Before you ask: positive, of direction I've had celery earlier than. But as I found very last night, our home-grown Ventura celery is a totally wonderful animal (er, vegetable).
It's clearly form of an twist of destiny that we ended up having any of this celery in any respect. Of the four plant life I positioned within the garden itself, 3 withered away and died earlier than they reached any sort of reasonable length, and the fourth remained sort of stunted. However, we ended up having a few extra area inside the new rhubarb bed that Brian placed in handiest outside the fenced garden vicinity, because the 4 new rhubarb flowers I supplied this spring did not survive. (This appears to be a outstanding component, because the vintage flora that we moved to this location not most effective survived however grew to great proportions. Between the three that Brian transplanted first of all and the one straggler that he later decided pushing its manner up through the state-of-the-art raspberry canes and moved, they're giving us as plenty rhubarb as we are able to likely wish to hold up with.) So, on a lark, Brian sowed some extra celery seeds in this area.
Well, seemingly, a hint more sun have become a whole lot of those flowers desired, because of the fact they grew tremendous weapons of their new vicinity. However, they in no way definitely grew into the scale and form that we have turn out to be aware about with grocery shop celery. The character stalks had been shorter, narrower, and more notably spaced. They additionally had a far greater tremendous green shade than the faded barely-green colour that is going via the call of
Well, that turns out to be an understatement. This home-grown celery has a very strong, pungent flavor. I tried one bite of it raw and found that it was too bitter to even eat that way. Cooked, it was more manageable, but even so, we used only one small stalk of it in the potato-apple skillet we made last night, which normally uses two—and even then, the celery flavor in the dish was much more pronounced than it's ever been.
Now, it might seem that, from an ecofrugal standpoint, this is great. If just a little bit of this celery goes such a long way, then we should be able to get all the celery flavor we need from just one plant, right? And that would be true, if we treated celery primarily as a flavoring agent. But to me, celery isn't really an herb; it's a vegetable, and that means that one of its main purposes is to add bulk to a meal. But you can't really use this celery in that way, because its flavor would overwhelm the entire dish. And if you scale back the celery to the point where it balances with the other flavors, then you can't use enough of it to make up much volume in, say, a stir-fry.
So on the whole, I'm not enthusiastic about this celery, and I'm not particularly keen to grow it again. I'm sure we'll find some ways of using up what we have in the garden right now; Brian has talked about trying a homemade cream of celery soup to take the place of the canned variety we can no longer find at Aldi, and we can always use some as an herb (it might even be strong enough to take the place of celery seed in dishes that call for it). But for everyday use, I think we're actually better off with the milder-tasting supermarket celery, which we can get away with using in greater volumes.
