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
Every year we have more herbs in the garden than we can use up before the weather turns and the leaves get gross or drop off the plant. Most years we dehydrate (or dry) at least a little bit of our harvest in the last couple of weeks that we have nice weather so that we can enjoy the herby
This year was a great year for pumpkin farmers! (Ok, I’m just guessing on that one, but the pumpkin patches around this neck of the woods were bursting at the seams with families hunting for the perfect jack-o-lantern material this year–saw it with my own eyes!) Because we weren’t sure how Covid was going to affect Halloween, people planned a
Last fall we tossed a bumpy green pumpkin out into the garden to compost (and get picked apart by animals) and this spring, up came a squash-y looking plant near that spot. Several months (and many flowers) went by and eventually the little plant put on one, medium sized, olive green pumpkin. We left it alone until the cold weather
Poinsettias are a classic, festive indoor plant to have in the house during the holidays. Most people enjoy them for a month or two while they bloom, then the plants begin to drop their leaves and they begin to look tattered and tired. At this point, most people chuck them in the garbage can. It doesn’t have to be that
Even with the chickens running around all spring, when I put in the garden, I always have to bait the heck out of it to keep the snails and slugs from eating every leave that comes up. I really don’t like spreading poison around, and I’m always looking for new ways to keep pests at bay without having to poison.
Right up until a couple of weeks ago, we were still getting a beautiful harvest from the garden, when a hard freeze was forecast for the evenings. Then we knew we were either going to lose all of the hot peppers (which had not yet ripened) and the rest of the basil, which was not yet bolting. Since we were
