BBQ Garden Connection

Sharing another note written for our local community garden members . . .   Some of it won't apply to the public at large, but some may prove useful!

While everyone knows there are many things we can grow in the garden that are tasty cooked on the grill or used in a sauce, some people may not have started experimenting with using garden grown natural smoke flavorings yet. Get your taste buds ready!

Rosemary at Growing Together Gardens

Rosemary is the most well known garden smoke flavoring, and we do have some rosemary to share in the garden. We have two varieties of rosemary, one is a tender version and one is more woody. The woody one is the one you want for the BBQ, and ours is a little over grown and needs cut back. It is growing in the large octagonal bed that was formerly tended by Adam and Melissa. This is the one closest to both the rows of rectangular garden beds and to Water Street. The part that needs cut back in hanging out of the garden bed. If you pruned a four inch piece, that would give you enough to try, and it would leave the rest for other people who wanted to try it as well. This is also the best rosemary for drying and grinding to use as a spice. If it turns out that no one wants it for the BBQ, maybe latter in the season someone will want to dry it for use in their kitchen. 


Another thing we have in the garden, which makes an excellent smoke flavoring is our raspberry canes! In fact, all the related cane fruits--raspberry, black berry, thimble berry, logan berry, and so on—produce a very tasty smoke. The canes themselves add fruity flavors, and the leaves which also have fruity notes, are more complex and hard to describe. If you have used fruit wood on the BBQ or in the some house, cane fruit is more like cherry wood than anything else, but really, it has a taste all its own.

I recently pruned back one corner of our overgrown raspberries in the garden, primarily to get them to resprout as more compact plants to give away through the food bank. That left a little pile of young canes with their leaves attached. Looking at that pile made me drool; however, I no longer run a little smoke house and I won’t be BBQing at anytime in the foreseeable future. If you would like to take some or all of those canes, they are on the ground between the new staked beds near the black compost bin and the berry patch. If no one is interested, once they are thoroughly dry, they will be safe to bury in a compost trench or to be clipped up into small pieces and put in a compost pile. If nothing else, they will contribute to our topsoil! Nothing need be wasted in an organic garden!

Questions are always welcome, in person at the garden or right here as a comment. In fact, if you want to share some BBQ tips on using anything from the garden, that would be grand.

Photo added 11.13.2016.  Text and photo copyright Harvest McCampbell.  Please feel free to use the buttons below to share.  All other rights reserved.