot Sauce
There’s a lot of Rhode Island goodness wrapped up in these sandwiches! You can make the chicken ahead (get your kids to help with the “pulling”), then stuff it together with your favorite cole slaw, or sliced apples, or avocado. Pack these roll-ups for tailgating or lunch on the go.
Find the recipe here.
Pot roast stew
Slow cooker root vegetable and beer pot roast stew
with Wicked Natural Caramel Mustard and Newport Storm beer
A cook-all-day recipe, this beef stew combines meat and potatoes, root vegetables and beer. Start this in the morning with just a few minutes of prep, and it will be ready when your pick-up football game ends in the afternoon.
Find the recipe here.
Vegetable lasagna
Triple-herb vegetable lasagna
with patty pan squash and carrots, with Mayor’s Own Marinara Sauce and Narragansett Creamery cheeses
Wednesday might be Prince Spaghetti Day, but any day can be lasagna day. This veggie lasagna, packed with herbs and vegetables and our great local cheeses, uses Buddy Cianci’s marinara sauce, which we love because it’s all-natural. Substitute your own homemade sauce, if you prefer. It’s a stick-to-your-ribs family-friendly pasta dish that won’t weigh you down.
Find the recipe here.
Linguini
with vegetables topped with romaine and feta, with Narragansett Creamery Salty Feta
If pasta is a staple in your kitchen, try this dish of pasta topped with salad. Think of it as your entire meal in one bowl! You can use any vegetables of the season, and a good, fresh feta cheese to add some tang.
Find the recipe here.
White clam chowder
Quick and easy white clam chowder
with Iggy’s clams
White, red, or clear -- where you come from probably determines your loyalty to one chowder or another. So what's a girl who was born in Manhattan (the home of red chowder), lived for decades in Boston (white chowder), and now spends most of her time in Rhode Island (clear chowder) to do? She’d create her own chowder, the quick and easy kind. I'm partial to white chowders, made with the addition of milk or cream. To enjoy this chowder year-round, we've used canned clams (our local favorites, from Iggy's, the clams we used in Rhode Island Recipes), and bottled clam juice.
Find the recipe here.
Maple syrup doughnuts
Maple syrup whole wheat doughnuts
with Chepachet Farms maple syrup
In Apple Valley, where one half of the Rhode Island Recipes team lives, you can smell cider doughnuts baking as you drive from one pick-your-own farm to the next. These baked doughnuts, with apple cider and maple syrup, might just be the best you’ve ever tasted.
Find the recipe here.
RI Hot chocolate
Rhode Island Hot Chocolate
with faux fluff, with Dave’s, Autocrat or Eclipse coffee syrup
After a day of raking leaves, nothing tastes better than hot chocolate. Kick yours up a bit with some (decaf) coffee syrup and homemade marshmallow fluff. Is it healthy? Well, no, not really. But it’s good for the soul.
Find the recipe here.
