Mar Vista’s Bounty Hunter: Fourth of July Feasts
The latest post on Mar Vista Patch is here just in time for your holiday meal plans. Check out some great recipe ideas with farm-fresh ingredients:
Fourth of July Feasts
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Beneficial Flowers Build Your Ecosystem
One of the first things I talk about in my lectures about organic gardening is the importance of creating an eco-system around the garden. After all, a garden is much more than just a planter bed. It's everything around it as well.
Beneficial flowers attract beneficial insects, which do a number of jobs for you in the garden. They can pollinate, they can eat other bugs, and they can also be food for birds. Let's explore some of the easy flowers you can grow in your garden to attract beneficial insects: ...
Growing Lemon Cucumbers
They may look like lemons, but they taste just like cucumbers. That's because they are cucumbers - lemon cucumbers. These little unusual beauties are one of my favorite heirlooms to grow, and in recent years, we're starting to see them become more popular - to the point that the plants are being sold at nurseries. Oh lemon cuc, you've made it to the big time!
I have to admit, my first few years trying to grow lemon cucumbers, or any cucumber at all, were disastrous. The coastal weather would stunt the growth, then powdery ...
Use the Harvest: Swiss Chard Pie
There is only so much room in the refrigerator, and Swiss Chard can take up a lot of that precious space. Those bright colorful stems usually have to "go away" in order to fit a batch of chard into the vegetable drawer (which is fine with me, since I don't care for the stems anyway). I recently found a recipe that uses up all that chard in a tasty pie that lasts for a few meals.
Whether you hate or love Martha Stewart, you have to admit that her empire comes up with ...
Mar Vista’s Bounty Hunter – Will Work for Croissants
The latest post to the Mar Vista Patch is alive and kicking. Find out where to get the best croissants in town:
Look Ma – Homemade Bread in 5 Minutes!
One benefit of taking a long airplane trip is that a tremendous amount of reading is accomplished. During my trip to Italy - land of wonderful food and bread - I read Jeff Hertzberg and Zoë Francois's book, Artisan Bread in 5 Minutes a Day. It has changed the way I think about making bread.
Confession: I have a bread machine, and while I learned how to make bread the old fashioned way prior to getting the bread machine (*cringe* - 20 years ago), I must admit that ...
Mar Vista’s Bounty Hunter: Satisfy Your Sugar Jones
The latest post on Mar Vista Patch is up and ready to make your taste buds tingle. Read all about the most decadent treats in town:
Satisfy Your Sweet Tooth with Help from Sugar Jones
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Making Kale Chips – Solar vs. Oven
Sunny days mean that it's time for a little solar food drying. Add an overabundance of kale and you've got a formula for a tasty snack: Kale Chips
We pulled out the solar food dryer that we built last year and started warming it in the sun. Before long it was up to 110º inside and ready for a batch of kale chip. Here's the recipe we used:
Crispy Kale Chips
Zucchini Overload Solution: Zucchini Bread Cookies
There are some years that I don't plant zucchini because I'm still sick of it from the year before. This was not one of those years. Admittedly, summer squash doesn't hold my interest as long as winter squash is around, but I wanted to try a new variety of summer squash. But wait...
First let's clarify something. Summer squash grows in the summer. Winter squash... grows in the summer. The difference is in the storage. Summer squash has to be consumed during the summer, but winter squash stores through the winter (think pumpkins, ...
Gardening Joys – Harvesting Corn
There's an old adage that advises corn growers to have the water boiling before you pick the corn. So as I write this there is a pot of water coming to a boil on the stove. It's harvest time for sweet corn here in our test garden, and here's the blow-by-blow:
We grew Stowell's Sweet Corn, an heirloom variety, for the first time this year. We planted 20 plants in a 4x4 square foot bed (using Grow BioIntensive hexagonal spacing. Confession: the bed should only have fit 16 plants, but we ...