Italian Vegetable Garden. Rosalind Creasy

       One of my early specialty gardens included many vegetables and herbs enjoyed in Italy. The beds were filled with tall, purple sprouting broccolis, beets, chard, arugula, chicories, and lettuces as well as rosemary, oregano, fennel, thyme, and parsley.

      In addition, Italians harvest many plants from the wild and grow some of them in their gardens. Italian gardeners grow and harvest “baby greens” and garden blanch (deprive the plants of light to make them more tender and less bitter) many of the chicories, endive, and cardoon.

      To enjoy many of the Italian specialties in your own garden, you must order both the Italian varieties of common vegetables and the more unusual vegetables and herbs from specialty seed companies. See Resources (page 109) for the names and urls of seed companies and nurseries.

      Because Italy is on the Mediterranean, its climate is characterized by long, hot summers with very little rain, fairly mild winters, and a long spring and fall. The long growing season allows the Italian gardener to plant slow-maturing plants, such as some of the radicchios, many garlic varieties, and some varieties of sweet peppers; to plant vegetables that grow best in a long, cool spring, such as fava beans and cardoon; to enjoy the tender perennial artichoke; and to sun-dry tomatoes with ease. In the United States a similar climate is found in parts of California, Texas, Arizona, and New Mexico. American gardeners in other states who want to grow these plants sometimes must make cultural compromises. Gardeners in the humid South need to plant especially disease-resistant varieties and will have the most success if they provide afternoon shade for species that suffer in the heat. Gardeners at high altitudes and in cool northern areas will do beautifully with some of the spring and fall vegetables but need to provide extra heat for tomatoes, peppers, melons, and eggplant. Here black plastic mulches, windbreaks, south-facing masonry walls, and floating row covers help raise the ambient temperature by 5º–10ºF/-15º to -12.2ºC.

      Nothing is healthier or more flavorful than vegetables, harvested at their peak, that have gone fresh from the garden to the kitchen and table.

       A selection of fresh vegetables featuring varieties of onions, peppers, and the tomatoes for which Italy is famous.

      I find that to fully appreciate any garden or cooking situation enough to write about it, I need to grow and cook with most of the featured plants. To this end, I have enthusiastically grown and cooked with hundreds of Italian vegetables and herbs and visited many sumptuous gardens. I offer you my own experiences with these wonderful varieties in the pages that follow.

      Picking & Growing Wild Greens

      It is difficult to delve into Italian cooking without coming across references to foraging and serving wild greens and herbs. Generations of Italians have stayed close to the land, often under very lean conditions. For their survival, and because many outlying towns remained isolated, rural Italians continued to harvest from the wild after much of Europe had ceased doing so. For many years this practice had little status, and the plants gathered, like borage and mustard, were considered peasant food. Nowadays upscale restaurants serve many of these “wild” greens, and it’s not unusual to find market stalls in Italy offering them too. Some of the greens are still gathered from the wild, but more often they are grown in market gardens. Italian cookbooks also call for wild greens these days, and proponents all over the world see consuming these nutrition-packed greens—whether grown domestically or in the wild—as a part of a healthy lifestyle. Even though some of these greens are not widely available outside of Italy, as a gardener you are in the fortunate position of being able to grow most of them yourself. Further, gardeners are better able to gather plants from the wild because they have the skills to recognize different species more readily than does a nongardener.

       A home garden in Italy backs up to the Alps. In this cooler climate, summer gardens include broccoli, lettuces, leeks, onions, cabbages, and fava beans.

      These plants may be uncommon in markets, but it’s not because they are hard to grow. After all, they grow untended in many parts of the world. In fact, give some of them a chance and they can become thugs and crowd out their weaker domestic cousins. As a gardener, you probably already know a few “up close and personal,” namely, dandelions and purslane (one of the pigweeds).

      Over the years there have been dozens of plants associated with wild harvesting, some used as potherbs or vegetables, others used raw in salads. In Italian these plants are referred to as erbe selvatiche. The more familiar ones include arugula (Eruca vesicaria, Diplotaxis tenuifolia); borage (Borago officinalis); burnet (Sanguisorba minor); the many chicories (Cichorium sp.); the cresses (Barbarea verna, Nasturtium officinale); dandelion (Taraxacum officinale); fennel (Foeniculum vulgare); corn salad, also called mâche and lamb’s lettuce (Valerianella locusta); hops (Humulus lupulus); mustard (Brassica nigra); nasturtiums (Tropaeolum majus); purslane (Portulaca oleracea var. sativa); salsify (Tragopogon porrifolius); sorrel (Rumex acetosa); and violets (Viola odorata). The more esoteric ones include chickweed (Stellaria media); Good-King-Henry (Chenopodium bonus-henricus); nepitella, also called calamint (Calamintha nepeta); minutina, also called erba stel-la and buck’s horn plantain (Plantago coronopus); shepherd’s purse (Capsella bursa-pastoris); silene (Silene vulgaris); mallow (Malva sp.); alexanders or black lovage (Smyrnium olusatrum); rampion (Campanula rapun-culus); samphire (Crithmum maritimum); and nettles (urtica dioica), which must be cooked so the multitudinous prickly hairs on the leaves are softened.

       “Wild greens” are borage, violets, sorrel, nepitella, purslane, nasturtiums, corn salad (mâche), and wild lettuce; rows of young nasturtiums and chicories (OPPOSITE BOTTOM) are ready for harvest as “wild greens.”

      Historically, these wild greens were a welcome sight in the spring after a long winter of meals that were devoid of fresh edible leaves. The greens were consumed as a “tonic” to cleanse the system but were also enjoyed as a treat to the palate and for the senses after a gray winter. In fact, Italians who move to the city or away from Italy speak fondly of them. Italian chef Celestino Drago, who operates three restaurants and a bakery in Los Angeles, would make an annual pilgrimage to his home in Sicily. If he and his brothers couldn’t make the trip in early spring, their mom would make sure they could still enjoy the taste of the first flush of young wild greens, which she would lovingly cook or steam, drain and freeze until her sons could come home to her table. In the spring, when the California hills are covered with wild mustard, Drago would gather this potherb

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