Pick Your Own Fresh Kkaennip (Korean Perilla)

For the past eight years, one of the crops we’ve grown and sold consistently at Sweet Botanicals has been Korean perilla, or kkaennip (깻잎). You may also know it as sesame leaf, which is the name many of our customers use when they ask for it.

Despite that name, kkaennip isn’t actually related to the sesame plant. It belongs to the mint family and has a flavor all its own: fresh, aromatic, slightly minty and a little reminiscent of basil. It’s also different from Japanese shiso, even though the two plants look similar. In Korean cooking, fresh perilla leaves are used whole as wraps with rice and grilled meats, shredded into dishes, pickled, steamed, or made into kkaennip kimchi.

One of the nice things about growing kkaennip ourselves is that customers can get the leaves about as fresh as they possibly can. Some people like to come to the farm and pick their own, choosing the size and leaves they want right from the plants. Others would rather have us harvest and package them so they're ready when they arrive.

Fresh kkaennip prices:

Pick your own: 12 leaves for $2.49
Picked and packaged by us: 12 leaves for $2.99

We also make marinated kkaennip. If you’re interested in buying it prepared, contact us and ask about current availability and pricing.

If you’ve never eaten kkaennip before, one of the simplest ways to discover it is as a wrap: take a fresh leaf, add a little rice and whatever meat, vegetables or other fillings you like, fold it up and eat the whole thing. But there are a remarkable number of things you can do with this one leaf. Korean cook Maangchi has recipes for kkaennip kimchi, pickled kkaennip (kkaennip-jangajji), steamed leaves, pan-fried stuffed leaves and many other dishes.

For a good introduction to the ingredient and ideas for using it, we recommend Maangchi’s guide to perilla leaves (kkaennip).

After eight years, kkaennip has become one of those plants that simply belongs here. Every year it comes back into the garden, and every year people come looking for it. Some already know exactly what they want to make with it. Others have never tasted it before.

Either way, if you’d like some, get in touch with Sweet Botanicals or come pick your own while it’s in season.

The Center of Granby That Disappeared

  

If you drive along West Street in Granby and come to the intersection with Amherst Street, there isn't much about the crossroads today that announces, this used to be the center of town.

But it was.

Long before the common, Town Hall and churches farther east became the Granby center we know today, this was where the community gathered. And the reason that center existed in the first place tells much of the story of how Granby became a town.

The first European settlers began arriving in what is now Granby around 1727, when this land was still part of South Hadley. Most families were farmers, scattered across a landscape that must have looked very different from the one we know now: cleared fields and pastures around individual farms, but also extensive woods, wetlands and rough country between them.

As settlement spread eastward, getting to the South Hadley meetinghouse became increasingly inconvenient. In colonial New England, the meetinghouse was far more than a church. It was where religious services were held, but it was also at the center of civic life. Where you put the meetinghouse effectively determined where you put the community.

And people argued about it.

Residents in the eastern part of South Hadley wanted a meetinghouse closer to where they lived. The dispute eventually went to the courts, which decided that a new meetinghouse should be built closer to the center of South Hadley instead.

The people out here took another route.

They created their own community.

A meetinghouse was erected near what is now the corner of West and Amherst streets, and in 1768 Granby was formally incorporated as a separate town. The population was only about 475 people. The town says Granby was named for John Manners, the Marquis of Granby, a British military figure from the Seven Years' War.

A village at the crossroads

It is difficult now to picture West and Amherst as downtown Granby.

There were no cars, utility poles or paved roads. West Street would have been a country road connecting farms and neighboring settlements. Travel was by foot, horseback or wagon.

But around the meetinghouse grew the things a small New England community needed. Homes stood nearby, along with businesses and places where neighbors could meet, exchange news and conduct the ordinary business of life.

For the families living around here, this wasn't the western outskirts of Granby.

It was Granby.

There is still a physical reminder of that earlier landscape. A stone and plaque at the intersection commemorate the site of the old meetinghouse. The town's own historical account specifically identifies the corner of West and Amherst as the location.

And some of the old houses survived.

That is one of the things I find fascinating about living here. We tend to think of history as something preserved behind glass or marked by a sign. But in Granby, much of it is simply mixed into the landscape. You can drive past an old house a thousand times without thinking about the people who built it, the road they traveled or what the neighborhood around it looked like when that house was new.

Then the town moved

Granby didn't literally move, of course.

Its center did.

As settlement continued, the location at West and Amherst became increasingly inconvenient for people living farther east. In 1821 a new meetinghouse was built near what became the present town center.

Not everybody was pleased.

The move contributed to a division between East and West parishes, another reminder of just how important the location of a meetinghouse could be in a New England town. Most of the West Parish eventually reunited with the East Parish in 1836.

Gradually the civic and commercial center followed.

Today, when someone says "the center of Granby," we picture the common and the collection of historic buildings surrounding it. The town describes that area as retaining much of the character it has had for the past century.

West and Amherst became just another crossroads.

The swamp beside the town

There is another part of this story that especially interests us at Sweet Botanicals.

Pitchawam Swamp is right here.

In our previous post, we wrote about the large wetland that still occupies this part of Granby. About five of our eight acres are part of that same swamp landscape.

It is easy today to think of a swamp as someplace away from civilization, a wild patch of land beyond the places where people live.

But early Granby grew right beside it.

The meetinghouse and the first town center stood near the southern end of the Pitchawam wetland. The farms, roads and houses of early Granby existed alongside a landscape of wet woods, streams, beaver habitat and seasonally flooded ground.

In other words, the swamp wasn't somewhere beyond town.

It was part of the neighborhood.

That relationship between human settlement and the land is still visible if you know what you're looking at. West Street follows the higher, usable ground. Houses sit where generations of people found places dry enough to build. Behind them the land falls away into woods and wetlands that resisted the plow and, later, development.

Those wet places are one reason parts of the old landscape survived.

Looking at an ordinary corner differently

That's what makes the intersection of West and Amherst interesting to me.

There isn't a reconstructed colonial village there. There aren't crowds of tourists. Most people drive through in a few seconds.

But imagine stopping there around 1770.

Granby is only a couple of years old. The meetinghouse stands nearby. A horse and wagon come along West Street. Smoke rises from the chimneys of neighboring farms. Someone is walking toward the meetinghouse. Beyond the cleared ground are woods, and beyond those woods is the wet country of Pitchawam.

For the people standing there, this isn't "historic Granby."

It's just home.

More than two and a half centuries later, we're living on the same landscape. The roads have changed. The town center moved. Forest returned to many former fields. Houses appeared where farms once stood.

But the swamp is still here.

And if you know where to look, so is the old center of Granby.

Sources

Town of Granby, Open Space and Recreation Plan, History of the Community.

Town of Granby — About & History

Town of Granby — Charter Day Committee

We Live in Pitchawam Swamp

 

When we talk about Sweet Botanicals as our little eight-acre farm in Granby, Massachusetts, it gives a slightly misleading picture. There are gardens, fruit trees, blueberries, raspberries and herbs around the house, but most of our land looks nothing like a farm.

About five of our eight acres are in Pitchawam Swamp.

For years, that was simply the name of the wetland behind us. It’s the place where the ground gets soggy, where water collects and drains, where wildlife moves through the property, and where nature has considerably more say about what grows than we do. But Pitchawam Swamp turns out to have a history that goes back much farther than Sweet Botanicals, and much farther than Granby itself.

The name appears to come from an Indigenous name recorded as Pitchawamiche, or in some older sources Pitchawamuche. A Massachusetts Historical Commission survey of Granby identifies a Native travel route that probably ran from the area of Bachelor Brook toward Pitchawam Swamp, roughly along what later became Easton Street and possibly North Street. The same survey suggests that the wetlands around Pitchawam would have been natural locations for small hunting camps.

The people using that landscape were likely connected with the Norwottuck, whose communities were centered farther west in the Connecticut River Valley around what are now Hadley and Northampton.

That changes the way we think about the swamp.

Wetlands can look like the empty spaces on a map, the places between roads, farms and houses. But long before those roads and property lines existed, a swamp like Pitchawam would have been anything but empty. It provided water, plants, animals and habitat, and it sat within a landscape crossed by people who knew the woods and waterways in ways we can barely reconstruct today.

The name survived.

An 1890 description of Granby recorded the name as Pitchawamuche, shortened to Pitchawam, and said it was believed to be the only Native place-name still surviving in the town. Whether that claim was completely accurate is something we'd like to investigate further, but the survival of the name itself is remarkable. Generations came and went, Granby was settled, roads were built and farms divided, yet people kept calling this wet ground Pitchawam.

The swamp also became part of Granby's colonial history. The early center of town developed near its southern end, around the present-day Amherst Street and West Street area. Granby's first meetinghouse was there, along with some of the community's earliest homes. The center of town eventually shifted, but Pitchawam remained.

And now part of it is behind our house.

That makes us think differently about what we're doing here at Sweet Botanicals. We grow berries, fruit and herbs on a relatively small part of these eight acres. The majority isn't ours to cultivate in any conventional sense. It is wetland, and perhaps that's exactly what it should remain.

Those five acres are doing their own kind of growing.

They're habitat. They're part of the local watershed. They're a corridor for wildlife. They're storing water and supporting plants that chose this ground long before we arrived. And they connect our little patch of Granby to a landscape whose human history reaches back centuries before there was a town called Granby.

So as we begin telling the story of Sweet Botanicals, we want to tell the story of the land too.

We thought we lived next to an old swamp.

It turns out we live in Pitchawam.

Sources

• https://unfenced.land/map#ma
• Massachusetts Historical Commission, Granby Reconnaissance Survey
• Pioneer Valley Planning Commission, Granby Open Space and Recreation Plan
• Massachusetts Gazetteer, 1890, historical description of Granby
• U.S. Geological Survey mapping, Pitchawam Swamp, Granby, Massachusetts

 

Some Recent Pics

 

Some recent pics

  

Sweet Botanicals Is Growing Again

Years ago, Emily and I had an idea.

We were already growing herbs, berries, vegetables and fruit here at home, and at some point we started talking about putting up a little roadside stand. Nothing elaborate. Just a place out front where we could put whatever happened to be coming out of the garden: a basket of raspberries, some blueberries, bunches of herbs, maybe vegetables or flowers.

We even gave it a name: Sweet Botanicals.

Then, as often happens, life got busy and the idea got put aside. But the funny thing about putting aside an idea involving plants is that the plants don't necessarily cooperate.

The raspberries kept spreading. The blueberries grew bigger. We planted more fruit trees. Herbs came back every spring. Some things thrived, some things disappeared, and every year the garden taught us something new.

Today we have around 65 raspberry bushes, 15 blueberry bushes and 18 fruit trees, along with the herbs, vegetables and other things we grow around the property. We don't use the land like a commercial farm. It's our home, our garden and a place we've been slowly shaping over the years.

And lately I've been thinking about that old Sweet Botanicals idea again.

So we're bringing it back.

We're starting small. The plan is still basically the same one we had years ago: when we have more than we need, we'd like to make some of it available to our neighbors. What you'll find will depend on the season and on what Mother Nature decides to give us. There won't be a warehouse in the background or produce shipped in from somewhere else. If we didn't grow it here, it won't be sitting on the stand pretending we did.

Right now we're working on the stand itself. I'm looking for an old farm wagon, preferably something big, wooden and weathered, with enough room for baskets and shelves. I want something that looks like it belongs here, not a shiny new retail display ordered out of a catalog.

We'll use this blog to document the process: getting the stand together, watching the berries and fruit through the seasons, experimenting with herbs, figuring out what works and probably documenting a few things that don't.

We'll also let you know what's actually available. If the raspberries suddenly decide they're all going to ripen on the same Tuesday in July, you'll hear about it here.

Sweet Botanicals isn't really a new business.

It's an old idea that kept growing while we weren't looking.

And now we're curious to see what it becomes.