As I was perusing the offerings of my favourite plant and seed store last spring, I discovered some seed packages for Cherry Vanilla Quinoa. http://www.herbs.mb.ca/en/on-line-shopping/seeds/all-seeds/quinoa_cherry_vanilla_seeds.html
Quinoa seeds! How preposterous! I want some!
Somehow I assumed that quinoa would be an exotic warm weather plant like everything else that's tasty in the world, but it was first domesticated up in the alpine plains of the Andes. It doesn't like weather much above 30 degrees and it prefers cooler nights. It's actually currently being grown commercially in Saskatchewan, so I figured it should do just fine in downtown Winnipeg.
I had planted a bunch of new things in this part of the garden so I wasn't sure which plants were weeds and which were my seedlings. The arugula was spindly, the frisee was non-existent for the first week or so and all I could see where I planted my quinoa was pigweed. On the other hand the spinach was gorgeous due to the colder weather.
After a little investigation online I found out that quinoa does, in fact, look exactly like pigweed which made it a little difficult to separate the good stuff from the bad stuff at first - but it kept getting taller and taller and taller...
This clump of greenness shows the garden at the end of August. At this point the tallest quinoa plant was about 5 foot 7 or so - definitely taller than me. Officially this stuff isn't supposed to grow this tall, but it seemed as though our weird weather last summer made it shoot straight up instead of staying shorter and producing big seed heads.
The plants started drying up mid-September, so I cut off the seed heads and left them to dry in a big vase on my kitchen table for the next few weeks.
Once they were dry, I had to figure out some way of removing the seeds from the chaff. I thought of using screens, or of using a fan to blow away the undesirable stuff, but the seeds are just so small that I had to think of something else to try.
I started out by rubbing the seed clusters into a big bowl, and then painstakingly hand-picked all the green stuff out of the bowl. Because the flowers hadn't developed that well, there was a lot of fluffy stuff that kind of looked like it should have contained a seed but hadn't matured properly. After a bit of experimenting I found out that this fluffy stuff FLOATED.
So a routine developed... Add water to bowl, swish around vigourously, whisk away the stuff that floats to the top. Inspect the removed portion for errant seeds. Repeat.
I must have rinsed out that damn blue bowl a dozen times....
The good thing about this technique was that home-grown quinoa requires vigourous rinsing since it grows with a bitter coating which is usually already removed in commercially available stuff.
After all the rinsing, the quinoa was left to dry on a cookie sheet in my dining room. After about a week it was totally dry and it went into the jar pictured at the top of this post.
All this work created one cup of quinoa. ONE CUP!
How do you honour ONE MEASLY CUP of home-grown quinoa?
By making quinoa salad with oranges, mint and sun-dried black olives for all your friends at a potluck, that's how. I hope they enjoyed it.
More on growing quinoa in Canada: http://www.saltspringseeds.com/scoop/powerfood.htm
More on growing quinoa in Canada: http://www.saltspringseeds.com/scoop/powerfood.htm
3 comments:
I'm looking at my seed pack of Temuco Quinoa while reading your blog post. Makes me wonder if I should sow it or give it away as a "present" to a quinoa lover! I have a much greater appreciation for the price of quinoa now. Although, on the other hand, I have a greater connection for edibles once I've grown them myself. And, it sure does look nice as a centerpiece!
i sure hope you check this blog regularly. i am a high school home ec teacher here in winnipeg, and a group of my students just won the localvore competition yesterday! instead of sitting back and just staring at my i mean OUR trophy i starting thinking how could we make it 100% local for next year. that is when i started looking for all kinds of local ingredient ideas, that hopefully they would be willing to look into. now i personally am gluten-free so thank god for quinoa! i was thinking, i wonder if this grows in mb and that is how i found you. so two questions, first did you keep any seeds (if so, what are the odds that we could snag a few to try growing in our school garden) if not where did you get your seeds? next, do you think you will be growing it again this year, and if so how would you like to maybe be a part of our recipe? i was thinking if we could get some local winnipeg grown quinoa for the recipe that would blow the judges away! let me know your thoughts, i am obviously so impressed that you grew them yourself!
Hey, L!
Congrats on your Localvore win! Even though I now live in Nova Scotia, I read about the Localvore competition on the Food Matters Facebook update this morning, and had warm and fuzzy feelings towards all the cool stuff happening in Winnipeg.
As for the quinoa, I got my seeds at Sage Garden Herbs a few years back. I just checked their catalogue, and quinoa isn't listed anymore. Maybe they'd still have small amounts directly at their store? The variety I used was either the 'red head' or the 'cherry vanilla'.
Shouldn't be too hard to find elsewhere online, though. If your school has a community garden, quinoa might be a cool thing to try growing. It grows like a weed (literally - it looks exactly like pigweed) and the greens are really tasty and nutritious. I think if I'd grow it again, I'd do a little more research into supplementing the soil with the nutrients necessary to develop good seeds - my plants grew really tall, but weren't terribly interested in growing seeds!
I'd love to chat with you some more about the cool work you're doing... maybe e-mail me at froddard@gmail.com?
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