Glorious Fennel!

Thus far, my foray into growing my newest favorite vegetable has been smooth sailing.  I was gifted free extra seeds from a friend, and every single one sprouted.  Over the past couple of weeks, they have grown and grown, becoming a veritable forest of fennel.

Have you ever seen a more beautiful sight?  Sigh.

Of course, now comes the tricky part.  I've never actually grown fennel.  I've never seen fennel growing in a garden, except on TV in my pal Hugh Fernsley-Wittingsall's River Cottage garden.  And everyone knows that is helped along by an army of minions.

This leads me to be concerned:  what if fennel requires an army of minions to be grown successfully?  Eeek.  I have no minions.

I need some minions.

Lucky for me, I have a slew of gardening books, hopefully filled with helpful advice on how to grow fennel, even if you don't have an army of minions at your disposal.

The first one I checked, Step-by-Step to Organic Vegetable Growing by Samuel Ogden (circa 1971), contains absolutely no information about fennel.  It's not even listed in the index.

This is not a promising start.

The second one I checked, Down-To-Earth Vegetable Gardening Know-How, featuring Dick Raymond (copyright 1975) claims to have information on growing fennel on page 123.  But, upon turning to that page, I discovered that it skips from "endive" to "garlic".  No "fennel" section to be found.

Apparently, the 70s were not big for fennel.

So I turned to my bible, The Encyclopedia of Country Living by Carla Emery.  Lo and behold, there is a small section on "Florence fennel" (as opposed to the herbal fennel variety, which has a whole page to itself).  Apparently, fennel is one vegetable that Carla can't stand.  There is next to no information on how to grow it, aside from the remark that it is "an easy-to-grow" perennial and advice to "cover the base of the plant with dirt to blanch; this makes the flavor milder".

Oh, Carla.  Really, did everyone in the 1970s have such a prejudice against fennel?

Finally, I pulled out my copy of Rodale's Illustrated Encyclopedia of Herbs, from 1998.  Twenty years after the 70s, and finally fennel has come into its own.  There's a three (three!) page section all about fennel, both wild and sweet--I'm growing the sweet variety.  There's planting instructions, companion planting recommendations (apparently, never near bush beans or tomatoes), and ideas for using all parts of the plant, beyond cooking and adding raw to salads. It even has information on harvesting the seeds, so you can grow more fennel the next year.

Take that, fennel hating people of the 70s!