I spent the better part of the weekened paying back for all that good compost we laid on the vegetable beds in the spring. The cosmos were seven feet tall. The zinnia were so big they had simply collapsed and were splayed all over the ground. The “mammoth” variety sunflowers had grown into sequoias, towing over [...]
Entries Tagged as 'garden'
Germination in Record Time
August 31st, 2010 · 3 Comments · garden
Tags: compost·fall·germination·greens·planting
We Win for Best Local Food in First-Ever D.C. State Fair
August 29th, 2010 · 7 Comments · garden
I didn’t win any of the categories I entered in yesterday’s first-ever D.C. State Fair. Not jams or jellies, not pickles, not biggest vegetable. But when all the votes were counted, our zucchini bread and butter pickles–which came in third behind pickled peaches and pickled white asparagus–won us the overall title of “Best D.C.-Grown Food Product.”
In [...]
Tags: pickles·state fair·zucchini
What to Do with Green Tomatoes
August 23rd, 2010 · 5 Comments · Recipes, garden
I saved more than 10 pounds of green tomatoes from the marauding pack of field mice that have been devouring our kitchen garden lately. In the picture above you see what I salvaged from our Roma vines, the tomatoes we would normally use for canning. No ripe tomatoes to can here. Fortunately, some of our [...]
Defeated By a Mouse
August 21st, 2010 · 14 Comments · garden
Don’t be fooled by this guy’s cuteness. He’s an unabashed garden marauder. In just the last couple of weeks, a family of field mice has eaten their way through my entire crop of eggplants, peppers and tomatoes. Yesterday I decided radical measures were called for: I harvested everything edible from my vegetable beds, pulled up [...]
Tags: mice
Spicy Cajun Pickles
August 20th, 2010 · 1 Comment · Recipes, garden
We look forward to these pickles every summer because they’re our daughter’s favorite and they really are spectacular. The way they’re made is a bit unusual, too. They’re lacto-fermented in a salt brine with a wee bit of vinegar and a heap of herbs and spices while in the jar. Then they’re moved into the [...]
A Little Sweetness in Your Dill Pickles?
August 19th, 2010 · 3 Comments · Recipes, garden
I’m convinced that the best dill pickles I’ve ever tasted had at least a little sugar in them. The traditional flavor combo–dill seed, mustard seed, peppercorns–just doesn’t do much for me. Yet I’ve had the hardest time finding a dill pickle recipe (I’m talking about vinegar pickles, of course) that gets me closer to the pickle [...]
Foraged Garden Mash-Up
August 18th, 2010 · 1 Comment · Recipes, garden
Sometimes bits of one thing or another from the garden end up creating their own dish.
As I considered a handful of okra left over from a round of pickling yesterday I wondered what else we had in the garden that might work with it for dinner. A few minutes with a pair of kitchen scissors [...]
Teaching Urban Composting
August 15th, 2010 · 4 Comments · garden
My composting system has been turned upside down this year. Normally I spend quite a bit of my time foraging the ingredients for my compost pile–leaves, grass clippings, coffee grounds–and managing a three-bin system for turning it all into the primary means of maintaining fertility in my vegetable beds. Despite all of that work, and [...]
Tags: composting
Okra Gone Wild
August 10th, 2010 · 3 Comments · Recipes, garden
It’s that time of year when we are racing to harvest our okra. It grows so fast in the heat and humidity here in the District of Columbia that we have to check our okra plants twice a day. You can practically hear the okra pods getting bigger.
But my purpose here is not to bend [...]
Tags: basil·coconut oil·eggplant·okra
Pole Beans: Fun, or What?
August 6th, 2010 · 1 Comment · garden
Of all the joys of growing your own food, hardly anyone ever talks about picking pole beans. I wonder why. Isn’t sticking your face and arms into a thicket of scratchy bean leaves on a 95-degree day near the top of your list of favorite garden activities? No?
Don’t get me wrong. I actually like picking beans (sort [...]
Tags: beans
We are engaging the concerns of a hungry planet--slowly--right here in our kitchen garden in the District of Columbia, about a mile from the White House.
