Blog Archives
2012 Goals, Plans, & Resolutions
It seems like most of the garden blogs I read have been doing some type of New Year’s Resolutions, and so I’m going to jump on the bandwagon a few days late. This is a mixture of goals and plans for the blog and the garden. (The garden goals are going to be very general, since we aren’t having our first planning meeting until Jan. 17th!)
1. Have raised beds to plant in – hopefully early enough in the season to be reasonable!
2. Post more vegetable and herb recipes on the blog again. Last year I got away from posting many recipes (probably because there weren’t a lot of vegetables for a chunk of the summer). I’m planning to feature more yummy veggie recipes on the blog.
3. Grow some good tomatoes. Okay, this is probably more dependent on the weather than anything I can do.
4. Do a better job of staying on top of insect and disease problems as they occur – both for blogging purposes and enacting solutions.
5. Do more vertical gardening. We had a pretty successful year with the trellises, and I hope we’re going to try some new things again this year.
6. Think about water conservation – and maybe do something about it too. While conditions aren’t as dry as they were in the fall, we are still in a drought without many signs of it letting up. As we get a new irrigation system in place, I hope we can make it as efficient as possible. Many vegetables have a better flavor with a little bit of deficit irrigation (getting a bit less water than they strictly need), so maybe we can practice a bit more tough love.
7. Get a rain barrel. We’ve been talking about getting a rain barrel put in the Quiet Garden area, and maybe we’ll get that done as part of the renovation. We wouldn’t be using it for the vegetables, but it could be used for flowers and containers.
8. Explore Italian vegetables. Maybe this will happen this year or maybe next year. I have been salivating over the new Seeds from Italy catalog, and dreaming up ways to make fennel, radicchio, cardoon, and other fun things grow in Kansas.
What are you garden plans for the new year?
Wednesday PhotoEssay & Miscellany
Sorry about not posting for a while. If you’ve been following my Flickr stream, you’ll see that I’ve been posting pictures, but just haven’t gotten around to writing any posts.
The leaves on the Sweetgum trees were beautiful a couple weeks ago. They are still nice, but not quite as bright as they were.
This Shumard Oak was showing this great red color this fall. It will fade to brown over time.
With the leaves off the trees, it is easy to see what has been going on in those trees all summer. This gingko tree was home to a large squirrel nest in the top. It is kind of funny to see a squirrel nest made entirely of gingko leaves! I wonder if those squirrels have really good memory?
Since the overnight temperatures were getting cold last week, we decided to pick the rest of our Swiss Chard and Kale from our community garden plot. Do you think we have enough chard? It weighed in at 4 lbs 11 oz!
The first step in dealing with all that chard was to strip the leaves off the stems. You can see the mountain of stems and the cascade of leaves in this picture. The water glass is there for a little bit of scale…
I chopped the stems up and shredded the leaves. Then I sauteed them in batches with a little oil, salt, and pepper.
We ended up with a 4 quart freezer bags full of Swiss Chard to use during the winter. I’m sensing some of that yummy Swiss Chard & Sweet Potato Gratin in our future!
Just don’t ask. Really. Don’t ask.
Have a Happy Thanksgiving!
What to Do with Kale?
I have to admit that my main reason for growing kale is aesthetic. The purple kale is just to gorgeous not to grow. The main reason we planted it in our community garden plot was because it was available (leftovers from Garden Show), and we thought it would be a good sacrificial offering to the rabbits. (Sidenote: the rabbits preferred eating the tomato plants to the kale. Is that a sign?)
When I make the suggestion of eating the kale, my husband helpfully wrinkles up his nose and says, “Mmm…green.” And he’s right, of course – Kale is an extremely nutritious, dark green leafy vegetable. (DGLV’s as a nutrition guru might call them.) Somehow, I don’t think that’s what my husband was getting at though.
Mature kale is rather fibrous, chewy, and definitely has a strong flavor (especially raw). So what to do to get all those good vitamins, minerals, and fiber into your stomach when you’ve got a bumper crop? Here are my favorite 2 options.
1. Kale Chips
Kale chips are so easy, and very tasty. You just wash and dry the kale, tear it into bite-sized pieces, and toss it with just enough olive oil to give it a light coating. Then you bake them at 350 for 10-15 minutes, or until crispy. The difference between soggy/limp and crispy is usually just a minute or two, so keep a close eye on them! Once they start to turn brown, they will taste bitter. Once they are crispy, just put them on a paper towel to blot any extra oil and sprinkle them with salt, pepper, and any other seasonings you want. I like a dash of cayenne pepper.
2. White Bean, Sausauge, and Kale Soup
This isn’t my all-time favorite soup, but it a nice fall staple. I didn’t use a recipe this time, just browned up some diced onion, carrot, and celery with some garlic for good measure. Then I browned the sausage, and then a few mushrooms. We had some beans left from another recipe, so those went into the pot with the veggies and the meat. I used beef stock for the broth. I added salt and pepper to taste, as well as other seasonings that I felt like. I ended up using a Greek Seasoning that had cinnamon and peppermint in it, which wasn’t exactly what I was going for, but actually tasted really good! The mushrooms and the kale were added about 10 minutes before serving to get nice and tender. Yum!
These are the two ways that I use kale the most. How do you use kale (other than for garnish)?
Friday PhotoEssay & Link Around
It isn’t often that I’ve gone outside the boundaries of our Demonstration Garden for pictures or post topics, but since our garden is pretty barren right now (see the previous post), I wanted to keep providing some garden eye candy for as long as possible. This week, I went out and visited the rose garden!
Our hybrid rose garden is still looking amazing, even after a few freezes. Aren’t these roses gorgeous?
This if the flower from the ‘Mister Lincoln’ hybrid tea rose. It is an older hybrid tea (introduced in the 1960s), and has big, beautiful flowers. A lot of catalogs show it as being a redder rose, but ours is definitely a paler, fuchsia color.
I also found a number of different articles and recipes to share this week, covering quite a range of topics. Read the rest of this entry
Preserving Peppers: Sambal Olek
This topic has been sitting on the back burner for a couple weeks. As you may have noticed, the Demo Garden had a bumper crop of peppers this year, including more hot peppers than anyone would know what to do with. (Well, unless you really like very spicy food.)
What are the options for preserving hot peppers?
- Dry them and use them whole for flavoring
- Dry them and grind them into pepper flakes/powder
- Chop them and freeze them
- Make LOTS of salsa or hot pepper jelly
- Make pepper paste/sauce in some form or another
My husband and I really like Asian food, and for the past couple years, we’ve been using a chile paste called Sambal Olek for flavoring foods that need some heat. We also had tons of hot peppers from our community garden plot, so my husband found a simple recipe for Sambal Olek that only called for the peppers, salt, and vinegar. Read the rest of this entry
