There’s more to food than recipes. We’ll approach the answers to growing questions, and new ways of taking on tricks of the food trade, and Boil It Down for you.
Ever since I was a kid, I’ve had some sort of vegetable garden in the yard. From my parents’ house and my father’s veins coursing with the blood of generations of farmers, to my own home, where I seem to have a lot of success with growing squash and tomatoes, but not much else. I tend to try to grow what we have a use for, and if you know my wife Deb personally or through this site, you’d know that saying she’s fond of cilantro is an understatement.
So, of course, I attempt to grow cilantro every year … and fail at it miserably. The reason: the damn stuff bolts, or flowers, way too quickly. No sooner will I have a small pot of cilantro planted in my 8’x8′ sorry excuse for a garden, when I’ll find it teeming with flowers.
Let me tell you something about cilantro: I think it tastes like soap. And when cilantro bolts, it’s soapy times ten. It’s like I took a dive into a vat of Irish Spring with my mouth open. It’s just not good for anyone. So how the heck do I stop cilantro from bolting? Short answer: you can’t. You can, however, do something to stop it from happening to quickly.
First of all, I’m going to have to relate the following to growing cilantro in New England; I have no experience with growing it elsewhere, though this all may benefit everyone. There are two main problems with growing cilantro in your own garden: nursery-bought cilantro and planting too late.
Most owners of small herb gardens or casual at-home farmers will buy herbs from a nursery, meaning they are already growing. Sometimes you’ll see them as teeny, tiny plants that are just barely peeking through the soil, while other times (and, in my experience, most times) they’re to the point you could probably just harvest the leaves right away! Many times these large seedlings of cilantro are put on nursery shelves much too late in the season, so there’s almost no point in planting it — what you see is what you’re going to get, until it goes to seed (bolts).
Cilantro will tend to bolt once you get into 80-degree temperature days. Once that happens, all bets are off — if you don’t keep an eye on your plants daily, you’ll find you’ve waiting too long into the hot spring/summer and now you’ve got useless, bitter (though a little pretty) cilantro. It’s frustrating as hell, and a high-maintenance nightmare if you’ve got a lot of plants you’re counting on.
Your best bets for successfully planting cilantro without it flowering too soon:
One final best bet for dealing with cilantro: don’t try to plant it. It’s usually rather plentiful in supermarkets. Or you could just not use cilantro at all, because it tastes like soap.
Clacked by Keith McDuffee 
on Aug 05, 2009 @ 12:00 EST5EDT
