Garden Journal 6/16/08: The First Fresh Dill of the Year

Quick Comfort Food - Salmon Patties with Garden Scallions & Dill

So what have I been doing for the past nine days besides eating scallions? Dealing with strawberry diseases and potato beetles, clearing weed-choked raised beds, still trying to get more pepper and tomato plants in the ground, wondering if this otherwise much needed late spring rain is ruining my gorgeous garlic crop, repotting my mail order French tarragon plants (which are doing great), and even starting a few heirloom cucumber and summer squash seeds in containers (because there's no unweeded room in the garden for them yet).

Oh yeah, and we've been putting up hay—an enormous, exhausting, sweat-drenched job that takes precedence over everything. It also happens to be one of my least favorite things to do on the farm — yep, I'd rather shovel out the sheep barn than bring in hundreds of bales of hay from the field and stack them in the barn. But it feeds our animals through winter, so it's worth it. At least that's what I keep reminding myself when I can barely get out of bed the next morning.

As for the all garden goings-on, I've been learning a lot, taking plenty of photos, and am hoping to get back to my newly revived regular posting schedule very soon. Meanwhile, a girl's still gotta eat, and last Friday we showcased the first dill from the garden in one of our quick comfort food standbys—salmon patties. These healthy burgers are easy, inexpensive (we use canned wild Alaska salmon) and delicious, and thanks to the dill and our beautiful bounty of scallions, Friday's were the best I've ever made. I'm headed back out into the hayfield now so I don't have a chance to post the recipe yet, but I'm mentioning it because I wanted to make note of the first dill harvest.

The nicest thing about dill—a cold-tolerant annual that is easy to grow from seed and is almost never bothered by pests—is that once you plant it, it almost always comes back year after year on its own. It isn't called 'dill weed' for nothing. I haven't had to buy dill seeds in years.

My only complaint is that my volunteer dill is always ready to pick well before I have any cucumbers, but gardeners getting something for nothing can't be choosy. You can dry your dill, and while the flavor isn't the same as fresh (and I wouldn't recommend using it for homemade pickles), it's a lot tastier than nothing come winter.

So what's your favorite thing to do with dill?

© Copyright 2008 FarmgirlFare.com, the award-winning blog where we also love adding dill to homemade beer bread and herbed yogurt cheese.

Garden Journal Entry 6/7/08: What To Do With 125 Scallions (Green Onions)?

Just picked bounty

I'm in a bit of a pickle. Actually it's more of an onion - scallions to be exact. I remembered to double plant my onion sets in the kitchen garden this year so I could thin them out and reap a bonus crop of spring scallions, and my plan worked beautifully.


This is definitely The Year of the Scallion

But despite my tossing extra scallions into pretty much everything except dessert for the last few days, I still have about 125 that really need to be harvested now.

There are a zillion recipes that include scallions - which are also called green onions - but these mild and tasty alliums never seem to be the star of the show. I thought I remembered seeing a delicious sounding recipe somewhere for stir-fried scallions (maybe with a teriyaki sauce?), but a quick online search resulted in lots of stir-fried things with scallions added to them, but no recipe for just the scallions themselves.

When I reported my scallion situation to my best foodie pal Beth (aka kitchenMage), she suggested I toss a pile of them with some olive oil and then slow roast them in the oven at about 325 degrees with some thinly sliced garlic. I haven't tried this yet, but I think the idea it has serious possiblities.


I think spring onions are so pretty

When green onions begin to form bulbs they're called spring onions, or sometimes salad onions. I have plenty of those, too.


Too close for comfort - but very tasty

So what would you do if you were faced with an enormous quantity of gorgeous scallions and spring onions? While I'd love to know any of your favorite ways to use them, I'm particularly interested in recipes that call for large quantities, like 10 - or even 40. You're welcome to leave recipe links from your own blog in the comments section. Thanks for the help!

Oh, and because I'm so desperate, I'm posting this plea on Farmgirl Fare as well, so if you're looking for even more fresh scallion ideas, check out the comments section of Wanted: Your Favorite Recipes & Ways to Use Green Onions.

Up next on Farmgirl Fare (well, probably after a Daily Dose of Cute or two) I'll be sharing my recipe for Swiss Chard Tuna Salad, a refreshing twist on the classic standby that calls for a healthy dose of Swiss Chard (one of the best vegetables you can grow from seed) along with plenty of scallions.

In the meantime, here are some of my other favorite ways to use them:
Sour Cream & Onion Dip
Savory Cheese & Scallion Scones
Fiesta Cottage Cheese Veggie Dip
Mexican Jumping Bean Slaw
Summer in a Bowl
Colors of Summer Salad
Sprinkled on top of Hot Swiss Chard Artichoke Dip
Three Onion & Three Cheese Pizza (starring spring onions)

Related Kitchen Garden Posts:
Growing Onions In The Garden
3/16/06: It's Time to Plant Onions!
4/4/06: Operation Onion Complete!
4/26/06: Companion Planting Beets & Lettuce with Onions

© FarmgirlFare.com, the onion-breathed foodie farm blog where an overabundance of food in the garden is always cause to celebrate, even if we're not sure exactly what to do with all of it.

Garden Journal Entry 6/4/08:Growing French Tarragon Again

Looks Like They Survived Their Cross Country Journey Just Fine

Realization of the Day:
This is the first time I've bought plants through the mail.

I'd actually forgotten I'd even ordered them until I arrived at the post office today and our postmistress handed me a small square box from my beloved Pinetree Garden Seeds in Maine.

Backordered seeds? I thought. And then I remembered - on a whim (and thrilled by the fact that they were only $3.98 each and there was no special shipping charge) I'd tacked two French tarragon plants onto my seed order back in March. But then a slight panic set in. I hadn't picked up the mail since last Friday. (They won't deliver our mail all the way out to the farm, and the post office is 10 miles away.) How long had they been sitting here, suffocating in a box without airholes or even a warning label that said Live Plants? (The postmistress will call and let me know if something marked 'perishable' or 'live' arrives.) Had I managed to inadvertantly kill them already?

Unable to rustle up a pocketknife, I anxiously tore open the box with the truck key and released my little live purchases from their captive darkness and immediately sprinkled them with a little water from the jug we always carry with us when we leave the farm. They seemed tired and a little peaked but otherwise fine. By the time I made it home they were already perking up. Now all I need to decide is if I should grow them in a pot or risk putting them in the ground. Hmmm. Maybe I'll tuck next to the rosemary, sage, and thyme in the greenhouse. Oh wait. I bought two - one for the ground and one for a pot. Duh. Or maybe it was one to live and one to accidentally murder.

Ordering plants by mail is exciting! Sure, I've bought strawberry starts and raspberry canes before, but they look more like little root wads and dead sticks than real live plants in real live pots of soil. Even asparagus roots are kind of on the dull side.

The label that came tucked in on of the containers cracked me up: French Tarragon - Sun - Unique Herb Robust Flavor - Harvest and Make Vinegar.

So have you ordered live plants before? What did you get? How did it go? And, more importantly, what do you like to do with French Tarragon? It's been so long since I've grown this perennial herb (and I can never get myself to buy those overpriced, usually sad-looking packets of 'fresh' herbs at the store) that I can't remember what I used to put it in.

© Copyright 2008 FarmgirlFare.com, the award-winning blog where Farmgirl Susan shares stories & photos of her crazy country life on 240 remote Missouri acres - and so far 2008 is turning out to be a very good year for herbs.

Garden Journal Entry 6/2/08: Planting Tomatoes Later Is Better than Never (I Think)

Eight Tomato Plants (No, Really, they're in there)

Realization of the Day:
It's the second of June and I have a pathetic total of 9 tomato plants in the ground - which is more than double yesterday's count of four. Most years I have at least 40 or 50 - sometimes as many as 80.

Oh yeah, and they're tomato plants I broke down and bought, too - not started from the couple of dozen packets of heirloom seeds still safely sitting in my office.

How did this happen? I have no idea. I'm still trying to figure out how it got to be June already. I think it has something to do with the concurrence of lambing season and seed starting season each year. While my foodie mom was visiting the farm back in April (because she wanted to be here during lambing season), the running joke was that at 10pm when we staggered back to The Shack from the barn I would say brightly, "So are you ready to go out and work in the garden now?" Instead we poured ourselves glasses of wine, scrounged up something to eat, and collapsed into bed.

Back on February 14th I was flailing around trying to figure out what I could direct seed (and get to germinate) in the greenhouse that wouldn't either a) freeze to death in the coming months (basil, zinnias, bush beans) or b) suffer from heatstroke when the temps shoot up into the 90s in there like they do every time the sun comes out (lettuce, broccoli, kohlrabi, spinach). I thought about bunching onions (which I buy every year and never plant - it's like a tradition), but settled on my beloved Swiss chard instead. It's thriving, but what I really should have been doing back then was starting tomato and pepper seeds in containers. At the time, though, the thought of 2+ months of dealing with growing stuff indoors under lights seemed like a total pain. Yes, sometimes I can really be that stupid lazy.


Mr. Midnight Inspects My Work

This morning I took a break from planting to see if the guys working on our new building (the hardwood floor is looking great!) were interested in taking home some Jerusalem artichoke plants (more about growing these soon, I hope). Our contractor, who puts in a large garden every year, happily took me up on my offer even though he had no idea what Jerusalem artichokes were. His two helpers politely declined.

"I only grow tomatoes and green onions," one of them told me.

"I have plenty of green onions," I said. "But I'm really behind with my tomato plants." They nodded understandingly. "In fact," I sheepishly admitted, "I'm in the middle of planting some right now."

"Oh," they said in unison. "That is late." Being polite types, they left it at that, though I have a feeling as soon as I was out of earshot they probably had a little more to say.

In an attempt to look at this embarrassing and depressing tomato plant situation in a more positive light, I've been telling myself that since the weather is already hotter than hell and humid beyond belief nice and warm, my tomato plants will probably be big and tall in no time. The one I planted last week has already grown a couple of inches and is putting on new leaves. None of that chilly April and May stunted growth for these babies.

This will be an interesting experiment, though I really hope I'll never break this late planting record. I'm not a fan of Missouri summers by any stretch of the imagination (in fact I've already started counting down the months until fall), but I can't help hoping that our first frost arrives a little late this year.

The best thing about all is that in the future I'll always be able to console myself by saying, "Sure I'm behind with the tomatoes this year, but it's nothing like what happened back in 2008!"

And of course if you happen to be behind on your own tomato planting progress, my situation should make you feel a whole lot better - because it can't possibly be as pitiful as mine. At least I hope not.

Tomato plants already in the ground:
1 Black Cherry
4 Celebrity
4 Cherry (that's all the sign at the feed store said, but in my experience you can't go wrong with cherry tomato plants of any kind)

Next on the planting list:
27 more tomato plants (purchased)
20 Golden Bell pepper plants (purchased)
2 heirloom eggplant plants (purchased on a whim)
seeds to start: lemon cucumbers, various summer squash, more beans, several types of basil, parsley, & some other stuff

What, you thought I was only behind with tomatoes? Oh, I wish.

So what kind of tomatoes are you growing this year? Did you start your own seeds? Buy plants? Just get everything in the ground? Don't forget to tell us where you're located.

Related posts:
Growing Kellogg's Breakast Tomatoes & Colors of Summer Salad Recipe
How To Trim Tomato Plants & Why You Should
Growing Arkansas Traveler Tomatoes & How To Save Your Own Tomato Seeds
What To Do With All Those Green Tomatoes? Make Green Tomato Relish!

© Copyright 2008 FarmgirlFare.com, the award-winning blog where a raucous thunderstorm dropped a lovely half inch of rain on us today, and that was on top of the 1-1/2 inches we had two nights ago. Everything is growing like crazy!

Garden Journal Entry 5/31/08: Seasonal Strawberry Eating At Its Sweetest & Juiciest Best!

Orange Yogurt Pound Cake with Freshly Picked Strawberries & Mint

Realization of the Day:
Sometimes you just need to have a slab of cake for breakfast - with a big side of strawberries.

This morning I trudged back to The Shack from the front field, sweat-soaked and starving after wrestling with portable electric sheep fencing for an hour under the hot sun, and promptly treated myself to this plate of ruby red heaven. Oh, and there was a large scoop of creamy French vanilla ice cream involved, too.

Now it's back out to the field and the fencing - then hopefully the garden!

© Copyright 2008 FarmgirlFare.com, the award-winning blog where we just may have to have a repeat of this breakfast for lunch.

Garden Journal Entry 5/28/08:Successfully Growing Strawberries!

Jewels of the Kitchen Garden

Realization of the Day:
I forgot to have strawberries for breakfast.

Can you believe it? These gorgeous beauties were out in the garden, hanging by their stems and just waiting to be devoured, yet somehow they completely slipped my mind. I had a whole wheat tortilla with peanut butter and - get this - storebought strawberry jam instead. It's embarrassing, really. At least the jam was organic - and I remembered about the strawberries in time for a sweet and juicy mid-morning snack.


The Thriving Strawberry Bed Today (And look at all those healthy weeds surrounding it!)

Last year I planted a brand new strawberry patch in one of my 4' x 8' raised beds. (I'm enamored with raised bed gardening, which I started doing 8 years ago, and one of these days I'll get around to telling you why, I promise.) My old bed had served me well for several years, but even if you do things like thin them out and mow down the plants (which I probably didn't do since they are in a raised bed after all), a strawberry bed will only last for so long. Most of my plants actually kind of evaporated, to be taken over by large clumps of very happy grass - which made a wonderful dog bed. I even have photos. But I digress.

Anyway, in January of 2007 I ordered 30 Cavendish strawberry plants (which are actually more like little bundles of roots with a crown and maybe a leaf or two than actual plants) for $9.95 from my beloved Pinetree Garden Seeds, tucked them in the ground (not too deep, not too shallow) on May 7th (they don't ship you your plants until after the danger of frost), watered them regularly, and snipped off every single blossom that dared to make an appearance. That's right - no berries the first year means much bigger and healthier plants the next. It isn't easy, but it's worth it, trust me.

For the first several months I also snipped off all the runners so that the plants wouldn't concentrate their energy on producing baby offspring plants, but when the deer started sneaking into the garden at night and munching down the entire bed (this was before I thought to cover it with floating row cover to deter them - which worked), I decided that a few extra runners to fill things out might in fact be a good idea. What I did was wait for them to put down a few roots and become established, then I cut the mother cord and left them on their own. They did great.

Yes! This is What gardening is All About

Of Cavendish strawberries, a midseason variety, the Pinetree Garden Seeds catalog says this:

High yields of large berries with excellent flavor make this a good choice for home gardens or roadside stands. High resistance in red stele and intermediate resistance to verticillium wilt. Ripen over a long season. Grows best in zones 3 - 8.

Miller Nurseries, a family-owned company in business since 1934 that I've never ordered from but that sounds good (have you?), says this about Cavendish:

It has been a long time since we introduced a strawberry that has made new friends as Cavendish has done. Cavendish is proven winter-hardy through Nova Scotia’s extra-frigid temperatures. It runners so well a child can easily establish a solid plant stand and it produces crops weeks longer than other Junebearers. It’s so bountiful it yields much larger crops per square foot than lesser berries. It is highly resistant to red stele. This is simply the richest, berriest-tasting strawberry you’ve ever let melt on your tongue. Or put in a shortcake. Or drizzled over ice cream. If you’re ready for new pleasure in strawberry flavor, you simply have to try Cavendish. No longer premium priced. 25 virus-free plants are $8.55, 50 are $14.45, and 100 are $26.85.

And of Cavendish strawberries I say this:
They are absolutely, positively, delicious!

One of my very first posts on Farmgirl Fare was all about homegrown strawberries, and in it I confessed to having become a purist, feeling that the best way to savor a batch of luscious strawberries requires doing nothing more than making sure you have clean fingers and a plain white dish.

I will admit that I ate the first strawberries of the season this year standing out in the garden, and it doesn't get much better than that. And yet I can't stop thinking about the several inches of thick and oh-so-whippable cream that comes atop the gallon jars of fresh milk I buy from a cow down the road. Then there are the oatmeal scones I'd been thinking about baking today - which, when you think about it, are a lot like little shortcakes. And the Orange Yogurt Cake recipe I've been drooling over for the past 3 days and am now thinking would taste wonderful with a side of sliced strawberries. (Nicole is calling it bread, but let's not kid ourselves - there may not be a thick layer of buttercream frosting in sight, but this is definitely cake.)

Um, yeah, sorry but I really gotta go. If you need me I'll be in the kitchen. Or the strawberry bed.

So what's your favorite way to enjoy fresh strawberries?

Related strawberry links:
Farmgirl Fare 6/4/05: Strawberries
What's Growin' On 5/21/06: A Beautiful Breakfast! (obviously my memory was better back then)
What's Growin' On 5/27/06: Me, Cary, & Bear vs. The Turtles
What's Growin' On 10/28/07: Growing Strawberries & Preparing Your Bed for Winter

© Copyright 2008 FarmgirlFare.com, where the best part about this year's strawberry crop is that so far that hasn't been a single turtle - or turtle bite mark - in sight!

Garden Journal Entry 5/27/08:Getting Back in the Groove (I Hope!)

Tiny Flowers for Fairies?

Realization of the Day:
I need to get my original garden blog attitude - and pronto.

Back in the spring of 2006, I started this blog with a simple goal - to help me keep better records of what goes on each year in my Missouri kitchen garden. I made it a separate entity from Farmgirl Fare, my main food and farm blog, so I wouldn't bore non-gardeners with obsessive ramblings about sheep manure, seedling woes, the joys of growing 19 varieties of heirloom tomatoes, and the unbelievable destruction wreaked by blister beetles.

At first things went really well. I put up a short but newsy post nearly every single day, beginning most of them with a personal Realization of the Day, then babbling on from there. I was helping my gardening efforts and having fun.

But as more and more kitchen gardeners (and would-be kitchen gardeners) discovered my little blog, I decided I needed to offer more helpful hints and how-to advice. Posts became longer and exceedingly more complicated. I began to hear from happy people all over the world whom I had helped or inspired to expand or create their gardens. It was wonderful.

Then somewhere along the lines all those quick little posts and daily realizations dried up. I continued taking all kinds of photos, but I stopped making notes. Part of it was a simple matter of not having enough time to do everything I wanted to do (should I sit down and write something about the garden or actually go out and work in it?). But the idea of putting up a blog post that discussed nothing more than which flowers were blooming that day, or what I'd finally got around to planting, or even what I'd picked and enjoyed for dinner that night suddenly didn't seem like enough. And the longer I waited between posts, the more it felt like I needed to write a long article about something really substantial. Because this kind of daily detail stuff wasn't really going to help anyone become a better gardener.

Except me. Which brings me back to the whole reason I started this blog in the first place - my need for a garden journal.

I love being able to look back and find out what was going on in previous years. Because sometimes it's all those tiny, seemingly inconsequential details that really mean the most. Even just a photo can, well, be worth a thousand words - or simply be nice to look at.

So I'm officially starting over. From here on out, I'm going to try to post something every day - or at least every other day. I have the photos, I have the realizations, I have lots of stuff going on in the garden (even when it feels like I'm so behind there's nothing planted out there - which in itself needs to be noted), and I have a strong desire to get back into that garden blogging groove. Wish me luck.

In the meantime, here's a photo of the tiny white flowers that pop up in our front lawn each spring when I remind the Head Mower (actually, the only mower) to please steer clear of the stuff that doesn't look like grass because one day it'll be covered with charming little blossoms. And even though I have no idea what these plants are (which means I can't even impart a name, let alone any helpful knowledge, to you about them), posting this photo, which was taken back on May 13th, lets me know that yet one more flowering plant is behind its blooming schedule this year due to our cold and crazy winter.

In 2007 I didn't bother to write about these fairy-like flowers, but I know that in 2006 they had already popped up on April 23rd - and on that same day I ate the first two stalks of asparagus (while standing in the garden), saw the first hummingbird of the season, and had some very happy Aconcagua pepper plants finally in the ground.

Phew. Done. Now that wasn't too bad.

Do you have a garden blog or blog about gardening? How has it affected your garden/gardening?

© Copyright 2008 FarmgirlFare.com, the award-winning blog where it just started to rain - but I'm still going to try and finally get some really pathetic looking (and purchased!) tomato plants in the ground.

The Winner of Butterfly by Thomas Marent!

Butterfly in the Farmyard (And I Really Should Know What Kind!)

The randomly selected winner of a copy of the gorgeous and gigantic book, Butterfly, is. . . Laura! Here's what she said in her butterfly related contest entry comment:

I have always loved butterflies, since I was a kid. My fondest childhood memories of butterflies were the tiny orangish-brown cuties that would come to visit our butterfly bush every summer. I don't know their name, but they are so small and cute. I used to catch them sometimes (I know, that's bad!) to look at them up close.

Here's a picture of a pretty butterfly on my finger in Costa Rica. It had just hatched from its cocoon at a butterfly farm.

Congratulations Laura! Please e-mail me at farmgirlfare AT gmail DOT com and let me know where to send your new copy of this amazing book.

Thank you all so much for sharing your butterfly stories and memories and links - what a wonderful collection to savor. I know this was a book giveaway contest, but I feel like I'm the one who really received the gift!

© Copyright 2008 FarmgirlFare.com, the award-winning blog where Farmgirl Susan shares stories & photos of her crazy country life on 240 remote Missouri acres - and we're thrilled that it's the height of moth & butterfly season.

Luna Moth Love & A Book Giveaway!Win a Copy of Butterfly by Thomas Marent

Some of you know about my love for moths and butterflies. I'm constantly awed by these remarkable creatures, and of course it would be nearly impossible to have any sort of garden without them. Well if I'm in love, then Swiss author and photographer Thomas Marent is obsessed - in a good way. And his gloriously gigantic new book, simply titled Butterfly, offers a (much) larger than life size look at these 'flying flowers.'

The more than 500 stunning photographs in Butterfly - all shot on location in natural habitats - offer an extraordinary portrait of some of the 165,000 species found in almost every region of the world, and visually document each stage of the life cycles of butterflies and moths in an incredibly detailed, close-up view of their world. This large hardcover is first and foremost a picture book (there's a slideshow of images here), but the minimal text offers tidbits of fascinating information. For example, of monarch butterflies, which I remember going to see migrate when I was growing up in Northern California, Marent says:

"The monarch butterfly (Danaus plexippus) repopulates eastern North America every year after spreading north from Mexico. In fall, the entire population east of the Rocky Mountains returns south in a flight of over 1,800 miles, completed by a single generation. Guided by instinct, stopping only to sleep or refuel with nectar, their destination is a remote area of central Mexico, where hundreds of millions of monarchs gather in a few patches of highland fir forest. Here, the butterflies are safe from frost yet cool enough to spend most of the winter semi-dormant."


Luna Moths In The Garden, August 2006

We have all sorts of butterflies and moths here on the farm, and one of my favorites is the large luna moth. I was thrilled to come across this mating pair at the edge of the garden two years ago, and just yesterday I saw one perched on a beam in the sheep barn. According to Marnet, "female luna moths 'call' males in the night by extruding a scent gland at the tip of the abdomen. Males can detect the scent from a few miles away and react by flying doggedly upwind along the scent trail."

Butterfly would make a wonderful gift for anyone enamored with these little winged creatures, and thanks to the nice people at DK Publishing (the same company that published Bread, one of my favorite bread books, as well as all sorts of other beautiful publications), I have a brand new copy to give away.

Just leave a comment in this post between now and next Thursday telling me something - anything - about butterflies or moths: why you love them, what your favorite kind is, why you wrote about them on your own blog (leave a link to your post!), your best butterfly story or fondest memory, or simply why you want to win this book. I'll randomly pick a winner and announce it in a new post on Friday, May 16th. Sorry, but due to the weight of this enormous book it can only be shipped to a U.S. address.

© Copyright 2008 FarmgirlFare.com, the award-winning blog where life is always better with butterflies.

Garden Journal Entry 4/16/08: My Favorite No Maintenance Flowering Perennial Bush

Ah, Spring!

Realization of the day:
I have no idea what this bush is but I love it. (Update: It's a flowering quince!)

It was here when I moved in and is definitely my kind of plant: it flourishes in our crazy Missouri climate, requires no special treatment (or even attention), doesn't grow quickly enough to need pruning or shaping, and is never bothered by disease or destructive insects.



In early spring it's covered with these delightfully bright blossoms that pretty much scream the word happy and attract swarms of bees and other pollinators (you can see a close up photo of the flowers here). This bush is located on the south side of The Shack next to the clothesline, so right now hanging up the laundry - an activity I always find fairly pleasant - is even more enjoyable. My only complaint? The flowers don't stick around for very long. Well, that and the fact that you can't eat them.

So does anybody know what this mystery bush is? If we figure it out, then you'll be able to go find one for your own yard.

Do you have a wonderfully low maintenance perennial plant in your yard or garden? Please tell us about it!

© 2008 FarmgirlFare.com, the blooming foodie farm blog where if it isn't edible, then it had better be pretty - and thrive on serious neglect.

Attention Homeless Organic Vegetable Lovers: Would You Like To Move To A Farm?

Your New Home Sweet Home?

FOR RENT: Charming cottage on a beautiful biodynamic farm. Separate, private 700 square foot building has one bedroom, cathedral knotty pine ceilings, gas stove and heat, washer/dryer in unit, dishwasher, wifi dsl, cable, and an outside large storage unit. Rent is $1200 per month and includes all the heirloom tomatoes you can eat. Separate utilities charge of $100 per month includes: PG&E (electric), full cable, wifi dsl, garbage, and water. Deposit is $2000. No smoking allowed inside or outside. Cat ok, well-behaved small dog that doesn't chase cats ok. Cottage will be shown the weekend of April 12 and 13 and will be available for occupancy around the same time.

Unfortunately this cute little place isn't located here on my farm, because if it were you can be sure we'd be living in it instead of in The Shack! It's actually somewhere even better - on Love Apple Farm which is located in the Santa Cruz mountains near the central California coast. It's halfway between San Francisco and Monterey, and about a half hour's drive to the beaches in Santa Cruz.

My new foodie friend Cynthia Sandberg lives on and operates Love Apple Farm, a two-acre biodynamic paradise which originally became known for growing 100 varieties of heirloom tomatoes each year. It is now the exclusive kitchen garden for world-renowned Manresa Restaurant in Los Gatos, California.

As soon as I read about the cottage I was ready to pack up and move back to California. But since Bear chases cats, and I doubt I can afford to feed my sheep veggies destined for a Michelin two-starred restaurant, I guess we'll have to stay where we are. Besides, Cynthia told me that "the chef at Manresa would certainly insist I try my hand at making sheep's milk cheese if we had any sheep here - so you better stay put since I don't need any more chores!"

Since that pretty much settled it, I figured I'd spread the word about this fantastic opportunity in case any of you are looking for a wonderful new place to live. I also asked Cynthia for some of the food and garden related details regarding the rental. Here's what she said:

"Tenants sometimes get to partake of our often excess amounts of stuff. For example, I've got a whole bed of radishes that needed pulling to make way for the tomatoes and the restaurant just cannot use that many at one time. And of course, all the tomatoes everyone can possibly eat are available, as I grow way more than the restaurant can use of those. You can take the girl out of the tomato patch, yadda yadda yadda.

"Residents here are always rewarded for lending a hand, as our my volunteers. If I'm thinking straight when they leave, I will forage around and get a bag of goodies for them to leave with. We sometimes have extra eggs, too, because on the occasion that the restaurant is closed for a few days (happens several times a year), then the hens don't stop and we're eating an awful lot of omelettes around here.

"Oh, and all my residents and tenants can partake of any of my gardening classes for free: Growing a Summer Veggie Garden, Tomato Masters Class, Installling Drip Irrigation, Tomato Cage Making, Sowing and Tending Tomato Transplants from Seed, Keeping Chickens, and Growing a Winter Veggie Garden."

If all of this isn't tempting enough, you also get to share the farm with Dali, the enormous pot bellied pig who "continues to delight and terrify small children and their parents."

You can see more photos of the cottage here. If you'd like more information about the cottage you can email Cynthia at loveapplefarm AT gmail DOT com. And if, like me, you can't make the move but love great gardening tips, be sure to check out Cynthia's wonderful blog, Grow Better Veggies. Do you already live near Love Apple Farm? The 2008 Tomato Seedling Sale is going on now through May 31.

© 2008 FarmgirlFare.com, the award-winning blog where we love our crazy country life on 240 remote Missouri acres - even if we don't get to share it with an enormous pot-bellied pig.

Grow Your Own: A Monthly Blogging Event You Can Sink Both Your Teeth & Your Hoe Into!

Are you a gardener who blogs or a food blogger who gardens? If so, my foodie friend Andrea has a delicious monthly blogging event for you! Grow Your Own "celebrates the foods we grow or raise ourselves and the dishes we make using our homegrown products."

All you have to do is make a dish that uses at least one item from your very own garden or farm and write about it on your blog. You can use something that was given to you, but the giver must have personally grown or raised the item.

Anything edible that you have grown or raised qualifies, including fruits, vegetables, herbs, sprouts, edible flowers, nuts, grains, legumes, dairy products, eggs, and livestock. Produce from both indoor and outdoor gardens are welcome!

The deadline for Grow Your Own #8 is March 28th, but you're welcome to enter any qualifying post from the month of March. Just check out the simple Grow Your Own rules and help yourself to one of the fun GYO badges. Below the rules you'll find links to all the previous Grow Your Own roundups, which are published around the 1st day of each month. There's even a Grow Your Own Flickr photo group where you can share photos, too.

Maybe you're a homeowner like Andrea who is turning her backyard into an edible paradise, or you're a top floor apartment dweller with a single pot of rosemary on a sunny windowsill. No matter where you live or what you grow, you're invited to join in the Grow Your Own fun. I wrote about Onion & Herb Crusted Lamb Spareribs and Grilled Lamb Steaks for GYO #7 and am hoping to have another homegrown lamb recipe posted in time for GYO #8. I can't wait to see what everybody else cooks up this spring and summer!

In the meantime, what are some of your favorite things to do with homegrown goodies? If you've shared a recipe on your own blog, feel free to leave a link to it in the comments section.

© 2008 FarmgirlFare.com, the award-winning blog the cooking style Less Fuss, More Flavor - and we don't consider ourselves strange just because we sometimes pick gourmet lettuce in the dark so that it's really, really fresh. A little obsessive maybe, but definitely not strange.

Herbs In & Out Of The Garden: Tips For Growing & Using Rosemary

Rosemary thriving in the homemade greenhouse despite single digit temps.

This was supposed to be a quick post about one little plant in the greenhouse and a new lamb recipe on my food and farm blog, Farmgirl Fare, but somehow it turned into a rambling rosemary learning experience. Now if only I could get my rosemary to ramble this much.

It took me a long time to get up the guts to put a rosemary plant in the ground. I used to keep it in a pot - setting it out in the garden when it was warm, and then moving it into the greenhouse in fall.

When it started getting really chilly, I would bring the pot indoors and set it a few feet from the woodstove in the living room, next to the only available window that receives any measurable sunlight. Within days it would start happily putting on cheerful new growth, and then several weeks later it would die.

Each spring I would buy a new little rosemary plant and the cycle would begin again. This went on for years.

Finally two autumns ago I decided that I should take my chances and transplant my rosemary into one of the raised beds in my homemade, not airtight, and almost always unheated greenhouse instead of bringing it into The Shack. I was nervous, but I figured I had nothing to lose except my beloved little plant that I was planning to murder in a month or two anyway. So I did it. And boy am I glad that I did.


Fresh vs. dried rosemary - there's simply no comparison.

The little plant took off, and now I'm now able enjoy freshly picked rosemary all year long, even when there's snow on the ground. On winter nights I drape it with floating row cover, and when the temperatures really plummet I add an old bedsheet or lightweight blanket, held up off the plant with short sections of bamboo stakes. During the day I uncover it.

It's been as cold as 7 degrees F in there, and yet my rugged rosemary didn't even flinch.

I'm still not sure why I kept killing my rosemary plants in the living room; the gardening books and websites I looked at while working on the post make it sound like everyone except me is able to easily grow rosemary in pots both indoors and out. I know it's warm near the woodstove, but rosemary is a Mediterranean plant that loves heat.

This expert rosemary grower, however, says that when kept indoors rosemary prefers temperatures around 60 degrees. It's possible it was too close to the sometimes icy-cold window, or it might not have been getting enough sun. Or I may have watered it too much. Who knows.

I did relearn an important thing to keep in mind when growing anything in containers, and that is that even if you move them to a warm and sheltered spot, the roots are still much more susceptible to cold that they would be if they were buried in the ground.

A friend pointed this out when I called him last month for 9-1-1 herbal advice regarding the beautiful but now rather dead looking rosemary topiary I'd bought for myself last December after surviving an all day bakery building supply mission to Lowe's.

I assured him the plant hadn't frozen because it had been in the greenhouse and covered. But it was in a flimsy plastic pot that offered no protection from what I'd thought were tolerable temperatures. We learn by mistakes, and this year one of my goals is to stop killing rosemary.

Growing up I never cared for rosemary, despite the fact that we had an enormous rosemary bush in our Northern California backyard. But when I moved to the country and planted a large kitchen garden I was determined to grow it, along with several other herbs I never used, like sage.

There's just something so alluring about growing herbs, even if half of them are simply for show. After all, most gardens and landscaping are only for show.

I am trying to be a better herb eater, though, as evidenced my past pleas for help regarding what to do with lemon thyme and purple basil. Anyway, somewhere along the line I fortunately developed a taste for rosemary, and now I love the stuff.


Fresh rosemary shines in these Herb Crusted Lamb Spareribs

I suppose this was inevitable since I raise sheep, and lamb and rosemary are a match made in culinary heaven. Unless we're quickly tossing some plain chops or leg steaks on the grill (it's so nice when your meat has enough flavor to stand on its own!), pretty much all the lamb we eat is has been seasoned with rosemary.

You'll find one of my favorite ways to combine rosemary and lamb (pictured above) in my recent post on Farmgirl Fare, How To Cook Lamb: Onion & Herb Crusted Lamb Spareribs & Grilled Lamb Leg Steaks.

According to About.com: Gardening, the three fundamentals for successfully growing rosemary are: full sun (6 to 8 hours a day), good drainage, and good air circulation.

Rosemary doesn't require much attention, but to keep your plants from becoming scraggly you should prune them back hard after they flower in summer - just don't cut them all the way back to the old wood.

You can buy rosemary seeds, but germination of the best seed available is only around 20%. Instead, look for healthy, preferably organically grown plants at nurseries or natural foods stores. Or better yet, see if you can swipe some cuttings from a friend, then follow these easy instructions from Fine Gardening to root them.

My herb growing and bread baking pal Beth (aka kitchenMage), who lives in the Pacific Northwest where rosemary thrives, says she starts 50 to 100 rosemary cuttings each year and doesn't even bother using rooting hormone. If you're feeling particularly lazy, try plunking the cuttings in a glass of water and setting them on a sunny windowsill; there's a chance they'll develop roots.

Despite the fact that I grow several different types of basil, thyme, and mint, for some reason I've always thought of rosemary as just being rosemary. But of course it isn't.

From Creeping Rosemary, a tall ground cover that can cover eight to ten feet in diameter or trail down eight to ten feet from a second story balcony, to Blue Boy, that grows out only about 12 inches wide and rarely gets over six inches tall, to Shimmering Stars, a trailing rosemary with pink flower buds that open medium-blue to lavender and is great for making topiaries, there's sure to be a variety of rosemary out there to fit your every taste and space. You can read about several other types of rosemary here and here (scroll down).

Lamb burgers with rosemary, shallots, and feta on focaccia 'buns' (lamb burger recipe here and focaccia recipe here)

At least I was aware that rosemary has a life beyond lamb. This versatile, aromatic herb can be used in everything from salad dressings to sorbets. I made some scrumptious and easy rosemary focaccia recently (my first foray into focaccia!), and I created a separate category on del.icio.us just for rosemary recipes I hope to try someday.



This Pane di Ramerino (Italian Rosemary Raisin Bread) is another favorite way to enjoy rosemary.

Rosemary's usefulness extends far beyond the tastebuds, too. According to Rosemary Gladstar in her wonderful book, Rosemary Gladstar's Family Herbal: A Guide To Living Life With Energy, Health, And Vitality, "We've only begun to uncover the many uses of rosemary."

She goes on to say that this evergreen member of the mint family has long been renowned as a memory aid, produces a tonic effect on the nervous system, and is good for circulation. It also strengthens the heart and reduces high blood pressure.

According to Kitchen And Herb Gardener, an enormous beauty of a book by Richard Bird and Jessica Houdret, rosemary can be taken internaly as an infusion for colds, influenza, fatigue, and headaches, and can be applied externally in massage oil for rheumatic and muscular pain.

In addition, rosemary has been used for hundreds of years as a cosmetic herb for its benefical effects on the hair and skin. Infusions are used as rinses for dry hair and dandruff and added to bath lotions and beauty preparations.

You can include rosemary as part of an invigorating bath blend to help aching joints and tiredness, or when preparing a warm herbal footbath, which can help with headaches and mental stress. Its fragrance and texture also makes it excellent for use in potpourris and insect-repellent sachets.

Hmmm. It sounds like I need to add at least a few more rosemary plants to the garden. Don't worry - I'll be sure to let them know that murder isn't on the agenda.

So do you grow rosemary? How do you like to use it? If you've written about rosemary or shared a favorite rosemary recipe on your own blog, feel free to leave a link to your post in the comments section.

© FarmgirlFare.com, the greenthumb foodie farm blog where we figure that if you're gonna go to the trouble grow it, you might as well be able to eat it.

Garden Journal Entry: I Heart Sheep Manure

And I Found This Rock In The Barnyard To Prove It

Happy Valentine's Day!

Several years ago I started collecting heart shaped rocks I found around the farm, and I now have over 200 of them. I think of them as little signs - and sometimes their meaning is quite obvious.

So what do you love about gardening?

© 2008 FarmgirlFare.com, the award-winning blog where everybody contributes to the garden - in some way or another.

Grow Better Veggies Blog, More About Kohlrabi, & Ten Chances To Win 5 Packets Of Organic Heirloom Tomato Seeds

Heirloom Inspiration From A Summer Past

Great gardeners must think alike, because Cynthia Sandberg posted "Kohlrabi: A Kick-Ass Winter Veggie" on Love Apple Farm's Grow Better Veggies blog the same day I posted "Let's Trade: Your Kohlrabi Growing Tips For My Best Kohlrabi Recipe Ever" here. Of course only one of us actually qualifies as great in this case, since my kohlrabi growing attempts of late have been disasters, while Cynthia had a gorgeous winter harvest.

If you haven't yet discovered Grow Better Veggies, you're in for a real treat. Cynthia is the owner and farmer of Love Apple Farm, which is located in the Santa Cruz mountains on the central California coast and originally became known for growing 100 varieties of heirloom tomatoes each year. It is now the exclusive kitchen garden for world-renowned Manresa Restaurant in Los Gatos, California. Her Grow Better Veggies blog is "dedicated to tracking the progress of Love Apple Farm in its quest to transition to full biodynamic status, to tackle the challenges inherent in successfully providing hundreds of different kinds of edibles to Manresa Restaurant, to teach others how to grow not only the everyday popular vegetables, but also the exotic ones, and to talk a whole lot about Cynthia’s primary passion, the love apple."

If you're fortunate enough to live nearby, Cynthia gives a number of fun and informative gardening classes at the farm during the year. Love Apple Farm also offers over 100 varieties of heirloom tomato seedlings for sale at the farm in spring. Interested in some hands-on learning experience? There are volunteer opportunties at the farm as well.

Unfortunately I don't think I'll be visiting Cynthia's glorious gardens anytime soon, but I still signed up for the Love Apple Farm free e-mail newsletter. It keeps me informed about what's going on at the farm and on Grow Better Veggies, but more importantly, I get to hear about the subscribers-only contests.

Cynthia announces a new contest in each newsletter, and the current one will have 10 winners! Here's how it works:

"Anyone who leaves a nice comment on my January 24 post about kohlrabi will be entered in a raffle to win a set of 5 different and unique heirloom tomato seed packets from my friends at TomatoFest.com."

Want to win? After a short but drooling look at the TomatoFest site I know I do! Warning: they have a lot of amazing sounding heirloom tomato seeds for sale - and they're even organic. It would be really easy to go really overboard ordering seeds from this wonderful company.

To be entered in the raffle, simply subscribe to the Love Apple Farm newsletter and then leave a comment at Cynthia's kohlrabi post. There's newsletter sign-up info in the Grow Better Veggies right hand sidebar, or you can click here to go directly the mailing list sign-up page.

Whether you visit in person or in cyberspace, I think you're going to love Love Apple Farm. And who doesn't want to grow better veggies? Now if only Cynthia would send me some of that beautiful kohlrabi.

© 2008 FarmgirlFare.com, the award-winning blog where there can never be too many vine-ripened heirloom tomatoes in the kitchen garden.

Let's Trade: Your Purple Kohlrabi Growing Tips For My Best Kohlrabi Recipe Ever

Pathetic purple kohlrabi direct seeded sometime last summer


Realization Of The Day:
I'm giving up on the kohlrabi - again. (But I'll still eat the leaves.)


There's nothing like a couple of zero degree mornings to put things into perspective. It's time to let last year's garden go. This is actually a relief because there comes a point, usually around mid-December, when covering and uncovering half a dozen raised beds with floating row covers, old bedsheets, raggedy quilts, sheets of thick clear plastic, tarps, and whatever else is cheap and handy starts to feel like a real pain in the butt—especially when you uncover the tiny Swiss chard plants you've been coddling along for months in one of the mini greenhouse beds only to find that they've been munched down to nothing but pathetic little stems by. . . well, I have no idea what ate them, only that they had to have been really persistent (and really hungry) to reach them.





As for this row of kohlrabi plants I direct seeded sometime around last June, it's actually doing pretty well considering it's been covered with nothing but two floating row covers and an old sheet during these record-breaking bitter cold temperatures, more of which are expected tonight. Kohlrabi is one cold-hardy little vegetable, but my problem seems to with the other end of the thermometer. Once again the plants have refused to form bulbs, and I think it may have to do with the heat.


Early last spring (unfortunately I didn't write down exactly when) I direct seeded a couple of rows of purple kohlrabi, and only a few of the plants ever formed bulbs. They didn't get too cold, were planted in rich organic soil, had plenty of sunshine, were watered regularly, and weren't overcrowded. But they just kept growing straight up instead of out.


Not a single one of the plants in my second planting (again I forgot to make a note of exactly when I started the seeds, but I think it was June) formed bulbs, and I made sure they were thinned out so that none of the plants were even touching each other just in case that was the problem, though I didn't think it was.


Apparently most gardeners don't have any trouble growing kohlrabi, because my search through books, blogs, seed catalogs, gardening forums, and various other online sources for help about my no-bulb problem came up with zilch.


Everybody did say that kohlrabi matures quickly, likes cool weather, should be grown in the spring and/or fall, tastes even better after a frost, and is extremely easy to grow. For them, maybe.


I did find an excellent online article about growing kohlrabi from Mother Earth News called "Cool Kohlrabi" that said if you let the bulbs form during warm weather they can become woody. I also read somewhere that if you let the bulbs get too large they can become woody, but nobody mentions what you're doing wrong if the bulbs don't form at all.


It's iffy growing spring and fall crops in Missouri, which is why I almost never get any decent broccoli. Or cabbage. Or spinach. Or rapini. Or cauliflower, which I fortunately quit trying to grow years ago because I recently learned that it is incredibly finicky.


Our winters are harsh (relatively speaking), spring heats up very quickly (we almost always have April days in the 90s), and by the time the ridiculously hot and humid summers have cooled down enough to start seeds for fall, it's well into September, and there isn't usually enough growing time left before winter really sets in.


That's what happened this year with a lot of my fall plantings. I direct seeded all sorts of things on September 15th, and while I did enjoy some gorgeous spinach, a fine crop of kale, a few Oriental greens, and even a double cutting of mizuna, the turnips, five kinds of beets, and several varieties of Swiss chard I had high hopes for unfortunately never amounted to anything. (The chard I definitely should have started earlier, as it is extremely heat tolerant.)


On the other hand, the four types of bush beans I planted in late March (and was so happy I was getting them in the ground early!) froze to death.



This is just wrong—and depressing.


I'm not giving up on my purple kohlrabi, though. I love it way too much. In fact, I probably love it even more because I hardly ever get to eat it.


Kohlrabi, from the German words kohl (cabbage) and rabi (turnip), is not actually a cabbage or a turnip. Cultivated in Europe since at least the mid 1500's, this cold loving member of the brassica (cabbage) family is low in calories, high in fiber, and a good source of several vitamins and minerals. Although kohlrabi has been grown the U.S. since at least the early 1800's, it still has yet to become very popular.


Sweet and mildly flavored, kohlrabi can be braised, boiled, stuffed, sliced, scalloped, steamed, julienned, roasted, and sautéed. You can grate it into slaw, toss it into salads, slip it into soups and stews, snack on it raw with dip, and stir-fry it. You can even wrap it in foil and grill it.


I've seen recipes where kohlrabi was covered in cream, sautéed with anchovies, stuffed into empanadas, fried into cakes, served with hollandaise sauce, and turned into a cinnamon brunch bake. This vegetable is versatile.


Unfortunately all of these cooks are wasting their time - and their kohlrabi. For the only thing you should ever be doing with kohlrabi is turning it into purée. Trust me. You'll find my favorite recipe in this post on Farmgirl Fare, What To Do With Kohlrabi? Purée it! What's really nice about this recipe (besides the fact that it tastes divine) is that it makes use of both the kohlrabi leaves and the bulbs. By the way, the cute little baby leaves make wonderful additions to salads.



Now that's kohlrabi! (This photo was taken in my kitchen garden on 7/16/07, so I know I can really do it - or it can really do it.)


Okay, so now that you have my recipe, I'm hoping you'll give me some kohlrabi growing tips. What do you think I'm doing wrong? I know kohlrabi can be successfully grown here, as I've had bumper crops in the (very distant) past, and even last spring's planting gave me enough harvestable plants, like the beautiful one above (which I supposedly let get too large but didn't taste woody at all), to make one batch of perfect purée. Any help is greatly appreciated!


In the meantime, I'm tempted to start some kohlrabi seeds in the greenhouse right now, but even in winter it can quickly shoot up to 90+ degrees in there on a sunny day, and if the heat actually is my problem I'd be wasting my time.


Instead I think I'll start a few containers of seeds indoors (which is how I used to start almost everything, but I've been direct seeding more and more as the years go by) then set out the seedlings as soon as they're a couple inches high since I know they can handle the cold.


Wish me luck. I'm really hoping that 2008 will be The Year Of The Humongous Kohlrabi Harvest. I know that someday I'll have so much kohlrabi I'll actually get tired of devouring it puréed, so I'd love to know your favorite ways to eat it, too.


Never give up for good in the garden.


© FarmgirlFare.com, the purple passioned foodie farm blog where Farmgirl Susan shares stories & photos of her crazy country life on 240 remote Missouri acres.