DIY Garden Projects, Yummy Recipes, & Crafty Goodness
I thought it would be nice to set out a healthy-ish treat for the Easter Bunny. Alas, there are no cupcakes left. Sorry, Bunny.
Cupcake Ingredients:
There has been so much that has needed harvesting with the cool and super wet weather that we have been having that I just can’t keep up with it all. This is a collection from my home garden and my community garden plot: many tomatoes, fairy tale eggplant, leeks, small wonder spaghetti squash, zucchini, a baby cinderella pumpkin, and hops from the community plot (what the heck am I going to do with the hops???)
I also needed to pull out some carrots from the home garden before the dreaded rust fly burrowed in.
And I’ve been pulling beets for almost 8 weeks now, whenever we want them for dinner.
Needless to say our dinner plates have been very colourful the past few weeks!
It’s still summer, technically, and so I’m still going to eat summer salads. This one is a variation of my Festive Black Bean & Quinoa Salad Recipe using freshly picked produce from the garden – I used purple carrots, french filet beans, leeks and snow peas.
Ingredients:
Cook the quinoa according to package directions, taking care to rinse at least five times before cooking to eliminate bitterness. In a separate pan, saute leeks in olive oil until soft and set aside to cool. Meanwhile combine apple cider vinegar and well-rinsed black beans together in the salad bowl you will be using. Let the beans marinate until the quinoa is cooked and cooled, then drain the beans and assemble the salad by combining the beans, quinoa and chopped veggies. Stir to combine and drizzle with a dressing made of lemon juice and a good quality olive oil. Add salt and pepper to taste. Store in the refrigerator and serve as a healthy lunches or a side dish to chicken or pork.
When I went to de-blight the tomatoes at the community garden plot this morning, I noticed a carrot top & greens of what was most likely one of my prized multicoloured carrots (pulled and eaten by a yet another vegetable thief) which made me think, “Hey, my carrots are ready!” While the greens sure didn’t look like much, I decided to pull them anyway and to my delight, beautiful red, purple, white, and orange carrot with no sign of carrot rust fly damage. Booya!
Back in April I pulled up my winter carrots and sadly, I lost the battle to that wily carrot rust fly. This year I planted a summer crop, planted each seed individually spaced (painstakingly), mixed lots of sand in the soil and watered well. Oh, and the most important thing: full sun. My home garden is so crowded and lush that there just isn’t the sun there is at my new garden plot. This, I’ve noticed, had made all the difference in the world to my vegetable gardening. 6-8 hours of direct sun just isn’t enough.
So here they are, some lovely purple carrot sticks, without a rusty track to be seen. Take that, carrot rust fly.
Me: 1 ; Carrot Rust Fly: 1
Well don’t ask me. This is what my carrots looked like this year: riddled with tracks from the disgusting, putrid, foul, menacing carrot rust fly. Those little buggers can sniff out a carrot with superhero powers so I planted carefully and didn’t have to thin them (thinning releases the smell and attracts the flies), but the females still found my carrot patch, layed eggs and a week later the larva fed on the hidden roots. Bummer.
The steps to avoid damage range from scientific to witchcraft, so trial and error is your best bet. Here are a few suggestions:
1. Cover your crop with a lightweight, permeable row cover that will let both light and water in, but keep flies out.
2. Rotate your crop as a good practice for all veggie gardening to reduce instance of disease, pests and nutrient depletion.
3. Plant a fly-resistant variety like Fly Away which they don’t like that much. Then plant another patch farther away of bait carrots that they will hopefully choose instead.
Clearly I’m not doing well at all in the carrot department but this year the carrots are planted in a new location and will have a row cover to keep those vile, hated, stupid flies out.
Me: 0 ; Carrot Rust Fly: 1
