Archive for the 'Growing Food' Category
It’s been a year now that I have taken on the new adventure of growing purple cauliflower. I started the seeds indoors in March 2009 and tenderly cared for them until they could be hardened off. I grew a bunch, maybe twelve, so I put two in my back garden beds, took six more to the community garden and gave the final ones away. The ones in my back garden grew and grew and grew into monstrous proportions and finally started to rot and stink over winter so I composted them. That was hard to do after ten months of anticipation for a purple crown of deliciousness but the backyard patio area smelling like rotten cabbage was a strong motivator.
The ones at the community garden were basically in shade because my plot—unbeknownst to me when we took the plot in the late winter of 2009—was totally shaded by a huge tree until 2PM every day. Not the best spot for growing veg. Nonetheless, four of those plants seemed to be staying healthy albeit quite small so I potted them up and brought them home and forgot about them. One day I had a bare spot in the front garden so I put four of them in the ground and a year later to my great surprise I have purple cauliflower!
Each plant is looking a little different today. Two have golf-ball sized crowns, one has melon sized crown and one, in this photo, has started to set a bunch of florets instead of a crown.
Cauliflower Gardeners out there: what should I now do with my purple cauliflower? I couldn’t imagine after the treacherous life these plants have had that they would provide me with something edible, but they have, and now I wonder if I should harvest them or let them grow larger. Could it be that each one could become it’s own crown?
This certainly is no ordinary tale of planting a growing cauliflower, and I would not recommend it, but this sort of chaos is to be expected as I try new things and stray from the traditional ways of doing things (like gardening in rows – for shame!) I’m sorry to those experienced gardeners with dedicated vegetable plots that are carefully organized and planned that I am making cringe with my tale but for me any experiment that ends with a tasty meal is a success. And I’m hoping for a tasty meal soon.
March 04 2010 | Community Garden and Gardening and Growing Food and Harvest | 5 Comments »
My radishes are growing so well under the umbrella greenhouses that I started thinning them this morning. Not one to throw away fresh greens, I topped my breakfast with the culled radishlings. With all the pepper in me now, I think I’ll go do some gardening!
February 25 2010 | Growing Food and Photography | 7 Comments »
I think I’ll have a great crop of radishes in a few weeks with this warm sunny weather we have been having and my wonderful umbrella greenhouses. I planted these just a few weeks ago and I already have to thin my seedlings.
The lettuce and peas I’m growing under the other greenhouses are also doing really well. I can’t wait for spring salad season!
February 18 2010 | Gardening and Growing Food | 1 Comment »
I wasn’t into gardening in the 70’s (unless you count eating dirt while running around my yard in diapers) but those of my friends who were a bit older then, remember growing their own sprouts in a jar or a basket, forgetting about them on a windowsill and that memorable odour of neglected, fuzzy sprouts.
Well if that’s how you remember sprouting, then welcome to the new millennium. For Christmas / Chanukah last year, I was the lucky recipient of an automatic sprouter. This lovely contraption has a water basin below a tray for your seeds and sprinklers that automatically turns on and off at some random intervals that I have yet to figure out. All you need to do is change the water in the basin daily, find a nice spot with some indirect light and in 4-6 days you’ll be eating crunchy fresh greens right from your tabletop.
Sprouts are nutritious little mini-plants full digestible energy, bioavailable vitamins, amino acids, minerals, enzymes, proteins and photochemicals. All that good stuff is locked up within the seeds just waiting for you to give it the start needed to create a plant. For more information on sprouting go here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sprouting.
Needless to say, many of us in cold climates are lacking nutrients in the winter. Fresh vegetables aren’t growing in our gardens anymore, our pantry and freezers are emptying of the previous year’s harvest and we are resorting (ugh!) to buying our fresh produce shipped in from warmer climates. That combined with the gardening itch that starts ramping up after Christmas for me, got me into sprouting.
So far I have sprouted alfalfa, fenugreek, red clover, radish, broccoli, beets, spelt berries, mung beans, lentils, sunflower seeds, and I am currently working on a batch of green peas. The results have been varied. My favourite is the mix of alfalfa, fenugreek, red clover, radish that has the right mix of flavour and spice for salads and sandwiches. The mung beans were hard to do and was an eye-opener for the unnatural conditions required to make those crunchy and sweet mung bean sprouts we get from China. The lentils have a delicious nutty sweet flavour perfect for adding a crunch to soups, and the sunflower seeds are best grown as micro greens (seeds jam-packed in a soil-less mixture) rather than in the sprouter.
{From left: sprouting spelt berries, sunflower seeds, and alfalfa / radish / red clover mix; the Fresh Life Automatic Sprouter; the whirling sprinker is a hit with the under 4 crowd.}
As I was organizing all of my packets of seeds for the garden this coming season, I started feeling overwhelmed with the idea that I could very possibly be a garden hoarder! Not really, but I do have a lot more seeds than I can possibly grow this year, or any year for that matter. It seems reasonable then to sprout the suckers now and eat them before I have to call A&E and register for the show. PS: My sprouter and my seeds come from West Coast Seeds.
January 09 2010 | Gardening and Growing Food | 2 Comments »
Trevin Farms: view from farmhouse
One of the highlights of my trip through New England this fall was the cheese making class at
Trevin Farms in Central Vermont. Trevin is a farmstay that offers a 3-day chevre-making class in the company of the gracious Chef-Owners, Troy and Kevin, and their family: two giant Bull Mastiffs, two friendly horses, a small herd of milking goats, and a flock of free-range chickens. Our host and teacher, Kevin, promised that if I were able to make it to the farm by 4:30pm the first night of the stay I would be able to milk the goats for our cheese. SOLD! I arranged my trip to ensure that I could make it in time and while the road trip through the Adirondack Mountains was delicious with fiery trees in full peak foliage, I had my mind on getting to the goats in time.
Trevin's goats waiting in line to be milked
At 4:30pm as promised we were given the milking rundown and introduced to the milking goats: Sassy, Indiana (Indy), and Strawberry. The girls were always milked in the same order, which they had chosen, and they were not only practiced but eager to get on with it as was made clear by the forceful bleating that marked our arrival to the barn. Sassy, who was aptly named, hopped up on the platform in milking stance and after a short demonstration it was time to get to work. It was initially intimidating with Sassy’s low groans marking her dissatisfaction at my slow and unskilled attempts to relive her udder. But with a little practice and a lot of goat patience, the milk was retrieved and the udders were relieved, until the next morning at 6AM when it was to happen all over again.
Milking Indy the goat
Later on that evening we began the cheese class. Using the unpasteurized milk fresh from the girls we began the incredibly simple and rewarding task of making chevre, a mild and soft goat cheese. This first step included bringing 1 gallon of milk up to 86ºF in a double boiler, adding chevre culture and rennet, and then letting the cheese sit undisturbed for 12 hours.
Chickens begging for pancakes. I wonder why?
The next morning we woke and had a lovely breakfast with Zeus and Zoe the Bull Mastiffs at our feet and a hoard of chickens begging at the back patio door for the leftovers. We checked in on the cheese and it had done its work, separating into a large central curd surrounded by whey. We cut the curd with a knife slicing it into a grid of about 1” cubes and with a slotted ladle, scooped the curds into a colander lined with butter muslin, a fine cheesecloth. While scooping each layer, we salted the curds to flavour the cheese as well as to draw out more moisture. The next step was to tie up the muslin and hang it in the very sophisticated cheese making room, a.k.a. the downstairs shower, to drain. Twenty-four hours later it was wrapped up and ready to travel through New England with us.
Making chevre in Vermont
The final chevre was light and delicate in flavour, not at all like the pungent and often sour goat cheese I have had in the past. It was delightful with the butternut squash soup Kevin made for us one evening, and equally as nice with the Fig Brandy & Honey Mandarin Preserves I made this summer served on a little toasted ciabatta. It was not much fun to travel around with for another 10 days, and we couldn’t finish the entire pound of cheese before it expired, but the flavour was so creamy and fresh that it just cannot compare to much of what I have bought in the past. With my new skills in hand, I’ve ordered my own supplies of rennet and enzymes to try the whole thing again in my Vancouver kitchen. Now I just need to find some sassy goats in need of milking.
This is Brandon, one of the 3 male goats
November 18 2009 | Growing Food and Photography | 6 Comments »
Tonight after many, many months of this beautiful decorative cabbage growing in my front flower beds it was time to up root it, wash off the bloom, and dig in.
Half was chopped and sauteed with red onion, olive oil and a bay leaf to accompany tonight’s pork. Tomorrow, the other half will be thinly sliced for a cold cabbage and apple salad.
Now I just need a decorative kale to fill up the hole in the flower bed.
November 05 2009 | Growing Food and Harvest and Photography | No Comments »
For a brief moment in time I rented a house with a huge Italian Prune Plum tree in the backyard. When the plums were ready, they would fall off the tree and knock me on the head as if to say, “Hey, pay attention to me!” And when I finally obliged, I was pleasantly surprised that the tart but sweet egg-shaped beauts are not the messy drippy plums, but neat and organized, offering fabulousness and no muss. So we climbed up the tree and shook the branches to get a bounty to eat and we left the rest to the birds.
So when I bought my own house, the first thing we bought for the yard was a prune plum tree. It is now a member of the family. Sitting right by the compost heap, it gets regular organic feedings and enjoys a yearly pruning (snicker). Then the question begs, what to do with hundreds of plums? Last year I made preserves with vanilla and orange. This year it was, Plum Apple Bran Muffins, Chinese Plum Sauce and the most amazing torte. All were delicous but the torte was such a hit the first time I made it (on Thursday) that I remade it for the harvest party (Sunday) at the community garden. The recipe is here: The Original Plum Torte.
It’s easy and tasty, and if you have some extra prune plums, give it a try. I’m glad I was encouraged to!
September 28 2009 | Canning and Growing Food and Harvest and Photography | 2 Comments »
At the end of June I posted a summary of my 2008 Topsy Turvy failure and my 2009 outline for success in Topsy Turvy: Ugly as Stink But Good Tomatoes.
And a sucess it was! In August and September, I have had more tomatoes than I knew what to do with. It’s mid- September, and they are still going strong. I walk by and pick a few off for snacks, cook some, freeze some, dry some, and give them away and still I have tons leftover.
So now I spend my rockin’ weekends putting them by in various ways. These Sweet Heart Grape Heirlooms are so sweet and meaty that I just couldn’t bear freezing them. So the lucky fellas got oven-dried overnight and will be preserved in olive oil for pizzas and pasta.
September 19 2009 | Gardening and Growing Food and Harvest | No Comments »
Ingredients:
- grape or cherry tomatoes
- coarse salt
- olive oil
- fresh herbs
Directions:
Wash, dry and half the tomatoes. Arrange tomatoes cut-side up on a baking sheet lined with parchment paper. Sprinkle with coarse sea salt. Dry in the oven at 175 degrees F for 6-8 hours. After you have done it a few times, you’ll know how long it takes and you may be able to leave them overnight safely. I find mine take about 8-hours. Pack into a jar with some fresh herbs & olive oil. Refridgerate and start enjoying. Note: these aren’t meant for long term storage, so eat ‘em up (like that will be hard).
September 19 2009 | Growing Food and Harvest and Recipes | No Comments »
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