Edible Mexican Garden

By Rosalind Creasy

Learn how to create a lovely Mexican garden and then create delicious dishes with your produce using this easy-to-use Mexican cookbook and gardening guide.

Rosalind Creasy, the grande dame of edible landscaping, has compiled an amazing variety of Mexican herbs and vegetables and has brought them up from south of the border straight to our dinner plates.

Mexican food, Creasy tells us, consists not only of crispy tacos and refried beans, but also savory salsas and mole verde, corn-on-the-cob dipped in crema and grated anejo cheese, and winter squash soup. With gorgeous photography and practical growing tips, Creasy takes us on a tour of several of her own Mexican gardens, where authentic varieties prevail and colorful design reigns.

She addresses climate concerns, as well as the process for saving seeds and incorporating Mexican flower varieties into the garden plot for variety, for color, and to ward off pests and insects.

In addition to gardening techniques, some of the delicious Mexican recipes include:

• Mole Verde
• Salsa Fresca
• Cactus Paddle Salad
• Tortilla Soup
• Winter Squash Soup
• Red Pozole
• Fava Beans with Tomatoes
• Pork Shoulder Sandwiches with Tomatillos
• Melon Cooler
• And many more!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Periplus Editions
• Release date: Mar 15, 2000
• ISBN: 9781462917655

Book preview

First published in 2000 by

PERIPLUS EDITIONS (HK) LTD.,

with editorial offices at 153 Milk Street,

364 Innovation Drive, North Clarendon, VT 05759 U.S.A.

and 61 Tai Seng Avenue, #02-12 Singapore 534167

Photographs and text copyright © 2000 Rosalind Creasy

All photos by Rosalind Creasy, except those that appear courtesy of:

David Cavagnaro: pages 32, 33

Cover photo appears courtesy of Charles Mann.

Illustrations by Marcy Hawthorne.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior written permission from the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

ISBN 962-593-297-6; ISBN 978-1-4629-1765-5 (ebook)

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JAPAN

Tuttle Publishing Japan

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PRINTED IN SINGAPORE

contents

Edible Mexican Gardens

How to Grow a Mexican Garden

Creasy Mexican Gardens

Mini Mexican Herb Gardens

Interview: The Anderson Garden

Encyclopedia of Mexican Vegetables

From Amaranth to Wild Greens

Cooking from the Mexican Garden

Ingredients

Cooking Techniques

Basic Cooked Mexican Tomato Sauce

Mole Verde (Green Mole with Vegetables and Seeds)

Guacamole

Salsa Fresca (Fresh Salsa)

Salsa Verde (Tomatillo Salsa)

Salsa Cruda

Greens, Mexican Style

Fruit Salad with Jicama (Ensalada de Fruita)

Cactus Paddle Salad (Ensalada de Nopalitos)

Cool White Salad

Tortilla Soup (Sopa Azteca)

Malva and Zucchini Soup (Sopa de Alache y Calabacitas)

Winter Squash Soup (Sopa de Calabaza)

Red Pozole (Pozole Rojo)

Chayote Sauté with Chilis

Fava Beans with Tomatoes (Habas y Jitomates)

Esquites

Huevos Rancheros

Quesadillas

Bean Burritos

Tortilla Casserole

Pork Shoulder Sandwiches with Tomatillos (Tortas de Piernas)

Pork Stew with Purslane

Melon Cooler (Agua de Sandia)

Jamaica Tea (Agua Jamaica)

Iceberg Cooler

Appendices

Appendix A: Planting and Maintenance

Appendix B: Pest and Disease Control

Resources

Acknowledgments

Peppers of all types are native to Mexico and parts of South America and play a critical role in these regional cuisines. In Mexico, peppers are valued not only for their spiciness, but also for their incredible range of flavor and versatility.

edible mexican gardens

My husband and I moved from the Boston area to Northern California in 1967. For a few days I was homesick and needed a reason to feel we had made the right decision. A former Bostonian friend had settled here a few years earlier and she invited us over for supper. Well, sir—she served tacos with homemade salsa. What a revelation! I’d never tasted anything so good—I was hooked. A few more Mexican meals and a trip to San Francisco and I knew I had found my spot in the sun.

Looking back, it’s amazing to me to see how, over the years, my day-to-day Yankee cooking has completely changed. Grilled cheese sandwiches somehow turned into quesadillas, my bread box always has tortillas, a comal (flat Mexican griddle) sits on the stove, ever ready to toast herbs or grill an onion, and chiles show up in so many of my meals that when members of my tender-tongued East Coast family come to visit, I have to change my whole repertoire.

My garden, too, reflects the south-of-the-border shift. Numerous trips to Mexico and much time spent in the Southwest, where Mexican culture dominates, not only changed many of the crops I grow but my garden aesthetic as well. As a landscape designer, I can design an English garden with the best of them—good enough, in fact, that on occasion I’ve had homesick Brits stand at the end of my walk and weep for home—but despite my English blood, my heart’s not in it. I keep coming back to an in-your-face, colorful garden style, all tangled with flowering vines and squash and filled with chiles and dahlias.

The gardens and recipes that I share with you in the following pages are from my years of experience, much of it from muddling through and still more learned from generous gardeners and cooks. I hope you find the information zestful, inspirational, and even more exciting in that the vegetables and herbs, and the cooking methods, are based in the Americas. I thoroughly enjoy Chinese and Italian vegetables, Southeast Asian herbs, and I glory in French cooking techniques, but over the years I find that growing and roasting great tomatoes and chiles, hominying corn, and stewing beans brings me truly home.

how to grow a mexican garden

Most of the vegetables in a Mexican garden are grown in a routine manner. The tomatoes, onions, hot peppers, and squash, for instance, are often the very same as or similar to those we usually grow in the United States.

Mexico is a huge country whose many climates range from tropical to temperate. Most gardeners in the United States can grow a good number of Mexico’s vegetables and herbs, but the nearer one lives to the Mexican border, the more options there will be for growing specific Mexican varieties.

Let’s start by surveying options open to gardeners in Canada and the northern U.S. They can grow numerous varieties of common vegetables used in Mexican cooking, such as tomatoes, Swiss chard, lettuce, radishes, white onions, and snap beans. They can also choose vegetables less common in the States but characteristic of Mexican cooking, such as many kinds of dry beans; some of the dent corns; jalapeños; purslane; tomatillos; round, light-colored zucchini-type squash, and the important herbs cilantro and epazote. Nurseries with a good selection of appropriate varieties for these short-season areas are Johnny’s Selected Seeds, Nichols Garden Seeds, Stokes Seeds, and Abundant Life Seed Foundation.

For more southerly gardeners, the array of authentic Mexican varieties is larger. Because the fall stays warm longer, they can grow day-length-sensitive varieties (varieties that don’t set fruit until the days get short in early fall) of winter squash and Mexican corn. There are also more chile options, plus the tender perennials, such as jícama and chayote, which need a long, warm growing season and a mild winter.

To obtain seeds of Mexican vegetables and herbs, consult the seed companies given in the Resources section of the book. Mexican seed companies are not cited, as they carry mostly commercial varieties of standard vegetables common in this country. Seeds of varieties favored by Mexican gardeners in the States can sometimes be purchased from seed racks in local Mexican grocery stores, especially in the spring. The rest of the varieties, including unusual Mexican herbs, are available from specialty mail-order nurseries or from local nurseries located in the Southwest.

In Mexico, most gardeners obtain their seeds from local purveyors, and if they are open-pollinated varieties, not hybrids, they keep the seeds from their plants from year to year.

Once you obtain your Mexican varieties, you may want to save your seeds too. See the sidebar entitled Saving Seeds for basic information. For specific information on saving the seeds of beans, corn, peppers, and tomatoes, see the Encyclopedia of Mexican Vegetables.

You will most probably get most of the seeds you want from the specialty seed companies listed in the Resources section but, if you visit Mexico, you can shop in the markets for an even larger selection. Most vegetable seeds in commercial packaging are OK to bring back home, except Mexican corn, which is confiscated at the border as illegal to bring into the United States. Another option is to visit a Mexican market near you to shop for seeds of pozole corn and dry beans. But when you grow these grocery store seeds out, be prepared to baby them for a few years. The folks I spoke with in the community garden in San José found it took two or three seasons to acclimatize the Mexican market corn, in particular, to their own gardens. Be aware, too, of the possibility that in wet, cold climates they may never acclimatize.

Seeds of Mexican varieties are sold in many Mexican markets in North America. They are generally available only in the spring.

Large blue buckets in a Yucatan market offers a variety of seeds and spices.

The harvest from one of my many Mexican gardens includes tomatoes, corn, chilis, and pumpkin.

[Saving Seeds]

Ifind saving seeds simple and satisfying process. The following general guidelines apply no matter what kind of seeds you are saving. See the Encyclopedia of Mexican Vegetables for more specific information on saving the seeds of beans, corn, peppers, squash, and tomatoes. In addition, everyone interested in seed saving will benefit from reading Seed to Seed, by Suzanne Ashworth. She gives detailed instructions on how to save seeds of all kinds of vegetables.

1. Save seed from open-pollinated (nonhybrid) plants only. Saving vegetable seeds from hybrids is wasted energy, as they will not come true—in other words, there’s no telling what you will get. Hybrids are created by crossing two vegetable variety parents; a gardener needs to know which two parents are crossed to create an identical variety. For proprietary reasons, seed companies keep that information to themselves. They do however, label hybrids and Fl hybrids (first-generation hybrids) on their seed packages, so you know which are hybrids and which are open-pollinated.

2. When you are saving seeds to perpetuate a variety, you need to take steps to prevent cross-pollination. With some plants, such as beans, which are primarily self-pollinated, cross-pollination problems are few. For others, more protection is needed. Get to know the vegetable families, as members of the same family often cross-pollinate. A list of vegetable families is included in Appendix A with the information on crop rotation; see page 94.

3. Do not save seeds of diseased plants. Save only the finest fruits from the best plants of your favorite varieties. You need to learn to recognize diseases because some (particularly viruses) are transmitted in seeds.

4. Label your seed rows and seed containers; your memory will play tricks on you.

5. Never plant all your seeds at once, lest the elements wipe them out.

6. To maintain a strong gene pool, select seeds from a number of plants, not just one or two. (This does not apply to self-pollinating varieties.)

7. Only mature, ripe seeds are viable. Learn what such seeds look like for all your vegetables.

To get you started with your own Mexican garden, in the next section I rhapsodize about my own Mexican gardens, both full size and in containers, and Kit Anderson shares her Vermont Mexican garden as well. For specific information on each vegetable, see the Encyclopedia of Mexican Vegetables.

Chayote, white onions, tomatoes, and chilis are the basis for many a great Mexican meal.

creasy mexican gardens

For three decades, I have been an active vegetable gardener, much of it professionally. In the first decade, I mastered the basics like sweet corn, tomatoes, snap beans and was ready for something more exotic. Inspired by my travels, I decided to try growing ethnic vegetables of all types; from Mexican amaranths and Italian radicchios to Asian pac chois, tucking them in among their more prosaic cousins. Eventually, armed with all my new knowledge. I started a large garden cookbook and decided to grow a number of ethnic theme gardens for the book, including a Mexican one. I needed to grow out many unusual vegetables and herbs to develop my recipes. Also, I wanted to see how prototypical ethnic gardens went together and how well they fit into a standard American garden.

My first Mexican garden was planted in the corner of my backyard nearly fifteen years ago. It included all sorts of vegetables and herbs I had never seen before, much less grown, including epazote, huauzontlí, grain amaranths, and wild chiles, plus numerous unusual varieties of familiar vegetables, including grinding corns, tomatoes, peppers, lima beans, and sunflowers and pumpkins, for their seeds.

I not only wanted the vegetables to be Mexican but, as a landscape designer and photographer, I wanted the garden to give the feel of Mexican home gardens I knew. The ones I was familiar with were filled with exuberance, joy, and colorful flowers—and, in most of Mexico, planted in layers, with vegetables, herbs, and flowers among and under fruiting and flowering trees.

With these design goals in mind, I added a number of flowers I associate with Mexico, namely, tithonia (also called Mexican sunflower), Mexican sage (Salvia leucantha) and two south-of-the-border favorites, marigolds and nasturtiums. Because Mexican peppers, tomatoes, and tomatillos need a long growing season, I seeded them in the house under lights, starting with the peppers in February. A month later, I started the tomatoes, and a few weeks after that, the tomatillos. Once they became mature enough, I moved them outside to my cold frame.

I must say, I mastered the exuberance component! The garden spilled out of its boundaries, thanks in part to my great organic soil, which caused the corn to grow to 14 feet, the amaranths to tower over the tomatoes, and the tomatillos to