June 2010 Blog Posts (27)

Greetings, new friends here at the HomeGrown network! I wanted to invite you to an upcoming NOFA event, and I hope that you will let your various circles know all about it .

The challenge: to make a meal with ingredients from this week's farm share. Share consists of: golden beets, baby carrots, strawberries, peas, arugula, broccoli, green leaf lettuce, collard greens, radishes and parsley.

The result: Braised radishes and peas, whole wheat…

(Or otherwise known as: The Sandwich Which is God’s Compensation for the Heat in Texas…)

And sweet compensation is it! It’s no small matter to taste the broiling sun in the juice of a tomato, or to sense the coolness of the shade coming off an eggplant, or to brush clumps of local grit off an onion… And peppers! Don’t get me started on the…

The summer solstice just passed and the garden is now kicking ass after a slow Spring start. I had doubts as to the survival of many of my starts but are now 100% healthy and growing.

I have three kind of potatoes, LaRatt, a French fingerling potato, a purple potato and a yellow potato and a few volunteer whites from last year that I didn't have the heart to uproot when they looked so promising. I have been stealing a few of the whites and seem better than last year. Next is the two…

OK, admittedly I don't bake it daily, but it sure is a regular occurrence around here. For the past year and a half I've been baking my own bread, because I have a gluten sensitivity. There are commercially produced gluten-free breads available, made from tapioca flour, brown rice, and some other stuff, but frankly, they just aren't that good. For $5 a loaf, I expect my bread to taste like more than packing foam.

There are a lot of great GF bread recipes - I especially love…

Since we live in a rental house, I wanted to make a compost bin that I could easily move when we buy a house. After looking at the expensive plastic barrel style models, I chose to make a compost bin out of a trash can and saved myself about $100. To mix, I simply roll the can around for a couple of minutes. In order to turn the ordinary trash can into a compost bin, all I had to do was drill holes in the bottom and sides of the can. I placed the can on bricks to allow drainage from the…

One of the things I love about Mexican food is that it lends itself well to garden-stuff. Pretty much anything I find in my yard, I can convert into a Mexican dish. I had some cilantro that came up unexpectedly, and some rogue green onions that wintered over, as well as some lettuce, so I thought tonight would be a perfect evening for some light south-of-the-border fare.

There's a nice Mexican restaurant around the corner from us called Senor Patron, and it's run by the…

Please welcome –



Jackie Brown – she’s super chill – if she grows up to be anything like she is now she’s going to be super docile



Lucy Loo – she picks on everybody – so far at the top of the pecking order



Cluck Norris – Lucy’s right hand pecker – Cluck Norris starts pecking where Lucy leaves off!



Smiles Davis – kinda hard to pin her down. She fights back when picked on but otherwise just hangs out. I wasn't having a…

I mentioned to a friend the other day that I have a rain barrel in my garden, and she replied that she was going to buy one over the Big Home Improvement Store for around $75, because it was on sale. I told her that I had made mine for about $20 last summer. It sits beneath the downspout at the rear of the house, and one good rainstorm will fill up all fifty gallons. I have a hose coming out of the bottom so I can use it to water plants -- because it's sitting up on four concrete blocks,…

Went outside to weed and discovered that it was time to start pickin' the pickables. Brought in this basket full of chives, sage, mint, young kale, fresh mustard greens, organo, and a few strawberries. The strawberries never made it inside.

In my dreams, I live in a rustic cabin far from the madding crowd. I have several acres of forested land, as well as a few acres which have been tilled for my numerous gardens. There's a greenhouse and a pond, a pole barn with a couple of sweet little Nubian goats, a coop of chickens who happily lay me eggs each day, an orchard full of fruit trees, and a pond where my children can fish. In my dreams, I make everything from scratch, I live off the grid, and life is good.

In…

Some sad news in Baltimore over the last weekend plus the usual global issues.. the garden and kitchen become my place to be a part of what I feel is right in this world.

This past weekend I harvested much of the spring crops: golden and bull's blood beets, fennel, and…