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My Book!
I wrote a book about preserving food. The same step-by-step instruction and full-color photos you find in my blog. Buy it at Yes, You Can
Yard Birds
Adorable, handcrafted, folk art. Yard Birds add whimsical flare to any garden, yard, or entranceway. Click here to find a Yard Bird for your kitchen garden.
Links to planters at selected vendors:
Sprouts
Amazon.com is a terrific source for certified organic seeds intended for home sprouting. Dress up salads, stir-fry, sandwiches, spreads, and other dishes with homegrown sprouts of all kinds. Follow this link to order your sampler or to find home sprouting kits.
Small Kitchen Garden Store
Find the perfect gift for any kitchen gardener--or find products to help get the best from your own small kitchen garden. To save you time, we've selected products from Amazon.com that received the best customer reviews. Click here to visit our store and pick up the perfect gifts for any small kitchen garden enthusiast.
Author Archive
National Wildlife Federation & Scotts Miracle Gro: OMG!
January 26, 2012 | 
Author 
I’d be happy to have a stand of goldenrod in my backyard wildlife habitat if it attracted butterflies and honeybees. Were I to use Scotts lawn and garden chemicals on my lawn and garden, I’d stand a reasonable chance of killing the very wildlife my habitat was supposed to attract.
The National Wildlife Federation (NWF) and Scotts (the cure-it-with-chemicals lawn & garden company) have created some kind of partnership where Scotts is giving money to fund NWF projects. The NWF seems pleased to have this support from Scotts. Scotts must be ecstatic to have bought a relationship that looks like an enthusiastic endorsement from an alleged environmental watchdog. For that to make sense, I relate a conversation from many years ago that significantly shaped my attitudes about putting chemicals on my lawn and my small kitchen garden.
My Brother the City Gardener
My brother lives down-river from me near the Chesapeake Bay. He has managed the gardens in a large city for years, and his job has put him through training in all things horticulture: plants, insecticides, fertilizers, weed killers, heavy equipment operation, hydraulics… He has written some posts for this blog, and has corrected my errors when I’ve misspoken or misconstrued things on a Facebook group where we hang out.
We were chatting some ten or more years ago and I mentioned I was going to treat my lawn to knock out broadleaf weeds and crabgrass. He offered the following rule of thumb: To beat crabgrass, apply pre-emergent weed killer before the blossoms drop off of your forsythia plants.
Then he went on a rant. He complained that all us lawn-owners in the Chesapeake Bay watershed (I live near the Susquehanna River which drains central New York and Pennsylvania into the Chesapeake Bay) should scrape our lawns bare, layer on six inches of high-quality sop soil, condition it with aged compost, and start fresh. If we’d manage our grass better, the Chesapeake Bay wouldn’t be choking to death from all the chemicals that wash out of our lawns and down the Susquehanna river.
When I Realized I was Stupid
I took stock. It had always killed me to shell out more than $40 in very early spring to cover my lawn with crabgrass preventer. I’d hit the lawn again in mid spring to knock out broadleaf weeds—another crazy price tag. The chemicals coated my sneakers as I worked, and they smelled bad. So, I’d ban the kids and the dogs from the lawn for days until a decent rain had washed the stuff down to the soil.
I’m excavating to establish a rain garden. The long channel along the garden’s retention wall will receive gravel and perforated pipe before I fill with soil. The wet area in the left front of the photo is the actual rain garden, though I’ve dug it much larger since I took the photo.
I’d buy grass seed and work it into bare areas, but there were always new bare spots. Of course, I’d mow at least once a week, and sometimes twice. This meant more than an hour each time walking behind a noisy, stinky device, and heaping the clippings into a compost pile. If it wasn’t enough to burn all that gasoline (and time), I once had a mower catch fire and I let it burn on my driveway (kind of satisfying, actually).
Could I mow the lawn when it was convenient? Nope. I had to do it on dry days; couldn’t count on mowing on Saturday or Sunday. Oh, and I wasn’t the only one. During rainy seasons, if there was a dry day, there were mowers roaring all over the neighborhood. My family couldn’t (and still can’t) eat on our screened porch without hearing at least one mower grinding away every time.
And why do I have a lawn anyway? Because it’s the default when you buy a house. Even with young children, we had very little use for a lawn. But when I gave it serious thought I saw that the lawn is useless; I was doing all that unpleasant work and spending hundreds of dollars a year to grow something so I could cut it down and throw it away. I felt pretty stupid about it.
Chemical-Free Small Kitchen Garden
Once you try ornamental, you just want more. Some day, there’s likely to be a stand of bamboo growing in my yard… not because I need it, but because I really like the way it looks. I hope we can still get along.
Now I try NEVER to buy packaged chemicals for my lawn or garden. If I’m putting anything on the soil, it’s compost, mulch, or manure. I manage my kitchen garden by mulching with lawn clippings and adding compost when I set plants in the ground. From a lawn-growers perspective, mine is horrid, but it’s green when it’s supposed to be.
The bigger news is that I’m getting rid of my lawn. Three years ago, I gave myself 10 years to reduce the lawn to pathways and decorative patches. In its place there will be food. I’ve added several planting beds as well as perennial fruit bushes. In time, I’ll have nut trees, fruit trees, brambles, strawberries, and grapes. As well, I’m planning decorative herb gardens, extensive trellising for annual vegetables, and unusual land features (such as rock piles and amorphous raised beds) to handle other annual veggies.
I’ve excavated much of what will become a rain garden to redirect excessive runoff away from my main vegetable bed. That will be an ornamental feature which, I’m afraid, will start me down the slippery slope at the bottom of which are more ornamental plantings. At the risk of diluting my “grow food” message, I’d love to have a stand of bamboo in the yard.
What of the National Wildlife Federation?
I’ve lost all respect for the National Wildlife Federation. They have a certification program through which you might get your yard certified as a Backyard Wildlife Habitat. It’s inconceivable that they’d recommend tossing Scotts chemicals into such a habitat for ANY reason. Yet, if you pay for the certification, you’re supporting a program that enthusiastically publicizes it’s a good idea to use chemicals in gardens and lawns. Seriously, if you use weed killer, bug killer, and fertilizer on your lawn and/or planting beds abutting your Backyard Wildlife Habitat, you contaminate that habitat and make it unsuitable for the wildlife it’s supposed to attract. Pretty much the way Scotts’s relationship with the NWF contaminates the NWF.
Here are some articles I read over the past day as I was deciding what to write about this inappropriate alliance between the National Wildlife Federation and Scotts:
NWF Teams Up With Scotts Miracle Gro
Scotts National Wildlife Federation Partner Get Kids Outside
National Wildlife Federation Scotts Miracle Gro: Weird
Post Produce, Jan 2012: Sweet & Sour Pork
Scroll to the bottom of this post if you’re here to link to your January 2012 Post Produce post. I look forward to seeing what you’re consuming from your garden!
I can pineapple and pickled mixed vegetables so they’re on hand when I want to make sweet and sour pork. The vegetables are carrots, onions, broccoli, cauliflower, and chili peppers quick-pickled in brine made of water, vinegar, and salt. Canning pickled vegetables involves specific procedures to prevent growth of deadly bacteria, so please don’t make your own pickled vegetables without following USDA-tested procedures.
Still no produce to pick fresh from my small kitchen garden! Actually, we finally had our first snow of winter, and the planting bed is buried under white powder. About six inches fell overnight, finally making winter real.
But this non-planting season hasn’t soured me on Post Produce. I try always to look at the larder when planning meals, and more often than not, the larder saves me when I’ve failed to plan. Today was such a day, so for dinner we had sweet & sour pork.
Pickled Vegetables from My Small Kitchen Garden
Each year I like to preserve at least one canner full of pickled mixed vegetables in quart jars. When I can them, I follow the procedures I wrote in my post, Pickles From Your Home Kitchen Garden, with two significant differences:
1. I don’t use pickling spice—I use no spices at all.
2. I don’t use dill.
Making a canner full of pickled vegetables in summer lets me make sweet & sour pork or chicken seven times through the year.
I also can a lot of pineapple, but I don’t grow that in my kitchen garden, so it doesn’t qualify for sharing during Post Produce. Still, it’s important to know if you want to do this at home: I use 10% sugar syrup to pack pineapple chunks when I can them. Of course, what matters during the off season is how the veggies and the pineapple combine to make a sweet & sour sauce.
Sweet & Sour Pork (or Chicken) in a Hurry
Typically, I serve this stuff with rice. Right when you start prepping the meat is a good time to set rice on to cook. I almost never work from recipes, so there are no hard numbers here.
Ingredients:
1 pound of boneless pork (boneless spare ribs, chops, or tenderloin all work well)…
OR
1 pound of boneless, skinless chicken (I prefer breasts, but thighs work well, too)
2 tablespoons vegetable oil
1 small onion
½ teaspoon grated fresh ginger root
1 clove garlic (optional)
1 tablespoon soy sauce
2 teaspoons sesame oil (optional)
1 pint canned pineapple chunks in juice
1 quart pickled mixed vegetables
1 – 2 cups beef, chicken, or vegetable stock
1 – 2 tablespoon cornstarch
Procedure:
Cut the pork (or chicken) into bite-sized pieces. Peel and dice the onion, and crush and dice the garlic if you’re using it. Open the pickled vegetables and reserve ½ cup of brine; pour off the rest if you can’t think of a way to use it. Open the pineapple and strain the juice into a measuring cup. Ideally, you’ll get a cup of pineapple juice, but if not, add water to result in a cup of liquid.
Heat the vegetable oil on high in a wok or skillet. Being careful not to splash the hot oil, put the diced onion, grated ginger, and garlic in the pan, and stir briefly to prevent sticking. Then dump the cut-up pork or chicken in on top. Stir and turn the meat for five minutes or so to coat it with the oil.
When I cooked dinner, it didn’t occur to me the meal would end up in tonight’s blog post. So, the only photographic record remaining is of the leftovers in storage containers. My son and I each had a generous serving without side dishes, and there’s enough left for two more servings. The recipe in this post should easily feed four and possibly five people.
While the meat is still obviously not fully-cooked, add the soy sauce and sesame oil to the pan and stir it in thoroughly. Continue to stir until all surfaces of the meat appear cooked and most pieces have cooked through. You don’t need to stir continuously, but neither should you leave the pan unattended while cooking on such high heat.
Add the drained pickled vegetables and toss the contents of the pan gently for a few minutes until the vegetables heat through. Add the drained pineapple, and heat for another minute or so. Then add the reserved pickle brine and pineapple juice and stir.
Taste the liquid! If it’s sour, stir in a teaspoon or two of sugar till it dissolves.
When the liquid has a pleasant sweet and sour balance, stir in a cup of stock. While that heats, stir a tablespoon of cornstarch into a quarter cup of stock and then add that to the skillet. Stir it all until it thickens… if it’s too thick, add more stock, if it’s too thin, mix more cornstarch and stock to stir into the pan.
Your Turn to Post Produce!
Please join the celebration of home-grown produce. Post about something you’re eating from your garden, then return here and link to your post. Watch for other Post Produce posts to see what others are enjoying from their gardens. Follow this link for more information about Post Produce.
Posted in post produce | 
Tags: canned pineapple, cooking, pickled vegetables, post produce, recipe, sweet and sour | 
5 Comments »
Flexible Plastic Containers in my Small Kitchen Garden
Have you seen these flexible plastic buckets in your local department or gardening store? I did some math and found that they hold up to severn and a half gallons. They seem to be sun-tolerant, and the handles make them easy to move around on a deck or patio during growing season.
I’m always experimenting with low-cost, simple ways to extend my small kitchen garden. One of my greatest frustrations has been the expense of buying or building planters to handle vegetables with large root systems. Cheap, durable planters that hold five or more gallons of soil typically cost $15 or more, and it’s common to find prices over $35.
Thankfully, lower-cost products have emerged in recent years. Grow Bags are “pots” made out of material that resembles plastic garbage bags. Depending on how many you buy at once, you could pay as little as 20 cents apiece for these bags in the five-gallon size. They are free-standing and hold their shapes when you fill them with soil.
Slightly Upscale Plant Containers
I appreciate the low cost of Grow Bags, and might use them for gardening in spaces where there isn’t a lot of traffic or where I can hide them from view. A company called The Seed Keeper Company produces a “burlap girdle” you can wrap around a grow bag to provide some eye appeal, and you’ll have a five gallon planter that costs under $10… not bad.
These flexible plastic buckets are water-tight, so I drilled five quarter-inch holes in mine before I filled them with potting soil.
But three years ago, I started noticing flexible plastic “all-purpose” buckets (with handles) in local department stores. In season, these usually go for $5, and they hold seven and a half gallons if you fill them to the rim. One display for these containers showed them holding canned or bottled drinks in ice, or tools for gardening… but typically there’s just a stack of nested buckets with that $5 price tag. In early winter, our local Walmart usually drops the price to $4.
I’ve bought three buckets to try as planters and they work pretty well.
Gardening in a Bucket
Clearly, whoever manufactured this $4 bucket didn’t intend it to be a planter; it doesn’t have drainage holes. Before I planted, I drilled five holes in each bucket using a ¼ inch bit. I filled each bucket with commercial potting soil, and planted as I would in a garden… one planter received five bell pepper plants, and another I planted with carrot seeds (I’ll tell the carrot story in an upcoming post).
The buckets spent most of each summer day in direct sunlight—when there was sunlight (it was a very rainy year). They performed as you’d hope for a seven-gallon planter, and looked pretty much unmarred by the season. In October, the buckets were flexible and strong; I was able to lift them by their handles without trouble. Based on that experience, I would recommend them to anyone looking for a vaguely attractive low-priced container for deck or patio plants.
Five bell pepper plants in six gallons of soil might have been pushing it a bit; I’ve found a two-gallon planter is pretty good for a single pepper plant. So, next season I might plant my flexible plastic buckets with only three pepper plants apiece. Incidentally: If you want to get an early start on peppers, set seedlings outside in containters three or four weeks before your last frost date, and lug them into your garage, back hallway, or garden shed when overnight lows head toward freezing.
But there’s more: Last week I carried one of my buckets across the yard and dumped stuff out of it. With the bucket empty, I dropped one handle so the weight of the empty bucket transferred entirely onto just one handle. At that moment, the bucket snapped off of its handle and fell to the ground!
What changed from October until now? The temperature dropped. Apparently, when these flexible plastic buckets get cold—I’m talking about 24F degrees cold—they get brittle.
For now, I’m sticking with the recommendation: for $4 or $5 apiece, these utility buckets make great planters if you put holes in the bottom. I did some research and found that they come from a company in China called Ningbo Bonny E-Home Co, and chances are you won’t find a brand name on the bucket itself. Bonny apparently makes the buckets out of recycled plastic which makes them more appealing to me. I’ve found them at Walmart and Big Lots, and I suspect they’re available at other department and garden stores as well.
If you decide to try some of these flexible plastic buckets in your kitchen garden, try not to use them when the temperature drops.
Posted in plant vegetables | Tags: bell peppers, cheap planters, containters, deck planters, plastic bucket | 7 Comments »
Butterflies and Puddling in my Small Kitchen Garden
The flower beds my wife maintains near my small kitchen garden get a lot of attention from butterflies.
My wife has established various ornamental plants near my small kitchen garden. Many of these, she has heard, will attract butterflies. I can attest that at least some do; there are often colorful butterflies flitting about while I till soil, plant vegetables, remove weeds, prune, and otherwise muddle about in my vegetable beds.
I enjoy the variety of butterflies that come and go, and I have two observations I want to share.
A Kitchen Gardener’s Deep Thought about Butterflies #1
Butterflies? Really? Whatever about butter made someone name these insects butterflies? I reviewed the Word Origin discussion at dictionary.com and found a silly explanation that mentioned witches, butter, milk, yellow wings, and excrement. Clearly, this is an effort to cover a more astonishing truth: No one ever named them Butterflies.
Trust me: there can be no doubt that the original name for these insects was Flutterflies. You can find hundreds of literary references to the fluttering of these colorful creatures. Anyone lacking even primitive imagination would have named them Flutterflies, and that they did.
Then, near the beginning of the Renaissance, a scribe was copying an authoritative manuscript about Flutterflies. This scribe was known for pushing the tolerances of his quill and he accidentally turned the “Fl” into a B on the nearly-finished cover panel. Rather than recreate the cover from scratch, the scribe copied the entire text of the book using “B” in place of “Fl” wherever the word Flutterfly appeared.
Sheep that we are, we continue to call Flutterflies by this silly dairy-related name. There’s no going back.
A Kitchen Gardener’s Deep Thought about Flutterflies #2
Marauding cabbage flutterflies puddle after I water my small kitchen garden. I love that they do this… especially if it keeps them away from my broccoli. Yes: broccoli worms are baby cabbage flutterflies.
Puddling. If you’re a gardener, you’ve probably seen puddling, but you might not have heard of it. Often after I water my small kitchen garden, a flock of flutterflies assembles on the moist soil. This, my dad used to tell me, is how flutterflies (though he called them butterflies) ingest essential minerals that simply don’t exist in nectar the flutterflies typically consume.
So, while my wife plants flowering ornamentals to attract those pretty insects, I do my share by watering the vegetable garden from time-to-time. Of course, my brassicas wouldn’t mind if someone would come to puddle besides the cabbage butterflies.
Whatever Happened in the Book Giveaway?
I’m embarrassed, and must apologize to the folks who participated in my Yes, You Can! Holiday Giveaway at the beginning of December. In my last comment on that post, I said I’d announce the winner before my bedtime on Saturday, December 10. I can’t even remember all the reasons that didn’t happen. So many things didn’t go “just so” that I actually FORGOT about the giveaway.
Today, while scrolling through the blog, I found the post and had a panic attack. Please forgive me for the omission.
Iris suggested the name Hairy Yes, You Canary for this Yard Bird.
The Winner Is…
My judges have chosen a winner, and the winner is Iris. This is Iris’s entry:
I would name YBID0079 Hairy Yes, You Canary because every cute yellow canary needs a head full of long streaming black hair… 
The judges felt that Iris’s entry played to the judges most effectively. Iris actually worked the name of the book into the name she suggested for Yard Bird YBID0079! My book (my baby) and my family appreciated the thought.
About the Entries
For all who entered: Thank you so much! I loved your efforts and promised to comment on each one. Here we go:
Charlotte: My mom’s name was Charlotte. So sorry to hear about your rooster. Feathers would have made a good name for YBID0079. It is one of the most feathery Yard Birds I’ve ever seen. Of course, in my mind, that one will forever be Hairy Yes, You Canary. Incidentally, someone bought Hairy just before Christmas…
Michelle: I love the name “Little Bit.” I called my first child “Little Man” and “Smidge” for many months… long before he could tell me his favorite color.
Jennie: Mother Goose? But I’m sure YBID0051 is a boy Yard Bird
Iris: Congratulations! You won over the judges.
Cavernap: Black Spy! I read Mad Magazine for nearly 25 years. Alas, my family (the judges) did not.
Melanie: Birds are yesterday? Arachnophobes among us: be afraid!
Mark: Mark, Mark, Mark. I’m afraid, despite your warning, none of us ducked low enough. Thanks for being brave and submitting the limerick!
Jill Patterson: Heckle and Jeckle were guests at our house each Saturday morning when I was young. I enjoyed the memory, but as with Mad Magazine, my family had no similar reaction.
JeninCanada: Your suggestion of a name out of the Star Trek franchise was a long hit into center field. We all are Star Trek fans here. As a family we watched the original series, The Next Generation, and about two-thirds of Deep Space 9—all on video tapes and DVDs. Here’s the sad part: pretty much all of us dislike the Tasha Yar character and felt TNG didn’t really hit its stride until they killed her off. Sadly, she wasn’t any better later on as the spawn of a Federation/Romulan time paradox accident. (I hope you and I can still be friends).
December 2011 Post Produce: BBQ Pizza Sauce
Looking a lot like a calzone, my folded pizza contains BBQ sauce I made using produce from my own garden.
With this, the first Post Produce of winter, my small kitchen garden is dormant, though not frozen. It is crazy warm for late December, but rain keeps me away from the garden. Thank goodness for canning!
For a few weeks this summer I harvested tomatoes from my kitchen garden. I canned tomato sauce and diced tomatoes, and I used some of the tomato sauce to make Pear and Tomato BBQ sauce… which brings me to today’s Post Produce post.
Folded BBQ Pizza
I discovered that I really like pizza with Pear and Tomato BBQ sauce in place of traditional pizza sauce. When I started to make some pizza, I also discovered that my pizza paddle is broken, so I made what I dubbed “folded pizza.”
My folded pizzas look a lot like Calzone. They’re really easy to make, and they taste fine with traditional tomato-based pizza sauce, or with pear and tomato BBQ sauce. The photos tell the story.
Use whatever pizza dough recipe you prefer, and make each folded pizza starting with a chunk of dough slightly larger than a golf ball. Heavily flour an otherwise clean counter, and use a rolling pin to flatten the dough into a six- to eight-inch disk about 1/8 of an inch thick.
Leave a generous border around the sauce when you spread it on the pizza blank. Cover the sauce with shredded mozzarella cheese, then fold the blank in half.
Align the edges of the folded pizza blank, and fold the dough over along the entire edge. Crease the dough along the fold and then fold in the edge a second time. Press firmly so the folded material sticks together reliably. Set the filled, folded, and crimped blank on a baking sheet that you’ll covered liberally with corn meal; there’s no need to grease the pan.
One you’ve made an air-tight seal along the edges of your folded pizza, stab a few holes in the crust using a sharply pointed knife or some other sharp implement. By the way, you can put these pretty close together on the baking pan; they don’t rise a lot. Bake the folded pizzas at 375F degrees for about 12 minutes. The top crusts should develop a golden-brown. Sadly, even with the vent holes you poke through the dough, pressure may build up during baking and cause melted cheese and BBQ sauce to ooze out. When that happens, I scrape up the mass, let it cool, and snack on it.
Post Your Produce!
The 22nd is Post Produce day. Please join me and other bloggers and share whatever you’re consuming from your garden. Whether it’s still growing in your garden, you’re harvesting it for a meal, you’re preserving it, or you’re taking it out of your larder for dinner, blog about your homegrown produce, and then link to it below. For more information, follow this link to the Post Produce page.
Linky:
Robins Nest at My Small Kitchen Garden
Catbirds could pass themselves off as the generics of birds. What they lack in flamboyant feathering, they make up for with genuine curiosity. This one visited me nearly every time I stepped into my small kitchen garden in 2011.
Gardens attract birds. I’ve made no scientific measurements, nor have I reviewed science journals to support this claim. But I’ve no doubt that it’s true.
I have two favorites that have hung around my small kitchen garden for several seasons. First, perhaps, is the cat bird. A cat bird is quite unremarkable: brownish-gray with a dark spot. But what a cat bird lacks in appearance, it makes up for with personality.
Catbirds are naturally curious, and when one nests in or near my yard, it invariably flies to the garden whenever I go there to work. A cat bird won’t get close if it doesn’t need to, but it will stay close enough to keep an eye on me; as if it’s supervising my activity.
When you stress out a catbird, it scolds. And, a catbird’s scold sounds kind of like a cat’s meow. I understand that the meowing earned the catbird its name.
We get only the ruby throated variety of hummingbirds in Pennsylvania. These are some of the bravest wild animals I’ve ever seen. During our photo shoot, they hovered near my head as if measuring the camera angle. Usually, if hummers are in the garden it coincides with my watering activities.
Humming Birds in my Small Kitchen Garden
While humming birds don’t spend so much time in and around my garden, they are amazingly curious about me when they’re there. Splashing water on a sunny day seems irresistible to a humming bird. When I do see a humming bird in the garden, it’s usually when I’m watering in bright sunlight; the bird will zip around me a few times as if deciding whether to shower.
One of my best moments with humming birds was when I made the photo in this article. I stood ready to shoot, and time and again I’d hear the buzz of a hummer’s wings behind me. When I turned, at least one bird would be hanging in the air about three feet from my head; staring at me. I danced with the hummers for about a half hour before one decided to use the feeder.
Robins on the Downspouts
So, this past summer a catbird nested somewhere in our yard. I never spotted its nest, but it was in the garden pretty much whenever I was. We also had hummers, though rarely at the garden. They were happy to visit the feeder just outside our screened porch but they otherwise stayed away.
The first flock of robins above our deck hatched out in early spring. While I spent some time watching the babies grow, they didn’t show much interest in me.
Robins, however, weren’t shy about their relationships with us. Our screened porch abuts a deck from which stairs lead down to the yard and garden. Above the stairs, robins built a nest on the bend in the downspout. The robins were prolific. They raised a small flock of chicks and, when the chicks left, the robins raised a second flock. Photos in this post are of the first robin family.
Robins aren’t particularly friendly. They make house a few feet from our main walkway, and then fly away scolding when we come and go. Occasionally, whichever parent is on incubation duty hunkers down low as we walk by—a great time-saver when we’re particularly active.
I enjoy having the robins around; in most years there are two or three nests in our yard. Their child-rearing fascinates me, and I watch them come and go, but the robins aren’t at all interested in what I’m doing. Their only interest in me, I think, is whether I’m about to try to eat them. (I’m not… yet.)
When the first flock of robins left the nest, all but one vanished in a day. This one sat on the downspout next to the nest for hours before it, too, flew to a nearby tree. At one point this year, the robin parents administered to two of their babies while sitting on my kitchen garden’s rodent fence. Sadly, the photos I captured weren’t nice enough to publish.
Vegetable Seeds Choose Life in a Small Kitchen Garden
I don’t think this is natural… and it’s even a little creepy. In real life, corn seeds dry out on the cob; get eaten by rodents, birds, and deer; and end up back in (or on) the soil before they sprout. Even if you don’t treat corn right, it wants to grow; it wants to make its own corn seeds.
The whole point of being a mature vegetable is to make more vegetables. Once you’re all grown up, you have only to spread your seeds so they can take root and produce new plants. As a vegetable seed, you do everything you know how to do to succeed; to grow into a mature plant so you can spread seeds.
To illustrate my point, the photo to the right shows an ear of sweet corn which, when I husked it, simply looked too old to cook and serve at a meal. Instead, I set the ear—along with husks from the night’s meal—into a compost bucket and set it on the deck rail. Then I kind of overlooked that compost bucket for a week or two. When I finally got around to dumping it, I found that the corn on the cob was growing.
I had not treated these corn seeds well. I hadn’t dried them. I hadn’t removed them from the cob. I hadn’t stored them in a moisture-free environment. I hadn’t planted them in well-nourished soil. I hadn’t kept them uniformly moist. Still, they did their best in the environment they had available.
I won’t make a habit of sprouting seeds in dishrags for my small kitchen garden. This was a complete fluke and it will never happen again (maybe).
A Tomato Seed Shows Pluck
Poor housekeeping in my kitchen should further make my point: I prepared a tomato salad during the summer, and used a Handi-Wipe towel to clean up the counter. When I finished, I rinsed out the towel and tossed it against the backsplash of the sink.
Apparently, I didn’t use the towel for a few days, but when next I picked it up, I found it had a passenger: a young tomato sprout had emerged from among the towel’s fibers. This was not the tomato seed’s natural environment, but still it managed to set out on its mission to grow up and produce seeds of its own.
Starting Vegetable Plants is Easy
Why am I telling you about my horrible housekeeping? To emphasize just how easy it is to start a garden: when you follow instructions in a “how to plant vegetables” article, you’re pampering seeds with an ideal environment; you’re bound to succeed! So… try it! Even if you mess up in extreme ways, your seeds will try very hard to make you successful.
Do you have examples of seeds sprouting—or vegetable plants succeeding—in unlikely environments? Please share your story in a comment!
Posted in plant tomatoes, plant vegetables | Tags: corn, planting, seeds, sprouts, tomatoes | 2 Comments »
Yes, You Can! Holiday Giveaway
Use Amazon.com’s Look Inside feature to see the terrific job the art director did in designing and laying out Yes, You Can! And Freeze and Dry It, Too. Oh… and to get a good look at the book you might win if you enter this Holiday Giveaway!
Thank you for visiting Your Small Kitchen Garden! I love writing this blog, and I love that at least some people actually read it. In that spirit I’m giving away a copy of my book, Yes, You Can! And Freeze and Dry It, Too from Cool Springs Press.
I wrote Yes, You Can! last summer for people who are just starting to preserve produce—whether from their own gardens, from farmers’ markets and farm stands, or from grocery stores. Reviewers have been very kind to Yes, You Can! and (of course) I’d love to see it coach tens of thousands of gardening-, food-, and green-enthusiasts into more responsible relationships with the food chain.
Win a Signed Copy of Yes, You Can!
This giveaway has an ulterior motive: to introduce more people to Yard Birds. Here’s how it works:
I’m giving away one copy of Yes, You Can! And Freeze and Dry It, Too. The book’s retail value is $19.95, and I’ll cover the cost of shipping to the winner.
This is a judged contest. To enter, do the following:
1. Visit the Yard Birds store (this is a link to it)
2. Note the serial number (item number) of a Yard Bird that tickles your fancy
3. Return here and leave a comment that…
- …includes the Yard Bird’s serial number
- …proposes a name for the Yard Bird
- …explains why you would give the Yard Bird that name
I was lucky to capture a photo of this small flock of Yard Birds in the artist’s yard before he sold off most of them at an annual arts festival here in Lewisburg..
How We’ll Pick the Winner
My wife and kids will select one winning entry from all the entries posted. They will read all the entries and select the one they agree is the most entertaining. Use humor, pathos, irony, wordplay… if you want to play to the audience, keep in mind that some of the judges are seriously geeky.
Our judges will not know the identities of the entrants; this is a blind judging. I’ll announce the winner on this blog as soon as the judges finish their task—probably within a day or two of the close of the contest.
Enter Now, Enter Once, Enter Again!
The Yes, You Can! Holiday Giveaway ends at midnight on December 7, 2011. We will consider only one entry per participant; if you enter more than one time, we’ll include only your LAST entry in the judging. Last entry? Sure. This contest includes an opportunity for a do-over. If, after you post your entry a much better idea pops into your head, go ahead and post another entry. We’ll enjoy all your entries, but only the very last one you post before midnight on December 7th will go to the judges… so make the last one your best!
The Prize
To be clear: I’m not giving away a Yard Bird. The prize for this giveaway is a single signed copy of my book, Yes, You Can! And Freeze and Dry It, Too from Cool Springs Press.
Posted in home kitchen garden, small kitchen garden | Tags: contest, free book, garden art, garden tool sculpture, giveaway, lawn sculpture, yard birds, yes you can | 12 Comments »
Corn Pancakes Post Produce: November, 2011
I doubt the canned corn I ate today included any kernels from my kitchen garden, though I did harvest sweet corn this year. This ear went from the garden to our dinner table in less than an hour. Home-canned sweet corn tastes much better than commercially-canned corn. For the best corn flavor in a preserve, try freezing.
It’s time to Post Produce at Your Small Kitchen Garden. This month, I’m posting corn. In the interest of full disclosure, the corn I’m posting about is almost certainly not from my garden. I grew and harvested sweet corn this year, but I also bought a few bushels at various farmers’ markets—way more than I harvested of my own. It would be impossible to find the specific canned corn in my larder that grew in my small kitchen garden.
That said, for lunch today I made corn pancakes. I ate corn pancakes occasionally when I was a kid, and was dismayed to learn recently that my wife and kids don’t care for these delicacies. I still like corn pancakes, and it doesn’t bother me at all to make up a batch that I’ll eat for breakfast and lunch over the course of several days.
Will you like corn pancakes? If you like corn fritters, you’ll probably like corn pancakes. They’re nearly the same product except that there’s no deep-fat-frying involved with corn pancakes.
1 cup all-purpose flour
½ tablespoon baking powder
¼ teaspoon salt
7/8 cup of milk
2 tablespoons butter, melted
1 or 2 eggs
Stir together the flour, baking powder, and salt. Whisk in the milk, then the melted butter, and finally the egg (or eggs). With each addition, mix till you’ve blended everything well. If the batter is very runny, sprinkle in flour one tablespoon at a time, blend it together, and reevaluate the consistency.
When the batter is appropriate for making pancakes, stir in one pint of drained canned corn.
How to Make Corn Pancakes
You make corn pancakes exactly as you should expect: mix up pancake batter, stir in sweet corn, and pan-fry pools of batter. Use a commercial pancake mix or make batter using your favorite recipe. The box titled Daniel’s Pancake Batter holds an approximation of the recipe I use.
I like corn pancakes with maple syrup; real maple syrup. I also like them with fruit syrup, and today I used black raspberry syrup that I canned myself from berries that grew in the woods up the road from my house—not specifically from my garden, but when I pick them in the wild, it feels as though the black raspberries are “my produce.”
I made a video that shows how to make corn pancakes. So, if you’d like more guidance on the topic, look in the Linky below for the link from “cityslipper.” That leads to my Youtube video. Then, I hope you’ll join in on this third Post Produce event.
To make corn pancakes, mix your favorite pancake batter, or use the simple recipe in the box, and then stir in canned sweet corn.
Cook corn pancakes as you would cornless ones. In a properly-heated pan (I set the temperature knob for the burner at about six; it has numbers from 1 through 9), a pancake needs from 60 to 90 seconds on each side to cook through.
Home-canned black raspberry syrup makes a fine topping for pancakes—with or without corn. Chances are that a carnival or country fair corn fritter booth offers only powdered sugar or “pancake syrup.” Those may satisfy as well on corn pancakes, but when you get a chance, try corn pancakes with real maple syrup.
Now You Go!
The 22nd is Post Produce day. Please join me and other bloggers and share whatever you’re consuming from your garden. Whether it’s still growing in your garden, you’re harvesting it for a meal, you’re preserving it, or your taking it out of your larder for dinner, blog about your homegrown produce, and then link to it below. For more information, follow this link to the Post Produce page.
Posted in post produce | Tags: black raspberries, corn pancakes, post produce, sweet corn | 5 Comments »
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