Tag Archives: gardening

Tending my pot

Volunteer amaranth took over this pot of celery.

Before

In a relatively short amount of time, I set things straight in the celery pot.  Fortunately, amaranth leaves are edible.  At this young, tender stage, you can eat them raw.  Later, you can cook them like spinach.  If the plants mature, they produce seeds (i.e., amaranth grain) with high nutritional value.

After

The amaranth leaves add amazing color to this salad (and match the color of the shamrock leaves).  Their flavor is very mild; I added dill and arugula to punch up the flavor, plus sunflower seeds for crunch (and protein).  Served with a side of sugar snap peas.  Dressed with a mixture of seasoned rice vinegar, cider vinegar, olive oil, crushed garlic, and a dash of sesame oil.  (Sorry, I don’t measure on the dressings — drives DH crazy!)

The first and the last

I love it when we sit down to a meal and realize it’s almost all local food!  We made this salad with our first garden harvest of greens (although we’ve been buying local lettuce for a few weeks now), radishes, green onion, and locally grown kidney beans.  The sunflower seeds and dressing (homemade with a base of olive oil, vinegar, and minced garlic) prevent this salad from being 100% local.

Second component of the meal: butternut squash soup.  We bought 15 butternut squash in the fall; for this meal, we ate the last squash.  They kept beautifully for over six months with minimal effort.  We put them in mesh bags (the bags that onion come in, for example) and hung the bags from nails in our basement.  Simple!

For this soup, we roasted the whole squash, then added sauteed onions, butter, milk, cumin, turmeric, and salt.  I blended it all with my stick blender for easy clean-up.

It all came together for a simple, delicious, local dinner.

No rest for the weary

You know that, “get back from vacation and feel like to you need a vacation to recover from your vacation feeling?”  Yeah, that.

We enjoyed a fabulous week in the Smoky Mountains (except for that part where a bee stung me on the arch of my foot and the subsequent itching like crazy and swelling that engulfed my ankle bone) and returned on Saturday so that we could have a day to recover before heading back to work spend all day Sunday gardening.  Hard core gardening.

I whipped eight (or more?) rows of potatoes into shape with the help of my friend the soil miller (see here for more information), and Matthew planted forty-eight tomato plants, along with peppers, eggplant, and tomatillos.  We staggered back into our apartment shortly before eight o’clock last night, and somehow found the energy to make dinner.  (I was seriously considering finishing the last few pretzel thins from our road snack stash and going straight to bed without dinner.)

I will post vacation and garden pictures soon, but top priority right now is unpacking/reclaiming our apartment and getting back on track so we don’t eat sandwiches for lunch all week.

Save the tomatoes

Getting big and looking good
Getting big and looking good

We haven’t had the best luck starting seedlings this year.  In January, Matthew planted cruciferous veggies.  They germinated decently, looked healthy for awhile, and then bit the dust.  We noticed lots of little gnats around the grow trays and thought they might have been transmitting some kind of fungus.

We moved on to warm weather crops (tomatoes and peppers).  Guess what?  The gnats returned!  I investigated and we most likely have fungus gnats.  The gnats lay eggs in the soil, which hatch into larva.  The larvae consider the tender roots of seedlings a delicacy item.

I instituted remediation steps immediately after identifying the problem on Monday.

Step one: Stop the over-watering (ahem, honey) and let the soil dry out.  The gnats and their larvae love really damp soil.

Step two: Work to eliminate the gnats.  There are a few suggestions for this, including shallow dishes of beer or sticky traps (made with petroleum jelly).  We tried both.  Finally, a good use for beer!

Step three: Get rid of the larvae.  This one is trickier.  One place suggested putting potato slices on top of the soil to attract the larvae.  We tried this overnight and didn’t see anything in the morning.  That could mean that 1) the larvae weren’t there; 2) the larvae do not like potatoes; or 3) the eggs are in the soil waiting to hatch.

We started a RIDICULOUS number of tomatoes, most of which are looking pretty good at this point, and I’ll be really upset if we lose them like we lost broccoli, cabbage, and cauliflower!

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Info on fungus gnats and how to get rid of them:

http://gardening.about.com/od/gardenproblems/a/FungusGnats.htm

http://www.ehow.com/how_2101512_rid-gnats.html

Weekend warrior

Friday: 10-mile round trip (RT) to the doctor, followed by 9-mile RT for a lunch date.  I underestimated that second trip — I estimated it at 6-7 miles until I mapped it to write this post.

Saturday: 4-mile RT to the last of the “winter” indoor farmers’ markets.  I bought some gorgeous early spring greens: spinach, arugula, red-leaf lettuce, plus green onions.  A flat tire stopped Matthew short of the market.  He replaced the tube and pumped it up, only to find that the tire itself was shot.

Fortunately, he was only two blocks from our local bike shop.  I caught up to him locking his bike up there on my way back.  We hung out in the park for fifteen minutes, waiting for the shop to open.  While I’m glad to have a bike shop within a mile or so of our apartment, I’ve often found the owner a bit gruff, which he proved again on Saturday (given my hubby’s tale of the encounter).  Compared to our experience later the same day with another bike shop, “Neighborhood Bike Shop,” as I’ll call it, has a thing or two to learn about customer service.

Anyway, new tire in place and ready to roll, we headed set out on our 22-mile RT ride to our commuter garden.  I rode the garden-to-home half of this trip back in August, when we sold my car, but this was the first time we rode it full circle.  We enjoyed a lovely lunch and a bit of (thankfully) light gardening in the middle.  We made it back home to rest up for Sunday . . . .

Sunday: 3 miles to church, 6.5 miles to brunch, 5.5 miles home, and done.  Moratorium on biking for the weekend!

Surprisingly, my legs feel pretty good for cramming 60 miles into the weekend.  Our car enjoyed it’s weekend rest period, sitting parked on the street from Thursday night until Monday morning 🙂