Posts tagged ‘gardening’

For those of you in the NE Ohio area, you must make a trip to the Farmer’s Market at Stan Hywet. It’s Thursday’s from 4-7pm through September 23.   We bought fresh wheat bread, grass-fed cow cheese, and plumbs.  Everything tasted fresh & flavorful.  I was especially amazed at how creamy & rich the cheese was.

As a bonus after the market, you can walk the estate gardens for free.  I took lots of pics of my son running across bridges, next to fountains, & through the grape arbor tunnel.

It’s tomato time! I grew “lemon boy” and “ruffled yellow” tomatoes this year to change up my usual early girl, cherry tomatoes and romas. The harvest has been quite prolific, actually quite a bit more than I can use in just salads and sandwiches. Rather than freezing them, I decided to try to use them fresh as often as possible, and that’s how I started making my Simple Salsa.

It’s very mild, since I am always sharing it with the girls, but you can easily add a jalepeno or other hot pepper variety if you like some fire in your salsa.

The recipe is as follows:

Simple Salsa

about 6 tomatoes diced

2 small red onions diced very small

2 green peppers diced

1 clove garlic minced

1 T sugar

2 tsp salt

1 tsp cumin

black pepper to taste

Stir all ingredients together, let it set a bit for the flavors to blend together. I’ve had it 5 minutes after making it and it is great. It is even better if you can manage to wait until the next day. We can rarely wait that long!

Last week some friends came over to help weed my driveway.  I didn’t pay them , nor was I in dire need because I broke a leg or something.   It was just an experiment in helping each other.

See, some of my girlfriends regularly get together for brunches.  But Devona & I brainstormed, “Why not do work projects for the person who hosts brunch?”  So last week I was the first work brunch hostess and kindly received lots of help with the overgrown weeds in my driveway.  I chose a project we could do while socializing & watching the kids.  We worked for an hour on what would have taken me a week alone.

Have you tried anything like this with your friends or even family or neighbors?  I’m curious what other ideas are out there.

Starbucks Coffee Grounds

I got this complimentary 5-pound bag of used coffee grounds from Starbucks.  My store keeps them near the bagged coffees.  Here’s an article about all the benefits of using coffee grounds in the garden.  You can add grounds to compost or use them as mulch.   They benefit plants because they’re high in Nitrogen, and they help bring down soil pH.  Supposedly they deter slugs & snails.  And if they’re fresh, the smell is nice as well.

For years I’ve had the most ragged garden, one which I apologize periodically to my neighbors.  This year it was, “I’m sorry my mint is appearing in your lawn.” and “Sorry about the raspberries looking so messy right near your garage.” But they’re nice about my urban gardening experiments, plus I always give them fresh produce!  So to curb the chaos, I’ve teamed with my husband to build three raised garden beds.

Here are instructions for building a wooden raised garden bed, plus tips on how to set it up in the garden space.  I think it’s much easier if two people work on the project together.

Supplies (for building the wood square):

tools for building bed

-4 pieces of wood per square.  Mine is 6″ tall 2″ deep, and cut to 4′ long, so my box is 4′ x 4′ square.  You can change the size, but keep in mind that you need to be able to reach all plants from the outside perimeter.  Ideally, I wanted 5′ square, but the wood only came in 8′ pieces, so 4′ square didn’t waste wood.  By the way, the nice people at the hardware store only charged $.25 a board to cut my wood.  That saved so much work!  Also, I used untreated wood.  I don’t want those chemicals near my plants.

-8 wood screws per square.   Mine are 2 1/2″ long.

-drill, extension cord to reach your drilling area, a drill bit that’s a little skinnier than your screws (for predrilling holes), and a screwdriver bit for the drill (unless you want to hand screw them with a screwdriver instead). Read more »

Our flower gardens are in full bloom. And if you have  little girls, like me, then all of the floral bounty is probably turning their imaginings to the subject of fairies.

This dish, filled with water, became the paddling pool for some fairies on our dining room table this week. I let the girls cut the flowers from my hostas before I trimmed them down to use in decorating the pond. They also clipped some lamb’s ears, some pink flowers (I don’t know what they are!) and some of the petals from my day lilies. The day lily petals made great boats.

The bonus feature for this “craft” is that it makes a wonderful variation on a center piece. The flowers remained vibrant for about 5 days before I needed to remove them from the table giving us plenty of time to enjoy the arrangement, and plenty of time for the girls to retell Thumbelina around the dining room table.

I’ve written about this before. Has anyone one out there given it a try yet? These are my first new potatoes of the year, along with some other crops from the ol’ garden, which I used to make fried potatoes and green tomatoes for breakfast Saturday morning.

Here’s a quick review of the process. Bury your seed potatoes in clump-free and rock-free soil about 5 inches apart. Or if you’re me, bury some sprouted potatoes from the pantry! After the green stalks ( like the ones seen in my guess the veggies post) have flowered you know that there are some potatoes under your soil. If you see tops of potatoes sticking out of the ground they will begin to turn green and slightly poisonous, so mulch them to keep the potatoes covered. Now all you have to do is dig around and find them. They will just keep getting bigger and bigger as long as you leave them underground, so keep them in the garden instead of the pantry until fall. Then you can dig up the rest and store them in a cool dry place.

I’m really disappointed when I’m at the grocery store hoping to buy something that’s in season in Ohio, only to find it’s been shipped in from Chili or California.  I want to work my cooking around local produce because it costs less in transportation, it’s fresher, and so I can support the area farmers. So I’ve been looking into farmer’s markets & CSA’s (community supported agriculture) in the area.

Recently I wrote about a CSA I visited.  The waiting list to join was long, so I asked if anyone knew of others in the NE Ohio area.  A reader named Emily suggested City Fresh, a non-profit that collects fresh produce from NE Ohio farmers & delivers it to selected urban drop-off points for pick-up.  I discovered that a drop-off point is a couple miles from my house, so I decided try out their program.

Today I picked up my first share of produce.  This is the family share (for 3-4 people), and it cost $28.  There are two bags of green beans, red potatoes, herbs, zucchini, beats, broccoli, a jar of raspberry jam, red onion, cucumber, lettuce, and pickling cucumbers.

I received a rain barrel for my birthday in March and finally got it installed today…just in time for the forecasted storms the next few days.

It’s a Fiskars rain barrel.  It wasn’t difficult to install.  We had to cut the gutter & drill a hole in the barrel (while entertaining 2 kids at the same time).

So, why did it take three months to get it up and going?  Well, mostly we weren’t sure if we should keep it.  We have a small yard and wondered if it’d be an eyesore.  Now I need to figure out how to camouflage it into the landscaping.  We also weren’t sure if we could use the water safely in our vegetable garden.  I read lots of websites to try & get a straight answer.  The most educated answers I found from the Texas Water Development Board.  They make suggestions for the types of roofs to use, how to keep out debris & other contaminants, and treatment methods for potable water.  They said composite & asphalt shingle roofs leech toxins.  Plus, my system doesn’t have fancy roof cleansing abilities or first-flush system, so rain will collect bacteria, mold, fecal material, etc from the roof.  I’m not comfortable putting these things on my plants, so I’m pretty sure my barrel will just be for landscape plants.  But either way, I’m thankful for my gift & I’m happy to conserve a little water.

Rachel! How did I get this winner? For every correct answer you gave, I put your name in a list, in order of the way you left your comments. Then I asked our dear friends at random.org  who should get the prize, and Rachel was the winner. Great job, everyone on your guesses!

So, what were the veggies anyway? Number one is a red onion, and I took any variation on the word “onion” as a correct answer. Number two is broccoli, my favorite thing to grow. And number 3 is potatoes, which some people are surprised even has a green part to it.

The secret prize was a secret because I wasn’t sure I’d have the chance to make them. But now I know that I will have the time, so Rachel will be getting 3 stamped silverware garden tags. You can tell me what plant name you want me to stamp on there. Hope you love them!