Keep the Garden Going
Use French Intensive methods to keep garden beds going through the Summer
San Marzano tomatoes, fresh parsley, fresh oregano, and homegrown garlic and onions.
Recipe: Homemade Tomato Sauce
Italians believe that San Marzano tomatoes are the only tomatoes for making sauce. I'm Italian, and I've made sauce with just about any tomato I can get my hands on, but this year we grew San Marzano tomatoes for the first time. So there will be sauce. I grew up watching my mother make my grandmother's recipe for tomato sauce. It took no less than 3-5 hours. She often used canned tomatoes, one of the few canned products we bought.…
Nature gives us answers if you know where to look.
Harvesting Onions
Onions take a long time to grow, but when it comes time for harvesting onions, it's incredibly satisfying, and worth the wait. Here in Southern California we plant onions by seed in the fall, or by "sets" in spring. By the middle of summer, those sets and seeds have turned into full-blown onions that actually resemble something you'd buy in the supermarket. It's amazing! In late March, someone gifted us with their leftover onion sets. These are not the tiny…
Kelloggs Breakfast
Tomatoes, Tomatoes, Tomatoes
It's harvest time for tomatoes, whether they be determinate or indeterminate. These orbs of delight are the quintessential summer fruit and we're picking them daily. We planted early this year (quite possibly a mistake since we now have blight...but then again, we get blight every year, so I give up). We grew 18 different varieties this year, all heirlooms, all gorgeous. Here's a little tomato parade for 2014: Our first time growing these successfully. Can't wait to make sauce. Jaune…
Black Dakota Popping Corn
Harvesting Black Dakota Popping Corn
This spring we experimented with growing heirloom Black Dakota popping corn. It's a beautiful, deep red, pointy popping corn that pops white. We couldn't resist the opportunity to plant this ancestral corn and load up on one of our favorite snacks. Growing popcorn is easy because you don't have to time it out to pick it during the milk stage. You just grow it and let it dry on the stalk. That's it. To learn more details about growing popcorn…
Start with fresh fruit
Recipe: Garden-Fresh Fruit Leather
Preserving the harvest was never so fun as when making fruit leather. It's simple and easy and is far better for you than the sugar-laden stuff you get from the store. Kids love it, and grown ups do it. Here's our first attempt at making two different kinds. We use our solar food dryer as much as possible during the summer, and this was the perfect experiment to try outdoors. If you don't have one, you can make fruit leather…
Try adding tomato for an even more savory experience
Recipe: Provolone & Leek Grilled Cheese Sandwich
We're up to our ears in leeks right now. We've made the giant vat of potato leek soup. We've dehydrated 3 jars worth of leeks for use in eggs and soups later on. Now what? Well, when we found this recipe for Provolone and Leek Greens on Country Sourdough, our inner 4-year-old jumped up and said, "YES!" We strive for extravagance here at Gardenerd, so we went full tilt on the melted butter and went a step above country sourdough…