Oreo’s eggs, deeply orange with homegrown spinach
Category Archives: food (growing, cooking, preserving)
A New Approach to Water, Being More of the Same
From the beginning (2008), I have gardened organically – better than “organically,” actually. For instance, I always refused to use the hose, that is, tap water, in my gardens. Even as the garden grew larger and more labor intensive, I insisted on watering with buckets and watering cans. Some relief came when I installed drip …
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What’s Growing?
A commenter asked if things are growing. Are they ever! Winter ended quite suddenly, with feet of snow melting away in a matter of days. So it was time to get growing. Here are the seedlings in the basement: If necessary (I’m also growing seedlings for friends and school gardens), I can add an extra …
Spring!
Four signs of Spring 1. Most of the snow in the backyard and the vegetable patch has melted or been washed away by the rain. (The front yard, however, is still covered, but by much less of it than before.) 2. I started lots of seedlings in the basement: the onion family, celery, tomatoes and …
Seedling Boxes
As our trusted reader(s?) know, we grow all our vegetables from seed, and now that it is spring (on the calendar at least) the time nears to sow the seeds. We do this in the basement, where we have a large “seedling bank” of lights and a heat mat. But most of my plastic trays …
Mead Clearing
The mead I made in September has cleared a lot. This is the bottle (front) in September: It’s much lighter now. Here’s the bottle next to the year-old, wholly clarified mead: The bottom is a moonscape of dead yeast people and quaintly coalesced beeswax. But something else in the yeasts must make them consume and …
Soup!
Harvested celery, chard, kale, sorrel, escarole, and sage. Soup’s on, and kale chips!
Wood and Apples
In the middle of October we had a warm spell, hovering around 70F for a week. Still, firewood was on my mind. Our friends Kath and Paul joined us in renting a log splitter and doing the work. First we worked at our place, splitting all those old rounds that had been cut last year …
Kitchen Day
Aside from eating the lunch and dinner I prepared, I was busy in the kitchen for eleven hours (11 am to 10 pm) and it was wonderful. I had a lot of accumulated CSA produce to use up, and I’d bought a lot at the last Farmers Market in town. And then there were eggs. …
Kale Chips for School Lunch
Today, I wore my Green Team cap and handed out kale chips in my local elementary school’s lunchroom. I had mixed the kale with lots of olive oil and salt and pepper and dehydrated the leaves at 110F overnight (10 hours). They were cri-ispy! A big bunch of kale shrank to just about enough to …