Making an Italian Garden

(from Orto Italiano!, by Rick Gush, page 2 of 2)

Starting an Italian Garden

Italy is a large and diverse country, and the typical methods of growing vegetable crops are similarly diverse.

Making an “Italian” garden in the United States is just a matter of selecting a few of the classic Italian crops that appeal to your taste, and any Italian garden will certainly be different from the neighbors’.

There are a great number of nurseries and seed catalogs in the United States that offer plants and seeds of Italian vegetable varieties. One of the best is www.growitalian.com that features seeds from the Franchi seed company in northern Italy, which is the dominant brand in Italian nurseries.

Another notable site is www.italianseedandtool.com, where a very nice selection of Italian vegetable seeds is available.

One more is www.gourmetseed.com, which offers a huge selection of Italian varieties.

Italian Landscape Chic

Not all the fashionable flavoring plants in Italian cuisine come from the vegetable garden.

Olives, capers, laurel, pine nuts and saffron are all important flavors in Italian cooking, and having these seasoning plants somewhere in the landscape is an Italian tradition. Any of these five plants can be easily grown in many areas of the United States as well.

Laurel
The leaves from laurels, known as bay trees in the United States, are added to most soups and sauces, and because these trees are so widespread, the leaves are more often harvested than purchased. Lauris noblis is the most common species in Italy. In the western United States, the California bay tree (Umbellularia californica) has a similar flavor.

Capers 
Capers are another common Italian seasoning. While most Italians buy their capers, those who are fortunate enough to have a few caper plants growing out of a rock wall somewhere will harvest the flower buds before they open and cure them in vinegar or salt. Capers (Capparis spinosa) grow well in sunny, well-drained locations.

Olives
Making your own preserved olives is ridiculously easy, if tedious. In most parts of the United States where olives grow, they are landscape trees, and the fruit is considered undesireable. More people should harvest this urban fruit and use it.

Pine nuts
The big cones can be intimidating when they come crashing down, but it’s a definite treat to live near Pinus pinea, from which come most of the pine nuts in Italy. The statuesque Maritime pines are everywhere, and pine nuts are added to pastry items, as well as being a key ingredient of pesto.  Most of the scrubby pinyon pines of the Unites States also make nice pine nuts.

Saffron
In some areas of Italy, the saffron crocus grows wild or almost wild, and gardeners in these areas can harvest the tiny stamens to make their own saffron seasoning. Saffron crocus (Crocus sativus) is not a wild species but the result of centuries of domestic selection in the eastern Mediterranean. In the United States, saffron cultivation was common until recently among the Pennsylvania Dutch.

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About the Author: Rick Gush, an agricultural writer from California who now lives in northern Italy, is fascinated by the farms in his new, adopted homeland. Follow his Italian gardening stories on his blog, and get the scoop on organic Italian farming here.

This article first appeared in the July/August 2009 Hobby Farms.

A piece of Italy in our lives is a sentimental gesture mixed with the practical acknowledgement that the Italians have been growing gardens for quite a bit longer than we have, and that there might be a fun or useful thing or two that we could learn from them. 

An Italian vegetable garden is called an “orto.” Italian ortos and American vegetable gardens are quite similar. Most everybody grows some tomatoes and zucchini and then spices up that pair with an assortment of peppers, beans, eggplants and so on. But what is it that makes an orto different? What are Italians growing that American gardeners aren’t?

For starters, Italians almost always grow the same crops that their grandparents did. 

Italians also grow more leaf crops than Americans; they’re more likely to eat some of the spring weeds that appear in their gardens; and they take their squash quite seriously.

Finally, no Italian-style orto would be complete without a healthy planting of herbs. Vegetable gardens in Italy are not a leisurely pastime, rather a dead-serious attempt to provide oneself with high-quality food and flavorings.

iStock photo Near Rome and south into Sicily, greenhouses full of cherry tomatoes supply the celebrated vegetable to all of Europe.

Tomatoes

Italians were among the first Europeans to consume tomatoes. They started eating the ornamental fruit in the 16th century.

Today, Italians enjoy probably the most sophisticated tomato horticulture on the planet. Vast acres of greenhouses near Rome and further south in Sicily pump millions of crates of perfectly formed clusters of cherry tomatoes, in particular, to markets in Italy and all of the other European countries, and it’s generally agreed that these perfect tomatoes are also among the best-tasting fruit ever produced by a factory farm. 

Not all the tomatoes that Italians grow are heritage varieties—not by a long shot. Italians are as crazy about American vegetable seeds as Americans are about Italian food, and it’s common to find Rio Grande and Ace tomato varieties for sale in the Italian nurseries and Peto, UC and Heinz varieties growing in the big fields.

Of the 315 varieties of tomato in commercial production in Italy (not counting seeds traded by hand), 162 are varieties that come from outside the country. Most of these imported varieties are American, but there are also Dutch, French, Spanish and English varieties in cultivation.

Like Americans, Italians eat lots of cherry types and lots of round types. The two Italian varieties most often available in the states are the famous oblong Roma and San Marzano, both considered cooking and sauce tomatoes.

But if you’re searching for something a bit more exotic, you might want to try any of the big convoluted tomatoes that are so popular in Italy.

The Ligurian Cuore di Bue and Tuscan Costoluto varieties are tough plants and heavy producers—much easier to grow than their fussy American counterpart, Beefheart. The tasty little pointed cherry tomatoes from southern Italy called Datterini are another classic Italian tomato variety.

Greens

One characteristic of a typical Italian orto is the abundance of greens. Some popular greens are used both as cultivated plants and as self-seeding plants.

Three of the most popular greens of northern Italian gardens are bietole (beet greens), rucola (arrugula) and borage. All of these greens are both planted deliberately and collected as spontaneous weeds. 

Bietole are the rustic relatives of Swiss chard that can grow wild in the open spaces of a vegetable garden.

Particularly suited for areas with mild winters such as Florida, California and Arizona, bietole are eaten steamed, cooked into soups, used as the filler for filled pasta like ravioli, and baked into vegetable pies.

Torta di Verdure (vegetable pie) with bietole is a common rustic dish that enjoys continuing popularity among the urban population. (Click here for the recipe.)

On the northwest coast of Italy, a wild-greens mix called preboggion is commonly harvested during the spring. Preboggion includes a half-dozen different dandelion types and a variable list of other species such as rumex, dock, bietole and borage.

All over Italy, similar mixtures of wild greens are commonly harvested for personal use and are also sold by small farmers in the open-air markets. Another particularly enjoyable weed is wild asparagus, and hikers head up into the wild to collect asparagi selvatici in early spring, just before the mushrooms start appearing.

Learning how to eat the weeds that appear spontaneously in gardens and woodlands is definitely an Italian trait.

While Italians grow a lot of lettuce, the favorite salad green is probably rucola. Rucola is a common garnish for pizzas and appears frequently in mixed salads. Rucola has two forms, cultivated and wild, and both are most commonly seeded, but any garden that has been growing rucola for a few years will surely have some rucola that has reseeded itself naturally. Self-seeded rucola is often more robust than seedbed plants and can produce enormous, deliciously crunchy leaves.

Bright-red radicchio is another classic Italian vegetable, but Italians these days are much more likely to buy these blanched chicory heads from the market.  Blanching red chicory is an involved process that includes digging up and replanting the heads in between trimming and resting periods. The easier-to-grow mixture of colored garden chicories resembles lettuce in cultivation and mixes particularly well with lettuce in salads.

iStock photo Fava beans have the reputation of a poor man’s crop, yet they continue to be enjoyed both raw and in soups.

Horse Beans and Broccoli

Aside from the leaf crops of the colder season, Italians are also enthusiastic winter cultivators of several other crops. In areas where snow doesn’t fall regularly, a range of unusual cabbages are widely grown.

One of these, cavolo nero—black kale—is an upright, dark-leaved kale. Like the ornamental kales, this is a striking plant. Covered with wrinkled, strap-like leaves, that are steamed or added to soups and vegetable pies, black kale is represented by several ancient varieties.

Winter is also the season for growing one of the most classic Italian crops: horse beans.

Horse beans are also called fava beans, or simply fave in Italy, and are usually planted in fall and harvested in the spring. Fave are traditionally eaten raw, on a picnic on the first day of May (shucked by the guests), with salami and sheep cheese. While fave are almost always eaten raw, some are also added to soups. These beans never caught on commercially and are traditionally considered a poor man’s crop.

Fave can produce a large crop that can be stored for future use, but these days, they’re usually grown as a sentimental crop; a celebration of how good things are these days and a reminder of the old days when times were tough.

Broccoli is another all-star of the Italian orto. Although about half of the broccoli sold in farmers’ markets is of the large-head type, the other half is made up of smaller shoot types with meaty legs.

Most of the broccoli grown in Italy is green, but there are several red and purple Sicilian varieties. Broccoli culture is another traditional activity, and local records from 500 years ago mention broccoli varieties that are still commonly being cultivated today.

Some of the old varieties don’t make large heads but instead produce several waves of smaller buds, which are often preferred when making pasta with broccoli. The plants of the large-head-producing varieties are left in the field after the large heads have been cut off and will produce one or more successive crops of small shoots.  

iStock photo Squash and squash blossoms are sold at markets throughout Italy. Cooks prepare both for meals.

Squash

One notable difference in the way Italians use their orti is that they Italians eat the squash blossoms as well as the fruits.

The markets even sell squash flowers separately and attached to small zucchinis. The blooms are either stewed along with the rest of the squash, or they are prepared separately, often battered and fried. Italian zucchinis come in a range of pale to dark greens, and also in the round form, called Tondo, that are popular for making stuffed zucchini dishes.  

There are a number of regional specialty squashes in Italy, but the star has to be the trumpet squash, tromba di albenga, also known as trombette (pronounced tro-m-betty). This prolific vine produces copious amounts of skinny green fruit and bright-yellow flowers. It’s best grown in such a way that the fruits can hang, so an overhead trellis is best.

Trombette are eaten fresh, like summer squash, or allowed to get large and saved as winter squashes. Hanging trombette fruit look a bit like the gourd lagenaria, but the trombette’s skin is much softer, and the flesh is always crunchy, like young zucchini.

While fresh summer squashes are highly appreciated, winter squash are equally popular among Italian gardeners. Although pumpkins are mostly grown in Italy for commercial use, the beach-ball-sized variety quintale is popular in central Italy, and a particularly beautiful yellow-and-green pumpkin variety called tonda padana is grown extensively in the north. The other popular winter squashes are generally smaller with very hard flesh that can easily be kept for months, such as the lumpy, green-skinned marina di chioggia.

Herbs

Italians are serious about growing herbs for their personal culinary use.

Rosemary, sage, thyme, marjoram, oregano, parsley and basil are all sold in little pots by everyone from the florists to the vegetable markets, and you can see herbs growing in every nook and cranny of the entire country. Certainly, those with a garden plot are sure to include a handful of flavoring plants, and even those with balconies frequently cultivate herbs in pots. 

Although oregano gets a lot of press as the dominant Italian seasoning, growing good oregano is difficult, most Italian gardeners purchase oregano from someone else. There are also many who prefer the often stronger-tasting oregano cousin, marjoram. Marjoram is an easily grown little plant that’s widely sold in 6-inch pots that are then either planted in a garden or maintained on a balcony.

Fresh herbs are often touted as superior to dried, and this seems to be true with marjoram, basil and parsley. On the other hand, sage, thyme, rosemary and oregano are more commonly used dry, as cut branches are kept in the kitchen to provide a bit of seasoning when needed.

Two flavoring plants that are common ingredients in Italian recipes but that aren’t really herbs are garlic and spicy peppers. In general, the Italians aren’t as crazy for hot sauce as Americans are, but cuisine from the south, in Calabria and Sicily, includes hot peppers in everything from cheese and salami to spaghetti and calzone.

For Making an Italian Garden, go to page 2.

About the Author: Rick Gush, an agricultural writer from California who now lives in northern Italy, is fascinated by the farms in his new, adopted homeland. Follow his Italian gardening stories on his blog, and get the scoop on organic Italian farming here.) 

This article first appeared in the July/August 2009 Hobby Farms.

Well, the garden is officially out of control now.

The vegetables are growing so fast that it takes an hour a day just to tie everything up and pull the most obvious weeds. 

Watering takes an hour at a whack and there’s so much semi-wild arrugula that I can’t pick it all.

The pumpkins have already smothered the foot tall corn planted three feet away and the beans seem to grow about six inches every day. 

Just last week I was still in nurturing mode, carefully coddling the little plants in tidy rows and pulling up the little weeds underneath while crossing my fingers and hoping that nothing untoward like a freak hailstorm or some disease or pest outbreak would visit this year.

This week my tidy rows have been notably eroded, and I’m resigned to the fact that I just have to stand back and stay out of the way now. 

My control is gone, and the plants and weeds will grow wherever they want. Everything seems to be crowding its neighbors and I had to rip up a bunch more of the precious red poppies to make room for the trombette squash.  It’s no longer possible to walk among the bean poles and the zucchini planted three feet apart have filled in the spaces.

This is the end of lettuce season though.

The last half dozen heads are huddled in a corner behind the cherry tomatoes and aren’t getting any direct sun now, which is okay, because they’ll remain crunchy slightly longer in the shade, but the long day lengths push them to seed, so their days are numbered anyhow.

The most noticeable change is definitely the tomatoes.

What seemed like nice well-behaved juveniles last week have turned into surly young adults who are throwing out thick new shoots all over the place and showing large quantities flowers and green fruit. 

All twenty four staked tomatoes needed to be re-tied three times since last Saturday, and the dozen cascading Datterini plants are smothering the flowers growing on the wall below.

The photo this week is of one of the cascading datterini. 

This is a Sicilian variety, like a cherry tomato, but with a pointed end. Sometimes people hang clusters of these fruits for a week or longer after harvesting to make them softer and more flavorful, which is better for cooking uses. 

Sometimes in the markets, “aged” datterini are sold.  At our house we don’t always cook the datterini, and more frequently use them in salads.

There is a reason why tomatoes are by far the most frequently cultivated of all vegetables, and it isn’t just that they are so tasty. 

Fairly frequently, over the course of the years, the tomatoes in just about anyone’s gardens explode with an exuberance of growth that is amazing.  Ten feet tall plants are everyday events and every year somebody plants a tomato on a compost pile and stands back as the monster grows to thirty feet in length.

Even we mortals manage regularly to cultivate tomato plants that are quite emotionally satisfying.  Being connected with such an impressive demonstration of the wonders of plant growth is good for our soul.

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