Azure A's List: Gardening

• In a culinary context, the zucchini is treated as a vegetable, which means it is usually cooked and presented as a savory dish or accompaniment. Botanically, however, the zucchini is an immature fruit, being the swollen ovary of the zucchini flower.
• The female flower is a golden blossom on the end of each emergent zucchini. The male flower grows directly on the stem of the zucchini plant in the leaf axils (where leaf petiole meets stem), on a long stalk, and is slightly smaller than the female. Both flowers are edible, and are often used to dress a meal or to garnish the cooked fruit.
• Firm and fresh blossoms that are only slightly open are cooked to be eaten, with pistils removed from female flowers, and stamens removed from male flowers. The stem on the flowers can be retained as a way of giving the cook something to hold onto during cooking, rather than injuring the delicate petals, or they can be removed prior to cooking, or prior to serving.
• A zucchini with the flowers attached are a sign of a truly fresh and immature fruit, and are especially sought by many people for its sweeter flavor.

• Zucchini is one of the easiest fruits to cultivate in temperate climates. As such, it has a reputation among home gardeners for overwhelming production. One good way to control over-abundance is to harvest the flowers, which are an expensive delicacy in markets because of the difficulty in storing and transporting them. The male flower is borne on the end of a stalk and is longer lived.

   

   

   

   

  

   Zucchini plant, Gurgaon, India

   

   

   

  While easy to grow, zucchini, like all squash, requires plentiful bees for pollination. In areas of pollinator decline or high pesticide use, such as mosquito-spray districts, gardeners often experience fruit abortion, where the fruit begins to grow, then dries or rots. This is due to an insufficient number of pollen grains delivered to the female flower. It can be corrected by hand pollination or by increasing the bee population.

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• nearly all oyster mushrooms are primary saprophytes, meaning they do not require a composted substrate. They grow readily on dead wood, straw, grasses (wheat, rye, rice, fescues, corn, bamboo), cotton, cacti, Scotch broom, hemp, coffee wastes, paper products, and practically any other dried cellulosic plant material.
• Cultivators of button mushrooms (Agaricus bisporus, aka portobello, crimini and meadow mushrooms) noted long ago that nematodes (tiny worms that feed on living plant and fungal tissue) -- the bane of their industry -- are not an issue with oyster mushrooms. This fact led Barron and Thorn (1986) to discover that oyster mushroom (P. ostreatus) mycelium is carnivorous -- it eats nematodes. It exudes extracellular toxins that stun the worm, whereupon the mycelium invades its body through its orifices.
• Following on this discovery of nematode-predating activity, oyster mushroom mycelium was also found to be one of the most adept, of more than 100 tested, at consuming bacteria (Pseudomonas and Agrobacterium) in order to get nitrogen and protein (Barron 1988).
• Oyster mushrooms are rich in protein (up to 30 percent by dry weight), plentiful in B vitamins, have no cholesterol, and have significant levels of the cholesterol-lowering molecule lovastatin -- up to 2.8 percent by dry weight
• In Asia, Pleurotus nebrodensis and P. eryngii are gaining market share since these thick-fleshed and short-gilled mushrooms have a shelf life that exceeds most species by several weeks.
• extremely important to always cook oyster mushrooms! Oyster mushrooms contain a novel, heat-labile, hemolytic protein called "ostreolysin," which can be toxic unless the mushrooms are cooked at temperatures exceeding 140 degrees Fahrenheit. This compound is found in developing and mature oyster mushrooms yet is absent in the mycelium. Nevertheless, this is another good reason -- among many -- that all mushrooms, with the exception of truffles, should be cooked to best take advantage of their beneficial nutritional properties while deactivating heat-sensitive toxins.

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• 1942, when Congress decided that the best way to control opiates was to ban domestic cultivation of Papaver somniferum and force pharmaceutical companies to import opium (which they use to produce morphine and other opiates) from a handful of designated Asian countries. Since then the perception has taken hold that this legislative stricture is actually a botanical one—that opium will grow only in these places. The other myth Hogshire had exploded is that the only way to extract opiates from opium poppies is by slitting their heads in the field, a complex and time-consuming process that, I heard over and over again from law-enforcement officials and gardeners alike, made the domestic production of opium impractical.

   

  The durability of these myths has obliterated knowledge about opium that was common as recently as a century ago, when opium was still a popular nonprescription remedy and opium poppies an important domestic crop. As late as 1915, pamphlets issued by the U.S. Department of Agriculture were still mentioning opium poppies as a good cash crop for northern farmers. A few decades before, the Shakers were growing opium commercially in upstate New York. Well into this century, Russian, Greek, and Arab immigrants in America have used poppy-head tea as a mild sedative and a remedy for headaches, muscle pain, cough, and diarrhea. During the Civil War, gardeners in the South were encouraged to plant opium for the war effort, in order to ensure a supply of painkillers for the Confederate Army. The descendants of these poppies are thriving to this day in southern gardens, but not the knowledge of their provenance or powers.
• I was reminded of something Hogshire had said about the laws governing opium poppies. “It’s as if they had on the books a twenty-miles-per-hour speed limit that was never posted, never enforced, never even talked about. There’s no way for you to know that this is the law. Then they pick someone out and say, Hey, you were going fifty. Don’t you know the speed limit is twenty? You broke the law—you’re going to jail! But nobody else is being stopped, you say. That doesn’t matter—this is the law and we have the discretion. The fact that your car is covered with political bumper stickers that we don’t like has nothing to do with it. This isn’t about free speech!”

• AGENTS TO CHECK ON HOW POPPIES ENTERED THE COUNTRY, read the page-one headline in the Griffin Daily News, alongside a photo of one of Moore’s scored poppy heads. The article made no mention of the well-known seed catalogues found in Moore’s trailer, which, of course, proved that his poppies had not “entered” the country at all. Instead it quoted Vincent Morgano, a DEA agent, claiming that the growing of opium poppies in this country was unheard of: “In my 25 years with the agency I have never seen it grown in the United States.” Clarence Cox, head of the Griffin-Spalding Narcotics Task Force, assured the press that the confiscated poppies are not the same kind that are commonly grown in American flower gardens, Spalding County Sheriff Richard Cantrell said that each of the 258 seedpods seized in the raid could, if properly harvested and processed, yield up to a kilo of heroin apiece. (Talk about alchemy!) Bill Maloney, also with the DEA, explained to a reporter that extracting narcotics from the pods entailed a very complicated and dangerous procedure: “I don’t even think someone with a Ph.D. could do it.” He also said that opium poppies were extremely rare in the southeastern United States. “The climate has to be just right,” he explained. “The temperatures have to be warm and you have to have the right amount of water.”

   

  All these assertions I read in the Griffin Daily News, which had taken them on faith. And why not? What reason would government officials have to lie about horticulture? Yet several of these statements I had already disproved in my own garden.
• I happen also to think that it wouldn’t be wrong to describe that tea as little more than an interesting home remedy—a powerful analgesic that also produces a mild sensation of euphoria. But that’s my description.

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