Homemade concoctions to aid in making homemade concoctions.

 

A few holidays ago (I have no idea which one) Charlie started building me a drying rack as a gift. Six, maybe 8, months of starting and stopping later it's finally finished and in full use! It's basically a pine frame with slots to slide trays in. The trays are also pine and I hot glued taut screen on top of each tray.  The whole thing, though large, is lightweight and easy to move, but also slips nicely into place underneath the kitchen counter. So far I'm drying snow/snap peas and fava beans for fall planting, various herbs, and thin slices of a large beet.

The beet is an experiment. My favorite lip balm has a hint of beet powder in it to tint the balm. I'm interested in trying to make my own with fewer ingredients and perhaps a bit brighter color. Wish me luck, it may take me another 6 to 8 months to get around to making it!

A taste of Spring

A few weeks ago the wild violets were poking their pretty little faces up in the yard and I took the opportunity to try my hand at candied violets. Mabel and I brushed the delicate blooms with egg white, coated them with sugar, and set them aside to dry thoroughly.

They were so pretty I asked my baking expert friend Jude to make a special treat worthy of showing off the candied flowers. The cakes definitely upstaged the delicious violets, but not because the violets weren't amazing themselves. Other sweets were topped with sugars colored with wildflower petals. 

Candying violets will be added to our rites of spring. Interested in adding it to yours? We'll have wild violets available at our fundraising plant sale on Saturday, April 18, 2015. Come out to support Little Sugar Creek Community Garden (Charlotte), leave with a gorgeous array of interesting plants ready to inspire tasty treats!

Wildflowers in the kitchen

When I heard the slightest whisper from spring the inspiration to play came on full force. The violets peeked their pretty little faces toward the sunshine and I gathered a cupful for kitchen experiments.

 

Violet petals in sugar with a hint of lemon zest made the prettiest lavender sugar!

Egg white wash over whole violets, sprinkled with sugar makes for candied violets. I'm dreaming of cupcakes fit for a fairy party!

 

And because  the violet sugar was so fun, I tried the same with dandelions. I don't know if the color will keep, but I'm already thinking of what other flowers I can try!

 

 

Black Walnut Ink

What does a stay-at-home-mom do between baby wrangling and printing posters for a couple of upcoming shows? Simmer walnuts on the stove to make ink, of course!

Mabel has been helping pile up the walnuts in our yard, which then go into one of my big enamel pots (formerly used for canning), are covered with water, and then the liquid is reduced in half. I also gathered some goldenrod to add to one of the batches to see if I could get a bit of a yellow hue to the ink. I didn't gather enough goldenrod and the plants are at the end end of their season here anyway.

The result is a beautiful warm brown. I've bottled some up to take to the Handmade Market, saved a quart for Charlie to use as a wood stain, and have another batch I'm reducing even further to make it really saturated.

Want to make your own? Follow the instructions over on You Grow Girl! Gayla takes all the guess work out of the process!

Respect your Elders

There is one blueberry bush in our yard (of about 10) that has berries on it. I suspect that's because it's tucked beside an elderberry and the birds have been so distracted with the elderberry they haven't noticed the blueberry. Whatever the reason, it will have a nice-sized harvest when/if they ever ripen.

Yesterday I went to check on it and saw the elderberries are ripe! I'd had it in my mind that they'd be ready sometime in August. I guess that needs a mental correction? Anyway, it seems early to me. I harvested about 3/4 of the clusters from the 2 largest bushes. There were enough clusters that were nearly bare to tell me there have been ripe berries for a few days at least. The remaining unpicked clusters are mostly green and will be harvested in a couple weeks, I suppose.

Earlier in the spring I saved a few flower heads for use as herbal tea. Now I have about 2 cups of fresh berries. I'll probably dry half and syrup (You can verb 'syrup' right? You can verb 'verb' right?) the other half. Elderberries have historically been used for prevention of winter ailments, they're packed with vitamins (A, B, and C) and immune boosting antioxidants.

Later today we're going blackberry picking! Any berries in your neck of the woods? What's lookin' good?

For those interested in growing elderberries, one of my bushes was started from a twig I simply stuck in the ground. I believe it is Black Elderberry (Sambucus nigra). The other is one I purchased from Gardens of the Blue Ridge and is the North American native elderberry, Sambucus canadensis. If you're interested in purchasing one, I can't recommend them highly enough.

Mulch it good

When I first got into veggie gardening we talked about buying a tiller and working the land that way. Since permie school/hippie camp, I've come to know, love, and totally rely on building mulch beds. Remember how I do it? Start by suppressing grass and weed growth with cardboard.

Pile on layers of mulch in a variety of forms. We have a hill of decaying shredded woody material so I use that, grass clippings, leaves, chicken litter....whatever is free and handy.

Water well, add soil/finished compost in pockets throughout the deep mulch and plant directly into the soil.The next season that whole mound you made will be beautiful, dark, rich compost, full of worms and ready for growing.

Keyhole Bed: A recap

April 2011

May 2011

June 2011

2012

Then in 2013 I didn't do much gardening...

I was pregnant with Fox. I did

get some onions in the ground in the fall.

Late 2012 the plum tree had bad blight so we chopped it down.

Sometime in early 2014 I put bricks we had on hand

for another project around the bed. This is April 2014.

Here it is now, taken over mostly with perennials, a few annual veggies

tucked here and there, and some flower seeds yet to sprout.

The Pond, a recap

2008 - the plan in place

2008, just after we finished building the pond

2009 - 8 months later

2010 - 2 years later

2014 - 6 years later

Simply delicious

The nip is in the air and it's time to replace the tomato plants with cold hardy greens. I haven't had the heart to rip them out yet, there are still a few tomatoes on each plant, slowly turning red. They deserve to become ripe, I deserve to relish them. They need to be honored.

Cheese tortellini topped with roasted tomatoes with a bit of basil and olive oil. Yep, that'll do the trick.

The 10 Minute Tiny Pond Project

Having a water feature can bring lots of new creatures to a garden. This isn't really a pond, but a planter I found on end of season clearance at Target. I added a solar aerator, goldfish and plants from the backyard pond, and voila! A new point of interest in the yard for Mabel (the goldfish have a magnetic quality). I'm also hoping it will be a point of interest for nature's own mosquito control, dragonflies and damselflies.

A few more garden critters

We're finding a lot of critters in the few minutes we spend outside each week. It's so hot I have a hard time motivating Mabel to play out there and should admit that I'm pretty happy to sink into the couch for a while each afternoon, too.

We found another batch of swallowtail caterpillars, both of which are now chrysalis. Saturday night I made a sorrel tart. The sorrel, straight from the garden to the kitchen, had lots and lots of little snails which I collected in a jar. I told M we weren't going to keep them, but they're still in the jar on her work table (aka the den coffee table). I'm thinking we could become Matthews, NC's first escargot farmers.  

Pretty powders

Of the gardening (spin-off) activities I can do with Mabel is get her to help me grind dried goods up in the small coffee grinder. To keep her entertained, she needs to see what's happening and to know she's not just doing busy work. Powdering things up is an activity with immediate results, and she gets to do most of the actual work. So far we've done this twice: first pulverizing tomato peels into a seasoning something like tomato-bent paprika, the second was to turn homegrown (and dried) stevia into a powder. All-in-all it's a time consuming tasks and requires an extra bit of patience with the toddler since the powder ends up everywhere, but our time together making things and the pride on M's face when we're done make it that much better. Plus, look how pretty they are together!

Monday Musings

A plaque I commissioned from Melissa Bridgman. As soon as the porch is finished it will find its permanent home. In the meantime, I love seeing it in our kitchen window.

Long Tom paste tomatoes (pencil for scale): Delicious, giant, and virtually seedless. I'm in love with these tomatoes, the plants are dripping with tomatoes. The harvest (below) is one day's harvest from 3 plants. I have to pick them just slightly earlier than ripe or the rabbits will taste every single one.

Preservation Proclamation

Friday evening I made a big pot of sorrel and potato soup from MizTrail's Easy Growing. It was excellent! Part of the issue with growing non-traditional honky foods is that I have to figure out a way to cook them and use them. Especially when they start coming in by the truck load. Note to self: having 3 sorrel plants for a family of 3 is more than plenty. Thanks in part to the potatoes, the soup was filling enough that it provided dinner for 2 (Mabel wasn't feeling experimental that night), Saturday's lunch for me, and a big enough batch for the freezer that we'll have dinner another night.

I spent a couple hours in the community garden on Saturday morning, first teaching a class (of 2!), then attacking the weeds* that had taken over. Currently the garden consists of 20 mounded rows, each 8' wide and 25' long. We've consistently had 3 people there working on Saturdays and 2 stalwarts who make it out a couple times during the week. Suffice to say, the uprooting of weeds has been much slower than the growth of new ones.


I brought some clear plastic to the garden to begin solarizing a couple of the beds. In return, I came home with a plastic grocery bag full of lamb's quarters, a giant cilantro plant that went to seed, and a bin of red wrigglers. Later in the afternoon I gave my own herb garden some TLC by giving one of the rosemary bushes a trim, uprooting and drying catnip (for our own use as tea), and dividing a few of my plants-gone -wild in preparation of unloading (errr...) giving them away.

This is actually a different batch of pesto than the cilantro pesto I made, 

but what can I say, it's Monday and I'm lazy.

To recap: we're now well stocked on rosemary infused oil, rosemary balsamic vinegar, cilantro oil, cilantro pesto, and coriander. I'm still deciding what to do with the lamb's quarters, we have a ton of lettuce to go through before I get to them.

All of this jabber is to get to the point of what my Mother's Day consisted of: preserving. Whether keeping herbs in oil, vinegar, or finding a way to freeze them, I've already got a nice stockpile and the summer growing season hasn't really started!

*Most of these weeds are edible, but we want more mainstream crops producing food for Friendship Trays.

Independent Suppliers: Fire Escape Farms

This is going to sound like a commercial, but I promise this is a little post about an online store that I keep visiting {weekly!} for a bit of window shopping .

Have you ever visited Fire Escape Farms' website? Geared toward the apartment gardener but is packed full of high-quality tried and true products for all kinds of gardeners, the shop is packed full of beautifully designed essentials. Hard working and easy on the eye, that's what we all need more of.

This, though...These pruners are what keep me going back.

The ARS 120S-8 is the cadillac of Pruners. Made of high chrome steel it is coated with hard-chrome to resist rust and sap. A professional grade pruner, it creates smooth clean cuts and wipes clean easily. The metal handle is coated with rubber for easy ergonomic handling and is the perfect size for most hands. 

In the past 6 years I've probably been through as many pairs of pruners. Rusty blades, dirt getting into the spring mechanism, and most recently a chunk of metal fell out of the blade of my Fiskars when I opened them to prune something. I think I pretty much deserve a Cadillac, don't I? Seems it's time to stop window shopping and go in and make that purchase!

DIY Soil Amendment: Calcium

Calcium is one of those things we don't usually talk about in terms of garden nutrients, right? I mean, you buy a bag of soil amendments and the big numbers are NPK, but what about the little guys? The minerals and micro nutrients that feed soil health? I'm no soil scientist, I don't purport to be an expert, but I can recognize a deformed fruit when I see one. (Blossom end rot, anyone?) Funk lookin' fruits can be a sign of calcium deficiency. Calcium is vital for sugar production in plants, it's part of what keeps your vegetables from being bitter. 


To boost my beds with a bit of calcium I fill empty milk and dairy containers with water to rinse them, but instead of pouring the water down the drain I'll pour it on a garden bed. I'm also hoping the finished bokashi will add micro nutrients to the soil, and the addition of bokashi-composted bones from dinner should add a little something to the soil, too.

We also have a plenitude of eggshells. After a Sunday of cooking snacks for the week ahead I generally have a small pan full.Now, if you've ever thrown eggs in the compost bin you know they break down very slowly. When added directly to a garden bed they break down even more slowly, so they don't directly provide much calcium to your plants; something like Soft Rock Phosphate is better suited for that. This past winter I've been saving the shells from hard boiled eggs and grinding them up. I've also been taking the shells from other eggy exploits and sticking them in the oven to bake when I'm cooking dinner. My theory is to kill off unwanted bacteria and dry the shells out for storage. They, too, are ground up. In the end, I have something that looks like this:

The texture ranges from a fine dust to gritty bits that look like pulverized shells on the beach. Since eggshells are a good way to keep slugs under control, the grit should work double time. The powder will be more readily available to the plants and the larger grit will work as pest control.

It's not revolutionary, but I get a little excited about free garden solutions. Do you save your eggshells? What's your favorite free soil amendment?

Hard Working Hens

These nice spring days, we've got eggs out the wazoo. There will be quiche with foraged greens, there will be all sorts of homemade custard, the gardens will be amended with chicken poop and the slugs will be deterred with crushed eggshells. These girls *just might* work harder at keeping us all healthy than what we do for ourselves.

On being a fan of Weeds

Hey look! You can download this image here

As I've been reading up on herbs and their uses, I've realized just how many weedy plants in the yard are actually medicinal.  After the initial feeling of astonishment passes, the same thought runs through my head each time, "They're weeds only if you don't know how to use them." That one thought and a little series of drawings was born.