Seeds from Italy News
Vol 5, # 3, September 2005
We publish four times a year (usually) and include information on all aspects of Italian vegetables, herbs and flowers: selecting, growing, harvesting and storing and cooking. We would be happy to receive and if space permits, publish your experiences in these areas.
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1. Privacy Policy
2. What's New
3. Genuine Italian Garlic
4. Recipe
5. What is this thing? - Arugula
6. Cookbook of Note: The Flavors of Southern Italy
7. Market Growers. I need some help.
8. Seeds from Italy Trial Garden
9. Fava beans for the fall.
10. Growing Tip. Beet spacing
11. What can I still plant.
1. Privacy Policy. A number of people on their order forms asked me not to sell or divulge their personal information: address, telephone numbers, email addresses, etc. I want everyone to understand that I take privacy very seriously. I never disclose any customer information to anyone under any circumstances.(except of course the inadvertent screw up in the July 2003 newsletter. ) I have been bothered by too many telemarketers, received too much junk email to do that to anyone else. I don't even keep credit card numbers: a number of customers who reordered and told me to use their credit card number on file were surprised when I told them I do not keep them on my computer, nor do I have access to them from the credit card authorizing service.
2. What is new. I am working on new items for 2006. Franchi has some new items which look very interesting. There is a yellow watermelon from Poland & a Yellow Radish (also from Poland). They have a couple of new tomatoes. I am also going to add some more beans (a green anellino & maybe a varigated anellino). There are several new winter squash (rouge vif etamps & a French one that looks like a cheese pumpkin. Franchi has asparagus crowns and I think I have figured out how legally to get them in the United States. They look pretty exciting: one is a 'wild asparagus' and the other is a white hybrid from Venice. More on those in the December issue.
3. GENUINE ITALIAN GARLIC. I have finally set up a mechanism to bring in Italian garlic. It is a bit tricky (it has to come through New Jersey and be fumigated) but it should work. The three varieties available are: 1. Rosso di Sulmona (red from Sulmona). This is a red hardneck garlic from Abruzzo. Really good flavor. I know it will work at least in zone 5 (where I am in Massachusetts) because I actually got a few cloves three years ago (before they changed the rules) and it grew quite well. 2. Bianco Piacentina (white from Piacenza). White softneck from Tuscany. I have grown this and it is a really nice garlic and obviously it works in at least zone five. 3. Viola Francese (French purple). There was some confusion over the description of this, but it sounds like it is a softneck type. It has larger cloves than the Italian varieties (which are small like most Italian garlic). Said to have very good taste. All of the garlic is loose (not in blister packs) and is sold in half pound (or larger) quantities. It is all up on the web site. The garlic should be here by the middle of September and I will ship in time for planting in your area. Order now since quantity is limited and I am not sure I can get any more.
4. RECIPE. Zucchini & cherry tomato salad. This is really simple, but boy is it good. There is a photo of it up on the newsletter published on the web site. You can see it at: Pick some smallish zucchini; try and get them five or six inches at most. I used the white from sicily which I grew this year, but any will work. Drop them in a pan of boiling water and cook them two minutes or so. Remove and run cold water over
them to cool them. Slice them into quarter inch or so chunks. Cut up some cherry tomatoes. I used lilliput and a yellow heirloom I have been growing for years (save the seeds). Roughly tear up a good sized bunch of basil. Toss everything together. Add 2-3 tablespoons of really good olive oil (the stuff you save for really special occasions, not the stuff you cook with) and and a tablespoon or so of good red wine vinegar or some balsamic vinegar. Add salt & pepper to taste. Let it sit for a couple of hours. Have it with some really good bread (maybe spray the bread with a bit of olive oil & toast it).
5. WHAT IS THIS THING? This is the section where I highlight a particular vegetable which is either very little known in the United States or is one for which there is some confusion as to what it is, what it is called [as opposed to official name] and/or how it should be grown and used. What I will try and do is describe the vegetable, how it is grown, what it is used for in Italy, and how it is cooked. This month I want to focus on Arugula. While most people have seen and tasted arugula, they often are not familiar with the various types, the most effective ways to grow it, and the many ways it can be used.
What is it: Arugula (in Italian, rucola). It is a leafy green with a very distinctive peppery/sharp taste. It is incredibly easy to grow-it grows faster than the weeds. It comes in both a cultivated variety [rucola coltivata] and a wild variety (rucola selvatica which is wild in Italian). To make things a bit more confusing, there are different strains. Franchi Sementi, for instance has regular cultivated arugula & sel ortalani (market grower) cultivated arugula. For wild arugula they have regular wild arugula and wild arugula sel. extra. In general the fancy versions are more regular in growth habit & taste. The extra wild arugula tends to give an extra cut (three cuts, for example, rather than two). Cultivated arugula has a lobed leaf, grows very quickly [it should germinate in three days] and be ready to pick in 30-35 days, and you get one pick. Wild arugula is slower growing (60 days or so), has a long leaf with a distinct stem and and serrated leaf, and you can pick it multiple times. It is much more assertive. There is also a wild arugula sel. liscia which has a roundish leaf. It is more common in southern Italy. It is pretty hard to find. Sometimes I can get it, sometimes not. I am not sure about this year.
How to grow arugula. Forget about this stuff you see in garden centers with one or two plants in a pot. Franchi packs have 5000 or so seeds. For cultivated arugula, the easiest and most effective way to grow it is to make a nice smooth bed; all my beds are three feet wide and raised a bit. Broadcast seed it trying to get one seed an inch. You will never get that exactly, but try. For someone who likes cultivated arugula, perhaps do a two foot section of your bed. Once you have scattered the seed, tamp it down [I use my hands). Water well. Water every day and it will be up in three days. Just leave it. It grows so quickly it will choke out most weeds. When it is four or five inches high, begin to
harvest. The easiest way to harvest it is to grab a handful and cut it an inch or so above the soil line. You can also just pull a bunch out and clean it later. However, it is more difficult to cut the roots and clean it that way. That section should give you plenty of salad for 10-14 days. By then it is too big to bother with & turn it under. Every ten days (unless you get sick of it), plant another two foot section. Wild arugula is a bit different. You can try and grow it in a bed, but the problem is that it is slower growing than cultivated arugula & the weeds can be a chore. I grow it in rows spaced 10 inches or so apart. Try and sow a seed an inch. The seeds are really small and that is pretty hard, but try. When it comes up, you can begin to thin it (eating the thinnings of course) spacing your plants 5-6 inches apart. Use a stirrup hoe to control weeds inbetween rows. It grows fairly close to the ground, so once you get it established the weeds are not much of a problem. Pick the outer stems. You should get at least two or three pickings per plant. If you let some of it go to seed, it will come back the next year and you may be able to establish a permanant bed (I usually just replant). A pack of wild arugula should take care of a family for a year. For cultivated arugula fans, it depends on the size of your family. I usually go through a 100 gram pack a year, but I eat a lot of it and cook with it too.
How to serve arugula. Cut it or pick (for wild) and wash well. Everyone thinks of salad when they hear arugula, and I must admit that I like it on salad. My favorite is one I serve on a dinner size plate. The first layer is a bed of lettuce; something crunchy like radichetta or lollo rossa is nice. Then spread a bunch of baby arugula on top of that. Slice up a tomato (red pear?) and put a layer of that on top. Cut some onion thin and put that on top. If I am going to make a meal out of it, grate some really good cheese like a fontinella. Salt & pepper, good olive oil & a bit of vinegar and you are good to go. However, arugula is also great other ways. You can serve it with pasta which is a real treat. (Make a salsa cruda - chop up some really good tomatoes, add some olive oil, salt & pepper, perhaps a bit of garlic. Let it sit a while. Toss the arugula in. Add cooked pasta. Serve. Any cook book has a ton of recipes on using cooked arugula. If you wish, just go on line and use google to search (arugula and pasta)
6. BOOK OF NOTE. Erica De Mane. The Flavors of Southern Italy. John Wiley & sons, Hobeken, NJ, 2004. This has some really great recipes from Southern Italy. The first 80 pages or so has really good information on techniques, ingredients, etc. There are six or seven really nice sounding recipes using arugula. The pasta with halved raw cherry tomatoes, arugula, capocolla, garlic, basil, olive oil & grating cheese sounds like heaven. Her salad with cherry tomatoes sounds better than mine.
7. MARKET GROWERS. I need some help. I advertise in Growing for Market and for next year, I would like to have an advertisement which includes 'testimonials' from customers (preferably positive) who subscribe to Growing for Market. If you have used my seeds, I would appreciate a comment about them. Perhaps what customers said about the vegetables, perhaps how they grew or germinated or produced or taste, or anything else you can think of. Please keep it brief-advertising space is not cheap. Also, if you are willing to allow me to use your name and/or the name of your farm, please indicate that. You can either send by email: bmckay@growitalian.com by fax: 612 435 4020 or postal mail to Seeds from Italy, PO Box 149, Winchester, MA 01890 Many thanks for your assistance.
8. 2005 TRIAL GARDEN
FAVA BEANS. The last snow did not melt until mid April, so I was not able to get fava beans in until 20 April. I planted superaguadule and supersimonia
(sel maroc). Seeds were one inch deep, space five inches apart with rows 24 inches apart. I thought the crop failed; they took three weeks to germinate, but I had
almost 100 percent germination. They grew pretty slow through may and early June, then really took off when it warmed up a bit. First flowers appeared about sixty days after sowing; the first favas were ready in 78 or so days. Harvest continued through July. I finally pulled them around the beginning of August; it got really hot and aphids showed up with a
vengeance.
Both varieties took about the same time to mature (80 days). Had the spring been warmer and if I had a bit more sun on my garden space (spouse will not let me cut down some of the trees that shade the west) they probably would have been ready five or six days earlier. Both varieties had fairly long pods with five or six beans in each pod. If you pick them young, you can eat them with out removing the bitter outer skin. Taste was outstanding. They are really worth growing for a treat.
Some of them I pinched the tops when the first flowers appeared, others I left alone. If you pinch the tops, you actually increase the yield since you get a lot of side shoots. This is especially important if you have a long cool spring so that those side shoots have time to flower and set pods. I also basket wove mine with a string, since favas have a tendency to flop over when they get tall and set a lot of pods. Pictures are online.
TOMATOES. New varieties this year were
maremmano, San Marzano nano (bush), goia della mensa and gigante liscio. I will report my results here; next time will include the results of the trial growers. Of course I grew a bunch of my favorites also
(patano, red pear, san marzano redorta, costuluto fiorintino, oxheart, palla di fuoco and a bunch more). Tomato plants were started on 28 March in flats, went into six packs, then four inch pots and these went out to the unheated hoophouse about May 1. Usually I transplant from the four inch pots around 20 May, but it was so cold they stayed in the hoophouse until 2 June when they went outside. Some were transplanted into six inch pots and had got pretty big and had flowers when they were transplanted. It was so cold & damp I did have some fungus problems while they were in the
hoophouse. Weather was difficult for tomatoes and almost guaranteed to produce disease problems. June was cool, then warmed up for the last two weeks. Tomatoes were doing incredibly well when we had a long spell of cold (as in 40's) with rain in
midJuly. Most plants developed leaf spot diseases, though they continued to produce as the weather improved significantly. In general, plants all did well, though they did not look terrific.
Maremmano. This is a bush variety. It produces a huge quantity of 1-2" fruit. First fruit were ready in 60 or so days. It was the first tomato to produce, even before the cherry tomatoes. Most of the fruit ripen at the pretty much the same time. While taste for fresh eating is ok (since it was first to ripen it tasted great) it is really a cooking/processing tomato. Taste is excellent for a paste type tomato. It has soft flesh & the skin comes off fairly easily. It makes a great sauce. It is suitable for fresh sauce, for canning whole (perfect size) and especially for processing with the passata machine. If it has one fault, it seemed to me that it had a lot of seeds (but if you make
passata, the seeds are removed anyway.
San Marzano Nano f1. Bush hybrid San Marzano type. Early (65 or so days from pretty good sized transplants. Amazing production of 4-6 ounce paste tomatoes. Fairly concentrated ripening. Fruit are definitely for sauce or conserving. They made an excellent tasting sauce. This probably made almost as many fruit as an indeterminate San
Marzano, though the harvest season is more concentrated.
Goia della
Mensa. Translation of name is "Jewell of the Table" and it is a very handsome tomato. It produced a large quantity of deep red perfectly shaped fruit which weighed 10-12 ounces. Taste was very good. Fruit were ready in 70 or so days, so it is an early mid-season variety. Fairly good disease resistance (anything that survived this summer in New England has decent disease resistance.) Definitely a tomato for fresh eating.
Gigante Liscio (Large smooth). This was another perfectly shaped tomato. Indeterminate, ready in 70 or so days. Good producer of 10-12 ounce smooth red fruit. Very good taste & texture. For fresh eating. Plant was a small indeterminate and might lend itself to basket weaving type support for you market growers. I did them in two foot wide cages, but that was a bit of overkill. Pretlty good disease resistance.
BASIL TRIALS. This year I set out Genovese Basil (the standard) as well as Napoleatano Bolloso and Sicilian Basil. Plants were started in six packs at the end of March, 6-7 seeds per cell thinned to three. They went out to the unheated hoophouse the end of April. They went into the garden the beginning of June spaced 12" apart. The Bolloso developed into 12" plants with huge (4 inch plus) leaves with very assertive flavor. Both the genovese and the sicilian basils grew sixteen plus inches tall and were very bushy. The genovese has the characteristic smooth leaf and excellent flavor. I was not sure what to expect of the sicilian basil
(diserento strain). It is a small leaf type, about the same size leaf as the
genovese. However, the leaf is a bit blistered, like the Napoleatano. Very assertive flavor. I tried several taste comparisons. Liked them all, though I thought the sicilian was the most assertive
flavor. Any of them make a really good basil.
These are young plants and it is a bit difficult to tell them apart. The
sicilian is on the right, then genovese, then napoleatano. The far left
row is more genovese. This is a close up of the Sicilian basil. You
can see that the leaves are a bit blistered whereas the genovese is completely
smooth.
ONION. I grew the cipollotto a mazi (bunching onion) for the first time and was impressed. Direct seeded in 4" deep trenches on May 7th. Seeds were spaced at one inch, rows at 8 inches. Good germination. Filled in the trenches as they grew which made it easy to control weeds and also gives the onions that longish white stem. They were ready toward the end of July. Very nice white tips with absolutely no bulb. Good tender green stems. Great flavor, excellent in salad. If you started them inside about 9-10 weeks before set out, they would be considerably earlier. Also, I would probably make my initial trenches deeper, perhaps six inches, so as to increase the size of the white tip.
SPIGARIELLO. This is a broccoli, though it is grown not for the head but for the leaves. In southern italy where this is very popular, the
leaves are commonly made into a soup. However, it can also be eaten raw if you like. Better is to cook it like any green (boil it, drain, chop,
cook in some olive oil flavored with a bit of garlic and red pepper). It is grown just like head broccoli. I started some transplants about six weeks before setting them out the beginning of May. Spacing was sixteen inches since these get pretty good sized. Initially, the plant looks just like a regular broccoli plant. The photo on the left is the immature plant. The photo on the right is the mature plant. As it matures, they grow smaller and longer leaves and little brocoletto type heads. The more you cut them, the more side shoots they will send up.
The photographs below have been previously reported on, but nevertheless are old favorites.
Four Seasons Lettuce (quattro
stagioni). This is a lovely and tasty butterhead. In the spring the
color is a lighter red than in the fall when it turns almost completely
red. It has medium resistance to bolting. This was grown from 
seed
and just about made it to full size before they began to bolt. In the
spring, if you get very hot weather early, you would be better off setting out
six or seven week transplants. Note that this particular plant is growing
in the middle of a a few rows of parsley and there is a beet (egitto) next to
it. The reason is that I had a bunch of red ants in the garden. I
sow lettuce on the surface and they redistributed my lettuce seed (and other
seeds) all over the garden.
Red salad bowl is also
lighter in the spring than the fall. It has a nice crunch and very good
resistance to bolting. 
It is definitely a loose leaf lettuce worth growing.
9. Fava beans for the fall. In many parts of the country (pretty much anywhere the winter temperature does not go below 15F or so), fava beans should be planted in the late fall. They overwinter well and give a crop the following spring before the temperatures get excessive. Last year I had a hard time getting fava beans in and they were not available for fall planting. This year I have them in stock right now and more are on the way. Order now for fall planting.
10. Growing tip. Beet spacing. I usually encourage people to give their plants plenty of space. Planting too close encourages the spread of disease, usually results in smaller plants/fruit, and you will probably get less total harvest than if you plant at the recommended distance and ruthlessly thin out your plantings. However, sometimes you can get away with it. Beets are one vegetable that do well planted closely. Instead
of planting one seed every two or three inches and spacing rows 10" or so apart, you can plant wide rows. Try planting 5-6" wide rows. Try and get a single seed per square inch; thin to one plant every two square inches. Begin picking when
the beets are an inch or so across. Set up your harvest so that you are at the same time thinning out your wide row. You will get an enormous crop out of a very small area and your planting will last for a longer time. The only down side is that your crop will probably be a bit later than if you used a single row. For what it is worth, I think the best size to pick beets is when they are one to two inches. They are incredibly tender.
In the picture on the left, chioggia beets are in the foreground, egitto are in
the background. This is the result when you space closely. These are just
about the correct size for baby beets.
11. What can I still plant. It depends on what part of the country you live in. In colder areas like New England, things are winding down. You can still plant arugula and get a harvest. If you provide a bit of protection (row covers, for example) you can still do lettuce, endive or chicory salad mixes. Further south you can still get in traditional fall crops and for you lucky folks in California, Florida and other parts of the south, you can continue to plant your cool season crops throughout the year. Just about all varieties are available - they ran out of a couple of fennels & some beans in Italy, but otherwise, I have everything here.
Good Growing
Bill McKay