Winter salad

Because I grew up in Southern California and the West Coast of Florida, to me "a vegetable side dish" means salad.  This is very different, I have learned, from what many mid-westerner's think of as a veggie side.  It's not that I don't eat cooked veggies - in winter we have to.  All of our garden veggies are frozen and waiting to be cooked into some sort of wonderful dish with herbs and garlic.  But I still crave the salads.  That's why I grow the lettuce and arugula in the basement and the sprouts in the window in our kitchen.  As I was making my salad for dinner tonight it struck me how different my salads are in winter versus the rest of the year...they just lack the color!

Here's a spring salad:

And here's a winter salad (ignore, if you can, the size difference - in summer a salad is really not a side dish but a meal):

I have frozen peas from the spring garden sprinkled over, but there's no color.  So now I'm wondering if I can grow violas under the lights in the winter.  That would make such a cheery change to the winter salads!

I think I'm going to try it.  I've already tried to grow just about every other possible thing in the basement in the winter (think sub-arctic plenty tomatoes, radishes, peas, nasturtiums...all failures), so why not violas?  Time to get the seeds out...

Sage pesto in chicken roulade

We have two beautiful sage plants in the flower garden area.  They attract pollinators and bloom with a pretty blue/purple flower.  The sage itself I never seem to find a use for except turkey baking and stuffing at Thanksgiving.  I dry it and sprinkle on chicken with other seasonings, but I'm using so little.  This last year I decided to make sage pesto.  So today I took farmer Nick's chicken breast - deboned and deskinned it - then beat it to about 1/4 in thick....maybe less.  Spread the sage pesto on it, with a pressed garlic clove, salt and some ground homegrown basil and oregano, dried tomatoes, and asiago.  Rolled it up and baked it.  My recommendation - try another recipe.  It didn't cut it.  It wasn't bad, but it wasn't great.  Maybe the sage is best as a bee magnet.  That's fine, we need to keep the pollinators happy after all, don't we?

Ordered Seeds

Just got finished ordering seeds and onion sets.  I ended up using 3 places: Baker Creek, Territorial, and Burpee.  The only thing from Burpee was the onion sampler - 3 sets of 75 plants each.  I didn't have to spend near as much money this year as last since I have left over seeds from last year.  I'm very excited.  I will be growing cauliflower and eggplant for the first time. 

Onions

Yesterday I transplanted the rest of the lettuce and all of the arugula into larger pots.  The arugula was doing poorly under my lack of supervision.  It's just been so warm this year that I haven't been spending enough time in the basement with the plants - they would have been transplanted long before now had it been any other year.  Last year was so cold and snowy that I was desperate to be in the company of growing things.  Indeed, this time last year I had already started the onions.

I have tried two years in a row now to grow onions from seed.  This should be do-able.  In fact, The Vegetable Gardener's Bible by Edward Smith gives quite a nice little set of instructions.  But for me, no cigar.  First, I have a hard time starting the seeds, many just don't come up.  Of the ones that do sprout, many quickly die off.  Finally, the ones that remain and I transplant into the garden have never developed in size to be bigger than a golf ball.  Last year I started over 60 onions, and harvested about 6.

Look in the foreground in this picture and you can see one of my baby onions.  This was from last summer - I was making cole slaw.

This year I will purchase onion sets.  I'm hoping to be as self-sufficient in onions as I am garlic, so I want to look for long-storing onions.  I found an inexpensive sampler set from Burpee that includes Walla Walla, Spanish White and Red Zeppelin, but the only storage onion is the Red Zeppelin.  I might just go ahead and get that, after all, it's all a big experiment.

Recipe: Pesto pizza

A pizza recipe may, at first, sound boring.  Especially if you expect it to contain pepperoni, bought sauce, and mozzarella.  But we made pizza tonight that far surpassed my expectations, and that's why I wanted to share the recipe.  It's not your momma's pizza.

I started with Boboli pizza crust because I don't have the time to come home after work and make pizza dough.  But after that is where the fun begins.  I had saved a small portion of the home canned tomato sauce from the spaghetti I made earlier this week.  I mixed this (approximately 1/4 cup, maybe less) with a handful of chopped, frozen sweet (Jimmy Nardello) peppers, a cube of arugula pesto and a cube of basil, oregano, garlic and onion pesto.  I spread the mixture on the crust and sprinkled a tiny bit of cooked sausage on top (about 1oz of sausage - it's just for a slight bit of flavor).  See here:

Then I topped it with a combination of shredded sharp cheddar and asiago cheeses.

This is the first time I have tried this combination of flavors and I thought it was great.  I'm learning ways to use my different pesto cubes, and as I do I will share the ones that taste great as well as the ones that taste terrible.  This one turned out quite nice I think.

Seed Catalogs and Dave's Garden

So now that my guilt has been assuaged, back to thinking about the garden.  As I said in my blog about tomato cages, now is the time that I'm planning the garden, plotting and scheming about next year's garden, including the seeds I will purchase and from what company.

My daughter turned me on to Dave's Garden Watchdog.  It has helped me tremendously in assessing what seed catalogs to keep and which to ditch (recycling of course).  You may already be familiar with Dave's Garden, but if you aren't, here the skinny: it's like Angie's list for seed catalogs.  You can find out which companies have great reviews on their merchandise and customer service and which do not.  I have tossed many a seed/plant catalog after looking up the reviews on this site.  It's my go-to guide for what I keep and what I toss from my mailbox full of catalogs.

My personal favorites for seed catalogs are:
1) Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds
2) Seed Savers Exchange
3) Bountiful Gardens
4) Territorial Seed Company

But some charge an arm and a leg for shipping so be sure to consider that when you're costing it out - I found that Territorial charges quite a bit more than most.  Unless you are buying a lot from them it just isn't worth it.  Baker Creek charges $3.50 for shipping whatever you order.  Seed Savers Exchange charges in a tiered pricing system based on how much money you spend, the more you spend on seeds the more you pay in shipping: $3 for a purchase of $10 or less, $4 for $10-20 etc.  Bountiful Gardens does the same, but shipping costs are less than Seed Savers at $2.50 for up to $10 and $2.95 for a $10-20 order, etc.  Territorial is the most costly, especially if you are ordering a small order.  No matter what the order total, the shipping is $7.50.  So if you find two packets of seed that you want from Territorial you're going to pay more for shipping than you did for your seeds - so just keep an eye on that.

If you're growing your own food because you want to save money (not only because you know what you are eating, you can keep your family safe from toxic pesticides and herbicides, and you enjoy maintaining biodiversity while growing your own food) then you have to consider those shipping costs.  They add up.  I grow my own food for all of those reasons - so I consider return on investment in my garden, and shipping costs are taken into consideration.

Guilt and Blogging and Wild Shrimp

So I didn't realize that taking on this blog would make me feel guilty.  I missed two days.  I feel guilty.  I was traveling for work.  Doesn't matter.  I feel guilty that I didn't take at least a few minutes to write down my thoughts.  Really?  Yes, really.  I think about what I could have written...OK, I was in Georgia...I got to eat local, wild Georgia shrimp.  I could have written about that.  Well, I decided when I started this that I would try to post every day, and so it makes sense that less than 2 weeks after I started I feel guilty about missing a couple of days.  Que sera sera. 

So about wild Georgia shrimp...

My mom and I go on a vacation together every year.  Last year was Savannah, GA and Beaufort, SC.  I spent the entire trip eating locally caught shrimp.  The taste is tremendously different from the shrimp I buy in the store, whether in Illinois or in Florida.  Along the coast the shrimp had a flavor that was fine and delicate, and I while I had grown up eating seafood I had lost my taste for shrimp until I tasted them fresh caught daily from the Georgia coast.  I found myself in a wonderful restaurant in Atlanta, GA this trip and ordered the shrimp and grits.  Still better than what I can get here in Illinois, the taste still wasn't the same as the shrimp I had along the coast.  A testament to the local food movement, and how shipping and storage change the taste - even when shipping is not far, and storage is short.  I never would have thought it made such a difference!  Hats off to local food!

Taste of summer in winter

Last night we had pasta with tomato sauce. The sauce was made from our wonderful heirloom tomatoes - canned at the end of the season. Because it is dangerous to use the hot water bath canning method with fresh herbs, garlic and onions in the sauce, it was pure tomato. But during the summer I also made a pesto of fresh basil, oregano, garlic and onion with just enough olive oil to hold it together. I froze this in ice cube trays and once frozen put the cubes in bags and back in the freezer. So last night I took two of those herb cubes and added them to the tomato sauce. I also had some bulk breakfast sausage from our local farmer Nick, and the sauce did not need a single thing. No salt, no additional flavoring - just spooned it over the pasta with a little pecorino Romano and it was perfect! I have sage pesto, arugula pesto, fines herbs pesto (parsley and tarragon mostly), as well as the standard basil with garlic and nuts. They were all put into ice cube trays and frozen. I was talking about it this evening with a colleague and he suggested trying sun dried tomato pesto. I think I will do that this coming season, he recommended it with goat cheese on fresh made bread. Yum. Especially in the winter when you are starved for a little taste of summer.

Thoughts on tomato cages

As the winter digs in, I spend this time of the year pouring over seed catalogs and garden equipment catalogs - making a shopping list of the things I need for spring.  If you too are contemplating what kinds of garden accoutrements to purchase for your spring gardening adventures, let me say that this last year convinced me of the importance of sturdy tomato cages.  Not because they hold the tomato plants up better.  Yes, they do that.  They don't topple over when the indeterminate heirloom plants reach over 6 feet tall.  But the sturdy square cages I purchased from Gardener's Supply do more than that.  These cages served to protect my tomatoes from complete and utter destruction. 

A severe storm came through one morning, and as I watched through the picture window overlooking the back yard three huge maple branches came crashing down on top of my tomatoes.  Here's what it looked like:

I had such high hopes for a great tomato season - I had planted 7 tomato plants at the top of the garden bed, which was now completely covered in maple branches.

I was devastated.  That was half of my tomatoes under there!  The branches were so big and heavy I had to ask my neighbor (we have wonderful neighbors!) to help me move them.  I was expecting all the plants to be completely crushed.  But we got the branches off, and lo and behold the cages had saved the plants!  Every single one of them.  They were a little worse for the wear, but mostly intact.

Look at this photo taken immediately after we got the branches off the garden (I straightened the cages, and put them back into the ground where they had come up so I could inspect the plants, but otherwise this photo was taken right after the branches were moved - you can even see some maple leaves on the ground in front):

The cages were a bit bent but they were salvageable, and most importantly they saved the plants.  So when you're contemplating what kind of support you want for your tomato plants, don't just consider how you keep the plants off the ground - consider how you might protect those babies from the vagaries of mother nature!

Happy gardening!

Book Review: Animal, Vegetable, Miracle

So I was thinking that I would reserve every Friday to do a book review.  I love to read and have spent many a long winter night sitting cross-legged in the guest room (also known as my mom's room, or, the hippie room) sipping wine and reading wonderful stories, instructions, and hints for starting a business in farming/gardening. I don't like to give a "grade" to the books however, so I will not rate them - just give a summary and my opinion of what the book emphasized.  I spent too much time teaching college classes, I don't like to give grades.  Too often people look at that alone and don't pay attention to the comments.

So here are my comments about "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle" by Barbara Kingsolver - the most obvious book for me to review first because it is what led me to start growing all of my own veggies.

This book is both beautifully written and emotionally touching.  Ms. Kingsolver is a biologist and while this cannot be the reason that her descriptions of the natural world are so compelling, I am sure it is the reason she sees the natural world so deeply.  It is a moving story of a year with her family living completely off of her husband's family's farm, written with her older daughter.  One of my favorite parts of the book is a description of her younger daughter's exploits with chickens.  Lily loved (loves) chickens.  I still laugh when I think of Ms. Kingsolver commenting that the first thing they had to teach Lily was not to kiss the chickens on the lips!!!  It now reminds me of my granddaughter who puts my daughter's chickens in the coop every night.  She, too, loves chickens.  Lily's exploits with her chickens are funny and moving - and she is bright as a whip! 

The book is informative, it has recipes, and it's a wonderful memoir - but the reason to read this book is because it is written so beautifully.  It draws you in, makes you part of it, connects you with the author, her family, and the natural world.  You will curl up with this book and not want it to end.  Here is a quote, from page 13, just to get you into it, it's from the chapter on spring: "The maple buds glow pink, the forsythia breaks into its bright yellow aria.  These are the days when we can't keep ourselves indoors..."

Today - while it continues to snow and we expect a buildup of 6-8 inches - I can't wait for that spring.

Cabbage in the basement

Another post on growing food in winter. 

Note to self (and others), you can't dig up the fall cabbage that didn't do so hot in the garden, repot it, and expect it to grow big in the basement in the winter. 

I thought this was a good idea.  In 2010 my fall cabbage and kale crops did great - nice big heads on the cabbage.  We blanched and froze a bunch.  In 2011 I planted cabbage and kale in fall hoping to get the same results.  Perhaps I planted a bit late, I'm still trying to figure that out, but in any case it didn't do so well.  Before the first hard freeze I cut most of it down and used some of it fresh and I blanched and froze a rather small amount.  There were no heads on either the Famosa or the Early Jersey Wakefield.  I decided to dig up two of the Early Jersey Wakefield and put them in pots, in organic potting soil, and grow them in the basement.  We have nice windows in the basement, and I put them near the south-facing windows where we get good light and the tropical plants winter over.  Yep...sounds good...but it didn't work.  Here's a picture of the cabbage now, two months later:

It's pretty and we'll have a nice slaw from it, but apparently I shouldn't expect to get a head of cabbage.  Oh well, as I'm constantly saying about this whole thing: it's all a big experiment.

Everybody is doing it

Even the folks at O'Hare airport have gotten on the local and sustainable bandwagon.  Check out the ABC news story here: abclocal.

And for those of you in the northwest suburbs of Chicago, check out Duke's Alehouse and Kitchen in Crystal Lake - they serve locally grown food and advertise the farms they buy from.  The food is quite good.  I visit them often when we go to the Crystal Lake farmer's market to get Farmer Nick's local, free-range, organic meat.

Growing Food in Winter

Since I have digging and dirt and harvesting withdrawals in the winter (I was raised in southern California and Florida), I decided I needed to grow at least some edible things in the Illinois winter.  But instead of building a cold-frame I grow sprouts in my window and lettuce and arugula in the basement under grow lights.  We have fresh salads about 3 times a week that way, and I keep my hands in the dirt.  This is so easy and inexpensive if you buy shop lights and suspend them with chain from a sturdy beam.  Just make sure you get grow lights instead of regular fluorescent bulbs, and you can be growing your own salad makings all year 'round.  Especially good for basement gardens are cut-and-come-again lettuce types, like little gem and speckled trout's back.  You can find these and other heirlooms and organic lettuce types from Baker Creek or Seed Saver's Exchange, among others.  You can see some of my lettuce growing here:

I will cut some of these for a salad and leave them under the lights, watering from the bottom, and they will grow back at least once and often two more times.

Believe it or not, you can also grow lemon and lime trees - my neighbor is even growing a fig tree.  If you plant them in large, but light, pots, you can take these warm weather loving plants out in the spring and bring them back in the house in the fall.  They take minimal work - just watering and misting, and once in a while cleaning the leaves with alcohol to fight off spider mites - but you get the most wonderful citrus flower fragrance when they're blooming and you get to watch the fruit ripen over the winter.  I have a Meyer lemon and a Rangpur lime.  The lime turns orange when it is ripe so these two plants also bring in bright orange and yellow during the monochrome days of winter grey and white.

But if you live in the north and are really jonesing for gardening joy, check out my daughter's blog at organic-gardening-adventures. She lives in Florida and so her garden is growing like crazy while mine is covered in snow and ice, and she regularly posts pictures.

Just Starting Out

Well, this is my first post, on my first blog, and I'm not quite sure what to do now that I've created it.  I think the most logical thing to do is to introduce how I came to this point and what I intend to include on the blog as I start this new path of writing along with gardening.

First of all, I fully blame Barbara Kingsolver for my present condition.  She doesn't know me, and I don't know her, but she is definitely the one who led me here.  About 7 years ago my partner and I bought a house together that had a wonderful spot for a vegetable garden.  We both liked to grow our own herbs and veggies and we started cleaning out the chosen area that next summer.  I bought some books on organic vegetable gardening and gardening in Illinois.  At the same time I was reading every Barbara Kingsolver book I could get my hands on; she came highly recommended by my mom and has such a lovely writing style.  Sometime during late 2007 or early 2008 I learned she had a new book out: "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle" and it sounded like a wonderful read - while not fiction like the other books I had read of hers, it was about growing her own food and, after all, I had this little vegetable patch, it would be a fun read!  And that was the start of it all. 

Some people say I get a bit obsessive about the things I love to do, perhaps that's the case or perhaps I just get enthusiastic (a description much more to my liking).  In either case after reading that book I decided I wanted to learn more about growing as many of my own vegetables as possible.  I bought more books (and more books) and the more I read the more I planned and plotted and schemed.  I was seen outside at night, and in the snow, with measuring tape.  I started getting all manner of seed catalogs and even farming magazines.  I had decided I wanted to grow enough vegetables and herbs (and hopefully one day fruits) that I would never have to purchase them in a store or farmer's market again.

Now, here I am.  In the complicated throes of trying to balance a busy professional career with growing as many veggies and herbs and fruits as I possibly can...and loving every minute of it.  I hope you will join me.  There is nothing that I would like better than to inspire at least one other person to come home after a hard days work and relax by walking their vegetable garden, pulling a weed here and there, and going "shopping" in their own back yard when the produce is ripe on the vine.

This blog will include my own adventures with different organic and heirloom varieties of vegetables, fruits and herbs, as well as information on other backyard gardeners, beekeepers, and farmers, along with recipes, book reviews, and whatever I stumble across that I think others might be interested in, or might help them grow more food.  I like to learn from my mistakes and hope you can too - and I'm always open to suggestions for how I can do things better, so whether it has to do with my garden or this blog, let me know.
Crysta