Featured Plant of the Week: Nasturtium - From Rich Colors to Poor Man’s Capers
The cool night weather has really revived my nasturtium plants. I’d almost forgotten they were there. Now they’re the first orange and golds of fall. It’s been awhile since I’ve had to purchase seeds of nasturtium. They’re so large, it always seems a shame not to scoop some up and save them to plant next year. They don't even need to be started indoors.
I finally tried using some of the seeds to make "Poor Man’s Capers". I resisted for so long because I don’t really like capers. They’re always overly salty and usually kind of mushy. But nasturtium capers were a real treat and I plan to try it again this year. Unlike real capers, which are the flower buds of the caper plant, poor man's capers are made from the nasturtium seeds. You’ll need to pick the nasturtium seeds while they’re still green and firm. That’s about as difficult as the process gets.
For every cup of nasturtium seeds, you’ll need:
- 1 cup of white wine vinegar
- 1 teaspoon salt (or to taste)
- 5-8 peppercorns, slightly crushed
Rinse and drain the nasturtium seeds and blot them well on paper towels. Next, pour them into a 1 pint canning jar. Bring the vinegar, salt and pepper to a boil and pour over the seeds. Seal and refrigerate the jar and let them sit for about 3 months. Then enjoy!
You can spice them up further by tossing in garlic, onion or spices like celery seed, dill or thyme. Try a few different flavors and use them in salads and on vegetable and fish dishes.
Photo: © Marie Iannotti (2008) licensed to About.com, Inc.
Comments
Nasturtiums are wonderful indeed – true garden workhorses.
They not only look good, they make good companion plants in the vegetable patch where they are beneficial to tomatoes, radishes, cabbages, cucumbers, asparagus, and fruit trees. Rabbits don’t like them and will stay away. Even if you don’t believe in companion planting, who can argue with a flowering vine winding through the patch?
For maximum flowers (i.e. “capers”), plant in poor but well draining soil. Rich soil causes them to produce more leaves and fewer flowers. And don’t forget: the flowers are edible, too. They taste mildly of radishes and look stunning atop any salad.
Here in zone 5, the seeds need to be collected for next year, although the odd one will survuve the winter and self-start in spring. I would suspect that they will happily self-seed in zone 7 or higher.
I so enjoyed the article on nasturtiums. When our son was 4 years old he wanted to help in the garden but his little hands couldn’t handle the tiny seeds. So I got him some nasturtium seeds which he proudly planted all by himself. They came up and by fall the bed was a mass of color. He picked the flowers every day to take to his kindergarten teacher. When they died back, I picked a jar of seeds which I took with us when we moved the following spring. Those nasturtiums reseeded themselves every year until we moved, 27 years later. My son is now 43 years old but he remembers sucking the “honey” out of the flowers with the neighbor kids—lucky I didn’t use pestasides and gardened organically.
What a lovely story. You know, I never really considered nasturtiums when I’ve worked with kids. Usually it’s sunflowers or radishes – something that grows large or quick. But nasturtiums, as you said, are easy to handle, come in the bright colors kids love and the entire plant is safe to eat. I’ll have to remember that.