Zucchini, Patty Pan Squash, Cucumbers, Tomatillos, Ground Cherries, Okra, Basil and Tomatoes — the first significant haul of the harvest season is upon us! Amazing colors, inspiring art and amazing smells, inspiring cooking. 🙂
Also known as a cornflower, you will normally find these tall, lanky flowers growing wild along the roadside in striking cobalt blue. However, this fellow in our garden is lavender purple! We grow a variety of wildly colored bachelor buttons in among the garden vegetables most years, and this year this one wins a spot on my list of favorites.
This is a very paintable nasturtium that we found growing in Bandon, Oregon. Oregon coastal towns are shrouded in fog and clouds for most of the year, avoiding the worst of the blistering summer sun as well as the killing winter freezes. Tender, moisture-loving plants like these nasturtiums thrive and flourish, and can even overwinter and shine again the following
The Western White Trillium (also sometimes called Wakerobin or toad lily) is a white lily that springs up from the damp forest floors of the pacific northwest U.S. and Canada in early to mid spring. Each plant has three green leaves, and each flower has three bright white petals. As the blossoms age, they turn from their brilliant white to
Looking for plant markers that are renewable and biodegradable? How about inexpensive? If the answer is “yes” to either of these questions, then I’ve got the perfect solution for you… wooden popsicle or craft sticks. You can get them by the box of hundreds or thousands, and they last a year or two before getting all funky. After that, chuck
This monster of a volunteer sunflower was at least 12 feet tall and had many, many noggins! They were not the largest sunflower blossoms that I’ve ever grown, but they did make a very nice size cut flower to feature by itself in a good size vase. What I really loved about this sunflower is that it accommodated a lot
A couple of years back I got a set of claw gloves from one of my good friends, and I love them! These are an excellent gift for any gardener, but especially for gardeners (like myself) who have a hard time manipulating small garden tools (like hand trowels) while wearing gloves. These allow you to get in there and loosen
When one is a gardener, during the off season, there is always going to be a little pining away over the memories of the fairer months of the year. 🙂 Here is a flashback to, oh, probably a couple of summers back. It was a year or so after we’d grown both Mammoth sunflowers as well as Royal Burgundy sunflowers
I was introduced to kohlrabi at a very early age. My grandmother used to grow these and I would just eat them up like mad! As I grew older and my grandmother didn’t grow them as often, I began to notice that you couldn’t get these at the store. In fact, most produce clerks or home gardeners that I asked
It’s almost December right now as I write, but here is a throwback to July when the raspberries and blueberries were in full production! In July and August, a handful of raspberries and blueberries is not an uncommon snack for garden visitors. I have 18 blueberry bushes, some of them 10+ years old, many around 5 years old and a
If you love decorative corn, you should try growing the variety called “Glass Gem” — the kernels come out in all kinds of wild colors, mixed around on each ear seemingly randomly. They dry well and make a very interesting autumn decoration and conversation piece! Here are some things to know about growing corn: Corn is pollenated by the wind.
Summer might just be a memory, but this is the time of year that here in the U.S.A. we celebrate the things that we are thankful for, and we celebrate with food and our bountiful harvests from the previous growing season. This year, 2020, may have been a strange year, but one thing that I am thankful for is that
Ever have those summers where you’ve got so many tomatoes that you don’t know what to do with them and you can’t even give them away? (It seems like that happens to me every year now-days.) If this sounds like a familiar problem to you, you should try making tomato sauce… It’s really easy, takes only a half hour, and
Making homemade raisins takes a lot of work and takes a full two days of running the dehydrator on medium-high heat, but the raisins are so flavorful and different than what you buy at the store! For these raisins, I had two paper grocery sacks of purple seedless concord grapes, a full stack of 10 dehydrator trays, and that equated
Basil I have found to be one of the trickier herbs to preserve by drying. It is fragile and has a tendency to mold, turn black or lose all flavor and taste like ash! There are so many times I have wasted a good batch of basil harvest to poor drying results… Blegh! So here is the most reliable way
