Introductory segment of the Grow Yourself podcast hosted by Nicole Johnsey Burke. The host introduces herself (owner of Rooted Garden and Gardenary Inc., author of upcoming Kitchen Garden Revival), states the show’s purpose—surprising stories about food and practical steps to a whole, happy life—and invites listeners to join regularly for short, actionable insights.
Welcome to the Grow youw Self podcast. Surprising stories about the food we eat and inspiring conversations about what it really takes to live the whole and happy.
Life we're all craving.
My name's Nicole John C. Burke and I'm the owner of Rooted Garden and Gardenary Incorporated, an author, author of the upcoming book Kitchen Garden Revival. Is it obvious I'm kind of obsessed with the kitchen garden.
Each week here on the Grow youw.
Self podcast, you're going to be shocked at the things you'll learn about foods you eat every single day. And you'll feel encouraged to take little steps in your own busy schedule to create a more whole and happy life for yourself. So turn up the volume and let's take a walk, go on a drive, or just hang out in the kitchen garden together. Every time you listen, I promise you'll learn something that will help you grow yourself in a new and exciting way. Sound good? I think so. Now let's dig in.
You've heard the idea of eating seasonally, but what actually is in season this spring? How can you pick out among all the fruits and vegetables and all the whatnots in the produce department these days to make sure that you're eating in a way that is good for your body, that makes sure that you're tasting the very best tasting food, that you're taking care of your local farmers and growers and actually even doing good for the planet. That's what we're going to to dig into in today's Grow youw Self podcast. So let's do it. Today's episode is brought to you by my Green Thumb Quiz. It's my purpose, my mission to get all of you growing a little bit of your own food. And the way I like to do that is by helping you discover the green thumb that you possibly, maybe did not even know that you have. So go check it out. Take the Green Thumb quiz. You will find find out where you are in terms of your current level in the garden and then I will coach you through and give you tons of resources to help you bring your garden skills to the next level. Check it out@gardenary.com quiz now let's dig into what you can eat all spring long. Welcome back to the Grow youw Self. Welcome back to the podcast. Today we are talking about one of my favorite subjects, eating. In fact, we're going to talk all about eating today. What you can eat when you can eat it during the spring season. If you go way back to one of the very first episodes at the Grow youw self podcast, you'll hear me talk about three things that you can do that can change everything. Those three things are, number one, eating seasonally, Number two, shopping locally, and number three, growing naturally. And I promised you way back then in January that each and every episode would help you do that in a better way, that I'd give you more information again and again to help you do all those things and have the information you need to make that happen. So we had an episode about what to eat in the winter, and now, believe it or not, it is actually spring. So in today's episode, we're gonna get to talk about what to eat in spring. And, guys, it's much more fun than what you eat in the winter. I mean, winter's great and all, but it is now spring. We've passed the first day of spring, and now we can really dig into some delicious first bites that the garden's going to bring us throughout the whole rest of the year. So I'm super excited about this episode. I'm going to walk you through a variety of things that you can be eating that you can be pretty sure are being grown here in North America. I'm assuming you're listening in North America. If you're not, if you're listening, say, in some place south of the equator, then this is going to apply to you about six months from now. And if you're listening and you live pretty close to the equator, then these might have been things that were actually locally available to you, I don't know, two or three months ago. So the assumption here is that most of us are in a space that where the temperatures are ranging somewhere between 25, 30 degrees Fahrenheit up to 75 degrees Fahrenheit. I know that all of us have different temperature ranges, but if you kind of think through those temperatures, that's what we're working with here when we talk about these particular types of foods. So if your temperatures are higher than that or lower than that, if they're higher than that, then this is what you could have been eating for the last few months and that you can start eating again probably in the early fall. And if they're lower than that, then you're just going to push this back, say, a month or so to be sure you're eating locally. So that's enough of the details now. Let's talk about what you can eat this spring to feel confident that you're eating locally and seasonally. So the first plant. As you know, I love to divide my plants up into families. It helps me learn so much more and understand plants because they can be a little overwhelming. There's, like, way more plants in the world than there are people or animals. So, you know, it seems pretty overwhelming just to think about all the animals that there are in the world. But there's way more species of plants. So a great way to take off the overwhelm and to just start to get a better picture of what plants need and how to grow them and which ones to eat and enjoy at different times is to look at them instead of separately in groups of families. So that's the way I'm going to present this information to you today. We're going to walk through the different plant families that you can be eating this spring because they love to grow in this particular time of year and this particular temperature range. In my book, Kitchen Garden Revival, which now comes out, I believe, May 5, we had to push back the date because of the dreaded coronavirus. So the factory production in China was really delayed because of that, which is totally understandable now that we're facing this in our own country in the US so we're looking at a May 5th date. But if you haven't pre ordered it yet, please, please, please do so. In chapter five, I walk you through all the major plant families from the kitchen garden. And it's super fun. It's such a beautiful chapter. So enough about that. Let's dig in to what we can eat this spring. The first family I want to talk about is the amaryllis family, or the allium family, otherwise known as the onion family. So this is one of the earliest things you're going to be able to pull from your garden. When the weather starts to warm up a little bit, the ground starts. So this could be green onions, garlic scapes, scallions and chives. All those first greens of this plant family can be enjoyed very soon, if not right away. I'm sure you've seen the first chives pop up from the ground. Even wild chives or scallions or green onions. Those are great things to cut from the ground to enjoy right away in an omelet or a salad or a top of a homemade soup. And they just bring to me that really fresh first taste of spring that's so special. You may have heard the story of how my mom. One of my first successes in growing was when my mom gave me a pot of garlic chives. And I felt like, so. So, you know, like gourmet, heading out to my porch in the early spring. In Nashville to just cut some chives for an omelette for my family. I was like, oh, my gosh, I am literally Alice Waters right now. So if you haven't experienced that yet, you've got to give it a try. Just plant some garlic in a pot and you'll be able to be cutting garlic, scallions or chives from that pot very quickly in spring. These are great things to buy from your farmers at the farmer's market, to order in your CSA packages, or even to get from the grocery. You just want to make sure you're checking the labels. This is something you could definitely be buying locally. So don't buy green onions or anything from this family if it's not grown locally or near you, because they're all going to be being grown, produced there. So it'd be such a shame to be buying it from far away when you could get tons of it locally. So that's. The first family is the allium family, the onion family, or the more like, you know, proper term, I think is Amaryllidaceae. So that's the Latin term. I'm getting all fancy on you guys. What used to be inside that family, they moved it out. The great scientist or botanist or whoever studies plant families, asparagus used to be inside of this plant family, but they took it out because it does obviously have a very different way of growing. But asparagus is known as one of the first enjoyable spring greens. So asparagus grows like. It has fern like fronds, but the spears are the first thing to pop up from the ground. So asparagus is a perennial bush. You wouldn't want to grow this in a raised bed. You'd want to grow it, say, in a landscape or row garden. And they die back in the cold of winter. And then just as the ground starts to warm up, these spears come up out of the soil. It's so amazing. And those are. That's what we eat. Is that nice, like, very tender, sweet spear from the ground. So I loved the account. You guys know my favorite book is Animal Vegetable Miracle. Well, not my favorite book, but a book that got me on this journey of eating locally and seasonally. And she talks of their first bites of asparagus in the spring. And it's just. It makes you, like, really appreciate it. It's so precious. So asparagus is also something to be enjoyed in the spring for sure. It's one of the first signs that spring has ARR. If you're growing asparagus, make sure that you don't harvest all of the spears. So generally the rule is you harvest for a bit and then you let those spears grow in and go to full maturity. Because you really need that plant to take the full cycle of its growth throughout the year so that it'll come back strong the next year. So it makes it seem even more precious, right? It's like you have to limit yourself. You can have a little bit, but not too much. If you are interested in growing asparagus in your home garden, I think it's a super great thing to do. You do have to be patient though. So unlike a lot of the things we talk about here that you can grow in a 60 to 90 day period, asparagus is something where you'll plant it. And the experts say you should really let the perennial bush mature over a two to three year period before you start harvesting those spears. So patience, dear one, okay? The next family that we can be harvesting and eating and buying is the amaranth family. This is probably one of my favorite things to grow in the garden because it's so beautiful. The back photo on my book, Kitchen Garden Revival. I'm holding a huge handful of leaves from this particular plant family. So it's otherwise known as the goose foot family, the spinach family. Inside this family are super foods. We've got Swiss chard, spinach, beets. These plants are so, so good for our bodies. They have that red line in the plant's veins, I guess, that has all these super qualities, these antioxidants, just all these great vitamins and nutrients for our bodies. Like, it's so perfect timing, right? Like, nature obviously knows we need this after we've come out of a long, cold, hard winter. So all of these can be harvested and enjoyed. The Swiss chard, the spinach, the beets. Even the beets, though you'll have to wait quite a while to get the root out. You can literally be harvesting beet greens from almost the very beginning. So I love doing Swiss chard. And just a saute, you can cook those baby Swiss chard leaves. You can have them in a salad. Spinach the same way. You could eat it both fresh and raw, have it in a smoothie, or you could cook it up and then beets. I think the simplest, best, the easiest way to enjoy beets is just by roasting them with a little bit of olive oil and sea salt. And I love making like a beet green frittata. It's a great way to enjoy the greens, but still let those beets keep doing their thing underneath the ground. So the amaranth family. So good for you. If you're not growing any of those plants yet, you definitely should. And if you're shopping at a farmer's market or buying locally, be on the lookout for those greens. They're so good for your body this time of year, and chances are they're going to be locally available. The next family is the apiaceae family, or the carrot family, or the umbellifer family. This has got celery, carrots, cilantro, parsley in it. These root crops that are so good for us in this early springtime. If you head to a hardware store in the middle of the summer, I don't know why, but they seem to love to offer you cilantro right next to the tomatoes. I think they know that we're suckers for a good salsa recipe. And so anytime we're buying tomatoes for our garden, we just think we should have cilantro, too. But the irony is that cilantro and tomatoes actually don't grow together in the same season. Cilantro loves the cool weather, and tomatoes love warm weather. So bummer. But those two friends just don't play nicely together. But these four do. So celery, carrots, cilantro, parsley, dill is in there, Parsnips are in there, and fennel. All those plants are considered seasonally ready for you to enjoy in the spring. I do hear that there is a certain group of the population that doesn't like cilantro. I can't even understand it, but I read somewhere that it's not their fault. It's just, like, something in their DNA that makes them taste soap every time they have cilantro. Is this you? If it is, I'm so sorry, because I absolutely cannot get enough cilantro, especially when it's from the garden. So I don't know you, but if you've ever bought cilantro, parsley, or dill from the grocery, the stuff that's been shipped all the way from, say, California to your grocery store, it goes bad in, like, negative one days in your fridge. How many times have you pulled out cilantro or parsley? And it's, like, all gooey and slimy, and it just heads to the trash. Yep, I've been there. So it's so much better to get it locally from a farmer, a grower that's growing it near you. The more you can cut down on the travel time of any of those foods, the better the taste is going to be. And you're just going to enjoy it so much more. And I know we'll cut down on tons of waste if we buy these things locally rather than from far away. The next family is the Aster family. I talk about this family a lot because I love it. It is the plant family that taught me how to be a gardener. So this is the lettuce family. In here you've got buttercrunch romaine spring mix. Hello, the name F. Right. Red lettuces and even, would you believe, artichokes are in this plant family. So the Aster family is going to be a little bit more sensitive to frost than some of these others. So things like spinach and beets and even Swiss chard can hold up with some frost. But these softer lettuces, they're actually going to be available a little bit later in the spring. So the less bumpy the leaves, the less tough the leaves, the less the leaves can hold up under more extreme conditions. So you could be buying these from a farmer who's growing under hoops or in a cold frame or even in a greenhouse. But these might be a little bit more challenging for you to grow in your own garden in early spring if you don't have those kinds of protections. But be on the lookout, as soon as these greens are available at the farmer's market or from a local grower, you're going to want to snag them up, because the taste is incomparable to anything you have ever, ever, ever had from a grocery plastic box, believe me. So all these lettuces can be eaten seasonally all spring long. And until the temperatures really rise above, say, 75 or 80 degrees, there's a good chance that these lettuces are being grown locally around you, even if not in your own garden. So please, please, please make sure you prioritize getting these from a local grower rather than from some farmer in. What's that place called? Oh, yeah, California or Arizona. If you haven't listened to my episode on romaine, you gotta do. So I think it was, I don't know, maybe five number six, somewhere around there. It's called Romaine Calm. And I tell you the surprising story about how about 98% of the romaine lettuce in the US is grown in two places, the yumas Valley in Arizona and Salinas Valley in California. And how we really should change that. So romaine is in the Aster family. So if you're in a place where the temperatures are ranging from, say, 35 to 75 degrees Fahrenheit you really could have romaine locally grown near you rather than buying it from those two places in the US So search for it. Find somebody that's growing lettuce or grow your own. I give you tips on how to do that in that episode. Now I mentioned artichokes are also in this family. They're very different kind of plant than the lettuces. So artichokes are a perennial plant that stay in the ground. If you do want to grow artichokes like the asparagus, I recommend growing them outside of your raised bed kitchen garden. Artichokes have these amazing, I think, dinosaur like looking leaves that are like incredibly bumpy and kind of fern like. And artichokes grow from this major one stem. The plant will really branch out with these huge leaves and they'll send up stems, tall stems. And then the artichoke really is like the seed pod. It's the fruit of that plant. And these actually come up in the early spring, believe it or not. So I had the pleasure of growing these in my garden in Houston. I actually planted these throughout my landscape, and they were some of the most gorgeous things to watch form. I almost didn't want to harvest them. And if you don't harvest them, they will open up and provide the most beautiful flower I think that maybe you've ever seen. It's like purple and frilly and incredible and the bees and the butterflies just love it. So if you've never watched an artichoke grow, I highly recommend the experience. It was so fun. Artichokes can be a little bit difficult to manage in terms of picking them and using them. You need to do a few steps to soften the, whatever they're called, petals or whatever and make it digestible. But the whole experience is super fun. And if all you've ever had is like a jarred or canned artichoke, then it's pretty neat to harvest your own. Or just look for them from your local farmers. You can request them if you head to the farmer's market. And then when you're at the grocery store, make sure you're really prioritizing buying artichokes that are locally grown rather than one that that's, you guessed it, been shipped pretty far across the country to get to you. All right. Another plant family to prioritize during the spring is the brassica family, otherwise known as like the dark and leafy green family or just the super good for you greens family. This includes everything from arugula to cauliflower. So arugula is one of the fastest growing, easiest greens to grow. If you want to try your hand at growing just a little something this year, you've got to try arugula. I find so much success with it. Even when we're coaching brand new gardeners, arugula is almost a for sure win. Arugula grows really fast from seed and it tastes so good when you get to harvest it when it's small and eat it right away. Personally, I can't stand the bagged arugula from the grocery store. It's just like either tastes like list tastes less or just like, I don't know, cardboard like. So don't eat arugula from far away. Eat arugula that's just been harvested. I promise you the taste is unlike any other you've ever tried. Even if you just have a little container outside your front door or maybe even indoors, I highly recommend trying to grow a little bit of your own. Also in this family are mustards. So mustards can be really large like collards or Florida broadleaf I think is one of my favorites. But in the mustard family is also a very simple green to grow called Mizuna. Mizuna has these lace like leaves. It's so beautiful. You can grow purple varieties and all different colors, obviously green varieties. It has a little bit of a mustardy flavor, the name fits, or a peppery flavor, if you want to call it that. And it just adds this little bit of punch to, to home grown salad and I love it. Mizunas, I would say come in second in terms of the easiest greens to grow from seeds. So start with arugula and then move on to mizuna. The third easiest green to grow I think is kale. Kale is so fast to grow from seed and you can harvest it at all different stages. You could eat a little bit when it's little. You can eat a ton of it when the leaves are large. And kale will really kind of conform to whatever kind of space you want to, to give it. So if you want to give it a lot of space in your garden, it'll totally take it up. But if you also want to just keep it small, you can just keep harvesting from it. These greens, the mustards, the arugula and the kale are wonderful to buy from local farmers. They can grow a ton of it. And I'm guessing this is a place where they could really make their money because they can harvest from those plants again and again. You're going to get so much more Nutrition. So much more taste, so much more value. When you buy these greens from your local farmers versus versus buying them from the grocery. And they can harvest these again and again. So the plants and the hard work that they put into their farms and gardens, I'm guessing this is probably a place where they can really make a little bit so that they can keep on growing for us. So support your farmers. If you don't have enough of these greens in your own garden, be sure that you're buying these locally. Some greens that take longer to grow in this family are broccoli and cauliflower and also romanesco or romesco, however you want to say it, that super alien, like green. These are all in the same family. They all grow pretty slowly and take up a good bit of space in the kitchen garden. These plants are actually ones I really highly recommend buying from local farmers versus growing your own, unless you have a lot of space. So if you have a row garden or like lots and lots of garden beds, then growing something big like broccoli or cauliflower can make sense because the taste is fantastic. But these plants are going to take at least 90 days to fully form, and they're going to take up a minimum of probably 2 square feet in your garden, if not more. So if you have smaller space, it really doesn't make sense to grow these. You'd be much better off to grow mustards and kales and arugulas and sweet lettuces, rather than giving your time and space to these plants. But probably down the road, you've got some farmers and growers who are growing these very things. They're doing the them organically or naturally. So you're still going to get that awesome local, just harvested flavor, but you didn't have to give up the space in your own garden to get it. So if you do head to the farmer's market or you're in a csa, you might want to prioritize the broccoli, the cauliflower, the romesco, those bigger plants, because they've done the hard work, they've given up the big space on their farm to grow that for you. And then you can prioritize the smaller things in your own garden. That's just my recommendation. That one's for free. Okay, so that's the Brassica family. Now, finally, let's talk about the. Actually, it's not finally I have a couple more, but in the vegetable realm, let's talk about the legume family or the Fabaceae family, I think is the way you say it, it's like the bean and the pea family. So if you missed it, episode 11, I believe. Yeah, episode 11 is all about the sugar snap pea. I tell you the surprising story of how the sugar snap pea was developed. It's a super, super cool story. If you haven't listened to it, you should go check it out. And I also talked to you about how to grow and plant your own. So there are peas in the cool season. So peas grow in the spring. We've got traditional garden peas, then we've got snow peas. The name fits, right? They're. They can deal with frost and snow. We've got fava beans and sugar snaps. So all of these peas have some frost and cold resistance and really thrive during this time period between, say, 30 degrees, all the way up to 75 degrees. Peas either are going to grow up a trellis, so they're going to need some support, or they'll grow in bush, like form where they're going to grow to, say, 1 to 2ft tall and might need, like a stake or something in the middle of them to keep them. Peas are so good for you. They do offer some protein and fiber and can keep you sustained throughout the spring season with like, a little bit more. What's the word? Like, they just have a little bit more depth, right, Than all these greens and leafy things that we're eating. It's so great to add peas to the mix. So if you aren't growing your own, you definitely want to prioritize buying these from your farmers and your local growers, too, because they're so great for you and they're going to taste so much better. If you listen to the episode on sugar snaps. I talk about the fact that the majority of sugar snaps we buy from the grocery store. There's a very high likelihood that those have been sprayed with pesticide. I don't know about you, but it's very hard for me to find organic sugar snaps at my local groceries. They often are already wrapped up in a plastic pouch and there are very few organic available. So that means all those sugar snaps, they're actually on the dirty dozen list, I believe. So they're one of the plants that has the higher content of pesticides and herbicides sprayed on them. So, boo. Right. Like you think you're doing something good, but instead you're eating pesticides. So your local farmer, there's a chance you can ask them how they grow, and hopefully they're growing more organically and not naturally. One quick thing. I forgot to Mention in the brassica family is the radishes. I forgot to throw those in. So that's a unique part of that family that obviously you definitely want to add to your spring list. Freshly harvested radishes are so good, and it's a great thing to be growing and buying right now in the spring because they are one of those first root crops to come up, and right alongside the arugula and the mustards and the kale, I would say radishes are kind of right behind them, and they're so good for you. And so they have such a great earthy taste at the beginning of spring. All right, let's move quickly to our fruits. So what fruit can we eat seasonally in the spring? There aren't a lot at the very beginning, honestly. So first we're just going to talk about rhubarb. Rhubarb is technically not a fruit. In fact, a lot of people think rhubarb is in the same family as celery, which it's not. It's in the buckwheat family, or polygonaceae, something like that, in the Latin phrase. So rhubarb is going to feel similar to asparagus and artichokes in that it is a perennial bush. So this is going to be grown generally, you want to have this in the ground, not in your raised beds, because it's going to be very large. And rhubarb is one of those first things to come up in the spring. It's these beautiful red stalks. And. And mostly what people do with the red stalks is treat them like a fruit so they'll make like a rhubarb cobbler, a rhubarb pie, or, I don't know, rhubarb stuff with sugar and butter and all those other things that make it taste appetizing. So that is one thing you could use kind of as a fruit stand in, if you will, as we wait for the berries and the apple, other parts of our favorite fruits to come into produce as the season wears on. The very first berry generally to be available are the strawberries. And strawberries are coming up pretty soon, depending on where you live. So when I was in Houston, strawberries in some places were available year round, or not year round, not in the summer, ironically, but in the winter, because we had such a mild winter there, and a lot of farmers would grow them in greenhouses, are under cover. But I can remember going strawberry picking with my children as early as late February or early March. Strawberries in more temperate parts, more Cooler parts of the US Will be coming up as the weather starts to warm. So say April or May or even early June. So be on the lookout for strawberries. And that's another thing you want to really be checking that you're buying locally. So as soon as local strawberries are available, don't buy them from California or someplace far, far away from you. Whenever you're entering the season, when those things are available locally, you definitely want to prioritize them. So blueberries will be coming fairly soon thereafter. The strawberries. I know when I visit my parents in Mississippi, we always go at the end of May and the beginning of June to pick blueberries. So that's in a pretty warm climate. So I know for some of us, that may mean blueberries are more in the middle of summ, but if you are in a more temperate place, blueberries will be coming by the end of spring. So there you have it. Those are some of the things that you can be filling up on this season. And, oh, my gosh, isn't this a big list? There are so many fun things, so many delicious things to be enjoying in the spring season. This is where we first get to get a hint of how amazing it is to eat food that seasonal, seasonally available, to buy local food, and to grow a little bit of our own, if you will, put just a little bit of this into practice. If you would just prioritize, say, eating one seasonal meal a week, you could change so many things. If any of us, if all of us, would commit to eating one local meal a week, the amount of fuel that our country uses to truck our food would go down by millions of barrels. It doesn't feel like little things like that add up, but they literally do. So I want to challenge you to eat one local meal a week for the entire spring season. So take this list and put together some menus of things that you could try and eat and just focus on doing it. One meal a week. I know you can do it. I hope you feel inspired to grow a little bit of this food yourself. I hope now you feel equipped to know how to head to the farmer's market, what to ask for, what to look for. And now you definitely know what tags to check at the grocery store. So be a little sneaky, get in there and make sure you're not buying any of these things from far away when they're literally probably growing right outside your back door or down the street from you. When we eat locally, when we eat seasonally, and when we buy locally, we literally can change the world together. So let's do it. Let's fill up on the good stuff all spring long. I cannot wait to see see what you put on your plate. Thanks so much for listening and I will see you next week on the Grow youw Self Podcast. Thanks so much for listening to the Grow youw Self Podcast. Listen. In these tough times, doing these simple things really make makes a difference. Just imagine a world where all of us were eating seasonally, we were supporting our local growers, and we were all growing a little bit of our own food. Think about what a different world we would be living in if we were all doing this before we faced the scare of this coronavirus pandemic. I dream of a day when all of us are growing a little bit of our own food and we're all supporting the local growers near us. And I know that that day is soon to come. So thank you so much for being part of this good food movement. Thank you for being here with me and filling up on the good stuff. Don't forget that today's podcast is brought to you by my Green Thumb quiz. It's going to give you so much insight onto where you are currently as a gardener, and I'm going to give you a ton of resources on how to take where you are as a gardener right now and bring it to the next level. There are challenges, there's ebooks, there's courses, there's all kinds of good stuff for you on the other side of the quiz. So go check it out@gardenary.com quiz thanks so much for listening to the Grow youw Self podcast and I'll see you next time.