In This Issue
The L, You Say: Lincoln Square Market, Steps From the Brown Line
When Groceries Want to Be Plants (Seasons of Change)
The L, You Say: Lincoln Square Market, Steps from the Brown Line
It was a gray Tuesday morning for the kickoff of the Lincoln Square Farmers Market, chilly with a little misty rain. But who cares? The intrepid farmers market shopper isn’t going to be stayed by a little drizzle!
OK, there an important message in there. Almost all of our outdoor markets are rain or shine, and odds are good that the rain will fall on every market at some point.
Everybody wants to be at the market on the sunny days, when the place is a parade of baby strollers and leashed puppies and the produce sparkles on the farm stands. But it’s on the gloomier days, the ones that the more casual shoppers shun, that your farmers need you most. Put on a sweatshirt, put an umbrella in your backpack and buy some dang produce, would ya?
End of sermon, back to Lincoln Square. The first thing to note is how very convenient it is, especially for public transit folks like us. You descend from the platform, step outside, and the market is right there. Not just close, literally right in front of you.
Lincoln Square — at Lincoln and Leland Avenues — has two weekly markets: on Tuesdays from 7 a.m. to 1 p.m. and on Thursdays from 3 p.m. to 7 p.m. There are lovely shops on Lincoln for a couple of blocks immediately north of the market — we dropped some money at the enchantingly fragrant Savory Spice Shop — and the Old Town School of Folk Music is just a few blocks south.
Here’s a photo essay of their opening day:
When Groceries Want to Be Plants
We really enjoyed this second Seasons of Change article from Jill Tessler, our vegetable-growing high-rise apartment neighbor. Jill is a veterinarian and thus steeped in science and learning, and the spirit of experimentation infuses her indoor gardening experience. Here she describes how food she brought home from the store to eat turned into productive new growth, and how she identifies which of those items are really wannabe plants. — Bob
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Because I do not consider my high-rise apartment to be “ideal” vegetable gardening conditions, I have leaned towards frugality and minimal financial investment. One of the ways this has evolved has been allowing some of my groceries to become my houseplants.
Sometimes it has been very purposeful. After the first successful year growing indoor tomatoes from a starter plant, I decided to simply put a cut cherry tomato (directly from the pint in my fridge) into the soil. This has worked very successfully now a few times — so successfully that I typically need to cull a dozen (or few dozen!) seedlings so my pot, which holds about four comfortably, is not completely overcrowded.
Sometimes, I follow the lead of produce that get ideas of grandeur. In general, I do not allow my produce to hang around long enough to show interest in becoming plants, but occasionally I acquire produce that cannot be stopped. Once these signs are showing, I enjoy fostering the growth process and have used the opportunity to learn about new plants.
In the winter months between tomato seasons, I have intermittently grown English peas in my otherwise vacant pot. I have bought shelled fresh peas for my own convenience, and found that peas that were willing to sprout were easy to spot. Small root tips were often already visible on some of the peas, so I sorted through a bag of about 100 peas I originally intended to eat, and selected 10 to grow instead.
I also vaguely remembered the damp-paper-towel-technique that I used in school as a child to grow and study sprouts, and re-employed it. I was astounded by how fast the sprouts grew and was transferring them to soil within a handful of days!
My other favorite grocery-item-gone-plant experience was with ginger. I had a mostly-used piece of ginger root (not actually a true root, but a rhizome or subterranean stem) sitting in a bowl on my kitchen counter. I noticed that although it was starting to dehydrate and wrinkle a bit, it had also created a node that looked like it wanted to grow a stem.
I did a little YouTube research and decided to place the ginger rhizome into a shallow bowl of water to see if it would grow actual roots — and it quickly did! In my research, I also looked at what kind/size of plant it would eventually become (I had no idea!) so I could eventually pot it reasonably appropriately.
Ginger does not like direct sun so instead of putting it on the window bench with my other plants, I placed it on my drafting table where I sometimes make small ceramics. The ginger grew like gangbusters and added lovely greenery to my creative work space.
I enjoy the ginger as a houseplant, but it grew so successfully that I eventually did a second round of brief research and learned that the fresh leaves can be made into a mild tea or chopped up on a salad. Now I can harvest leaves every so often and enjoy tea without digging up the rhizome or destroying the plant. I get both additional lovely greenery in my home and an enjoyable food item I wouldn’t have otherwise known.