My Favorite Books

In a universe long ago and far, far away (last year).  I remember talking about talking about books.  Well, best laid plans....so here I go.

I have just read the most thoughtful and thought provoking book published by Twelve Press.  This was a publishing company formed in 2005 with the goal of publishing one book a month.  A quality book, with some substance. 

The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore is one of those books.  The only thing I can say is that it is a true  philosophical treatise on what it FEELS like to be human.  Many books are written on what it MEANS to be human, but this is a marvelous work of fiction.  Must read for those wishing a thought provoking read.

My other recommendation is Divergence.  This is a fascinating futuristic novel that I could not put down.   There is a sequel that I haven't read yet...but it is on my stack.


A few of my favorite all time ones for your reading pleasure:

The Book Thief

Atlas Shrugged

My Sister's Keeper

Time Traveler's Wife

Lord of the Flies

Catcher in the Rye

Middlesex


These are just a few to get started.  I have so many books that I seriously could open a used book store.  There is only one problem...my books aren't for sale.  I have probably at least 3000 books.  I have tried to go through all these bookshelves and boxes and I can come up with about 2 or 3  each time I am willing to give up.  Jeez...the foundation on my house will begin sinking soon.

Please post any suggestions for good reads, or if you want to talk about a book...go for it.
I could spend all day discussing books, gardening and food.  I am always open for another suggestion for a good book.  I will read anything to see how it reads.  I read Fifty Shades of Grey, something I never would have thought I would do.  I enjoyed it too!!!   So please, suggest away.

I am going to research how to create a discussion format on here for book or food talk.  I don't know if that is possible.  Until then, we will have to make do with the posting option.

Hope to hear lots of feedback.

Karen

Weeds Again!

My lazy butt is still trying to find ways to beat the weeds.  I accept that they will always be there.  My struggle is that I am going to be eating this food and sharing with my friends and I don't want any toxic chemicals near the garden.  So I continue to go out and weed any time I see some coming up.  What that means is that between working, and working, and spending time with my family...I am weeding. 

Here in Washington we have such a short growing season, that I want to maximize the food.  So during the good weather when I should be playing I am in the garden.  I want to share a great recipe for weed killer that works quite well and is not scary bad.  It goes like this:  One gallon apple cider vinegar, 1/2 cup salt, 1 tsp. liquid Dawn dish soap.  Mix together, pour in a spray bottle, and Oila!  It will kill the weeds and grasses threatening to overtake the garden. 

Another thing I learned this week, and could have learned much earlier had I been not wrestling the weeds, is that it is recommended but not necessary to prune tomato plants.  Who knew?-probably the whole rest of the world.  Anyway, the tomato plants are growing like crazy, so I am going to go out and try my hand at pruning.  There is a great article with pictures at  www.wikihow.com/Prune-Tomatoes.  It is worth a look.

Since I am planning on producing enough tomatoes for all my tomato needs during the winter, I better get busy and brush up on all this stuff. 

Yesterday Gerard went out to till around the edges of the garden where the grasses and weeds are poking thru the fence.  The garden is near the edge of the designated backyard area, and then begin the trees and the woods behind the house.  So the wild stuff tries to creep through the fence.  It was about 75 degrees yesterday and it felt pretty humid.  So when he finished tilling he came crawling inside and said "maybe we should consider container gardening next year".  The man has wisdom. 

Something else I am noticing is that potatoes will grow any damn place.  I was following the planting directions about building a mound, covering the plants when they begin to wilt...blah blah blah.  Well that volunteer potato plant over in the corner of the garden is doing better than all the other potato plants that I have nurtured and kept alive.  Go figure. 

I love lettuce!!!  I have been harvesting it for almost 2 months.  I had no idea it was so good.  Last year's lettuce was good, but this year we have better weather, and I have thinned it , watered and fertilized it, and it is just delicious.  It has so much more flavor than the rabbit food you can buy in the store.  If you like salad, it is worth erecting some kind of small cover where you can grow your own lettuce.  It is truly amazing!!

The radishes are crisp and spicy.  I didn't get any last year, and this is my first taste of a home-grown radish.  They have quite a spicy bite to them.  It is really good in salad, but they are also delicious in stir-fry.  They add a very nice texture if you just warm them up and don't cook them into mush.

At the rate of my learning curve, I am guessing by the time I am ninety I will have this whole gardening thing down.  Hopefully I will still have my teeth if I am still around to eat. 

Try this stir-fry:

meat of your choice-I prefer chicken
celery
radishes
pine nuts
mushrooms
onions-green work as well as yellow or white
yellow bell peppers
bean sprouts

Cook these in your hot skillet, adding the longest cooking veggies first, of course

I use left-over meat so it is already cooked.  Cook the veggies in a small amount of veggie oil.  Then add some chicken stock after the veggies are cooked.  Into the chicken stock add lots of garlic, ginger, and salt and pepper and any other seasoning you would like.  If you like a thick sauce add a bit of cornstarch to thicken.

I am not big on highly seasoned stuff so I taste each time I add a seasoning to see if it tastes like I want it. Add the cooked meat last.

The secret in this is not to overcook the veggies, as in any stir fry.  Depending on how much seasoning you use, this sauce allows the taste of all the veggies to come thru so you are not eating a heavy sauce with some veggies thrown in.  You actually taste the veggies.

Yum yum.  Until next time.
Karen

Please post any tricks or tips or any ideas you have.  It is ALL welcome.

Weeds

I spent the whole day yesterday in and out of the garden.  I would weed for an hour, then come inside and rest.  Then go back out some more, and weed, and come inside and rest.  I have these weird little ground cover weeds that will not go away.  They are tiny small like a four-leaf clover and if let go, they will form a nice green blanket, completely covering the soil.

Since I hadn't been out to do any weeding in a half second, the weeds were beginning to leave a nice light cover of green.  So, my plan was to spend a couple of hours weeding.  HA HA HA...joke's on me.  I was out there for hours sweating and weeding with breaks to re-hydrate.  It was cloudy but warm, so every time I went out there, I began glowing (women don't sweat), and was IMMEDIATELY attacked by a swarm of mosquitoes.  And I do mean a swarm.  I must smell like a gourmet meal because they would come in droves (at least 3 at a time) and start biting me.  It was a good time.

These weeds I have been trying to kill got me to thinking.....I may be approaching this whole weed thing in the wrong way.  I think I maybe should be watering the weeds, and trying to dig up and kill the vegetables.  Makes sense, doesn't it?   Think about it-if I were doing any other task, I would research, and watch and do what worked the last time I did the job, or if I saw something different working, I would switch to that strategy.  Well...I am trying to grow vegtables.  It is slow, and not all the crops grow.  Some seedlings look beautiful and get outside and die no matter what I do.  I can water, fertilize, sing, prop up...and nothing works.  Yet these damn weeds keep proliferating while I am trying to dig them up and kill them.  I am taking the wrong approach to growing.  I should be doing the opposite of what I am doing:   dig up the food and throw it in a pile, and fertilize and water the weeds.  Makes perfect sense to me.

I have proof of my theory.  This year after carefully planting the seed potatoes, I had some leftovers that, according to the book, would probably not sprout.  So when I was done planting I dumped them in a corner of the garden so they could decompose and rich up the soil (that's a technical phrase).  Last week Gerard came in the house and told me I have a couple of volunteer potato plants in the corner of the garden.......so there you go.  Throw the stuff in a pile and have food in a month or so. 

I love radishes and so I planted lots and lots of radish seeds.  I did not do starts because the seeds are so tiny and only one radish per seed.  I DO NOT HAVE PATIENCE for that kind of endeavor, so I put a bunch of seeds in a trough in the raised beds.  I did a little experiment.  The books all say to thin the crop after the plants get several inches high.  I thinned the plants in the raised bed.  However, I did not use all of the 2 million seeds that come in the package, so I went back in the greenhouse and dumped the rest of the seeds (slightly sprinkled) in a flower pot that was about 12" in diameter.  I forgot I had done it, and when all these pretty leaves started coming up I couldn't remember what it was, so I set it on the front porch for decoration.  About a month later, I realized I had radishes and left them there to grow.  No thinning, no water, no fertilizer...nothin.  I now have a flower pot full of radishes. 

But that isn't the experiment part.  I picked a couple of radishes from the flower pot when they were ready.  You can tell they are ready because you can see the top of the radish peek up through the dirt.  I picked several and they are all carrot shaped.  None of them are split open either.  So I discovered that the only difference is the shape of the radish if you thin them out.  They grow just as big, only vertically.  I have no issues about the shape of my food, so I think I just eliminated some work for myself.  I think I also proved that I am onto something with this whole neglect thing. 

I am going to have to try out my theory in earnest next year.

I'm Back

I haven't posted a thing since last August.  I just got busy and decided I didn't know enough to be talking about growing stuff.  Then the last 8 months I have been talking to people about gardens, growing food, living green, etc.  Evidently last year was a horrible growing year, mainly because we had little sun.  It was not a good year. 

Last year was my first attempt at gardening seriously.  I was going to talk about preserving the abundance of food I was growing, but I didn't have enough to preserve.   I gave up on composting to get any amount of soil, and I now just do it to not fill up the garbage with foodstuff that can be naturally recycled and decomposed.

Last year, only because of encouragement from my dear man did I decide to have another go this year.  But before I get started, I want to pass on my lessons. 


1.   Ground prep is critical.  We covered the ground with tarps last Dec. so that weeds and grass would not spring up during the winter.  We also tilled 3 times before we planted anything.

2.  Start the cool crops in the greenhouse as early as Jan or Feb.  I also figured out that things like radishes, lettuce, green onions, and crops that don't have vines that crawl around, can grow to maturity very nicely in the greenhouse. 

3.   Fertilizing is a must.

4.   Slug bait in the Pacific Northwest is a must.

5.  Raised beds are fantastic!!   It helps the soil stay warmer.  Put some landscape fabric down under the bed so that critters such as moles cannot come up under the bed.

6.  Wander through the garden talking to yourself, pulling stray weeds, and admiring the beauty of the plants, and they will respond by growing several inches overnight.  (Did I really even utter those words?)

7.   Peppers make lovely decoration growing in pots on your porch or patio.

8.  At the end of the season it turned out that the experts were right (imagine that), the upside down hanging tomato plants did not produce but one or two tomatoes.


Gardening has a way of changing you and the way you look at your world.  I have already harvested some radishes and some lettuce.  It was such an empowering feeling to eat something that I had produced myself.  It also tasted so much better than any produce I could buy in the store.  That sounds so cliche, but there is something validating about the sweat of your brow.

Ok, so this year I started everything earlier.  I am growing sugar snap peas, corn, potatoes, summer squash, cantaloupe (we'll see how it grows), tons of tomatoes, carrots, green beans, garlic, green onions, radishes, and lettuce.  

There is no rhyme or reason to what I put in the raised beds.  I just threw the packages of seeds in the air and wherever they landed, they got planted.  But seriously,  this is all a test.  I put the garlic, onions, radishes, lettuce and carrots in the raised beds.  I was curious as to how the root veggies (carrots, radishes and garlic) would grow in the raised beds.  Radishes and garlic are doing well.  Haven't harvested garlic or carrots yet, but the garlic is getting big, so that must be good, right? 

I began planting mid-May, I just planted the peppers last week.  I could have done that earlier, but I forgot to get pepper seeds and just got around to getting them a couple weeks back, and started them in the greenhouse.  As you can tell, for me this whole process is very scientific, based on all the test data available.  I figure mixing things up a little bit will give me good experience and information.  That's my story and I am sticking to it.

Basil grows beautifully indoors in a window.  It is a beautiful green plant with a delicious smell.  You can just reach up and pick some basil, add it to your food, and voila!  Fabulous flavor!

Tomorrow I plan to go out and hoe some weeds, and sing a little bit to the carrots to get them growing faster.


                                                   Roasted Cherry Tomatoes

Place as many cherry tomatoes as you want to eat on a roasting pan.  Pour OLIVE oil over the tomatoes.  Sprinkle with generous amounts of salt and fresh ground pepper.   Roll the tomatoes around in the oil and the seasonings so that the tomatoes are coated all over.   Put in a 325 degree oven for about 7 minutes.   Remove from oven and sprinkle with fresh-cut basil.  You will have a warm, delicious tomato that is still firm enough to burst juice into your mouth when you bite into it.



Cherry tomatoes are very sweet and are perfect for this recipe.  I think that you could probably also do this with a large tomato if you cut it in half and took out the seeds and then placed it cut side down on the roasting pan.  But seriously, cherry tomatoes are like a bit of candy and this is just succulent and sweet as a side dish with chicken or fish.

Hint:  Fresh basil can be stored in the fridge in a glass of water like a bouquet of flowers.

Heat

Evidently heat is required for most of the crops that are not blooming like I would like them to.  Mainly the popcorn.  Something is sorely wrong with the bunching onions also.  I have been doing more research and reading stuff online.  I read that raised beds keeps the heat in the ground.  I am going to consider raised beds for some of the crops next year.  Of course I am considering.....I will need to enlist the help of my glorious, handy partner to build the boxes for the raised beds.  That may be asking a bit much.  He worked so hard building the fence for Fort Knox this year, and so I am reluctant to ask him to do more work for next year.  I may just try some different food to grow.

 At the end of August I am going to begin the winter experiment.  I will begin to plant lettuce and herbs and maybe some garlic ...see what happens. I am wondering if I can grow some of the cool weather crops thru the winter in the greenhouse.  I would like to make the greenhouse into a big giant salad bowl.  I would like to grow lettuce, garlic, cucumbers, radishes, green onions, and maybe some herbs like rosemary, more basil, tarragon, oregano, mint, parsley, blah, blah, blah.  I would love to have fresh produce all year.  Of course I am not quite sure why I think I should be able to do this, given I don't know people who have done this, and I know I am not the first one to think of it.  I guess I am a lot like a kid in that regard.  I just need to figure it out for myself.

The composting is not going very well.  There is a huge operator malfunction occurring.  Composting requires some leftover green material.  Well, to get that, it has to be saved, and then transported to the composting bin.  This is where the malfunction occurs.  I have a limited amount of time during the day between my work and play.  I am terrible at actually stopping what I may be doing and hauling that green material out to the bin.  If I do manage to get it there, then I have to walk out to the empty woodshed area, and get some straw to put on top of it.  Then, I have to go get some dirt from somewhere to put on top of that.  It just seems like a huge interruption for such a tiny amount of worm poo.  I have a hard time forcing myself to make the treks.  It is the same to me as stopping to gas up the car, or taking a potty break.  Seems like such a blasted unnecessary interruption of my stream of activities.  As we speak, I have a bowl of slimy, green, bubbling,  "stuff" in a bowl in my kitchen.  When I am not home, I tell myself as soon as I get home, I will empty it.  Well, I get home, and get to talking and doing vitally important stuff like petting the cat, drinking coffee, catching up on my reading...and I just never think of it again.  Sad sad sad state of affairs.  So, I just accept I may not get much worm poo any time soon.

I am very excited about the yellow crook neck squash.  It is doing beautifully and I may make a lot of enemies this year by passing out my extra squash.  I can only eat so much squash each meal.  I hear it is prolific, so I am making plans for saving and sharing.  So all my friends...look out. 

I have a couple of good recipes for cooking squash that I plan to share with you.  So, when fall gets here, get out your cook pots.  I have some good stuff in store.

I have picked tons of peas so far.  They are doing fantastic.  Some of the vines got pulled up out of the ground during weeding.  I just left them hanging off the strings and those blasted vines are turning yellow, but they are still full of snow peas.  I had no idea those little suckers were so hardy.  I haven't had to store any yet, because I eat them and share them, almost as fast as they can grown.  I am going to blanch a batch this weekend and see how they freeze.  My boyscout boyfriend is always prepared for anything.  He does all the shopping so we never run out of anything, and he has more handy dandy kitchen gadgets than the local kitchen store.  He of course had food dryers, food processors, and the tried and true ...wait for it.......SEAL A MEAL!!!!!!!  Wooo Hoooo..we are set.  So I can blanch the peas and put them in that dandy seal a meal...and put them in the fridge...easy peasy.

Next week, I am going to sneak a book review in between garden talk.  I am a voracious reader, and I have a lot to say about some of the books I read, so for anyone who may not be too crazy about reading about gardening, I am going to provide some literary fodder.

I have been throwing rocks at the raccoons so they won't eat my geraniums.  I throw small rocks because I don't want to hurt them.  I think it has done the trick.  I have a front deck full of beautiful big stinky geraniums.  It is a good thing they are so gorgeous, because they stink to high heaven.

I also have some blooming "sweat peas".  Now they smell divine.  They are blooming in a variety of colors.  They have climbed the trellis and are taller than I am, and are releasing a heavenly scent.  I think next year I am covering the deck with sweat peas.

Until next time,
Karen

Peas, Glorious Peas

Yesterday I picked another huge bowl of peas.  I wanted to take them with me to work to share.  I found a way to store them that keeps them crisp and delicious.  Straight out of the garden they go into a huge bowl of ice water.  Water first, then peas then ice all over the top of the peas.  It cools them down quickly if you don't have much time.  Then I got a gallon size zip lock baggie and lined it with two dry paper towels, put in the wet peas, and zipped it shut.  When I got to work, I put it in the fridge and ate out of it all night long.  They were fantastic.  This also works with lettuce.  I can keep lettuce out of the garden for  a week or more, and it stays crisp.  As long as the paper towel stays damp, the lettuce will stay crisp.

I have to say, I have never tasted peas quite as good as these.  Fresh from the garden they are indescribable.  I admit that I have had some darn good peas from the farmer's markets, but it must lose a bit of flavor after a day or so because these are just like eating dessert.  The minute you bite into them there is this explosion of flavor from the pod, and then when you bite into a pea, another burst of sweet freshness.  I cannot believe that I can get so excited about a pea pod.  Maybe I need a hobby or a life? 

 One thing that is puzzling to me is that the popcorn grew about 4-5 inches immediately after we planted it.  It has not grown another centimeter since.  Doesn't look like we will get popcorn.  The chili's are starting to ripen also....woo hoo.  There are quite a few tomatoes also, and they will hopefully be ripe soon.  I know nothing about potatoes because I can't see them, but the greenery is blossoming, and the bushes are getting quite large.  I read somewhere that the potatoes can be harvested as the bush starts to wilt and die.  I will watch and hope I get it right.

We have plenty of lettuce, and it also looks like we will have yellow onions.  I have no idea what happened to the green bunching onions, but they are not doing well.  I wonder if it is our soil.  It is really clay-like and heavy.  I maybe should have grown them in the green house.  I have big plans for that greenhouse this fall.  I am planning on planting more lettuce, and more bunching onions and some herbs.  I will be experimenting through the winter.

The sweat peas (flower) are blooming on the front porch.  We started those from seeds and they climbed up the trellis and are now sprouting a variety of colors.  They smell so good and beautify the front deck.  The geraniums are also in full bloom and since I have stopped feeding the raccoons and have been throwing rocks at them every time they come around, they have not eaten any of my geraniums.  I imagine this admission will bring down the wrath of animal lovers everywhere.  Be assured that the rocks don't hit their mark, (well maybe once in a while), and they are small and are accompanied by a lot of screaming and yelling.  I haven't hurt a raccoon yet, hopefully just scared the s*** out of them so they don't come back.

I don't know where the summer has gone.  Oh wait, we haven't had summer yet.  I just can't believe it is already August.  Soon the harvesting will be over.  Then I am going to be figuring out ways to store the food.  Then I plan to move on to my passion and talk about books.  There is no subject I love more than books.  I read voraciously and am always happy to discuss my latest find.

Until next time.

Karen

Fine Line

Yesterday afternoon, after much ruminating, I decided to go out and pick the peas.  It had been 2 days since I had checked them.  The last time I checked, there were a few peas ready for picking.  Yesterday, there was a giant mixing bowl full of peas.  I picked all the ones I thought were ready, and some that I thought were not plump enough, because I have noticed that in stir-fry dishes in restaurants, the sugar snap peas are more flat than plump, so I picked some flat ones to taste them.

I discovered 2 things.  First, there is a fine line between ripe and too ripe.  Second, peas ripen in a half a second.  Once that pod is on the vine...don't blink or they will be ripe.

As it turns out, the plump peas are overripe.  The pod is very sweet, but a bit chewy, and the peas have begun to turn bitter.  Not bad, but a bit tart.  There were 2 really big fat ones that I missed picking earlier this week.  The peas were pulpy and sour, and the pod was leathery.  The flatter peas are sweet and moist, and the pod is delicately sweet.  They are perfect for eating raw and for stir-fry or steaming.  If you plan to remove the peas and not eat the pod, then the slightly plumper pods are best.  Picking and tasting is the only way to decide how you like to eat them. 

My own personal preference with the sugar snap peas is to eat the whole thing.  Why grow sugar snaps if you aren't going to eat the pod?  It is just crunchy enough for good texture and deliciously, delicately sweet.  Just grow plain old pole peas if you just want the pea inside.

Every tomato plant in the garden has tomatoes.  They are still very green but they are there.  Since we have a super duper fence around the garden, I am sure they will make it fine until they ripen.  I have googled several recipes for fried green tomatoes.  I need to try that before they ripen.  I have never had one, but I have heard stories about the deliciousness of fried green tomatoes.  So that is my next experiment.  We are going to get lots of tomatoes, so I am going to try several recipes, and maybe try my own version.  I will report the results when I am done.  If anyone has any recipes or ideas, please leave a post and let me know.

Until next time...

Karen